Skip to main content

A Sign of Things to Come

I have found myself making raspberries as part of my vocabulary.

     The other day, in the Goodwill, I had a sudden prophetic vision of me--the tangle-haired old woman with a Goodwill shopping cart full of crap--making big, fat, farting noises with my tongue at every butt ugly holiday sweater I saw, including those on actual people.  

Look, I'm not going to go toe-to pointy-elf-bootie toe with you on fashion, but if you need a holiday sweatshirt to get you in the Holiday Spirit, maybe you deserve what you get, though.
     Occasionally, like the clothes in my closet, I have to do a certain amount of inventory and culling of personal habits--like going to the thrift stores every day, or chewing my thumb cuticles into bloody hamburger--after I get senile that won't matter to me so much, but right now, I've got to be at least a teeny bit vigilant, lest I stop showering or start muttering to myself in grimy subways or start putting children into stews and so on.
     I know how it started: people asked me how the writing was going, like they do, and the only answer that fit at the time, because it was just too dismal to verbalize, was to take my thumb and arc it downwards as though tumbling down a steep slope and make a long, wet-tish raspberry: "Thbbbbdbbthbthbthbddbp!"
     Then, I started using it--while I was alone, mind you--when thinking about a particularly annoying and high maintenance individual that I was dealing with...("What is they want from me? Can't they see they're making me crazy??? Oh, thbpthpbthpbtthhhbp. Whatever.")
     I got rid of the individual, I'm doing some writing work, but the verbal tic is hanging on.
     Now, let's get back to those holiday sweaters.
     Why? For those holiday wear fans out there, can you just answer that?
    
I mean, you can really (don't push it) only wear it for one day.
 "Let's see, I've brought that dish of green beans with cream of mushroom soup thing and there's Gramma and that lardass Uncle Bob watching the Cowboys...what day is it? What day is it? Oh! Thanks for the wardrobe cue, cuz! Thanksgiving Day. Phew! Because you know--tempis fugit and all that, right? And the food's getting cold. The little embroidered turkey definitely helped me remember what to do with it! We can be thankful for that, at least!" 


     Aw, hell: C'mon, Gramma: say it with me now:  THTHTHTHTHBBBLTHTHBDDDBLT!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lost Designer of the 80's

Claude Barthelemy seems to have been one of those if-you-needed-to-ask-you-didn't-need-to-know designers. In the '80's, he was listed as a young, hot couturier alongside go-the-distance blue chips like Karl Lagerfeld and Lanvin with his oversized sweaters, minis, leggings and fur-trimmed stoles. Exclusive stores carried his soft-edged jackets to shoppers in the know. And then what happened? His pleated skirts, intarsia sweaters, and naughty, zippered wool catsuits still fetch high prices in vintage world and any dealer with his elegantly simple, Gallic tag on her racks raises a flutter in second-hand seekers. He designed for Barbie, for heaven's sake! But the designer himself, who seems to have cut a meteoric swath across the runways and then...? So what's the story with this wasp-waisted pleated skirt? I wondered what else this woman could have dropped off on her Goodwill drive-by--a Chanel original? A couture Pucci? Surely someone this linked in wouldn't just ...

Change Your Tone!!

I know I have a "unique voice." But I can count on one hand how many people I know who can stand listening to their own voice. (That is not saying there aren't those guys who seem to love talking just to hear the sound of their own voice; but if you literally  played it back to them --they'd cringe and crawl under the sofa.) When I was in the 3rd grade, I was chosen to be in some experimental speech/voice therapy at our school. They tried for many weeks to raise the pitch of my voice by having me go up and down the do-re-mi scales until I hit one that they thought sounded pleasing. I had a deep, true contralto voice somewhere a few notes below "do." With the sort of rasping, old-chain-smoker undertones of a freckled Billie Holiday. The experimenters settled on "fa." For 20 minutes three times a week, I got to leave Ms. Foster's third grade classroom and go to the convent living room where I would sing "do-re-mi-fa" and say ...

G is for Garbage In-Garbage Out--Good Advice for Potential Hoarders

I do try to keep a relative handle on the homeostasis of my inventory and my home work and storage space. I keep things either selling or returning, and I'm trying to buy less actual inventory. But I've lost interest in the back-breaking work that the eBay biz requires and I have hit a patch where I just can't deal with the even limited social interaction with buyers. I try to convince myself I'm buying salvage materials for my new up cycle projects, or that I won't be acquiring any new inventory when I'm up at my farm for the entire summer. All the same, I'm picking up definite vibes that this is an addict's justification and I'm starting to cross the line where the stuff is coming in faster than I can process and get it out again. You actually can't call it "inventory" if it's not actually for sale. It is just "garbage." Part of the hoarding disorder is the supreme discomfort that is caused by getting rid of items....