The Freeway Jump

I was walking along a bridge that connected to the freeway. Traffic was bustling by me, but I didn’t mind all the commotion, nor was I threatened by its proximity. I contemplated jumping from the bridge into the busy traffic below. I had been told that I would survive the jump (even though it was a very long fall), even with the speedy cars. I jumped, landing on my feet without an ache in my body and without a car coming close to hitting me. I turned and saw nothing behind me. No cars, traffic, people. Just a long empty road. Ahead of me cars were appearing out of nowhere. I walked along, seamlessly weaving through the busy activity without doubt, courageously and curiously drifting with some purpose.

Spaceship

I dreamt I was in a space vessel with some unknown travelers. I told a fellow traveler that I was worried about being sick in outer space and that I was scared of being weightless. The traveler squenched his eyes with annoyance, “But you’ve done this a million times, why would it make you sick now?” Perplexed, I tried to remember what it felt like to travel in outer space all those times before. Then it occurred to me that the impact of spinning combined with high speed made me so dizzy I would fall asleep every time. On this sojourn, however, I awoke shortly after take off and watched the stars as we spun and projected through the galaxy. Our destination was further than we had gone before and I was glad to get to be conscious finally.

Shakey

I’m Quitting

Today is my first day off cigarettes. I don’t remember the last time I attempted quitting. I remember the first cigarette I smoked after having been quit for over a year. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my boyfriend of the time, after a string of stressful days, and after a particularly grueling day waiting tables at a local restaurant. He had offered me cigarettes before, but I had yet to accept any of these hand-rolleds. I was especially desperate and moody this afternoon, which caused me to toss caution to the wind. What I recall of that cigarette was that it did not taste very good, made me nauseous, but relaxed me. I remember thinking the disadvantages outweighed the perks right then at the kitchen table, but I fell victim to my own weakness and succumbed to another year and a half of roller-coaster up-down smoking.

The clarity of quitting, this time, will serve me well because I’m making the leap differently than past attempts.

• I have so far told my closest friends about this decision to quit. It’s cold turkey and I might get snippy or moody, but I will make every effort to avoid the foul behavior.
• I am carrying around with me a bottle of this just in case: http://www.gaiaherbs.com/images_prod/nicotine-relief.jpg.
• More yoga!
• A quitting buddy, Patrick, will smack my hand and/or insult me anytime I fail myself.
• I am considering setting aside, occasionally, 8 or 9 dollars to represent the money I’d otherwise spend on tobacco (I smoked roll-your-own American Spirits, which, although more expensive, was organically grown and the pouch would last sometimes upwards of two weeks), making it my healthy lung foundation. I have yet to figure out what to do with the money (suggestions welcome).

And, of course, there are some things I will do similarly to my past attempts.

• Be thankful for my senses of taste and smell returning. More bath salts, essential oils, sushi, bread, coffee and experimental desserts. Need I say more?
• Far less alcohol. Smoking is a time killer. So is drinking. The two combined are like salt and pepper.
• New found time on my hands (literally) resulting in some new, healthy habits, or an emphasis on the regular old stuff.
• Drink more water. I can’t explain, but it always works this way. Perhaps my body knows when it’s trying to flush out old toxins, especially toxins that I’ve put in my body daily for too long  a stretch.
• I’ll smell better, be cleaner, have whiter teeth, have a more natural, less harsh voice, be more alert, more balanced………

Chocolate Cake, I Adore You

Your Road to Bliss:

1.5 cups flour (all purpose, rye, whole wheat, pick your poison)

1/3 cup of Carob Powder or Cocoa Powder (if you use this, I highly advise you reduce your sugar)

1 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup of water or cold coffee

1/2 cup of oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Grease a 9″ cake pan.
3. Combine all dry ingredients, mix thoroughly.
4. Add water, oil and vanilla, mix well.
5. Add vinegar, but do not overmix! If you see bubbles, stop stirring.
6. Pour batter in cake pan (duh), and slide into the oven, leave it there for 25-30 minutes.

For reference, I have played with this recipe so much (and made it with other people that experiment into much grimmer territories than my comfort level) that I can give some words of advice and/or suggestions for variation:

• Use apple cider vinegar. It’s good for you and if you don’t have a big jug of it in your kitchen, this is the perfect excuse to buy one.
• To make a thicker, fudgier cake add more cocoa/carob powder, increase by about 2/3 cup. You will not regret it, especially if you like chocolate the way I do. The batter will be much thicker t han usual. You like this.
• If you’re going to use coffee instead of water, make sure it’s room temperature because otherwise it will throw off the chemistry of your batter.
• I’ve heard about an extreme variation that involved a sourdough starter and lemon zest. Not for the faint of appetite.
• I have used coconut oil, which some of you have probably already adopted anyway. I, however, felt that it took too much from the taste of chocolate. I have also tried sesame oil, which had the same effect, except this I didn’t mind as much, as it provided a nuttiness. I prefer extra virgin olive oil.
• Mix by hand. No regrets.
• Make a ganache! Simply put, if you haven’t made it before: make sure you have a ratio of chocolate and milk 2: 1. Heat milk (or any preferred milk-like substance, half-n-half, goat milk, cream, rice milk, whatever) and pour the heated milk over the chopped chocolate. Cover. It’ll do it’s thing. Pour this, while it’s still warm, over the cake. Yum!
• Double the above recipe to make two layers, marry the two with  homemade syrups and jams. I once made a double layer chocolate cake with ganache, between layers was a delicious homemade elderberry syrup. With elderberry wine! Bliss!
• Experiment with nuts and different kinds of extracts beyond vanilla. I thoroughly enjoyed using anisette extract as well as orange.
• Add cinnamon! Lots of it! Cinnamon and chocolate are a heavenly duo.

 

Vanity + Disgust = Ugg Boots

I am suffering in an early morning shock of vanity. I rarely go on tirades about these sorts of useless, shallow atrocities, but I am trying to exorcise my hatred for those Ugg Boots. Before I worked on a college campus I never really noticed them. I live in an urban setting where these pampered sophomoric adults who typify the Ugg Boots donned population dare not roameth, unless they’re too drunk to realize where they are. Even then, Ugg Boots rarely make an appearance, luckily, without a safe radius of my home.

I’m willing to make a compromise with the Ugg Boots Wearers. Please, for the sake of a very mildly stylish lady, do not wear those damned fur boats with sweat pants. This trend is like a zombie factory. Everyday it gets grimmer, everyday the style of sloppy sweats tucked into the tops of bunchy Ugg Boots grows more dominate, and I get grumpier.

So, you’re all wearing these psychotically ugly clodhoppers because they’re comfortable? I know there are better options, even considering the Merino Wool lined on the insides of this apocalyptically terrifying shoe make. Just try harder, try not following Jessica Simpson, also. She really does not know what she’s doing.

Why Even Try?

Biography of Spring

A ceiling of thorny branches obscure milky gray skies, tufts of new wild grass shoot indiscriminately here and there. A sooty ground is slowly turning into a playground for robins and squirrels. Blackbirds caw atop the roof of an old unused church. The tools from last summer’s painting project are stacked against the building’s back wall, covered in crusty leaves. The three-legged grill is rusted into one spot.

The sun rests wearily in Pisces. It’s a trans-figurative influence, traipsing with difficulty in a zone of monotony and death, purging cesspools of forgotten hope, ripe with an unsurprising mood. Nothing is disturbed, everything is stagnant with memories of first Aquarius, then Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries. Pisces awaits its final day, to put the memories into their cubbies, to let the energy completely break itself down. All rest in their bunkers, like Aphrodite and Eros, waiting for the safety of spring’s dawning.

Underneath these heavy somber layers is some unsettled urgent chaos that cannot break from the Piscean cloak. The desire for peace is never matched, security always beyond grasp. The cycle perpetuates. Not until Spring’s equinox can a deliverance occur. Fields barren, minds drained, bellies sagging, lips unquenched. All under the Piscean guise march drearily to a death, a funeral song. The apex approaches. It will always happen this way.

The vines growing along the tree turn from fragile veins to supple toadstool covered fingers, crawling and reaching upward. Little violet flowers peep out along the sidewalk’s edge. Trees lining the street begin to burst with trembling green buds. Birds swoon to one another in glorious, fluting cadence. Honeysuckle creeps in along every fence and border, bounteous with unrelenting steadfast, the eve to the coming influence. The air is saturated, dense with perspiration that has built since November. The earth’s body odor creates reactionary fits.

The sun bursts from its melancholy into a vibrant position honed only by Aries. A spirit of unique newness spawns and awakens the rust, the fragility, the oldness. A daring bet to survive the cycle again is placed by the Aries sunrises, with a bouncy, clean, childish grin. Activity once solemn becomes seemingly abruptly refreshed. And so again, it will go.

It Is Fact Somewhere

Part One:

I was pregnant with our child. I knew I was close to childbirth because the due date had already passed. We took a train into town, we had been living in the country for some time, but needed to get into a populated region for some specific errand. The train stopped because a man had been run over and lost all of his limbs as well as his head. The lone, very square looking torso was passed through the train, much to the chagrin of the many passengers. It looked nearly frozen, and neatly pared.

We decided at this point to de-board the train. Soon after this, though, I went into labor. It was a very solitary experience, and also somehow very painless. I told everyone after having the child that I didn’t know why it was always talked about in such morbidly painful ways. It was one of the easiest things I had done! We named the boy Saul and he had beautiful blond hair and a wild, innocent curiosity. He was instantly independent and yet very connected to his parents. I walked in a drugstore with a soda fountain with Saul, jointly we were oodled by strangers with a penchant for such images as mother with child.

Meanwhile, as I bonded with my new son, you were sorting things out with a fuzzy image, kind of like a walking cloud of static. An entire soundtrack of music burst forth in pockets of heralding, epiphanic tides, I was distraught and trying to stay focused on Saul, your mom was also keeping me company. I looked deep in your eyes and asked you something, and said, “Please be honest.” You responded casually, “Well, yes,” with a shrug to your shoulders.

Saul slept between us.

Part Two:

We had a church wedding. Everything matched a tradition neither of us follow or believe in. My hair was closely cropped and dyed, though no-one could tell since I wore a blossoming veil that concealed the short red tufts. A flood was raging slowly into downtown as hundreds of people ushered us into the church my parents took me to as a child. This Catholic church had a peculiar Italian architecture, which, even though we could not accept what the building stood for, somehow appealed to our own designs. Instead of the usual organ master, we chose your brother to beatbox. This inspired a few giggles throughout the usurping crowd that greeted us. You decided to wear white with me, we radiated newness and growth, particularly in our hands. Tenderness and excitement percolated throughout the ceremony. When we walked back outside after placing rings on each other’s fingers, the water was at the bottom of the steps. We found a salvation in this.

Kitchen Killing Floor

Just as I promise to write more often on Tirades From the Sink, I also promise to post more podcastics at kitchenkillingfloor.podomatic.com.

A Haven For Attempted Cleanliness

The kitchen floor is the bane of my existence. I’ve tried loving it excessively, daily sweeping and a weekly or bi-weekly scrub with suds. Why do I have old hardwood floor corroding beneath my feet when I make breakfast or the usual coffee or when Jonathan prepares some vast unassuming feast? Today I swept twice, not initially feeling up to scrubbing until an hour later when I noticed a few dried spills, one was peanut butter which my bare toes smudged, at which point I could wait no longer, disgusted by mine and Jonathan’s slovenly ways. Filling the blue bucket with hot soapy water, I infiltrated those boards and the vast cracks between with all the vigor my arms could pursue. Once I felt how close I was to the floorboards, closer than my short stature is accustomed to, it dawned on me the tyranny I was exercising. My shoulders were at my ears and I was focusing, direly, on all the mysterious stains on the pearly wood.

Perhaps if I had not also washed the dishes, dusted the glass and wood furniture, thrown in and hung two loads of laundry (the sheets are drying in the sunshine of our balcony), picked up the stray papers, sorted the piles of mail, scooped the cat poop, straightened my desk, taken out the trash and recycling I would not have felt so homely, or like I belonged with some fleet of begrudged female cronies southbound in a bygone era. The ritual pursues and I resist changing my role.

No matter the status of those floorboards, the increasing gap between doubtlessly infested by a growing amoeba-like case (one that is perhaps responsible for the scuttling noises late at night), I can do no more than what I know I must. It ain’t genetic, it’s pure neuroses.

Speaking of Manson

I heard the following on the news yesterday:

Day to Day, May 20, 2008 · For nearly 40 years, rumors have swirled that dozens of victims of Charles Manson’s family are buried at a remote, mountainous ranch in California’s Death Valley National Park. Now, with the help of a dog named Buster, authorities are investigating whether the talk is true.

A police detective last year took Buster, a dog trained to find cadavers, to the site where Manson hid after a killing spree that left seven dead in the summer of 1969. Buster’s agitated behavior indicated the presence of decaying human remains, Los Angeles Times reporter Louis Sahagun told Alex Chadwick.

Subsequent searches were inconclusive, as were soil tests, but Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze said he would allow a limited four-day excavation at Barker Ranch beginning Tuesday. The main targets of the dig were to be hot spots that Buster had flagged.

“There was no consistent response from the dogs that searched and no conclusive findings from the soil samplings tested by top experts in the field,” Lutze said in a statement. “The only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson family is to proceed with limited excavation.”

Locals, however, have predicted that the only remains investigators will unearth will be from ancient Indian graves. They are concerned about the dig’s costs, Sahagun reports. Even if investigators find remains, it’s unclear whether Inyo County can afford to perform the necessary tests to identify the victims.

Manson is serving a life sentence at the California State Prison in Corcoran for the murders, whose victims included actress Sharon Tate. Manson had been sentenced to die, but that sentence was commuted after the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty unconstitutional in 1972. It was reinstated several years later.

Sagahun posits that if Manson were to be convicted on additional homicide charges, it’s possible he might once again receive a death sentence.

From NPR staff and wire reports

Dictionary

I will begin posting daily commentary on a word du jour. Two occasions caused me to dictate unknown semantics.

1. I began a book titled Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx and she has a ceaseless, boundless, depricatingly unfathomable,  jealousy-inducing vocabulary. I re-read sentences because they are delicious, crunchy, finite, as if they were molded in the crest of a nebular system.

2. Crosswords/Jeopardy.

This will be a seperate page I run, parallel to the books list I am slowly maintaining. It might also include specific nouns, places, or historic figures. Perhaps “Encyclopedia” would be more appropriate.

Kitchen Memento

I sat the warmest lamp on the checker-tiled kitchen floor, next to a pile of tapes and a broken boom box that only allowed for radio and tape deck perusal. I sat down in a chair at my small wooden prep table and began chopping several large cloves of garlic. The knife was just sharpened and I could sense the smoothness of its blade, of its endeavor to cut open the aromatic herb, fill the impending maggots –who incensed my trashcan which had weeks-old potato salad—with an air deadly unto their antennae and legs and little bodies. The Vidalia onions succeeded the garlic, surpassing in affecting the kitchen’s living members. I teared up, but breathed through open lips, exhaling gently, body beginning to bop to a Frank Valli and the Four Seasons tape.

Fourth of July still invaded my kitchen. My in-town-from-out-of-country cousin and I prepared a feast for few. The fruit from our sangria still lying bleakly in an apple juice jar. The fermentation from strong whiskey and cheap burgundy wine caused the grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, lemons, oranges to sag like wilted prunes. The dill and labneh in the potato salad confused my sense of smell, fumes of putrid sourness possibly still edible. I hung onto the three plastic containers of Jon Claude’s leftovers for three weeks, never humoring the chunks by way of digestion. I had two trays of Jell-O that were only ingested with cups of the sangria, a few patrons sliding sloshes of the blue and red festive gelatin to perhaps anchor a more deep drunk. I munched on popcorn we prepared on the stovetop the entire night, feeling the elastic in my stomach shrinking as I drank repetitively, waiting for the boy who promised an arrival. I was on a consistent alcohol guzzle since 3:00 that afternoon, a nap, a rainstorm that outlasted most of those celebrating. I wanted him indelibly. What could I possibly do to relinquish his moving across the country in three weeks? My morbid side accepted his departure as part of a contemporary tragedy.

The onions and garlic were slowly simmering in unsalted butter in a saucepan over a heat so low it was nearly a suggestion of a flame on the gas burner. The tomatoes were sorted, some heirlooms, some romas. Those with deep cracks filling with a fuzzy white were tossed. The rest were diced and waiting to join the onion and garlic base. I swept the floor mechanically, observing the difference the lighting made. Overhead bulbs always disenchanted me, a romance filtered through an old brass lamp where it ought not be, on a dusty kitchen floor.

He walked in with a lazy grin, a relief at locking eyes. I sat the broom in a corner and wrapped my arms around his neck, kissing lips, tongues slinking together. His white t-shirt was practically threadbare, I could nearly see his nipples, chest hair slipping out of the ringer. His legs always looking longer in corduroy, a fortuitous, brawny man, I could get a handle on it through the touch of any of his body parts.