I am finally on my way home at the moment, which is a very good thing because I desperately need a vacation from my vacation.

Lest I give the wrong impression, the trip wasn’t really intended to be a vacation, so it’s fair to say that it was unrealistic on my part to expect one. It was intended to be a trip primarily for book promotion, but with places chosen for that promotion where I could spend time with friends and family and — I’d hoped — I could also get a little R&R.

About that.

I can’t even figure out where to start with this one.

Do I start with the honor killing drama — nope, not kidding — that ensued in Chicago on the one day I’d decided to schedule nothing at all and just have some downtime with my mother and her partner via her college friend, and how our day turned into the three of us scrambling to help this woman? Or, perhaps, with the two men who came to the feminist bookstore event, one with enough of an agenda that he actually had notes prepared, and another whose spittle I watched accumulate in the corners of his mouth, while he raised his voice, clenched his fists, barked at me relentlessly about why I blame him for everything (this nonsequitur in the midst of my merely trying to answer some poor 21-year-old kid’s practical question about confusion on what STI vaccinations he may have had) and refused to sit down? The Minneapolis bridge collapse on the second day of my trip? Maybe I start by explaining that one peril of doing what I do is that even when not at promotional events, nearly everyone will drag you aside to make their sexual confessions to you, including your family members? On the other hand, it’d be a highly dramatic entrance to instead start with the car accident Mark and I got into when a woman ran a red light and flung our car (Mark’s new car, I should add, the one he was supposed to be driving home on Monday, so now lord knows when he can come back or how) across a few lanes as we were on our way to the airport, where I was no less than completely elated — and obviously, rather delusional in thinking the state of Ohio would let me leave — to finally be going back home?

I’m far too sleep-deprived to figure this out right now. I’m okay — and Mark is okay — but I’m sore, pissed and very, very sleepy. So much went on, and my head is so foggy, that it’s looking like the only thing to do is to divide the (mis)adventure into parts once I get home. Or a couple days later, after some therapy (AKA, cupcakes, pug-hugs, a glass of wine and a date with my vibrator). And sleep: precious, precious sleep. I can at least be sure that for the next few days, it is highly unlikely I will have any insomnia to deal with: it’s hypersomnia I expect to battle, and I intend to wave my white blankie flag gladly at the first sign of its troops.

Ideally, I’d start by sleeping on this first flight, since we woke up at 2:30 this morning eastern time, after a luxurious three hours of snoozing, for the two-hour drive to the Lexington airport to catch this 6:30 flight. Alas, the way the flights worked out, I’m on this puppy for only an hour and a half, then to Detroit, then — and I expect all my fellow smoking readers to gasp in horror alongside me — unto a nearly five-hour flight to Seattle.

Suffice it to say, I’m trying to save my sleepiness up so that I can use it for as much of that flight as humanly possible because if I’m not unconscious on that flight, I may well chew my way through the seat in front of me.

Or maybe not. I am so beyond ecstatic to be heading towards my own bed, my dog, my garden and some seriously being-left-the-hell-alone (though given how things have been going, I’m trying to maintain a certain nonattachment to ever actually getting back there). That isn’t to say that amidst all the mania, there wasn’t some good stuff in there too, there was. I’d just really, really and truly, had loved to have one single day over the last eleven that was a) anything even slightly resembling relaxing, and b) without even the vaguest whiff, let alone the ripe stench, of any sort of drama whatsoever.

Thank christ that I had some very key boons throughout:
1) I had a housesitter who went SO far beyond the call of duty — including staying on extra with no notice whatsoever — and who I trusted so implicitly that I didn’t have to worry a single minute about the dog, cat, garden or anything else that lives in our place.

2) Within a mere 24 hours of leaving, it appears a bunch of misogynist assholes felt the profound need, as usual, to plaster the Scarleteen boards with spew at myself, the female volunteers and the female users there. I only found this out via a Google alert to a user’s blog, took the most cursory glance at the disaster before I shut my laptop, and decided that for the whole rest of the trip, I was simply going to let my volunteers do their job, hope the site didn’t implode, and walk the fuck away from the thing full-stop for the whole of my trip. Which I did.

3) My two book events were actually the best/busiest events I have had so far. Both sold out of all the books, to the point that the WCF event bought three extra copies from me I had in my bag to sell more, both packed the places, and despite the bitter men who decided to try and make me their personal whipping boy, both were really solid events that I deeply enjoyed most of, even though by the second one, I’d broken my voice and sounded like Tom Waits as an adolescent boy for the remainder of the trip.

4) The Detroit airport has a bar: a bar where one can smoke. There’s not a whole helluva lot of good things I can ever think of to say about Detroit. Now I’ve got one.

And they’ve just announced that we are now getting ready to land so that I can put my bottom in that bar, where I fully intend to have a very large cocktail at an hour of the morning where I’d otherwise only be drinking if I had gotten started doing do the evening before. Then again, in Seattle time, I woke up when it still was the evening before. Bottoms up.

filed under Heather Corinna | apropos of nothing | events
posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 7:38 am

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