And now for something completely different…
Too. Much. Heavy. Stuff. I’ve been so emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed the last couple of weeks following the last entry (which so many people were so beautifully responsive to, thank you so much). With the events in both Colorado and Lancaster, the latter of which is doubly haunting for me, since it’s where we spent the first six years of my life, and the ridiculous media and general public approaches to both. With stories like this (if there was some award for the most sickening, disturbing thing said about rape in a given month — and how fucking sad it is so many disgusting things are said so often that I don’t feel able to say in a year — this one would win it, no contest). With editingeditingediting, and then spending two weeks of concentrated time going back and forth and forth and back between my editor, the publisher and the marketing folks desperately trying to hit upon a title for the book which everyone could agree on so we can take it to the bloody distributors already, dammit. With a couple of the girls from ST and the AGA in deep crisis. With conflicted feelings per the feminist community as usual; per having others around who do the sort of work I do at ST who can really get it, per just needing some intellectual communion I cannot for the life of me seem to find anywhere. With being annoyed at all the grunt work I have to do,and the fact that over the last couple months, I cannot find even an ounce of time to do some artwork, which is generally the salvation of my mental health and my often sore heart. With just really feeling like it’s possible that the way I have worked over the past decade, at this constant, breakneck pace, I have accumulated a need for vacation time worthy of all of that, as in, if I could take a whole year off right now to lay on my back somewhere warm and stare at the sky? I would. Would that I could.
I felt uncomfortable, with all that’s been going down in the world over the last month, having any entry up but the last one, which now permanently lives here. But I need a small respite into the land of silly, especially since I went and got myself some brand of sick this last weekend, to boot. I tell you, it’s a very hard balancing act sometimes having one part of you be a very silly, light whimsical person and having the other part, and much of the work you do — largely because of the world you live in and your efforts to keep constant awareness so you can try to fix it — be the other side of that coin.
So.
Sometimes Mr. Price and myself head to bed early to go roll around in it, get sticky, and make lots of happy, guttural sounds. Other times, we go to bed early with an eye towards an extended snuggle period in which we whisper back and forth for hours like little girls up late at a slumber party.
A week and a half ago, it was the latter. As it was, we were both so tired, we ended up falling asleep record-early, around 9:30.
And were woken up again not an hour later, quite suddenly.
Mark grew up in the quiet ‘burbs of Cincinnati. I, however, grew up in the third largest city in the states, and spent a good half of the life I lived in Chicago in a damn noisy ghetto, right at street level.
I can sleep through ANYTHING. I once slept, for weeks, through a building janitor letting himself into my basement apartment at night to creepily watch me sleep (the one night it did wake me found me breaking my lease the following morning). I have slept through car crashes outside my window, through domestic arguments next door, above or below, and through two floods, waking only once I was literally bubbling to breathe. When I moved to Minneapolis, I couldn’t sleep for weeks because the quiet was so freaky: I’d wake up and have to go outside to double check that the world hadn’t ended while I was napping.
Considering that I now also sleep with one snoring pug and one snoring boyfriend, back in a major metropolitan city, though getting to sleep is ever still a challenge at times, once I am asleep, the girl is dead to rights.
So, when, say, a car horn is wailing endlessly right below, I might toss and turn a little, maybe mutter “mrrrmmma urrrshle” (literally translated as “what an asshole” for those of you who aren’t fluent in sleepy-Heather-mumblese), but I’ll sleep through it.
Even when it’s Mark’s car, in our driveway, right below our bedroom window.
THE MARK PRICE GUIDE TO CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Find a dyke. If you have one nearby, wake her up. Plead with her to do something, anything, to remedy the situation like magic. Because this is what dykes are apparently made for, to fix shit for everybody else.
I’m asleep. Dead-to-the-world asleep. It’s warm under the covers. I’m all snuggled with the pug and — I thought — my sweetie. Sugarplums probably aren’t dancing in my head, but it’s likely that Otis Redding, reborn just to give me a private show, and lots of vegan donuts are. In a very layered, festive Bugsby Berkely number. With Tom Waits. And there’s enough cigarettes for all of us, even with me and Tom around.
Some horn is blaring, and somewhere in the maze of my subconscious mind, I hear it and do a good deal of annoyed, murky muttering, sputtering forth some form of incomprehensible gaelic curse involving a brassed-off hedgehog and malevolent cornflakes. But I stay asleep: I can do this, see, I’m an awesome multitasker.
But then there are lights on. Bright lights. My blind boyfriend is running around the bedroom like a lunatic waving his hands around. I don’t smell fire, the dog appears to be alive and well. Sparing whatever stupid ass is outside laying on their horn, I do not understand what all this fuss is about, especially since without my glasses, he appears to be doing some sort of dance akin to what I’d expect to see at a Pentacostal gathering. But he’s not Pentacostal. Did he convert? When? Why? Did they offer him film funding?
Just because some drunken bonehead is playing with his car is just no reason to get all fussy. Go to bed, hope it ends: if not, sandwich one’s head with pillows and suck it up.
Clearly, Mark disagrees. Sofia and I are still adjusting to the light and the noise, both (I feel I can speak for her) blearily looking at the veritable madman spinning in circles, naked, in the bedroom, stricken by a sudden case of Tourette’s barking, “Horn! Car! Help! MY car! Pants! Help!”
In my sleepy mental fog, I only understand one part of this.
Know where your pants are at all times.
“Where are my pants!”
Umm, I dunno. Why do you need them? It’s not like I haven’t seen your stuff before, babe, and you know already I think it is tay-sty. Yum-yum. Bring it back to bed, wouldya? Oh! Are you cold? Here, have a blanket. It’s warm and cozy. Mmmmm. Toasty blanket. Sleepy goodness.
“PANTS!”
Okay, he’s having a moment. But maybe pants will fix it and then I can go back to sleep. I mumble that unless we had sex, he never takes his pants off in the bedroom, so they’re probably in his office. (When Mark is screenwriting, his process generally involves removing more and more clothing as he goes on: I do not understand this process, but as a casual onlooker with a hearty appreciation for his backside, I have no complaints.)
However, I only mutter this after several rounds of “I don’t know, turn off the fucking LIGHTS!” and after he’s already found the pants and since left the bedroom. Oh well. I did try and help. La-di-dah. Back to bed. ‘Bout time.
Then I begin to hear voices. They’re not happy voices. Then there is a loud knock downstairs at the front door.
Be on the lookout for lynch mobs.
Apparently, at this point, Mark had come to several conclusions:
1) That awful horn was HIS car. Even though it’s an old car, without any alarms or the like that tend to go off when they want to, and even though he wasn’t in it, but was sleeping upstairs.
2) That those voices and the knock at the door are everyone in our neighborhood, waiting for him with rope and a nearby tree.
3) That he is living his worst nightmare, in which he has not merely been rudely awakened by a crisis he must manage, but by public humiliation of the worst variety.
4) There is simply no time for one’s anal-retentive complexes at a time like this.
Suffice it to say, my sweetheart is far more obsessive-compulsive and anal-retentive than I. Of course, everyone is, which explains the state of my kitchen.
So, for instance, whereas I would walk in the snow barefoot (and in high school, once paid the price for that with a bad bout of pneumonia when, one hit of acid over the line, it seemed really wonderful to take a long hike in the middle of a Chicago winter in one’s sundress and bare feet), Mark would go to bed with his shoes (and the two pairs of socks he always wears) on if I let him.
The only time I ever see his feet are when we’re having sex or taking a bath. Otherwise, I’d have no idea he had toes.
Mark would also sooner die than go out in public with his glasses rather than his contacts.
You will never see Mark naked in any photograph I ever take (no matter how much I beg to have a historical monument of the nicest bottom I have ever seen, even just for my own personal use).
So, you can imagine my surprise when, in stumbling out casually with my pug in tow, I saw Mark under the hood of his car — a strange enough occurrence all by itself, since the only other time I have seen this happen is when I insisted we go under there since clearly, the strong, smoky smell emanating from within was Not A Good Thing — quasi-shirtless, shoeless and in his glasses. It was like someone honked the horn to call us out into an alternate dimension.
Thankfully, for Mark, who was utterly convinced that every neighbor we had was outside with rope, stones and flaming crosses, it was but one neighbor, who had no intent to lynch.
Be bald, and call upon your bald brothers in your time of peril.
It was, rather, one of the neighbors in the multi-unit building next door, also bald, and also apparently once the owner of a wayward car which liked to yell in the middle of the night.
So, when I finally stumbled outside — having since woken up enough to figure out that the asshole leaning on the horn was the invisible driver of Mark’s car, which is an entirely sensible conclusion to reach while barely awake, for the record — with a couple of tools in hand just in case, I found two baldies under the hood. As it were.
Know your tools. Even if you don’t know what they’re called.
He needs to work the nut off the battery connector, since myself and Bald Guy #2 have explained that this will assure that the wily, strangely self-directed horn will not have the capability of shouting to the rooftops again while we sleep.
He asks if I have a pliers. I’m too out of it to explain that he needs a wrench, which I hand him.
He does not know this is not a pliers, and clearly thinks I gave him what he asked for. But that’s okay.
When all else fails, stamp your feet, pound your fists, and verbally abuse the once-inanimate object in question.
As it turned out, the mechanically minded of us were actually of little use with this fiasco. Because what finally made the horn stop yowling, well before we disconnected the battery, was simply Mark — in his great strife of having been woken to, by his perspective, giant public humiliation — pounding his fists against the horn, yelling at it to shut the hell up.
Go figure.
After this entire adventure, the poor guy was so hyped up with adrenaline from having been woken up like this and, again from his perspective, almost drawn and quartered by the neighbors, it required much wine and much sitting on the couch watching (the unpredictable choice of) “American Movie,” to feel secure enough again to brave bed and sleep, knowing now that somewhere outside in the world there were cars — maybe even yours! — who had minds of their own and could torment you while you peacefully slept, without warning or mercy.
Given that horrific nothing, it’s shocking, really, that some booze and a flick were enough. Then again, he also had a dyke and his pants.
Oh, be good: I said AND, not in.
Caveat: Mark is actually generally WAY better in a crisis than this. Do not take this to be a testament to his skills, nor mistake my exploiting Mark’s traumas for our entertainment as an accurate representation of how he normally behaves in crisis. And yes, this caveat is here because I’d like to sleep somewhere tonight that isn’t the couch. I’m no dummy.
posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, my fine romance |
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