Fractal Custodial Grandparenting

Probably, if I had a laptop, I would be in my bed (I have quite the most wonderful bed in the universe, it has four huge posts, leather trim, its quite massive and dark wood, and well, I honestly just love it a lot) with the television on, maybe oh, discovery, or the learning channel, perhaps the history, science, bbc america, or even bbc for real, and I would have wireless internet, cable of course, plumped up pillows at my back, leaning against the padded leather headboard which is over five feet high, snuggled down balancing my laptop on my lap, bitching about how hard it is to balance.

Isn’t life perverse? Seems as though it doesn’t really matter a whole lot what we HAVE, it’s what we HAVE NOT that really defines us. I guess that is part of what brought us down from the trees though isn’t it?

I mean, if not for striving for SOMETHING, we would still be up there, happily eating bananas and swinging from vines wouldn’t we? But no, some prehistoric, pre homo erectus (do gay men think that phrase is as hilarious as I do? I know quite a few, maybe I will ask them), had to go and think to him/her self...

Wow, that ground thing down there looks really cool. I wonder if I fall down out of this, well, whatever it is I live in, if it will hurt, or if it is soft, or will I perhaps bounce back up?

And so, our brave pre-hominid promptly fell out of the tree thingy to his immediate and very painful death. His mate, having watched the whole thing quietly, shook her head and climbed down, slowly putting one foot in front of the other, and then when she reached the bottom of the tree, where ground intersected sky, and tasted terra firma for the first time. And liked it.

She went slowly at first, getting the hang of walking upright. Found out that down the block from HER tree, was another tree, and in THAT tree was more life forms who resembled her.

The rest, as they say, is history. Once he/she/them got out of the tree, civilization followed shortly thereafter. Most of civilization revolves around defecation. No really. Stop and think about it.

Now that we are down from the trees, we seek shelter. Well and good. We find shelter, then oops, gotta poop. WOW, that smells. It never did THAT in the trees, it just sort of fell away. Now we cannot stay in HERE with all that nastiness. So off we go, to find a two room cave or a cave that has an little alcove so to speak, off to the side. Shelter when pooping is rather important for several reasons. The first is practical, the smell is going to attract various and sundry large beasties who are going to view YOU as dinner, or perhaps a light, late night aperitif. So it is smart to have a small, out of the way place to quietly do your business, as it were.

Then, it must be CLOSE enough to the living quarters that you don’t get ambushed on the way back from your morning abolitions.

And DAMN if it isn’t COLD out there sometimes. Whooooeeee. Maybe we could figure out something to take care of that. I mean, for pete’s sake, living in the cave isn’t too bad, the cave walls keep the chill out in the cold, but taking that WALK and squatting there in the freezing cold, well, THAT has to change.

Enter Buildings. Rock, Stone, then wood, brick, whatever. Each type just made it easier and easier to take a dump whilst staying warm.

In the what? late 1800’s or so, the way to insure that you were IT, was to have inside bathroom facilities. If you had a water closet, you were the berries. Even now, in our consumer oriented society, the nicer the bathroom, the better we are thought of.

Okay, a bit of an exaggeration. However, I do remember being in the Bahama’s and thinking how strange it was to see a brand new vehicle sitting right smack outside of a true and mean HOVEL. And when I say HOVEL, I mean HOVEL. I mean a 30 x 30 wood edifice, with cut outs boarded over and latched instead of windows. Quite literally, A shed type door with a PADLOCK on it. And a BRAND NEW Range Rover in the mud driveway.

To me, raised in the lap of luxury so to speak, being American (what a dirty word that sounds like here), that would be anathema. But then, what if I WASN’T raised this way. Really, maybe they don’t give a SHIT about where they live, and spend lots of time in their cars?

I live in a $100,000 house, and drive a 1993 piece of shit minivan that I bought two months ago for a whopping $300. Who is to say I am right and they are wrong? Their car payment is certainly much less than my house payment. Their house is probably paid for completely. Maybe they have a whirlpool tub and heated toilet seat in that Hovel. (see, back to pooping again). Maybe all they do in that wood structure is sleep and bathe. It’s the Bahamas for God’s sake. You can do EVERYTHING outside in the Bahamas, except stay dry in the monsoon season, and if you don’t mind wet, and if you DO mind wet, well you don’t stay long in the tropics do you? So what is the point to a fancy assed house. Get the bloody Range Rover and drive somewhere and spend all that extra money on a good time too. Hell for all of that, you can do all your entertaining at the hotels that dot the landscape and dirty it up with slightly understated wealth.

You know, that makes me think it would be a sight better to put the house on the market tomorrow morning, sell off EVERY bloody thing I own, take the kids and the hubby, tell the world to piss off and head for the nearest or furthest abandoned or undiscovered or even slightly tacky but already discovered and somewhat passé tropical island, build a hut out of bamboo or whatever presents itself to the opportunity and live off the tropical fruits. Maybe climb on back UP into the trees.

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There is nothing quite like a good glass of merlot. I didn’t used to drink wine. It made me very sick. Really, incredibly sick. Puking immediately sick. Funny though. My mom drank wine when I was growing up, and by extension, of course, I started drinking wine when I was young. Very young. Ten or so I believe. I didn’t turn into an alcoholic either. I wonder why? But Mom always drank white wine. I don’t particularly like white wine. Some are okay. A good dry chardonnay is nice on a hot summer’s afternoon, about 3ish, just after the sun has hit its zenith and you think you cannot possibly get any hotter. A nice glass of chilled chardonnay will put you right in the mind for a quick (or slow) nap under the air conditioning!

After a good bit, I started drinking scotch. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was I liked about scotch at age 18, but I must have liked it a good bit, I certainly drank enough of it. And if I drank alot of it without liking it at all, I was an ass, (which, now that I think of it, is probably true, both the lack of taste and lack of brains).

I didn’t try red wine until about 13 years ago, funnily enough when my husband and I were visiting a lesbian couple who were friends of ours, some eight hours or so drive from home. We had wine with dinner that night, and I spent hours in their wonderfully decorated bathroom, puking my guts out. The bathroom was all done up in neutrals, lots of minimalism, textures and rough sort of brownish/grayish tile all through. I remember the shower, it took me a while to actually figure out WHICH object WAS in fact, the shower. There was no curtain or other hints as to the function thereof so to speak. I figured out the bidet, having been raised SOMEWHAT civilly, the lavatory had a wonderful sort of waterfall and some rocks in it, I didn’t see any soap there though, which I found quite strange. I finally located the shower by finding the drain in the floor and looking up after that, following the clues. There was overhead, a sort of stainless steel plate, which the water cascaded over. There were two buttons, stainless of course, recessed into the rough cut tile wall, which controlled the water flow and temperature. It was all quite impressive, but not very pleasant to bathe with.

I stayed QUITE away from red wine until about a year or so ago. One day, having a good craving for a fine cabernet, (which incidentally one of my friends drinks, and so, was quite handy, since my place of employment just HAPPENS to be a full service restaurant which my best friend owns, and so it is not entirely unusual to find either or both of us downstairs quite OUT of the office, as it were, on a stressful day, well, having a drink), so anyway, I DID in fact, have a glass of a good respectable Australian cabernet.

And remembered JUST how heavenly it could be. AHHH, the oakeyness. The slightly tangy, nose wrinkling bouquet, barely reminiscent of the vines upon which the lovely grape once hung, ripening in the sun, full and ready to burst.

And I drank quite a lot of it that night, and many subsequent nights as well. Got rather pissy a few times too. Ran on and on at the mouth at length to all my friends and became very obnoxious on occasion. You don’t really think that little 4% alcohol content difference between white and red is a big deal until you over imbibe on red. Whoo boy.

The next day, your friends will remind you of many many things you didn’t know you could possibly do, but in fact, did.

However, being fifty, you kind of take it all in stride. You don’t really embarrass easily at fifty, well, at least you shouldn’t. At least I don’t. My basic feeling is that well, piss off if you don’t like it anyway.

And then, I tried Merlot. A wonderful little mix of cabernet and something else, quite probably merlot? Who cares? Not me. But I do like the taste of it. A bit smoother than cab, not as tanninny (I am not sure if tanninny is a word, the spell checker doesn’t seem to think so, but I think it fits, so piss off to the spell checker). Easier on the tummy than cabernet, which can be a bit, well, acidy and keep you awake at 2 a.m. ish. Not something you need at fifty when you stayed up till midnight watching television and having a glass, and have to get up at six.

No, Merlot is quite nice. The perfect cap to a crappy day. Truth, I am sitting here watching myself blog, drinking some now !! There is a dead baby fish about 3 feet away in the tank. He was alive this morning. I didn’t know for a long time that I had a baby fish until I saw him lurking in the tank. One of the guppies I suppose. I eventually fished (how funny is that) him out and put him in a baby fish sort of thingy that hangs on the side of the inside of the fish tank. To keep him from being eaten by the other fish I think. It worked for that. But tonight, alas! His little 1/16 inch body is floating on the bottom of the net. I suppose fish sort of people could tell me what I did wrong. But I shall probably just stop at Wal Mart tomorrow and buy another little fish. We still have big fish, well big comparatively speaking. They are in fact, quite small, but they were bigger than he.

And so, me and my merlot, a dead fish and the rest of the evening.

Good night.

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i thought for a while that maybe i was getting a handle on the whole life thingy. but it was not to be. that whole God person/omnipotentness has control over all just totally messes with my head and my schedule and i don't actually like it very much. the thing is, i am fifty. i supposedly am of the age where i should be 'getting it all'. so where exactly did i go wrong then, if in fact, i did go wrong. maybe i didn't go wrong, and i do get it, but it is the absolute opposite of what i envisioned it to be? what a hoot that would be. i mean. here i am. say at work. now i have a good type of job. it is more actually a career thing. but call it a job for sake of brevity and lack of social striving. i get up every morning, get ready for work, go to work, do my work, leave work, come home from work and then not work for the rest of the day, not work as in not get paid for it. so then, what is the problem. well, nothing is ever predictable. now you say, well, thats life isn't it? well yeah. but once in awhile it would be really cool to have a predictable day i think. i am not of the school that thinks boring is bad. boring has LOTS to recommend it when you think it through. i mean how much adrenaline can one body take? i think boring would be quite wonderful. oh. well maybe thats because i don't normally HAVE a boring life. the grass is always greener and all that. bullshit. hogwash. turds. thats what i say to that. i can think of a perfect day. say you live in new york city. okay. 6 am. up with the alarm. into the shower, do the hair, do the face, do the toilet thingy's, (or perhaps do THOSE before the shower...) okay, look out the window, sun is shining. great. wonderful. nice day it turned out to be too. good. so zip out to the elevator and say, nope. six floors is nothing on a day like today. head for the stairs. right. down like a gazelle, thinking, hey, not bad for a 50 yr old woman. quite good in fact. stop out on the curb for a moment to appreciate the view of the street, the one lone tree leafing merrily away, it's spring in the city. jump on a bus at the corner, ride for a bit. get off, there is a wonderful little deli serving bagels and lox with fresh roasted dark coffee. too right !! an onion bagel, some cream cheese, thinly sliced lox delicately draped over the bagel, a superbly sliced piece of red onion complimenting nicely the well cured lox.....you can smell the coffee before you drink it, reveling in the way the coffee makes you feel, almost as good as post orgasm. onto the stairs going down into the subway, waving your card at the turnstile and it actually works. hooking up your ipod and settling in with your coffee, bagel and the morning times. not caring about how you are sitting, cause hey, who gives a shit at 50? jeans on anyway, knees up agains the seat in front of you, zoning out and its not even 8 am yet. get to work, sit at desk. do work. interact occasionally with people. read through lunch, the latest book. get off work, head out. see a friend as you are leaving building, decide to go for drinks. head to corner bar, have a few gin and tonics with triple lime, tanquery and sugar free tonic too so there. decide to eat out. have a lovely dinner with the friend, head home in a cab, change into jammies, sink down into the imported leather sofa and watch will and grace reruns until you are tired. perfect day. is that wrong to want?

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well, its not as good as the picture where she is in the teapot, and i am not going to put it over on stuffonmycat.com; but the cat has a nice coat of toothpaste on it. its on the left side. which i find interesting.

why only on the left? well, it was ****** who decided that the cat's appearance would be vastly improved by toothpaste. but it was plain toothpaste. had it been me, i think i would have perhaps chosen the new red toothpaste with the cute little pinkish sort of crystals in it. or she could have chosen the shrek toothpaste, it is green and is reportedly supposed to taste like chocolate, which may be why she chose NOT to use that one, maybe she likes the chocolate tasting toothpaste and didn't want to waste it.

she didn't use the stripey sort of toothpaste either. just the plain old white toothpaste, which is even odder, because THAT particular toothpaste is only resident in my shower, and it is contained in a little sort of plastic thingy which is affixed to my shiny fiberglass shower wall with little plastic cuppy suctiony things. and, here is the thing, it is affixed to the wall way to high for ****** to reach. not to mention that if she was to have used this particular tube of tooth cleansing product, it would have necessitated much thought before hand. premeditation as it were.

****** is three years old.

now i have watched this child since the second she was brought wailing, (actually, i was there at the birth, and she, in fact, was very much NOT wailing when she was born. she was rather quiet, contemplative and looked around) into this world. i have watched the development of her brain. i have watched her learn to walk, talk, think, construct sentences which are complex and original.

i, however, do not understand her predilection for wanting to apply food products to various parts of her, or other bodies.

do NOT ever give this child yogurt unattended. she will spread it, quite calmly and determinedly over any exposed part of her body. should you make the mistake of giving her yogurt for breakfast, you will shortly need to bath the child, the t.v., the sofa she was sitting on and any other close by object/life form.

icing is good too. don’t ever leave a birthday cake unattended in her presence. she doesn’t however, like to spread applesauce on her body parts. maybe it is the consistency? nothing at all chunky. if i would go out and buy baby food applesauce, which is a good bit creamier than regular applesauce, and leave it out for her to eat/spread, then i could see.

i don’t feel like cleaning up that though you see. so i will not find out.

the cat doesn’t seem to mind the toothpaste. it has been three days. i thought that the dog would be accommodating and clean it off, but apparently plain colored toothpaste is not to the dog’s liking. i find that a bit strange. the dog has a real liking for crayons of various colors (he doesn’t however, like black crayons), he eats at will from the litter box, and will clean up just about anything at all. so why not toothpaste? he regularly grooms the cat, although i do have to constantly say, “dog, get the cat’s head out of your mouth”. but since the toothpaste episode, he has consistently refused to groom that cat.

i have caught him grooming the other two cats.

my dog doesn’t like toothpaste. my youngest granddaughter doesn’t like toothpaste either. empirical evidence that. i think. i am not exactly sure what empirical evidence is anymore. i used to know. but now i am fifty, and that was a very long time ago.

i think i lost most of that knowledge sometime during the decade of the seventies. i don’t have the prejudice against toothpaste though, so i don’t think it is hereditary, for either the granddaughter or the dog.

now, i am waiting, biding time, counting the days, hours, minutes, to see just exactly how long it takes toothpaste to disintegrate off of an organic life form. the cat doesn’t seem to like toothpaste either, as i haven’t noticed the cat grooming itself. herself, whatever, in those particular spots. she grooms herself really well on all the parts NOT covered in toothpaste, but leaves the bits with toothpaste on them totally and completely ungroomed, alone, as it were.

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life. it is such a mind boggingly huge concept. we live it, we labor about it, we go on and on and on about it, but none of us really understand much about it at all.

i am not exactly sure that life is supposed to be understood. there is a school of thought (no one is quite sure where the school is, i think there is a a faction of some who have gone looking, but they never returned so perhaps they found it and are in fact, living life and the rest of us are all figments of each other's imaginations) which plainly states that if we ever figure out what life IS, in tangible terms, we will all spontaneously disappear. there is another faction which states that this already happened and those of us left are in fact, the result of a nasty time warp.

love sort of goes along with the whole life issue/question/dichotomy. other than money, i cannot think of one thing that most of us spend most of our time in pursuit of. they are both badges that we can publicly wear, sort of a "look at me, i am rich", or "look at me, i am happily, solidly in love with no fear of being abandoned".

well, here’s the thing though

its all about self awareness and self acceptance isn’t it? which is what makes it so horridly hard to get around.

because, when you really are comfortable with who and what you ARE. when you indubitably know WHO you are, WHAT you are, and if you are REALLY good, lucky and have tried for years and years WHY you are, well then, you really don’t need anyone else’s approval do you.

but thats the really hard bit. see society doesn’t want us to do any of that. society relies on us being waffly, wishywashy and mostly confused about ourselves. otherwise, there are quite literally thousands, millions of other people who will be out of a job.

if, in fact, we are happy with our bodies, then well, we just put clothes on because they keep us warm, or make us feel good. we don’t worry about how big our boobs look, or whether or not the roll of fat around our belly shows. if we don’t really devote a lot of angst toward the idea that our complexion may have spots on it, or is the wrong color, or even multi-colored, well then, we don’t wear make up. we just sort of jump out of bed and run a wet cloth over our faces to wash the sleep off and go on with life.

if our hair is something that we obsess about, that is kind of sad isn’t it? it doesn’t define us in any way or shape, other than in OTHER’S eyes. i have never really gotten the whole concept of having to be accepted by others. that is not to say that i don’t have bad hair days. i am sure i do in fact, have MANY bad hair days. I simply don’t look in the mirror enough to notice them at all. its not so much that i don’t CARE how i look, oh. wait. it IS that i really, deep down, inside myself, do NOT really care. i don’t. fuck the way i look. if i don’t like the way i look on one day or another then i simply avoid mirrors that day. if others don’t like the way i look, i expect that they can figure out a way to not look at me that day. or not. that becomes, then, by default, THEIR problem and not mine. you see?

and so, going on through life trying to find someone to accept/love you is an exercise in total futility. why must you be loved by anyone other than yourself.

oh wait. isn’t that a bit narcissistic? well, no. not in that sense. i am not IN love with myself. i do however LOVE myself. first. best. better than anyone else can. why? because there is no other single person in the entire universe who knows ME better than ME. all of my good bits, and all of the bad ones that i would rather NOT know about, but still have to find room to live with.

so then, if i can accept me, then i am good with whatever anyone else chooses to feel or not to feel.

which brings me to the point that somewhere back, i started to make.

love, increases. that is the essence, i believe, of love. love can not, by virtue of being love, decrease. so, being loved by anyone else besides myself, makes me more of ME. if someone other than myself loves bits about me that are inherently me, then it only makes me more ME. and then, there is more of me that is lovable.

okay. that didn’t make one whit of sense. well, what i mean is that, okay. there are bits about my husband that i don’t necessarily LIKE. but i love the whole person. and if he changed any of those bits in him that i don’t like, then he wouldn’t BE the man that i am in love with. so i have to accept ALL the parts of him, even the ones i don’t necessarily like, or it flies in the face of what love really is. and besides, what if the person that was left after he changed the bits is NOT someone i ended up loving? what then?

so, what i think i am leading towards, in a very convoluted way, which is, in fact, the only way i can arrive at most destinations, worthy or not, is that you cannot BE loved by anyone until you understand LOVE, at its most basic, nor can you GIVE YOUR LOVE to anyone until you in fact, are so totally comfortable with your own self, id, being, whatever, that you wouldn’t change anything about you even if you could. no that doesn’t mean that you have suddenly turned into an egotistical asshole like my brother. it means that you are COMFORTABLE with your essence of being.

so then, what is comfortable? to me, comfortable is a state of being in which i am not actively moving in any particular direction out of some misplaced need to self improve.

if i do, in fact, improve, then well and good. but if i set out to change something about me, i had damn well be sure that it is in fact, something that NEEDS to be changed. because lets face it, i will be 51 my next birthday, and if i am not too happy with myself, then i ought to just cash it all in shouldn’t i? if i haven’t gotten it by now, what are my chances? not good.

so, in looking for love, you must, by default of logic, look within. really. look at yourself. are you absolutely horrid? do you disgust yourself? what? i mean, others like you don’t they. why don’t you just be a whole lot easier on yourself. who said anyone needed to be perfect. how boring would that be after all.

get to know who you are. find out if you like yourself. are you funny. sometimes i crack myself up. i get things no one else gets. i like that about me. okay, its not something i can share well, “oh, yes, i’m laughing, but you are too incredibly stupid to get it so i cannot share it with you sorry.” no. doesn’t fly well at all. we do still have to live in society.

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For Doe

one of my heroes cried today

right in front of me

it was just for a second

brief moment out of time

but it crashed my world

and fucked with my mind

one of my heroes cried today

her facade cracked in an instant

i had to watch her do it

it snuck up on the both of us

and broke my heart

i've known this woman for

twenty years, or so

and we have shared

and cared

sometimes dared

we have laughed

saw babies born together

been through the deepest pains

and held dear ones when they died

but we never cried

we loved life to the fullest

we raised our kids

we did what we did

and

no one else EVER got what we did

but me and her

but we never cried

oh a tear, now and then

when we lost a friend

or relative whom we loved

but those aren't the tears i am talking about

i have never known anyone else in my life

and believe me i have had THE life to know

and friends uncounted, numbering high

but not like her

no.

not like her

she is my rock, and i hers

and after all was said and done

we could ALWAYS find humor in the things

that life sent our way

until last year

now the humor is gone.

forever gone.

and just the pain remains.

and no one else gets it.

i know they don't.

they never will

i think it was the hardest thing i have ever done

to just sit there.

when her face cracked, and her voice cracked,

and my world cracked

because i knew

if i cracked

neither one of us would ever be okay

again

i saw my hero cry today

and the world will never be the same

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