letter to my daughter

"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on. " Carl Sandburg

On weekend mornings, I make coffee and sit at my desk for a leisurely perusal of news and facebook.  Inevitably, a post will catch my eye, and I'll write some long-winded-but-well-thought-out response to someone's throwaway comment that I might not have noticed later in the day.  This morning, the post I took on belonged to my daughter.  She'd listed ten things she thought would make the world end in 2012:

1. Rebecca Black
2. Walmart
3. Lady Gaga
4. Country Singers
5. Autotune
6. Desperate Housewives
7. The iPad
8. Ugg Boots
9. Nicki Minaj
10. Vin Diesel

We could argue with the merits of the list, but I'm sure my daughter doesn't believe the world will end or that Vin Diesel will be the cause of it.  Frankly, if it does end, all those things will have contributed, just like taking one's first breath contributes to the taking of the last.  But a facebook post doesn't call for that sort of existential philosophy. 

As you can imagine, a provocative opinion (especially on a place like facebook, especially when one's friends are users of the items in said opinion) causes some to take umbrage.  Is it necessary to hate on Gaga?  Whoa, Watch the Nicki Minaj stuff!  Come on—what's wrong with Walmart?

My kid has a good mind, and I'm sure she can articulate why these items and people could contribute to the end of the world—or at least the downfall of Western Civilization.  But something she said struck me because it's something I expect from other facebook users, not my daughter.  "I copied these things from my best friend's status—that doesn't necessarily mean I believe they're all bad."

Whoa.

So I'm copying my letter to her right here.  It's my letter to you, too, and to your kids.  The funny thing is that I don't feel unqualified to give the advice, even though I don't exactly fit the measure of success in this world.  My house is so small that when the six band members come upstairs from the basement, I feel like I will explode.  Yesterday, I spent $60 I didn't have on dinner and a museum admission, and I'm feeling panicky this morning.  I have two inches of roots that I can't afford to make match to the rest of my hair.  My weight loss breaks for Berger's cookies.  And my eleven-year-old SUV is rust held together with bird shit.

Still, I make things with my hands, my heart, and my brain.  I am fulfilled by my experiences.  I try new things, eat delicious foods, go interesting places.  I don't have the added stress of a job I loathe and a boss I hate or clients who treat me like a slave.  I'm surrounded by beauty and by friends who make me laugh and animals that lick my face.  And I suppose this is why.

- - - - - - - -

Here are some worthwhile tips about life.
 

1. Never JUST copy anything. Always make it your own. Look at Ted Brodysseus Merrill.  He can play like the record, but he plays the song with his hair, too, and in pink clothing. Or like Brett Diamond, who plays leads by deadening notes on the neck.
    
2. If you don't like something, be open to changing your mind. I'm open to changing my mind about Nikki Minaj and Lady Gaga. Hasn't happened yet, but I'm open to it.
    
3. Don't let anyone bully you into changing your mind. See their point that yes, Gaga sings and plays well, but no, she's not your (or my) cup of tea. (Or, thankfully, soy latte. Blech.)
    
4. Spend your dollars at the places you think best represent your interests (i.e. not Walmart). Spend more to buy in your neighborhood, so stores stay open, and your house stays valuable. Doing so amounts to more dollars in your pocket eventually, when store owners tell others what a good person you are and help you get gigs and work, not where you are just an invisible nit not worthy of a clean restroom.
    
5. Never wear Ugg boots. You'll find plenty of cool boots that don't look like anyone else's hideous (Ugg--short for uggggggly) footwear. (See my beautiful turquoise cowboy boots with Frida Kahlo hearts on them, for example.)
    
6. The iPad is stupid, but it won't make the world end. Windows-based programs will do that.
    
7. Finally, while it's cool to dis Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black (and Ke$ha and Taylor $wift and all those mediocre-to-lousy YouTube stars), fight the genre by being the best you can be, practicing regularly, being prepared, and enjoying the hell out of all you do—whether it's saxophone, drums, guitar, vocals, writing, drawing, reading, school.

Stop the world from ending by being the reason for it to go on. I know you are mine.

Love,

The Crazy-Ass Bitch Who Buys You Shit and Cooks You Stuff and Drives Your Ass All Over Town

P.S. Country singers are STILL writing the best songs. Ignoring that fact will be of no help where numbers 1 and 7 are concerned. 


- - - - -

photos of a few things I love, top to bottom: new puppy, Jett; three of my Kims; Ted Merrill's awesome guitarring; Serena, the reason.

the new no?

I have applied for jobs randomly over the past few years, but a few months ago, I answered an ad for a position that seemed a perfect fit for me.  Within a day, I’d scheduled a telephone interview. 

This job was different from any other I’d seen in that I actually wanted it.  The talk went well: I’d read up on the company, so I was able to ask some good questions.  When I hung up the phone, I was actually excited and thought I had a pretty good shot at doing communications—writing, video, photography—for a rabble-rousing organization. (Perfect, right?)

I followed up with a thank-you email to the interviewer and reiterated that the position sounded perfect.  After two weeks, I sent another note letting him know that I was still excited and was hoping to hear from him about setting up an in-person interview.  Still nothing.  Another two weeks passed, and I wrote again, this time just to ask if he would please reply regardless of whether I was still being considered.

Nothing.

“Silence,” says my friend Ira Kessler, “is the new no.”

Why replace it?  No is delightful closure, as final as the last period in a book!  It doesn’t dash hopes but instead extinguishes the burning fires of desire.  No can be appropriately terse or delightfully polite.  It can be firm and direct.  It can be nope or nah or nuh-uh, for the ultra hip and casual. 

No can come with excuses to soothe the sting: it’s not you, it’s me.  No can acknowledge the pain of loss without implying fault: I’m sorry to inform you…. 

Best of all, no is fast.  No.  One point two-five seconds.  Add a sorry; there’s still time.  But how about this: Dear Ms. Miller, I have filled the position.  Thank you for your interest.  Thirteen seconds, including a typing correction.  Press reply, and Bob’s yer uncle.

My third email to that guy was going to be a bridge burner, asking him whether silence was, indeed, the new no, admonishing him for not being considerate.  But my mother, my regular proofreader and compass of right and wrong, told me to reconsider.  What if the person he went with doesn’t work out? 

Like the two people who had already held this position before he began his search again?   I bet he told them no. 

It might sound as though I haven’t let this go.  I have, but it's a fine example of how advances in communication technologies lead to lapses of etiquette.  I need the no—or, at the very least, the acknowledgment that my paragraphs have reached their intended target.  How do I know that my emails to him—or the people at the stained glass store, to whom I have sent four unanswered emails since March 10; or the several people to whom I’ve submitted résumés; or the countless others from whom I’ve requested information, quotes, prices, etc.—were not caught in some virtual ethereal web of tangled ethereal virtualness?  They are not the kind of messages that one would expect to remain unanswered. 

It’s not like I’m asking someone to make a poster for my missing cat.  And if I did, nothing is not better than no.  No is still perfect.

thirty-year-itch sonnet

My husband's and my love affair began in November of 1981 or 2—I've forgotten, but does a year really matter when we're talking about a relationship that has spanned about three decades? 

We're still together, though it's been a far-from-perfect thirty years.  And some weeks are more difficult than others.  Is it possible, at this late stage in our lives together, to reverse the trend?  So many people around us can't and don't. I doubt it will happen if my husband continues to wake me at 6:30 a.m. with his acoustic rendition of "Crazy on You" booming through the floor beneath my bed, though I must admit I do dig it when I'm fully awake.  So I have faith.

It's been said that money is the number one cause of fights between couples—even in this relationship, where lack of money was never a surprise.  The one thousand or so of you who've read The Book know that when I met Marty, he was quite content looking like, and earning the income of, a bag man—and even told me once that his goal was to impregnate one beautiful woman in every country in the world to create the "international family of peace."  I know he loves me because he stopped after the first one.

Now that I've gone through menopause (I'm not old, I'm early; it's genetic), I'm even more convinced I need a wad of cash, if not for the repairs of the pesky and irritating flaws of my home—the spatter-warped cabinets and cracked kitchen floor tiles, the rotten bathroom floor, the absent hot tub—then to fix my drooping eyelids and pay the personal trainer to work off these extra fifteen Facebook-exacerbated menopause pounds.  But we're both financially underemployed.  I don't want anything frivolous—not stuff like a new guitar or camera, though, privately, I dream.  

The sonnet I just wrote (only the second in my life, the first about eating the contents of an ashtray, which was the basis for a song I performed with my band in the eighties) captures what it's like when two people choke each other out with alternating arguments and silence.  There's no blame; if one has mood swings and flab, the other has unkempt hair and makes chewing noises.

I couldn't have written this poem—well, wouldn't have—without the help of a few of my Facebook friends.  For the past year, I've been requesting random words in my status updates.  Those who feel like it submit a word, and when I think I have enough, I write a poem using one of the supplied words in each line.  They take at least a week to write.  Much of the time, they've been good poems—surprisingly good—so I'm saving them for a book, rather than publishing them here.  But yesterday, I asked for seven pairs of rhyming words for a sonnet.  This is the poem that emerged.

It is no more autobiographical than any other poem I have written.  That is: there's a mix of true for me and true for you. Poems take liberties.  They are life stories, but they do not concern themselves with facts.  And they are only a single moment, not thirty years.  We can tolerate five minutes of crack-of-dawn "Crazy on You" because of years of good times, good smells, and good tunes.





thirty-year itch

I hear unspoken words in every sigh

and in your heavy footsteps on the floor

I hear the truth you never tell.  The lie

instead is uttered while the rotten core

infects the flesh—where once was love is pain.

we’re ugly like the belching of a trumpet

prisoners of notes that make it strain,

exploding on the other notes that bump it,

cacophonous like falling silverware.

together, honey, both our names are mud.

though some might say we have this savoir flair,

I can promise this: there will be blood.

If we’re to stay together through this jinx,

I'll need a couple carats and some minks.

old yeller

My name is Leslie, and I yell.   (Please don’t call me a yellaholic; I prefer ale to yellahol.)  If there were a club, a deity-free 12-step program, a debriefing, a detoxification, a reprogramming, I’d be in.

I don’t need anger management.  I’m not particularly angry (though perpetual pain does make me snappish); I’m frustrated.  Most of the time, I yell to get people to listen, to recognize that I’ve asked three times nicely already.  CLEAN YOUR ROOM! I AM SICK OF YOUR PILE OF CLOTHES!  Or I yell to stress to them that I really did tell them last week we were going to dinner at Beth's.  I TOLD YOU LAST WEEK WE WERE GOING TO DINNER AT BETH’S!

Sometimes I yell at the dog after I step on him.  I yell at the TV when the news is on.  I yell at people to get out of the kitchen, to stop using my computer, to PUT MY FUCKING CAPO BACK ON MY GUITAR WHERE IT BELONGS. 

Yelling is more love than hate. It is more caring than not caring.

Sometimes the yelling is the reaction of a control freak trying to control areas that she can’t control (people) because she’s unsuccessful at controlling what she can control (pizza).  Today I yelled at an acquaintance.  Instead of being the trainer barking obedience into a dog, which is the way it’s supposed to work, it backfired, and the dog ran away, which is the way it sometimes goes.  Because this was a person, not a dog. 

I could blame it on my family.  I was raised by a pair of yellers.  My first words were yelled.  When my sister was about to be born, my parents drove me to my grandmother’s house.  I fell off the back seat when we went over a bump, and I yelled, “OH, SHIT!”  I was four.  The old familiar familial yelling bothered me when I was little, but I couldn’t beat them, so I joined, yelling at my sister, my parents, our dogs and cats.  I moved out when I was seventeen, and, though I yelled a little less with the help of mellowing agents, I yelled more because of my punk rock band.

Yelling is an exorcism of sorts.  GODDAMMITRASSUMFRASSUM  is usually followed with Hi.  I don’t yell to hurt anyone’s feelings.  In fact, I hate that about yelling.  But I yell if you’ve hurt mine. 

I don’t mean to excuse it.  I just want to explain it. I often resolve to stop it.  But I don't know how.

I tried to quit yelling once a few years ago.  My therapist (he retired, or I’d be on the phone with him right now instead of talking to you) told me that every time I yelled, I had to do some housework I disliked.  I chose to wash the filthy kitchen floor.   For two weeks, I had the cleanest fucking floor in Baltimore.  Sometimes I would yell with the wet mop in my hand.  And soon, like the skinny bitch I put on the refrigerator to remind me not to eat the pizza, the mop became invisible. 

My name is Leslie.  I yell, and my floors are dirty.

missing

I've temporarily disabled my Facebook account.  Could be a day, could be a week.  Place your bets here.

beer googles

Beer and cake are the most heavenly foods on earth. How do I reconcile my worship of a bitter, carbonated nectar with my equal rapture in the presence of the sweet, dense manna? Hell is having to choose between them.

But I can choose, and I choose beer. Nearly every day. But beer has a stigma: it's undignified, manly, aggressive, unlike its more refined counterpart, wine. It's associated with frat parties and thick-necked guys and redneck softball teams, where the outfielder has a cigarette in one hand and a can of Natty Boh by his feet. Tell someone you drink a glass of wine every night with dinner, and she'll tell you how healthy it is. Now tell her you drink a beer every day at 4:00, and she'll think you're an alcoholic. Even though beer is good for you, but soda is not, beer still loses; no one thinks you're a drunk if you have a can of Coke with lunch.

You should know that when I talk about beer, I don't really mean beer; beer is, typically, lager—that piss-water-colored stuff that tastes nasty. I always mean ale. I like hoppy, bitter, light brown beers—no food-thick stouts with weird additives like chocolate. Give me some Flying Dog Doggie Style or some Harpoon IPA or some Rogue Dead Guy (perfect for Good Friday) or the holy grail of ales, The Brewer's Art's Resurrection (perfect for Easter Sunday).

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the alcohol in beer. Coffee tastes delicious, but most of the people I know drink it for the flavor and the caffeine. Look, in a world that's as fucked up as ours, we need all the legal drugs we can get. Back when I suffered from insomnia, my therapist told me I should live like a starlet—popping uppers for breakfast and downers for dinner. And I do. Did.

On Monday, I took a beer-drinking hiatus, at least during the week, so of course I can think of nothing but beer. I quit because it's obvious I have a problem. That's right: I can't fit into my fat jeans. My problem isn't an alcohol addiction. If I had to pick from among Budweiser, Miller, Coors, or even Yuengling, I would abstain. If all you had was wine, I'd chew gum.(Possible exception: Riesling. Hey—I was raised on Maneschewitz, which spoiled me for Merlot.) Don't even mention diet beers. Blech.

Last night, my husband cracked open a Resurrection. Curses! I went upstairs and got in bed to wait for The Good Wife. The defendant had a drinking problem, and there was a picture of him with a beer in his hand. Last night I dreamt I was cooking eggs for breakfast—while drinking a beer. This morning, I found a pair of Flying Dog caps in the silverware drawer. I am Flying Dogfaceboy.

It's going to take the patience of Saul and the faith of Job to get to Friday with two six packs of Resurrection in the fridge. I like beer. A lot. But there's something I want a little more.

I want to fit in those white dragon pants.

I made this.

The first time I saw the press-kit photo of Jimmy Page on the wall of the School of Rock, I was in love. Not with Jimmy, though his sloppy, many-layered solos and his squinty eyes are timeless and sexy. With the suit, the suit of dragons and poppies. It's not a suit just any man can pull off, especially without good reason.

But a girl? A girl could wear the hell out of that suit! So when Serena signed up for the School of Rock's Tribute to Led Zeppelin, I knew what had to be done—and, true to form, I waited until the last minute to get on it. Last Saturday, with a week to go, I dragged a friend to some thrift shops in search of white pants and a white jacket, and when I blew ten bucks on three pairs of too-tight white jeans, I dragged my kid with me to the Belair Road Goodwill. I hit the jackpot.

In case you want to know the details so you can try this at home (and you can!), I did a Google search for "dragon" and "dragon art" and "dragon clip art" and "dragon suit" "jimmy hendrix." I didn't find a single beast I liked, so I combined the perfect clip-art dragon head with the body of some guy's back tattoo, using a cut-out filter to turn the photo into art. When I liked the results, I printed the dragon out (it took four transfers—it's about 26" long) three times, and ironed it on the clothing. I did the same thing with some clip-art poppies. Then I painted over everything with fabric paint, slopping some glitter-filled house paint on the dragon scales.

Every day, my daughter walks by the pants hanging on the door of the armoire in the living room, and she says, "Those are some fucking awesome pants."

Hey, I make some good stuff. My kid is the best of the best stuff I make.

Serena—and her suit—are on about a third of the songs at this weekend's School of Rock tribute to Led Zeppelin (4:00 Saturday, 1:00 Sunday at the Recher; $10). If you are in the area (and not watching the playoffs), come watch these amazing teenage musicians show off the chops they've been polishing since September, and throw yourself right back to 1975, at the Capital Centre. If I'd been born yet, I'd have gone with Andrea Palefsky.

I heard Page didn't wear The Suit that night. We've got that show beat.