Tin can

Never let them give the ashes back.
Never tuck the corpse into your pocket–
leftovers tinned, or hair inside a locket.

When my sister’s dog died, I had only one bit of advice–don’t get the ashes back.

When we picked up our beloved Tuffy’s ashes, we found that he would have fit inside a soup can. No matter how many movies I had seen with people carting around urn of Uncle Vernon, I wasn’t ready for a life to shrink to Cream of Chicken. The tin had flowers on it, of course, but I suppose Tuffy would have preferred the chicken anyway.

He’s been dead for a couple of years. Why am I thinking of this now? Murder will out, I suppose, and that cat killed something inside me for a while–optimism.

There are times when living in backwoods Ohio is fine and times when it makes me rend my garments and crawl under the hedge. Today is one of the latter days.

And it’s all because of dessert.

Some evil person mentioned tiramisu in my presence. Bastard! Don’t you know that I can’t get that here? I used to be able to buy tiramisu gelato at the store. They stopped stocking it. BASTARD!

Pardon me while I gnaw on this root. Mmm. Tasty.

The first person to comment about how the cutest little bistro down the street has tiramisu dies. Or gets a very stern glance. And makes the baby Jesus cry.

Bastards.

You’ve got to admit my rendition of Santa is just a little more hip than the fat dude in the suit.

What’s sad is that he wasn’t supposed to look like Santa. He was supposed to be cool. Sexy, even. And then I couldn’t resist the beard. Or the clown pants. Yes, I do have issues.

You can do better. If you gloat about it though, I’ll bite you.

But Soon

I’m writing speeches for my father’s wake,
deciding how I’ll hold my hands and head
while speaking calmly of the newly dead.
Enunciating grief without mistake.
I will not pull away if strangers break
my spine in crushing hugs, attempt to thread
their fingers through my own. I will not dread
their platitudes or pity, and will make
myself a smiling puppet. Casseroles
will bring me solace. I will never cry
in public, nor permit my hands to tremble,
nor fuss when dripping calla lily bowls
leave lasting rings on the piano. I
shall be as still as that man I resemble.

This poem is getting to be pretty ancient, an artefact of my father’s first stroke. What frustrates me about the damned thing isn’t anything in the poem. It’s my inability to do anything else. My father died two years ago, a couple of years after this poem was written, and I have yet to come to terms with that death, emotionally or poetically. I’m still writing speeches for a wake that is long past, deciding how to hold my head instead of deciding how to hold my pen.

I’ve had glimmers of being able to break out of it, but then I slump back into a general malaise. Blaming the dead for my inability to write poetry. Now there’s a mature attitude.

I don’t have writer’s block, I have writer’s don’t wanna. I don’t wanna push past this. I want to be past it, but not to do the work to get there. I think part of me even thinks that it’s disrespectful to my father if I get over it. I don’t know. I’m writing speeches, writing speeches, writing speeches.

I was a teen. My friend Jo loaned me a book, Memoirs of an Invisible Man.

I began to read, and I became violently ill with a stomach virus. It wasn’t the book’s fault, I don’t suppose, but it didn’t matter. My stomach thought it was the book’s fault. My brain is in thrall to my stomach and dares not contradict for fear of revolt. If there is one thing you can be sure of in life it’s that you do not want a revolting stomach. Trust me.

In any case, the stomach won. The book was Bad. Evil and No Good. The book caused more queasiness than mayonnaise in the sun. I gave it back to Jo who, safe in her ignorance, didn’t know that it was barftastic.

Years later, I found that my boyfriend had a copy of the book. Despite that, I still married him, thereby proving that it’s occasionally fine to upset the stomach, but only if there’s sex involved.

Fast forward to Friday. I was reading Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer. (I had qualms about checking this out of the library, though my husband assures me that they’ll just think I’m reading about politics again.) I was hungry and had some leftover chili in the fridge. Too much chili for one bowl. Too little chili for two. I got a bigger bowl and I wolfed. Verily.

Oh, and did I ever pay. But that is another tale, a colorful one. Let it just be said that I became indisposed and that Shadow of the Torturer has become only the second book on my stomach’s hit list.

If I were honest, though, I’d admit that I don’t really mind. It’s a good book. I was far enough in to say that. And far enough in to say that I wanted to escape it, wanted to tear myself free from its relentless melancholy. I chose an awfully dramatic way of going about it, but guilt free. Next, my stomach is planning the overthrow of Communist China through the consumption of spring rolls. Never underestimate its power.

I just realized who I sound like. Topper.

No, not the little man with the ghosts. The little penguin with the scarf.

If that isn’t at least tickling the dusty edges of your memory, then you’re no child of the seventies. Poseur! Er, not that you claimed to be a child of the seventies. Maybe I should lay off the cough medicine.

Topper, you see, was a lone penguin, crying out in the wilderness of Germany, when Kris Kringle find him and, well, no. It doesn’t make sense. But it was stop-motion animation and Kris Kringle looks like my brother-in-law and don’t you judge me!

It’s bad enough that I want to stick my head in a cement mixer (putti, putti), but then to be insulted by a pie? It’s too much.

Yes, I decided to find out what kind of pie I am. Something light? Something dreamy? Or something that harkens back to kids in diapers eating dirt? Oh, most definitely the latter:

You Are Mud Pie

You’re the perfect combo of flavor and depth Those who like you give into their impulses

Riiiight. I’m flavor and depth. And crunchy granules of loam. And an earthworm or two.

What does this prove? You can’t trust pie. I once loaned a Boston Cream a sawbuck and did I ever see that money again? You know the answer. Down with pie.

Finally, proof that there is an Og and that Og hates telemarketers with the same fury as the congested podiatrist who just got roused from a much-needed nap by a seller of a lifetime subscription to “American Noodle Monthly.”¹

The FTC has fined DirecTV $5.4 million for violating the “Do Not Call” rule.

[Nelson Muntz]Ha ha![/Nelson Muntz]

¹ References to “American Noodle Monthly” do not constitute an endorsement of the American Noodle Lifestyle or the American Noodle Agenda and should not be mistaken for such. Perverts.

You know it’s bad when the searing headache and intense sore throat of a sinus infection that made you want to die was in the good part of your week.

Last week began rough and ended rougher, what with the consumption of Bad Chili and the barfitude therein.

Let this be a warning unto you. When you think it can’t get worse, it can. Tempt it not.

Now I’m going to crawl under my desk and talk, quietly, to myself.

So the Winter Meetings are over, and the Indians haven’t signed Millwood. And according to all signs, they won’t.

It’s what I get for being a Cleveland fan, I suppose, though it seems that even the deep-pocketed Yankees aren’t extending their payrolls, quite unlike them.

But the Mets are, and the Blue Jays. 55 million dollars for a sub-.500 pitcher. And despite my crissy-crossy fingers, someone decided to take a flyer on Kenny Rogers. You make it hard to root for you, Detroit.

Bah.

Humbug.

It doesn’t matter, of course. Come hell or high water, in April I’ll be curled up on the sofa, watching the Indians lose. If I had a soul, they’d own it.