Tag Archives: Indian Burial Ground

This the kinda of shit that you bump to get drunk to

I dunno, my baser instincts suggest I make jokes about how National Buy Nothing Day will be pretty easy for so many more Americans this year, but that is so wrong. It’s not nice. I like buying stuff and so do you! May we all take advantage of deep discounts on melamine-free items.

I was just saying to my moosie relation, who may or not be writing on her personal internet homepage again, that ….uh what the hell was I saying. Let me ask, er, review the logs. Yes, OK. I am seeing way more straight up gratitude posts today versus the usual smallpox blanket jokes. This must be a function of a bad economy, like hemlines getting longer. I beg to differ on that point in the article about people cutting their hair shorter when the market drops. Their cuts must not top a c-note. Me, I am growing mine out, and it looks fantastic. I still go every 6 weeks, though, because who wants split ends? It’s not the apocalypse.

This year, I am thankful that I played a twenty minute command drum solo on a Wednesday morning instead of going to a real job (I worked last week, so I am off the hook til I get the urge to buy stuff again). I am grateful that my child is a brilliant little beast, even if it means she is going to come up with shit even I never fathomed when she is a teenager. I am pleased that Mr. H got a job with a mere twenty minute commute. I am pleased I did not throw up today, despite initial leanings (seriously, WTF is wrong with me). A Cat did not throw up and only bit me two or four times. So much is right, right, right, despite living on an Indian Burial Ground. I mean, it’s sort of like living in a giant fridge box, but with climate control and indoor plumbing. Those things are OK by me. I am thankful to be Facebook friends with YOU! I am thankful my sister never got a Taz tattoo, you betcha. Hey, my kid hasn’t bothered me in ten minutes, and I have to go see about that. I am thankful she can’t reach the knife block. Yet.

Timing is everything

Dang, my kid is sucking on a toy made in China. I bet it is pure injection molded melamine, coated with lead. Luckily she has brain cells to spare. She can put her shoes on! She can memorize books and recite them while on her hind legs, like a little Rory Calhoun. She sees when I am sleeping, and wakes me the hell up.

We had a showing of the old Indian Burial Ground the other day, and the lady seemed to really like it. We baked cookies and posed seductively on the bed, sprinkled with dollar bills, saying “Here, take our money!” Take my house, please. Then wouldn’t you know there’s no credit left, so I would imagine she has a chance in hell of getting a mortgage. Is American Express going to stop buying me things too? I need to know! What about my dastardly scheme of getting 5% cash back and paying my bill in full every month? I hope they don’t see through that.

In order to ensure financial prosperity, I have been calling my representatives all day to remind them that provisions for scratch tickets and McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces for every man, woman, and child should be attached to any bills they happen to feel like passing. Park Place, you are my golden years strategerie!

And confidential to A. Cat, that $6 I spent on litter was just too much. You and I have a dinner date.

I have a Peter Schilling song stuck in my head

Man, I took the trash out, and I found out just how low of concerns my neighbors really are. Not only do they not recycle, they read “In Touch Weekly!” Didn’t even have the decency to hide it under something else!

Although who can really blame them, since this one lady in the building went to court to get the communal recycle bin hauled off because she felt its location made her parking space less convenient. I really do sympathize with her inability to back her SUV out with the flourish to which she was accustomed, but now I am stuck shredding and eating my own magazines, and this is harder than one might think. I saw a woodchuck up the hill, and I am going to see if I can kidnap him to eat the magazines for me. He can live in the washing machine when I am not using it. When I am, well, we will work that out when we get there.

I have to go figure out who I can sue about something. The weather: inconvenient or malicious?

Math: fad or here to stay?

Dear the internet, I wasted my whole weekend trying to buy a TV. Apparently no one wants me to buy a TV, as there are eleventeen thousand choices, with hundreds of dollars in price variance between sellers of TV sets. Plus the poor slobs at Sears will haggle, I hear! Is it even called TV anymore? Apparently it is called HDTV, and I am getting a “screen,” not a set. Also, my old DVD player is a few letters too short to just plug into the holes on a “display.” As Mr. H said, we have put more research into this TV than we did into buying our Indian Burial Ground, but then, look where that got us.

I backed into needing a TV by getting a TV stand, er, media wall, (from here!) and it is fantastic, but so completely attractive that maybe putting a TV on it would spoil it. It may well just sit there, languishing glamorously, until someone comes up with the notion to sell TVs in three flavors, like Apple products. You know: nice, nicer, really nice, and no, you can’t afford it. I cannot abide more than three choices, and I become so paralyzed that I would rather stare at all this reclaimed Brazilian barn wood than watch TV. I hear there is nothing good on TV anyway. Oh, barn wood, you have a lovely and fascinating pattern of holes. By the way, its beauty is superlative when placed against our new wall color.

Other than that, cruising altitude is nice. Is it the Oprah book or my stop smoking medication (I don’t smoke anyway, so really, this is approximately the same as taking speed, with less scratching holes in myself)? Now I’d go watch some Olympic Facebook updating, if I had a TV. My money is on the team from my old highschool, where people I don’t even remember meeting will still add me. You who what? Is that your married name? No? I really just don’t remember?

Oh, Jesus, remind me to tell you about the going jogging some day. My shoes are shiny like a robot.

Home improved

Oh, I didn’t mean I was DONE. Just that two walls, some baseboards, and a door are impeccably painted. Like art restorer at the Met painted. I get strange urges while on my knees. The little brush. Oh yes. The tiny one. Give it here to me!

This has taken the better part of 3 weeks, interspersed with cleaning, throwing out, donating, screaming, huffing, stomping, threatening, and other things Bob Vila must do as a matter of course. To celebrate the limited success thus far, a ybab came over and dragged a screwdriver down one of the newly painted walls. We can’t have. You know.

Why did a ybab have a screwdriver? Why ever not? Children need to fucking learn to be useful.

When I was at a large home product chain retailer the other day, I noticed they sell tastefully faux weathered placards inscribed with “Everyday is a gift.” I stuck my head in a foot spa and muffled my screams with a stainless steel polishing cloth.

In other news, Mr. H got stung on the toe by a wasp of some sort.

But the ocean ain’t whiskey and I ain’t a duck

As I was teetering on a ladder carefully painting the edge of a wall, it struck me how this will be one of those stories where we’ll look back and laaaaaaaugh. “Oh,” I’ll chortle, “One time, long, long ago, before the mutant wars, I had to make a thing called a condominium look like a West Elm catalog in order to convince someone else to buy it!”

“What’s a West Elm, grandma?” the kiddies will say. “I thought trees were illegal now?”

Then I will tell them about arranging vases of dried sticks, and they will laugh at me and ask me to tell them the story of how I lost my eye at IKEA. We will all relax in our hovel until the radiation winds kick up. One of the skins from the mutants I killed over a’ter holler will blow off, and we’ll have to make due with some tattered Pottery Barn catalogs to cover the hole.

The kiddies will drift off to sleep, muttering “And you could get meatballs at this place called IKEA? Made from animals?”

In other news, the secret to trimming a ybab’s nails seems to be singing “Rye Whiskey” over and over again. I was trying to get Mr. H to join in on “Alabama Song,” and then “Mack the Knife,” but he is not familiar with those works. He didn’t even know “Rye Whiskey,” but it’s simple enough to jump in at any time.

If, when, why, what?

My ass has been kiting checks again, if you know what I mean. And I hope you don’t. I have a series of impossible choose-your-own-adventure dealings with which to deal. Please pull up a chair.

The largest problem is probably our ridiculous living situation. Let me tell you it: we live in a beard of bees. No, we live in a loft in a charming old mill with a recycling program and a contentious owner message board, steps from a body of water that did not even flood this year, a lovely park, and old world charm-y cobblestone streets! There are now restaurants where you can get shiso on everything, if that is a kind of thing you like.

In short, my lovely home is a fantastic place for anyone who does not own a toddler. It is RATHER SMALL for raising a team of helper monkeys as well, so be warned. But people are all concerned with “mortgages” and “credit” and “interest rates” and do not seem keen on buying anything these days. That’s too bad. I would like to sell you my bee beard. The bathroom was recently painted by a man who could pass for Perez Hilton. There are numerous other selling points, including the fact that we would get out anytime you wanted, even in the middle of the night, and we would leave any items of furniture you fancied. I might do your grocery shopping and other unpleasant errands for a year. Do you need your taxes done? I got a guy. We recently discovered the image of the Blessed Virgin in the ceiling over our bed, if that helps.

We have hit upon a plan to kidnap Ricky Gervais, namesake of a local car dealership and famous actor/director, before he leaves this lovely town when his movie finishes shooting. He taunts me with posts about using a private jet and house hunting in New York. He clearly has no idea he needs a Lowell pied-à-terre. We will convince him of the beauty of this area by taking him to the Blue Moon, a windowless cinderblock strip club out on 3A, and then to Club Thirtysomething across the way for a nightcap. There you will be able to find a woman with a tattoo reading “The only things getting between my legs are a hard dick or a Harley.” I assure you, she is out there. Then we’ll take a tour of where they print The Lowell Sun. We could start with the proofreading department, but the donkey died several years ago. Very sad.

From there, we’ll attend a Lowell Spinners game, participating triumphantly in dizzy bat, and after this, some skanky townie friend of a relation is probably having a “Jack and Jill” shower at a VFW.

Perhaps some of you more worldly types are concerned and wondering why I am not pushing the martinis and the shiso a bit harder, but honestly, you can get that anywhere. I moved here for the local color, or colour, if you must. I moved here to live next to a minor league ballpark and a methadone clinic. It speaks to me. You just can’t make this crap up, except when you exaggerate a little. You people who can have nice things don’t know what you’re missing.

The rain in Spain

Fellow humans, I am living proof that all it takes is one rainy day to undo a month’s work of feeling pretty spiffy! I should just live in a gro-light.

Instead, I live in a place where someone parks lengthwise across three parking spots, one of them being mine! I live in a place with a husband who snores and refuses to get his sleep apnea mask properly fitted to render it comfortable enough to wear and thus stop the snoring. I live in a place with a small child who pitches an unholy fit about sleeping in her special big girl bed, preferring to climb on top of me at 2 AM and 4 AM. I heard tell that at 4 AM, I actually snarled “You and your waking up and you and your snoring! I hate you all!” before jamming a pillow over my head and crying myself back to sleep. Or I don’t know what I really did, because I don’t remember even saying this. Someone claims I said this. Maybe someone is lying. Maybe someone is delusional due to oxygen deprivation from extreme sleep apnea.

The small child had a fit at the library this morning. Last time she assaulted the sign language bear, and this time she wept 10,000 tears when transparent scarf time ended. I am enjoying a fine cocktail of “Am I horrid parent, or is there something legitimately wrong with her?” This cocktail is a multivitamin and a glass of water and empty promises that someone is going to bring me back lunch soon.

While at the library, I overheard one lump of a woman say “Oh, I never know what to order at Starbucks. Everything on the menu is different.” Starbucks should take a memo and introduce a menu with only one thing on it. Or 30 things with the exact same name and constitution. The other lump who was the target of this declaration replied “Lattes! I love lattes! Get a latte!” And then I wept 10,000 tears, and I fell on the ground and kicked my legs in the air until a janitor came and removed me. That exchange, plus the fact that the LOL, MA newspaper, the Lowell Sun (motto: “We never spellcheck, and we call hot dog restaurants gourmet”), reports that a new wine and cheese shop called “Cest wine, Say Cheese” [sic] is opening, causes me to fling myself on the bed like a be-kneesocked school girl and scream “Get me out of this god-forsaken town!” Can’t you see that I am destined for bigger things? I’m packing my bag and heading to the bus station right now, like Axl Rose in the “Welcome to the Jungle” video. You’ll never take me alive, LOL, MA.