Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you make a movie with Rula Lenska.

Fortunately, my stepmommy Darla is looking out for my best interests. The word cinematic doesn’t quite cover this career opportunity.

HENCHMEN NEEDED
(London, but planned worldwide expansion)

Turtleneck sweaters! Oh goody!

20-30 henchmen needed for moderately-sized supervillain organisation with large expansion potential (fortresses built into geological structures, corruption of government officials, possible genesis of ‘nemesis’ vigilante). Electrical theme.

Applicants must be willing to learn new skills, including but not limited to operation of specialised ‘lightning guns’. Applicants will also be required to wear specialised uniform when at work (functional rubber suits with my logo on front), except in cases where deception is required (posing as hostages in order to ambush vigilantes, etc).

Desired (but not necessarily required) in applicants:

-interesting deformations/obsessions/powers(?) giving rise to interesting nicknames (e.g. Claws, Pyro, Buzzsaw, and similar)
-unwavering loyalty
-being a corruptible government official
-ability to work as part of a close-knit team (unless interesting obsession is of the ‘lone wolf’ variety)
-grudge against any well-known vigilante
-flexible moral code

This seems ambitious. Can I apply for entry level Minion?

Equal opportunies employer. Both henchmen and femmes fatales absolutely welcome.

Great promotion opportunities – right-hand-man position constantly being unexpectedly opened. Would look good on any future supervillain resume/CV.

Send an email with details of any prior henchman work, or details of what is driving you to join the ranks of a supervillain organisation. Will reply to all serious applicants. Hope to hear from you, and with luck, welcome you into a rewarding and promising career!

– Jacque (The Zapper) Zerapi

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I just read the words prior henchman work!

* Location: London, but planned worldwide expansion
* Compensation: £20,000pa starting salary, with added commissions based around success of supervillain operations. Contracts negotiable depending on applicant’s personal skills/powers.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Well, of course not! Creating a supervillain organization is going to take up your whole day. Thus, we still have all night to puzzle over this vomity vomitrociousness:

Hat tip: the guy who sits next to me in the library.

Ephesians? You read your kid Ephesians and wonder why she can’t fucking sleep? How about something a little more secular and age appropriate like those lovely Bronte Sisters: “It was the only house on the moors and it was creepy. Beautiful and creepy. Cathy and I fell in love, which was beautiful and creepy. One day, she was annoyed and the next day she was dead of fever, which made her beautiful, though no less creepy. I mourned her as only I, Heathcliff, could mourn her, beautifully and creepily. And in death she hounded me to mine. Which is, you guessed it…” I suppose Goodnight Moon is out of the question because it might interest the little darling in science or bears or something – but listen, I have one important word for the maker of these terrifying pajamas: headbands.

A bazillion years ago, headbands became an overnight sensation. I can’t recall seeing them on the street, but I can’t remember if I’m wearing shoes, so that’s no certain indicator. Anyway, suddenly, everywhere a person turned, there floated the smiling face of Olivia Newton John sporting a headband and warbling Let’s Get Physical, which was hugely mortifying. If you had a pulse. I immediately understood what had happened: a small group of people in a closed environment had one stupid thought and because of the pressurized environment it blew up and made a giant, fashionable mess. Headbands would not have happened if even one person – one person! – had said in a stern voice, “You all look stupid. Cut that shit out and get back to work. Those thighs aren’t going to firm themselves.”

This has got to be said: Crazy person – and I mean that in the nicest, least judgmental and not at all spitting-mad manner – Crazy person, despite your best intentions and despite what you think you see, your children look like the best dressed Klansmen on the whole fashionably doomed Templar crusade. Burn these terrible costumes – not on Iman’s front lawn, mind you, no matter what she’s peddling at Target. Resist the impulse. I can tell you feel it! Get rid of these hateful things, plunk your kids into some soft, pastel footie pajamas and read them some motherfucking Winnie the Pooh. Save your children a lifetime of wishing YOU would get therapy.

Some months ago.

Miss Sasha: We’re having ‘Panky christened in August.
Tata: In a church? Like, splashy-splashy, scrub off the original sin?
Miss Sasha: Yes, and then we’re having a luau at Dad’s house.
Tata: You’re serving roast pig to old Jews on a Catholic occasion and setting it to soothing hula music?
Miss Sasha: When you put it that way…
Tata: Lightning’s bound to strike. I’ll go roller skate under an antenna in some other town.

Later.

Daria: You’re going.
Tata: I’m not going.
Daria: You’re going.
Tata: Nope. Not going!

Also.

Tata: Dude, I can’t go.
Minstrel Boy: It ain’t about you. Zip yer lip and go.
Tata: Thanks for setting me straight, cowboy – as straight as I get, anyhow.
MB: Well, gotta mosey off into the sunset, fight crime and mix metaphors. Burr whisk, away!

Later.

Daria: You’re going.
Tata: Maybe.
Daria: You’re going.
Tata: Maybe. Man, I’m sick of talking about this.

After that.

Tata: I cannot in good conscience spend my whole week fighting the homophobic and anti-choice rhetoric and violence of the church and show up on Sunday in a grass skirt. Hey, did you know I could say the words in good conscience without laughing hysterically?
Miss Sasha: Fine. Wear your coconut bra to the party. I know you have one.

Thursday.

Miss Sasha: I have potentially upsetting news.
Tata: I’m still the black sheep of an increasingly angry family?
Miss Sasha: My biological father’s coming on Sunday.
Tata: Who knew that black sheep came blacker? Because there’s one now.

Saturday.

Tata: I thought you were staying in Cape Cod and coping with a plumbing disaster.
Mom: If he goes to the christening tomorrow I’m not going.
Tata: Have you made this declaration to Miss Sasha?
Mom: Not yet. If I call now it’ll ruin dinner.
Tata: …Whereas if you wait, you can wreck her entire evening! I’ll have to try that next time.

You will no doubt be pleased to hear that no one was killed in the baptizing of this baby.

If I hadn’t recently started taking bellydancing lessons I might not have noticed this right away. The teacher lives in the house directly behind me as I pointed my camera toward the town’s main drag. Many streets in this town look just like this: large, old houses and snug, old Cape Cods, surrounded by trees and plants. A large number of the houses were built by the same builders in the early twentieth century. My great-grandfather bought a house for his wife and seven children eight blocks away in 1917. The trees are an important part of the character of the town, which prides itself on being a walking community: you can walk to the store, to a restaurant, to buy a snow shovel. A few years ago, the Department of Public Works began doing something mysterious: cutting off the tops of healthy trees and leaving fifteen or twenty foot stumps. Two avenues over, there’s a block that looks like totem pole training school.

One day, I drove past the teacher’s house and saw a Department of Public Works crew had taken the treetop of the tree on the corner and started hacking asymetrically at the next one. I was horrified but not as horrified as the teacher and her family, who were traumatized. After some thought, I proposed the homeowners turn that one tall stump on the corner into art supplies by inviting woodworking sculptors to make something of it. They’d have to wait a year for the wood to dry, but it could be done. As you can see, surprises were in store.

If this story sounds confused time-wise, there might be a good reason for that: I was frantically working on other things. Each time a treetop came off it was after crews departed, apparently finished, but returned. On Thursday as I drove home from work I saw five crew trucks and a large crew taking down the second and third trees. I had my digital camera with me but I was so busy fighting the urge to turn a chainsaw on a chainsaw-wielding lunkhead it didn’t occur to me to menace same with a camera. So: that’s totally my fault. I’ll try to remember next time to calmly threaten cobags with Kodaks, their natural enemies. The moment passed, but there’s one important thing to remember: the trucks weren’t from the Department of Public Works. They were from a private contractor, the trees were on town land and were town property.

Sometimes the town takes down a tree when it interferes with the electric lines, but these were no different from trees anywhere in town in that the had grown up around the wires. So what’s to stop Public Works from deforesting the entire town? This drives my brother-in-law Dan crazy. He’s a landscape architect. Every time I tell him the Department of Public Works is up to something he gets a weary look in his eye like he’s retired from crimefighting, hung up his tights and it’s someone else’s turn. He says the last tree the crews cut has a hollow, round spot, which made me wonder if they’d started with the wrong tree and kept going. He says, “The trees must have been a hazard of some kind, right?” I’m so mad about this Dan’s in grave danger of explaining to a judge why I should be denied bail.

When I took these pictures yesterday the sunlight was so bright I couldn’t see the pictures I took. I was guessing. The teacher turned into her driveway as I stood there, staring at electrical wires and wondering what the camera saw. She was shocked to see the fourth tree apparently cut in half after she left the house that morning. My sister says a consultant working for the Department of Public Works gets paid to decide to take down trees and if there’s no deciding there’s no job. That may or may not be the case. The town has a committee that makes decisions about trees. Yesterday, that group’s website was down.

There may be a perfectly rational explanation for what’s happened here. I’d like to hear it. The homeowners would like to hear it, too.

This commercial warms my icy heart, combining as it improbably does my loves beee-YOO-teeful mermaids and totally spotless bathrooms.

Bless my buttons, so old am I I only saw color TV at Grandma’s house until I was in high school. Imagine (or remember) what Adam West looked like in gray tights! Black and white left a little too much to the imagination. Even so, every graytone commercial for Weeki Wachee looked like a lightning bolt from the blue.

In 1946, Newton Perry, a former U.S. Navy man who trained Navy Frogmen to swim underwater in World War II, scouted out Weeki Wachee as a good site for a new business. At the time, U.S. 19 was a small two-lane road. All the other roads were dirt; there were no gas stations, no groceries, and no movie theaters. More alligators and black bears lived in the area than humans.

The spring was full of old rusted refrigerators and abandoned cars. The junk was cleared out and Newt experimented with underwater breathing hoses and invented a method of breathing underwater from a free-flowing air hose supplying oxygen from an air compressor, rather than from a tank strapped onto the back. With the air hose, humans could give the appearance of thriving twenty feet underwater with no breathing apparatus. An 18-seat theater was built into the limestone, submerged six feet below the surface of the spring, so viewers could look right into the natural beauty of the ancient spring.

Newt scouted out pretty girls and trained them to swim with air hoses and smile at the same time. He taught them to drink Grapette, a carbonated beverage, eat bananas underwater and do aquatic ballets. He put a sign out on U.S. 19: WEEKI WACHEE.

The first show at the Weeki Wachee Springs underwater theater opened on October 13, 1947 – the same day that Kukla, Fran and Ollie first aired on that newfangled invention called television, and one day before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. The mermaids performed synchronized ballet moves underwater while breathing through the air hoses hidden in the scenery.

In those days, cars were few. When the girls heard a car coming, they ran to the road in their bathing suits to beckon drivers into the parking lot, just like sirens of ancient lore lured sailors to their sides. Then they jumped into the spring to perform.

Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was probably two or three when I realized the most glamorous human beings on earth were wearing spangled costumes and sucking oxygen out of tubes 19 feet below the surface! The only way they could possibly be more miraculously fantaaaaaastic would be if they spent their days off waterskiing in tiara’d pyramids, like these ladies from Los Angeles, who are so glamorous you could just pet them all day. Some of us probably have.

Alas, my bathroom could be cleaner.

Yesterday, through an absolutely unreproducible series of circumstances, Daria and I missed the funeral. Auntie InExcelsisDeo and her daughter Monday drove like Jehu and skidded to a halt in the Jewish Cemetery, dressed like they were going to the beach. Monday was wearing her sister Sandy’s clothes, so I hope the word JUICY wasn’t printed across her butt. We were all caught flat-footed by the timing of the ceremony. I tried to remain calm in the face of this potentially disastrous morning, but Daria took a somewhat different approach, and by approach, I mean she approached a few drive-thrus.

Yesterday, Daria called me six times that I know of because checking my messages seems a little perilous right now. I’m not so great with the phone, while Daria’s will one day graft itself to her ear. Anyway, after lunch, Daria called to tell me she’d gathered her wits and her recycling, her drycleaning and her children, and rolled out the giant Ford Excoriator. First, she stopped at Taco Bell for her middle child Sandro. There, she couldn’t decide what she wanted, if she wanted anything, so she ordered a Mexican pizza, a crunchy gordito and something else shiny. After letting go of the drycleaning and the recycling, Daria hit the McDonald’s to pick up chicken nuggets for tiny Fifi and couldn’t decide between an Angus Third Pounder and a chicken sandwich. Because, you know, because!

Tata: Put three of those things in your freezer immediately and throw one away.
Daria: I’ll eat something and Tyler will eat the rest when he gets home.
Tata: I do not have to tell you that some things do not improve with age, and hello! Didn’t you two just spend about a year on NutriSystem?
Daria: Well, yes. But three more and I can start my Ph.Diet. So yeah, I’m not good with the letting go of stuff.

Sometimes, the subconscious serves it up piping hot, with pickles, to go. If I hadn’t been at work I might’ve been wandering around a parking lot at Wendy’s.

It’s Tuesday, 100 degrees and Sharkey is predictable.

Tata: Golfing?
Sharkey: Tonight, after work.
Tata: Daria says your going to play golf is the funniest thing she’s heard in years.
Sharkey: What can I say, I’m a funny guy. Tell her I appreciate her concern for my wellbeing.
Tata: She’s got pneumonia so you’ll be pleased to hear the laughter almost killed her.
Sharkey: You’re right, that IS funny.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
— G. K. Chesterton

When one spends a great deal of time with a chef one doesn’t so much lose one’s waistline as develop a circumference. I am eager to get moving. Thus, last weekend, Pete and I conquered household tasks at his place together and separately, and with vigor. I went out and worked on the garden, which was reassuring. While I had my hands in dirt I was in no way making and eating exotic sandwiches. This reminds me: jazz, Georg and I and a dozen or so of our friends used to go camping and during the few hours between I Meant To Do That and When Does the Bar Open?, we played a glamorous game called I Am A Sandwich. It was like Twenty Questions, except with lettuce and tomatoes, and everyone’s goal was to get over on the group with some obscure cheesy goodness. Speaking of tomatoes, I staked up the tomato plants with bamboo poles and zip ties, in anticipation of the day when fresh mozzarella and basil solve the problem of pomodoro prosperity.

One of my least favorite tasks is transplanting and tying up the bean plants. Pete had sowed the seeds generously, so I had to spread out my little hostages and wrapped a bit of cotton string around each. I tied the other end to a line stretching across each row. Beanstalks, as every child knows, climb to the firmament, though most stop after about three feet and seldom cost a cow. I transplanted my fingers to the bone but I only tied up about one-third of my leafy captives before moving on to other tasks like mulching, food prep and plotting the cocktail hour. You get just one 5 p.m. each day, and gin isn’t going to drink itself!

Yesterday was the anniversary of Steve Gilliard’s passing, and at the Group News Blog, you will find heartfelt laments. I can’t add to that, and if I could, what would it bring into being? At lunchtime, I drove to Home Depot in glorious sunshine, bought four bags of shredded pine bark and after work, put down mulch with Gilly in mind. I used to go dancing when someone died because grief needs a place to go and we can’t let it settle or it stays. Likewise, the house we care for now was the place Pete’s family moved when his mother died, and grief settled in. Painting, gardening, sewing seeds and making repairs in anticipation of life celebrates what we had and what we will. So for Gilly, I put pine bark around a bed of decorative and fruit trees. In ways we are still learning, he was so very wise.

The Systems Guy has known me for over a decade. He appears at the doorway of my cubicle today to do some hour-long higher form of magic, during which my workday comes to a close. He has come to our office with two new assistants. He tells me his last assistant spent ten minutes talking with me and developed an embarrassing crush. I tell the Systems Guy I’m crush-proof, but I still have to leave and my stuff is on the other side of him.

Tata: I bicycled to work. See?
SG: That’s a bicycle helmet?
Tata: Yup, and that’s my basket.
SG: I just thought you were special.
Tata: Special or Special? Because I am special.
SG: Well, Special, obviously and specially padded.
Tata: Co-workers! Co-workers! Systems Guy thinks my job is so stressful I might get a concussion sitting at my desk.
Co-workers: We kind of have a betting pool. So: yeah.

I’ve been a little tense lately. Yesterday at the family store, I re-wrapped a wedding gift twice because I kept tearing the double-thick formal paper when I folded hospital corners with extreme prejudice. Though Pete manned the register at the toy store while I womanned the till in the gift shop and we love working together, it was a long day. After work, we bicycled to my house, drove to his, gently wedged a tree into my trunk and planted it in Mom’s backyard two towns away. By the time we got home, leftover Chinese under one arm, we were exhausted, determined and scheming a scheme. As we’d bicycled to the stores in the morning, I was carrying so much weight in my messenger bag I could barely breathe, let alone pedal, and damn it, I was not doing that again.

You know that moment when you get over yourself in a big way? It’s strange, really. You’re marching down life’s highway in fetching Ferragamos with your dogs barking for ages and finally – finally – you think ‘Hey, maybe Adidas and sweat socks wouldn’t cut out my still-beating heart and who the fuck invented pantyhose anyhow, the Marquis de Sade?’ You reluctantly switch to flats and learn to live without podiatric agony. The sun comes out and angels sing. Even so, you look back and wonder what took you so long.

When I couldn’t breathe – and thus could hardly utter topical dirty words – suddenly I was completely, totally over my reluctance to put a basket on my bicycle.

A Boy And His Cat

This morning, we ran errands. While Pete picked up bagels, I stood on a one-way street and epoxied a finger puppet to my car’s antenna. Pete was and remains skeptical, but I have every confidence that in the seas of look-alike white cars and gray cars through which I sail to purchase my elitist arugula, which until recently was a peasant lettuce, I will easily navigate to my own white car now that I’ve glued a five-inch irridescent grasshopper to the antenna. It might’ve been more fun to affix gold-painted macaroni to the roof but imagine the glare. By the same token, I dare you to NOT imagine me pedaling around town with a megaphone, instructing people to surrender Dorothy. As you can see here, Drusy was very helpful as Pete assembled the basket.

Lovely Topaz basked in the sun during all the commotion, which I understood because I made the mistake of putting down the camera and nodding off for two hours. The day was gorgeous. We’d gone walking around Lake Carnegie and sat on a lock in lazy afternoon sunlight. We drank our Joint Juices and read all the plaques. We stopped at a farmer’s market wedged into a tiny house on Princeton’s Nassau Street and picked brussell sprouts and lemons for grilling. By the time we got home, I could barely hold the camera.

Then we took lazy catnaps in golden afternoon light.