This morning, I went to the orthodontist to get my braces tightened. Currently, my teeth ache, but that’s not the point. The orthodontist, who is either amused or extremely annoyed by anything I say or do, took one look at my braces and said, “What the hell have you been eating?”

I knew exactly what he meant. I’d been eating to build my blood count. “Beets,” I said, but I had misgivings. “When I ate beets and blueberries on the same day, I decided I should never do that again.”

“Jackpot,” he said.

This evening, my teeth are sore. It was difficult to eat dinner, by which I mean biting down felt like part of my skull might break off and make eating an engineering nightmare, and the fare was peas. Yeah, there’s just no way to…it’s not macho.

I haven’t had a cigarette since before my nap this afternoon. I nap. What, you don’t? Anyway, I could change my mind at any insomniac moment, but maybe not. I bought a bottle of wine because I wanted a bottle of gin, and if we have martinis we all want cigarettes and hookers – it’s a style thing, yes? I seldom drink on school nights, but I was trying to write. Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, was sleeping. The noise in my brain is turned up to a good rattling 11.

A new day might dawn, if only I weren’t at the pie counter in this Appalachian diner with Ernest Hemingway and Betty Buckley, and my order seems to be up…

This was a test post. You should not be alarmed. The test succeeded. The guys at the host company now call me by my first name, smile when I bat my eyelashes, pretend to understand what I’m talking about…Isn’t that what we all want from people we pay to admire us?

A good thing about the Blogosphere: many things happen in the outside world and bloggers tell readers all about these events. A bad thing: you can spend your week reading about a crappy candidate for U.S. Attorney General and by Friday you know more about him than you do about your mom. A week of being barely able to write permitted me plenty of reading time, and my brain is now full of stuff I’d like to scrub out with a wire brush. And bleach. Alberto Gonzales is now the blueberry stain on my cerebellum, and Condoleezza Rice is tomato paste on my frontal lobe, and just look at the gritty mess.

Invitations to Miss Sasha’s wedding went out this week. They’re crisp and to the point, belying the complete lunacy of the last month’s preparations. Someone under the mistaken impression that *anyone* will listen to me calls almost daily with an argument, or a grievance. Everyone wants to know what color I’ll be wearing. After all, I am the Mommy. Apparently everyone will be looking at me. If I had a buck for everytime someone said, “You CAN’T go shopping without ME!” I could pick up a shiny new pair of Doc Martens.

Yesterday, I read one of my essays on the tsunami relief efforts on the local college radio station that – depending on whom you believe – either *no one* listens to or *everyone* does. The stage fright was bad but not so bad I yakked in the booth. In fact, except for the part about people thinking I might mean what I say, doing radio sounds like a good idea, maybe. I think this now, from the security of the day job I seem to have been sentenced to but last night, holding my color-coded and numbered pages, I wondered if I were going to kick the bucket. My heart felt like it was going to burst through my sternum. I thought ‘Sweet fancy Moses, don’t let me become a Meatloaf song…’

Yeah. So that went well.

Since Friday, I’ve struggled with a connectivity problem at home. At first, I thought it was Blogger, because Blogger can be spiteful. Then I thought it was an equipment problem. Then maybe the ISP had singled me out for this particular shower of blessings. As of this morning, I just don’t know. I need a staff nerd.

It’s temporary, as all trials are. Still, I wish this one would reach its verdict and penalty phase.

I was thinking about the inauguration speech, and I realized finally what was bothering me. It was one oversized sestina, testosterone-bloated and pasteurized beyond recognition. Graduate students in literature remember the time they studied sestinas as “the semester I took up drinking.” From the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Enlarged Edition:

Sestina. The most complicated of the verse forms initiated by the troubadours. It is composed of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by an envoy of 3 lines, all of which are usually unrhymed. The function of the rhyme in the s[estina] is taken over by the recurrent pattern of end-words; the same 6 end-words occur in each stanza, but in a constantly shifting order which follows a fixed pattern.

If we let the letters A through F stand for the 6 end-words of a s[estina], we may schematize the recurrence patterns as follows:

Stanza

1: ABCDEF

2: FAEBDC

3: CFDABE

4: ECBFAD

5: DEACFB

6: BDFECA

envoy: ECA or ACE

Most commonly, the envoy or tornada, is further complicated by the fact that the remaining 3 end-words, BDF, must occur in the course of the lines, so that the 3-line envoy will contain all 6 recurrent words.

*************************************************************************

The definition goes on to explain who devised this form of torture so you know which of the troubadours it was you want to dig up, slap around and re-bury.

You can go look up a transcript of the inaugural speech or find it here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/20050120-1.html

…but before you do, imagine you’re an overeducated and overstuffed fool with a jingoist bent, and you’ve had all the fun you think you can get away with reusing the same words into oblivion. You can’t even hear yourself think for the way you’ve bent ‘oppression’ to mean ‘freedom’ and ‘plutocracy’ to mean ‘democracy.’ You’re bored, bored, bored. What can you do to add a little spice to your life? I got it. Take six words, plunk them down on a piece of paper and doodle in between. How about these six words:

freedom

liberty

tyranny

America

democracy

ideal

Now, you know that if you stick strictly to the sestina format, William Safire will be frowning at you before the second paragraph, so you add a few dull allusions and historically dumb patter. Maybe Safire’ll be distracted by Jenna’s inevitable and determined lipgloss application. Anyway, the thing’s already written, he’s retired and what’s he gonna do about it, hmm? He’s still sore about screwing up the inscription on the moon, anyhow. Let’s move on.

You’re a speechwriter determined to whack the pinata of Presidential speeches with the biggest stick you can find but you can’t stop giggling. Shoot, nobody in your demographic’s going to figure it out and those freaks in the Northeast are already slapping their foreheads everytime the Commander In Chief opens his mouth. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, boy…

Let us don mustaches and assume new identities. Let us try out French accents and join the Resistance. Please stand in profile under the streetlight so the angles of your lovely face appear and disappear. We cannot be seen together. Not in a time of war.

Let us meet on a corner in Prague and pretend to discuss the weather. Let us whisper through clenched teeth a few facts about Spain. There is freedom in the moment I am anxious for your safety when all I have to give is worry.

Let us close the dark curtains and dim the lights. Let us sing quietly as footfalls echo in the hallway. We smile when we are frghtened. We are waiting for explosions we know will come. There is no comfort like your trembling hand on my cheek.

Let us play at peace. Let us imagine what we will do when we can leave the house someday.

Let us remember we were never lovers and we never will be. Let us depart the way we came into shadows and smoke rings. If not for my fear, I would be nothing but longing. Your secret is not safe. I am missing a button.

This afternoon, I wrote an entry that evaporated – again – and the error message asked me what *I’d* done wrong. Had I done something exotic or different, I might buy that story.

As Mamie says, “Computers are trying to kill us.”

If I didn’t have constant automotive turmoil I’d have to find a new hobby. Monday night, I drove a modest five or six miles across the wilds of Piscataway in the bitter cold of a quiet early evening. Just about half way to my destination I noticed the temperature gauge was a little higher than I expected so I turned on the blower to vent some heat. That’s what you do in summer, right? About a mile later, I discovered sitting at red lights aggravated the situation, and a few hundred yard later at another light, the gauge topped out. I shut off the car while waiting to turn left. Now here’s the thing: as an old bat with memory loss in a suburban metropolis that can’t tear up and rework roads fast enough to suit trafficmeisters, I was reasonably sure I was on the right road, heading in the right direction, but *not* sure where to turn or how I would explain to AAA on a federal holiday if the car overheated and met its ignominious end on a deserted road, and would they please send someone before I froze to death?

When the light turned green, I turned the key. The car started without explosions or death rattles so I turned onto a road I thought probably used to lead to my destination but wasn’t so sure it still would. I knew that right or wrong, there was a gas station about half a mile ahead of me – or there used to be. Suddenly, the temperature gauge dropped all the way to the bottom and sort of floated back up to a normal temp for a freezing night and a car that was just warmed up. With that, I made straight for a parking space outside my friend’s apartment, and if I could’ve slapped my car across the face, I would have.

My friend had an appointment with an eye doctor some distance away, so we jumped in his less spiteful vehicle and drove off in the darkness. Some hours later, we returned, and despite nervous attempts at common sense thinking, I started the TataMobile and headed home. Just about the same time I thought the gauge was laughing at me I wondered if “Stand back, officer! My car is about to commit vehicular suicide” would be a good thing to say or my ticket to a lengthy stay in Orange Jumpsuit Land. Could I claim the Dennis Hopper Defense with a Chevy convertible if I refused to stop until my engine melted?

For the mechanic, it’s Day Two of the seige. He’s used to peculiar explanations. Last time I left a note with one of his teenage pumpjockeys: “After the addition of oil and wiper fluid, my car makes a noise like a swarm of angry bees. I’m developing a phobia.” When he called to tell me the car was fixed he said he was absolutely shocked when he started the car and moisture spraying a belt sounded EXACTLY like a swarm of angry bees, and the problem was fixed. This gives me hope that someday I may describe something to a medical professional and not feel I sound like Charlie Brown’s mother.

So. Cabbing it around town sounds so urbane. In reality, depending on which cab company one may find oneself in some very punk rock situations. For instance, if the driver stops the car to pick up the boyfriend he met in Rahway State and wants to take you to a second location, hand the driver cabfare and leap from the vehicle. I use the happy-go-lucky cab company that sends out cars with all sorts of dashboard lights flashing. Will I get home? Will I get to work? It’s more fun than betting the ponies.

Mamie and I went big game hunting at the beauty supply store. My trophies are lined up on the floor. Eighteen little bottles of nail polish in exotic and not so exotic colors sit in a lovely row. Three shades of red, five shades of copper, black, two shades of blue usually found in tropical fish, and a light shade of jade green, not to mention bottles of base, top and strengthening coats with extras for repairs at work, comprise the list of my treasures. This is luxury, for me. Nail polish doesn’t last forever; it gets thick with age, and useless. To bag a whole bunch of new colors and toss all the old ones – this is as decadent as I get.

Mine is an austere existence, and I don’t regret this in the least. A cup of coffee after dinner on Friday evenings, a fragrant new shampoo, clean linens – these are the kinds of inexpensive luxuries I adore. I am a happy, happy gal. Simplicity *is* bliss.

Outside, a spate of gunshots in the distance. Yes, they sound like fireworks but then again they don’t. I didn’t expect to hear that again for a few months. During the summer, it’s like old Piney call-and-response songs:

Singer #1: Hey! It’s freaking hot! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Singer #2: It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, moron! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Singer #1: Oh yeah? Your sister’s a whore! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Singer #2: No, you didn’t! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Once in a while, the shots find their mark and someone pushes up daisies, but most of the time it’s like the bullets fly straight into the stratosphere. I don’t feel threatened by this in the way you might think. No, I wonder why people have guns that can’t shoot straight. For another thing, it’s not like New Brunswick is a cut-rate Beirut, and I have a friend living in Beirut, and until fairly recently I walked through the streets here at all hours while a serial rapist was on the loose. Essentially, I gave thugs in town fifteen years to shoot me, and bullets never whizzed past my head – not even the night I was sleeping next to the frequently touring guitarist boyfriend and I was awakened by someone crawling in my bedroom window. I shouted something stupid about the half a person crawling in through the window and the underwear-clad boyfriend woke up, shouted something equally stupid at the half a person as I ran off to call 911. It’s not a proud moment. I should’ve whacked the half a person because that’s just the kind of angry apartment-dweller I was then and the boyfriend was probably defenseless because he had zero violence in him, but it’s a good thing I didn’t because the prowler turned out to be a cop trying to get into the apartment below us, where the burglar alarm was blaring and we were sleeping through it because the neighbors were away and not fleeing to the safety of our little penthouse.

Christ, another 30 seconds and the cop would’ve been stepping over us to get to…well, the place was a maze with super-narrow Escher stairs, and if he found the downstairs apartment uninjured someone should’ve given him a piece of cheese.

It turned out later a gang of burglars lived one building over, and when the police finally caught them it was because our apartment had been broken into and the thief was standing in a small crowd across the street still holding my computer, which I never got back. Maybe it was the naked pictures on the hard drive.

I recommend renter’s insurance and a can of mace. It’s not much, but tonight the shots in the distance died out and I didn’t hear any sirens so if no one’s injured, maybe that’s just another Saturday night.