(the underground sensation that’s waiting to happen… and waiting… and waiting…)
Saturday, May 12, 2001
I have the afternoon unexpectedly free, because I finished editing the latest Manual of Clinical Laboratory Immunology chapters, and more work isn’t due to arrive until Monday or Tuesday. This sort of lull always feels like a double-edged sword (if a lull can be compared to a sword, and I’m pretty sure it can’t), because there’s always that guilty voice in my head that says, You shouldn’t be lying in bed reading—or sitting at the computer typing—you should be sorting out the clothes you’ll never wear again (all those Levi’s with the shrunken waists) or dusting around the daddy longlegs that has taken over the bottom shelf of the bookcase (I’m the first person to actually live on a web site, ha ha). But for now, anyway, I’m going to ignore that voice. That’s one of the perks of living alone, or I should say, living with an animal companion who gives even less of a damn about housekeeping than I do.
I just got home from my little foray into the world. Usually, I try to avoid the world on Saturdays, because that’s when everyone else is in it, doing the chores that I could theoretically do any day of the week. It’s always a nightmare trying to find a parking place in Montecito shopping center on Saturday, but I manage to snag one next to an SUV that’s taking up two “compact” spaces. Why is it that you read annoyed letters to the editor in the paper every day about how much everyone hates SUVs, but whenever you leave the house, they’re everywhere? It doesn’t seem like there are enough people left to hate them. At some point, the regular car drivers are going to feel like manual typewriter enthusiasts complaining about those newfangled computin’ machines, and no one will care—not that they do now. To quote an SUV buyer who was informed of how much damage those things can do to a regular car in a collision: “All that matters is that my family is safe.”
What I want to know is: Why is everyone so goddamn self-absorbed? Why do we insist on pulling around the wagons (or the light trucks) and seeing everyone else as the enemy? Why is the basic construction of social reality “us versus them”? “Us” can be a country, a political party, a state, a city, a school, a neighborhood, a block, a family. The square root of “us,” of course, is “me.” Me and mine. Screw you and yours. Does this antagonism toward “the other” stem from a childhood of choosing sides for Red Rover? Or is it our “selfish genes”? Are we trying to survive as the fittest by constantly walling ourselves off and defining ourselves as different from everybody else? It’s as if we’re all aliens with—instead of exoskeletons—exo-immune systems, wearing our star wars defenses on our sleeves as we go around attacking one “nonself” after another.
I include myself in this, never fear. There are the rare feelin’-groovy days when I can leave the house and more or less float on a cloud of good will and compassion. On those days, it feels like it’s my karmic duty—even my pleasure—to be courteous to other drivers, patient in long lines, solicitous of harried store clerks. Some days, I’m on the borderline, don’t know which way I’ll fall in a crunch. That’s when a friendly clerk or a bitchy fellow customer can make or ruin my day.
In the last issue of the ‘zine, I wrote about how we stereotype other cultural and racial groups. When someone makes a bad move in traffic, we check out the driver and think, uh huh, Asian. If someone’s driving too slow—uh huh, Hispanic. But when it’s someone of your own general complexion and geographic origin, you have to find something else to pin on them—uh huh, SUV, talking on a cell phone. Like this one—pulls ahead of me into the parking lot when no way is it her turn… then sits there blocking my progress to wait for someone else to pull out who hasn’t even gotten in their car yet, when she could have kept going and found another spot farther away from the store and would it have killed her to walk the extra 10 yards?? In our cars, we dehumanize one another on a regular basis—idiot! asshole! Maybe the true pollution of the planet is coming not from our exhaust pipes but from our toxic thoughts.
So at the ATM, I deposit the $15 “tax break” I received from the DMV. How stupid is government (or Republicans), that they’d rather give a dime to every man, woman, and child than fund schools, libraries, and fire departments??
Excuse me, I seem to have stumbled into the Department of Curmudgeonly Rants.
After making the deposit, which will swell my bank account hardly at all even as it bankrupts California’s, I go next door to Silver Screen Video to rent the first few episodes of “The Sopranos”—I have finally broken down and decided to see what all the fuss is about. [Thumbs way, way up!]
Then I drive down to Woodlands Market in Kentfield, which is an absurdly long way to go, but they have the best gourmet deli in Marin, and I’m addicted to their pan-fried filet of sole, chicken tacos, quesadillas, and even (gasp!) roasted vegetables. The problem is, I never know when they’re going to have my favorites, so I’m trekking over there every few days. I justify the extra mileage by reminding myself that at least I don’t drive an SUV. (Apologies to my dear readers who may be thusly vehicularly endowed; if it’s any consolation, I shall soon turn my attention to a group you probably have issues with, too.)
(As I was typing that last sentence, I saw a little bitty object floating by—the smallest spider I have ever seen. I grabbed the thread it was presumably hanging from—surely it wasn’t doing the Australian crawl in mid air—and started pulling it back in the other direction so it would drop to the floor and not into my keyboard. It fought me, flailing its little legs to keep going in it original direction, as if it had an important appointment on the other side of my desk. But I proved to be the victor in this little struggle between Woman and Nature. I flicked my fingers a few times to get the spider to drop, and now it’s probably crossing the desert of the plastic mat my desk chair sits on, cursing [in tiny spidery nonverbal epithets] the surface roads and me—that huge invisible [i.e., too big to comprehend] force that pulled it off its path. Of course, when this sort of thing happens, you can’t help but make it into a metaphor for your own out-of-control life and wonder what giant being is sitting at its cosmic computer typing the latest issue of the cosmo’zine when you float by, hanging by your own tenuous thread, thinking you know exactly where you’re going until you are plucked out of thin air and made to start over on much rougher terrain. Can you?)
In my high school, the reigning “pet peeve” was “people who think they’re better than other people.” I used to make fun of this cliché—I thought I was better than people who spoke in clichés—but I’ve come to believe that this is the universal complaint. Arrogant America hates arrogant China. Arrogant men hate uppity (arrogant for women) women. Arrogant bike riders hate arrogant car drivers who hate arrogant pedestrians. We are not our mode of transportation, as closely as we may identify with it at times—I mean, SUV drivers, if you prick them do they not bleed? But we all seem to be convinced on some deep molecular level that other people are the problem, when in fact the problem is us, and we are all, all of us, us. The next time you’re cursing the traffic, think about who you are at that moment—traffic. And sure, work toward alternative modes of transportation and all that, but how about addressing a root cause or two, such as our bloody insistence on separating self from nonself when there is no earthly reason to do so. Cooperation would get us across town more quickly and more pleasantly, but that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone. (Oh, how I exaggerate. There are plenty of mensches out there on the road, and whenever I encounter one of them, my gratitude is boundless.)
Being as self-centered as the next person, I hate all other operators of transportation—maybe especially the arrogant bike riders—who hate me for driving anything with a combustion engine, no points for fuel efficiency or, for that matter, physical limitations that make it impossible for some people—your aged, your infirm—to peddle to and fro morally superiorly. I barely notice the thoughtful, careful bicyclists, because I’m fixated on the ones who shoot through stop signs and force cars going in their direction to cross over the center line and risk head-on collisions so as not to run them over. And the thanks we (car people) get for not wanting to crush them under our wheels is to be excoriated as selfish road hogs and polluters, as if everyone who’s not 25 and physically fit and a vision in spandex and God forbid has to carry a passenger or several bags of groceries should just die now and leave the spoked-persons to live out their joyful green existences until they too turn 40 or 50 and have to start riding sitting down with the help of four wheels and a seat cushion and then we’ll see…. I find that one of the consolations of aging is that you get to see what’s in store for the young whippersnappers who think they invented youth (when everyone knows it was invented in the late ‘60s).
So Woodlands Market is overflowing with people—I really should have known better. And of course in my current frame of mind, I notice every inconsiderate shopper who leaves her cart sitting in the middle of the aisle or—worse—pushes the cart into the store and stops just inside the door to gape around at all the motion and color or to root in her handbag for her glasses or shopping list, then shuffle forward just as I’m trying to go around her. Naturally, I don’t see myself and my cart as a hindrance.
Well, the only item the deli has today that I want any part of is the flank steak quesadilla, so I manage to swim upstream far enough to get my number called and get waited on and then gratefully leave the main tributary for one of the smaller streams that will take me to the less-populated produce department where I can pick up my obligatory broccoli and bananas and gaze longingly at the raspberries, which are still $3.99 for a package of about 10.
I check my shopping list, pick up the Sunday Chronicle, and, right on cue, start hearing the siren call of the Mountain of Baked Goods over on the other side of the store. My cart weaves its way through the crowds, suddenly as agile and single-minded as a horse heading for the barn, and I spot some individually wrapped cookies and actually pick up and hold in my hand a huge, fat peanut butter cookie, squeezing it just enough to see that it’s soft the way I like them…. I will hate myself if I don’t buy it, but I’ll hate myself more if I do, so I heroically put it down and get in the checkout line like the martyr that I am. It would be nice to think that my act of self-sacrifice will really make a difference, i.e., produce weight loss, but nooooooo… the only thinness in my future is the thin moral victory of occasionally taking the high road and leaving behind the peanut butter or chocolate chip cookie, only to succumb to the key lime tart at the next stop. As I leave the store, I wonder, How can I believe in a God who created a world in which fat and sugar are both ubiquitous and off-limits? It’s the Adam and Eve story all over again—He puts temptation in your face and then punishes you for succumbing to it. “You call this Paradise??,” I cry in frustration. (If I’m struck by lightning before the next issue comes out, you’ll know I went too far with my religious humor.)
Last stop, the post office to mail some invoices, a birthday card to my sister, and the last of the ‘zines. Arriving home, I look forward to a lazy afternoon napping followed by an evening watching “The Sopranos.” The red light on my answering machine is blinking, and I push the button, wondering why leaving the house seems to create a force field that attracts incoming phone calls. The message is from someone I don’t know who has found my ATM card in the machine next to Silver Screen Video. Needless to say, she didn’t have to interrupt her own busy day to look my name up in the phone book and call me, much less offer to meet me somewhere to hand the card over in person. When I call her back, she’s on a cell phone, no doubt cruising the area parking lots in her SUV, annoying everyone in her path. Maybe she already annoyed me an hour or so ago as I was leaving the shopping center unknowingly sans my ATM card, railing against her choice of transportation and her total arrogance and disrespect, never dreaming she would turn out to be such a decent person.
Opposite of the Life Force
Recently, I spent 5 days painting the Opposite of the Life Force. It’s amazing, the things you learn while painting intuitively for long periods.
For example, Death, contrary to popular opinion, is not the Opposite of the Life Force. The Opposite of the Life Force, at least in my world, at least for those 5 days, is or was a kind of sucking, dragging force that operates from within—like a parasite that attaches to a host and sucks it dry. It’s closer to what we call depression, which is an involuntary refusal to face up to Life and its demands.
Day 1: I have not been looking forward to this painting intensive, because I’ve been depressed, probably as a result of barricading myself (figuratively) in my condo for the last 6 months, leaving the house only to do battle with my fellow drivers on the way to the supermarket, where I fight a different kind of battle (in which the word “bulge” figures prominently). In the morning session I feel temporarily liberated, as if indifference to product can be equated with freedom, but that pseudo-confidence quickly breaks down. I spend the afternoon struggling, “trying to surrender” (an oxymoronic phrase if I’ve ever heard one). In the group sharing at the end of the day, I call it Mind Participation Day because I spent the whole day trying to keep up with or stay ahead of or stay on top of or in some other way be in control of the creative process. Barbara talks about “contraction,” and I feel the word echoing in all my dry and clenched parts. My whole life feels contracted lately, as I retreat into greater and greater isolation. And my body conveniently carries out the theme, with a sensation in my upper abdomen that’s like a fist, or a glacier—an example of my lifelong tendency to curl various parts of myself up into a tight, defensive knot.
Day 2: It seems like a good sign that I get weepy in the shower. Maybe my inner glacier is starting to melt. I arrive at the studio sodden with tears and tell Barbara half- (or maybe 10%) seriously that if I could kill myself but make people think it was an accident, I’d do it. Barbara shoots glances at me during the sharing, and I finally say a few words that I can’t remember now. The words aren’t important, anyway; what’s important is that I’m starting to shake and crack. My carefully constructed façade—“I am a rock, I am an island”—is falling apart. No one has yet been able to satisfactorily explain how standing in front of a sheet of paper all day, painting whatever wants to come out, reflects so faithfully what’s going on inside. But it does. The mind may run along behind, like a dog trying to catch a car, but the creative process goes from zero to sixty in nothing flat, and it’s good-bye to your carefully calculated avoidance.
I paint myself embraced by—or crushed between, is that the same thing?—my dead parents, the three of us bound together by golden ropes. Then I paint some of the other people I’ve known who have died—Grandma and Grandpa Larsen; Aunt Doris and Uncle Sonny; my baby brother Mike; Francis the drowned 10-year-old friend; adult friends Jo, Sue, and Dot—and finally I paint the anonymous dead. It’s soothing, believe it or not. (I’m taking a chance by writing about this for people who don’t paint, because it’s bound to sound weird. But it’s liberating to paint taboo or scary images. It’s as if exaggerating the fear collapses it, revealing the lie it’s based on.)
It feels good to cry while I paint, but at lunchtime I just want out of there, so I get in my car and start driving. It’s Bay to Breakers race day, and the city is inundated with people in tiny shorts carrying water bottles. It’s a beautiful, sunny, windy, foggy-over-the-Gate day, and I have the sun roof open and “The Sopranos” soundtrack on tape. I’m blasting The Lost Boys, Elvis Costello, The Stones, Bob Dylan, the Pretenders, Van Morrison, and the Eurythmics—like a real California girl, driving down the road with the wind in my hair and a song on my lips. Before I know it, I’m over the bridge into Marin. I have lunch at a food court in a shopping center, of all places—it’s surreal to walk among the Sunday shoppers in the 90° heat, as if I’ve been beamed to another planet. I’m close to San Rafael, so afterward I go home and take a nap. My 2-hour lunch has turned into 3, but somehow it’s what I needed—to touch base with the familiar. As I drive back to S.F. across the windy bridge, I hold tight to the steering wheel. It’s not so much that I want to live after all as that I don’t want Barbara to think I deliberately crashed if God does decide to take me in a head-on collision.
In the sharing at the end of the day, everyone is giddy with nonlinear thought, having abandoned the left side of the brain for 2 days in favor of this other, nonverbal language. What people are saying would sound strange to a nonpainter—“I tried to paint the flesh first but I had to paint the bone and put the flesh on after! And it turned out exactly the same!”—but everyone is nodding knowingly. It’s like discovering that words float on the surface of an ocean we’re usually not aware of. It’s only the second day and we’re already submerged deep in that ocean, waving to each other as we glide by, pointing and gesturing with words that work better on dry land but that carry our meaning nonetheless.
As always happens in a painting intensive, I connect with my old friends and discover one or two people I’ve never really noticed before. In the sharing, an Israeli woman talks about feeling “unsafe.” Later, I ask her what she meant, and she tells me about being born in Israel right after the Holocaust and feeling unsafe in the world as a Jew. Because I’m blasted wide open at that point (painting = an explosive force for good), I find myself responding from my heart, without my usual self-censorship.
I say, “I think this is the perfect place to be Jewish.” (My mind looks on in amazement: What are you talking about?)
Then I say, “I’ve always felt deeply connected to Jewish people.” (Oh Lordy, what a lame thing to say.)
But my words seem to touch her, and we hug and beam at each other. It’s a mystery and a gift how these sudden, inexplicable connections happen after a few days of painting. There we are, standing literally with our backs to each other all day, and yet when we come face to face afterward, it’s as if we’re looking into our own eyes.
The sky was dark with chickens coming home to roost.
—Line from some old movie
Day 3: I’m tired, wrung out. Trying not to pop an Excedrin for the energy boost. (Barbara has asked us to consider our unspoken beliefs, and I realize I believe that I can only get energy from caffeine.) It’s that horrible feeling of no escape. Barbara works with me to see how I can get my own energy going on the painting. She asks how I feel in my body, and I say it’s like a force dragging me down. I call it the Opposite of the Life Force. This sparks something in me, so I start painting the Opposite of the Life Force as a monstrous-looking, multicolored creature. My interest and energy level pick up immediately, but after I paint for a bit, I start to feel physically tortured, as if the Opposite of the Life Force (OLF) and the Life Force (LF) are using my body as a battleground. I can’t sit still, can’t stand still, my back hurts, I go outside, can’t stay there, lie on the couch, can’t lie there. I feel like I’m being mangled and battered and beat up. I tell Barbara this, and she says, in all seriousness, “That’s exactly what’s happening to you.”
If there are states of Grace in painting, when painting is sheer bliss, there are also states of Torture—which may be the same thing in the end. The only thing that keeps me going, besides the fact that there’s no rescue anywhere, no fucking Choice, is that I know it means “something is happening”—the iceberg is melting and the contraction is painfully releasing, at least on some level. It’s like some sort of visceral fight for life, the natural desire of the mind-body-being to live. I spend 2 or 3 hours in this physical torment, and there’s no relief even after I finish the painting. When there’s only about 10 minutes left in the session, Barbara works with me on how to start a new painting. We talk about various possibilities, and finally she asks how the OLF sucks the LF out of people. It takes me a minute to come up with the obvious: sucking tubes that attach to all the tender places. So I start a new painting with another big OLF creature with all these tubes attaching to my body, and—I swear—I immediately become completely calm and quiet inside… it’s that dramatic. And a good thing, too, because it’s almost time for my friends Liz and Eric, who are visiting from Oklahoma, to come by and take me to dinner. I’m exhausted from the day’s battle, but instead of wanting to rush home and hide, or sleep, I look forward to seeing them.
the world—bring it on
It can feel strange to go out into the world after painting all day, especially in the company of nonpainters, but this time it’s exhilarating. We end up at Goat Hill Pizza on Potrero Hill, where’s it’s all-you-can-eat night, so it’s filled with pizza lovers partying like it’s 1999. We eat salad and pizza and drink wine and catch up on our news. I feel great, and I can’t explain why. I tell my friends about the OLF, and instead of my usual feeling that I have to portion myself out to suit the sensibilities of whichever “type” of friend I’m with, I realize I can be myself in all my complexities and contradictions, like an actor with a meaty, complex role instead of a walk-on part. What a gift.
Day 4: Now we come to the more challenging part of my story, because you’d expect me to be in painting bliss for the next two days, after my “breakthrough.” But I revert to depressed mode. I have a slight hangover and didn’t get enough sleep, still want the temporary boost from caffeine, and don’t feel up to another day of fighting the OLF. The thing about painting is that, though there can be periods of deep peace, you can’t know ahead of time which way it’s going to go. So there’s no choice but to keep painting and deal with whatever the moment brings. (Barbara has pointed out that, when we say we want to live “in the moment,” we usually have an image of “the moment” being all peaceful and serene—when actually, “the moment” is constantly changing.)
On my new painting, I enjoy creating gruesome combinations of colors—smears of blue, black, yellow, and red. Strangely, the uglier I try to make the OLFs, the more colorful, cheerful, and lively they look, as if they’re being transformed into their “opposite” as I paint them—the Opposite of the Opposite of the Life Force. Eventually, I notice that I no longer know what these creatures are about—they still have sucking tubes coming out of their bodies, but they also have crosses on their foreheads, and the image I’ve painted of myself getting devoured by them looks quite peaceful. It’s such a relief when you say good-bye to the duality of the thought process—all those either/or’s. Painting—to return to the ocean metaphor—is like submerging in deep waters, leaving behind the panicked, bobbing lifeboat of our surface lives. Such drama up there on the surface!—thinking we know what Life is all about—or that we’re supposed to.
At the end of the day, John Irwin, our beloved physicist friend, comes to talk to the group about life and the universe from a different point of view. As he tells us about cell division and the Big Bang and the “100,000 Club,” his words wash over me. More than the scientific facts, what I’m receiving is his deep love of studying the physical universe. I marvel at how we all have something inside that drives us to greater depths—none of us lives on the surface, not really—regardless of how different it may look from what drives other people.
Day 5: Painting is easy, but I get caught in looking for a result—not the result of a beautiful painting, which is what I used to want, but the result of having my physical symptom subside. It’s tempting to think of painting as a panacea, a switch I can turn on to eliminate whatever problem I’m having. In the afternoon, Barbara and I discover that I’m avoiding painting anything on the “peaceful me” that’s being “peacefully” devoured by the suddenly “peaceful” OLF. So I paint two black wedge shapes on the body at waist level (where I feel the pressure in my actual body), and I immediately know that Death is standing behind me with its “wings” gripping me from behind. So I paint the hooded, skull-faced Death figure, and I realize that death is not the opposite of the life force, that Death and Life are just doing a dance—they’re the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the Universe (Life does everything Death does, but backwards and in high heels). But my stomach symptom is bothering me more and more. I’m disturbed that all my breakthroughs in the painting haven’t affected my somatic reality (at least not for the better), and so I climb on my “vicious cycle” and pedal back down the path of hopelessness.
Again, writing for nonpainters, it’s hard not to feel like painting’s earthly representative, its priestess or pope, as if it’s my job to hand down the received wisdom from on high. If I were writing a propaganda tract to convince you to try it, I probably wouldn’t include such information as “I was just as depressed at the end of the 5 days as I was at the beginning.” This is one of the many mysteries of the creative process. You don’t put your quarter in the slot and punch the button beneath the treat you’ve decided you want. Like God, painting works in mysterious ways. Like prayer, it’s a surrender to a higher will, not a wish list you mail to Santa. What it does is to get something moving, and it may be weeks or months before you get a clue as to what was really going on.
In the final sharing, the woman from Israel who had felt “unsafe” earlier in the week talks about how strongly she had felt while painting that she was “stopping the war” with each stroke of the brush. (“Making a cup of green tea, I stop the war.”) She feels that by doing this deep inner work we are “in service of something”—though it seems impossible to name what that “something” is—a thought I’ve had before, too. As Krishnamurti said, “You are the world and the world is you…. You do not have similar consciousnesses, you have the same consciousness.” Though the mind has its place—like seeing how I project my own bad thoughts onto other drivers and shoppers and people in general—this knowledge has to be felt deep in consciousness, at some core level of being where there is only you (=the world), no escape, no choice but to respond honestly and fully. The reward is a deep feeling of connection with all of life. This is what I trust about painting and about the wonderful community of souls with whom I share it.
pookie sleeps around
It’s a mystery how cats decide where their favorite “spot” is and an even greater mystery why it changes from day to day or week to week. Pookie has a perfectly good bed; in fact, he has the mezzanine suite (upstairs hallway). His sheepskin bed is tucked in the corner by the water heater closet, and across from that are a large piece of cardboard and a couple of wine corks for his batting pleasure. The cat dancer dangles invitingly from the stair railing, but he ignores it unless the human motivator (yours truly) gets it bopping up and down and bumping against his back and swinging just out of reach of his paws. This is not a cat with a whole lot of get-up-and-go. (As my father would say, his get-up-and-go just got up and went.) Despite this perfectly comfy arrangement, he adopts various other sleeping spots, which I suppose, for one who sleeps 23 hours out of every day, is appropriate—[Note to self: Explore metaphor of Eskimos having lots of different words for snow—oops, someone’s at the door]—
ha who is she kiddin theres no one at the door and if there was she wouldnt answer it. shes as bad as howard hughes for gods sake. shes probably down in the kitchen trollin for snacks which believe me in this household are few and far between at least the ones that are any good. she hoards that tuna flavored laxative like it was gold. in case you havent guessed this is pookie god help me with such a name. it wasnt easy gettin up on this blasted chair its got wheels and its hard for me to balance ohhnooooo… 23erghmffffbb blxxxxzz,,, sorry about that i almost took a tumble. ok ive got a lot to say and not much time so listen up. i am not the weird one in this family believe me. the stories i could tell… shes a wild one when no one is watchin no one except me of course not that i count for beans around here. youll have to fill in the exclamation points which believe me this paragraph is full of at least in my head but i cant seem to work the bloody shift key. oh oh here she comes xxzgaluuffffmmb…
Well, there was no one at the door after all, sorry about that [munch, slurp]. Now where was I? Well, one of his favorite afternoon sleeping spots is under a stepstool in the bedroom. I thoughtfully keep it draped with my clean laundry so he has the illusion of privacy, at least that’s my excuse for never putting my laundry away, ha ha! He thinks he’s hiding but doesn’t realize that his big furry rear is sticking out the side. Sometimes I’ll be looking distractedly in that direction and realize there are two big green eyes looking back at me from between the sleeves of the draped t-shirts. As soon as we make eye contact, he comes lumbering out, creaking like an old man, sometimes one leg buckling slightly under his considerable weight. [Hold that thought, I think I hear the mailman…]
hi its me again geez any excuse to go down to the kitchen eh// considerable weight can you believe that111111111111 big furry rear1111 you should see her in the bathroom in the mornin now theres a sight111. i mean if there was ever a case of the pot callin the kettle black … o shit njxkmv,bn/mbbf//,,,,
That’s funny, I could have sworn I heard the mailman [gulp, crunch]. Let’s see. Oh yeah, lately he’s adopted the cramped space between the dresser and the nightstand, where he lies on a bed of Kleenex (never mind how it got there), crammed in between the books strewn under the nightstand and the crowbar I keep for earthquake- and intruder-related emergencies. He has to climb over the duffel bag I still have packed from Y2K to get in and out of there… weird… [Now that’s got to be the mailman…]
who the heck is she kiddin///// what could she be findin to eat down there///// nkkkco886hfjfl;lsamd;;;/
Ah, that’s better. I feel quite refreshed after walking up and down the stairs a few times. Hmmm, how come my chair is moved every time I come back here? And what are those cat litter crumbs doing—POOKIE!!!!! OK, just for that, I’m going to dish some real dirt. You think the name Pookie is undignified? Well, how about I tell the nice folks what your previous humans called you, the ones who abused you. SQUEAKY. There, how do you like that? And furthermore, I’m done telling cute stories about you, you ungrateful little… hey!—NO FAIR—don’t you dare cough up hairballs at me! why I oughta… Get over here!!
i will not use the computer without permission
i will not use the computer without permission
i will not use the computer without permission
i will not use the computer without permission
i will not use the computer without permission
nkkaakco88p0hhfjfl;amd;;;/
THE END.
[Mary McKenney]
http:/www.editorite.com 
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