Another Disconnect

My whompus gave out at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon. I still had to walk two dogs, go in & take care of two sets of other dogs, & walk mine. I was resentful of so much care taking of animals & no time for dinner yet. I needed kibble. I didn't really have dinner in the house. When I went off to visit the first set of Italian greyhounds, I had money & cell phone in my pocket & a menu as a bookmark in Potatoes Not Prozac.

It was after 6. That was more bites out of my energy. I decided it was too complicated to order food AND carry kibble home & besides, when would I eat? I still had another set of greyhounds to go, & my dogs to feed & walk.

If you're waiting for the cookies-&-ice cream binge story, you won't get one. I had breakfast for dinner, one helping each of oatmeal & yogurt, & fell into bed. Today is Saturday & simpler. My dogs & one set of greyhounds to take care of.

Still, I need groceries. Badly. I need to do laundry. Badly. I had intended to go to the bank this morning & get a couple of rolls of quarters. But after walking the dogs & eating breakfast, my whompus said we're not going anywhere. So I didn't. I stacked the dishes in the sink & crawled into bed with the girlies & kind of dozed for two hours. From there I could take care of the greyhoundse & take my own monsters out for an hour of fetch. I just finished lunch & did the dishes. Groceries still loom, & so does whatever laundry I have quarters for. But where's my whompus???

This is one of those Fatty/Normie Disconnects & I'm pondering which is the truth.

Fatty says, "You're fat & lazy. Just face it. If you weren't so fat, you'd have more energy. If you weren't so fat, you wouldn't wonder if this is a patch of depression or a lack of energy. If you weren't so fat, you wouldn't be depressed -- or if you weren't depressed, you wouldn't be fat. Because you're fat you can't figure out why you're so lethargic today so stop trying."

Normie says, "It was a rough ten days. You boarded at Roger's house for four nights & have had Hero & Daisy squeezing you in bed all of this week so your sleep has been disturbed. You finished a tough chapter on deadline but with nerves that had you shaking ten minutes after you woke up each morning. You had three days in which you had three extra dog walks as well as having to spend more time out with Daisy because Hero needed the time to do her business as well. Why in the name of Normality would you think you'd be anything BUT de-whomped today???"

We all spend a lot of time talking about what we eat, ate, wish we were eating, exercise, stress, deadlines...but this is one of those days when I honestly don't know if I earned this lethargy or whether I deserve it because I'm fat. My food has been good -- it's not a sugar hang-over. Most days it felt good to put in four or five hours of walking dogs. Then yesterday, at 4, the batteries stopped. I told Hero last night, as I was putting coffee together for the next morning & measuring out their kibble, that I had to be really really careful not to put the coffee filter on the floor & the kibble on the coffee maker.

It was that kind of tired.

Writing about it makes me think that Normie is the right voice. I remember being thin & having my batteries run out at some point on a Friday. & a two-hour dozelet made it possible to face what I couldn't before -- dogs, dishes, lunch, blogging.

Then my Self-help Normie wants to clamor in that I should "be gentle" with myself today. & I sort of am. I took that nap. But I think I must get groceries today if I want to both productive & "gentle" with myself tomorrow. There has to be some kind of do-it-anyway clause even on a Saturday.

+++

Two or three side notes. You may have noticed that I had my CELL PHONE with me last night. The last person in probably the whole world has gone cellular. I am ashamed that I caved.

I finally figured out the basics of my new camera (this was the week of reading badly written instruction booklets). It can do fabulous things & I feel like one of my best friends has come back from rehab or Boy Scout Camp. It really is a "toy," in the way that toys were when I was seven years old.

Last and not in the least, least, I'm flirting with an interesting man. We have made some conditions for a more serious relationship. He knows I want to lose weight but is OK about how I look now (well...with the book deadline hanging over me, I haven't had a decent brush-up -- washed, let alone colored, my hair in a week; the cold has peeled my hands and cuticles; my eyebrows are out of control; my toenails threaten to puncture socks -- the latter being what I meant by getting groceries today so I could "pamper" myself tomorrow -- I need to shave & generally do the "Merry Old Land of Oz" thing.) But just about each time we talk, he asks if I've been to the doctor or, now, if I'm worried about going to the doctor, & how my weight is.

G'rrrrrrr. This is the WORST question, isn't it? Especially because he's asking because he wants me to be comfortable with me & knows this is an impediment. It's not judgment. I'm not weighing myself & can only say my food is clean & I can walk up a couple flights of stairs with more ease than not long ago. This makes the question worse yet because I can't say, "I've lost 1.2 pounds."

I'm going to have to tell him that I'll talk to him about my food or my weight when I need to talk to him about it but that the question smacks of everyone who made me eat more when I was a kid.

G'rrrrr.

The Red Project

It must be the Catholic short story writer in me that tends to blog only when I can create a vignette or a sermon. I'd like to be a more frequent blogger, who plops down the detritus of the day but I seem to wait for something momentous to happen.

You've been exposed to my dating woes, for which, in some ways, I'm sorry. It brings out the whiniest in me. For a while, I was thinking of the couple of men I liked who did not seem to reciprocate as being "love poisoning". You know, you eat some shrimp & spend the next day violently ill & are shaky for a couple days after.

In the wake of my heart bug, I started a new project, The Red Project. Walking dogs can sometimes be so idiotically boring that I often carry my camera with me. It's gotten so that I've made some prized calendars of my neighborhood & of dogs, at least by people who are under contract to adore me. So in my fit of the blues, I thought it might help to have something ongoing, active, engaging to do, something about love but anti-disappointment.


I decided to start taking pictures of random red things. Some photos worked & some didn't. For instance, an abandoned red shoe made it on to the Brooklyn Heights Blog But some weren't worth the struggle of getting the dogs to hang on so I could snap the damn thing.

I like taking pictures. I can't draw a stick figure without a ruler, so it's amazing to me when my friend Anna, a painter & ceramicist, goes on about my "eye". Who knew? It makes me feel better to have taken a picture, as though I'd done something as creative as making muffins or writing a poem. There is hope when I upload photos into Adobe & then go in to edit them with my very crude abilities. Will they or won't they "rise"? Will they or won't they "rhyme"?

I think I've always liked taking pictures because I remember that when I was a college sophomore in Stratford-upon-Avon on Shakespeare's birthday, there was Moorish dancing on the green & leaning out of a third floor window of a Tudor hotel was a chef. I've never gotten over not taking that picture. It's been more than twenty years. Maybe I'm still trying to take that picture.

The Red Project has taken the pressure off my little foray into dating, although I might still be dating as well. The jury's out & I'm too busy with the book, dogs &, until yesterday, The Red Project to dwell on it too much. Then tragedy struck.

I had taken Boomer & Roger out for a walk in the snow and when we got back to Roger's house, I had to pee violently. I stripped off everything in a big hurry to waddle into the bathroom and my camera -- my primitive, beloved Fuji that my parents gave me a couple of years ago, went crashing to the floor. It takes pictures but the flash is busted & if I set the zoom, I can't move it without turning the camera off.

Last night I took a little tour through readers' comments at Amazon & laid down some, for me, Serious Money in order to reclaim my Red Project.

In the meanwhile, however, I have missed the following photo-ops:

An abandoned Spider Man umbrella in the trash.
A strip of Chinese New Year paraphernalia dangling from a naked tree.
Many wild rain boots.
A long line of men at CVS with armloads of heart-shaped candy boxes & truly awful stuffed animals.
A swatch of red leather hanging in the shoemaker's store.
A swarm of people at the local luscious flower shop making their Arrangements for tomorrow.
A woman with a Southwest Indian bag dangling from her shoulder.
The neon yin sign in the local fortune teller's storefront.

I contemplated buying a throw-away digital camera but I know that trying to upload the disk I'd get back would make me insane. & I have a month's free trial of Amazon Prime so it should be here five minutes ago. Still, Valentine's Day is nearly over & I won't have the knack of it even if the lines at CVS are even more desperate tomorrow evening.

It's kind of a great metaphor for dating. The photos I've seen in my head & haven't been able to take, the photos I've seen in my head that were hopeless when I uploaded them (the three red bottle caps, for example). The photos that are great but blurred. The photos, like the one above, that are almost red & too irresistible not to take & show off. My moderate skill that I've boasted about. The time they steal from the book. How I cheat just a little bit by adjusting this & that with Adobe.

A much more complete metaphor than love-poisoning.

Yep. Morris dancing. With white knee socks & everything.

Dating is not just about you

I'm not in a very good mood.

Anonymous writes: "Dating is not just about you -- it is made infinitely easier, if not just plain old possible, by having enough of yourself left over (after ruminating and obsessing over yourself) for other people."

Anonymous is right -- it's not just about me. But my blog is. This is where I tell my stories & am the first to admit that dating brings out my Inner Brat.

What I think & struggle with (including swings between shame & grandiosity) -- which is what you read -- is not necessarily how I act.

But then you might not know that given that as Anonymous, I don't know if I know you.

& you know, because I've been cyber-dumped & will not be mean to someone who had enough niceness to hook me, I'll be mean to you, Anonymous. As far as I know -- but then I can't know, can I? -- you have not had any niceness with which to hook my empathy, compassion, interest, & services. So, Anonymous: piss the fuck off.

False Romance

So I took my own advice & posted a personal ad. The timing is terrible -- my book is overdue, I have dogs spilling from the Bat Cave, I've told myself I won't put the Xmas tree away until this fucking book is done. & yet, I also told myself & you, when is it a good time? I had a weekend of relative space two weeks ago & did it.

There were a ton of responses. They asked for photos and I had already called myself zaftig. So I sent photos. Surprisingly, because I still hold that old notion that I'm undatable if I'm fat, they responded flatteringly. The couple I met quickly noted that I hadn't lied in my photo -- hadn't sent a younger, thinner version of myself. This is good information.

Inevitably, however, I had to draw some lines. No to the guys who expected sex too quickly without preamble. No to the ones I didn't find attractive or somehow loose-ended enough. (You know: the guy who only wants to talk about himself & who, at the same time, wants to talk about how the world is cheating him. Like that.) No to the ones who aren't in creative or professional fields.

& then I was down to two & they have disappointed me enough that I'm going to be heart-heavy for some days.

I did, however, learn one cool thing: I like a man who somehow or another brings out my ability to laugh, hard, at myself.

& I did one strong thing, which was to ask for a date. When the response was positive but not specific, I realized my instinct that this flirtation was going down hill with the inevitability of a bowling ball. I called. He was on another call & said he'd call back. I knew he wouldn't & fell peacefully asleep. & yes, I turned my computer on upon waking up & checked my email sooner than I normally would & there was no email. I knew all this in advance & gave him the opportunity to come through for his own sake.

Because, you see, I've done some accounting & I think I'm wonderfully datable. I asked myself in doing this if I would date me & said yes. Why, I asked myself. First because I've always wanted a Lab. Then because I'm funny. I'm, um, you know: responsive. I listen carefully. I'm in need of inspiration & so am willing to do new things. I'm a great cook. If I like to know when we'll see each other & whether our routine includes phone calls or regular emails, once that's established I'm insistently independent. So, yeah, I should be dating.

& of course, in the writing of this, Mr. Unreturned Phone Call emailed me quite prettily.

I wish he hadn't. I wish I hadn't responded prettily in return. I wish I'd take myself out on a date.

2/3 addendum: Flash: He broke a tooth. My reaction? What about meeee????

Mr. Boi, meet Francie, Frances's Inner Brat.

More information.

Mirror, mirror

A friend of mine has entered into a romance that her circle of pals has fair cause to distrust. The man has a history of taking direct aim at women and hurting them badly. This isn't one of those "It's just not working out" break-up mo's. He's always been on the look-out for other women, sleeping around, lying blatantly.

I am alarmed -- for her but more for me.

Maybe we need friends, I was thinking as I walked Zeke on this sunny warmish blowy Friday afternoon, to hold up a mirror to us. If you'd said this to me a week ago, I would have assumed you meant that friends tell us when our labels are sticking out or someone has been putting it out that we put out, but today I can see other ways this truism works.

My first reaction to her news was exasperation. Then I began to brood about it. Why should I get my knickers in a twist about her decision? I don't have to see the guy and wonder if he's telling the truth about why he canceled coming over last night. She has offered to keep quiet about it, knowing that her friends are so opposed to the romance: I don't even have to hear about it unless I ask for details.

Further, she's obsessed about this man for so long that this is the opportunity for her to find out if he's really all that and a bag of chips. I'll go so far as to say that she has a double-load to carry in beginning this relationship. She's got to evaluate him in his own right AND police his person for that doesn't match either of their heads. It's gotta to be tense over there in Loveland these days.

My official reaction was to wish her luck and warn her to protect herself. That's the kind of reaction that's guaranteed to have her prodding for what's underneath such a staid line. What was underneath, I began to realize, isn't pretty and I warned her that my curled lip at the thought of what she's doing has more to do with me than with her, and that it's a good object lesson for us both to see how much any reaction we meet with in life is not about what she (or I or you) have said or done.

I could also say that the name of some of what I feel is wrong. I envy her, but I don't envy her getting together with this guy or for having a relationship. I envy the balls she's shown in taking on such a Lothario. I envy her ability to forgive him, or try to.

The night she told me what she'd done, I had a vivid dream of being committed to an insane asylum where I and the other inmates were hearing voices and living in alternate universes. In the audience was the man I once loved. Sitting very close to him was his current lover. Audience? I don't remember why there was an audience. It wasn't Bedlam but for some reason they were there and he was terribly eager to ask me, apparently normal among the mad people, questions. When I saw him I morphed like Bertha Mason, lunging and spitting to get at him and claw his eyes out. The next day I received an email asking me if I wanted to be someone's "friend" on a website I know he lurks on. It was a bogus invitation but of course I had to go look. He looks very happy with his new love. I thought about how I was that pretty when I was thin. I thought about what he said about why "we" didn't work out. I thought about how he wanted to be friends with me as this new relationship blossomed and how I finally said I couldn't do it. I thought about how I dropped the last opportunity to be in touch with him like a hot coal. I thought about how thinking about him still tears my throat out.

I envy my friend's opportunity at a chance with someone she knows, warts and all. I won't have that opportunity.

Distraction! I thought. Other men! But there really aren't any. And so I had to acknowledge that one man I had an ongoing email/phone relationship with point-blank refused to meet me and how I terminated it because of that, how I pushed at someone else when I felt used and he'd dropped me. I thought about all the men kindasortalmosthovering on the periphery of my life and I envied her gumption to open herself up to that world of hurt and the stores of energy it takes even to get to the part that hurts.

"I can't date until the book is done," I said to myself. Well, that's not all that distant now. "I can't date until I've lost weight," I tried not to say. But isn't that a crock of shit? I mean, I'm fat. I'll always be fat. If I'm very lucky, I might get to hide how fat I am in a thin body, but I have a fat head and fat blood and a fat history. Maybe the point is to date someone now so he'll know...the worst of it. I didn't want to write that phrase. The truth of it? The Fat Girl I also love, or who should be lovable as well as the thin one?

Something.

And that, folks, is the first layer of my reaction to my friend's news. It leaves me sad for myself and ashamed of that sadness. Look, the grown-up Frances wants to say to that snarking Francie, YOU dropped two men for being too roughshod on your heart. YOU stated in one sentence how hurt you were and that man disappeared. You've done some good housekeeping in the last year so you don't get to be all regretful about the past you tossed out for very good reasons.

But her chance has reminded me of my lost chances and informed me of how reluctant I am -- and how undeserving I feel -- to court new ones.

It's not about her. It's not even about me wishing I were in her shoes.

It's about me and the mirror she's held up for me to see the state of my heart in.

Back from the Land of Weak Irony

It's Day Three of getting off Christmas Sugar and Day Three of Daisy's and my return to Brooklyn from Arizona. I'm not going to apologize for breaking my abstinence but I will say that I feel like shit in the wake of it. I wasn't walking and being back in business with the dogs is hard on my thighs and shoulders. I'm hungry every two hours as my body readjusts. I won't mention my digestion. And yet it feels heavenly after three weeks of that heavy sodden ghastly mulch I was living in. When I'm In The Sugar, there's no sense of "this will be better when". When I get out of it, I know the first seventy-two hours will be hard and the first ten days dangerous and touchy. So I'm countin' days.

It may sound very strange, then, that I will be thinking about thinking about moving to the Land of Nothing when the Book is done. My mother is ailing and my father is blind. They are scared for each other and scared for themselves. They need me and I want to be there to walk them as gently and intelligently through their end time as I can.

There are pro's and con's to this. I realized how much I miss being treated as though I am not responsible for how much the Safeway clerk, cable guy or waiter hates his or her job. People are friendly, smiling, helpful, accommodating. When the Schwann's delivery man brought in food, he stocked the freezers for my parents, roughed up Daisy, said hello in the most jolly way to my parents and breezed on out in the time it would have taken for a New York City or TriState deliveryman to diss his customers for having paid for his services.

I want to collect my stuff and live with it before I, too, face my end times. My china and furniture are spread out between Montana and Oregon and the things I have in the Bat Cave can't be seen OR appreciated for the crunch of space here. It would be nice to have a full size refrigerator and a microwave and fuses that don't blow when I run my hair dryer.

On the other hand, Arizona is as white bread as any place I've ever seen and the last place on earth I'd pick to live. I find the consumption of gasoline, land, and water distasteful. There are no mailboxes on the streets. There are no people on the streets. There is no recycling beyond newspapers. The houses all look the same and even the city offices are in strip malls.

Like my digestion, I won't go into the lack of greenery and the summer heat.

And then there is being home. I took Daisy out five minutes after getting back and five minutes later we ran into Boomer. At seven the next morning we bumped into Steven, Jonathan, Susan, and Daisy's friend, Chance. The dogs were incredibly happy to see me and I laugh at how I drag myself out on Monday morning to be met with, "FRANCES! IS IT CHRISTMAS? YOU'RE HERE -- IT MUST BE CHRISTMAS! DON'T YOU JUST LOVE MONDAY MORNINGS WHEN WE GET TOGETHER AGAIN!?"

The chances of knowing one's neighbors are slim in the Land of Weak Irony. You may only chat once a year, as you're setting up your inflatable snowman in the front yard for Christmas.

But then I arrive at Newark and find that Daisy's crate had been secured with those police ties. "You want those cut?" the clerk asked.

No, I wanted to say. I carry sharp scissors in my carry-on bag.

"Please," I answered.

So she did -- all but one, meaning I had to interrupt politely, collect glares and clerkly suspicion while I cut the last tie off in order to break the crate down. This is what is considered "service" in the TriState area.

And then again, I talked to one of my dog's humans yesterday evening and we laughed about the dogs until we were on the verge of tears. I ran into a friend this morning and laughed about dogs (it's a theme, OK?) until I hawked up a loogie. I cracked another of my dog's humans up at noon. People get me here. People make me laugh here. My acquaintances are, intellectually if not financially, my peers. We're all fulsome Democrats. There are books in our homes and dreams of hilly forests in our citified hearts.

But a gym would be cheaper in Arizona and some of the year I could take Daisy to the lake.

Back and forth. What I do know is that my dream when I finish this book is to rent a car and drive away. I want to visit every important person from my past and make peace with it. I'll take a miss on three or ten people I actively...well, hate, but I'd like to reinstall friendships, colleagueships, sisterships, auntships and cousinships while seeing how they have fared and shaped their lives in the last twenty or thirty years.

It would seem my parents' end times are shaping how I'm thinking about my own initial descent down the slope.

I Kid You Not

Occasionally I have Chinese or Thai food.

Daisy adores broccoli in any sauce and because I usually cook a hunk of protein (my pals at AFG can tell you how wearisome it is to read roast pork or chicken in my daily food day after day), I often get broccoli in something. Garlic sauce. Lemon grass. Basil. I save most of the rice for breakfast -- if you're on a food plan like mine, rice, fat-free ricotta, almond extract and sugar-free strawberry jam is a lovely breakfast, particularly in summer) -- and toss the fortune cookies in a jar to give Daisy another time.

They may be the only cookie in the world, aside from Fig Newtons, that I could care less about.

Lately Daisy has been on a hunger strike. It's not that she's trying to lose weight: she'll eat anything off the street, bite my fingers off for a cookie, try to rip open trash bags for old fish spines. At home, though, given her nutritious, measured kibble, she goes to sleep.

Other owners of Labradors find this to be impossible. They don't call `em "Lardadores" for nothing.

I think she's pouting over so many other dogs invading her space, even though these dogs are good friends.

If I have scraps of my protein, I cut them up and add them toher kibble, stirring well so that to get the last bit of chicken skin she has to eat her way to it. But yesterday morning, after her kibble had sat untouched for 12 hours and not really wanting to handle chicken at an early hour, I decided to lure her into eating by crumbling a fortune cookie into her bowl.

This is always an event because the fortune is then Daisy's, not mine. Sometimes they're so apt I put them on a little bulletin board on my desk. "Life is never more fun than when you're the underdog competing against the giants," reads one, and "Any impatience you show will only create more stress" is another I'm looking at right now.

Yesterday's, just in case you can't enlarge the photo, her fortune read, "Hungry is the man who finds salvation in a cookie".

You coulda knocked me over with a feather.

The irony -- looking for your future in a cookie. The irony -- my dog who looks me straight in the right pocket as we're walking down the street. The irony -- fooling her into eating correctly with a cookie.

The irony -- that this cookie would fall into my bag of lemon grass broccoli on some weary Friday night.

Do I really need to spell out the mirror image Daisy presents me of my own culinary tendencies?

Oh Lord, the irony.

Musing While I Can

My manuscript is due December 1, 2007. I finished the sixth chapter last evening. Today has been kind of a day off except that I did two big loads of laundry, switched two bags of winter clothes for summer clothes, ran some errands & started reading a screed called Fat: A Fate Worse than Death? This is one angry dudette writing one thing over & over: society victimizes (she even uses the word "sodomizes" at one point) women by forcing them to be thin, wear make-up, try to stay youthful, paint & dye & squeeze & tweeze. I nearly put it down -- I have lots to read -- because the second paragraph uses a direct instead of an indirect pronoun.

The author photo shows a comfortably plump-to-large woman in a big cozy fisherman's L.L. Bean sort of sweater. She complains that her doctor won't tell her what obese is but tosses the word "fat" around in a way that only the once-thin (she gained about 40 pounds in her 50's) & at her top weight can. Which is to say, there is fat & then there is fat.

I've been thinking about the definition of fat for a while -- I think I wrote about it. We need some terms here. There is Misses Department Fat, 14 - 18. There is J. Jill Fat, up to 2X. Then there are the other Fats, on beyond Silhouettes & into the pages just after the underwear section of the Lane Bryant catalogue. I'm not good at guessing weights or sizes but I'm thinking she's Misses Department.

I'm thankful as hell to be J. Jill Fat. Really. I've been Muu-muu Fat & being able to wear jeans & not feel like a freak is still so astonishing to me that I sometimes forget that I am, still, fat.

I have six chapters to write in 26 days. There's no way I can do it if I'm in the food. I love this pressure because I get to be very small, very focused. I pray each morning for abstinence first, then being able to write, then the dogs & then productive use of my time. I go to bed as early as possible so that I'll have energy for the next day.

I spoke to my mom & a friend today & both of them were asking things about the Book that they might ask about my "diet". Are you working? Can you do it? Is it too hard on you?

Deja vu.

But today is a loose-sweater day, a phrase from The Rooms that, in its entirety, is a prayer & intention to wear the day like a loose sweater. No fretting. No having to take a Klonopin because I'm so anxious about dogs & writing that I'm having diahrrea. I don't have the time to get all the winter clothes but I have enough time to get out some.

I had to force myself to go grocery shopping, however. One of the problems I'm facing is dinner & cold weather. I want hot food. I'm tired from the day & don't want to make hot food. I don't have the time, even in today's loose sweater (or flannel shirt & sweat pants), to make a lot of food ahead of time. My freezer doesn't freeze & I don't have a microwave. I had to do some thinking about the simplest food I could make & I made the produce man laugh because he was ready to restock Brussels sprouts & I kept scooping them out. I left him a nice empty bin to replenish.

The grocery stores in the Heights on a Sunday night are frightful. All the yups have been with their kids or shopping, & the students have all been studying or getting over hang-overs (we have an enormous dorm for spill-over housing for Pace & NYU). Suddenly it's getting dark & there's nothing for breakfast! A mass exodus begins & you're taking your chances on getting those Brussels sprouts. The crowd was bad enough that I gave up after I had a couple of day's worth of fixings but interestingly (there is a point to this), the crowd was made much bigger by three people. I believe they were Dutch, who are now the tallest nationality in the world. Very blonde, buying Gatorade in, like, a 12-pack & Nutella. That was all I saw as I paid for my own groceries. They were conferring on every item & took up a HUGE amount of room.

The man maybe had some weight to lose; the women didn't. He had to be 6'4" & the women must have been nearly 6 feet tall. The blondest was wearing a leather jacket that nipped in at the waist. They were the personification of the K.D. Lang lyric about a "big-boned gal...you really couldn't call her small".

Thin people can be a voluminous as fat people. In fact, maybe more. They didn't move through the store with the self-consciousness that a lot of Us have about taking up room, or even that New Yorkers in general have a sensitivity about.

There's another side to this, I'm seeing. Because I'm so conscious, I have all these rules in the store. Put my cart some place out of the way while I gather up yams & apples, usually in front of the cake & cheese cooler where not many people are apt to brouse. Snatch-&-dash. No browsing. Get my groceries on the belt as neatly & tightly as possible so that the cashier doesn't have to search out the bar codes & the person behind me can begin unloading his/her cart, too. Push all the loose carts together in front of the fancy soap display -- out of the way, ready for the stock guys -- & stack the baskets with the handles in place. Pay by debit or in cash -- no signing credit chits that takes up more time.

I get pissy when other people don't play by my rules, when they dawdle over which flavor of Gatorade to pick up or sort through the yogurts without putting the strawberries back with the strawberries.

I'm in a pretty relaxed mood tonight so my pissiness was at a minimum. I'm abstinent & was wearing an L.L. Bean jacket so I wasn't lumbering down the aisles like the Stay-Puff Man.

But it was interesting to see these Olympians in their lack of...what? urban manners...& how much room they took up at every sharp turn of the aisles.

It's like how the skinniest women wear too much perfume, I guess.

+++

Here's an oddity, & then I'll stop & take the chicken out of the oven. A friend & I want to make a gingerbread house for Christmas. I saw a mold & thought I'd get it cheaper at eBay. I probably will. But in scrolling through the cake molds, I came across a lamb mold that we had when I was a kid. It was a killer cake to make my mother said & it was paired with a Santa mold that was impossible.

The lamb was in a heated auction for $41. I grinned & looked for the Santa.

$499.00.

It occured to me that eBay is my den of inequity, next to the bakery shelf. & what I want most from it is my childhood. I didn't buy the Chatty Cathy doll I saw the other night that was said to be haunted & I haven't found the right Mary Poppins doll that I adored. But I have a Francie doll from eBay, dressed in an outfit I still had, & I browse Chatty & Mary every once in a while.

Go figure.

Back from Arizona

My Father Is a Fixer of Things

The clock limped with waiting, hours of my teeth
chattering from the mouse that ran between my feet
at four a.m. Up the radiator pipe it had come, the gray ghost
of everything I despised or suspected
about myself. When he finished laughing, he said,
“Stuff the hole with rags soaked in Tabasco. He’ll burn
his little mouth & go back to the cellar.” Three
thousand miles away, I knew he had pinched his lips
& was patting them in sympathy with that mouse.

Another late night & Jim calls, his car stalled
between St. Ignatius & Ronan. It is the coldest night
of the year, the stars laparoscopic against a dead
black sky. I decide to go too, & we layer up, the Donner party
with foresight. It is any old weekday night but it is a world
in this car, my father driving fast to bring his son home,
our urgent silence tattooed by something Russian
& wild (Romeo & Juliet, but Prokofiev or Tchaikovsky?) boundaried
by the green dashboard lights, the hard
geological dark, landmarks swept by, unremarked.

I spill a necklace into his hand. His fingers are thick, square-nailed,
strong, a peasant’s hands bred for midwiving cows
& fashioning such furniture as his forest huts needs. But knots
are his business, all kinds: jib lines & dry flies, one-handed
surgical seams up the chest of the Thanksgiving turkey. “Your hands
are smaller than mine,” he sighs. “Can’t you
do this yourself?” No, my face closes. I can’t. Or I won’t.
I wait for such crises like cake on Sunday. Slivers that he pincers
out bloodlessly, the smell of rubbing alcohol from his use-softened
bag as he puts together his otoscope with its cool promise
in my fevered ear, an hour scanning every word under Webster’s “T”
until I give up & ask why pterodactyl is missing from the dictionary.

Sometimes my helplessness amuses, sometimes it gives us
what I crave more than anything – more than sugar, more than love –
a chance to be father & daughter, a rare island in his other lives, all
of them, I know, hanging on that balance of patient speed,
rich livid mirth, even as he glides onto the fixing of other things.

My father explains a transistor radio/TV to my grand-niece, Sophie.

Random Thoughts - Photo Essay

You tell me: is this a sign, & what is it a sign of?

When I was working for Alix, my therapist asked me to get a Cindarella doll for my desk to remind me that I wasn't sitting in the ashes any more. This weekend she fell into my large lamp. I smelled something burning. Here's Cindarella now.

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

Tomorrow I leave early in the morning for a wekk in Phoenix. My father is turning 90 & there's ahuge party for him on Sunday & 30 people from out-of-town dropping in & out of the house for a sort of reunion for the two days before. I'll get to see my nience & grand-niece, as well as the other nieces & nephews. I'll be cooking for 30 people. I've planned meals that are abstinent -- salad & sandwich bars for lunch, jambalaya -- & I know my father is going to be thrilled.

I've taken the right steps & some unusual ones for my physical well-being. My clothes fit to a T -- no room for goofing off. There is a box of ex-lax in my luggage. Breakfast & lunch are packed & in the refrigerator for the plane tomorrow.

I'll be seeing my Perfect Cousins, or three of them anyway. This has me in fits. My brother Jim & I always laugh that we have to brace ourselves to see our cousins. I have killer shoes, several pairs. An elegant brown-fading-to-champagne silk dress. My Prada knock-off's & honkin' big zircon earrings. So we'll see.

I've planned most of the party aside from the big she-bang on Sunday, although I've ordered pinatas for centerpieces & order chili pepper balloons & found a place to fill them.

I'm exhausted.

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

I survived John Malkovich only to have spent an hour in the dog run, where Henry splashed water on me from knees to shoes & the Roger skrtched dirt on my from knees to shoes. I dropped off my dogs & hurried to walk Zeke. & yes, I defiitely got a second glance, the antithesis of Eric Clapton's, from Gabriel Byrne.

His look was NOT admiring.

I really hope one of the five pairsof shoes I'm bringing makes me feel like a girl...

Seeing John Malkovich

I'm putting together a couple of weeks of shaky abstinence here. The sugar cravings are passing, I've lost some pounds, I've shown up for a good portion of my life which, these days, consists of many balls in the air.

Today, however, I've been peepee-whipped by a fits of the Sads. As I negotiated my way across the street to go pick up my first dog of the day, I started making a list of all the reasons I loathe myself. It was starting to get pretty long before I got distracted by the wind or a kid bawling or looking both ways before I crossed the street.

Two hours later, I have a big wad of gray and now-flavorless gum in my chest, as well as acid in my throat. I've thrown many balls and been cheerful for my dogs, run the gauntlet of the film people clogging my side of the block, and I have a chance to think a bit. I'm thinking and writing instead of taking off my filthy dog clothes and taking a shower because, well, I'm kind of in the mood to stay in my yucked-out shorts and t-shirt and 24 hours' sweat. Every time I walk out of my apartment building I'm on display and under suspicion for a moment, and today being gucky suits that situation just fine.

The Coen Brothers have taken over Brooklyn Heights and John Malkovich has nearly literally moved into the house next door. This is to say that the lovely blue wooden 1824 Federal townhouse is his house in the movie. If you look at the little round awning by the massive white truck that is pumping air conditioning into the house, you're looking at my moment of feeling as if Mr. DeMille is waiting.

It's getting just a little bit stale, all this ruckus and milling around of technicians and gawkers camped out across the street, but the people are quite nice and lovely about the dogs. Sometimes walking a dog -- and you Lab-owners know this with a particular poignance -- is a public service. A friendly dog is so willing to love people who love them first. We've quieted babies, given the infirm and the elderly some tactile affection and made friends with people I'd never meet if it weren't for the dogs and their particular favorite humans.

This, of course, is when the dogs aren't being a public threat. It's been a good week. They've been mannerly.

I digress.

Sort of.

Yesterday afternoon was sultry in anticipation of a rain that didn't happen. I showered after the morning in the dog run and, at 3, put on a dress for the clean last five walks of the day. I walked out of my building and found myself surprised into locked eye contact with John Malkovich. He was in his jammies and robe (I believe this is called "costume" in cinema parlance) & talking on his cell phone. I turned a sharp left, kind of jittery. He's my favorite actor, or one of them (Jeremy Irons? Robert Downey, Jr.? Alan Rickman?), and I've seen him close-up and in person once before. But still.

He was hanging around on MY sidewalk for much of the next 90 minutes -- 90 minutes when I had to come back with Boomer and then leave again with Daisy, Hero, Boomer and Henry. He'd LOOKED at me. My insides were jelly at the thought of the parade I was putting on.

And then, today, the Sads.

You know, I'm glad to say it's the Sads. What prompted me to make that list this morning was the question of why I'm sad. My default is, "because I hate myself. I hate myself because____."

But the reasons, while hugely emotionally charged (I'm fat; I have no close friends at hand and I'm lonely; I don't like the dinner I ate last night; I'm poor; I'm lazy -- etc.), really aren't true, or not true as reasons to hate myself. Yeah, I'm fat. Fatter than many, thinner than many, squaring off with the issue as best I can. Yeah, I don't have a best friend over on Sydney Place, but I have friends and --

you get the gist.

The Sads are not reasons to hate myself. They're symptoms of weak points in my life that I ignore when I'm in and out of sugar. I haven't been in and out for a couple of weeks. The thin spots of the trampoline I live on are showing.

Then again, why the Sads?

Let's begin by respecting the fact that it's Friday. I went into the week without a day off from dogs and had extra dog walks until today. I have other work pressures besides dogs and am virtually in charge of the big 90th birthday party my mother is giving my father. All of that is simply tiring. And Daisy woke me up at 4 this morning in duress, in the middle of the first night I didn't take a sleeping pill. Scoop on a little more tiredness.

The Male Who Shall Not Be Named was in touch this week with a technical question. One of the reasons on my list of how I loathe myself was my obsessing, my in ability to get over love and failure. His techincal question, that could have been researched pretty easily, and subsequent couple of emails, were defensive but probing for friendship on his part, confused on my part. I decided not to answer back after Round Three. Still, the Balrog was awakened. Love and -- what is the word for the feeling when someone you haven't, quite, gotten over has found an enduring love that is much more successful than the one you tried together, once upon a time, in the First Age???

That. "That" hovers, emerging as my body relaxes a bit as I tick off the last dogs of the week (until tomorrow afternoon).

And then there was locking eyes with John Malkovich. I've been sitting here for a couple of days hyper-aware of the commotion next door, that John Malkovich is, right now, twenty or forty feet away from me. It's made me think about what he sees when he is on the streets of Brooklyn Heights -- kind of a bland neighborhood, really, although it's liberal and pretty and well-educated. Lots of baby carriages and tons of priviledge, as I know too well from bowling through those carriage-pods with one or more dogs in argumentative tow. And now, in his eyes, I'm one of Them.

Not that he remembers.

Which is also part of the point. I feel conspicuous when I walk out, and small, unimportant. Henry would beg to disagree, being crated at home to give me some peace this afternoon when he'd rather be here chewing on my new Caligarius shoes, but his presence has made me aware of what a speck I am in the scheme of things.

I guess there's a direct parallel here, isn't there? John Malkovich looked me in the eye, made his unconconscious judgment and clumped me in with Them. Unnamed Male tapped me for whatever stuff he was after, but in doing so, made me aware again of the judgments he's made and where he's clumped me -- part of Them, not part of Us.

For some weeks, I've been angry with myself for how hard this books is to write, how I'm not Persons Also Unnamed whom I went to graduate school with who are known for their literary (as opposed to senstationalist memoirist) ability that they spin with some ease and definite acclaim -- how that's in me but I can't DO it (hence the lazy entry on my list). I've been angry that this struggle is what keeps me from being more than a speck -- only to walk out my front door and lock eyes with...

well, you get the point.

OK, negativity aside, I want to remember that feelings -- the Sads -- pass. If I'm lucky, the Sads will prompt me to do something about any one of those reasons I am not allowed to hate myself for. And the first thing these particular Sads must prompt is the recognition that feelings do not equate self-loathing.

Malkovich will be out of here soon enough and Henry will throw himself on the couch with a smile on his face in about 90 minutes and I can go looking for a bombshell of a first sentence for chapter seven.

Fatlish & Thinian, Part II

A week and a half ago, one of Us came to visit me for a day. We headed toward Chinatown but didn't quite make it into the heart of the tumult. We didn't mind. I had stuff I wanted from Pearl River, a bargain import store of fabulous things -- tai chi shoes, wind-up toys, quilted jackets, strange candies, happy Buddhas and sublime Buddhas, utensils and cloth. I was loaded up when we left only to be met on Mulberry Street by a man hissing, "Bags, bags."


"Where?" I asked. We were escorted to a Storefront That Shall Not Be Named (partly because it was so tiny and so innocuous that I can't remember the name) and slipped into a hidden door to a tiy room full of Dooney & Burke, Prada, Juicy Coutoure, Kate Spade, Chanel and Louis Vuitton. There were a number of us Caucasians crammed in there and the other were dressed (in white! white! skinny! skinny! jeans) and tans, discussing Chanel and the car on hold in those narrow streets outside in ways that suggested they didn't need to be buying fakes.



So I figure they're at least good fakes, right?



They were speaking Rich White Thinian (although slightly tacky, as I recall: did she have Big Hair?) while we two Fat Girlz were interloping on the fringe of Thinland among the accessories.



I'm calling all anonymous women Zelda this week, so Zelda and I walked out a hundred bucks poorer but richly happy with our booty. Added to the sublimely comfortable massive selection of shoes I'd gotten for 34 dollars and the intense massage for even less, and this was a happy woman who came back to the Bat Cave from an extremely rare day of escape.



It was the beginning of an intense ten days during which I found myself speaking a good deal of Thinian, broken as it may be.



I sent a picture of my booty to another one of Us and her response, which I'm paraphrasing, was the perfect dialect of Eyeorish Fatlish: "I admit I'm jealous of the bags. If I hadn't gotten sick I would have been able to come to New York and get bags, too."



Why is this Eyeorish Fatlish? Years of obesity's listless, unfulfilled, possibly amorphous hope motivate its gloom. Thinian would spin it a different way: "I can't wait to go to New York and do that." Doris Day's Thinian would add, "I wonder what the fashion in handbags will be by then?"



This exchange has weighed on me because it's so perfect in its way. Think negatively so that you don't get your expectations up. Expectations are very different from hope. Hope is just that, a whiff sent heavenward. An expectation is -- well, look at the word! "Expect": "to look forward to"; "to consider likely". An expectation is not only a calculated demand of someone or something else, it's a borderline you have to work toward reaching.



Fatlish doesn't have a positive aspect to the word "expect".



The day after our shopping expedition, my ex-sister-in-law came to New York with her new husband, a surprise for me. We had a couple of meals together and I showed them around the nabe. He has a literary bent, although it's not my literary bent, which can be a dangerous game. "Have you read X?" "No," I'd say. "You have to," and he'd dash to the used bookstore to buy it for me. I can get very insecure in this game but I know, at last, maybe, that I'm as well-read as I need to be in the reading I need to do.



He's also an aspiring writer, making produgious numbers of notes and quoting his writer friends with the abandon of confetti. "I only have one book in me," he would say, "and some day soon I'm going to write it. Zelda Smith says..."



I finally told him this is bullshit. You either write or you don't and collecting all the writerly quotes about writing is not going to get the book written. I had begun to make gentle fun of him before that but finally came out bluntly and told him the Deal. I also put him onto Julia Cameron so we'll all be hearing a lot from her in months to come.

He was speaking Fatlish in that one book to be written some day and the tiny notes he was taking now.



I was speaking thinian because it was mildly flirtatious. He is exactly the man I could go out with a couple of times. He'd be dazzled by me and I'd finally admit to being underwhelmed by him. This is not to say that...Zelwood...is not a fine man for Zelda II. Their passions are matched by being artistic, but his are literary and hers are in dance. No Trivial Pursuit involved.



To recognize someone I could date is Thinian in incomplete translation. To recognize our final incompatability is a complete translation.



Interstingly, I had a similar conversation with my childhood friend this weekend. He was comparing opera stars and operas and I don't know whatall when he turned the subject to how he disliked Beethoven in his 20's and came to revere him in his 30's while still disliking Wagner and Strauss, until he came to love them in his 40's. "Isn't that weird?" he asked. "Not at all," I answered. "We have to grow into some things. I couldn't make heads or tails of Emily Dickinson in my 20's. When I read her ten years later, it was, like, of course! this makes perfect sense."


Then he had to admit how little he reads. The conversation was, almost, a tie.


That flirting thing has to be sorted out from Fatlish joking-so-you'll-forgive-me and Thinian take-or-leave-it. I saw it a day or two later when I stopped into a local pet store to buy yet another ball for the tag team of loose-jawed Labs who keep losing Daisy's. "You want balls?" Zelwood II said. "I got balls. You want big balls or little balls?" "I want big balls, Zelwood, you know that. Big firm balls with a lot of bounce."



It's a constant joke, almost a schtick. It means nothing. He bagged up the balls and said, "Good to see you, young sexy lady" and I thought, Heh! I pulled off another heist. It was "young" that made it a Thinian heist for me. I laughed and thanked him, which is the Thinian response to such banter.



The last important Thinian experience in that week is somthing you'll have to wait to read between hard covers. It was confrontational and violent and I reacted in kind without one whit of regret. It made me realize, when my sponsor and I discussed it, what protecting a child means and how little I was protected and how little I protect that kid still in me.



You know: that Fat kid who dreamed over Jane Eyre and a box of grape popcycles?

Thinian & Fatlish, Part I

There's been a lot of blog-talk about how to talk Thin & how to stop talking Fat. The concern has applied to dating, & it's applied to life. So I'll take a stab at the subject in that order.

For those of Us who have been struggling against our weight -- or the many circumstances that Set Us Apart at a Too-Early Age (being too nerdy, being poor, whatever) -- for many years, we have to consider how much we missed out on. We are stunted, emotionally & socially, & not infrequently we're lagging professionally & financially. It takes years to catch up.

Thin girls learned to talk to boys at whatever age they started being interested in each other. They rode bikes down steep hills, no hands, together. They went to parties & played spin-the-bottle. They had crushes that changed every week. They had "boyfriends" in name only because they were too young to do anything more than use the term. They cheered boys on at basketball games. They went on their first date with one of the parents driving. They went to dances that included Sadie Hawkins.

When you become thin after the age of about 17, all this stuff is well past. Flirting has become a more intimate game with more extreme possibilities attached to it. So when you haven't started with the gonzo bike thrill or the I'll show you mine if you show me yours, how well will we flirt, let alone talk to a man?

If you look at the stuff I've listed as preliminary to grown-up dating, you'll see a lot of it is physical, a lot of it is joint-activity, a lot of it is public, a lot of it has no substance whatsoever. Some of it has the girls on the sidelines singing the school song.

There are some useful lessons here for those of Us catching up. When Dick & Jane are racing their sleds down Bald Mountain, they get to the bottom, possibly in a heap, & talk about how fast, how cold, how deft the ride was. When Dick & Jane party down with Nan & Bert, Freddie & Flossie, Jo & Laurie in the Bobbsey basement, & Laurie decides he wants to go "steady" with Flossie, they may never do more than walk home from school together. Flossie, however, has learned that a "relationship" can be nothing more than a word.

As for "Fight, Mighty Possums, Fight!" the girls are learning enthusiasm, admiration, stand-by-your-man &...when not to need. Bert is tired from losing 101 - 98 to the Wolverines. He's depressed. He wants to hang out in the locker room with Freddie, Laurie & Dick.

& when Jo gets to see Bert, when she rides her Schwinn over on Saturday morning, she's going to be wreathed in smiles, maybe carrying brownies she got up extra early to bake, with suggestions of doing something that will take his mind, & his mind's body, off his defeat. A bike ride. A visit to the swimming hole. Bowling. That monster movie where she can clutch him & make him feel all protective & manly.

How do these lessons learned between the ages to 12 - 18 apply to Us?

Fat Girl Date Rules:

1. Meet with a plan to DO something. You're leaving the Planet of Fat, so try, if you can, to arrange a walk-&-talk or movie or something.

2. Do NOT talk about your weight loss or diet. If you have to invent something more important than your weight for conversation, do it. Make sure that, if it's a girly thing ("I love to knit") it can translate to a guy thing ("I made a gray cable sweater for my father last Christmas that you'd look great in!")

3. Talk to him about him. Tell him he looks great. Laugh at his jokes. Ask him questions.

4. Take him brownies. Or a CD you burned of sure-fire tunes. Take a pack of Black Jack gum or Sugar Babies so that you have something era-appropriate to laugh about in common. (You X-generationers & others will have to figure out your own version of this)

5. Look at the other men if you're in a lighted, public venue. You aren't doing this to drive insecurity into your date, you're doing it to remind you that ther are other men out there & to do some on-the-spot comparison shopping that may give you a better sense of whether you're truly attracted to your date or not.

6. Ask for advice in some area he knows more about than you. The last date I had was a man into "the Standards" -- the romantic songs of Rogers & Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, etc. He could go on at length about Rosemary Clooney versus Frank Sinatra. I was interested in it enough to think, "I wouldn't mind spending an evening letting him play me his favorite songs & dilating upon them."

7. When he asks about you, talk about your friends & plans & busy schedule. Have. A. Life.

8. Smile. A lot.

Do I follow all these rules? No. For one thing, when someone asks me what I do, it's kinda hard not to get into the weight-thing. I turn it back to dogs as quickly as possible, however, & to him. I don't take stuff but I might go in with an attitude that's the same as a box of rocks. I must find dried mushrooms for Tina or if we don't have potato pancakes, I'll die.

& when it's all said & done with, have something as delicious as fudge waiting for you at home. A book, a video, slippers, guilt-free computer gaming, uploading photos -- anything, even fudge itself -- so long as you're going home to something you like more than how much you think you should like this man.

Because a former fat girl will always think this is her last date, the only date, the end of the line. It can take two weeks to get over that way of thinking

If you liked him enough to see again, email or call him (try to get his machine) the next day & thank him for the lovely time & nriefly mention something you liked about him ("You made me laugh. I needed that.")

Then...let it go.

That's what girls who started dating at 12 years of age learned to do.

Nota bene: These rules are not The Rules. They only work when they become second nature to Us. They must be used as Our stomachs twist, we obsess, cry, & check our in-boxes 1500 times a day.

After about 10 years it gets easier.

Zorro the Humbled

I knew this business of staying with a new her was a bad idea. Why do you think I whined all morning that first day? I wasn't scared -- Zorro is never scared -- I was gentlt communicating my need to return to My Den and My Humans. That the she ignored me (she even told me to calm down and be quiet) should have prepared me for the days ahead.

Every day is the same. The she gets up and drinks the vile black drink and eats fire. Then the she tells us to get off the bed so she can flip it over, thus moving me, Zorro, from the pillow nest I have created. She puts the itchy-scrtchy loop on my nose and we all go outside. The daisy gets a cookie about every other step. I know what's going on. It's called farvoritism. But I, Zorro, do not deign to look back and beg for a teat as well.

I have retained that much dignity from the Zorro the Magnificent Days.

My Magnificence has diminished. It failed me at 4.37 p.m. on Sunday, August 12th, now many years ago.

I was walking around the dog run, granting one whiff of my magnificent butt to those dogs courageous enough to seek my permission, when I looked over at the she flinging a ball across the dog run for the daisy. The daisy --

the daisy! My God, the daisy. Who would have imagined it? I'd spent two nights with the daisy. We'd eaten Milk Bones and peanut butter together, shared ginger snaps, slept in the same bed. But it wasn't until I saw the daisy break out of the weeds with the ball in her mouth and come streaking like spilled honey back to her her that I felt my heart drop and my mouth go dry.

Perhaps it's because there is honey in my ginger snaps. Perhaps the she put something in my Alpo, an aphrodaisyac, say.

Whatever. I, Zorro, watched my magnificent and regal aloofness drop like the ball the daisy spat out at the hers feet. I am in love.

I am ashamed.

What makes this daisy different from the hero or the mellie? There are plenty of females for Zorro to take without having to beg, let alone be yelled at.

Hey! the daisy said when I mounted her with my one shred of magnificence in the ready. I am my own bitch! Get. Off.

The daisy is not namby-pamby about what she needs. She does not whine. She does not give in. She does not submit. I respect this in her...up to a point.

Worse, she is a flirt, always running up to humans and pawing at them for love, and sleeping in such a way that makes me, Zorro, feel like a dog leashed three inches away from a steak. The daisy is asking for it, if you ask me.

Which, of course, if you were asking the question at all, you would come to me, Zorro, for the correct answer.

Despite my running after her (I, Zorro, do not run) and despite my magnificence at her beck and bark, she insulted me and humiliated me. There were bichons present! Papillons. Worst of all, a sharpei, with whom I share half my magnificent bloodline with.

The sharpei sniggered. Oh, he tried to hide it by sitting next to his Him and ignoring me, but I saw the curl of his right jowel.

After one or two more attempts at expressing my diminishing magnificence on the way back to the daisy's den, I gave up. I decided to play it cool. I studied up on How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You but I did this secretly, in the bathroom and on the couch at night, disdaining the Bed of Shame where the she and the daisy slept in innocent peace. I walked around the dog run biting my lip in shame but not getting any closer to the daisy than I had to be when we're on leash. I watched the boomer try to make love to the daisy. My mouth tasted like fire but I soon saw that the daisy either ignored the boomer, sat down or snapped her usual line about not being anyone's bitch.

I watched her with the hero, however. The daisy is clearly in love with the hero. They often sleep together. But while the hero is not in love with the daisy, the hero is obsessed with the mabel, the Pomeranian across the street who looked up at me from the corner of her eye and winked. I may be little, she seemed to say, but I know the zorro is head-over-paws.

The humiliation will never end.

Today, after many years of ignoring the daisy, I made one more attempt to secure her adoration. When the izzie border collie jumped out to nip at the daisy fetching the ball, I, Zorro, stepped in to save the daisy from this annoyance. (I, Zorro, must tell the truth. Hero did it first but not effectively. I am nothing if not efficient.)

Did the daisy thank me? No. The daisy only spat the ball at her her's feet and demanded that she throw it again. Thank God the daisy didn't thank the boomer for growling at the izzie. And the daisy's she pulled the boomer off the daisy when he tried to make love to her.

Hope flared! Perhaps the she pulled the boomer off because she knows I am the only one magnificent enough for the daisy!

Hope deflated. The daisy told me to get off and the she told me "no" and then kept the mellie and the hero in between me and the delicious, beautiful daisy.

I refused the cookie the she offered me half way to the mellie's house. Whatever shreds of magnificence I have left must be preserved.

But they are only shreds and I am reduced.

I took the cookie the she offered me a mere block away.

I, Zorro

They hauled me from sleep and dragged me out the door in a driving rain for a long walk with suitcases and rushed conversation, then met a her outside a door, handed over bags of my food and snacks and left.

They left! I, Zorro the Magnificent, was abandoned by Them to a her I've barely acknowledged the existence of and she pulled me into this small dark den where, apparently, dogs come and go.

Especially Labradors.

I, Zorro, am not a Labrador. I am Magnificent. When you are magnificent, you ask only for the occasional scratching of the ears and chin, your Big Milk Bone with Peanut butter, a couple of gingersnaps, your choice of furniture, a can of beef and gravy, and to be allowed to go wherever you want at whatever speed you want.

When you are Magnificent, you must be allowed to walk among your kind and among humans at will in order to show them how little you care.

But no. They left me with this her and many Labs. There is the daisy one who insists on sleeping next to her head (pathetic: human feet is where the truly Magnificent sleep) & always wants a belly rub or a ball thrown or strange humans to say they love her. She's here all the time so far. I think she may own this Her.

Then there is the boomer one I was forced to walk with in the rain yesterday. He is clearly in love with the daisy one, poor sap. He kept kissing her, if you can believe it. I kept myself apart by pulling harder at whatever direction this sad little group was going.

This she gave me no peace. She took me into the daisy's den again -- along with a hero Lab and a henry Lab. The daisy put her nose up in the air and stalked off in high dudgeon. (I can respect that. I am Magnificent and therefore recognize scraps of Magnificence in others. But she's still too lovey-dovey and screeches like a hyena for that ball.) The hero took the best couch, leaving me to wander around after the she and to bark at the henry who kept {shivers} getting close to me.

You cannot see a portrait of me, Zorro the Magnificent, because the henry ate part of the portrait-maker. Something about flossing his teeth. This henry is below contempt. I don't know why they don't take all young dogs off to Alberta until they mature. They might even train them to be Magnficent. Although never, of course, as Magnificent as I. I am the Most Magnificent, and the First Magnificent, and the Paragon of Magnificence.

The best the henry will ever be is older. Perhaps when he's twelve he won't feel the need to constantly badger every living thing with a squeaky toy until they take it away and he can jump on them and bite their necks.

But even the hero is a slut for this love business, rolling over on her back as if she'll die if the she doesn't scratch her belly. And the henry positively giggles when he gets a belly rub.

It is truly pathetic.

I do not know why the she didn't let me eat the daisy's dinner. I could easily have done so in a much more expeditious way than the daisy. More with the hauling. My collar has never gotten so much work before.

Today dawned dry and sunny and the she brought out a torture device that wraps around my -- Zorro the Magnificent's -- nose. I am no longer able to apply the necessary pressure to go where I want. Instead of looking Magnificent, I now look like a circus pony. The she has yet to learn you cannot control Zorro the Magnificent.

To top off the unfairness of it all, the she left me with the daisy for over two hours today, although she had the courtesy to serve me my Milk Bone and peanut butter first (as well as one to the daisy: did my Him say that was allowed? Why was I not consulted on this business of sharing?) The she put another collar on me before she left. This one smells like a skunk that's walked through the perfume aisle if I bark.

As if I, Zorro, ever bark unless it's absolutely necessary.

I think this she is obsessed with collars.

I've managed a couple pieces of the her's chicken so far. The daisy gets the yogurt containers when the she is finished with them. These are two things that will have to change before I, Zorro, allow myself to feel comfortable here. The she says it's for nine days. She doesn't understand that for Zorro, a "day" means nothing. There is only Now.

At least I get the good couch Now.

Perhaps they are beginning to recognize my Magnificence.

Oh, great...

I decided to 1) add a feed so that anyone who wanted to be informed of my latest -- fairly infrequent -- postings could have an alert sent, and b) change the font across the cherry blossoms to black.

I managed it. But all of the posts disappeared.

You can still read comments, however. {Sick giggle here.}

This is not the post I meant to write. I want to write about it being Day 3 of no sugar, no flour. I want to say that my mantra right now is "It'll get easier." I want to say that I have to think very clearly about what I need to do each day so that I don't hit the Eight O'clock Wall being disappointed in myself. Today I've chosen hacking up a few vegetables, minimal grocery shopping & one load of laundry. Those chores + doing well by the dogs and an abstinent breakfast and lunch are my bar for saying, "You did what you set out to do. Good show, old girl."

I had a grand but very wicked laugh this morning in the dog run. Brooklyn Heights is the world headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses. They are nice people, good neighbors in their way...but also easy to make fun of.

Tons of Witnesses come to Heights not only to serve in the Witness Protection Program they run out of the priciest real estate in the neighborhood, but to visit. It's Mecca, Rome, Salt Lake City.

Some kids were coming out of one of the buildings all dressed up in little suits and dresses with sashes. They skipped across the street to look at the dogs. "Hey, doggie," one of them cried and Boomer charged the fence, barking huskily. It Bad of me to laugh. But I laughed.

So, thank you Blogspot for emptying out my precious words. Maybe this will prompt me to write more often. I'd like to use this more like I used to do my Julia Cameron Morning Pages, which I don't have time for. Maybe I'll be profound or maybe I'll talk about dogs.

Now I'm going to try to sneak out of here to throw laundry in the wash.

Trigger[s] -- the Smartest Horse in the West

This is a blog I don't want to write. I've put it off, & then put it off some more. Coincidentally or not, my reasons for not wanting to blog have not abated -- or abated only enough to risk talking about them.

How `bout that latest study on obesity, the one that says it's catching?

That shut me up. I felt like Typhoid Mary: if I talked about Night Sugar I risked spreading the disease.

Or the few times I've felt chastised here: what X or Y think, even if X or Y don't comment. & I don't believe in suppressing comments.

I think about this stuff & -- surprise! A new trigger is found, as well as more reasons to isolate myself from the world.

I've been doing that all over the place lately. I have sound reasons -- 9 p.m. is way to late for me to meet someone with atomic energy; I've had extra & very difficult dogs; I'm swimming upstream on chapter four still. But it comes down to exactly the same thing: people have extended their interest in being with me & I've cancelled at least five times in the last couple of months. One reason I cancel is that I don't want anyone to see me. I'm a mess in general & on a good day no thinner than the last time my friends have seen me. Then the guilt sets in, along with the relief, &...

another trigger appears.

I'm as much a nanny as a walker for my dogs & it seems I'm on call a lot. Emergency overnights, frantic 9 o'clock walks (I'm pretty much trying to go to bed at 9), messages on my machine a couple of hours before I'll need to see the dog. It's hard, if not impossible, to get enough time together to write anything (my book, a post, an email) or do serious housework. By Saturday I'm slack-jawed & it's Sunday that I have the wherewithall to sit for hours with the book.

I feel I have little control, aside from saying no to money I need desperately & risking the loyalty of my clients who depend on me, over my time & energy. I get home between 5.30 - 7.30 after a couple of steady hours of walking dogs & have to buckaroo with Frustration & Not Enough, two more...

triggers.

I'm full of some emotion[s]. Dunno what what it/they is/are. Don't wanna know. Don't have TIME to know or feel them or deal with them. What better than food to make sure they don't get a chance to surface?

So, yeah: I've been eating. There you go. Simple three-word sentence.

The last two days have been clean of sugar & flour, by the grace of self-disgust. I try every few hours to remember what I've invested in my abstinence so far. Breakfast, dishes, brushing my teeth, anti-depressents; lunch, dishes, doing well by the dogs. It's night that gets me, & it's night + klonopin that kills me.

I've been struggling with this, not simply giving into it. I have a better chance of getting through the Night Triggers if I keep my list-of-things-to-do very simple. It gives less to beat myself up with when, at 8 o'clcock & I'm beat & disappointed & insufficient & lonely, I haven't overwhelmed myself.

Although I perpetually do this simply because my days -- like yours -- are moving targets. "Can you walk Roger?" Sure: no problem (except it's hot & steamy out & that walk will drain 15 minutes of alertness later as well as put off this or that chore). I have to school myself in unpredictability. I can't afford to say no.

It's a matter of a few hours, really. I rarely eat flour or sugar during the day because it makes me too sleepy to handle Boomer when he sees the akita or Roger when he hears the voices in his head. I don't even head for the sugar at dusk. I want it last of all.

I suppose everyone wants their lover coiled around, next to or in them as they fall asleep.

Checking In

I'm working on the fourth chapter. I've re-written, or re-organized what I'd written, or thrown out what I'd written, the first half about a dozen times now. I feel like Cinderella sorting lentils from the ashes so that she can go to the ball: it's a task I'll never finish & so will never go on with my life.

I'm looking at chubby chick lit, whick I blogged about for the AFG site a while ago. This is on a grander scale & involves media figures & movies & TV as well as books.

It bugs the shit out of me when these books have the heroine newly thin after a hundred pound loss bouncing around in a bikini. As weird as I find Gwyneth Paltrow dressed up as a fat girl, the fat suit above is, at least, almost the truth of what deflates, what we are left with.

I'm on my food plan & today was a challenge. I'm boarding Mad Malachi, a three-year-old black Lab who is crazy like a rocket, & have Henry, a year-old Lab, around during the day. The mayhem was unbelieveable although Mally is at my left almost six hours after being sent home from any more World Class Wrestling & seems to be zonked. At 6 all I wanted to do was eat. I had breakfast again & as I was hefting my bowl to go get some more I thought, No. Not now. Let's see if you really want this, later.

We'll see how "later" goes. I've taken a Klonopin & may pass out soon.

The other problem is have is smoking vs. sugar-free calories.

Actually, that's TWO problems. The first is that I came back sick from seeing my parents, with a borderline bronchitis that has almost cleared up now. Smoking was not only bad for it, it tasted terrible & felt terrible. So I cut w-a-y back. I'm down to about a half a pack a day but the price is that when I'm out with the dogs -- or as betwitched by them as I was with Mally & Henry this afternoon -- I suck on sugar-free hard candy. It makes my tummy grumbly, is cloying, & distresses me. Gotta start watching this more carefully.

The second problem with sugar-free hard candy is that it claims to be FIFTY PERCENT LESS CALORIES.

Dear Sweet & Low,

I would like to apply for the position of grammar checking your products. Your butterscotch candies, which are not nearly as good as Werther's, by the way, are NOT fifty percent less calories. They are fifty percent FEWER calories.

I'm sure more literate consumers would buy your candies if the little wrappers that fall easily out of pockets and into the gutters would be more likely to purchase the Sweet & Low variety if only you fixed this simple but annoying problem.

Sincerely,

Frances Kuffel

Oh well..................................................................

I responded to an incredible post by Beula this morning that I'm realizing that every time I eat off my food plan, which is one of several first steps to the little hell I call Hating Myself, I'm handing victory to my enemies. The least I can do is not give them more than they already took. It's the thinking of someone who's angry. It would be about time I got angry except that I have to, one way or another, knock this chapter out.

I'm excessively tired of reading about fat chicks, dieting, addiction, et cetera. There's a biography of J.S. Bach on my bookshelf I want to read. Instead, having checked in without saying much of anything, I'm taking a Sarah Ferguson "inspirational" book to bed with Daisy & Malachi.

Sweet dreams everyone...

They're limiting our rights once again. It's Us again the Telephone Companies & the FCC.

Learn more:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

But get on it -- five days left to preserve out rights to free access of information.

A Month of Two Full Moons

Goodbye, June. We went through some heavy rains together, roses & lilies, the Rose Moon & now a Blue Moon.

I cancelled therapy today. I woke up at 10.20 with the start of a cold, too limp to lift a finger beyond the weekend dog obligations -- it became apparent that I had no energy for either the subway/self-revelation or the dinner party I was invited to this evening. I'm running that small fever that's under the skin: I feel normal to the touch but can feel the burn on my cheeks & forehead & the tops of my thighs.

I feel beaten up, as well I might be, as though this moon-heavy month has pulled me this way & that. Part of how I'm feeling comes from getting off sugar yet fucking again. Part is crashing after the plane ride from hell on Wednesday. "You're due, honey," I tell myself. "This is inevitable." But I miss my old energy.

It was a gorgeous day, even for someone with fever under her skin if she stayed in the shade. We walked Mellie & ran into lots of people we know, some of them by their dog's name: Izzy, Roger, Stanley. Tom rushed out of the store to play with Daisy's mind & to tell me about the spate of complaints he's gotten lately, providing a good deep laugh I sorely needed. I managed to vacuum a very little, write one email, clean my desk up sort of. It's 7.30 & I bet I'm in bed by 9.

So what's a crazed girl to do when she's got a fever & sore throat & the woozies of getting sick? Order smacking-firey chicken vindaloo (use only under adult supervision) & two pairs of jammies.

Time to wash the dish, stash the left-overs & clean some Italian grayhound crates. If we're lucky, Daisy & I will make the turn onto the Promenade in time to fall in love with the fireflies...

Be it ever so humble...

<>

2.oo p.m. Sun City, AZ 6/26

Ah, the Bat Cave. There's no place like home, even though I've been up for 27 hours (with catnaps on planes), Henry just chewed the back of one of my favorite flip-flops, I got eaten alive in the dog run by little flies & I'm retaining so much water that the skin on my shins feel as taut as a drum & there are creases in my ankles as though I've been wearing too-tight Mary Janes.

It's warm & humid out today but a shower has solved the worst of it & a diuretic will help drain my drums. Red wine & airplane travel do this to me. I'm sore from sugar & slipping on Henry's stoop a week ago & landing on my butt with the small of my back jammed against the step behind me. But the dogs are exhausted from an hour of fetch in the swelter & I'm sitting in my robe thanking God it's not 120 degrees in shadeless shameless sunshine.

I did not do this trip abstinently or even with much dignity. One night, in fact, I levitated into a dozen cookies & the next day my mother chirped, "Oh! We have some cookies, don't we? I think I'll have a cookie." No, I was forced to say. They're gone. "But we just got them yes- -- oh. OK."

She knows.

I knew only that the package wasn't there with a dim recollection of eating a couple at 3 a.m. But the package was in my room, empty. Scary.

Do I regret this? Of course. It's embarrassing, it's not keeping my pact with God, my sponsor, my program, you.

But I studied my compulsion to really go at it in my parents' house. I'm increasingly imprisoned there -- too hot to get out much, a new car that's confusing to drive, my mother on oxygen with extremely limited energy. The squirming of being expected to...something. Tell them things that are too complicated, or simply to talk when I don't really talk very much. The boredom of the frequent naps they lapse into, Dr. Phil & Wheel of Fortune. The need I have to get away with something, to get something of my own when I'm with them.

I told a friend this morning that I sometimes long to be able to tell my mom the stuff I would have five or ten or fifteen years ago. How I operate out of depression. The little romantic heartbreaks I've had lately. I can't. Her world & her life are slowly but inexorably imploding & her job now is to breathe, sleep, take pills, conserve her small energy to pull through another day, most especially for the sake of my blind father. It's my turn, now, to listen to her frustrations, prognoses, aches & attacks. To lay my deeper feelings on her would be another worry to nag her into living under the cloud of worry that my father's needs already thicken her lungs.

So I talk about the dogs. I tell them the simplest things about my book. I showed her my pictures on flckr. I ask for news of the rest of the family & old friends. I answer her questions & describe what I'd like to do by learning decoupage, how much I like taking photos. I bought her Memoirs of a Geisha because she said she didn't know what was the must-read that she'd like. (Personally I found Middlesex to be pretty boring despite my mother's adoration of Oprah.) I ask about the past.

Mostly I slept, great droughts of sleep that took up hours. I'd wake to read the chubby chick lit I'd taken along -- Little Earthquakes, Eating Heaven, I'm the One that I Want, Size Fourteen Is Not Fat Either. I helped my father get a couple of Marine Corps ribbons he's missing & ordered some extracts to make more syrups after I helped him make fake maple syrup (as a science experiment: it's neither cheaper nor better than Mrs. Butterworth's). I wrote out instructions for using the DVD player & tried to figure out how he could record on his four-track tapes for the blind. I read him his Musical Heritage catalogue & wrote out the order, read every single kitchen gadget at Target to him & described each toaster oven to him. I left them with a cake & peanut butter cookies that I had not eaten most of.

I was pleasant company except when my mother drove (yyyyoooowwww!) & when they bickered because my dad kept changing his mind about dinner. I don't know if I would have been more "present" without food or nicer. I'm grateful it was only six days away from my humble home, two of which were spent travelling. I'm not grateful for the thunder storms that kept us an additional five hours in Houston but it was wonderful to see Daisy this morning, who leapt into my lap & then gave me a long & reasoned lecture on my crimes. I went out for French toast before picking her up & that was nice, too.

Too nice, in fact, to use as a reason to go out & do any more damage.

The humans of the Italian greyhounds I was supposed to stay with cancelled -- a loss of several hundred dollars but a gain on the foothold of sanity for me. I'm very tired now: do I risk a two-hour nap? Am I capable of doing anything else?

It's good to be home with you again -- I missed you.