From my daily Calendar: 

Jackson busy at what he did best

1942, Peggy Guggenheim offered to support Jackson Pollock while he painted exclusively for her gallery and completed a mural for her apartment.  When his first show opened a year later, it attracted significant attention.  But he still had to complete the mural.  At nightfall the day before the deadline, Pollock started painting and worked for fifteen hours straight.  As soon as the paint was dry, he rolled up the canvas and hauled it to Guggenheim’s apartment, where he realized in horror that it was too long!  Guggenheim sent Marcel Duchamp to help.  Duchamp calmly suggested they cut eight inches from the painting.  By then Pollock had found Guggenheim’s liquor stash, so the canvas was trimmed at one end and tacked to the wall.  The artist then stormed into the middle of Peggy’s party, staggered to the marble fireplace, unzipped his pants, and urinated. 

This is the mural from Guggenheim’s apartment.  Can you see Jackson’s name in side the design?  Maybe it was in the eight inches Duchamp cut off.

You know, sometimes there are moments when you look at your children and you have a flash of recognition.  It’s a moment of clarity that your child shares all the DNA before them.  My brother looks just like our father and my nephew – well, it’s really amazing how much that boy looks like his grandfather and great grandfather.  The four of them have the same face – long and strong boned.  I got the cleft in the chin – yea for me.

I had a really powerful moment like that right after Sassy was born.  She was very early – 7 1/2 weeks early and thus was very tiny at 3lb 9oz.  She spent the first month of her life in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the NICU for the uninitiated.  Yes she was beautiful, but she was so tiny and so thin – she didn’t look like anyone I knew.  Don’t all new parents look down into tiny faces and think, “You have your father’s eyes” or “She has her mother’s nose”.  I didn’t see that.  Not then, and I thought I was missing out on something.

Holding Daddy's Hand. This is one of my favorite pictures of all time

But after Sassy was about ten days old, I had an epiphany.  I was in the bathroom washing my hands, preparing to head off to a day at the NICU when it hit like a ton of bricks.  Her tiny, tiny hands were just exactly like mine.  The shape, the large knuckles, everything.  It was a really extraordinary moment for me as a brand new Mommy.  She was really and truly mine and all of her family before her.

I’m going somewhere with this, I promise you. 

We had so much to do today: grocery shopping and a ton of christmas shopping.  Sassy was ready early.  She was wearing a beautiful sun dress.  It’s 80 degrees out here in the desert so, ridiculously, a sundress is entirely appropriate.  But no one had seen The Bandit for a while.  We kept hollaring for him to come out so we could go.

This is a Project Runway task gone horribly awry

The minute he did, My Honey nailed it.  “Oh dear God, he looks exactly like his Poppa.”

Here is his look. 

He came up with it all on his own.  Believe me, no one else is willing to claim any part of it.  But I’ll tell you, he worked this look all day.

We call it “Lumberjack Surfer”.  We did insist he lose the tie.

“I see London, I see France,” the singing was high pitched and punctuated with giggles.  “I see Daddy’s underpants.”  The Bandit was jumping up and down on the bed while his daddy was changing out of his work clothes.

Daddy was tired and hot and he really wanted to be crabby.  It’s awfully hard when The Bandit is this silly.

“Yeah, well, you’re probably not even wearing underpants,” My Honey replied, yanking up a pair of shorts over his offending underpants.

The jumping ceased and the boy spread his arms out wide, taking the stance of a PT Barnum style showman. 

“Prepare to be amazed!” he shouted.

His wee little tushy was modestly covered by Spiderman jockey shorts.

And we were amazed.  Amen.

I was not selected for jury duty.  In fact, I was never even selected to go to a court room for prospective selection.  All of which was fine with me.  I took my lap top as I told you I would, and I got so much done.  I wrote 7 pages on the new chapter.  It was the first real writing I’ve done in weeks.  It got me back on track , out of my head, and onto paper.

Paper good.  Head bad.

One thing I was disappointed with during my tenure of civic duty was the total lack of weird people.  Seriously.  When one goes downtown, a person has certain expectations.  I expect to see weird people and lawyers.  Maybe some lazy and rude government workers.  I realize I’m working with cliches and generalizations but history has proven the rules, not me. 

I saw not one single crazy person arguing with themselves or an inanimate object.  This is unusual.  It’s winter.  That’s when the best crazies come out.  I may sound mean, but think of the desert as the south and under-medicated crazies as the birds that fly there.  Every winter they flock here to the warmth – pun intended.

The only person I had any problem with whatsoever was an old man who wore his Know-it-all Hat.  And he wore the hell out of it.  All day.  He lectured all who would listen on every single topic and after lunch he took the opposing stand on several of his most vehement opinions.  It was almost unbearably annoying for someone who was trying to concentrate on the voices in her own head. 

At one point, I must have huffed louder than I thought because I caught his attention. 

He swelled all up like  an ancient rooster and said, “What?” as if he was a 17 year old ruffian and not a septuagenarian with a walker.

I chuckled, shook my head and replied, “I’m just exhaling.”

My Honey has said for years my exasperated huffing and puffing was going to get me in a fight.

I had to read it twice before I got it.  Of course, I read it wrong the first time….

I have jury duty tomorrow.  Part of me says, “ugh!”  However, there is another part of me almost giddy about it.  There are two reasons for this excitement.

1) I don’t have to go to work.  I seriously hate my job.  I hate my industry.  I hate everything about it.  Seriously.  It’s a soul sucking, hateful place to be and I’ve been at it much too long.  The only thing bearable are the ladies I work with.  Them and the fact that Ava is my boss.  Every single day I instant message her my resignation.  Every single day she refuses it.  I’m only sort of kidding.

“Please let this message serve as notice of my resignation.”  That’s what I’ll type or some variation on that theme.

“Nope,” is all I’ll get back.

2) Some people hate jury duty because it’s hours and hours of sitting and potential boredom.  I’m looking upon this as an opportunity of hours and hours of potential writing time.  I’m taking my laptop and probably my iPod to tune out the other people and I plan to write like a maniac.  I hope to complete, at minimum, one entire chapter.  MY AGENT (yes, I still think of her in all caps) has suggested something for book 2 that I think will be a great addition so I need to write that from scratch.  I’ve had ideas for it running around in my head for weeks and it’s time to push them out onto the paper.

At the very bare minimum, there will certainly be plenty of people-watching for me to report back to you in my own special, snarky way.  Stay tuned…

Oh my god, the dog is making me insane.  He’s clearly feeling better and at this point, My Honey and I are force feeding him pain meds just to calm him down.  I’m going to have a dog addicted to narcotics and I don’t even care. 

I spent perfectly good money on his surgery, and of course, I don’t want anything to happen to him for real.  But if a cartoon anvil should happen to fall on his head, I’d be totally OK with that. 

Because I don’t want to be the cause of anything happening to the dog, he’s still wearing the cone on his head to keep him from licking his incision.  What it means now that he’s feeling better is that nothing is safe.  He’s barreling around the house with his usual mania, only his head is eighteen inches wider than he’s expecting it to be.  He nearly took out the open dishwasher this evening after dinner.  Not to mention my knees.  At one point he careened past the table while we were eating and literally shoved Sassy’s chair several feet using the cone as a plow.  All of this to chase the cat.

And the cat is doing it on purpose. 

This cat of ours hasn’t been this active in years.  Usually he only comes out during potential feeding opportunities or to keep me company at night.    But for the last several days he has taken a great deal of fun in appearing behind some innocuous obstacle, taunting grin on his smug, feline face, all with the intent of enticing the dog to do his doggie best.  That’s why I have miscellaneous furniture strewn about my house.

And in another exciting development, a doorbell rang on the television tonight.  Roscoe came hauling ass down the hall and baying as threateningly as possible when one is a cartoon.  Only now, he has his very own amplification device.  If Ava and Kelli thought my house was loud before….  Deep sigh.

I’ll bet the Coyote’s ACME Anvil Company has free shipping this time of year.

Roscoe and The Bandit

The Idiot Dog was fixed on Saturday.  I’m here to tell you, you’ve never seen a more pitiful thing in your life than a bloodhound after surgery.  They sent him home with the cone around his head and, if we thought he was droopy before, well he’s reached a whole new level of droopy pathetic-ness the likes rarely seen before.

My Honey and I took him to the vet first thing in the morning.  He was all excited to get in the car and he watched out the window with glee.  My Honey kept apologizing to him in advance – clearly it’s a guy thing we women just don’t understand.  I guess after your fourth annual pelvic exam, your sense of pity is seriously diminished.

We arrived and, when the vet tech came out to collect Roscoe, the dog seemed a little wary of this change in circumstance.  However, when she gave him a reach around his opinion rapidly improved. 

She said all matter-of-factly, “I’m just going to check to see if he has both…”

I swear to God, Roscoe looked right at his dad with both eyebrows high as if to say, “Hey, I’ve heard about these massage parlors!”

The poor, misinformed dog blithely trotted after his new lady-love to have his naivete crushed under the tennis shoe of a woman in puppy dog scrubs.

Many hours later when we picked him up, the lobby was full of people to see the doctors for more routine reasons.  The Bandit, who’d become completely obsessed with the idea of what Roscoe was losing, continued to ask questions that I didn’t mind answering, but didn’t necessarily want to discuss quite so loudly in a crowded room of strangers.  I tried to keep my blushing to a pale fuschia and explained for the umpteenth time about testicles and doggy birth control.

When the door from the surgery opened, poor Roscoe literally staggered out.  He looked worse than a sailor on a three day drunk.  His ears hung limply down the sides of his plastic cone, his eyes sagged low forming little bloodshot pockets of pity down his cheeks, and his front legs kept crossing as he walked.  I could tell his eyes weren’t really focusing.  The entire room stopped its chatter and as one said en masse, “Ahhhhhhhhh,” with as much feeling as they could muster.

He literally collapsed on the living room floor when we got him home.  He didn’t even have the energy to defend himself when the cat came out and made fun of him.  The cat stuck his head all the way inside the cone to check out the dog and then walked away in disgust.  After all, the cat has been a eunuch for years and I’m sure he was wondering what all the fuss was about.  Roscoe promised to chase him later in the week.

It’s been a day and a half since.  He’s loving his pain meds and he’s sleeping a lot, but when he’s awake, he’s definitely the same Roscoe as last week.  We’re trying to keep him calm, but he took a freedom run, albiet a short one, down the street before he realized he was wearing the ever present cone and came to a stop about a house away, humiliated and chagrined.

The after surgery instructions suggest leaving the cone on for ten days, but I’m actually concerned he’s going to break his damn-fool neck.  You certainly don’t have to concern yourself with him sneaking up on you because you can hear him crashing his way through the house from one end to the next.  He never clears a doorway on his first try and collides with the step every time he tries to come into the kitchen.

My Honey has started calling him Satellite Dish. 

Wouldn’t it just be easier if we made him put on a pair of the Transformer underpants The Bandit refuses to wear?

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Once at a lecture in London titled “Paranoia, the Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx, and Phantoms,” Salvador Dali made a magni ficent entrance, as usual.  Holding two white Russian wolfhounds on a lest in one hand and a billiard cue in the other, he was dressed in an old-fashioned diving suit and helmet topped with a Mercedes radiator cap.  He tried to speak but soon realized that, without a supply of oxygen to the helmet, he was unable to breathe.  The audience blithely watched him struggle for air, thinking it was a part of the act, but finally two friends realized something was amiss.  They frantically attempted to hammer off the bolts on the helmet.  Finally a stage hand arrived with a wrench and released the nearly suffocated Dali.

You know Dali is a weird guy.  That’s his whole thing – being odd.  At least when you hung around him, things were probably never dull.

Can't you see a little bit of Johnny here?