Archive for the ‘Married life’ Category

It was Mother’s Day?

May 14, 2013

I’ll be the first to admit that I had more than one agenda when I finally agreed to marry my wife.

On the one hand, I promised myself that I would lose my virginity by the age of 37.

It was a lofty goal that only crossed into the realm of possibility when Jacquie and I started to date.

Still, I wasn’t sure if she was “the one”.

Norman Rockwell Mother's Day plate

In fact, it wasn’t until the third time Jacquie proposed to me that I finally acquiesced, after I had realized that our betrothal could benefit me, as well.

You see, another dream I’ve had since I can remember was to invent a pretext so credible that my family would have no choice but to excuse me from ever seeing them in person again. It would be christened the OMEGA Excuse, the justification of all justifications. No more birthdays! No more funerals! No more other boring bits in between!

I had known for some time that Jacquie was keen to return to the homeland 9,000 miles away from New York City. That might be some people’s idea of a “comfortable distance” to put between themselves and their family. But not most people. Most people would need to live permanently on a space station to reach their familial comfort zone. And I understand the feeling. But in my case, let’s be real. I wasn’t going to get a better offer than 9,000 miles. Before Jacquie, I would have been grateful for a one way ticket to Hoboken.

We quickly made plans to move to Auckland, and then I popped my cherry. Eighteen seconds later, we were back to talking about Auckland. It was a moment of triumph. No longer must I rely on my grossly inadequate neocortex (I was born breach) to think up new excuses to avoid personal contact with my loved ones.  with our relocation to Auckland arranged, if anyone in my family asked if I were attending this or that gathering, I had the OMEGA Excuse to save me. “Oh, I’d love to spend Thanksgiving at your house eating your dried out turkey and repeating the same conversation we had last year. Oh, no. I just remembered. I’m going to be 9,000 miles away living my new life in Auckland that day. Damn.”

It’s hard for me to say all this. I’m a sentimentalist at heart. But if I’m honest, I think me moving away was the best arrangement for all parties concerned.

Norman Rockwell's sentimentality

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and infrastructure, even separation by a continent and an ocean is not enough to suspend all contact with loved ones, unfortunately. Facebook and Twitter keep us up to date on important news from the folks back home, such as what they had for lunch, and how some of it is still stuck in their teeth. (The rest is made up of George Takei re-posts).

There is also gmail, for our semi-literate siblings and parents. And there is Skype, for those relatives who want to see how fat I’ve gotten.

This  multichannel, always-on, ever instant online access to anyone in the world means that we still have to deal with shit like Mother’s Day.

Which I only just found out it was yesterday.

I’ve been adequate keeping in touch on every occasion. Except for  Mother’s Day, which has proven a tough nut to crack.

My first Mother’s Day here, I woke up that Sunday morning, eager to beat my siblings to wishing mom a happy day.

I called her on the land-line, but what I failed to take into account was that, due to the International Dateline, it was still early Tuesday morning back in New York.

Needless to say, mom was kind of angry I woke her. She said goodnight, and then implied that of all her children, I was the one that came closest to being aborted. Then she hung up.

I decided I’d take the high road the next year, by tagging my mother in a photograph that, if memory serves, had something to do with Mother’s Day.

But by 2012, the demands of acknowledging this holiday, year-in, year-out, had pretty much exhausted my creativity, to say nothing of my interest. I ended up tagging my mom in a status update about how she can fart on request.

But this year, I was inconsiderate. The day passed without my notice. And that made me feel bad.

To make up for my neglect, I decided that for the next day or so, I would be nice to whatever mothers happen to get in my way.

Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out well, either.

On Sunday morning, for example, I stopped to say hello to my neighbor, Lucy, who had just come out of her apartment accompanied by an older woman.

I made a comment about the pleasant weather. I mentioned how much I liked Lucy as a neighbor, even though she doesn’t clean up the dog shit from the courtyard, and I think she’s been reading my mail, and that she must be proud.

This woman was very offended by what I said. “I’m her sister, you asshole,” the old lady said, before storming off.

Then there was the poorly timed “baby sea lion for lunch” joke I told to a mother who happened to be raising money for the SPCA, and the whole misunderstanding over my use of the word “bastard” in passing, and on and on and on.

So, I give up. I’m no good at this shit. That’s my new Omega Excuse.

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Posted in Married life, Non-Zealand, Now Zealand | Leave a Comment »

On doodling

January 29, 2013

There’s this app called Paper that’s kind of addictive.

It’s the perfect gift for those indolent, self-styled creative-types that make your life so interesting.

Apple or someone (maybe the developer, FiftyThree) categorizes Paper as a “productivity tool”.

I kind of have to take issue with their nomenclature. I’ve probably lost 17 or 18 hours to Paper, doing nothing but doodles. If a productivity tool is supposed to save you time, then clearly somewhere in the supply chain, there has been a gross miscarriage of the service level agreement.

And if Paper wants to make it so easy to doodle your life away, then they should also develop an app that makes its users more responsible managers of their time. They could categorize it as a productivity tool. Its only task would be to prevent the customer from using Paper. It could be called Paper+ (now with added productivity).

Hello, FiftyThree? I’m reasonably certain that I have more important things to do with my time than doodle. Like, my job or paying attention to the cars in front of me in traffic. And when Jacquie is telling me it’s time to clean the cat box, how many more times do you think I can get away with, “Not now. I’m being productive” before she catches on that I’m just doodling? Seven, eight more times is my guess.

Paper is a digital palimpsest on which you make marks to simulate physical media, as they might behave in a rigidly ordered world. There is a brush with a water color effect, and tools that mimic a pencil, a magic marker, a pen. You are constrained by the rules of the app, parameters that force you to pay attention to the potential of the tool combined with gesture. This includes the simple “undo” interface, which antiseptically corrects your missteps, the way physical erasure could hardly ever be.

Anyway, I like to doodle. And not just the whatever comes to my head kind of sketching, but real portraits.  Here’s one I did of Vince as a microscopic parasite.

Vince as microscopic parasite

I also like to doodle my wife. I use my finger. I could doodle her all day long.

Last night, I was doodling her and she didn’t even notice.

She said, “Simon, the cat box smells terrible.”

And I said, “Not now. I’m being productive.”

This is the piece I was working on at the time.

20130129-235703.jpg

I know realism isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But as you can see, Paper makes it a cinch. In fact, if I had decided to draw Jacquie with conventional tools, she would have put her shirt on and sat up straight by the time I started sketching.

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Posted in Culture, Married life, Vincent Maine Flame Red Hustler | Leave a Comment »

Midlife crisis, on the cheap

November 20, 2012

When I was nine or ten, I made a solemn vow.

“One day, long after I’ve grown into a man,” I pledged, “I will divorce my wife and run off with my secretary, who will be half my age.”

Reality, of course, does not always work out the way we plan. And there isn’t always a happy ending. And we learn to enjoy the contours of our lives, taking solace in those precious moments when we are alone and can sob bitter tears of regret over the dreadful hands that fate has cruelly dealt us. That’s called aging gracefully, the acceptance that we do not earn nearly enough money to afford a really awesome mid-life crisis.

Not like the ones our fathers and grandfathers took for granted.

If my generation was led at a very young age to believe the big lie, we have only our print media to blame. After all, the one thing I learned as a schoolboy from my friend’s father’s Playboy magazines, was that I would have it all. The cherry red mustang, the shapely college cheerleader, the pack of Newports with 17% less tar, and the bottle of Old Spice. It was all supposed to be there for the asking.

Since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, there has been a lot less home equity available to men of my age and older. Consequently, for the first time since the Great Depression, the average middle-class, balding, shriveled up, overweight heterosexual American male could not afford to sustain a respectable mid-life crisis. The men of my generation are only now confronting this shocking truth, right at the point in our lives when our penises are starting to slowly but inevitably telescope up into our abdomens, where they will eventually disappear altogether within the fleshy, adipose folds surrounding our crotches.

All is not lost, though. You can enjoy a decent midlife crisis without breaking the bank! You just have to think creatively. Instead of buying real Ray Ban sunglasses that can run as high as $900 a pair, just buy the $20 Ray Bans the next time you fill your car with gas. That’s how I’m doing it. Instead of a Mustang convertible, I roll down the window of my Honda Civic and stick my head out while I’m driving. Instead of a mistress, I have a kitty. And instead of a venereal disease, I have a feline venereal disease. Midlife crisis, with all the fixings.

You know how I know I’m middle-aged? Because today, someone posted this on Facebook.

And I realized that there would be a lot of people out there who wouldn’t get that joke. And that would be for most of them because they were born after me. A long time after me. Like, I was doing adult type shit before they even existed, and now I’m closer to dead than I am to childhood aspirations for satisfying mid-life crises. But they’re not.

But I took out my depression on two who were very dear to my heart. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. And I wrote horrible things about them on Facebook.

I wrote that Uncle Owen was a “martinet”, and that I was glad “they did him”. Uncle Owen was always like “Luke do this; Luke do that; Luke, there’s going to be hell to pay; Luke, it’s time for your colonic.” Poor Luke. And the worst part about it? Uncle Owen wouldn’t let Luke waste time with his friends picking up power converters at the Toshi Station, until all of Luke’s chores were done.

If I were Luke, I’d be like “fuck that” then use the force to put a cap in the motherfucker’s ass. Uncle Owen gets in my way? He’s got to fall. Because, let’s face it, that’s what Luke was like. “Toshi Station” and “power converters” were such a transparent euphemism for “losing one’s virginity at a whorehouse full of Jawas”.  Uncle Owen wasn’t a fool. He knew what went on at that cab stand. That’s why the chores were never-ending.

I could have continued. But a silence seemed to have descended over Facebook. It was as if nobody knew what I was talking about. And the only possible explanation for that, beyond the unlikely suggestion that I am incoherent, is that those people are too young to even understand.

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Posted in Culture, Depression, Married life, Non-Zealand | 4 Comments »

Pity-party-pooper

April 28, 2012

Why do people give a crap about other people’s problems? A veterinarian gets crushed by a retired circus elephant, in her own zoo. A young gastronome develops brain damage from eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yeah, OK, fine. We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed once in a while. So deal with it and move on so people can focus on my calamities for a change. Is that really too much to ask?

I'm not sure what bothers me about this Stuff.co.nz headline about Milla, the 39-year-old circus washout that killed its keeper, Dr. Helen Schofield. Stuff might have been saving this one in the event that Kim Dotcom made a dramatic and deadly escape, while maintaining a solid journalistic insouciance toward the entire affair.

If I found out the hard way that the Colonel’s secret recipe was salmonella, and suffered brain damage for it—delicious, crispy original brain damage—do you think people would give me the time of day, at last?

Damn straight, and much, much more. I’d be rich and famous. And retarded. People would be forced to pay attention to me. Not out of respect, an aspiration I long ago abandoned due to the modest amount of effort involved, but out of a deep sense of pathos, the quality most coveted by all mankind. Or at least the mediocre segment of that cohort. A walk is as good as a single, as the Boston Red Sox might say.

I want to let KFC know that if I do manage to achieve brain damage from my now thrice-daily visits to their fine establishment, I would not sue them. In fact, I would offer myself up as a kind of “celebrity vegetable” for ribbon-cuttings and franchise promotion. They could just prop me up near the drive through window and let my day-time nurse drag my palsied, pen-bearing hand across someone’s napkin so they can show all their friends. KFC could even name a meal after me: the “Sad Sack”, consisting of a giant boiled potato, an autographed napkin, and a beaker of salmonella. Well, the KFC guys can figure out the logistics, but I guy can dream, can’t he?

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m throwing a pity party and nobody has even RSVP’d. You want to know what for?  It’s this: I had the shittiest summer. Now, a lot of people in Auckland will say their summer sucked too, what with the record number of cloudy days, the below-average temperatures and the rain. But mine was the worst because it happened to me. Besides, look how I was forced to spend mine, indoors, taking pictures of myself washing my hair.

Taking pictures of my cat washing his hair.

And taking pictures of a book I was reading while I was waiting for the cat to finish in the bathroom.

Incidentally, this was a horrendously misleading title. I will admit this “handbook” contained plenty of information for granola-shitters, such as how many people you should hug at night when you’ve reached the “confessional” stage of hypothermia, and how to construct a blind for moss-watching, and the 11 signs that you’ve just swallowed a berry. All that’s well and good. But there wasn’t one useful bit of information for stalkers. If anything, it gives that forsaken cross-section of hopeless romantics some fairly impractical advice.

“The party is moving as a unit”. How in the world are you supposed to stalk as a “unit”? It’s a dead giveaway. How would you even find a group of stalkers to go after the same target? Do they take turns? Does everybody meet at the mall with their rucksacks and bedrolls, and draw straws?  Does the winner say, “Yeah, this week we’re going to stalk my ex-wife. Everyone follow me.”? What if the target turns around all of a sudden? Is it better for the stalkers to try to hide, act casual, or should they start singing and pretend they’re a choral society and it was just a coincidence they were in the mall in the first place? And what happens when the security guard comes over and says they don’t have permission to sing in the mall? What then? You see? You finish reading this book with more questions than answers.

Anyway, that’s the kind of morass you sink into when you have a bad summer. Of course, when the autumn came, the weather started to improve.

But, by the time we took our belated summer holiday this week in Tairua—a two-hour drive south and east of Auckland, on the Coromandel Peninsula—it was shit again.

Frankly, it’s not just that the summer was bad, and that our consolation holiday was bad. It’s that any time Jacquie and I have some time off and do anything together, a few things inevitably happen.

  1. The weather turns shit.
  2. One spouse contracts a stomach virus and vomits.
  3. The other spouse laughs so much at the first spouse vomiting that it makes the second spouse vomit.
  4. The rest of the community vomits, en masse.
  5. Authorities are notified. Evacuation procedures are put into effect. Tsunami alarms are sounded
  6. We go home and pick Sunny up from the cattery.
  7. I nearly die from fur exposure.
  8. Jacquie laughs so hard that she vomits.
  9. etc. etc.

How’s that for a pitiable routine? I hope Stuff picks it up. I even have pictures they can use, along with a few scenarios, from this week’s abhorrent excuse for rest and relaxation. As I always say, when life gives you lemons, complain to as many people as possible.

Horrible Holiday Highlights

Jacquie was eager to run on the beach, in spite of the rain.

She ran ahead. Some fishermen nearby seemed to shake their heads, and leer at me.

Later we went to the supermarket to get ingredients for dinner and I saw this.

Aha. What better opportunity to draw attention my piteous than by arguing with a supermarket clerk about Tairua’s apparent treatment of women as pets. How dare they pooh-pooh my wife when she runs on the beach without a collar. What nerve of them to insinuate in their Vitapet display that my wife does not already sleep as comfortably as a dog of roughly her size and proportions. Stuff is going to hear about this. This is going to knock that salmonella story right off the splash page…etc. etc.

The clerk seemed to find all this amusing and the whole thing fizzled.

The next day, during a break in the storm, we went to Cathedral Cove about 20 kilometers north of Tairua.

Here, I found a new angle with which to generate sympathy for myself.

I would turn myself from hapless holiday-maker to infelicitous widower, due to the unfortunate combination of a precarious rock formation and a series of very loud sounds.

“Jacquie,” I said, “Sit inside the cathedral cove, and I will clap for you.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“Just indulge me. I will clap and clap.”

“OK, but only because I feel sorry for you. Moron.”

So I clapped.

It came to leave and after putting my hands on ice at home, I went back to Tairua, defeated and furious that the world was so unjust, feeling sorry for myself that more people didn’t feel sorry for me.

There was only one thing for it. A secretive purchase of adult entertainment from the local video store.

Now, whose life sucks more than mine?

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Posted in Married life, The Outdoorsman, The Pet Peeve Petting Zoo | 4 Comments »

Bad signs and mixed messages

March 10, 2012

New Zealand readers may be familiar with the Hobson’s Choice brand.

Well, sir. I’m here to tell you this company loves its meat.

I didn’t know how much so until two weeks ago. It all started when I went to Newmarket to take photos.

This was right after I’d written about a PSA advising New Zealand children to stop in the middle of the road when a speeding car was bearing down on them, instead of running out of the way. At least that’s how I read it.

The ambiguity of the PSA prompted a search for more examples in signs and billboards of that mysterious Kiwi aversion to precise communication.

Newmarket, a shopping district, seemed the perfect locale for the expedition.

The signs were disappointingly concise and informative.

Still, there were one or two things I found worth commenting on. Of course, I used to snack on lead paint chips, so what do I know?

The first thing I spotted on my search was the local outlet of a national shoe chain.

Admittedly, this is ambiguous only as far as it is questionable branding.

I mean, what is so tantalizing about a clinic? It’s so medical. Isn’t a clinic where you go to find out if you should be worried that it burns when you pee and that funny swellings happened to appear in a special place only a few days after you blacked out during your last drinking binge?

(Incidentally, and on a completely unrelated matter, Jacquie, if you’re reading this now, we need to talk. I have a surprise for you. Nothing to be concerned over. Not too much. Yet. But, yeah. We’ll talk.)

Maybe some people find the association of shoes with potentially frightening, painful, or invasive diagnostic procedures a good reason to go into a shoe store.

Personally speaking, after five minutes in any store, a colonoscopy starts to seem like a more pleasant way to spend my time.

But what kind of person reads “Shoe Clinic” and thinks, “If I go there, maybe I’ll get stuck with a long needle or exposed to X-rays. It’s a value-add. They are so getting my money”?

Me, that’s who. Shoe Clinic doesn’t only concede that going to a store is a tedious, uncomfortable experience; it’s saying that’s exactly the experience you can expect when you step inside. I can’t tell you how refreshing I find their honesty. Just like going to a clinic.

Not far from Shoe Clinic, we have tchotchke emporium Texan Art Schools.

When I first came across this store a couple years ago, I assumed there’d be something to do with art inside, like pencils, and drawing pads, and books on Banksy.

Alas, no. Just a lot of Kiwiana, some of it quite chintzy and little of which I’d gift to anyone that I didn’t want to hate me. You’d be surprised how many people fall into that category. Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. In which case, I’ll probably be shopping at Texan Art Schools for your next birthday.

It is obvious that the owners of this store have never been to Texas. Unless, by putting “Texan” and “School” so close together in one name, they were being ironic. This is the state, after all, that put into office a governor whose policy response to a serious drought was to declare three days of prayer while slashing funds to fire services battling record numbers of wildfires…thanks to the drought. Now that’s smart thinking, and not a way of thinking you can learn in any school. Unless you’re in Texas, apparently.

There were other pictures even less worth talking about than these two, so I went back to my neighborhood, slightly dejected. Which brings me back to Hobson’s Choice. On the way home, I passed one of its trucks making a delivery, and I felt drawn to take this picture.

I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. There was nothing patently interesting about the sign. Hobson’s Choice is a clever enough brand name. And what it is selling is a pretty commonplace staple that I was already sold on years ago. In fact, you might call me a Hobson’s Choice man. It is not unusual to find me lying on my stomach tasting the maple difference out of an open faced sandwich spread before me. Other times, I’ll just lie on my back and have the Hobson’s Choice lowered to my mouth. I’ve handled it with my fingers on occasion, but that can be quite messy, so mostly I pretty much prefer to eat it.

I looked at that picture several times over the next two weeks. There was something attractive, yet odd about it. It inspired my appetite, but there was something revolting there as well and  I couldn’t figure out what that was until I finally showed it to Jacquie.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head. She was blushing. She pointed to a particular part of the picture, and the light bulb went off in my head.

“‘Oh my god’ is right,” I said. “That’s a picture of a ham sandwich.”

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Posted in A Closer Look, BottomFeed, Culture, Married life | 2 Comments »

That dairy there on Sandringham

October 11, 2011

I come home from work with some shopping. Jacquie leaves for sewing class and after a short while I’m staring at my feet. She won’t get back until nine. She wants me to meet her half-way at Dominion after it’s done. She’s still not used to the neighborhood. It’s too dark at night, she thinks. What does she think I’ll do? At the first sign of trouble, I’m running.

Nine O’clock, she won’t be back til. Three hours for a sewing class. What on Earth could they possibly be going on about for three fucking hours? Who has the energy for that kind of industriousness?

I’m still on the couch and I haven’t decided what to do about the thing. There’s the couch, there’s the DVD with Star Trek again, the one with the atrocious theme. There’s dinner in a cold pot on the stove. I asked Jacquie to smell it before she left because it was in the refrigerator so many days we had to count backwards on our fingers to remember. The coil sparks against the bottom after the heat’s on long enough. I eat and look at Star Trek and look out the window and it’s going to be light for a while, and there in the wood tray by the laptop, underneath some jewel cases, stray bills and a USB cable, is the thing, nearly empty.

There is something, now that I think of it, that I didn’t get at the store on the way home from work that I can go get now. Jacquie won’t be back for more than two hours. She missed the first class because she was on shift that night, so she made arrangements not to miss the second. She paid a-hundred-something, two-hundred-something dollars. Disparate friends knew of the teacher, all saying the woman has a mean reputation for never refunding deposits to anyone dropping the class, regardless of reason. A prima dona of the Bernina. A prima dona. Instructing a sewing class. I don’t get it.

The overcast sky is at just before the color blue it gets at dusk. It will be like that in another hour, to make your eyes tear. Am I the only one that ever happens to? I pat the key in my right pocket, shaking the thing loose from my left pocket to get it to my mouth. I see the marigolds are doing well. It’s a good time to walk because it’s after everybody comes home, even after they go out for a run. A lot of people here make that healthy lifestyle choice.

There were these two couples I passed the other night. The girls jogged in front talking together side by side a few paces ahead of their male counterparts doing the same thing. I can’t even imagine the dialogue that led up to this scenario. Did they plan it? Did they mark it on their Outlook calendars:

Jogging with Stella and Pete, 6:00-6:30  :-b  

It baffled me which among them said to their spouse, “We haven’t seen the lovely so-and-so’s for a while, let’s have them over one night after work. It’ll be fun. We’ll go jogging.” Them jogging meant  that—as with any fucked-up relationship—the other spouse had to have enabled the first, saying something like, “What a great idea. I’ll mark it on my Outlook calendar.”

My timing now couldn’t be better. Some evenings you’ll come across a whole family of joggers. None of them are around. There’s a warm salt air to remind you you’re on an island, and birds being territorial in the trees barely in bud.  A few doors down toward Sandringham, a late commuter slams the door shut to his car and makes one of those neutral-neighborly assessments of me as I take my hand down from my face and smile back as he turns toward the light of his porch.

There’s a bird carcass near the shortcut to Sandringham. I stop and look. There’s no blood and the wind animates its feathers. But it is dead. It seems to have crash-landed head-first, broken neck, left cheek pressed against the asphalt with its right eye staring up at god kn0ws what. It makes me think of a painting I saw at the National Gallery in Washington, The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, (1430/1435). It shows a guy talking to a satyr. When I first saw it, all I could think was, “What the hell is he doing there.” For a moment, I wondered if there were satyrs in the bible and I just forgot about them. But of anything in the bible, I think I would have remembered something like a satyr. This was a guy with cloven feet, not some no account leper or  dime-a-dozen chick with an issue of blood. A satyr in the bible would make it about 1 percent more likely I would still be a theist today, not because I believe in the existence of mythical goat-men, but because goat-men are so fucking awesome.

It started to become apparent to me what was going on in this painting, even before I read up on Saint Anthony of Egypt. Here was this guy. He’s a bit on the devout side. He’s just minding his own business in the fourth century wilderness, thinking about god and stuff, going out of his way to talk about god stuff with another guy who thinks a lot of god. Out of nowhere comes this figment of the Greco-Roman imagination. An emblem of the same culture that inspired a secular, mercantile alternative to domination by the Catholic Church and her noble allies, was tempting a faithful man to stray from the path. I don’t know what was happening in 1435 Siena, but somebody sure was pissed off about the Renaissance.

I finish the thing at the corner, then wait for a car to round the bend before crossing to the short cut. Will the driver see the bird carcass in time or run it over again? I can’t imagine. I cross the road and head to Sandringham. Putting myself in the driver’s shoes, the question would not be if, but how many times I run it over. That’s a lie. There was that sea turtle they found a couple of weeks ago, and I felt really bad about it because I heard it might have eaten something plastic that got lodged in its esophagus. It made me feel depressed for a few days. I felt responsible, indirectly, by dint of using plastic. Then I found out I was invited to preview some new Xbox video games, and I haven’t thought of that turtle until now, for which I blame that fucking bird.

I toss into the rubbish can the empty box that the thing was in. The dairy is up and down. It doesn’t carry club soda all the time. It doesn’t sell peanut butter cups. I stand there looking for something else. Jacquie still won’t be home for an hour. A three-hour class. At least an hour of that has to be for announcements and toilet breaks. I mean, they use sewing machines in this class. You’d think with a machine, you wouldn’t need any more than 20 minutes. There’s nothing I want to eat here. Behind the cashier is the cigarette case on top and below the cabinet where they used to keep the legal marijuana. It was banned a couple of months ago, but there’s always something coming out to market under a new name and I guess just have to know where to buy it.

I get a new box of the thing and say thanks. Back on the street by the rubbish can, I unravel the plastic and tap the box open and look around with the lighter poised. Nobody coming. The clouds are that almost electrified blue that tears my eyes. I can’t believe I’m the only one who experiences this. But it has never come up in conversation with anyone. Outside the light from the dairy, there whooshes a passing bus. It is always a comfort to smell diesel exhaust. It gives a certain kind of license, as if demonstrating to the odd, sanctimonious passerby that one passively inhales fumes just as toxic as my second-hand smoke. Even with nobody around on the sidewalk, I’m still self-conscious about blowing cigarettes into the face of a pedestrian that might appear out of the blue. The plastic wrapper goes into the rubbish for the sea turtles to eat.

The walk home is unremarkable. That smoke stinks. Jacquie must smell it on me, in my clothes and hair, despite the washing, flossing, rinsing. The bird is still dead, not squashed. The door opens, and the new thing replaces the old thing under the USB cable and jewel cases. I watch Star Trek until Jacquie comes back, saying the teacher is nice, nothing like they said she would be. She loves the class, and the people are nice, and there is this one student that uses a very old, large pair of scissors with tape wrapped around in places as if it to keep it all from falling apart. They used to belong to the student’s grandfather, who was a tailor back in India, and again in New Zealand when he emigrated. They’re learning how to sew an apron. Jacquie wants to make a barbecue apron for her dad, out of the polyester material she bought to practice on. The teacher said it was flammable, but Jacquie asks if I think it would still be ok to make the barbecue apron. I think she’s joking.

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Posted in Married life, Now Zealand | Leave a Comment »

Shifting flats

July 10, 2011

Last month Jacquie and I received terrible news. We were being evicted. This had never happened to me before. (In New Zealand). We were mortified.

Our landlord dropped the bombshell on us right out of the blue. It arrived by post, like some kind of hate-mail: with the proper amount of postage.

Recognizing the sender, Jacquie opened the apparently innocuous correspondence. She suspected this had to do with the water bill, which we split with the other renters in the building, the family upstairs.

As Jacquie read, her face darkened. She bowed her head and handed the paper to me, solemn, without suggestion of tears, for she was brave and rarely lost composure.

“Read,” she said.

Apparently, our neighbors take issue with our alternative lifestyle.

The letter divided us. Who was at fault? Which of us was more self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking than the other? Which one of us ate a can of baked beans every night for dinner when the other was working a night shift and the one who was at home didn’t know how to do anything in the kitchen but heat stuff up on the stove? Of course it was Jacquie.

We began to look for an apartment. It was bad timing. In several weeks, we were to be visiting the United States and we had already spent a lot of money at the travel agency renting donkeys to take us to the airport on the day of our flight. The money we had left over was meant to purchase a sheep which we would slaughter on board the plane so that we would have something to chew when our ears clogged up due to the pressurization process in the cabin. But now we needed that money for something more important. A place to live.

As we searched for a home, we decided to list the three things both of us wanted. Our new apartment would have to be cheap, walking distance to one of our jobs and have some architectural character, a precious commodity in these parts. Luckily, it didn’t take us long to find what we wanted.

It's the one on the bottom.

We first saw this flat advertised on the Internet. Oftentimes, realtors will post photographs that intentionally make a place look better, so Jacquie and I were pretty skeptical at first.

Later, we went to a real estate agent. Before we got a chance to tell him what wanted, he said, “I have just the place for you.”Again, we were skeptical.

But I’ll say this. Real estate agents in New Zealand are pretty sharp. They take one look at you and, bang, right off the bat they know exactly where you fit in the relative scheme of things. And wouldn’t you know it, he took us to the very same apartment we’d seen advertised on the Web. It was kismet.

We fell in love with the flat once we saw the dusty old wheelbarrow filled with week-old standing water. "Just think of all the things we can do with that dirt," Jacquie said. Already, her designer's imagination raced into overdrive. "Our late 19th century Japanese military campaign chest will sit handsomely back there next to that coil of stainless steel flexible electrical conduit." Jacquie's instincts for color, composition and texture once again elicited my admiration, to say nothing of my envy. We signed the lease that very moment.

We really didn’t want any trouble. When you’re in your 20s and you move to a new apartment, you don’t hire professionals. You get your friends to do it. You say, “Hey, come help me move and I’ll buy you pizza and beer.” There’s always one friend who knows how to do things and seems to take authentic pleasure in the logistics and management of a move, while the three to five others that tag along are really just doing it because they hope you’ll owe them one when their turn comes around. Then when everything’s shifted, you take your friends out to eat and you get them so tanked that they end up splitting the bill in the end anyway.

This method might be appropriate when you’ve just graduated from college. But after 15 to 20 years, you kind of grow out of doing things that way, mostly because by the time you hit 40 you don’t have any friends left and you’re kind of forced to hire movers anyway. This is what most people refer to as “maturity”.

Moving day is always a drag. Not only is there stuff to carry and clean, but it's easy to forget important things when you're shifting flats. That's why we decided to throw all our possessions, including rubbish from the old place, into one convenient bin. After the guys we hired to push the bin to our new house left in the ambulance, we dove right in, selected the stuff we wanted to keep, and left the rest in the bin for somebody else to take of. Who said moving has to be difficult? I'm sure eventually one of our neighbors will get so sick of the bin, they'll have to complain to the Auckland City Council because, hey, who wants to live next to garbage? Not me. If there's a petition to get the government to remove that thing, my name will be at the top.

We had to do a lot of cleaning, both at the old flat, deep in the mildew forests of Mt Eden’s sub-alpine northwestern slopes, and at the new place, the exact location of which will remain undisclosed indefinitely due to the criminal element that makes up the majority of my readership.

In any case, cleaning both apartments sent latent particles into the air that triggered my allergies. I sneezed for three days straight.

The people at work wondered if this were finally the grounds for my dismissal they’d been praying for since I was hired. Their attitude toward me evoked the memory of one of my first jobs. I was a gallery assistant in a mediocre decorative painting space. We had an important exhibition. When the exhibition closed and those paintings that weren’t sold were sent back to the artist, it was my job to wrap everything in bubble wrap. Including the paintings, as I discovered later when my boss came in to check on my progress. I was able to secure bubble wrap around one painting, but my enthusiasm had gotten the best of me and I managed to wrap several other things with the painting underneath the bubble wrap, including a stapler, a telephone and half a burrito I couldn’t finish at lunch. My boss stood in silent horror looking at the work I had done so far.

“What are you, retarded?” she said.

Needless to say, I was flummoxed by her insult. On the one hand, there was no doubt that when it came to bubble wrapping things, I was indeed “retarded”. But from a strictly clinical perspective, her point was quite open to debate.

However, so taken by surprise was I that I let the matter drop, and continued to bubble wrap the gallery owner.

The point is that Jacquie and I performed what seemed like the labors of Hercules until our new flat was in order.

 

Our lounge.

Molding.

We were able to relax finally. I could watch movies again. There was one video I rented called  One Day in September a riveting documentary about the 1972 Munich Olympics. My brother in law told me it would be “grim”. But I didn’t know how grim until I watched it for myself. What a terrible, evil tragedy. I mean, the USSR beating the USA at basketball? A national disaster.

Molding.

Archway to the breakfast nook.

The view I see every day, just before I rifle through Jacquie's dresser drawers.

It’s Sunday morning early, 12:15, as I write this. Later today I will fly from Auckland to Los Angeles for a conference. Then next Sunday I will head to NYC. I hope to post another blog while I’m on the road. Aren’t you excited.

 

 

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Posted in Married life, Now Zealand, Uncategorized, Work/Career | 4 Comments »

My dog spider

June 26, 2011

I only ever wanted two things out of life when I was young.

The first was I wanted to grow up to be an irredeemable slob married to a woman of superior intelligence, wisdom, earning-potential and physical beauty, so inexplicably contrasting with my own qualities that people seeing us together in public would marvel, saying to one another “He must have a lot of money” by way of justification of this mystifying arrangement. In retrospect, my desire was not an overly ambitious one, considering that by the age of five, I was already considered by most experts on the matter to be a child prodigy in the “irredeemable slob” category. I was that much closer to attaining the American Dream.

The author (left) enjoying a visit with a family of domesticated Okies on display at the Monmouth County Fair Grooming Stables in Red Bank, New Jersey, 1979. The author exhibited from a young age a preternatural instinct for becoming a slob.

The stunned, even offended expressions of our wedding guests as Jacquie and I marched to the altar that infamous day in 2007 only confirmed my sense of pride and masculine achievement. Perhaps the prospect of such a match was revolting to our friends and relatives who saw it as a defilement of nature. How could anyone argue with that? But nobody that day would even dare try to come between me and my happiness.

And I was happy. For a while. Then I became depressed, a contributing factor to which was the realization that though I was married to someone who smelled better than me, had more money in her pocket, knew her way around dental floss and could fill out a tax form, whereas I was limited to signing my name with an X (drawn in crayon), there was still that other thing missing from my life. I felt its absence sorely.

I did not have a devoted pet, the kind of animal I imagined when I was 11 I would eventually have by the time I was an adult: a furry thing that would wait by the door every night for me to come home from my job sorting the discount sex-toy bin at a local adult-emporium. But that was just a childhood fantasy. The reality is, I don’t have my dream-job sorting the discount sex-toy bin at the local adult emporium. Nor do I have anything more companionable in my life than my cat, Sunny, an orange miscreant with a bad attitude, a short temper and shiv-like claws with which to kill and maim.

My bad luck seemed to have finally changed recently. A winter storm had caused a power outage in Mt. Eden.  The house was dark when I came home from work. I was instantly surprised to feel something furry nuzzling my leg. I thought I’d finally gotten that pet dog I always wanted. I couldn’t see him very well in the candle-light, but he was real friendly and we played for a long time. I kept throwing things and he kept bringing them back.

Woof, woof, woof, woof.

Come on boy. That's it. Come to daddy. Who wants to go for a walk? You do. Oh yes you do.

Wait a minute. Something's not right here

Apparently, my dog was really a Black House Spider (Badumna insignis). What I thought was playful cavorting was actually its attempted insemination of my leg using its palps. And what I thought was me having fun and enjoying myself turned out to actually be excruciatingly painful swellings, nausea, vomiting, sweating, giddiness and skin lesions from multiple venomous fang marks.

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Posted in Depression, Married life, Sunny | 11 Comments »

How I found out it was my wife’s birthday

June 5, 2011

Jacquie and I had a candid discussion the other day about our marriage.

She had just come home from the supermarket laden with many bags of groceries. I was busy watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD, otherwise I would have helped Jacquie unload the car.

Nana Visitor as Kira Nerys on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show that I've been watching on DVD to ease my crippling depression. Unfortunately, it's had the opposite effect.

When the episode ended, I went to the kitchen to help Jacquie as she stocked the cupboards and refrigerator.

“Good work, honey,” I said. “You’re doing great.”

Then I went back to the lounge to take a nap.

For some reason, this upset Jacquie and she asked me why I wasn’t helping her.

“But I did help you,” I said. “As I understand our relationship, your job is to get up at the crack of dawn and till the fields and plant the potatoes and disembowel the livestock. My role is to wait at home for you to return from your 17-hour day of sweat and toil and tell you a joke while you make dinner. I’m pretty sure those were our vows.”

“You know,” Jacquie said, “there are reasons that only you find that funny.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just don’t ruin my birthday, dip-shit” she said. “If you fuck up my birthday, you’re going to be sorry, motherfucker.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“Do something thoughtful, and not hideous.”

“OK. I’ll start right now.”

I immediately went to the kitchen to stock the refrigerator all by myself. But almost immediately there was trouble.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” Jacquie said. “Tasty Cheese does not go in the vegetable crisper.”

“Well, I can’t win, can I?” I said.

(It’s for reasons plainly illustrated by this post that I am offering $20 to any reader willing to plan a thoughtful and not-hideous evening for Jacquie’s birthday. Make it something nice, but not too expensive. Jacquie is fond of Burger King, but she’ll happily pick through the garbage behind most of your fancier restaurants. For entertainment, take us back home after dinner so that Jacquie can organise things around the house, since that’s what she likes to do best.)

Jacquie's favourite restaurant.

After the refrigerator fiasco, Jacquie and I got into a terrible fight in which she used the worst insult she could think of to describe me–”disorganized”–to which I replied with a satirical fairy tale narrated in a voice that was supposed to mimic Jacquie’s as nasally, juvenile and snide. As it turned out, that’s how I normally talk, so Jacquie didn’t realize I was making fun of her. Anyway, my fable went something like this:

There once was an incredibly virile lumberjack named Simon who lived deep in the lushly appointed western slopes of Mount Eden with his wife and scullery maid, Jacquie. Every night the couple would engorge themselves on takeaways of one kind or another from the shoppes on Dominion Road.  Mondays were fish and chips, and Tuesdays were referred to as “Kebab Night”, but Fridays were best. They called Friday “Smörgåsborgasm.”

Every Smörgåsborgasm, they would separately purchase a meal in a plain brown paper bag so neither would know what the other had bought. Then they mixed the dinners together in a third plain paper bag until the meals were completely indistinguishable one from the other.

These peculiar dining habits persisted for many years, and over time, the lumberjack and the scullery maid slowly evolved into a pair of disgusting lard asses. All the children in the neighborhood shrieked in a mixture of delight, terror and confusion whenever the lumberjack or scullery maid were seen in public. The opprobrium of their neighbors confined them to shadow and despair, burrowed in the mountain’s frigid heart of scoria, to a life of severe isolation and gloom, which pretty much describes life in New Zealand anyway, so nobody noticed the difference. Myth fell to legend, and some things that should have been remembered, were forgotten (ie, the couple in this story).

The gloom and isolation of two disgusting lard asses.

This went on for many years, day in and day out, and the couple grew repulsed by themselves and one another. Then one day something incredible happened. Jacquie had boiled a pot of water in which to soak her bunions. She reached up into the cupboard for her bath salts but she didn’t notice was that she had knocked into her pot  old beans of different sorts from the days when the couple used to cook along with some dried soup mix.

But after a while of soaking her toes, she began to notice an aroma and tracing the scent to her pot, she tasted it and decided to feed it to her husband as a kind of practical joke. Simon loved it and asked for more and for weeks after, Jacquie would prepare the soup in the exact same manner. But finding it impossible to keep the joke to herself, she eventually confessed that she had been soaking her feet in her husband’s soup.

“I do not mind,” Simon said.

“Why not?” Jacquie said. “Are you not disgusted by my freakish prank?”

“Why, no, it’s quite the opposite,” Simon said. “I’m elated.

“Why?”

“Because thanks to your bean soup, I’ve had the most wonderful bowel movements of my entire life and…

Jacquie interrupted me in the middle of my fable.

“OK, I have two questions,” she said. “What are you talking about and will you be stopping any time soon?”

I didn’t know the answers to those questions, but at least I found my wife had a birthday coming up. The only trouble was, when?

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Posted in Depression, Married life, Now Zealand | 7 Comments »

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