Finding my center

Hey guys! 

Been gardening and writing and reading and taking yoga and figuring things out in my head. My cousin's super-talented wife is helping me redesign the Lance. I'm dense when it comes to technology – borderline luddite. Rebecca offered to help make this site look snazzier, which I'm apprehensive to do because when I started writing it, I could give two-shits about design. I just wanted a place to write. A little bit of structure to my mornings. A creative way to pass the time before Joe woke up.  

I've been sleeping in later and Joe's been waking up earlier, which means we've been rising together, drinking coffee together. Not much lag time between my waking and his. Oddly, parts of me are rubbing off on him. Parts of him are rubbing off on me. Kind of like how when you stick a sliver of soap on top of another sliver of soap they become one. Joe does this with his bars of Irish Spring. Whenever a bar runs out, he sticks whatever's left on top of a new bar of soap. It always makes me laugh, the tiny nub of Irish Spring glued to the full bar of Irish Spring, like the soap is wearing a green derby cap. He does this so he never wastes soap. Very thrifty that Joe. 

He dug me a vegetable garden last week and I've been nuts about watering it in the morning. Nuts about watering my other plants too. PK is baffled by my sudden bursts of domesticity. To quote, "I never thought I'd see the day when you'd care about petunias." 

I told Joe I was quitting the Lance last night. I told him I want to write a book more than anything in the world and I've made zero progress on that front, but we'll see ... 

If Rebecca makes this site look freaking cool, I'll have to keep posting and just suck it up and write my fiction book regardless. My stupid annoying fiction book. Even if it means waking up before Joe again. My sanity depends on it. My center, so to say. 

Anyway. It's 1:30 in the afternoon here in St. Pete, Florida and I've got a lunch date with Zipper Boy. 

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PS. I took the photo at last year's Langerado Music Festival on the Big Cypress Indian Reservation outside of Fort Lauderdale. Group yoga, y'all. Throw your flubby thighs in the air and spread 'em like ya just don't care. It's liberating. 

The tent diaries 6

“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday's post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota. 

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note. 

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose. 

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The Oregon Coast & Thank You
Just did the dishes. Zac cooked bean burritos for dinner tonight. I cut up cubes of cheese and tomatoes. We listened to This American Life. Max won cards. Rachel drank White Russians. Cubbie licked Sadie's ears and teeth and I told some stories about Oregon and Wyoming using accents and flailing hand gestures.

I reached Bandon, Oregon at ten o'clock at night and if I had approached the end of the continental United States the coast of Oregon gave no warning. Like a security blanket, high bluffs and forests shield the Oregon Coast. When you drive from Klamath Falls to Bandon there are only subtle hints of the Pacific Ocean. The dark is pitch dark. (So much of coastal Oregon reminded me of a previous trip to Rhode Island.) I S-curved down highways and through national forests. I constructed in my head the image of the United States. The shape of my country, kind of like a chicken breast.

I rolled down my windows. The night looked like it might feel cooler and it did. I could smell it. The coolness and the ocean. The air felt like cellophane. I hung my arm out the window, flattened my palm and let the resistance turn my fingers into peninsulas. Peninsulas like Florida. I missed Florida. For the first time since moving to Sarasota three years ago, I had, during a phone conversation with Joe, called Sarasota "home." Used the word without hesitation. I missed my home. I missed Joe. This I was sure of. So many nights I narrowed my eyes like Matilda, beaming him into my tent whenever I felt lonely or I wanted to share something spectacular with him. Like, "Hey didja see those wild horses humping each other today?"

I missed my friends and that became more apparent as I went about my daily business without once laughing. I love to laugh goddamit! Without human company when do you laugh? What's there to laugh about? What does your laugh sound like when you're alone in your car, your tent, on the side of a dirt road? It sounds psychotic that's what. Lunatic. Laugh alone sometime without a television on, or a radio station dialed in, or a good book on your lap. Laugh without any of these devices and you're bat shit crazy.

I laughed anyway. With my hand out the window and my fingers like peninsulas, I laughed. Cubbie poked his head out the window and left it there for some time until I took a corner too hard and jolted him back into his seat. If the trees weren't so high I'd have seen stars.

Route 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, runs like a braided ponytail up the coast. I reached it and turned left. I had never seen the Pacific Ocean and now at every traffic light I craned my head out the window — was I there yet? Would I drive off the United States like Thelma and Louise? I could hear the crash of water on rocks. Crashing like tambourines! It was ten o'clock at night and I had traveled the width of my country. Sound the trumpets. Yet no trumpets would sound.

I would reach Bandon, where thanks to Joe I'd manage to get a $200 hotel room for the $60 military rate. Good luck? Good karma? Did I deserve either? I was so sick of the sight of myself. People had treated me so kind along the way. They were what I had expected — good, kind, curious and eccentric. How I like my people.

Before I left Sarasota my coworkers at European Marble handed me an envelope containing $200 in twenty dollar bills. My tent, my table, my cooler, the picnic basket, the propane burner, boxes of couscous, cans of tomato soup … all of them given to me by friends and coworkers. 

On the night before I left Sarasota Zac hosted a dinner where he cooked my favorite author's favorite foods. John Steinbeck's beer milk shakes. Hemingway's gazpacho. He invited my friends over and we toasted my trip from a plastic table set up in our apartment parking lot. Then he handed over a brown paper bag filled with Shell gas station gift cards. The cards took me as far as Chicago, and I saved one for my return trip. Redeemed it in Dade City, Florida. As I pumped my last tank of gas, I kissed the magnet strip. 

The unfolded roadmap on my wall with thumbtacks in it had become more dream than journey. More challenge than vacation. A rite of passage in my own head and in no other. The Mormons go on a two-year mission. I drive alone from one coast of the Unites States to the other.

In Estes Park, Colorado I'd treat myself to a mandarin chicken salad, a People magazine and a Blockbuster movie courtesy again of my boyfriend, who would treat me again to chicken fingers and curly fries at a diner with a name I wished I remembered in Bear Lake, Utah.

In Boise, Idaho I'd eat Cracker Barrel mac and cheese on Susan Holsing, a former European Marble coworker, who bestowed upon me a Cracker Barrel gift card that, if I continued to eat $3 mac and cheese off the kid's menu, would get me from Tampa to Portland.

Today in Sarasota, I met Rog and Ricci for coffee at Starbucks where, thanks to Jason and Jess, I treated us all to iced coffees in the titty-sweltering humidity.

So! This is the last blog. Finito. I did it. I write way too much anyway. I use too many metaphors and too many similes. I abuse similes like a drunk abuses– fuck, see.

I'm listening to the CDs Teisha gave me in Springfield, Missouri. Cubbie will be getting a bath soon. The walls in my bedroom are empty, save for an old drawing and my map of the United States with the thumbtacks in it. I'm debating whether or not to donate my bed to Goodwill as the house I'm moving into in a few weeks is fully furnished. I like my bed. It's a nice bed. Pillow top mattress. But it's a bed. It's stuff. A thing.

I guess what I'm getting at (what I was getting at 1,000 words ago) is thank you. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way. People are better than stuff, better than places, and I'm ecstatic once and for all to be back in Sarasota with my people.

Thanks for reading.

The tent diaries 5

Just before I left Florida, my friend Ricci gave me a dragonfly, with this message written on the wings:

“All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost.”

I’m sleepy now as I write this. Uninspired for the most part, sneezing in an auto repair shop, where I’m getting the oil changed in Joe’s car. It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday and I’m drinking Timmy Ho’s out of a plastic travel mug. Mechanic's coffee is always too black and too dank for my taste buds, so I usually bring my own. 

I’m listening to Ani as usual, and to the woosh of power tools ripping lug nuts off tires in the shop. It’s sunny out and what I really want to do right now is curl up like a cat in the light cast by the vertical blinds hanging in the front window. 

I brought a book and my laptop – the laptop so I could write an intro to this last installment of tent diaries and a book so I wouldn’t have to write.

Life is banal and beautiful no matter where you are. That’s what the road taught me; what staying with strangers and friends taught me. People's lives are no more or no less glamorous than your own, whether you live in Athens, Ill. or Sisters, Ore. 

Nature is nebulous and left entirely to interpretation. I fell in love with the trees in Oregon. I fell in love with the sky in Idaho. I would have married a sandwich in Wyoming had a notary been present. I got shitty directions from a boney hag in the Ozarks and shitty directions from a plump doe-eyed girl standing beside a fly strip in southern Oregon.

I was flagged down on a highway somewhere between Wyoming and Utah by a 40-something couple, whom I lent my cell phone to and pathetically my tire iron, which of course was too small to help change the flat on their empty horse trailer. 

Before I even opened my mouth they told me they were from Sarasota, Fla., heading to Oregon to pick up a horse, which of course was laughably surreal given that I was coming from Sarasota and heading to Oregon too. 

I had driven thousands of miles, met dozens of people, mowed through three loaves of bread and an entire jar of peanut butter and here I was, on a desolate stretch of brown highway somewhere between Utah and Wyoming, handing my cell phone over to people from Sarasota. Processing this information caused my mind to explode into stars. I coughed and laughed and stomped my feet. It was the most understated well-I'll-be-damned moment of the entire trip. 

Not a single vehicle passed us during our 45-minute exchange. 

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Bear Lake, Utah
Knocked my socks off.

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Twin Falls, Idaho
There was a three and half hour traffic backup on I-84 outside of Twin Falls, Idaho. People were moseying about their parked vehicles, truckers kept getting out of their cabs pounding the sides of their tires with hammers to make sure they were what — not leaking (I don't know.) It was 6 pm. The sky was starting to fade from baby blue to watery pink. The clouds looked like taffy. The moon cocked curiously to my left as the sun did that thing it sometimes does in the summer— it gave an encore performance. The night wouldn't settle on Idaho and I wondered if it was because I was so close to (but not in) the Pacific Time Zone. Sprinklers lined the fields in straight ghostly patterns, water arching like colorless rainbows across the green. I rolled down my windows to a cool, sweatshirt-y night. The couple in the Toyota Tundra in front of me said it was a major accident two miles ahead. We'd be stuck for several hours. Jesus. We'd been at a standstill for over an hour already. I was about to ask if they knew any other way to get to my campsite but I looked at their plates and saw they were from Montana.

The girl in the Hyundai behind me had Idaho tags so I asked her if she had any suggestions. (The last time I set up a tent in the dark I hammered my thumb numb with a Dollar General mallet.)

"No other way to your highway than to stick it out here til this accident clears," she said. "That's what I'm gonna do."

She was so sweet and peaceful, on her way home from work. She was wearing black work pants and an undershirt. An hour later I walked back to her car. She was sitting with her windows down, contentedly listening to the radio. I offered her my bag of Oreos.

"Really?" She asked.

"Really," I said. "Take it. I've got plenty of food in this car. I've kind of been living out of it."

Feeling like I'd slighted the couple from Montana I walked up their window with my box of banana bread from Laramie, Wyoming. They too were starving and graciously accepted. They thought Cubbie was cute and well behaved considering the traffic backup. I was very proud of him and when I got back to my car I pieced up some banana bread for Cubbie too.

As the sun fell it peek-a-booed behind the sprinklers, the ch-ch-ch of the water hitting the fields put me at ease. It was the most beautiful summer night I've seen since leaving my home in New York. The stars looked like someone flicked them into place. The sky spread so seamlessly flat it looked like my mother had hung it out to dry. Two miles further up the interstate two people died on the side of the road. A semi truck was on its side. I was reading a book; the couple from Montana was eating banana bread, the girl from Idaho was eating Oreos. I covered the moon with my thumb. The horizon, unmistakable, moved me to tears.

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Friday, July 06, 2007

Klamath Falls, Oregon
This is a story of expectations, highways and disappointments:

When I reached Klamath Falls, Oregon at 9 o'clock in the evening I was deliriously tired. I had gained one hour of daylight and I was ungrateful for it.

My day had started in Jerome, Idaho with a blueberry muffin, scrambled eggs and a long hot shower. I had shaved my legs for Oregon. Wore my favorite dress for Oregon. And then I'd driven for ten hours through Oregon.

If you've even driven through Oregon or plan on doing so know this — there is only one interstate in Oregon and it runs north to south. Its only concern is getting you to Portland and then finally Seattle. That is the objective of I-5. It begins (or ends, whichever way you look at it) in San Diego, California and goes as far as Blaine, Washington. It takes you from the Mexican border to the Canadian. It does not take you through the guts of Oregon. That is the burden of the highway. The highways (and there are a few) will take you through the fibrous, pulpous, and at times mystical region known as central Oregon. These highways are fantastic and frightening. They make you feel infinitesimal. They cut through desert, through forests, climbing the sides of mountains and spanning valleys. They remind you that you are composed of water. That people need people. That you could scramble up the rocks, reach the top of a plateau, crawl into a crevice and disappear. Those who pass through would never know you existed and it would mean nothing to them if you were to ever emerge again. If you're feeling lonely these highways will make you feel lonelier. If you are looking for vindication these highways will not vindicate you. If you're feeling lost these highways will not find you and they will not lead you to a place where you are found. If you are looking for answers to questions you've not solved in years, these highways will not answer them. They will however roll out before you like a tattered scroll as you drive 90 mph and they will let you doggedly work things out in your head. They will absorb the things that have plagued you. That is what they do. They run east to west and they absorb you, cleanse you, and wring you out like a wet rag. Highways like the Outback Byway, the Volcanic Legacy Byway, the Central Oregon Highway… They will crawl inside your head and claw at the parts that make you feel safe and warm. Every fifty miles a town will appear along these highways and you will take that town with you wherever you go. The people who live there will ride with you wherever you go because that is the only way some of these people ever leave. On more than four occasions I asked for directions in south-central Oregon.

"Can you please tell me the best way to get to Bend?"
"No clue."
"How about to Crater Lake. How far am I from Crater Lake?"
"Sorry. Can't help ya."
"Are you familiar with Oregon?"
"Yeah. Born and raised in Klamath Falls."
"But Crater Lake is supposed to be close to Klamath Falls."
"Yeah, beats me."

I was 45 minutes from Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States. I found it easily using my maps, my books, my compass, and the northern star. I exhausted every navigational tool I had in the state of Oregon.

In Klamath Falls I checked into my campsite. I was still wearing that goddamn dress. Cubbie was restless, buckled into the passenger seat. The Klamath Falls campground was also the Klamath Falls gas station and liquor store. I was cut in line by a man and a woman buying two 40 oz Budwesiers. They reeked like smoke and booze. They had six teeth between the two of them and I wanted to say, excuse me I'm waiting in line here. I've been driving all day to get here. I have a date with Oregon. Can't you see? But I didn't speak up, just backed up, gave them their space and let them cash out. When their credit card was declined I didn't roll my eyes. I was patient. I picked through the Oregon postcards on the wall.

"Just run one through," the woman slurred.

The clerk ran one bottle through. The card was accepted. The drunkards rejoiced, walked away with one brown bag, six teeth and in the case of the woman — no shoes.

I asked for a tent site for one night please. One night in Klamath Falls and then I'd be off in the morning.

"How close am I to the Oregon coast?"

"Umm … I'm not sure."

"Any suggestions on the best route to the coast?"

"Mm. I haven't been to the coast in years."

"Are you familiar with any east-west highways?"

"I uh, don't know. Maybe the people at Walmart might know."

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Friday, July 06, 2007

Bubble Burst, Oregon
The things I did not photograph are the things I cherished the most.

I'm home now. I'm in St. Pete. Sitting in Joe's apartment. The pug is asleep next to me. His fur matches Joe's couch. Joe's at work. I'm watching the Cartoon Network. I'm wearing the green sweatshirt I bought in Bandon, Oregon.

The drive home cost me some fingernails, a flat tire, a dented muffler and one sleepless night from one end of Nebraska to the other. When, at 6:30 in the morning, I could not find a motel with any vacancies in the entire state of Nebraska, the kid working the front desk at a Holiday Inn said, "Sorry, no rooms left." I snapped, "You have got to be fucking kidding me," I knew I just needed to get myself home.

It was actually Joe's idea to go to the coast. I was defeated. I'd reached Klamath Falls and I was defeated. I'd driven as far as I could drive. Two drunks in a campground underneath a highway overpass had cut me in line. I had not eaten properly in days and anytime I attempted to eat properly the food wouldn't go down. I was homesick. Homesick and too stubborn to admit it … until eventually I did and it came pouring out.

"I think you should drive to the coast."

"I had a picture of Klamath Falls picked out in my atlas. It looks nothing like the picture. It looks nothing like the picture because the picture was of Multnomah Falls. I had the wrong friggen waterfall."

He told me to calm down. (He's good at that.) I calmed down. He'd mapquest the coast for me. I was only six hours from the Pacific. I should get some sleep, go see Crater Lake and keep going west. I should pick out a place on the ocean and just calm down. I should relax because it would all work out. These things always do. And then, he said … I should just come home. He missed me.

My funds were running out. Totally running out. I needed two days in one place that did not involve ten hours in a '97 Honda Civic that smelled like a Dutch oven. I picked out a dot on the Oregon Coast. Bandon, Oregon — a coastal town as far west as I could go. My heart filled with blood. Blood poured through my arteries, and like a nest of sleeping spiders, my veins and arteries perked up, carried the blood to my brain. The same surge that compelled me in Sarasota to pack up my car for Oregon compelled me to quit fucking complaining and keep going. I was almost there for god sakes.

In the morning I ate what was left of my stale banana bread. I spread out a sheet under a tree and read my Albert Einstein book until I reckoned it was time for Crater Lake and then I took down my tent, rolled up my sleeping bag, fed Cubbie some Alpo and buckled us both back into the Dutch Oven Civic.

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PS. The first picture is of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon on the crest of the Cascade Mountain Range. Below it are my sneakers, all wet and sandy from running into the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life. 

The tent diaries

In the summer of 2007 – less than three months after I started dating Joe – I took a road trip from Southwest Florida to the Oregon Coast. I was gone for a little over a month. Just me and the pug in a borrowed tent. With a loose plan, and a 1997 Honda Civic stocked with jars of peanut butter and cans of vegetable soup, the pug and I camped alone in state parks from Asheville, N.C. to Klamath Falls, Ore. 

It was, to be brief, the most amazing and fantastic adventure I've ever taken. It's been almost two years now and I was thinking today about how inspired, how bold and how awe-struck I was at the time. How utterly fearless. 

I didn't have a blog blog then. Instead I chronicled the trip in a series of newspaper stories that I emailed to my editor by ripping off wireless Internet connections in Holiday Inn Express parking lots. 

In addition to that column, which Joe so aptly named "Heidi Go Seek" after I called him in Osceola, Arkansas to pick his brain for headline suggestions, I also wrote these rambling MySpace "blog" posts. Here are the first four – unedited, un-tweaked, grammatical errors and all:

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Savannah, Georgia
All I know of Savannah is that my motel has free wireless. As my Nana would say, "It rained like the dickens," so I did the sensible thing and booked a room at America's Best Value Inn, watched "John Tucker Must Die" and ate popcorn chicken from Sonic.

I had all the intentions of setting up camp on Skidaway Island, Ga., reading dusty literature and writing something that would make someone sigh. Instead I surfed DevilSpace with it being free wireless and all, broke my daily allowance of $30, showered under hot water with Dove soap and cursed the misfortune of having tailed Tropical Storm Barry from St. Petersburg to Savannah.

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Monday, June 04, 2007

Asheville, North Carolina
Asheville is like a good peanut butter sandwich. It is exactly how I imagined it. Creamy. Easy to spread. Fun to lick off my fingers. Good on apples. Plentiful. Generous. Good even when it's not brand name.

My pug likes Asheville better than Savannah but I credit the weather with that. It didn't rain! Although last night the wind picked up for a good 30 minutes and in that 30 minutes my tent shook so badly I could only imagine eight burly men looking like the Brawny paper towel dude shoving the thing back and forth like a game of hot potato. Cub was trembling and I don't use the word trembling often.

I was told this trip might kill me. People are creeps and pyschos. Who the christ sleeps in a tent across the country alone, my nana asked me. I was told to carry sharp or heavy blunt objects. Upon talking to a police officer in Sarasota I was told to get a concealed weapons permit and a handgun. My father refused to discuss this trip with me anytime I called, as if not talking about it would make me stay safely in Sarasota where I would spend the summer walking my dog on the beach, getting $58 tickets for ... walking my dog on the beach. (Which I got the day before I left town. Fellow Sarasota dog-lovers stay away from Shell Beach!)

Anway, back in Asheville my neighbors one tent over are from Chicago. Their names are Bob and Jen. Jen brought me over laundry detergent and Bob likes to fish for bass. On this trip however he's mostly snagged snapping turtles. A crying shame really. One turtle was so flipping huge the hook broke off in his mouth. I asked Bob if the hook would find it's way out of the turtle's mouth and he sort of shrugged, a cigar wedged between his lips and said, "Ya never know."

When Jen asked me if I was traveling alone I hesitated. ("Goddamit never tell 'em you're alone," my father warned.) Well, duh. It doesn't take CSI Miami to figure out the chick with the pug are without human company.

So I replied, "Well, yeah. I'm alone."

"Aren't you scared?" Jen asked.

I wanted to say, sometimes yes.

"No," I said (with forced bravado.) "There are more Bobs and Jens than creeps and pyschos, right?"

Oh, the naiveté!

On to Gaitlinburg, Tenn. I hear Gatlinburg is the Las Vegas of the mountains.

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Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Gatlinburg, Tennessee 
I'm lying in my tent at 11:30 at night. It's raining out. Pretty little popcorn rain in a one-man-one-pug tent. If Joe were here I'd be whispering, "This is soooo romaaantic."

Turns out Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park also has wireless access. Yogi totally is smarter than the aver-age bear.

So! These are the Smoky Mountains. It's true what they say about them too- there is a blue-green haze that hovers over the forests in Tennessee. Like North Carolina is burning incense and the smoke is wafting to Tennessee.

It's thundering out in a pleasant way. Please let is stay pleasant all night. Cubbie is snoring. I just ate six chocolate donuts, felt guilty, brushed my teeth, rid myself of guilt breath.

The owner of Jellystone Park drives around on a golf cart with a big "T" on the back of it. He loves my pug. Has one himself. Heard from the girl up at the front desk that I'm camping alone. Said, "If there's anything you need darling you just let me know." Then he pet my pug and said, "You got yerself a good companion," and drove off.

My neigbors one tent over are about 25-ish. Sean and Rachel from Baton Rouge. They got engaged beside a waterfall yesterday.

"It was a piece of junk waterfall," Sean said. "But she said yes so that's all that matters."

Rachel invited me over for hotdogs and s'mores. I took a raincheck, hung in my hammock and read a book. I'm digging the Yogi Bear park ... although this thunderstorm is really starting to pick up. Ey! I can barely hear my iTunes.

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Thursday, June 07, 2007

Memphis, Tennessee
I can't sleep in Memphis, Tennessee. This time I booked a room at the Deeelux, Inn where I could give Cubbie a bath. He's snoring at my feet in this big scary bed. Maybe he's happy now that the tree sap is scrubbed from his fur. Maybe he doesn't care. I hate motels. I much prefer camping in the woods to staying in a motel alone. There are two flies in this room. Two dopey flies. I swatted one earlier with a washcloth and killed it. I set the washcloth on the bedside table ready for the next kill. Also on the bedside table -- my pepper spray and swiss army knife. I hate motels.

I gained an hour. It's only 3:15 in the morning. Only.

Memphis was a whirlwind, last minute detour in the name of my father. He has no idea I decided to skip Louisville, KY in favor of Memphis so I could go to Graceland to purchase an Elvis baseball cap for him for Father's Day. My dad loves Elvis. He's never been to Memphis. If he were on this trip he would insist on following the tour guide throughout the entire tour. 

He'd be the guy asking the questions along the way.

"Really? So Elvis loved orange marmalade on his toast? Get outta town! Say, is that his original baby blanket?"

By the time I got to Graceland the place was closed. So I took my pug for a walk up Elvis Presley Blvd. upon which he took a shit. And then I walked across the street to a (nearly) 24-hour Elvis emporium.

The most overpriced souvenir in Graceland -- gold sunglasses. And I wanted them too! I wanted them to wear around Sarasota for when I go through the Wendys Drive Thru. Instead I got an Elvis bikini for ten bucks. It was a wise choice. I'll wear it to the YMCA on Euclid Ave.

There's this scene from, "A Thing Called Love" in which Samantha Mathis and River Phoenix get to Graceland but Graceland's closed for the night. That's how I felt tonight.

For breakfast I want an omlette in Memphis. What are the chances of my waking up in time for breakfast? What are the chances of my finding a diner in this town that serves breakfast all day? 

Hmm ... I'm thinking something like the Bluebird Cafe. I'll Google it.

--

PS. Pictured above is my tent in Asheville, N.C. I purchased the red collapsable hammock from a Vietnamese five-and-dime in North Sarasota. If you look at the picture and squint to the far left, you'll see Cubbie, my pug. If I've failed to identify Cubbie until now, I apologize. He wanted to remain anonymous and requested that I simply refer to him as "pug," but since I'm not editing these old entries, I must (by default) reveal his true identity. If you want to friend Cubbie on Facebook, click here. 

Joe's getting married down the road from me.

Check out Joe at work, talking about our wedding on top of a hill in Western New York, at the wrong Ellicottville ski lodge. 

Darling, it's HoliMont lodge. Not Holiday Valley. Ah well! He's so cute when he tells people we're getting married somewhere we're not. I'll let is slide.

PS. This video is one of several segments spun from Creative Loafing's 2009 Summer Guide. For more summer lovin', click here.

Homegrown tomato virgin takes a bite

The tomato has been picked. 

After 10 minutes of staring at my first red tomato in all his round ripe perfection, I picked him, cradled him in my arms and tiptoed him to the kitchen, where I laid him down on a cutting board and halved him with a steak knife.

I picked some basil too. Cut mozzarella as well. Sandwiched it all together and then gazed again at the cutting board in rapture. Squealed even. Brought it all to my mouth and then stopped. 

I removed the mozzarella from the tomato and put the basil leaf off to the side. I couldn't bring myself to mask my tomato's virgin taste. I wanted him in his purest form. No creamy cheese. No pungent basil. Just my unblemished handsome tomato and me.  

He was delectable. Exquisite. Quite possibly the most succulent, luscious tomato I have ever tasted. The first bite was so gratifying I took another and another, until all that remained was basil and mozzarella, rendered useless by my tomato's flawless tang.

I squealed again. 

"THIS IS AMAZING!" I yelled from the kitchen.

"I'm glad you're enjoying it," Joe yelled back from the living room.

"THIS IS THE MOST WONDERFUL TOMATO ON EARTH. IT IS A SUPER TOMATO."

"Good. I'm glad you think so," said Joe, who hates all vegetables and fruits.

"MY STOMACH IS REJOICING! BABY, YOU'RE MISSING OUT ON THE TOMATO OF A LIFETIME."

"I'm OK with that," he replied flatly. 

As I returned to the living room with juice trickling from the corners of my mouth, Joe perked up from his basketball game and said, "I'll have to make a sauce when the rest of them are ripe."

I stopped. Licked the juice from my lips. 

"Oh hell no," I snapped. "These tomatoes ain't for sauce. I'll plant you a sauce vine if you want. I'm eating these guys raw."

Haute coiffure

To the left you will see two pictures – one taken three months ago after receiving a $50 haircut at a swank salon in St. Pete, the other taken last week after receiving a $5 haircut at a beauty school in the ghetto.

Can you tell which is which?

I'm posting these pictures for two reasons:

1. I'm no princess about my hair, but I'm very particular about its shortness. The second it grows out, I run to chop it off. Because of this urge I've had the same hairstyle for 10 years. 

2. I got an e-mail recently from one of my editors asking where I get my hair cut. I responded with, "funny you should ask ..." followed by a brief explanation of how a girl goes from cutting her own hair with the kitchen scissors to forking over $50 for a more professional job. 

From that e-mail:

When Joe and I first met I was cutting my hair with the kitchen scissors. On especially indulgent days, I'd fork over $12 at Super Cuts and call it a day. I remember he URGED me to make an appointment with J.Con (a fancy St. Pete hair salon.) I remember he told me it would, "change my life." It was as if I had been cutting my hair with a Flowbee. Eventually he bought me a gift certificate for Christmas, and for a year two years thereafter I only got my hair cut at J.Con – and I only made appointments with Cara, the chick who cuts his hair.

 

J.Con is hip, modern and smells like Aveda hair products, which is what I imagine Jennifer Aniston smells like on windy days.

J.Con stylists are hot. Seriously, seriously hot. They dress in only black and white and at first glance resemble Victoria's Secret model Ana Beatriz Barros. Cara, my old stylist, is no exception. She looks like a brunette Julianne Hough from Dancing with the Stars. 

Usually I bring in a picture of Sienna Miller. Something like this.

And Cara, who by now doesn't need to see my grubby magazine tear-out, chops at my hair like Edward Scissorhands and I usually walk away feeling like Sienna's less attractive younger sister, which is great. 

Now, before you get the wrong idea, it should be said that Cara gives absolutely fantastic haircuts. I recommended her to my editor, as well as other J. Con stylists, because frankly they are all stellar.

Problem is: us girls with seemingly short low-maintenance hair need to get it cut every five to six weeks, which wasn't a big deal until I moved to Florida.

Back home my mom would just cut it, or my sister's friend Laurie, who on one occasion buzzed my mop off with an electric razor. 

It's hard enough to make friends in a new state, let alone friends who are willing to cut an asymmetrical bob. The J.Con haircuts were making my Liz Claiborne wallet whimper. The more I thought about dropping fifty bucks on my hair, the more I thought about how else I could spend the money, which was when I discovered J.Con's massage therapist, Stephanie, who unbeknownst to Cara was the real reason I reallocated my hair fund. 

To cushion the blow, I began dragging out my cuts, making appointments with cheaper J.Con stylists and cutting it myself whenever it grew too shaggy.  Joe even trimmed it once after I ran around the house ranting about how I looked like Joe Dirt. 

And then there was last week's adventures in low-brow primping after I received a card in the mail advertising for $5 haircuts at Loraines Academy, a beauty school off 9th Avenue in St. Pete.

"Frig these $50 haircuts," I told Joe one evening, brandishing Loraine's postcard. "I'm gonna see what five dollars buys me."

When I called the number on the card, a woman with a smoker's voice told me it wasn't necessary to make an appointment, instead she suggested I swing by the salon between 5 and 8 – when the students were "in class."

"Perfect!" I said, hanging up the phone. "I'll cook dinner when I get back." 

Loraines was 20 minutes away, or so it seemed as I drove a dark, seedy stretch of 9th Avenue, past vacant Rent-A-Centers, mobile home parks and dimly-lit convenient stores. When I finally found the salon, in a Big Lots plaza next door to a Chuck E. Cheese, I had to circle the parking lot three times before I found a space. Chuck E. Cheese was oozing with children and as a result, the entire plaza was a zoo.

After 15 minutes of space-stalking, I walked into Loraines, where a man with yellow shellacked hair took my five-dollar bill and scribbled my name on a sheet of paper. 

The salon smelled like 99-cent strawberry shampoo. The waiting room chairs were upholstered in vinyl and felt clammy under the jet stream of A/C blowing down from the ceiling. As I sat and waited for my name to be called, I flipped through the pages of a Redbook magazine and nodded my head to the rap radio station that was drowning out the sound of blow dryers and gossip.

In one corner of Loraines, a guy about 45-ish stood at a station perming the hair on a plastic mannequin head, wrapping fake blond strands around curlers, chatting with the girl next to him, who was also perming mannequin hair. 

"Neidi!" I heard a woman call. "Neidi you're up."

Neidi, if you haven't guessed it, was me. Heidi. The man who took my name at the front desk, wrote it like Neidi, which was how the stylist pronounced it when it was time for my cut. Since I was the only customer in the waiting room, I perked up and said, "that's me."

Without exchanging pleasantries, Daymie (the Cuban stylist who knew very little English) sized up my head and asked in less than three words what it was I wanted. Rummaging through my purse for the grubby Sienna Miller tear-out I said, "I want this girl's hair."

She considered the picture for a moment, then said, "You have this already."

"Yeah, I know. I'm just looking for a trim. I hate when my hair grows out into a mullet."

"Mullet?" She asked.

"You know. Business in the front. Party in the back."

She narrowed her eyes and shrugged. "Don't know," she said.

The guy perming the mannequin head poked up from his client to study my magazine tear-out. 

"Cute," he said, turning back to his client. For a second it looked as if he was going to ask the mannequin if she too wanted a cut like Sienna's.

After a quick dousing with strawberry shampoo, Daymie walked me back to her station and flagged a Loraine's instructor. 

"Help," she said, handing him the picture.

After a 5-minute lesson in layering, Daymie was given a comb and scissors and told to give it a whirl. Lucky for her, I've made a career out of butchering my hair, so I barely winced when she made the first cut with a terrified oh-shit look on her face. What was the worst she could do? Give me Rosie O'Donnell's lop-sided tribute to Boy George? Bah. 

As she snipped slowly and painfully at each strand, I conversed with the teenage girl sitting next to me, who was getting her hair done for the prom, followed by a $6 Loraines pedicure. 

"Your hair looks cute," she said. 

"Thanks. So does yours."

"Thanks."

"Where's your prom?"

"Tradewinds Resort on St. Pete Beach."

"Awesome. I took my fiancé there for his birthday."

"Is it nice?"

"Really, really nice. I think it's the perfect place for a prom."

"Oh good. I was worried a little. This one is supposed to be real fancy. Like we were told to dress up super formal."

"Are you not into that?" I asked.

"Well, not really," she said. "The way I see it is, people already know what I look like. It's like who'm I tryin to impress? I'm still gonna be me in heels and sparkles. What difference does it make if I dress up or dress down? I just wanna be comfortable."

"Amen," I said, pinching at a chunk of hair and instructing Daymie to lop it off. "I like it short in the back. No mullet."

For a hair cut that was laughably close to what I already had, it took poor Daymie 45 minutes to do it. When she was through – after she had dropped her roller brush on my fingertips twice, blow dried the ends under like George Washington's powdered wig, and squirted my head with a fine mist of Biolage hairspray – I went home to cook dinner for Joe.

"It looks great!" He said as I walked through the door. "It's rounder or something."

"She blow dried it under," I said. 

"It's not much different than what you had."

"That's what Daymie said."

"It bounces though!"

"And smells like strawberries."

--

PS. Last night I went out for drinks with my friend Loren, who writes this blog for the newspaper I write for. We got on the subject of hair. After I told her the details of my $5 cut, she blew me away with the details of her $180 haircut. I couldn't resist the urge. I had to take a picture. Her hair looks amazing, but $180! That's three massages!

 

Anatomy of a refrigerator door

While Joe watched some snooze-fest on Charlie Rose tonight, I diagrammed our refrigerator door. I'm not necessarily proud of this. In fact, there were a million other more productive things I could've, should've done. Ah well. At least now you know I have a framed photograph of my fiancé with his dentist and dental hygienist on the fridge. (And yes, they're posing with balloons.)

Note: This is just the top of my fridge. There's an entirely different collection of crap on the bottom.

High coo!

Joe burst out in spontaneous haiku last night on his way into bed. 

For no good reason, other than because he loves to make up lyrics to songs and rattle off poems about the pug, this is what he uttered in perfect syllabic rhythm:

"Cubbie, when you breathe

It sounds just like breaking wind

But without the smell"

--

PS. Picture is of me and the pug walking up Osprey Avenue in downtown Sarasota three years ago. (Ricci took it. She used to walk on the opposite side of the street to get to her apartment on Cherry Lane.) I posted it because my friend Martin suggested I reenact the red-headed pug-walking photo from last week. When I found this old picture, I scanned it and thought, a-ha! This is what I look like walking the pug ... in the winter ... in Sarasota ... back when I used to work from an office ... back when I actually wore skirts ... and fancy hats.

PPS. Joe's haiku also reminded me of a poem my father once wrote for my mother. It goes: "I want to hug you, and squeeze you, and pop you like a zit."

For red-headed pug lovers and hometown farmers

This ain't me, but if it were, I'd be fine with it.

The hair! The pug! The ankle socks! The Mary Janes! I wish this chick lived in St. Pete so we could kick it over beer and peanuts. I wish I hadn't just happened upon this picture while randomly searching for PUGS on Flickr.

Today I'm word-loose and Lancey-free, basking in the kind of deep relief that comes with turning in a story at 1 p.m.

When he's in the middle of an assignment, Joe, my fiancé, who's an associate editor here, likes to say: "The story's done. I've just got to write it."

On most days, that's usually where my head is. Floating somewhere between Story's Done and Just Got to Write It.

But not today! Today I turned in a big story – a cumbersome but interesting one – then I took the pug to Coffee Pot Park and I sat on a bench by the bay with my eyes closed for 20 minutes and daydreamed.

It was glorrrrious. 

I called my Nana, and then my mother and I sat for awhile longer on the bench and listened to water lapping at the break-wall. The sloshing reminded me of my childhood spent on a sailboat in Lake Erie, so I closed my eyes again and willed memories into focus.

The pug, happy to be in the shade under the bench, was so quiet and grunt-less I forgot he was with me, so I let the leash go slack.

Then I walked back to my house off Coffee Pot Drive, scheduled a few interviews and retreated to the backyard, where I sat in my Sky Chair and contemplated something my mother had said:

One house down from the house I grew up in, lives a man named Norm who owns the grape fields stretching up and down Langford Road.

He's about 90 years old, dour as hell and drives a rusted truck. When I was a kid he used to pull into our driveway and lay on the horn whenever he wanted to talk to my dad. According to my parents, he still does this today except lately his visits are fewer and far between.

My parents say it's been years since the red-headed goose-haired farmer stopped in, so when his pick-up truck pulled into the driveway yesterday my mom kind of did a double-take and my dad kind of sat back and waited to hear a horn-honk.

When that didn't happen, my dad went out to the truck to see what was up and a few minutes later walked back in the house with a bemused look on his face.

"Do we have any masking tape?" He asked my mom.

"MASKING TAPE?" My mom yelled from the kitchen.

"Yeah," my dad said. "Norm needs a piece of masking tape."

"MASKING TAPE? What?" My mom asked.

"I'll tell you later," he sighed. "Just rip him a piece."

So my mom ripped my dad a piece of masking tape and my dad brought it out to Norm, who was waiting as usual in his jitney truck, and the two sat in the driveway for awhile catching up on stuff.

That night, my dad wondered out loud if maybe Norm just wanted someone to talk to. He apparently needed the masking tape to adhere his crumbling car inspection sticker to his windshield, but my dad has a hunch the old man's just lonely. His wife died not long ago and since then, Norm's been up to all sorts of nice things. For one: he reconciled with his estranged brother Carl, who lives one door down from him on Langford Road, and whom he hasn't spoken to in 25 years.

Turns out Norm's leaving the country for the first time this summer. His daughter is taking him on a Caribbean cruise.

Well, my dad said, wouldn't ya know the old bugger doesn't have a birth certificate! He's come across nothing but trouble trying to get a passport for this cruise. He tried talking to the town clerk about it and she suggested he talk to someone in New York City.

The Office of Vital Records in New York told Norm they only deal with ancient birth certificate requests in person. So next thing Norm knows, he's flying into LaGuardia to deal with the matter face-to-face.

When he got there, the agency suggested he find someone who was at least eight years old when he was born to prove he wasn't trying to pull a fast one on the government.

"That's gonna be tough," Norm said. "Nobody that age is still alive."

So the agency let it slide, using testimony from Carl, who's three years older, to prove that yes, Norm was born in the United States and has lived in North Collins, N.Y. since the Paleozoic Era.

"All of this to go on a cruise?" I asked my mother.

"Hell," she said. "It'll probably be the first time Norm's left the state!"

--

PS. Lance turned one year old on Friday. Happy belated, pal.

PPS. R.I.P. Dorothy Zbornak.

PPPS. Pug-walking photo by Zen. For his photostream, click here.

I'm still here!

This is my 100th post. It's a post I started at midnight about two weeks ago but fell asleep in the middle of writing. When I woke up the next morning, I was 27 years old, had a 9 a.m. phone interview with a mathematician from Maine, a cover story due about a ballet dancer from Houston and plans to go to the beach (see left) with my best friend Ro and sister Heelya.

I didn't know I had it in me to stick with the Lance. I figured I'd get bored with it. Tire of writing about myself, my friends, my family, the odd ducks and lovable strangers that cross my path and make me laugh, cry, whisper and cuss.

I thought I'd get distracted. Find a new way to spend time while Joe was asleep. Take up abstract painting. Join a knitting circle. Volunteer at a nursing home. Start trading stocks online.

But here I am. Still Lancing. Truth is, I can't shake it. I find a story in everything. So much so that's it's annoying. If you were to ask me to write 500 words on the sound a potato chip makes when it's chewed, I'd give you 600 words and a sidebar on the texture of french onion dip.

In the picture above you'll find me on the left, Ro in the middle and Heelya on the right. Joe took it the night the girls arrived from Buffalo, just before we unfolded the pull-out sofa in his Man Cave and the girls fell asleep in a cocoon of down-filled blankets.

Ro and Heelya like nests. They like to burrow and they like to snuggle. I know because I spent many nights curled up beside either one of them, prattling on about things girls prattle on about.

Ro sleeps with her mouth open and Heelya talks and eats in her sleep. One night, when we were teenagers, I heard Heelya murmur something about French fries. Another night I caught her in the refrigerator, rummaging through the crisper for cheese slices.

Growing up, Heelya and I slept in bunk beds, alternating between the top and bottom bunk every few months. Whenever Heelya slept on top, I'd lay on the bottom with my feet planted on the planks of her bed, kicking her up in the air a good three inches just to aggravate her. One night when I was on the top bunk and Heelya was on the bottom bunk, my mattress fell through the weakened planks and landed on top of her head.

Basically Ro, Heelya and I spent the weekend laughing, catching up on nonsense, drinking beer and telling old stories around the campfire. There's much more of course, but I'd be here all day if I were to write about it all. So I guess I'll write about April 10, my birthday.

We had plans to go out to a Japanese steakhouse – me, Joe, Heelya, Ro and my sister PK – when around 7 p.m. PK, who lives an hour away, called to tell me she got in a car accident.

"Don't freak, Heid. I'm fine," she said, explaining that her car was towed from the scene and that the cop gave her a ride back to her apartment, and that for every day her car was in impound she would be charged a grotesque $100.

To avoid this monetary raping and to get PK up to St. Pete for my bachelorette weekend, I had no other choice but to load everyone in my car, drive an hour south to Sarasota, free the crinkled Escort from the impound lot and pick up PK – birthday or no birthday.

So at 9 p.m., with Joe in the front seat and Ro, Heelya and PK in the back, I pulled off a desolate street in North Sarasota, into a gravel parking lot guarded by angry dogs with no manners, where a Bubba with a belly like a bass drum unlocked a prison-high fence and mumbled that my sister's car could be freed for $250 cash.

(Note: Heelya is in a Sophia Loren sun dress. Ro is in a Doris Day skirt. And Joe is wearing the faux suede gentleman's blazer he reserves for television appearances and birthday parties. Remember, we were supposed to be at a Japanese steakhouse, sipping sake and watching a chef chop onions in the air using a Hattori Hanzo samurai sword.)

So at 9:15 p.m., with dapper Joe in the front seat and Ro, Heelya and ATM card-less PK in the back, I pulled into a SunTrust bank and withdrew enough money to recover a bent 1998 Ford Escort.

PK was pouting. I was bitching. Joe was deciding whether we should refuse to pay the after-hours fee. Ro was insisting the charges be itemized and Heelya was bitching about my bitching, suggesting I should just be happy we were all together.

And to be honest, though I was irritated and driving with night-blindness through a ghetto on my birthday, I was, actually, ecstatic we were all together.

When we returned to the impound lot with money in hand, the Bubba behind the gate barked at another Bubba to, "chain up the Escort and move 'er out," at which point Joe lost his cell phone in the dusty abyss.

As we followed the tow truck driver back to PK's apartment, and as Joe began frantically searching the car for his cell phone, I remarked that my 1997 Honda Civic was dogging it with so many bodies weighing it down.

"Shit," Joe muttered. "I must have dropped my cell phone in the parking lot."

"You sure it's not under the seat?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "I checked there."

"You sure it's not in the glove box?" Ro asked.

"No, I checked there."

"What about in my purse?" I asked.

"I looked through your purse."

"Did you check in the door?" Ro asked.

"It's not there."

"What about under the seat?" Holly asked.

"IT'S NOT UNDER THE SEAT!"

And then the car fell silent until we got to PK's apartment ...

Around midnight, after PK's car had been towed to her apartment and after we had returned to the impound lot for a third time to comb the dusty abyss for Joe's cell phone, and after we had returned to St. Pete, ordered two large pizzas, nibbled on leftover ice cream cake and opened presents, I settled into bed, exhausted, content and three years away from 30.

You see, I've been a little stressed lately. I'm not exactly sure why. I seem to be working things out in my dreams though, because every day I wake up a little less wound. I wonder if it's wedding stuff. Work stuff. Money stuff. The fact that I just paid the government $1,400 in taxes – half of my pathetic life savings. Or that I still can't clear up the pug's eczema, or stick to the novel I suck at writing or finish the novel by my bed I suck at reading.

One things for sure. My friends, my family and my fiance keep me grounded. Without them, I'd lose my head.

I tend to digest life better when I'm driving. I think it's because it's the only time I sit still and concentrate on getting from point A to point B. On my way home from the Tampa airport after I had dropped off Ro and Heelya at Southwest Airlines' curbside check-in, I started sobbing so much my temples hurt.

When I got home, Joe walked with me to the bike shop to pick up my Bianchi and I cried some more. I told him my heart breaks every time I have to say goodbye, and he told me to keep my chin up and sang me a stupid pop song to make me laugh.

And it worked I suppose, because on the walk home I saddled up my Bianchi like Lance Armstrong and pedaled fiercely from point A to point B; Joe running like a bull behind me with my purse slung over his shoulder, trying to keep up, looking hysterical and lovely at the same time.

--

PS. Ro & Heelya – I miss you and love you. See you in June when we ride 62.5 miles in The Ride For Roswell.

PPS. To my succulent readers – I'm alive and well. Thank you all for checking in on me! I received e-mails, Facebook messages, TWITTER greetings, younameit, wondering where the hell I'd gone. Thanks to yesterday's deep tissue massage, I'm back to my narcissistic self. I plan on catching up on all your blogs this weekend from my new Sky Chair.

Learning to sit still and write

I learned a long time ago that newspaper stories don't always flow like wordy liquid from the fingertips.

The process is usually ... how I do I put it?

Painful.

As a 16-year-old cub reporter (or as my first editor called me, "a stringer") I would drive home after covering three-hour town board meetings in a rural town where the council members' various concerns included accidental or deliberate manure seepage by farmers driving their tractors up village roads.

I had to summon an army of self-disciplined brain cells to write about this stuff. When I'd return from these meetings, I typically had two days to produce a story, which I understand is a virtual god-send for daily newspaper reporters.

(I've always written for weeklies. I still haven't decided if it's because I'm too slow or too intimidated by the pace. I think it's the latter. Daily newspaper reporters, if they're lucky enough to still have jobs, can't afford to lollygag. I have a good friend who works at a daily newspaper in Southwest Florida, who often returns to the newsroom after beastly city commission meetings, and busts ass on a story until midnight with his editor lurking over his shoulder, insisting he call a source who just a week ago announced at a planning board meeting that all reporters are lousy muckrakers hellbent on manipulating quotes.)

So, yes. I write for weeklies. To motivate myself I often set Reese's Cups beside the computer. For every 300 words written, I get one Reese's Cup. Depending on the length of the story it's possible that I've consumed an entire 8-pack of Reese's in just one afternoon.

It's a motivation/reward system.

Back when I still worked in a newsroom, before I started doing this job from home, I would reward myself with several vodka cranberry cocktails at a bar down the road, where a guy named Nick played Spanish love songs on a small guitar.

The motivation/reward system is precarious. Over the years, I've repeatedly failed to achieve many of my personal deadlines, which means I've plodded back to the kitchen with handfuls of uneaten Reese's, pissed off at my lack of ambition, or even worse, my propensity to procrastinate.

I knew I was a glutton for punishment when my high school newspaper internship turned into a reporter gig that lasted an excruciatingly gratifying three years.

Things I used to do the day after town board meetings to avoid pumping out 500 words on the board's decision to turn down the construction of a telecommunications tower:

1. Walk to the bathroom and put on my mother's red lipstick. Wipe it off with toilet paper. Reapply. Wipe it off again.
2. Perform handstands against my closet door.
3. Call my friend Ro and gossip about nonsense.
4. Eat dinner with my family extra slowly, impersonating a councilwoman whose voice sounded like Lily Tomlin sucking tennis balls through a vacuum cleaner.
5. Tear out useless notes, crumple them into balls and chuck them at my sister Heelya, whom I shared a room with.
6. Sign onto AOL and submit poetry to writers' Web sites.
7. Re-read dogeared pages from Alice in Wonderland and type sentences only the Mad Hatter would say.
8. Hold down the fast-forward button on my hand-held tape recorder, amused by how council members sound less irritating as chipmunks.
9. Do homework.
10. Daydream about becoming a marine biologist.

Ten years later very little has changed, except of course that I've fine-tuned my motivation/reward system.

Yesterday after finishing a story on deadline, I rewarded myself with an Adirondack chair.

When Joe and I first moved into our house, we pedaled our bikes on a cobblestone roundabout, where we passed a small house with one Adirondack chair in the front yard with a sign tacked to it that read: ADIRONDACK CHAIRS FOR SALE. CALL ###.

I made Joe memorize the phone number and when we got home I jotted it down on a piece of cardboard torn from an empty case of Pepsi. I decided when I was ready to jazz up the front yard, I'd call and purchase a proper chair from a craftsman in my neighborhood.

Yesterday, while blundering through a halfway interesting lede for a mostly boring story, I decided to fish through the kitchen junk drawer for the chairmaker's phone number. When I called it, an old guy named Ernie answered in a Long Island accent.

"Hey there," I said. "Do you sell Adirondack chairs?"

"Sure do," he said.

"You make 'em yourself?"

"Yes m'am. I got two right now. One made out of cypress. One made out of cedar."

(When he said cedar, he sounded like seeda. Oh, downstaters!)

"How much you selling them for?"

"Ninety-nine bucks."

"Listen," I said. "I'm on deadline trying to finish a story. As soon as I crank it out, I'll be over."

At 5:30 I headed over with $125. I wanted a table too and Ernie had suggested he had other bits and pieces of furniture for sale.

When I got to his house, eight blocks away from mine, I knocked on his front door and heard a woman say, "Ernie! We have company."

Ernie opened the door, shook my hand, and took me to his back porch, where he told me how he makes his chairs using plans designed by some Bob Vila-type guy on PBS, and how he purchases his wood from a guy who lives in the sticks an hour outside of St. Pete, and how cypress is insect-repellent and how he and his wife are going on a cruise next week through the Panama Canal.

"You know much about the Panama Canal?" Ernie asked.

"Not really," I said.

"Ya know 27,000 men died building the Panama Canal."

"Really?"

"Yellow fever and malaria. They didn't know about mosquitas then."

"27,000 men. Jesus."

"I know," said Ernie, wringing his head. "The French tried to build it in the 1800s, but after so many men died they gave up on it and Teddy Roosevelt stepped in and finished the job."

"Wow, and now we motor up and down it in luxury cruise liners."

Ernie smiled and hoisted a cypress Adirondack chair into my trunk.

"Do you have a little table I can set beside it?" I asked.

"Sure do," he said, pointing to a crude plywood table by his garage with a dusty flower pot on top. "I'll sell it to you for 25 bucks."

"How about $15?"

He paused for a second, reached for the flower pot and said, "Ahh, alright," tying the table to the Adirondack chair with a piece of twine and fastening my trunk shut with a bungee cord.

"Where do you live?" He asked.

"30th and 2nd Street," I said.

"Ah. The center of the universe."

"Yeah!" I said, reaching into my wallet for cash.

"'$114," he said.

I handed him $115 and told him to keep the buck.

He thanked me, tugged on the twine and the bungee cords and declared the rigging safe for at least 10 blocks.

"I tell ya what I do in my Adirondack chair," he said. "I get me a cold drink and I set it on the arm rests, then I lay back with my feet out in front of me and I think to myself, life is great and I've got no complaints."

--
PS. I tried to write this post from the Adirondack chair, but it's too bright in my front yard. Must build porch!

Go dupe yourself.

ABC, you've got to be kidding me.

I apologize if I'm late to the game here, but after watching The Insider tonight I learned that Steve-O, the jackass (at left) with a lobster clamped to his tongue, was hauled off Dancing With the Stars by an ambulance last week, after injuring his back rehearsing the tango.

Steve-O, the masochistic clown ABC lovingly refers to as "MTV's Jackass prankster," apparently pulled a muscle.

ABC, stop patronizing your viewers.

You expect people to believe that Steve-O, a man who stapled his nuts to his thighs, pierced his ass cheeks together, swallowed a worm through his nose, injected vodka (intravenously) though his legs and pole-vaulted through glass doors, ceiling fans, tables, and trees; Steve-O has a bad back.

ABC, have you no shame?

First you script Bachelor Jason Mesnick's "change of heart," then you stick his jilted cheerleader on (surprise, surprise) Dancing With the Stars, and now you're telling us that Steve-O, a scrawny coke addict who once turned his tattooed body into a human dartboard, has suffered a pinched nerve?

What next? Steve-O signs on for four episodes of Grey's Anatomy, wherein he undergoes back surgery and falls in love with a cancer-stricken Katherine Heigl?

In other news, it's me and Joe's two-year anniversary. I insisted he wear his Area 51 T shirt to celebrate the occasion.

Man, he looks adorable in it.