Now that
the Christmas trees have been dragged to the curb (or kerb for proper
English spellers) and all the fireworks – well, mostly here on
Nebraska Avenue, 33605 – are well and truly lit and exploded, although we
shall be celebrating the beginning of 2015, well into March, unless
that's the sound of AK-47s I hear in the distance, it's time to go
back review some of the major craziness that once again, passes for
just another day here in da 'hood.
I'm
proud to say that THIS year, I didn't contribute to it for a change;
at least, not in a way that caused anyone to bleed, or run screaming
from the grocery store, although that one would-be mugger doesn't
count and he had it coming to him, anyway. Alex still doesn't know
what I did to him, and I'll never tell. It had to do with some of my
more serious crazy ju-ju that I am able to summon at a whim, in a
manner befitting Johnny Storm of Marvel's “Fantastic Four”; a
sort of Flash-on, Flash-off thing that dowses itself when I'm no
longer in harm's way, or like "woge-ing" if you're a Wesen in NBC's "Grimm". By that time, said wanna-be mugger was two
blocks down the road.
courtesy: Grimm Wiki
A fully-woged "Klaustreich", scars and all.
No, this
past year just saw everything from the Sharpie Lady to my Fairy Opera
Singer Neighbor, who truly cannot help herself. Sharpie Lady has a
particular derangement, which lurks just below the surface of a
cheerful countenance and it's difficult for me to really tell if
she's delusional or just plain cheap. This is partly due to the fact
that her English is worse than my Spanish, and she sells things out
of her house, that are mostly junk with the most outrageous prices
attached to them. Once, she showed me a bag full of children's beads,
the kind that have both a male and female end, in different colors.
You push them together and make bracelets and necklaces for kids out
of these things. I played with them for about 5 minutes once. I was a
crappy girl-child and was much more interested in blowing things up
with my boy cousins.
These are about the most boring toys on earth, I think.
Anyway,
she had these beads mixed in with a lot of junk and costume jewelry
that wouldn't have looked good on a 2-dollar whore, which we have
plenty of around here, and were probably the source of her
collection. The Tampa Police Department have a habit of chasing the
prostitutes north on Nebraska Avenue, past, say Hillsborough Avenue,
or Fowler, and they'll stay up there for a while, until the local
businesses complain, and then, the TPD, will run them south down past
MLK, Junior. Boulevard. They'll migrate back down here, for 4 or 6
months. When I lived in the homeless shelter, there were three of us,
who used to sit out back in the driveway in lawn chairs and watch the
police run stings and take bets on which john would get popped. It
was better than tee vee. The only thing better, were the Friday Night
Fights in the mens' house. We bet on who would bleed and cry first; I
could've taken them down. Good times, good times!
But, I
digress. Sharpie Lady wanted like seventy-five dollars for this
entire bag of junk and I thought, “No way. No one knows where it's
been, and most of it's in a tangled ball of cheap metal, tears and
regret. No thanks.” I didn't think all that poetic stuff; I just
made that up. I'm trying with middling success here to be a writer
and failing, because now, I'm just being self-aware. Gah!
I love Sharpie pens, I just don't think they're for drawing on your face, when sober.
So, on
to my neighbor, who is really, well, different. She is beyond sweet
and wouldn't hurt anyone, or take advantage of a soul. She herself on
the other hand, has been damaged and taken badly advantage of in her
much younger life and it harmed her brain and her body. She was
brutally gang-raped and beaten horribly, and left for dead. She
somehow managed to survive, crawl to a house, where she was given
help. She really remembers nothing of her past life and pretty much
lives in the here-and-now. She's about 64, and has been taken in and
been cared for by Bernardo, our handy-man. He has watched over her
for years. When he's off working, she somehow gravitated to me,
originally, and she'll just come in the house, unannounced, now and
then. She's always welcome.
She
fancies herself an Opera singer, but has had no formal training, but
she knows I am a professional musician; she hears me practice and she
likes that. I make a HUGE fuss over her when she sings: “BRAVA!
ENCORE!” and ask for another aria, even if I don't understand it.
She's getting her sing out, and expressing herself and that's good.
She's one of the several good, harmed souls that lives in this area.
But, we all have a certain feyness, or oddity. I think because of my vision
and my essential tremor, and now, lack of sensory perception, I
“feel” things that may not be there - although, my mother always abjured me to try and keep at least one foot in this world. I've “seen” things in
this old house for years, and not out of the corners of my eyes. I've
completely lost my sense of smell, which was great this summer, when
something or heaven forbid, someone died under the house. The police
couldn't find anything, but I am told the smell was horrific. Thank
God, I only had to hear about it.
Anyway,
I digress once again; my Fairy Opera Princess showed up one day in my
“computer lab” here in my house, recently to ask about ghosts. I
was trying to type a string of code, that was being particularly
stubborn, and then I looked at her, and. . . bear in mind, she's a
tiny gnome of a woman; I myself am only 5' 4” tall, and she is
probably 4' 7”. She has long, brown hair, streaked with some gray,
as she is 64 years old. She was wearing some white dress, with a
filmy, transparent, gauzy sheath over it, that was trimmed, like a
feather boa. She had on a flamboyant hat with many colorful flowers,
interwoven into the brim – she has many, many hats that she spiffs
up this way and adds flowers and spangles and tinsel to, to brighten
them up – and she was, of course, holding a fairy wand that she had
made, a shiny metal, sparkly wand, that she had glued a pink, puffy
ball to the end of it. Because, naturally, all Fairy Princesses should have Fairy Wands. I have one, too, but it's a different kind of Fairy Wand. It keeps me from falling into the street and on uneven sidewalk.
courtesy: fanpop.com
I don't remember if my Fairy Princess had wings; I don't believe she did. But, she did have a beautiful hat. She always, always has hats!
I looked
at her for a moment very seriously and I totally Scoobied this and
asked, “Are they the shouting kind, or the whispering kind?” She
kind of chewed the inside of one cheek for a minute, thought and
said, “The whispering kind, but there has been shouting. . . and
that was the neighbor upstairs.” We both rolled our eyes, because
we both knew who she meant. She does have some grasp on reality. I
said, “Well, for the whispering kind, they tend to hang out more
near the windows. What I would suggest is putting a dish with some
table salt, if you don't have Sea or Kosher, down on the floor, by
each window. Not a lot, just a little. That should do it. If that
DOESN'T work, try putting dishes of water down by the windows. But,
give the salt a try, and try it for a few days, okay?”
I was
looking directly at her and she at me, as I said this. I took it as
seriously as she asked it. She nodded her head, and said she would
try it, and off she went. Sometimes, what people really want is just
validation, that their existence has some kind of meaning to someone
outside of themselves. She knows she has problems, she knows her man
sometimes loses patience with her, but by and large, Bernardo is
kind, kind, kind to her and she will come over sometime, just for a
hug. Really, it's that simple. Anyway, her whispering ghosts have left for the nonce. They may return and bring friends, around here, who knows?
I have been carted out of here a few
times in an ambulance (twice, I don't even remember; this was during
my psychotic break of the famous “Let's Celebrate Mental Illness
Month of March 2012”, of which there will be NO encores!) and twice
for essential tremor-related heart things (prior to diagnosis and
treatment) and she has come out and “sung me off” every time.
Embarrassing, until you remember, that the EMT, Police and the Fire
Department are all cheering her on. So, you have to love it, and her.
Thankfully, since I began treatment in June of 2013, I am healthier
and stronger every day. It just took 10 years of self-medicating,
then searching, discarding, running up blind alleys, dealing with
complete shits and morons before finally finding the very right
doctors who completely understand what I'm about and it turns out,
I'm not all that unique.
Anyway,
there is a kind of mania that exists around here; witness the dude
who thought his Hogwart's Cloak of Invisibility would keep the SWAT
team from finding him two blocks south of me, a few months back.
That wasn't a really special day around here. No more so than the
drunk that James at Family Dollar and I played some kind of nightmare Tag (I'm it! Run!) with in the Parking Lot as the drunken fool first lunged for
James than myself, as we attempted to keep him busy until the TPD
arrived. It takes a special kinda drunk and stupid to run after a
partially-sighted woman, with a cane and miss her every time he
lunges at her. James and I had a good laugh over that. Another
dumbass. Or maybe, he was the same dumbass who got tagged by the SWAT
team a few days later, who knows. It's hard to keep up with the
stupid around here, sometimes.
But, I
myself am either STILL prone to the madness that prevails at the corner of
Dumbass Boulevard and Batshit Insane Avenue, or my own brand of insanity has HARMONIZED with it. I hate split ends; hate
'em with a passion. I used to have a really good hairdresser that I
could walk to, but she left over a year ago, and I have just kind of
put up with the mess on my head, courtesy of lots of mousse, #8 super
strength hair spray and clips. My hair grows pretty fast, and after
the last round of medications and when I had my marathon stay in the
hospital in 2010, I had completely whacked it off, so that it was
very short. It had grown out again, and then I found this
hair-stylist, who was very good. I could take 3 buses to “Fantastic
Sam's” but that's such a pain in the ass for just a haircut. I
tried the haircutter's across the street from my psychiatrist's
office, but the Hondurans there, practically pulled every hair in my
head out and I didn't like the way they cut my hair. It fell in steps and I thought it was horrible.
courtesy: bajiroo.com
Okay, so it didn't look THIS bad, but is was pretty awful; at least to me. Then, there were those darned split ends to consider. . .
So, I
took the desperate measure of consulting the innerwebz; a life-hack
or a DIY. Being the careful sort that I am, when it comes to my hair,
I grabbed the first thing that came up, when I Googled “cutting
your own hair, DIY” and hastily skimmed the contents. I didn't have
an “elastic band”, whatever that is, so I took some twine and
doubled it over a few times, and made a knot in it, so I had a loop.
I “dampened” my hair, per instructions, under my bathroom sink,
but my head didn't really fit, so I kinda combed and brushed all the
water through my hair, and then put the twine on it, and looked in
the mirror. I looked like some kind of hellish gnome, gone wrong; red
hat, rather than green, or a conehead, only minus the flesh.
Another
quick skim of the DIY page: “sharp, barber shears, or scissors”.
Rummage in junk drawer and find “scissors” part of that
description, only “blunt-ended”, like for kids' paper scissors
and Dollar-Store. Okay! Good to go.
There
was something something about cutting “into” the mass, or lump of
hair you had on the other side of the twine, but this was clearly not
working. I think the correct term would be “sawing” and after 30
minutes of this, with the twin slipping and becoming uneven and sore wrists, I had one of the shittiest mullets
that was ever seen in 1986. Unfortunately, this is 2014. The
short part kind of ended somewhere around where my skull ended and
where my vertebrae began and I was thinking of rummaging around in
that junk drawer to see if maybe there was an ax in there somewhere
, so that I could separate the two, but I decided to wait a few days.
Three days later, I hacked off the longer 4 inches so that it doesn't
look quite so mullet-y, and it will grow out, but I fear there is a
gouge somewhere back there amongst all the curls. That's fine,
because I do have curly hair and it hides a lot of sins; usually the
venal kind. I'm afraid this is a mortal sin, but I still have my
go-to mousse, #8 Suave Industrial Strength Hair Spray and Hair Clips
in Black for those concerts that are coming up. Thank God my hair
grows fast. Around here? I fit in; I look just like everyone else and
that is fine with me! Happy New Year's!
My Goals
this quarter and for this year are to stay sane and try to write
more, just to get my writing "chops" back in shape. I fear I am in for a tough year, not for me physically, but
emotionally, and I must stay creative and stay engaged to stay
strong. Now, I sound like Lance Armstrong; ick. But you know what I
mean. I am also coming up on 100k views of this here blog, which will
be a milestone. I turn 60 at the end of 2015, which is another
milestone, and I am going to begin planning my traveling itinerary
for the next two years. It's time for me to put some mileage on these
feet.
