Love

The new news about Jill Carroll is chilling. Of course I want more than anything in the world to see that video but I’m glad they aren’t showing the whole thing, for her parent’s sake especially. Well, before FOX gets a hold of it anyway. It’s good to see that she is alive or was alive when the video was taken but it’s also horrifying on a really base level. The still image reminds me of “The Blair Witch Project.” She has been with them for almost three weeks now. What is her reality? What is her day to day? I complain about my day job. I complain about my life? For shame La Ketch, for shame....

Valentine’s Day is coming up and it means nothing of course but perhaps this post will be a bit of a valentine because I’m feeling quite in love with all of my people right now and I only want you to know that I love you. This is what happens when tragedy strikes. We finally appreciate what we have. There’s a line in “The Hours” that distills it so perfectly. When Virginia Wolfe’s husband asks her why the poet in Mrs. Dalloway has to die and she replies, “He must die so that the others will value life more.”

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who I have been close to for years but she doesn’t say, “I Love You” very easily. Once I have decided that I love someone, I say it like, “How are you?” It falls out of my mouth like the easiest thing. I probably tell my husband 20 times a day that I love him. It must have something to do with losing my dad so suddenly, knowing deep down that someone can indeed disappear in an instant. I mean, they probably won’t but they could. I understand why someone wouldn’t want to say it as often or as easily as I do. It loses meaning and it loses power when you use it nonchalantly. It doesn’t bother me that my friend doesn’t tell me that she loves me because I know that she does. I know because she shows me that she loves me by the way she speaks to me and the things she does for me, the quality of time that she spends with me and the amount of time she chisels out of her very busy life for me. It doesn’t bother me that she doesn’t say it and I even find great joy, sneaking it into the end of our phone conversations and the depths of our hugs good bye. I try to do it at a point in time and at level that is just loud enough for her to hear me but also just soft enough for her to be able pretend not to have heard me. Sometimes I can’t quite find that place and so, I say it in my mind.

In pouring over all of the articles that are under the “Jill Carroll Update” section of the Christian Science Monitor, looking for something new, some clue, I have been reading some of the articles that she has written. She is a very good writer I think and I’m not just saying that because she is a prisoner of war. She writes with a sense of humanity that is not sensational or syrupy and not antiseptic either. She seems to me to be a very real person. These articles that she has written about the Iraqi people and what they are dealing with in their day to day have really made things three dimensional for me. In reading her words, I can picture things there in a way that I couldn’t before. I can see, although not fully, that this is a real place and that these things are really happening.

I was talking to a friend about how upsetting it is, this kidnapping and not hearing anything for so long. It seemed to me, that not hearing anything was a bad sign. My friend told me that she was very upset as well but remains optimistic and even if the worst happens, at least we can see what a difference her life has made. She has raised the consciousness a notch. I agree. There is an outpouring for her from many sides. So that’s something. If she does die it will not be in vain. If she lives though, this outpouring will have the same effect. I don’t think that she has to die. I think actually, more than anything, that in order for us to value life more, she needs to live.

This post isn’t funny and it isn’t ironic. It’s a bit much and yes, I am listening to some old Ani Difranco right now and yes, I’ve had some wine but I feel like I need to say something here, to the world, no to you. I feel like I need to tell you that I love you. Jill Carroll could be released tomorrow and I could get hit by a bus and I would feel horribly if you didn’t hear me say it right now. If you didn’t know. If you’re reading this right now and you don’t know me or we’ve never really met before, well then I’m sorry, I don’t love you. I never did and maybe one day I will but right now it’s not happening. If you do know me though and you have an inkling or a suspicion that I might love you, if I’ve ever told you or if I’ve ever forgotten to tell you or if I’ve tried to tell you and you’ve stopped me, well then hear this now...

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I do.

Hey, La Ketch! How's that book you're supposedly writing coming along?

Um, I'm going to work on it this weekend.

Did you hear about Cherry Bomb? She booked it.

How about Frey getting Bitch Slapped by Oprah? Hot.

And here's a Quote from my favorite gossip blog:

"If an actor can't get drunk first thing in the morning and bury prostitutes in his backyard, then the terrorists have already won."

-IDLYITW-

Lu Lu Eightball by Emily Flake

(click on comic for larger view)

Question:

Is there anything cuter than a baby elephant?






Answer:

Um, probably not.

This week in hate.

Oh God, I hate bush. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.

Don’t get me wrong, I always have hated him but today, in the past few days, the hate has hit a new boiling point. It’s seeped in deep. I can feel it at my core and it’s getting emotional. A couple of things have happened this week to cause this.

First of all, this is pretty far removed but one of my best friends, someone I’ve known for a long time is dating an editor for the Washington Post. She’s very close with him and cares about him a lot and now, well this reporter who was kidnapped in Iraq last week, Jill Carroll he knows her. She used to work for him as a reporter for the Post. Now, she is working for the Christian Science Monitor or she was, before she was kidnapped. Still, he feels a strong sense of responsibility toward her because he was her editor. My friend told me the story of Jill last Sunday, before it had broke in the news and for some reason it cut me open like nothing else.

She told me how Jill's interpreter was shot and how her driver was pulled from the car and how her kidnapper got into the driver's seat and sped off with her. As she told me the story, I felt like I could see what happened, not from the outside but from Jill's eyes. I felt really strongly the extreme terror and fear that she must have been feeling, continues to feel. I just kept saying, “She’s alone with them. It’s just her. She’s alone now.”

It’s truly horrifying people, truly. I know that this kind of stuff has been going on. For years, this has been playing in our consciousness. Daniel Pearl was beheaded on National Television for fuck’s sake. Please God. Please God, do not let that happen to her. Please God, just save this girl.

Even though I’ve been told about what’s going on in Iraq, I think knowing her, even by two degrees of separation, makes it more real for me, much, much more real than ever before. I find myself feeling so exhausted from it now, enough already, ENOUGH!! How can my mind possibly even begin to grasp a milimeter of what the Iraqi people must feel? How can a person be capable of that kind of compassion? It is disabling.

I work near Grand Central Station and across from the Roosevelt Hotel where the President sometimes stays when he is in town. I don’t know if he is in town this week but someone with a lot of power is because they have two square streets blocked off around the hotel and the Station and on Tuesday, when I was running an errand, I witnessed the gnarliest motorcade I’ve ever seen. There were ambulances and cop cars, motorcycles, all of it. Then I saw three sort of weird Lincoln Limousines with the windows tinted and then, two big armored black SUV’s with swat team like guys, all in black, with huge, huge machine guns. It was gross.

The weather in New York has been so whacky lately and Tuesday was horrible. It was like 59 degrees and pouring rain with wicked wind in the morning and then by 4pm the clouds went away and the temperature dropped to 39. As I saw the limos go by and drive up to the side entrance of the Hotel, I had this sick fantasy play out in my mind where I watched myself running up along side the cars, pounding my fists on the windows and screaming like a banshee at George W. Bush. “NO GLOBAL WARMING HUH MOTHERFUCKER? NO GLOBAL WARMING HUH? IT WAS 60 DEGREES OUT TEN MINUTES AGO AND NOW IT’S SNOWING YOU DUMB BASTARD. YOU WANT TO DRILL IN THE ARTIC YOU FUCKING DUMB BASTARD?!! IF JILL CARROLL DIES I HOLD YOU PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE. IF JILL CARROL DIES I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!”

Now, how I am going to hunt down the President of the United States and kill him while he sleeps remains unknown but when you really hate someone that is what you have to tell them you are going to do. Otherwise, they won’t take you seriously and I am serious.

Please pray for Jill. Let's send her some vibes. So she knows she's not alone.

Conversation between my 21 year old self and my 31 year old self

21 year old la Ketch: What are we doing?

31 year old la Ketch: What does it look like we’re doing?
21 year old la Ketch: It looks like we’re walking into a McDonalds

31 year old la Ketch: Um, yeah. Yeah we are.

21 year old la Ketch: Well I hope we are going to burn it down or something. We better have some gasoline and a match in our purse.

31 year old la Ketch: No. We’re not going to burn it down. We’re going to get some fries and a diet coke because we’re slightly hung over and it’s the only thing that’s going to make us feel better and get off your fucking high horse because this is the first time we’ve gone here in about a year and half since we saw “Super Size Me” and we swore that we’d never go to McDonalds again.

21 year old la Ketch: No, I swore we’d never go to McDonalds again after reading "Diet for a New America". So why did we feel the need to RE-swear it? Unless, we’ve been going to McDonalds in the MEANTIME? Jesus you’re pathetic. Next you’re going to tell me that we’re eating meat.

31 year old la Ketch: Ummmm….

21 year old la Ketch: Oh my god.

31 year old la Ketch: Listen you little twit. You smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, you drink way too much, you smoke tons of pot, you snort cocaine and crystal meth, you stay out too late and you have sex with stupid people who don’t call you and make you feel shity about yourself. Your life is so much more dangerous and bad for you than our life now that I just can’t even stand to listen to you drone on about being a vegitarian.

21 year old la Ketch: Please don’t go into that McDonalds. You are going to feel horrible about yourself afterwards.

31 year old la Ketch: FINE. Okay. I won’t. You're right. I won't.

21 year old la Ketch: You could lose five pounds by the way.

31 year old la Ketch: So could you.

21 year old la Ketch: Yeah I know.

(Moments later, 31 year old la Ketch goes into McDonalds anyway. She feels horrible about it afterwards.)

bits and pieces

Inspired by the great MOE, here is a little tid bit called, "So La Ketch, how's that book you're writing coming along?"

Well, you guys I haven't really worked on it a whole lot. I did transfer it off of my blog onto my computer at home and into Word. So that's something. I did read what I have so far from beginning to end (took about an hour and a half, hmmmm). So that's something. In re-reading it from beginning to end I have come to two conclusions: 1. the middle sucks 2. the ending is crappy. I need to work on the middle and the end. So that's something. It's not much but it's something. I wish it were more but I have this wonderful excuse....

MY HUSBAND IS HOGGING THE COMPUTER!!!!

also, I'm an alcoholic.

BTW, if you haven't seen MOE's blog then you better get over there because it's FUN-EEE.

So did you hear that the guy who wrote "A Million Little Pieces" probably made a bunch of it up? God, that made me feel better about my own tendency to make shit up.

I wrote on my blog a while back about how my sister hadn't read the story yet and how I didn't want to tell her because I knew she wouldn't have time to read it; being a single working mother, she rarely checks her e-mail, etc. Well, she read it finally, a couple of months ago. My mom ended up telling her about it. My sister called me early one morning and I was like, "What are you doing up so early?" because she is in Seattle, three hours behind me. She said she hadn't gone to bed. She had been up all night reading my blog. She read the whole thing! Isn't that so sweet? What a compliment. Of course it's about her too, so who wouldn't want to read it. What I realized though, when she told me that she had read it, was that I hadn't not told her about it because I didn't think she had time to read it. I hadn't shown it to her because I was afraid she WOULD read it and call bullshit on a bunch of it.

My sister calls bullshit on things that I'm telling the truth about so when I'm EMBELLISHING, her flag really goes up. The reason she's so sensitive to this is because when I was younger, I used to lie all the time, big, long, elaborate yarns. Nothing to hurt anyone, just things similar to this fabulous tale. When we were young, there was no one I liked to hook into a tall-tale more than my sister. She is (was) so trusting and she just believed everything I told her, never questioned it. My favorite type of story to tell her was about "when we were little." Of course, we still WERE little when I told her these stories but I meant really, really little. I could remember more than she could because I was older. I was one whole year older but I made up much more than one year's worth of stories and I would tell them to her like I'd been around since the dinos.

The story she finally busted me on was one of her favorites. She loved for me to tell this story because it was so sensational. It's the story about how I threw her out of the "Dumbo" ride at Disneyland because she was crying.

The Dumbo Ride, as most of you probably know is an open air ride for two small sized people. You get in your own little Dumbo and you fly around in a circle and you have a lever that can make you go up and down. It can be pretty scary if you are really little. So the story goes that my mom let us go on the ride by ourselves and we got up there an my sister started crying and I didn't know what to do, so I yelled down to my mom who was watching us to catch her and then I picked her up and threw her out and my mom caught her.

As we got older and the story became less believable, I would tone it down a little and change it from actually throwing her out to trying to throw her out. I would tell her that I opened the door to the Dumbo and picked her up to throw her out and the guy came on the loud speaker and said "Don't throw her out!!" Then I would just say that my mom yelled up at me to not throw her out. Finally, one horrible, fated day, my sister was asking me to tell the story and my mom was in the room. I think we were about nine and ten respectively. I was rambling on about it and she was asking me questions about some detail that I couldn't provide...

My sister did something then that would change our relationship irrevocably. She checked a source. Not only could my mom not confirm that she had told me not to throw my sister out of the Dumbo ride, she couldn't even remember the Dumbo Ride story happening at all! Honestly, I can't remember what really happened on the Dumbo ride anymore. It's been too long and I've embellished the story too many times. I do know it happened though. We rode the ride together when we were very young and my guess is that my sister started crying and I yelled down to my mom and my mom said that we would just have to wait until the ride was over. I probably did consider throwing her out because I was most likely having a grand old time and she was ruining it with her baby crying.

When my mom told my sister that she couldn't even remember the event taking place, it was like all of the dots were connected in her mind. She looked at me and suddenly, everything changed, "You just make these stories up don't you?" Ummmmmm.... no?

So now, basically my sister doesn't believe a word I say about anything. To this day, if she hears me telling a story to a group of people, she will yell out from another room, "Don't believe a word she says! She makes it all up!" It's really cramped my story telling style.

I've been pretty up front with you all about my propensity to exaggerate and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I haven't embellished a few things that I can't quite remember about the homecoming queen acid story but all in all, to the best of my knowledge, most everything that I say happened actually happened the way I say it did. I certainly wouldn't mind calling it fiction though. That way, when the people I talk shit about read it and try to find me and kill me, I can say "It's fiction, please don't kill me."

When my sister called me and told me that she had read the whole thing I was like, "Sooo, do you have some notes for me? Some corrections?" I was braced for her to rip me to shreds. Instead she only said, "You didn't wear Rebok High-Tops to the Homecoming Parade! You wore those cream boots, remember?" She's right. How could I forget those boots! Jesus. I loved those damn things.

Thanks Daisey!

Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child' - New York Times

Jessa can you hear me?

I can’t stop thinking about this other, really big example of a telepathic experience I had, by far the best and biggest ever. I can’t believe I forgot to mention it yesterday...

I have this friend who is Belgian. I know her from an acting class. She is this amazing, hilarious, open, free-spirited, crazy, crazy, very good actress. Her name is Jessa (pronounced “Yes-ah”). Jessa may be the most in-the-moment person I have ever met and she is really, really out there. She’s also very funny and because she is Belgian and she speaks Flemish, she has a funny accent, this makes her even funnier. She would be a great clown. I remember one time I told her I had this dream about her and she responded, “Ooooh yes, I had a dream about you too last night!” and went on to describe the longest most elaborate craziness I had ever heard. She went on for like 10 minutes. It did have similar themes as my dream but I was like, “Okay?! WOW, that’s quite a dream.” That’s not the telepathic experience I’m talking about though.

The telepathic experience happened when Dup and I were on our honey moon. We had been in Amsterdam and were stopping in Brussels on our way to London. We went on this crazy honeymoon that was really amazing, incredibly expensive but also, believe it or not, too long. We both thought that the longer we were gone the better but by the second week we started getting lonely for some friends. So when we arrived in Brussels, I regretted that I hadn’t tried to contact Jessa because it would be nice to hang out with someone who knew their way around the city, which is quite large. I didn’t have her e-mail or phone number or anything but I was pretty sure she was living there at the time because the last time I ran into her (randomly of course), she told me she was moving back. I felt really strongly that she was there and so I decided, just for kicks and as an experiment, to send her telepathic messages letting her know that I was there too. I remember saying to myself, “If anyone is going to listen to a telepathic message it’s this crazy chick.”

Dup and I decided early on in the day that we would eat dinner in this really touristy section of Brussels. It was what Dup affectionately referred to as “The Cutie Town” of the City. We decided to eat at a kind of nice restaurant that was famous for mussels and fries because Brussels is famous for mussels and fries. I freaking love mussels and I freaking love fries, so this is like heaven to me.

I was looking at the map that day as we were just walking around and checking stuff out and the whole while I was sending Jessa these messages, “I’m here and I’ll be at this restaurant tonight”. While I did it, I visualized the alley and the restaurant the lighting, all of it. I had to visualize what I imagined it would look like because I hadn’t actually seen it yet but it turned out to be amazingly accurate (the description in the guidebook helped). I worked on sending her these messages for about 20-30 minutes and then, of course, I got bored and forgot all about it. I didn’t mention anything to Dup about it besides the fact that I regretted not getting in touch with her because she’s fun to party with, lots of energy.

I have this really funny story that is an example. I brought her with me once on this job I used to have when I first got to New York where I handed out samples of Absolute Vodka to girls in gay bars. I was kind of like the “Jaggermeister Girl” for Lesbians. It was a pretty good gig because it only took an hour to do each bar and you got $100 a bar so it was sort of like making $100 an hour. I usually did it alone but this one night I hired Jessa as my assistant because it was a huge night and I knew I was going to get bombarded; also, I knew she was strapped for cash. I told her to meet me at a bar near where we would be doing the gig and that she should wear a tight t-shirt. When she got there in her tight t-shirt, I gave her an Absolute Vodka baseball cap to put on her head and bought her a shot of bourbon. I could tell she was really nervous and I kept telling her that it was going to be fine not to worry. We both got good and buzzed and headed over. When we got there and I gave her the tray with the shots and the t-shirts, she was like, “Is all I have to do is pass out all these things and then that’s it?” and I was like, “Yes! What did you think?!” She thought we were going to strip. Once she figured out that we didn’t have to strip, she was so happy that she like took over the entire bar. She was partying with all these groups of girls and they LOVED HER. I had to drag her out of there and when I gave her fifty bucks she said, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid from this.” It was hilarious.

So Dup and I are in Brussels and we’ve walked around all day, drank beer and ate waffles (yes, together. Gross, I know but it was good). We saw the tiny pissing boy who was sooo tiny! We went to the Tin Tin Museum and saw a giant Smurf (Smurfs are Belgian and they first came out in the 50’s and there was NO Smurfette. Smurfette is entirely American). Finally we made it to dinner. It was awesome. We had some white wine and mussels and fries dipped in mayo (not ketchup!). Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. We were just finishing our meal and I was a little drunk, as I am want to be and I looked up and who the hell was walking up the alley right towards me? You guessed it motherfuckers, it was Jessa. I started screaming my head off like an insane person.

I leapt up out of my chair, “Jessa! Jessa!” When she saw me, her face registered one level of disbelief because she hadn’t seen me in so long and then a real, deep level of disbelief because she realized that we weren’t in New York but in Brussels. We were jumping up and down and hugging each other. She was with this guy friend of hers and the story gets even more random because she wasn’t even living in Brussels at the time. She was living out on the coast with her parents. Her sister was living in Brussels and she was only in town for one night, staying with her sister because the friend that she was with, who was visiting from Jersey, was in town and she wanted to show him around. She was only walking up this incredibly touristy alley because he was with her and she of course wanted to show him the “Cutie Town”.

Pretty cool right? We went out for some drinks with her and her friend. We didn’t stay out too late because Dup and I were so tired from walking around all day and being lost most of the time. Also, we had to get up early to catch our train but we had a really fun time talking and stuff. I told the story of Jessa thinking she had to strip and that got some laughs. Before we left, I told Jessa about how I had been sending her telepathic messages and I asked her if she had been getting them. Had she thought of me at all that day? Did she have any strange voices telling her to walk down that alley? She said, “Ohhh… no? I don’t remember it but I am glad you did it to me!” Then when we were saying goodbye I asked her for her current contact information so that I could keep in touch and she said, “But why? You and I don’t need that to talk to each other!” I guessed she was right and so we didn’t even exchange e-mail or anything. I’m sure that I will see her again at some point, especially now that I’m putting this story out there on the WORLD WIDE WEB FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO READ. Poor girl’s ears are probably on fire right now.

the time has come

I love synchronicity in all forms. It totally excites me. I love it when you are talking about someone and they walk around the corner. I love it when you run into someone randomly in a place that seems impossible for two people to just run into each other. It trips me out in a good way.

Back when I was doing a ton of psychedelics, I got really into synchronicity as well as telepathy, past lives etc. I still find that it’s fairly easy to tell what another person is thinking if you are open to it and they are. There are small examples and big examples.

Every once in a while, Dup and I will be walking along in silence and he will bring something up that I am thinking about at that very moment. He’ll be like, “When do you want to go see Blah blah blah?” and I will have been just thinking that very thing. “When should we go see that?” Things like this are small telepathic experiences.

Once my college room mate and I were driving from Bellingham to Seattle and her radio was broken. We sat in silence for a while, each thinking our own thoughts just hanging out. I was driving and she was in the passenger seat. All of a sudden, out of absolutely nowhere and in complete unison she and I both sang out the first line of that Midnight Oil Song, “THE TIME HAS COME!” That’s all we sang. We both swear that we hadn’t heard the song recently on the radio or anything. We didn’t own the CD and neither one of us had been singing it to ourselves or anything. It was bizarre, to say the least. That is an example of a large telepathic experience.

Synchronicity is different though. It’s sort of like, de ja vu in that it has no significance. Déjà vu is usually like, “I was standing here and she walked a cross and he said that, etc…” Nothing big or monumental is happening. And with synchronicity it's similar. How I usually notice it, is when two people will say the same thing at the same time but they are unaware of the other person’s conversation. You can hear it happen in an office a lot. I hear it maybe once or twice a day. Someone will be talking on the phone next to me and someone will be talking to someone at the credenza but they can’t hear each other’s conversations because they are both tuned into their own conversation. Then they will both say “I can’t do anything about that” at the same time. Or they will both say, “Yes” or the will both say “No” or they will both say, “No Way!” But they are talking to totally different people about totally different things. You can also hear it a lot at parties. If you sort of check out and wander so that you can hear multiple conversations, you can notice it.

The reason I started thinking about this so much this morning is because I experienced for the first time synchronicity over Instant Messenger. I’m at work and I was talking to too people at the same time (the genius of Instant Messenger). The first person was my friend Cherry Bomb who was telling me how she and her common law husband got each other a maid service for Christmas. I was telling her what a completely genius idea I think this is. In meantime, I’m over on the other side of my screen having this conversation with this guy from another company we do business with about getting a diamond from Kay Jewelers for his fiancé. I’m telling him he might as well get her socks and he says that maybe he will and I say well at least make them cashmere and he says cashmere socks shrink and I say you have to hand wash them and he says his MAID won’t do that and I say I don’t have a maid and he says “you should get one, it’s totally worth it” and at the exact, I mean EXACT same moment my friend Cherry Bomb who is still talking about her maid service types, “You should get one.”

I don’t know why I love stuff like that so much. I guess it’s just proof to me that there’s something else. I never doubt that there is but its proof to me that there is and I like proof. People call things like that coincidence but I don’t think it is coincidence at all. I think it’s synchronicity. It’s Chaos finding order in its self, in a very tiny way

Hmmmm. Deep thoughts with La Ketch….

What’s my point you may be asking yourself. What’s my POINT? My point is, I’m getting a fucking maid service. HELLOOO!! Life is obviously trying to tell me something here.

Lu Lu Eightball by Emily Flake

(Click Comic for Enlarged View)