This Way to Unicorn Land!

It turns out I like the instant gratification of blogging, in addition to the delaaaayed gratification of writing stories - as it turns out, stories no place fancy ever, ever, ever seems to want.

So I have a new room with a view:

HUnter4086

Let's never fight again!

The Road Goes Ever On and On!

I won't be posting anything new on this site. I am getting more involved in other writing projects and this particular format no longer really does the trick.

It will remain up until at least next year, because I just paid Google 10 smackers to renew the domain. So, do enjoy the archives if you are so inclined! (Because there's nothing more thrilling than reading a dead blog - the Internet version of a cul-de-sac.)

To all the regular comers, thank you for your readership.
High fives all around!


-danielle (grumpus)

Birthday Notes.

You know you're almost 30 when the sight of a boy (the dishevelled handsome kind), sitting in the cafe scribbling in a cheap lined notebook, a Penguin paperback of Faulkner in the jumble of stuff on his table, no longer provokes interest and a slightly raised pulse but only a vague feeling of weariness.

Disaster Planning.

At work they sent out a document for everyone to write down the names and numbers of three (3) people to call in case of an emergency.

I figured an "emergency" in this case was some generic bit of bad luck, ie. if I ever fall down the stairs, electrocute myself or am taken out by a gun-toting coworker...what other grimness can befall you when you work in a basement, tinkering forlornly with simple electronics?

So I wrote down the usual: boyfriend, brother, mother. Not that I can picture any of these people dealing with some Grumpus-related, run-of-the-mill disaster smoothly and efficiently and with a minimum of yelling. All are difficult to get a-hold of, disbelieving of stated facts, and easily excitable. No one knows my blood type or the medications I'm on either, or even how I wish to be disposed of post-death (may as well take advantage of this forum to publicly state: A+, Citalopram, and "LifeGem," respectively).

In any case, this time the emergency contact form was different. Two of the usual suspects, sure, for your boring work-related, "this is the clinic/hospital/morgue she's at; incidentally we're open between 9 and 5 so you can come pick up her desk shit at your convenience" disasters. But the third had to be a person outside of B.C., to contact in case of a province-wide emergency, SOUND THE KLAXONS!

It's times like this I realize my "six degrees of separation" social force sucks monkey balls. I don't know anyone who doesn't live pretty near to me. I have relatives in Ireland but I don't think they want to hear their long-lost whatever got squished in an earthquake or is currently missing in the B.C.-centric zombie uprising.

But is that really odd? Is it unusual not to know anyone, or at least anyone who could count as an emergency contact, who lives far away? I didn't want to ask anyone, lest they know how alone in the world I am!!

For my elusive contact #3, I gill-netted a random telephone number courtesy of The Inter-Net, and jotted in a caring-sounding name. I doubt that in a disaster our human resources rep, a bubbly girl named Sari who wears prom dresses to the office and gets dropped off by a muscle car every morning, will have the wherewithal to phone everybody's out-of-province contacts to give them the low-down anyhow. Any disaster that befalls us will also have befallen her! So the chances are 99.4% against my employer ever finding out my emergency contact is a pay phone outside a Fiesta Mart in Dallas, TX.

On this note, any out-of-B.C. reader is welcome to become my #3 emergency contact. Just shoot me your name and telephone number and I'll pass my updated information along to Sari, the human resources director at my job!

One Thousand Dozen.

I was trying to calculate the number of empty calories I'd taken in over the last three days and this is roughly the number I've come up with.*

Why are humans such a stupid lot? Never, not in one hundred years, would I buy Quality Street chocolates and put them anywhere near my face.

But at Christmas all my relatives have these low-budget chocolates out on their tables, along with salted nuts and other unholy-tasting seasonal eatables. So I eat them because they're on the table.

If I even had to open a cupboard, reach up and take them out that would be enough to dissuade me. But they're right out on the table, so that's different.

Plus I have to factor in the other empty calories, from the measures of booze splashed into mugs and wineglasses and shot glasses and highball glasses at regular intervals throughout the day beginning at 9 am with a half-mug of Kahlua topped with the lukewarm slurry of Folgers from my mother's 1980s drip coffeepot, ending with some sort of schoolgirl martini just after midnight.

Booze calories are not as regrettable as the chocolate and candy calories, because at least they do a decent job of tamping down anxiety.

When this unholy snow melts I can get out and run again. Overindulgence makes me feel indolent, complacent, and like I deserve to die shamefully quickly in a zombie apocalypse or "Red Dawn" type of situation, instead of getting to be one of the rugged, no-nonsense survivors.

When I visit my hometown for Christmas I feel fat and ugly anyhow, inundated with the sordid past. So I guess my body figures everything withing arm's reach is a go.

*It's also a good Jack London story.

Sepia-Toned Pee Buckets, Rabid Dogs, Drunk Moms, and Getting Spanked by Some Dude Who Looks Like Cowboy Curtis (Because You Woke Him Up).

In grade one I invited my teacher, Sister Agostine, to my birthday party. This laid the foundation for the monument of nerdliness I later achieved, but I won't go into that at the moment. Sister Agostine showed up, along with all the other nuns: Sister Michaelmas, who looked like the leader of the Decepticons, Sister Peter (who was the principal, and the most sullen of all the Sisters), Sister Clara who taught kindergarten and was shrill as a harpy, and finally sweet Sister Rosaline, who didn't teach school, but tended to the gardens and the housekeeping, and who knew how to drive. She was the only Sister with her license so that meant wherever Sister Rosaline went the rest tended to pile in to get all their errands done, turning their small Chrysler into something akin to a clown car, only with black-and-white habits and loud Maltese chatter instead of wigs, greasepaint, harpo horns and pom-poms.

Years later Sister Rosaline jumped out of the car without putting on the emergency break and Sister Michaelmas, buckled in the backseat and frozen with shock, rolled backwards down the hill and off a cliff, clutching a pointsettia on her lap and screaming all the way.

Anyhow, all the other nuns came to my birthday party. They gave me a pair of rosary beads. I showed them my bedroom. They each nibbled angelfood cake, which was so overcooked that when my pal Debbie dropped her piece it took a hard bounce sideways and sailed across the kitchen, like a rubber ball hitting a crack in the sidewalk.

Being the type of kid who'd invite nuns to her b-day, it will probably not seem surprising when I state here that I was a cowardly custard sort of a kid. I was the type of kid who got so homesick at sleepovers by 11pm or so I'd have to feign an earache just so my mom would come get my ass...when my pals woke up in the morning, inevitably I would already be long gone.
I was scared of friends' older siblings and their dads, and would turn purple with apprehension if spoken to directly by such figures of authourity. I was scared of my friends' pets, and if their grandparents spoke a first language other than English, then I was scared of their grandparents.
I was scared of strange toilets. I was scared of wetting the wrong towel, or wrecking the soap - I particularly dreaded the colourful, moulded soaps so popular with genteel mothers -- how could one resist sudsing up with a small, pink seahorse, or a starfish? But then later I would tremble, distracted from our games - would the mom come rampaging, demanding to know who got her good soap all melty? I was also apprehensive about lunches made by anybody who wasn't my mom -- God knows why; as purveyor of such delicacies as bouncing angelfood cake her own kids were half-starving all the time -- in short, I was a very smarmy and easily frightened pudding of a child.

Today at work the topic came up of Friends Who Were a Bad Influence, or more succinctly, Friends Whose Parents Did Not Give a Shit. Someone mentioned his neighborhood chum, a porky unfortunate named Brantley, whose skeezy parents partied 24/7, and at whose house dinner was stuff like Old Dutch potato chips or Twizzlers. He described how one time he stayed over at Brantley's and in the middle of the night got up to pee, but was thwarted because Brantley's mom was sitting passed out on the toilet, snoring heavily, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels by her feet, near the bunch of her panties. Unmoored, and desperate to pee, my co-worker let himself out of the house and walked home by the light of the moon.

On this inauspicious note, I instantly recalled a particular pal named Alexis, for the first time in years. She lived up the street from me in a ramshackle house. The front door had a window shaped like a boomerang. There was a dozen cats. The house smelled bad. Her mom was out to fucking lunch.

Alexis was loud, daring, and sometimes didn't wear pants, just a leotard. Though my scruples were vague, I did have them, and she actually wasn't really my cup of tea really, buddy-wise. But she lived near enough to me that she was useful for playing Barbies with in a pinch. Plus she had the Playdoh Fun Factory. She was also useful for teaming up with to walk to and from school, which was only a few blocks away so my mother didn't usually bother, even though it felt like a thousand miles. There was a dog named Snowball that lived further up the street. Rumour had it Snowball would tear you limb from limb if he saw you walking by. But with Alexis, she was brave enough to sneak up to his yard, peer around the corner, and then when Snowball was distracted she'd give the signal to run, run, run! She'd lollop along, joyous at putting one over on the neighbor's mean dog, whereas I'd be sprinting with all my might, tongue pinched between my teeth in fear, too scared too even pant lest Snowball hear, and be goaded into giving chase. I didn't really like Alexis, but I was grateful for her bravery.

The first time I went to Alexis's house was after kindergarten one day.
Her mom was sleeping in the middle of the living room floor, in a sort of blanket fort. I wasn't sure, but it looked like Cowboy Curtis was the man sleeping beside her. They were both snoring. The room smelled like the breath of uncles. Alexis said we had to be very, very quiet...or else! That was the sort of thing you saw at Alexis's house. It made it hard to relax.

Alexis is only one of the rubby-dub children who was actually quite common in my neighborhood, growing up. I was actually probably considered one of them, by some parents, but at least at my house the toilet never went on the blink, forcing us to pee into a collection of buckets, and at least cats weren't welcome to climb up onto the counter and eat out of the Crockpot (two more visions from Alexis's house).

All this talk today has actually inspired a little art project. I've started some sketches, kind of in the style of Norman Rockwell, but instead of girls trying on prom dresses and puppies prancing after rollerskaters and other boring shit like that, these sketches chronicle scenes of fucked-uppery I or my friends recall so vividly from growing up in trashy 'hoods. I've heard so many stories that make me cringe and laugh...one friend has almost-fond memories of being chased by a playground buddy wielding a hydraulic nailgun. If I can figure out how to draw a nail gun, I will add this to my collection.

I don't see why only ice cream sundaes and first kisses should have the market on sepia-toned nostalgia. Childhood is a surreal and distressing time for most. I don't know why people would rather look at that stuff. Does it reflect reality like a portrait of a friend's mother, her drunken chin propped up on her drunken rack, which is propped up by a beer belly further propped up by her podgy gunt? There must be a market for these visions! Monsters, strangers, feral cats, nail guns, Snowball, your friend's mom's beer belly.

Well, I want to see it anyhow...

Reindeer Assholes and the Books of Blood.

Every Christmas I announce I'm opting out. Fuck the malls. I'm going to Mexico. You guys can hold down the fort up here, wasting your money on presents no one wants, eating unholy quantities of meat and then playing Pictionary for the ten thousandth time. Me and the Baby Jesus are going to drink rum on the beach by ourselves.

But I'm just one of those people who always says shit like that, boring all and sundry. I am totally not going to Mexico this Christmas, or anywhere except back home. I have reasons though. Good reasons. Well, one good reason. My granny. She is awesome. Almost all my happiest childhood memories include her. But she is old. All the hot sand and umbrella drinks in the world couldn't make it up to me if I missed -- my mind rebels at phrasing this so bluntly -- her last one.

(Elders everywhere probably just roll their bespectacled eyes at this bullshit thinking. Who wants their relatives tip-toeing around all the time and skipping dissolute foreign holidays on the assumption that their mortal coil is oxidizing faster than a Slinky left out in the weather? But anyhow, this reasoning remains.)

So this Christmas will not involve hot sand. It will involve the usual. It will involve taking the Spruce Goose back to my hillbilly town of origin, or since that has been crashing a lot lately, my brother and I will instead likely opt for the bus, an unmodern speciman as bashed and weary-looking as anything you can imagine careening around the mountainous highways of Peru, people and chickens clinging to the roof. The driver is a sullen-faced man who keeps the pedal to the metal to make up the time when he stops for a smoke break. Bus or plane, it seems we are taking our life in our hands. The best bet may be to ride bicycles.

At any point on the visit when you see me with a beverage in my hands, know that the beverage has at least 4 inches of rum in it. I have to take measures to soften myself up, to blur the edges just enough to be able to fit back into the mold I've (please God) outgrown. My dreary home town, the pathos of family relations, and oh dear God, the memories.


Christmas remains rife with a residual stress that can never be washed away. It was always a time of year when the glittery lights threw into stark relief the shortcomings and bare patches of our haphazard family life.

I always thought life was hard because we were "poor." Being "poor" encompassed the gamut: the shame, unease and sadness. Every day being the same. Being poor excused you from doing stuff that everyone else participated in. Like having Christmases that didn't suck. Belatedly, I realize our poverty had little to do with finance.

I am not talking consumer shit here anyhow. We always had the presents covered -- mainly because of the aforementioned awesome granny. I am talking about how it was at holidays I particularly noticed that my parents had no loving connection. My dad couldn't bear his kids - I hardly remember even making eye contact with that guy. My parents seemed addicted to making life seem as bleak as possible. At times like Christmas, it was painfully obvious that our family was just a sketched together piece of shit.

All days, never mind holidays, left my parents unmoved. Nothing was ever special. Nothing was ever gracious. It was just another day of leaning on the counter and blowing cigarette smoke in your face. Eat your toast, it's getting cold.

At Hallowe'en, they turned out the lights so they didn't have to deal with trick-or-treaters. Birthdays -- meh. (My birthday occurs in the wash trailing after the Christmas/NewYears one-two punch, and it was usually just left standing.) Christmas was an inconvenience, an interuption in the regularly scheduled programming of Test Pattern. Easter just meant extra church.

Of course each of my parents had various disturbances they were struggling with but it occurs to me sometimes: I am fucking crazy too but I would not pull that shit. My parents couldn't tread water in their psychological morass just for one measly day, not even for the kids? Neighbor please!

Anyhow, now that my mom is on her own and her kids are grown up and flown the coop, to return to the ashes like quasi-successful phoenixes 2 or 3 times a year, everything is a lot better. It's just that my town is still the same, exactly the same, and it gets its cold toast crumby molecules all over me as soon as I enter the city limits. (Or is that just kraft from the pulp mill?)

Now my mom's brother and his wife have essentially taken over Christmas duties, by virtue of being the only family members with their shit pulled together. Thank God for them, it's the only illusion of cohesiveness our ragtag bloodline has to cling to.

"To hell with them! We'll just order a pizza," is my mom's yearly refrain. She still could not be bothered so far as to go up the hill to their house, where a lovingly-crafted meal awaits. But her children have been delighted to realize that not everyone, not even everyone in our family, sucks hard at making merry. We round up my granny and arrive on the scene nervous and eager to please. Could it be true we're wanted??

We bring stuff. This year I'm helping my nan with squash and a fruit plate. They entrust my mother with something simple, the way you give a child the money to drop in the collection plate at church. They feel important by proxy. "Oh Marie, dinner just wouldn't be anything without your dinner rolls from Safeway." My mom feels like a helper.

There's a trick here. You have to assign her something so easy-peasy it will not bring on a stress-related depressive episode, but it also has to be something not blatantly condescending , like toothpicks. She proved herself year after year with the bag of dinner rolls, so about two years ago they upped the ante and suggested....mashed potatoes. She fretted and bitched and plotted aloud for days, wondering the best way to incorporate into her schedule the peeling, boiling and crushing of two dozen humble potatoes. We would be talking about something, carefree, and she'd be snapped back to hard reality apropos of nothing: "Oh shit, I have to make those bloody-damn mashed potatoes tomorrow!!!!"

By noon Christmas day she snapped, flinging the masher across her apartment and shouting "OH, FUCK EVERYTHING." Since then she's back to the bag of buns. Now she can relax.

A fond Christmas memory I have goes back to my teenage stage of putting on airs. I said I wanted figs and a pomegranate. WTF. Maybe my Oscar Wilde books were having an influence. Anyhow, my mom came through with a little package of dried figs from the grocery store. They were fucking delicious and more exotic than anything I'd ever tasted. (Sad). My older brother picked up the package and shouted that they looked like reindeer assholes.

It was snowing hard that day and after church I lay on the couch and read Clive Barker's "the Books of Blood" and ate my reindeer assholes. This is a happy memory. My sad surroundings seemed temporal. Rawhead Rex clawing out of his forgotten grave and the taste of figs attested to it. To this day Clive Barker makes me think of Christmas, and heavy snow. Figs taste like escape. Fuck yes.

I Love You, Bea, and I Wish You Were In My Life in Some Indirect Yet Important Fashion, Like My Landlady Maybe, and Sometimes on Saturday Mornings...

...we'd eat chocolate cupcakes over coffee and you'd make light of my comically apparent anxiety that I shoulder like a dead mink stole, before scandalizing me (I'd try to hide it) with nutty sex stories from your earlier days, although now you just look so adorable and you're aging really well...fuck the haters...and I guess you kind of remind me of my great-grandma who died when I was 6, but she had the dirtiest laugh and most delicious toffees and the same white hair framing a face lined with experience and kindness...


I can't wait until I'm 86 either... I just hope I have a career by then...

Congratulations. "Golden Palace" aside, you've earned it.

Yes, That One Was a Real Heart-Warmer.