Entries

Flattened Old Futon

I’ll get the awful part out of the way first. That way I know I’ve written about it and hopefully I won’t cry and it’ll be over with.

On Sunday morning on our way back home we pulled into a McDonalds to pee (much better than a gas station ’cause you don’t have to ask for a key) and there was a mini-van with a murdered deer tied to the top. It was horrifying. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. I couldn’t stop crying for a long time. I kept thinking about that deer, just walking through the forest, having his life, and being slaughtered because — because what? Because some shithead who deserves to be murdered himself thought that killing would be FUN? Because some men (I’ve never met a woman who hunted in my life) think that it’s a big thrill to take away the spirit and the energy and the gentle look in an animal’s eyes? Doesn’t that sound evil? It does to me. If you took anything a hunter (god how I hate that word and anyone who would apply it to themselves) said and replaced the word “deer” with “child” he would sound like the most evil, frightening, sick fuck on the planet. But it’s somehow okay because it’s an animal. Somehow it’s all right. I think that hunters should hunt each other. It’s why I am so happy about paintball — I wouldn’t play it myself, physical games don’t appeal to me — but my god, what a fun way to spend an afternoon! What a wonderful way to use all of your senses, to spend a day in the woods! No one gets killed. No one even gets hurt. And if hunters think that they “need” to murder something to feel “good” (Doesn’t anyone worry about people who “need” to murder something to feel “good”? I wonder about women who marry, much less have a conversation with, men who hunt. I do. I really do.) then they can jolly well murder EACH OTHER. The planet would be a better place for it.

Okay, that’s all I want to say about that, before I get too angry and too sad and start to cry again.

Other than that, we had an absolutely fantastic weekend. On Wednesday night after I wrote the last journal entry we went to our favorite Indian restaurant for dinner. We were eating when we heard a lot of kind of scary shouting outside and then a lot of kids, they looked about 13-16, came into the restaurant. It was frightening. I remembered watching that really ridiculous movie Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, when I was about nine. It was on Cinemax and there wasn’t anything better to do. And there’s this scene where she’s wandering around lost and comes upon a group of children who she thinks are nice and cute and then they all reveal their creepy teeth, which are horror-movie-quality, and start coming at her and biting her. I remember thinking, when I was watching it, how interesting it was that they’d chosen kids for that scene because it was that much more scary, since kids aren’t something to be afraid of. So I’m sitting in the restaurant and thinking about that and Todd is reassuring me that it’s fine, and one of the kids asks the owner for a glass of water, which he gives her. I think it may have been a sort of game, going into all the restaurants asking for a glass of water, who’s brave enough to do it, that sort of thing. And then they all left, there was more shouting and yelling outside, and one of the kids came back in to ask what time it was. Which seemed really weird and I got nervous again, but he really did seem to just want to know what time it was and they all left after that.

We were both feeling kind of down, we came home and watched one of the movies we’d rented which was a terrible movie but had a person painting a room in much of it, so I got inspired about painting the dark purple bedroom again. Ha. Bad idea. Thursday was weird (no, really, the rest of the weekend was way fun *grin*) and we spent most of it doing this really dumb thing that we do that we even know we do but seem helpless to stop doing. It goes like this:

Sage says: I want to do X.
Todd says: I want to do Y.
Sage says: But we can’t do X if we can’t do Y and we can’t do Y if we can’t do X.
(discussion of what would be more fun ensues)
Sage thinks about it and decides that Y would be more fun than X.
Meanwhile, Todd has thought about it too and X sounds way more interesting than Y.
Sage says: Okay, let’s do Y.
Todd says: Um, wait, but X sounds better.

So we end up rooting for each other’s ideas, which is extremely silly and this is exactly what happened on Thursday. And so we were going to get paint and I was going to paint the bedroom, but then going to New York City sounded like it was more fun, and so we were going to do that, but by the time we’d figured it all out and gotten to the train station (we didn’t want to drive in on the day after thanksgiving, traffic was nuts) it was going to be dark by the time we got home which sounded overwhelming, so we went to a bookstore instead and had coffee there. Went to a lovely Indian restaurant, were giggling madly because Beverly Hills 90210 was on the tv there but without the sound, and since we haven’t seen that show since last year when we stopped watching tv, all we know of it is from Danny Drennan’s hysterical show summaries, which are, if you think of it, kind of like having listened to the show instead of watching it. So we were doing the Danny Drennan voice over for the show and eating wonderful yummy food and feeling very much more cheery than we had earlier that day.

Decided, like the tired and sleepy fools we were, that it would be a great idea to stop for paint at the home improvement store on the way home, and ended up spending a good part of that time crabbing at each other about what color to buy and how much to buy and should we buy blinds too, and really, we were like little kids who haven’t had their naps, and by the time we’d stomped over to the cash register we turned out to be $3 short, so I told the cashier that sorry, we were just going to go, and apologized for leaving her with all that stuff and we went home, agreeing ruefully that next time we were going to go there with a list of things we wanted.

Saturday morning I woke up for a little while and then fell asleep until eleven (I feel weird when I sleep late, I always feel like I’ve missed out on everyone else’s fun) and Todd said, “Hey, want to go to Northampton?” which sounded like a lot of fun — it’s a very liberal and interesting town — and I said sure, so we got our stuff together and kissed the cats (no, really) and were on our way. It was a long trip so I took a Tanith Lee book and read to Todd for much of it, we were quite amazed at how accurately, in 1981, she’d predicted things that were happening just 14 years later, although she did have everyone listening to cassette tapes which was pretty silly since the book took place somewhere in the late 2000’s. The trip wasn’t bad at all, pretty swell, actually, and once we arrived in Northampton we were in fantastic moods. It was really cold, though, and I’d worn my Galactic Web Empress t-shirt (hey, Damon, there’s a street called Damon Avenue in Massachusetts! We were going to take a picture for you but we couldn’t stop, it was right next to the onramp of a highway) with a vest over it, so I was freezing. Todd loaned me his coat, since he had a longsleeved shirt on, and I wore it over to the nearest thrift store, where I found a huge, heavy military coat for only $20. I look like Napolean in it, it’s hysterical! It’s almost so long it scrapes the floor, but not quite. Todd says it’s my Galactic Web Empress outfit.

We had dinner at a very cool teensy mexican restaurant, then didn’t really know what else to do, we’d thought about going to the Iron Horse but the band playing wasn’t very interesting. We found a “things to do in Northampton” brochure, with a map and everything, and found an internet cafe, which sounded great but unfortunately wasn’t open yet (powermacs at every table!) for business and went to a bookstore where we found a bed and breakfast review book and decided on a bed and breakfast to stay at, then drove there. The woman who opened the door for us was a big sweetie, she showed us into our room which had this Bed O Hugeness, I mean it wasn’t like a bed you could hop into because it was so cushy that I climbed up into it (and I do mean climbed) and then just sort of collapsed and couldn’t move, it was so comfortable. We went to a small restaurant near the bed and breakfast and had nachos and people-watched, were opinionated about the people coming in since we were right by the window. One family, the ones who ended up sitting at the table right next to ours, were walking up the restaurant. It was an older couple, maybe in their late fifties, and then an eighteenish looking woman with an eighteenish looking guy. And we both immediately said, “Aha — she’s introducing him to her parents,” which we found out was true when they all sat down. We couldn’t figure out what it was about the four of them that made that obvious, either. Interesting.

Then this guy who looked EXACTLY like Todd, except maybe 2 years younger, walked in. It was uncanny. I mean, he looked so much like Todd that he looked familiar to me, so familiar that I would have felt completely comfortable going up to him and saying hi. Todd saw it right away — he was the one who pointed the guy out to me, which I thought was fascinating because I don’t think that people see themselves in the mirror the same way that other people see them. We went back to the bed and breakfast and found this book on the bedside table which was full of comments people had made about the place, and it was a little surreal, the whole thing felt like a web page guestbook. We read through them, and the two most interesting were:

Had a great time. We both felt very
comfortable and breakfast was delicious.
It felt like we were in a movie.

Which is pretty sad, if you think about it. I mean, that attitude of “We had to re-find our relationship so we went to a bed and breakfast,” and everything that comes with it, and I’m staring after them saying, “But how did you lose it in the first place? I don’t get it,” and the way that having a wonderful time feels like “being in a movie”, what are their real lives like? So then the other one that we particularly noticed was:

What a dream this room is, or was it a memory?
No television to remind us of the chaotic world
outside. A gracious and gentle interlude that we
will definitely want to repeat.

I mean, if tv is reminding you of the chaotic world outside and you don’t like that, don’t watch tv!

Oh, and I completely forgot, I did a bit of a journal entry when we were there:

November 25, 8:?? PM

I’m sitting in a bed and breakfast on a huge antique bed smiling to myself while Todd takes a shower. We just arrived ten minutes ago and have been whispering the whole time, because it’s so quiet. When we lived in New Hampshire together we shared a house with three other people, so in a way this place, even the actual placement of the room itself, feels very familiar. Quiet jazz is playing on the radio and I’m smiling, thinking, this is a wonderful life to be living. Thinking about how when I was a little girl I would imagine the kind of life I wanted — writing stories that people care about, listening to NPR on the radio, loving a person who loved me too, waking up to the patter of little kitty paws…all of that. And somewhere along the line it happened. What did I do to deserve such an amazing existence? Todd just came and sat next to me on the bed and said, “Hey!” and I turned around and he said, “It’s the fourth anniversary of the day we actually met at the airport,” which it really is. Gad *grin* I feel so cliche now…

I read more of the Tanith Lee book to Todd until we were both sleepy and fell asleep. I didn’t sleep very well, had what felt like hundreds of short dreams and woke up many, many times. It didn’t occur to me until later on the next day that it was probably partly due to the number of people who have also slept in that bed — some sort of…oh, for lack of a better word, psychic residue, must have been left by some of them. Emotions. Feelings.

We went down to breakfast, which we ended up eating with

The Most Obnoxious Couple In The Known Universe

Geez, was it hysterical. Part of the trouble was trying not to laugh — they were so absurd that it really started feeling like WE were in a movie and they were actors hired to play the parts. We sat down to breakfast, and I wasn’t looking up, I was putting butter on a blueberry muffin and concentrating on not crumbling the muffin to bits, and I heard a man’s voice and a little girl’s voice, she sounded about eight years old. Like I said, I wasn’t really paying any attention so I didn’t know what they were saying, and then the man came and sat down right across from me and catty-corner from Todd, and I sort of inwardly sighed, I mean, I could see the small talk coming from a mile away. There were literally five other chairs he could have sat in, four of them far away from us, but he sat next to us. So he introduces himself, and we’re talking to him enough not to be rude, he says something like, “How did you find this place,” and we tell him it was a whim, and he’s, like, in shock because he cannot understand that we did this on a whim, it’s incomprehensible to him. So he asks what kind of drive we have to get back home and we tell him, and he’s getting confused because we’re not playing the small talk game right, we’re not asking him all about himself (because we could give a damn, I mean, okay, maybe he was trying to be nice but neither of us are very good at faking an interest in people who we could care less about) and then the little girl shows up. Except now I’m looking up, kind of gritting my teeth because he’s going on about the colleges in Northampton and Amherst and can’t seem to stop talking about the students there, he even asks if we’re students and we sort of looked at him for a stupefied minute before saying no, and something about the way that he asks the woman who owns the place if students ever stay there makes it sound so sleazy, and yes, Sherlyn, that really was just one sentence. So I’m looking up this time and the eight year old girl turns out to be a woman in her THIRTIES who for some incomprehensible reason is talking in this totally put-upon little girl voice. Like, imagine any eight year old girl you know and the way she talks, and take out every ounce of energy in that voice and go about three notches higher with the pitch and you have this woman’s voice perfectly. It was put on! This is the part that really was getting on my last nerve, that she was doing it on purpose. And we know this because at one point the owner, who’s trying to help this sad limping conversation along gets frustrated with this stupid voice and asks her to speak up and she does and her voice is totally normal and then she looks startled and goes back to the horrible voice.

So the guy is going on and on and on about the colleges in the area and the students, and Todd and I are starting to get a picture of the potential reasons that this woman is putting this voice on, and then she asks if there’s any dairy products in the pancakes. And the owner says no, there isn’t, and the woman does this laugh which I can’t even describe to you it was so irritating, something like, “Ohteeheeheehee” and then says, “I can’t eat dairy products,” and indicates her fake-milk stuff that she’d brought in with her, and the whole time this conversation is happening she is slathering butter all over her muffin.

We finally finish breakfast and bolt upstairs and fall over laughing once we get to our room and get everything together and check out, then drive home. I read the Tanith Lee book for quite a bit of the drive home, and then when we got here we checked email, hung out doing not much of anything for awhile, then decided to do laundry and clean the house as much as we could, considering how tired we were. That worked out wonderfully, I read some more just before we went to bed and we both slept beautifully. Who knew a flattened old futon with a thin comforter over it could be more comfortable and cozy than a huge antique bed?