Red Hot Mutha'

One of my top two favorite cities on earth is destroyed! I donated some money to the disaster relief fund for the humane society so they can get down there and help out all those lost pets. If people can't have their homes and their possesions, at least save their pets so they have some assemblance of normal in their lives. My heart goes out to all the people down there who have lost their home or worse............. And what the fuck's up with all the looters? For chrissakes people! WHAT THE FUCK! It's not like they're going in for diapers, bread and baby formula. Fuck, no. What the fuck are they going to do with five fucking televisions and three stereos? They broke into a fucking walmart and stole guns! They're taking their kids in with them like it's fucking christmas! What the fuck is wrong with human nature?

so...I was driving to work this morning, playing a little game with myself that I always do to keep myself awake. (I swear I'm narcoleptic when I'm in the car. It doesn't matter how much coffee I've had before I drive to work, or how loud I blast my music, I have to do everything I can to force my eyes to stay open. Really.) I look at other people in their cars and make up little stories about them. Like, "Oh, he likes to be spanked" or, "She's having an affair with that guy in her car". This morning, as I was playing this game, I looked over at a nondescript middle aged man in a green Focus and thought, "Molester." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him raise something to his face, maybe a coffee cup or something. No, wait. I looked again. A pair of pink and green polka-dotted string bikini panties. And he was sniffing them! And he didn't do it just once, oh no. He did this many, many time whilst driving on Route 40. I honestly don't think he was aware that I was cracking up; I don't think he was doing this for anybody's benefit but his own.
I guess everybody needs a way to stay awake.

(Incidently, i copied down his plate number in case he really was a molester.)

Vin and i went to the Sachs Fifth Avenue Company Store the other day. I can't say that I'm particularly lured by brands, but if a pair of Armani pants are ten bucks, and they look good, I'm gonna buy them. My motto is, "I Buy What I Want as Long as it looks Good and it's Cheap". I'll go anywhere: the Goodwill, Wal-mart, my grandmother's basement, anywhere I can get something that I can either re-make or use as-is. I'm pretty damned crafty when you think about it. Damn! Did I talk about sewing? I love to sew!! But I digress from the real story...

First of all, it was a madhose in the S.F.A.C.S. I should've known by the portable chairs that were stacked by the front door; these meant that people had actually waited in line to get in. (Yes, people do bring their own chairs to this place.) We went in. Everywhere there were women- and a few men- with bound and determined looks on their faces, like they had to take a good shit. A table of goods was piled high with clothes. I gingerly picked through it. Other women were literally grabbing the clothing, deftly eyeing each piece and then tossing it aside like some shucked ear of corn that had too many worms. Things were getting ripped. I decided to head past the shoes...big mistake! A woman had a shoe-alance sized pile of shoes, trying to squeeze her callused feet until a small strappy pair of Jimmy Choo's. (Mind you, I'm pushing a stroller through all this.) Ultimately, I managed to find a couple good pieces admist the ruckus, and I joined the checkout line of hyper-yet-pissed looking shoppers that wove around the back of the store. Three women at the front of the line called attention to themselves. They looked as if they were five-year olds who had picked out their outfits for the very first time. One was squeezed into a metallic pair of pants that was emblazoned with the Gucci symbol over and over; her top was way too small for her back rolls and they poured out of it, showing her bra from admist the flimsy Versace nightmare. (I could go on and on, but you get the idea.) Aparently they had a shitload of stuff "on hold". Like, I mean three large garbage bags of stuff that they were digging through. The last time I put something on hold at a store, I didn't have the money because I was sixteen and I hadn't got paid yet. Nowadays, I'm either going to buy it or not. It's quite a simple choice, really. One of the women was holding a Gucci leather strap, which appeared to be a brown dog leach, but was really a keychain. "You gonna buy that?", her friend asked. "No, I'm just gonna hold it. It still sixty bucks, on sale." Glad we got that cleared up. Meanwhile, a man decided he didn't want the Prada handbag that he was going to purchase and he held it up for anyone else in line if they wanted it. "Ooh, me!", screamed one of the women. This Prada bag was bubblegum pink and looked like something I used to take with me when I went rollerskating in 1985. It was terribly ugly, about the size of a business envelope, but I guess the Prada label made it all worthwhile. As I stood their with Vince, milling all this over, the line behind me grew, And that's when he started to cry.
He's teething, the poor thing. Thank god I can't remember what it feels like to have a tooth spontaneously erupt from my gums, but I'm sure I'd be crying too, if I could. The tall, willowy russian lady behind me said, in broken english, "Why don't you see if they will let you in the front?", and promplty took it upon herself to go to the front of the line and ask for me. "That woman has an infant. Can you let her go?" The fashion victums answered,"No! I got three kids an' no one's ever done that for me! No way. We was here first." I smiled at the russian lady. She said, rather loudly, "That's a sad way to live", and I looked at her and thanked her for trying. It turns out that the three badly-dressed women were still there after I had checked out. I happened to get an extrodinarily nice man to ring me up, and I ended paying a lot less than I thought because there were some sales that I hadn't known about.
A good buy brings out the worst in people, like an all-you-can-eat buffet, or the breakfast bar at a Big Boy's. Food and clothing sales make us primal: the more there is, the more beastly we become.

For the past two weekends we have been going to out-of-state weddings. The first was my brother's in Pittsburg PA which turned out very nicely. Although Pittsburg looks alarmingly like Cleveland, Steve and Baby V and I had fun. Baby V did awesome on his first plane trip ever!

This past weekend, we had just came back from Conn. for Steve's niece's wedding. Of course, baby V did an outstanding job and everyone thought he was the cutest!!! But I have to explain the adventure that the V-man and I had together.

It was hot, like nintey-seven degrees hot and the church wasn't air-conditioned. None of the windows opened anyway; they were all stained glass. (Wouldn't have mattered because there wasn't any breeze) We sat on the wooden pews for a few moments and Vincent started getting really hot. His faced flushed red, he started throwing up and there was this awful heat rash which seemed to be covering his body more and more by the second. (It could've been me being dramatic, but he wasn't going to get brain-damaged on my account.) I took him outside and stripped his clothes off but that didn't seem to work. The limo driver must have seen me struggling so he invited me in the limo to change Vincent. We sat in the back for a while, Vince looking around comfortably as if he belonged in the limo and was quite used to it. At this point, the wedding was starting so we hurried out to see Steve's neice walk down the aisle. Very beautiful dress! I grabbed the keys to the car from Steve so V and I could go sit in the P.T. Cruiser with the A.C. on. I didn't think there would be much left to the wedding, so I figured that the V-man and I would go wait in the car for the remainder of it. It didn't happen that way. Look, I'm not stupid. I can drive a friggin Harley but I couldn't turn on the P.T. 'cause I didn't realize that you have to step on the clutch. (My Nissan is automatic.) I silently cursed American cars, and then I spied a package goods store and we hopped in the stroller and took off for it. I was thinking about A.C. for my baby and it didn't matter to me that this bar had plywood walls and no real windows. From the store's doorway, I figured I could get a good view of the church and simply walk back across the street when it was all over. Except for a few bearded and tattooed men, Vince and I were the only mother-son team in the joint. We were sitting in air-conditioned paradise, so it didn't matter. I waited and waited for the wedding to be over, but the catholics can't do anything fast, so I decided to be a good patron and order a light beer. Still we waited and there was no sign of the wedding party marrily busting out of the church. I ordered another beer. I imagined that the image of me in a sea-foam green silk dress and silver cuban heels slipping a beer with my son in a stroller might look a little odd. Then the sky suddenly grew dark, Vince was crying, and I figured that we'd better get going, as we might be bad for business at this point and it appeared it was going to rain. I pulled Vince's awning down over him to protect him as much as I could. Someone gave me a trash bag to put over the opening. I slipped off my shoes and my hose and stuffed them in the diaper bag. (I did this in the bathroom, okay?! I wasn't wearing any underwear to avoid the dreaded panty-line, but I was wearing a wonderful full-length D.K. slimmimg slip that I scored at the Sax outlet.) By this time, the sky was looking all the more omnious and the first few drops were beginning to fall. It was now or never. Vince and I shot out of the bar, like the proverbial bat. We honestly didn't have far to go. At that point, when the PT. Cruiser was only yards away, the sky opened up. Within seconds I was drenched, but thank goodness Baby V was dry. I put the V-man in his car seat as quickly as possible, struggling to put away the stroller, but gave up promptly when I realized I had cut my foot somewhere along the way. I got in the car to examine it, took off the silk dress that was now quite stuck to my body and sat in my ten-dollar slip, dripping. (It was originally sixty bucks!) Who should suddenly appear but Steve! The wedding was over! I wanted to go back to the motel to change in something-anything-but Steve wouldn't hear of it. Vince was in his seat, cooing excitedly. For the first time that day, Steve told me I looked cute. Not when I had perfected every stroke of my make-up, or when my hair hung in perfect Veronica Lake-like waves, but now, when I looked more like Marilyn Manson than anyone else at all. We were going back to his sister's house, and I could dry my clothes there. The five-minute journey hardly provided me a chance to fix myself, so when we stopped and Steve's mother handed me a plastic tablecloth to wrap myself in, I obliged. I stood with sea-hag hair and ruined mascara, clutching the blue plastic tablecloth around me, trying to get Vin out of the car so the family could meet him for the first time. I turned round and and I don't know who they were staring at more, me or Vin, but all I could say is "here's the crazy lady from Baltimore", and tried to carry on coversation as normally as possible as one could wearing a tablecloth while meeting distant relatives for the first time.
Get used to it, Vinnie. This is your mutha!