Superhero

(A fiction piece for The Speakeasy at Yeahwrite.me)

It ain't easy being a superhero. The power, electric like, pulsates as you feel your wings form and take you to new heights. Proverbially speaking.

Hell, I'm no superhero. Society sees me as the shitty ass piece of scum I am. As I walk down the street, people veer left and right, my superhero forcefield shoved them aside; maybe it's just the bugged out eyes, my tweaking gyrating dance my body performs without me as the chemicals make me their puppet.

Its all a dance, a well choreographed ballet. Dance mother fucker dance. As an introvert, the ritual of getting my fix itself needs a fix. I gotta arrive without suspicion, lest the neighbors call SWAT or ATF on my sorry ass. Already jumpy and paranoid, my hyper senses notice the curtains across the street move, and my heart jumps into my brain like a ping ping ball. Your serve.

Hell, I gotta be a bit high to get my high and to dance the dance. You can't just stroll in, "gimme my fix", toss down a twenty and leave. It's like a first fucking date every time. Small talk reigns, about non-intellectual bullshit like sports, tits, even the dammed weather sometimes. You finish the awkward date and its onto a counseling session, bitching about the old lady nagging you or whatever. Then, the magic show begins, QVC and Vanna White make a discreet appearance, as if its a fucking secret that you're here for dope.

If you loathe the pointless conversation and drawn out process like I do, you gotta be high to get through it all. But not so barely high that it wears off quick, causing nervous awkward chit chat that can signal you're a narc, making your very life at stake. But you also can't be so high that when you sample the goods, you can't tell shit from good and you get a bum deal.

I hate myself for my addiction but it isn't just the addiction that keeps me high. It's the mother fucking best feeling, being high. Self doubt, pain, troubles melt away and you're like a kid in a candy store. You become immortal. A superhero. Nothing can stop you.

I engage in this daily masquerade, the real me and the high me, battling reality, perception, relationships, the bills. Who knows I'm an addict? Do I wear the "normal self" mask well? Do I play the part well, hair in place, the right face on? Am I fucking kidding myself? Everyone knows. So, am I a superhero, an addict, scum, myself, or a ghost of my former self?

Every superhero has a tragic flaw, mine being when the high wanes and my blood turns to fire, my muscles to stone. I sweat buckets and become immobile, crouched in the corner, cursing myself for not getting my fix on time. My demons charge at me, no wall or disguise to stop them. I despise my self and my body, my life, my addiction. I hate the addict in me, the sober and imperfect me that led me to this place. I hate my everything. Yet, I also love the high, ah, what a poetic juxtaposition. I most of all miss the me before the high, before the superpowers, back when I was an infallible man in a simple world.

As I come down from the high, I for a moment consider releasing the bonds of addiction. Every time. But the bonds are suffocatingly tight. As I feebly pull myself up, ready for my fix, I look back to the corner and see my shadow self, multiple shadows crouching in the dark, whispering their farewells to the old me. A funeral procession of sorts, and the shadow me in the casket weeps for the lost self. Always nearly out of sight, that self whimpers for his death yet never really leaves the earth. He haunts me and guards the other shadows, waiting like a lost dog. I shut the door, so no one hears him as he cries out, "I sat there and waited, but he never came back"

Best mom ever

I am still trying to figure out this parenting thing, but being that my kids aren't yet even school age, I've got a while to figure it out. Will I let my teens date? Will there be a curfew? When will I give"the talk"? Will I let them wander the neighborhood unattended? Will I homeschool or public school? What kind of parent will they remember me as?

I saw a Chuck E. Cheese commercial that rubbed the wrong way. A boy praised his mom, thanking her for taking him to Chuck E. Cheese and mentioned how cool she was.

I won't deny my child things like amusement parks and the like, but that isn't what it means to be a parent, and a parent should rarely be "cool".

I want to be remembered not for the fact I took my child to Chuck E. Cheese or bought him hug me Elmo. Sure, I even fondly remember my parents taking me to Chuck E Cheese, but as I have grown, I remember them fondly for more than that; for more ethereal reasons I guess.

I want to be remembered as the mom who gave her children unconditional love, even when that love was spoken through clenched teeth growling, "you're grounded". I want to be remembered as a mom who kissed boo-boos and sang silly songs to make my children giggle. I want to be remembered for making sure my children were thankful, and for respecting elders and helping those in need. I want to be remembered as the mom who pushed for the best education possible. I want to be remembered as the mom who gave just the right amount of independence an responsibility.

I hope they remember more than just the big ticket gifts or amusement park adventures, not just lessons for life, but the little things, like walks around the lake at sunset, cooking meals together, making crafts, collecting acorns, skipping rocks.

I know I will stumble and fall sometimes as a parent. I will recognize my mistakes as a lesson and transfer that lesson to my children, that we humans are imperfect but should try every day to better ourselves and our world.

When my children end up parents themselves, I hope we grow closer, I hope they appreciate the mom I was and always will be. If they forget to thank me, all I will need is to look at the men they will have become and know I did a damned good job.

Semi homemade tarts

I love tarts. Especially the creamy ones with fruit on top. When I went to France for a whole entire day I had had had to get a blueberry and cream tart. Tres deliceux! I'm oddly not much of one for sweets but French desserts are a weakness. I hate cloyingly sweet desserts like birthday cake ...yuck! So the richness of, say, tarts, tickle my fancy.

However, I royally suck as a baker and if anything requires homemade dough or even rolling dough, I don't do it. I know better. My pre made pizza dough ball looked like the surface of the moon meets Swiss cheese. My cakes crack. My pies are inedible and oozing.

So I had to suck it up and tell myself, I am not a baker .

Yet...I made French tarts! Well, sort of. My recipe will never rival the tarts from La Duree on the Champs Élysées. But my version sufficed. And I will totally make them for a potluck cause they look very fancy and like I slaved over the stove for hours! So shh don't tell! If I bring them to your potluck, please appease me and act like I did indeed slave over the stove for hours.

Here is the recipe...
A little under 2 rolls of readymade sugar cookie dough
1 lb black berries or whatever berry
1 8oz light cream cheese
1 jar lemon curd ...well really 1/2 cup but Trader snows is one tbsp over a 1/2 cup
Handful or so sugar (depending on sweetness of berries desire)

Preheat oven to 350 and grease 2 12-cupcake cupcake to a
Let cream cheese soften and curd can be room temp or lightly chilled. The berries should chill a bit in the sugar.

Smoosh the cookie dough into the tins to make cup shapes, I made 14 but could make 16+.

Cool about 15 mi. You want them light gold and cooked all the way through...my convection oven is a good one so you may need 20 mins.

Let cookie cups cool to room temp. Meanwhile once your cream cheese is soft, mix in a stand mixer with the lemon curd and chill.

Fill cookie cups with a spoonful/dollop of the lemon cream. Top with berries. Enjoy.

Holiday schmoliday

As a child, I became your stereotypical only child and demanded certain things for Christmas. No, it wasn't expensive toys or anything, just the Christmas of Norman Rockwell or the made for TV Christmas movies. Hell I would have been alright with a National Lampoon's Christmas - they were more like my family, just more festive.

I wanted tinsel on the tree but my mom sad it would kill he cats. I wanted tinsel garland but my dad said it was gaudy, almost as gaudy as my grandmas metallic fake tree which I had a secret affinity for. I wanted lights on the roof and eaves, windows and trees, but my parents said no one comes to visit so why out them up? I wanted fake snow flocking but my parents said I could enjoy real snow outside. I wanted a turkey for dinner but the one time my mom made some, it turned out blue - a culinary mystery yet to be solved.

Most of all, I wanted to rip into my gifts with an almost religious fervor, paper like confetti and ribbons strew about in a post apocalypse of gift wrap. This was he one time of the year I could do this (my birthday, celebrated often on Christmas, doesn't count).

But my mother, who tries to deny she is the hippy poster child, wanted to save Mother Earth by saving wrapping paper. I had to repress all that was kid, that screamed rip it open now!!! In a whirlwind of gift wrap rain and ribbon blizzard and instead meticulously remove tape, surgically wriggle off the bow, and delicately remove and fold the gift wrap.

Rip it open!!!!

Recycling gift wrap was her way to save the earth (aside from the fact she burned junk mail) and it got so bad that paper wasn't recycled once or twice, nay may. A few years back I recognized birthday wrap from my grand mother (and he. Mom a few times) from the 1990s. The 90s! I vehemently ripped it to shreds.

And now...the holiday doldrums have caught up to me. Sure, the tree is decorated (with tinsel garland!) and their are lights outside, but the advent calendar is stuck on December 11th, gifts are still being shipped in the mail. I'm trying to get into the spirit for my children's sake, to give them that Rockwell scene, but I am failing.

But dammit. My son WILL rip into his gifts like a caveman!

only in california...

If I tell someone I live in California, they assume certain things...I drive a Prius, make millions, am tan, can surf or know surfers, am an aspiring actress, know people in show biz, smoke pot, and that I work at google. I defy all those stereotypes.

My dad is "anti establishment" in that he dresses like a crazy mountain man/hobo/biker because he refuses to dress like a "square" and he refuses to "fit in". A fantastic story teller, he ha spun tales of living in communes and partying with the Stones and the like. He has a name tattooed on his arm, not my mom's or ex wife's, and when I asked about it, he said it was some cool ex girlfriend, end if story. Come to find out, she was best friends with the "bitching biker chick" of my namesake.

A little prodding and the story unfolds. My namesake wasn't a biker but hung with them some times. She was as Californjan as they get, blond, gorgeous, aspiring actress, beach bum, dating a rock star, with relatives in the Hollywood scene. Her boyfriend was a band member for The Byrds. Her best friend, forever marked on my dad's arm, was, as my dad says, responsible for turning him from a jerk to a nice dude. And then, my dad ended up married, jailed, married, homeless, married, a father, and now a grandfather. Life goes on.

It's just weird that one of his most boring stories, "yeah the tattoo is an ex" and "you were named for a biker chick" were real. Not only were they real but kind of cool. I mean, I've never partied with an aspiring actress who was in a few films, who was "in" the know of famous musicians and entertainers. How...dastardly Californian! Now I wonder how many of his far fetched stories are indeed true, and if he has a little Forrest Gump thing going on.

books suck

No...really, books don't suck, yet recently I have struggled to find good boojs, browsing the best sellers and must read lists and being dissapointed.

Hunger Games...I love dystopian fiction and so I eagerly downloaded a free ebook sample. Twenty some pages in, I felt like I was reading a supermarket shelf young adult novel. I just couldn't get vested in the characters and thought, die already! Except, their deaths were just as....banal.

Then there were the Twilight saga books. One day at work, the computers were down and one can hardly aggregate online data without a computer, so I saw Twilight sitting on the 7th grade bookshelf and went at it. A few pages in, I thought, hmm I could care less about stupid vampires (having tried Anne Rice back in 6th grade)  but hey it is written kinda nicely, I mean it has a nice vocabulary. If a book hating kid wants to read this, right on! Sadly, it turned to nap inducing low intensity soap opera drivel. I struggled through 100 pages, unable to retrieve a better book because the 7th graders were testing.

Dan Browb books looked full of intrigue but the first three pages had me saying, and? So what? So I stopped reading.

The Great Gatsby was a book somehow avoided in high school and college, and even my years as a high school teacher. So one day, before it was even a movie, I picked it up. I even read a few chapters. I loved the way Fitzgerald made the characters so real that I could imagine their accents, mannerisms, and persona. He gets a gold star for "words painting a picture". So why did I stop reading? The story line bored the hell out of me. I felt like I was stuck in the hell that was Gone With the Wind. I know, everyone loves that movie but frankly I don't give a damn.

Pride and Prejudice and all those verbose Victorian novels are a no go, too. I respect the prose, it is excellent from an English teacher perspective, just...who gives a f@ck?

Now before you have a heart attack, I do love some decent literature. One of my absolute favorites is The Grapes of Wrath. The character development and story line is so raw and real. In fact, I haven't read it for about five years so I just may have to again. Even the old grainy black and white film was amazing for its time.

Call me crazy

Call so and so...

I had a bunch of things on my to-do list today, and I procrastinated with every excuse in the book, telling myself I needed to do the dishes, my toddler needed a different shirt on, Facebook just had to be browsed again.

I avoided the truth.

I have phone-phobia.

My heart races just at the thought of calling someone, especially someone I don't know. Call the cable company and the dog groomers? Wait is that the dryer buzzing? Huh? The dogs need to go outside?

I can feel the panic build up inside me and that fight or flight feeling blossom, the flight taking shape and beating the drums-my heart- at breakneck speed. My breath gets quick and shallow. I do a nervous clearing of my throat; the more I do it, the more nervous I am, and that makes me nervous because my husband knows about my "nervous twitch cough".

I don't know exactly why I have an irrational fear of the phone. I know nothing bad can happen and that I compose myself quite well over the phone. There's nothing to fear or worry about. But that means nothing.

Maybe it's because my mom often made calls I could have made as a teen, because she made all the calls for my dad who suffers from Aspergers, social phobia., and anxiety.

Maybe it's my personality. I am an total introvert, my Myers-Briggs is INFP, and "HSP" (Highly Sensitive Person) explains me to a "t".

I wish I knew why I am a phone-phobe so that I could address my phobia and conquer it. Until then, I feel like someone jumped out and screamed "boo!" For ten minutes before and after a phone call.

It feels good to finally admit to this, as it is something I have never told anyone. Maybe this is the first step in surviving a phone call.