My dear mother's eyes
I've been putting my resume together all morning. So far, I've tackled three words per hour. I'd like to snag a beat at one of the newspapers around here, but I'm reluctant to tack on another job. During college, I consistently worked through three jobs and a heavy load of classes every week, semester after semester. Most of us did and still managed to maintain regular ass prints at IHOP. Am I losing the ability to bring the noise and/or the funk?
I just got a second job at a lunch restaurant. Call me crazy, but I enjoy waiting tables. Not the customer part of it, but the running around like a goddamn emu and completing a long list of small duties I'm not obligated to share with anyone else unless I need help. It makes me feel self-sufficient and detail-oriented, two traits I've longed to possess since Courtney moved to West Palm Beach and proved me the needier child of two needy children.
I enjoy the surf shop for similar reasons, but I'm no good at retail. I sit around all day and play anthropologist, so when some batshit rich woman asks when the new shipment of Chinese baby-stomping boots is coming in, all I can think about is how much we humans resemble peacocks armed with credit lines. Truly, the American economy runs on low self-esteem. If we're not buying something to impress someone (or no one in particular), we're buying stuff because we're bored. If we only bought stuff we needed, we'd resemble a Marxist nation and my grandpa would flood the information superhighway with reckless forwards.
Which confuses me, because he only buys stuff he needs and that's one of the reasons he's rich. The other reason is because other people buy stuff they don't need. Let's all wrap our brains around that over breakfast at a leather kitchen table detailed with the lymph of Christ. My, how it shimmers in the morning sun! I got it on eBay in exchange for 100,000 viable eggs and I suggest you do the same if you want me to look at you without that nuance of disapproval in my eyes. I'm probably suffering from a grocery list or my own insecurities, but you won't know that until I break down crying, ruining the upholstery and diluting the lymph on your new table. The good news is you'll know you aren't alone. And you aren't.
A classic, recurring moment at the surf shop goes a little something like this:
A woman approaches the counter and notices the display of baby Uggs. Uggs for babies, that is. She coos, looks at me until I coo, then we coo together. She says, "They make me want to have another baby."
I'd rather sell food. No one relates procreation to a nice pan-roasted salmon with goat cheese over a bed of dark greens. Well, no one but us.
I just got a second job at a lunch restaurant. Call me crazy, but I enjoy waiting tables. Not the customer part of it, but the running around like a goddamn emu and completing a long list of small duties I'm not obligated to share with anyone else unless I need help. It makes me feel self-sufficient and detail-oriented, two traits I've longed to possess since Courtney moved to West Palm Beach and proved me the needier child of two needy children.
I enjoy the surf shop for similar reasons, but I'm no good at retail. I sit around all day and play anthropologist, so when some batshit rich woman asks when the new shipment of Chinese baby-stomping boots is coming in, all I can think about is how much we humans resemble peacocks armed with credit lines. Truly, the American economy runs on low self-esteem. If we're not buying something to impress someone (or no one in particular), we're buying stuff because we're bored. If we only bought stuff we needed, we'd resemble a Marxist nation and my grandpa would flood the information superhighway with reckless forwards.
Which confuses me, because he only buys stuff he needs and that's one of the reasons he's rich. The other reason is because other people buy stuff they don't need. Let's all wrap our brains around that over breakfast at a leather kitchen table detailed with the lymph of Christ. My, how it shimmers in the morning sun! I got it on eBay in exchange for 100,000 viable eggs and I suggest you do the same if you want me to look at you without that nuance of disapproval in my eyes. I'm probably suffering from a grocery list or my own insecurities, but you won't know that until I break down crying, ruining the upholstery and diluting the lymph on your new table. The good news is you'll know you aren't alone. And you aren't.
A classic, recurring moment at the surf shop goes a little something like this:
A woman approaches the counter and notices the display of baby Uggs. Uggs for babies, that is. She coos, looks at me until I coo, then we coo together. She says, "They make me want to have another baby."
I'd rather sell food. No one relates procreation to a nice pan-roasted salmon with goat cheese over a bed of dark greens. Well, no one but us.
10 Comments:
I wish I could write like you.
Aw, thanks! I wish I could write like you. And Lindsey. I wish I could smash you two together to form the ultimate writing machine.
If I could hack off your arms and attach them to my torso, I would. What a team I'd make.
Name that TV show from which I steal every other sentence!
I think you both are brilliant writers, for completely different reasons. Joey deadpans using razor-sharp, candid snark, and Amber threads vivid, unexpected metaphors with a colorful, unforgiving, wide-eyed needle.
When Amber storms the publishing world in a year or two with her gut-wrenching, absurdist romps, Joey, you and I will weasel our way into her editor's office and demand that he read our tattered manuscripts. The editor will read them and love them. The editor will throw out all his/her other projects because they will be blasphemous in the presence of such sheer brilliance.
Then the three of us, once we've been published and once our generation comes to rely on us as the three most important writers of the era, will found our own publishing house. We'll call it Femifagtastic House. And we will own the world.
This comment thread has become a regular ego circle jerk, ain't it?
Here comes the spooge.
She says, "They make me want to have another baby."
If that's the only reason this woman wants to have a child, then ... there is no hope for humanity.
And, for the record, I wish I could write as well as any of you.
Ah, but Coxxy Doodle Doo, you can write like a motherfucker! And with your mad skills, you're taking your unforgiving toilet paper of truth and dislodging corruption from Macon County's asscrack little bit by little bit with your snooping and explaining skills.
Plus, none of us look quite as intrepid as you do with a reporter's notebook in your hands and a cigarette hanging from your lips. We should pitch in and buy you a camelhair fedora for xmas.
When I worked at Dillard's, X* makes me want to have another baby was a standard utterance of the idiotic. They'd see a $12 mini tea set or a tiny coat or a purse the size of a kitten or a pair of little girl's panties that said "yummy" in rhinestones and their uteruses would swell and pulse with anticipation.
Ew, sorry.
*Not ecstasy
I so would never have thought that's what you meant. But it made me laugh.
Although, I imagine X does make a few people want to have babies. For a window.
Reading this reminds me of how I miss the little things...like the time you promised me eternal salvation in exchange for a Pop-Tart. It went a little something like this:
"Thank you. Your contribution will be duly noted when I decide who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell."
I've slept easier since, knowing that Hell wasn't in my future.
I wish I could write like all of you, but that doesn't mean I want to fuse you into some Frankensteinesque pull-a-part creation of writing genius.
That would just be creepy.
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