“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
— Ferris Bueller

— The Carpal-Tunnel horseshit in my left arm and hand has been flaring up something fierce. I had the release surgery done on my right meathook some 13 years ago when my second daughter was one (can you even fucking imagine changing a ten-wipie, all-the-way-up-the-back-to-the-neck, shitty diaper with one hand — and your OFF hand, at that?). The comically tragic part is that all of the women in my family eventually end up with The Carp — must be something about the way we are put together. On the other hand (no pun intended), no one in my family EVER gets cancer; NO ONE. Not anywhere in recorded history, going back for like at least 100 years. Probably due to the hearty, rough and tumble, hardscrabble peasant blood that courses through our veins, we are just cancerless freaks (knock on cocksucking wood.) Our traditional way to exit-stage-left is to either stroke out at 48…or to just go to sleep one night when we are 105, and never wake up. Or, we are shot or stabbed to death in the act of committing some horrible, unspeakable, abominable crime. Either way, it’s a quick fucking go-down, so whatever. In the meantime, I am wearing a wrist brace on my left arm and it is helping immeasureably.

— As for the other chronic condition with which I so fitfully live, it has been fairly quiet lately. Ever since hubby and I marched into Nordstrom’s and procured a fine, chartreuse umbrella for me about 6 weeks ago, my oh, so winsome skinsome has been touched by nary a ray of sunshine…which has translated into zero fucking flares. Keep your fingers crossed that it continues. No matter what my fellow dratted Catholics say, being Our Lady of Guadalupus is a bitch, I tell you. Oh, bother — health issues are just so tiresome as conversational topics. Next.

— I cut all my goddamned hair off. Though I attempted to have it professionally stripped from my locks THREE TIMES, the stubborn black dye of my middle-aged-goth period of the past two years wasn’t going anywhere. So, I calmly strode down to my punk rawk hairdresser (who is in her 50’s and is THE REAL GOTTDAMNED DEAL, vintage 1970’s track marks and all) and told her to just cut the shit off. “How short do you wanna go, honey?,” she asked, smiling and casually brushing stray hair snippings from a full-sleeve of BITCHIN’ MAD INK. To which I smirked and responded, “Tell me, toots, have you ever seen ROSEMARY’S BABY?”

Yeah. It’s THAT short.

I realize that I probably look a lot like a really angry, in-your-fucking-grille Berkeley feminist bookstore owner circa 1977, but goddamnit if I don’t love it. I’M BUTCH!

— It’s official: my husband and I have become the elitist pricks we have always mocked and hated. He now shops for work clothes pretty exclusively at (jesus christ, wait for it…) Brooks Brothers (I can’t believe I just typed that), we are forced to actually give a shit about drivelous, mind-numbing stuff like school districts and neighborhood crime rates (statistics to which my family back home directly and quite generously contributes, I assure you), Gregory has a new car (NEW…as in BRAND NEW, not just new TO US, which is a first, I also assure you. My darling old girl is 10 this year…but she will be with me forever), and we require the services of a dry cleaner on a fairly regular basis — which, to me, was always the litmus test as to whether or not you were an officially grown-up elitist prick. I can so easily remember back to when my ancient washing machine was broken and I was about 300 months pregnant with my first baby and we were too poor to get it fixed, much less replaced with a new one…and I quite literally washed all of our laundry by hand in the kitchen sink, wrang it dry (try wringing a sopping bath towel dry sometime, motherfucker), and lugged it all outside to be hung on the line. My back ached and my hands literally bled. And now, I actually revel in the luxurious services of a dry cleaner a couple of times a month. Christ, what an asshole I have become — and yet, I am still never far from the romantic call of the carnival midway…and my trashy, criminal Sicilian roots.

— I’m furious and desperate, and moreso and moreso as the days pass until December and the release of a certain Disney film for which I have been eagerly waiting nearly all of my life. Allow me to clarify. I consider myself a very generous person. I work very hard at this virtue. However, I have recently discovered something in myself that is ugly, selfish, territorial, exclusive, and downright beastly. I have come down with what I shall henceforth refer to as “Literary Greed”. That is, once I have discovered a writer or piece of work that I adore, they or it instantly becomes MINE — and I resent like hell when it becomes co-opted by the culture at large. It sullies it, it takes the sparkle off of it — it turns it into dookie.

In the frankest terms, because I delusionally fancy that I discovered them long before anybody else (or certainly most people) this means that solely in my possession are the following:

The Chronicles of Narnia; my sole property since 5th grade.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath; my sole property since 9th grade.
Truman Capote; my sole property since 11th grade.
The subject matter of The Da Vinci Code; my sole property since 1987.

These authors and works are my divine right, goddamnit — so back the fuck off, you interlopers, brigands, shitkickers, and thieves. Yes, I realize this makes me a madwoman — but there it is.

Wow…it just hit me. I really AM losing my mind.

— Ferris Bueller was right. Life does move pretty fast…and sometimes you just have to leap so as not to miss it. So…we are leaping.

And moving to Los Angeles.