My mother is probably the most worried person that I have ever met. She worries about everything from the government screwing her out of money to the fact that the biscuits may indeed not rise in the oven. When I was young, she used to have nightmares about forgetting to dress me properly and me having to go to school without socks. I wasn’t allowed to ride roller coasters, horses or 4-wheelers. Interesting woman.

I tried my best to become a laid back young woman. After all that worrying in my youth, I figured that worst case scenerio, whatever happend, maybe I would die, and would that really be so bad anyway?? As I get older, it’s not so easy.

Worries come in many forms. One day, your biggest worry might be that your shoelace broke and a mere 40 seconds later your biggest worry might be that your car has been smashed or that your wife has died.

Have you ever met people who were very afraid and then, suddenly, one day, thier biggest fear came true? I have. Over and over. It is a form of meditation, only these people are meditating on thier fears. I believe that your thoughts, worries, fears affect outcomes in your life. How many times have you heard of a woman trying desperately to get pregnant and then the second she adopts, she conceives? It happens all the time. I think that your negative thoughts, worries, fears draw negative things to you. I also believe very strongly in the power of belief. It’s been proven over and over that people who pray or meditate are healthier people. It doesn’t even matter which religion they are. Think it’s all new age bullshit? Consider this..

I make a living from the mental affecting the physical. I see first hand every day the toll stress (a non-physical factor) can have on your body. It’s not pretty. Every day I try to let go of the stress, worries, fears in my life. Sometimes, on days like today, when I have no money and my car battery dies, it’s hard. Hard not to give into the fear that I will never be back on top of things. Hard, but not impossible.

Take a walk, meditate, clean the house. Play with the kids. Do whatever it is that you do to clean your mind. Take a drive, sing along screaming with your favorite angry cd, write it all down and burn it. Just get it the hell out of your mind. I promise. Experience speaking here. It works.

I met Patrick when I was a senior in high school and he was here as an exchange student from France. The first time I saw him, he was boarding a school bus, wearing a red jacket and eating a banana. He had the most amazing black curly hair which I will never forget. I remember thinking that no american guy would ever get on the school bus eating a banana.

I knew I had no chance in hell at ever dating this guy, so I did what I usually do in that case and just sat back and talked to him like I was the most beautiful and intelligent girl in the world. I didn’t try to impress him and I just joked with him like we had been friends for years.

We quickly became close.

When he left for home at the end of the school year, we kept in touch through phone calls and letters…this was way before email. In one of our phone calls, he asked me how I felt about leaving the states and coming to live with him in France. I often think how different my life would have been if I had gone.

I eventually got married and had a child and lost touch with Patrick, but thought about him often. In 1999, I decided to use the internet to try to find him. I found several email addresses with his name attached to them…addresses from all over the world…but one caught my eye. It was “theinternetmonk@yahoo.fr”. I remember thinking…that’s got to be him! It was exactly his sense of humor and if I had gotten all caught up in the internet age, he probably had too.

I sent him an email and we corresponded on a regular basis…even talking through instant messenger. He moved to Canada in 2000 and married a friend of his there to get a visa. He became the web master for the Raelian organization and I began to lose touch with him again.
Apparently, the cult had a pull on him.

I’ve been dreaming of Patrick this week. I dreamed that he was alive and that my learning about his death was a mistake. I talked to him in my dream and he told me that he was fine and that he missed me. I told him how I tried to email him one weekend at the end of October and that his best friend emailed me back telling me that he had jumped off a bridge in Switzerland after a long stay in a mental institution. I told him how I cried and cried.

We used to joke about our precarious mental states, he and I. In my dream, we did again.

I miss you, my internet monk.

I’m going out of town this weekend…me and deshay…sort of a pre-birthday, damned- Katrina- for -fucking -up-voodoo- fest- trip. I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to do, but I do know that the journey will involve a 70’s and 80’s dance club in Dallas and this makes me very excited.

Speaking of getting older, my son has been making new friends in high school. Friends that look very mature. Friends that drive. (yes, drive) I spent some time today remembering back to when I was 14 and thinking, yes, I did have friends that drove…older friends..this is not the end of the world.

Still, I wasn’t ready.

I thought I had at least one more year of taxi-mom duty before his friends started getting licences. He’s the youngest of his close group of friends and I could deal with the fact that the other boys would be driving in a year or so and I would become obsolete as the only one in posession of a car. What I didn’t count on was that he would be making friends who were two years ahead of him in school and had hair longer than mine.

Don’t get me wrong. I love that hair. That’s not the thing. I distinctly remember seeing these guys in books a million playing chess and looking bored. It’s the fact that I look into the eyes of these guys and see my son’s future. It’s crazy..it’s like looking into a time machine and seeing what he will be like in two years.

I think these guys are still a little suspicious of me. They don’t know me yet. I don’t know them yet. All I know is that they dress like my son, have better hair than I do and seem to be pretty laid back (which is good). They’ve been over here almost every afternoon this week.

I think it’ll be ok. I heard one of them use the word “interloper” correctly in a sentence this afternoon. That’s pretty much all I needed to know.

Well, friend, you’re favorite sign in town is 3/4 of the way to being completely gone. Yes, you know the one…the Catfish Cabin sign on Louisiville. That appetizing, rust-drooling, 20 foot fish that we all know and love.

I am sorry for your loss. May it rest in peace.

Someone should consult me before doing these things. I say, leave the fish. It’s old, it’s big, at least it has character.

Take down, however, the church marquee by my house that constantly spounts, “all are evil” and “happiness is not the bottom line”.

Also, could you please do something about the Herringstone’s billboards. No matter how rich you are, if your daughters look like drag queens, they should not be blown up to historic proportions and placed out where everyone can see on North 7th street.

But then again, maybe that’s just me.

I am all lips and teeth.

I take your words
and seal them in a bottle
so that I can uncap them later
when I am at home in the dark.

I take in my breath.

I take a drink.

I have learned this week that an announcement was made at West Monroe High School that skulls are now banned from any article of clothing worn by students.

Hm.

Is this what we are spending our time on in the school board meetings? Banning the image of an x-ray’d human head?

My son has a skull shirt from a local clothing company called Mojos.  Instead of teaching the idea of promoting local business in his free enterprise class, apparently the idea is to teach, “you are what you wear and skulls are scary to us normal folks”.

Only once has anyone said anything to him about his clothes.  He was wearing a t-shirt which was vaguly flame-ish and a teacher told him that he shouldn’t be wearing demonic clothes to school.  To which he pointed at the kid next to him and replied, “Hey, don’t look at me, that guy’s wearing a Jesus shirt.”

I love my son.

There was no reason given for this absurb ban.  Possibly, they just didn’t like the connotation that the image of the skull conjures up.

Two words here.  Johnny Reb.  School Mascot.

School Flag: confederate (rebel) flag

Another student theory being passed around is that “they” don’t want anyone banding together as gangs and using the skull as a symbol.  As we already know, even just simple colors and strips of fabric can be used to identify gangs, so really, what’s the problem here?

I’m not sure when Jolly Roger became such a bad thing.  The whole idea is just silly.

So, please, West Monroe High School, maintain some sort of sense of humor here.

After all, I maintained mine when your HIGH SCHOOL football team got astro-turf.

The house of manic is situated on the corner of criminal activity and euphoria.

There is a lizard queen here. She rides around on roller skates with a bottle of vodka. We worship her because she is out standard of normalcy.

There are no beds here, no sleep – only bar stools that spin and spin. – Molecules that bounce, unaltered by conventional ways of thinking.

The house of manic has no walls. – We got bored one night and blew them up with toilet bowl cleaner and empty water bottles.

Our favorite phrase at the house of manic is, “it can’t be that hard, can it?” – sometimes prompting us to build home-made solar powered nuclear fusion machines – only to disassemble them the next day because we needed the duct tape for the inflatable swimming pool.

The noise here is constant. -definable sounds of music and typewriter keys – no song ever lasting more than two minutes. We live off a diet of heat-lamp fried chicken and gas station cappucino, the kitchen long-ago transformed into a moldy piece of living art- dirty glass sculptures piled high to the ceiling.

The foundation of the house is made of grey concrete. It is covered in poetry written with hot pink retractable sharpie. We lay on it at night and deconstruct words and ideas and theories. Conversation is our highest artform. Followed closely by sex. We have lots of great sex here.

What we don’t have here is electricity. We forgot to pay the bill.

Sometimes the neighbors drop by and offer us cookies and alternative ideas of betterment. “Therapy”, they say, “religion”. What they don’t understand is that we choose our lizard queen above all other gods. She gives us a life of measured chaos, time slips, fearless flights and lucid dreaming.

The house of manic is a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live here. – Especially in the winter – it gets cold with no walls and no heat. And the lizard queen always goes into hibernation. Our duct tape is replaced with red tape and police tape and we mostly just hold hands and hide out until the sun starts to shine again.

-Then, on to the dreaming – and the worship – and the vodka – and the racing, fleeting thought that nothing matters.