Epilogue I

In the last few months, it seems that most of my people have lost interest in my blog, which is a-okay and fine by me. I haven’t had anything interesting to post, and the random stories and anecdotes that might have passed as mildly entertaining I’ve already shared with you, friends of mine, via voice-mail, snail-mail, or email.

And to the rest of you:

I will not join FaceBook. Ever. I have not joined for so long, that I’m now part of the too-cool-for-school cool kids again, and I like it.

Some of you out there I’m always eager to hear from, of course, and catch up with. You know who you are and you know how to find me. (Unless you want me to read your angsty-shit poetry about how ambivalent and detached you are. If you love me, you’ll keep it to yourself, thank you very much.)

What’s more, I’d be remiss if I didn’t personally address those of you who happen upon my blog by typing in the search phrase “UC-E6 USB Cable”… Sorry, man. I’ve got nothing. I’ve never had nothing and I’m sorry for misleading you into thinking I ever had something. Your best bet is to go to an electronics store and ask nice ladies named Valerie or Paula or Jackie about where you can find an Image Mate. Mine’s worked out well these last few months, especially since I eventally found the original cord I had lost at the bottom of a handbag…

Okay, OKay, I’m rambling. I’m rambling and I’m sorry. So to those of you who I love hearing from, (and if you’ve ever dressed up like Gilgamesh for a class project, or if you’ve ever known anyone who has dressed up like Gilgamesh for a class project, you know who you are) I’d love to hear from you. Everyone else, yeah, you’re okay, too.

Take care. Much Love. Deuce.

Oklahoma City, Sr.

I know what you’re thinking:  an Okie gets a better job offer in Dallas and decides to move, hasn’t that been done already?  Yes, it’s been done.  It’s been done by about seventy-five percent of my graduating class.  I should probably feel like something of a cliche, but then again, I’m getting a company car, and on the eve of my poor little cloud’s 200,000 mile birthday, too.

 To Dallas, then!

 (Sometime next week, I mean).

(Help!) I Need Somebody! (Help!)

My computer crashed just before Christmas.  Crashed as in, would no longer turn on.  I had been having issues with it, took it in a few times, but I’m afraid the techs at CompUSA fried my hard drive.  I just got my computer back today.  Everything is gone.  All my drafts from the last year, everything I’ve sent in for publication, the beginning of a novel, my Masters thesis (most of which I had backed up), original songs by Wes, and most sentimental of all, pictures.

 Since I’m not one to moralize, I’ll let you draw your own moral from this story.  The ‘life lesson’ pretty much goes without saying.

I’ve made my peace with having to start over again, word-wise.  There’s actually something refreshing in starting over, in no longer being haunted by drafts and scraps and pieces of things that have sat on my computer and….sat.  And rotted.  And wasted my time.  At least now I have the opportunity to start something new and do something different.  Although I’m not a nihilist, there is something very appealing (even romantic) about the whole creation/destruction binary. 

 So that’s where I’m at.  A few words later.  I’m going to send out an email to most of you later.  The subject line will be something along these lines:  “Together, We Can Recapture the Magic!”  In it, I’ll beg each and everyone of you for any pictures that I happen to be stading in this last year.  No, that won’t replace the pics I had of harvest moons, freshly plowed fields, a weekend at the Texas State Fair, or the Red Bud Classic, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy them all the same!

So how about it?  K, you want to send me a copy of ‘Circumnavigation’ if you still have it?  (Gone.  It’s gone.  The best poem I’ve ever written.  Gone.)  Everyone else, you want to send me pictures?  Or something?  (Like money.  Money would be a nice thing to send.  So would a bottle of vodka.)

I have bigger updates to come, but for now, just a plea:  please, sir, (pretend I’m a Dickensian street urchin ) please let me borrar some pikchas….

The New Black/In the Red

So when did it become okay to say “the weather” meaning “inclement weather”? I thought it was just an expression country people like my grandparents said, but after yesterday, I realized that even the most urbane of my customers were using the expression. “Looking for boots?” “Got to have something for the weather that’s coming through this weekend…” It would seem that “the weather” meaning “inclement weather” is the new black (or grey, rather, because technically, grey is the new black this year). Before any of you run off and start abusing this new colloquialism (Cody) it is imperative that you must say it in front of a mirror a few times, get a feel for it, before you go out an use it in public. Imagining a giant rain cloud with devil horns and meaney face will help you get the point across, the point being that The Weather is out to get you.

Clearly, I am homebound today. I’m not on my laptop, alas, because it is in the clutches of the techs at a computer super-store. A computer store, I might add, that recently announced it was closing after the holiday season. Had I known Friday what I knew Saturday, I never would have taken it in. I paid for the service up front, but I now I’m having regrets. Having, too, bad dreams about losing everything on my hard drive (it goes like this: I smile I take the laptop from the tech, I open up the cover, hit the power button, and my laptop explodes…)

It really, really sucks for these guys–I just can’t think of a better way to say it. It effing sucks. Instead of a holiday bonus, they’re getting a pink slip. My heart goes out to Derick especially, who was on his way out to pick up his little girl from school. She’s seven and can put together and take apart computers better than her father. He told me he’s very blessed to have such a smart little girl, a beautiful wife, and a job in which he can spend time with his family on the weekends… There’s Erik who is working two full-time jobs to get ahead on his loans, who told me he’s at least fortunate enough to have something to fall back on, that he’s not completely out of pocket like most of the other guys. And Caleb, savvy and efficient who has been with the company for several years, now.

I think my mom’s right, though. As much as I like these guys, if something goes wrong with my laptop, I’ll have no recourse to any higher up. Shall I brave these icy streets and rescue my laptop? I might as well. I have cabin fever, even though I’ve only been home for less than twenty-four hours.

Hot Daddy (What a Racket)

Not long after I opened the store yesterday, a little girl in cowgirl boots up to her knees teetered through the door, her father close behind and pushing a stroller with an even younger child wriggling around in the bassinet. “Shoes!” She had to have been maybe three. I crouched down to her level and told her I liked her cowgirl boots. They were in fact the coolest cowgirl boots ever–brown and yellow flowers stitched onto bright pink leather. What made the outfit complete were the cammo-print pants tucked into the boots, and a red t-shirt tucked into her pants.

“Did your daddy help you get dressed this morning?” I was dying to ask, but didn’t. “I like your shoes,” she said to me, and reached down to pet my pony-hair flats. I asked her father if I could help him find something, and he asked me for my phone number.

Tic Toc

Is that leopard print?

It sure is.

I hate leopard print.  You know why I hate leopard print?

Why do you hate leopard print?

Because the woman who got me fired from my last job wore leopard print all the time.

When was that?

This morning.

Blind Man’s Bluff

Only the Irish could have come up with a holiday as cool as Halloween.  (In fact, the Irish did come with Halloween.  Not only did they come up with Halloween, but they also came up with such nostalgic traditions as turnip-carving.  I learned all about it just this week.)

I’ll say it again, Halloween is my favorite night of the year to close.  All the kids dress up as their favorite action hero, princess, fire truck, or Christmas tree–each one my new favorite–and make their way from store to store, sometimes shyly (a lot of times not), with pillowcases, shopping bags, and bright orange pumpkin buckets.

Two years ago, my favorite little girl was Princess Toadstool.  Last year, it was a little boy who had no idea he was going as Charlie Brown.  This year, my favorite little girl was a dinosaur.  The costume was way too big for her.  It was a onsie/hoodie number, and the plush dinosaur head which sat on top of the hoodie kept falling forward.  The little girl, though, just kept walking even though she couldn’t see.  I know I’m a terrible person for laughing at a little kid, but in my defense, her parents started it.  The poor little thing started walking in dizzing circles around her father, trying to find him.  And everytime she ran into, say, a table instead, she would roar like an angry dinosaur.  It was priceless.

Here’s One

It was Saturday, college game-day, the worst day to work at the mall because Texas fans are obnoxious.  So are USC fans, but that’s another story.  Anyway.  I’m trying to use my mad powers of suggestion to convince a guest that she needs to buy a $120 bag.  I was chatting her up and somehow it came up that she needs a longhorns hoodie.  I suggested a few places, I step back to the counter a minute and Tamara hisses, completely serious, “Tell her if she wants a longhorns shirt, she should go back to Texas!”  I kicked her behind the counter.  “Tamara, who cares.  I’m trying to sell a bag, here.”  Of course, the guest overheard the exchange, but fortunately, she thought we were funny.

“An Open Letter to De Codified” or “Writer s Un Blocked”

Dear Cody (and tacitly, other interested parties and sports fans):

I know I’ve been remiss about posting these last few, erhm, weeks, and when I have posted, the entries have been a little less than substantial.  There are several reasons for this, of course.  For one, I have to go to Panera or the public library for secure (funny, huh?) internet access.  The other and probably most significant reason that I haven’t been regularly posting is that I finally have a story worth writing.  That is to say, I’m taking a hiatus from the Writer’s Block.

Last summer, KCMP asked me over a Sam Adams why I closing out the successful tointerpellate.blogspot.com.  After all, I had amassed such a great and interested readership of friends and friends of friends.  I told her it was because I had committed to blogging for a year and the year was now up.  “Bullshit.  Why are you really closing out your blog?”  The real reason was, and I think you’ll understand what I mean, that blogging had become to easy.  It was too easy to write an entry, knowing exactly who my audience was and all of that.  I needed to do something more challenging.

That fall, I finished up my coursework at OU.  I didn’t expect it to be as trying as it was, but shit happens, you know?  And after grad school happened, the Writer’s Block happened.  Writer’s Block, as you well know, is something of a misnomer.  It’s more like a paralysis.  For me, it was as though my thoughts were out of sync with my fingers.  It was an issue of rhythm–of feeling the words as I write them, and of feeling them again as I reread my work.

So.  Instead of growing more and more frustrated, I started blogging again, this blog, because, hell, at least I was writing something new.  In the meantime, I was revising old drafts and sending them off for publication.  (Nothing exciting on that front, but you’ll be the first to know when it happens, or rather, second after my mom).

And then, when the summer happened, I started writing letters to Michael.  (Tall J has asked me what I write about, and I told him, nothing really, I just try to be as entertaining as possible.  Like, how I utilized the public transportation of OKC for one day, answered the door one morning to several admiring fans of Sam’s who had got the wrong address, heard scandalous rumors about a certain individual who had secret boyfriends in high school, and tried to convince everyone at the SKKY Bar one night that it would be really cool if the Spice Girls reunited to do a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.”)

Maybe it was because I was both typing AND writing, but I became Writer’s Unblocked around mid-August.  Happy birthday to me!  Unfortunately, my poor blog has suffered and, as a result, your blog-loving appetite has hardly been sated.  I’ll post again, I swear.  I promise I won’t close down this blog as I did the other back in July.  All the same, don’t count on anything spectacular anytime soon.  I have a story to finish and an editor to find.

Much love, always, and I’m looking forward to seeing you this weekend!  (Fox and Hound?  Something low-key?  I’m totally game for driving down to Norman this weekend since they’re playing an away game on Saturday.)

Misty Moo

What Book Are You?

Well, Ann, this is The Book I Are:

You’re The Great Gatsby!
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having grown up in immense wealth and privilege, the world is truly at
your doorstep. Instead of reveling in this life of luxury, however, you spend most of
your time mooning over a failed romance. The object of your affection is all but
worthless–a frivolous liar–but it matters not to you. You can paint any image of the
past you want and make it seem real. If you were a color of fishing boat light, you
would be green.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.