Vinnie Finds the Ghost

As every day is anything but boring, today in the West Valley it is overcast and drizzly. Thank heavens for the fires close by, I am hoping the drastic weather changes are happening all over, containing some of this horror. I have not had time to check the news, I am just keeping my fingers crossed.

However, the day after the last post about my brother and the dream and our cat Vinnie being even more weird than usual, I had almost managed to stop trying to logic out what felt supernatural and get on with things.

Then Vinnie started up again. Normally he is a Daddy’s boy, but those last two days he was focusing on me, running up to me, beeping and hopping about, this time he was focused on the open door of my bathroom.

We have a Rabbit, birth name Ze Bull, nickname Wullith. He lives in my bathroom, and since we don’t want him to feel lonely, have a barrier up so that he can hear the comings and goings of everyone and feel part of things. He is getting old and a bit portly, when he was younger he would have chewed through the barrier in 3 seconds flat.

So, Vinnie is at the barrier, focused on the corner of the floor where the door opens, and there is NOTHING THERE. He is clicking and tweaking and Tomas and I are completely flummoxed. We go from the supernatural to “what the hell is living under the house?”, which takes me back to being a kid and watching a movie called “crawlspace” that has stayed with me for 40 years. Deep Breath and a bit of sanity are required at this point. I manage the breath, but my sanity is being stretched a bit, even for me.

Gathering some faux bravado from God-knows-where, I start to move the barrier, as Wullith is out in the yard, kicking back in the dirt under the ficus tree. The barrier is a large square window fan, squeezed next to a pile of hardcover books and an empty Corona light box. It’s about 6 degrees below thrift shop chic. I believe that falls into the category of ugly, but sometimes things just have to be utilitarian, and one has to give up any semblance of decent taste.

I digress.

Vinnie is now in a state of electric shock, when we see it - a salamander whips out into the hallway. Tomas grabs Vinnie, and I grab the salamander, remembering not to grab his tail but up by his neck, gently. He is a wild little guy, and manages to nip my thumb, but after much chaos, we get him out into a tree, Vinnie has a fit that we did not let him torture and kill it, and I feel utterly foolish at my complete conviction that Vinnie was seeing my brother, or my father, or our recently passed cat Monkeyman.

Tomas goes back to his computer, and I try to sigh away the flop sweat of superstition run wild, when Tomas calls me into the studio.

Hey, this is weird,” he says, pointing to the computer screen. He had looked up the word salamander, and found this link.

Yesterday was my second day driving after re-injuring my back, I was in my old Volvo, and glancing up, saw the plastic salamander that I had affixed to the rearview window over ten years ago. It has never fallen, and it has been there so long it is just not something I notice anymore.

So guess what? We’re back to being convinced that my father is sending signals from beyond - don’t stop writing.

Vinnie has calmed down, it is starting to lightly rain, and Tomas is working on the last cue in “American Dumpling”.

It is a nice day. As always, we send our thoughts to the people who have been in the fires, and also send our sorrow that the 9th ward in New Orleans didn’t get the same wonderful treatment as the evacuees in the wealthy areas of Malibu and San Diego.

The anger at that issue will be howled from my main page in the politics section “No Fear…” at Kelly Mahan Jaramillo.

For me, it is often difficult to enjoy the rare moment of peace while others are suffering. Does that happen to you?

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Very strange happenings going on right now. Half of Southern California is on fire, for starters. Yesterday, Tomas and I woke up after the night of wild winds, to see a HUGE dark brown and yellow cloud just to the north. A few days before the winds began, I casually mentioned to Tomas that, living in the west Valley, we are quite protected from fires - the whole city would have to be on fire first. Van Nuys would be the last to go. I do not know why that popped into my head, but two days later, fires everywhere.

And here they are. The dreaded Santa Ana’s. I am worried about my biography subject, Warren King, as he lies in Santa Clarita, and I have written him twice, no response. I am edgy.

What does this have to do with my brother Kerrigan Mahan? This morning I had a very vivid, short dream about him. I was in the laundry room, throwing in a load of laundry, when I heard someone behind me. Tomas was due home, but I did not hear the door. I turned around, startled, ready to sock him on his arm for sneaking up on me, and it was not Tomas. it was my brother. I have not spoken to or seen my brother in over three years. I will expound on this on the memoirs page on my web site, as it is long and complicated. I was surprised, but very glad to see him. We hugged, and he told me that he and his wife Melanie, (more on her in memoirs - the little time I spent with her, well, I think she is a very cool woman) were moving to Canada and just wanted to say goodbye. I started to ask if it was because this country had gone to hell in a handbasket, but then woke up. Okay.

However, all day our little white cat Vinnie has been sitting and staring at the exact spot where I was standing in the dream. At first Tomas and I thought it was a mouse, we (well, he) tilted both the washer and dryer up while I looked under them for a mouse or rat or whatever. Nothing. Dust bunnies hugging the usual horrifying mixture that grows under big appliances, where after a few years there is a small city under there.

We shrugged and went about our business. But Vinnie would not leave. All day, when I have gone into the kitchen, he is staring intently, then he beeps at me, as if he is saying, “Hi! Aren’t you going to say hi to your brother?”

He is not acting stimulated, like he would if there were something alive, he is not acting freaked out, if the winds or the fires were upsetting him, and just now I quietly went into the kitchen and watched him. He is lying down, ears erect, paws out, and he slowly gazed across the washer and dryer, then looked up, exactly how he looks up at a person.

Maybe it is me, but I have a gut feeling he is seeing something I cannot see, he is alert but relaxed, and all I can think of is that my brother has died.

Our friend Pete Evans believes that souls only hang around for three days. I disagree, but none of know, we all have our own experiences with something that may challenge our senses, and we desperately need to make sense of it.

My father, Bill Mahan, has been dead for over five years, but I have had many bizarre happenings concerning him in those five years. Of course, when he was dying, I made him promise to haunt me. He got a real kick out of that, and believe me, he has. He is having a grand time gaslighting me. I knew he would but LORD!

I told him he could rearrange the furniture, make good light bulbs go out, just have fun. He has, and continues to. He liked to have fun. Just look at him! Little Billy Mahan. So Pete and I have different theories on the afterlife.

But Pete’s theory has stayed with me, and today, between the dream and Vinnie’s completely out of character behavior, has my mind and heart spinning. Logic and emotion are in a headlock. I want to call or e-mail my brother, as it is the only way I would find out - I have dropped off the radar with my family. Obviously, I am easy to find via the internet, but…..let’s just say it is not for certain anyone would make the effort. Again, more detail on the web page.

For now, a note to Kerrigan, the only blood relative I have feelings for -
I love you, and I am so sorry we just cannot seem to work it out. It is not all you, it is not all me, maybe we are just too much alike, and where we are different does not get along at all. I wish I were enlightened enough to accept the whole package, but I cannot. Especially since you are so tight with the other two. I am sorry.

Next life maybe?

I still have a small wish that in this life, you show up at the door, and we have found a common ground. But I have made it hard, because I figure at this point, I need the reality of if you want to find me, you will make an effort. I probably sound like an asshole, a princess, but I know my life, and I am tired of making the first move. Maybe I am an asshole.

I digress.

Ker, I just hope you are happy.

It is almost six o’clock p.m. on Monday, and Vinnie has still not left his post.

Bobby the Crow is sitting beside me, playing with Bills old fishing sinkers, and I have work to do.

I think that may include talking to a ghost.

Although, it just occurred to me, it could be the Monkey-man……who died on Bill’s birthday, and Vinnie misses him terribly. As sad as that is, I hope that is the case, because if something happened to you, dear bro, it would hurt more than you will ever believe.

Oh brother, where art thou?

Writing - can’t live with it, can’t live without it

My husband, Tomas Hradcky, is an Independent film composer. I am a struggling writer. In other words, we are broke. It is difficult to shut out the anxieties of too much to pay out, too little coming in. It is not conducive to creativity.

I used to use writing as an escape, instead of focusing on my real life problems, and before I knew it, I had four almost finished novels in my computer, about a zillion short stories, and future ideas in a folder. I started wondering if I should take this seriously and perhaps try to make it a career. After all, I came from a writing family - both of my parents and my Aunt had published books, my father wrote a syndicated column…..

I started taking it seriously, buying more writing books than I needed, and forcing myself to write every day.

That is when it became absolutely no fun. It was not an escape anymore, it was a chore, and I started hating it, avoiding it, considering going back to my old escape, the downtown sibling of Sister Morphine, because I was depressed! Where had the fun gone?

So I stopped, and got even more depressed. I was constantly pulled back to something I had written, kind of liked it, and would spend the whole day writing, feeling great. Normally, my addictive personality says, if it feels great, do it all the time.

Not this time.

Perhaps it is the serious case of arrested development colliding with a serious desire to be a little more responsible. Or perhaps we are trained that when we hear the word “work” it is synonymous with “hard and miserable”.

So, for the hundreds of dollars spent on hundreds of writing books where all of the authors insist that you sit down and write every day, I am doing just that, in the form of this web page and blogs. I am going to have a blog for almost every mood, be terribly self-absorbed and self-indulgent, and if someday I make a little chicken with writing, that will be the icing on the cake.

If nobody reads it, who cares. I am enjoying myself again, and for a suicidal type like myself, that beats the hell out of making money.

Although I do like to eat, too…..

Back in WHAT day, Embryo?

Warning:
If you are one of the few remaining people on the road who drives a car with no air conditioning and manual windows, DO NOT roll them down. It would be better to be dripping sweat than pull up next to a young caucasian man who looks to have just obtained his drivers license, vroom-vroom-ing in his little silver zoom-zoom, his rap music causing your car to shake, cell phone plastered to his ear, yelling,

“I know dude, totally, I know. I’m telling you dude, I know. Back in the day, man, you know, back in the day….”

For once I was actually sorry the light changed, as I was frozen in horror, yet insanely curious as to what “back in the day” meant to this kid who had been born AFTER Spandex died.

Back in the day of…..what? When all you could do was talk on a cell phone and it didn’t take pictures?

Two months ago when you broke up with your eighth girlfriend after dating for a week?

Back in the day when you no longer received nutrition out of a bottle and were eating with a spoon?

Back in the day when you were floating in nice warm salt water?

I must know, embryo.

Okay, what kind of airline is God running, here?

Okay, from the last post, I went through the extremely odd feeling of reading Susan Gordon Lydon’s autobiography, I am halfway through, and the twenty-four hour span of reading her one night, fully confident that I was going to find her web page, to discovering she had died, was a surreal reading experience. Now I keep calculating out her age as she recounts what was going on when she was thirty, and thinking that she had no idea her life was already half over. (She died of cancer at age 61).

I have always maintained that I would have handled my life so much better if I had been given a death date. It seems a little bit like the good old creator of this schizophrenic mish-mash we call living forgot that little addition. We all know we are born alone, and die alone, and our parents get our arrival date, but we get no departure date!

So I ask you - what the hell kind of airline is God running? Do you think he/she/it/ is up there, pounding his palm on his forehead and saying, “Damn, damn DAMN! I cannot believe I forgot to include the death date! And I cannot fix it, too many of them think I am all powerful and if I let on that I made this hideous mistake, I’ll stop getting all of this positive attention and I just don’t know if I can handle that. Oh, Me, I just feel terrible!”

Personally, I hope God feels guilty as hell. Most of the religions out there, should one subscribe, pump us full of guilt for just about everything we say or do.

Well, uh-uh. Girlfriend ain’t having none of that noise. God should feel guilty, not us.

We’re all stranded without a return ticket, just knowing that ka-bang, we’re gonna be leaving……..at some point.

Consequently, we are all slightly insane somewhere underneath our veneer of normalcy, however thick or thin one happens to have been able to make their shellac.

And God has the nerve to try to make US feel guilty.

I. Don’t. Think. So.

Susan Gordon Lydon

Warning to reader: Despite being primarily humorous, this first post is not, because of what happened today. They won’t all be so grim (despite a little too much death in my life these days) I promise.

Many years ago, I was given a book “Take the Long Way Home” by Susan Gordon Lydon. I have been sitting here for about ten minutes, comparing the first edition dated signed copy, irritated, because it was given to me on my birthday by a friend named Ingrid Heinze. It was given to me for a specific reason, it was a birthday gift, but for the life of me I cannot remember how old I was. I have been doing the math, the book came out in 1993, but…it does not quite jibe with what I was doing on my birthday fourteen years ago.

It does not matter. I read it, liked it, and it has travelled with me for at least 12 years. For the past few days, I have been packing up some books, and came across it. I have about a million books, but I have not felt like reading in months, due to catatonic depression that shows up every summer, each one worse than the last. It is finally starting to lift, and “Take The Long Way Home” was in one of the piles in my office that I was dispiritedly trying to organize. I flipped it open and it grabbed me. Hallelujah! I wanted to read again.

One of my little hobbies with the internet and web-pages and all this business is to contact authors whose work I enjoy and write them an e-mail. I get a huge thrill when I receive a reply. The last “snail mail” response from author Samantha Dunn is a personal treasure, it is probably the last paper response I will ever get. Still, an e-mail is very exciting.

So, I googled Susan Gordon Lydon, just as I had googled and had a brief dialogue with Sara Davidson (”Loose Change”) and Carolyn See (”Dreaming”).

What came up was that Susan Gordon Lydon had died two years ago, on July 17th. There was no point in even trying not to cry. I had been looking so forward to the fabulous internet highway connecting me with her.

Guess what I found out today. The internet just tells you they are dead. So far, the internet has yet to upgrade to sending an e-mail to the deceased one’s web-page. I am certain Apple will figure out a way soon.

For all of the younger women out there, you owe a huge debt to Susan Gordon Lydon. For all of you struggling with heroin abuse, you might want to pick up a copy. For me, even though there will be no e-mail, I am still so glad to have found her. Thank god for words.