Do I truly aspire to be a snobby new york culture writer?

Do I truly aspire to be a snobbish new york writer? This is the kind of question they should be asking me but are not. Instead they are saying "I've got this friend who makes her own greeting cards and sells them at rural-suburban new england craft fairs..." I woke up the other morning having just suffered a horrifyingly domestic sequence of dreams...in the moment before consciousness my mother was turned to me speaking with a look of blurred dissapointment saying "your tired of lawyers, jessie, its not that you're tired of being a lawyer" I read in a book once that in dreams the house represents the self, if there is a house. Now that I think of it I did not read this iin a book. I heard this off a 5 minute dream analysis segment on a morning talk show from the mouth of a very conservative looking, glossy and insecurely frosted mid 30 year old "dream expert" wearing a dress suit and clutching her hands in her lap. Still, I always think after a dream if I am the house then who is the babysitter? If I am the house, who is my mom?

In the apartment 7 winfield street, we currently employ 10-12 middle aged ladies of varying shapes and sizes on a semi to regular basis. Included in this estrogen rotation is myself, the youngest of the all female all sassy staff and the only live-in and blood related employee of the main subject, jestingly reffered to as nanee on the rare occasion, but most widely introduced and acknowledged and presented as Miss Josephine Zaikis, the main inhabitant and 3/4 loony 94 going on 95 year old of apartment A, 7 Winfield street, South Boston.

quotes

"what is it he's holding...it looked like a bottle of brute cologne."- Jimmy Fallon

"everything's ok if you end it with gIrl"- Wendy Williams

"we are merchants of good humor, if you will"

-CIRCUS

There's no time for love, Charlie Brown: first reply

The door handle signs I collected
one night, off the sidewalks and in between the bushes
of South Boston (they are bright blue with large white lettering)
read VOTE TODAY! I will not vote today.
The outcome, unlikely, should there be one,
is no longer the point. The importance
of things has dwindled down
into the chewability of an english muffin,
and who should stock the freeer? And what should be stocked,
and all that should be tossed away.

It is with joy that I voice my opinion
of the long rehearsed practice of the english mud-muffin,
the long forgotten records. It is with great and undue indignatio
that I respond to my mother's querie of where the jelly is,
or may have been, or certainly had once been.
I scoff (proudly) at the insinuation of jelly,
for I have seen no jelly slabbed or spread
or eaten here. For,
I have been her a long time.

Lately I have ducked my ears beneath the water,
which runs cold before I remember to remember
it will run cold, in the claw foot tub (my newest lover).
This old woman once scrubbed the sand from me,
and what is stranger,
my brother and I once shared a bath,
before the proper experiments had all
been conducted and, of course, he'd found me
hopeless. And just yesterday it seems, I saw him po out
in California. CAN YOU BELIEVE we strolled along
Venice Beach, all four of us-- of course,
he and my father walked slightly ahead, but
there were the skateboarders, the obscene couples,
attempting to reach each others' brains with their tongues,
and perhaps,
he found them brave. As the California salesmen tried
and tried to sell us pot, and as I could safely say,
you live here, Erik, and I do not.
And safely as nothing could be done about that,
and safely as nothing could be said about the state of CALIFORNIA
or of all things, or of bath tubs. Yes, as safely as that
I could fly through the air and past oceans and towns, away from you.
I could not pay attention to any of it. As safely as that,
I could return.

note to self: steve allen, banksy, elsa phillips, the old school comedian who reminds my mother of nane with her teeth out (check)

Backwards, he kept saying

Backwards, he kept saying,backwards. I thought of the red-haired Australian woman who'd used that word. I thought about her Italian husband and a murder in the non-descript mountains and her newly published novel cover-- how they'd changed the title. You just have no say in a thing like that, she'd said. Its all backwards out there.

And here I am writing in a new pen. And here I am in my new handwriting, my old rooms. I'd been down in their basement, stacking t-shirts.

I'd been down to the river, where was I? I looked up at the city of Richmond. This was all Bob's idea, of course. He didn't trust the water there.

I was driving to Boston and off the highway a tractor trailer caught on fire like a raw animal. The treetops singed and curled under around it. The highway went silent. The fire hoses spritzed and dribbled at the thing, which passed me by clear as a photograph-- real as it could manage.

There was a change, then, and we all had to crawl along on our stomachs for hours. Philadelphia came on full of Christmas tree lights. It looked like a dream. Only later did we see it was a factory. A man was saying "engine" like "injun". All I heard was injun, injun. Nobody saw her coming.

The cats are panting cadillacs. It drives a U-haul around town, pays 50 cents for red feathers and sticks them in its hair. I'm not good at these things, said Bob. And Bob, we can stay in our rooms, I said, we can read all these books! Oh, spine and brain, old whether or not...

This is how it felt underwater: like a tunnel. like its green.

Now keep moving. Take a left, sure but keep driving. The brickman lays his bricks down and you expect arrangements to be made for your shoes, don't you? What makes it so hard to say things straight is the peculiar shape of your pockets? To Ramona, you say, as if this means anything.

Ramona would not notice you on fire in her kitchen, dear. What does anyone mean by sickly, to Ramona? A man waters his plants and dries his kitchen counters with a dish towel. If the sheets had been there when we'd said they were, we'd have remembered. We are forever picking up these glass jars, saying heavy.

The truth was I'd been fired from my waitressing job on Wednesday morning the week before, information I was still guarding from my mother but joking about regularly with the woman who took care of my grandmother, Josephine, and lived on the third floor of our building. Both my Uncle and mother were coming in on a Tuesday to take Josephine to see the neurologist. I was still a bit high when my Uncle arrived and then my mother, who came in and immediately peered through the door into the living room where I was caught standing, waiting for her to walk toward the kitchen. She could see my feet I guess and stood there a moment, saying tersely "Hello Jess, come out and say hello" as if I had been hiding in the room all afternoon and had not come out to greet my Uncle and if not for her instruction would probably have stood silently in the room until they both left with Josephine.

Love's advice

Love's advice, he called it
pithy. He mixed his paints in
empty cardboard tubs
of popcorn. If it wasn't that
it was at least very close
to that. The tubs themselves
were always neon blue and orange
but he didn't mind much, talking
about them. My neurologist
had thought I was attractive,
but we don't see eachother anymore.
Sort of squirrelly, thin...and handsy,
one might say.

Beth sits at home and thinks of
terrible things. She places things
in lead jars and lifts them,
saying, heavy.