I haven't had much to say recently.
Most of what I would write would be bile. My gallbladder is tired and all my Cantista pals are already putting voice to my thoughts on most of the matters.
My creative energies have been focused on projects around the house. Whenever I start to wonder about the amount of time and energy I'm spending on my workbench, I remind myself that it's good practice for everything else I want to build. I'm learning from my mistakes made on something that will sit in the garage. Also, my future workbench stars as the centerpiece of our garage organization strategy.
My other energies have been spent trying to keep up with my two kids.
So I haven't been writing much.
My grandma always used to tell me "If you don't have anything good to say, then why do they call it a buffalo nickel?"
She was a vindictive old bitch.
At the time, I was about 10 years old. My grandfather had passed away a few years before. I was sifting through a huge collection of old coins that my grandpa had collected while combing the beaches in Orange County, back before they started raking the sand with huge beach cleaning machines. He would spot coins and other interesting detritus by the distinctive craters dug by the wind in the sand around the object. You could just stroll along the beach and find stuff without looking like a no-life nerd with a metal detector.
I'd already sorted the Mercury dimes from the Indian Head cents from the Standing Liberty quarters from the silver Washington quarters when I started in on the Buffalo nickels. I'd read that the animal referred to as the buffalo is actually the bison. I mentioned this tidbit to my grandma. I watched as she appeared to inflate, her eyes going wide as she snapped at me: "Then why do they call it the buffalo nickel?"
I remember thinking "Whoa, Grandma. I'm just a kid." I also remember wondering why my mom and dad left me alone with her as much as they did. (Now that I have my own kids, I don't wonder about that so much.)
I wish that I'd been able to explain to her then that the taxonomic name for the Plains Bison is Bison bison bison. Bitch.
My grandma had huge seething gobs of intelligence that remained untempered by knowledge, wisdom, or empathy. She was a nasty old cunt who spent her time with people like a spider on a captured fly, frantically poking with her fangs to find a weak spot and inject her venom.
I have found fragments of short stories that my dad wrote as a form of therapy. They are bleak and shattering.
My dad was her second and last child. My grandma blamed him for her weight problem, using her child as a scapegoat for her ability to eat five pounds of cheese in a week. After she finally died, my dad sifted through family photos and found an old California driver's license predating his birth by many years. She looked like someone had stuffed an air hose up her ass.
My aunt is a basket case. She is still family and every once in a while I can feel the connection, but you have to wade through torrents of histrionics to get to it. She's gone through three husbands. Her relationships with my two cousins are a bit strained to say the least.
My great grandparents were wonderful people. My dad tells stories of his grandma's baking and the quiet strength of his grandpa. I think that their love and attention kept my dad from driving a car off a cliff into the mud of the Back Bay or choking to death on his own puke in some random drunk tank.
My grandma's sister never married. She took the same native intelligence and put it to good use. There's an economics fellowship named after her at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
My grandma would lie.
She crowed to my parents about how much I loved her Salisbury steaks. She related words of praise that I never uttered, counting on me being too young to call her on it. I thought her damned meatloaf wannabe patties tasted like salted ass.
Speaking of salt, I once watched as she tore into a hunk of KFC. She ripped off the skin with her teeth and as she chewed the salt and spices and fat and oil and bird skin, she salted the flesh underneath. She salted KFC, which is as close as you can get to a chicken-flavored salt lick. She didn't just sprinkle a few crystals on the flesh. She poured until the chicken sparkled with a translucent crust of salt. Then she ate it.
My grandpa was a kind and loving man. My mom attests to this. In fact, he taught my mom to drive soon after she arrived from New Zealand.
As my dad explains, my grandpa loved my grandma too much.
My grandpa spoiled my grandma, he says.
I can't help but think that, as twisted as she was, something else got to her first.
Pakeha