Obama did it!

I - and the rest of the world - can breathe more easily again.

NTD

Just Checking In

I haven't gone anywhere... but it's hard to know what to say anymore during this economic collapse/presidential campaign. I believe that everything - from the insightful to the ridiculous - is being stated all over the place.

However, we did get to see the Divine Mister Obama live and in person on Sunday at an Asheville rally. It was a proud moment, and Obama yard signs, buttons and stickers continue to sell briskly at the shop.

The fall of the global economy is in the hearts and minds of my customers. Still, sales haven't plummeted any worse than they already had in the previous months of 2008.

Today I'm just hoping for an Obama victory and good leaf season sales.

NTD

Gasoline Blues

Are you there, God? It's me, the NTD.

Where the hell is all the gasoline in Asheville, Lord? I found only one station that was selling - and you could spot it a half mile away, with fifty cars backed up on either side of it. Multiple policemen were present in order to keep the peace.

It would be less frustrating, except that I am assured that the pumps are flowing freely elsewhere.

Any divine intervention would be much appreciated.

Your arrogant little American daughter currently residing in a western North Carolina gulag,

NTD

P.S. Really, God, it's just the PMS and an empty gas tank talking here. I will be working on resuming my gratefulness for every breath and restoring my sense of awe as I ponder the infinite beauty and wondrous glory of the universe shortly, I promise.

A Republican Drinking Game

It's a tough week in the news, trying not to write about the Governess of the North. All of us liberal opinionators are like moose caught in the headlights of Sarah Palin's Suburban, paralyzed while she aims her gospel gun toward our bleeding hearts. I miss falling asleep to the soothing sounds of Barack Obama's dreamy voice offering hope and change to those of us who have not enjoyed the last eight years.

But that was so last week; it's been all-Sarah, all the time on the news ever since John McCain made his startling announcement. The McCain/Palin ticket promises two political strategies: pandering to a brand of fundamentalists who have about three issues on which they base all of their voting decisions, and remaining defensive and prickly about anything else the candidates might have said or done which deserves comment. If the National Enquirer doesn't find some John Edwards-level dirt on Mrs. Palin soon (and what a sorry state of mind I'm in to depend on the Enquirer for investigative reporting), I'm going to be engaging in electoral drinking games until November.

Join me in the fun! Head to the liquor store and follow these simple rules, and you'll be an advanced alcoholic (but for the left!) in no time.

- One shot of Svedka vodka every time Palin denies the man-made aspect of global warming
- One shot of Gummi Bear N' Schnapps whenever Palin defends her anti-polar bear protection position
- One shot of Sailor Jerry Rum every time Palin defends her anti-beluga whale protection position
- One sip of sacramental wine every time Palin suggests that God wants a $30 billion natural gas pipeline built in Alaska
- One shot of Jose Cuervo whenever McCain struggles to appease both pro-immigration Latinos and anti-immigration white coservatives
- One shot of Hennessy every time that you notice that the McCain-Palin ticket is failing to attract black voters
- One sip of a perfect mojito whenever Palin decries gay marriage
- One Miss Saigon for every instance of McCain retelling his Vietnam experience
- One gulp of Samuel Adams Brown Ale when Palin suggests that our Founding Fathers recited the Pledge of Allegiance
- One keg stand every time that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are trotted out as a young couple for whom "life happens"
- One sip of a Dirty Martini whenever you check out a YouTube video of John McCain staring at Sarah Palin's breasts or rubbing up against hapless female Republicans - One White Russian for each instance of Cindy McCain mentioning Alaska's proximity to Russia via the Bering Strait
- One Jager Bomb for each reference to Palin's extensive command of the Alaska National Guard
- One bottle of Dom Perignon for every time John and Cindy McCain realize that they own another home
- One liter of Fiji Water whenever some bitter Ron Paul supporter comes up and tries to convince you that bottled water lover Mr. Paul can still beat Obama and McCain
- One bong hit whenever John McCain talks tough about opposing medical marijuana
- One shot of Wild Turkey for every instance of Palin or McCain complaining about the liberal media
- One Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer each time multi-millionaire John McCain suggests that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are elitist
- One Mind Eraser every time that John McCain neglects to mention the incumbent Republican George Bush
- One nuclear cocktail if McCain starts singing his perennial favorite "Bomb Iran, bomb, bomb Iran"

The drinking game continues until the Obama/Biden ticket wins and Palin heads back to Alaska for hunting season. However, if the Republicans prevail in the presidential election, keep up the game as long as possible. Crying in your beer and/or other remaining liquor will be perfectly acceptable for the next four years (as the economy tanks further, you may substitute malt liquor or My Wild Irish Rose). But do not - I repeat, do not - drink that Republican Kool-Aid.

NTD

Lynne Spears for Vice-President

Bristol Palin is five months' pregnant... what is this, Lynne Spears for VP?

My gosh, maybe I should have thrown my own hat in the ring and given Obama an outsider choice to compete with this fiasco. At least both of my daughters made it into college without getting knocked up. And, let's see, I have owned a store for 21 years, and between that and birthing two babies - I feel about as qualified as Tina Fey's cousin from the far north....

Shouldn't McCain care about the safety of this country more than he cares about winning an election?

NTD

The Bong Show

I sell many, many things in my shop. Along with Indian tapestries, Japanese incense, glass jewelry and Obama stickers are several cases of tobacco accessories. I have always blamed this on my old friend Eric, who back in 1987 talked me into displaying three deer antler pipes that he made in between downing twelve-packs of PBR and smoking packs of More menthol cigarettes in the back of that sharecropper shack he was staying at off Highway 301. I agreed to consign them, and shoved over a few vintage rhinestone brooches in the case to make room for them.

They sold.

Although I didn't care for smoking in any form, I kind of liked selling pipes. The tobacco paraphernalia clientele is generally a grateful one, and not shy about shelling out the bucks for a myriad of smoking devices. A couple of decades later, I sell vaporizers, water pipes, handpipes ranging from corn cob to color-changing glass, bubblers, and traditional meerschaums. I still don't smoke, which means that I spend a lot of time listening to people describe the pros of cons of carburators and the widths and lengths necessary to draw from an upright sherlock, and whether a Gravitron is practical for solo use. There's a thesis waiting to be written regarding the fine art of smoking, I'm sure of it.

So - in spite of the fact that a certain 1994 Supreme Court decision rendered the selling of a thing called a "bong" a felony (so of course none of us in the business sell anything named the "B" word, we're just selling tobacco waterpipes) - I attended an accessories show in Las Vegas this week which my daughter and I nicknamed The Bong Show. We spent several hours staring breathlessly at thousands of pipes. While others at the show were obviously considering their personal smoking possibilities, I was one of those parties whose cartoon balloon floating above my head would have instead focused on this subject: Can I Triple My Money On This One? Would My Shop Move A Hundred Of These By New Years?

Besides, there were way too many Bong Babes in there. The average thirty year old dude who owns a store would salivate over dozens of women clad in fishnets and Daisy Dukes and black brassieres, but middle-aged mamas such as myself - there were perhaps another one or two women who made buying decisions in addition to me - were just angry that there was not a single Scantily Clad Man.

I mean, I feel good about selling an item which so obviously skirts the legal line of respectability. Pipe-selling makes me feel vaguely bad ass, although I realize that this is just an illusion (but it's a pretty good illusion when you're pushing fifty, as I am). It's a nice business, nice folks, nice products, and nothing that Wal-Mart can ever take away from me. Pipes have helped put my daughter through college and paid two mortgages. But - just like when I ran the biggest used CD and indie music business in a college town back in the nineties, it's a man's world. And nothing reminds me of this fact so much as being at a trade show where all the girls wear push-up bras and stilletos, while the men handle all the money.

All of this just inspires me to try harder. Pipes aren't really a gender issue, anyway, right?

BONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONGBONG...

NTD

I Heart Hyphens

I spilled my Shredded Wheat on the keyboard the other day. There are three keys which have not worked ever since: the five, the six, and the hyphen. Rather than plugging in a spare keyboard to replace the faulty one, we have been adjusting to the change. I was definitely becoming too hyphen dependent... in fact, I am jonesing to use one right this second, and am substituting the melodramatic ellipsis instead. I've also gotten a little more high faluting with an increase in semicolons and colons. Alternating between semicolons and ellipsis, my writing resembles the ramblings of a depressed spinster English professor.

Project for the day: replace the keyboard....

NTD

Just tell yourself, Ducky
You're really quite lucky.

Dr. Suess, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973)

NTD

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

- Rumi

Mean People

The amazing Stewart left his 401K and other benefits behind him in order to help his girlfriend with her shop. That would be me and my store. While some view this merging and mingling as a precarious teetering toward potential disaster, I think that it is just peachy. A) I need the help, because all other wonderful people involved have health, family and educational conflicts, and B) Stewart is a completely excellent human being who knows how to open a cash register and make change.

Twenty one years of a very eccentric retail business has taught me that every day can be weirder than a series of Clerks outtakes. Take our bathroom: our loo has suffered everything from opiate works left behind on the toilet tank to clogged-up leavings from allegedly good friends who neglected to notice the plunger, and you can take both of those facts literally as well as metaphorically. My own daughter managed to open the superglue and taste the contents when she was two years old and another daughter was largely raised in an appliance-sized cardboard box filled with styrofoam peanuts and watercolor markers. They both ran credit card machines while too short to reach the cash register without a stool. I got divorced and fell in love (the latter more than once) while standing behind the counter. I fired one employee who had bragged about having sex in my dressing room, although that was not the particular offense which led to dismissal. I fired several others who sold drugs, stole merchandise, and/or would not leave their vicious dogs at home. Plus, there are the customers.

Stewart is already meeting The Mean People: The Mean Blind Girl, The Mean Dwarf. Any day now he'll meet The Mean Spitting One-Eyed Vietnam Vet, if no one sends him back to jail. Stewart is really nice, so he was trying to describe The Mean Blind Girl to me with compassion:

An interesting girl who couldn't see came in today, and I tried to help her with the rings...

"Oh my God! That mean blind bitch is back! Don't let her waste your time..."

He was taken aback by my nastiness, but I know this girl and her longsuffering older husband/parent/caretaker/whatever. She complains and insists on cutting deals in a charmless way:

Gimme a break, I'm blind... can't I have this twenty dollar ring for twelve? C'mon... God, why don't you have more rings my size... show me all your size nine rings with square stones, I don't like round ones... Harry! make her help me with this....

I try to look at Harry and imagine that he married this girl when she was fourteen and cute and has to face the aftemath forever, sort of how I also imagine Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So I treat the couple like I would any other unpleasant customers and go about my business, leaving her sputtering and angry. It makes me smile.

The Mean Dwarf rarely comes in, he prefers to intimidate the tourists with a pack of spare-changing gutter punks. He has threatened to kick my ass when I declined to give him a quarter and I avoid him almost as much as the one-eyed Vietnam vet, who once spat on a friend of mine when she didn't pony up some change.

I know that the dwarf and the vet and the blind girl have had their hard knocks. Honestly, I think that they are far more entitled to their bad attitudes than, say, when a rich tourist gets huffy because I don't have a Coexist t-shirt in their preferred size and color. I just think that everyone would catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother would say.

Welcome to the street, Stewart. No one but pregnant women and children in our employee bathroom, please. And don't ever let the mean people intimidate you into giving them something for nothing.

NTD

The Hazard of Googling One's Self

In an entirely weak moment on a lazy Sunday, I typed my own name into Google. Big mistake. For days now, I have been hot and bothered about a particularly mean-spirited tirade on my newspaper column. I really should rise above a standard flaming incident. However, it is infinitely more pleasurable on a hot summer night to jump directly into the fray.

I frequently discourage my boyfriend from reading message board tripe out loud to me when I am about two sips into my morning coffee. Why would one spoil one's mood with so much negativism, I say. But hypocrisy is so human, now that I have pulled up the personally offensive post and made him read it once more just to refresh his memory before I point out all the flaws in the writer's logic.

As an op-ed writer, one must roll with the punches. It's the reasonable, mature thing to do. You can't please all of the people all of the time, and columnists are not even aiming for universal appeal. We invite controversy, right? However, in cyberspace, intellectual discourse is rarely the goal; personal attacks are the standard-bearer. Critics are not bound by regular debate procedure, or even decent manners. In this case, the writer describes his dislike of me largely due to nonexistent details about my personal life - i.e. he doesn't even know me, but rails on, unencumbered by reality.

The kicker here? The rant against me was written by a Macon writer who also happens to be a columnist for that edition of our paper. We are unseen co-workers in the virtual office space.

Dear Macon Columnist: For the record, I am rarely one to blather on about jambands. In fact, the major events I have attended in 2008 would include the Lou Reed show in Asheville and Tom Waits at the Fabulous Fox. I would bet good money that either Lou or Tom would curbstomp anyone who linked their names to the term "jam band". I also don't smoke pot, I hate the music of Dave Matthews, am friends with many soldiers, have never aligned myself with the libertarian party, have lived a tattoo-free life, and never stepped inside a yurt. I don't feel as though I am compensating for a lack of some earlier, essential life experience by being a middle-aged person who writes two columns a month. I will eat the occasional veggie burger, but prefer barbecued pork a la Vandy's of Statesboro. I don't speak derisively of the troops, although when a security guard screams that he has been to Iraq before touching breasts in a so-called patdown, I think that I can call a spade a spade without criticism from someone who wasn't even present to witness this.

I do, however, own a pair of Crocs as you surmised. But so do most Americans, so that's only a half credit for a lucky guess.

In other words, it is lazy thinking to attempt to turn anyone, either liberal or conservative, into a cultural stereotype so that the person does not have to be dealt with as a real human being. My life extends far beyond the boundaries of newspaper and web pages, as does yours.

The larger point is not which sort of columnist is more interesting, the one who aspires to be Charles Bukowski or the one who aspires to be Molly Ivins. That’s based entirely on whether one is more concerned with tales of excessive drinking, or tales of political life. I enjoy a stiff drink considerably more than I enjoy the presidential campaign, but there’s only so much I can say about alcohol. I’ve seen its destructive power on close friends, so it would be dishonest of me to recommend it wholesale, particularly to a readership of largely twentysomethings. I might hate politics on some level, but am afraid of what happens to the world when too many good people ignore it. We can’t let the bastards shoot up and poison Planet Earth without a fight. So I write about the things I care about; and those who regale us with drinking stories are also writing about what they care about. Only the late great Hunter S. Thompson and a chosen few get to write about it all.

Write what you know, that’s the first rule of all writing.

It’s a brave thing to put yourself out there, no matter how a person chooses to do it. I commend all those who write with their own faces and names - I avoided it as long as possible myself until served with a photographic ultimatum, and deliberately chose a picture that my daughter took of me from a safe distance. I behold the hundreds of photos that the current generation fearlessly uploads online with a sense of wonder as they smile confidently at the universe. I hope that such self-assurance will follow them all the days of their lives. The lessons here are slight - don’t Google what you don’t want to read, and when it’s too late, try to work through what it is that bugs you. Be honest, and avoid cheap shots - that’s too easy, and ultimately is unsatisfying. Feel free to respond, whether privately or within a suitable public arena. Then get over it, because life is way too short to do anything else.

Quote of the Day

'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'

-Ray Bradbury

Summer Hiatus

It's not as if there is nothing to say; I've rarely been accused of that, at least since I turned eleven and decided that speaking to others was a skill worth honing for my personal benefit. This was fifth grade, after the late winter of fourth grade, when the kid who picked his nose in the back of the classroom raised a snotty finger and pointed it at me. The boys were choosing dance partners for the Georgia Day square dance. That was the defining moment when I realized that I had to raise my voice in protest of something. I had to set limits and control my destiny. But I didn't. So the first hand of the opposite sex that I held belonged to the booger-laden class pariah whom I despised, because I was too shy to prevent it.

I pondered this humiliation during the summer. By the first day of fifth grade, I determined to quit being the mousey girl. I opened my mouth and spoke to classmates.

By sixth grade, I had advanced to spreading rumors about bra-stuffing simply because I hated a girl. I gossiped, lied, bragged, and sometimes even said nice things when I ran out of bile and nonsense.

I have rarely been at a loss for words ever since. This has made blogging easy for me, and my newspaper column has steadily hummed along for five and a half years.

But this summer I have been struggling with family illness, business, and other stuff of life. I want to write but have difficulty finding time for the blog right now.

Long story short, I'm taking a few weeks off and will be back to posting when life settles down. This worries me - not because there are hundreds of readers out there hanging onto my wise words - but rather because I love the discipline required by regular posting. It's writing practice, and the process helps me order my otherwise chaotic existence. I had tried to achieve this via purely private writing before starting to write online three years ago. But this site has worked remarkably well for me, so much better than pen and paper. Even the most mundane post requires reflection and focused intent. This page keeps me honest - I'm beyond spreading rumors about classmates' brassieres. I have to make sure that I'm not stuffing wads of paper down my own shirt.

So I'll get back to online wordsmithing by the dog days of August - I suppose that if I were still in school, that would be the beginning of the 41st grade.

NTD

busybusybusybusy...

...busybusybusybusy.

NTD

Cancer Sucks

My niece called early this morning to complain about the cancer life. Actually, it's not the cancer or the chemo that's getting to her; it's the lack of independence. She's almost 32 and trying to enjoy a week out of the hospital with her two sons before the second round of chemotherapy. However, it's jarring to lose one's job, one's apartment, access to any belongings that might harbor excessive germs, and even the simple pleasures of taking the children for summer outings or going to buy one's own groceries.

I can listen, but that is most of what I can do today. I can promise a little vacation (if her platelets and white blood cells cooperate) later in the summer, and I can send money, and I can visit, but that's about all. It's a helpless feeling, knowing that I can't rescue her from any of this. Cancer is so damned personal.

NTD

now what?

It's the morning after the final graduation - well, at least until Anna gets through college or Sarah goes for another degree. I still wake up involuntarily to make sure that Anna gets to school on time. However, I trust my intrinsic ability to sleep too much, which should be kicking back in within the next few days.

My shop is open from 11 - 7, which seems so darned civilized compared to other people's schedules. I don't mind the occasional six a.m. alarm when it is warranted - but I prefer my lazy, leisurely schedule which requires no alarm clocks at all.

I hope that Anna's somewhat amorphous summer plans include no early bird scheduling, since she will still be home most of the season.

NTD

another day, another graduation

It's amazing how girls can fret about wearing the "right dress" - with strict guidelines spelled out in the high school handout - just to cover their entire bodies with a cap and gown in order to march into Hanner Fieldhouse with the other graduates.

10:00 a.m. graduation... so early for those of us trying to abstain from coffee for a few days.

NTD

six word memoir

My life: music, southern cooking, kissing.

Just one of those dorky computer challenges. Most of the time I head directly for the "delete" button, but this time the one-minute answer seemed about right.

NTD

Congratulations Sarah!!!

It's a three exclamation point post - my eldest daughter Sarah graduated from UGA with degrees in Latin American Studies and Romance Languages. And in a few more days, my daughter Anna will be an honor graduate of Statesboro High School!!! Three exclamation points for her too!!!

Some days it feels wonderful to be a mother.

NTD

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for. - Tom Bodett