and The Cure sang like the first time

It has been two months since my last journal entry.

Sad to say, I still don't have any super, well-formed thoughts or revelations to force upon any onlooking eyes. I have, however been keeping the usual scribbles in my little red notebook of things that I intend to write about. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I died and my family gained access to my cryptic thoughts. They would try in vain to make sense of a puzzle that includes pieces labeled "Shaker Village. Gotta get me some" and "She's got great big legs and they're shaved like Georgia hounds" and band names that I crudely spell through phonics as the teenaged college radio DJ's recall play lists like auctioneers.

This said, and since it appears that the thoughts will never gestate into anything that resembles a real journal entry, I have decided just to purge the pages of said scribbles and make room for new ones. It is Spring after all and this weekend, the clocks have to be moved one hour ahead. We're going to lose an hour, it seems. And my friends, it will only put me further and further behind. So, here they are in a little wandering paragraph or two that I am going to call "Juxtaposition" (just because I have been wanting to use that word lately):

C. Everett Koop. He told us that it would kill us. Elliott Smith makes me want to cry. He killed him. That album. It makes me want to cry. Track 3. Tsunami. Tsunami. Tsunami. Coffee shop. They sit, obliviously sipping cafe latte something or the other with a name that makes a list longer than a third grade roll call. There are those same LOST LAB posters all over town. The lab stares out of a faded mimeographed photo at every four way stop, sometimes so over-posted that he stares back at himself with me in between in my car, praying that he will be found. It never worked for my own Jake, his black lab body found frozen in a ditch. South Carolina ground is hard to dig in the Winter time. And Bonnie mourned him like he was the last one as shovel barely nicked sod. I had left the electric fence uncharged.

When I was a child, the puppies froze to death. On concrete. I could have saved them, I was told. Shovel barely nicked sod. The vet said that the mother dog's teets would dry up on their own now that the puppies were gone.

The Westside Attacker has now attacked his way into the third dozen. According to the nightly news - the news that will slap-ass wear you out with talk about the weather as if we can do anything about it - they have put red dots all up and down a map of my neighborhood showing where he has been. I try to play super-sleuth and figure out where he will hit next. Nancy Drew rocks the casbah. Hardy Boys, watch your backs. I took the gun out of the drawer and remembered the day I bought the bullets at Wal-Mart. I didn't feel at all like myself. I also bought a pair of Summer sandals.

I have a lovely friend who is obsessive and compulsive and organizes his front bucket seat like I wish I could organize my life and he gives me advice like a thousand self help books yet never asks for advice from me. We saw a documentary about the Vietnam war. My friend lost his Dad in Vietnam while he was still a huddled pink tadpole inside of his mother who was about to lose his father but she didn't know it yet. Once, we sat on his bed and opened letters one by one that his father had written to his mother from over there...over there...send the word.....send the word over there..... and in one of these letters, we read his father's words - his father writing to his mother planning his upcoming brief visit home - the romantic evening that would eventually lead to my friend's conception. I doubt that many of us have that. The blueprint of our creation, right there on pen and pad. But, he does - and I will add that to the reasons that he is lucky. Though, he lost his father and I quickly take the "lucky" part back. Though, I am lucky to know him. I wish he had known him.

In the documentary, General Westmoreland stood in a beautiful garden and explained why it was okay to kill the Vietnamese. He reasoned that "Orientals" don't see death the way that Americans do. Life isn't as precious to them as it is to us, he said. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. These were the kind of people who sent my friend's father to war. My head was pounding all the way through the graphic scene where a couple of soldiers visited prostitutes and cracked jokes about their girlfriends back home. War is ugly - even if it is way over there. In the same neighborhood where the lost dog eludes us and the attacker does too, there are signs that read, "Why war? Wage Peace." It is then that I end my lost dog prayer with, "Amen."

In traffic each day, I see the good and the bad in people. Mostly the bad. I watched a short, slumped Mexican cowboy walking across the street even as the traffic light changed from red to green. The woman in front of me pounded the steering wheel and shook her head until her thick, 1980's era flybacked bangs moved in rhythm to the impulse-purchase air freshener dangling from her rear view mirror. Pine. The Time sang "Ice Cream Castles" from my speakers. I wished that I could give him a ride up to Nolensville Road where I bet she wouldn't dare be so American.

And for nights, I haven't been able to sleep. And when I do, I sometimes have dreams that involve box turtles. I'm not sure why I have a synapse in my brain that quite often fires on box turtles. I rescued a box turtle from a science lab once and wonder if from time to time, he feels the sun on his face and sends up thanks to the heavens for his release which are then bounced back down to me like as if from some satellite dish. If this is the case, I wish that I hadn't rescued him. So many of my dreams are peppered now with box turtles. I wish him no harm but want my dreams back.

I told my friend that I would like to own a box turtle (after one of the dreams) and she said, "Oh honey...you don't want a box turtle.." I didn't have the strength to argue. As I so often don't anymore.

I ordered the pizza to disguise the real reason for the call. I wanted the cake. I had the cake once and now wanted it worse than a junkie needs a fix. 40 minutes later, a young girl arrived and in a Southern drawl that made me seem Northern, told me that they were out of cake. As she refunded my cake money in nickels and dimes that she retrieved from her red, cotton apron, she said, "God Bless you, ma'am" as if that somehow made up for the cake. I'd never had a pizza delivery person bless me before and it kind of unnerved me. Later, as a cat named Sobu stood in the pizza, I really, really just wanted cake. And a little more salvation.

Several days ago, as I turned into an intersection, I was almost hit in the side by a Rabbi driving a Toyota Camry. I was singing the lyrics "Romance is the pole dance of the stars" along with the radio. I could have died. Would the Rabbi have blessed my crumpled body there on the street as the pizza delivery girl had done? As I lay there pinned underneath my rolled car in a scene straight from CHIPS, would the Rabbi have kneeled in gasoline and saved my soul from the rock and roll?

Across the dark street right now, the neighbor lady's bedroom wall is decorated with dusty teddy bears. In dozens, they are nailed straight to the wall in a sort of fuzzy carnival barker-esque crucifixion. I have not seen them but have been told by someone who has. And so, I picture them there when I look in the direction of the house. I mentally remove them from the wall in my mind and see dark teddy bear shapes on the paint behind. Years in the sun having toasted their fur like breakfast rations, their non-blinking eyes always staring forward like straw and stuffing filled soldiers. I pack them away in boxes with all of their faces pointing upwards just like I always had done as a little girl, so that they can breathe. I then apply a fresh coat of paint to her wall and put the teddy bears on my own bed after naming each and every one and before deciding them too dusty to sleep there. The next morning, the lady awakes to find the bears on her doorstep along with a piece of cake and a mix CD.

And life goes on.