Roman All Over Me

It's my husband's birthday. Before I met or saw my husband I heard him laughing. My heart blossomed to this friendly, good-willed stranger from behind a closed door. My dad was helping him carry a couch.

His dark curly ringlets, bronze hard body, primitive work out regimen and voracious appetite for eggplant parm fed into my fantasy. I believed the neighborhood Apollo must be Roman. It turned out he was (Russian) Jewish and really balls-out funny, and never wore shirts, which worked for me, because when he did they clashed with his busy shorts. As his hair grew out, people at work began to call him, The Dude. Most especially himself. Like the mayor of Venice, folks on the street knew him by sight because he was as friendly with grandma as he was with the kids from the hood as he was with Susie Q. He'd make everyone laugh and make everyone feel special. He was the hairy chested Jew with the 'fro and open shirt who ate at the taco truck and spent his three-hour lunch break walking around town. Because of or despite being an urban Thoreau with ADD in loud prints, women would throw themselves at him. Usually women with one thing on their minds. Learning to surf. He didn't actually surf, but his collection of cute Japanese souvenirs from his ex he wasn't over was endearing. Sometimes Aussies looking for a place to stay tried to move in. He often dated women who wound up preggers with the next dude they dated. It's a jungle out there.

He cooked dozens of fried chicken breasts every day, and he'd whip out his gallon jug of oregano and Walmart-sized mustard squeeze bottle to flavor it. He had no need for plates, because he ate standing up in front of a greasy frying pan with a knife. Fuck forks. He'd spend hours doing push-ups and lifting heavy arrangements of chairs after his twenty-mile bike rides. He was the guy perpetually clearing his head. He liked when I called him my mimbo. Yet, he had studied Shakespeare at Oxford, studied poetry in college and had written a Jane Austen parody. Night Call Nurses posters covered his walls and his old computer with the flying toasters screensaver gave way to really tight dialogue. I thought his minimalism was very zen, and he always had records playing. Usually surf when he was writing things for Trimark and Corman, et al. He was a real writer, because he was a hunt and pecker. Boink. He was perfect for me, because he wasn't serious about anything and we never thought it would last.

One phase led to another, and we both became more serious about the meaning of life, work and our paths. That was after we rejected an invitation during a meeting to create a "reality" show based on our TV pilot. The actually real producer hated 'my' character, but asked me to play 'myself'. "You're caustic, abrasive, outrageous, and in my opinion completely unsympathetic. Audiences will love you or loath you." The producer was a visionary. I felt misunderstood. Firstly, she's not mean. She's just honest. She's a sharp emancipated character who won't be held down by societal conditioning. And secondly, it's not based on me. The first draft was written before I came along." "I don't care one way or another. Do we have a deal?" Reality TV? Exploitative drama? Screw that, we thought. Idealists we were. Which accidentally led to a fulfilling and mystical path.

Raven's an adoring, thoughtful and attentive father for which I am extremely grateful. We're well into our second decade, and I Still Forget He's Not Roman. That outta be the name of something you'd find at Toys of Eros in Ptown.

Happy Birthday baby! Love you!

Quelche Chose de Sucre

My precious pearl turns seven at the stroke of midnight! He's such a polite, loving, gifted child. It is a cause for celebration to have made it thus far without marring his beautiful spirit. I have hillbilly blood, so solar returns are marked with melancholy undertones. Where-oh-where are my six other children? By the time my great aunt Teet was my age she had birthed sixteen children. I wonder if the modern American birthday, with its array of loud distracting plastic and paper products covered in caustic, farty and morally reprehensible characters from blockbuster children's movies are just our way of mourning the lonely ova and sperm that pass through our reproductive systems like, strangers in the night, like ill-fated lovers.

Within this paradigm, wasted packaging seems to be equated with a joyful extravagance earned by merely surviving another year on the planet. Here, fanning the flames of greed is part of the initiation into our cultural pathology. "Go, Susie, go! You're not opening your goddamn gifts fast enough." "Tear it like you mean it, baby!" And kids are goaded to open all of their gifts before the guests go home, like it's a carnivorous military exercise. Lay Siege, little darlin'! Take charge! You the man! And we seem to foster this ravenous appetite for new plastic things pridefully. Passing down to a new generation a love of sweatshop goodies, the perpetuation of looking to the outside for gratification, satiation, and validation of the inner most self. Problem is the inner most self is unmoved by Jolly Ranchers and untouched by Savage laughter bubbling out of cola drunk mouths. The window of acceptable demonstrations of love and care opens and closes in the same time it takes to wash and dry a load of dirty laundry. A couple of fleeting Instantagramable moments, a pile of trash sky high, belly aches, and some toys that amuse for a few weeks are left in the wake.

Are these high-octane, junk-food-and-sugar fueled festivities punctuated by the destruction of wrapping paper and shiny gift bags, the result of clever marketing by the Gift Wrapping Industry, an initiation into brand identification and over-reliance of external stimuli to mask the vulnerable internal self, or it is merely a happy distraction from hunger to exponentially expand your brood and populate the planet with your DNA? Because after all, we are animals.

That said, birthday parties are fairly harmless. And, I think birthdays are a wonderful opportunity to celebrate people's lives. My own son's Star Trek(TM) birthday party was brought to a halt by a small guest list, and we've decided to reschedule when more folks are available. So, tomorrow will be low key.

I'm listening to Trois Couleurs: Rouge while I type up transcripts. And it occurs to me once again that, mon horloge biologique fait tic tac.