All Around The Mulberry Bush

My friend Kim has some sort of war going with the ice cream man. She runs an in-home day care and I probably don’t have to tell you how horrifying it is when the sound of Pop Goes The Weasel is blasted from a tiny truck and followed by “KIMMIE CAN WE HAVE ICE CREAM!?!?!” in five or six tiny whiny voices. And this is in spite of the fact that the ice cream is really a disgusting Popsicle of some kind that costs $3.95.  So she’s asked the guy not to play his music through her neighborhood on the weekdays. Of course his feeling is… “I’m trying to earn a living here.”  

RIGHT. Clearly he’s just full of wild ambition.

*insert sound of golf cart going down the most pot holed road in SE Portland here*

Seriously.

We were standing on her deck when I first learned of this animosity. I was helping her plant flowers in pots all over her back deck. Children were napping. The sun was shining. All was right in the world. The deck is around a pool and sits up plenty high enough to see the road on the other side of her lower fence. I looked up from trying to remove a two year dead bamboo root ball from a pot to observe her giving MASSIVE stink eye to a rather nasty man (aren’t they all though? I mean really have you EVER seen a guy in an ice cream truck that didn’t give you the skeeves? I think not.) in a beat up old ice cream cart thing. Or it was a van. I don’t know. Anyway I give her the “are you nuts? What’s your problem face.” and she proceeds to explain their ongoing dislike of one another. Which I find enormously funny.

Then she says “The worst part is… when I DO go get ice cream he NEVER has what I want.”

“ahahahahahahahhahahahahaha! You buy his ice cream??”

“I’m only human. He plays the music….”

And now you know why there are still men in golf carts selling the worst ice cream known to man kind.

The Grim Grey Inbetween

I would like to live in a world of white. I would just float about on the fluff that comes off a dandelion and maybe sleep on a puffy cloud when I’m tired of spinning in the blinding purity of right or nothingness. Something like righteous nonexistence. Clean sheets. Blank paper. The absence of anything.

Then again I can’t help but be drawn to the sharpie staying power of a decisive black line. The words formed on the paper,  the quality of what something actually is or is not with no further debate needed. Here it is! Here is the line! The shapes we’ve determined mean exactly this or that, this is the reality we’re all going to keep to.

Of course what I get is layer upon layer of gray. The smudgy graphite on the too thin paper of a kindergartner learning their letters. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right it's all just trying to figure out what the shapes might mean and trying to avoid tearing. Maybe this… this is almost slate. Nope. Erase that. Try again. Search for understanding of yourself, of others, of any damn thing at all. Ashes and ashes and dust to dust ... the neutral kiss of a girl making love to god while being reamed in the ass by the devil.  

June 10, 2010