A LUNESTA MIRACLE

I'll do anything for a good night's sleep.  

I've taken so many pills, I probably shouldn't donate blood.  Mosquitos would be better off steering clear, unless of course they're insomniacs too.  

 

Xanax.  I still toss and turn, I just don't worry about it.  Ambien.  Works like a 3 hour charm.  Trazadone has a cinderblock-on-my-face effect and I run into walls like I'm Karen Black the next morning.  Melatonin makes me dream in a nightmarish technicolor.

Now I'm on Lunesta.  So far so good.  Apparently, there is a side effect of male breast enlargement, so I'm hoping for the miracle of miracles: 

to be well rested and stacked by the month's end.

FRANCE vs. USA

My father is on Facebook and it's making me really uncomfortable.  

I live in fear of the notification:

YOUR FATHER HAS SENT YOU A FRIEND REQUEST.

You have 0 friends in common.

Exactly.

It's not that there's anything on my page that's especially racy.  It's not that in real life we don't have a workable relationship.

This is a very specific sort of Baby Boomer/Gen X kind of dilemma/collision.  Can't we just share Bob Dylan?  

Thank you for being a genius.

1923-2008

 

I found out recently that I'm actually a man.  Not only that, I was once a boy too.  According to the Social Security Administration I have been an red blooded American male since 1985.  Before that I guess, the government didn't consider me period.

These days a kid is tagged immediately- that is to say, given a social security number right at birth- but back in the freewheeling 1970's in Maine, there wasn't a rush.  Parents were too busy composting, starting food coops, and reading Thoreau.  You got a card when you needed one.  I mean, for now, let's just weed the garden, shuck some corn,  and can preserves. 

For me, the necessity came when I spent my first seven minutes of fame in a Stephen King movie and thusly began my life as a taxpayer.

Social Security hasn't been easy to convince, by the way, that I'm a Ms.  A phone call, with my most sultry female voice didn't do it.  The operator laughed actually.  On the first trip to the main office in Brooklyn, where a young lady(ostensibly) ahead of me had a scalpel confiscated, I also failed.  Despite my utterly convincing breasts practically falling out of my most feminine summer dress, I didn't have proper documentation.  And though hoisting my tits onto the counter and pressing them against the bullet proof glass made the agent laugh, she won the Mark Twain Award:

"Honey, this is New York.  I've seen some really good work."

I'll be honest, in that moment, facing an in-person rejection of my sex, I started to panic slightly.  My mom is fairly famous for leaving out big details.  For instance, "Oh pumpkin, I'm sure I told you I was married before your father!"  I was too busy hyperventilating then to answer or to laugh now.

Could she have overlooked telling me?  Was there an accident during the circumcision?  Had I been born a true blue tranny and my parents had to make a sexual Sophie's choice?  My dad is Greek, was I the real life version of, MIDDLESEX?  My mom always had said she really wanted a girl first.  Had she been trying, albeit WASPily, to tell me something?  Omigod.  This explains everything about me.  No wonder I only have gay male friends.  I am a gay male.  No wonder I like wigs and to show my boobs in public.  I am a tranny. 

So instead of trusting my mother's insistence of my gender as female, I contacted the state of Maine directly for my birth certificate.  The good friendly folks at bureau of vital records thought my story was totally shelarious.  Who knew bureaucracy had such a sense of humor?

Social Security has since accepted the document as genuine (and my vagina valid), but my sex is still pending with the state of New York.  Stay tuned.

 

HOKEY POKEY: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

What does it mean exactly when you're poked on Facebook?  I have enough trouble decoding people in real life and now this?  I phoned a wise friend in Los Angeles hoping he could help. He only said he wouldn't touch "the Facebook" with a virtual 10 foot pole, after the therapy bills he accrued from being a victim of Friendster. 

So, I got a little Nancy Drew/Lois Lane on it and went to the faceless Facebook information page to get an automated quote on the ambiguous virtual gesture.  Amazingly, there is a section dedicated to POKES and their meaning.  I guess I'm not the only one.  

Their explanation is equally esoteric:

A poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook.  When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose.  People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings.

Cool? Sure, if by cool you mean, horrible.   What is so awesome about things without specific purpose?  That is so my anti-narrative loving irony obsessed generation.  I spend every waking moment interpreting.  The last thing I need is to come up with more of my own meanings.  

To me the poke is inherently pervy and I welcome any and all definitions from you gentle reader, just pretty please, be specific.

IF A TREE FALLS IN THE MAINE WOODS

Maine is a strange place to be from.  Imagine growing up inside a Norman Rockwell painting, but styled by LL Bean.  It's monogrammed canvas tote bags and cross country skis, wild blueberries and bug spray.  It's sailboats, it's Christmas trees, it's softball games.  It's a wood burning stove, penny candy village store kind of existence.  

To live year round in Vacationland, to be a full time native in a seasonal state breeds a very specific sort.  There is a pride that comes with sticking out the brutal 9 month winter and a singular pleasure in rolling your eyes at the prissy out-of-towners come summer.  Now I am one of the prisses.

 The unofficial motto, found just over the Kittery Bridge upon entering the state says it all:

MAINE: THEY WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.  

Not that is or was, just that it should.  As a neurotic, allergic kid without an ounce of innate rusticness, comforted only by the thought of Greenwich Village, that notion threw me into a pint size existential crisis.  WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

 The way life SHOULD be?  The way LIFE should be?  The way life should BE?  The question becomes a horrible method actor exercise. 

And sitting here at sunrise, on a perfectly New England dock, overlooking an equally ideal little lake, pondering the trip back to New York City, I'm still asking.