Stories My Grandma Tells Me Part One

I've had to be flexible for a couple weeks. The point of a blog isn't to keep the audience updated on all of the ham sandwiches I've eaten or women at whom I've swooned, is it? I'm struggling if it is.

I went to DC today to be a part of The Rally to Restore Freedom and/or Fear. I failed, if my idea of participating was to be listen and watch the rally. I succeeded if my idea of participation was being slammed into a crowed of ten thousands with funny signs and silly costumes.

I'm going to lean towards the latter. There were too many people there. Jon Stewart joked that there were 10 million. All of Gresham showed up, that's for sure. I think all of the East Portland suburbs showed up. That's about how many people were there. 300,000, give or take 100,000.

The entrances were closed, but what can you do? I read in a magazine (whichever, they're all the same) that it's better to spend one's money on experiences, rather than goods. Higher emotional capital.

It was AARP magazine.

I'm flexible.

I really enjoy my grandma. She's crude and old. I used to ask how old she was and my parents would estimate and then tell me "Old." That's an answer, thank you. She has the same birthday as me and in March, she'll be 97. She needs to slow down. Too many years. Somebody should tell her.

Sometimes she traps me in her room (I'd gladly be trapped, with the sugar-free Werther's and yarn) and tells me stories, most of them I've heard before, but they resonate differently each time I hear them. She tones them differently, different context, shifting point. The same ten stories.

I really like the one where her brother accidentally drinks breast milk that he found in the refrigerator. That one is hilarious, but sits the same every time, on my shoulders, like lightning.

She told me this one today, involving her last late husband,

"He was going, you know, but I didn't know it. It makes me angry that he didn't tell me he had Alzheimer's. I didn't know what it was. He didn't either...

"One night he told me he felt great. 'I'm taking you out,' he said. I said, 'okay, I'll go get dressed upstairs and I'll come down and you'll get dressed.' I used to lay his clothes out for him, you know.

"So I got dressed and I called him and he said he was in the shower. I went into the bathroom and he was showering with all his clothes on. 'I feel great,' he said. 'We'll get you out of those wet clothes and into dry ones and right into bed.' That was the frosting on the cake. That was it."

Fleeting, like an escaped balloon

So I'm listening to Vitamin C's Good Riddance or First Day of My Life, or whatever.
Graduation.
Vitamin C's Graduation.

It's been a strange day. It's been a set of days that fall into each other.

Today was marked by the balloons in the sky, or UFO,
Technically UFOs, but they looked like balloons. A policeman friend of Cansino, the best the security guard I know, said it was forty balloons. Fear not citizen!

What's the deal with covert ops while I'm in school? Seriously, nine months out of three years and they have to happen while I'm at work (in reference to the bomb in Times Square; I'd link my previous post, but whatever) and this one! This diabolical weatherman scheme! This was happening in Chelsea!
MY NEIGHBORHOOD!

I thought Chelsea was a secret.

I went to a vigil today. I'm an Ally. I announced it, proud of it.

Have you ever wronged someone badly once and continued to wrong them, without trying? Even while trying to do the right thing?
Ever wonder if sometimes you are the perpetual antagonist to someone's perpetual victimization?

I do. I think about it every day.
Melodrama...

There's a girl that looks like Aurora at Lang. I don't know what to say, or if I should say anything at all, but I have a keen urge to tell her not to apply for a job at Office Max because
"They'll fire when you get pregnant with Natalie,"

but she probably wouldn't understand.

Writing on the Wall

One of my favorite parts of the New School, I'm talking top two, is the graffiti.
There are some real idealists at my college and they mostly want to be read, not heard. They want to leave their print in an ever-expanding city where they feel like only the wall will be willing to be marked, impressed with their very personal opinion.

"Fuck you, you bunch of faggots"
and so forth.

That's really most of the graffiti, that and rebuttals.
"You homophobic piece of shit... Why are you at The New School?"

It's called Trolling. It's baiting and it is common. That you fight back means you've lost. Don't take scribbles seriously, man.

But that's not the focus of this post. The focus is the aficionados and absurd, the non sequitur humor sometimes in response to the rest of the hate-baiting mess.

I like,
"UNIVERSITY ASSASSINATES YOUTH"
and in response,

"ODB was the best rapper of the Wu Tang Clan"

In fact, if we are measuring popularity just by graffiti, Ol' Dirty Bastard, the deceased rapper, has a significant New School following. Some people are willing to fight to the death in his honor.

I have two other favorites. I go out of my way to read the writing on the walls of these bathrooms.

1.) To the conversation referenced at the beginning of the post, there is one separate thought, hanging over the rest of the nonsense:
"There's always money in the banana stand."

And that's it.

I'm glad someone thought that a Arrested Development reference was applicable. So glad.

2 and new.) The original quote was
"Life is Dead" to which someone with a large scrawl responded, "Cultivate DICKS".

I believe the response was a reference to Voltaire's Candide, as in Cultivate your Garden, but the person omitted the necessary comma between the two words of his counter so naturally someone else drew a large phallus being watered to the side.

The best part is that someone else in blue crayola marker decided to fix the first statement to say, "Life is BRead", rendering the comeback and the illustration meaningless.

I think I'm going to go to work now and see how many of the anonymous will fight me.
"ODB can't be the best MC, he's not even alive."