A Peek At The Players

The "Wet Rag"....this is my, so to speak, brother-in-law. He and Siss (my sister, rhymes with "hiss" because you never know when she is going to strike) have been "married" for more than twenty years, yet she lives alone and takes mini vacations with girlfriends. More than ten years ago, he told her to get out of the house, that theirs had never been a marriage, that he had never loved her, and left her like a pile on the floor with only her half of their 401K. She bought some furniture and moved into a little house in another town, miles away from him. She started life anew. End of story, right?
Not hardly! Somehow they became the best of friends and he moved into an apartment right across the street from her, and thence into a house right next door to her. Cozy. She allowed this to happen. Now, every other word out of her mouth is this rat's name, and she uses him as an excuse not to get on with her life. Her green dress diaries went completely to hell, and she now lives and dies for this pseudo man. His non-presence dominated every visit and every conversation she and I had, including the infamous "birthday trip". Even when he was not physically there, his name came up with nauseating frequency, and she called him by cell 'phone many times each day. I really mean many times. Even when she was with me and Sig, she dialed him from the car, from the restaurant, from the Alamo, for heaven's sake! Would she ever have written anything about the dress if he had not been in the picture? I don't know. What I DO know is that she has hung my dress in her house as "inspiration" for about four years, and has not, to my knowledge, taken a single note. If she had written just one paragraph for every 'phone call to The Rag, she would have had a tome to rival "War and Peace"!

My dress. My warehouse space. My clothes. My music. My "style". My perfume. The list goes on and on. There is nothing about me that my sister has not envied and/or tried to copy at one time or another. At the same time, there is not one thing about me, including the above list, that my sister has not vilified in self-righteous tones. There are times when I think she actually wants to BE me. She has gone so far as wanting us to dress alike so much that she ran out and bought us matching tops! They were profoundly ugly, a tired shade of peach with a v-neck surrounded by a wide, rippling band of iridescent sequins.The were sleeveless "wife-beater" type material, and very unflattering to both my body type and my red hair. I just found mine lingering at the bottom of a drawer last week, and threw it out. What a pity! It would have made a fine illustration to insert right about here.

I live in a warehouse, in a 1200 square-foot artists' live-work space. I have concrete floors, stained a clear, cocoa brown that highlights and brings together all the stains and imperfections of the space's original use. I did the stain myself,a mixture of clear concrete sealer and Rit cocoa brown dye. I applied it with a long-handled paint roller that allowed me to roll stain with one hand while wielding a glass of Pinot in the other. Quite the civilized little Boheme!

I have glass cabinets full of beautiful glass and ceramic and "sparkly" objects, a glass dining table, and a huge glass coffee table on wheels. My computer desk is also glass. The walls are full of paintings and fine-art photographs and primitive frescoes from my travels to the western U.S. There is a real fossil fish, 65 million years old, in my glass cabinet. There is a tiny cut-crystal pineapple from Kauai. I like glass and the illusion of space that it creates, and its reflective sparkle.

All my furniture is "disposable"; that is to say that it is inexpensive enough to be clawed, stepped on with muddy paws, and strewn with fur of various hues and textures. The dressers are made of high-impact plastic, and the kitchen shelving units are steel. This is to accommodate my six cats and one dog; Julie, Jackson Pollock, Leo Scrap, Pisces, Kong and Squee. Since my warehouse space is indeed one big room, I don't even have a bedroom where I can retreat and shut the door on the thundering herd. They all play and sleep where they choose except the dog, Julie, who is 15 and too arthritic to climb on chairs and sofas. Julie has a cushy, circular bed of her own, with raised sides that she can use as chin rests.

Note: since this was originally written, Julie passed away from cancer, and a visitor to another warehouse space here stole Pisces for her kids when she left.

The warehouse is also an organic farm, so I am free to run barefoot out my door and come back with arugula and lettuce, cilantro and green onions. We have crops twelve months of the year. We are "The Last Organic Outpost", an urban farm with three locations, non-profit status, and great, fresh food. My friends Joe and Marcella own the farm and are becoming famous as everybody wants to jump on the "Green" bandwagon....but they were first.

I wear Jimmy Choo shoes, and have more than thirty pairs, along with shoes and boots by Chanel and Marc Jacobs and a host of other luminaries. Where a humble girl like me should come upon such largesse is another story, but suffice it to say that I am well shod, and well dressed, too.

I am looking back through my writings, and I realize that I simply do not know how to phrase things, how to whitewash things, so that I don't look like "miss perfect". I have "stuffed" everything that Siss needed to be told for the past forty-odd years, and of course I am venting now. The red thread of piss-off that runs through this whole thing is intentional, I assure you.

I am the one with the grievance; I am the one who has been slapped down verbally and emotionally time and time again. I am the chance-taker, and always have it rough coming up against my safety-first sister. It is so easy for a person like her to pontificate from the safety of her sheltered and structured life about how SHE would never take the chances in life that I do.

These are my writings, my opportunity to see in print the truths that have been so evident all along but were silenced for kindness' sake. Perhaps when I am finished with notes I will disguise everything in novel form, but don't bet on it. I was always partial to the essay.

In the next post,meet Siss, Orgonomy, and the "Bang or Whimper" theory.