In the continued interest of improving the quality of your life (because that’s the kind of altruistic give-back soul I am), allow me to share a few of the hard-won lessons of the summer, in no particular order or urgency.

As always, if you find them useful or life-altering (particularly if you find them life-altering), feel free to thank me with a beer and/or the beverage of your choice. Mazal tov!

Don't even think about it.

1. First and foremost, and without hesitation, do not get up and eat a half-dozen cold Buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing for breakfast no matter how delicious that might sound. Sure, it seems harmless enough as they’re sliding over the lips and past the tongue but- as you damn well know – now it’s ‘look out stomach, here they come’ time.

And that ain’t good.

What am I trying to tell you?

I’m saying that two hours later when the vinegar, butter, and cayenne-based hot sauce is eating a hole through your stomach lining, you’ll have only yourself to blame.

I would know. I speak from experience…today’s breakfast.

2. When offering to ride along with a friend through unmarked roads in rural Mexico for the sole purpose of preventing her from being maimed or raped or murdered, inquire first as to whether or not there is a map. Or at least some kind of half-baked directions culled from the internet. Or hieroglyphics. Or smoke signals. Or if she has ‘the shining’. Or ANYTHING.

In other words, inquire as to whether or not there is any hope in hell that you will actually get there without being maimed, raped, or murdered yourself.

3. Whenever humanly possible, do not use a port-a-potty/Johnny on the spot/Honey Bucket/*Insert name of portable plastic public restroom brand here* in the complete dark.

The sight of all these human waste receptacles gives me the heebie jeebies.

Acknowledging that was a lengthy rule, let me highlight the two most important nuances: public and pitch black dark of night.

Whether or not this actually happened to me, let me just say that it’s entirely possible to be at a Michelle Shocked show, wait in a lengthy line to use the portable public bathroom unit, and finally get inside…only to realize that you cannot see a damn thing.

And since it’s a handicapped portable bathroom unit, it’s very large and roomy in there, and thrashing your feet about does not allow you to locate the actual toilet part of the room, you must resort to using your hands to braille your way around. That’s right. Feeling your way around a portable public bathroom in the dark, folks. It’s not for wimps, and if it isn’t cringe-inducing, I don’t know what it.

But then it gets worse.

How’s that?

Well, because you can’t see anything you’re afraid to sit on the seat, so you do your best to crouch over what you suspect is the toilet itself, and when you’re done with your business and come back outside, you realize that your entire left pant leg is wet.

In short: stay out of port-a-potties in the dark.

Enough said.

I know what I said, but I think if this thing was parked outside, I would go inside it. And I may or may not be sober when I did so.

4.  Don’t run with scissors.

Don’t run with scissors while drunk.

Don’t run with scissors while drunk and in a carnival fun house.

Stay out of carnival fun houses even while sober and scissorless, because if you’re old enough to be reading this far, you’re too old for carnival fun houses.

5. When potentially vacationing with a group of women that you don’t particularly know, inquire ahead as to how closely their idea of fun resembles Senior Week Daytona Beach 1991 and approximately how many hours per day they plan to spend buck naked and discussing their (ahem) personal landscaping preferences.

As before, enough said.

6. Editing sucks!!!

If you can, write everything perfectly the first time around, because EDITING SUCKS BALLS!!!

7. Do not date a double-amputee rock star, especially Bret Michaels (should he be involved in a freak accident that causes him to lose both arms and thus become a double-amputee. Not that I’m wishing anything like that on him.)

Once again, I know from experience.

He makes one hell of a pissy amputee, but at least if he didn't have arms maybe somebody could do something about that hair?

Okay, it was a dream, but it happened to me (in a manner of speaking), and thus I choose to count it as an experience.

So in short, Bret Michaels was a double-amputee, and I was dating him (and whether or not I’d been dating him before the accident/incident/whatever was unclear), and he was a seriously difficult chip-on-his shoulder grouchy bear to deal with.

For instance, I would offer to help him with things that seemed like they would be exceptionally challenging without any arms (and I’m not talking condescending things either, like feeding him with a spoon, although if I should ever become a double-amputee, do not hesitate to offer to feed me with a spoon. Odds are good that I will cheerfully take you up on it.) Okay, so I offered to do something that I felt was truly useful, like button up his shirt, and he WENT OFF on me about patronizing him and don’t try to do things for him that he can do himself, and it was really unnecessary and rather uncalled for to overreact on me like that.

I thought.

Because I really was just trying to help.

You can talk to me in a normal tone of voice, you know. And maybe after you calm down.

And note to self, if I ever really do find myself in this situation, remember to watch My Left Foot in order to bone up on what one can and cannot manage without arms.

Regardless, like I said in the opening sentence, watch out for romantic entanglements with washed-up hair band rock stars who are now missing limbs as they can be rather prickly and even a touch mean and how can anyone be all that good in bed without any hands anyway?

(And I have to add this because it’s just too stupid, but I all of the sudden remembered at one point I felt kind of bummed out that if I stayed in the relationship I’d never be hugged again [because he had no arms, as you know, but perhaps have forgotten, which is why I’m explaining it yet again. Perhaps you have arms, but your brain isn’t all that functional for reasons I won’t begin to speculate on?], and that I really could go for a good hug, and I thought about asking him if he’d figured out how to hug with his legs.

But then I decided not to because I reasoned that would just piss him off and make him yell at me some more. Figures a rock star would be a prick.)

When I was in middle school, we had a planetarium. I’m not saying it was a great planetarium…but then again, maybe it was. I don’t know. I couldn’t really see it.

In my mind, the mere existence of a planetarium in a middle school is somehow wondrous and wealthy and fancy pants, but at the time it was yet another burden on my young soul.

Feast your eyes on the one and only constellation I recognize: Orion the Hunter. Ooh baby.

You see, I couldn’t see.

And I had glasses.

But it being the 80s, they were the horrible round glasses that are again coming into fashion (so help me God). And perhaps they weren’t these, but then again they were perhaps these pink transparent framed numbers with a gradient pink lens. Very Dolly Parton. Or Tammy Faye. Or plain old awful.

But I digress.

I don’t necessarily know what they looked like, but I know I wasn’t wearing them. The point here is that the school had a planetarium and at least once a week in science class we were shepherded into said planetarium and talked at in a droning Ben Stein manner for an unspeakably long time, and I couldn’t see jack sh*t.
And I listened sort of.

And saw nothing.

I saw nothing because my pre-pubescent but still remarkable sense of style informed me that the hideous round, over-sized pink glasses were doing nothing for my Eastern European one-day-striking-but-at-the-time-extremely-gangly-and-awkward looks.

So I ditched them.

And thus – as previously mentioned – I saw nothing. (Much as I do each and every morning of my life, as I grope for my night stand in search of my current-day glasses the way a Helen Keller sought out a water spigot…)

What I’m trying to say here is that the combined effect of blindness and boredom was that I learned nothing.

Which didn’t seem to matter until one day the teacher announced that there would be a test based on everything taught to us during the planetarium classes.

W—?

Wh—-?

Wha—–?

WHAT!?!?!?

A test!?

I was supposed to be paying attention!?

Do you  not understand that I was trying to look fashionable and non-chalant!?!?!?!?!?!?!

No. They did not understand this, nor did they care, and thus I drug into the next class with my ugly glasses and a hell-bent determination to memorize whatever it was this joker had to share.

And for the most part, I failed.

But, at the same time, I somehow managed to retain the exact arrangement of lights that make up Orion the Hunter. And I can always pick out the Beetleguise – the star that denotes his armpit, as well as a movie starring Michael Keaton that I once loved and used to torture the guy who drove me to high school with by insisting that we listen to the strange soundtrack every day (“Shake, shake, shake senora. Shake your body line…”)

But that, I’m afraid, is another story for another day.

Anyway, the point here is that I was sitting outside tonight and saw Orion’s belt and remembered how I came to recognize Orion’s belt and, of course, Beetleguise and thought of you…and there you have it.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but since getting here, I have slept an obscene amount.

Me at Parc Guell in Barcelona

The first night – and thirteen HOURS of sleep later – wasn’t so shocking, as I’d slept maybe nine hours in the two day prior. Obviously I was paying off a sleep debt.

But last night? And the 11 hours I slept then? Until 1:30pm? And five feet from the super noisy, mopeds screaming by at 120 kmh and at all hours? How is that possible?

Tomorrow it will not be possible, as we have to catch a 10am train to Valencia. And need to leave the apartment by 8:30 am. And have a dinner reservation for tonight at 11pm.

I think that’s the only thing that makes getting up so ridiculously late in the day seem less wasteful…knowing you’ll be eating dinner in the middle of the night. It’s sort of like the Spanish have skewed the entire day forwards four or five hours.

No wonder they need a two-hour siesta in the middle of the day.

If you were up eating dinner until well past midnight, you’d be tired too.

As for me? I like to combine my sleep and my siestas into one long, uninterrupted Sleeping Beauty-esque slumber.

He's a bold little fellow.

In other news, my cat Siddhartha is missing.

If your first reaction to that statement is “You have a cat?” then you are probably not alone. He doesn’t get much press coverage because he doesn’t tend to open pantries or ravage countertops or eat poison or do much of anything to give me a heart attack…apparently because he’s been waiting the nearly five years of his life to pull a real doozy (a.k.a. disappear for four days) and give me a possibly fatal heart attack just for show.

It started Tuesday night when he missed dinner. Sid loves to eat and has missed no more than a single meal in his entire life, so the sight of his still-full food dish Wednesday morning before I left was upsetting. Since word from home is that he still hasn’t appeared, and I can still see the food dish in my mind’s eye… it’s still upsetting.

See? Remember the egg thing I was talking about? Why can't they do this in America? Take the guesswork out of it?

It’s times like these I wish I was a pet psychic (or knew a pet psychic or cat dowser or a feline empath or any kind of far-out resource of that kind), as the worst part of a missing pet is wondering if they’re still alive. I’m vacillating between thinking positive (he wandered into someone’s garage or basement or shed and is stuck there, and they just haven’t figured it out yet) and extremely negative (a hawk grabbed him).

In the net, and as I’m both a believer in positive thinking and unsettled by the idea that anything painful would ever befall my furry kids, I’m choosing to visualize that Sid is currently wearing a velvet tuxedo, a large purple Mad Hatter top hat, and eating tea and krumpets and sharing a hookah with Alice and the Caterpillar, while the White Rabbit anxiously urges him to hurry up, as he’s now been sitting there for four days.

And knowing Sid, that’s not entirely impossible.

I have a rock collecting problem.

Like any addiction, it more or less rules me.

I love rocks.

And shells.

And sea glass.

And even giant boulder-esque stone outcroppings that have any chance of being carried back with me.

Basically, anything that can quickly escalate my luggage up into the 80 or 90-pound range is just fine by me.

If I go anywhere with, near, in sight of, or on water, I immediately fill all my pockets with heavy earth-made goodies.

Once I found this amazing black triangle stone in a remote lake in northern Idaho. It was just lying there amongst a sea of round pebbles and oblong stones in varying shades of white and tan – a thin equalateral triangle in darkest ebony, with all three sides uniquely beveled. When I found I could stick it to my forehead and would stay there, I decided to keep it.

After a while I got it into my head that it was a magical rock. I would show it to people and they would always exclaim in disbelief that I had found such a thing sitting in a lake. It was perfect except for the rippled surface and some mild flaws in the beveling which made it clear that it’s strange shape was natural.

Eventually, I made a necklace out of it, and if I was on my older computer, I can guarantee there are at least two dozen pictures of me wearing that necklace, as I did so every day for almost a year. There’s actually one sitting in my bedroom that I glance at on a regular basis, taken by my friend Sam.

But I digress…  One night I went and saw David Sedaris read from a book in progress (later to be released as Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim), and he (Mr. Sedaris, in many ways a personal hero, as I adore anyone who can make me laugh – particularly with their writing. He is masterful in that regard, and some of his stories make me laugh hysterically, like the story “Big Boy” in Me Talk Pretty One Day about when he found the giant turd in the toilet at a friend’s house and was afraid people would think he’d done it and yet couldn’t figure out how to dispose of it. Hi-larious.). Anyway, what I was trying to say was that Mr. Sedaris, while signing some of my books – including Me Talk Pretty One Day – afterward, pointed out that my necklace strongly resembled a bathroom tile.

Although I was a bit hurt by the observation*, it did not deter me. I kept wearing it, even though I had to acquiese that if you didn’t notice the rippled and slightly grooved surface, it did look a bit like something you’d pick up in a set of 100 of Home Depot.

No. David Sedaris and his cruel, yet accurate, wit did not cause me to quit my necklace. What deterred me was a string of bad luck so horrific that ‘bad’ does not begin to justify it. ‘Bad’ becomes more like when Michael Jackson sang, “I’m bad. I’m bad. You know it. You know, you know…” and he meant it the other way. Like opposite day.

  (more…)

So if it isn’t the seemingly incessant thunder and lightening, it’s my own brain.

A lot of people have been giving me all kinds of advice lately, and it has started to feel like there are too many voices in my head…and not remotely enough of them are of my own fabrication. The feedback runs the gamut from blunt suggestions that I may have made colossal and irreversible blunders in my life, to someone else’s remorse or lamentations at having made mistakes at my expense, although once again with the inevitable conclusion that (apparently) I am rendered quite damaged or at least not as far along the bell curve as I might have otherwise been.

These are depressing thoughts, and by and large I reject any philosophies that revolve around guilt or regret. At the same time, I had this random memory which brought home the strange realization that I may have instinctively had more figured out in my teen years than I do now.

Actually, let me restate that: I may have unconsciously been onto some things in my teen years that I am only now once again discovering. Now, bear with me, because this is probably going to sound a little strange.

What I’m referring to is the memory that when I was 19-years old and going to college in Santa Cruz, CA, I decided to stop wearing shoes. I had some theory about how it put me in better contact with the earth and that was very important, and I’d be lying if I claimed I actually remembered all of the elements that went into the decision.

I went everywhere barefoot: across campus, down to the college newspaper where I worked (crossing a particularly rocky portion that makes me cringe thinking about walking on it now, but eventually was not painful anymore), to the beach, downtown, on the bus system, riding my mountain bike,  and – most notably – in Safeway. Safeway was striking to me not only because they had a ‘no shoes, no shirt, no service’ policy that remarkably no one ever called me on, but because the floors were astoundingly slick and cold. Really, really cold.

I also shopped in some natural markets and co-ops, and they didn’t have floors remotely as icy as the Safeway on Mission. No matter how many times I went in there, I never got over the initial shock of those floors.

Anyway, the weird thing of it is that I saw a psychic in December (the first and only psychic consultation of my life) and she told me that I needed to ‘be barefoot on the earth as much as possible, even in the snow.’ Something about how it empowers me, but it is also very good for the earth and ’she benefits from it.’ Needless to say, the advice that Tuesday afternoon got a little out there/freaky deaky at times.

What made me remember all this tonight, was that I was recently lamenting to someone very beloved to me that I needed to meditate and get balanced; I had too much floating around in my head and was feeling a little bit overwhelmed. He suggested, quite uncharacteristically, that I walk barefoot on a beach – that the Chinese say it balances your chi or something.

No beach being in my immediate vicinity, he suggested I at least imagine that I was doing so. Good advice, no doubt, I just found it ironic (particurly since this individual is about as far away as you can possibly get from New Age-y) and couldn’t help but wonder if only I’d left the shoes off, I might be sleeping in the White House rather than Mr. Obama? Actually, that sounds more burdensome than fun. Maybe I’d simply be a little closer to the realization of my life’s purpose than I lamentably find myself at the moment?

In all actuality, most likely I would have gotten tetanus or a really gnarly cut from a piece of broken glass or - at a bare minimum - eventually been refused service in Safeway. Nonetheless, I can’t help but be slightly amused at the very random and slightly demented thing I started doing so many years ago, has now come back full circle.

Perhaps I should take a look at my other strange and youthful impulses and see if there’s any other gold to be mined there? An obsession with Joni Mitchell? A vegan diet? A wardrobe comprised more or less entirely of tie-dyed clothing? Or perhaps, and most importantly, an oblivious willingness to look stupid?

Alas, as I mentioned, I’m not one for looking backwards, and I am staunch opponent of regret. That stated, I guess I’d better peel off my 4″ heels sometime in the next few days and get my footsies onto Gaia. Massive insight, wondrous emotional healing, or nasty bout of athlete’s foot?: I’ll let you know how it goes.     ;)