When I moved into my very first apartment, teetering above the alley between Franklin and Laurel Streets, I had pretty limited furniture. A desk, a bed. A kitchen table. One rickety chair bequeathed from a friend, and a couch. The chair situation was probably my most dire problem, as chairs are pretty vital and necessary pieces of furniture. Guests sit on them, you stand on them to hang high artwork, you sit on them when you eat at the table…they’re just necessary.

Over time, people became aware of the fact that I needed chairs, and they started trickling in, bit by bit. Two of the Czechoslovakian folding chairs from my father’s house, so fragile that you needed to sit on them very precisely and avoid breathing. One hall tree. A few standard kitchen chairs. A decaying wingback. At one point, I had 22 chairs, which stuffed the house so thoroughly that it was like a gauntlet, and the chairs became sort of a running joke.

They just kept coming, and coming, and coming. And finally they stopped arriving, and I sifted through them, kept the ones I liked, and bequeathed the rest to goodwill. I brought the chairs with me when I moved, and then when I moved to San Francisco, I left most of them at my father’s house, or in storage in my old house, because Puff already had chairs, and it seemed silly to start the multiplication of the chairs all over again.

So, when I moved back home, I had, again, no chairs, except for Mr. Bell’s armchair. And because someone was now living in my old house, I couldn’t exactly nip back and retrieve my furniture. (And other goods left in storage there.)

This house is much smaller, so it’s probably good that I don’t have chairs, but now the parade of stools has begun. When I moved in, I had two stools, both of which I had used as stands to hold various objects in the old house. And there was a stool waiting for me, which I kept because I eat at a little counter by the door, and it was roughly the right height.

However, it was a real pain when guests came over, especially when I invited more than two people to dinner, because one of the stools was too frail to really sit on, and the stool that came with the house was crappy, so usually someone would end up sitting on the ball, which wasn’t very comfortable. So I picked up a couple more stools at Rossi’s, bringing the total stool population to five: three at the counter, one in my bedroom, where it stands in as a lamp table, and one frail rickety inherited stool which I stashed in the loft.

Then, Loki broke the ball, so I have nothing to use at my desk. And I decided to replace my desk with something smaller, and ended up with a high table which came with two stools. I think I have officially crossed the line into the house of stools from the house of chairs, and it’s all my fault. At this point, I’m hoping I don’t work my way up to 22 again. I seem to be cursed with a fate of excess seating, which is especially ironic since I so rarely entertain.

What will it be in my next house, I wonder. Couches?

The other day, I was reading on the porch in the sun and looking out into the garden, and I thought to myself that what I really need is a giant tub of fish, dug into the ground so that the rim is almost at dirt level. We used to keep fish in the water troughs in Elk, and I could never figure out how the animals didn’t eat them by accident while drinking, but they didn’t, because the fish got huge.

And then I started thinking that if I seriously wanted a little pool of fish, I would need to think about how to protect them from the neighborhood cats and birds, which would pretty much regard that sort of thing as an open-season all-hours buffet. And then, for some reason, I remembered the Day the Fish Died.

When we lived in Caspar, my father and I, for a time, kept fish. Mostly goldfish, as I recall, in a big aquarium which was later the scene of the Great Frog Debacle (a story for another day…if you ask nicely). We also kept parakeets and finches, which were much more of a pain in the ass than the fish, and I think my father was a big fan of the fish. I was too. Fish are pretty cool, you know, even if you can’t really interact with them most of the time. (Except for tame koi. Tame koi are cool.)

At any rate, one time I went away somewhere for a few days in the summer, and my father decided, while I was gone, that the fishtank needed to be cleaned. This was probably true, because we tended to let it go awhile between cleanings, due to the water shortage issue. (And apparently goldfish actually like dirty water better, so we were doing them a favor.)

My father duly cleaned the fishtank, using a few drops of bleach as he scrubbed, like he usually did, and rinsing it before filling it and putting the fish back in. When I came home the next day, he mentioned that he had cleaned the tank, and we both trouped into the side room to look at the results, and…

…well, you may be able to guess what had happened. Concerned about water use, my father did not rinse the fishtank out as well as he usually did, and as a result, there was some bleach residue in the tank. So the goldfish were very very dead, except for one which was still swimming around drunkenly with bits of its scales peeling off.

We both felt very bad, and those were the last fish we kept. We ended up giving them a Viking funeral at the beach, I think to atone for my father’s sin, and I suspect that he remembers the Day the Fish Died as vividly as I do.

For some reason, this incident from my past has been skulking at the corners of my mind over the last week or so, although it’s hard to say what, precisely, dredged this memory up from wherever it had been hiding. It sometimes seems like these strange images of the past just appear, for no apparent reason and with no real lesson in mind. They’re just sort of there.

Living in Molybos, one sort of came to know everybody else, and therefore, most of the town showed up for major events like christenings, weddings, and funerals. Funerals were announced with a dolorous clanging of bells, and people would wind their way through the city to the church for an interminable service, and then dutifully follow the coffin to the graveyard and watch while it was interred.

Unlike in the United States, where funerals are a tasteful, refined, quiet affair for the most part, Greek funerals were as noisy and colourful as the rest of Greek life. Members of the procession would weep and wail whether or not they knew the deceased, with the female family members of the deceased weeping more than anyone else, rending their black clothing and smearing their faces with dirt and ash. Before the coffin was interred, women might throw themselves upon it to be pulled away by their family members, and after the burial, the women would return to the grave every day to tend it, keep the memorial candle burning, and talk to the dead.

On Saturdays especially, the graveyard filled with women in black who would sit and talk with one another while tidying the graves, and periodically there would be an exhumation, which would also be attended by most of the community, as we waited to see whether or not the bones had been stripped clean as they were laid out on the traditional white cloth before being bundled into an ossuary. Some superstitious Greeks believed that the condition of the bones after the three year wait for exhumation was an indicator of the character of the deceased; good people would obligingly decay away into neat skeletons, while the less virtuous would still have clumps of stringy hair and papery skin which would necessitate reburial.

For some reason, in this memory I have a strong feeling that the cemetery was on a hill, which would make sense, since there’s no good reason to locate a cemetery on land which could be farmed. I remember a forest of headstones and rocks and gnarled shrubs, and I remember threading our way along with the rest of the village to the yawning grave, presided over by the priest.

What makes this funeral more remarkable than the others is the identity of the chief mourner: the butcher. The butcher was a terrifyingly large man who could immobilize a thrashing cow with one muscular arm, and he had long been a subject of fascination for myself and my German friend, Anna. We would skulk around the corner to watch him at work, efficiently hacking up poultry and livestock, and we were fans of his gigantic pig, who would lazily wallow to the fence to accept kitchen scraps from us.

The butcher was a fairly taciturn sort of man with a coarse voice and a common accent, and it was not unusual for transactions to pass in almost total silence, in marked contrast to the normally voluble commerce of the Greeks. He was simply a man who knew his business, and wasn’t that interested in discussions.

At this funeral, I was not the only one astonished when the dirt began to clod onto the coffin and the butcher started to sing in an eerily high, ethereal sort of voice, a lament that pierced your heart, pinning it to the back of your spine as you stood frozen in awe. For a man who rarely spoke to suddenly burst out in any sort of song would have been remarkable, but it was all the more astonishing for its haunting beauty and purity, the sort of sound which you hear and realize that you will never hear again. Like most Greek mourning songs, it was a tune that was invented as the song was sung, and the words were spontaneous and without calculation, and it captured the depth of his bitter sadness and the spirit of the deceased. While he sang, the other mourners fell silent, and even the priest stood still, the incense censer idly twirling from his hand.

At the end of the song, he left, silently, while everyone else stood stunned at the edges of the grave. I cannot remember who it was that died, if I ever knew, but even now I marvel at the depth of feeling conveyed by the butcher on that bitter day.

So, I went to the Neighborhood Watch meeting tonight, mainly because Tristan said that I should, and because I figure if I want to get the rest of the neighborhood to band together to start a violent revolution, I’d better meet them all.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much I loathe meetings. My friend David was there for the first half, and we entertained each other, but then he fled, using meatloaf as an excuse, and I suffered alone through the agony.

I was going to give an entertaining and pithy blow-by-blow of the madness, but, honestly, I think I will let my notebook speak for itself:

Click through for the full version, including explanatory notes.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I thought I would tell this story, because it’s pretty darn funny, and it may be one of my favourite stories about my father the party animal. I was just going to include the story in the post, but it’s too excellent to bundled in with a serious discussion on the macabre doings at the Times, so I decided to wait.

At any rate, this story dates back to when I was living in Oakland, and my father visited me for a few days. On his first day there, we were supposed to meet an old friend in Berkeley for dinner, and I suggested taking BART, because parking in Berkeley is a real pain in the butt. So we duly headed to the BART station, and hopped a train, which was moderately full, it being roughly rush hour.

We talked about this and that on the way over, and eventually the topic of his garden came up, and he mentioned that he had really been struggling with the deer. His landlady, who lives up the road, has a really nice eight foot deer fence which keeps them at bay, so they stroll over to his house and chow down on his vegetables, which is really annoying. He can’t afford to put a fence up, and thus he’s resorted to all kinds of shenanigans to keep the deer at bay, but they just keep coming back.

Therefore, when my father spotted a pellet gun on sale at the store, he decided to buy it, with the intent of firing it roughly in the direction of the deer to scare them off. He had mentioned the acquisition a few weeks ago, and I asked him how things were going with the pellet gun plan.

“Oh,” he said, “the best thing happened the other day. There was this deer in the yard, with that insolent expression, headed right for the cabbages, and I got the pellet gun, and the window was open, so I could just sneak the barrel outside and aim right at him, and he kept just chewing and wriggling his little ears…”

At this point, the train fell silent, for no apparent reason, but neither of us was really aware that all conversation had ceased. I’m sure this has happened to you at some point; you’re having an awkward conversation in a crowded place, and for some reason everyone gets very quiet just in time for the worst possible phrase to be shouted at the top of your lungs.

“So,” my father continued. “I shot the fucker right in the ass! That’s what you get for coming into my yard!”

A young black man the next seat over visibly flinched when my father started raving about shooting things in the ass, since he obviously hadn’t heard the first part of the story, and even I jumped in my seat a little, because my father was so filled with delight and rage and passion that he seemed to visibly grow. We both have a tendency to get a little voluble when we’re over-excited, and I can see why it intimidates people, because we start flailing our arms around, and our eyes twinkle, and we get really loud.

“And then,” he said, with the whole train hanging unabashedly on every word at this point, “the little bastard ran off into the forest, twitching his little tail, and I opened the window a little wider and shouted ’so, how do you like THAT!’”

With the payoff, the train settled back into the quiet hum of normal conversation, and my father shrank back to his normal size, but that moment, frozen there in the train with everyone staring at us with astonishment, will live on forever in my mind.

I realized this morning that today marks the year anniversary since I moved into my new house, which means that I have been back in town for around a year as well. How time flies, I tell you what. Anyway, I happened to be watering the garden when I came to this realization, so I thought, what better a way to illustrate the changes a year can make than to post some pictures of the garden?

Here’s my front door roughly a year ago, taken with my cellphone.

Well, ok, not a lot of change there, I grant you, although I did get rid of the awful lace curtain.

Here’s the infamous trench.

And here’s the same spot, a year later. The gate moved, did you notice? Also, I am not responsible for the picket fence. Not. Responsible. Got it?

Here’s a view to the north…

And the same view, today. Do you like my hose snake?

Here’s a kinda easterly view from last year.

And a slightly different angle on the same view from today.

I don’t know about you, but I think that things look a heck of a lot better. Not just because they’re taken with a real camera.

I’m glad to be back home again; it’s hard to believe I’ve been back a year already!

Every day this week, I’ve passed them at the Post Office. The chipper woman at a folding table scattered with poppies, with an aging representative of the Greatest Generation propped up beside her, staring blankly at the Chapel by the Sea announcements pinned to the noticeboard. Apparently the same 1,000 yard stare which causes men to catcall at me in the street and women to cross to the other side of the road with their children’s hands tightly clasped allows pert blonde women in “support our troops” t-shirts to pretend I don’t exist, because every time I walk by, she’s busily arranging the poppies, or talking about “our boys” to some earnest or bored victim, who is forced to scrunch into the table to let people pass.

Every day, I try to muster up the nerve to dig out my wallet and buy a poppy, to say something, and every day, I fail. I leaf through my late voter’s guide, I pitch political advertisements into the trash, I open a bill from my student lender, I wedge the Tuesday coupons into the recycling, but I don’t say anything.

I don’t really know what to say.

“The fields of Flanders are a long way from Iraq,” maybe. Or “what do you think about the VA’s unstated policy of refusing to diagnose PTSD in returning servicemembers?” Perhaps “funny, we’re eradicating poppies from Afghanistan, and selling them here!” Sometimes I think I might say “it’s a real pity that the VA isn’t taking very good care of returning Iraq veterans, isn’t it?” Snarky and frustrated on Wednesday, I almost think about snapping “you know, it’s kind of offensive to hear you blathering about packages for ‘our boys’ when there are a lot of women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, too.” Or “isn’t it strange that we’re still fighting wars?” Perhaps I should ask her if she heard McCain’s speech about getting “most” troops out by 2013. Five more years.

I think about veterans making poppies when I walk by, and I want to ask “my friend lost his legs. Have you seen them?”

I think about my grandfather when I see that old man in his black cap covered in pins. Don’t let the man get you down. I think about my grandmother, sitting on her brightly polished Indian in a hot pink motorcycle helmet.

As I pass in the already shimmering heat of Friday morning, the pert blonde and her steadfast refusal to recognize that I exist suddenly irritate me. Who is she to pretend I’m invisible, I think. She doesn’t even know me. And I reach over her to take a poppy from the man’s trembling hand.

“Thank you for your service,” I say, somewhat awkwardly, and the woman looks up from her studious poppy arranging in surprise. “Really,” I add. “Thank you,” and I press his gnarled fingers with mine, my split knuckle throbbing in the heat.

There is a pause, and I leave my money on the table, too much, really, but I’m too shy to ask for change, and I stick the crooked little flower behind my ear and walk off down the street.

When I get home, my sweat has caused the red dye to run, leaving a wilted puddle of tissue behind my ear, and a red streak trickling down my face.

“You’re bleeding,” the neighbor I like says.

“America is bleeding,” I reply.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking recently about beating someone up with a baguette. I think it might have been brought about by the scene in Buffy where Buffy pretends to stake Angel with a baguette, and when I saw the scene, I thought “that’s completely ludicrous,” but then the image stuck in my head, and I realized it wasn’t. Given the opportunity, I would probably do the exact same thing, because there’s something about a baguette which simply demands it, especially when said baguette has gone slightly stale, and it’s been coated in a fine layer of flour which rains down like dandruff.

It might be a “you have to be there” kind of thing, but the fact of the matter is that I did once beat someone soundly about the neck and shoulders with a baguette, and it was one of the most satisfying and invigorating events of my life. I should hasten to say that this wasn’t a case of bread rage, but rather a playful mock breadfight, made all the more awesome by being able to battle in a dumpster full of bread. I really think that humans don’t engage in play nearly enough. It satisfies so many primal urges and desires, you know?

Have you ever dived into a dumpster full of bread? It’s a pretty fantastic moment in your life. It’s the kind of thing where, as you’re doing it, you think “this is a pretty fantastic moment in my life,” as bread rolls skitter away under your feet and bags crackle. Really, the only thing that makes it better is grabbing a pair of baguettes and setting to, oldschool style, and prancing along the top of the dancer waving your bread about until it snaps in half and you are forced to grab a new loaf.

Alas, we don’t have a real bakery in town, let alone one which would produce bread in such large volumes that it would fill dumpsters with stale, discarded loaves. The only dumpster full of stuff to dive into around here is probably fish guts, and even that is a dwindling commodity.

Pity, really. Maybe I should start a baguette fighting squad, with members willing to have vigorous demonstration fights on the Guest House lawn in full Victorian regalia. Bustles and all. I should start knitting my baguette holster now.

So, thanks to Haddock, I am now aware that my feeds are apparently awry, and I apologize for that. I think it has something to do with the latest version of Wordpress, which I recently upgraded to, since things are going haywire on the back end as well. At any rate, hopefully those of you who can’t read this because it’s not showing up in your feeds will eventually head to the main page and see this. The direct feed for this ain’t livin’ is at: meloukhia.net/feed, and you may want to update your feed readers to reflect this. There are some other direct links too; you can use your feed reader to find them, if you feel thus inclined, by typing in my URL.

Speaking of which, I do like the latest Wordpress, although it is kind of irritating that it’s making the site go all wonky. For those of you who use Wordpress, it is a good idea to upgrade to the latest version just in general, and it was an easy install. I realize it sounds sort of silly to be plugging the new version of Wordpress when I’m having site problems, but I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Wordpress for all of those problems. So, uh, go upgrade.

For those of you who are completely mystified by the above two paragraphs, here’s a story about rearranging furniture:

So, the thing is, I like to rearrange furniture. It’s kind of a thing with me. Usually, every six months or so, I totally rearrange my house. I start to feel restless when everything remains in a static position, and I get antsier and antsier until I abruptly decide it’s time to tear the living room apart, usually late at night, and then I get all sweaty and covered in dust and then I am filled with a sense of deep satisfaction.

The problem is, I can’t do that in my new house, because my new house is very small, and it has a highly restrictive floorplan. When I moved in last year, I arranged everything in what seemed like the most logical way, and everything is still arranged in pretty much the same way, despite the fact that I moved in almost a year ago. This is…unprecedented for me.

A few weeks ago, I rearranged the objects on the shelves in the kitchen, attempting to channel my frustrated desire to move furniture around, and it really wasn’t very satisfying. The problem is simple: I want to change the way my house looks and feels by moving things around, and I can’t, and I’m starting to feel like I’m suffocating, which makes me bemoan the myriad issues with my house even more.

For example, they could have put in a half-story to make the upstairs lofts useful, but they didn’t. So instead I have what seems like a lot of space upstairs, but I can’t use it, because the ceiling is too low. And they could have made the bathroom, I don’t know, a few square feet larger so that you don’t feel like you’re making out with the hot water heater when you take a poop. Oooh, and they could have put ventilation in the kitchen, so that the house doesn’t always smell like whatever was most recently cooked.

The fact of the matter is that I bore easily, and I think that rearranging furniture allows me to pretend that my house is different, as well as allowing me to work off some excess energy. And the thing is, I don’t really want to go through the headache of moving, because it’s a pain in the behind, so I’m stuck in this furniture configuration and it suddenly feels very oppressive. In short, I’m bored with my house.

I thought about moving my desk upstairs, because there is just enough room to sit on my ball and work up there, but I think I would feel too cloistered, what with the ceiling sloping in on either side of me. And then I would have to skulk upstairs to watch movies, which doesn’t sound all that pleasant. Plus, it’s going to get wicked hot up there this summer, because this house only has one window that opens. And, seriously, ONE WINDOW? It’s not like this is Siberia, people. Cross-drafts are actually a good idea, and I’m not talking about the drafts that whistle through all the cracks in the winter.

So maybe I could move my desk against the west wall, and unstack my bookcases and line them up against the wall that the desk faces now. But then I would have my back to the window, which I think would give me the heebie-jeebies.

I think I might be going stir crazy. Maybe I’ll just burn all the furniture and fit the house out Japanese-style.

One Saturday in the fall at my first college, I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, and a friend of mine turned to me and said “let’s go to Brattleboro and get some crispy tofu,” and we did, three of us in her big purple Subaru. It turns out that Brattleboro happened to have a very good Vietnamese restaurant at the time (and maybe they still do), and the tradition of going out for crispy tofu when feeling blue had begun several semesters before.

So we ate our crispy tofu and spring rolls, and then we wondered around Brattleboro in the warmth of early fall, going to bookstores and the Brattleboro Food Co-op, and then one friend remembered that she actually needed something from the outdoor store, so we went there, and while we were there, I purchased a Nalgene bottle.

This may not seem like a big event in a person’s life, I mean lots of people have water bottles and a fair number of those water bottles are Nalgene bottles, but Nalgene had just come out with the line of brightly colored ones, as I recall, and it was a topic of much debate, which color I should get, and then someone else got one too. I also got a tin of Burt’s Bees Chapstick, as I recall, and even now, the smell of Burt’s Bees transports me back to Vermont in the winter, with snow and cracking lips and long silences.

I’ve been using that bottle ever since.

I missed the bottled water craze because of my Nalgene. Why buy bottled water when I already had a bottle of perfectly palatable water, ready to hand? I never got the point of bottled water, and was kind of surprised when it became hip and trendy.

The printed volume measurements on the side wore off long ago, and at one point the cap became so damaged that it couldn’t close anymore, so I was forced to replace it. On the side of the water bottle, I typed a helpful typewritten reminder: If love is free, why so sad? The tape has endured through years of use and multiple dishwashings, as has the paper itself. I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t disintegrated, thanks to the humidity.

I’ve taken my Nalgene camping in all sorts of strange places. I’ve accidentally left it clipped to my pack and watched my bag skid across 150 feet of tarmac at an airport after being misthrown, leaving one small scratch on the bottle. It’s been carried on hikes, refilled from mountain streams, frozen, and run through a garbage disposal by accident (there’s a small scratch on the bottom).

When I had real jobs where I went to work somewhere, my Nalgene always came with me, and people could tell when I was working because they would see it perched on the counter, or near my workstation. I drank from it in nervous, sudden gulps when I was stressed out or upset, I used it as a handy gauge to see how much water I drank a day, I threw it at someone in a fit of rage one when I was breaking up with him and split his eyebrow on it.

My Nalgene and I have been through the wringer. That water bottle has more frequent flier miles than most people I know, and it’s been present through thick and thin. It might seem silly to think of having such an intense and personal relationship with an object, but there it is. That bottle has been a part of my life for so long that I’ve forgotten what it would be like to live without it.

Looking at my Nalgene reminds me of so many events, places, people, and relationships. There’s a lot of memory packed into that humble water bottle, and sometimes it’s almost too much to bear. I’m sometimes reminded of the scene in Stranger in a Strange Land where Michael looks down at a city and sees it as “so choked with living experience.” I have always suspected that places and some objects can become almost overloaded with memories and experiences, personally.

I think it’s safe to say that my Nalgene is one of my oldest friends, and that’s why I was sad to learn that the plastic it is made from is apparently toxic. People have had their suspicions about BPA for years, but I guess it’s official now. The Canadian government even says ixnay on the pabnay. Nalgene has stopped making bottles with BPA, mainly in response to consumer concerns, I suspect, and some stores have pulled products which contain it.

I suppose I should retire my Nalgene, given this information, but I can’t bring myself to do it. After all, I live a block away from a hazardous waste dump, and I lived on a hazardous materials site for almost a year. Lots of things around me are probably cancerous, including a number of former friendships. So I’m just not ready to drain my Nalgene and recycle it. It seems so cold and callous to dump my old friend like that, just because of the latest health scare, the latest political trend in the health conscious community. Maybe I will be ready, someday, but for now I know that it will always be there in the fridge waiting for me, filled with cold water, and I like something fixed and dependable in my life.