We went back to Union Dale yesterday, this time with a fully charged camera battery (apparently our spare is dead forever) and I had a moderate level of success this time. I was still a big pouty bitch and yelled at Henry a lot because obviously it’s his fault that I am an amateur photographer. (Blame Henry 2012 pins coming soon!) I am mostly satisfied with the results and now willing to admit that perhaps I need the Xanax hookup.
Finally, a reason to use the real camera! Not that I need a “reason,” but I’ve got to say, taking pictures with my iPhone and then uploading them straight to WordPress has really turned me into a lazy ass fauxtographer.
Henry had one responsibility all day: charge the camera batteries. Well, he did. Except the one is apparently dead forever and the other one he LEFT AT HOME. I managed to take maybe 3 pictures before the camera died and it was back to fauxtography for me. (Insert lots of screaming, swearing, crying and THIS IS THE WORST XMAS EVERing in between all of that though.)
Creepy Doll came with us. I haven’t officially named him, though I HAVE been calling him Buddy a lot. I thought it would be cute to recreate these two pictures from 2007:
Maybe that can happen when I go back with my real camera.
Every Christmas I say, “Next year’s picnic will be better, we’ll plan ahead and make it good.” And then a year goes by and there we are, snatching bags of chips and stale processed baked “goods” off the shelves of CoGo’s, just like the year before. I guess it’s part of the tradition, eating convenience store crap in the cemetery. This year, they were out of egg nog though. Fuck!
As soon as we got out of the car, this wicked gust of wind kicked up out of nowhere and we were fighting to walk through it. It was actually pretty intimidating and I kept telling Henry that I felt it was pure evil and he was sort of giving me this look that read, “What? It doesn’t feel like you at all. It’s much warmer.” It’s weird how some days I can go to the cemetery and carry on my business (gutting hobos to sell to the bait shop) like nothing, but then other days I feel decidedly unwelcome. We wrapped up quickly and split.
I mean, I’m sure Creepy Buddy had nothing to do with it.
Take Two happens today.
I took Andrea to the Southside today to walk off our Pamela’s breakfast, over which I learned that she is morbidly terrified of old people and begged me to not invite some liver-spotted lone diner to join us at our table. I tried to get her to walk in vomit, because those are the types of things I do to my friends. And yet she still bought me the most amazing Sidney Crosby t-shirt of all time.
We had plans to meet Wendy at the Beehive for coffee at noon, and thank god we got there before she did because I almost had to move some guy’s crutches to sit down, but then I said, “I’ll just let Wendy sit here” and took the seat next to Andrea. When Wendy arrived, she tried to sit down and then realized the legs of her chair were entwined with crutches and had to reposition them against the wall, which caused the owner of the auxiliary legs to whip his head around and glare at her.
Meanwhile, Andrea was being aurally raped by the man and woman behind us who were telling each other about their respective spouses and how unhappy they were. Between them, the Crutch Guy and yesterday’s Eat n Park breakfast buffet disappointment*, I think she was on the verge of writing off Pittsburgh for good.
(*Andrea said she only got the buffet because Henry got the buffet, so she figured it must be OK. “Yeah, but I can eat crappy food,” Henry retorted. He hates taking the blame for anything, which must make life stressful for him when you figure everything is his fault. Anyway, if that were the case, I suppose we can expect Andrea to start wearing non-descript t-shirts and stuffing her pockets with individually-wrapped prunes as well.)
I kept trying to see what Crutch Guy was doing on the computer. Probably some sort of workman’s comp fraud.
HE WALKED TO THE COUNTER WITHOUT HIS CRUTCHES. WHAT A FUCKING FAKE. He left before we did, but not without giving each one of us a scrutinizing once-over. And then he barely put any weight on the crutches as he walked out. I was so appalled by this and kept saying so, but Andrea and Wendy continued to talk over me because he was old news by then.
Then we followed Wendy out to her part of town because she wanted to take us to a haunted cemetery called Hankey Church in Plum. We ditched my car along the way and rode with her (which was like a dream come true for Andrea because it meant a reprieve from the constant loop of Dance Gavin Dance in my car), but before we got there, I totally started to have a whiny, low blood-sugar meltdown and said, “I either need an apple or a cookie, like now.”
“Well, you can’t eat an unsliced apple, so I guess we need to get you a cookie,” Andrea deduced, because she has been reading up on the Keeping Erin Alive and Tempered handbook. Wendy pulled over at the first grocery store we came upon and Andrea bought me a Snickerdoodle and a Reese’s Pieces cookie. Then she bought two lame thumbprints for herself and Wendy.
At the checkout, the middle-aged cashier asked, “Oh, did you just get out of school?”
Andrea was completely perplexed by this, and as we walked to the car Wendy kept trying to assure her it was because she looks so young and she should be happy, but by this point I was going into apoplectic shock and they mostly sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher; all I could think about was eating the fuck out of one or all cookies.
“I guess because adults don’t come in and just buy four cookies,” Andrea laughed. “I should have bought a pregnancy test, too.” And then there was even more convivial chitchat between those two and why the fuck was no one handing me a goddamn cookie?
I finally got my cookies. I ate both of them so fast that I can’t even remember if I liked them. But I felt instantly better.
Hankey Church is a tiny cemetery semi-enclosed by a white picket fence, but not the kind that makes you dream of planting petunias and playing catch with your freckled kid, mostly because there are old, slanted tombstones beyond it, but also because who dreams of having a freckled kid?
Various supernatural websites claim there has been reported activity there. “Weightlessness and loss of balance” was listed on one site as being common experiences in the vicinity, and Andrea did actually fall immediately after getting out of Wendy’s car. Oh my god, it was fucking outstanding; the slowest descent I have ever seen in real life. In fact, it was so stupid how she went down that I actually for a second thought it was a staged pratfall, that she felt bad for hating so terribly on Jonny Craig and all of his ginger brethren, that she was all, “Hey, look at me, ginger gods! Lucille Ball shoutout!”
But then I realized that she had stepped into a slight divet in the ground and I started laughing. Just stood there laughing while she was in this sad, pathetically infantile crawl position on the damp grass.
She was fine, you guys. Don’t worry. Totally not as bad as when she bit it on roller skates the last time she was here.
Her head’s chipped like mine.
I didn’t really feel any weird sensations while we were there, but the creaking noises the trees were making was seriously disturbing me. It sounded like all of these invisible doors were opening down the hill from the cemetery and I whimpered a little.
One source says this headstone is the center for all of the paranormal activity, but my totally accurate EVP iphone app was not picking anything up.
Another source says it’s the vacant lot across from the cemetery, which was once the site of the Hankey Church, which burnt to the ground after the pastor was hanged from a tree out front.
Yet another source says, “There was never a church there, you dumbshits, and that cemetery is a peaceful place with the occasional BJ and date rape.”
However, when Wendy and I were still poking around the cemetery (we found two CD-Rs labeled as some strange Baptist sermons, tucked in a tree), Andrea was sitting on a large rock across the street. Her back was toward the vacant field and she said she felt legitimately creeped out sitting there, like something was behind her but she was afraid to turn around.
She probably took a lot of amazing spirits back to her hotel room. And they’re probably still laughing about when she fell in a half-inch hole in the ground.
In either case, my Toms were fucked after trudging around that sodden field.
Driving away from the cemetery, I said, “Hey Andrea, remember when you fell and I didn’t help you up?”
“You’re a dick,” she mumbled from the backseat, quietly masterminding a plan to make me a special batch of acid-based eyeshadow.
I know blogging shouldn’t be a chore, but goddamn—-I woke up today and just the thought of all the stuff that happened over the weekend made me feel so exhausted. I guess that’s a sign that it was pretty successful! So while I have the pie party and an awesome night at Castle Blood with Henry and my new friends Rick and Tammy to frenetically type out, I wanted to first share some photos I took of my friends Lauren and Lindsay’s kids yesterday. I was really honored that they wanted me to do this, because I’m no professional, and even more excited when they suggested a cemetery locale. You know how I love me some boneyards.
We did some regular autumn-ish shots and then they got to change into their Halloween costumes. Some of those ones were shot on my mom and aunt’s street (where Lindsay’s parents also live so we all just parked in their driveway, lest my aunt come flying out of her house with a broom and a shotgun). Oh look, here are some of the photos now.
Dean & Olivia: Any kid with pink streaks in her hair is cool in my book, but now I miss my own pink streaks. I think she was scared of me at first (most kids are) but by the end she was posing and then demanding to see the shot on my camera’s screen. Total diva!
Anthony & Tiffany: Tiffany is Chooch’s female counterpart. She loves horror movies and was all excited for a second when she thought the pond at the cemetery was full of piranhas. She was mad toward the end of the second cemetery shoot because it was supposed to be scary but it wasn’t. I mean, Henry was lurking in the background—wasn’t that creepy enough?
These kids did great. Two hours, three locations, and one wardrobe change and they barely bitched. It was at least 80 degrees and I was sweating my ass off, so I can only imagine how hot they were in their costumes. The only one whining was me, though. (I have a low threshold for discomfort, plus Henry was there and his presence always exacerbates the bitch-baby in me.)
Then I spent the day panicking that I fucked it all up, because that is how someone with low self-worth rolls. (Or stumbles, as it were.)
Now, I have to get back to putting things in jars for my murder desk. Ciao for now.
[The final shots can be seen here]
In between Chooch’s extreme divo antics, we actually had a pretty good time at the Evans City Cemetery last Sunday, even though every ten minutes found me asking, “OMG are we going to get yelled at?” every time a random person would approach. It always turned out to be a fellow zombie enthusiast though, some having traveled as far as New York and Tennessee. Wendy was about 4 seconds away from developing a Facebook friendship with one of the creepier of the graveyard tourists.
Zombie Guy Smiley
This is pretty much all Henry did the whole time: stood around with a stupid smirk on his face, playing Words with Friends and being of little assistance.
We dined on Burger King, post-boneyard romping. Andrea was intrigued by the “zesty sauce” I got with my onion rings, because the Burger Kings in California have apparently not caught on to this condiment craze. She tried it and immediately deemed it “too zesty.” Maybe her palate is just “too pedestrian.”
Then we were treated to a long, obnoxious ride home because Chooch lost the magnet to his Drawing Thing pen back in the cemetery and had nothing to keep him busy but the sound of his whiny bitch-factory voice. Besides Andrea going back to California, that was probably the lowest point of the whole weekend for me.
I’m working backwards here, but I couldn’t wait any longer to post these. This definitely turned out to be my favorite cemetery photo shoot ever.
Chooch could have stood to be more cooperative (children! ugh), but it was overall a really fun day. Wendy even came out to spectate and then wound up a victim. Meanwhile, Henry leaned against the car for most of the time, playing Words With Friends and being annoyed. It was awesome!
[Majority of the makeup effects were achieved using My Pretty Zombie cosmetics. Look for the limited edition Zombify set coming soon!]
Hey zombie fans! Halloween may be a few months away, but if you’re a true lover of the undead, it’s never too early for cemetery-flocking and brain-craving. And just for you guys, I have re-added some zombie-related shit to my Somnambulant shop.
If you’re a real George Romero fanatic, you might be aware that Night of the Living Dead was filmed an hour or so outside of Pittsburgh in the Evans City Cemetery. I’ve turned some of my photos from that very cemetery into pendants, and by that I mean I literally make 4 every six months because this crafting business is exhausting, you guys.
Actual photos, which I am hoping to have available for purchase sometime in the near future over at Appledale Snaps:
And here they are in pendant-form:
Here is what people are saying about them:
Jane from Ass Stew, Arkansas purrs, “I spent my last $10 on this pendant instead of cat food. Now my cat’s dead, but at least I have a cool pendant. And something to eat.”
Timothy from Toenail, Utah writes, “Gave this to my mother for her birthday. She keeps saying it feels like zombies are trying to burst through her chest like it’s a brick of solid grave dirt. This makes me happy because I hate my mother.”
Ulysses from PeePoo, Canada signs, “Ever since I bought one of these, pianos keep coming dangerously close to falling on me as I walk through seedy neighborhoods collecting money for the deaf. Clearly this is a good luck charm.”
If you’re in the market for paper goods, maybe looking for some sort of LOVE card to give to the mailman you’re stalking, I have some zombie-flavored note cards over in my other shop, non compos cards:
It’s proven that this card will brainwash even the chastest of priests into falling in love with you. Besides, the zombie was drawn by Chooch!
This concludes my quarterly plea for sales. Carry on.
I’ve already bombarded Facebook with these photos, so now it’s your turn, Blog.
We stopped at Goodwill beforehand to snag a plain white buttondown and some dress slacks (which turned out to be a womens pair) for Blake. I found some paisley piece of shit thing that we attempted to use as an ascot. Too bad none of us knew how to tie an ascot.
Immediately after walking into Goodwill, Henry was accosted by some older man (older even than Henry, if you can fathom). Apparently, they knew each other. Their discourse was not interesting enough to massage my eavesdropping gene, so I very huffily scoured the racks on my own.
“Who is that man Daddy’s talking to?” I asked Chooch, who was bouncing back and forth between me and the conversating rejects.
“I don’t know, Outrageous, I think.”
Turns out it was Regis, whoever the fuck that is.
I decided we should take some “safe” pictures at the cemetery before introducing the blood and bones into the mix, just so I’d have something to show one of the boss-types at work, who has no idea what actually goes on around here.
We then went to my grandma’s for the action shots, because, well, it’s gloomy as shit back there now. I had major anxiety being there, though, since my Aunt Sharon is crazy-weird about people stopping by. We parked the car in the upper driveway and prayed for the best, trying to stay as far away from the actual house as possible.
“Try not to get any on my undershirt,” Blake said as we stood near a large tree stump, opening packets of Ketchup procured from McDonald’s. “It’s a vintage Penguins shirt.”
I expressed my approval at his hockey-geared fashion sense.
“It’s from 1991,” he stressed.
BITCH THAT’S NOT VINTAGE. Shit, I can’t remember the last time I felt so old. Perhaps when I was called MA’AM at a Chiodos show. That’ll do it.
“It’s vintage to him,” Henry argued. “It’s from the year before he was born.”
DOUBLY OLD FEELING.
Just another normal day at Grandma’s house.
Blake in any type of animal mask scares the shit out of me. I need to buy more animal masks.
Chooch was getting sincerely irritated by this point. He’s good for the first few minutes, but then the novelty of being bossed around and forcibly positioned in ridiculous and absurd stances kind of starts to piss him off a bit. These are probably the moments he wishes he had a normal mom who just take him to the fucking mall and pay $20 for a regular Easter portrait with a blood-free Easter bunny like all the kids in his class get to do.
I was on the phone today, and mistakenly let it slip to Chooch that it was Sharon on the other end. Raising his voice approximately eighty-seven octaves and acquiring an obnoxious lilt, he yelled, “TELL HER WHAT WE DID YESTERDAY AT HER HOUSE! TELL HER!” and I’m trying, one-handed, to use on him the things I learned last night at Zombie Defense Class, but his little-big mouth just kept flapping.
Fucking turncoat. Like he didn’t know what he was doing.
Yesterday was a pretty nice day, so I cajoled Henry into going for a walk in the cemetery with me and Chooch. He was pretty equivocal about it at first, because even something as normal-sounding as a “walk” or “stroll” can lead to certain headaches, arguments and popo run-ins when I’m involved.
Nothing like a nice Jamaican Lager in the boneyard.
A view through Henry’s new glasses. At first they made him look like BTK, but they’ve grown on me. He’s at least halfway to aging scene king now.
I forgot about how INTO NATURE Henry can be. Within two minutes, he had pointed out deer, turkey and squirrels before turning his attention skyward in search of birds.
“LOOK, THERE IS A WOODPECKER, OMG!” he cried desperately at one point, and I had about ten year’s worth of cemetery-walk flash backs, most notably the unlimited minutes he spent schooling me about moss in ’04. Get a fucking life with your nature shit.
Inspecting a dumping ground for what I embarrassingly mistook for rocks but were really STONES (rookie mistake, really), Henry shook his head in disbelief and said to no one in particular, “I can’t believe they’d just dump those stones there. Those are EXPENSIVE stones. THEY ARE CUT STONE AND MARBLE!”
That is the sort of guy I’m dating, the one who knows the difference between a mere skipping pebble and EXPENSIVE STONES, yet it gets us nowhere.
Imagine your town molester, taking a break from copping feels to amble slowly through the park, hands clasped behind his back and smiling sweetly to himself while his unmarked white van idles sinisterly in front of the middle school down the street.
There, now you know what Outdoors Henry look like!
Henry must have been getting under Chooch’s skin as well, because I overheard him quietly cantillating at one point, “Zombies/Come kill my dad/He’s annoying me.”
My favorite place in the whole wide world.
What better photoshoot conditions than a cold and rainy day. Henry wasn’t thrilled about it, but too fucking bad. I need him around to hold my lenses.
“That was kind of scary,” Chooch informed me just now as he walked past, looking for a cat to torture.
This was Chooch’s idea. I went along with it because I liked the angel/demon juxtaposition. How apropos.
I asked, in a kind of huffy tone, “Why do you always have to pose like a goddamn zombie?”
“Because we’re in the cemetery?” Chooch answered, hands raised. Then he shook his head and gave me the “You’re so stupid, Mommy” laugh.
“It’s nice to know you made a sandwich for you and Chooch, but not me,” Henry said, peeking inside the Iron Man snack pack Chooch uses for school. Hey, I never promised him a ribbon-topped box of consideration for Christmas. Chooch and I waited impatiently for him to make a sandwich and then we finally set off for our (my) favorite cemetery on the Northside of Pittsburgh.
Henry was worried that our car would get stuck on the unplowed cemetery lanes, which is his way of saying, “I think this is the dumbest tradition ever and sandwiches don’t taste good when eaten while my dick is getting frost-bitten.” I knew that the dead people wouldn’t let ourcar get stuck. NOT ON CHRISTMAS! Who the fuck else is going to visit these old, forgotten bones?
Chooch loves going to the cemetery on Christmas. I mean, I used to always just assume he did when he was too young to really have a say, but now this brat is so strong-willed that I know he would be all, “Oh hell no!” if he really didn’t want to do something. Because that’s what he says.
“I don’t look pissed off enough,” Chooch said. “Take another.”
A much better depiction of my child
For the forty-five minutes we spent amongst the dead, I was completely at peace and stress-free. But there were family-obligations looming ahead, so I should have known that wouldn’t last long.
Some old ass cemetery in Lancaster, PA
Chooch is already asking if we’re going to have our traditional Christmas picnic in the cemetery and I think that’s so awesome that it’s already become a “thing” for him. We didn’t get to do it last year because it rained pretty steadily on Christmas, but we had a little post-Christmas cupcake snack on a drier day. The cemetery picnics were something that started in ’05 when I was pregnant and we had no where else to go on Christmas because my family was being a basket of dicks. It kind of just stuck after that, even after my family took me back. We grab some snacks, some plastic bottles of eggnog from the convenience store, a blanket if we remember, and eat while shivering amongst graves. I don’t think Henry enjoys it, but Chooch and I do and isn’t it really all about pleasing the children?
All my life, I’ve had encounters with people who think it’s “weird” or “unhealthy” to have a fascination of cemeteries. I’m sure Chooch will eventually run into these same types of people who will crinkle their noses and attempt to make him feel like there is something wrong with him for pointing out the car window and yelling, “Cemetery! Let’s go!” just like he did in Lancaster. But hopefully he will be able to brush that shit off like I do. It’s not like we’re digging up dead bodies, for Christ’s sake.
Christmas 2008
Someday I will make a photobook filled entirely with all of Chooch’s cemetery photos and then all his friends will be like, “Dude, you have the best baby pictures ever!” and I will sneer in the faces of their parents.
What kind of holiday traditions do you have?
It’s not really an unknown fact that I frequent several of the cemeteries around Pittsburgh nearly every day. Cemeteries are my favorite places to jog, to have some peace, to just be. Henry, finally realizing that he receives less bitching/nagging phone calls on days that I get to go on these cemetery runs, has been making concessions to enable me to take a break from Chooch and go to my happy place.
The one I went to yesterday morning is the more deserted of the handful of area graveyards I’ve claimed as second homes. Occasionally, there might be a maintenance man here and there, driving around on his mower, making my skin crawl with the promise of rape. But it’s very rare that I encounter any human life form other than the type that stinks of sweat, gasoline, and molestation.
So imagine, as I stood outside my car all a’pretzel in my pre-run stretches, the fear that ricocheted off my heart when I heard a wet snuffling approaching to my left. It was accompanied by a frenzied panting interspersed with grunts and a soft jangling of chains. I caught a quick glimpse of a shock of black hair.
Ducking behind my car, my first thoughts were:
It was a dog. Just some black dog being walked by a girl in (really short) yellow shorts. I laughed a little to myself and began the very scientific process of applying my suntan oil. But my heart never really had the chance to recover from its WE ARE ABOUT TO DIE NOW Indian drum beat; a cop car coasted up behind me as I was making sure I had ample coverage on the back of my neck. The car slowed its a pace a little as it became parallel with me and my car, then it made the first right, crawling slowly, gravel crunching and twigs cracking beneath its wheels amplified in my paranoia-filled head.
I have a strong dislike for cops. Some might say I even HATE them, but let’s pretend there might be a cop reading this who isn’t a complete fucker and I will try to remain unbiased. But cops and me? We’ve got a pretty storied past.
I was expecting him to turn right onto one of the smaller arteries that would lead him back out of the cemetery, but instead, he turned around so he was perpendicular to my parked car, and backed up into the shadows where the road is cut off by a guardrail. (The rest of that road is crumbling down a hillside. I like to walk on it because I am THAT dangerous.)
“OK, he’s turning around,” I thought, and then realized if that were the case, he’d be driving right past my car in a way where my OUT OF DATE inspection stickers would be visible. So I’m trying to be all casual about this, all “Doo do dooo,” walking stiffly to the front of my car and laying my sun tan lotion and water bottle across the expired stickers with the motion of a robot up to no good.
And then I ran away.
I tried to shake it off, to stop looking like I had a body stowed in my trunk (because who would be at home watching Chooch if that were the case), and proceeded to just enjoy my time in the cemetery. I was down in the lower section, Dance Gavin Dance keeping me all motivated, when I started to ascend a hill and noticed that the cop car was still parked in that dead-end corner. I shook it off again, and lost sight of it for awhile.
But then I came up one of the paths that was parallel to where he was parked, but lower so that I couldn’t see the car just yet. I’m walking along this path and my mind starts churning. I start wondering if there’s something going down. The four main cemeteries I like to walk in are all smack in the middle of the North Side, which is not the best area in Pittsburgh. At all. What if I’m about to be an innocent bystander in some sting operation gone awry? Would I even be able to hear the gun shots with headphones on and one bad ear? (My right ear is in the middle of A Saga right now. This morning I actually looked for a doctor before giving up after five minutes!)
Finally, the path I was on intersected right in front of the cop car. I turned a quick right so that I was walking away from the cop. I could feel that I was wearing my shoulders as earrings, which is typical “Erin is nervous/guilty/tense” fashion. My arms were locked at my sides. I looked less like I was on a casual jog through the cemetery and more like I was being escorted to the gas chamber.
Act casual, act casual, act casual. The more thought I put into it, the more I walked like some leg-braced orphan from 1935.
This particular cemetery isn’t that big, so I inevitably had to be near him again. But this time, I was more curious than frightened, so I pulled my headphones off, perched my sunglasses on my head so he could see my eyes and not feel inspired to shoot, and approached the drivers side of the car with purpose.
And then I spoke to him. It went exactly like this:
Me, in a tone that sounded kind of bitchy even though it wasn’t my intent: “AM I OK BEING HERE?” Seriously, nervous situations make my octave raise involuntarily. I’m a walking suspect.
Him, smiling (OMG cops smile??): “You’re fine. I’m just sitting here reading a book until I get my next call.” He gestured at the big red hardback propped against the steering wheel. He didn’t appear to have a tattered copy of Hustler tucked inside the pages, either. (OMG cops READ??)
Me, laughing nervously, fidgeting with the wires of my headphones, practically asking to be arrested: “OK I WAS JUST MAKING SURE, YOU WERE FREAKING ME OUT (COME SEARCH MY CAR NOW I SWEAR I DON’T HAVE 48956 KILOS AND A DEAD MEXICAN IN A TARP)!”
And then we both laughed. I turned stiffly on my heel and stalked away.
How refreshing! A cop who was not only pleasant, but reading a BOOK and not a menu at a donut joint. The first thing I noticed about him was that he bore a striking resemblance to Eric Van der Woodsen from “Gossip Girl.” Also, he didn’t have that perma-sneer marring his mug like most cops do. (Are they born that way, or do they learn that shit at the Academy?) I never thought I’d see the day that I not only exchanged pleasantries with a police officer, but I shared my haven with one.
Me, little old Oh Honestly, Erin, had a conversation with a cop that didn’t involve Tourettes-level cursing and end with a fat fine.
I did a few more laps. He was still sitting back there reading as I got ready to leave. When I drove away, I beeped two staccato “goodbyes” to him, and then giddily laughed at the fact that I acted like a real person in front of a cop and not some daughter of a fallen Mafia don out for vengeance.
I wish I had asked him what book he was reading. It was probably just some library copy of Twilight.
We decided to take Chooch to the Evans City Cemetery yesterday, where Night of the Living Dead was filmed (even though at least 5 cemeteries in the surrounding areas of Pittsburgh claim to hold that title). I think he was disappointed that there weren’t really any zombies there.
There was, however, a freshly buried body, and two old men hovering atop the loose earth who stared at us suspiciously across the way. I’m sure the locals just love getting visits from assholes like us.
They’re coming to get you, Barbara.
It was about as anticlimactic as you can probably imagine.
Afterward, I was hungry, so hungry; the kind of hunger that’s so intense, it devours any shred of patience and rationality that might still exist somewhere within my dark self, and I turn into the type of woman who might yank the steering wheel from the hands of the driver, causing the car to careen over a bridge into some disgusting river, if only to prove her point that dead bodies do exist beneath the filthy surface.
“How about Hank’s?” Henry suggested. “It’s Mexican.”
He made to pull into the lot and I yelled, “Um, I am NOT eating at a Mexican establishment named after some guy named HANK.” Then I saw that you ordered through a window and were expected to eat outside, at dirty picnic tables. (So maybe I wasn’t close enough to actually see the surfaces of the tables, but I just know. I just know.) “Oh and I am NOT eating outside,” I added, crossing my arms and scowling out the window. This is truth right here, not hyperbole.
“You know, I think you only do this shit to me,” Henry said, on his way to poutsville. “I bet when you’re out with other people, it’s never this hard to find a place to eat.”
At least three dozen traumatic food-finding scenarios with Christina flashed through my mind, but I said nothing.
“If you did this shit to Alisha,” Henry added. “she wouldn’t still be friends with you.”
This is probably very true.
We settled on a stupid place called Ree’s Family Restaurant. It was bad enough the cheese wasn’t melted on my grilled cheese, but when you bring me a slice of blueberry pie and it’s been over-refridgerated to the point of coagulating into a pie-brick, and the crust tastes like the less-flavorful bastard offspring of one of those packaged Hostess pies, you can go choke on a dick, OK? It’s not often that I pass a piece of pie across the table after one fucking bite.
I should have just buried my food expectations in the Evans City Cemetery. Maybe they could make a cameo in the 8th remake of Night of the Living Dead.
Bayernhof Music Museum, Part 1
“We’re going to be so late!” I cried to Andrea, after she had purposely tried to sleep through our appointment at the Bayernhof Music Museum last week. She was against this part of the Pittsburgh itinerary from the get-go, especially after I had Wendy call and make us a tour appointment when we were hanging [...]
I’m not a crafter at all. Give me craft supplies and the end result will be nothing short of a horrific eyesore, with a trail of blood and tears in its wake. But when Brandy gave me her Santa Voodoo doll tutorial to post on my blog, I was inspired to make one myself, but [...]
(These are the companion photos to this post, which I wrote while still in Gatlinburg. I miss Gatlinburg. Also, I have not been able to go back and check out all my horrendous typos borne from a writing-derelict like myself using a PHONE to blog.) In the AM: It was all downhill from here. (Except [...]
When I launch a new obsession, I of course want to share this with my work friends. For example, the Wacky Worm. I was hoping it would become a wide-spread sensation, culminating in a department field trip to DelGrosso’s, which is a semi-local amusement that has A PERMANENT WACKY WORM, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. [...]
Many years ago, when I was friends with that crazy lady Cinn, she was dead set on making her own absinthe. “I found a place on the Internet where we can buy wormwood!” she squealed. She said “we” when she meant “you” because I was the one with mommy’s American Express. I was nineteen, extremely [...]
I wasn’t looking for love at Soul Skate. It was hotter than Snookie’s kooka in that joint and really all I was focused on was not melting into a flesh-puddle while rollin’ to Justin Timberlake’s “Summer Love,” which I never realized just how truly anthemic that song really is until I had quads laced to [...]
Henry’s Worst Idea To Date: Homemade Lollipops
Get fucked. All the pre-school kids get to bring in treats on their birthday. Since there was no school on Monday, Chooch is bringing shit in tomorrow. I thought perhaps Henry could bake some cupcakes; Chooch suggested cookies. But Henry went off on his own and decided to make chocolate lollipops. He bought three different [...]
A few months ago, someone was trying to get my work friend Kaitlin to buy a lamb-shaped cake pan that they didn’t need anymore. Included in the email he sent to her was a picture of what the finished product could conceivably look like, so she sent it to Barb and me because it was so [...]
There was a drowning today in the sea monkey tank. We tried to stop it, I swear. Pre-infant suicide, I caught one of the sea monkeys writhing around on the hood of one of the pink cars, like it was caught in some sort of Whitesnake video. The other sea monkeys didn’t seem very impressed at its poor [...]
Reverse Racism at the Roller Rink
I realized on Sunday that I miss football season. It kept all the idiots inside on Sundays and let me enjoy life without the promise of asphyxiating on humanity. And apparently, the skating rink is where all the people want to be when suffering football withdrawal, because that fucking rink has been packed tighter than [...]
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