Why I quit AA

The Tyranny of God's Will: Why I Quit AA

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak outside the pre-set AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by what is called the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same meeting at noon every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about The War. He talked about The War as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood Him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the original text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unrealistically pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this at nearly every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise. . . I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy and forgiveness towards him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work! I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the unquestioned (and unquestionable) model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “people with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades?

What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of gender, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it”, so why make any changes?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.

I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many compliments about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).

In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn't – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to attend. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and even seems to discourage normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some smug or even pitying version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, forever frozen in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood Him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, then I think I’ll make a plan of my own.

Hey, if you're not cool enough to know what Mad Men is, why are you reading this?

Let us now praise famous men. Famous men like Jon Hamm. I don't care if he has a silly name. Where has he been all my life?

Jon Hamm is one of those actors who was sleeping in a pupa for 10 years before finding the role that not only defines him, but a whole era. The show's executive producer Matt Weiner has been quoted as saying, "Mad Men IS Jon Hamm."

Watching the show is like the Time Tunnel or something. I step across the thresshold into the wonderful land of Ahhhhhhhs. Period details don't just leap out at me, they jab me: the "Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy" TV campaign jingle I hadn't heard since I was five; the "High Flight" TV signoff while Pete Campbell was screwing an anonymous sweet patootie (with her elderly mother on the other side of a folding door); Don Draper's little kids running around with dry cleaning bags over their heads.

I could go into all the machinations and intrigues of the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, but let's not, shall we? Recently they canned art director Sal Romano, my next-to-Don favorite, maybe for being gay or too nice or something. Meantime, Don trudges on. At the end of the third season, his company has disintegrated, his wife has run off with some ugly-looking Senator whom she doesn't love, and he has run out of Lucky Strikes for the third time today.

There is a weirdness about Mad Men (i. e. Robert Morse as the eccentric company Zen master, Bertram Cooper: where have we seen him before? He starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the early '60s, perfect period timing, not to mention Mad Men irony), a sense that, in spite of all the deja vu, we've never quite covered this territory before. A man can get his foot run over by a John Deere tractor during a drunken office party (causing the cynical Roger Sterling to quip, "It's like Iwo Jima out there"). A thick-headed husband can get brained with a vase. But most of all. . . most of all, we can spend some quality time with Don.

Don has many faces, the hardened masked face of the office, the creased-brow expression during the numerous boyhood flashbacks (the only part of the show I really detest), the softer face when he is with his kids (and in spite of being emotionally crippled, he really does love his kids), the roughed-up, carnivorous, rrrrrrrrArrrrrrw! face when he's in bed with some woman (a different woman every week). Yes, in bed he's a whole 'nother guy. Every once in a while, he even screws his wife. God, what a body, and he has that good man-smell that somehow mysteriously comes across on the screen. (Men either smell good - George Clooney, Harrison Ford - or they don't - Matthew McConnaghey, Brad Pitt). Just enough hair, and a build that is devastating but somehow doesn't call attention to itself.

So what would it be like to have sex with Don Draper? Has he read the Kinsey Report? (I don't mean that loser guy in the office.) Does he know what a clitoris is? Does he, "you know"? Do "everything", as Elaine used to say on Seinfeld? They can't show too much, of course. But it's implied. "I might scream," one of his conquests, a naive young school teacher, gasps. "Don't," Don replies. Another time, well, he ties someone up, but she deserves it because she's such a slut.

And what is Jon Hamm reallyreally like? The photos I see show a goofier person, his smile a little too broad. A person who can't quite believe his good fortune at being famous, at having a really juicy and challenging part at last (and according to legend, he spent a whole decade as a waiter). I think he's probably pretty hyper. But seems to have one steady girlfriend, un-Draperlike. He gave a long interview for the Advocate, and for a moment I was heartbroken, afraid it was maybe Sal he loved all along. But then they mentioned the girl friend, and everything was all right again.

Maybe. (But who is she?? I'll scratch her eyes out!)

The thing about Jon Hamm is that he is a somewhat more rugged version of Anthony Perkins in his youth. Perkins had a sort of supernatural beauty before age and AIDS withered him up into an old walnut. Hamm naturally has a sort of GQ look, that "I was born to wear a tux" aura that is so rare in men. Cary Grant had it, but I've never felt any sort of attraction to him (in spite of the fact that he was probably also a good-smelling man, if gay).

So how does JH smell? A hint of warm sandalwood; some aftershave remeniscent of Old Spice; a neutral deodorant we can't name; a soupcon of bourbon, but maybe from yesterday; Lucky Strikes, not the smoke but the unburned shreds of tobacco with its golden, molasses-y scent; fine quality wool; leather jacket worn earlier today; clean shirt, with the man-smell just barely sifting through.

Sheer torture.

Let's slip away, shall we?

OK, was everything really brown then? Like it is right here?

I don't remember it being brown, but then, I was sitting in the middle of the floor sucking my fist (and come to think of it, I was probably sitting on something brown). Shadows of those early memories still pass across my neurons. They went like this: "SEE the real coffee flavor." "SMELL the real coffee flavor." "TASTE the real coffee flavor."

When I see these things again, and I just saw a slew of them on a not-very-good DVD compilation (too much repetition: do we really need 15 ads with Mr. Whipple squeezing the Charmin, or '60s color ads so degenerated you can't tell what they're selling?), it shakes something loose. I have a reaction. Maybe infantile,

I don't know.

When I saw that classic Maxwell House ad with the coffee percolator, geez, I could smell the goddamn coffee. It's probably the most brilliant ad ever made: starts with a very close shot of the top of a "coffee perc" (the only way to make it then), with that sound to represent the percolation, a sort of coconut-shell melody in irresistable intervals. The type of jingle that fries itself into your brain.

Then the voice-over telling us we WANT TO SMELL and TASTE that coffee. A shot of a very wide, round white cup on a saucer, surrounded by a lot of empty space, slowly being filled.

Then, total genius: a shot of someone picking up the cup and bringing it up to their lips, so that the steaming black coffee gradually fills the entire frame.

I won't tell you the rest. Lots of repetition. The use of circles (ask Walt Disney: that's why everyone loves Mickey Mouse). Clean, uncluttered images. Simplicity. This ad is fucking incredible, and I watched it maybe five or six times, then made my husband watch it while he shook his head at me.

Oh, and then! There were others. "Meet the Swinger, Polaroid Swinger." This was probably the first instant camera. They were "only nineteen dollars, and ninety-five". I don't know if I had one of these, or my brother did. The ad had Ali McGraw in it before she was anyone, and the camera ate her alive. I remember how you had to pull off a disgusting layer of goopy plastic film when the picture had developed, and the warnings not to get it on your skin.

Then this, oh yes: "It's new! It's now! It's flash cube!" This was an incredible invention that allowed you to take four pictures before you had to change the bulb.

Gear.

Beer tabs. This was announced as the greatest invention since the wheel. No more need for those pointy openers (all right, I know you've never seen one). You just - watch this - zip this strip off the top. The woman was left holding a 3-inch, curved, razor-sharp blade. People later reported ripping their feet open on these things. It took the industry a while to get them right. Once they were made smaller, people dropped them inside the can, then swallowed them. You can imagine.

Oh, and this was maybe my favorite. I love those old bubble-shaped cars out of the '40s, what I call Popeye and Bluto cars, bulbous and low-slung. Huge, by today's

standards.

By the '50s, cars had turned ugly. O-o-o-o-o-gg-leeee. I don't know how they ever got so ugly, and fins began to develop and gradually enlarge like mutant

appendages.

I sat through an awful lot of these ads, but the one that made me bark with disbelief was one that began, "They'll know you've arrived - when you drive up in the 1958 EDSEL!"

For those too young to know, Edsel was the white elephant of the car industry. Named after Edsel Pretzelgruber, it was considered to be a can't-fail deal.

Nobody bought it, and no wonder. This car was ugly enough to scare your mother. Enough said.

I liked this one. It was called Slip Away, and at first I thought it was sort of like Pam. It was an aerosol that you sprayed all over your frying pans to make food slide off. But something strange was going on here. You had to bake them in the oven for half an hour. Yes. Bake them. The coating would stay on "for months", though they later described it as permanent.

Well, we know why: the spray was made of Teflon. That's right. In those couple of months, your family would eat the Teflon right along with their fried Spam. This gave a whole new meaning to "permanent".

Various celebs popped up, and most of them were boring, but there were some incredible 15-second spots for Hefty Bags starring Jonathan Winters. These were weirdly funny, like Winters, but most of all they extolled the marvels and obvious virtues of plastic bags.

They were all good! And they kept the place clean and sanitary. This philosophy caught on too well, to the point that we're now having a spot of trouble keeping the planet clean.

Another fave little chuckle: in an ad for Bounty paper towels, a woman's trying to get some ketchup to come out of the traditional glass bottle, and it sprays all over the place. "Ohhhhh! I wish someone would invent ketchup that goes where you want it

to."

Well, dear, hm, yah, maybe, just maybe they've done that, but at what cost? Billions of plastic ketchup bottles sitting for centuries in landfills.

But a small price to pay for hitting that hot dog bang-on.

"AND. . they are mild"

In case you've been wondering where I've been over the past few days (for I am sure my hordes of readers will be worried about me), I've been trying to pull myself out of a funk of non-writing, based not so much on the work itself as the miserable process of trying to get it noticed.

So I'll do something else for a change! Something besides ordering Minnie Mouse panties (size 4 - they're not for me) or out-of-print books or cheap DVD sets on-line.

Ah. Cheap DVD sets. This takes me to an orgy I allowed myself to indulge in yesterday, with deep regret later: I think I watched about a billion ads on a 3 DVD set called 1001 Classic Commercials (and I haven't even looked at Disc 3).

These weren't as fascinating as I'd hoped. I love old ads - maybe it's the reason I watch Mad Men with such fervor (that, and Don Draper's magnificent body, often depicted half-nude). The reason being, this was a very sloppily-compiled set. Ads were slapped on the discs with very little care for the quality. Ironically, the '50s ads were often in pristine condition, in the kind of crisp black-and-white I enjoy in old movies.

The ads from the mid- to late '60s were atrocious, barely discernible in the blur of neon orange. You have to wonder what happens to color film over the years, if it rots or melts or what. I skipped over these very quickly. They never should have been included.

Ads are a-spose-ta tell us everything about a culture at any particular moment. Aren't they? Women all seemed to want to look like Donna Reed, her blonde puffed helmet hard enough to repel schrapnel. One hair spray ad claimed that "your hair will still feel like hair", as if that were an aberration. Men's hair products were simply disgusting, rendering a decent head of hair into a slick of oily black sludge full of comb-tracks. Supposedly, women loved this: "they'll love to run their fingers through your hair!" Eeeiiiicccccchhhhhhhhk-k-k-k.

I didn't realize before how obsessed these early ads were with proper meals, nutrition through the warped lens of the 1950s. The words "wholesome" and "nutritious" popped up everywhere. Vitamins were mentioned constantly. There were modern-day wonders like canned zucchini (hmm, what's a zucchini?) and Tropi-Kai Mixed Hawaiian Fruits (? Probably another variation on fruit cocktail. Mmmmmm, those gaudy red maraschino cherries.)

"Eat well. . . but wisely," the authoratative male voice-over advises us. Right. Jell-o was nutritious, apparently, as was every kind of sugary cereal (all made in Battle Creek, Michigan - oh, how I remember sending away those box tops for a plastic fire engine!). This strange guy, a nutritionist called Euell Gibbon, told us that all sorts of bizarre things were edible (holding a cat-tail in his hand), then said he loved Grape Nuts. Did no one else see the irony?

No one knew how to pronounce "protein": it was "PRO-tee-an" (a term no doubt conflated - remember that term, boys and girls? - with "protean"). This was a whole different shoe size. What sort of yearning was lurking under the glossy surface? You judge.

Then came the creme de la creme of astonishing advertising: the cigarette commercial. All these had very catchy jingles, and mostly depicted young people running along beaches with dogs. "Kent. . . satisfies best," "Come all the way up to Kool", "Winston tastes good like a (bop-bop) cigarette should." This one has become infamous on the 'net because of a cartoon ad of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble smoking in the back yard while their wives slave away at the yard work. At the end of the show Fred lights Wilma's cigarette while he sings the jingle wildly off-key, and she takes a luxurious drag. The shot of Bedrock at night while the credits roll is overwhelmed by a giant sign that says "WINSTON". Can't hurt the little buggers, can it?

Camels brag that they send hundreds of thousands of FREE cigarettes to veteran's hospitals every year. Hospitals. Where most of the men lie dying of cancer? Denial was rife in the ads, constantly mentioning how mild and easy on the throat these sticks of dynamite were. Some were even recommended by doctors. A particularly tough and virile man (and most of the men were tough and virile, no pansy-ass fags here) claimed, "It's a treat, not a treatment."

Anyway, the cigarette ads put me in a stupor after a while, so I had to dwell on something else: the odd popping up of celebs, some of whom were not yet famous. Gene Wilder (his nebbishy voice unmistakeable) did two voice-overs, one for Alka-Selzer ("Ah! The blahs!"). Alan Arbus, the psychiatrist on M*A*S*H showed up. I swear I heard Mel Blanc's voice more than once (the Frito Bandito?).

The brilliant Buster Keaton, a man who worked constantly until his death at nearly 70, did a perilous pratfall backwards off a platform, making us wonder how he ever survived.

Jack Gilford did his charming thing ("When it comes to Crackerjack, some kids never grow up"). A very drunk Arthur Godfrey did a Lipton's Chicken Soup ad as part of his show (for in the past, hosts had to do the ads). "The chicken is there. You might not see it, but it's there."

After a while the whole thing was a blur of impressions, some of which I remembered from my childhood: "Gaylord, when you pull his leash he walkety-walkety-walks with you (arf, arf!)". "Mystery Date". Lucy and Desi, looking at each other fondly and smoking. Sugar Bear sounding like Dean Martin. A toy called the Great Garloo, some sort of remote-control robot on a long cord. And oh, Chatty Cathy. The doll from hell!

You can't see the angst and despair. But it's there.

Why did I keep this? Oh well. . .

Sometimes I'm like, I mean. I'm like, and he's like, and I'm. An icon, I mean. Iconic.

There. Now that I've got(ten) that out of my system. . . 'Jever wonder why it's so hard to throw some things out?

Like the bouquet from your wedding or something, now withered into a crumbling yellow horror with cobwebs and life forms living in it?

Hey?

So here's mine, what I can't throw out. Old columns. I started writing columns for teeny community newspapers in the mid-'80s, and soon became hooked. I kept them all. I was afraid, if I didn't, I would disappear (or at least the writing would).

I have kept everything I've ever written for publication. Over 25 years of weeklies, not to mention all the dailies and magazines, that's not just hundreds - it's thousands.

Okaysothen. So then, my best friend, the sister of my soul, the sister I never had coz my own sister is a poisonous banshee (and I hope she reads this!), the sister God sent me when I was about to fall apart, is going through a hard time about her high school reunion. She phoned me about it the other day.

Say the words "high school reunion" to the average sane person, and it will have about the same effect as the word "biopsy". It is not a good thing.

For you will see all the thrivers still thriving, or pretending to. Everyone else will have died, or won't show up.

Myself, I am sure nobody would remember me. Jeez, four years of my life! I was a cipher who drank on the weekends and attracted 35-year-old married men. A freak.

I got a whole novel out of it, Mallory (Turnstone Press - I'm afraid you'll have to get it used).

But in this crumbling old column, I played it for laughs. I can't find any other way to transcribe it except to take a quill pen and run it between my legs (oops) and write the damn thing out. But here it is, Margaret Gunning's Between the Lines, published in the Hinton Parklander on October 28, 1986.

Do you remember her?

She was the girl who sat in front of you in high school - the one with the long, straight blonde hair that always looked like something out of a shampoo commercial.

She also had a model's figure, a pert name (something like Pammie or Casey), perfect teeth, hundreds of friends, a Corvette, and a straight-A average. And oh, yes - she was head cheerleader in her spare time.

You don't remember her? Well, maybe you remember him. Roddie played the romantic lead in all the high school musical productions. (They didn't just pick him for his looks. He also had perfect pitch.) He was a pretty busy guy - captain of the football team, head of the debating club, president of Student's Council - so it was a wonder he ever found time to go out with that blonde-haired chick who sat in front of you.

But he did, every Saturday night. You'd see them together at all the dances - Pammie and Roddie, the dream couple of Everywhere High. Two perfect smiles, without the benefit of braces - and nary a zit between them.

One of my favorite activities in high school was dreaming up sadistic futures for these two. You see, I was one of those girls with a "nice personality", which meant I spent most of my time sitting by the phone and praying it would ring. It's not that I was jealous of them. Oh, no. Why should it bother me that they seemed to have every human advantage ever invented?

But sometimes I would get a little bored during science class, a little sick of staring at that perfect platinum waterfall of hair in front of me. When I wasn't devising sneaky ways to stick a wad of gum on the back of Pammie's chair (so that her fabulous tresses would get stuck the minute she leaned back), my mind would start to drift.

I'd dream that Pammie finally married Roddie, and on the first day of their honeymoon they'd discover they couldn't stand each other. Pammie would break out in a hideous red rash whenever she looked at him. And Roddie? The minute the honeymoon was over, he'd start making advances to his secretary.

From then on, things would deteriorate. Pammie's mother would move in with them and start cooking rich, greasy, fattening meals that would ruin Pammie's pert little figure within six months. Roddie would get caught up in some crooked investment scheme and be thrown in jail. They'd lose their home and have to move in with Roddie's mother (who made Pammie's mom look like Julia Child).

Meanwhile, their seven children (aged eight to fourteen) would all become juvenile delinquents.

Ah, me - the sweet fantasies of youth! Do you want to know what really happened to this golden couple, this Barbie and Ken of my teens?

I'll tell you. They've been happily married for the past 15 years, with a lovely home in a nice quiet suburb. Roddie is a corporate lawyer, and Pammie is a clinical psychologist. Their income allows them to take nice little jaunts to Europe every summer while their 2.2 children (who both have perfect teeth) stay home with their live-in nanny.

Pammie still has that long, straight blonde hair like something out of a shampoo commercial. She weighs the same as in high school, and can still fit into her cheerleader outfit. And Roddie has become even handsomer with age. Sort of like Paul Newman.

Is this fair? Of course not. But neither was high school.

So, I've decided I'm never going to go to my class reunion.

Or if I do, I might just accidentally leave a wad of well-chewed Juicy Fruit on the back of Pammie's chair. . .

A squirrel of one's own

From way back in the memory junk drawer, I recently retrieved an image (or a song, or whatever-it-was) of Martin Short playing the bizarre Jackie Rogers, Jr., a performer always on the verge of being buried by his own pretentiousness.

What sticks in my mind like a paper clip is a song he did: "Pardon me, miss, but I've never done this/With a real, live squirrel."

I remembered the original, smarmy song from the Mike
Douglas Show, one of those '60s things that sounds predatory and creepy now (a "real live girl?" As opposed to a blow-up doll?). It was like something playing in a bar on Mad Men. Well, OK then, what's the connection to me as I sit here over coffee (God, it's too strong, give me more) contemplating my "new" surroundings?

I've never had a real live office before. Never. The room I've worked in since I started writing with a computer in Year Zero isn't really an office, it's more of a utility room. There are cheap bookcases everywhere, crammed and cluttered with other people's stuff. My husband is a kind of controlled hoarder (controlled by me, I mean) who just sort of exudes or emits this stuff, little coils of wire, black plastic things, used twist ties, boxes that haven't been opened since 1972. He keeps instruction manuals for appliances that have long ago bit the dust. On top of that, one of his desks with an old obsolete computer on it was pushed against the wall, never used, just stored.

The stuff that was mine wasn't work-related: craft boxes full of felt and beads and feathers, and and and. The place had become a catch-all.

What happened was this: our usual screaming territorial battles escalated when he went into semi-retirement and spent even more time clumping back and forth between the main part of the house and the garage. This meant clumping right through my non-office, the only room with an access door, a door which had to be slammed heavily (or so he believed) every time he clumped on through.

It was getting bad, I mean, really bad. He just didn't see that there was a problem. Why was it disturbing me that he ran a power saw in the garage, when there was a whole wall between us? Why was it bothersome that he had blathering ad-infested talk radio on full-volume as he worked because he's deaf as a cucumber?

I just ground my teeth a lot and put up with it until he suggested something.

"You know the bird room."

"Yeah. The bird room."

"Upstairs."

"Yeah."

"I had this idea, but I don't think you're going to like it."

"Try me."

"What if we switched your office with the bird room? I mean, put the bird down here. This would be his bedroom. Then you'd have your own private room upstairs and I could do anything I wanted in the garage."

It was one of those idiot-simple solutions that no one had ever thought of before. Jasper is the most spoiled 3"-long bird in history, with a cage that takes up 1/4 of the room. Wouldn't he be happier downstairs where he could have his own bedroom and be part of things? Why was this so unthinkable?

When my long-grown-up kids found out about this, they looked almost offended. "Whaaaat? What are you going to do that for?"

Move something in the house? In the house?

"Sure. The bird needs a change."

This may have had something to do with the fact we're finally putting some money into the place and getting a new bathroom and new windows and stuff like that. I hate change, and my first reaction was unease, even dread, but I was absolutely gobsmacked when the change was made relatively smoothly and without mishap.

Instead of fuming and tripping all over and missing the stack of 750 padded mailers in the old place, I find I. . I. . .

I like it here.

I have a view, which I never did in the old place, unless you count a wall with a huge tacky bulletin board on it. It's all cedary, layers of feathery green which right now has a gentle drizzle sifting through. On nice days, if they ever come, I'll have sunlight. I can see birds flitting about. In 25 years here, I have never looked out this window. I never had this perspective, ever. It was wasted on a dumb bird.

The room kind of wraps around my desk (a huge desk which I love, and which was in storage for years before I realized I could be using it). These are my books in the bookcases, not frayed copies of Shell Busey's Home Ideas and How to Repair Practically Anything.

It's just. . . my stuff, my space. I feel both humbled and exalted. The energy is completely different, almost cocoon-like (when I feared it would be claustrophobic). My old amplifier from 1973 is gone, replaced by a sleek model that looks like it might have come from this century.

There are carpets, which softens the sound of everything. I like it.

I could go on and on about all that "room of one's own" stuff. And I wonder now if I'll be able to concentrate without all that clumping and slamming. Will I miss the hissing arguments, his posing as a bloody saint wronged by a heartless, selfish bitch? Well, we can still do that in Ikea when we can't agree on a lamp. (Snarling at each other in public is especially enjoyable.) And have a few Swedish meatballs with gravy in the cafeteria while we're at it.

The good fairy came (or maybe the sanity fairy), and now Pinocchio is a real boy. I never thought it would happen. And hey: what's that I see leaping from branch to branch in my stunning new view? Could it be. . . a real live squirrel?

Life's candy, and the sun's a ball of buddah

Eye on the target and wham,

One shot, one gun-shot, and BAM -

Hm. Well, it isn't Mr. Arnstein I'm after, but something infinitely more elusive and devious (and it plays a mean game of poker).

I want to get published again. I need to get published again. I have three books written, all finished and ready to go. Three. All are publishable, as far as I am concerned. But has anyone ever seen them?

That would be a big "no".

People have weird ideas about being published. "Must cost quite a lot, I'd imagine. Are you going to take out a loan?" "Is your book going to be on the bestseller list?" "Don't writers all help each other get published - I mean, kind of like one big artist's colony?" Yeah, like I'm going to tell all my sneaky colleagues how to get published so their nasty little novel can kick MY novel's ass!

It isn't at all what you think.

When my dream came true, after thirty years of pining and longing and bloody hard work, it came true the same way it does for maybe 85 or 90% of writers. There was one big popping flare of fireworks, then fast-fading embers raining down, then . . .

nothing.

It didn't matter how good the reviews were (stuff like "fiction at its finest "- no kidding). They meant nothing. I was supposed to run all over the country on my own dime and try to drum up interest. But I also learned that readings and posters and web sites and all that shit made no difference at all.

So what does make a difference? Something called "buzz". If a novel is "buzzy", it automatically has tons of readers right out of the starting gate.

Buzz is like sex. No one tells you what it's all about, or how to get it. You just sort of fumble around, and fail most of the time. And when the novel fails to sell, guess who gets the blame? Mr. Agent? Ms. Publisher? Don't make me laugh!

I can't stop writing, which I guess means something, good or bad. I have kept writing and kept writing through the most hideous, soul-destroying crises of my life. I now have two novels and a book of poems, all of which I feel deserve publication. I WANT SOMEONE TO READ THEM, GODDAMN IT!

In many people's minds, this is sheer ego. "Oh, isn't writing its own reward? Can't you just do it for self-expression?" (Or, worse, "leave it for your children").

No one expects a concert pianist (or a gymnast, for that matter) to play in an empty hall, but we writers are seen as crass and egotistical if we want someone to look at what we've slaved over for years. Stories must be TOLD, not chucked into a drawer. An untold story isn't even a story.

So, Mr. Arnstein, you big galoot, you mustachio'd rat fink, I'm pursuing you once again. Like Barbra Streisand in that ridiculous sailor suit , it's one roll for the whole shebang.

Hey, all you agents, pundits, arbiters of literary taste - get ready for me, love, 'cause I'm a comer - so even if this fantasy-trip is a bummer -

NOBODY

No, NOBODY
Is gonna

rain

on

myyyyy

paaaaaa

(rrrrrrrr)

rrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYD-UH!

The Red Shoes

Hello, boys 'n girls. I have a treat for you today.

Here they are, the feet that everyone dreams of.

This is what Cinderella's feet looked like at 52.
After jamming her pink pieds into too-small glass stilettos for 35 years.

These are the feet of some Italian peasant woman who has stomped grapes for so many years, her feet have become marinated and ready for the grill.

The feet of a Chinese princess, agonizingly wrapped in tight bandages until the toes turned under and broke under the strain of trying to walk.

If you prance around on stilts for decades, no matter how chic you may look, something awful happens to the feet. They are squished into a pencil point shape, the arches forced into a line parallel to the ankle.

I've seen something called ballet stilettos, which are the ultimate fetish shoe (or at least I think they are - maybe there will be worse ones where women can't walk at all). Literally, you walk on the ends of your toes, the heels jacking up the feet to the point that the top of the foot buckles forward. Oooooooh, sexy.

I don't know what it is with women and feet. They have to be ow-y to be sexy, I guess. Me, I went into ecstasy when I found a pair of gold-and-white high-top Skechers on sale at Winner's for $20. I have one pair of chunky heels, maybe 3 or 4" high, but I always fall off them, and suffer cramped calves the next day. Yes, they make your legs look longer, leaner, sexier, and etc. etc. But look at Sarah Jessica Parker, balanced on skyscrapers that look like extensions of her twiglike, painfully bowlegged thighs. Sexy? You be the judge.

So, OK, I'm coming to it now: whose feet are these, do you think? One hint. Of the four gals from Manhattan, you know, the ones in that new movie, she's been crushing them the longest, which maybe explains their painful array of blisters, corns, bunions, calluses and other hideous pustulating deformities.

She did it voluntarily, of course. There is a price to be paid for beauty. But when she stands up, I'll bet she walks around on tiptoe.

Conflate, inflate, deflate, he-flate, she-flate

I looked it up in Wikipedia, that unassailable source of truth, and it said something like "to bring together, mold or fuse." This isn't the kind of word you use every day in polite company ("Let's conflate our wedding plans, shall we, dear?"), but it crops up once in a while, and I just enjoyed a particularly interesting (to me, anyway) example of it.

The internet long ago molded or fused with my hazy memory of old book titles, things so out of print you used to have to dredge them up in rare book stores for hundreds of dollars. Now they're lying around in Amazon for one cent (I'm not kidding - I guess they're in a warehouse somewhere and they just want to get rid of them). I buy most of my used books this way, paying only the shipping and handling.

As long as they hold together, they're OK by me. When they come, I get to smell that musty butter/bug/shelf smell of yellowed, slightly crumbly paper again, the Book Smell that will very soon become obsolete (not that anybody cares). I get to read books that in the 30 years since I've read them have mysteriously turned to

dust.

The only down side is that sometimes I only remember part of a title, or part of an author's name, or assign the wrong author to a title. This necessitates a tangle of detective work that would be impossible without the net.

The other night I was propped up in bed reading the Oprah bio by Kitty Kelley - a nice, fishy dish of Meow Mix that makes perfect bedtime reading as a slice of modern-day mythology. Kelley kept referring to an author named Gloria Naylor, who had written The Women of Brewster Place (later made into an Oprah TV

miniseries).

I kept thinking: Naylor. Naylor. Naylor.

Naylor was the name of an author I used to read, oh, eons ago! Didn't she write a book called Psyche, all about a little girl who had been abducted? I tried to find it. Naylor, Naylor, Psyche. You can imagine what I found under "psyche": a host of bafflegab about the human "mind", "soul" or whatever it is that floats in the air around us, completely independent of the brain. There must've been thousands of entries about "the psyche", but no mention of Naylor.

Then: pay dirt! On my millionth try, I found the name Phyllis Brett Young, and her hundredth book, written in the '60s, was called Psyche. Nothing at all to do with Naylor, for sure, but at least I had her name and knew I wasn't imagining the book.

But another title kept nagging at me, and I was sure it had been written by the same author.

It was called Revelations, a well-written novel about a young woman growing up in a rural Fundamentalist family who has a secret affair with a phony evangelical preacher. I remember a couple of things about it: one, that the main character's nasty older sister at one point exclaimed, "There's hay on her back!", and two, it said on the cover, "Soon to be a major motion picture starring Sally Field!"

Hot on the trail of Phyllis Brett Young, I googled Revelations, and found even more stuff that wasn't relevant at all. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of books called Revelations, including the book of Revelations. I was lost in the world of defunct novels, at a dead end.

Then I thought back. Gloria Naylor. Phyllis Brett Young. Was it possible that I had, well, not quite conflated but somehow de-conflated the two? In muddling around the 'net, I came across a name that finally rang the bell: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Yes, there was a Phyllis, and a Naylor, and they belonged

together!

Phyllis Naylor turned out to be an incredibly prolific children's/young adult author who had somehow popped out this novel during her spare time. It was listed under used books in a million places (and I ordered one, lusting after that musty antique smell), but when I found lists of all the things she'd written (over 200),

Revelations wasn't there.

At the same time, I know it was the same Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. I think the busted movie deal must've caused her to want to bury the book. It's too bad, because though it's simply written, it has a heart, exploring a delayed awakening of sexuality in an honest, compassionate way.

I wonder what got in the way of the movie. Sally Field would've been around 30 or 35, the perfect age for the "spinster" who stayed at home to look after Grandpa after his stroke. Sally Field doesn't get enough play these days except in Boniva commercials (you know, for menopausal women whose bones are crumbling away to dust). I remember her ferocity in Norma Rae, jumping on her desk with that piece of cardboard that said, "Strike!".

Sam Shepard could have played the preacher, natch. It would have worked. Do they do that in Hollywood: blare it around before anything is signed? Or WAS it signed, and fell through? I wonder how many sure things fall

through in Tinseltown.

Anyway, from Gloria Naylor, to Phyllis Brett Young, to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. This sounds like six degrees of separation. But I like conflation better, with its sense of blowing up some vast balloon or iridescent bubble of the imagination.

Everyone knows it's slinky

So what's the connection between the image on the left, a coiled spring, an insufferable racket, and bad popcorn?

I'll tell you.

When I'm in the mood for a bad movie, there's no stopping me, so paying about $25 at my local cineplex (named Scotiabank, after the bank that took it over from Paramount) wasn't quite the horror I thought it would be. I wanted some sparkling entertainment, some sleazy laughs. I wanted to see The Girls again.

I did watch Sex and the City. I DO watch it once in a while, '90s relic that it is. The highly improbable sexual frolickings of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha were usually good for a guffaw, and once in a while you'd even see a flash of nudity.

But now the franchise has moved on to big box movies. They should've stayed on that other box, the smaller one, but never mind. This has very little to do with a pretty bad movie that went on far too long (2 1/2 hours, when a comedy should clock in at about 90 minutes, tops).

For an early matinee, the place was unusually crowded, and I had to climb like a mountain goat to find a seat, popcorn and drink smashed against each other so I wouldn't lose my purse, dripping umbrella (this is Vancouver) and 5000 napkins to keep my jeans from being saturated with grease.

Finally found a seat up in the gods, top row, with a young couple entwined just on my left. I mean entwined, like those photos you see of mating snakes.

And then.

Bom, bom, bom. . .

What walks downstairs, without a care, and makes a slinkety sound?

I swear! I could hear that theme song as a bizarre noise sank into the left side of my head.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

This sounded for all the world like the metallic shoop-shoop of an ancient Slinky. But the thing is, it went on and on. And on. And on. And on And Andandnadndndnndd

I had to peek, to see what the hell was producing that sound. The guy was sitting on the left, with his bare forearm on the seat rest.

The girl was rubbing his arm.

And rubbing his arm.

And rubbing

And rubbing

And rubbing

Swoosh, swoosh. Shoop, shoop. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhh,

shhhhhhhhh.

Now I've sat beside or behind some humdingers, mucus-snorters, knuckle-crackers, popcorn-macerators, but - never this. A "rubber".

It might have been OK, well, more or less, if she'd stopped at some point. But she didn't. She rubbed his forearm all through the previews. She rubbed his forearm all during the opening credits.

SHE RUBBED HIS FOREARM ALL DURING THE GODDAMN FUCKING MOVIE.

The same patch of forearm. Her clothes were some sort of noisy nylon that shhhh-shhhh-ed when she moved, and every few minutes she squirmed around in her seat like a two-year-old being forced to sit still.

I tried everything: shooting them poisonous glances (they probably just thought I was nuts). Eating my popcorn really loud, except that there was someone on the other side eating hers even louder.

An hour went by. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

An hour and a half. The Girls went to Abu Dhabi or Timbuktu or somewhere, to get laid. It wasn't funny.

How could this guy have any skin left on his forearm? Why was his forearm suddenly an erogenous zone? Was this just a promise of another kind of rubbing that would happen after the movie? What the fuck was wrong with these people?

At about the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, I was hearing the Slinky jingle in my head and couldn't shut it down:

"It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's the best of the toys

It's Slinky, it's Slinky, the favorite of girls and boys. . . "

This was preposterous, it was just unendurable, not to mention bizarre. I had to stop it. There had to be a law against public rubbing. I kept thinking how I would phrase my complaint. Excuse me, miss, but you're rubbing your boy friend too loudly in public. Excuse me, people, but you're acting like total weirdos.

I tried to focus on the movie, which was essentially inane and a waste of money (with only one good line: during their Middle East adventure, Samantha spies a desert hunk and exclaims, "It's Lawrence of My Labia!"). It was nothing more than a parade of Pravda and them other guys, who knows who they are.

But the endless, irritating, bizarre shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and. . .

I wonder why reality is so full of tortures like this, at least for me. Someone with less sensitive hearing might have ignored it. They were sitting on my left, next to the ear which is constantly attuned.

Finally I said to myself, that's it, this is ruining my $15 movie, I HAVE to do something. I can't just sit here and play victim to a whole lot of obscene shoosh-shoosh while Boyfriend gets a 2 1/2-hour hard-on. So I took a deep breath, and took action.

I got up and moved.

Sex and the endless summer

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

Then we wouldn't have to wait so long

And wouldn't it be nice to live together

In the kind of world where we belong

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true (run, run, run)

Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do

We could be married (we could be married)

And then we'd be happy (then we'd be happy)

good night my baby

sleep tight my baby

good night my baby

sleep tight my baby

good night my baby

sleep tight my baby

good night my baby

sleep tight my baby

Well, wouldn't it? Be nice?

Those things we thought were nice, those things we were SURE would be nice, have somehow changed radically over the years. That "wouldn't it be nice if we were older" sure turned around violently at some point.

The only reason this whole mess is repeating in an endless loop in my head is that TLC is using it to promote their summer season. Not that I ever watch TLC. No sir. No Cake Boss, no Hoarders, no Intervention, no Ten Ton Man or women giving birth on the tracks in a subway tunnel, none of that stuff.

I hadn't heard that Beach Boys tune in a long time, and it's mesmerizing, surfer dude music taken to the height of Mozart. It's meant to (and does) call up summer and smoke and sand (and sex), bathing suits straining, salty douses with sea water, steaming hot dogs, and etc. (Hey, it's early in the morning and I've only given myself half an hour to finish this because I want to go into town to see Sex and the City.)

What are the things that would be "nice" now? If my beloved granddaughter no longer had Type 1 diabetes. If my husband and I no longer faced an uncertain financial future. If I felt I had a place in the community (long-shattered by a mammoth health crisis in 2005). If, if, if.

I am profoundly ambivalent about my work now. Actually it's not the work, which has been going better than I could have dreamed. I want to publish again, but now I KNOW what it is to be published. People have such absurd notions about what it will mean for them. Civilians say things like, "But you were published before. Doesn't that mean the same outfit will publish your work for the rest of your life?"

In their minds, there are two levels: Stephen King/J. K. Rowling, and zero.

I know this is a refrain I fall back into too often, and I know I shouldn't. I remember seeing something printed on the wall in Ikea (where we go for the food), a quote from Sven Svendsvendsvendensen or whoever it was that founded the outfit (by getting up at 1:00 in the morning and not having sex, I mean ever), about how the only time you don't make mistakes is when you're asleep.

Me, I've made plenty of mistakes while I was asleep! But it's when I wake up that I find I've honed it to an art form. My experience tells me that mistakes are not only embarrassing, they are very, very costly and can follow you around for years, if not for the rest of your life.

If a person does nine exemplary things and on the tenth time slips on a banana peel and falls on their ass with 5000 people watching, GUESS WHAT THEY WILL REMEMBER? And probably forever.

Oh, that guy who. . .you know, the one who. . .

Oh.

That explains why movie stars and authors and politicians kind of drop out of sight and don't come back. They've made some sort of fatal mistake. Or maybe even a garden variety mistake.

Don't make mistakes. It'll cost you. Bad. Now I'm off to see the movie.

OK, so. Here is my dream car

OK, it was something like this. But really, not even close.

It was like something out of a Popeye cartoon of the '40s, the really old ones, I mean the Fleischer, good ones. (I'll write about them later.) Cars already looked like cartoons then, like giant bubbles, bulbous.

And huge.

As I sit here slurping down a giant mug of Red Rose tea and eating McVitie's Digestive Biscuits (can you tell I'm Canadian?), I'm trying to piece together just what happened. This was an Event such as I only experience a couple of times a year. A sighting of beauty so sighful, it felt it almost like an affliction until I had told my husband all about it.

I was standing at a bus stop, bored, not expecting anything, vaguely aware of traffic whizzing by. But behind me was a leisurely lane leading (like the alliteration?) to the shopping area: Safeway, Canadian Tire, and other stuff.

I don't know why I turned around. As the Beatles song says, "Had it been another day, I might have looked the other way". But I did turn around, and was assailed by a vision in burgundy and cream.

Burgundy, cream, and chrome. Remember chrome? This vision had a mouth, a rather fierce grille with teeth. There followed a slipstream of shape. A little aggressive at the front, almost like a nose; bulby around the front tires; high roof with absurdly small windows, then. . . a taper.

A waterfall of car, a cascading, almost down to a point. There appeared to be no back wheels at all. The rear of the car sank right down into the pavement.

The colour must've been custom, as I'd never seen anything like it before, the two tones divided by a bar of (more) chrome. This lordly vision slowly drove past me, then turned off into the shopping area. A young guy (I barely saw him - he could've been George Clooney and I wouldn't have seen him) got out and went into the bank.

I stared.

I don't even drive. I hate cars. They belch out poisons. I fear them. I've been almost run over 100 times. What was this thing? Some sort of vintage, obviously, maybe on its way to one of them-thar car shows I never seem to get to. It appeared to sail forth like a giant boat supported by massive pontoons.

The guy came out of the bank, got back into the car and drove verrrry sloooowly over to the Canadian Tire lot, about 50 feet away. I mean, he didn't see me (I'm 56, remember, and thus invisible), but maybe he saw me seeing him (or rather, his car).

He drove away equally slowly. A float in a parade. I felt faint. I didn't want him to go. I wanted to hop in, to tootle around town with him, watching all those dials 'n' things that old cars have (and creaky old leather).

As soon as my senses would hold together, I rummaged out a pen and notebook and tried to draw it. It was hopeless. I tried eight times, then lost my pen on the bus.

My husband can tell, at a glance, the year and make of every car ever made. I am not kidding. I have never stumped him. Sometimes I check it against the internet, but I really don't have to. I described this car to him. I showed him my miserable drawings,

which looked like a car a 2-year-old would play with in the bathtub.

He didn't know what it was.

That was when I began to believe that what I had seen was an apparition. It floated into my consciousness when I least expected it, swanned past me in splendour, then disappeared into the vapour of unreality from which it had come. It un-was, or un-did itself, or something.

Well, we all die, don't we? Why wasn't this lovely thing thrown on the scrapheap in 1941? My only clue was handwritten in chrome on the rear bumper: Mercury.

"Oh, so it was a Ford," my husband said. "Probably 1940. Called a Westerbrook or something like that. Maybe a custom."

Oh, don't burst my bubble. It was a dream.

Cheezus!

Every time I do this, I have good intent-(bangbangbang - oops, that's the guys putting in the new windows, just igbangbangbangnore them). I mean, I renounce things. Not sex or anything (praise God!), but foods.

Certain foods become Franken for me. Not frankfurters (a furtive Frank, for sure). No. But I mean, what could be a more insidious Frankenfood than Gummi Bears? Made of nothing but sugar and goo and artificial this 'n' that, (and forget about that "made with real fruit juice" garbage, it's a corporate lie so mothers can plug their kids' mouths with a gob of high fructose corn syrup without guilt), they can be easily inhaled, first one at a time, then three or four, then - . After a while the head spins, the eyes unfocus, and the entire body

succumbs to sugar coma.

Right. I gave those up, gave 'em up when I suddenly realized that I liked the queasy feeling of skyrocketing glucose. So I self-righteously swore them off and started eating. . . something healthier. Much healthier. Pretzels! Not just any pretzels but Rold Gold Pretzel Sticks, crisply varnished

and crusted with salt.

I have a history with Rold Gold. I used to buy them as a child for five cents ("Fi' cents," Mr. Mardling of Mardling's Groceteria use-da say), in a little box wrapped in cellophane. I don't mean a normal snack box. I mean a flat little box less than an inch deep, shaped sort of like a pack of cigarettes. It was wrapped so that you could see the pretzels lying there in a neat little row, just waiting to

be devoured.

Rold Gold. Pretzel Sticks. These had no fat in them, none whatever, so I could insert them into my mouth one after the other while watching Hoarding: Buried Alive until I looked down and realized that half the bag

was gone.

I don't know what happened with the pretzels, but one day I just didn't want to eat them any more. I began to lose weight, then more weight. I began to eat like a human being. It was amazing. Maybe my binge days were over.

So when did the Nips come along?

I've always had a thing about cheese, you know, orange cheese. I don't know if it goes back to my mother, who was a walking refrigerator emotionally (at least to me - she loved my sister without reservation), but baked

extremely well.

After making one of her impossibly delectable pies, Mackintosh apple or sour cherry (from the tree in the back yard, the one that leaned against the white picket fence so I could neatly vault over into our neighbor's yard and feed the pigeons) or maybe even rhubarb which stripped the enamel off your teeth, there would always be some pastry left over, the trimmed-off bits.

Sometimes she rolled these out again, sprinkled the surface with grated orange cheese, rolled it up, folded it over and rolled it out again. She then cut them into strips and baked them: cheese straws. This method created flaky striations of cheddar that melted in the mouth. The pastry sort of puffed up and formed crusty, crunchable browned bubbles.

Dear God.

I can't fool myself that Cheese Nips are anything like that. They aren't. But every once in a while I get a box that's a little more browned than usual, probably some minor mistake in the factory. And Oh God. I have been Nipped again!

I imagine the postage-sized squares with the cute little hole in them are cubes of cheese pastry magically conjured from my childhood, pulled out of time and plunked down in front of me.

Before I know it I'm 2/3 through the goddamn box. And I feel guilty as hell,

because I've done so well with my weight loss lately

and it could all come back to me just like that.

And probably will.