Mehitobel Wilson: writer, reader, chronic curmudgeon.

Tomboy bombshell cowgirl; lover of funk, attracted to roadsides.

Besotted with spots.

Friend to sleaze.

Admirer of filthy films, fleshy steaks, Hong Kong rap, new felt and pocket-knocking 8-balls; prefers 10 gallons of hat and 4 fingers of Jack.

Procrastination here breeds urgency there. Urgency begets sharper fiction. The dream: hone it to a splinter, and sink it deep.

So I'm here.

Tough Jerky!

This is the BEST, I want a tshirt.

Plus, I LOOOVE seeing people stick up for the jerky. Here at the office, every damn desk has a big bowl of candy on it, and they pass out donuts and cupcakes and cookies, and... bleh, what is it with the sweetteefs?

They think I kid when I say I want salt licks and jerky. But I have a tub of SlimJims (not jerky, but it's hard to take phone calls when one's jaw is overly occupied) - and a jar of bouillion and some emergency cup-o-noodles.

SALT LICKS AND JERKY. Annnnnnd SAKE!
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 3:34 PM

This is embarrassing

Ringtones

Sigh. Mine does ring the Imperial March, aka "Vader's Theme." The only damn song whose title is printed is mine.

It does not CHIRP. It grinds. I programmed it myself and it reminds me when it rings that doom and authority is calling to make me do things I don't want to do. It's my work phone, you understand.

Please please please let me sleep. And please remind me not to stay up til 4am when I have to work at 7. I need to stop that. I need sleeping pills or something - BUT, then I'd have LESS TIME to do stuff, because I'd be... asleep. I need AWAKE PILLS. Coffee isn't cutting it any more. Ephedrine, I don't want to go into the freezer for the emergency Eph. Outright speed, here I come.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:20 PM

Anniversary

Krueger was a street stray. He, a calm boy and not a psychoface like Eike, is allowed to stay out of his crate when I've determined it's Dog Bedtime. (Plus, each dog gets some time during the day to hang out alone, without the hassle of having their heads stomped on.)

He's asleep next to me. Earlier, he was asleep in the hall, and in the kitchen, and in the dining room.

He has, often, what sound like bad dreams.

He's free in the house and sleeping so hard that he's dreaming, and he's rolled onto his back with his belly to the wind, and when I stand up he opens his eyes and wags his tail, and it makes me think: what was his sleep like before he came here? Did he crawl under things and curl up tight? Did he sleep deeply enough to dream? Did he ever wake up easily, open a lazy eye and wag, or did he always jump up, ready for fight or flight?

I'll never know his story. Having been a street stray myself, I'd love to know.

He got picked up by Animal Control March 24, 2004, and now he sleeps belly-up and wakes up happy.

I found a bed and a roof (granted, with a benefactor much less kind than I) TEN YEARS AGO, and still, despite being surrounded with chainlink fences and deadbolts and guns and German Shepherds and alarm systems and giant, heavily-armed Tony, I still expect at any moment to wake up blind, naked, hungry, and ready to fight for my life.

I sleep very little.

I did all of this to myself, of course. I could have called my parents and told them the truth and asked for help, but I didn't want them to know how bad everything had gotten. I could have asked to come home, but didn't want to leave Minneapolis, which I really did love. And when I found my roof, it came with a human that did different kinds of damage - but I chose him, accepted him. Worse, I initiated the whole thing. This is what lust gets ya.

I have a habit/conviction that is: you got yourself here, you deal with it. I have stayed in bad situations out of some misguided self-flagellant penance too often: "Look what you caused! Sucks, don't it? EAT IT. Every bit. Clean your plate."

There's fear, too, and stubbornness. In college, the fear was: someone will find out that I can't afford this. They'll see that I failed. So I didn't take off for a year or two or ask for another loan. On the street, the fear was: if I ask the people that can help to save me, they'll think they failed me by letting me get here, and I did it all. With the Evil, it was that I had nowhere else to go, and that I was so fucked in the head that I thought I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

I have this dog laying next to me, see. He's just stunningly beautiful, and sweet, and a prize. I think he was purchased as a cutie puppy, yelled at in the house, and then tied to a rope in the back yard when he became too much to handle. I can't begin to guess what his time on the street was like, or how long he was there - the neglect and malnutrition were clearly long-term, but a human could have been responsible for that, too.

But he's here now. And he sleeps soundly, and wakes without fear, and eats with leisure, not with panic. He moseys around with an unguarded, carefree attitude, and he's playful. Not once has he been defensive, aggressive, or disrespectful.

I envy him. I hope this sort of thing rubs off on me.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 4:36 AM

Oh, yeah

This is a kickass blog. I even forgive the Grrl Power stuff.

(Edit: Oh, shit, this is Jessica Hopper's blog, she of Hit It or Quit It! Goddamn, the punk world STAYS SMALL. Just now I read some of her recent essays and, even though they're still slightly Grrly, they're more in line with how I feel now, though it's not her intention: I'm getting old and scowling at the ignorance of the kids in the scene, and this includes girls and guys.)

(Edit again: a Girls Gone Wild commercial was just on, and for free, you could also receive a DVD entitled Girl Power. Synchronicity, my lovelies.)

Since thinking about T's last night I've been very nostalgic:

Waitresses get to know regular customers. Food is made quick. Scantily clad, tatooed/ pierced waitresses entertain customers with their quickness on 4+ inch heeled shoes. Maybe not for your grandparents but this place is great. Quirky atmosphere complete with little signs everywhere, from 'Good customers put away their crayons' to 'No Checks'. Greasy spoon tex-mex restaurant done well.

Food was once made by Del, now dead, having gotten bombed in his apartment after we confiscated his cats. His cat had had kittens and he was throwing them against the wall. Thor's girlfriend, with whom I'd been going to take bellydancing lessons until she got pregnant, came bursting into the restaurant, screaming about the cats. We all lived in the same building at the time, kitty-corner to the restaurant. They filmed some of FARGO in our building and the Coen brothers used Ali's apartment as a lounge, and appropriated my moose head. Story of Del's death and the discovery of his body aren't blog material.

Food was also made by Jayson, the paranoid anti-communist guy. He was a freak, but I loved him. After the OKC bombings he reported Jake and Eric of the band The Subversives to the FBI because they looked like the suspect sketches, which meant we all got interviewed multiple times by the feds. One FBI guy did change the flourescent bulbs in the kitchen for me, though. I wasn't playing the girl card, I was playing the "we have to open in 20 minutes and I have shit to do, talk to me while you WORK" card. Plus, spiders lived in the light fixture. I pay that guy's salary. He works for me.

Food was made by others, too, but I'm not sure what their situation is, so I have to leave them out.

Insider Tips:

Know Before You Go
Little signs in the booths warn against leaving money at the table. Heed them.

This is true, and I'm glad they're publicizing it.

Wait staff and kitchen staff got into some nasty fights with customers - I'm talking the kinds of fights where blood was drawn and cops were called - because of such things. If a waitperson got stiffed, we'd basically mug the table - we'd prevent them from getting into their car until they paid, then make it clear they weren't welcome again. This was mostly for art students. If they tried to stiff on the bill, we let them get all the way to the alley, and then we met up with them and got paid - AND tipped. Nobody called any cops in those cases.

If someone STOLE money off a table, we got mean.

The Scene:
A legendary nocturnal spot, this cantina is equipped for an alternative late-night crowd: old carpet, duct-taped pleather booths and loud punk music. Servers with hot pink hair and body jewelry are pleasant, but aren't afraid to enforce the many rules--no refills, no substitutions, one-hour limit on tables and a minimum for tabs.

Ever seen someone that you knew would be a friend? One of our regulars (the girlfriend of an excruciatingly fine guy, the Cenobyte, we called him) struck the rare Likely Friend chord with me near the end of my years working there. This was my first experience with the weirdness of Friend Flirting. It's like hitting on someone, yet you don't even have the fallbacks of a one-night stand or "what's the worst that could happen, he/she could say no." Plus, I have little in common with most girls. It's easy for me to befriend guys, but I don't know how to obtain female friends when I want them.

(Aside: the words "nocturnal spot" inspired this line of thinking, fyi.)

Right after I left the job, I got a phone call at my house... from my imaginary friend, Mel. One of the other waitresses had mentioned to her that I wanted to meet her and wasn't nuts or hitting on her or anything. It WAS an awkward conversation, but my sense about her was right, and Mel's one of those people that I lose track of for years and then can reconnect in a heartbeat.

Now: no refills, one-hour limit, and a bill minimum - unless things have really changed, those are rules we made up to get the hookers to leave. Now, we HELPED the hookers all the time, but when they or the crackheads or the gutterpunks who came to take advantage of us, their friends, occupied a table for hours with a .95c cup of coffee, only to leave maybe a buck for a tip, MAYBE, we got annoyed. It might have changed, but the way it WAS was, if you were dicking us, we'd make it hard for you, but if you and yours were eating food and ordering malts, we'd be a little more lax with our rules.

Sigh.

I remember, every day, thinking how much I both hated my job, and loved it. I knew for sure that I'd never waitress anywhere else, I knew it then. I'm not at all opposed to waitressing, but that was the BEST, and I knew it. I'd make a lot more money waitressing now, but now I'm in a tourist town, where I'd have to kiss ass and where I'd get stiffed constantly - why not? Tourists aren't regulars.

Then I got a crippling craving for liverwurst, so I had to go grocery shopping. My grandpop used to make me liverwurst sandwiches, and for years I've been trying to remember what it was. It was br-something. Today I remembered, Braunschweiger!!!

This is a fun word to say.

Anyway, I was prepared to hate it, in case I'd misremembered my reaction to the sandwiches, but upon licking the knife after opening the casing, I swooned with saliva-squirting joy.

And I've been missing Rhode Island, too. The land and the places I went, not necessarily the people I was there to visit.

And Montana, I've been ghost-missing that. I've never been to Montana, but I dream of it too often. Montana and Maine.

Sigh.

Not that I have a problem with Savannah - just that, I think, my wanderlust is all abrew. Most of the time when I leave town, it's for a convention, so I'm in a hotel. I adore hotels and motels and all kinds of 'tels, but it's been a LONG time since I've gotten to know a new town, or even to get a taste of it. I miss that.

posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:19 AM