Mom-a-dukes: The Compassionate Nurturer
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
The Counter Culture Festival is coming together. The page has been updated with attendees and bands – we’re going to have a pretty good mix of people.
Josh and I are finalizing the script for Elk’s Run 6 and it’s shaping up to be my second favorite so far behind issue 3. Depending on what Noel does with it this issue can easily become my favorite of the bunch. We’re putting away issue 4 right now, should be ready for print by week’s end.
And I forgot to plug two things – first of all there’s the new edition of the collaborative column I take part in over at Buzzscope. This one focuses on Diamond’s new policy to cut books that no-one’s ordering from their catalog. The second thing I wanted to plug was Mark Fossen’s tremendous review of Elk’s Run. I just like hearing someone get this jazzed.
____________________________
Being the compassionate nurturer also means having a ridiculous amount of patience. When we’re kids, we really don’t have a good handle on our emotions, especially not in conjunction with things like “plausibility”, “logistics”, “time” – things that, as an adult, tend to keep our reactions balanced.
For instance, every Christmas Eve we went down to my Grandma’s house deep in Red Hook. It tended to be a late night, the whole family came by and we opened up presents after mass - an ordeal which, with twelve grandkids, took the better part of the evening. We’d usually head home close to midnight.
This one magical year, on the car ride home, I actually saw someone dressed in a Santa Claus suit going into somebody’s front door. As a kid that believed in Santa at the time, that was the most insane mind-blowing shit I’ve ever seen (as an adult, I can’t believe the odds of this happening). I remembering freaking out in the backseat, worried that Santa already passed our house and insisting that my dad sped up so I can get home and get to bed.
My parents had no problem with that, they were beat to shit. But as we went down Imlay Street, a mile long strip that’s populated with warehouses (although I heard they’re being converted to condos), I spotted a stray dog with a litter of FUCKING PUPPIES. And if you think I freaked out when I saw Santa, you should have seen me freak out when I saw these animals huddled on a street corner in the cold winter night.
Crying like you wouldn’t believe. My father keeps trying to get my mind off of the shivering puppies, telling me that we have to get home or else Santa will pass our house. He’s tired; he realizes there’s nothing we can do for a pack of homeless dogs when our apartment barely fits us. He keeps trying and trying and trying and all I can say is, “But it’s Christmas and they’re cold!” That was my logic.
My mother took a different route and attempted to nurture these strong feelings I was having. She told me that, if I wanted to, we can come back with some food and old blankets for the dogs. Now, I wasn’t paying attention to my father’s reaction but I’m pretty sure that if I were to look at his face there his expression would be along the lines of, “Are you crazy woman? It’s midnight on Christmas Eve. We still gotta leave the cookies out, read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, put the kid to bed, get the presents from the basement, wrap the presents, put them under the tree and eat some of the cookies only to wake up in two fucking hours. And you want to come and feed one of the hundreds of stray dogs in our neighborhood.”
I know that’s a lot for an expression to say, but I guarantee you that had to be what my father’s eyes were projecting.
No matter what my father may have felt about my mother’s plan we drove to Pathmark, got some dog food, drove home and got some blankets (my old Smurf sleeping bag included), left it all out for the dogs and then went home, left out Santa’s food, read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, put me to bed, got the presents from the basement, wrapped them, left them under the tree only to wake up an hour later to me jumping on the bed screaming, “Santa came!”
But, that was my mom’s job. Who knows how I would have turned out if my father got his way? I could be roaming the streets of DC right now, punting kitties onto the highway and shoving bottle rockets up a stray dog’s ass. Which, technically, would allow me to fit in just fine down on Capitol Hill but that’s not how we roll in Northern Virginia.
Josh and I are finalizing the script for Elk’s Run 6 and it’s shaping up to be my second favorite so far behind issue 3. Depending on what Noel does with it this issue can easily become my favorite of the bunch. We’re putting away issue 4 right now, should be ready for print by week’s end.
And I forgot to plug two things – first of all there’s the new edition of the collaborative column I take part in over at Buzzscope. This one focuses on Diamond’s new policy to cut books that no-one’s ordering from their catalog. The second thing I wanted to plug was Mark Fossen’s tremendous review of Elk’s Run. I just like hearing someone get this jazzed.
____________________________
Being the compassionate nurturer also means having a ridiculous amount of patience. When we’re kids, we really don’t have a good handle on our emotions, especially not in conjunction with things like “plausibility”, “logistics”, “time” – things that, as an adult, tend to keep our reactions balanced.
For instance, every Christmas Eve we went down to my Grandma’s house deep in Red Hook. It tended to be a late night, the whole family came by and we opened up presents after mass - an ordeal which, with twelve grandkids, took the better part of the evening. We’d usually head home close to midnight.
This one magical year, on the car ride home, I actually saw someone dressed in a Santa Claus suit going into somebody’s front door. As a kid that believed in Santa at the time, that was the most insane mind-blowing shit I’ve ever seen (as an adult, I can’t believe the odds of this happening). I remembering freaking out in the backseat, worried that Santa already passed our house and insisting that my dad sped up so I can get home and get to bed.
My parents had no problem with that, they were beat to shit. But as we went down Imlay Street, a mile long strip that’s populated with warehouses (although I heard they’re being converted to condos), I spotted a stray dog with a litter of FUCKING PUPPIES. And if you think I freaked out when I saw Santa, you should have seen me freak out when I saw these animals huddled on a street corner in the cold winter night.
Crying like you wouldn’t believe. My father keeps trying to get my mind off of the shivering puppies, telling me that we have to get home or else Santa will pass our house. He’s tired; he realizes there’s nothing we can do for a pack of homeless dogs when our apartment barely fits us. He keeps trying and trying and trying and all I can say is, “But it’s Christmas and they’re cold!” That was my logic.
My mother took a different route and attempted to nurture these strong feelings I was having. She told me that, if I wanted to, we can come back with some food and old blankets for the dogs. Now, I wasn’t paying attention to my father’s reaction but I’m pretty sure that if I were to look at his face there his expression would be along the lines of, “Are you crazy woman? It’s midnight on Christmas Eve. We still gotta leave the cookies out, read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, put the kid to bed, get the presents from the basement, wrap the presents, put them under the tree and eat some of the cookies only to wake up in two fucking hours. And you want to come and feed one of the hundreds of stray dogs in our neighborhood.”
I know that’s a lot for an expression to say, but I guarantee you that had to be what my father’s eyes were projecting.
No matter what my father may have felt about my mother’s plan we drove to Pathmark, got some dog food, drove home and got some blankets (my old Smurf sleeping bag included), left it all out for the dogs and then went home, left out Santa’s food, read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, put me to bed, got the presents from the basement, wrapped them, left them under the tree only to wake up an hour later to me jumping on the bed screaming, “Santa came!”
But, that was my mom’s job. Who knows how I would have turned out if my father got his way? I could be roaming the streets of DC right now, punting kitties onto the highway and shoving bottle rockets up a stray dog’s ass. Which, technically, would allow me to fit in just fine down on Capitol Hill but that’s not how we roll in Northern Virginia.
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posted by Jason at
11:08 PM
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