Godammit, I’m Mad!

While laying in my death-bed, I’ve been able to read the new Vogue magazine with a fine-tooth comb, so to speak. It’s filled with horror this month. I haven’t even begun to dissect its many insults, but a feature on the style of ‘real’ women introduced me to the self-centered Trophy Wife of John Mellencamp.

Former fashion model Elaine Irwin and John Mellencamp have named their two sons “Hud” and “Speck.”

What were they thinking?! Hud is just awful, but Speck? Did they name him after serial nurse-killer Richard Speck? Or was he just really tiny, like a little teeny speck of a baby?  Whatever, the Mellencamps are fucking idiots.

I am also a little disappointed in Brangelina’s name for their new boy, “Knox.” I see it is imperative that all their boys have an X in their names. Maddox, Pax, and so on.

But “Knox?” It cries out for the suffix, “Fort.”

Here is my list of suggestions for their next son (leaving out the too-conventional “Max”)

Tex
Tex Mex
Text
Fax
Lox
Vox

That’s it, I’m worn out. Any one got some more?

My best friend washed my hair last night. It was matted and vomitty and she poured water over my head that ran down my back and drenched my borrowed dress. It was sublime. Today my sister came over and shaved my legs. She did a much better job than I’ve ever done.  Maybe I can get her to do it from now on.

In the hospital, I shared a room with Dorothy, an 85 year old woman whose voice was weak and quavery.  Poor Dorothy had been in the hospital for four weeks without getting a diagnosis. She complained that her hands and arms were purple from being stuck with needles.

Dorothy was miserable. She suffered endless indignities, like a night nurse who inquired loudly “You need go poo-poo?”

One day, Dorothy’s son came to visit. I couldn’t see them behind the curtain that divided out beds. The son had a deep booming voice and began reading letters from lawyers, concerning a quarrel over her estate. Her younger son was mentioned and characterized as a shyster. The Booming Man, Gene, wanted to be named executor of the estate, instead of the shyster. Dorothy was barely able to respond. She probably just wanted a sip of water or a bedpan.

One night I started crying and told Dorothy that I just wanted someone to shoot me. She answered back, “Me too.”

When I’m back on my feet, and I will be, I’m going to find Gene. I’m going  to make him sorry for being a monster and a douchebag. I’m completely serious. That’s how I know I’m still me.

Being helpless triggers a shifting array of emotions. I’m so grateful for assistance and so touched by kindness. When my husband is careless for a moment, I want to kill him.  I tell him that I’m going to read for a while, and he leaves the room, aware that I have no books or magazines within reach. I’m testing him, to savor my anger.

He’s better than a nurse, though. At least he’s not actually trying to hurt me. If he needed to stick a catheter tube up my bladder, he’d fucking well do it.

When I couldn’t pee and it went on for days, the nurse on duty couldn’t find my bladder. She went to get another nurse to help. The two of them stuck tubes up me, peering between my legs as though they were explorers on the Amazon River. “Where is it? It should be right THERE!”

They couldn’t find it. I started to worry that my bladder was now somewhere else. When they changed shifts, a new nurse, named Sol, rolled her eyes and promised “I find it.” She was a young Filipina with beautiful white teeth, and she knew how to find a bladder.

The temperature in my bedroom at home is around 100 degrees. I’m always sweaty. All my visitors complain about the heat but it doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m only concerned with degrees of pain. I experiment with leg placement, trying to relieve the pressure on my tail-bone. I smell awful but no one offers to wash me. My sister suggests Female Wipes. She also eyes my Oxycodone.

When I left the hospital in an ambulance, I had just started shitting after 5 days of laxatives. Morphine is constipating, as it turns out. My stomach was churning in agony but the ambulance had been ordered for 4 o’clock.

The nurse put me in an adult diaper, big enough for a 500 pound man. She put my friend’s cotton dress over my head and didn’t bother to zip it up. The two young ambulance guys lifted me onto a gurney, showing great respect for my pain.  One of them flirted with me a little, unaware of my shit-filled diaper.

Finally home on a hospital bed, I couldn’t stop shitting. Eventually, I lifted my body to the bedside commode with excruciating effort. I cried while ten thousand tons of Morphine marinaded shit flooded through my bowels with a sickening force.

The next morning I was still shitting. I chewed tablets that promised to stop the tide but nothing worked. By nighttime, my stomach was finally peaceful and most of the shit was cleaned up. Now I could return to worrying about constipation.

My husband bought bright red sheets for my home hospital bed. Friends are reminded of Frida Kahlo when they see me. I feel a new affinity with Frida. I am Frida without the paint.

The nurses know that you’re helpless and when they try to roll you over and you scream in pain, they just keep pushing you. If you say “I can’t!” they take that as a challenge to their authority.

If you throw up all over yourself and your hair, they yell at you in annoyance. “Why jou dint use the pan!” They cluck their tongue and tie your hair back as tight as they can with a piece of torn latex glove. That’ll teach you.

The instant you hit the pavement, your whole world turns over. You can feel all your organs rearranging inside you like planets.

After six days, the image of a squashed cockroach won’t go away. I’ve just inched across my bed using my arms to support me, dragging my legs together like a broken mermaid. If you move slowly enough, you might be able to avoid the stabbing burst of pain in your groin. The fractured tail-bone is always in play, but the pain from that at least stays where it belongs.

Any sudden noise or unexpected movement sends shock-waves of pain radiating from my pelvis. I jerked when a bottle of water spilled on my bed, and it took hours to move again. “Bones have feelings too,” my physical therapist explained. “It’s only been a week. Your body is still in shock.”

My helplessness only matter to me. No one sees it as a call to duty. My husband plays music in the other room, blasting all the bands I hate. When I call him name, he won’t answer. Finally, I start screaming HELP at the top of my lungs as if I were on fire.  Still, he won’t come. Just as I start to cry, he says “What?” He was taking a nap.

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about The Rake’s Progress until I read an article about the fascinating Robert Lepage. I googled around to learn more about the opera, composed by Stravinsky in 1947.

It’s a three act opera featuring several elements that I count among my many obsessions.

A man is tempted by The Devil to leave his country-bred sweetheart to seek fortune in the big city. There, he is seduced into marrying a Bearded Lady and invests all his money in an invention that proves to be a sham. He wins a final bet with the Devil, who then curses him with Insanity. The hero dies in Bedlam.

What more could one ask for in an opera? I need to get Lepage’s production of it, recorded in Brussels.

If you’re interested in mental asylums, I wrote about Cane Hill here. If you’re interested in Bearded Ladies, you can go here.

If you’re not interested in any of that, how about this Pvc Bustle Skirt? It’s only $150 and with the matching top, it looks like something Vivienne Westwood might have designed, doesn’t it?

I’m sorry, I can’t seem to avoid penises.  This time, I was browsing some gossip site and saw a picture of director/douchebag Brett Ratner at a party celebrating the launch of a new book. Sure enough, it turned out to be a new title by Taschen called ‘The Big Penis Book.’

“This hefty book is profusely illustrated with over 400 historic photos of spectacular male endowments, including rare photos of the legendary John Holmes.”

Okay! What’s not to love about this book? You can look at some of its contents at the Taschen website, but I personally am afraid to do so.  Maybe I will once the kids are asleep.  Let me know what you think.

My pal enc wants these Prada Boots, which Neiman Marcus will gladly provide for $1,200.  In a lucky coincidence, I found my self online last night, hypnotized by crazy boots at Amazon.

Once I started looking, I couldn’t stop. It’s like eating Oreo cookies. You must keep going until the package is empty. I found a style that’s similar to the Prada, at a savings of $1,150.

Call me nuts, but I just don’t see why anyone needs Prada. I feel the same about the Lanvin ballet flats. The only reason to pay $500 for them is to feel special for wasting all that money. You can waste only $134 at Sue London for the same buttery soft quality, plus they come with a matching leather shoe bag!

I think I’m as brainwashed as anyone into craving luxury items at insane prices. But more and more, I’m wondering if the initial rush is worth it. Do we really need the tag to say Prada or Chanel to feel good about ourselves? I’m starting to feel “Been there, Done that” about luxury items. But maybe you need to own a beat up, poorly constructed Chanel bag to achieve this attitude.

It’s not like I’ve transcended snobbery or anything. I’d still go barefoot before buying shoes by Jessica Simpson. I still recoil from Juicy Couture. In fact, if I stop, someone call a doctor!

Back to the splendor of the crazy boots at Amazon (and speaking of Doctors) here is one I’d like for the boudoir:

And here’s the one that upset me the most.

Sometimes, things that are awful bring us joy; but sometimes, they’re just plain awful. Queen Marie was rightly offended by the notion of fake high-heels made for babies. For $35, you can buy a pair of these shoes, put them on a baby and laugh your ass off. Ha ha, look at the baby! You could also put sunglasses and jewelry on the baby and laugh even more. Sister Wolf says, Give that $35 to a homeless shelter and leave the baby alone.

As a fur-lover and proud carnivore, I am usually happy to see fur accessories, but here’s something that shocked me with it’s assaultive ugliness. Not only are these leg-warmers an abomination, they are even sold out! Presumably, whoever bought them is somewhere right now, laughing at babies in high heels.

For the third and final No, I bring you this photo courtesy of The Look-See. These models were used by Yohji, Etro, and Ann Demeulemeester in Milan. They are not conventional male model types, get it? They are old geezers! This is so funny, like high heels on a baby! But I would rather stick with handsome boys.

The moral here is that some people will be fooled into accepting awfulness as some sort of post-modern joke, but We are simply not having it.

In this new reality show, eight women with “differing disabilities” will compete before a panel of judges to prove they have what it takes to be a mainstream model.

Huh?

Is there something wrong with me or is there something wrong with this premise for a show?

On the one hand, I support the disability rights movement. On the other, I’m squeamish about any fetishistic appreciation of the disabled. It feels like exploitation to me, even when the disabled person is so willingly seeking the attention. One of the contestants on the show will be Debbi, who has recently posed for Playboy and says she’s met more men since she lost her arm than before. Here’s Debbi.

This whole thing is making me feel like a cunt for not celebrating the moxie or whatever it is that drives these disabled women. They’re kind of pissing me off, in fact. It’s like, I’m missing a toenail, so why don’t I try to be a foot model? Or, My voice has a limited range, so why don’t I compete to sing opera?

No, those are bad analogies. And that guy who “needs” to be paralyzed is going to be mad at me again.

Can anyone help me to articulate what is wrong with this show? Or if not that, what’s wrong with me?*

*No saying It’s because I’m a cunt, since I’ve already admitted it a million times.

None of us like Handbag Snobbery (unless we are the ones disparaging someone else’s choice of handbag.) I don’t even like it when a person praises my handbag, for god sake. When Susie B wrote about suffering the disdainful gaze of two awful Handbag Snobs on a train, my heart went out to her.  I should start making little badges that say “Please don’t stare at my handbag.”

It’s a difficult situation if you care about style and fashion. I love my bags for being both beautiful and expensive. I love them for being not the ones that are obvious and popular. But on some occasions, I don’t want the burden of my enormous handbag. So I pack my essentials into a bag that I selected for it’s stomach-turning ugliness.

Check out its ugly features. The flower thing made out of a zipper, the studded wristlet, the gold handcuff things dangling there for no reason, and the purple plastic that is actually transparent even though you can’t tell from the picture. It is eight X five inches of pure eyesore.  All that for $11.

And speaking of eyesore, today at the mall I walked past a shoe-store window and was assaulted by a vision from hell itself: Gladiator sandals in a rainbow of awful colors, signifying to me that gladiators have not only jumped the shark, they have eaten and regurgitated the shark. Behold the wares of Shiekh shoes.