Blog Title: Xenophile

Wasted Youth: The Story of Vee (fiction)

There was so much wine. Really. Red. Blush. White. You name it. Even the expensive sparkling variety…how could I not have drank it? But well, that isn’t the point of this tail. I remember the wine. I remember it more than anything. Flowing freely and the gayety it inspired and the smile on my mothers face as father spun her around and around. I remember my first. I had caught a bottle as it rolled from the table and grandfather looked at me and said, “Vee, it’s yours. Enjoy it!” So I did. There was not but an eighth of it left but I was ten and it was wonderful and intoxicating.

Second to the wine I remember the music. There was so very much of it. It was utterly impossible to keep up with who played what and who it was that even knew the proper way to coax music from strings and horns and drums. No body could read sheet music or really much of anything else. I think they like to call it functional illiteracy now. My older brother used to be a deity as he sat before the piano, playing and laughing and drinking his wine. Mother was always so much more proud of him than me. I couldn’t play an instrument to save my life, let alone earn coin. But I could sing. And we needed voices here.

But with the music and the wine came travel and it is what I truly loved. The wine was my addiction and the music was my affliction but the road was my home, my lover, my very reason to breathe. There were many roads to go down. I preferred the ones that were splitting and barely stripped. That lead to little town so far away that nothing seemed to exist outside of it. Those pocket universes were what inspired my singing to my divine brother’s playing. It mattered not that his song and my tune were foreign to one another, impromptu. The crowds we sang and played and danced for could never get enough of it.

So then it all fell apart. They started to shun our kind across Europe and then America. Its like in the great war of culture and politics that there was not an inch of room for our minority. This had happened before though, back when we were all just Gypsies and again as Romanians and now? Well, I think they call us hobos, vagrants, and any number of foul things. The rich get to be called the circus and people pay to see them in their sequins and high topped tents. Our family split ways after long nights of bitter arguments and the music and wine stopped. My brother and I left together. My parents took our younger siblings—twins. And the cousins and grand parents all took off to who knows where.

The wine and music kept going for Jeremy and I. But he died. It wasn’t the wine, it wasn’t the music or the seedy bars that we put our act on for. He’d caught a cold. It turned into pneumonia. His lungs turned into water. He died coughing and burning with fever in my arms, in a shitty bathroom in a shitty truck stop in a shitty town in a shitty state in a shitty country. He died in shit. I was his lover, his friend, his cohort. He was my lover, my inspiration, and the music to songs that no one remembered. The world is a worse place without him.

I travel on. Or I did. My last stop is this city on a river at the edge of a gulf and its recovering from the wrath of nature. I wasn’t here then, I was a little too far north, in a city that those people were fleeing too. We’d been heading for that Crescent. I’d like to believe that nature avenged my brother’s death; though why on that poor place I don’t know. I don’t care either. I sing in lounges now. To whatever music they afford me. Karaoke has put food in my belly on more than one night. Selling my other wares has done it more nights than that. Though, I have to say that there is still wine. I might as well say that it is my blood now.

I’m slowly poisoning myself with my fondest memory. A poet’s death I’ve been told is slow and consuming. But I, am not a poet. I’ve tried to be and the words flow like bile from an infected wound. Certainly not beautiful, and certainly not worthy of a poet’s death. I wonder how my family fairs. I wonder what started the fighting. Probably money. There has never been much of that.

Dicketry: The Ring

My friend Django Durango kicks so much ass. One night after work at our shitty job cashiering at Wal-Mart we were doing some shopping and we found this ring makin' kit on the clearance isle with all the Easter Crap. Well, we took the kit back to my place and she made me a ring that says "Dicketry". It is the most bad ass thing ever. The letters are in lovely glow in the dark neon green all on a matte black background. <3

The ring can be seen here.

Ugh

Don't you hate it when you have nights that just won't allow for sleeping?

So far, tonight has been one of those nights. And to top it all off my iPod Nano decided that it just doesn't want to work. I plugged it up to my PC to charge it and got a whole lot of nothin' as a result. The piece of hardware that is the Nano wasn't at all recognized by my PC. The drivers were installed, I'd just finished the iPod 1.1 softwhare update and all that crap, so it isn't like I whipped it out of the box and it quit working. It worked perfectly fine for about two weeks. Then Monday it decided it hated me.

I wondered why it was the only one still at Wal-Mart. It had been owned by some guy named Scott because my computer read the device as "SCOTT'S IPOD" when I had it hooked up in accordance with the installation prompt. Seems Scott had problems with it, too. Well, later today/tomorrow I get to take it back to Wal-Mart and fight the good fight about getting another one because until now, I'd been 100% satisfied with the performance of my MP3 Player. Such is life though.

So long and goodnight, for now...

--Jami

Marriage

Earlier today I was at my grandmother’s mooching food off of her like any smart, broke college kid would do if they had a grandmother that liked to feed people living not but a few blocks from their campus. While I was there she had “Dr. Phil” on and there was this couple on the show that got married something like six weeks after they started dating, had been married for three years, and did nothing but fight with one another. They both claimed that they felt trapped by their marriage. How the fuck did they think it was gonna go? I mean, it’s a bit rash to get married that soon after meeting isn’t it? They’ve also got three kids; one was from the husband’s last marriage. I was watching this show and got to thinking about the idea of marriage and why it is I’ve always been so…adamant about remaining single.

I finally figured out why it is I’ve always shied away from the idea of getting married. At first, I thought it was just because I had some inborn fear of commitment but that isn’t entirely the case. Nay, it is more like I know I’m the type of person to make a decision—especially one as important as deciding to spend my life with someone—and stick with it.

This, might actually sound like a good thing, but what if the person I decided to marry ended up being a horrible mate? Dating for an indefinite amount of time, and even living with someone isn’t the same as being bound by marriage to them. In marriage, there isn’t that much room for the “self” when it comes to making important decisions as to move to another place for a career, change banks, and other such things. I don’t know if I could really trust anyone enough to have intimate knowledge of my finances, and I don’t know that I’d want to know so much about my partner’s. Some things I will always consider to be strictly my business come hell, high water, or the IRS.

And of course there’s the ideal of divorce. Things would have to be seriously bad for me to consider it, seeing how that I wouldn’t make the decision to wed lightly, and I’ve mentioned before that I’m a rather stubborn person. There wouldn’t be any chance of reconciliation, at least not on my end. With my luck I’d also get the short end of the asset stick as well. But, even though I’m not, and will never be, a rich woman there’s a good shot I’d force a prenuptial agreement on my spouse anyway. Damn, that says a lot about how much I trust people, doesn’t it?

You can say what you will about falling in love, I’m far too pragmatic and to some degree selfish to let myself fall into a decision like marriage without covering my ass. Does anyone else share my feelings on the subject, or am I just an exceptionally cold person for looking at marriage like its just some business contract?

--Jami