Sometimes when I chat with particular people, I feel the same excitement and comfort I used to feel when I would be under the sheets with one or both of my legs straight up in the air (this is not going where you think it is, “comfort” should have given that away) creating breathing space and a little “tent” if you will. I talked so much in a tiny little space with my back pressing into the mattress as my legs began to bend and bop around from the inevitable giggling that would ensue, struggling to maintain our shelter because I would always let laughter win. I also struggle to whisper. I know, real fucking shocker. But for some reason, when I whisper, I always want to laugh. I suppose anytime I am whispering, it is usually something not fitting for the moment. I mean, come on, Britt. I feel like I just wrote out some terrible definition of “whisper” and pretended to be so brilliant. What is brilliant is this feeling being replicated with so much more intensity and without the requirement of solely being responsible for holding up the sheet tent with my feet crying for the ceiling to just compromise as my belly acts like the youngest in the family and is seemingly unaware and uninterested in what everyone else has to do for them to be so carelessly joyous (yes I am the baby of the family). It also feels good to attempt multiple times to whisper the only joke I sometimes successfully remember…What do you call a woman with one leg? Typing it was not difficult, timing it in real time right into someone’s ear while trying not to laugh and messing up the pitch as a result, however, was. But in the end, she is still called Eileen, even if I spit it on your neck and screech the vowels. 

I lean. I am not so lean right now. I have been eating mixed nuts and cottage cheese for the last few months in quantities that may be concerning to Eileen, given that she has to consider weight distribution a little more than most. I eat randomly. I have mentioned before I see eating as a chore, one I will do before the most taxing chore…drinking water. I am not so sure how I survive lacking the drive for necessities to do just that, survive. I feel like I am doing aight though. The Universe is giving me little nods in random faces and experiences. I was stuck in a little slow-moving traffic. This man pulled up next to me, smiled, and spanked his steering wheel. I did my head back laugh where these insanely deep, layered, and tangled trapped emotions come out, masking themselves as a laugh, and then I smiled back as if that was simple enough. He was pushing eighty, and we were only going ten…get it, daddy. I feel like every time I visit my grandma, someone in her hall has passed since the last time I was there. The facility replaces their name plate with “Future Resident” and leaves the white door covered in the past resident’s stains and spills open, revealing an empty bed and empty room. I never feel any energy, I just feel what I see, empty. It seems like a cruel waiting room for heaven. A drab one without any magazines or music to complain about, and instead echoing cries from neighboring rooms with images that haunt you in ways a magazine would soothe. Interesting how it goes. Just like that, their names are replaced. I wondered this last time if they have some label machine they use to print a new one each time, or if they just keep rotating the same labels around once someone else comes along to wither away. Seeing that old man spank his steering wheel right after made my day. May we all live to be old and perverted on the streets, and not locked away with a label machine just waiting to erase our place. I am already perverted on the streets, now I just need to keep myself from getting locked away.  

Once I wrote about being semi zen and semi asshole. How important the balance is to me, and it always will be. So today I did yoga while listening to Chevelle on the Bluetooth speaker full blast. My music ranges from classical to screaming Germans(they exist). I do not always have to have Mozart pet my nose and calm me, sometimes I want Rob Zombie (not a screaming German). My sons often tell me they hear me when I pull up because Bossy be bossing her bass. They have never “allowed” me to drive with music playing at this level with them…until this weekend. An Easter gift, if you will. And Easter weekend seemed appropriate to blare Kendrick Lamar while rolling past their empty middle school, going 30. Otis hunched over in the front seat and had his hands on his ears, but I could tell he was liking it; he just needed a minute to not be embarrassed. I let my left foot slide off the seat and placed it back on the all-weather floor mat so I could get my ass deep into the seat and I used my left hand to push off my knee and leaned my face over the steering wheel. Avery stared straight out the front windshield with his freckles bouncing across my rearview mirror to the vibration of some song I had never heard before, and his eyes were all bloodshot from an allergy attack he had while we were out at a nursery “plant” shopping. He was determined to withstand it, and shouted he wanted to go for a ride with just me, and listen to his music that loud the whole time. He looked like the living definition of “let your hair down” in action. I wondered if he would let me wear my new handwoven bolga hat I purchased at the nursery if I took him up on the cruise in Bossy. In addition to the hat, I purchased a room and linen spray and an evil eye wall accessory. Where else do people get such a fucking unique haul? I find amazing shit err where and never hold myself to some “rule” of “you can’t buy a dress at a carwash, Britt.” One of my favorite dresses did come from a carwash gift shop. I let things happen where they do without some label of what is “acceptable”, just like my old steering wheel spanking man. I found him on the highway in an agonizing slow roll. And I found my dog Chip at the park. He was free, and he was for me. I will set fire to every label maker that nears his tiny little body. He is my current resident, the baby of the family, and never requires me to hold the sheet tent up…the min pin in him likes to burrow.