manta ray

My mom just told me that these are swimming by her window. Manta rays are different than sting rays. They don't sting. They're friendly and curious about people. And they jump through the air. I really wish I was there right now.

8:21 AM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

dear vg,

Dear Voiceover God,
    It has been too long. I went to the mailbox today and found a check, I assume, from you, since you are the overlord of things like rainstorms and showering people with money. This check was for a rad voiceover for Dragonball Z that I recorded 1.5 years ago. I was paid promptly, oh, let's say, 1.4 years ago. To get another check from you, on behalf of them, well, gosh, what can I say? Thanks, and stay tuned. I will do a Craig's List search for a virgin I can sacrifice upon the altar of my ghetto home recording setup (which is especially hillarious right now - it doesn't have any soundproofing yet, so I stand there in the closet with a bunch of bathrobes tented over my head and the condenser mic - it kinda works). If for any reason, you would like to continue to shower me with checks, I'll happily receive them, especially for jobs where I have to pronounce things like "press the right nunchuck to wreak Super Kamehameha power on your enemy" or that more recent one for Steak-n-Shake's two shakes in one glass. I'd even be happy to receive them for no reason at all. Voiceover God, remember, more checks equals more sacrificed virgins, and we know how much you like those.
    Yours truly,
    Jayna

2:18 PM - 8 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

mortal motivation

So, it was, what, two years ago, when I got the strong "you're going to die in four years feeling" which propelled me to write that book (and no news yet, but I am about to start the big fat marketing push, for better or worse). Today, I'm feeling under-the-weather, and as I massaged a sore lymph node, I thought, well, I still might die in four years (nice time travelling capsule that travels with me and the lymphs), so I better hurry up and write another one. No, it wasn't, I better rush off to Disneyland. Or save Lilliputia from outerspace monsters. Or get a haircut. Or a Dick Cheney tattoo. It's, write another one. *sigh*

6:25 PM - 12 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

must should ought

It's been a month of must, should, ought, and sometimes will do. I don't know why a theme shows up the way it often does, but it can be merciless. It can fester in my gut until I write the correct thank you or sorry, or buy the niece a present, or buy that other person the appropriate thing. Whether or not your underlying intentions are in allignment isn't the point. The point is you can't always slide through life, era to era, if you consider yourself a people-person. People are weighty, and interchange even moreso. If you want to be a participant, you have to participate. Context demands it. People won't always let you slide by. Nor should they.

3:48 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

richness

I scraped my car alongside someone else's car yesterday which you could say helped my blue car acquire some new *ahem* white pin striping. Your first reaction tends to be "crap" and "run!" but I didn't crap or run. I left a note with my phone number on the windshield. Today I met the girl whose car I dented. It's possible that I'm very lucky to have dented her car. You can meet the most fascinating people in the most oddball ways. She has one of the prettiest names I can recall ever hearing, Avasa. We were fast friends in less than a minute, and she told me her incredible life story. She grew up as a Menonite in Mexico. Low German is her first language. She has memories of her father telling all the kids to gather leaves for him to burn her mother. She has a mystery half-sister that was traded for some livestock. She somewhat recently returned from two years in Iraq, as a soldier, but a conscientious objector, with a gun, but a refusal to shoot to kill (try straddling that ideological line...I don't think I could do it). She said she'll send me a link to a youtube video of her hanging out with a squirrel she's befriended who responds to a name and lets her pet her/his/its squirrel tummy. I love all the people I meet here and there. It really is the best part of life. As she was telling me about many of her very real highs and lows, I felt pretty non-plotlined. My trajectory is practically invisible, probably a good thing in a way. I sometimes feel like a ghost, wandering around, picking up the stories other people leave around. 

11:50 AM - 8 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

inflate-a-brain

After a much needed who-knows-how-many-hours floating in a pool yesterday, softening my brain in the sun, I read this nice tidbit which tasted better than my dinner: "...a healthy sense of all we don't know - even a sense of mystery - keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets." Yeah, begin the grand dissolve right about now.Oh, and in case you haven't heard, everyone's favorite reformed gay preacher has more thoughts to share with you. He's coming soon.

7:30 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

make way for meatball

Some of you know that one of my regrets is that I never was an ice-cream scooper. When friends of mine had jobs at the mall, at the cookie place, or the corndog spot, my parents told me "your job is to get straight-A's." My first real job was teaching tap-dancing. My second was database entry at a law firm (yawn) which allowed me to refine my Tetris technique. As such, tonight, I fulfilled a lifelong dream, of carrying a tray of food and offering it to the hungry, overpaid, overdressed masses. My suspicions were confirmed. I like being of food service. Maybe I got broken in too easily. At a truly fancy-pants affair at a high-end, uber-modern furniture event (up my alley point 1), I got assigned to help a pair of high-end chefs with Mohawk hair (up my alley points 2 and 3). I noticed many laws of nature at work during the event, a pleasant thing to observe set against imported Italian whatnots (Dwell magazine, in the flesh) and epoxy floors. So, these gustatory renegades were different than the other "celebrity chefs". While other chefs had elaborate set-ups, offering truffle this, and caviar that, my guys had one simple offering, pork and beef meatballs set on garlic crostini with fresh basil. As soon as they'd hand me a plate and send me off into the crowd, the plate was ransacked, and I returned, empty plated, patiently waiting for another platter of the balls.  The balls sent their smell out through the sanitized scene and brought forth the people. Next thing you know, people were lined up, wanting their fifth and sixth ball, or a seventh or eighth ball, all salivating in unison. The chef told me not to rush him. He had no interest in being rushed, and so the well-heeled cooled their heels, and waited for the balls. This is a marketing lesson, I am sure of it. Be painstaking about your craft. Do it at your own unhurried pace, and you will yield delicious balls to entice patrons from far off corners of fancy furniture land. By the end of the night, they were feeding me balls, and siphoning wine my way, reducing my server job to a mere "just keep the business cards straight and wipe off the counters, ok?" I got jolly, started speaking Italian (but I don't speak Italian, bongiorno!?) and singing showtunes. I ran into Phillipe, my favorite Frenchman and apparently still a big fan of my Thanksgiving Bjork karaoke stylings, un peu. Leigh was shooting pictures. Ridlen was spinning music (you know, cd's spin). I watched the models for hire do nothing but walk around on stilt-like shoes, just being long and tall as they are wont to be, for hire, to lend allure to the Italian whatnots. *Dina will be upset, one of the punk chefs has a tv show coming out with a concept she came up with years ago. Sorry Dina* His restaurant will open up in September, in One Arts Plaza, the place with the big, stupid neon square – it will be called Fedora, "a 1920's upscale mafia restaurant". Mmmm. Balls. And a paycheck.

Paul Stark, www.starkravingchef.com

8:38 PM - 10 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

dream retention

Here we are, it's noon, and I still remember my dream from last night. I might as well post it for all of gelatinous posterity. It was cool. I lived in a brick firehouse with a fenced in backyard full of flowers. A large, brown animal back there startled me. "Is that a neighbor's escaped great dane?" I wondered, watching it hop over the fence. But it wasn't. It was a large, male deer with no antlers. Maybe even a moose, but no antlers. One really large brown eye and plenty of soft fur. So I went for a walk to look for something to eat. It was a quasi-Oak-Cliff sort of place, but not truly Oak Cliff. There was a Greek man behind a counter, like you'd see at a carnival, with hand-painted, stencilled signs, selling scoops of various Greek foods, served in ice cream cones (let's assume they were savory cones) for 60 cents apiece. I tried the one he called mokkalakka-something-or-other, as opposed to the parmagalattagoopatta-something-or-other. Then I had to get back to work. And what was work? I had a telephone that would give me directions to go here, go there, do this, do that, and every time it did, the scenery would change.

That's all. Happy sunshine.

10:20 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

london bridges

At 3am, Mark will go up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
He'll fall down, break an ankle, and the rest of him will come tumbling after.
The paramedics will make an unfortunate choice, take him to a crappy hospital, leave him in the street to call me in a daze, to pick him up, and take him to a better hospital. Moral of the story, Kiddos, don't call the ambulance. They can be cruel. But good decisions were made in Room 12. You should've seen Mark today, motoring around Costco on a scooter with his crutches in the front basket, sticking out like insect antennae through rows of frozen food. Well on his way to recovery, despite 911's best efforts to thwart that.


Hey, how about a talking picture show? I've got a bunch of pix for blogs that never happened, or might happen someday. Let's settle down for a mishmash. Life goes by so quickly and strangely...






Might be moving this show to another blog site soon...Any suggestions are welcomed.

4:14 PM - 7 Comments - 7 Kudos - Add Comment

Mondigliani in Jail + Bonus Tornado Footage

Albany, Texas is where it's at, in the middle of almost nowhere. Population 1921. To get there, you have to leave the interstate and drive into the fields of wind turbines, which turn to the beat of your radio, mesmerizing as the beginning of the twilight zone, "look into my turbine, you are getting sleepy". I made my way over there after a very early morning, up at 5am, chasing the farmers around their cafes before work. At Oak Street Café in Sweetwater, there are two main tables of men. One calls the other table "the serious farmers guys". And that table calls them "redneck oil field trash". 

Thank god I could remember my one really offensive but not pedophilic dirty joke, because it made me fast friends with the "oil field trash", who sent me on my way down to the highway to Retta Mae's Diner, to catch the other cotton farmers. Diner stop, diner stop, and then the farmer's coop. Who would have guessed it. Overwhelmingly, the farmers don't want to be on TV. It was a hardsell, which was fun for me, half-asleep, throwing forms at them "just fill this out, you don't even have to accept the job, help a girl out!"

But back to Albany. Population 1921. They turned their old jail into an art museum, with Renoirs, a rare Mondigliani, Fatin-Latour, and even freaking Gustave Caillebotte. Not to disparage, but I wonder if the Mondigliani is a fake, only because Elmyr de Hory, the main Mondigliani forger sold much of his stuff to rich Texans, including our beloved, swindled Meadows family. Who knows, but anyhow, the art was great, and I liked that they had a room that showcased art curated by a local, who could choose from whatever was hanging around in their permanent collection. Fun! And of  all things, the front desk lady used to be a Campbell Agency fashion model. Which is to say, people in that town are attractive. And according to her, friendly, "People, when they drive by you, they give you the peace sign or the finger wave."

I was told that Albany has more kids getting into Princeton University than any other small town in the nation, and any town kid gets a town scholarship for the first year of college anywhere they want to go. The town has an independent book press, a beloved theater, dance classes, art classes, some edgy public art, a cool coffee shop - you could end up in worse places. Every year the town puts together an elaborate play called "The Fandangle" using 300 locals of all stripes to sing, dance, and act out the backstory of the area.

Everyone raves about the food at The Beehive, which really is cowboy soul food, and  a menu printed on a brown paper bag. Water in jelly jars with sliced lemon.  Dark brown bread on a wooden slab. When I told the waitress it was my first time there, she said, "Well then, we'll treat you well now, but not call you in the morning."

Lucky me, I got to stay in a bed and breakfast in a room with a heart-shaped bathtub. Breakfast started with a broiled grapefruit covered in brown sugar, nuts, and unidentified dried fruits. It actually tasted wonderful. Joey, the lady who made it said that the only guest who had ever had that recipe before was once a Home Ec teacher during the 1950's.

Many dogs passed by my window, well-kept dogs with fancy collars. Seemed strange. Turns out, there aren't leash laws there, and many people let their dogs wander free. Those dogs all tend to meet up on the lawn in front of the courthouse, hang around, and then skulk home for dinner.

One evening, I went to Abilene to get some college opera students on tape, which meant driving the dark country road. Many flashes of beast fur, weasely things, bobcatty things in my peripheral vision, but none of the dreaded wild hogs who live out there (crosses of imported Russian boars and Javelina the migrated North from Mexico), one of my favorite fears, unmet.

In Abilene, at the opera theater, I chatted with a 22 year old guy named "Ran, yes. I'm a verb. Was born on Mother's Day. I was the gift." In 2002, he had an 18 hour seizure and should've died. All he remembers from that summer was his deceased grandfather, also named Ran, at his bedside, telling him "god has a plan for you". Now that he has "the memory span of a squirrel, the intelligence level of a 14 year old, and seizures all the time" he spends most of his life twiddling his thumbs at home, or fetching groceries at Wal-Mart, next to the motel where he lives with his mother, a cat, and a Chihuahua. He loves Forest Gump, and some "slow character" in Mash ("you're not slow, you're good" they told him). The doctors think a mosquito bite started this, and that it's a form of the West Nile Virus.

I told him that he could sit with me during the opera, which was Mozart's Magic Flute, but translated into English (I'm sorry, but, opera sounds so lame in English), but it's okay. The opera had dancing bears. And Ran kept asking me every ten minutes, "What's your name again?" I told him to call me "Anything". So as long as he could remember to, he did refer to me as "Anything."

Of all things random, in the firs t scene of the Magic Flute, Tomino, the prince, gets bitten by a serpent, nearly dies, wakes up, having beaten death, gets up and sings his tenor "I have beaten death, why did god revive me" ditty. I looked over at Ran. He smiled, and said, "I do believe god has a plan for me." And then he wanted to know if I was religious. I told him that was another whole conversation, that we probably believe very different things, but then again, maybe not. I give him credit for not bringing up baby Jesus, since I'm not of his flock.

Driving back home through dark slants of hard rain, nothing could stop my morbid tornado curiosity. I was looking out for them. I have recurring tornado dreams and have always thought it would be the most fantastic way to die, sucked up through a straw. "Hey, have you seen Jayna lately?" "Didn't you hear?" "What?" "She got sucked up by a tornado and no one has seen her since." "Oh. Tornado got her." I really was inspecting all of the clouds for telltale signs, wall clouds, green haze, cows midflight, moo. The rain kicked back from the trucks in front of me. Blown-out tire rubber everywhere.  I was thinking, tornadoes could happen, or wild boars hitchhiking, hobo satchels hanging from their tusks. Passing by  the Relax Inn. One of those dumb billboards "Need to curse? Use someone else's name. –God"

And then the sky called bullshit. I saw what I was looking for. The green haze. A twist of dust over the median. A burst of white birds. No joke, stuffed animals laying everywhere, like they fell out of a stuffed animal delivery truck. This is what I saw.

I didn't take this picture, some super gutsy person did. No. I called my mom, who is my weatherman. She's a nervous cat, always watching the weather channel, and I knew she'd know. "Mom, it's Jayna." "Jayna!" "Mom quick, tell me. What's going on with the weather?" "There's a tornado warning in Parker County. The tornado is about to touch down in Weatherford." I look to the right and see a sign that says "Welcome to Weatherford." "Mom, that's where I am." "You need to take cover right now!" I never knew for sure whether I was a run or a hide girl. I said, "Fuck that, I gonna outrun it," and pushed hard on the gas. I went 100 mph down the highway. According to the weather alert guy, the storm was moving in the same direction as me, but going 60 mph. I outran the fucker. Yeah, that's right. I did. With adrenaline the whole time. Didn't get hit with any of its baseball hail. Got home, and just really needed to pee, almost peed in my pants.

9:47 PM - 9 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment