I Apologize.

Listen, baby, I'm sorry I've been so high-maintenance. I know I can be distracted and cranky. I know I can be all self-pitiful and complainy and it puts a lot of pressure on our relationship. Oh, Barbara. You know I love you. Things will look up, soon as I get some sleep, and some money.

Will you still come to this show I'm in?

HAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAA!!!

It's The Small Press Book Fair, a two day long event happening on Saturday December 3rd and Sunday December 4th. On the 4th at 3, I'll be reading along with Reverend Jen, Master Lee, the O'Debs, and Moonshine Shorey. I'll be reading this one essay-type thing what's been published in Art Star Scene, Reverend Jen Miller's magazine.

There's more info. on this site, though my name isn't there. I'm billed as "other downtown compatriots."
It's all happening at The Small Press Center, The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, 20 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036

PEACE!

RAAAARR!

I had trouble sleeping again last night. Son of beetch! Sheet!!
Quick anecdote regarding perhaps-insensitive quasi-phonetic foreign accent lapse there: When I was in college the first time in Austin, I lived in the 21st Street Co-Op, an artsy nonprofit alternative communey un-dorm founded in part by Lady Bird Johnson. A crazy, crazy place. But shit, I digress, already, again. Anyhoo, one night, me and some other kids, including, if memory serves, Andrew Jenkins and Anjali Gupta, we went over to a nearby 7-11 to skulk around. A man of possibly Middle Eastern or Pakistani origin worked at this 7-11. A nice, friendly, non-creepy man who we all knew to be calm and sane and sound. But this one night we went in there, we found him arguing with a big dumb drunk frat boy who was wanting very badly to buy beer with no ID. The sane hardworking immigrant 7-11 guy started off polite, but firm. The frat guy didn't give up, however, quickly becoming whinier and surlier and more insistent, his fratty whiney beer-entitlement finally reaching such an annoying, nay, Presidential fever piitch that the clerk erupted thusly:

SON OF BEETCH, SHEET!!
HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE TO TELL YOU??
FIFTEEN???
...FIVE, MAYBE!?!?!?
YOU EAT OUT OF MY BUTT!!
FUCK ME, FUCK ME, FUCK ME!!!!

Which is about the best cuss-out I have ever heard. I mean: !
Okay, it's a little gross, but still...for one thing, I think it's genius to reverse the numerical value in the "how many times I have to tell you" sequence. Fifteen? No? Well how about FIVE?
Not only did this cussout send the frat guy right back to his Broncoful of lame-os, but I swore then and there I would immortalize this poet's incandescent righteousness to all the world. And it only took me fifteen years. You're welcome, sir, wherever you are!

So that's one accomplishment accomplished today.

Stuff I thought or hoped would happen today, but didn't, plus mitigating and aggravating factors:

1. I was supposed to go to yoga class tonight. However, due to my continuing dysphoric PMS insomnia deal, I didn't fall asleep til close to 3 this morning, and so had some trouble getting myself together for work four-and-a-half hours later. I was on time to work, but neglected to haul my yoga togs with me. Which I realized while I was on the train. So, to remedy this, I RACED home after work at 5 to pick my yoga bag up from my Brooklyn bitch pad and then make it to my yoga instructor Amy's place in Harlem before 6 pm class, only to find:

2. That the envelope of signed freelancer contracts for the Holly Hobbie project that I sent to Simon & Schuster on Monday was returned to me today for a dearth of required postage equalling (somebody helpfully hand-wrote in, on the return-to-sender stamp): NINE CENTS.

3. This wouldn't've been such a biggie except that S&S gotta get my contract before they can PAY me, and the notion of even a 2-3 day delay in me getting paid is very deleterious for my broke, overemotional ass at this juncture. So I had a complete wailing meltdown in the foyer (read: radiator cover where the mail piles up)of my apartment building.

4. Because of the PMS and not sleeping.

5. Also because I am BROKE, y'all! I have this new job, which is great, but I am still in a hole, due in part to Teamster dues being sucked from my paycheck til my probation's over (luckily this month), a 3-week-lag in getting paid, and having to pay New York state five hundred dollars from when they gave me some Unemployment Insurance money this summer that my former employer/eternal nemesis, St. Martin's Press, then decided to not grant me. (A whole 'nother story entirely.)

5. But about all that, my parents have been incredibly generous in preventing homelessness and healthcarelessness and worse poverty for the past far-too-long. To wit: they sent a relief check at the beginning of the week to help me over this hump, but it has yet to arrive. This was another thing I was hoping would happen today.

So: supposed to go to yoga and then one of my writer's groups and then possibly a party/film shoot tonight
But instead: I've decided to stay in and weep.

But I feel good about sharing the 7-11 story with you, Barbara.

Why Am I Awake?

It is now 5:29 in the morning on a Monday, and I can't sleep. I have to be at work in three and a half hours. Any sleep I would achieve between now and then would rate only as a nap, and would, I fear, jeopardize my chances of waking up in time.

Oh, it's not a tragedy. I slept til 11 am this morning, and got a lot of sleep this past holiday weekend. I'll go to bed early tonight, hopefully. But when you're lying awake at (now) 5:32 after four hours of thwarted effort, your internal monologue tends towards either the fruitlessly existential or the maddeningly specific.

Crap I've been thinking about since roughly 1 am:
1. What am I doing with my life? Specifically, where did it all go wrong for me to such a degree that I own such a decrepit, uncomfortable, spring-sprung bed?
2. Why should I complain about my bed? People sleep in worse beds. Many people have no beds at all. Eric, the homeless guy who looks like Jamiroquai with facial lesions who hangs out in front of Kellogg's diner, sleeps in a stairwell, and that's when he's lucky. I should be grateful for any bed at all and go the hell to sleep on the power of that gratitude alone.
3. Ruminating upon the sleeping places of the homeless is not, in and of itself, soporific. I should think about something peaceful, like snow gently falling...onto the sleeping homeless people. I should turn on the TV.
4. Everything on television is enervating, noisy, and wants to sell me something. Fucking Christmas season, with the endless commercials urgently exhorting me to buy as much stuff as possible in the next three-and-a-half weeks. I'm worried about basic necessities. Fuck you, Circuit City.
5. Well, at least I FINALLY got finished with my incredibly frustrating 96-page Holly Hobbie color and activity book freelance project! I closed up freelance-writer-shop at 11:30 tonight, but I can't seem to let go of it. My mind keeps coming up with goddamned coloring book page scenarios, and then resenting the hell out of them.
6. I had my interview for the New School B.A. program on Wednesday and I think it went pretty well, but I mentally re-write my application essays and obsess over the possible reasons I won't get in.
7. I think this bout of insomnia may be PMS. I often get insomnia and meaningless anxiety around this time. Too much information? Well, I can't say this information thrills me either, bucko. So it might be PMS. So what? Knowing it doesn't make me any sleepier.
8. Luckily, work is kind of slow at the library lately, so I can be a little zombified tomorrow without it mattering much. I just gotta get through an eight-hour workday, then buy some Tylenol PM on my way home from work and collapse. My New School application process is done, Holly Hobbie's done, there's nothing too specific hanging over my head right this second, really. Eventually, I will have a good night's sleep. really, everything's cool. Except for the fact that I'm thirty+thousand years old and I don't even own a bed without ginormous craters in it. Also, my government is operating secret torture prisons all over the world, it would seem. Shit.
9. I know. Let's daydream about having enough of something. Like money, or time, or sleep. I'll daydream about...awww, man. I blew my imagination wad on Holly Hobbie coloring book ideas. Whatever, I should stop trying to control my thoughts this much. Just drift. Breathe in and out, in and out. In and out.
10. Holly Hobbie. Holly Hobbie. Holly Hobbie.

Felicidades, Pescados

Sorry for not blogging here lately--I've been messing with drafts of this post for over two weeks, but I've gotten sidelined by a freelance project. DAMN YOU, HOLLY HOBBIE!!!

Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about this blog when I look at blogs that are all coolly ironical in tone...like sometimes I try for high-concept and relatively impersonal, and sometimes...anyhow. My brother's wedding… WAS VERY FUN!
Here are some fonefotos from it.
(Nice windup, Fisch.)


My brother David Alexander Fisch as "the groom." Very debonair, no? He was a beautiful groom. His beautiful bride:


Celeste Fisch (nee Trevino) pictured above debriefing the bridesmaids during rehearsal. I should have a photo of her there all bridey, but she was pretty much in constant motion and I didn’t wanna stalk her. It’ll suffice til I get a better one.

Alex and Celeste pictured above with the miniature whatchamacallits, you know, the... ritual wedding children. (DAMN YOU, ALZHEIMER'S!)The boy is their friend's son Wyatt and the girl is my sister Anna's 3-year-old, Lilly. Lilly was a rocking ritual wedding child, in that she had zero regard for the conventions of the genre; she kinda skulked down the aisle looking like she was up to something, then spent the actual wedding ceremony strewing her basketful of flower petals all over our family pew, and shoes, and laps, so that she had nothing to scatter on the way back down the aisle. This alarmed Wyatt a little (Wyatt was extremely cognizant of his duties), but did Lilly give a shit?
HELL to tha NO!

Look at her!


And look at her NOW! Punk as heck! Raaaaarr!


So that was at the church. Now here are some fonefotos of the reception.
First up: ***Night of a thousand aunties!***


Aunt Susan Rogers and Tante Beverly Schwartzman! Both are retired schoolteachers. They were in the union and everything. Susan was careful to point out that according to Dick Cheney, that makes them terrorists.


My Aunt Susan Greco! Like me, she works in a school library! She lies to the kids there and tells them I wrote Shrek. Sneaky! She also enjoys ballroom dancing.


My Aunt Margaret Tiffin hit me during Mass when she thought I was making the sign of the Devil at my brother. I wasn't, though, I was doing "hook 'em horns." Margaret is a schoolteacher, too. She's blowing bubbles here. TERRORIST bubbles.



















And here I am in my weddin' get-up. OK, that’s Annie Oakley. She wasn’t at the wedding or anything, Barbara. I just put her in there as a palate cleanser.

Here’s my brother Alex and my sister Anna. Cute, right? They’re twins, for real. Fraternal. My mom didn’t know she was having twins until she was in labor, by the way. Surprise! They didn’t do a lot of sonograms in 1973. Annie was standing on Alex’s head, more or less, according to family anecdote. Alex, understandably, greets this anecdote with a bit of annoyance. Here, though, they seem to have settled their intra-uterine differences.


Here’s Annie again, I like how this photo turned out kinda John Singer Sargent-y. The shadowy figure kissing her shoulder is her husband Matt Hamlin.



Here's my brother-in-law Matt again and my godbrother Adam Schwartzman. Barbara, can you guess which celebrity everybody tells Matt (on left) he looks like?*

















Now look at Dad:




Dad hates wearing a tuxedo. On the way to the reception from the church, he asked me, "why is it that in our supposedly modern age, I gotta dress up for special occasions like a goddamn upperclass English person in the goddamn Victorian era??"
I answered that I thought it had to do with the spread of portrait photography as part of an expanding mass culture during the late 19th century, and an eagerness on the part of new American immigrants to assimilate. Somehow we all got stuck there, sartorially. To wit, here's a wedding photo of my great-grandparents:







Then I mused that it woulda been nicer had we adopted, say, Japanese ceremonial clothing, which seems more comfortable. "But the crazy thing is, they wear tuxedos in Japan now too!" Dad harumphed. "If they're gonna assimilate anything Western, why not forks?"

Later I asked my cousin Margaret Greco, who's an anthropologist, about the persistence of the tuxedo as formalwear. She said, rather wearily, that "it's because COLONIALISM NEVER ENDS."

Anyhow, here's Mom and Dad, Mom enjoying her weddingwear, I think:

And finally, and most importantly, Alex and Celeste, dancing. It's really them. I know, the picture is pretty impressionistic.

Awww. Very sweet. Congratulations, Fisches.

THE END


*(an Osmond. Not Marie.)

Life changes-a-go-go!

No, I'm not going through menopause. My girl parts, damn their pink hides, are all still charging full steam ahead.

What I did do today, though, was turn in my completed application for the B.A. program in creative writing at the New School. I'm a little freaked out with impressitude at my derring-do, here, y'all. I filled out all kinds of tricky forms, and got my transcript from my long-ago University of Texas career (kind of an ordeal, by the way-not the acquiring of the transcript, which was a piece of cake, but the attendant emotional bushwa. I considered sending it to the New School admissions office without even looking at it. I was NOT a stellar student those last...several...semesters. One of the courses I got an F in, incidentally, was The Artist and American Culture. Another one I flunked was Spanish, which, as my then-professor remarked, is ridiculous because I speak Spanish! En realidad, hablaba mucho mas mejor en 1995 que hoy dia, pues, en 1995 yo hablaba hasta por los codos--seee???)

I also wrote three essays. Do you guys remember college application essays? I swear to God, they about killed me. I think I'm slightly mentally afflicted from the effort, which is why my verbiage and bad grammar on this particular blog post is so out of hand. One was basically about who I am, what I want from my edumacation, and what I'm gonna do with my edumacation from now until I die. Another one was about a book that changed my life, explaining how, and why, and blah blah, and the third asked me to design my own degree program and justify every detail. I'm paraphrasing. Anyhow, they were hard, and were made much harder by the fact that I was convinced that if I messed them up AT ALL, I would end up a sad, unaccomplished little nobody living under a bridge.

But so anyway, my application is finished, and I even walked it over to the admissions office myself. LIFE CHANGE #1!

Cambio de la vida numero dos (see? more Spanish!) is that I got fake nails yesterday. Not super-long ones, they're quite short. I am pretty enthralled. I got some kind that don't have the crazy chemicals--they're like slightly glorified Lee press-ons. They were pretty cheap. We'll see how they last. If they do pretty well, I may consider upgrading to longer ones with stencils.

Fake nails have been on my mind a while. Right before I interviewed for this job at the New School I got a vey conservative manicure on my very short ugly never-grow-long nails. Shell pink. Very corporate. I sat in a row of white girls receiving pretty-much-identical manicures, and I suddenly wanted more out of life. Tropical scenes! Holiday themes! I wanted URBAN HANDZ. And I may yet have them. What I have right now, really, is suburban Texas wedding handz.

And WHY do I have suburban Texas wedding handz, Barbara??
It's because of LIFE CHANGE NUMBER THREE! My brother Alex is getting married on Saturday! I'm hading down to San Antonio for the shindig, and I'm pretty pleased about it.

Here's Alex is at age two. Excuse the lousy photo quality, it's a cel phone photo of a framed photo on the wall at my parents' house.


Wasn't he cute? He liked to chew on the picnic table and cry. He also loved to wear a big red vinyl hat everywhere and make up rock and roll songs about his fictional girlfriend leaving him. Here are the lyrics to his big hit:

OH MY GIRLFRIEND
SHE LEFT ME
AND I MISS HER
SO MUCH
COME BACK, BAYBEH!
COME BACK, BAYBEH!
COME BAAAAAACK..
OH BAYBEH!!
DA NUUUH NUHH NUHHH!!!

He was a very sweet little guy who grew up into a very sweet big guy. He rarely makes up rock and roll songs anymore, but he does a fantastic original dance to the Sabbath classic Iron Man. My brother is all that is good about Texas, to me. Here he is as a grown-up:


He looks cranky there, but he wasn't. We were at the beach, which he loves. I think he was maybe philosophizing, or thinking up new dance moves.

He's marrying an awesome girl he's been with for over five years. Meet Celeste Trevino Fisch-to-be:

Celeste is smart, funny, compassionate, good at sports and cards, has the most infectious laugh ever, and fabulous hair, none of which you can discern from my bad cel phone photo of her. We all love her like crazy and she loves my brother like crazy. She even took up golf. I have great faith that she'll never occasion my baby brother to sing sad rock and roll songs about her.