I've found that over the last few days I've been so extremely grumpy I could have pissed blood and laughed about it. There is/was really nothing going on that would cause this mood, just a few days of getting up on the proverbial wrong side of the bed (which, if you must know, is the right hand side)

The weather today was gloomy and damp and my brain felt not unlike an old, used tissue...which caused me to stare off into space and not pay attention while Pete and Justin and myself walked in the city. Etta James was singin' "Stormy Weather" in my head and my ankles and knees ached slightly due to the combined efforts of the weather and my un-arch supporting sneakers.

Complain complain, bitch moan whine...

Seems everyone recently has been on a bit of a downward bend...and I'm having a lot of fun blaming "the new year" not because it's new (because, quite honestly, it's just another day) but because people have all these notions & expectations of how life should be...and the holidays, if nothing else, serve as a big mile marker of our lives moving along, and even the best of us will feel a little emotionally winded at the speeds we're going.

We saw Big Fish this evening and for some reason towards the end of the movie, images of my grandmother popped into my head. Her name was Rebecca which is from the Hebrew for "to tie" or "to bind" which was done to fatten aniamls before they were sent off to be slaughtered, however the secodary meanings are "Beautiful" or "Desirable" which I think is what her parents had in mind when she was born (if not, then her parents were pretty damn fucked up)

I always thought she looked like a movie star, a siren of the silver screen...her hair was always perfect and it wasn't until I was in my very early teens that I discovered it was because she would get up at the crack of dawn and go to the Salon where she would pay homage to the beauty gods of Clairol and Revlon and return home looking ever the more radiant.

My mother told me that on the day before she died, all of her friends from the Salon came to visit her in the hopital and they had make overs. Sure my grandmother died from the breast cancer, but when she did die...she looked fabulous.

At her memorial service there was a time when people were allowed to stand up and share their memories of my grandmother. There was silence for a little bit, but then one by one people would stand and talk about how they had met her and what a wonderful woman she had been. Towards the end, a small hispanic woman sitting in the back of the church stood up and amid sniffles and sobs, told everyone about how shy she was when she first moved to the US from Mexico, and how she had become friends with my grandmother and how she had helped her with her english. The woman then broke down for a bit, and after collecting herself again she said:

"not only did she help me with my english....she taught me how to accessorize!"

This, ofcourse, summed my gandmother up perfectly and caused me to laugh a bit which annoyed my sister and she hit me and reminded me that I was supposed to be sad. I spent the rest of the service looking out an open window by the pew I was sitting in, and watching a light sun shower splash drops of water down on a large blue van parked by the curb.

So if FISH's amaranthine vision of death is anything like what is real, then I hope when I'm being taken down to the river, I see my grandmother, looking like a movie star, waving to me from the bank.

So enough with unmorbidly thinking about death...on to better and brighter things. I recently got a letter in the mail from my old realtor "Mopper-Stapen" returning my security deposit. They only took out $33 for general cleaning, so it pleases me that I got the majority of my money back. Also, my grandmother sent me a check for $500 because I am a poor, jobless mother fucker. Hurrah! Yay for money!

Also, while scanning a bunch of shizzle for my brother-in-law, I scanned my sketch of a sexy Pin-Up girl that Disco's wife asked me to draw for S.W.I.S.H., granted she's looking kinda messy at the moment, but I think she'll look pretty slammin' when I get her cleaned up and maybe colored (if I'm feeling wild).
So, if you so desire, take a gander at my very first S.W.I.S.H. Girl

....oh...and gimmie some Guest-Book luvin'