Our days are numbered.

Another night spent on my porch, drinking High Life and white wine on ice with assorted lady friends and Thad. I whipped up a nice caprese salad! I made fire in the grill but no one would leave the porch to look at it. It was gorgeous.

This was last week, when the biggest problem with my car was NOT the smoke pouring from the hood but the dead battery. Up For Anything flagged down a jazz musician for a jump but he was worried my sick battery would somehow infect his Scion. While attending to the car, an episode of Elimidate broke out on my porch and two ladies kissed a passerby. Which was fine, you know, whatever, but lately I'm craving wholesomeness, sort of how bodies crave foods with the minerals they need, like...Crunchwrap Supremes. I wanted knitting to break out, or sober conversations about God. No time for that, anyway. My car is so broken!

I eventually chased Mulligan down the street and forced him to assist me, an endeavor that paid off for days and days in the following ways:

He took my battery out and charged it for 24 solid hours; cleaned the engine block; I went to his garage sale and got myself a green dress and beige nail polish, a white dress for Cousin, a ruffly dress for Selma, and a chair for Pretty Kelly; I meet the seventh Ms. Mulligan and their dog, Mulligan ("Mully") and three more neighbors: Lisa, Ricky, and Maria. It was a fully Mulligan weekend, and wouldn't you know his workshop is spotless, he's selling ancient carpet samples, she sells Avon, and they have a framed poster of the Irish Declaration of Independence in their garage?

It was a spot of wholesome in a time of...not debauchery, or even unwholesomeness, but that floaty feeling you get sometimes, right, when looking at your life? Mulligan does not float above anything. He's deep in the streets! He is ground level!

Everytime I love something I wonder what it will be like to lose it, and lately, I want to squeeze this damned city SO TIGHT but now is not the time to think about leaving but staying put, ground level--now is for living, and sitting, and riding my bike before the ice takes over.

It's been awhile since I mom-blogged, right? So I'm about to go out with my latest girl crush--brillant, funny, horrible childhood, drunk: God love her--and I'm getting ready and I think: "This is the life she wanted." Not for me, she never really knew me, or knew I was there--but there is always that residue, her traces in my bones, her thoughts in my head. I have the life she wants, I have the love she denies, I have the defenses she lacks.

Pray for her, okay? I don't know how she is, but I know in my bones it isn't good. I'm going out anyway. It's my life.

Yeah, well, it was the greatest day ever, so far, I think, in a life of dizzying highs and miserable lows. Our Glee Club played the Hideout Block Party, and we did good, and we felt GOOD, and then some of the lady Glees sang back up for the Frames, and then a lady with some fashion website liked my robot dress, and my friends were there, and my cousin was there. Everything was handed to me on a damn platter, that night, having made cheeky jokes about making it with this specific rock star and he's at the house party. That party, itself, was perfect: everything was too bright, no furniture in a collapsing house, everyone was beer-smeared and awkward. Chick feel down the stairs. I pretended to smoke a crayon. And this is what happens to me at a hype party: I want to be more wholesome. And then when I'm reading and doing dishes and writing letters to friends: I want to go to a loud and messy porch party.

You know what isn't perfect? People in these parts don't enjoy fireworks like they should. So, there. Nothing is perfection, but some days come close. What if Art Brut, standing an watching in gleeful appreciation, had started shooting roman candles off? That would have been something.

This bodys only rental

Baby Mama is going to make her nickname a whole other human truer. I asked her about some of my fancy pants reading on attachment: that there may be a decrease in a woman's sex drive post-delivery because touch is touch and the erotic needs of plugged-in humans are met by the constant feel and affection of your baby person. I thought of this as I watched her daughter crawl on her and cuddle her like she wasn't a separate body, and Baby Mama added another dimension: "I didn't want to have sex because I didn't feel like it was my body, it was hers." We were on the beach, I was getting a sunburn and multiple, inexplicable exotic bug bites. Different bodies, different upkeep, rosy skin with no melanoma requires lotions and protection that I haven't mastered in 30 years. Bodies in rest and motion, humans made in tummies and emerging like Borscht Belt comics from behind the curtain: "Ta Dah!"

It was a toddler week, and oh, I love toddlers. Difficult and brilliant, like everyone I really value. I finally met the daughters of a close friend from way back, and the littlest one, the love bug, fell asleep clutching my hand after laughing all night at my jokes...it was heavenly. I had some good times baby-sitting a nearly 2 year old, navigating "yes" and "no" while trying not to manipulate or lie to her just because my brain is 10x bigger. It's an ethical conundrum, interacting with a toddler.

And so. I was thinking of bodies, and babies, and walking on the beach in front of strangers in borrowed short-shorts; I was humming This Bodys Only Rental, concentrating on the line "Pick your risk and take it"; I'm using pop music to validate my life choices, as always. God Bless the swimmers and eggs and life's longing for itself; the more babies you make, the more people I meet, and even if I don't treat you well enough, we had a good time, right?

Chicago note: What kind of beach creature leaves a bruise that is swollen hard and vicious pink, eventually subsiding and leaving three little bumps? I think I got bit by a lamprey on Dempster Beach. Be warned! There was also poop in the water, and a 16year old life guarded walked on the sandbar with a shovel and had to make an announcement that "poop has been spotted in the water! The effects of which should subside in 30 minutes" at which point every got out of the Lake. The Lake, as we all know, is composed mostly of Milwaukee's human excrement, so I think that the mass exodis was a social interaction: no one wants to be the person that is okay swimming with a poop on the loose.

I'm okay with it, but now I'm going to lose my arm to a lamprey bite. The Life of the Body of a Saint is not an easy one, friends.