Mental Floss

I didn't come up with that phrase. I saw it somewhere, but I don't know who to give the credit to.

It's 11:45 on a Sunday night. I should be asleep or working on the reply brief I need to finish by Friday. I have the brief in my head; I just need to put it on paper. As my boss back in West Texas used to say, I have 'em by the short hairs. But I can't really say it that way in the brief. I've had a long, busy weekend, and I'm not about to start working now. So I'm giving myself 30 minutes to offload some mental clutter.

I took the kids up to see my mom in Hico. On the way, I spent way too much money on flea market junk, but I figure I was making up for lost time. I love to see my mother so busy and so happy with her life as it is now. But that town ... I could (and should) write a screenplay. I need to tell you some stories about that place, but it deserves an entirely separate post. We met a friend of my mom's for dinner Friday night at this little Mexican restaurant. I was mesmerized by a "family" that took over a couple of tables next to us. It included two sweaty, morbidly obese, braless women in threadbare NASCAR T-shirts with their toothless meth/mullet-headed husbands/boyfriends along with a brood of unfortunate children who were obviously not fathered by the Caucasian cretins who were ignoring them. These folks proceeded to light up cigarettes and smoke as they ate their nachos and bitched at each other. (Who smokes and eats at the same time?) Hey, far be it from me to judge, but I'm just saying. I'm certainly not the most classy person, but I just can't help but stare at small-town trash and pity all their babies.

Last night, my mom asked me if I had ever seen the movie Elizabeth- town. She was mortified when I told her that I had not. After she recovered from the shocking disbelief, she said, "Well then you have to watch it." So she pulled it out of her DVD library. I think it was stuck somewhere between Breakfast at Tiffany's and Saving Silverman. Elizabethtown came out in 2005. That was kind of a bad year for me. And 2006 was worse. 2007 was spent recovering from the previous two years, and I don't think I had yet realized that it is now 2008. So that's why I missed Elizabethtown. It is now my new favorite movie. And Orlando Bloom has officially kicked Matthew McConaughey out of my list of five. What's really scary now is -- I'm afraid Orlando is also on my mom's list, and that she may have a better shot at him than I do.

Today, I ran out of gas on my drive home. That OnStar account comes in handy every once in a while. So that took a good hour and a half out of my afternoon. The guy who came to give me some gas didn't take credit cards, and I of course had no more cash. After he poured a few dollars' worth into my tank and then had to jump my battery, he followed me to a gas station so I could fill up his truck with diesel as payment. Sure, I should've known better and stopped for gas before the low fuel alarm started beeping at me. But I kept looking at the "fuel used" numbers along with the trip odometer, and then relied on my own bad math. I figured I could make it to Johnson City, and there perhaps, find gas that was maybe two cents per gallon cheaper. This is what happens when you are both a cheapskate and a moron with two grumpy children and a thirsty dog on a road trip in June in Texas when it is 98° at 3:30 in the afternoon. Needless to say, we were all glad when we finally got home.

I didn't mind waiting almost an hour for my automotive savior to arrive. We had just picked up a healthy late lunch at Taco Bell. There is really nothing better than eating tacos in a hot car on the shoulder of a busy highway. And both kids had an opportunity to pee outside, which is always quite an adventure for them. I needed to go too, but I didn't, as I was afraid that the gas can guy would show up just as I got comfortable squatting over the weeds with my two giggling children shielding me from late afternoon traffic. Besides, I had something to distract me while we waited. You see, the new David Sedaris book came out last week. Had I not pre-ordered it on Amazon, I would have had to camp out at Barnes & Noble the night before. I picked up my mail before we left town on Friday. As fate would have it, there amongst the junk mail, the bills, and various meaningless envelopes from the VA, was the package I had been waiting for. His latest book is called When You are Engulfed in Flames. Normally, it takes me a good year and a half to read a 200-page book. Well, I'll have you know, in less than two days, I am already on page 202. As the kids and I (along with our healthy dog Buzz) sat waiting in the hot SUV, I immersed myself in the book I had been anticipating since last fall when the object of my literary obsession came to town to read selections from this latest oeuvre. The kids finally stopped asking what I was laughing at and went about their bickering without my interference.

More about Sedaris later. I only have about 100 pages to go. Look for my review in late 2009.

A few years ago, I used to get fluoroscopic steroid injections in my lower back in hopes of relieving my constant left-butt-cheek sciatic pain. Part of this process involved intravenous Fentanyl. Afterward, I would always feel like my brain had been to a spa. Like they took it and shook it out and pressure-washed all the creases and cleared out all the debris. I'd get a clean slate. A good kind of amnesia. It was as if my brain had been treated to an aromatherapy massage and bathed in a mineral water whirlpool. Yep, that Fentanyl was some good stuff. It worked great. Too bad the steroid shots never did. Now that I can't get a good Fent fix every few months, I have to clean the dirt from my mind manually from the outside, pulling stuff through the tips of my fingers to the keyboard, not unlike the way Chopin would create a musical masterpiece. Except my stuff isn't musical, and masterpiece would be a bit of a stretch.

So ... I just now got to the point where I was going to list all my latest random thoughts, all the snippets too small to build a story around, but too big to dump or to keep in my head. This blog has become not only a public diary, but the closest thing to Fentanyl that I can find without risking a drug trafficking charge.

Here are just two of the bits and pieces from the lost and found in my cluttered mind:

I recently found out that Peter Cottontail and the Easter Bunny are one in the same, thanks to my sister-in-law. We were at my in-laws' for Easter. Joellen told the kids that Peter Cottontail had been there. I was all like, "What? Don't you mean the Easter Bunny was here?" She practically grabbed me by the shoulders like I was someone who needed an intervention, and said, "Jill, 'Here comes Peter Cottontail, hoppin' down the bunny trail, hippity, hoppity, Easter's on its way.' Does this ring a bell with you?" I wanted to say that I didn't think Beatrix Potter saw her Peter Cottontail as the Easter Bunny, but who was I to argue when it says it right there in that song?

The following is a conversation I had with my daughter just yesterday:

Katy: "What's that?"
Me: (In one of my rare attempts at being discreet) "It's a feminine product."
Katy: "Oh... like, 'I'm not a chick; I'm a woman.' That kind of feminist product?"

God, I love that girl.