Place smells

Today when I was getting out of the taxi at the Richmond Airport, I said "It smells like waffles."

The cab driver told me that the Nabisco plant wasn't far away, so I was probably smelling cookies baking by the thousands.

Mmmm arrowroot.

When I lived in my first apartment down by the beach in Ventura at 1160 Pittsfield Lane, the evening air was often scented by lemons being boiled down into lemonade concentrate. It was like a room freshener, but it was a whole neighborhood freshener.

The best smell of all was in Chicago near the Milk Dud factory. Boiling caramel and chocolate all together - I think that must be what heaven smells like.

Do you have experience with ambient smells?

Anniversary

My sister Laura died a year ago today. Conventional wisdom tells me that anniversaries are hard, but that wasn't the case for me. I had many, many harder days in the intervening time. It started to get better after January 1 because I had sort of given myself til then to be as screwed up as I wanted to be, and I was.

I didn't go out; I drank too much; I ate like a supermodel who has lost her Ford Agency contract; I zoned out at work.

But now it is May and I am surrounded by dogwoods and tiny bunnies frolicking in the grass. Every azalea that blooms has my sister in it - she is eternal in that way. The missing her has gotten as bad as it could ever get, I think, and that is a comfort in itself.

Growing up or not

When we were in our late 20's my friend Mike said "My ex-girlfriend wants to be friends."

I asked "What are you going to do?"

He said solemnly, "Oh, no, I can't. I'm not emotionally mature enough for that."

That made me laugh but I think of it often and use it occasionally. There are some things that it takes a long, long time to become grown up enough to do.

Normally I would not talk about this

I hate to read about dreams. I never, ever read dream scenes in books. I always skip them. The device pisses me off. Yes, author person, I know you want to say something deep and meaningful but you can't figure out how to say it directly, so you start with the italics. Well, screw you. Learn to write.

So last night I had this dream... No, bear with me - I will keep this short and it was a blogging dream, so that counts for something, doesn't it?

I dreamt that I was looking at the movie page in the newspaper and there was a movie called "Jonniker!" after one of my favorite bloggers, of course Jonniker but in the movie title she gained an explanation point.

I ran around telling all my friends about the movie and I even went over and got to meet Jonniker's family (they live in Los Osos, California, of course, in dreamland).

The only problem was that they got Molly Shannon to play the lead role and the movie sucked really bad.

I was all at once upset and happy. Upset because I wanted Jonniker! to do well, happy because maybe no one else would find out about her and it would still just be us cool kids in her comments section, which is one of the funnest places in Blogsylvania.