Zit

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Monday October 12, 2009 · 5:57 PM PDT

2009/10/12 · 17:57

I am 52. The passing years have relieved me of most of the horrors of adolescence—seething wrath against the parental entities, the almost carnal need for "he said-she said" exchanges performed in front of personalized lockers, fruity lipgloss—and although I do have small breakouts from time to time, they are mostly associated with the dwindling occurrence of menses. I got my first pimples in the sixth grade, and from then on the nightmare of teenage and then adult acne ravaged my face, shoulders and back, leaving me with what a gentler friend described as "ritual scarring." The condition was worsened by keloidism, and as the acne raged on, the scars and pits peppered my countenance until it was really more of a landscape than a face.

Poll

49 votes Show Results

My skin is...

49 votes Vote Now!

My skin is...

...as smooth as a tide-washed beach

15 votes

...more like the Sandhills of Nebraska

9 votes

...more rough, like the San Andreas Fault trace

10 votes

...a veritable Cascades

1 vote

...a close up of the Erta Ale volcanic field

4 votes

...the Moon

0 votes

...the Moon after LCROSS

2 votes

...there are no words

8 votes

The Grieving Room: I Miss My Joy

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday May 25, 2009 · 8:11 PM PDT

2009/05/25 · 20:11

If I felt depressed I would say that I needed to increase the dose of medication I am on. If my outlook was burnt umber-dark—if I felt I am without any kind of future, I would say that I was indeed depressed. I am disinterested, certainly. Honestly I can say that I am without any interest whatsoever, in anything. I did just spend almost an hour peeling flat warts and non-pigmented skin from my hands and forearms and that interested me for a while, but only in a marginally obsessive way; and I did have the energy to get up, get the flashlight out of the drawer and go outside in the sharply cold wind of a springtime Wyoming night and pull up the sunblind from the studio window.

crose

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Friday March 13, 2009 · 9:13 PM PDT

2009/03/13 · 21:13

When I awoke this morning, I knew it could be a day filled with danger; with Chuck Norris's minions promising panic, disorder and chaos I could only hope to win through until sunset brought calm back to my world. My friends, I barely survived.

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday October 06, 2008 · 7:55 PM PDT

2008/10/06 · 19:55

I have lunch maybe twice a week at a local dive, a small house-cum-restaurant that has been serving food inside its humble walls for over 50 years. The people who work there are mostly city natives who have worked hard all their lives. The owner, Sherrie, has worked in the restaurant since she was a teenager. Her mom Betty owned the business before her and cooked while carrying her in her womb. Betty's been cooking and serving the folks of my hometown good food since many of them were babies. The waitstaff are all very loyal to the small but dynamic family that is just as happy to serve you a cup of coffee as they are a baked chicken dinner. Jennifer Randel, one of the bussing staff, was a tiny, elfin woman of forty who looked twenty five, unless she was bruised. Then she looked sixty. Her story ends badly and continues below the fold.

crose

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Tuesday September 02, 2008 · 10:24 AM PDT

2008/09/02 · 10:24

I have finally trapped a cat that has been nabbing birds off of my feeder for, well, months. I would like the opinions of some pootie-loving Kossacks as to what to do with this cat now.

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday October 31, 2007 · 7:15 PM PDT

2007/10/31 · 19:15

Last week, after listening to NPR's "Homework" segment wherein there was a call for scary personal tales, I emailed the following story to the host. The story was almost used on the next Homework segment--I guess almost isn't good enough in the 15 Minutes of Fame area--and because it was fun for me to recall I wanted to tell it here. Come back a ways in time with me, to about 1985 or so, to a crisp October night along the North Platte River in Central Wyoming...

Poll

33 votes Show Results

How afraid are you after dark in the country?

33 votes Vote Now!

How afraid are you after dark in the country?

Very--my knees quiver and I have an uncontrolled urge to run

0 votes

Deeply--there are nasty beasties about when you get out of the city's lights

2 votes

Irrationally--I just know that Cthulthlu itself is after me

5 votes

Pfft! Dark? What's a little da

18 votes

AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

8 votes

A Day in June

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday June 10, 2007 · 1:58 PM PDT

2007/06/10 · 13:58

Ten years ago today, my father died in the local hospital after living for over ten years with COPD. He and Mom were four days out from their 49th anniversary—I was 15 away from turning 40. I took care of them both as they aged. I never married, I didn’t date, I worked rarely in the public workplace and instead did my jewelrymaking in my home studio. In exchange for my attention and care, my folks let me live in the little shack on their weekend property rent-free and even provided me with an allowance—in the old days they called this a "remittance."

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday April 11, 2007 · 9:58 PM PDT

2007/04/11 · 21:58

A few years back, a fellow ceramics student at Casper College used to come and clean for me because he needed the money and I was damn sick of cleaning my own house. He was argumentative and cavalier with my stuff though, and on the day I found a couple of pieces of fossil oreodont jaw out in the dooryard where he had emptied the dustpan, I fired him and hired Dawn.

Dawn was a tattooed smartass of about 28, married with a young son and a husband who was an habitual petty criminal. They lived in Midwest Wyoming, an oil town that figured into the Teapot Dome oil scandal and that is now barely holding on in the face of the kind of oily, sulfurous neglect that rusts western towns where the pumpjacks outnumber the sober three to one. Dawn was coarse and untamed but conversely bright and funny. She seemed to have endless energy and she practiced yoga and exercised every morning to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. A dusty parade of kids and dogs tracked oilfield mud through her little house. She was the assistant at the preschool who taught swimming and bowling in summer to kids who would otherwise be bored into early crime or pregnancy. She liked to party though, and liked nothing better than to spark up a fatty with the roughneck oilfield and mining crowd she and her husband hung with. Join me below the fold.

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday February 19, 2007 · 9:36 PM PST

2007/02/19 · 21:36

I walk my dog in the only (to the best of my knowledge) off-leash city park in the state of Wyoming. The land was donated to the city of Casper by the doctor-rancher who homesteaded it to be used as a sort of "as is" park for the enjoyment of nature. The park encompasses about 30 acres of river bottomland with cottonwood, Russian olive, grey willow and bar willow the dominant tree species, with a few boxelders thrown in. Someone planted grape hyancinths and crocuses a long time ago, and they are naturalized now and spreading where they can find a likely spot. The city paved the ranch two-track that used to wind along the river and made it into a walking and biking trail, joining it to the several miles of trails that cross back and forth over the North Platte. Somewhere along in time they made the park off-leash, and the dogs of Casper have been loving it to death ever since.

What is your favorite term for dog excrement?

19 votes Vote Now!

What is your favorite term for dog excrement?

Poop

7 votes

Dooky

2 votes

Turdage

1 vote

Doo-doo

0 votes

*#!?!!*&%!, there's sh*t on my shoe!

4 votes

Poo-poo

2 votes

doggage

2 votes

other--explain below

1 vote

Fat Chance

crose

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday January 02, 2007 · 8:06 PM PST

2007/01/02 · 20:06

A skier has broken his leg in a brutal fall. He is gravely injured, but unfortunately he lives in a country where he is not only blamed for breaking his leg, he is denied treatment for it and must hobble around the best he can, crutchless and in agony while the limb heals, if it ever does. The general public in his country also deride him for how all this limping and moaning appears, and he is treated with contempt if not outright hostility wherever he goes. He is insulted in restaurants, denied space on public transportation and he finds he cannot even find trousers that fit his swollen leg. Instead of the sympathy and medical treatment he needs, he is told that, if he really wanted to be cured, he could be. He just needs to have the will to be healed. More below.

Poll

29 votes Show Results

Fat people should

29 votes Vote Now!

Fat people should

shut the Hell up

2 votes

be eliminated from the gene pool

1 vote

wear fabric stars pinned to their clothing

1 vote

be harvested for their organs

0 votes

be rendered for their valuable oil

7 votes

be treated like you would like to be treated

16 votes

hang on--help is coming

2 votes

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Zit

The Grieving Room: I Miss My Joy

SURROUNDED!! My Battle to Reach Kos HQ

The Grieving Room: For Jennifer

Pootie Dilemma

Tell Me A Scary Story!

A Day in June

Feminisms: Dawn's Choice

Women (and Men) Who Run With the Dogs, now with POLL

Fat Chance