(no subject)
mom is good to me. i have successfully trained her to give me gifts whenever i am home to visit, but to never
expect me to take them home to boston with me on the plane. so within a couple of days of a holiday visit, i
can usually expect a series of meticulously packed boxes waiting for me on my dirty front porch.
look at that perfect motherly penmanship. mom has changed a bit in the 32 years i have known her. but
her pretty cursive has never changed. it warms my heart. the only problem -- she addressed my care
package to newtonville. tisk tisk. i live in newton corner. very posh. newtonville is the dirtiest of the
13 villages of newton. its like living in the 10101 and getting something addressed to you in jersey city.
let's open it up.
cookware. delicious. mom redeems some kind of credit card user points for products she doesn't need, then pawns
them onto austin or myself. she's been very keen on filling out my kitchen ever since erika left and took her
dozens of pots and pans with her.
mom is also a fan of doctor oz (although she is not an oprah show viewer. curious.) i think i'm going to eventually
be gifted her entire Best Life library ever since she discovered i had started smoking again on christmas day.
c'mon, mom. its the only vice i have left. i mean, after the drink and the ladies.
an athletic bag she presumably received at some tennis event at her country club. i don't have anything i could
put in it for my athletic activities. but i am tempted to put karl in it and bring it to the gym. i see a handle.
more cookware. awesome. i used the bad boy to make a delicious bit of rice on saturday night. i experimented
with a mixture of curry powder and old bay. east meets... east. wonderfully pungent.
a painting of a... carrot. the carrot and i have a storied history together. i was a huge fan of the vegetable
as a raw snack during my teenage years and the early twenties. when i got fat in college and mom put me on
sugar busters during summer break 1997, carrots were off the menu. and i pitched a total fit. i was sort of a
dirty punk about my carrot consumption as an irresponsible teenager; you would often find the roots of a
consumed carrot hanging deep in the cushions of our living room couches. this is already up in my kitchen as
a reminder to clean up my act.
mom took a huge interest in the photo collages i made while she was visiting me in boston last summer. i'm
proud to say i inspired her; austin and i both have these. this is her hat montage; a collection of photos
of the family in stupid hats. very classy.
kyleen saw the photo of me with the anti-shock bag hat from college and said i hadn't changed one damn lick
since 1996. as someone fearful of aging, this was the perfect thing to say to me. also in this detail, my god
awful cowboy outfit dad procured for austin and i in the early 1980's. what you can't see is the ridiculous
rawhide belt with "horne" branded in the back. yes, i wore it to school. it was also the belt dad frequently
used to beat the hell out of me during my teenage years for most of my bouts of bad behavior. yehaw.
austin and i took immense pride in our big wheels.
this is the montage of homes my parents lived in over the years. mom has been a bit obsessive recently
at making sure we get copies of most of the older family photos. mom and dad lived in some great crappy
texas apartments during their early years and some are on display here. of greater interest are some of the
run down dirty ranches mom spent some of her childhood on. mom had a pet chicken at some point in her life.
the third and final collage is a collection of places i myself have lived; both family homes and the dingy
philadelphia apartments i called home. dead center is me coming out of my newton apartment; a photo taken
at probably the fattest point of my life in the last three years. i'm not proud of it. when asked why the house
i shared with erika for three years wasn't part of the collage, mom replied, "i sacrificed veracity with a
desire for you to actually look at the collage." good going mom.