The Ice Looks Nice When You're Stoned, Probably

So with my own ban on writing about my personal life (which is rocking itself to a tiny, sharp-edged nib these days) and with my endless preoccupation with the idea that when my laptop is open (even on my lap right now) that I should be working on my book, I find it difficult to blog these days.

But for my own sanity, here goes.

I was fact-checking something for my newspaper today, and I ended up on a web site about ghosts. I got particularly involved in images of “ghosts” that showed up in people’s pictures in New York, and I have to tell you, it was a particularly hee-haw kind of crop.

Now, I’m not one to definitively say yes or no to the paranormal, but I heartily reject the idea that bright splotches on a negative are ghostly activity. People post these pictures with captions like, “I feel this is the ghost of Mrs. Mary Schooner, wife of the 18th-century admiral, Scott Freakmonster Schooner [names approximated]." or “The orb hung around my daughter’s foot, as if my dead mother were trying to insert herself into the photograph.”

I wish I knew what site it was, but I have no idea, 10 hours later. Maybe it is a product of the chain-smoking, a fantastically horrible thing I’ve done for about a week now. (I know, save it.) I know full-well it is no excuse to talk about my ability to start and quit the cigarettes, but I think it’s fascinating that my father smoked for 30 years and quit one day, only to never desire another cigarette again. I was that anti-smoking child, who was disgusted at the smell wafting through the vents in our house from the ground to the second floor. Such a lonely memory. Adults smoking when they were angry. Sad, desperate. And you should have seen the day I came home from a year living in Italy and my father pulled the duty free bag stuffed with cartons from the trunk of his car….But I’m the strangest smoker—I do then I don’t, for six months, a year, because I begin to loathe the taste and feeling. So I can only hope that will be the case again.

I’ve spent two nights attempting to watch “Brokeback Mountain" on DVD, which is an act I’m not proud of—my brain can’t focus these days, and Ang Lee—I could kiss him for making “The Ice Storm.” I grew up vaguely in those woods in Connecticut. My uncle lived there, nearish there. Same kinds of spindly and close-nestled trees. And the actual ice storm of the movie happened just before I was born, when my parents had already moved into the house I grew up in. I asked one of the parents about that time recently, and either he or she (I’m blocking which) told me they remember cuddling (wrong word. sitting? staying?) by our fireplace while the power stayed out for a couple days and the trees hung heavy with tubes around each branch of glasslike ice. There was a red oriental carpet in that room when I was a child. I lay in front of the fireplace with my lush yellow Labrador, who was the same age as me and died when we were 13.

And I asked my parents about the “key party” depicted in that movie, when couples went to parties and dropped their keys in a communal bowl so that at the end of the night they could pick at random and go home with the person who belonged to the keys they’d picked.

My parent (mother or father, I guess I don’t remember which) said they recalled those parties, that they’d actually existed in the ‘70s. “But we never went to them,” he or she said.

Well, sure. And you didn’t smoke pot, even though you admitted you did, after asking me if I did, while I was still in college.

“Your father never liked it,” my mother said. “But I did. And I would have done it again," she said, giggling a little, conspicuously, showing a part of her she rarely lets show.