Edgy Mama

This idea comes from writer Joshilyn Jackson via poet Pam McNew. Perhaps you’ve noticed that funky young writers like to create witty, often obnoxious, clearly bs-full biographies of themselves to run in the contributor sections of the edgy magazines and on-line journals in which they are published. Here’s my outrageous bio–what’s yours?

Edgy Mama wears only hot pink underwear and likes to fish for sharks in her bathtub. She has lived in Armenia, Alaska, Azerbajian, and Algeria. In fact, she refuses to live any place that doesn’t start with an “A,” because she starts with an “A.” Her favorite job was being the Oracle at Delphi from 970-972. She would have stayed longer, but she has a policy of never staying in the same place for more than two years. Her hobbies include sloth, arachnid collecting, and pyromania.

It seems that I have not been as forthright as necessary about who I am. If you have had the misfortune of addressing me incorrectly, I forgive you. You are the 9,895,654th person to do so. So don’t feel badly.

At birth, I was blessed, or cursed, depending on your perspective, with a double first name. Yes, you who have not been lucky enough to live below the Mason-Dixon line–folks down here like to give multiple names to poor, helpless infants, because God forbid they leave out any living ancestor in the naming game (now you understand why Southerners have so many children). In fact, you will be haunted, cussed at, and generally reviled, if you choose to name your child, say, Eugene, if there are no Eugenes anywhere in your family’s near or distant past.

I am named for my great-grandmother, Anne Fitten Glenn, who grew up being called Anne, but when she married (at a rather late age for the time), she began using both her first and maiden names, for some never-to-be-clear reason. For the rest of her life, everyone called her Anne Fitten. Thus, when I was born, and she was still alive and kicking hard, my parents named me after her. For all of my life, everyone has called me Anne Fitten, or, when three syllables seem too much, AF (of course, people have called me other things as well, but we won’t go into that right now).

It’s not that I mind being called Anne, it’s that it feels funny, kind of like when you’ve got a hair stuck in your throat, and you try to cough it up, but it’s plastered there with saliva, and you try to wash it down, but it just gets caught a bit further down your esophagus, right where you can still feel it, so you try to stick your fingers down your throat, but that makes you gag, and…well, you get the picture.

Interestingly, my friends are typically much more protective about my name than I am. They’ve been known to vehemently correct people: “Her name is ANNE FITTEN.” Which statement is usually met with blinking incomprehension. So there’s no further confusion, you, my blogger friends, may call me AF, Anne Fitten, Edgy Mama, EM, Fitten Glenn, or Blog Slut. Just as long as there are TWO names or initials, always.

For this month’s Blogging for Books, write a blog entry about one of three things:
1. A memorable trip or “mini-vacation”; 2. A time you did something spontaneously, in order to shake up your life; 3. A time you metaphorically took “the road less traveled”, and made an unpopular or uncommon decision. If you don’t already know about B4B or want to know more, visit The Zero Boss.

My post, below, definitely fits into category one, and, to some extent, into category two, and, stretching it a bit, perhaps into category three (at least from one person’s perspective).

February 1994, White Water Canyon, Utah

I sat in the front of the raft drinking a Budweiser. Behind me, rowing the oar boat down flat water, he sang, “Celia, you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily.” The striated canyon walls blocked the afternoon sun as he steered the raft towards our campsite on the river’s left bank.

“Big water tomorrow,” he said.

After everyone else had gone to sleep, we sat on the sand next to the river telling each other stories until late at night. Imagine, for instance, that a crazy ax murderer was hiding in one of the caves we passed alongside the river. He could have followed our rafts to our campsite. Now, while we sat talking, away from the tents, he could come down and brutally murder our friends as they slept. We wouldn’t know that anything was wrong until we woke up tomorrow morning and saw the tattered tents and splattered blood.

May 1994, Canyonlands and The Green River, Utah

As I drove up, I saw him sitting against a tree reading a book.

“Hi,” I said.

“You’re here,” he said.

He smiled, stood up, and hugged me. He held me for just a second too long.

We spent the next few hours helping to organize food and sleeping arrangements for eighteen eight and nine-year-olds.

After the kids were asleep, or at least, in their tents, we talked until late, ignoring the other teachers and parents chaperoning the trip. He told me that he was going to try to work things out with his girlfriend. I said that I was disappointed, but I respected his decision.

“Give me a squeeze,” he said.

We hugged–hard. He didn’t feel like he really meant what he had said. He felt electric with desire.

We spent three days and nights in the desert, teaching and leading, tending and shepherding. In the evenings, we sat next to the fire and told ghost stories to the kids. After they were asleep, we would walk around the campsite in the dark, bumping shoulders every few feet like drunken sailors. I thought, “Because of who I am and who I think he is, this has to be his decision.”

On the last night, he said, “Hey, my inflatable kayak is in my car. Do you want to stay tomorrow and go rafting?”

“Just the two of us?” I asked. He didn’t reply.

“I have a date tomorrow night.” I paused. “I’ll call and cancel.”

We said good-bye to the children, the parents, the teachers. Suddenly, it was quiet. We looked at each other and smiled.

“The river,” he said.

We set up his two-man kayak, bought a 12-pack of Budweiser, rubbed sunscreen on each other’s shoulders, and floated down the Green River.

Twice we saw death on the river. A mama magpie protecting her nest from a tree-climbing snake—hectoring the snake until the long length of it splashed down into the water. A golden eagle swooped down to pinion his dinner, a soft bunny that should have been camouflaged by the barren brown rocks.

It started raining as we neared his car. By the time we pulled off the river, an afternoon storm had begun to dump buckets of rain on us. We had to climb the hill to the car through thick, sucking clay. He took my hand and pulled me up the hill. Wet and covered with clay, we sat in his car drinking beers and dipping tortilla chips in salsa. Again, he told me of his decision to stick with his girlfriend.

“If it wasn’t for her, I would be trying to kiss you right now,” he said.

At this point, I was tired of hearing about it.

“What am I doing here? I should have just gone home,” I thought.

I think he sensed my frustration. Maybe it was the glare I gave him every time he brought up his girlfriend’s name.

I told him I’d follow him back to the Roaring Fork Valley. We drove along, two beat-up cars separated by more than distance, along the flat road through the desert, heading towards the tiny town of Dinosaur, Colorado, where we planned to stop for dinner.

“Why prolong the agony?” I thought. “I should just pass him, wave, and keep driving.”

I was listening to Kevin Montgomery singing: “Which way is it gonna be? Will you give up what you had so you can have something with me?”

He suddenly turned sharply down a rutted road that led to a wooden shack containing what sounded like a generator (although I didn’t notice the reverberating noise until later). He stopped his car and got out. I stopped mine and got out. He walked towards me, a look of determination on his face.

“What’s wrong,” I asked.

He said nothing, but took my shoulders firmly in his hands, bent towards me, and kissed me.

We kissed there, leaning against my car–wet, dirty, disheveled–for two hours. People would drive by, blow their horns and whistle. We would laugh and keep kissing.

June 2005, Asheville, North Carolina

My daughter and son giggle as their Daddy chases them around the house, growling.

“A monster! A monster!”

They squeal and scream as he catches them and wrestles them to the ground. Eventually, one of them escapes, rescues the other, and the chase resumes.

I watch as I prepare dinner and think about river trips far from home—and about a first kiss that led to forever.

If you do nothing else today, go to my friend Chad’s blog at: http://www.tempermentalblender.blogspot.com. Glad I can help inspire you to greatness, Chad.

Eddo the great is moving this site to http://www.edgymama.com (much easier to remember and type in than my long name plus blogspot). So, those of you who have linked to me, please update your links. If you haven’t linked to me, now is your big chance. We’ll leave this site up for a few days so that everyone gets the message.

In more computer world news, I have hired Eddo to redesign my website: http://annefittenglenn.com (and yes, I’m paying in cash, not chocolate chip cookies). I’ll keep you updated. I’m excited, although I can’t imagine how he’s going to top this site. The website is really about marketing myself as a writer (although I haven’t updated it in ages–because this site seems to take priority). If any of you have feedback or insights on how to make my website more marketable, this is the time to kvetch. Thanks.

I will write about circumcision, but not today (speaking of difficult words to spell-can you think of any other words that contain three c’s, one s, and five vowels?). By the way, I’m getting tired of the testotesrone gel ads–they must be popular because they won’t go away!

Writing update: I wrote last night. Yea! I completed the Cyprus short story, which is now entitled “The Magic Road.” It topped out at about 2,400 words. I’ve done one editing pass, but I need to do about three more. Also, I need critiques. Enviro-spouse is my primary editor, plus a few of my writer friends, but if any of you have the time, desire and energy to read the story, e-mail me. It needs to be in the mail by June 23rd.

I’ve also decided to enter Zero’s monthly Blogging for Books contest. I’ll post that entry tomorrow or Saturday once I do a couple more editing passes. The story is about the two rafting trips that brought E-spouse and Edgy Mama together.

Reading update: I finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides last week. Many of you read this novel years ago. It’s been sitting on my bedside table for months. If you haven’t read it, you should. Yes, it’s about an hermaphrodite, but it’s really about a family and history and love and survival–in other words, all the good stuff. To some extent, it inspired my Cyprus story.

I also just read Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben. I’ve turned E-spouse into a Coben addict, and we’re going back and reading the old Myron Bolitar novels. This one was published in 1995 (may be his first?), and is an excellent page turner, except you know it’s an “old” book because all the technology is dated. No one has cell phones, but they have car phones. The police have access to Caller ID, but the general public does not. People use answering machines instead of voice mail. Wow, the phone system and how we use phones has changed in the past 10 years. Of course, all of this stresses me out about my writing–tasers are pretty cutting edge at the moment, but will they be five or even two years from now? My characters use satellite phones, but that technology is probably about to be superseded as well. Sigh.

Arithmetic: How much money have I made from writing in 2005: $10 + $10.

Keep the faith, friends.

I don’t have a writing update this week because I haven’t written a word–in a week! And it wasn’t like I was on vacation in Hawaii or anything. I was in Atlanta, staying at my mother’s house with my two kids, while Enviro-spouse worked (slight exaggeration–he did take most of Saturday and Sunday off).

I did, however, manage to have some fun. Thursday night I went to my cousin’s home to drink beer and catch up with her, my other first cousin, and one of my best (and oldest–not age-wise, but length-wise) friends. The three cousins–myself, Libs, and Woze–are the oldest of our generation and were born within nine months of each other. We grew up in this big extended Southern family. My grandparents hosted Saturday morning breakfast at their home for their four sons and families for most of my life. My grandfather died just over two years ago. He was in his home until the morning of his death at 93 years of age–and he hosted Saturday morning breakfast three days before he died (not that he was cooking–or ever cooked–in fact, I remember him calling me long-distance when I was in college, because I was the only person who seemed to be able to explain to him how to microwave a hot dog). So, this is a long way of saying that we are very close cousins. Libs and Woze live five minutes from each other and have kids around the same ages–and they are not only related, but are best friends.

Anyway, the talk turned to “procedures,” as my cousins called them. Procedures that 40-something and older women like myself are undergoing on a more and more common basis–boob jobs, face lifts, eye lifts, tummy tucks, liposuction and the like.

I’ve always been pretty hard core about what I term “unnecessary” surgery. In fact, I’ve been known to spout off about the mutilation involved in such “procedures” as circumcision, body piercing–even tattoos. However, as I grow older, I seem to be becoming less judgmental (although I’m still fairly militant about circumcision). Woze said, “If something makes you feel good about yourself, you should do it.” And that made me think–well, if it prevents a mid-life crisis, an affair, alcohol abuse, a descent into depression from low self-confidence–yeah, that seems okay. At the same time, I think we have to look at the cultural underpinnings of such “procedures.” There’s the unrealistic pressure to look 30 when you’re 40 and 35 when you’re 50. Cosmetic surgery has become less dangerous, less expensive and more accessible. This has led in turn to younger and younger women (teenagers, even) getting cut to make themselves look better–or to be more desirable. So, I’m feeling less judgmental, but still mixed.

What do y’all think?

If you grew up in the Southeast, as I did, you probably think of Texas as that sprawling, oil-encrusted, cowboy-infested, semi-nation to the west. It’s south, but not “Southern.” Its accents and attitudes differ significantly from those of the “Old South” (read as people who still care that they lost a war that ended 140 years ago).

I once read that the bumper sticker “Don’t Mess with Texas” is one of the most successful bumper stickers of all time. That it originally was produced as an anti-litter slogan is irrelevant to most who sport it. It has come to represent the energy and feistiness of the those who inhabit the state.

I’ve been driven through Texas once and driven through it once. Both times were in the summer, and I felt like I’d been dropped in a foreign country–hot, dry, dusty, and never-ending. Otherwise, until recently, I’ve given little thought to Texas.

So why do I now turn my attention to Texas? For some odd reason, a large number of the blogs I read and the bloggers whom I’ve attracted are, you guessed it, Texans. This is in part because one of the first bloggers I befriended is the incomparable Eddo, and once you’re part of his tribe, it’s like joining an extended family. Other than FOE (Friends of Eddo), I’ve still met a proportionately higher number of bloggers from Texas than from anywhere else.

Perhaps Texans are natural bloggers–expansive, extroverted, funny, and spinners of magnificent yarns. Of course, I’m attempting to stereotype a state that’s bigger than most countries–a state with a population of almost 21,000,000. Given that mind-boggling number, it makes sense that one would come across a proportionately high number of Texans in the blogosphere. At the same time, I haven’t met any Californians. I’ve met one Floridian, one Georgian, and only a few New Yorkers (all from the City). Maybe I’m just lucky. Or again, maybe Texans are natural bloggers.

I did a little research on Texas and came up with some seemingly relevant factoids. The state motto is “Friendship,” and the name Texas comes from a Native American word meaning “friends.”

Also, the state bird is a mockingbird. There’s a mockingbird in our neighborhood who never shuts up–at the same time, he keeps me informed of what’s going on. He’s shown me an owl, a conclave of crows, and wild turkeys.

Coincidence? I think not.

I’m in Atlanta for a few days–visiting family and Enviro-spouse, who has been on the road for much of the past three weeks. He’s working in hot Lanta through Monday, so we decided to come join him.

I’m on my Mom’s computer at the moment, so blogging and blog reading will be sketchy (so is the mom of Edgy Mama–Edgier Mama?). Sorry to neglect you all. It’s summer, and the blogging is easy.

I have not posted photos of my kids, thus far. Today, however, AB and I are on the FRONT PAGE of the Asheville newspaper, so the attempt seems oblique: http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage. Incidentally, I was not supposed to be in the photo (no shower, no makeup, hair in a pony tail). They also screwed my name, which I spelled out carefully and watched the guy write down!

Have a great rest of the week and weekend.