Almostgotit.com

In one of my stupider moments, I agreed to be a block representative for our homeowner’s association. No one else would do it, and mostly all I’ve had to do is go to very boring meetings.

But a few days ago, a neighbor began circulating a petition for our block of homeowners to secede from the rest of the neighborhood. Turns out this man is not in fact a homeowner, has never been to a neighborhood meeting, never shown at work parties, never contributed money, and never bothered to get any of his facts straight.

Most of us had never even met him before,either. I spoke to him at length, could get nothing out of the whiny little man that made any sense, and concluded he couldn’t do much harm.

I was wrong.

As the day progressed, I became increasingly amazed at how much havoc one person could cause. He brilliantly found the people who were most ready to take offense, most likely to listen to his irrational arguments and half-truths, most eager to hear and even help him spread rumors of who was insulting whom, and which group had conspired against which other.

I pondered an appropriate response, and finally sent around a letter. I didn’t mention the man or his petition, only re-introduced myself. Said I was available. Mentioned some great things about both our block AND our neighborhood. All better now, right?

Wrong again.

The man came to my door. “Everyone” had told him to talk to me. “Everyone” demanded $500 to fix a vague something he could provide no further details about. But he had “letters,” he said. He invited me to come up to his house to listen to the 17 angry messages on his answering machine (I declined.) The “11 people” who first asked him to be their spokesman? Too afraid to tell anyone their names because of what might happen to them if they do.

Oh. Bloody. Hell.

After about the tenth round of “everyone is pissed off” I finally used his name very deliberately (own it YOURSELF, jerk-face, and no more of this “everyone” crap) and said X, *you* are pissing *me* off, and I think we’re done talking. He was taken aback, but quickly rallied and triumphantly declared that now he would add “The NEIGHBORHOOD says our block is pissing them off!!!!” to his list of grievances he would be reporting back to “everyone.”

And darned if he didn’t, the little cockroach, wreaking even more havoc.

The worst was the woman who called me in full attack mode. I was so dumb-founded by her unrelenting nastiness that I couldn’t even hang up on her. I had a relationship with this woman. She’s a little silly, sure, but she’s also all alone so I’ve taken the time to tour her silly little garden, coo over her silly little dog.

In the wake of all this drama, for the past several days I have worked almost non-stop at researching and compiling a handy and fact-filled “Neighborhood Q&A.” (AKA “Chill, yo.”)

I’ve rewritten nearly every word. I’ve shortened, sharpened, considered and reconsidered. I’ve read bits aloud to myself. I’ve moved large pieces back and forth, deleted them, rewritten them. It seems a little obsessive, but also seemed truly necessary. Writing it out has settled and refocused me. I feel more like the words are making me than I them. They have been my best friends. They’ve put me back together, held me up and re-energized me.

They are strong, true, simple, tough words now (also a tiny bit funny) and they are finally done. 13 pages, 40 copies. Attached to 40 copies of the neighborhood bylaws.

It goes in all their boxes tomorrow. And then? To hell with it. My neighbors are either going to knock it off or I am going to resign. We’re going to get THIS failure over with as fast as possible.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ~Thomas Edison

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~Samuel Beckett

One fails forward toward success. ~Charles F. Kettering

With our eldest finishing his second week at college, we are all quickly getting our first college failures out of the way. This is good news. It’s good to fail as quickly as you can, to learn as quickly as you can, too.

For instance: we thought we could manage without his having a cell phone. I hate cell phones on a visceral level, and they are bloody expensive, besides. And didn’t *I* manage college without having a cell phone?

But it turns out that our son does need a cell phone. Moreover, his parents need him to have a cell phone. Our 18-year-old has not yet activated the phone in his room, nor does he regularly check his email, nor does he write letters, either. Too busy, too overwhelmed, too inexperienced, too new? Whatever the reasons, we’ve been largely out of contact with him for these very important first few weeks of his college experience, and guess what? There have been some problems. Together, the three of us have failed to manage that much separation, all at once, this soon in the “growing up and leaving home” process.

Furthermore, all of his friends arrange their meals and other social activities together by cell phone. (Or on Facebook, but you can only go into so much detail with so much efficiency on Facebook. )

Turns out, too, that cell phones are herding devices, serving the same function as the call of migrating geese, who honk constantly back and forth in order to organize themselves in proper V-formation.

Who knew? We only learned all this, about cell phones, by failure.

I also learned (again) that my own successful experience (going to college without a cell phone) does not necessarily make me an expert about someone else’s experience. The problem is that I was successful in college without a cell phone. All of us were, back then, of course. But things are different now, and consequently my husband and I had something new to learn, right along with our son.

But we had to fail, first, in order to learn it.

Mikael Rudolph is a college buddy of mine. That was back in the stone age, but even then he was a fabulous mime. Come to think of it, that’s also probably when he got so good at taming rocks — but more about that in a minute.

Mikael is also a cancer survivor, having had a fairly miraculous cure of a tumor that appeared in a rather undignified location, and as a result is currently writing a play called (ahem) Cancer, My Ass. 

You may not have heard of Mikael, but I bet you’ve heard of the world’s most famous mime,Marcel Marceau. Marceau once said of Mikael that  ”In this style… he is a master. Absolutely. It could not have been done any better.”

I KNOW.  Wow, right? 

But mimes don’t get no respect, and Mikael wanted me to share what he CLAIMS to be a possibly-fictional tale of his disastrous journey to Chicago to audition for an “America’s Got Talent” casting director. 

REJECTION. Oh, if only he had bouncing breasts, was married to someone who bites the heads off of live bats, or had apprenticed with Donald Trump. 

But here: judge for yourself, and don’t miss the pet rock.

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Related post:
Once Several Times Upon a Mattress

We’re back from our vacation, but I accidentally shut one of our two cats in our bedroom for the entire week we were gone. He’s fine, but our bedroom is not. Imagine what a cat can do, over and over, in seven days. We’ve hauled the mattress into the yard just to get the smell out of our house.

That awful odor speaks more eloquently of squalor and general, personal failure than anything else I know.

Quite a contrast with the borrowed place we stayed in Oregon: a large, airy home with spotless floors and everything perfectly in place. An enormous, fully-equipped kitchen. A triple garage, no oil stains, holding neat rows of sporting equipment: cross country and downhill skis, bicycles, golf gear, a nice boat.

Photos of a happy, athletic family pose on nightstands next to large beds in huge bedrooms, each room decorated according to a theme – golfing. Skiing. Black bears. Pine trees.

Not a single cat, though.

No fluffs of cat hair, either. Also, no random piles of stuff, no old kitchen with chipped counters and divots in the floor. No junk in the laundry room, and certainly no actual laundry — just an expanse of gleaming, maple cabinets holding a very clean box of detergent, a box of trash bags, and one neat little paper bag with crisp-folded cuff to catch the non-existent dryer lint.

Even more amazing was the discovery, in the kitchen, of several half-consumed chocolate bars, foil wrapping neatly folded over the uneaten portions, as well a HALF-EATEN box of expensive chocolates in one of the perfectly-organized kitchen drawers. Which finally proved, of course, that the homeowners are actually ALIENS.

Ah well.

We can’t afford a new mattress. We’ve already over-extended ourselves this summer, assuming I’d have a job by now.  And to think I used to teach financial planning.

Today I called a friend, needing to confess that I have a foul mattress in my yard and no, we didn’t get to the dump with it this morning as planned, so we will have a mattress in our yard forEVER now, probably. Inevitably to be joined, soon, by a nasty old couch. Yes, she agreed gravely, but your need to add a couple of dirty, barefoot children running around in diapers and snotty noses.

We both suffer from severe middle-class anxiety, you see. Certain that we’re each about to slip down to an Unacceptable Class of Human at any minute — if we haven’t already – we expect the news to arrive shortly in some horrible letter.

My friend bravely concluded that tenement living really isn’t that bad.

Another dear friend, feeling a bit more constructive, said she wishes she could fly here from Michigan and help me clean the stinky room and set the contents on fire in the backyard, but

Is your neighborhood zoned for cat pee bonfires?

Therapy for three, please. Preferably with some chocolate-abstaining, wealthy athletes in Oregon.