Someone tried to steal my truck a couple nights ago. About 1am a drunk homeless guy came to the gate and started telling my neighbor Jason he ditched his truck in the parking lot when he was running from the cops, and now he needed to get back in so he could get it. He was holding a giant key ring with dozens of keys on it. Jason said "which truck is yours" and he pointed to mine. Jason said "really? You have the key to that truck? Let me see." So the guy put his arm through the gate and Jason deftly took the big key ring and called 9-1-1. Of course, the guy took off, and it was all kind of funny, but a little creepy... A new development in our neighborhood is the man who is pimpin' on the front of our building. I saw a very dark-skinned lass with him Wednesday in a baby blue get-up that was not at all flattering, though it was the perfect complement to the white platform sandals she was obviously suffering from. Now this chick was not a tiny girl and the ensemble was some knit material and extremely tight. If you put a razor blade near that, there would have been hind-end all over the place. The high price of keeping it real.

Last night was karaoke madness. My dearest friend and I made a delicious hash of "Tainted Love" (it would have been much better if it were just her singing without me) and her fiance has sworn that next time he'll do "Genie in a Bottle." I can't wait. I love to sing, but I hate singing into microphones--it's annoying.

A close friend has gone over the edge, apparently. Sadly. Being home in the daytime I see a lot of the comings and goings in the building. Don't start thinking I'm like Mrs. Kravitz on Bewitched - meddlesome neighbor. It's just that my huge window is right by the stair, and a crackhead neighbor who used to live above me would come home on his lunch break for about five minutes every day, and I began to realize he wasn't coming home to whip up a tunafish sandwich. In fact, he lost a lot of weight and began acting a bit jumpy and less personable - much out of character. Finally, he moved to another loft in the area, and when he did, a much more beloved neighbor began hanging out at the guy's new pad. I can be a bit blunt, on occasion, and today I was bringing up the subject of gossip with another brutally frank neighbor, and she said "oh, were you going to tell me that jameson is on crack?" Having no intention of the kind, I was floored by this statement. Jameson is a lovely person who grapples with demons, but I've always held out hope he would get a grip and just be himself and learn how to be happy. I think he wants to have a different life, but is pinioned by the fear of wounding his backwoods Baptist minister father with his lifestyle choices. I asked her what she meant - if she was serious, and she said that she smelled some burning chemical wafting from his open window a few days ago, and that besides he has a smell like crackheads get - she knew this because a friend's mother and another friend had been addicted and she recognized the odor, which seems to ooze from his pores 24/7 lately. (and here I thought it was just the beer and chain-smoking that made him reek) I wish Jameson would just embrace his gayness and pinch off the downward spiral. I'm the last person to judge someone for choosing their own poisons, but dammit-- he's not even having a good time! He drinks the shittiest beer imaginable to a state of stupefaction nightly. He obviously is self-medicating and needs to deal with the real problems in his life and get on with it before he pisses it all away. I realized in December he had gone to the dark side of stupid when he made a crap comment to me, and I honestly believe he intended the comment to be helpful. I must have had a look on my face like I was about to give birth to a litter of yaks, because after flattening me with his unwanted advice, he began to cry and beg me to please not be mad at him because he just wanted to be helpful. Jameson has been a dear friend for five years and I found myself looking into his eyes and thinking "who is this motherfucker?" Anyway, I was too flummoxed at the time of the revelation today to remember that I had predicted Jameson would also become a crackhead when he began spending a lot of time at the crackhead's loft. Husband reminded me of my prediction later. I wonder what the future holds, but it's hard to imagine anything good coming of this. I wish I were wrong, because this feels like watching a fatal car crash in slow motion.

I've always heard that men are visually oriented as opposed to women, who feel their way through life. If this is true and women and competitors are sized up by men visually, then is it possible for a man blind from birth to be sexist? How do men blind from birth know if they are gay or straight? Do they have to taste test both to determine? OK, taste may be a poor choice of words, but...

Two guys lived in a loft in my building and they built a half-pipe in their space. They had two ill-cared-for large dogs who always seemed demented. Now we know why. They were recently evicted after various violations of property rules. The space was left open Sunday, denuded of half-pipe and all their worldly goods, and the neighbors were all sitting around on the deck drinking beer as usual when Jules came over with her boxer, Noodles. Jules lived in that same loft before the skater boys and said "I wanna see what the old place looks like" and she went in and Noodles followed. She came out thirty seconds later saying how bad it smelled and the boxer came out onto the deck and started bucking like a wild bronco with its nuts in a vise. One of the neighbors said she was covered in ants, but on closer inspection they realized that the wretched beast was covered in fleas from that apartment. Now the entire property is infested and my little white dog is starting to chew and groan constantly. I bathed her as soon as I heard the story, but to no avail: she suffers the torments of the damned. We are going to the vet tomorrow, and in the meantime I am dismayed by her discomfort. I should have known something intense was going on with the fleas when I saw one leaping in and out of her coat like a dolphin. I grabbed the little bugger and dropped it into the liquid wax of a burning candle I happened to have handy. [Here's a tip for fun with ticks if you don't just enjoy keeping a mason jar of alcohol around to collect their carcasses like my grandpa in Arkansas has always done-- stick the tip of a straight pin into the wet wax of the candle and then quickly tap the back of the tick with the pin, and the wax will glue him to the pin. Then put the tick near the flame, and the tick will puff up and explode like a mini piece of popcorn. Of course, it is sick and rather cruel, but I conveniently choose to believe that ticks don't have feelings anyway, so why not enjoy ourselves on their dime?] I have been searching flea remedies online, and I looked up diatomaceous earth and here is a description that made my seat wet: Diatomaceous Earth is a natural, non-chemical product. It appears to be a powder, but it is actually razor-sharp crystals to fleas. It blocks and cuts the fleas' gills, and they die. I'm all aquiver. Fucking fleas.

The office I'm working in has glass windows on three sides, and yesterday it rained so hard that it looked like the office was traveling through a carwash. People who move away from Texas say they miss the torrential rains and intense electrical storms. I can understand missing that - there's no better weather for sleeping late or vegetating and staring out the window. It's crap to drive in, though.

Reunions in my family are always worth attending simply for the novelty of being around apocalyptic white trash (thank you Sandra Bernhard). Once the family rented a pavilion at a state park in Arkansas for the annual gathering. As it happened, Arkansas didn't shut down the entire park to the public, and many unfortunate souls came by along the path wending between the gigantic springs of the park and the pavilion. I wonder if the woman in the wheelchair thought she would be communing with nature that day, breathing the fresh air and escaping the cruelties of life, if only momentarily? She made her way slowly, laboring to scale the gradual incline of the path. Her legs were both removed above the knee. In a just world, she could have made her way unhindered through the glories of nature, but then again--in a just world, my family and all its tangled strands of DNA would never have existed. It would have been a mercy, too, if the woman could have glided by unmolested by Colton and Austin, my cousin's two young sons. Colton and Austin have the developmental level of a three-year old baboon, with equal communication skills. Austin ran up to the woman shouting "Hay Colton! Come look! This lady ain't got no laigs! Hay lady! What happened to yer laigs, lady?" Uncle Billy (the proud grandfather) said "them kids are gonna end up dead or in prison." Quite.

It's one of those divinely nasty days I'm always telling you I love. Running an office errand, I cut across downtown Dallas in my pickup truck and headed down Fort Worth Avenue. It's great driving a truck--the only vehicle in which one's earrings and boobage can swing comfortably. Flipped on the radio as the darkening slickness of the streets mirrored head and tail lamps of people hurrying home from a hard days'. Normally, I'd flip to another station, but the skating rink organ of "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley just seemed so right with the weather. Funny how I hated that song when I was a girl--it seemed so dark, ugly and pessimistic. Now it seems so true that it's banal. I chuckled about that. I could have saved myself some hard lessons if I'd just cut to the chase in 1984 and became a bitter hardened cynic right out of the box.

It's been sitting for absolute ages, neglected for weeks at a time, so I asked my sister today if she would like my piano for my niece and nephew to begin lessons. She was ecstatic, as was my 7 year old niece, so just like that it is finished. Even though I barely used it, as long as it sat here I could think of it as potential energy stored in a battery, all coiled up and ready to spring alive with vibrant tone, but to let it go spells the end of my favorite chapter of my own unremarkable story. A kindly neighbor helped husband move the piano into the truck for transport, and we leave in mere moments. Letting the piano go is me saying firmly that the dream I labored over so many hours and years of my life--aspirations of an opera career--is utterly finished. I can barely breathe. I can't see evidence of the metal bands that have strapped around my rib cage, but I can feel them forcing the breath and water up out of my mouth and eyes. This is the feeling of my heart breaking.