Stumptown, GA

Jetsom

One of my New Year's resolutions was to clean out the garage and transform it into a working printshop. That means letting go of a bunch of old junk projects that have been piling up. Emboldened by our recent success with Craigslist, (we sold an old sink at 200% profit) yesterday I posted a new round of offerings. The photos and half-hearted copywriting really capture a funny moment in my life... its a catalog of my dumpster-diving over the last couple years. I had high hopes for some of this stuff... now I just want the cash and the space. Within an hour, I had several takers. People are especially curious about the safe!

Diebold Steel Safe - $10



Just what you've been looking for...a massive, oldschool steel safe. If you can open it, you can have what's inside! This big heavy thing came with our house and its kind of a mystery. We just want to get rid of it.
25"x42"x25" deep.
   
Vintage Retro Highchair - $15



Scruffy little chrome high chair that made us nostalgic so we picked it up off the side of the road. The little animals look very '70s. Clean it up with steel wool and add it to your retro baby room.

Vintage Retro Table - $40



Here's another cute diner-style table from the '60s.
Chrome and formica with a red teapot pattern.

Vintage Retro Maytag Washing Machine - $60



Rusty old Maytag washer from the '40s with a wringer on top.
Looks like a cartoon.
Maybe you'll plant a palm tree in it?

Vintage Retro Diner Table - $40



Classic chrome & formica diner table from the '60s with a 12" leaf. Its been used as a work table, but with a little steel wool on those legs, it'll shine again.
With the leaf its 59"x35" and 29" tall.

Vintage Retro Pedestal Sink



Elegant old cast iron pedestal sink. A classy addition to your renovated bathroom. Considering its age, the finish is in great shape... just needs a good scrub.
The top measures 23"x20" and its 30" tall.
Asking $60 or best offer.

HON Steel File Cabinet - $30

Here it is. The file cabinet of your dreams. You know you don't want to go pay retail for something to hold your boringest paperwork.
in classic drab taupe
3 drawers & a door.
29"x38" and 16" deep.
$30 or just make an offer

Vintage Retro Wood Side Table - $25



Neat little solid wood side table. I picked it up because I love those atomic era looking legs. Needs to be refinished, but with a light sanding and paint job, this thing will look rad.
The top is 24" x 24" and its 25" tall
Asking $25, but whatever.

Better Than the In-Flight Magazine

Sky Mall is so entertaining:

"hand-painted for startling realism."

(this guy is very pleased with his problem solving skills)

Time Machine

(d.mathias)

There’s time to think about the life that comes
after the tanning bed. Instead of cancer
and blue light, the August heat will gust
in from the parking lot, tremulous, through
the waiting room, the long slow afternoon.
I won’t be naked in a box full of lightbulbs,
the heavy lid just inches from my nose,
or dozing in a strip mall, a thin-walled stall
that holds the machine and the timer.
The digits wink down to the future when
I'm out. I will race to get dressed.
The present still pressed between hot glass,
The door chime clatters in my wake.
In minutes, I’ll fly past shoppers
at the grocery store. They are standing still
as I weave a cart around their clusters, their lists.
Meanwhile I am unbelievably raising my arms
overhead to pinken in the warm embrace,
practicing for the mammograms, the MRIs
I’ll have someday. Scan here and here.
Miss young and proper and just breaking a sweat
in this room with a number on the door.

Greatest Hits Nightmare

(d. mathias)

When I can’t write, I dream. Then I write my dream:

1. My dog scratched up my scalp and face. She didn’t mean to. I debated going to the emergency room. The scratches weren’t bleeding and were hidden by my hair.

2. The hospital was in midtown Manhattan. The nurses were lined up behind plexiglass teller windows. At first, they wouldn’t admit me because my driver license had expired.

3. I decided to use my time in the waiting room cramming for two college finals that I somehow needed to retake: Calculus and the Novels of Jane Austen.

4. I picked a name for my unborn daughter: Hera. Sure it has some negative connotations, but I’d tell her only the good stuff about Hera. “You’re the queen of the Gods,” I would say.

5. In the interest of accessibility, the hospital had no stairs, only long tiled ramps of dark chocolate brick. These long ramps made me more tired and slow, somehow, than stairs.

6. Then I had sex with my uncle in the waiting room.

This was like a "Greatest Hits" of all my nightmares: test-taking, incest, bureaucracy, pregnancy and weird architecture.

Lemonade

(d.mathias)

The kids across the street, they know what goes on. Five of them, chanting, “Lemonade for Sale,” they come running like they’ve been waiting for me all day. Cynthia and Miguel and their prim little cousins from Oklahoma.

“Its a hundred degrees out here, you know that?” I said. They were already crossing the pavement, barefooted, carefully bringing me a thin plastic cup. Yesterday I peed into a cup and it looked like this.

“Don’t drink it!” shouted the oldest. “Its nasty!” But even he crossed the street to see me.

The little ones crowed, “It's good!”

“Don’t drink it!” he said again.

I drank it. The lemonade was warm and sweet— the only flavor of Kool-Aid I can bear. Granny used to mix it in a scuffed crystal pitcher and let me turn the wooden spoon.

“What did you put in here?” I asked. “Did you poison it? Did you spit in it?”

“Nooo,” they giggled. I paid them with two quarters.

There was a green tarp strapped over the neighbor’s car. It filled with the hot breeze and lifted.

“Look at that.” I said. It hovered and strained against the twine. “We put that tarp on there because her windows are down.”

“She don’t have the keys,” said Miguel.

“Where is she?” asked the cousin.

“She’s sick.” He is thirteen and he thinks he’s grown.

“She’s in the hospital,” I said.

“In the head,” he insisted.

“She’s just old,” I said. “She needs someone to take care of her.”

“In a nursing home?” says Joseline. She’s so small, I forget she’s ten. Not a baby. Why do I lie to kids?

My other neighbor opens her door a crack and waves a dollar bill. “Y’all selling lemonade?” she croons.

They scream with delight and run to fetch the money. I’m free to get out of the driveway and into some AC.

The last thing I see is Joseline’s mother yelling for them to come inside this instant. They are visiting from Oklahoma, but they already know the story. One neighbor is sick in the head, the other is even worse. Where did they get the idea to sell lemonade? They know this isn’t that kind of neighborhood.

Ladylike

(d.mathias)

Twice in one night I got called “lady.”

I was standing in the Kroger parking lot on Metropolitan gawking at a minor car wreck. A small white 4-door had turned the corner way too fast and jumped the curb. It plowed up the sidewalk and landed with an awful cha-chunk on an elevated concrete manhole. I think. What did it land on? It was hard to tell. All four wheels, no three, no four again, were suspended above the ground.

It was like seeing a rainbow. I needed to share it with someone, anyone. The driver of the car tried reversing, then revving the engine. This only caused the wheels to spin stupidly in the air and the car to wobble on its mount. It was bad to laugh, but I laughed. I scanned the parking lot for fellow witnesses, someone who might have a clue what to do.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind me. “Can you tell me the way to Buckhead?”

“Oh my God. Did you see that?” I said.

Here was a skinny young Mexican guy with braces. He had not seen the accident so I gave him the eyewitness account. Meanwhile, the driver and his family descended their dangling Taurus and three Burger King employees started across the asphalt. Maybe they were planning to lift the car?

The kid, Arturo was his name, was mostly unphased. He was anxious to find the Marta station and get back to Buckhead.
Feeling guilty maybe, about the stranded family and their busted up Taurus, I offered Arturo a ride. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?” I said. “I’ve got a hammer.”

He giggled. “Oh no!”

I asked him questions as we headed towards Stumptown and he answered in broken, lisping English. He was starting at Emory next month. His mother was in Mexico, his father in Brazil. Near University Ave, I heard him on his cell phone telling his roommate, “This nice lady is giving me a ride.” That’s funny, I thought. I’m a nice lady, giving him a ride. He probably would’ve got mugged on Marta.

Later that night I drove deep into Kennesaw, down a dirt road searching for a stranger’s house. “Billie” and I had arranged a transaction on Craigslist and because of my detour with Arturo, it was now dark. I hadn’t expected the dirt road, the series of ramshackle trailers and outbuildings. Where am I? I thought. Lord. Again, I was thankful for the hammer. 

I was met by Samuel, a stocky Mexican dude with his name sewn on his shirt. He introduced himself and Pedro the chihuahua.

“Billie’s not here,” he said, “She went to the store. She said some lady coming by.”

It took me a second to realize that I was “some lady.” Funny how old it made me feel, how detached.

Satisfaction

(d. mathias)

I wonder how many of us had the same dream
of blasting a laser beam from the car window,
mowing down trees at seventy miles per hour,
or a giant saw blade clipping streetlights
at the root. That line of mailboxes? Forget it.
Those rotted trees, toothless in the swamp?
Billboards? Telephone poles? I sent them all
to an orderly doom. Like wipers slicing through
a field of rain, just doing my job.
Why does riding in the backseat
conjure such visions– a minor apocalypse
along the interstate between dad’s house
and mom’s every other week? Why is it
the pines up front pass so much faster
while the deep forest hovers behind the blur,
secret black at the center? No matter. My long
arm lays em down, a thicket of dominos.
It’s finer than anything in real life, wider,
cleaner than the stubbled path of a tornado.
It shames the power company and their half-assed
tree-trimming. My knife never stutters, never
strays, leaves not even a splinter dangling.
It slips through trunks like scissors through bangs.
I dreamed I clear cut acres with my stare,
the blade of one palm flexing in the wind.

Steakhouse

My first warning that Crockett’s was a little rundown was the grimy kitchen odor that permeated the place: grease-soaked concrete, pressure washed, steamed broccoli, yeast. It triggered a powerful memory of running around in the kitchen of Mister J's, an ill-fated business venture in which my dad tried his hand at managing a family steakhouse.

There is an appetizer menu pinched between the Heinz Ketchup and the A1 bottles on the table. It’s a generic offering of fried cheese, fried broccoli and cheese, and some other fat bombs, no doubt frozen and bagged, sold as a package to the owner of Crockett’s with this attractive presentation menu, imprinted with Your Restaurant Name Here. Surely, they must’ve thought, now we can compete with the big guys.

Her name is Kari and she’ll be our server this evening. She takes our order briskly, without making eye contact and then vanishes.

A thick, bleach blond manager is distinguished from the teenage waitresses by her short sleeved denim shirt and tie. The girls all wear purple Crockett’s T-shirts (for sale at the hostess stand, $14.95 each). Manager roams the dining room settling disputes. That job will give you a stroke.

An oversized boy, maybe 12 years old, has slid down in the booth next to us so that is head is level with the table. “If our food don’t come, we should just leave,” he’s whining in his whiniest voice. “Can’t we just leave?” This kid seems awful young to be doing the customer service moan. “It’ll be here in a minute,” says his mother, pleading.

The steamed broccoli is a happy green, but drenched in butter or something. It slips around the plate when I cut it with the side of a fork. The fork has one inner tine slightly bent and it scrapes my lips with each bite. 

We start piling our trash in the bowl of peanut shells. The red onions from our salad. The lonely squares of kale that decorated the steak. A slab of blubber from the prime rib. The wrapper from a lemon scented Fold-a-Fresh. The bowl is now the prettiest thing on the table.

The oversized boy and his two even bigger brothers and their mother are eating now. All four are bent over their plates, eating wordlessly. One reaches for a drink. Mom has her head resting in one hand, turned away from the dining room as she feeds herself.

In the men’s room the floor the old brick red with black grout. Then there’s another section where the floor is a grimy terrazzo that looks like it belonged to another room. A guy in one stall appears to be vomiting and smoking at the same time.

Later I peed and it smelled like Baby Back Ribs. I image my dinner was drenched in liquid smoke, frozen in some far off processing plant, thawed and microwaved at the Roadhouse, and slathered with sugary BBQ sauce. The smoky flavoring survived my digestive system with minor alterations.

Fear in French

The four of us in Conversational French
that Spring were: Denise, a math major, 
Nooshin, the Persian debutante,
Agnes, the imported instructor,
a round-faced, lollipop francaise,
And me, preoccupied with love.

We spent a weary hour each day
trying to fit opinions through
our flimsy French vocabulaire,
like funnelling Kool Aid through a straw.

Je pense que… Nooshin studied
her manicure. A mon avis…
Denise sunk down behind her books.
I swiveled in my swivel chair,
and watched the clock behind the poor
girl sent from France to be our friend.

We spilled out into madeup words,
into English or just silence.
Agnes would steer us onward to
new topics: la musique popularie,
la politique, le mariage.
But talk was still a sack of bricks
passed around the conference table.

The afternoon when Agnes asked,
De quoi avez vous peur? our blank
stares were misunderstood.
She tried again. What do you fear?
What worries you? Still no one spoke.

Rien? There must be quelque chose.
To the doodler she offered, Le chômage?
To the princess, La guerre?
And to me, L’avenir? I just shrugged.

Outside the window azaleas burst
In tacky, unrepentant pinks.
Maybe I lacked the words in French,
But I think there was a moment when
I wasn’t afraid of anything.

Soundtrack

You stop me underneath the neon sign.
Hear that? You ask, and I am not the kind
of person, yet, who hears these things and smiles.
The hum, you say, plus there’s an orange fuzz
around the street lamps, where muggy air
is changing into mist. Now listen to the hum
and watch the bugs colliding in the light.
You’re making videos these days and this
must be the soundtrack to the Plaza Drug
on Highland Ave. You don’t make any sense
when talking about art but you make eye contact
and that’s enough. Hold my hand. Pretend
you don’t know where the sound is coming from.
It’s like the movie version of our life
where everyone’s the walking dead except
the two of us because we hear the soundtrack
all along and we’re invincible.
I wish I had a camera for every time
you turned the radio up on the interstate
and from that windy wasteland, springs bluegrass
and a t-shirt sleeve flapping from the trunk
of a beat up Honda, to beat the banjo,
at 70 miles per hour. See that? You ask.
But this is not an act, a tragedy
or comedy. We hear the soundtrack swell in
the produce aisle where chrome carts stutter to
Vivaldi or the Marshall Tucker Band.
You record the dogs as they dream and whine
while the percolator twitches on the countertop,
a tractor trailer guzzling to a halt as
an old man clears his throat, conjunto from
the neighbor’s yard while outside our window,
nandinas dance by the air compressor,
a twelve year old doing cartwheels in a leotard
with AC/DC from a background boombox,
and raindrops play piano on the asphalt.
You offer me these clippings like roses
from the yard, one at a time, before they burst.
But this not a gift. Just a soundtrack
at a given time, whether I am there or not.