INTRODUCING: The Apocalyptic Housewife!

The Not-Nice, Apocalyptic Housewife

I live in a place that I love—California, land where my fathers died, etc—in a part of the state where very few people who claim to love California ever go, but many people are. That’s part of my burden as the bitter many-generational Native—along with her contempt for both our Cousins who have never gone to the Getty or the beach, and the transplants who act like they are introducing me to Yosemite.

That’s my burden, as I say, and that’s why I am not nice. “‘Nice’ just means ‘content enough to be agreeable’” – the best line in a otherwise regrettable Shirley MacLaine movie I was up late watching last week when I was sick.

The major way in which I am not nice is my intolerance of what other people tolerate. I am almost physically unable to tolerate dull conversation (and the most talkative talkers are also the dullest… same goes for bloggers, yeah?). But my discontent is the mother of invention, and by invention, I mean creative re-purposing.

I love bringing apt quotations and poems to awkward occasions the way another guest would bring a box of See’s. Actually, I do that, too. Anyone who doesn’t have a sweet tooth is bound to have a mean streak, and freegan chocolates are perfectly salvagable most of the time (a point I aim to cover in a future post).

When I am forced against my solitary nature to entertain talkative and gregarious chatterers of limited imagination, I borrow the Proust Questionnaire. One of the questions that people nearly always founder on is ‘what phrase do you most often say’? Mine is a toss-up between ‘what the actual fuck?’ and, ‘are you going to eat that?’

This is the sum of my philosophy. I do complain about my sordid surroundings, this foul and fraught moment in history, but it comes almost fully formed as a question– what are YOU going to do about this? man hitting his child, half a pound of good vegetables thrown away, foreclosed abandoned house-wreck.

I am not young, hip, white, rich, educated, suburban or any of the other things you are unconsciously assuming anyone who loves the earth must be. I am a high-school-dropout, married grouch. And I still get my butt out of bed to go save what other people have thrown away and use my spirit-guided imagination to make something out of refuse that wasn’t there before, for no other reason than that—if you will forgive the expression—it mends the Hoop.

That’s me. I’m the Not Nice Housewife. I take pictures and have ideas and enjoy my thoughts and try to do a little something less about consuming and more about redemption every day. It makes me a little nicer. Not to mention what it might be doing for the rest of my beloved California.

I’ll be bringing you along on a bumbling, fumbling, digital sortie next post. See you here. Warm up your pitching arm.