Menopausal Stoners World Headquarters, whitewashed

I took these photos earlier in the week. It's my apartment. You'll notice how nice and smooth the white walls look. It's a lot of white. The living room was always white, but there were shelves built in along the wall with the TV. There was also a big wicker chair. This green recliner is Buzz Kill's. The divorce decree stipulates that that chair remain in the living room until he moves it his own self.

It's nice light, but the new building is awfully damn close.  Nobody lives there yet.  The Whole Foods is across the street.  The dining area was always white too.  I got this dining set from Crate & Barrel when Buzz Kill still hadn't moved some months after I filed for divorce.  We had a big Queen Anne style dining set of dark cherry wood.  It might have been nice in another apartment, but I always thought it sucked in ours.  Buzz Kill would buy it, though, no matter what I said about the lighter wood French Provincial one.  My father came to visit for a few days and we hired a mover to move that Queen Anne set to the Salvation Army with the implication that Buzz Kill was next.

I like the tulips better:

The kitchen is beyond the table.  It used to be totally white, but then the dishwasher spontaneously combusted.  We got a decent settlement from GE considering that as a weapons manufacturer they sure as shit don't care how many kitchens in America catch on fire as a result of their dang products.  Buzz Kill figured that if I got a fabulous custom kitchen, I would like him better even though he had let the insurance lapse.  Fortunately, Buzz Kill's wealthy sister loaned us the money to fix the place and we recouped the cash through litigation.  The American Way.

The front door is on the other side of my refrigerator. I love my refrigerator and hope that some day, I have another just like it. I hope I have something the color of this tile again, too. It reminds me of the ocean.

Here's my office

 

My office stuff.  

On the side of the highest shelf you can see is a laminated page from Horton Hears a Who.  I really do like that book. The old Texas license plate from my car is shining on the middle shelf.  The car has NY tags now.

Here's my room.  The walls used to be deep, dark blue and the bed was covered with a velvet quilt, tie dyed in shades of blue, teal and grey. 

It's all neutral now, but my Great Grandfather's 1912 Remington is under the bed.  It's been busted for years and years.  I like to do arm curls with it and think about the Menopausal Stoners Militia.  I was telling Worldwide Hippies Joe about the Menopausal Stoners Militia today.  He found the idea a bit alarming, especially since I'd been wake and baking.

When Velvet was a senior in High School, one of Velvet's friends took his girlfriend into Velvet's room at 2:00am and shut the door - when the living room was full of kids and I was wide awake.  Velvet pulled them out of his room.  I got the shot gun and delivered a lecture on teen pregnancy.  It was effective, and frankly I think the children all relaxed once the rules were clear.  Kids get nervous when they don't have adults setting limits.

Velvet won't recognize his room now.  In fact, Velvet's room is so different that I think I might have to start calling him Buster.

That brown bag of stuff on the table belonged to the young woman with the Joan Jett tattoo who stayed with me last week.  I like her and am happy to say she's coming back at the end of the month.  That chain saw bear sculpture is something Buzz Kill and I hauled back from the Catskills the summer Velvet was three.  It's one of the things that will certainly travel with me so Velvet (or maybe Buster) will have familiar things in his new environment.  The skis in the corner are staying with Buzz Kill.  He's had them since he was Velvet's age.  They might have been the ones he used when he followed the Lewis & Clark trail in Yellowstone one winter. 

The cool thing is that with all the sorting and cleaning I've been doing, pretty much the only stuff left is the stuff I'm taking with me where ever I go.  My treasures.  I'm taking the tiara that Buzz Kill gave me the first Christmas after we got married.  He got me a Leona Helmsley outfit:  A white terry cloth bathrobe from Victoria's Secret, a nice tiara and a magic wand - an acrylic wand filled with floating gold sparkles that had golden charms dangling from one end.  The tiara was always too small, and thinking of it now - the whole ensemble seems twisted somehow in view of the character of his mother, Vagina Dentata.  I have lots of other treasures, though, and they are nearly all in these boxes, stacked as neatly as I could manage in Velvet's room:

That's the chair that used to be in the living room.  Blizzy is the big, dirty polar bear on top of the treasures.  It's a Steiff, which is the fancy brand of stuffed animals they used to sell at FAO Schwartz across from the Plaza.  The Plaza is condos now, and that FAO is gone now.  The woman who gave Blizzy to Velvet is gone too - dead, may she rest in peace.  She was Vagina Dentata's very best drinking buddy - a hard driving woman with her own PR firm.  Steiff was a client.  Blizzy needs a bath, but he's coming too.