The Pace, Explained. (By a Lifelong Outsider.)
Real summer heat makes me weak and lazy. The rest of the year, I will run or walk. In the winter, the cold makes for an alacrity, gives me reason to run on its coldest days, with needle-like incisions through the cracks between my gloves and my sleeves, my neckline and hat, urging me: Go, go, go.

On days like today, when it’s 90 degrees at nine-o’-clock in the damn morning, I understand all the old stereotypes about the slow-moving South. I don’t want to move. If we had a screened porch like my grandma’s, I’d migrate out there with a book or knitting and a lemonade, but that’s as far as I’d get to the Great Outdoors today, and that act of relocation would be the closest I’d get to exercise.

Today I set my alarm for eight, to get up and run while there was still some morning cool, excited about that extra burst of adrenaline to start my day. When I woke up though, I could tell it was already hot out. Our flimsy little box of a house with its air conditioning, ceiling fans and heavy blinds is clearly but precarious protection from real heat like this. You can be anywhere in the house and you’ll feel it pressing against the walls and windows: the kind of heat that makes trickles of sweat run down the front of your shirt when you so much as walk to the mailbox. So you don’t, deciding to wait till evening instead, when the sun’s moved to a slightly kinder angle. You stay inside and go to the refrigerator instead, reach for the eggs and the milk with your atrophied arm muscles. You will make French toast, then you will watch movies or read a book. You’re not sure, yet. You will make these decisions slowly.

The Wonder of Modern Fax Technology
One of the perks of working at Small Publication (besides having an office in a building that requires me to utilize strip clubs as landmarks any time I give directions to visitors,) is the wonderful array of faxes we receive. When I first started working here, it was my job to look through them, and separate the wheat from the chaff, find the newsworthy and scrap the rest. I don’t do that anymore, but today I had some extra time and was able to check out the today’s catch. It made me nostalgic for those early days. Here’s a sampling of today’s fax-bounty.

1. The Sweet Smell of Freedom
Did you know that Creed, the happening new band, shares its name with, ahem, “the world’s only privately held luxury fragrance dynasty”? It’s true.

Here’s the latest from the luxury fragrance dynasty according to the fax transmission they sent us today:
“Wounded U.S. Soldiers At National Army Hospital Receive Royal Creed Fragrance.”
Yes. The Creed royal fragrance company “has shipped 260 bottles of one of its classic fragrances to U.S. soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where soldiers returning from Iraq are treated.” But that’s not all. The name of this classic fragrance (for men AND women)?

CREED Zest Mandarine Pamplemousse.


No shit.

It’s a blend of “Calabrian bergamot, mandarine(um, sic) grapefruit and white flowers,” continues the fax, “that is free to the soldiers but retails for $98 a bottle at Neiman Marcus and select Saks Fifth Avenue stores.”

Although they may never again sleep through the night, those lucky veterans are sharing in a dynasty of smell that “has served more than 10 royal houses and…King George III, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Princess Grace, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn”. No chance, of course, that whenever they catch a whiff of said-smell in later periods of their lives, they’ll be jerked back to this horrible period in their lives.

So where can a work-a-day shmoe like me find some mandarine grapefruit? Well, I guess I could contact them at their “offices in the Empire State Building in New York City.” But the street address on the fax is in Paris. Paris, France. And the phone number has a North Carolina area code.


2. “Special Summertime Report…On Ice!!!”
Yes, this one leads with not one or two – but three exclamation points to let your health editors know…um, that this is about ice. Or that it’s a report about a corpse. Either way, it’s compelling, isn’t it? You’ve gotta read on…And when you do, it’s…more punctuation!

“ICE IS DIRTIER THAN TOILET WATER???
How to protect your family and friends this summer from contaminated ice”

It begins:
“You may have heard recent reports that your ice could be dirtier than toilet water.”

Why, yes, I think I have. I think it was…very. Recent, in fact. Feels like mere…moments ago.

“How is this possible? It could be processed and packaged from a moldy ice machine. Or perhaps it’s mishandled through the use of dirty buckets or even hand scooped by dirty hands. Anyone thirsty now?”

Dirty hands? Dirty buckets?! Mold??! Good god. Has anyone even stopped to consider the danger posed by eating corn on the cob? Leaving your house? Taking showers???? (VLKF Guys, help!

3. THERE’S NEW HOPE FOR THE PREVENTION OF SHINGLES IN OLDER ADULTS.

You know, I’m just…not gonna continue with this one. It’s hot outside and frankly, I’m feeling kind of nauseated. Also, I normally reserve my Fridays my “Severely Irritating Skin Infection”-Free days. Which may just change, I guess, as I grow into “older”-adulthood.
See ya later.

We Love you Florida, oh yes we do.
Those are the slightly altered lyrics to a song we used to sing at Camp Kon-o-Kwee back in Pennsylvania when I was a bonny wee girl. And so they’re apt once again. I’ve just spent a week at a conference center for journalists and am returning home with that same old verklempt summer camp feeling as when I was thirteen.

I learned a ton about my craft this week, more than I could communicate in several posts here, but I always come away from intense group-travel experiences with most of my gooey feelings aimed toward the other people in my group. Adventure tourism bus venture to Mexico a few years back: There were sights to see; cities with rich histories to explore, and I partook in these activities (“partook” - a word? Hmm).

But when I flew home, my head was ringing with the voices of the folks who had become my traveling comrades in those six weeks. And now: same thing. It’s only been a week, but through all the intense sessions and conversations over our jobs and our stories and ethics and favorite rock and roll bands – I feel most intensely, once again, about leaving these fine, fine people as we disperse to our corners of the nation. I thought the summer camp intensity of this sort of experience would dissipate as I grew older, but I’m nearing thirty now, and I felt like crying earlier today. Maybe it’s just time I got used to it.

Licensing Cutesy.
And I come back to find this out: The Flying Biscuit is becoming all a-franchised. Geezle. My first experiences with this nouveau southern cuisine all-day-breakfast joint were when I first moved to Atlanta. Fresh from college, everything about urban Atlanta felt artsy and edgy to me, including the FB.
Since then, I’ve come to the following conclusions: Their coffee is terrible. By pitching one of their biscuits onto someone’s head from a balcony, you could easily kill him. Their service is miserable. It’s too loud. But I still dig their Love Cakes.

And when you’re preparing to move away from a place, all of life’s swirling carnival seems to take on an egocentrically symbolic turn. I realize this, but still, I say: This feels like a sign that it’s time to leave Atlanta.

Did You Know?
I was told by someone recently that Wikipedia - you know, the online compendium of "knowledges" created by Joe Information SuperhighwayDriver – has now been noted by some Really Highly Regarded Someone as one of the top sources of reputable information on the web. I don't know what sources the site was supposedly being compared with but certainly it wasn't this one, created by two very wise and scholarly Atlantans, whose blog I, cough, just stumbled upon in my own ongoing quest for truth. Make that Truth. I would never just cheaply tout the sites of my friends. Gah, Henshaw.

So behold now the wonder, several whole days in the making:

Very Little Known Facts.
Bring your pencil.


(On second thought, the person who told me that whole Wikipedia yarn mighta just been lying.)

If it’s in the Bible…
(Addendum-!!: As I have just discovered, you should never type “www” at the beginning of the prior web url. That is, unless you’re in the mood for a darn good story.

Howling at the Moon.
Well, I seem to have remembered the cure for senioritis, and that’s keeping yourself as engaged in a project as humanly possible. This week I’m working on a really interesting story that’s had me here both early and late every day this week. Of course this is what I’ve been needing. And while my friends say I’m putting in way too many hours, there’s a lot to be said for those intrinsic rewards, huh? I really doubt I’ll ever reach a happy medium: A job I enjoy immensely, but only from 9:00 till 6:00, then go home and forget about. Who does that? What the hell? I prefer working on the stories that eat up your brain and heart. And this leads to the big question, which is of course..Well, you know, I’m a woman of a certain age, so I’m starting to wonder: Is there any way I can ever get a dog?

Because I want one. Bad. My ex-boyfriend got custody of my first dog. (Our dog. His dog, now. Whatever.) This was the best thing for all of us, considering my insane work schedule and the fact that Hunter (the ex) and Otis (the dog) were two sides of the same energetic, puppylike coin, personality-wise. (Last time you’ll see the phrase “puppylike coin” here; enjoy it now.)

At the Risk of Sounding like Grizzly Man…
But now. Oh lord, now, here’s the thing: Some women my age heave great sighs upon gazing into the strollers of people jogging in Piedmont Park. While waiting in line at Kroger, they thumb through In Touch magazine and feel an inward clench of longing at photos of those bored prepubescent stars with their Lovely Baby Lumps.

Henshaw, not to make light of the biological baby urges, but I swear to you, I feel the same thing when I go jogging past people with their Dobermans. I see those lolling tongues and joyous panting in the morning air and have to tamp down the urge to grab the mutts and embrace them. Those cardboard labs on television that retrieve Frisbees in the artificial comic 80s rerun sets? I swear, the very ovaries ache. I meet people outside the coffeeshop with their hounds (Oh, the hounds are the worst), and I make jokes about stealing them. I joke, Henshaw, but they don’t laugh. They see the glint in my eye. The imbalance. I am the one who shouts out the car window at one too many stoplights, “Oh, is he a puppy?” to those passing on a stroll. “You asked us before,” they tell me, picking up their pace and averting their eyes. “Two intersections back.”

Some people want a house, white picket fence, a baby. I just want a house and a dog. House and a dog. As I slink in and out of my currently Very Unsatisfactory housing situation, this is my mantra. As I drive to the post office to return $80 bathing suits purchased in folly from a catalogue, I envision that money going instead toward flea medicine for a mutt that I love at some point in the hazy future, toward a dog kennel. And maybe, someday, a human-sized kennel for me. One that’s all mine.