-Mobile continuation from Xanga blog PinkyGuerrero, this blog is PinkyGuerrero, ongoing continuation at blogs Pinky & Janika & Basically Clueless & PinkFeldspar, in that order.
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-Personal blog for Janika Banks.
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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

the night was smashy

I gave myself a writing prompt to help me unwind from a very long day of all kinds of stuff going wrong all at once (@bonenado's pickup dying at 5 a.m. and driving through heavy pre-dawn traffic on a 6 lane highway in my pink camo Hello Kitty pajamas was a great start) and finally ended in a violent smash from a heavy stoneware plate falling off a wall after sunset, as if the day needed an exclamation point.

Always glad to see that breaking an antique wasn't that big a deal


Almost everything up on my walls is antiques handed down through families or rescued from yard sales, and then rescued by me after they piled up in someone else's house. I really don't care, it's just I have this house with miles of nearly white walls and Scott won't let me plaster them with fan stuff.

We look deceptively normal. I have a full size Jack Sparrow cut out in my basement, along with four 3-foot Star Wars promo cutouts (thick cardboard, printed on both sides) of Queen Amidala, Darth Maul, little Anikin, and I forgot who else (not Jar Jar) that I rescued from the retail store I worked in when they were going to be thrown away. I've got a poster sized collage of my kiddo on stage when she was doing theater in college sitting in my closet. I created a neat map in cartography class in college of my ancestral migration to America, and it sits behind a dresser. We've got cool stuff lurking all over the house, but you can't see it.

The diamond of them all is the giant poster of Kai, the last of the Brunnen-G. It's framed and has been sitting behind a hamper for 9 years because we live in a neighborhood full of old people (older than us), and for some reason I can't seem to break through that glass ceiling of freedom into doing whatever I want with my own house, like hang up a giant pic of a Divine Assassin. Considering that I plastered my bedroom walls with Van Halen until you couldn't see what color the walls were when I lived in my parents' house (and my dad is Mennonite, and I'm pretty sure he's convinced I'll never make it into any kind of rapture), I've felt a bit restricted in this house. I'm sure Scott has his reasons, like maybe making sure no one thinks he married a crazy person, although he comes home with collectible Pez and regularly scours all the Hot Wheels displays in several stores within a 50 mile radius, and wherever we travel.

And here I am wasting my white space on other people's old junk because no one else could bring themselves to throw or give it away, thinking it was 'valuable' but not valuable enough to hang onto themselves, but boy doesn't my house look homey and deceptively inviting.

I want a life size Sherlock cut out in my livingroom so bad I can hardly stand it.


And there's so much more cool fan created stuff out there.

I wasn't sorry to see that plate go. Maybe more accidents should happen. (Crossing my fingers the roofing team will vibrate my house silly.) After Scott repainted the livingroom a few years ago, I never put anything back on the walls. He wouldn't let me. No more holes, no more little nicks. No more anything but a perfect paint job after years of raising kids. I'm not even allowed to use sticky tack in there. Or tape. I'm ok with it. I can't do what I want anyway, so who cares. No Mr. Spock wall cling. No model Enterprise hanging from the ceiling.

Some of you are asking why the kitchen still has stuff up on the walls, since that plate fell. It's because we never repainted the kitchen. The new paint stops right over the floor where the carpet from the livingroom stops. Exactly over. Perfectly over. And the kitchen, as pretty as it still is, keeps getting water stains from our stupid roof. No painting in here until we get the new roof, and even then it might take another couple of years (or more), and once all the stuff comes down off these walls, nothing is going back up. Ever. (We might need to sell the house, who knows.) But we'll still have this cool light fixture, which was totally my idea and doesn't match a single other thing in our house. Why? Because I love sitting under those in restaurants, so it's over my kitchen table.


I love the nail holes and little peely bits of wallpaper trim. I love that it's no big deal if we bump the walls in here (or color on them). The water stains don't bother me. I didn't grow up in a big house and I never asked for a big house. When I used to dream of a house, it had a whole room done in Chinese decor, another room done in Mexican, another room stuffed full of scifi, another that stayed Christmas all year, stuff like that. You hear about rich people having 'the green room', or a special home theater room. In all the years I've lived here I've never color coordinated towels or dishes, none of the furniture matches, and half the things we own are at least as old as I am and even older than our parents because we accumulated what other people didn't want but couldn't throw away. It's like we must do reverence to some kind of past. It's like we rescue other people from guilt trips or something. Plus I worked in retail and got stuff really cheap when it super clearanced out or sets got broken up.

What I really really want and have wanted for a very long time is a whole wall like a screensaver, that looks real, like a beach scene looping through an hour of ocean footage, or a night sky or dark horizon slowly going by, or like a city at night is right outside because the wall feels like I'm looking through a glass wall, or a deer is walking by in a forest kind of stuff. I would be able to change it to fit my moods. I know it's possible because I've seen Asian and European artistic entertainment using screens to choreograph whole floors and walls and even parts of sets with light and background film. I don't see why I can't have a wall screen in my house that can do the same thing.

Someday one of Bunny's or Batman's kids will wind up with my Kai poster that no one could part with because it belonged to me and I loved it, but everyone felt too guilty to throw it away or give it away and was terribly disappointed that by then it wasn't worth trying to sell, and it will keep sitting in a closet or behind a piece of furniture because no one knows who that guy is or why it was important at all.

clicks out to bigger
The plate smashing was me pulling a window blind cord back down after Bunny left so I could lower the slats and then close them. The plate just missed hitting me square on the head and showed me how spectacularly old stoneware can burst into micro shards over a distance of 5 feet, and then of course we had to drag the vacuum out right at bedtime. Now we're kind of in a really quiet post-Bunny malaise on our separate computers. Mama and Bunny drove grampa home from work and ate yummy supper with us, which means the house exploded a bit and TV never happened. But that's ok because mama woke up with a 101 temp this morning and just started antibiotic before she and Bunny drove grampa home from work, so they needed a really good supper. All in all, I'm reflecting that this day really wasn't too bad after a nasty wreck I saw being cleaned up on my way home this morning.

And no, the Kai poster is NOT for sale.