Feel the Love

I’m in love with a gas station.

First, let’s define love. In English, we casually use the word “love” to describe everything from spiritual love to lust. The ancient Greeks, however, were more precise. To them, “philia” meant virtuous or brotherly love, “eros” meant passionate love or lust, “storge” was natural affection, and” agape” referred to deeper, more spiritual or sacrificial love.

I love my husband, which incorporates emotional and physical love as well as commitment, spiritual oneness, and a reluctant willingness to put up with his misplaced affection for the snooze alarm. As Prince sang, “I would die for you.” It’s much more intense and all encompassing than what I mean when I say that I love Snickers bars.

My gas station love falls somewhere in between.

For some people, red symbolizes the Maryland Terrapins or the Red Cross. For me, “red” is all about Sheetz.

My love affair began when I used spend between five and six hours driving from Radford, Virginia, to Baltimore. After nearly four hours of road hypnosis, interrupted only on by an occasional appreciation for the rolling, maternal curves of the Appalachian Mountains, I would exit I-83 at Westminster and there it was—the friendly Sheetz, shining in all its red and silver glory, like a light on a hill or an inn in the desert, offering refreshment and calibration for the soul.

Sheetz symbolized civilization, refueling, and progress toward my destination. It offered practical amenities like a clean bathroom and yummy comfort food—warm coffee and a crunchy Snickers bar--all seemingly offered out of magnanimous concern for my well being. All told, the Sheetz experience stirred warm fuzzies and evoked something bordering on bliss in my innermost being--for real.

Sheetz was a marker, letting me know that the journey was not interminable, but would conclude within a reasonable and perceptible time span and that, in the meantime, Sheetz would minister to my most basic needs.

That’s why, when I recently saw a Sheetz truck with the slogan “Feel the love,” I did not resent it as a crass exaggeration or brand identification run amuck. Instead, I considered it a stroke of genius. Indeed, my friends, groove with me, revel in the redness, feel the shiny friendliness of your inner Sheetzness and, in the process, “feel the love.”

The Dump

We get rid of garbage every day whether we want to or not. I read that the skin that encases us sheds cells that fall from our body to the tune of 30-40,000 cells per minute, creating a feast for millions of microscopic dust mites. The cells pop off like loose tiles, no longer connected to our life force or fed by blood, they return to dust just as, one day, our bodies will return to dust.

We’re basically animated, organic garbage dumps that lose the source of our animation after an average of 75 years or so.

During those 75 years we create and rearrange lots and lots of external garbage, some of it very toxic. Therefore, we’ve had to create complex systems for disposing of that garbage.

My life is in transition right now, so I’ve made several trips to the Baltimore County dump to dispose of the accumulated detritus of nine years in the same domicile—construction debris, clothing that’s not worth giving away, excess materials from half-finished projects, half-empty paint cans, all the stuff I’ve stored in the basement or shoved aside until I can determine its value or confirm the irrevocable passage of an expiration date. Eventually, the value of being free from “stuff” outweighs any intrinsic value or potential for repurposing, and it becomes garbage.

The dump is made up of things we’ve shed, but instead of organic skin cells, it’s often, plastic, metal or something poisonous like mercury-filled batteries or corrosive acid. Nothing is more soulless than metal, but there’s still something sad about a heap of discarded metal that once had purpose. The metal boxes that washed our clothes or contained our food end up twisted and empty, with gaping spaces where doors once stood, all bent and askew, discarded and unwanted-- and if you’ve ever felt discarded or unwanted, the dump can seem like a vivid illustration of your condition.

At the dump, the cutting edge technology of the recent past is now just toxic refuse, a reminder that people as well as things eventually become obsolete. Things that were once shiny and new dot the dump’s floor like dismembered robots, with clunky monitors for torsos, keyboards that look like elongated pelvises, skinny cords for arms and mouse clickers that poke up from crevices like fingerless hands, begging for mercy.

In a way, the dump is an organizational marvel. Upon entry, workers inspect your identification and assess the contents of your garbage to ensure that only properly authorized residents can dump the correct garbage in the correct location. Then, you drive your car through the proper lane depending upon the characteristics of your garbage and its recycling potential. Finally, you arrive at the general trash section, where you back up your car, take out the trash and toss or heave it down onto a concrete surface about 20 feet below.

I’ve made it past the inspectors and the recycling sirens, so now I’m allowed to enter Baltimore County’s inner sanctum of trash. I open the back of my car, take excess wooden molding and broken flagstone out of the back, and throw it over the edge onto a heap of someone else’s garbage of indecipherable origin, except for the soggy pillow. The pillow was once a bright, white stage for a theater of dreams, but it’s now dingy, wet and brown.

I take my own soggy dinginess, psychically transfer it to the flagstone, and heave it away from me. It goes flying down onto the pavement and shatters.

My old stuff is now discarded.

I thrust it away from me.

I am free.

--Jeanne Johnson (Ms. Sticky)

Wedding Dress Blues

It’s time to sell my wedding dress. Yes, that’s right, my very own, iconic symbol of love and wedded bliss is about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder on Craigslist. And if I’m blessed enough to sell it for about half of the $500 I originally paid (before alterations), my dress will possibly become soiled by a stranger’s sweat while she vows her lifelong fidelity to a man she has a 50 percent likelihood of divorcing.

It seems like an ignoble end to a dress choice that involved blood, sweat, tears, and the near-murder of a “bridal consultant” from Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!)

I loved my wedding dress, but getting it was an ordeal I would never want to re-live.

Every bridal dress purchase starts with a passionate devotion to research unrivaled by any merely scientific motivation. This is a wedding dress, after all, a purchase that should express who you are on your "special day." And figuring out how to express who you are on your special day requires looking at an endless stream of photographs of models with unrealistically wraith-like bodies wearing ridiculously overpriced gowns from designers who are probably gay. A colleague called it “wedding porn,” which is probably true in the sense that it involves lust, albeit for a dress, and voyeurism.

Apparently, these days, it’s OK for a bride to wear white even if she’s not a virgin, even if she’s pregnant, and even if she doesn’t know who’s the daddy. After all, discovering who you are on your special day is all about fantasy and if I want to fantasize that I’m a virgin, even though I’ve birthed three babies, that’s my right on my special day (so get over it Mr. Stuck- in-the Dark-Ages observer who thinks that colors should actually symbolize something). Still, I just couldn’t convince the Stuck-in-the-Dark-Ages observer in my head, so I opted for ivory, which is kind of like saying, “OK, I’ll concede that I’m not a virgin, but I’m trying to do it right this time so just consider me kind of a tarnished, off-white, wannabe virgin, who is at least going for virginAL, OK?”

So after I had torn out reams of samples and sulked out of the high-end wedding store with my tail between my legs, aghast at the $4,000-plus price tags, I perused the discount rack at Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd near my house (NEVER go there!)

Trying on wedding dresses helped me to discover the power of “structure.” What I mean by structure is that, if I suddenly disappeared, it would take my clothes a while to figure out that my body was missing. The older I get, the more my body loses structure, and the more I appreciate structure in my clothing. Still, the structure was so extreme that in some wedding dresses I felt overwhelmed and constrained by the dress rather than highlighted “on my special day.”

Finally, I found an ivory-colored dress in my price range in a shape and style that I liked. But when I tried it on, the structured bra cups were clearly made for someone with ginormous gazongas, not my middle-sized ones. My modest boobs floated around in those structured bra cups like marsh mellows floating near the rim in a cup of hot cocoa.

“That’s all right,” said the bridal consultant. “We can send it for alterations.” I couldn’t see how anyone could alter a structured cup down from a size that Heidi Montag would covet down to a simple B cup, but what did I know since I usually just buy clothes off the rack, minus the rack alterations?

So I ordered the dress, paid for the bulk of it, and waited. And waited. And waited.

Personally, I think the dress arrived way before they acknowledged its arrival. My theory is that the shop likes to wait until the last minute so that you’re in a desperate time crunch and you’ll be less likely to ditch the dress if you don’t like it or it didn’t turn out.

As it turned out, even after the dress came in, they wouldn’t even let me try it on unless I paid in full ahead of time. That should have clued me in that something was fishy about Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!) So I paid and tried it on. And it was a disaster.

Even after expensive alterations, the floating marsh mellows aspect had not improved significantly, but other parts of the dress, which fit fine before, were now too tight, even though I hadn’t gained any weight. Instead of apologizing, consoling or reassuring me, the delusional “bridal consultant” actually said, “Well, of course it’s not going to fit because your waist is bigger than your bust.”

My jaw dropped. I may not have the proportions of Marilyn Monroe, but I can absolutely assure you that my waist is not bigger than my bust. I can prove this with photographs, diagrams, doctor reports, signed affidavits, or whatever documentation you desire, but my waist is definitely not bigger than my bust, and the fact that such words actually came out of the mouth of someone with the title of “bridal consultant” left me dumbfounded. You might expect someone who was dragged in off the street to be totally delusional and tactless, but a “bridal consultant?”

I wanted to throw the dress at her. Instead, I just abandoned the dress in disgust and marched out of the store, but I ended up having to come back, my chin held as high as possible, and retrieve the dress because, otherwise, it would be like giving Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!) money for nothing. There was no way I was going to wear that dress, but there was also no way that I was going to let them keep it.

I ended up taking it to a different tailor, paying a lot of money for a competent tailoring job, and on my wedding day, I dressed it up further with some long gloves and a pearl- topped veil I got for $25 from Goodwill that looked great after I steamed out the wrinkles. In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed my dress, I had a great time on my “special day,” and I did it without spending ridiculous sums of money.

Still, it’s just a dress. I have no daughter who would appreciate having me pass it down, (if any daughter really appreciates that) and I’ll never wear it again, so let’s just be rational and trade it in for some practical spending money, and maybe even help out someone who can’t afford the usual overpriced wedding gowns as well as sparing them a trip to ... well, you know. Call it Cash for Cloth, or Bucks for Bridal Gowns, something practical.

Still, it sort of feels like selling off a field of dreams. I mean, it may be a wedding dress but it’s still just a dress

… isn’t it?

--Jeanne Johnson