We were watching a "True Crime" TV show the other night.
Come to think of it, that's kind of all we watch these days. (Except for last week when we watched "Transgendered And Pregnant", which was fabulous...).
I don't really know why we've gravitated to these types of shows, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say we enjoy watching people who's lives are more fucked up than ours right now. Sad but true.
At any rate, the show was about a woman who murdered her husband.
Killed him with a hatchet.
Hit him in the face.
Sixteen times.
She also stabbed him 21 times, with what they didn't say. But really, once you've been hatcheted in the face 16 times I think the stabbing is probably a little beside the point.
Self defense, she said. Battered wife. And she might have been able to pull it off if there wasn't that surveillance tape at Home Depot showing her buying the hatchet, a tarp, duct tape and some bleach.
At any rate, they did the obsequious jail house interview where they asked her...
"What was going through your head.... what do you remember?'
To which she replied, of course... "It was all a blur..."
Tell me about it honey.
I was just realizing today that a year ago it appeared we'd weathered the storm.
My business went into freefall the Summer of '08, and by November I wasn't working at all. The boyfriend was bracing for the layoffs soon to come and we entered the Christmas season dreading the worst.
But by last January it appeared we were out of the woods. He'd dodged the layoffs (or so we thought) , and I had more work than I could handle (all too briefly). We'd joke about it all some day, we said.
But it ends up it was all just the last, short, lift hill on the rollercoaster, the one that takes you up to the peak for the final, steepest, most terrifying drop.
Everything was gone in a matter of months.
It was all a blur.
I think about that a lot, late at night, unable to sleep.
Staring through the plastic mini-blinds at the dead trees outside our Bakersfield rental.
