http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Baby-Body-Found-Teen-Bag-Victorias-Secret-Herald-Square-228225441.html

"..doing that shoplifting with the baby in her bag the entire time certainly suggests a little bit of difficulty following society’s rules.” uh huh. The other barely mentioned 2 yr old, that one'd be heading to foster care...but she will probably get the kid back...

So we go partway through the foster intake process and quit. The very day that we were supposed to start the day-long actual training, we bolt. What we want(ed) was a baby, not a psychoneedy teen, not even a preteen. And fyi, there are a buttzillion of those, psychoneedy kids, in foster care and in “normal” families, everywhere you look. The more I look, the more all I want is to stop looking at other people.

Have we covered this? I hate people. I can’t help it. I just cannot help it. And this isn’t helping it, not at all.

Then that very night of the very day we bail, we go to a surprise birthday party for Nunu. Her partner, an extremely pretty dark Cuban girl (wow), is crazy about her and is throwing her a party. The eclectic guest list I try to anticipate, like the antisocial partyphobe that I am (the exlovers will be there, they’re all very close very strained friends now, ignore the subtle angst if you feel it, it’s just…it's like damp), plus Milagro’s family about which I know nothing except that they’re helping throw this shindig and I’m picturing a quinceanera. Nunu’s stiff resistance to such displays of affection cannot be overstated, so I’ve got the nervous coping giggles just imagining how weird this might be. At the door, the mom greets us, a clearly NOT Latina, more like Irish, grandmotherly woman, who must be into Latino-Black guys (?). No, that’s not it. The house is filled with gay couples by half, VERY coupled couples, it’s hard to describe the in-your-face coupledness of each pair, the proprietary vibe – I mean, I know about the WE syndrome, where the first person singular is seemingly wiped out of the English language, and here it is on some kinda steroids. Everyone had a hand on his/her shoulder, or is the shoulderhander, at all times. Shutting me out, which I already am, in any room, of any kind of people, especially couples (I know, it’s unjustifiable, but in general couples weird me out). The other half of the guest list is M's family, all Irish and very north Buffalo, working class, sawed off flannels, beer can caddies. The walls are so covered with inspirational quotes and family pictures and clocks that I’d need weeks to catalog it all – if it weren’t so tidy in general, I’d think this was some kind of wall-chachki hoarding. Nobody belongs to any minority I can see except Milagro…and a very tiny very quiet Black baby being handed around. She’s the “newest”. This is a foster home that Milagro grew up in. The baby is, o, something like half a year old and her name is something like Siraya, but nobody knows either fact for sure, even the baby’s own bio-mother doesn’t remember the baby’s name. Everything in the scene is weirding me out except the baby and Van, the guy who started a clothing business for fashion-conscious MS sufferers whom I’ve known since then, which I remember because I gave him a tarot reading – he had wanted to know when he was going to get laid again, but the cards said he should go into business. I sit next to Van, he tells me outrageously dirty stories like about fucking the man who designed my boots (Frye). And I take the baby. I don’t give her back. By the end of the night, the baby (Ray, I’ve begun to call her, the “drug baby” so diagnosed by the utterly saintly foster mom, has a premie hernia the size of a penis and a personality that Aa describes as “I got over crack at 3 days old, why get upset at anything after that? That shit teaches perspective”) is attached to me like glue, has my earrings in both fists and is saddled on my hip, asleep with her nose in my armpit. By Monday, we’re back at foster intake, this time with the county DSS, in the building with the food stamp line downstairs (I have been in that line) and upstairs we watch videos of foster families caring for children shaken into brain damage. Etc. (It is hard to capture just how odd one week of a life can be sometimes.) The process of approval, the FBI background checks and nightly coping classes and all that, would take us into next summer before we’d be on the call list for a drug baby, probably coming home on a ventilator. Stand by for updates.

(Maybe.)

But, what do I obsess over really? That’s the real spell I’m casting, I know. What spells I truly cast, stirring the pot of myself endlessly, those things come into being. And it is this: Getting off the grid, away from people, just trees. Parties of trees.  Every time we circle in for a close brush with people in these ways, the cycle is followed by a corresponding retreat. We were deep into the woods and peeing on dirt repelling off the wall of that party, the last weekend allowed for camping in the nearest state park, cold or not fuck it pack up the marshmallows, I herd us all right Out of Range. I have mapped the entire Allegheny region in my head now too since then. Seriously.

(Almost inevitably:)

http://youtu.be/AMt0nQ4mVCI pugs are the foster babies of dog breeds (honing my fucked up sense of humor for this...)