The Grudge. It’s that movie. You know the one. Sarah Michelle Gellar gets scared in Japan.

Those Japanese directors really get it. They know there’s one thing scarier than the run and get killed, my pretty that we have in the west.

Kids.

Kids are scary as hell. That Ring movie - stupid. Still, I couldn’t look at television static-snow for a year without getting a tick and feeling faint. Same thing with the Grudge. I don’t even remember what the story was about. All I remember is that little boy and how I had to watch the rest of the movie through a thick-bottomed tumbler of scotch because it made things just blurry enough to keep the edge off.

Subconsciously, people are afraid of kids. I’m convinced. That’s why all those Japanese films work so well. It’s why Linda Blair was 13 instead of 35.

Kids have always freaked me out.

Lately, it’s a different kind of freaky.

Like this.

Gabby. She’s four and from Virginia. She speaks with an almost-English accent and has been known to discuss Condoleeza Rice and whether her transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State was a good one. At a recent birthday party she requested an armadillo, please from the balloon clown. She once told her mother “You’re going to have to do something about the giant baby; the child is getting out of control.” (Giant Baby was younger sister who occasionally dumped spaghetti on her head and dive bombed, head first, from atop how’d-she-get-up-there- high pieces of furniture.)

Gabby scares me. Partly because you just know a kid who talks like that and makes sense can scan your brain with her eyeballs. Mostly….she scares me…..because I kinda think I want one like her. I’ve got the brood. (See: Disposed to sit on eggs to hatch them.)

Oh Lordy. Pass the scotch.

I’m too tired to make sense. Too tired to be creative and talk in a voice that isn’t mine. I’m back in the belly of the Corporate Beast (Let’s kill all the lawyers*) and my brain is already cooked to a tinder.

A few things I’ve been reminded of this week.

One. Some people have more money than sense. Learjets. Med Yachts paid for through client smoozing. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollar company cars. They keep their cots packed away in file cabinets. Their toiletry bags under their desks. Their families on hold. Sometimes they fly between the two. They’re happy with their decision. When they’re not…they jump out the window.

Two. Oxford Street sticks to your face. In a bad way.

Three. Transit workers don’t love me like they use to. I’ve not been able to get a free ride all week.

Four. The Prada boutique will cure what ails you. If it doesn’t, the Hidden Gem will.

Five. Nothings ever urgent until you put your coat on.

Six. International Commercial Arbitration bites.

Seven. I hate reprographics and public transport.

Eight. Chianti is gooooood.

Nine. Handling $490 million just makes you feel poor.

Ten. I’d rather be a writer than anything ’sits in the office’ related…oh God please make it so.

Poor. Not quality. I know. Forgive me. I’m tired.

Next week I’m between Manchester and London. Bureaucracy. Red tape. The US Embassy. My brain will fry. Then I’ll think of Hezekiah Bishop from Puckett Ridge Road and how he’s gotta be good for a story or two.

Yep. Come back in a few. And I’ll tell you about ole Hez.

*Henry VI

“…. is killing me.”

Driving the road was like driving through a mine field. Mining was destroying the land. Leveling and laying bare the world’s oldest havens. Ancient rivers. Glaciated mountains. Time had softened their edges. Eroded their heights. Coal companies set out to destroy the rest.

Surface Mining. Mountain top removal. It had many names. Give a dozen families a job and wash away ten dozen more. A tree in a valley where a mountain use to stand – government handouts. Without nature to protect them – without the trees, the rocks, the dirt that hid the treasure - cities and towns were destroyed. The rains and floods washed away homes and lives.

Politicians and their spin. Big operators and their greed. The green earth. Meant to last forever. To receive us home. In the end. As it begot us in the beginning. In the beginning it was. How much longer before it was not? Before we had to find somewhere else to lay our dead.

Would the mountain last?

But families need to eat. And who can blame a father for crawling on his belly twelve hours a day, through mud and water and emptiness, to shovel at a hole three feet from Hell?

Who can blame a man for sucking down poison and dirt. For choking on the rock that feeds his children. Breathing it. Deep. Deep. Into his petrified chest. Because a man needs to breathe. Just like his children need to eat.

The suits would squeeze it from his lungs if they could. Every last ounce. Shovel it onto the back of coal trucks and railroad cars and ship it somewhere to turn into dollars. If they could. But they cannot. So they deny: ‘The good fresh mountain air did it boys! It turns organs to stone and smothers you in your sleep.’

“That black lung that I ain’t got is killing me.” Pa jokes and chokes.

Lungs continue to blacken. Operators send out new men who have new families. To fill up their chest with black and grit. To suffocate and pay while they wash away their homes. Their land. And move on. On.

But families need to eat…

Sometimes a girl feels like pretty and a chippie. I can’t do the fish & more because I’m Livin La Vida Thurmond. But I can do pretty, and I can do it in a list.

I read this morning that the average British woman spends over £180,000 (Transatlantic Translation: $302,400) in a lifetime on beauty products - i.e. pretty.

I believe it.

Skin care ranks higher than food on my personal budget. I’ll have a fine facial over fine cuisine any day.

Once a month I sit down and go through all my stash. Make a list of everything I need and almost need. Add a few things that I just want either because the hype is so great or the packaging so awesome. This month I need it all.

(1) Decleor Cleansing Milk
(2) Decleor Aromessence Rose d’Orient Soothing Concentrate
(3) Decleor Rose d’Orient Night Balm
(4) Kanebo Sensai Eye Contour Balm
(5) YSL Touche Eclat
(6) Elizabeth Arden 8 Hour Cream
(7) Decleor Harmonie Gentle Soothing Cream
(8) Dr Hauschka Deodorant
(9) St Tropez Self Tan
(10) Lancome Amplicils & Benefit Badgal Mascaras

It’s time to go shopping.

She was tired of being old. Tired of dressing head to toe in what use to be.

Memories of a mother. A husband. He’s my heart, and I’m gonna see him soon. A father that never really was.

Tired of not yet going where she knew she belonged.

Her name was Belle, and she would die soon.

I was born in a little knock about town by the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. Some time before people came along the Appalachian Plateau was carved up for residency by the mountain waters. Not the second-run kind that Dewey got liquored up on at 160 proof; but the kind that leaked into the river basin and bathed his grandfather’s daddy on a Saturday night.

Indians washed there once. Named places like Horse Creek, Possum Branch and Beartown, then somebody ran them off and the miners came and never left.

A Hill Country full of black gold. WV style. Scratch the surface, any surface, and there it is. Feeding families and making widows.

The coal basin.

A kid could get lost in it.

It had happened before.

My aunt is ballsy as hell. Whether that works for her or not these days, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask.

But I know I loved it when I was thirteen. When she use to sneak boxes of romance novels (Serious contraband in my house) into my room and under my bed. The kind with Swashbucklers and Miss Scarlet types who fall in love and move to Istanbul. My favourites were the ones about highwaymen and London fog. They’re what gave me the hankerin’ (I’m sure it’s a word) to move to England.

You want a thing long enough, you make it happen.

I wanted to walk in the fog. So I did.

So I do.

Most of the time.

Today, I’d rather stay in.

The weather’s awful. Bone cold that sticks to the sky. Wet that smells like rain but ain’t. I like my slippers and robe and the fact it’s a Friday and I can sit and write and love it.

But I’ll face the freezing fog and I’ll do it on foot. For touché éclat and dinner. Because my under-eye-vein needs the slap and Tall Dark & Handsome needs the food. Because a girl cannot live without YSL any more than the man can live without cheesecake and Bordeaux.

We’re also out of coffee.