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 Blog attempt 1. |
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The first few entries come from a private journal I have kept for a few years now. also home for my entries for 
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| We shouldn't be throwing stones at other governments' handling of the Corona Virus. We have a government of fifty conflicting microgovernments called states. Talk about a lack of polite conversation. Congress can't agree on whether or not to call the sky blue. The president (no longer the antichrist, Trump) has a bad case of, "do as I say not as I do." Masks? Everybody but me has to wear them because they have to, but I can go without because the American people will go into hock to keep their president alive. That said at least he is trying to manage the epidemic. Though interfering with constitutionally guaranteed rights and insisting everyone is going to get a vaccine that may or may not have been approved by the FDA. Then again President Biden doesn't seem to have much interest in protecting any of those constitutionally approved rights. I have heard he has been neutering the right to free speech, free press, and religious freedom. Did you hear my heavy sigh? There I go, stepping out of polite conversation. So how is the weather where you are? |
| Okay, to start this chapter, I apologize for the brevity of the previous chapter, but it has been several months since I have written anything and the world has moved on and so have I. Welcome to the world of the pandemic. Covid-19 has most of the world shaking in their surgical masks, I take it fatalistically. If I am meant to die from this thing I will. It is the only point of view I can take. I am the designated shopper for our entire clan. I go into all the stores alone. I face the empty shelves. I face the stickers telling you one way only down the aisles, not that anybody pays any attention to that. I am the one who stands on the little Xs in line. Other than that, I’m good. My health is good, as long as you don’t count the cough I have had since before this whole pandemic thing happened, or the deteriorating mental health. I can’t seem to make up my mind between mania and depression. I am energetically depressed. It is an interesting place to be. As for the cough, I am not too concerned, until the woman in the line ahead of me coughs, without a mask. Then the slightest tickle in my throat sends me straight to the panic button, but it is what it is. Now to the irony of things. I believe my views on Trump are clear by now, if not you have not been paying any attention. That said, I can’t criticize how he has handled the crisis. There was a comment about using disinfectants to just flush the infection out of your system, but he wouldn’t be Trump without some show of his level of intelligence, or lack of. He closed the borders to keep out sources of infection. He closed non-essential businesses. He encouraged people to… who am I kidding? The man refuses to wear a mask! I know that the successful measures he has taken were someone else’s idea. All we can credit him with is actually taking the advice. Flush their systems out with disinfectant? Enough politics, how about the economy… The first stimulus payment was a real windfall. It was just what we needed when we needed it. Okay, so we’ve talked about Covid-19. We also have another set of crises. There is the whole Black Lives Matter issue and the resultant riots- ehm protests. Also, there is the toilet paper shortage and other shortages of goods. Like for a while my Walmart was completely sold out of flat-screen tvs and if you want a Nintendo Switch be prepared to pay five or six hundred used on eBay. Then there is the more disturbing shortage that has come up recently, apparently there is a national coin shortage. A lot of retailers are accepting cards only. So, if anyone is reading this, does anyone feel like I am watching the fall of American civilization? I mean, it sure feels like the emperor is fiddling as Rome burns. Trump refuses to wear a mask, how is anyone supposed to take him seriously when he tells everyone else to wear one. Is this like what the romans felt as their civilization fell. We have major cities defunding or outright disbanding their police forces and then acting surprised when civil law collapses. I have heard that police in New York city aren’t responding to calls involving gunfire. A grassroot civilian group is trying to hold the line but they are just civilians. Trump has shut up about the border wall, but no one is going out or working anyway, so I guess illegal immigration is down? Or he has just moved on to other issues that are more frightening to his constituents. I can’t tell if he is trying to scare his way into reelection or buy his way back into office. I heard he wanted his signature to appear on the first round of stimulus checks. Can anyone say bribing the vote? Well, his people must have checked the polls and done the math. They seem to have told him that the first round didn’t assure his victory because there is serious talk of another round before long. Economists are even calling for regular rounds of stimulus checks. If there is another round of checks, most articles project that most of us will have received our money by September or October at the latest. Right before the elections. Hmm. Maybe congress is trying to buy votes too. How is that going to work? Who is going to keep voting locations secure and prevent ballot fraud with a substantial portion of law enforcement on furlough? Maybe that is why the Black Lives Matter Protests fell when they did, to ensure Trump or someone, an unfair advantage at the polls. I feel like someone or something is manipulating us all with these circumstances. What I find odd is the silence of religious leaders on this subject. In the past, all it took for some to holler Armageddon was a few round digits on the old calendar. But now, with a plague, collapse of civil order, border walls, the real possibility real money will be worthless, namely a switch to strictly electronic payments, I haven’t heard one peep about the antichrist, Armageddon, seals, vials, four horsemen. I mean come on people, that is all we heard for the last three decades of the last millennia. Maybe I am just tilting at windmills, but things feel wrong here. Coincidence is too simple a word, maybe it is all interconnected, but that doesn’t automatically mean Armageddon. Sure, all the self quarantining could have made people irritable, lonely and more than ready to riot. And maybe the prospect of people not working made them sensitive to even minor shortages resulting in reflexive over buying or people having to skip work because of quarantines causing lumps in the supply chain. The coin shortage could just be the natural outcome of injecting so much extra money into the economy. They just had not prepared for so much of the population lacking bank accounts having suddenly sizeable amounts of money. I suppose that is what is going on… But why aren’t people reacting to these things like one would expect? People talk about riots and cities under siege by riotous mobs matter-of-factly, like it is just how things should be. No alarm, no distress full of speculation on what should be done. Just "Oh, we’re out of change. That is funny, guess I’ll just use my card.” Come on people! Where are the conspiracy theory whackos? Did the virus preferentially kill them? Given what I am writing, does that put me on some kind of hit list? Only if I get published, which I am thinking will be increasingly unlikely. Nobody reads books anymore anyway! Sorry. I didn’t mean to rant. NO WAIT! Yes, I did! I have to vent. Things are circling the crapper and things look only like they will get worse. I have heard some formerly sane people talking offhand about becoming doomsday preppers. Walmart now carries a bucket of emergency rations for a family of four for a week. You used to have to go to some quack’s website to get stuff like that. Stop. Breathe. Is there even a normal to get back to? |
| New chapter, same day, same s***, different angle, let’s get started. Curveballs, every life is full of them. Few of them qualify as polite conversation. I have come to find that they usually come with much swearing on my part. Even death and taxes can hit me like curveballs and they can be expected. You can expect death your whole life, but are you ever prepared for it? Even if it is someone else’s death, it comes as a shock. Not even the words hospice or terminal prepare you for it. You know it is coming as a midnight phone call, but when it arrives… devastation. For me, the death of my mother was a personal apocalypse. Even with my beloved propping me up it was almost too much for me. It wasn’t my beloved’s fault. We were still learning each other. She didn’t have as practiced a hand at offering me support as she does now. Apocalypse, the end of the world, it comes as a prepper’s wet dream. They spend much of their energy, money and time gathering what they think they will need. If the apocalypse happens, they will be as unprepared as the rest of us. Unprepared, I am sitting in the middle of a situation. The possible outcomes are beyond preparation. Next week I go in for a diagnostic mammogram, followed by an ultrasound of my breast. They want a better look at a nonsymmetrical mass. Then next Friday I have to go in for a thyroid biopsy. I won’t say cancer until they do, but… There, we are back on polite terms. I am very politely terrified. I want to laugh, but I am not quite that sarcastic. How can you not be afraid when things like this happen? Is it cancer? I have two tries at that jackpot. If I win on both of them does it mean they are connected? Has it metastasized? Do I have it throughout my body? Am I already beyond help? It may be polite, but I physically cannot contemplate the situation any more right now. My beloved would cry if she read this page. She is in no state to face me cracking up like this. Too bad, I am in no state for it either. Let’s table this talk until next Friday. How do you prepare for the inevitable? Tears? Screaming? Armageddon might be upon me and I have no earthly idea what I am supposed to do about it. I will fight of course. I can’t not fight. Editor hated that sentence. It worked for muse though. Muse sweeps the current situation into the fiction dustpan. It is so wrong it can’t be real. Editor taps her foot and checks the time. Still enough time to edit this book into oblivion. My dogs offer me kisses. They don’t know our happy life could be swirling around the toilet drain. The cats don’t particularly care. But they only give a s*** about catnip treats, especially Malachi. He is an addict. One time he got so high all he could do was stare at the ceiling fan yowling “Mam, Mam, MAAAM.” I think it might have been a bad trip. We tried to get him to quit cold-turkey, but he kept waiting for the turkey… Then he broke into the treat drawer and ate every last crumb of catnip. The weather is cold. October is almost over. That means November is days away. Happy birthday mom. The fourth is hers, the fifth is mine and my father claimed the sixth before either of us. I dread November. My parents’ divorce became final on the second many years ago. Well howdy, it is December now. Yep skipped a whole month! Not really, I wrote a book of fiction last month. I already edited it and self-published. My first reader loved it better than any of my other books. I almost think I am ready to send something to a real publisher again. Yea, more rejection in my life… I had a bad day today. I got through November with very few tears. Today I have been a waterfall. I don’t know. I just broke down and cried. No, I sobbed. I was wracked with grief, defeated and a failure. It all started with a word search puzzle. My beloved’s mother asked me to type up and print out a word search puzzle she had been working on for my beloved for christmas. I tried three different programs and the damn things just wouldn’t line up the letters on the different lines. Okay so no big, not Armageddon, except I just cracked. The tears came and would not stop. I cried about everything and nothing. Of course it wasn’t about the puzzle. I am still not clear on what it was about. The day went downhill from there. I spent forty-five minutes waiting in the checkout line at the dollar store for six foil pans to make Christmas food in. It is the twenty-second by the way. The shelves of the store were nearly bare. Then I needed to go to Walmart. I know it is a joy to shop there on a good day when nobody is cramming everything in reach into their carts. It is the twenty-second of December by the way. Yeah, good times…not! I just love shopping, especially during the Christmas rush, the only thing better is Black Friday. I went Black Friday shopping, once. Never again! I don’t care if they are offering Samsung Galaxy 40s for twelve dollars! Never again. That was almost polite conversation. New thought on a superpower, the ability to hurt other people. We as a species are incredibly self-destructive. We will injure or incapacitate each other even when it is detrimental to our own wellbeing, just to say we won. Example? Let’s go with the big one, war. We will shake sharpened sticks at one another over stupid things like which side of the impassible river our territory ends at. Everybody wants to own the river even when they can’t use it. Who cares how far our borders extend out into the ocean? It isn’t like we live there… Oh boy, I have an attitude problem today. |
| What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own. What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds…. My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot. I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse! I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety. Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have. I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind. Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea. So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually… My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up. What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together. Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart. Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me. Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use. The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it. Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that. I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months. At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now. Synced What shall I disturb myself with now? I was… 12 Pages | 2,974 Words | 0 Today What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own. What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds…. My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot. I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse! I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety. Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have. I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind. Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea. So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually… My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up. What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together. Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart. Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me. Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use. The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it. Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that. I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months. At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now. Synced What shall I disturb myself with now? I was… 12 Pages | 2,974 Words | 0 Today What shall I disturb myself with now? I was talking with my therapist today. (Yeah, I am in therapy. Given all we’ve shared here, didn’t you expect that?) Of course this document came up. I told her about my theory on our superpowers. She smiled nodded and told me I had forgotten our main one, Greed. Her argument brought up her belief that it was the only real deadly sin, since all the others were either caused by greed or were just another form of it. So we are supremely empowered with greed. Yeah, it fits, Trump is a poster child for that too. The only real problem with calling greed one of our superpowers is that I didn’t come up with it on my own. What do we do with our greed? We drive other life-forms to extinction. We poison ourselves and the rest of the planet with our leavings. We inspire ourselves to some of the worst behaviors that we are capable of. When we are done with that we tell everyone else not to do what we have done. Maybe greed is our only superpower, hypocrisy and f***ing things up seem secondary to it. Then again, the comic books separate telekinesis, pyrokinesis and flying… It seems like pyrokinesis is just moving molecules with your mind so fast they explode into flames. The power of flight would most logically be explained as self levitation by means of telekinesis. On the other hand, superheroes can fly and they can start fires without being able to move things with their minds…. My inner editor totally rewrote that last sentence before I could stop her, and she has taken control of the backspace and delete buttons again. I don’t see myself as being all that productive today if my inner editor keeps it up. So what if the rough draft will be easier to follow… I am missing out on good thoughts and ideas because of her. Now I have nothing. My inner editor has dragged my inner muse into a dusty janitorial closet and chained her to the slop sink drain. I am not sure who let my inner editor out of her handcuffs. She isn’t creative enough to have figured a way out on her own. Maybe she scolded them into letting her go. I can see inanimate objects being afraid of her. She likes to use the delete button a lot. I think my inner muse has smashed the cheap plastic slop sink and gotten loose again. I can see the two of them running around in my dusty memories. Editor is running in fear as Muse threatens her with colorful epithets and promises of torture. Editor is throwing boxes to the floor and releasing random thoughts from where she hid them. Like why does my dog like to be sung “You are my Sunshine” I mean it is all gray skies for him. Maybe that is why he likes it. You know, “You make me happy when skys are gray,” would sound to him like he is constantly making me happy. He doesn’t. I get pretty mad at him when he carries a pile of cat s*** up on the bed as a snack. I imagine he calls the litter boxes all you can eat buffets. When one of the cats starts farting warning shots that he is about to use the litter box my dog acts like it is a dinner bell. OMG, this discussion has degenerated to total literal crap… How can I possibly keep up polite conversation with Editor throwing things like that at Muse! I remember the huge ash tree in the backyard of the last house my parents’ shared as a married couple. There was a bald tire hung from a sturdy branch. I used to like sitting in it and swinging for hours. It was a lot safer than the swing set which wasn’t properly secured in the ground and nearly tipped over when you started swinging on it for that reason. Shut up Editor, it does not matter how I spell reason. Anyway the ash tree was beautiful, and really old, at least fifty or sixty years. The crotch of the tree where the main branches spread out was very near the same height and within leaping distance of the flat roof on the rear addition to the house. There were wooden slats nailed to the one side of the tree to make a ladder up to what may have once held a tree house. I never had the balls to climb it. My sister scurried up and down it many times, I think she even jumped on the roof once. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I still dream about the blue and white house. I know it inside and out. But the version in my dreams no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, one of its owners chopped down the last two trees in the backyard. It was painted in two shades of hospital green when I saw it last. Seeing it that way, physically hurt. That was the last place I had a happy family. I can almost remember being happy there; for all my dad would spank us excessively or lock himself away. Not to mention the horribly overcooked dinners I would spend half the night eating, and then going to bed directly from the kitchen table. They might not all be pleasant memories, but that was the last house of my young life where I felt safe…until I had to make that call. Something about having to send one of your parents to jail does a number on your feelings of safety. Parents are supposed to love, support, and build you up. Even once she went into actual construction, my mother did her best to be that. My father…I am not sure he ever was that. He didn’t know how to be that. I really can’t imagine what growing up with a dying mother was like. It sure as hell didn’t teach him any of the skills he needed as a parent. I know communication is hard on him, with his hearing loss, and because he doesn’t know how to express himself. (Hey, dad, you still hanging in there?) It is my understanding that he was only passing English comp away from a degree in computer science. I believe he totally flunked it, possibly several times? He doesn’t know enough words to express himself, although I know he is fluent in several computer languages. It is almost like computer is his native tongue. I regularly received his computer hand-me-downs from age nine until at over twenty-one I bought my own computer. That’s that, I became technologically independent. I have since owned laptops, tablets, and now a phone that is smarter than any of the computers he gave me. I’m not writing on the phone right now, but I have. I no longer need paper to pursue my authorial fantasies. It’s weird. For the longest time I carried composition books to have paper should inspiration strike. I would write in them in pen, to confound Editor. Muse likes the feel of paper and pen, or she used to. My well developed writer’s callus has notably diminished in the last decade. It actually hurts to write too much out long handed. Am I lazy to not want to have to go back and type things over, because handwriting in ink doesn’t really hassle Editor, it just postpones her until I begin typing. My inner Editor can backspace on autopilot, that right there, autopilot was corrected by Editor. I can’t separate her from my fingers tapping on the keyboard, no matter what I try. I feel like I could be ever so much more productive if I worried less about putting a perfect manuscript out on the first try. Just the impulse to delete can derail any valuable insights that might be whirling in the back of my mind. Thought derailed. My dog is in heat. She has a live in boyfriend. At some point soon I will hear a yelp and discover them stuck together. What would it be like if a pair of humans got stuck. I have heard it happens on very rare occasion. Imagine a pair of teenagers just discovering one another… he gets stuck… they have to call 911… her father is the EMT that responds. His reaction, “Get the jaws of life!” I can just see the blood going out of things. The boy would remove himself and begin frantically grabbing for his clothes, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Father, Sir!” And they never see him again. Sorry, just had to put that out there. I actually do think of things like that, far too often. You don’t even begin to know the trains of thought that pass in the dark reaches of my mind, well maybe you are getting the idea. So, (imagine me clapping my hands together) global warming, I hear it has officially killed its first mammal. It is- was a little rodent type thing. It looked like it was fairly cute. If people in power weren’t so busy denying global warming, the darn thing might be cute enough to get people to do something about it. Yeah, cuteness is our kryptonite. Show even a razor toothed, tatted biker a picture of a fluffy kitten trying to climb out of a tea cup and they would melt into murmurs about how cute it was. Sometimes cuteness can cancel out our power to f*** things up, or at least slow it down. Occasionally cute little endangered species can manage to stop housing developments. Unfortunately, greed can usually… My dog in heat just reacted to a bottle of drinking water as though it was holy water and her surname was Dracula. Seriously my love hands me a bottle of water from the fridge and Precious leaped away from it and me. So, of course I held it out in her direction and she ran like our living room was on a marathon route. I chased her butt around the living room with it. It makes me think of the stupid cat videos on the internet that show cats freaking out at cucumbers. My cat loves vegetables I have never shown her a cucumber but I feel like she would just salivate. Googling why cats are afraid of cucumbers. Wow, it is a thing! There are people doing scientific studies on it! Who would have thought? I mean a lot of my thoughts are just random but scaring my cat with a cucumber really would not have come up. What kind of person would enjoy making their cat jump like that? Sorry, my hypocrisy is showing. I like sneaking up on my cat as she lays in the sunshine, and grabbing her while shouting, “Gaaaah.” She jumps a mile and scratches me. Sooo worth it! Yeah I am a hypocrite. I said they were our superpowers, didn’t I? I embrace my superpowers! Yes, I am a super-villain. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that it exists. So, where does that leave me? Is there any hope that I am not irredeemable? Much of conservative America would say no. Okay hold my horses...not, irredeemable, saying no… A triple negative, my inner editor is apoplectic (A word I understand as meaning “ridiculously upset.”) Poor deary, I have been torturing her quite a bit with this manuscript. Maybe I can get editor to go on strike? Yeah, like that could happen… just in this sentence alone, she has use backspace ten times. I think the only way to keep her fingers off of the delete button is to chop those fingers off. They happen to be my fingers. I am not that self-destructive. Muse would do it though! That bitch is crazy. I think that is how VanGogh lost his ear… editor kept whispering in his ear about the paintings and muse had enough, and a knife. Mental illness is no joke though. Trust me I am not really joking. I have had points in my life where leaving me alone with muse could have gotten me in trouble. I am my own worst enemy, especially when muse and editor get to working together. Editor doesn’t just critisize my writing. My inner editor has commented on virtually every aspect of my life at one time or another. She has a bad habit of echoing my father’s less than supportive words, “I don’t have a real job,” “I’m fat,” or “If only I actually tried to accomplish something...” Those times muse can be very close to powerless. She is a child at heart, and takes to heart the words of the parent she desperately desires to please. Muse know’s the echoes by heart. Bummer man! Editor has silenced Muse. She is rocking on her heels, cowering in the corner of my mind humming tunelessly to herself while editor cackles in malicious, superiority near the center of my being. I am doing everything I can not to make a mistake that my inner edititor needs to fix. My psyche is badly bruised and I can blame no one but myself for poking at the livid colors of it. Emotional pain resonates within me. Today has been a bad day. My sweet beloved is going through her own internal struggles and she cannot keep them from overflowing into our interactions. She awoke in a sour mood and the curdled emotions of that mood have affected me. Whoa awesome, I think I used “affected” properly without Editor’s help, though writing this sentence required five separate instances of backspace use. The weather is cooling. Winter is coming! I have never watched a whole episode of “Game of Thrones,” so I am just throwing around a phrase I have heard spoken by others. From what I have picked up, doesn’t winter in that world last like generations? I could be wrong… what do they eat? I don’t really care, at least not enough to research the topic, watch the show, or read the books which inspired it. I like science fiction more than fantasy. It was twenty years from the point when someone told me I HAD to read The Hobbit before I ever picked up Tolkien. I liked it when I read it, but not re-reading liked it. Some things I re-read almost every year or at least every few years. The Stand is one I like to read just as winter is coming on. I read it one year and just as everyone was dying, I was living in a small town where the streets rolled up at six pm and living on Mainstreet I did not see another living soul from my front porch from noon through sunset. That was a lotta bit creepy. Another set of books I read is the Earth’s Children series, Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest… That was another book someone reccomended to me but it was like twelve years before I pulled my nose out of my own ass to read it. I finished the first book and devoured the rest faster than the author could publish them. I like Anne McCaffery’s books too. She has at least three series that I really enjoy, but I mention her more because I mentioned metaphorically devouring books. Sophia, the dog I bottle raised and later lost, literally devoured my copy of White Dragon. I didn’t find that funny at all. She did it spitefully too. I left her to go to school and she was pissed. That shows me for adopting an animal at the beginning of summer break. I had to crate train her after that. Neither of us was happy about that. I am also a vain reader. I read my own series of novels at least once per year. It helps me keep the ongoing story straight, and the style of writing consistant. When I am actively working on a book I only read books off of this relatively short list because I have fully encorporated them into my style of writing, whereas a new book might change my style mid-book and I really don’t want that to happen. So, I am re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear right now, not because I am working on this, but instead because I am getting ready to work on another novel. I have it started, I am intending to finish it in the next couple of months. At the mention of working on a novel, Muse has come out of her near catatonic rocking. I am seeing pictures in my mind’s eye of magnificent vistas and glorius battles. Okay, so I have never written a glorious battle scene, but I do have one planned. In my stories it I usually focus on one or two characters. I don’t do large masses of people often, and so far it has never been in a single battle. I guess it comes from my point of view on the world. It is me and my beloved against whatever comes, but fortunately we don’t face armies or huge battle scenes. Usually the villans in our life are singular, or more often, non-corporeal. I sigh, at villains. It is unfortunate but they are found in every life. Sometimes it is us against ourselves, or nature, or the law of man. I say law of man because we are only starting to take into consideration the will of women when it comes to law. We still make less per hour, and have fewer jobs truely open to us. I think I am going to call this chapter done on account of…being done talking about this, for now. |
| Can I really pretend this is a polite conversation, when I have been dredging up the crappiest most painful realities I have experienced in my life. Weather deteriorated into a quasi-political rant. My health brought up the bile of bipolar, and my mother’s decision to lie down on railroad tracks. If possible, politics and religion degenerated beyond the disasters Miss. Manners warns of. Holy hell am I digging deep into my dis-functional psyche. I think everyone is now thoroughly aware of my rather twisted views on reality. Does this mean I am deep? Or does it mean I am treading water in the shallow end of our gene pool? I am pretty sure there is no way to discuss politely the shallow end of our collective gene pool, or the superpowers that come with it. After all our gene pool seems to be all shallow end. How can we criticize other species intelligence when we elect people to lead us on a basis of how photogenic they are rather on their competence. What is next for our presidency? A professional wrestler? How about a talk-show host? Or what about one of those oh so good examples of competence in MTV reality shows? When I think of the future, I can’t help but feel tears welling up in my eyes. They are most definitely not happy tears, but I can’t tell whether they are from desolation or the kind you get when you roll on the floor laughing your ass off. That’s right people I just wrote out a text acronym. If you can’t properly communicate by spelling the words out, how can you possibly read the context when you use an acronym. Smileys and emojis I can see. But taking the meat out of the words and expecting them to mean the same thing? It sounds lazy… but that is coming from someone who loves words enough to have asked for various dictionaries and thesauruses for birthdays and Christmas. Yeah, I am a geek… get over it you have followed me so far. I am soooo not done mixing metaphors to the point I have brought my food processor to bear on them. Lets see; don’t count your eggs until you cross the street, home is where the toilet is, a bird in the hand is worth twice as much as a lucky penny. I really like the layered complexity of that last one, but that is just my two cents worth. I am not just sticking metaphors in my food processor. I am tossing sayings, wives tales and other crap in too. Have I made clear how much fun I have playing with words and trying to wring new meaning out of words that have existed far longer than I have. It is my hobby, perhaps it will be my vocation at some point. I think things have to get you paid for them to be a vocation, until then words are my vacation. I can vomit up ideas all over the page, sometimes they come out the ass end to. Yea, I write out my ass like Trump speaks out of his. The difference between us: I don’t necessarily expect people to listen. Though if you listen to Trump for long you might notice that he doesn’t seem to expect people to listen either for as much as he contradicts himself and verbally weasels about. Not that I am calling him a two-faced weasel or anything… You know what I really like, when people find their calling in life and it just happens to mesh with their name. Like a chiropractor named Krickrak, or a house painter named Brush. A trump card is used to win a trick in cards. An alternate definition is a resource to use at an opportune time… So, who is using Trump. Is he in office to use our collective superpowers to soften us up for something worse? Is his, “absolutely necessary,” border wall for some other purpose? I think if he starts moving for one across the Canadian border I am outta here! I don’t want to end up in the middle of some conservative totalitarian state. Totalitarian states tend to eliminate people who do not live up to their norms. Ahem, cough <GAY>, <FEMINIST.> Yikes!!! I know if Hitler had his way I would be taking a short, “shower,” off a shorter pier. Boy this whole book idea is starting to sound like a bad idea. Do I really want to tell the whole world I am a sarcastic, lesbian, feminist who has little to no confidence in our very popular/vilified president? Cause that is kind of what this is doing. I am telling everybody and god’s developmentally delayed cousin, (You know, the one god put in charge of platypuses, dodos, Trump, and blue footed boobies. ) that is what I am. Leave it to a lesbian to mention boobies. WHAM! My inner editor just had a seizure at that paragraph! It is screaming, “DELETE!” louder than a cyberman. At least it isn’t my inner Trump yelling “EXTERMINATE.” I don’t know if I have gone too far… I mean I have always wanted to write a banned book. I feel like banned books are the ones people feel strongest about. If enough people haven’t read them to organize a banning, then they really haven’t been read. Even the bible has been banned. Not that I feel this mess of verbal diarrhea is in anywhere near the bible’s league. Now I am wondering if this is a significant moment in my own history. Is this pile of words what people will remember me by? Will I be remembered at all. At 27 pages, this is the longest I have managed to keep my inner editor at bay in years. It has been about a month for me since I began this verbal voyage, if I don’t count the decades that preceded it and colored my world view. Will this be the work of my life? I wish I could think that this would actually be published, and read… by a lot of people. At this point I am not sure I even care whether they are fans or hate me to the core. I would like to think that these words would shake something loose inside them. If the time I put into these words makes one person pause in their preprogrammed thought for just a moment and go, “Hmm,” I will have been successful. This is sort of a second draft of an old purpose. About seventeen years ago, I self published a book of poems and essays, four of the copies I titled, Painted with Words. The fifth I titled, “Who I Am.” I did everything from write to print to hardback binding the copies. I think I donated one to my local library, I gave some to some of my college instructors. I gave one to my mother. The last copy, the one titled, “Who I Am,” I gave to my father in an attempt to get him to understand me. I made the cover from a blue glitter night scene fabric, and spent nearly a week figuring out how to print it out successfully on my printer. At the time I had one of those old black and white printers that required the perforated tractor feed paper with the holes on both sides. Trust me it was not easy, that is why there were only five copies. Back to the point. I started this voyage, into the darker places in my mind, with the vague purpose of writing something that would help my father understand me better. At this point, I am pretty sure he hasn’t hung in to see where I am going with things. Maybe I need to consider another purpose. To make people think? To express my disgust at modern society? To help me understand myself better. I like you, oh gentle reader, have been surprised and shocked by what has ended up on these pages. I think I have a better understanding of my own life than I did some twenty or thirty pages ago. I am kind of curious what more there is to learn. I feel pretty wrung out by today’s words. I have had more prolific days than this, but I am not usually so honest with myself or my readers. I write a lot of fiction. I spend hours a day lying to myself about reality. In my little universe, good always beats evil, and there is always a good reason for the bad things that happen, and that reason is discovered before you reach the last page. It helps me face the real reality that those things are rarely true. Superheroes never swoop in and save the damsel in distress trying to teach herself to fly off of a bridge. People hurt people for no good reason, sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes people hurt themselves worse than other people ever could. Things are lost, for good, and they aren’t discovered to have been merely displaced at the beginning of the sequel. Fact is I can neither confirm nor deny that there is a sequel to this life. Let’s start with the lies we tell ourselves, “I will just have one more drink,” “I don’t need my glasses for that…,” “I am not cheating on my diet, per se, “I will just make it up next month….” I seem to like lying to myself about the type of person I am. For the longest time I told myself that I like boys. I berated myself for being short and horribly overweight. I thought of myself as doing things a year younger than the other people around me. I defined myself for nine and a half years as a year younger than everyone else in my grade, and that was the one thing that made me special. Dropping out for a semester changed that. I lost some of who I was at that point. After graduation, as I got older that identity as a year younger fell flat. A year younger at what. I was an adult and all the crap I went through in school, all the teasing and abuse coming from my peers that I survived because I was special and a whole year younger than them was long behind me. Except that it wasn’t. I still don’t relate well to other people. For the most part I go through my days sarcastically oblivious to people. The only way I can handle them is by thinking they aren’t there. I don’t listen to people around me for fear of hearing them laughing or whispering. If I heard it I would be certain they were talking about me or laughing at me. Somehow I still haven’t reached beyond the adolescent me that thinks everyone is happier, smarter, prettier,or otherwise better than me, and I am the only one that feels this crappy about myself. That all admitted to, I do have one shelter from all the storms in the world. She makes me feel special, important, loved, in a way not even my mother could. Since I found her I have known what smiling was for. It wasn’t just what other people did after making a sour joke about my insecurities. I know what happy is for because of her. For the first few years we spent together she subconsciously attempted to push me away. She had been hurt so many times. I knew it for what it was and I dug in my heels. After a time the waves of self-protective rejection broke over me and she embraced me heart and soul, finally believing me when I said forever. Nine years in, several of the married couples we count as friends are spinning wildly apart and the word divorce is the common topic of conversation. When couples get divorced they expect you to choose sides. You are either for one or the other. This epidemic of separation has made my beloved anxious. She asks if I am mad at her with every other breath. In her sleep she latches onto me and begs me not to leave. I do everything to reassure her I am going nowhere. I didn’t wait more than thirty years to find her to decide monogamy wasn’t for me. I said forever and meant it. I still mean it! I expect to go forward into the sequel to this life with her at my side, FOREVER. I would sooner cut off my right arm than walk away from what we have. Besides, if I left who would clean the cat boxes. Yes, I am a crazy cat lady. Each of them has a name and I can tell them apart with my eyes closed, except for Callie she is schizo, sometimes she lays down on me like Ruby, sometimes she just walks over me like Smokey. I can tell she isn’t Malachi though, he weighs like thirty pounds. We got his balls chopped and he went into depression, and developed a binge eating disorder. He also has a self-destructive catnip addiction. We have tried interventions… but you try and tell a cat not to do something. It isn’t just cats, we have dogs too. I am much more of a dog person. I understand them much better. When a dog wants something, they butter you up with a stupid grin and those deadly puppy dog eyes. Cats...sometimes they stare at you like they are trying to use the Jedi mind trick, other times they just walk up and start slapping you, either way I am confused. I love my animals, but I think sometimes I spend way too much time with them, but I like them more than people. The worst one of them can do to disappoint me is have an accident. No big, we only have carpet in one room the rest it’s just a mop and squeegee away from a memory. People can disappoint in oh so many more ways. They lie. They treat one another badly. They don’t apply their brains to problems they apply brute force or worse. People swear and talk behind other peoples’ backs. I question the wisdom of collective society. I think as a species we would have been better off as a species that lived quietly alone until breeding season. Then it would be wham bam thank you ma’am, and everyone would go back to their solitary territory. The one problem is you can’t develop a civilization as a society of one. Language skills would be lacking if all you had to talk to was yourself for the majority of a year. Then men would beat on each other because they wouldn’t be able to discuss who got what female. Never mind that the world is too small for everyone to have enough suitable territory. Okay, so there would be a smaller population, but also, women would have to look after several children at different ages all by themselves, unless the children matured faster. Now we are just discussing an animal population, because there is no way children could learn everything from their mother in one season. So civilization is dependent on people gathering together. Except when they gather, they tend to become noticeably uncivilized. Damned if we do damned if we don't. The great book of western civilization, The Bible, indicates we are just plain damned regardless of what we do or who we are. I remember being a child and being told I already had god wanting me dead and in hell. I couldn’t even fathom what I could have done to make him so mad, well except for the feelings I had… But everyone started out damned, and most people liked who they were supposed to like. To even think of getting a reprieve we had to apologize to god for every sin everyone before us had discovered, and any more we might think up on our own in the future. If he didn’t want us to sin, why give us free will and creativity. Was it to make us more like her? Does that mean that god can sin? If he made us in his image… now I am flirting with heresy. Okay, so god doesn’t sin but he created it… Why? Why does bad s*** happen to good people? If original sin exists… are there good people? Is everyone just bad? Even the ones who have made their apologies and accepted the gift of god’s own son’s death for our sins. Did I ever have a hope of not being damned even if I could have resisted the temptation of love? Am I damned now? I made my apologies, repeatedly, I accept that Christ died to pay for my sins, especially my sin of love… Maybe life is just a cosmic hamster wheel. We just keep going around until we drop dead and fall off. I think we’re big enough that god won’t flush us with his goldfish, but how big is god’s toilet. Hmm… probably about the size of a blue-green ball circling a medium sized star. We are just the floaters that haven’t flushed properly. So, people really do end up sleeping with the fishes. I wonder what god has against fishes. New topic- who decided what written language should look like? I mean was it decided by committee? Or did one dude just say here is an “A” and it sounds like AAAA when you read it. Who decided to separate letters into consonants and vowels? Why couldn’t “O” be a consonant, and “J” be a vowel. I know the establishment of writing was a process through centuries, or millennia bringing us to where we are. Countless generations of scribes were born, worked and died, so I could annoy you with my rantings like this. Let us bow our heads in respect for these underappreciated men and women, but mostly men. Why does “P” begin a word like “penis” but it looks like the side view of a woman’s chest.” One would think that the name for that particular organ would be more phallic looking, like “olo.” Now I am just being silly. We have a phonetic alphabet not a pictographic one. That is a good thing because pornography would be very different. I mean… you wouldn’t necessarily need photos, just the text could be arousing? Nah, Asian alphabets are current examples of pictographic alphabets and I think they still have pictures in their porn, all be it anime, but still erotic images. When I sat down this morning to write, I don’t think I thought the word erotic would come up. I am not sure how I got there from being a crazy cat lady. There is nothing erotic about crazy cat ladies, nothing. Although, cats can be called “pussies….” That paragraph has me scratching my head. How am I boarding these trains of thought. I don’t know, but I am pretty sure I am not paying for my tickets. I am writing about the journeys though. Hmm does that make me a travel writer? I never wanted to be a travel writer. I am just ever so slightly agoraphobic. I really don’t like leaving the house. If I could afford to get everything delivered, I probably would. I could see me shutting myself in our bedroom and writing nearly constantly. I think it would be just about as close as I may ever get to heaven, just me, my love, and my animals. A pleasurable sigh escapes at the thought of it. The only thing lacking for the fantasy to come true is enough cash flow. Maybe this book is my ticket to paradise? Only you would know. Did you buy this book? Hardcover, paperback, or ebook? Did I end up self-publishing again? Or do I have an actual publishing house signing off on the quality of my words. I might just get banned! Woo to the whoo! I feel like I am getting somewhere. I have written twenty-two thousand words, hopefully I haven’t bounced about my subjects too quickly to keep up. I suppose I could go back and delete the really impolite stuff, but what in the hell would be left. Let’s ask god’s developmentally delayed cousin… Okay so I might have one half page of boring musings on my cats, and maybe a little about my health and the weather. This is not how I usually am… I am quite polite. I tend not to speak my mind in public, if I speak at all. I do very little to be noticed. I can’t count how often I havebeen in a group of people and had several ask where I was, like I wasn’t in the room. I am a wallflower ninja with natural camouflage even I can’t see. Still this, these words are who I am. I have these thoughts all the time, this is just one of the highly limited occasions I have chosen to give these words an outlet. It is cathartic, and frightening. Some of this I really didn’t realize about myself. Some of it I knew but never admitted to. How could I? So much about them is just so… wrong. I don’t question god’s existence, but I question my place in his world. How could he make me the way I am and always have been, and condemn me at the same time. Most churches would say, its okay you just have to resist your urges, if you don’t like men just stay celibate. How many of those heterosexual church goers choose to do the same. It isn’t like I am sexually driven, most of our relationship is about our emotional, personal, even spiritual connection. I am supposed to deny that kind of passion just to keep myself out of hell. Yo, heteros you spend your life alone, without your soulmate so you can get to heaven! I would accept your criticism then. Why would god make me this way and expect me to spend my whole life alone and incomplete. What sin did I commit to deserve that. Surely my life is better than one spent lying to myself and my husband every single day, until I resent him so much we end up divorced… Isn’t lying a sin as well. How could I stand before god and promise to love, cherish and obey a husband I am not even sure I like. That would be lying to god too. I was left a choice of three untenable positions, being alone, marrying without love, or sinning against god by loving my soulmate. WTF. Did god wind up this toy just to watch us fail??? Are we the type of toy that is supposed to spin wildly out of control? I am feeling really low energy again. Writing these kinds of words takes more out of me than the fluffy nonsense scifi I usually write, but I think they are worthwhile. Even if no one else reads them, they are giving me insights on myself. Some that I might not have come across any other way. I mean I knew how I feel about my beloved, but I don’t think I fully expressed it before. Some things I have come to realize because of these words I haven’t found a way to express yet, but we are only twenty-three thousand words in what could be a one hundred thousand word adventure. Thinking about adventure, I remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. You know the ones where you go to a different page depending on your choices. I would always keep my thumb on the old page until I was sure I wasn’t going to end up dead. They were fun, but they give kids an unrealistic view on life. You can’t leave your thumb on the page for most decisions, and no matter what you choose you end up dead. There is no “safe” path through life. Some choices let you live longer, but you never find out until much later on, long after you would have taken your thumb from the page. The way my life unfolds reassures me that the plot devices I use in my stories are not entirely inplausible. I mean life happens according to certain patterns. I have noticed that my author is heavy handed with the foreshadowing. Small life events have been fore echoes of larger ones, like Cinder Sue’s diabetes, or the way my mother ended up on the ventilator twice before she ended up staying on it. Another thing is the sarcastic or dark sense of humor my author seems to have. There have been several things large and small; like the kidney stone, or the time I predicted the winning lottery numbers a week before they were drawn and didn’t buy a ticket. Ironic huh. Yes, some of the foreshadowing in my life has been as subtle as my dreams. For the longest time I had dreams in two flavors. In one type, the normal ones, I wasn’t able to read anything in the dreams. The words would always blur beyond recognition. The other type of dreams, the ones where I was seeing things about to happen, I could read fluently. Like Sofluffy, the dog I raised on a bottle, I saw her in a dream long before my mother ever thought of visiting that junkyard. In the dream she communicated with me and told me I would name her Sophia. A month later I was figuring out how to bottle feed a puppy. The trouble is now I am so used to reading that I read words in my dreams as easily as I see in color. I still have trouble getting my phones to work in my dreams though, but I am a recent convert to smartphones or cell phones in general. Speaking of phones, did I mention that I wrote an entire page of this manuscript on my phone. I am a cell phone addict now. For the longest time I needed to carry notebooks and pens in case inspiration hit. Then lap tops happened and carrying a computer case worked in my favor. Then tablets happened and I could throw one and a bluetooth mini keyboard in my purse and write anywhere. Eventually even that became a bother. I had switched to mini notepads for ideas, but I have forgotten the pads or pens on occasion and lost brilliant inspiration because of it. Now I just open an app on my phone and… I have a page of text I can copy and paste into any document. I almost never go anywhere without my phone. It even follows me into the bathroom at home, as if I would loose an idea over toilet paper and a walk of ten feet. I still remember typing manuscripts on an electric typewriter or an early computer the size of a large microwave, which required two five inch floppy drives to write on it. The first drive held the program the second is where I would save the text. The, actually floppy, floppy disk could only hold like twenty thousand words. So it took between two and three floppies to hold a short manuscript divided into three files. Plus it didn’t take much for a floppy to get bent and the data became corrupted. I lost thousands of words that way. It was almost enough to make me quit. But I always kept hard copies, usually handwritten in a little booklet of twenty five sheets stapled together into a fifty page segment. The trouble is my natural handwriting style is something a little less legible than the proverbial chicken scratches. Even I can’t read the early bits. Plus it took forever for me to type it up because until I was sixteen I was a hunt and peck typist. It took less time to hard boil an egg than it did for me to type up a sentence. I could maybe type ten words a minute from a handwritten manuscript. That didn’t even include the time it takes to think of what word goes next, the words were already strung together. Now, thinking up what I am writing and typing it takes up a lot less time and I can read every word. I think I have about a fifty word per minute writing speed and a sixty word per minute speed if I am just transcribing. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China, or the location of Trump’s comb over? Nothing, except it was on my mind. Technology has advanced so fast. I am falling behind on learning about it. That is something that makes me uncomfortable. My true love is tech savvy and about ten years younger. There are times she makes me feel downright stupid, like when I spend five minutes trying to get my phone to do something and she taps it four times and gets it done. When I figured out how to video chat on Facebook, I felt like our nephew making it to the toilet on time. I feel old, older than I am. Pretty soon words and phrases like, whippersnappers or back in my day…, will be coming out of my mouth. My hair is losing the battle against the gray. It was never as thick and luxurious as my love’s but it is thinning out even more. My father’s hair is still thick and only slightly receding. I seem to have been dealt the crap cards, general metabolic issues, immanent baldness, arthritis in my formerly cracked tailbone. I tell you that one is a pain in the ass! Time to stop bitching about s***. What do I have to celebrate? I have written thirteen books, drawn three coloring books, and have about five books, not including this one, in the works, basically outlined with perhaps a chapter or two written. Those kind of accomplishments are beyond the average. Even if everyone who says they are going to write a book wrote one, very few of them would make it beyond that single book, let alone thirteen, and not everyone who says they are going to write a book ever manages it. I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t finish writing a book. I write books faster than some people read them. I have finished three in one year, not on a regular basis, but it has happened. I feel like I started reaching my writing goals late in life. My early manuscripts were just not organized enough to finish. My writing project from when I was ten until I was fifteen never got finished. There just was no way for me to shape that loose jumble of plot and characters could work. I named the characters after their jobs, like Rocky Stone, team geologist, or Cam Eras, the photographer. The setting for that one was just a false start at the universe most of my books have been written in. At fifteen I gave up on it and started my second book. I was a little more organized, but still wasn’t working from an outline. I kept writing myself into corners and ended up with a mess almost as bad as my first one. I worked on it for about six years. Then I began playing with sculpting my universe into what it is now. I finished my first book at around twenty two, it took about a year and a half from rough planning to finished book. I then managed my second book in a year from formal outline to publication. Books started piling up from there. I had my lulls where I wrote little more than journal entries, but always I would come back to the same characters and universe when it came time for a book. This book is my odd man out. So far it is nonfiction. I don’t write nonfiction. The words are too real in nonfiction. You start talking about capital “T” truths in nonfiction. I don’t want to go down those roads. I want to stay off of those trains. It is all so much more confrontational than I can handle in public. Thinking about discussing those things makes me want to melt back into the background unnoticed. I want to be so invisible that people ask where I am when I am standing two feet from them. I want to be the quiet one. But, I also want to be heard. I want to put images and thoughts into other people’s minds that they wouldn’t even consider otherwise. I want to make people think about just what normal and safe is. I am trying desperately to write what I know, or at least what I think I know. These words are a desperate beacon blipping out my existence to the universe, or at least to people I know. I wonder if I have the courage for anyone to read this manuscript all the way through. Am I a coward? I hide. I avoid conflict, but god help you if you threaten someone or something I love. I will bite, claw, kick and pull the hair of anyone who messes with them. Ironically if someone f***s with me I just curl up in fetal position and hope they don't kick me in the metaphorical head. It is like I expect abuse. Like people degrading and devaluing me are just doing what I deserve. I am seriously f***ed in the head! Or are those feelings more common than I think. People aren’t all mean girls picking at your every flaw. I am not the only quiet one watching from the sidelines. If life were a sport what would it be. This is going to be another f***ed up metaphor because I know very little about sports. I was a year ahead my peers intellectually, but I was in remedial gym. Yes, that is a thing. I literally could not walk and chew gum. I choked on it once. Another time I walked right into a door frame. That’s really okay, back in my day gum was the top controlled substance in school. Chewing on school property was a visit the principal offense. Your parents were called if you were a repeat offender. I still equate gum chewing with hard drugs. Seriously, I only chew it when I have to go through a sharp change in elevation, like going up into the mountains or getting on a plane. Medicinal bubble gum anyone? Back to life as a sport. I think it is mostly like golf. A lot of hitting goals around and then chase them to hit them again. Or maybe it is like… wait are metaphors the ones where you use like or as, or are similes. f*** if I can remember. Anyway, life is like contact football. You spend your time trying to keep what you care about safe and within your group of friends, the rest of the world just wants to take it and grind you and yours into the astro-turf. If they get a chance they will sack your quarterback. Whatever that means. Maybe I should bury this comparison, in a compost and manure pile. Sports just are not and never will be my thing. Other than the liking other girls thing I really am a goody two shoes. I don’t smoke and have never tried illegal drugs. I only drink on rare occasion. My big vice is food. I love it and it must love me because every ounce that I eat sticks around on my waistline. I have an almost impossible time losing weight. I can walk five miles in a day and eat less than 700 calories and GAIN weight. Or at least that was how it was before I got put on diabetes medicine. I lost fifty pounds over seven years. My diabetes improved to the point I got taken off of the medication, I regained fifteen pounds in three months. Well, so far I have kept to polite conversation on this page. You know that isn’t going to last though. Don’t you? I think I will put in a chapter break here just to say I had one polite page in this whole damned thing. Oops. |
| Had to leave that train of thought there… or risk shorting out my laptop with tears. Today is my birthday. I am feeling pretty numb. I just really don’t want to feel right now, yesterday was rough. The roughest part was that it was so ordinary. Inside I feel like it should be a national holiday, but people still made plans, went to work, ran errands. I ran errands. I… I don’t know what I feel about that. What is a birthday supposed to be when you are grown up? Do people even celebrate them anymore. Today is pretty much sucking. It would take a lot for it not to suck. I fell down, hard, last night I am covered in bruises. I physically hurt. I am emotionally hurting. It is all so much my mind has really shut down. I was going to talk about things today. I had things to say. I was going to wring meaning out of this weekend. There is nothing there but a dull ache. How about some polite conversation? The weather is positively dreary today. It is cold, which I don’t mind, but it is also wet, which I do mind. My dogs love this kind of weather. They race outside and wallow in the chilly mud then whine to come in and shake it off, sharing their “fun” with me. I had to shower after my shower. I had to mop the kitchen floor. They had made it slippery and I did not want to fall again. There have been days like this I have had to completely change my outfit because I had perfectly formed muddy paw prints on my chest, or butt. I hurt. My arm is sore and it is making typing unpleasant. My neck has a kink in it and, I just hurt okay? I feel like being unreasonably grumpy today. Nobody deserves it but I still feel like just being a plain argumentative bitch. Lucky for them I didn’t sleep well. I just do not have enough energy to manage it. I could probably take a nap right now. Some asshole called at dawn thirty and woke me up. I won’t mention his proper name but he is on my official s*** list today. I don’t foresee that position down grading any. Especially when I really want to be bitchy! Crappy birthday to me, Crappy birthday to me, who gives a f*** that it’s my birthday, crappy birthday to me. Bad mood’s happen. The key is to roll with them until you roll out of them. If you fight them too much you can end up wrapped up in them for much longer. Then you are the bad kind of brooding, sullen. I like words. They can express so much. Especially when they are written. Stringing them along like beads can soothe or it can rile. Words have started wars and put ends to them. Words are the seeds of revolution and of common sense. We would not be an independent nation without the written word. There is no way that the signers of the Declaration of Independence would have had the balls to walk up to the king and say it to his face instead. How powerful does that make a picture? In the math of things, they are supposed to be worth a thousand words. Written ones? That is powerful. One picture taken by a journalist in Vietnam turned an entire country against the veterans of that war. It took more than a generation for them to receive the respect they deserved. The journalists in The Gulf were a little less sensationalist, and we sort of won those wars…. Is there any such thing as winning a war? Even with the best in training and weapons both sides both loose troops, living men and women that are no longer there for their families. Property is destroyed, sometimes property of great cultural value. Even when the war is contained, overseas, that doesn't mean the loss is nothing to the country not being invaded. A great deal of history and prehistory has been lost, often to the point that the civilization that “loses” becomes a myth. With as often as they have been invaded and conquered, there has to be a divine force protecting the Jewish people, since they still exist, heck they have even been restored as a nation. When was the last time you met a Babylonian, or a member of the Olmecs? Not every society has been so favored. You know that is probably why many Arabic people hate them so much. No one has given their fallen civilizations much of a do-over. It smacks of favoritism. Or guilt… maybe because Hitler nearly wiped them out? A lot of countries considered Jews a nuisance until “The Final Solution,” was put in motion. Then the world did a collective “My Bad.” Cultural groups, races and countries aren’t the only things that are persecuted. I am talking bullies. Juvenile humans can be the worst behaved animals. Mid-teenaged individuals can be the worst. They go from moderately civilized in junior high, to completely inhumane over one single summer. Most blame it on the changes involved in puberty. I agree, the main one being their sense of empathy. I would put forward that they do not lack empathy, rather they suffer of an overabundance. Unfortunately, it is not finely tuned or understood. They see the fronts others put on and mimic the “okayness” of their peers, while inside they feel alienated and confused. Since everyone is fronting they believe they are the only one who feels like s***. The baser instincts and a warping of the “golden rule” leads teens to attempt to do unto others as they have done unto you. So they are caught between clawing for independence from their parents and trying to get into the group of “Happy People” in school. The teenage years are s*** served up on a rusty hubcap. That was the first two years of high school for me. Then, somehow I managed to find a high school full of people who were decent to each other. I went from “Lord of the Flies” to civilization. I loved my last three years of high school. I was active, I lettered in Drama, though I am not the best actor. I was really good at sets and costumes though. I was also on the Knowledge Bowl team. It was like Jeopardy, only with teams of four. I didn’t have the reflexes to buzz in fast enough but I usually had the answer, I wasn’t necessarily the smartest on the team, but I knew the most trivial things. With a deep sigh I leave the pleasant memories and drag myself back across the border into “Impolite” territory. The government is about as coordinated and logical as a manatee on land. I don’t want the government to collapse under the weight of its collective stupidity, but it is incredibly likely. We elected a businessman I know has been in bankruptcy at least once into the highest office of our land. It is probably because he was a reality TV star. Now I know the fear my parents must have felt when an actor was elected. That didn’t go too badly. Maybe this will end well? I don’t know about that though. He seems intent into starting a war with immigrants that just want asylum. Said president is bent on building a wall to keep illegal immigrants out. He is willing to shut down the government not once but very probably twice to try and get it built. I have some strong reservations about this wall. A wall which is secure enough to keep people out, is just as good at keeping people in. Considering I am not sure the president isn’t the Antichrist, I really don’t want something like that blocking me from fleeing into “uncivilized” areas. If he is the Antichrist, then I figure the only safe places will be in South America, there is still plenty of rain-forest to hide in. Actually that is the biggest argument that he isn’t the Antichrist. I figure before the Antichrist comes along that we will have successfully destroyed the wild places of the world. There will be nowhere to run. Still, I wouldn’t mind having that back door left open. f*** the wall! The way the dumbass is going he will run our country into another Great Depression, and all the illegal immigrants will be running across the border in the other direction for a better life. I might join them. At least they know how to treat one another. There are times that I really worry that some kind of Armageddon is soon to come. I fully admit I have fantasized being able to create a self-sufficient compound for friends and family. It would have everything culturally necessary to restarting civilization. The fact is though, if civilization did collapse, there aren’t enough of the easily accessible resources necessary to restore it. We have mined all the easily mined minerals, we have to move mountains to get at them anymore. Oil is running out and the cheap energy it provided was necessary to fuel civilization to reach as far as it has. Most of the post petroleum technologies rely on a continued supply of oil to reach levels where they are self sustaining. If we use up oil before establishing them, we might get knocked back into the stone age, permanently. The damage we have done to the natural world is such that any survivors of the collapse would be hard pressed to survive. We have lain waste to entire swaths of rain-forest, they are so nutrient poor it could take millenia for them to support even a quarter of the diversity they once had. Of course that diversity will have been long gone by then and nature would be doing its damnedest to refill niches. The nutrients in the soil of our farmlands have been depleted by factory farming to the point that they require fertilizer to grow nearly anything. Unless we correct these practices soon, a lot of people could go very hungry in the deserts the farmland will become. Civilization is affecting weather patterns and global warming doesn't help in the least, even if it is not entirely our fault. I am not really optimistic about the future. Heck we might not have enough time to worry about environmental collapse, the turd in the presidential seat might just get us nuked by our allies before we can totally f*** the environment. I really don’t feel optimistic about his legacy. I think I would even vote democrat to oust him, and I am not a democrat, or a regular voter. How much about me is regular? My feet are too small, I can wear size three shoes. My waist is larger than average, my BMI is in the obese range. Actually that might make me average. I think of myself as too short and too fat. The family I have fallen into thinks of me as skinny, and they aren’t that heavy. I have noticed something anecdotally. When I go to church, I tend to be one of the taller people, and yes I appear thinner, but compared to the population at science fiction conventions I am short and fat. Is the forward thinking nature of science fiction more attractive for the tall beautiful Darwinian success stories. Does that make churchgoers the next replacements of neanderthals, an evolutionary dead end? No, religion encourages reproduction and the dystopian nature of science fiction encourages birth control. It really is not uncommon to hear many variations on, “I don’t want to bring children into the world as it is,” coming out when sci-fi fans discuss children and reproduction. Church and sci-fi fandom are the two major groups I have identified myself as a member. Recently I have been considering participating in the LGBTQ community. Even consideration was more than I ever thought I would get to, Hellfire and all. I don’t really understand myself completely on this account. If I admitted to my feelings, I spent the longest time contemplating my damnation, but I have had friends and acquaintances with non-standard preferences and never thought of them going straight to hell. I remember the gay couple that lived in our driveway while they renovated their camper home for a cross country excursion. I remember the transexual woman my mother worked with at drywall finishing. There were others, none of them seemed damned at the time. They were good people that happened to feel differently about their sexuality. Even knowing them I was courting damnation for the longest time for my own feelings. Feelings, I find, are best put down on paper. It is easier to trace their source when you are staring at them. The sense of damnation could have come from my long ingrained belief in my own inferiority. I couldn’t put a finger to anything I was inferior at, but I always felt I was never… enough. I can trace why I feel I am overly short, I went into school a year younger than everyone else, and was quite reasonably shortest of my peers. The feeling of being fat stems from my growth spurt where I began growing out of waistbands before length. I am clumsy and uncoordinated. I am not technically mobility impaired, but I am not much more than adequate when it comes to getting around. I have good stamina. When I have to I can walk several miles to get where I need to be, or I can stick to a job until it is done, without breaks. Why do I think I am so inadequate? My eyes are dry but the question threatens tears. Writing, that is one thing I can do well. I have written over a dozen sci-fi books. I rely on spell check but who doesn’t anymore? I don’t like writing reality based things. I usually write to escape the uncomfortable questions and problems of reality. Writing lets me turn the unfixable circumstances into a tiny bump in the plot easily solved with one Maguffin or another. When my characters need a safe place, I create shields that somehow block their enemies from entering. When my characters are injured or sick, nannites or scanners and laser surgery fix them. Heck they can read each other’s minds, so crime is something nearly impossible to pull off. In my little universes no one is murdered or raped, war is over in a few chapters, and the worst of all evil is contained in what appears to be a marble. (Actually the marble bit hasn’t been written in yet, but it is outlined.) All that said, why am I still writing this over twenty pages in? Short answer I let some trusted people read it. They raved and insisted I keep going. But that is not why, if I am honest with myself. I think that is it, these words are the first time I have really been honest enough with myself about any of this. Well, not the first time, I wrote an essay in college. The assignment was to commemorating someone or something. Hey want to read it? Here it is. November 21,1996 I love You! A young child sits with a box of crayons and her little spiral notebook. She calls it her Book. It is February 13, the day before Valentine's day. Today she made valentines in her first grade class. The girl is proud she learned to write "I love You!" Now she sits with her crayons and decides to make a valentine in her book. It will be for someone special! The crayons are not grown up enough to make this special valentine for this special person, so she goes to get a pen. First comes the gigantic letter "I" it goes from the top of the page to the bottom. Then a slightly smaller " love". Below the love she writes a tiny little "you", because she made the love so big there was little room left. Last comes the huge bubble exclamation point that she fills in with black ink. A young girl sits in the center of piles of spiral notebooks and other papers. She calls them her books. It is the day after her father tried to hurt her mother. It is the day after she called the police on her father. She did nothing in her fifth grade class, because she did not go to school. The girl is angry and afraid! Now she sits with her notebooks and decides to tear them up. It will be because she lost someone special. The books are not grown up enough for someone that called the cops on her father, so she goes to tear them up. First out comes a page of gigantic numbers. The rip goes from the top of the paper to the bottom. Then the page with a slightly smaller alphabet. On the page below that are teddy bears and flowers, ripped out because he made the love so small they didn't fit. Last page comes the huge "I love you," with the exclamation point filled in with black ink. She stops. Who was the special person she wrote this to? It was someone proud that they could write "I love you," and happy because she meant it. That was who she wrote it to. Her eyes fall to the paper, she reads emphasis in the gigantic letter "I." "I love me?" the girl asks herself aloud, not knowing if the, lost someone special can be found. It sounds good. She says it again! "I love me." It feels good! She shouts it. "I love Me!" A young woman sits at her computer, near a disk she calls her book. It is November 27, the day before Thanksgiving. Today she boiled potatoes and defrosted turkey. The girl is stressed she needs to write an essay. It must be about someone special! None of the people she can think of are any more special than any other. So she goes to get her files to find someone she wrote about before. First comes a gigantic file labeled history reports. Then a slightly smaller file called TV people. Below the files lies the cover marked My Book. Last beneath that cover lies the page with the huge "I love you," with the exclamation point filled in with black ink. So she-I commemorates this woman, girl and child. I’m back, funny that essay comes back to me so near Valentine’s day. I don’t know what happened to My Book, it was safely packed in one of the boxes stacked in storage in the house I had to give up. That was before a couple of preschool children moved in with their mother. I have little hope that I will see it again. That page should be mounted and framed. It has helped me so many times when I was very deep in the dark places of my mind. I could recreate it… I just might. Maybe I will play with the words in my art journal. Here I am making myself cry again, and I wondered why my English composition teacher referred me to student services for counseling. It seems like every time I let the real words inside me out on paper, someone asks me if I want to hurt myself. One of my beta readers for this, whatever it is, essay, book… one of my beta readers asked me if I needed to go in (to the hospital.) Okay, so my real words come from a dark place. I have seen a lot of dark places. Shortly after my dad left us my mother saddled me with the knowledge that if she hadn’t aborted my older sibling or siblings, she would never have gotten pregnant with me. I wouldn’t exist. What child is ready to hear that someone had to die for them to be born…. Sorry mom, you weren’t perfect. You did make mistakes and telling me that was one of them. She had named him, her or them PB, every so often she would wistfully mention PB and I got a knife to my gut. I would spend the next two days worrying that she felt ending them and making me possible was a mistake. I was a planned mistake. My sister has it worse. She was conceived to fix my parent’s marriage, and the experiment was a failure, probably because my dad repeatedly argued she wasn’t his. I am absolutely sure my mother slept with no one but him. God, this is dark. I need to light things up. Polite conversation time, but wait even that has been deteriorating into a dark place, global warming, debilitating depression, hellfire and brimstone. How about a light and fluffy subject? Puppies! Puppies are good. Have I mentioned that I had a dog my sister was named after? I can’t remember and I don’t want to lose the flow by looking over what I have already said. So, yeah, I had a dog named Melissa for over a year before I had a sister named Melissa. Melissa Puppy was never a mother, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We tried for puppies. We got her a male companion she was quite fond of, but there was never a litter. I also remember my first cat. It was a gift from Charlie. I am fairly certain I have mentioned him if not I will… I named the cat Mikiki. Miki never had kittens, even after we brought her home a male for the express purpose. We also had 40 guinea pigs at one point but I only considered one of them mine. Her name was Flan, like the Hispanic pudding. She was less than a month old when I got her from the breeder. Her mother had died or refused to nurse her and she was a vet trip away from heaven. The breeder gave her to me for free because after taking care of Sophia, I was willing to try to save Flan. We grabbed Mexican food on the way home and I fed flan some of my flan on the way home, instant name. Flan probably had some internal defects. She never reached the normal size for a guinea pig. She had other issues, like when she got too upset she would pop her eye out of its socket and we had to put it back in. We gave her a cage mate at one point, and it was the biggest mistake. We thought he was a she, and Flan got pregnant. The babies didn’t make it to full term and delivering them left her back end paralyzed. She had to be put down. It about killed me. Anyway… I know I haven’t mentioned the belief I carried from some point between Mikiki and Flan that their being barren was god gently explaining to me I would never have a baby. I was never desperate to be a mom, but… I still believe it was a message from above, just like Cinders. None of my animals had any offspring until after I formed that opinion and accepted it. That acceptance made a continued message unnecessary. My cat had babies last month. There have been lots of points where I could practically feel god yelling messages at me like that. The main ones were the April fools kidney stone, Cinder Sue getting diabetes, and the one about my fertility. I know god exists as completely as I know water becomes ice. Coincidences seem to me to be far too coincidental. I think the great big author in the sky inserts foreshadowing and symbolism as much as I do. I wonder sometimes when I am manic if god is having a hard time sleeping, or when I am sleepy if god is trying to sneak in a few pages before going to sleep. Seeing god as an author is the way I can best understand his, her existence. I wonder if she outlined things or if we are off the top of his head. Does god edit things. Does she have a giant delete button? Does he ever have to ctrl+alt+delete reset things? How many times has god lost a hundred pages because of a faulty memory card? Or does god write longhand. Is prehistory prehistory because god lost the section he wrote about it? If the universe is god’s novel, who are his main characters? Jesus of course, and Moses, Methuselah? God help us all if Trump is a main character, I pegged him as comic relief. I don’t know which archetypal descriptor worries me more, comic relief or Antichrist. If he is the Antichrist, then hello Armageddon. If he is comic relief, does that mean that the plot is about to take an ironically unfunny turn? Hello, Armageddon. God must be sleepy, I am yawning as I type. Maybe I shouldn’t put too much reliance on this metaphor. It was fun to entertain. Good morning all, today is positively dreary. The sky is white, and the temperature is low, possibly below zero. Snow is probable. It is winter. Winter, what a strange word. If you didn’t know its meaning it would be one of the stranger ones, I think. Then again, most words are fairly odd, especially in their written forms. How natural is it that certain assemblages of patterns should have such specific meanings. Words, chimpanzees don’t possess many and they survive just fine. They still can go to war, but their wars don’t risk every life on the planet. Imagine world war chimp, not going to happen. We have far more words, what is worse is that they each can possess so many meanings. Just a change in tones can even turn, “I love you,” into a sarcastic insult. I love words, but I have to wonder if humanity wouldn’t be better off if we did not have so many. Two people can be speaking the same language but can place far different meaning on words than the person they are sharing them with. When talking the tone and body language helps, but written or “texted” words don’t have those cues. It is up to the mood of the reader and the context to decide which tone is being used by the writer. Texts are the worst. There aren’t by necessity enough words to catch contextual cues and the short-cut acronyms can cloud things up even worse than that for anyone not familiar with them. ROTFLMAO, my grandmother would think I was speaking in tongues. The meaning of many words depends on context and shared understanding. In the past, like my grandmother’s childhood, “Gay” was a feeling of happiness, “Queer,” meant odd or puzzling. How did they become derogatory terms for groups of people who just come from a different point of view? I have heard of “Boston Marriages,” which were an acceptable form of same-sex relationships way back when. Words can exclude people or include them. Words, despite the rhyme, can hurt very much. My sister is not a Worm, she is a person. My beloved is a woman but we are not Gay. We love each other. Why do people want to hurt us with words because of that love? Will there ever be a time when “Straight,” will become a swear word. Has it in LGBTQ circles? I can’t rightly say. What I can say is that if it has, then the ones using it as such are hypocrites. I guess that would make them human. I think I found another human superpower, hypocrisy. It isn’t as powerful as screwing things up, but racially speaking, it is a newer ability. We were screwing things up before we learned our advanced language skills. We are like children we have learned about swear words and we are really taking advantage of them. Hey, I just had a disturbing thought. If humanity's main superpowers are screwing things up, and hypocrisy, then our electing Trump was inevitable. Follow the logic, superpowers, Trump. He is the poster child for screwing things up, and hypocrisy. We were destined to elect him. SCARY, huh. I wonder if we have any other disturbing superpowers. Dear God, I hope not, but we will see. If you could see me you would see a plump woman sighing deeply at our species stupidity. It frightens me that Trump is swimming in the same gene pool. His mere existence means it is much shallower than I would prefer. I would like to blame the population bottleneck that anthropologists theorized occurred in prehistory. We came very close to extinction before we had much of a chance. I think our survival alone demonstrates the reality of divine intervention. Us being here is one of god's true miracles, though the autocorrect gave me the idea that “mistake” would be a good replacement word. I wonder how many times a decade he sits back and hangs his head in disappointment at our collective behavior. Why is it when I think of god's disappointment that he becomes fully and decidedly Male. Decades of fatherly disappointment? My dad has never had a single reservation about outlining my every flaw. My hair tends to be mussed. I never smell pleasant enough. I don’t have a “real” job. I waste my time writing. Boy if this gets published will it prove him wrong on that account. Actually in the last few years he has been almost supportive of my writing. Actually I kind of miss him at times. He still lives in Colorado, I haven't seen him much since I moved east, but that isn't his fault. That concession is a big one on my part. There was a point in my life when I felt like he was a supervillain, but then aren't we all. I said we had superpowers, not that we were superheroes. At best humans are the kind of antihero you could almost root for. We don’t exactly have a sympathetic backstory. We started raping the natural world almost as quick as we could depersonalize it. I seriously wonder if, as a whole, humanity is at all redeemable. What we need is to have God spank us good and send us into the next decade without any supper. Here We Go Again, an odd word. Supper, where I grew up we called it dinner. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now there is brunch, supper, and high tea too. I would also like to mention the second breakfast of the hobbits. There are an awful lot of words relating to food. Hmm I am kind of obsessing about food now. I wonder if God is hungry right now. I just ate. Now I am feeling tired. My eyeballs ache. I might have a sinus infection or I could just be a hypochondriac. I do have a history of psychosomatic illnesses. My brain doesn't always act like it is on my side. I know I mentioned my history of depression. It is due to a chemical imbalance. I am a bit more unbalanced than many. There is a family history. So I probably shouldn’t make an issue of other people making the gene pool shallow. I have written a lot today. I have shuffled alongside many a train of thought today. Sometimes I overthink things. Okay, a lot of times I overthink things. Another name for overthinking things is worry. I am addicted to the art of worrying. I can worry myself up into a fine state over nearly nothing. I am not sure if it is a superpower or a weakness. Hmm, superpower, I am Worry Girl. Duh da dun, I can turn any anthill into an insurmountable mountain, or a slight drizzle into a deluge. Some f***ing superpower, add to it f***ing things up and hypocrisy. I am truly dangerous, but mostly to myself. I am my own arch-nemesis. Who isn't? |
| Hmm. Interesting direction the weather took. Damn global warming! What is left to discuss? I can’t remember the other topic acceptable in polite company. It will probably come to me… for now… Politics. I already tangentially covered religion...so politics. I am a registered republican, when I manage to register. That is the only proper christian party according to how I was raised. Even so I don’t agree with their philosophy. If religion doesn’t belong in government how can government comment on the activity of our bedrooms? Why should the government care if men love men or women love women? Were you aware that at one time the activities of same sex couples were entirely illegal? A man could rape his own wife and that was fine, heck she was even in the wrong for not providing him the proper outlet, but two consenting adults could not express their love for each other. Yeah that makes sense. Fortunately lawmakers have woken up a bit, rape is rape and love is love. Of course there was a time when people could own other people based on the color of their skin so what can I really expect from government. Back to religion. Specifically, I want to address the christian movement dedicated to the defense of the family. The defense of marriage act, where they wanted to define marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman. That is defending marriage. Never mind that married couples below the poverty line were regularly counseled by their social workers to divorce so they could receive enough aid to survive, whether or not they had children. I know of a lovingly married couple, he was dying of heart failure she was his sole care giver. Health and human services told them to get legally separated so he would qualify for better care which might extend his life. He decided he would rather die than even go through a sham of the action of saying they didn’t belong together for life and beyond. But god forbid we let the gays marry! Defense of marriage my ass! It was more like defense of their intolerantly bigoted world view. Didn’t their holy books imply children needed a mother and father? Didn’t most churches glare down their noses at divorcees? Weren’t formerly married couples looked down upon by congregations as failures? But gays and lesbians could not, should not, will not marry if they can help it. There I polished up the soap box I firmly stood upon even when my feelings were utterly irreversibly wrong. Was that politics? Or religion? Let’s be real people, despite our country’s protestations to the contrary, they tend to end up pretty much the same thing! The separation of church is and state is not just a historical fallacy it is humanly impossible. Government is the codification of right and wrong, ultimately it defines what is and is not acceptable behavior for its citizens. You can not expect human being to walk into an organization intent on drawing those lines to suddenly shed the ideas of right and wrong their clergy have browbeaten into them on the authority of god. “In God We Trust” is printed and engraved on our money. The ten commandments are stationed on many a courthouse lawn. I am not saying it is unacceptable to base government on the morality we share. As long as enough of us still share that morality. Government needs to be quicker to adapt. When the majority of the population decided it was immoral to own another person, the slaves were freed. When the people accepted women weren’t actually too illogical to make political decisions we gained the right to vote. I am not arguing a special interest group should have the right to veto everyone else though. Atheists shouldn’t be able to try to wipe god completely from the government, on the basis of the separation of church and state. It just isn’t real. If everyone were atheistic okay, take god from the schools! But if you are the solitary atheist parent you should be allowed to request your child not participate in prayers or mention of god. It’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses can request their children not participate in holiday celebrations. Don’t steal the holidays from the majority because of a minority, but do not force them on the minority either. It isn’t like the Jewish parents force Hanukkah on everyone else. The atheists don’t have that right either. We need more tolerance, religious, racial, political, sexual. That is not to say that the special interest groups should be dictating the morality or laws. The point is that when it comes down to it the majority is just as much a special interest group. Some kind of reasonable accommodation should be made. Allow homosexuals to marry, but do not force individuals to go against their consciences to aid them. Allow the act but do not force it. Allow people to divorce one another but do not economically force it. Couples on disability benefits lose one fourth of their income if they marry. Marriage is hard enough. Just because you’re married it does not mean your costs are any less. You both still eat, shower and use the same amount of electricity. Money should not be the deciding factor in love. How can a morality that believes that the unwed are living in sin not just allow, but support a system that requires it? Hypocrisy, and the sure safe knowledge that it doesn’t apply to them, until the day it does. A loving couple with a five bedroom home can be a car accident away from a homeless shelter and facing the choice of surviving or divorce. Everyone should remember that. Except it doesn’t really matter what people with a two, four or even five bedroom house remember. They aren’t the ones who make the laws. It is for the most part the idle rich with their set mostly inflexible and intolerant world views that do the actual lawmaking. Them and the literally soulless corporations that have no sense of morality at all save the positive knowledge that profit is king. Not a one of them has ever wondered not what they would have for dinner, or if they would have anything at all. I think one of the requirements of public office should be living in a slum and surviving on a budget just below the poverty level for a month. Then the budget would be balanced, and the money would go where it was needed not into mysterious pockets somewhere. The president wouldn’t be writing dumbass tweets or arguing out of both sides of his ass. And just maybe the crime rate would go down because people wouldn’t need to steal to make ends meet. I am not a socialist or a communist. Profit can be a good motivator, but I do not believe it should be the only motivator. Too bad common sense can’t be directly measured, monitored or compensated for. I guess I just want the best from people, and I hate most of them for disappointing me, including myself. Health! That was the other topic of polite conversation. Oh, I already covered that. Wow I am more polite than I thought I was. Ignore politics and religion, and polarizing topics, for now let us pretend that I have stuck to the polite ones. I wouldn’t say that I have ever been really physically healthy. I was a sickly child, sick more than I was not, though it was mostly psychosomatic. Psychologically I didn’t want to leave the house so somatically I was sick. I didn’t ever really like people. They lie too much. They say things like until death do us part and then they split up. That was an early lesson in the dependability of men. I can’t entirely blame my father for abandoning us. He didn’t want to take us away from our mother. To him that was a greater travesty than not having a father. The fact is his mother had MS, for most of what he remembers she was an invalid. He and his siblings were responsible for caring for her not the other way around. From what little he describes of his childhood, it was bad. His mother’s sole act of punishment for the children was yelling at them and telling them to put their fingers in her mouth, so she could bite them. Ouch. He talks about grocery day when his father would bring home food and the kids would scramble to hoard away enough for the week. It was bad, so bad that joining the army was an improvement. Dad went to Vietnam, the second of America’s great unwinnable wars. He weaseled his way into the trackers despite not actually graduating from the training. He talked about getting in country with a group of certified trackers and managing to prove himself better at it than them when he pretended to be one of them. The officers in charge knew there was one more man than there should be but they weren’t used to that kind of problem and let it go. He managed to point out an enemy sniper during a training exercise, that incident and one other like it were his credentials. War left many a mark on him though. He came home with serious PTSD, and damaged hearing from bedding down beneath the mortars. In the time he spent living with us while growing up, there was not a night when he did not barricade himself in his office for most of the evening. He didn’t completely isolate himself. I was always welcome to knock. Most of the time he would move the two by four aside and allow me entrance. It was like the magic fortress of an alchemist. He would scold me for that metaphor, magic was of the devil and unacceptable but for a young child it was the only impression possible. He had parts of electronics and robot kits scattered over an L shaped workbench. This was back before the real dawn of the age of PCs when such things were still quite esoteric. I remember puddles of melted solder and burn marks in the long board. Beneath the bench were blue cabinets with clear drawers filled with any number of nuts, bolts and other mysterious fasteners. He had a little television on the end facing a small love seat, or large recliner. It was nearly always tuned to PBS. In the evenings they showed science and nature programming like NOVA or Nature. We wouldn’t always pay attention to the television. There were snacks sometimes too. I remember velveeta slathered with Best Foods mayonnaise on white bread. My dad would smear extra mayo on the edge before a bite. Somehow it wasn’t too much mayo. To wash down the sandwich was a tall clear green plastic glass of ice cold water. It never tasted as good as when we ate it together. As we watched TV or ate, or played with his doodads, my dad would talk about chess, and electronics and computer programming. Sometimes he would work on the computer he was building himself, or one of the robot kits. That was back when R2D2 had just made robots cool. Sometimes he would work on reloading bullets, or he would pack and repack his backpack for a camping trip. Two things I remember are that the backpack was taller than I was, and his camping food smelled disgusting when he would make some to show me what it was like re-hydrated. His room always smelled of solder, gunpowder, camphor, and kerosene. My father didn’t smoke or wear any cologne I can remember his smell was a hint of his study. The rest of the house smelled of diapers, cigarettes and Pine-sol. My two worlds were distinct. When he wasn’t fiddling with a project or engrossed in the mating patterns of wolves or black holes, my father would try to explain the twisted and illogical logic of calculus. I knew what an imaginary number was before I could really multiply two and two. Spotty knowledge of higher math mad learning the basic mathematical functions more colorful. I argued with my teachers a lot. When learning arrhythmic I really wanted to understand the process of subtracting a larger number from a smaller one. No first grade teacher was ready for that. She flatly insisted you just could not do that. I knew better I just wanted to understand the process. That is not the last time a teacher fervently lied to me about math. In fourth grade when I started algebra, we learned the chant, “A negative times a negative equals a positive.” Okay, got it, and a positive times a negative equals a negative. But what about when you want to take a square root of a negative number? The teacher quickly argued you just wouldn’t have to do something silly like that… So imaginary numbers were just my imagination? By that time I was no longer my father’s perfect little princess. I had withdrawn from him, not because I didn’t desperately love him anymore, but because I could not stand the things he said to my baby sister. For the rest of my life I will always hear him telling her as she sat knocking outside of his door to go away, she was just a worm, she could come back when she decided to be a person. Sometimes I am in the room with him, sometimes I am just walking up behind her to knock myself. Guilty, a small percentage of the time I remember knocking above her head and gaining entrance. I warred within between feeling special and feeling like a monster. I knew I was passively calling her a worm too. The older we got the more I hoped she would rate being a person too. But it just wasn’t happening. I stopped knocking I couldn’t handle the guilt I felt even when she wasn’t pounding at the door beneath me. I have to say my sister was born with more persistence and strength than most. She was still regularly knocking when I finally stopped. My sister was far more physical than I was. Even as a young child much of my play was imaginary, focused on verbal skills and creativity. My sister wasn’t particularly verbal until she started school, but my sister learned to ride her bicycle half an hour after I rode mine unassisted for the first time. I know when my dad and sister started spending time together it wasn’t the same as the time I spent with him. He taught me chess, he taught her how to fish. She was like the son he never had. They became close pretty quickly. Not once did either of them consider I might want to be included. My sister started to treat me like crap. As a family we went to the circus. I got a plastic clarinet, mysister ate popcorn until she puked. She still rode home in the front seat with mom and dad. I liked that clarinet, until sis gave me a black eye with it for not letting her have all of the pillows for her pillow fort. I cried like a baby. In contrast, my sister decided to break glass bottles in the alley. A glass shard from one flew up and cut a four inch gash in her thigh. She didn’t even notice. The neighbor boy had to run and get my mother. Even after more than a dozen stitches she didn’t cry once. Her pain tolerance was ridiculous. When it came time for discipline, my father was a fan of using wooden spoons. There was even a particular place just outside of his study where he kept the current one. When one of us screwed up… we were ordered to bend over his knee. I was usually in tears begging for forgiveness before he ever touched the spoon. I might get one or two whacks for most things. My sister would get five or ten whacks for the smallest thing and wasn’t beyond standing up afterward; staring my father in the eyes; and stating unemotionally that it didn’t even hurt. That usually lead to more whacks. In the end she might get twenty or thirty wacks for the same offense that I would get one whack for. It wasn’t beyond reason for either of us to be spanked until the spoon broke. I don’t know how many times I wished my mother would stop buying them, but the one time he used a slotted plastic spatula made me grateful for the spoons. The slots left welts that hurt far more than a simple spoon. Even with all of that my father wasn’t generally a violent man, physically anyway. He was very good at beating on you verbally. My mother would clean until her hands cracked and bled. He would come home and berate her for being lazy and doing nothing. I recall arguments about my mother not fulfilling marital duties. I thankfully did not understand that euphemism. And I recall early arguments that there was no way he was my sister’s father. I don’t think she ever heard those the argument was tabled before she was old enough to understand. My sister and I were too noisy, to dirty, to disheveled. I don’t know if that was our fault or mother’s He didn’t come home at the same time every day, and he never called to let us know when he would arrive, but if dinner weren’t ready or had gone cold… My sister and I would put ourselves to bed early. Dinner… my father always insisted we completely clean our plates. I had a small appetite, and most nights my plate was still full when I was. I remember the nearly daily ironic lecture, “Don’t take more food than you can eat! Because you will eat everything you take.” One point I must make, I had no control over what ended up on my plate until well after he left us. Technically I hadn’t “taken” any of it and should not be punished over waste. I was a strange child. I had to be bribed to eat my macaroni and cheese with extra spinach or fish. I was very into vegetables and much less into starches. Meats were okay in limited amounts. Really if I had been allowed to follow my early dietary inclinations I would be neither overweight nor diabetic. Oh the irony! I guess I am back to my health. I had many ear infections and bouts of strep throat as a child. I was on antibiotics at least once or twice every six months. Ear tubes and a tonsillectomy were discussed and passed on. My father didn’t like doctors and didn’t see the need. Another thing I was plagued with was my ankles. Both of them are very weak. I got them from my mother along with my gnarly pinkie toe. She broke her foot one time stepping off the front porch. I haven’t officially broken anything other than my tailbone, but I am almost an expert at sprains and strains. Remember the purses, the ones that have EVERYTHING in them. I can’t tell you how long those purses have carried ace bandages, athletic tape, and or ankle braces. I also can’t tell you how many times I have been to the ER for my ankle wiping out. I have injured myself dozens of times more and not gone to the ER, just doctoring myself. At some point though I know I will need to get some kind of surgery in one or both of them. But that is in the future, this is not about the future is it? Hmm, where do I want to be in ten years. Still in a committed relationship would be a good start. Rich? Famous? No I don’t necessarily think I could handle the problems associated with either. Taxes? PR reps? That would be too much effort. Then why the f*** am I writing this? Don’t I want to be published? Yes, I do, but can it be without wealth and fame? Sure I want people to read what I write, and maybe I want to change someone’s mood if not their life… but do I have to be famous to do that? Well… yea and nay, I could just self publish this… like the rest of my books. Yes, people this isn’t my first ride on this pony. Never heard of me? No one has. I kind of like that. On the other hand who doesn’t want a pat on the back for a job well done. Some recognition would be nice. I would like to shake some foundations and rattle points of view. Are you supposed to discuss your hopes and dreams in polite conversation? Heck, I know I threw polite out the window on the first page. Hopes… I hope someday someone reads this. Dreams...I dream of winning the lottery. I would probably blow the money on starting my own publishing company. I would publish the people no one else wants to risk it on, well the ones that can string words together in a way that makes sense. I buy lottery tickets not with the dream of winning in mind but as a license to daydream...what if… The problem is that money can’t buy the things that I want most. I want that my parents never got a divorce. I want that my mother didn’t die. I want everyone I have ever loved to still be alive and close enough to talk to. I want to cry. That is okay, crying is cheap. All it costs is a few sips of water. Pennies if you buy it by the bottle. I need about a gallon. One of my worst memories is the night my father’s abuse went beyond words. Mom was in a nightgown and she let my dog out the front door on a chain because the little area in the front yard under the tree was the only place the snow wasn’t too deep for her to do her business. My dad had yelled at her not to do that for the last three days. This time as my mom put the dog out he ran up behind her and shoved her out of the house and locked the door behind her. She was barefoot in a knee length thin nightgown. It was below freezing. She went to let herself in using the Realtor lock box. My dad caught her, ripped the lock box out of her hand with the key and all, and flung it right into her face. That is when the yelling really started. I dragged my sister up the stairs and dialed 9-1-1. I can’t remember what I told the operator other than my dad was hurting my mom. The rest of the night was a blur. The police came and when it was over my dad went with them. My mom hurriedly got on the phone and made some emergency phone calls, yelling at us to pack an overnight bag. My sister tried to pack all of her toys. I had to unpack her bag and fill it with clothes before doing my own. My sister clutched at her teddy as mom pushed past us to pack a bag for herself. We ended up staying at one of my mom’s friend’s house. She had been a teacher at my school until she got married. Then she had moved across town to teach at a different school. I wasn’t quite clear on all the adult conversations that happened over the next week, but words like restraining order and parental kidnapping floated around. What I knew was my mother was afraid to go home, and even more afraid to send us to school for fear my father would pull us out and disappear with us. Instead I went to school with her friend and was classroom helper for a week. She had a small lizard as the classroom pet. It could change colors to better hide in its terrarium. I would spritz it with water daily and knock a cricket or meal worm into its terrarium every day. I wished I could hide half as well as it could. I felt like it was all my fault. I had gotten my dad in trouble and it had messed up our whole family. My mom’s friend bought me a Pound Puppy toy and I whispered to it about the horrible things I had done. From there I didn’t see my father much. There were counseling sessions and therapists. Mom went to work. They tried marital counseling and my dad came home for like a week on a trial basis. It didn’t last. Then we stopped seeing him at all. Mom eventually filed for divorce so she could get aid from DHHS. It wasn’t until almost a year later when child support entered the conversation that I saw my father again. He had to pay, so he was going to insist on visitation. I felt like he was renting us. Like the only value we were to him was the $400 he had to pay every month. The only real things he left behind from the time before was the paint splattered chair he used at his workbench and the tall green plastic water glass. For years afterward I would fill it with ice water and sip at my “Daddy glass,” when I was really hurting. Whoa, that has me teared up and emotionally torn up. I still feel like the call and everything that followed it are my fault. I KNOW my father is really responsible for everything. He chose to hurt my mother. He chose to virtually abandon us. He chose not to fight for custody. I still FEEL like it is my fault, like I chose sides. It’s like I betrayed him, not once but twice first when I abandoned him to make him stop calling my sister a worm, and a second time when I called the cops on him. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t let him start beating her too… or did he before? I don’t think he beat her. She never said he hurt her… except with words. Words hurt, often worse than sticks and stones. I don’t care what the rhyme says. Words hurt, and they scar. “You’re short fat and smelly!” That would hurt from a classmate, how do you think it feels when it’s a parent. He rarely used them all at once, and sometimes he used the word unfeminine or said “You need to dress better or people will think you’re gay.” That is as close as he ever came to confronting me about how I felt. To this day I am not sure he knows… that is just one closet I can’t open. HE is my FATHER, I only get one real father. I don’t want to break our relationship beyond repair. I guess I have my hand on the knob right now. If this gets traditionally published… fatherly pride will require him to buy it and read it. How far he will get before he flings it away and swears that I am going to hell… that I do not know, but I am guessing he probably isn’t reading this right now. If you are on the other side of these words dad, call me… even if it is to tell me you never want to hear from me again. It will let me know I was at least worth this much of your time, even if you don’t agree with or like what I have said. Father, while I only have one real one, several men have tried to fill the job. The first was my mother’s uncle, Donald. He was the first man I knew that really understood who I was. He put real thought into the first and only gift I got from him. We had gone on a trip to Dinosaur National Monument, as far as I cared at the time it was Mecca. I had been telling people I was going to be a paleontologist since I was two. I was a little older than twelve when we went with him. The whole trip I rode in the back seat asking every fifty miles, not if we were there yet, but what time it was. I was calculating our speed and guesstimating how long until we got there. I was a strange child. The point is that for Christmas that year he bought me a watch with an alligator on the face, it was as close as he could come to finding a girl’s watch with a dinosaur. I am not sure my father has ever put that much thought into a gift. For example, my 25th birthday he gave me a power chisel… I got to use it twice before I nearly carved off my fingertip and my mother gave me a stern warning not to touch it again. He knew I am clumsy as f*** and he gave me a power, chisel. Just as I was melting in to the safe feeling of a father figure that was kind and caring, uncle Don died. We spent six months traveling back and forth across state lines to Wyoming while my mother settled his estate. The worst part of it was that his house still smelled like him even when he was gone. Not like a dead body, no, it smelled like he was still alive, burnt pine needles, wood smoke and old spice. We went through the collected flotsam of his life. Christmas tins full of change pins and dead credit cards. I still have his original brass social security card, and a mostly used ration book. He was not a man without flaws. He had a terrible drinking problem. He was both honorably and dishonorably discharged from the navy. The dishonorable discharge was following a court martial for being AWOL because his boat left without him while he was sleeping it off in a drunk tank. He had a bite out of his ear and was missing half of a ring finger from bar room brawls. He wasn’t popular with most of our family. He was the black sheep and that is why we, not his surviving siblings were responsible for him in the end. His ashes sat behind a recliner for a decade before we were ready to sprinkle him over the graves of his dead siblings and parents. He isn’t the uncle who shared his annuity that was another uncle. Speaking of uncles…my plain uncles, my mother’s brothers, were absolute dicks to her after she married my dad. One had a family with three kids. We saw them one time of year when my sister and I each received exactly one gift. We ate dinner sometimes, then we went home. The entire visit was tense especially back when my father came too. There were a lot of verbal jabs at my mother’s choice of mates. Despite my father’s departure, my mother’s relationship with that uncle continued to deteriorate I am not sure if we went over there for very many years after the divorce was final. The other uncle was a mechanic he had one biological daughter who died in infancy from meningitis. That prompted a vasectomy. He had several wives that I could remember. The only time we saw him was when our car broke down. He would fix it and make a payment plan for my mother to pay off over time. About the time my mother found out from his then current wife that he had probably over charged her we stopped seeing him and found another mechanic. I remember sitting in his greasy waiting room for hours drinking fifty cent sodas back when most machines sold them for twenty five. I think that expresses my understanding of his life philosophy. So, within a few years of the divorce our family had shrunk pretty much to the three of us. Every few months we might visit my mother’s father and his third wife? His forth? His first wife was my mom’s mom. She died and he told my mother to either move out or get married. His second wife was, according to my mother, a platinum plated witch, and my mother was pretty sure she was being unfair to witches. As a christian she felt witches were the devil’s minions. Anyway that step mother was mean, and in the end divorced my grandpa and took all of what my mother was supposed to inherit from her mother with her in the divorce. I think there was a third wife which I vaguely remember. She liked to give me dolls every time she saw me. I am not sure what happened with her, it could be that I am just recalling my interactions with the royal bitch. The last wife was with him until he died. She too liked to buy me dolls at the flea market. One Christmas she gave me a Cabbage Patch Kid knock off be cause I had been asking for a Cabbage Patch Kid since they came out in stores. That was the same year my mom made my sister and I Cabbage Patch clones from kits she found in a craft store. They even came with birth certificates and adoption papers. She had to sew them herself. I don’t know how she even found the time. Another doll my mother made me, repeatedly, was Balleria. The original Balleria had been given to me by a consignment craft store owner. My mother made a lot of crocheted animals around plastic eggs and sold them at various shops. I remember riding the bus all over creation with my mom as she dropped off another round of egg animals. Anyway Balleria was my best friend when I was a toddler. I wore her out at least eight times. My mother would take the worn out doll for a vacation and she would “come back” fresh new and often in a very different dress. My mother remade her a lot. The other main toy I remember from my young years, was Bobo. He was a stuffed bear. I got him for free too. An older couple who worked as truckers had him in their truck. I saw him and asked what his name was. The woman asked me what I thought his name was. I answered Bobo. She smiled and asked me how I knew his name. Then she said since I already knew so much about him I should take him home with me. I didn’t just take him home. I took him everywhere. Bobo was my car buddy. We would go to stores together and just about everywhere. Then one day my mother and I were touring model homes and Bobo disappeared. He wasn’t in the car when we came back to it. I had just lost one of my best friends. I hate loss. It is the beginning of November. My mother’s birthday is Sunday. My father’s is Tuesday. Mine is Monday. I am having a hard time. I am not looking forward to the next few days. What makes it worse is my one true love is doing physical therapy at the nursing, sorry, rehabilitation center where my mother died. My mom always hated the beginning of September and had serious mental issues then, because her mom died suddenly in the beginning of September. When my mother died the second of September I thought I had just inherited the same curse. I didn’t. I can get through most Septembers with minimal issues; November… not so much. I used to make my mom lots of little presents for her birthday, mostly elephants. She loved and collected elephants. The end of October is hard because I used to crank out my birthday presents for her then. Most of the time I don’t get really bad until November first. That is when the guilt for not remembering to make her a present wakes up the reality that she is not here to receive it. If my birthday weren’t the day after hers, I don’t think it would be as hard. I might not remember her birthday and would be able to get by it better. Unfortunately nothing allows me to forget my own and by extension hers. Heck even if I somehow forget my birthday, I would still have my father’s birthday to remind me. I miss you mom. There are so many books that I have written and you never got to read. You never saw what I ended up doing with my fairy pictures. You missed a lot of birthdays, and Christmases. You never got to meet my neighbors you barely met my true love. You weren’t even aware of our relationship. I lied to you the one time you asked about her. Did you know I liked girls? Did you ever guess? What about when I ran up a two hundred dollar long distance bill talking to my best friend when we moved away? Did you guess? Do you care? Do you love me anyway or would you fling this book away from you on the second page? |
| Once again, I stare at a blank page and wonder what I will fill it with. So often lately I have worked from outlines and storyboards, with side notes aplenty. I wanted to just write right now. My page is blank and so is my mind, except for the verbal version of swirly twirly ink dissipating in water, making the water eventually one solid but lighter color. That would be nice, if my thoughts would settle into a solid lighter mood. I am too tired for the effort it takes to be depressed, and depression is the lowest energy state of my being. I honestly do not know what is animating my fingers to type these words. I have no idea where I am pulling the energy necessary for these thoughts from. Screw grammar, screw spelling they require too much effort. I will just type and let the thoughts tumble out. I say that and then I waste precious seconds trying to remember how to spell thoughts. I can’t help myself. My editor will not hibernate and let me make honest mistakes of grammar. I need to disable the backspace and delete keys if I want to get the reigns fastened on the editor. I wish I could edit my life as easily as these words. I get caught in a lie, backspace; I tell the truth. I break a dish, delete; I have a full set of dishes. But my life would take so much longer, editing things costs so much effort. I could better put it to living my life without the need for editing. Like writing. No, there is no writing or living without mistakes. Okay perfection on the first try failing, is there a form of auto-correct for life? God? Or is he just the ultimate editor who will sit down with you at the end and carve some sense out of your rough draft. Will there be some kind of second, third, or final draft after that? That is the ultimate question isn’t it. Without god not even the high priests of science can completely make sense of the universe. There has to be some kind of causal moment. Sure, big bang, what lit its fuse? Random chance? One of the first things science determined was that life does not just spring into being. Order does not come from chaos. Matter and energy cannot really be created or destroyed, at least not by the laws of science I was taught. Something or someone had to wind up the clockwork machine that is reality. They will be here when it winds down to put away their toy, or wind it up again, perhaps with different gears in the mechanism. Is the universe just god’s box of Legos? Or tinker toys? How much of infinity did he sit planning how the flow of time would play out. How much play did he leave in the machine for surprises? Or is god beyond surprise? Did he design the universe for entertainment? Does that mean our universe is one big video game or a TV program? Are we syndicated or network? Were we good enough to warrant reruns? What interesting trails my thoughts are running down. I should try to corral them, to send them in a purposeful direction. I should put them on a leash. Unfortunately, my thoughts are like a bad mannered litter of puppies. All barks, nips and tugs coming from eight directions at once. What do my thoughts nurse on? Or are they weaned? God help the world if they are weaned. I know they aren’t paper trained. The world is too cold to even think of them going out into the yard to make their messes. So they bounce around each vying for my attention within the confines of my consciousness. My experiences are too limited. My consciousness is like a studio apartment. I can’t move out because it’s rent controlled and allows pets. I could try banging down a wall or two but I don’t think the surrounding people would really appreciate the noise of the renovations, or the intrusion into their space. What’s worse I don’t know when my lease is up. I could just finish renovating and really be happy with the place and bam, I am out of here. Down girl, sit stay… away from that. Mortality, it is the mirror in your face every morning. No matter how well groomed you think you are it slaps you with your tangled hair and morning breath. It makes you not want to go out in public, what’s the point it all comes to crap in the end. Is mortality really like a morning mirror? You do not wake up to it in the beginning. At first your mirror is all smiles and pigtails. Then you face the zits and the bad hair days. Not so bad yet right? What about when the wrinkles and the gray hair pop up on you? By then it is evening. Add a little makeup, maybe you can handle the night out, but most likely you will end up uncoordinated and confused, drunk on the last fumes of life. What does your mortality show you on the morning after? Worm food. That was a little dark; dark and obscured like the future. What now? Time for another metaphor? Good god… when will I stop this nonsense. Do I have no sense of propriety. These are not subjects to address in polite company. Where will I go with this? Will I choose to slip into the flippant talk of the weather, or will I bullishly tumble down the road of the bulls*** of politics. Hmmm start with… The weather. It has been quite erratic of late. We nearly had hundred year floods two years in a row. The rain pours down and washes lives away when it is least convenient, but plays dumb when it is really needed. It wouldn’t be so bad if it would just settle into a cycle of dry seasons and monsoons. Who needs a winter anyway. People can celebrate brown Christmases just as easily as white ones. Why the crazy weather? Global warming, they say. I have to admit things are getting hotter, but is it just our ego that we blame ourselves for it? This planet has wound through ice ages and heat waves for longer than we have been around. Sure there is a correlation between our activities and the rise in temperature, can we say it is causative. Hmm, it is just as likely a natural increase in temperature is making us all act like irresponsible assholes. That argument made, I have to say the human ability to totally f*** things up is greater than that of any other life form we can name. It probably is our fault. Animals, people used to think that the main difference between us and animals was our ability to think and feel and communicate. Except now it is acknowledged that animals have feelings, they have thoughts. Communication isn’t our sole property either. Animals communicate just fine, sometimes in ways we haven’t even considered. Okay maybe language is ours, the systematic, learned application of communication. Except chimps can use sign language. They are smart too, they can use tools too. That pulls another rug from beneath the list of distinct traits of humans. Okay what about manufacturing? Bees have been manufacturing honey since before we were around. They have wax cities where their children are reared with an ordered hierarchy of importance. What about civilization, the construction of monuments requiring not just peaceful coexistence, but cooperation? Nah, the ants and termites build huge cities and mounds above the surface. Some termites even figured out air conditioning. Peaceful? Perhaps we are unique because of war and the planned slaughter of our own kind. Nope chimps and gorillas go to war, and who knows what dolphins do when we aren’t watching. Completely f***ing things up for ourselves and others seems to be our singular characteristic, heck it is practically our superpower. We aren’t superheroes though. Ask the millions of humans who have been slaughtered or the thousands of species wiped out by mere contact with us. When was the last time you saw a mammoth? Dinosaurs aren’t our fault though. They had their own problems, but given their hundreds of millions of years of success, we can’t exactly poke fun because they’re gone. Given how long they hung around, god must have really liked the dinosaurs. Why did god even let them die off? If they had survived, we never would have come along to f*** things up. Maybe he got tired of playing with them. Or maybe they couldn’t hold up their end of a conversation. Not that we as a species are doing much to hold up our end of the conversation. Sure for the first several thousand generations we were respectful and made the attempt. Some of us were more devoted than others and tried to send him presents, wisps of smoke from sacrificial altars. Not every civilization had the same idea of what gifts were appropriate to send. Some settled for grains or flowers, others bled or slaughtered animals; the really intense civilizations offered up people, some of those even volunteered. Humans are straight up crazy. Why would god go to the trouble of creating all of… everything if he wanted gifts of dead things burned to s*** or left to rot? That doesn’t make sense. It makes no more sense than any of the thousand other butt headed stupidities perpetrated in his-her-its name. Why would god care which hand you wipe your ass with? If god’s goal was creation, I can see why he might want men spreading their seed among women. The book attributed to his authorship forbids men to lay with men as they would with women. I still haven’t found the part where women shouldn’t do the same. That’s probably because god’s male superiority pep squad ghostwriting the book didn’t give two s***s what women did as long as they cooked, cleaned, satisfied men’s other needs, and popped out babies. Okay, so maybe I have a poor opinion of men, but I haven’t always found them to be very reliable, or smart, or useful. There are exceptions, but they are so few and far between. Sorry dad, but I really don’t see much hope for your entire sex. I have heard that some scientists have found that the male y chromosome is shrinking and at some point will become in-viable. What would the world be like if there were only women. Put aside the thought that without men there would be no babies, by that time we will have found a way around that. I have heard that some scientists are trying to turn women’s cells into sperm. Hmm… I am not so naive as to think that it would mean the end to war or other conflict. I know women. We can be passive aggressive bitches. Imagine that a passive aggressive war full of talking behind your enemy’s back, pulling hair and sabotage. It could be more vicious and insidious than a male war. It wouldn’t have clear sides, just complicated chains of violence. Females can be aggressive aggressive too, don’t think we aren’t. For example, Black Friday Sales...’nuff said. I don’t know why, but I find the female form more attractive. Males are all hard edges and scruffy stubble. Women are soft, smooth, soothing. I can’t even begin to understand the clockwork gears grinding within a man’s skull. I can see and feel the thoughts of other women on their faces, in their voices, the way they stand, sit or move. Women are not transparent though. Somehow we are totally open yet keep our own sense of mysteries. I barely understand myself. I have been slow in coming to that understanding. When I was young, I had male friends and female ones. The boys shared many of my interests, superheroes, spies, dinosaurs. We had much to talk about at first. But I would still rather spend time with other girls. My best friends were always other girls. I clearly remember coming back to school for first grade and feeling hurt and annoyed it was no longer acceptable to hold hands with my female friends. Somehow over the summer, holding hands had taken on a different meaning for them, or rather her. I only ever really had one real friend at a time. I felt strongly about her, and jealously guarded the time we spent together. It was a painful insult when she wanted to spend time with another person, female, or one of the boys she secretly giggled at me about. I didn’t always understand their obsession with fashion, makeup, music and certainly not boys. They would get all giggly and bubbly talking about who they thought was cute and why… I felt the same bubbly lightheaded feeling about them. I didn’t want to be popular, I wanted to be physically close to the pretty girls, the mean girls. I know none of them understood, really understood how I felt about them. God knows I did not. Speaking of god, my first understanding of human sexuality was colored by the absolute certainty that girls were not supposed to “like” girls and boys should not “like” boys. God would rain down fire and brimstone and hells beyond imagination on the stupid boy or girl to cross that line. I had a very good imagination so something beyond it was terrifying in the extreme. I absolutely one hundred and fifty thousand percent could not, would not, did not “like” girls in that way. I did not want to make god mad. I prayed the sinner’s prayer dozens of times fervently by the time I was eight, usually after spending time with my best friend. I didn’t know why I felt so guilty, or afraid, but there it was. My unconscious preferences warring with my conscience yelling it should not be so. I hit puberty and it hit back, about forty pounds in six months worth of hitting. My hormones treated me to migraines and menstrual cramps so bad that I couldn’t stand standing up for several days per month. Worse, my father and mother fell apart around that time. He went one way and mother tried to stay and pick up the pieces. So aside from not having the right romantic feelings for men, I actively hated them because they were the species that had abandoned me to being half child and half parent to my younger sister while my mother struggled to keep us afloat. She settled into a typical male profession. She would come home from the construction site, crack open a beer and regale me with the bawdy sexist jokes of her male coworkers. I became adept at twisting them on their ear and sending my mother back to work armed with pithy comebacks and inappropriate jokes of her own. This period soured me on men even more. How dare they joke about the inferiority of my sex they were not capable of bearing children, and were nearly incompetent at raising them if my absentee father was any example. Despite that history, I tried, desperately to shove and cajole my romantic interests into the right direction. I had a boyfriend in middle school, long enough for him to try to grope me. That was when I slapped him and decided high school or college was soon enough to date. High school rolled around and I “dated” a developmentally delayed older student. He was safe. We talked, and we hung out at lunch, but we didn’t once go out on an actual date. Then somehow he graduated. After my freshman year, my mother lost the fight to keep our house, and we moved miles away beyond the view of the ever present Rocky Mountains which had been my silent compass pointing west my whole life. I ached for lack of them. In the pod peopled town where blonde haired blue eyed future farmers of America were the majority, and as a brunette I was as much a minority as the singular African American boy rumors said was being bussed in because he was a gang member. It was hell. I cleaned garbage from my locker morning, noon and night. Whispers and laughter followed me. They hated me, and I hated them. Not even the girls turned my head. I kept that head down for two months before I dropped out and watched cooking shows. Before the next school year we had been evicted and moved back towards the mountains again. That re-centered my compass. The school I ended up at was soothingly accepting of everyone, including people with forbidden interests in the same sex. I continued to deny being among them. I was too afraid of brimstone to act otherwise. It was an unnatural impulse, what animals ever mated with the wrong gender? In the closet from myself I kept my head down and graduated from high school. My mother gave me a year to find myself. Then I was sworn to join the workforce or go to college. A year passed, failing at telemarketing I enrolled at community college. I had a nearly perfect grade point average and a perfect attendance record when a little old lady rear ended our car and my life went to s***. I ended up with a concussion and debilitating migraines. My mother was injured too badly to work. We lost even more including a dog I raised from an un-weaned puppy, almost everything. We spent six months in a homeless shelter. We finally found a place and I maxed out the credits I could earn on financial aid, and would have needed to decide on a degree or a four year college, instead we moved four and a half hours east to the intolerant state of Nebraska, a great place for a sexually confused youth. We lived in a small town for ten years. Some of that time we were surviving on $400 per month plus food stamps. The four hundred almost covered, house payment, utilities, taxes and insurance. That was back before they put food stamps on a card. I was pretty good at spending the paper food stamps so we ended up with actual coin change. That is what I bought shampoo and toilet paper with. It was tight but we were on our way to owning the home. The man we bought it from was the town banker and he was willing to gamble on us getting a large settlement from the car accident. He sold us the house for two hundred dollar house payments to end with a lump sum balloon payment when the insurance settlement came through. Once we got the settlement it ended up that all together we paid like twenty thousand for the house. Needless to say that meant it needed a lot of work, but it was cheap and it allowed pets. There is a theme there...just thought I would point it out. We had three dogs, Ginny the Pooh, Frieda-nater, and Cindersue. After loosing the dog I raised from a puppy, wishful thinking had me visiting animal shelters looking for her. I hoped she would be one of those amazing dogs that ran away from the people who adopted her, and she would somehow find me Five hours away from where she last saw me. I was at the animal shelter when I met a dirty mop-head of a dog named Muffy. Muffy was in a sorry state. Her hair was practically rastifarian when we met. Her eyes screamed please don’t beat me, at least what I could see of them. I volunteered to bathe and groom her in the hopes she would find a home. I was gentle. She shook the whole time, flinching every time I moved more than a millimeter. I found her eyes. They were liquid pools of love and testified to a life of abuse. When I was done with her she looked physically healthy, if very thin. I left her there, for a week. The shelter called me on the eighth day, they had an incoming load of puppies, her time was up. Either I come rescue her or...ashes to ashes. Muffy moved into our house by noon, and lived under the living room chair for the first week. She only came out when no one was looking. I let her be. After a week of that I began offering her treats to get her to poke her head out from underneath. After a month she would lay halfway out from under the chair. She stared at us constantly. If we moved too fast she would dart back under. Over time her personality opened like a flower. Muffy was a truly beautiful soul. All she ever went through taught her to be kind. She only did unto others as she would be treated. Cinder Sue was her big sister and best friend. They were inseparable. Muffy was a Shih Tsu… something mix. Cinder was a terror, I mean a terrier mix. Together they were trouble walking. Muffy depended on Cinders. Cinder depended on no one. She could even handle her “special feelings” on her own, no male dog needed there. She spent a great deal of time at it. She was either quite good at it or quite bad. Though from the panting and smiling she did when she was done… Mother went blind in one eye, cataracts. She bounced off of doorways and couldn’t drive. She wasn’t even able to handle the odd jobs she had been doing. For once church actually was a blessing, our small congregation pulled together the funds she needed to get the surgery to see again. God was on our side clearly, even if our dog masturbated. Okay so maybe sex itself was not evil. Another memory attached to that church and Pastor Dan was his sermon one year, it was the week before April fools, and the sermon was “This too shall pass.” God is an ironic comedian, April 1 of that year I was in the ER for severe abdominal pain, the punchline was a kidney stone. The doctor’s prognosis, “Don’t worry, it will pass.” Really funny god, it’s a good one...painful in the extreme, but funny. After that what I remember of that church was watching Pastor Dan die from cancer. That was not funny. Mom applied for disability based on her back and her diagnosis of COPD. Social security checked out her back and denied her. She shrugged it off and became a dishwasher for Pizza Hut. Cool beans, free pizza, it wore her down. She ended up with repetitive cases of pneumonia. Finally her doctor noticed her standing pulse oxygen reading was in the 85% range. He asked her why she wasn’t on social security disability. He sent in her records. Mom reapplied. This time they looked her over for breathing difficulties. Not only did they approve her disability, but they took it back to the date of her original application. Eight thousand dollars landed in our lap at once with the instructions to spend it quick or her benefits would be cut. We spent money like crazy. She went blind in the other eye, but this time medicare and medicaid picked up the tab. Out of the blue, mom’s uncle made her co-beneficiary to his annuity. We got an extra two hundred dollars a month. I went back to school and was clearing fifteen hundred in financial aid after tuition, fees, books and materials. After living on less than seven hundred per month including food stamps, suddenly we had more money than Trump, or that was how it felt. Whatever crap we had been stuck in so long had finally passed. That was when god sent me a warning. My health and life were at stake. Cinder Sue developed diabetes and was dead within a month of diagnosis. We were all devastated, none more than Muffy. She retreated under the chair again. What warning? How did that apply to me? Well it taught me how serious diabetes could be. Two months later my doctor was running blood work and threw in a blood glucose test just to be thorough. My blood sugar was over four hundred, one hundred is normal. Wham! I am diabetic. Holy crap! I listened to and followed all directions I was given. I spent weeks in a class to teach me how to eat, exercise and live. I checked my sugars I took my pills. I got things under control. I am sure to this day that Cinder was a warning meant for me. Physically healthy for the first time in a while, my mental health deteriorated. I had never actually been in good mental health. How could I be, my base impulses and attractions were fundamentally wrong from my assigned world view? I was bad to the core… How could I feel good about myself or anything else. I came very close to hurting myself. The only thing that stopped me… My mother laying down on the railroad tracks to kill herself. She was tired of struggling. I knew if something happened to her Muffy would have no one. And I knew if I weren’t here to pull her off the tracks, something would happen to my mother. Okay, grudgingly I hung in. I ended up on medication, but I wasn’t just depressed. I was bipolar, yes, manic depression. An imbalance of the humors. Except it was not really so simple. I wasn’t just depressed or just manic. I could be up, and running for days without sleep, mind racing impulsively, and crying my eyes out and wishing never to wake up again at the same time. Antidepressants alone were not helping. I tried lithium. I didn’t tolerate lithium. I ran through a library of medications. Most would work for a while, then… not. I was in a day program meant to get me functioning. I met a man. He was everything I as a little girl thought I should marry, down to his last name starting with the same letter and him being a Jr. like me. Again I desperately tried to be attracted to him. I spent the night at his house, in his sister’s bedroom, alone. We kissed. It was like kissing a potato. Holding his hand was like holding a banana peel. Only I was much more attracted to food than I was to him. We were good friends, but that was really more than I wanted from him. That is when I decided I was asexual, or at least self servicing like Cinders had been. I let it go at that and joined the national honor society in college. Then I graduated having majored in fine arts. I took like six semesters of ceramics in the end, as well as sculpture and painting. My sculptures had a tendency towards a definitely feminine shape. I found it inexcusably satisfying to slide my hands over female-like curves. I never painted or drew a nude, for class. I did imagine the activity a bit, but my visualization and sketches were never of a man’s junk. As far as I care “junk” is all they have. I harassed myself slightly less over those thoughts since they were in the name of art. At home, my mother got worse. I found an ad for purebred dachshund puppies for only a hundred dollars. I love wiener dogs. I adopted one named Ashely, and later my mother later got one named Tinker. Both were female. Muffy found them uninteresting and began coming out of her shell as an individual. Ginger was by that time rather elderly and didn’t last long into Ashley’s puppyhood. I dug her grave in the backyard by myself, crying over losing her and over the last hope of finding the dog I had lost. Ginger was five years younger than Sofluffy my wonder pup. Ashley’s presence was slightly soothing at the time and watching her mature was comical enough that I survived. She reached puberty and went into heat. She so wanted to be a mother. It wasn’t hard to see, she bathed, fed and watered her favorite toy, Bunny. She took Bunny everywhere. It did not take someone intuitive to see she wanted a real baby. I tried to find her a boyfriend, to no luck. Not a one of them really interested her, though she kept attempting to get Tinker Toy to tickle her fancy. She would show Tinker what she wanted, mounting her briefly, then she would hop down and run around front and try to shove her tail end beneath her very confused, “sister.” If I hadn’t known better I would have thought her a lesbian. But that could never be… Animals were never, that way. God despised homosexuals, didn’t he? Why would he allow them to… No I was just mistaken and confused. Frieda-nater, our dalmatian didn’t last much longer than Ginger. I buried her too. After some more drama my depression landed me on SSI, I finally had money of my own. Then my life went to s*** again. My mother, the one loving constant in my life, ended up on a ventilator. The local hospital was unprepared for long-term care. So we moved another four and a half hours further east. Or rather she did. As her medical power of attorney, I just commuted. That meant lots and lots of Xanax. Ever since the car accident time spent in vehicles set me into panic attacks regularly. For four months I commuted back and forth. Then when it was determined that there was no way she could return home on a ventilator; I spent two solid months sleeping in a recliner in her nursing home room, learning how to take care of her while her care coordinator arranged a wheelchair accessible apartment for us in town. I used their occupational therapy laundry for my clothes and the staff shower downstairs. Staff shower, the room had a smooth concrete floor. It was slick enough to sell insurance when it was dry and potentially deadly when it was wet. Follow me here, it was a place to take showers. You know the process of stepping into a booth to let water and soap run over you. Then dripping wet you exited and dried off before dressing. Do you see the flaw? I did not until I ended up staring at the ceiling from a prone position. My ass hurt. I tried to walk it off. I could not sit. I could not stand. I had no bed to lay down on. Finally, I had to go to my mother’s care coordinator to find a way to get to a doctor. She said it wasn’t possible, the nursing home couldn’t find me transportation. Finally I made her understand how bad the pain in my ass was. It was even worse than her… She arranged for one of the handivans to take me to an urgent care clinic in a supermarket, yes, a supermarket, not the ER, not an actual doctor, a nurse practitioner in a clinic within the square footage of a discount supermarket. Fortunately, the nurse practitioner was smarter and saner than the care coordinator. She took one look at me and directed the handivan driver to take me to the ER. After several hours and many x-rays. The emergency room doctor sent me back to the nursing home with the suggestion of ibuprofen because, he in all the wisdom of his degree insisted I was fine, I had just bruised my ass. For the record three hours later the hospital called me on my pay as you go cellphone to tell me the x-ray tech had discovered my tailbone was cracked clean through and that they would have a prescription for pain pills waiting at the pharmacy of my choice. The care coordinator did a one eighty and bent over backwards getting them to me. Next came the news, we had an apartment, but one of our dogs could not come. I had left Muffy, Ashley and Tinker in the care of a friend. She adored Muffy, and had taken her to the vet several times to deal with arthritis in her hind legs. After two months away, I returned home to her to decide which dog would need to find a new home. Disaster of disasters, Muffy was a shadow of her former self. She could barely get around and her enthusiasm for life was gone. I had decided that one of the younger dogs would find a new home because I felt Muffy would not survive rehoming, but it had become time to say goodbye for other reasons. None of the medication the vet had given her was helping her. It was time for her to join Ginger and Frieda. I had to take her to the vet for the final time without my mother’s support. Honestly I don’t know how it didn’t kill me too. In addition to Muffy I had to say goodbye to most of my possessions, there was not room in the tiny trailer I could afford for the move and there would be no more room in the two bedroom apartment. I left my house thinking it would just be for a time, until my mother passed. Then I would return to a suddenly empty home. It was not to be though. With both of us on government aid, including rental assistance for the apartment, neither of us could afford to own an empty home. We had to give it up. We signed it over to my sister. Instead of an inheritance of the other half of the house, two cars and everything in them, when my mother died I could only look forward to moving into my sister’s household. And what did I gain after all of that? Mom came home to the apartment for two and a half days. Then she went into respiratory arrest. She had to be resuscitated in the ambulance. Her kidneys failed she was on dialysis for a week, until they rebounded almost to where they had been. When my mother woke up and could speak she begged me to sign a DNR. That stands for do not resuscitate, aka let her die. I hadn’t uprooted myself and moved my world across an entire state I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be in to watch her die. Had I? Apparently that is what I had signed on for. At that point she would have understood if I went back home. The problem was that place was only a building. My home was, and I had thought always would be, where she was. Thankfully foresight had me transfer to a day program near the new apartment. There were days where the only thing that kept me getting out of bed was the expectation I would either go there or to spend time with my mother. Little did I know that the day program was a source of joy for the rest of my life. I moved through my days like a robot girl scout. With my purse I was always prepared. I even had a little kitchen sink key chain. My purse and my assigned work station on the organization’s newsletter conspired to keep me breathing, even to quicken my breath. There was a national mental health conference I had received a scholarship to attend before my mother went on the ventilator. It was in Omaha. This wasn’t an important point except that other people at my new day program had received scholarships as well. The important point is that one of the women needed business cards and a purse to carry them in. She happened to be assigned to the newsletter as well. I had shown off the business cards I had designed and printed for myself to our staff supervisor. She made the connection. I had cards, I had purses. The next thing I knew she was introducing us. My first look at her was a cloud parting kind of moment. I didn’t even hear the staff telling me what she wanted of me. I had to rewind the conversation in my head when it became clear some request had been made. The woman seemed as dumbstruck as I was. Yes, yes of course I have a purse she could borrow, I have dozens. Yes, yes of course I can help her with business cards. Uh how about tonight! Aha! I had offered the woman an invitation, at the time I just thought it was a way to spend some of my long lonely hours less alone. Doubt flared and tore at me when she didn’t agree within a measured breath. So I held my breath. The prospect of spending time with this person in particular excited me. She smiled and beauty touched that small place within where my real interests lay. I nearly retracted the invitation my reaction was so strong. Fire! Brimstone! Her eyes twinkled behind her glasses, to hell with hell! When she said sure I breathed again. I offered her dinner too, so she would stay longer, she accepted. Was this a date? No! I could not, should not, would not cross that line! We might just become friends, yes friends was okay wasn’t it. Surely I only wanted her around because I was lonely and needed a friend. My private place of special feeling was not, would not, could not be tingling. No, just friends! I don’t remember the rest of the day. I was too busy anticipating. Then I made the trek home, by bus and by foot. I warmed up my computer and laid my purse collection out on the couch. Then I paced from the door to the couch, not a long distance, waiting for a knock. I wasn’t sure she would come. She arrived with a smile. I think I had one too, though the idea of smiling was foreign to me. What did I have to smile about my mother was dying and I was practically indigent, but I had purses. Thank you god for nudging me into bringing so many! No! God would never do such a thing! God would never do something that would cause me to feel like that! Fire! Brimstone! Fire! Brimstone! Hells beyond imagination! But, Ashley had feelings like that… The woman chose a pink camouflage purse. I thought I liked her already. I offered her pizza, with toppings of her choice. She asked where I liked to order from. I was about to rock her world. I pulled a package of pizza crusts from the fridge, along with cheese and pepperoni. I extracted a can of tomato sauce from the pantry. Then apparently I worked magic because soon custom pizzas were baking in the oven. She actually asked where I learned to make pizza from scratch. I laughed and flippantly told her this wasn’t from scratch, when I did that I made the dough for the crust. I managed to burn her pizza but she politely ate it like it was ambrosia. Then we sat until I realized I was staring at her across my folding kitchen table. Time to get on task. I took her to my computer and helped her design her business cards. I had put a picture on mine so I helped her put one on hers. She friended me on facebook so I could use one of her self portraits from her profile on the card. I had a friend! A girl, friend. Stop it now! Fire! Brimstone! FIRE! BRIMSTONE! I printed her cards on cardstock and cut them out then we laminated them with packing tape. It wasn’t even six thirty. Monopoly! Let’s play monopoly! I let her win it was a short game, Lord of the Rings version using the one ring rule. We watched a little TV. I have no idea what we watched, or rather she watched. I watched her. Fire… Ashley leaped into her arms. She bled all over her, that’s how I discovered she was in heat again. I apologized profusely and loaned her an Eeyore sweatshirt to wear home, while I got the blood out of her sweatshirt. Home, that was the sticking point, she would have to go home. I offered to let her spend the night. I had a blow up mattress… She bowed out, her mom was coming to pick her up. I was crushed, but managed not to show it, until the words, “Maybe some other time?” Yes! YESS! Definitely there would have to be another time. How about tomorrow? No wait! I have to visit mom tomorrow, Friday? She nodded, we sat and talked. I felt like she bared her soul to me. She had mental illness, bipolar, like me. She had attempted to self medicate and ended up in rehab. She had been a bad girl and done things she was not proud of. I didn’t care. I didn’t really see any red flags. My main sticking point was that I shouldn’t like her this much. I told her what I was going through what had happened in my life, except my personal confusion and conflict. I just talked about the fluffy stuff, my parents divorce, the homeless shelter, my mother was dying. Then her mother arrived. Ashley was a jumper she tried to steal a hug goodbye. I put her back down and walked Her to the door. I might have walked her further, but my heart caught in my throat when she crossed the threshold and in my memory there is nothing until I saw her again that Friday. Friday, she came over and my heart started again. We played games, we talked we ate I don’t remember what but I cooked it from scratch. What a fine beginning. From there she was over more than she was not. Her grandfather drove us both to the day program and took on taking me to visit with my mother at the home. No more hour-long bus rides with a shopping tote on wheels. He dropped me off at the door… I went to the conference with my prearranged ride and searched her out the moment I arrived. We were inseparable. My assigned roommate was bumped from attendance for an unruly emotional support animal. I never saw her. My friend’s roommate never showed. I almost joined her in her room, but there was no real reason to. I had a posh hotel room to myself. I did hang out with her. I actually remember little about the conference except when it involved her. I remember a discussion she had with another woman about an LGBTQ meeting one evening. She asked if I wanted to go. I understood it had to do with “inappropriate” affections, but instead of brimstone and fire I just considered it curious. Why would she go to something like that. I didn’t go, I went to my room instead. I don’t remember for sure if she went. It was somewhere around midnight when the electric possibility that she might like other girls practically startled me awake… what no fire? No brimstone? Ashley liked Tinker? Could it be all bad? Fire, Brimstone, Hells beyond imagination… I let it go. We took the hotel’s courtesy shuttle to Walgreens and Burger King, in a less than savory neighborhood in Omaha. We bought butterfly wings and body glitter for costumes to wear to the Halloween party. I was more scared about how I felt about her than our actual physical safety. I was ignorant as to how dangerous our situation was. We made it back to the hotel without incident. No, wait we did witness a verbal battle between a woman and a man who was possibly her pimp? But we were fine. We went to the party together and I had fun at a party for the first time. The rest of the conference was a blur. About a month later, when she went home again for more clothes, her mother pointed out that she had moved in with me. That tidbit came as a total surprise to us both, but counting the nights she had gone home to sleep on one hand told us both her mother had a point. The next morning by chance I actually looked at myself in the mirror. There was a foreign expression on my face. I believe it is called a smile. My mother was dying, and I was smiling? My thoughts wandered back over the last month. Despite my mother’s condition getting no better, I think I might actually have been… Happy? I analyzed it. Aside from the first night I hadn’t really concerned myself about the nature of my feelings. I waited for the fire, the brimstone. My conscience echoed with crickets. A short time after that morning, perhaps within a few days we decided to ditch the crappy lunch provided by the day program and crossed the street to Village Inn. I was buying. She had no income. We got a lovely table and sat across from each other. We waited and ordered I do not remember what. What I do remember like a lightning bolt is what happened as we waited for our drinks. I stared at her like I did so much of the time. She glanced over the rim of her glasses at me and smiled at something I had been saying. It was electric, instinctual, beyond my control. I blurted out a loud non sequitur , “I LOVE YOU!” FIRE!!! BRIMSTONE!!! HELLS BEYOND MEASURE OR IMAGINATION!!! Fix it stupid! Before she gets the right idea! Uh Um… , “Like a sister?” Yeah that will work, “Like the sister I wanted, not the one that I got.” God, I hope she didn’t notice the red spreading hotly across my cheeks or read the lie in my eyes. I don’t remember the rest of the meal. I could have eaten tripe and hairy lamb’s balls for all I know. This was big. |
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