Pretend Babies. Bleeeeeech.

Inside the stroller: a "reborn doll," a lifelike doll that costs the "mommy" thousands of dollars and comes with free admission to the psychiatric facility of her choice.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Okay. When I was eight-years-old, my grandmother gave me for Christmas a toddler-sized Madame Alexander ® baby doll,  so life-like, so beautiful, so expensive, so plastic. I was extra careful with her handmade, pastel pink leather shoes and tiny white socks. I even hung up on baby hangers her soft linen, hand-smocked dress, her satin jacket and bonnet; and I only let her sleep in her delicate slip and some preemie Pampers ® my mother bought for me as an indulgence. I eventually lost the socks, wrinkled the clothes and pulled out her real-hair eyelashes because I wanted to see if they’d grow back. Motherfuckers did not. 

But that doll felt just like the real deal, and I learned what it might be like  one day to have an actual two-year-old in my arms. Today she is considered “well loved” if you’re appraising her resell condition. (Which I’m not.) 

The thing is, it’s FINE for a child in single digits to play pretend mommy with a cloth-and-vinyl doppelgänger.  For an adult woman, not so much. If you are over 18 and are still carting around a non-breathing infant, you A.) need to up your meds; B.) need to get laid pretty soon and maybe have a real baby; or  C.) need to contact the authorities and arrange a time to turn yourself in, you fucking, baby-killing freak. 

Even if you’re just a collector and have shelves of cutesy little Marie Osmond  creations, you’re still a nine on the creepy scale. But there are, apparently, companies that sell “reborn dolls,” frighteningly realistically styled dolls that can cost over ten grand. Shit. For that kind of money—maybe less!—you can get a real live baby from a crack whore. And while it is a bitch to wean a baby off drugs, the pay-off is that the kid will grow and eventually be able to go get you another goddamned beer out of the fridge while you watch Jerry Springer and continue to become one with your futon. Sweet!

But back to this new sickness. Women are actually ordering dolls that are made to resemble preemies (complete with intact I.V.’s), or even babies who look like their own children did at birth. Now, that’s just fucking wrong. Didn’t these dumbasses learn anything from Haley Joel Osment in AI: Artificial Intelligence? You can’t fuck around with Mother Nature. It always turns out bad. 

I’m sure that the retar…I mean, the females who buy “reborn babies” are victims of this virtual-oriented world in which we now reside. Kids can shoot to death any perceived enemy on violent video games with the flip of a controller. Or they can “take care” of a virtual pet online, and if they forget to feed it or to visit it ever again, at least they won’t find its mummified remains under the bed. People of all ages can invent whomever they want to be on FaceBook or on sites that let them create an avatar. 

If things keep going like this, we can all become completely anonymous and offer designer versions of ourselves over the great, global wireless network and have no physical contact whatsoever with anyone else real ever again. And we can all buy pretend babies, and have pretend spouses and pretend fabulous sex and pretend friends, and live in pretend mansions and drive pretend BMW’s, and go to our pretend jobs where our pretend bosses give us pretend promotions and pretend two-week vacations to pretend exotic locales until we retire after 30 pretend years and sail away on our pretend yachts into the pretend sunset on a pretend ocean in a pretend world in a pretend universe until we finally meet our pretend maker. 

Does this sound like a sane idea to you?

Doctors' Offices Blow

This guy was four fucking years old when he sat down in this doctor's office.

In a survey, 100 percent of the participants reported that they despised doctors. (Disclaimer: the only participant was my friend, Lisa’s cat, who had just had a hard, cold, glass tube shoved up her ass and then, jammed into her tender kitty flesh: a large-gauge piece of steel with some stinging contents that burned their way through all of her puttytat vessels. Meow.) But if I had asked more than the one cat, I am sure that close to 100 percent of the repliers would agree that going to the doctor, dentist, emergency room, etc. is as pleasant and welcome as a desert cactus inserted anally. Doctors are assholes who get obvious sexual satisfaction out of torturing their paying customers. Case in point: the waiting room.

If you think there is no hell, you have never sat in a doctor’s office waiting room three hours past your appointment, all the while fantasizing about stomping straight up there to that front desk and telling that receptionist that she can lick your unwiped ass and to tell the doctor that you wouldn’t seek him for medical assistance if you were melting from a nearby nuclear explosion, and he was the only phucking physician left on the planet with a supply of Morphine.

But of course, you cannot really go through with your daydream because then you’d just have to reschedule and wait even longer, and by then, who knows how advanced your sexually transmitted disease/brain tumor/dementia would be? It’s not like you go to the doctor for trivial things just because you saw yet another pharmaceutical commercial during prime time and have manifested the symptoms that require you to ask your doctor about Valtrex ®/Boniva ®/Once-a-day Cialis, ® so you can be ready anytime the moment is right. ® You know? You only go to the trouble of dialing the number, killing a quarter-hour while you slog through the automated system to get to the appointment desk, and waiting for the real person with whom you finally get connected to search for a day and time that is actually fucking convenient for you if you have a bona fide clinical reason to go to the doctor. Right? Right? I am wrong?

And then, after you get to the doctor’s office and circle the overfilled parking lot six times until you finally locate an undersized spot in which to squeeze your car so that you barely have enough room to open your door and dislodge yourself only if you exhale every cubic millimeter of air left in your lungs, you enter the waiting room, that benign space filled with brown places to sit, and crooked bad paintings with unidentified splatters on the glass, and multiple copies of golf magazines, and pamphlets about skin disorders and which nursing facility is right for your loved one. Fucking golf magazines? Are you fucking kidding me? Why not just throw in some fishing magazines, which are even more tedious and less inspiring than fucking fishing itself, so that I can slit my fucking wrists right here and now, and all the other drooling dickwads won’t have to wait as long to get back there to see the goddamned doctor?

For the love of Christ, why can’t they even put out some two-year-old copies of People? Maybe I have forgotten what television shows sucked ass two years ago. Maybe Charlie Sheen wasn’t a pathetically ineffectual and pusillanimous fucktard in 2009. (I stole much of that line from Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys, for which he was completely robbed of the Academy Award by Kevin Spacey, who—although he was good and sinister as Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects—did not deserve that gold statue in light of Pitt’s astounding performance.) Maybe I’m on crack if I think Charlie Sheen has ever been anything other than a pathetically ineffectual and pusillanimous fucktard. But still. Doctors have no business being in business if they cannot run their offices better than all of the ones I’ve ever been to, and I’ve spent approximately seven-eighths of my entire life at the doctor.

Every time I’ve ever brought it up, the physician has stammered some bullshit about his staff being responsible, as if he did not authorize the overbooking of patients so that there are four people scheduled every fifteen fucking minutes, and he is pulling in a thousand dollars a goddamned hour. Those wife-boob-jobs and trips to the Mediterranean ain’t gon pay for theyselves.

And it kills me that if I am ten minutes late for my appointment, the bastards can require me to reschedule for another day and charge me a no-show fee. What if I send the asswipes a bill for the hours I waste sitting in their uncomfortable freaking chairs smelling the elderly and enduring shrieking babies? I don’t know how this whole shit-scented system is ever going to change unless we, the people, stand up for our rights and demand to be treated properly. With respect. And at the actual fucking scheduled time.

F***ing Fair-Weather Friends

And so Billy was still friends with Jack, even though he could no longer run and jump and play basketball and now just blew a stupid, shrill whistle that scared away all the butterflies, and he probably smelled like pee.

Friend[frend]

–noun

1. a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.

2. a person who only contacts you when she needs something or when she needs to whine all about herself, or who jams her jagged knife in your back over and over and over as soon as the opportunity arises.

I’m cynical. And a shitty friend myself. Long-distance, that is. Phone conversations with me usually consist of the other party’s yelling assorted distorted blurbs and my bleating, “What? What?” multiple times until we both give up, exhausted and angry, with absolutely no communication whatsoever having taken place. Sucks.

I prefer email, but everyone else has moved on to texting, and I’m just getting the hang of that. Honestly, though, a face-to-face is the only true way for friends to catch up because they need the immediacy and the ability to see each other’s facial expressions and gestures and personalities and hidden meanings. And to hug if necessary. So I shun long-distance discourse most of the time, and since I can’t seem to get people all to live in some kind of compound with me, my friendships go global, get strained and then vanish.

Every now and then I’ll have a friend with whom I share a bond so strong that even the separation of many years and miles can’t make a dent. Or I think that for a while until I find out that I’m just kidding myself. My mother used to say, “You can count your true friends on one hand,” and I fucking hated that, almost as much as I hate admitting she was right. But my mother also said stuff like, “Eat that gristle. It isn’t going to hurt you,” so I have to wonder about the validity of many of her pronouncements. Anyway, she was accurate about the friends.

I usually love my friends so much that I’d do anything for them—even though it’s not like I have a lot to offer—which is funny because the origin of the word friend is some ancient word I cannot pronounce that means to love. I adore my friends, so it’s okay if they cry on my shoulder and get snot on my favorite t-shirt, or want to go out for dessert in the middle of the day so we can laugh at the stupid crap other people do, or if they think or say or do just about anything other than, like, murder someone I love or betray me.

As we all know, love tends to cloud our perceptions. We don’t realize that the person we love is telling all our fucking deepest secrets to anyone within earshot until the shit gets back to us. We don’t see the underlying jealousy and hatred until it’s too late. And we keep going back and back and back to toxic folks like a dog to its vomit, an image I’ve always found completely disgusting and gag-full, especially when you know that a dog will also eat its poo, which means that it can eat some bad cheese, vomit it out, go back and eat that, then poo the puke, and then eat the shit-of-upchucked-cheese. Son of a bitch! Buffy is never licking my mouth ever again. And this is exactly why when so-called friends treat you like shit that you should not keep going back to the buffet. You have let yourself become shit-of-upchucked-cheese!

Gack. I need a bath.

Fair-weather friends are people who only support you or come around when it is easy and convenient for them. Fuck that! I want tornado friends. Tsunami friends. Or at the very least severe-thunderstorm-warning friends. I am a crazy, deaf, loud, prone-to-bouts-of-extreme-depression, highly opinionated woman who isn’t afraid to point out how everything should be done. I am a fricking hurricane. So anyone who can’t seek shelter and ride out the tempest better not sign on.

I Hate it When I am Wrong.

It’s not like I don’t fuck up every day at least once. People who claim that they are always right are delusional assholes whose parents are siblings. Now, I’ve known people who’ve truly believed that I never own up to being wrong. But then I divorced most of them, so I didn’t have to listen to that bullshit anymore. I am the most wrong person ever. I feel my wrongness in my DNA. I admit it. I own it. I just hate that it’s true.

Take today for instance. I did not want to tackle the one million essays I had to grade because many of them are just brain-suckingly bad drivel with Fourth-World grammar. I bitched. I moaned. I procrastinated, which I’ve turned into an art; in fact, I am the Picasso of procrastination. I am procrastinating right now! Dawdling. Deferring. Postponing. Yeah.

Anyway. When I could lollygag no longer, I began reading a paper that had about as much merit and substance as a Weiner tweet. (Oooo. I love that. Weiner tweet. Weiner tweet. Weiner tweet. Doesn’t that just scratch all the right itches?) Vociferously I complained. Shrilly too. And, yes, I was whining, which has just been scientifically proven to be the most annoying and despised sound in the universe, like anyone who has ever been near a puling preteen or Fran Drescher didn’t already know that.

And then, my darling compatriot in the fight against execrable composition looked across the desk at me and said, “But it’s your job.” Pause. “You’re just like the waitress.”

Oh. Yeah.

I wrote about that very shit yesterday: bad servers who think their work is beneath them, so they take it out on the ones they are being paid to serve. Fuck. I’m a sucky server. Son of a bitch! 

If all the people who are enrolled in writing classes had already mastered the craft, then there wouldn’t really be a demand to pay me that staggering salary that institutions of higher learning reserve only for adjuncts. So. I’m shutting up. I was wrong. Maybe my husband is right—which he almost always is, by the way. Maybe I might be just possibly somehow helping someone, anyone, even just one learn how to write better. Huh. What a novel idea.

When Your Server Sucks

Exactly the expression of courtesy that I like to see on my waitress's face.

Yes, food service is a bitch. But that doesn’t mean you have to be one to go into it. One of the key words in the job description is service, a.k.a. “the act of helpful activity,” you indentured servtards who don’t seem to understand that your very paycheck—and thus your ability to fucking eat this month—depends upon my happiness. And, yeah. It’s not like you are snailing it to my table for free either. When you accepted the job, surely you realized that you were not going to be paid to lean.

Now, I’ve experienced stellar service at times, and it’s sad to say that I’ve made a huge deal out of those responsible because they are not the norm anymore. Generally, the folks who scan my package of women’s gentle laxatives at the pharmacy do so with a look best characterized by someone who needs a fucking enema. And the embryos at the fast food window all seem to be in a state of continual annoyance at my existence, as if my supersizing were chafing their mini balls. I just don’t get it. What happened to good, old-fashioned pride in a job well done? What happened to Bob down at the Chevron station who cheerfully filled up my tank and squeegeed my windshield with orgasmic glee? What happened to washing traveler’s feet for Christ’s sake?

Anyway.

The other day I met my lunch buddy, Lisa, at a certain sit-down place in town, and we had a crappy server of a different kind. She didn’t have a shitty attitude, or the kind of nonchalance that makes you want to drive a salad fork up her ass, or butt-of-warthog breath like that one guy who knelt down extra close to my olfactory system while he was breathfully explaining the menu specials at Olive Garden recently. Jesus. My whole meal smelled like colon.

No. This girl had impeccable timing. She wouldn’t come by when we wanted her for ages and ages like to take our order or refill my tea or bring me some extra napkins because that one little square that goes under my drink wipes approximately none of my sticky fingers; but then she would wait…wait…wait until the exact moment that Lisa or I arrived at the climax of an anecdote, and she’d materialize just in time to fuck it up. She’d just stand there, rocking on her heels, glaring at us in our awkward silence.

And about four seconds after she put our meals down, she popped back over and asked how we liked everything. Hell. We hadn’t even created saliva yet. And then she just hovered there like we were going to chew and rate right that fricking minute. Didn’t she have other customers whose plates needed spitting in or some stuck-on shit to scrape off a toilet or some translating in the kitchen to do? She clearly does not belong in a “people career.” She needs to work with lab samples or conveyor belts or the newly lobotomized. Whatever.

I realize that food service is usually the place where most folks test the waters of the job world, to see what it’s like to swim upstream for an all-mighty paycheck. But listen. If you hate people, if you think your fecal matter is somehow floral scented, if you are more interested in having your every need met by a group of scantily clad and oiled men than in helping someone else have a nice day, then please. Just take off that apron, unpin that name tag, and stay the fuck out of my restaurants.

It's Officially Summmmmmer

And then a large marsh monster shot up out of the murky water and ate Janie, leaving Carol all too aware of her rapidly approaching, painful and bloody fate. This is why humans do not belong in water that is not chlorinated weekly by some fellow who looks fetching in a Speedo ® even if it IS over 100 friggin’ degrees out.

 

Ah. Summer. Or as I like to call it, Season of Searing, Soul-Sucking Suffering, especially if you live in Georgia. Or on Earth. Today, I thirsted for over an hour in the community pool because it was 103 degrees, and so was my Coke Zero ® after about 30 seconds, and damned if I was going to drag my fat ass out of the water and cause mass hysteria and devastating blindness just to go get some ice.

Even the pool water was tepid, and by that I mean its temperature and its temperament. The waves were lackluster and could barely work up a normal lapping. Birds fluttered their wings a half stroke and then gave the fuck up and fell. Bugs that landed in the water just went ahead and died to save themselves the effort of trying to escape. Small children…no. Those fuckers still had their alien energy, all springy and jumpy and screamy, and if the US government could just figure out how to harness that shit and use it for fuel, we could once and for all give a collective middle finger to foreign oil. Not that I expect the government ever to come up with something simple and inexpensive and practical that would not only change forever the balance of world power, but would also free the public’s pools from the strangling grip of malevolent moppets.

Anyway. Where was I? The heat. Yes. The heat. I’ve always said that cold is far preferable because you can pile on more and more layers, but there is only so much you can take off when it’s sweltering. Once you get to skin level, people get all upset when you start peeling that off. And then the vomiting is annoying and smells, particularly in extra-hot weather.

So what are the options when the mercury is high or whatever they use in thermometers now since mercury turned out not to be such a fun thing to play with after all? Well. Walk-in coolers are good. You can get a part-time job in fast food and just stand around in the cooler, eating those pre-packaged desserts, which is not at all stealing if no one ever finds the wrappers. Or you can work in a morgue. I hear those are kept pretty chilly, so folks don’t rot until after they are in the ground. Or how about hanging out with Anna Wintour for a day? If you believe 60 Minutes, the editor of Vogue is such a stone cold bitch that the air around her for a ten-mile radius has visible frost particles. 

I don’t know. 

I never thought I’d say this. But maybe Al Gore is right. There is actual global warming. And it is caused by all the fucking hot air that comes out of blustering baby-kissers like Al Gore. So maybe if we just plug up our politicians, the climate will level off a few degrees, and we can get back to enjoying the things that matter in life. Like Freon. And refrigerated, bottled water. And central air conditioning. And other people who cook in restaurant kitchens so you don’t have to make dinner and get all sweaty. And autumn. Which will be here in only three short months.

Beggars Can't be Friggin' Choosers

First of all, WASH. A clean beggar is less likely to scare away potential suckers. And, damn. How hard is it to find a clean cup?

For some weird reason, I attract beggars. I also tend to draw flies, and small children flock to be near me. Perhaps I smell. I don’t know. But honestly, since my youth, I have frequently suffered the uncomfortable approach-of-the-beggar, and until last weekend, I didn’t know how to properly handle such an encounter.

Okay. I take that back. One other time in my life, just off a ragged shift as a burger-flipper in the mother of a hotbox that is Wendy’s kitchen, a timid fellow with a draggy leg advanced on me in the parking lot, and I dispensed of his sorry ass rapidly and righteously. He handed me a card on which was printed, “I am deaf. Please help me by accepting this key chain.” Or something like that. What it didn’t say was, “Give me a dollar for this piece of shit that any Sunday school fucker with some beads and opposable thumbs could have assembled in less than a minute, so I will be earning, like, $60 an hour, which is ten times what you just made in that mother of a hotbox that is Wendy’s kitchen.” But I knew that’s what he meant. And as a deaf girl with a father who is also pretty damned deaf and who has worked his ass off his entire life, I did not appreciate the gentleman’s pursuit. I unleashed upon him an assault that he couldn’t hear—unless the deafness were a ruse, which is entirely possible—and with my pointed gestures, backed. His. Ass. Up. He truly fled as fast as his draggy leg would allow.

It took me thirty years to gradually grow my balls again.

In the past when beggars appeared, I’d sweat and fret and guilt-out and hand over some cash like an idiot. I knew the fools were going to blow the cash on alcohol or drugs. But I used to be powerless against the thought that the person might possibly somehow be hungry. And I cannot stand for another person to be hungry, except maybe the people in Ethiopia or wherever because they are not up in my face all the time, and when pictures of their crying, fly-covered selves flash on late, late night television, I solve that with a simple click of the remote and then go get a snack.

But there are whole networks of fake-needy assholes who stand there forlornly with those retarded signs (“Stranded. Need gas.”) at interstate off-ramps. These folks work a circuit in which someone drives the lot of them to the various exits, and they rotate all around large cities or smaller areas, just raking in YOUR hard-earned money. Tax free, people! Stop giving these fuckers your money. You are going to pay taxes on it. Why should deadbeats get to have it for freeeeeeee? They fully intend for the guilt-out to work. And for all these years, I’ve let it work. But I graduated from handing out my coins to diverting my gaze—pretending I was concentrating on getting my air conditioner vents to all point on me, for instance—to speeding up to make it through the goddamned light so that I would not be the car right next to the beggar. It is so much harder to bite into my fresh, hot Whopper with cheese when there is a (pseudo) starving man pressed against my window.

What permanently changed my ways, you ask? Here’s what. Last weekend, my daughters and I were on a journey to visit my dad for a little pre-Fathers’ Day celebration when the elder had to go potty, which is just a colossal surprise since she never has to go every fifteen freaking minutes, especially right after we just stopped a mile before, and I asked her specifically to go squeeze some pee out, but no.

So we pulled over, and my younger daughter and I stood conversing while waiting for the liquid gold to fill up my gas tank. This dude in paint-spattered clothes sauntered up to my child and started his spiel. Perhaps he didn’t see me as he slinked over. His mistake. My daughter, not well-prepared for such an onslaught, retreated into her shell and peeked out with her large beseechers to Mommy for help. I didn’t even give the guy time to finish his question. I rushed forward, grabbed him by the nutsack, slammed a foot into his left leg so that it cleanly snapped backward at the knee joint, jammed my fingers into his eye sockets and left him broke and broken there on the oil-spotted Georgia asphalt. Okay. I might be exaggerating a little. I told him the fuck off, though, and didn’t stop telling him until he found someone else to harass. If you are a parent or if you even have a pet, you know exactly where my tirade originated. Just leave my cub alone.

Anyway, I’m not going back to guiltville now. Beggars better beware. I’ve had it with lending a helping hand only to have it returned to me with bite marks and a whole lot of empty.

It's Fodders' Day

Oh, joy. Another goddamned tie.

My father is a rock… and a rocket scientist (okay, technically an aerospace engineer, but still). Unfortunately, he is in a minority: Divine Daddies. I’ve never known another father who started his career as an Apollo engineer at N.A.S.A., managed to obtain and to hold a very well respected civil position at the air force base, PLUS earned his Eagles in The National Guard, jogged six miles each evening, worked in the yard, diddled around in his workshop, AND still had time to throw the baseball or Frisbee ® with me every single day after he got home from work, where he instructed his secretary ALWAYS to interrupt whatever he was doing if my brother or I called, no matter what. Now, THAT’S a frickin’ dad!

Other dads I’ve known: fucking sperm donors. Made a deposit and that’s about it. I know there is a lot of grousing on the part of dads who are “forced” to pay child support. One dad in my past wrote “blood money” on the damned child support check. That made the judge really happy. One of the reasons that fathers are often these days considered fodder, which means “people considered as readily available and of little value,” is because of boorish behavior like that. I could tell you other bad dad stories that would straighten your short-and-curlies. But I won’t. Instead I will bitch about the spelling of the holiday intended to honor all papas.

It’s FATHERS’ Day, dammit. Not FATHER’S Day. Do you see the difference? If you don’t, then you are probably one of the masses spelling it wrong.  If you spell it the second way, then you are claiming that the holiday is a celebration of only one father, and it sure as hell better be mine. The correct way to make the plural possessive so that you are showering praise on two or more begetters is to place the apostrophe after the s. 

Guess what? Congress spelled it wrong in their 1913 bill to establish Fathers’ Day, and again in its 2008 commendation of the founder of the holiday, (technically) Sonora Dodd, who spelled it RIGHT when she petitioned the government to make the day an official holiday, but who should have slapped her pappy for giving her such a sucky name. Still. Leave it to the United States’ government to promote incorrect punctuation. 

I believe it should be a capital offense to spell Fathers’ Day or any other plural holiday incorrectly, and that all those marijuana pushers should be cleared out of jail to make plenty of room for the grammar abusers, including all the Congressmen who voted in favor and didn’t fix the spelling when they had the chance. Alas. I am not in charge. Happy Fathers’ Day anyway.

Pain Murdering Medication

I admit it. I want to commit murder. Right now. I don’t just want namby-pamby pain killers. I want pain torturers. Pain assassins. Pain annihilators. If Ahnold hadn’t been such a total fucktard idiot, I’d want the Terminator to destroy pain’s ass. But as it is, I will have to settle for Aleve ®.

Why am I in so much turmoil, you ask? Well. Here’s what. For about ten hours today, I worked like an immigrant out in the 1000-degree shed where we store all the shit that won’t fit into the apartment. I repacked, retaped, and rearranged alllll the quintillion boxes of miscellaneous crap so that I now know exactly where everything is, and all the stuff that I want to go away is in the front, annnnndd, I am utterly certain that there are no motherfucking cock roaches in any of my triple-sealed packages. I was attacked by a swarm of flying beetles before I could close up for the night. One of them flew straight down my shirt betwixt the twins, nearly causing me in my apoplexy to drop my mother’s antique mixer with the glass bowl. That would have been très tragic for the beetle population. I did trap a few dozen of those sons of bitches in the oven-y garage on my way out. I hope they pop like corn kernels. At least I know they won’t be nestling.

Anyway. When I began this morning, clouds masked the sun and the thermometer said 83, so I thought I’d better get at it before the upcoming heat wave next week. Unfortunately, what I consider morning is way close to afternoon, so just after I dug in, the damned sun burned its way through the thunderheads and had the audacity to shine and glare and radiate the rest of the day. Bastard.

Even though I chugged Coke Zero ® and ice water, I just sweated all the liquid out as soon as it went in. I had no idea that my shorts could adhere so permanently to my ass. Fortunately, I found a paint scraper while I was repacking. And I completely get the phrase “bone tired” now. My back muscles mutinied several hours in, but I kept myself going with the promise of a long, cool, relaxing bath. By the time I was finished, I was looking so forward to total immersion, I thought I was a Mormon. But then I had sweet tea with my painkillers. So that didn’t last long.

Here’s what torches my meringue, though. Why would pain medication manufacturers allow their products to be sealed in bottles that require a degree in rocket science to open? Old people generally have gnarly arthritis and bad eyesight, yet we are supposed to line up those tiny assed little arrows and then use our thumbs’ super-strength to pop off the lid? Who designed that shit? Hitler? It’s just like Midol ® containers. Do the fine folks at Bayer ® not realize that a woman in need of menstrual relief caplets is the last person who should have to use a fucking chainsaw to open the bottle? 

If I were in charge, I’d sell pain medication in brightly colored bags at the check-out like M & M’s ®. Hell. I’d even cover them in chocolate because everyone knows the health benefits of chocolate, what with all its anti-oxidants and endorphin-production-stimulators. But, as usual, I’m not in charge. Still don’t know why.

Rain, Rain, Go to Hell.

And now a poem.

Rain, rain, go away.

Please come back…

…never.

You bitch.

Anyone who knows anything at all about me has no doubt about my feelings toward rain or anything close to rain or even just high humidity or fog. Aside from murder, torture, rape, child abuse and Charlie Sheen, rain is the number one most horrible thing in the world. Rain provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the planet other than helping to nourish crops and plants and flowers and trees and streams and rivers and thereby provide food and drinking water for millions of people and animals. All it does is ruin my fucking hair, which already takes forever to style in the morning or afternoon or whenever I get up and have to go out in public. Plus, those falling droplets just accumulate everywhere, so that my shoes get all soaked when I have to run through the Wal Mart parking lot, and then my feet are all cold and squishy, and my shoes smell like shit later, and I have to throw them out.

And don’t even get me started on how I can’t see to drive even with the wipers on HIGH sometimes because the sky has decided to take a big ol’ piss right when I need to go somewhere. Get a Depends ®. Damn. Plus, you saw what happened to Carrie Bradshaw because she just happened to be standing near a puddle when her bus came by. I know I sure as hell don’t want my nips showing like that, so fuck puddles. And buses.

Oh, and then there are the floods, people. Nice, brown sludge—or neon orange if you live in the South—in my house is not my idea of fricking fun, and more than once I’ve had to shovel thick Georgia-clay-soup out of my living room after it ruined everything I owned except for the stuff high on the walls and up in cabinets and on shelves, but nearly everything I owned, so it still sucked. 

If I were in charge, I would enact legislation forthwith declaring rain a public nuisance and a felony, and then the armed forces would have to create a big, earth-sized rain catcher—clear vinyl or something so that the sun could still shine through—so that all the rain could be funneled into a big reservoir, which would then allow humans to attach those cute little outdoor showers like they had on Gilligan’s Island and other valves that could be hooked to hoses for watering and drinking, and my hair would only get wet when I wanted it to. It would be perfect; but, as usual, I am not in charge. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

Eerie Coincidences Should Never be Ignored!

In this spooky, hazy photograph, there are no children on the playground. Eerie.

If you haven’t seen at least some version of the famous (but faulty) list of coincidences between the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln, then I don’t know. You’re blind maybe. Or in a vegetative state. And in that case I don’t know how you are reading this, but what the hell. I need all the readers I can get, so even the brain dead are welcome. But the point is that there are some eerie coincidences in life that cannot be ignored.

On the Kennedy/Lincoln list, it’s strange that Oswald (Kennedy’s killer) ran from a warehouse to a theatre, while Booth (Lincoln’s slayer) ran from a theatre to a warehouse, that both assassins were killed before they could stand trial, and that both presidents’ successors were Southern Democrats named Johnson born in '08. Eeeeerie. Most of the other items on the list are stretching for a connection, and some are down right ridiculous. That’s because humans love to find patterns because patterns give the illusion of order in a fucking disorderly world. (Although I think the universe and nature are pretty orderly themselves; the human part is the shit in the toilet.) 

Anyway. Whenever I detect orderliness, my neck hairs stand on end. But then they fall right back down because standing up in the first place is so much of an effort like everything else in my life. Still. I just can’t pretend that there are no coincidences sometimes. And some of the concurrences are pretty damned amazing. Take, for example, these correlations that I noticed when comparing Georgia and Indiana, two states in which I’ve split my time for most of the last 18 years.

• Both states’ names have 7 letters and end with an “a.”
• Georgia has 159 counties, the most of any state in the Union besides big ass Texas. The numbers 1, 5, and 9 are all not 2.
• Indiana has 92 counties, so fuck that.
• Both Georgia and Indiana have 12 months and 4 seasons, if you can really count winter as a season in Georgia when it is usually 75-fucking-degrees at Christmas so that the entire Christmas spirit is shot to hell. Thanks a lot, Georgia.
• It is hot as hell in July in Georgia and cold as hell in January in Indiana. Spooky.
• Both Georgia and Indiana have had governors with the first name "James," while Indiana has had governors named "Ratliff" and "Ashbel," which is fucking embarrassing, and their parents should have been ashamed and at the very least held under water until they stopped breathing and then let up and revived, so they would’ve understood the seriousness of giving their sons moronic names like that.
• Both Georgia and Indiana have had no women governors, yet both allow women to live within the states’ borders. Eerie.
• Residents of both Indiana and Georgia typically live in houses with at least 1 door.
• Most people who live in both Indiana and Georgia have 2 eyes.
• I’ve lived in both Georgia and Indiana.

Now. What stunning conclusions can be drawn based on this astounding list of coincidences that I’ve assembled? Not a fucking thing that I know of. But that doesn’t matter. Thinking long and hard about the similarities between Indiana and Georgia was a perfectly healthy and productive way to spend three hours of my Thursday, so don’t act all snooty like I had way more important things to do. Those dishes under the bed and the wadded-up, dirty clothes in the back yard can wait until tomorrow.

Time is NOT on my Side Because Time is a Stingy Bitch.

You know. If she spent half as much time working and taking care of her family as she does perfecting her circus skills, she might have a real job that pays a decent wage, and her children wouldn't have to wear shit off the sale rack at Wal Mart, and they wouldn't be out in the yard looking for something to eat because she never cooks. Bitch.

Okay. This is going to be short to make up for the extra long crap I’ve been spinning lately…and also because I don’t have enough fricking TIME to write a big, long diatribe about how much of a ball-breaking bitch time is. If I were in charge of the world, I would immediately pass legislation to increase the number of hours in the day to 40 and to strip Charlie Sheen of his American citizenship because he is a fucking embarrassment to the country. So you can see why I am not in charge of the world. Damn. I’m not even in charge of most of my own bodily functions and none of my thought processes, but I sure as hell don’t have time to discuss that, so stay focused. God. You’re always trying to get me off track.

Anyway, time sucks. It goes too damned fast, especially when you are old as magma like I am. I was just getting used to writing 2000 on my checks, and now you tell me it’s half way through June, 2011? Who allowed this? Probably some MAN who only needs three-and-a-half minutes to straighten his comb-over and get out the door in the morning. Asshole. It takes me three-and-half-minutes to work up a good pee in the morning. And then right when I think I’m finished and stand up, more from some second, hidden bladder comes screaming down the pipeline just in time for the pulled-up panties to catch it. Nice. No wonder I never have any clean underwear. Who has time to wash lingerie anyway? That requires freaking Woolite ® and a sink, and most of the time the sink is full of dishes that I didn’t get to, like I’m going to hurry and put dinnerware in the dishwasher when I’m late for whatever. Besides, crust comes off with Cascade ® so, yeah.

I know that I’m not alone in my dissatisfaction of the time system some ancient fuck invented. Practically everyone I talk to says things like, “Time goes so fast!” or “There aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done!” or “Time sure flies when you’re having fun!” or “Time flies like arrows, but fruit flies like bananas.” Or “I fucking hate Charlie Sheen; don’t you?” I don’t know what we can do about the issue, but I’m going to write my Congressman as soon as I have a sec. Those idiots on Capitol Hill ought to be doing something productive besides whining about silly shit like health care and war and the economy anyway.

Traffic Helllllllll

Whoever started this is so dead.

I. HATE. TRAFFFFFFFFFFFIC.

It absolutely never fails. If I am the slightest bit late, there is no way in hell that I’ll catch all the green lights or that the lane I choose will be flowing quickly and steadily all the way to my destination. So I either barely make it on time, or I race in just over the clock and sweat like a thoroughbred and breathe extra heavy for twenty minutes. Now. If I am desperately late, then it absolutely never fails: There will be a fucking jam o’traffic worse than an 89-year-old-red-meat-addict’s bowel clog. Take today for instance. (No. Please. Fucking TAKE it. Today sucked 89-year-old balls.)

First, an appointment at Social Security forced me to get up out of a freaking comfortable sleep that I had been enjoying, goddammit, for three solid hours. Then, there was harassment at the Social Security office, a cheerless, thunderstorm-colored place where people are paid by me to treat me like shiiiiiiiiiit. Loved that. I made it back home in time, however, to snag a two-hour tour, a two-hour tour…wait. That was Gilligan. And it was three hours. Leave me alone. I’m damaged. And sleep-deprived.

Anyway, I did squeeze in a two-hour nap before I had to bathe in preparation for work, and I don’t know, but my decision to go to Social Security “as is” this morning probably didn’t help my cause. Folks tend not to give you what you want when you smell like a  hospice patient.

Due to technical difficulties, I did not, in fact, leave my residence until 2:42. I am supposed to be in class at 3:05-ish. The drive from Cacatown to Shitville is about 20 miles. The speed limit most of the way is 70 mph. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, determine the odds that a Subaru Outback with a fourth of a tank of gas will cover the necessary terrain to ensure that my ass will be on time for class. (Hint: Fucking zero.)

As soon as I hit the freeway, I could sense trouble. Perhaps I was tipped off by the never-ending lines of SUV’s, semis and other asshole-navigated vehicles in front of me. Or all the lights that were the bad color. (If you don’t get the reference to The Village, I applaud you for your intelligence and good taste in cinema.) Dead-stopped traffic is never, ever a good sign. After a medium cursing of God and an extra-large sweat production, the wall o’auto began to inch forward at about one-half mile per hour. This went on until September. Finally, the car cluster picked up the speed a little, and we all got confident and kicked it to 20, then 30, then 35, then…Nope. Bad-colored lights again. More stalling. More revving. More inching. Until suddenly and without warning, the whole damn mess of moving metal split off into separate lanes, all traveling at 80 mph. What the?! That is such bullshit! If there is a jam that makes me a quarter of a year late for fucking work, then there better be dead bodies, at the very least.

I just can’t stand the entire mechanism of traffic jams, especially when you get to the “clearing,” and there is no reason, no answer, no closure as to why in the bloody hell all twelve-million of us were cruising along for precious minutes at NO mph. Did someone have to pee? Did a secret sink-hole open and swallow lanes of cars and then close back in time for me to get on the interstate? Did I ever mention that I have an active imagination?

So. I did arrive almost on time today, even with the slow going on the highway and then the stupid thin girl who took up the last two faculty parking spots because she has quite an eye for straight parking and obviously reads well. I hope she went to register, and she gets all 8 AM classes. That’s when the traffic is at its gnarliest with lots of gridlocks, and it will serve her skinny ass right.

Pukinnnnnnn

When I get restless, I have to do something crazy and rash and risky, or as I like to call it: eating something sweet, then eating something salty, then something sweet, then something salty, then something sweet, then something salty, and so on, until I have stretched my stomach tighter than Joan River’s face. And unfortunately, I get fidgety a lot, and that means unless I employ an old friend, I go around most of the time looking thirteen months pregnant. The trouble is that my old buddy, my old pal— bulimia—makes me sick. Literally.

I’ve thrown up more times than all the living Miss America contestants and the Housewives-of-Wherever combined. Any kind of vomiting you can imagine, I’ve mastered. There’s the immediately-after-eating retch, the late-stage-digestion hurl, the binge-and-purge, the quickie-puke-after-ingesting-anything-whatsoever, the two-hour-heave-to-make-sure-you-got-it-all, the firehose (when you’ve had a lot of liquid), the fireworks (when you’ve had mostly dry goods), and the country-kleenex (when chunks come out of your nose).  Some days, I would upchuck twenty times or more. To avoid being caught, I spent a lot of time cleaning the throne. When I left a restaurant bathroom, the toilet was clean enough to lick. (See, I didn’t even gag right there at the suggestion of licking a public potty. My gag reflex only works manually now.)

Although I have no idea how I knew innately the proper technique, I remember precisely the first time I voluntarily downloaded a dinner, and I recall why. Thirty years ago, after my philandering mother bulldozed my idyllic fantasy childhood façade, she further ruined my existence by demanding my company at her boyfriend’s house. Every. Single. Fucking. Night. I hated my life, and I had good reasons.

Good Reasons I Hated My Life

1)         I was a teenager. Duh.

2)        I was ugly. 

3)    And fat.

4)        I never wanted to live with my mother in the first place. Even when she was married to my father. When she announced that she was divorcing him, she asked, “Who do you want to live with?”  After I replied without hesitation, completely ignoring her mangling of the rules of English grammar, that I preferred Daddy, she shot me “the look” and said, “Change your mind or I’ll change it for you.” Ah. Democracy.

5)        I despised Mother’s boyfriend. He had a really attractive bank account and inflamed skin. There was a glass of gin permanently fused to his beefy hand from the microsecond that he got home after work until he passed out at 10. He grilled some sort of meat every night, and because he moved at alcoholic-stupor-speed, we always sat down to eat at 9:30. Every night. Do you know what happens when you gorge on chicken and potatoes and buttery vegetables and fresh-from-the-oven rolls right before you go to bed? Do you? Well, I’ll tell you: You get fucking fat. Or fatter, in my case.

I had to do something to take control of one simple thing in my purgatory. So I began tossing my cookies on a regular basis. I loved the high I got from the rush of relaxing brain juices that flooded my system after I reviewed each day’s menu; and the knowledge that I was, in effect, giving my mother and her pickled pal the finger by flushing the food they forced me to eat, gave me power. Unfortunately, it also ate the enamel off my teeth, infected my salivary glands, and made me insane. Or insaner, in my case.

In 1986, I’d been regurgitating daily for almost eight years when Meredith Baxter Birney starred in a movie called Kate’s Secret, about a beautiful suburban woman, who—although she’s married to a successful lawyer and has a lovely daughter—only feels in control when she makes herself throw up after she snarfs down entire cakes. The film was released the day before my 23^rd birthday, and I realized that I was just like Kate except for the beautiful part, and I didn’t want to have a heart attack and die so young on some nasty bathroom tile. 

I woke my first husband, and hysterically confessed my affliction and my fear. He was in medical school, so I assumed he’d embrace me with physician’s compassion and pronounce that we’d get through it together. Instead he rolled back over and resumed snoring. I spent the rest of the night in our guest room, weeping and cutting my wrist with an old key. I kind of wanted to die, but mostly just liked the physical pain every time I dug the metal into my flesh because it masked all my emotional fractures.

The next morning, my husband scoffed at my blood-crusted wrist and scheduled me to see a med school colleague in her mental health residency. He drove me to my weekly appointments, and afterwards to an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. I always left their toilets cleaner than they were when I arrived.

But after thirty years of bathing my esophagus and throat and teeth with a nice soup of hydrochloric acid and liquefied food, my teeth look like bloody hell, I have a Godzilla-sized case of GERD, and Chloraseptic ® should be sending me fucking stock options because of the amount of their throat spray I’ve purchased. I realized last year that I’d finally have to throw my sick sidekick out on its ass. I’d love to say I don’t miss you, you son-of-a-bitch, bulimia. But you were so easy. Now I’m going to have to try something radical. Like diet and exercise. Oy. Otherwise, Goodyear is eventually going to succeed. They keep trying to launch my ass over fucking Atlanta.

The Stupidest Shit in the WORLD

No wonder we're having all these earth quakes and tsunamis. These big fucking people are trying to balance on the continents.

There is no civility anymore, no decorum, no standard of public decency. God knows I cuss like a starving crack whore, but I give people a fucking choice if they want to hear it or not. What has happened to consideration for others, to giving a shit about one’s fellow man, to putting anything at all above one’s own self-serving, puerile wants? In the 60’s and 70’s, eons before most of the assholes who think they are running the world now were even blown wads busting through a ripped condom on the way to their fifteen-year-old mothers’ uteri, my parents could stare down at me or my brother and stop our unapproved behavior cold. We did NOT run in the grocery store or cannonball into the public swimming pool or dare to talk back to an adult in charge without the certainty of a soul-shrinking glare-of-doom all the way home and an asswhooping when we got there. With a belt. And we didn’t fucking sue our parents or call DFACS either. We knew the consequences ahead of time, and we were prepared to suffer them if we screwed up.

The problem is that now, even for children who need to learn boundaries, there are no consequences for wrong behavior and plenty of repercussions for any and every action that might possibly maybe somehow perhaps offend a goddamned dust mite. Prejudice sucks ancient elephant balls, so my eyeballs spend a lot of time bugged out in reaction to the bullshit I’ve heard spill out of embryonic fucktards’ feed slots: gay slurs, racial hatred, religious intolerance. To assert that any other human being is less just because he or she exhibits different clothes or skin or speech or standards is the stupidest shit in the world. And, yes, I acknowledge that I am slamming the prejudiced, which is, in effect, prejudicial. The difference is that I don’t like prejudice; I don’t appreciate the hatred and nasty vibes and killing done in the name of what’s right; but I don’t live a delusion that I am in any way better than people who act infantile out of ignorance.

But here is the rub: all people, no matter what, should feel free to express their opinions without fear. Even if those people are prejudiced. They should just proffer those thoughts in a way that allows the opposition to choose not to partake. If you plan to rap misogynystically, don’t beatbox it on Disney Radio. If you simply must declare your hatred for all things Bush, stay off Fox. If you can’t stand bigotry, don’t hand out pamphlets at a "clan" rally. And if you are a bigot, keep it to your fucking self. And that brings me to the shit that ties for first place in the stupidest-in-the-world category. If you get easily offended, don’t go where there might be offensive shit. Like a stand-up comic’s show.

When was the last time a comic made anybody laugh without offending someone? It’s their fricking job. Comedians make fun of people, you idiots who go hear them and then get your panties all in a wad after some wisecrack about drug addicts or trailer park dwellers or Republicans or fat people or gay people or blondes because you are one or more of those, and you think you are more important than anyone else in the universe and deserve to have a ginormous legal settlement to prove it. It isn’t even about hurt feelings or true damages, which is what lawsuits are supposed to represent. No. Greedy people just tend to hunt for an angle, any angle that might be lucrative. Hey! That guy just said something about gay people/Muslims/Southerners/the obese, and everyone laughed, and I think he was directing that at me. With hatred. I think he should write me a big, fat check. No offense to the “weight challenged.”

It is awfully hard to take a stand on any issue in the 21^st century without the fear of being labeled anti-this or anti-that. But it isn’t that hard to be civil. Believe what you believe and don’t ram it down anyone’s throat. But be open to other points of view. Teach your children manners. Don’t be hatin’. Laugh if it’s funny. Don’t read profane blogs if you don’t like cussing. Hold the door and let someone else go first. Say, “thank you.” Give love a chance. Quit blaming the world for your freaking problems.  And for God’s sake, stop jumping in the goddamned public pool when people are trying to float in peace.

Thank you.