Good Ol' Nebraska

The good life? For whom? Tornadoes, maybe.

Do you know why all the trees in Iowa lean to the left? Because Nebraska sucks. I’ve been in some really suckass places in my life, but you know what sucks more than Nebraska? Fucking nothing.

Three times now I’ve been forced to drive the total distance of the state on one of the loneliest stretches of interstate in the country. That means 455 miles of utter, desolate shit. The speed limit is 75 for a reason. So you can hurry the fuck up and get out of Nebraska. I’m pretty sure the residents are fully cognitive of their suckiness too because we stopped at a Mickey D’s, which was one of the only locations in the state with actual live people—although all of the specimens were ancient with their gnarled, liver-spotted fingers wrapped around their steaming Styrofoam ® coffee cups and their yellowed, mistrusting eyes peering just over the brims—and the bathroom was so goddamned cold that my pee turned into an icicle as soon as it hit the air, and it just broke off and fell in the toilet. Only business managers who intend their customers to rotate rapidly in and out keep their thermostats on fucking frigid.  I completely understand why hundreds of Nebraska’s cities have less than 1,000 residents. Not many people care to advertise so blatantly that they are 100 % sucky.

Guess what early Nebraskans used to call homes? Sod houses. You know what those are, right? Anyone? Anyone? Okay. Y’all suck too. Sod houses are humble abodes made of large cubic chunks of sod. Like bricks, but made of dirt with a little grass on top. The worst thing about sod houses besides the dank smell and floors that never come clean no matter how many times you mop is that when it rains and you are lying on your straw-filled mattress under a moldering quilt, snakes and worms and bugs fall out of the dirt on your head. In your hair. In your mouth if it happens to be open. The creatures that live in dirt like to burrow deeper when it rains to get away from the water. Unfortunately, there isn’t that far to go when the sod is no longer attached to the ground. Hence the sudden pile of slimy, crawly things all over your bed. Gackkkk. Good ol’ Nebraska.

We made the mistake of booking a hotel in Lincoln on one of our jaunts through the nation’s asshole, and there were lumps in the carpet. Large, creature sized lumps that were spongy and extremely disconcerting to discover in the darkness on the way to the bathroom to drop an icicle. There is no way that the carpet installers didn’t notice that they were covering palpable piles, and where else but Nebraska would allow carpet mounds?  The only good thing I’ve ever heard about Nebraska is that it sports the world’s largest porch swing. 26 children or 18 adults can fit on it at one time. That seems cool, and I’d like to see it. But it probably has a seat of poison-tipped nails, and all the children just cry for the whole ride and then die. Good ol’ Nebraska. 

Picture from newsroom.unl.edu.

Being on Time is Against my D.N.A.

Elizabeth Taylor and I have so much in common. The double rows of eyelashes. The multiple marriages. The millions in jewels. All right. That last one is bullshit. But here’s a true third similarity: Elizabeth and I are notoriously late for everything. I’m so going to copy Ms. Taylor’s last wish too. She had her burial service start 15 minutes before her remains arrived, so that she’d even be tardy to her funeral. God, I love that.

My lack of punctuality goes back a long, long way. I’m pretty sure that I grabbed the inner walls of my mother’s uterus so that I wouldn’t pop out, and she could stop and have Salisbury steak for lunch at the S & S Cafeteria on the way to the delivery ward. After her gyno told her that she was already dilated and needed to hoof it to the hospital, she made it clear to anyone in a twelve mile radius that she was starving and that the medical staff wouldn’t let her eat once she arrived. God knows I always wanted to do every fucking thing in my power to make sure my mother was happy. So I latched onto some womb and racked up my first tardy.

In elementary school, my daddy actually drove out of the driveway and left my ass because my slothful morning routine kept making him late for work. And my daddy hates, hates, hates being one nanosecond late for anything. He warned and scolded and pleaded and threatened. And then he made good on his promise. I was horrified for about no minutes before I realized that I’d have the house and the television (tuned to cartoons) all to myself for the day. I had just settled into the recliner as Josie and the Pussycats started, and I’d almost gotten the spoonful of Lucky Charms ® to my lips when Daddy came back to get me. Damn his heart of gold. Fuck his guilty conscience. I just know that ten hours of T.V. watching and junk food would have taught me a lesson for sure. Alas.

In high school, Mrs. Cherry, my homeroom teacher finally wrote me up and sent me to the principal’s office after my 52^nd tardy. Yes. 52. It was nearly the end of my junior year, and the only reason I didn’t have over 100 tardies is because most of the time, I’d pull into the senior parking lot—which was right outside my homeroom windows—and park illegally in a fire zone, rush into the room as the bell was ringing, and then make up some creative excuse for why I had to run an errand. Then I’d move my car over to the proper parking lot across the street and amble back over just in time to be late for first period.

When I meandered to the principal’s office that morning, it was my first-ever visit as I was a classic over-achiever and had never been in an ounce of trouble in my life. Fortunately the head-asshole wasn’t in, so I had to see the assistant principal. Things started awkwardly as my skirt got caught on the edge of his desk, and he had to come around and release me. His laughing at my expense did not help. Then he assigned me one afternoon of detention. One. I scooted into the detention room after school that day…late. There wasn’t even a monitor in the room, and my mom came to pick me up, so the two of us sat in there chatting up all the losers and then cut out early after 15 minutes. So much for my second chance for a life-changing lesson.

I got into mucho hot water during my first teaching tenure because I could not get my sorry ass to work on time. And I was incredibly immature about the whole thing. I just couldn’t understand why everyone had to ride me about being on time and why it mattered in the first damned place. It wasn’t like I purposely overslept or took too long to get dressed or drove the long way. If I rolled out of bed three hours before my usual wake-up time, it would be the very day that my dog had massive diarrhea, which would take me three hours and fifteen minutes to clean up. No one at work gave a shit about my best intentions.

I think the moment that finally made me actually work towards getting places on time was one morning when I was supposed to pick up my priest’s wife to go to a meeting at the Diocese of Atlanta. I was running late, and I called her and made up some crap about being “almost there.” But then my car wouldn’t start, and I had to call Mrs. Holy back and explain that I’d never even left my driveway and that I had lied to her and that she had to come pick me up, which would make us late for the meeting. Shit. It was so chilly in her car on the trip that we didn’t even need the AC.

I have gotten better over the years, especially when it comes to being punctual for work. But I still have my promptness issues when I am scheduled to meet someone for a social occasion. I was supposed to meet my best friend, Lisa, for lunch at 12:30 a couple of weeks ago, and I woke up at 12:20. I actually get all bent out of shape and frantic when I realize that I am going to hold someone else up now. But apparently that isn’t good enough. My darling friend wasn’t even really mad, but I wouldn’t blame her if she quit speaking to me.

And that same damned week, I made a date to meet another Lisa, one of my dearest buddies from high school, for lunch. We hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, and when I walked in late, she said, “Well. If you had been on time, you wouldn’t be you.” Damn! I wanted to explain that I’m not always late anymore, that I really have grown up a little, that I am not as rude and inconsiderate as I used to be. But people hate excuses almost as much as they hate folks being late. I’ll just pretend that my unpunctuality is one of my endearing qualities. And no matter what anyone says, I am still going to do my best to be late for my funeral.

DIY Moving Sucks Big Balls

Notice that these people are NOT smiling. And they have only unloaded two fucking boxes from the van. Wussies.

Where the hell have I been for ten fricking days?? Ohhhhh ho ho. I’ve been moving, that’s where. Son-of-a-bitching moving. Godforsaken moving. The apocalypse of moving.

You know, I don’t mind physical exertion or even really hard work at the end of which I realize that 12 or 14 hours has elapsed, but I was so busy and focused that I didn’t notice. I don’t mind sweating—even though it shorts out my hearing aids—or aching muscles or a few cuts and bruises. But. You know on Looney Tunes cartoons when Wile E. Coyote gets squashed by an anvil and then blown-up into bits and then run over by a train, and then he falls off a tall cliff and stabs his body into the hot, hard floor of the desert? I am Wile E. Coyote. And I wasn’t even trying to catch Road Runner. I just wanted to save $5000 by moving myself instead of hiring a goddamned moving company to do all the loading and driving for me.

In the words of Vivian Ward from Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’s incredibly realistic gorgeous and innocent prostitute—because no real hookers have meth-addict skin, straggly hair, yeast infections and fat rolls: Big mistake. Big. Huge.

I won’t name names here to keep my ass from getting in some kind of legal boiling pot, but the move-it-yourself company we chose is the kind where you stuff your shit in a truck, and then YOU haul it to your new town, and then you unload said shit into your new or gently used home. Our first mistake was thinking that we could squeeze all the crap we own into a 26-footer. Yeah. That’s the biggest fricking truck available, but I should have forseen that the smarmy bastard who rented us the thing was full of shit when he ever so smugly replied to my concerns, “So you have four couches, three beds, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, two dining room tables, 20 chairs, and 2000 boxes. I still don’t see where your problem is.” Then when I mentioned the odds and ends and clothes and 10,000 framed pictures, he added, “You aren’t going to have any problem because the 26-footer fits a 4-bedroom house.” Well. Fuck him. What about the shit in the garage?

So after our possessions would NOT fit in the mammoth truck as I suspected, we had to go back and rent an additional 14-footer. Plus, we had to get two auto transports on which to place the cars we couldn’t drive. Locating and procuring the second truck took three hours out of our loading time because even though the smarm-master swore that there were plenty of smaller trucks available, we had to go to another town 20 miles away to get apparently the last motherfucking small moving van in the state of Georgia.

Finally, at close to 9 P.M. we had the vans full, and we needed to put my daughter’s car on the auto transport. Unfortunately, the instructions that make the hook-up look so easy that any consumer should be able to follow them are so full of horse shit that they could keep the entire South fertilized through 2020. Or the equipment was defective. I don’t know. All I DO know is that when my husband drove my daughter’s car onto the transport, the hitch sprang up from the ball causing the whole transport to fall and slide under the truck, at which point the transport buckled and severed the fucking fuel line on the car. 

Add to that the fact that now the only way to get the potentially explosive vehicle off the transport was to push it, and when we did, my husband fell off the transport and smashed his right elbow into the asphalt, resulting in the sudden appearance of murder-scene amounts of blood, and you can see why I can’t wait to move my own household shit again really soon.

Waiting for the tow truck to come pick up the car and the auto transport was so much fun! Around 2 A.M., we finally left the baking heat of the South.

Fast forward nineteen hours. All three drivers in the move-it-your-own-damned-idiot-self convoy almost fell asleep at the wheel various times, so we had to pull over and grab snatches of snooze; but we finally rolled into our new state at about 8 P.M.

It only took until 9 A.M. TWO DAYS LATER to unload the two trucks and return the first one before its 9:37 A.M. turn-in time to the local move-yourself-only-if-you-stopped-developing-at-the-brain-stem-in-utero store. Because renters are required to fill up the gas tank before returning the truck, and the truck’s turn radius is fucking negative something, the first truck got wedged onto one of those concrete and steel barriers that protect the gas pumps at a Marathon station. The tow truck for that debacle got there in a speedy 3 ½ hours. Oy.

Returning the second truck only took an hour and a half. Yay. But it should have been about ten minutes. The dealership where we were supposed to return the truck was approximately 2 miles from the house. Our turn-in time was 7:03 P.M. So when we arrived at the dealer at 5:10 P.M. to discover that the motherfuckers were CLOSED, we called the parent company, whose rep directed us to another dealer about 20 miles away that would be open until 7 P.M. We hauled ass over there…to discover that it was fucking CLOSED. If only I could have driven the goddamned van into the store’s showroom without civil and criminal penalties! Alas. I had to settle for slamming the door to the key dropbox really hard after I shoved the key into it with great force.

So. Yeah. It’s been a crazy ten days. But at least I am free of that horrid moving van, and I plan never to go near one ever again. As it is summer, A.K.A. the moving season, though, I keep seeing the damned vehicles every fucking where. I have to down a handful of those new mini-Reese’s cups, which are unwrapped for your convenience, just to calm myself down. I may have an extra-fat ass, but at least I am serene while I unpack these 2000 boxes of crap.

Fat Privates

Fuck. You.

Hey. We’ve all seen women—and the occasional man—who have that really low hanging front pouch of fat that looks like a butt on the wrong side. I always want to go up to these folks at WalMart and ask what’s in there (an illegal immigrant? one of those quick-set pools?) and how they feel pale pink stretchy pants are helping the situation. I used to have a female teacher in high school who not only had the pouch, but also a receding hairline and a pretty substantial mustache. When she was at the board, we’d be all Where’s her butt? And then she’d turn around to explain something, and there it was! The whole thing was fascinating. But it isn’t so goddamned funny anymore now that I am starting to develop fat privates.

You know it’s impossible to get your ass clean when you can no longer reach it. That’s one of the only excuses I can see for owning a large dog. It is ridiculous to need a fucking garden hose with decent pressure in the bathroom, and I demand a recount. My ass has gotten so fat that in the event that I pass gas, which seems to be happening more and more in my old age, it takes a really long time to surface; one slipped day before yesterday, and it was from broccoli I had in 2008.

And you know another thing? My private parts doctor should not have to use scuba gear to find my cervix. But do you know how hard it is to exercise vagina flaps? What moves work that area exactly? And don’t get me started on the boobs. I specifically did NOT check pendulums on the order form, and you know how when skin rubs together all the time, those little nasty, boogery-looking skin tags form without permission? Yeah, well, I just cut those fuckers off when I find them. I don’t give a shit if rivulets of blood run down my belly all day. I am just not going to lift up my tits and have Morgan-Freeman-face up under there. Not going to have it.

I just don’t know. I could have the boobs lifted, and I know that there is even surgery to rejuvenate the vay-jay-jay. But slicing and stitches in the privates doesn’t sound so appealing, now, does it? I suppose I will just have to go chafing along. And I apologize in advance for those beans I ate last summer.

Upside-Down Days

Does this look wrong to you? That' s because I flipped the picture. Usually the day would be at the top because society thinks people who come alive at night are either freaks or Edward Pattinson. Wait. That's the same.

I wonder if the time we are born has anything to do with whether we turn out to be “day people” or “night people.” I was sprung at 12:43 A.M., and that’s about the time I really get going every day. According to most of the world, there is something wrong with me—aside from the depression, eating disorder, hearing loss, and general bitchiness, I mean. Because I prefer to sleep in the daytime and then enjoy the wee hours, society views me as somehow inferior or “not right.” Well. Fuck society.

Nights are so quiet, and for a deaf girl like me, that’s très important. No. Not really. I don’t usually hear a damned thing going on in the day anyway, so it’s all the same. There just is the potential for so much annoying noise in the day. Jack hammers. Clowns. Bagpipes. But at night, there is only the occasional crime victim screaming, sex-grunting in the apartment next door or bombs, if you live in the Middle East. Why would anyone want to sleep when there is the opportunity for so much uninterrupted concentration?

I love the solitude at night when there’s a kind of hush all over the world, thank you, The Carpenters. Everyone else I know is busy not taking advantage of the productivity of 3 A.M. (i.e., sleeping), so I am all alone with my thoughts and reruns of The Nanny. Oy. (Speaking of Fran Drescher, I am so thankful for Closed Captions.) But actually, even television is better late at night because the folks in charge of the F.C.C. are all old as dirt and are watching the insides of their eyelids instead of noticing Janet Jackson’s boob pop out.

I get my best work done while the rest of humanity except for people on the other side of the planet throws away seven or eight of the best hours in every set of 24. Plus, what’s way more fun: lounging in the cool, crisp comfort of cotton king-sized sheets or dripping with solid, running streams of rancid sweat in the car or parking lot or WalMart when it’s 100 fucking degrees outside? I’ll give you a minute. Did you think about it? Then you can see my point.

And, while I’m on the subject of WalMart, shopping there at 3 or 4 in the morning is such a treat. There are usually no in-breds out that late, and the only thing bad is the guy with the draggy leg and one really long tooth who polishes the floors while you’re trying to reach the shit on the top shelf that’s cheaper than the shit at eye level. If you haven’t tried your weekly grocery trip a couple of hours before the sun comes up, you are missing out.

I think it is a shame that most businesses close at night and the only place to get a steak after 11 P.M. is the goddamned Waffle House. The sirloin is all thin and grisly, and there are no blue cheese crumbles. It is totally not worth eight bucks or the risk of being pulled over for D.U.I. just from inhaling the pot scent off the massively stoned cook’s uniform. If I were in charge, I’d flip this whole day/night thing around. Day=siesta; Night=fiesta. (See? I’m learning the American language.) Sigh. But I’m not. And I have to be up like “regular folks” in 5 hours. Grrrr. And good night.

All Ants Must Die.

Yeah. You better look worried, you motherfucker.

You know what is about as worthless as Charlie Sheen’s publicist? Fucking ants. God, I hate ants. My distaste goes back a long way to a simpler time when young children spent a quiet, summer, middle-of-the-week day fishing at the family pond instead of flitting from soccer practice to baseball practice to swimming practice to Tai Kwon Do to gymnastics class to dance class, and then, if they were boys, to de-gaying class after dance (A.K.A.-church), all before 6 P.M. My grandparents owned property with a large, stocked pond in which I lost many a worm after it was sucked off my hook by the evil catfish who lived below the surface. To this day I eat catfish with a particular vehemence. But the ants. The ants were even worse. They were devil spawns.

Just because I accidentally stepped in their hill one day while standing on the bank watching my daddy fish, the fiery fuckers thought it was acceptable to swarm up my legs and into my shoes and proceed to sting my baby flesh repeatedly, lighting up every pain-sensing synapse in my parietal lobe and forming some new ones in the vocabulary-creating temporal lobe, which is clearly the exact moment that I learned the word fuck. 

My cerebellum, which controls the moving of my ass as quickly as possible, definitely failed because I just stayed there, cemented in that mall of misery where every store sells agony, only agony; and I knew that hell was real, only the idiot Sunday school teachers whose leg fat had slid down to their ankles got it all wrong with the lake of fire. If you do not repent, there is only the standing in a fire ant bed for eternity. The only reason I survived is because my father, who inexplicably found the episode hilarious, snatched me up and out of purgatory.

So you can understand why I detest ants and believe that the only good ant is a dead ant. The thing is that if you kill one ant, four hundred come to the funeral. Right now, over at my daughter’s apartment, there is a veritable carpet of ants on the walkway to her front door. I am not kidding. There is a moving black welcome mat of mania. No matter where I step, I am inviting hordes of crazy pests to rush to the area, so that they can check out why their relations have raised the insect warning screech and why there are now thousands of fucking flat ant corpses in the vicinity.

And then they are going to plot their revenge, which includes waiting until I fall asleep and then paralyzing me with their toxin and feeding on me until I am nothing but white, white bones. Ants can annihilate a whole lizard in under a minute, and, yes, I know that translating that example means that it would take five-and-a-half months for the ants to consume me, leaving me plenty of time to seek medical attention, but I think you get my point. Which is why I now officially love Phorid flies.

Most fruit flies are so annoying because their origin is Gilbert Gottfried’s vocal cords, but these babies, I adore. Why? Because they are the only predator of the freaking fire ant. And guess what they do to fire ants? Oh. This is good. They lay eggs in the ant’s thorax, which is kind of like its throat. Then, the larvae caravan up to the ant’s head. And feed on its brain tissues for about two weeks until the ant’s head falls off! Sweet. If I were in charge and had that technology, about two weeks from now, this would be the headline: Headless Hysteria! Without Warning, Charlie Sheen’s Head Falls Off.

Put a Ring on it, My Ass

Dude. You're about to marry a woman who has truly ugly fingers. Those things are like fat daggers. Are you SURE you want to put a ring on that? P.S.- Where's the engagement ring, you cheap shit?

You know what pisses me off besides just about everything? Men and women are so not equal, no matter what anyone tries. A man still makes more money than a woman for doing the same damned job. Men don’t get called bitches when they’re aggressive, and they are considered human and real instead of weak and on the rag when they cry, unless they are Republican representatives from Ohio who become Speaker of the House. And the fuckers can even be in beauty pageants and frequently look hotter than women contestants. How in the hell is that fair? Just throw in a couple of fake boobs, Nair ® off the leg and chest hairs, and suddenly some guys are all Angelina Jolie. Bastards.

And get this. In still another worthless effort to encourage equality while lining some pockets, British idiots have created the “mangagement” ring. Now, at first, I was reading too fast, and I thought that said management ring, as in “put this ring on the finger of a guy to whom you are engaged so that he can’t fuck around during the wedding planning.” (As if that’s stopping any man whores.)

But no. It is a nauseating play on engagement ring. But for men! Holy shit balls. What a concept! Now men can feel all special once they’re betrothed too. Yay. And what man wouldn’t want a diamondy band on the marriage finger?? (Hint: If gay men are excluded…none.) I’m kind of concerned about mangagement rings, though, because I don’t think I want to see men with more than one ring stacked up per finger all Liberace-like. Plus, it’s just one more piece of jewelry to have to pocket when they're out at titty bars or when  hunting and gathering or when shooting suicide-bomb-strapped children in the Middle East.

Here’s another entry in the don’t-read-this-while-you-are-ingesting-animal-flesh-because-it’s-so-gag-worthy-that-you-will-puke-meaty-cubes-out-of-your-nose category: “manty hose.” I am totally not shitting you. (Really. That would hurt because you would absolutely not be still, and your flailing limbs would tear my delicate areas.) European men and metrosexuals have been sporting men’s full-length hosiery for years. American men are always the last to know. Plus they are a lot of the time beefy and homophobic to make up for Tic-tac penises, and would not be caught dead climbing down from the cab of the half-ton pick-up while wearing panty hose. Fancy leg wear so clashes with a mouthful of chaw and a shotgun.

Anyway. The brethren across the pond bitched about having only women’s options when choosing hose for warmth under clothing or when compression garments were prescribed by a doctor for improved vascular health for so long that companies developed cotton and spandex man tights. Well. If the struggle involved in properly applying a rubber is any indication, manty hose will be très short-lived.

There is also this stupid trend: the man taking the woman’s last name in marriage. Stedman Winfrey is the only sumbitch who should get away with that. After actor Jay Mohr married model and extra-large-surgically-enhanced-lips-and-boobs-recipient, Nikki Cox, and became Jay Mohr-Cox, I’d say this idea has run its course. And someone needs to slap him until he dies.

That whole idea of the last-name-taking galls me anyway. Here’s why: Everything, absolutely everything we do depends upon our credit scores, that mysterious system of numbers no one can honestly explain, but which determines whether we can get a loan or rent an apartment or even get a job. And even though the three credit scoring agencies are supposed to assign values fairly, ha fucking ha. If a woman has been married multiple times, alllllllll of her “aliases” or “also known as-es” show up on the credit report. She is immediately downgraded in the opinion of anyone assessing her. But a man’s serial monogamy never appears, once again tipping the balance of things in favor of males. I am sick of it and think something should be done—that something involving snipping—until the men of the world change the fucking system. Who’s with meeeeee?