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If you DO want to know, welcome to my blog |
For those who actually want to follow my thoughts, ideas, moans, and gripes, this is the place for you! For those of you who are returning...I questions your judgment, you poor souls. 
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| I look around me and I sigh. It "seems worn and overused," as Mr. Howe & Co. put it. My clothes are mostly second hand. My house is 50% death trap, 50% dump, 100% money pit. There's never enough cashola to cover everything. My wife's health always ranges somewhere between poor and poorer. And my cat, which seldom shuts up, is the size of a small tun. So yeah…*sigh* ...I ought to be hosswhipped, oughtn't I!? See, that's the thought that follows in the next breath after I heave that selfish sigh. What gives? I bought my house in 2021. Lost my job within days of closing the deal. When I was able to move in and begin looking into my new gem, I found all sorts of hidden issues. And I mean that literally—hidden! A main support post in the main living room had been removed, and the upstairs was slowly sagging its way downstairs. The remedy the former owner had put in place? Add a drop-ceiling downstairs so no one can see the sagging joists, and create a series of wedges upstairs to put flat floorboards across to level up that area. Instead of replacing plaster walls with drywall, the former owner simply built another wall over top of the old. Now, instead of having 6-inch thick walls, we had 1-foot thick walls! The doorway from our kitchen to the dining room looked like a passage in a hobbit hole! Electric was jenky, there was a problem with the well, the septic system was almost full. Ugh! When I finally got a new job, I was ecstatic. But after having worked from home 100% of the time for the better part of a decade, I realized I had verry little clothing to wear into the office, even as "business casual." During my first week there, my boss brought in a large stack of shirts. "I don't fit these anymore; you want them?" he asked. They were all very nice polo shirts with the company logo emblazoned on them. More ecstatic-ness ensued. It's a small company, and the CEO works just down the hall; it's not uncommon at all for him to stop in one's office to say hello. "Did they bring the 'ghost logo' back after all these years?" he asked one day, referring to my shirt. I was to embarrassed to say I was wearing hand-me-downs as a junior leader in the first days at my new job. I make decent money, but everybody seems to have their hands so deep in my pockets, they're tugging on my socks! We live from paycheck to paycheck, sometimes hand-to-mouth, singing day-before-payday blues as we heat up mac 'n' cheese and wieners once again. My wife has rotten health: bad back that's only ever going to get worse, diabetes… and me as a partner! Welcome home, medical bills upon medical bills upon medical bills!And I'm just not even going to go into details about the hairy walking tub of Crisco not-so-affectionately called Fat Bastard! So why am I bitching? What's the point? Why am I sighing live a love-lost schoolgirl? Because it ain't so bad. Truly, it just ain't so bad. Some people are so much less fortunate than me, they would kill to live in this house I call a piece of crap. There are people who have to wear the same set or two of clothing every day. Too many don't even have enough cash to buy wieners, let alone nice warm mac 'n' cheese; and when they get sick, they get the minimum of health care since they can't pay any medical bills. And some people are so lonely, they don't even have a fluffy fat cat to lay down on them, crush their thighs into tingling near-numbness, and purr them consolingly back to peace. Things could be worse. Things might get worse; I might inadvertently make things worse. But things aren't so bad. They seldom are when one looks at them in the context of how bad things could be. Things aren't so bad. Just bear that in mind as you grind through your day. Let it be a little ray of okay-ness for you, or a life preserver if you feel like you're drowning. Things could be worse, so maybe things ain't so bad. |
| Things fall apart; the center does not hold. What do I mean by that? I'm really not sure. Today has been a day of reflection...but I'm not sure what I see in the mirror. Is it the past? Is it the dirt under my nails? Is it the stains on the wall where I forgot to fix that hole in the roof? I'm really not sure; but I know there's something off. Like the smallest corner of a photograph that is folded over. It has nothing to do with the picture, but once you notice it, you can't focus on anything else. So yeah, something's off; the center does not hold, the mirror is a spy. How do I feel about that? Fantastic!!! Scratching your head? Well don't dig too deep, people will think you have mange. The reason I feel fantastic is that being slightly off is something all of us writers—all of us artists—have in common, that the world is at a perpetual cant to our perspective. How the hell do you write about a killer clown eating kids without your worldview being slightly skewed? How do you look ar war and find hope unless the mirror you shine back at the world is tainted with hope? How do you write Lord Jim without...well, bad example; all you need is some good brandy and a bag of Colombian Red for that. So I look at the page and I see monsters and angels where other people see whiteness. I look at the horizon and I see the edge of a thousand other worlds than this one. I look inside my heart and see...well, we'll save that topic for another day. What's the point of writing all this? For one thing, this is a collection of my thoughts, blurted out onto the screen for the sake of me writing something and you reading something. But there's a point to it that might actually make reading this valuable to you: Take a closer look in your mirror. Gaze beyond the horizon and then look around at the world to which you've been transported. Look inside your heart and decide who you want to win—the angel or the demon. Always refuse to see the square that only has four sides; discard the blank page for one that is already smudged with an idea. You don’t need me to tell you, but a reminder never hurts, I guess. Stay tilted; remain canted. Embrace the misfit inside you for the artist that it is. Whatever else you may do, with all of what I've mentioned, for God's sake, my friend... Write on! |
| I hate going to the grocery store. For that matter, I really don't like being around people, but the grocery store is the worst. I know, I know, this is the same complaint about 2 billion other people have; but it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to! From the parking lot, to the surrogate shoppers, down through to the oblivious zombies, enduring a grocery shopping trip is the veryest of bitch-kitties for me! The adventure begins as soon as I arrive. Where will I park? Shit, will I even get to park, or am I going to get t-boned by the guy in the beat-up old Ford who's trying to rearrange his groceries in the back seat while driving? Or will it be a head-on with the 114-year-old lady in the Cadillac who's convinced that all the lanes belong to her? Maybe it will be the kid in the Charger who somehow fails to realize that the speed limit in a parking lot is not 45 miles an hour! Well, so far I've survived, but only by the grace of Sam Walton. (I firmly believe God is currently boycotting Walmart and has been for some time, now.) But playing Enduro and Frogger in the parking lot is only the first of my travails. Upon entering the store, it seems 90% of the customers are stripped of common sense and dignity. It's all but cliche, these days, to mention it, but behold the shoppers in the sloppy pajamas, the mindless wanderers wearing tank-tops, booty shorts, and galoshes. From the sidewalk outside to the area just beyond the lobby, the public have devolved into a new breed: Walmutants! You've run into them, I'm sure. Literally run into them. They're the ones who love to stop right where the shelves start after the lobby, taking more time to arrange their purse in the cart than it took the glaciers to make the great lakes! You'll encounter one of the same ones later on, her cart parked diagonally in the middle of the aisle as she peruses every ingredient in every can of soup. She's the one who will glare at you witheringly when you say, "Excuse me, ma'am." She's the one you want to follow to her car so you can slash her tires. You've met her sister, too. And her brother, and her mom. Her 3 second-cousins, each removed one, two, or three times. Hell, probably even her foster step uncle-in-law! They're the ones having a family reunion in the main aisle, the whole group clustered together like a blood clot threatening to give everyone else trying navigate the store a severe stroke. (Bet your left eye is twitching right now just thinking about them; mine is!) Of course, they break up eventually, but only to lumber through the store aimlessly, leaning on their empty carts, selecting nothing from the shelves, only causing grocery cart traffic jams worse than LA freeways at rush hour. Sometimes, I can dodge around one of these cretins (although not without the aforementioned glare, as if actually filling my cart with things to buy is heresy). Usually, however, it is only to run smack into a giant blue cart full of bins for 28 other people's online shopping loads. There's at least three of these rolling roadblocks in every aisle. I don't have to worry about glares, though; these marionette marketeers don't even look at me when I ask them if they can move their portable semi out of the way. They simply continue grabbing and slamming items into the bins, grab and slam, grab and slam. Finally, after spending at least half of my weekend at Walmart for one shopping trip to buy 2 liters of Pepsi, a block of Swiss cheese, and a jar of miniature sweet gherkins, I wend my way to the checkout where I wait in line for 20 minutes waiting for someone in front of me to rediscover how a barcode scanner works. But when I finally do make to the checkout, I wonder if I'm the one who has forgotten how it works: How can I owe $23.88 for this?! Frazzled, exhausted, and mere moments away from assault with a salty condiment, I limp out to the sizzling pan of a parking lot, fighting the glare of a sun I feel like I haven't seen in weeks to find my car. ten minutes of Defensive Driving 301, and I'm back on the main road among (relatively) saner drivers. And finally, finally, taking a breath of relief, I finally arrive back home, taking my groceries inside the cool quiet house. I put away my pickles, set the soda aside, slide the cheese in the crisper, and place the milk— FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU......!!!!! I forgot the milk, which was really the only reason I went to that madhouse in the first place!!! Oh well, ladies and gentlemen. I ain't going back; my blood pressure cannot handle it. I've got what I got, and it'll have to work. Who knows? Maybe in a future blog post, I'll tell you what Fruity Pebbles taste like in room-temperature Pepsi rather than some wonderful ice-cold milk. |
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