Who needs vampires? We’ve got the IRS.

This has been a year of “eh” holidays. Hospital stays, empty checking accounts and a general who-gives-a-whoop attitude have kind of deleted fun from the calendar, and Halloween is no exception.

I hate that, for Buzz’s sake, The kid, soon to be 13, starts planning his Halloween costume the day after, well, Hallowen. He’s had some great ones in the past, but my favorite was his King Arthur from the Monty Python Holy Grail movie. Complete with coconuts. The best part was hanging around the street and watching people answer the door. If they died laughing, I knew they were Python fans and got the joke.

I’m the pumpkin queen. Some of my past masterworks included a Batman, Jack Skellington from Nightmare before Christmas, and the piece de resistance, the stylized cutout logo from The Lion King. I’m not even doing one this year because we’re going to be at a friend’s house in Shelbyville while Buzz makes his final trick or treating lap through their neighborhood.

By the time his brothers were his age, they didn’t want to go trick or treating at all, but I get the feeling Buzz will keep at it until he sports enough facial hair to remove the need for fake beards, and the way he’s plowing into puberty, I expect that to happen by next year.

(Don’t laugh., My brohter was 6’6″ in junior high and had a full beard. He had to take his birth certificatre to footbll games because the opposing coaches were all sure he was five years older than he really was.)

Halloween is just as much fun for grownups, when they’re in the mood, but if the Grinch stole Christmas, then someone else has taken my Halloween spirit. It’s hard to get excited about fictional creeps and ghoulies when there are so many rel ones out there. Frankenstein’s monster attacking villagers isn’t nearly as scary as Oakland’s police officers firing on war veterans and senor citizens. After all, you expect a monster to attack …

It’s hard to be scared of sparkly vampires when you’re getting registered letters from the IRS, and who needs zombies for a quick thrill and sense of dread horror when you’ve got the GOP candidates?

Still, going along with the theory that if you wear a fake smile long enough, it becomes sincere (although I’ve yet to see that work with Cheney, Palin or Regis Philbin), I’m going to fake the Halloween spirit and try to come up with some costume ideas.

Terry and I could go as a groom and his bride. Terry would wear a sign that says “Incompetent son-in-law” and I could wear a sign that says “Job security.”

I could wear an old-fashioned report’s fedora with a card stuck in the band. Instead of saying “PRESS,” it would say “Will write puff pieces for food.”

I could put on a fright wig and spray paint myself orange and go as  Snookie, but even as un-Halloweeny as I’m feeling, that would totally creep me out. The zombies are starting to look better….

Here are some links to some other Halloween columns I’ve written.

http://www.t-g.com/story/1675955.html

http://www.t-g.com/story/1582455.html

The keyboard is my closest friend

When people win the lottery, they always get asked  — “Are you going to quit your job?”

When they say no, there are several reactions, most of which begin with “Fool!”

For a while there, I would have been one of those who stayed with the job, but then again, for a while there, it was a job worth staying for. I love to write and meet people and getting paid to be nosy and helpful at the same time. It was freakin’ fun!

In my journalistic career, I’ve interviewed Tiny Tim , Gordon Jump, Ralph Waite, Charlie Daniels, Marty Stewart, Alison Krauss, DJ Qualls, Lane Davies and Trace Atkins back when he first got started and was hawking his own CDs and local record stores.

I interviewed DJ back when he still admitted he was from Manchester and not Nashville and he had just finished the teen horror flick Cherry Hill. In fact, I’ll bet my story was the first time he got a full-page treatment in any publication. At the time, Brad Whatishisname was doing his catty “Brad about Town” column in the Tennessean and gave DJ a piffling little paragraph about his movie, and the upcoming role he had in a Cicely Tyson movie.

Our publisher came storming into our newsroom and threw the Tennessean down on my desk and fumed why I, as the lifestyles editor, hadn’t done a story on DJ. I promptly pulled out THE MOST RECENT edition of the lifestyles section, with the full-page story of DJ Qualls, and asked him why he, as publisher, didn’t read his own damned newspaper.

This was not the most recent idiot publisher I’ve worked for, but one of the early ones. There is a pattern here — yes, most publishers are not the sharpest pencils in the desk drawer when it comes to actual news — and no, tact is not my strong point. Being a part of the fourth estate for so long, I had the  silly idea that not only was I given the right to speak the truth, but the obligation.

That kind of stuff tends to get your ass fired, didja know? Especially since the pubs tend to have a Pontius Pilate kind of attitude when it comes to “What is truth?”

(I have to make a couple of exceptions here.  Terry Craig, who was my first publisher, was an asshole f the first degree, but the man knew newspapers. Lucy Carter, who edits and publishes the Elkk Vallet Times, rocks! And Judi Terzotis, formerly of the Daily News Journal, was everything a newspaper publisher should be — fair, openminded, smart, funny, generous — and never in the newsroom.)

But even before I found myself without a job to keep after winning the lottery, I’d already decided I wouldn’t keep it. Thanks to certain political parties giving incentives to certain industries who took their production efforts out of the United States, my husband lost his job as a production engineer and could not find another one, For some reason, companies that still actually make things here like those green kids fresh out of college — the ones who think $24,000 is actually a living wage. It occurred  to me, if I won millions and millions of dollars and kept my job, I could be depriving someone who actually needed it.

Not cool.

Besides, think of all the really amazing stuff I could get accomplished if I didn’t have to slog into work every morning? I could write my novel, take up watercolors again, and actually have every stitch of clothing and every dish in the house clean at the same time! Whoa, dude. It’s mind boggling.

Now here I am, not having to slog into work every morning, and what do you think is happening? A couple of dishes and two loads of laundry, if I’m lucky. The screenplay is almost finished, the novel has been outlined in preparation for NaNoWriMo, and I’m miserable.

I miss working.

Not my job, believe me. I do miss some of my co-workers, namely, all of the guys in the newsroom (But not necessarily the “editor” or the one who made fun of my kid for getting lice.)

I miss the folks I used to get to interact with all the time, my buddy Ike, and Gene and both Keiths … I miss people. I’d always heard that writing was lonely business, but since mine was always done in noisy offices with hectic deadlines, it never really sank in.

Until now.

Angry Birds and Wiccan bath salts

Thanks to the new computer, I finally get to see what the buzz is all about with these Angry Birds. The old PC didn’t have the oomph to knock a canary off a cue ball, much less slingshot a cardinal into a tower of wooden blocks.

I not only discovered why the birds were angry (stop stealing our eggs, you nasty green pigs!), but I was addicted immediately. Besides the silly sound effects, there is something deep-down satisfying about hurtling something at the bad guys and making their worlds fall apart.

I can think of a lot of green pigs out there.,

Take that, smug, healthy teenaged Green Pig who parked in the handicapped spot!

Ka-Pow, Green Koch Pigs who care more for their bank accounts than their employees.

Crash, Boom, Bang., Green Pigs who actually think Faux News is a legitimate source of accurate information.

It’s therapeutic, I thought. In fact, I thought it was so therapeutic, I spent three whole days doing nothing but smashing tiny balls of feathers into big forts of glass and watching them collapse into blue shards. I spent three whole days playing the game over and over again, watching those same, nasty green pigs come back to life and perpetrate their heinous crimes over and over and over again …

Uh-oh. I feel an object lesson coming on.

I didn’t write a blog in those three days. I didn’t add a single line to my screenplay. I didn’t send out a resume, pack a single thing for the Big Move, or in any way contribute anything to the universe except for some really good meals, and I only cooked those because the sooner my husband was fed, the sooner he’d fall asleep, and the sooner I could get back to smashing green pigs.

Who always came back.

So why, the suddenly enlightened me asked, am I wasting time and energy fighting a battle I can’t win? Why am I obsessed with taking out metaphorical former bosses with feathered cannonballs when it does absolutely nothing  to him  — and nothing for me.

Now for the Wiccan bath salts…

Before I was kidnapped by Bird Fever, I absent-mindedly Googled “break a curse,” wondering if there was some way I could get my luck to change that didn’t involve taking medication, revising my attitude, or anything that remotely resembled work. Most of the sites I hit were Wiccan, or other pagan religions (since Christianity tends to think that the only curses that really exist are the monthly ones Eve brought on us) , and most of the recommendations involved taking a bath with special ingredients  — chamomile, lavender and sea salt , to literally wash the bad juju away.

What was really interesting, is that some of the Christian sites (the one that actually thought you needed more than Kotex to deal with curses) had the same thing.

Wash it away.

Now I am not a Bible-thumping Christian by any means. I’ve been on the outs with God for a while now and I’m still trying to work through it.  I want to know how a loving God can permit child abuse, nepotism and Glenn Beck in the same world that has waterfalls, horses, and chocolate in it. Why do CEOs still pull down millions in bonuses when their employees are losing their houses, and why does the Kardashian nightmare stay on television when My Name is Earl gets canceled? It sometimes seem to me that angry birds with exploding eggs make more sense than the random arrangement of good and evil that clutters our existence.

But the more I thought about washing away the curse, the more it made sense. Ritual baths are dominant in almost every — if not every — culture and religion I’ve ever studied, from the sweat lodges of the North Pacific Native Americans to the Jewish mikveh. Whether you’re a baby sprinkler or a kid dunker, baptism is one of the building blocks of the Christianity, the gateway to the faith.

Think about it — when you come into this world, you are covered in blood and, well, goo. It is testimony of the pain and passage you (and Mom!) have just endured. The first thing they do is wash it away. Gone is the blood, the goo, the pain (except for Mom’s) and there you are, a brand new person with a clean body and a clean slate.

Of course, being a newborn, it doesn’t take long for you to mess yourself up again, but isn’t that what being human is all about? We have our clean bodies and clean slates, and we screw up. Over and over again.

And God keeps washing us clean — when we give Him the chance. (And yes, my feminist friends, I called God a He. If God were really a She, we wouldn’t have cramps and hot flashes at the same time.)

So I’m headed to the shower now. I’m going to wash my anger and bitterness away with my green tea shampoo and lavender body wash, and I’m going to step out a different person. Not a new person — just a refreshed one.

I saw a great T-shirt once that said “Life is not a computer game, there are no do-overs,” but it was wrong.

As long as we are still breathing, we have the chance to reset the play button and start a new level. When I feel the pressures of Bad Things happening to Good People, I may smash a few Green Pigs now and then, but I’m turning the rest of my energy over to the New and Improved Mary, who really, really has to pack up a household, find a job and finish the screenplay.

Fire away!!!!

The goose flew the coop

For almost four years now, we’ve had the greatest lawn art ever. (Although I’m sure our neighbors disagree — but then again, our neighbors clip their lawns with nail trimmers and really, really need to get a life.)

When my oldest, Scott, was in high school, we bought him a 1974 baby blue VW microbus. He was the envy of all of his friends and the first suspect on the local Teenager Harassment Police Squad’s hit list. The first day of school, the Sgt. Schultz bully boy lookalike who was patrolling the parking lot kindly strolled over and told Scott he had a small gas leak.

Scott got out and looked and promptly thanked him effusively. The grade-school gestapo guru then called for back up and my son was surrounded by four police cars and six police officers, two coaches, a teacher, and a crowd of his laughing friends. The cops, no doubt, took 47  8 x 10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.

Certain that he was a low-life drug-dealing hippie wannabe because he was driving a 1974 VW Microbus, they searched his car from one end to the other. Luckily, we’d given it a good cleaning out when we bought it, including the 30-year-old roach we’d found in the back seat ashtray.

I got a great column out of the event and Scott got about a year’s worth of driving before the bus — the Blue Goose — decided we were harshing its mellow be making it work.  It zoned out beside the house and remained there, as happy as a Dead Head in the Haight.

For years, it remained there.

We live in one of those wonderful post-WWII subdivisions that’s populated by beautiful oak trees, overmanicured lawns (except for ours, of course) and ranch houses that have only escaped clone status because the owners have added on to them over the years (except for ours, of course.) Often, coming home late, it was easy to miss our driveway, but as long as the Blue Goose was parked beside the car port, I could always find it.

We tried to sell it a couple of times. I even held it a year for this sweet, earnest hipster who sells tie-dyed shirts at Bonnaroo, but I eventually had to give up on him. With my current income status (none), we needed the money and I posted it again. On Craigslist. on Swap-n-Shop sites. Bathroom walls. You name it, I posted it there.

Then, one day, I was pulling out of Buzz’s school parking lot after picking him up and what did I see, putt-putt-piutting away as it idled in the pick up line?

A green VW Microbus.

I stopped, rolled the window down and called out to the tdriver.

“I’ve got a blue one that’s for sale!”

“On Westwood?” he bellowed back., “I’ve seen it!”

The soccer moms were fomenting rebellion behind me so I just shouted for him to come over someday if he was interested in buying it, then took off before the cell-phone yapping blonde, SUV driving chihuahuas behind me got their knickers in a twist.

He was interested and he bought the bus.

I was thrilled — my biggest fear was that the Blue Goose would end up being junked or sold for parts, but this guy’s hobby is rescuing them, restoring them, then selling them for buckets of money.

More power to him! As far as I’m concerned, it was a win-win-win sitituation. I was getting the bus out of the yard (thus reducing our white trash status at least three-tenths of a point) and getting some much needed money (can we say new computer? Yes, we canb!) The guy was going to make a nice profit — and the Blue Goose would roll again.

I admit to feeling a twinge of regret as they drove away, though, and I saw its mighty hippieness fade into the psychedelic sunset. The Blue Goose had flown.

How was I ever going the be able to find my way home now?

 

 

Can you hear me now?

Another computer has died.

Between cat hair, smoke, and the various creepy crawlies that invariably make their way inside my secondhand computers, they end up having shorter life spans than Erica Kane’s marriages.

Usually I get lucky — I find someone who rehabs Dells for schools and get a tower for $40, or I have a co-worker who has spares to give or loan, but after spending a few hours at the Computer Cafe in Tullahoma, I think I may stick with them until the Big Move. It’s quiet, clean, there are no cats and I’m not allowed to smoke, so I might actually get some work done here … and their games are really, really, really fast! Like, totally!

Okay, maybe I won’t get a lot of work done here.  The quiet kind of works against me, too, since I’m used to writing with the roar of presses 10 feet from my ear (Yooohoo, OSHA, consider investigating, please?), employees from other departments carrying on loud conversations right behind me, and godawful music screeching from a tinny radio across the room.

Even at home, I’ve the the white noise of the dog scratching for fleas, the youngest yelling at his xBox game in the next room, and the cats breaking things in the kitchen as they attempt to prove you don’t need opposable thumbs to operate electric can openers. Throw in the quiet jangle of my world crashing down around me, and you’ve got a comfortable wall of sound to cushion you from your own thoughts.

I used to be pretty good at silence. When I was a young girl, I’d ride my little mare down unpaved country roads and the only sound would be the soft clopping of her hooves and the occasional chirp of a bird, buzz of a horsefly, and anguished shriek of the young girl the horsefly just bit.

I used to be able to sit in the sun with my eyes closed and think about nothing but the warmth, instead of being shouted down by the worries and fears about everything from skin cancer to whether or not Eureka was going to be canceled before Carter found the missing spaceship.

I’ve been afraid of the silence for a long time — afraid I’d pick out familiar vouces in the babble your mind cretes to fill the void, voices of my own doubts and insecurities, voices the remind me of my faliures.

I’m speaking allergorically here, worrywarts — I’m not really hearing voices, unless you count my kid, sitting at a compuer behind me, giggling at his favorite LOLcats site.

But I’ve discovered, if I shut out those silent voices, I also miss out on the inspiration and ideas silence can bring. So I’m going to practice shutting up and listening to what I have to tell myself.

As soon as I finish another really, really fast game on this really cool computer. I do get brownie points for trying though —  I declined the earphones so I can at least play in silence, even if I can’t work that way.

That girl ain’t write

Ever since a good friend, John Carney, told me about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a couple of years ago, I’ve been itching to do it.

The premise is — you commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Don’t worry about details, fact checking or even if it’s very good, just get it it out there.

Kind of like Faux news, only when it’s all over, you’re supposed to go back, clean it up and correct the glaring errors before exposing your work to the world. Kind of unlike Faux News.

Last year, I participated for the first time but only got to about 38,000 words (thank you, influenza), which qualified me for a “win” in the Young Writer category.

Unfortunately, the fact that I had a kid writing in the Young Writer category automatically disqualified me for a win in the Young Writer category.

This year — no excuses. Even though I’ll be cleaning out my father-in-law’s place for us to move into, cleaning up our own place for the bank to move into, packing, shifting, and teaching my children a vocabulary list that would make construction workers blush while I’m doing it, I’m still going to write that book.

This time, it’s not for publication. It’s not for anyone to see but me. It’s going to be the final step in healing after the traumatic year I’ve had. I can’t blow up my ex-boss’s car in  real life — besides being sort of illegal and mildly dangerous, I don’t have a clue where to get C-4. Plus, I sort of expect to be the first one the police suspect …

But on paper, oh boy … Ka-Boom!

But even on paper, I won’t blow it up with him in it — I’m just not that kind of gal. That was my biggest problem at the Times-Gazette, I think. I just don’t know how to be mean, and it’s apparently a job requirement. Because I don’t know how to be mean, I don’t expect other people to know how to be mean either, and I’m always stunned when they figure it out and practice on me.

Aaaaannnnnddd, that’s another reason I’m going to trash the boss in my NaNoWriMo novel — I’m tired of whining about the living examples of the Peter Principle that make up the upper echelons of the TG (William, John and David most definitely excluded) and I’m pretty sure you guys are tired of reading about it. So when i feel the need to vent — boom! another chapter.

So here, it will be kids, critters and chaos again, with, no doubt, ruminations on the odd things found when shoveling out two houses at once.  I’ll get to add a couple of critter stories, too, since the house coms with two aging labs and about five cats.

They’re outdoor cats and skittish, and the neighborhood has coyotes, so I never know how many will be there when I go out, but most of them are gray, which is a very good sign. With the exception of the orange and white Karma, my best cats have always been gray.

Anyway, I’ll throw in an occasional blog about the book process to keep you up to date, and who knows? Maybe after time, when I can change the names to protect the guilty, you’ll see it on your local booklist.

Authors note: The Peter Principle states that people rise to their level of incompetence, meaning you really shouldn’t have taken that last promotion because you;re really going to screw it up. Tis is similar, but not identical, to another principle in which you marry into a job that is your level of incompetence. I have a name for it, but because this is not an X-rated site, I’ll just tell you it similar to”Peter” Principle.