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Not Quite Polite

Can I really pretend this is a polite conversation, when I have been dredging up the crappiest most painful realities I have experienced in my life. Weather deteriorated into a quasi-political rant. My health brought up the bile of bipolar, and my mother’s decision to lie down on railroad tracks. If possible, politics and religion degenerated beyond the disasters Miss. Manners warns of. Holy hell am I digging deep into my dis-functional psyche. I think everyone is now thoroughly aware of my rather twisted views on reality. Does this mean I am deep? Or does it mean I am treading water in the shallow end of our gene pool? I am pretty sure there is no way to discuss politely the shallow end of our collective gene pool, or the superpowers that come with it. After all our gene pool seems to be all shallow end. How can we criticize other species intelligence when we elect people to lead us on a basis of how photogenic they are rather on their competence. What is next for our presidency? A professional wrestler? How about a talk-show host? Or what about one of those oh so good examples of competence in MTV reality shows?

When I think of the future, I can’t help but feel tears welling up in my eyes. They are most definitely not happy tears, but I can’t tell whether they are from desolation or the kind you get when you roll on the floor laughing your ass off. That’s right people I just wrote out a text acronym. If you can’t properly communicate by spelling the words out, how can you possibly read the context when you use an acronym. Smileys and emojis I can see. But taking the meat out of the words and expecting them to mean the same thing? It sounds lazy… but that is coming from someone who loves words enough to have asked for various dictionaries and thesauruses for birthdays and Christmas. Yeah, I am a geek… get over it you have followed me so far. I am soooo not done mixing metaphors to the point I have brought my food processor to bear on them. Lets see; don’t count your eggs until you cross the street, home is where the toilet is, a bird in the hand is worth twice as much as a lucky penny. I really like the layered complexity of that last one, but that is just my two cents worth. I am not just sticking metaphors in my food processor. I am tossing sayings, wives tales and other crap in too.

Have I made clear how much fun I have playing with words and trying to wring new meaning out of words that have existed far longer than I have. It is my hobby, perhaps it will be my vocation at some point. I think things have to get you paid for them to be a vocation, until then words are my vacation. I can vomit up ideas all over the page, sometimes they come out the ass end to. Yea, I write out my ass like Trump speaks out of his. The difference between us: I don’t necessarily expect people to listen. Though if you listen to Trump for long you might notice that he doesn’t seem to expect people to listen either for as much as he contradicts himself and verbally weasels about. Not that I am calling him a two-faced weasel or anything…

You know what I really like, when people find their calling in life and it just happens to mesh with their name. Like a chiropractor named Krickrak, or a house painter named Brush. A trump card is used to win a trick in cards. An alternate definition is a resource to use at an opportune time… So, who is using Trump. Is he in office to use our collective superpowers to soften us up for something worse? Is his, “absolutely necessary,” border wall for some other purpose? I think if he starts moving for one across the Canadian border I am outta here! I don’t want to end up in the middle of some conservative totalitarian state. Totalitarian states tend to eliminate people who do not live up to their norms. Ahem, cough <GAY>, <FEMINIST.> Yikes!!!

I know if Hitler had his way I would be taking a short, “shower,” off a shorter pier. Boy this whole book idea is starting to sound like a bad idea. Do I really want to tell the whole world I am a sarcastic, lesbian, feminist who has little to no confidence in our very popular/vilified president? Cause that is kind of what this is doing. I am telling everybody and god’s developmentally delayed cousin, (You know, the one god put in charge of platypuses, dodos, Trump, and blue footed boobies. ) that is what I am. Leave it to a lesbian to mention boobies.

WHAM!

My inner editor just had a seizure at that paragraph! It is screaming, “DELETE!” louder than a cyberman. At least it isn’t my inner Trump yelling “EXTERMINATE.” I don’t know if I have gone too far… I mean I have always wanted to write a banned book. I feel like banned books are the ones people feel strongest about. If enough people haven’t read them to organize a banning, then they really haven’t been read. Even the bible has been banned. Not that I feel this mess of verbal diarrhea is in anywhere near the bible’s league. Now I am wondering if this is a significant moment in my own history. Is this pile of words what people will remember me by? Will I be remembered at all. At 27 pages, this is the longest I have managed to keep my inner editor at bay in years. It has been about a month for me since I began this verbal voyage, if I don’t count the decades that preceded it and colored my world view. Will this be the work of my life?

I wish I could think that this would actually be published, and read… by a lot of people. At this point I am not sure I even care whether they are fans or hate me to the core. I would like to think that these words would shake something loose inside them. If the time I put into these words makes one person pause in their preprogrammed thought for just a moment and go, “Hmm,” I will have been successful.

This is sort of a second draft of an old purpose. About seventeen years ago, I self published a book of poems and essays, four of the copies I titled, Painted with Words. The fifth I titled, “Who I Am.” I did everything from write to print to hardback binding the copies. I think I donated one to my local library, I gave some to some of my college instructors. I gave one to my mother. The last copy, the one titled, “Who I Am,” I gave to my father in an attempt to get him to understand me. I made the cover from a blue glitter night scene fabric, and spent nearly a week figuring out how to print it out successfully on my printer. At the time I had one of those old black and white printers that required the perforated tractor feed paper with the holes on both sides. Trust me it was not easy, that is why there were only five copies.

Back to the point. I started this voyage, into the darker places in my mind, with the vague purpose of writing something that would help my father understand me better. At this point, I am pretty sure he hasn’t hung in to see where I am going with things. Maybe I need to consider another purpose. To make people think? To express my disgust at modern society? To help me understand myself better. I like you, oh gentle reader, have been surprised and shocked by what has ended up on these pages. I think I have a better understanding of my own life than I did some twenty or thirty pages ago. I am kind of curious what more there is to learn.

I feel pretty wrung out by today’s words. I have had more prolific days than this, but I am not usually so honest with myself or my readers. I write a lot of fiction. I spend hours a day lying to myself about reality. In my little universe, good always beats evil, and there is always a good reason for the bad things that happen, and that reason is discovered before you reach the last page. It helps me face the real reality that those things are rarely true. Superheroes never swoop in and save the damsel in distress trying to teach herself to fly off of a bridge. People hurt people for no good reason, sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes people hurt themselves worse than other people ever could. Things are lost, for good, and they aren’t discovered to have been merely displaced at the beginning of the sequel. Fact is I can neither confirm nor deny that there is a sequel to this life.

Let’s start with the lies we tell ourselves, “I will just have one more drink,” “I don’t need my glasses for that…,” “I am not cheating on my diet, per se, “I will just make it up next month….” I seem to like lying to myself about the type of person I am. For the longest time I told myself that I like boys. I berated myself for being short and horribly overweight. I thought of myself as doing things a year younger than the other people around me. I defined myself for nine and a half years as a year younger than everyone else in my grade, and that was the one thing that made me special. Dropping out for a semester changed that. I lost some of who I was at that point. After graduation, as I got older that identity as a year younger fell flat. A year younger at what. I was an adult and all the crap I went through in school, all the teasing and abuse coming from my peers that I survived because I was special and a whole year younger than them was long behind me. Except that it wasn’t. I still don’t relate well to other people. For the most part I go through my days sarcastically oblivious to people. The only way I can handle them is by thinking they aren’t there. I don’t listen to people around me for fear of hearing them laughing or whispering. If I heard it I would be certain they were talking about me or laughing at me. Somehow I still haven’t reached beyond the adolescent me that thinks everyone is happier, smarter, prettier,or otherwise better than me, and I am the only one that feels this crappy about myself.

That all admitted to, I do have one shelter from all the storms in the world. She makes me feel special, important, loved, in a way not even my mother could. Since I found her I have known what smiling was for. It wasn’t just what other people did after making a sour joke about my insecurities. I know what happy is for because of her.

For the first few years we spent together she subconsciously attempted to push me away. She had been hurt so many times. I knew it for what it was and I dug in my heels. After a time the waves of self-protective rejection broke over me and she embraced me heart and soul, finally believing me when I said forever. Nine years in, several of the married couples we count as friends are spinning wildly apart and the word divorce is the common topic of conversation. When couples get divorced they expect you to choose sides. You are either for one or the other. This epidemic of separation has made my beloved anxious. She asks if I am mad at her with every other breath. In her sleep she latches onto me and begs me not to leave. I do everything to reassure her I am going nowhere. I didn’t wait more than thirty years to find her to decide monogamy wasn’t for me. I said forever and meant it. I still mean it! I expect to go forward into the sequel to this life with her at my side, FOREVER. I would sooner cut off my right arm than walk away from what we have. Besides, if I left who would clean the cat boxes.

Yes, I am a crazy cat lady. Each of them has a name and I can tell them apart with my eyes closed, except for Callie she is schizo, sometimes she lays down on me like Ruby, sometimes she just walks over me like Smokey. I can tell she isn’t Malachi though, he weighs like thirty pounds. We got his balls chopped and he went into depression, and developed a binge eating disorder. He also has a self-destructive catnip addiction. We have tried interventions… but you try and tell a cat not to do something. It isn’t just cats, we have dogs too. I am much more of a dog person. I understand them much better. When a dog wants something, they butter you up with a stupid grin and those deadly puppy dog eyes. Cats...sometimes they stare at you like they are trying to use the Jedi mind trick, other times they just walk up and start slapping you, either way I am confused.

I love my animals, but I think sometimes I spend way too much time with them, but I like them more than people. The worst one of them can do to disappoint me is have an accident. No big, we only have carpet in one room the rest it’s just a mop and squeegee away from a memory. People can disappoint in oh so many more ways. They lie. They treat one another badly. They don’t apply their brains to problems they apply brute force or worse. People swear and talk behind other peoples’ backs. I question the wisdom of collective society. I think as a species we would have been better off as a species that lived quietly alone until breeding season. Then it would be wham bam thank you ma’am, and everyone would go back to their solitary territory. The one problem is you can’t develop a civilization as a society of one. Language skills would be lacking if all you had to talk to was yourself for the majority of a year. Then men would beat on each other because they wouldn’t be able to discuss who got what female. Never mind that the world is too small for everyone to have enough suitable territory. Okay, so there would be a smaller population, but also, women would have to look after several children at different ages all by themselves, unless the children matured faster. Now we are just discussing an animal population, because there is no way children could learn everything from their mother in one season.

So civilization is dependent on people gathering together. Except when they gather, they tend to become noticeably uncivilized. Damned if we do damned if we don't. The great book of western civilization, The Bible, indicates we are just plain damned regardless of what we do or who we are. I remember being a child and being told I already had god wanting me dead and in hell. I couldn’t even fathom what I could have done to make him so mad, well except for the feelings I had… But everyone started out damned, and most people liked who they were supposed to like. To even think of getting a reprieve we had to apologize to god for every sin everyone before us had discovered, and any more we might think up on our own in the future. If he didn’t want us to sin, why give us free will and creativity. Was it to make us more like her? Does that mean that god can sin? If he made us in his image… now I am flirting with heresy. Okay, so god doesn’t sin but he created it… Why? Why does bad s*** happen to good people? If original sin exists… are there good people? Is everyone just bad? Even the ones who have made their apologies and accepted the gift of god’s own son’s death for our sins. Did I ever have a hope of not being damned even if I could have resisted the temptation of love? Am I damned now? I made my apologies, repeatedly, I accept that Christ died to pay for my sins, especially my sin of love…

Maybe life is just a cosmic hamster wheel. We just keep going around until we drop dead and fall off. I think we’re big enough that god won’t flush us with his goldfish, but how big is god’s toilet. Hmm… probably about the size of a blue-green ball circling a medium sized star. We are just the floaters that haven’t flushed properly. So, people really do end up sleeping with the fishes. I wonder what god has against fishes.

New topic- who decided what written language should look like? I mean was it decided by committee? Or did one dude just say here is an “A” and it sounds like AAAA when you read it. Who decided to separate letters into consonants and vowels? Why couldn’t “O” be a consonant, and “J” be a vowel. I know the establishment of writing was a process through centuries, or millennia bringing us to where we are. Countless generations of scribes were born, worked and died, so I could annoy you with my rantings like this. Let us bow our heads in respect for these underappreciated men and women, but mostly men. Why does “P” begin a word like “penis” but it looks like the side view of a woman’s chest.” One would think that the name for that particular organ would be more phallic looking, like “olo.” Now I am just being silly. We have a phonetic alphabet not a pictographic one. That is a good thing because pornography would be very different. I mean… you wouldn’t necessarily need photos, just the text could be arousing? Nah, Asian alphabets are current examples of pictographic alphabets and I think they still have pictures in their porn, all be it anime, but still erotic images. When I sat down this morning to write, I don’t think I thought the word erotic would come up. I am not sure how I got there from being a crazy cat lady. There is nothing erotic about crazy cat ladies, nothing. Although, cats can be called “pussies….”

That paragraph has me scratching my head. How am I boarding these trains of thought. I don’t know, but I am pretty sure I am not paying for my tickets. I am writing about the journeys though. Hmm does that make me a travel writer? I never wanted to be a travel writer. I am just ever so slightly agoraphobic. I really don’t like leaving the house. If I could afford to get everything delivered, I probably would. I could see me shutting myself in our bedroom and writing nearly constantly. I think it would be just about as close as I may ever get to heaven, just me, my love, and my animals. A pleasurable sigh escapes at the thought of it. The only thing lacking for the fantasy to come true is enough cash flow. Maybe this book is my ticket to paradise? Only you would know. Did you buy this book? Hardcover, paperback, or ebook? Did I end up self-publishing again? Or do I have an actual publishing house signing off on the quality of my words. I might just get banned! Woo to the whoo!

I feel like I am getting somewhere. I have written twenty-two thousand words, hopefully I haven’t bounced about my subjects too quickly to keep up. I suppose I could go back and delete the really impolite stuff, but what in the hell would be left. Let’s ask god’s developmentally delayed cousin… Okay so I might have one half page of boring musings on my cats, and maybe a little about my health and the weather. This is not how I usually am… I am quite polite. I tend not to speak my mind in public, if I speak at all. I do very little to be noticed. I can’t count how often I havebeen in a group of people and had several ask where I was, like I wasn’t in the room. I am a wallflower ninja with natural camouflage even I can’t see. Still this, these words are who I am. I have these thoughts all the time, this is just one of the highly limited occasions I have chosen to give these words an outlet. It is cathartic, and frightening. Some of this I really didn’t realize about myself. Some of it I knew but never admitted to. How could I? So much about them is just so… wrong.

I don’t question god’s existence, but I question my place in his world. How could he make me the way I am and always have been, and condemn me at the same time. Most churches would say, its okay you just have to resist your urges, if you don’t like men just stay celibate. How many of those heterosexual church goers choose to do the same. It isn’t like I am sexually driven, most of our relationship is about our emotional, personal, even spiritual connection. I am supposed to deny that kind of passion just to keep myself out of hell. Yo, heteros you spend your life alone, without your soulmate so you can get to heaven! I would accept your criticism then. Why would god make me this way and expect me to spend my whole life alone and incomplete. What sin did I commit to deserve that. Surely my life is better than one spent lying to myself and my husband every single day, until I resent him so much we end up divorced… Isn’t lying a sin as well. How could I stand before god and promise to love, cherish and obey a husband I am not even sure I like. That would be lying to god too. I was left a choice of three untenable positions, being alone, marrying without love, or sinning against god by loving my soulmate. WTF. Did god wind up this toy just to watch us fail??? Are we the type of toy that is supposed to spin wildly out of control?

I am feeling really low energy again. Writing these kinds of words takes more out of me than the fluffy nonsense scifi I usually write, but I think they are worthwhile. Even if no one else reads them, they are giving me insights on myself. Some that I might not have come across any other way. I mean I knew how I feel about my beloved, but I don’t think I fully expressed it before. Some things I have come to realize because of these words I haven’t found a way to express yet, but we are only twenty-three thousand words in what could be a one hundred thousand word adventure.

Thinking about adventure, I remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. You know the ones where you go to a different page depending on your choices. I would always keep my thumb on the old page until I was sure I wasn’t going to end up dead. They were fun, but they give kids an unrealistic view on life. You can’t leave your thumb on the page for most decisions, and no matter what you choose you end up dead. There is no “safe” path through life. Some choices let you live longer, but you never find out until much later on, long after you would have taken your thumb from the page.

The way my life unfolds reassures me that the plot devices I use in my stories are not entirely inplausible. I mean life happens according to certain patterns. I have noticed that my author is heavy handed with the foreshadowing. Small life events have been fore echoes of larger ones, like Cinder Sue’s diabetes, or the way my mother ended up on the ventilator twice before she ended up staying on it. Another thing is the sarcastic or dark sense of humor my author seems to have. There have been several things large and small; like the kidney stone, or the time I predicted the winning lottery numbers a week before they were drawn and didn’t buy a ticket. Ironic huh.

Yes, some of the foreshadowing in my life has been as subtle as my dreams. For the longest time I had dreams in two flavors. In one type, the normal ones, I wasn’t able to read anything in the dreams. The words would always blur beyond recognition. The other type of dreams, the ones where I was seeing things about to happen, I could read fluently. Like Sofluffy, the dog I raised on a bottle, I saw her in a dream long before my mother ever thought of visiting that junkyard. In the dream she communicated with me and told me I would name her Sophia. A month later I was figuring out how to bottle feed a puppy. The trouble is now I am so used to reading that I read words in my dreams as easily as I see in color. I still have trouble getting my phones to work in my dreams though, but I am a recent convert to smartphones or cell phones in general.

Speaking of phones, did I mention that I wrote an entire page of this manuscript on my phone. I am a cell phone addict now. For the longest time I needed to carry notebooks and pens in case inspiration hit. Then lap tops happened and carrying a computer case worked in my favor. Then tablets happened and I could throw one and a bluetooth mini keyboard in my purse and write anywhere. Eventually even that became a bother. I had switched to mini notepads for ideas, but I have forgotten the pads or pens on occasion and lost brilliant inspiration because of it. Now I just open an app on my phone and… I have a page of text I can copy and paste into any document. I almost never go anywhere without my phone. It even follows me into the bathroom at home, as if I would loose an idea over toilet paper and a walk of ten feet.

I still remember typing manuscripts on an electric typewriter or an early computer the size of a large microwave, which required two five inch floppy drives to write on it. The first drive held the program the second is where I would save the text. The, actually floppy, floppy disk could only hold like twenty thousand words. So it took between two and three floppies to hold a short manuscript divided into three files. Plus it didn’t take much for a floppy to get bent and the data became corrupted. I lost thousands of words that way. It was almost enough to make me quit. But I always kept hard copies, usually handwritten in a little booklet of twenty five sheets stapled together into a fifty page segment. The trouble is my natural handwriting style is something a little less legible than the proverbial chicken scratches. Even I can’t read the early bits. Plus it took forever for me to type it up because until I was sixteen I was a hunt and peck typist. It took less time to hard boil an egg than it did for me to type up a sentence. I could maybe type ten words a minute from a handwritten manuscript. That didn’t even include the time it takes to think of what word goes next, the words were already strung together. Now, thinking up what I am writing and typing it takes up a lot less time and I can read every word. I think I have about a fifty word per minute writing speed and a sixty word per minute speed if I am just transcribing.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China, or the location of Trump’s comb over? Nothing, except it was on my mind. Technology has advanced so fast. I am falling behind on learning about it. That is something that makes me uncomfortable. My true love is tech savvy and about ten years younger. There are times she makes me feel downright stupid, like when I spend five minutes trying to get my phone to do something and she taps it four times and gets it done. When I figured out how to video chat on Facebook, I felt like our nephew making it to the toilet on time. I feel old, older than I am. Pretty soon words and phrases like, whippersnappers or back in my day…, will be coming out of my mouth. My hair is losing the battle against the gray. It was never as thick and luxurious as my love’s but it is thinning out even more. My father’s hair is still thick and only slightly receding. I seem to have been dealt the crap cards, general metabolic issues, immanent baldness, arthritis in my formerly cracked tailbone. I tell you that one is a pain in the ass!

Time to stop bitching about s***. What do I have to celebrate? I have written thirteen books, drawn three coloring books, and have about five books, not including this one, in the works, basically outlined with perhaps a chapter or two written. Those kind of accomplishments are beyond the average. Even if everyone who says they are going to write a book wrote one, very few of them would make it beyond that single book, let alone thirteen, and not everyone who says they are going to write a book ever manages it. I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t finish writing a book. I write books faster than some people read them. I have finished three in one year, not on a regular basis, but it has happened. I feel like I started reaching my writing goals late in life. My early manuscripts were just not organized enough to finish. My writing project from when I was ten until I was fifteen never got finished. There just was no way for me to shape that loose jumble of plot and characters could work. I named the characters after their jobs, like Rocky Stone, team geologist, or Cam Eras, the photographer. The setting for that one was just a false start at the universe most of my books have been written in. At fifteen I gave up on it and started my second book. I was a little more organized, but still wasn’t working from an outline. I kept writing myself into corners and ended up with a mess almost as bad as my first one. I worked on it for about six years. Then I began playing with sculpting my universe into what it is now. I finished my first book at around twenty two, it took about a year and a half from rough planning to finished book. I then managed my second book in a year from formal outline to publication. Books started piling up from there. I had my lulls where I wrote little more than journal entries, but always I would come back to the same characters and universe when it came time for a book.

This book is my odd man out. So far it is nonfiction. I don’t write nonfiction. The words are too real in nonfiction. You start talking about capital “T” truths in nonfiction. I don’t want to go down those roads. I want to stay off of those trains. It is all so much more confrontational than I can handle in public. Thinking about discussing those things makes me want to melt back into the background unnoticed. I want to be so invisible that people ask where I am when I am standing two feet from them. I want to be the quiet one. But, I also want to be heard. I want to put images and thoughts into other people’s minds that they wouldn’t even consider otherwise. I want to make people think about just what normal and safe is.

I am trying desperately to write what I know, or at least what I think I know. These words are a desperate beacon blipping out my existence to the universe, or at least to people I know. I wonder if I have the courage for anyone to read this manuscript all the way through. Am I a coward? I hide. I avoid conflict, but god help you if you threaten someone or something I love. I will bite, claw, kick and pull the hair of anyone who messes with them. Ironically if someone f***s with me I just curl up in fetal position and hope they don't kick me in the metaphorical head. It is like I expect abuse. Like people degrading and devaluing me are just doing what I deserve. I am seriously f***ed in the head! Or are those feelings more common than I think. People aren’t all mean girls picking at your every flaw. I am not the only quiet one watching from the sidelines.

If life were a sport what would it be. This is going to be another f***ed up metaphor because I know very little about sports. I was a year ahead my peers intellectually, but I was in remedial gym. Yes, that is a thing. I literally could not walk and chew gum. I choked on it once. Another time I walked right into a door frame. That’s really okay, back in my day gum was the top controlled substance in school. Chewing on school property was a visit the principal offense. Your parents were called if you were a repeat offender. I still equate gum chewing with hard drugs. Seriously, I only chew it when I have to go through a sharp change in elevation, like going up into the mountains or getting on a plane. Medicinal bubble gum anyone?

Back to life as a sport. I think it is mostly like golf. A lot of hitting goals around and then chase them to hit them again. Or maybe it is like… wait are metaphors the ones where you use like or as, or are similes. f*** if I can remember. Anyway, life is like contact football. You spend your time trying to keep what you care about safe and within your group of friends, the rest of the world just wants to take it and grind you and yours into the astro-turf. If they get a chance they will sack your quarterback. Whatever that means. Maybe I should bury this comparison, in a compost and manure pile. Sports just are not and never will be my thing.

Other than the liking other girls thing I really am a goody two shoes. I don’t smoke and have never tried illegal drugs. I only drink on rare occasion. My big vice is food. I love it and it must love me because every ounce that I eat sticks around on my waistline. I have an almost impossible time losing weight. I can walk five miles in a day and eat less than 700 calories and GAIN weight. Or at least that was how it was before I got put on diabetes medicine. I lost fifty pounds over seven years. My diabetes improved to the point I got taken off of the medication, I regained fifteen pounds in three months. Well, so far I have kept to polite conversation on this page. You know that isn’t going to last though. Don’t you? I think I will put in a chapter break here just to say I had one polite page in this whole damned thing. Oops.