Tell me turn right at the tree with the rope tied around it, slow down at what used to be the supercool theatre back in the day but is now storefront with a painted baby buggy on the window, do a U-turn at the point where you can see they had to paint over the white lane lines, look for the slightly taller than normal fire hydrant and then….

Yeah. That’s how I like it.

I remember the little things. My brain likes the things I am not supposed to remember.

I often forget a name but I almost never forget a face.

I have been watching TV and will pause the screen when I see an actor, just some schmo in the background who has worked in other shows as a schmo in other backgrounds who I cannot place immediately. And I wait. And I wait. Until it comes to me. And 99% of the time it does. I might not remember his name (although I would guess it’s Joe), but I will be able to tell you the other eighty backgrounds he’s worked in.

When I see someone at the store, or gas station, or driving down the street who I just know I know but cannot place – I obsess on that person until I get it. And 99% of the time I do.

It could be the guy who was in line behind me at the Jewel two weeks ago and sneezed so I looked at him and blessed him. Or the woman who parked next to me months ago at the gym who opened her door and got out while talking loudly on her cell phone, so I noticed her.

I am a little weird so if I see the sneezing guy again much later, let’s say at the dry cleaner’s, I would say “Hey, Sneezing Guy! I was in line in front of you at the Jewel! I blessed you! Remember me?” Because to me that is the sort of thing I remember so why wouldn’t he.

And he’s all like “Uh. No. No I do NOT remember you, Freak.”. And then he pepper sprays me.

It is the stuff I remember.

I was looking through some old photo albums the other day. Pictures I have seen many hundreds of times. Pictures dating back 5, 10, 20+ years. And as I’ve done hundreds of times before, I look at the backgrounds of them. Pictures from 35 years ago…the main subject matter is a given; me and my sister in front of our childhood home.

I long ago memorized what we were wearing, the tilts of our heads, the shadows we cast. But I have also memorized the backgrounds. The things that aren’t supposed to be important to the shot, the stuff that is simply supposed to serve as the irrelevant backdrop.

I see the small smear of white crayon on one yellow brick to the right of the front door. I remember it. My sister had drawn on that brick one day and she got in trouble for it. In the picture you would probably mistake it for a glare of light. But it’s crayon, and it stayed there until the day my parents moved out of that house forever.

Then there are the crowd shots. Me and family or friends in front of national monuments, buildings, scenery…in crowded places, with people who over the years have evolved into the main focus when their job was to hang there as faded, white-noise enhancements to – us.

I notice the people, the mundane, nameless faces in the background merely caught by my camera in a split-second of borrowed time. But there they are, and I know their faces and expressions so well that if I ran into them on the street tomorrow I would stop, tilt my head back, close my eyes and wait for it to come to me.

My eyes would flash open fiercely with awe and excitement as if I had just invented the toaster, and I skip happily up to angry-looking-woman-wearing-a-yellow-shirt-and-pale-blue-baseball-cap-looking-behind-off-to-her-left-while-standing-to-my-right-at-the-Lincoln-Memorial-in-D.C. and say with all the familiarity of lifelong friends…….

“HEY!!! Angry-looking-woman-wearing-a-yellow-shirt-and-pale-blue-baseball-cap-looking-behind-off-to-her-left-while-standing-to-my-right-at-the-Lincoln-Memorial-in-D.C….how the hell ARE you?! Man it’s been, what, 19 years?? Oh, mannnn, it is good to SEE you again!”

And then that bitch would pepper spray me too. Or maybe taze me, I don’t know. She definitely looked pissed.

It’s funny. That woman is perpetually, forever, frozen in time to me as pissed off. I have made up reasons for that in my head over the years: her kids were lagging behind. Her husband was bitching about being hungry. She had just discovered her wallet was stolen. She realized that she was in D.C. when her flight was supposed to have landed in Seattle but now she was trying to make the best of it.

I will never know that reason, but I would know her.

Background people in photos have always fascinated me. They are not photo bombs because they aren’t even accidentally the focus, and yet I focus on them anyway.

They do not know they are a part of my life as I view it through the prism of frozen memories. Thousands of those people over my lifetime, trapped in my subconscious as they were caught on film. Burned into my memory.

Then I think, how many pictures am I in across the world, just hanging out in the background? Sneezing. Shoving a hot dog in my mouth. Looking bored. Yelling at someone. Laughing.

Is there a picture on a mantle in England of the happy couple in front of the Coliseum in Rome, and not so far back and a little to the right is me looking frustratingly through my fanny pack for my passport?

In photos that are incredibly important and meaningful to people all over the world, is me. Doing something. Or nothing. Innocuously. Or maybe even conspicuously. But I am there, unknowingly emblazoned in their brain as a forever part of that one frozen moment.

And you are too.

I am telling you right now, I want you to know that if you ever come running at me like a linebacker in the mall and say “Oh my GOD! Girl-scratching-her-ass-with her left-hand-while wearing-sunglasses-and-jean-shorts-and-striped-tank-top-with-her-right-hand-on-her-right-hip-in-front-of-the-Golden-Gate-Bridge….holy SHIT…how the hell ARE you!?!”….

I will not taze you, Bro.

I will not taze you.

Originally Posted:  May 10, 2011

We’ve all been asked what our top 10 movies are, right? While mine sometimes change depending on my mood or the barometric pressure, the following have consistently rotated in and out of that Top 10:

• Braveheart
• Jaws
• Star Wars
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Godfather, Parts I & II
• True Romance
• Aliens

First let me say I think it’s entirely possible I was a man in a past-life, and an aggressive, swashbuckling, womanizing one at that. But I digress.

If I look at just the movies above I ask myself what they all have in common?

• Central alpha-male figures? Check.
• Central alpha-male figures fighting against an alpha-male foe? Check. (I’m making the assumption that the shark in Jaws was a male. I will call him “Buddy”. And Nurse Ratched, well, Louise Fletcher created such an indelibly strong, frightening, gender-neutral character that at the very least she was the personification of “The Man”).

So they all have those things in common except….”Aliens”.

“Aliens”. Has there ever been a more kick-ass, archetypal, hell-hath-no-fury female character in film in recent memory? I think not. There have been attempted copy-cats, sure…but none that got is as right as Sigourney Weaver’s Oscar nominated performance as Ellen Ripley did in “Aliens”.

What fascinates me about Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley is she managed to bridge the gap between feminine and masculine power until you forgot the gender stereotypes, and with ease fit into the role of Earth-mother defending her child with the iron-will and steely courage of an unwitting soldier . And all the while….she looked damned sexy doing it.

The reason “Aliens” as a sequel worked so well is that it was no longer just an epic battle between humans and acid-blooded, 15 foot tall cockroaches with detachable, snapping jaws (ugh…still one of the scariest villains in moviedom if you ask me), but because this was a human woman fighting to keep her “adopted” daughter from dying in the clutches of the alien…and the alien, as luck would have it, was ALSO a mother defending her children…er…larvae. So you have all the action and suspense of a sci-fi thriller with the added bonus of watching the most epic of battles: two females defending the creatures within their care.

Remember Ripley’s line when she was in that gigantic robot-suit right before she deep-sixed the alien mother: “Get away from her you BITCH!” I mean, come ON…who doesn’t love a good bitch-slap???

I was thinking the other day about soldiers. Not famous ones like in the movies that I mentioned above, just grunts, troops. Just your average, every-day people who fight the wars that we’ve either told them to by drafting them, or asked them to fight with a pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top. People who go in and fight for the safety and security and well-being and national interests of people they’ve never met, on the orders of still other people they’ve never met. And all of those brave troops who actually fight in combat are only…men.

Why is that?

Has our testosterone-infused government establishment never SEEN “Aliens”?

I know, people, I know…Ripley is not a real person. And neither is the giant, phallic-headed cockroach alien (that we know of…), so I will clarify my question.

Um…just what IS the justification for not having female combat soldiers in the U.S. military?

I’m not a proponent of war. Not by a liberal-longshot. But again, I’m no pacifist. I simply believe that war of any kind should commence only when there is absolutely no other fucking option to protect the masses of innocents. When war, however, is warranted, why can’t a woman fight alongside a man?

Is it because we get our “monthlies”, our “friends” and that would make for an un-sanitary working environment? Because, you know, everyone knows how sterile and sanitary field barracks, and encampments and port-a-potties-if-you’re-lucky and ditches and caves and such are. If soldiers can carry around hand-held GPS’s, they can carry around some Tampax.

Is it because we’re emotionally unpredictable and emotionally fragile; that we can’t take the heat when we’re not in the kitchen? Riiiggghhht. Because everyone knows that while you’re in the heat of battle a woman would surely opt-out of the most hard-wired and primal of animal instincts which is to LIVE, and instead opt-IN for the lesser-known of the primal instincts which is to die while collapsed on her knees in the rubble, head in hands, shedding big, blubbery tears.

Is it because we’re…weak…physically in comparison to men? Now on this point I do not argue the merit itself; women, in most cases, are NOT as physically strong as men. But are we talking about one-on-one duels, here? Are we talking about a prison-yard scene from a B-movie in which the two opponents are encircled by the rest of the chanting group and made to fight to-the-death, or at the very least…to the shame?

Let’s face it, the list of reasons that women are given for not being allowed to engage in combat is a mile long: we’d distract the men with our feminine wiles (sorry, now that DADT has been technically eradicated – FINALLY – the issue of enticement shouldn’t hold water in terms of women/men either), we’re not courageous enough and too cautious (sorry, I’m here to tell you that courage has nothing to do with testes)…and ohhhhhh, just not enough time for the rebuttals to the faux-justifications.

In the end, hard-core military traditionalists, and well…most men… will tell you simply that a woman doesn’t harbor the necessary aggression, stamina and mental fortitude to fight in battle for the love of country. It’s not “in us”. Or to put it succinctly, “Dude…you’re a GIRL!” To those people I say: Have you ever actually seen a woman fight for someone she cares for? Someone she loves? Her honor? Her child? Would you ever want to be on the receiving end of her wrath, especially when that woman is armed with an AK-47 or a grenade launcher? Would you??

Women are nurturers by nature. I believe this to be true. It is not in our nature to voluntarily commit to harm others, regardless of the reasons.

But let me tell you this: love of country’s got nothing on love of family, of child, of personal honor. Look, women should rule the world. That is a given. War and all of its atrocities would eventually cease to exist in that scenario (another post for another day)…so let’s take baby steps.

You put a woman out there on the front lines, a nurturer – and I don’t give a damn what she’s the nurturer of back home: a child, a cat, a parrot, a goat or a plant – and she will fight like a man.

She’ll give new meaning to the term bitch-fight.

Seriously. “Aliens”. Just consider adding it to your Top 10.

It was 1997.

I did not know what I wanted to do that day, only that it was a morning I simply could not allow the same routine to exist.

I laid in my bed trying very hard not to allow the creeping feeling of guilt to lie on the pillow beside me. I instead allowed the just-fuck-it side of me to yawn and stretch and wake up. I said Hi! It’s about time you showed up, and I left a voice mail for my boss with some thinly veiled reference to things coming out of both ends of me…must have been something I ate…I should feel better tomorrow.

I lived alone. I sat up wishing I had a destination but was motivated to get up despite not having one.

I could tell through my curtains it was hazy outside, cloudy. And cooler than it was warm. This was good. I did not want the pressure of having to do something typical on a beautiful, exceedingly warm nearly Fall day such as ride a bike along the lakefront.

I stood up and got a head rush and waited for it to pass. I almost never wore my robe. But this morning I closed my bedroom door and took it off the hook. It was green, emerald-green. It is still green and I sometimes still wear it, but that was maybe the 5th time I’d ever put it on. It felt so nice and warm, and then I slipped on my slippers.

Taking probably seven steps I was standing in the middle of my living room. No noise except the vague sounds of traffic outside. I wished, deeply, that I drank coffee because that would have been the first destination. But I don’t drink coffee and never have. It sucks to not drink coffee, I thought to myself.

So I peed instead. No, man, not on the living room floor. I managed to get to the toilet. As I sat on the cold seat I thought, smelling coffee or bacon right now would be nice.

Done, I went to my refrigerator. Which was at the back end of my very long clothes closet. Which was of course just off the kitchen. So acceptable was this peculiarity in my 20′s.

Diet Pepsi was my poison, my caffeine. It is still so awesome. I opened a can and started to drink and took a step back.

The nice thing about having your refrigerator in your closet is that you can stand and stare at both and think…everything in here sucks, and have it apply to both your clothes and your food.

I made a slight belching sound and shivered at the coldness running down into my stomach.

I moved a box of crackers to get to a pair of my shorts. Then reached overhead and moved a box of stage makeup I’d had since high school to get at the comfy grey sweatshirt with no logos or words on it.

I took those and my poison and schlepped into the bathroom and got undressed. I started the shower while simultaneously brushing my teeth. I had to run the cold in the sink to ensure the hot in the shower would stay hot for longer than three minutes. I honestly have no idea if this was a factual cause and effect. But it happened once, and so I continued to do it for luck. My shower water needs to be just shy of scalding.

It was a big claw-foot tub that you almost needed a step stool to get into, and like every morning I showered I prayed, please don’t let me die getting into this thing because that would be a shitty and embarassing way to go.

While washing my hair I had two epiphanies: 1. I wasn’t even hung over and really wanted an Egg McMuffin. And 2. I was going to walk around my neighborhood and take pictures all day.

I was taking a photography class during this timeframe and I was suddenly excited that I had found the perfect justification for this day of hookie.

I rushed through my shower. I put my utilitarian underwear and bra on, khaki shorts and grey sweatshirt and blow-dried my long hair into a screaming knot. Instead of brushing it out in clumps I threw it up in a clip. A little makeup. Very little. Some blush and my ever-present lip gloss.

I was moving quickly now with purpose. Back into the hunger-closet to get my backpack. And then into the barely there little corner storage thingy in my bedroom to get my camera.

I opened the bag and began flipping through all the unused rolls of film. Yes, film. Film. The stuff Kodak used to make. Do they still make it?

Black and white. Sweet and salty.  Black and white.

I took two rolls. One Fuji and one Kodak, because I had just learned the difference between the two. I’m sure it was some subtly profound difference – but I couldn’t tell you now if you paid me.

I loaded the camera with the Fuji. I guess because it felt more exotic and leant itself to the possibility of something really cool happening. Fiji. Fuji. It’s how my mind works.

Shoved some crackers and keys in my bag, and walked quickly to the door. I banged my knee into the door jamb having not taken into account the backpack also needing to get through the opening.

Motherfuckkkkkkker, I whispered.

People had to go to work, after all, and I didn’t want to wake the poor bastards up. Skin was torn away from my knee but not bleeding so I slammed the door behind me to vent my anger.  Wow, so loud. I might as well have yelled MOTHERFUCKER at the top of my lungs.

I decided to walk North onto Broadway toward the not as nice part of my neighborhood and meander around in concentric circles from there. I had no idea if I would find anything which would be worthy of my Fuji. But there were some things. There were.

I stopped at Graceland Cemetery.  Cemeteries are usually beautiful to me and this famous one was no exception.  Through a chain-link fence bordering off construction I focused my paltry 35 mm lens on a tombstone.  Frankenstein.  That’s all it said.  Frankenstein.

A beautiful old church was being shredded apart with a wrecking ball, but the entire stained glass wall behind the altar stood alone.

Two ancient men smoking pipes and speaking to each other in what I assume was Polish.

A mobile HIV testing van.

And more, all worthy of my fictional gastrointestinal issues.

But I cannot find those pictures.

I have one.

The chain locked doors of a Pentacostal church which oddly held only evening services according to a sign on the lawn.  Two comically goliath doors were chained together.  Trying to keep the sinners out or keep them locked in?  From a half block away the wooden doors loomed absolutely black in color, shaded by an ornate archway, with the chains barely visible in the muted sun.

I knew the shot I wanted but it would not be easy to get on my manual camera.  It was a long exposure with no tripod.  I needed to hold very, uncharacteristically still.  I set my F-stop, adjusted whosas and whatsits, took a deep breath and held it in, then clicked the shutter three times.

Film.  There was no instant gratification.  No immediate affirmation of a job well or poorly done.  I waited over a week to get my photographs back from the developer.

It turned out exactly as I had hoped.

They were all worth it.

The Egg McMuffin was salty.

This, though, was my sweetest thing.

Music is just so powerful.  I cannot explain it.  How can something so logical and perfectly understandable on paper be transformed into pure emotion and feeling once translated via an instrument?  I shake my head.

That scene.  The one from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”…the one where scientists go to India to record the phenomenon of people chanting and singing the same sequence of notes over and over again.

That scene gave me chills the first time I saw it when I was a kid.  It still does today.  It was just a few notes.  But it evoked a very strong feeling when sung in unison by hundreds of people.

That was a weird example to get at what I’m getting at.  I am tired.  It has not been a good day.  What can I say.

I am not a musician.  I never have been.  I wanted dearly to be able to play an instrument when I was young; the piano or guitar…something.  I learned to play the Recorder in grade school like most other kids at that time.  (Incidentally, I can still play the theme from Star Wars on it).  But I never did become proficient on any instrument.

To me, at that age, I think I wanted desperately to be able to express my feelings and emotions with clarity and beauty, and doing that through music seemed to me the most natural way to do it.

I couldn’t play an instrument to create music so I thought “I’ll be a singer”.  See, often theatre and singing go together.  I wrote songs and tried singing them.  Only, haaaaaa.  I can’t sing.  I suppose I can hold a warbly tune, but only when it is comedic value you’re looking for.

I cannot cry for you, Argentina, but I can probably make you split a gut.

I found other outlets for my burgeoning expressiveness instead; theatre, dancing and writing.  I was moderately successful at these things in that they temporarily fixed my “fix”; the desire to express myself.  These things were such a high for me, but with the highs come the lows.  And during the lows, there was music.

I was so disturbed after watching “Amadeus” for the first time and thought, “Oh boy.  I know I should identify with Mozart here as the protagonist, but I’m thinking it’s really Salieri.  I get him.”

The scene in which Salieri as a very, very old man is recounting his experiences with Mozart in a time long gone by, and Mozart’s unparalleled genius in creating music and the ethereal emotion it evoked, and how he – Salieri – only wanted a small piece of the divinity he believed Mozart possessed in serving as a conduit for such sounds.

Why, God?  Salieri begged to the Heavens…why have you given me this desire but not the ability to communicate it through music?  Why??

Salieri believed it to be a punishment from God himself that he possessed the pure desire to create musical masterpieces but could not, and that Mozart while seeming to care very little for his God-given talent, could.

Salieri felt imprisoned by this desire, wishing for it either to disappear, or, the ability to magically mutate it into musical glory.

He did not receive either wish.

I identified with him very strongly.

Music has defined my life in so many overpowering ways, as it does for many people.

Certain songs take us back to a specific moment in time, a place.  Sense memory through music has proven one million times  more potent to me than that of smell, touch or even sight.   I am not alone.

Haven’t most of us heard a song that puts us instantly back into the arms of a person we loved and lost or even won, to the point where we can truly feel them, smell them, touch them at a very specific point in time?  The examples are endless.

Music is time travel.

Music speaks more clearly, more resoundingly, more universally…than any other form of personal expression known to man.  I state this as fact, not as opinion.  I dare anyone to argue this point with me.

I cannot create music, but throughout most of my life and certainly throughout the last couple of years, I have depended on it heavily to help me express or fully realize what I am feeling or thinking during times of pain or contentment or confusion or joy.

My iPod is like my own personal, little therapist.

I guard my aloneness with swords and arrows and slingshots.  I do not need much of it, but I do need it.  I crave it.  I must have it so as to bring order to chaos.

And when I am alone and my world is out of focus, skewed, wrapped in gauze…I search for sounds.

I was just searching on my iPod for something by Prince, or Bowie, or Gabriel or who knows who.  Searching.  I’m not sure how I do feel or want to feel at the moment, so the search has been difficult.

Sometimes, music picks you.  Sometimes it helps pull you out of the haze, or at least keeps you comfortable while you are in it.  And once you can get past the envy that you could never write something so simple and yet so transcendently beautiful, the fog lifts if only for a little while.

I wish I had a permanent soundtrack following me around; subtle and yet enhancing the backdrop of my life, keeping me company and alerting those around me to my moods and where my heart and head are at.  It would be so helpful.  No explanations needed.  You’d hear the music and just know.

And no one would have to talk to you in order to say “Jeez, she’s such a bitch today.” or “She is super happy!” or “Oh my God she is so SAD.” or “Nice attitude on her.  Whatevs.”  Because you would hear it a mile away.  No need for words.  It would prevent a lot of potentially uncomfortable encounters.

Perhaps Apple will invent one of those personal soundtrack devices some day.  For now, I will have to be content with ear buds and a soundtrack only I can hear.

Sometimes the music just picks you.  It is definitely not Prince, and it’s not Mozart.  But there it is.  I am suppressing my inner Salieri.

Surrendering to my inability to create something so simple and beautiful, while allowing it to take me mercifully to a place without gauze.

Billy Joel knows what I’m talking about.

Put on “repeat”.  Sleep……………………….

That’s not true.  No one has demanded it.  It’s just something you say.

But some people mildly enjoyed the last “Dear Diary” post so here is a little follow-up.

And yes, Mom.  I used aliases.

November 15, 1980 – 12 years old

Today I almost got hit by a car.  I was on my roller skates and went down a driveway pretty fast out into the street and the car didn’t see me at first and just missed me.  I was so scared.  I can’t believe I wasn’t killed.  So just in case I die soon I decided to make a will:

To my mother and father:  I leave everything in my scrapbooks and all the pictures of me I have so that they can keep their fond memories of me.

It was pretty presumptive to assume their memories of me would be fond ones.  Ah, I guess.  I was a pretty good kid.

To my sister:  I leave everything I own, which is all the games and toys we played with together so that she might remember me.  I will always remember her.

Brings a tear to your eye that I would remember my only sibling, doesn’t it?

To my Grandparents:  Anything left over, because I love them too.

After giving my sister everything I own, “anything left over” wouldn’t be much.  But hey, it’s the thought that counts.

Also, when I die I promise to contact all of my family and friends and tell them all about Heaven.

I promised.  And I meant it.  I remember thinking that everyone else who had ever lived and died just wasn’t trying hard enough to contact their friends and families from the Great Beyond. 

It really burned my ass because I truly believed they were all stone-cold slackers.

**********

November 29, 1980 – 12 years old

Tomorrow we are going to put up our Christmas tree.  I’m so excited, I can’t wait!!  (Oh, and by the way the 52 American hostages have been in Iran for 392 days now.)

I’m getting presents soon! (World War II is over).

I’m getting presents soon!  (They’ve discovered a vaccine for polio).

I’m getting presents soon!  (Americans landed on the Moon).

Christmas (and current events). 

Priorities.  Gotta have priorities.

**********

December 28, 1980 – 12 years old

My Mom told me about the birds-and-the-bees today.  Gross.

First she asked me if I knew anything and I said “No!”, but she got the wrong idea, because I already know everything there is to know.

Ohhhhhh dear GOD I remember that day.  The day every kid dreads.  The day every PARENT dreads. 

It is just a dreaded day overall. 

No one wants to hear it and no one wants to talk about it.  But there it was staring me in the blushing, queasy face.

The “talk” never, ever, EVER looks like this.

I had just come home from a slumber party at a friend’s house, and I swear to God I just knew it was going to happen that day.  I walked into the house and my sister and Dad were suspiciously absent. 

My Mom was sitting in the den doing some cross-stitching or something (maybe subconsciously of something phallic – I don’t know – just to work herself up to it) and I knew it was coming.  It was a coordinated attack.

I tried to sneak past her but she said “Hey, come here.  Let’s talk.“

I froze, my tongue stuck out of my mouth in a dry heave and my eyes rolled up past my eyebrows and into the back of my brain. 

In the name of all that was Holy, what more could she teach me that the after school special-esque/Tampax-sponsored menstruation movies they show you in 6th grade PLUS the movie “Sooner or Later” with Rex Smith hadn’t already taught me??

Nothin’.  That’s what.  Nothin’!

Yes, folks. He was 17. She was 13. 1-3.  What the WHAT? I was never much into blondes. But he did make me want to take guitar lessons from a babe-a-licious, kind of androgynous, man/boy.

My Mom did a fine job in the end.  She really did.  She’s the best.

Even so, through no fault of her own, I have a vague recollection of blacking-out after hearing each of these words pass my Mother’s lips: 

• sperm
• excitement
• ejaculate…and
• lovemaking

**********

September 2, 1980 – 12 years old

Well I’m in Junior High now.  7th grade.  A lot happened over the summer.  After John, I liked Jim.  What happened was I told this one girl that I liked Jim but I shouldn’t have because she has the biggest mouth in town.  So she told her brother Dave and Dave used to be Jim’s best friend so of course he told Jim I liked him.

“…Take it, MacDonald…”

**********

July, 1981 – 13 Years old

Finally I’m a teenager!  I can’t believe it!  What a great day.  I got my own room, a clock radio, a gold necklace, a cake and then dinner!  I think I like my room best of all though.  Now I have all the privacy I want.

1.  Apparently I felt it was very nice and super-special that my parents fed me on my 13th birthday. I don’t remember food being doled out as a special treat reserved only for landmark days, but perhaps I don’t remember because of the memory loss induced by severe malnutrition during the other 364 days of the year.

2.  It seems that I was actually trying to decide on this day which was the more awesome gift:  a clock radio OR my own bedroom (in which I no longer had to sleep with my little sister).  Hmmmm.  Choices, choices.

That clock radio was awesome, though.  It was digital.  And the numbers were blue. 

And as bright as the face of the Sun. 

But not so much this kind of sun…

As this kind of sun.

It took me three weeks to figure out how to lessen the supernova brightness on that stupid-ass clock.

**********

September 2, 1981 – 13 years old

8th grade is pretty hard.  And don’t think I’m feeling sorry for myself.  (Even though I am).

I couldn’t fool myself or keep a parenthetical secret from myself.  I was my own worst best-friend.

**********

August 26, 1981 – 13 years old

I am starting to gain a little weight.  I usually weigh about 106 lbs, but yesterday I weighed 110.  Today I exercised though and by 10 pm I weighed 106 lbs again.

I am highly skeptical of this entry.  My idea of exercising at that time was doing some cutting-edge leg lifts a-la those soft-core porn (I’m sorry…I meant legitimate work-out videos) they used to air on Showtime; the ones where the women were all either intertwined with each other and licking their lips and stuff, or very creepily into…themselves.

So unless I was sweating it out in the wrestling sauna at the old high school, sigh, I did not drop four pounds in eight hours. 

110 pounds.  Egad.  I kissed that bitch goodbye a long time ago.

Alright, I’m including this one just, cuz.  Seriously.  Come on.  (Skip to about 1:08).  Yessss.  So very, very aerobic.

**********

February 28, 1985 – 16 years old

My sister and I have been planning for a while to get my mom a message recorder.  The cheapest ones we’ve seen are like $70.  We always plan on getting big things for presents and then we end up with no money, and people get no gifts and everyone is sad.

How about a nice scented candle?  Maybe some earrings?  A homemade, moist and delicious Duncan-Hines cake from a box?  No way.  She birthed us and it was either the moon or nothing for my Mother. 

A 30 lb answering machine costing a week’s pay from me and a month’s allowance from my sister – or nothing. 

Better to make her and everyone else we knew sad on their birthdays with no gifts at all than to get them something shitty and cheap and yet personally thoughtful. 

THAT’S how much my sister and I loved my mother and the people around us.  That’s how we rolled.

**********

March 12, 1985 – 16 years old

Nothing much happened today. Unless you want to count the fact that he smiled at me.

I remember that day.  That was a great day.

**********

March 13, 1985 – 16 years old

Last week went great, this week is terrible.  I’ll probably fail my chem test tomorrow.  Oh well.  Life goes on.

Sure.  Yeah.  Life goes on.  Who cares.  So what.  I could see the bigger picture.  Wise beyond my years, knowing success or failure was in my control and ready to accept the blame if failure should come to pass.  Ho hum.  Life goes on.

**********

March 14, 1985 – 16 years old

I did fail my chem test!  Shit.  I have no time to study, or do ANYTHING, or see my friends because of this stupid play I’m in!

See, where I went to high school they physically forced you to act in these plays that sucked up all of your study time and energy and made you chronically unavailable to your family, friends and boyfriends. 

Way to man-up, Blamey Blamerson.

**********

July, 1985 – 17 years old

Well I’m 17 today.  It’s the first time I’ve been home for my birthday in a long time.  I went downtown with some friends (which my parents didn’t like to begin with) and then I came home 45 minutes late so of course they were PISSED.  They told me I only care about myself and that I screw around and keep pushing and pushing them.  They were over-the-top mad.  So ridiculous.  Me and my parents are beyond hope.

I had forgotten how awful my parents were to me.  I should have gone through the emancipation process as I had planned shortly after turning 15.  

Were they dumb?  Didn’t they remember no kid had cell phones then (it was 1980freaking5…hello??)  and that a teenage girl should be allowed a minimum of an hour grace period on her birthday curfew even with no notification of any kind that the grace period will be enacted? 

On the drive home via Westbound I-55 I remember very distinctly looking at the city from the passenger side and thinking just how beautiful it was and what a great time I’d had. 

And then it occurred to me just how fucking dead I was going to be when I got home. 

Eh.  Yin and Yang, my friends…Yin and Yang.

**********

Every woman’s body.

And I mean in a baaaaaad way.

Really bad.

Like, wanna-lay-me-down-and-force-objects-into-my-vagina-make-me-tell-my-employer-if-I’m-going-to-need-birth-control-for-sex- instead-of-endometriosis-keep-an-aspirin-firmly-between-my-knees-kind-of-way.

SAMPLE EXHIBITS:

A. The Blunt Amendment

B. Rush Limbaugh

C. Personhood

D. Rick Santorum

E.  Mitt Romney

F. Foster Friess – Santorum Political Backer

G. Bob McDonnell – Virginia Governor

H. Darrell Issa – House of Representatives

If you think that the phrase “war on women” is merely conveniently concocted Liberal hyperbole, I have to ask what you’re smoking.  I bet it it some gooooood shit.

Let’s lay just some of it out here.

I want to get straight what these people (i.e. Rick Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, Darrell Issa, Roy Blunt, Mitt Romney, various Republican-led state legislatures, Republican leaders of Congress, et al) and their political party and zealot followers want American women to succumb to and accept:

1. We are not supposed to want sex other than for the sole purpose of procreation.
2. We should keep an aspirin between our knees in order to keep them closed together so as not to let any male genitalia into our general genital area, and certainly not male genitalia that we are not married to and without the express purpose of conceiving a child.
3. Any employer should be able to opt out of covering birth control pills to prevent pregnancy based on any non-specific moral code that employer spews forth.  Every sperm and egg is sacred, don’t you know.
4. In order to have our insurance cover The Pill, it should be legal for our employer to ask us WHY we are being given this prescription and if it is to prevent pregnancy or for another medical condition.
5. Our employer should be able to morally, legally and practically object to our insurance covering a prescription of The Pill if it is merely for its primary function of preventing pregnancy.
6. Should we become pregnant with an unwanted pregnancy (for whatever reason that pregnancy is unwanted and/or untenable) and presumptively in part because we now have Draconian barriers to accessing The Pill, we – as well as our physicians – should be prosecuted should we actually have an abortion.
7. A newly fertilized egg inside or outside of our bodies should not only have legal “personhood” rights, it should have more legal rights than we do.
8. We should practice abstinence-only to avoid pregnancy.
9. We should not like sex for the sake of only sex – unless  you are married.
10. We should not want sex simply for the pleasure and intimacy of it – unless you are married.
11. Every time we have sex we should be ready to birth a baby nine months later.
12. If we do not want to birth a baby, we still should not have access to an insurance-covered medicine designed to prevent that baby’s very conception.
13. You want congressional panels of men, only men, and most of them religious clergy, to be the only voices heard during a debate on this issue.
14. If we do not want to birth a baby, we should not have sex at all.  Ever.  Not ever.
15. We should not be able to make the decision to have sex simply because we like it while simultaneously making the responsible decision to not become pregnant at all through the use of insurance-covered birth control pills, but should instead defer that decision to our employer or the Pope or Rick Santorum or Rush Limbaugh.
16. Should we become pregnant you want to force us to bear that child by repealing Roe v Wade; a choice you will make for us based exclusively upon your own religious beliefs and your interpretation of God’s will.
17. Until you can repeal Roe v Wade and while it is still legal to have an abortion (even though you didn’t want us to have fair access to medication to prevent the pregnancy to begin with) you want to force us to do the following things regardless of the fact that we have already come to our decision through significant soul-searching and consideration of all personal factors involved:

• Lie on a table, have a doctor spread our legs and forcibly, against our will, insert a 7-inch vaginal ultrasound wand into our vaginas.
• You want the doctor to point the ultrasound screen at our faces and describe to us to the fetus in detail.
• You want the doctor to crank up the volume on the fetal heartbeat.
• If we don’t want to see and hear the fetus, we might still have the option to close our eyes and sing “lalalalala” loudly with our fingers in our ears, although I suspect that forcible eyelid and arm restraint legislation is pending.
• If after this physical and emotional rape by our doctor we still want to have the abortion, we must watch an actual abortion taking place by, what??  Ostensibly forcing us to sit in between another woman’s legs while the procedure is being done??

In addition:

1. You want men everywhere to be given the right to have their Viagra covered by insurance, when the SOLE reason for taking it is to ensure a raging erection whenever they want one.
2. You want those men with the raging erections to be able to have sex with the woman of their choosing knowing that the culmination of their medically enhanced super-libido may result in an unwanted pregnancy with a woman who, married or not, who was not given the option to prevent that pregnancy through the use of an equally-insurance-covered medication: The Pill.
3. You are fine with those men with the raging erections being responsible for massive environmental damage due to billions of dropped aspirin littering the Earth.

Do I have it right?

Okay.  Thought so.

Hey, Conservative-Right folks of America…psssst….I have a suggestion for you.

No, really.  Come here.  Let me whisper it to you.

Don’t be a-scared…closer.

Good.  Thanks.

Now listen up……..

Why don’t you forget about screwing-over women, and go screw yourselves instead.

Not very ladylike of me?

The time for niceties has passed.

This isn’t about religious freedom as you proclaim.  You can’t whine “GOD is on MY Side!” every time you want to justify your flagrant misogyny.   It is about the opposite of freedom.  It is about shackling women with chastity belts per whatever religion you espouse.

This isn’t about your faux-outrage over how your tax dollars are being used to subsidize some woman’s birth control or Planned Parenthood or abortions when you don’t want it subsidizing those things.  Here’s a news-flash for you:  we live in a democratic collective.  We all pay for things we consider abhorrent or immoral via our tax dollars.  All of us.  Not just you.  It is the price we pay to help fulfill as much freedom and equality as possible – for all.

This isn’t about smaller government.  It is about the most massive, tyrannical intrusion into personal liberty since the pre-civil war era treatment of African-Americans.

This isn’t about protecting the unborn.  It is about protecting your funding from right-wing extremist/lobbyists and pandering to the special interests who give you and your representatives big, big money.

This isn’t about morality, because what you and I and millions of others just like me consider moral isn’t even closely related…at all.  Just because you say you and you alone are right and have a direct pipeline into God’s most private thoughts and access to the divine interpretation behind every word of the Bible and Constitution – does not make it so.

This is about SEX.

The controlling of women through controlling our sex lives.

You want to control our reproductive rights – and reproductive parts – in every way.

Every way.

Your singular goal is to shame women into making the choices you want them to make.

Are you a woman who wants, simply wants, to have sex?  You are most assuredly a slut.

Are you a woman who wants to have sex but also wants to prevent a pregnancy from occurring through the use of birth control covered by your health insurance?  You are definitely a slut.

“Shame the women!” you screech through your heavenly anointed megaphones.

Shame us into acquiescing to your bizarre mindset of what women should be and how we should act.

No one encapsulates this GOP mantra better than Rick Santorum:

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.”

“Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

And this absurdity isn’t coming from just Santorum (So sorry you had to abstain from the Presidency, Ricky.  Really, such a shame) or the religiously fanatical base of the GOP.  It is not.  It is now becoming mainstream Republican dogma.  More and more of these pathetic thoughts and bills and propositions come forward every day.

And you know what your backing is for these neanderthalic tactics?

The Bible.

That’s it.  The Bible.

The Bible.  Written thousands of years ago; when if a woman had her period she was deemed unclean and forbidden to leave her home without first sacrificing a goat or a chicken.  When she was the express property of her husband.  When she was fit for little else than to serve as a baby making machine for whichever man decided she was his possession.

The Bible; ordering women to miraculously somehow remain perpetually chaste and virginal…lest our sexuality show through and tempt the men-folk.

The Bible.  Written by men.  For men.

That is IT.  That’s who’s got your back.

Hillary Clinton got it dead-right.  All over the world, and in the name of whatever your religion is, you want to control women by:

• dictating what we wear
• what we think
• what we can learn
• how we have sex
• when we should have sex
• for what reasons we should have sex
• how much we should enjoy sex
• whether we should be allowed insurance coverage on a medication that will prevent pregnancy resulting from having sex
• what we can do with the pregnancy inside our bodies which resulted from sex
• who we must tell intensely personal information to regarding acquiring pregnancy-preventing medication so we can have baby-free sex.

And on and on and on.

It is sickening.

You Bible-blinded sheep.  You mindless, amoral, weak-minded sheep.

No religious doctrine – whether I agree with its content or not – which was written exclusively by men, exclusively for men – will be the reason that you get to control what I do with my body.

Generations upon generations of women have fought tougher foes than the likes of you in the name of personal autonomy, freedom and the right to control what goes in, and what comes out of, our vaginas.

You all mean business.

You are passing laws which thrust these perversions upon the inherent liberty of American women.

This isn’t just feeble-minded shock-jock talk anymore.

You want to push women and our human rights and dignity back 100, 500, 2,000 years.

You are all insane.

You know the definition of insanity:  you keep repeating the same action over and over again while expecting different results.

So you are thinking, what, Rightwingers???  That NOW, in the year 2012, is the time that your attempt to literally control a woman’s body and spirit will finally succeed despite the fact that is has failed in every attempt which has come before it?

Did all of the top Right-Wingbats in this country get together and discuss it?

Here’s how I imagine the conversation went:

Wingbat #1:  Hey, you know, a lot of people are really pissed off that Barack Hussein Obama was elected President.  People are out of work.  The stock market is in the shitter.  Gas prices are high.  Our followers are terrified of terrorists and foreigners and, well, everything.  Especially Obama.  He’s not even a Christian.  He might be Hitler.  Logic tells us it is time to strike….WOMEN.  Let’s get ‘em.  Let’s ride this wave.  We can get the masses to agree with anything now.  So…you know what I think?

Wingbat #2:  No.  What?

Wingbats #3 & #4:  I bet I know (chuckle, chuckle…)

Wingbats #5-#50:  Start repealing women’s rights to their own bodies, start denying them control over their own medical care and reproduction, and start forcing them to know their place, you know, before all that “women’s lib” shit happened.  We can’t legally stone them to death, YET, so let’s get conservative men…hell, let’s get conservative WOMEN to start shaming all women over being women who want to have sex!

Wingbat #1:  HA!!  You guys are so smart.  Yes.  Exactly.  Now is the time.  It will work this time.  We have God and a lot of Houses of Representatives on our side.  There is no way we can lose.  What could possibly go wrong?

Wingbats #1-#50:  Let’s show those slutty bitches who’s boss.  Hooooorrrrrayyyyyyyy!

You should drop all of this now.

You won’t, because you lack the humility to admit that women will never settle for anything less than complete control of our minds and bodies.

You won’t drop this.

But you should.

If you don’t, I swear to the God you believe in that a revolution will play out before your very eyes.  It is already starting.

Stop messing with this.  Retreat.  Run away.

Or it’s gonna get ugly.  Really ugly.  Coyote ugly.

You’re not fooling anyone.

It is about sex.  

“Why extremists always focus on women, remains a mystery to me, but they all seem to.

It doesn’t matter what country they’re in, or what religion they claim, they all want to control women, they want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions that we make about our own health and our own bodies.

Yes, it is hard to believe, but even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”

- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the right-wing extremists who have taken on the women of America ( and awakened a sleeping giant).

Okay maybe you can only appreciate the extreme humor of that scene if you actually suffer from it.

VERTIGO (DEFINITION):  The condition by which your balance and physical stability is compromised apparently due to some loose-piece-of-shit-eating-calcium or somethingorother in your inner/middle ear which enters and gets stuck in a part of the ear in which it does not belong and bangs around in that wrong place, wreaking havoc with your sense of motion – essentially creating the feeling of what you’re certain the brown acid must have been like at Woodstock ’69.

Hi!  I have Vertigo.  I was diagnosed with BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo).

I have had this condition for years, enduring for the most part only short-lived bouts of it.  Sometimes is hangs on a bit longer.

This time it is the latter of those.

I woke up abruptly in the middle of the night a while ago while on my left side, decided I needed to know what time it was RIGHT THEN for some reason, whipped my head to the right to look at the clock – and whhhhooooooooossssshhhhhhh – there it was.

The entire room started spinning violently.  I grabbed hold of the covers and side of the bed and held on for dear life, gritting my teeth.  It was several minutes until the spinning completely stopped.  It was the worst it had been since the first time it happened to me around 8 years ago.

It has settled down.  I can certainly function normally.  After I’ve been awake and up for a while I forget about it.

But then I do something reckless like tilt my head backward to chug a Diet Pepsi or lie down without propping my head up on 12 pillows first…and there she is, that bitch.

Doing sit-ups at the gym is full of hilarity and fun!  I pop in my headphones, rifle through my iPod to choose a song that enhances the mood such as “Rubber Band Man” or “Stuck in the Middle with You” – and wait.

My head has to be in the offending position for a fairly prolonged period of time (15-20 seconds) before it happens.

If I lie prone or tilt my head back and keep it there…at first it feels fine.  Then I get all cocky thinking, hey, it’s gone.  But I know better:

1. My eyes feel it first.  Almost like they start getting heavy and I close them.
2. Then a pulsating starts in my brain and the whooshing sound starts in my ears.  Maybe it’s my heartbeat.  I don’t know.
3. Then the spins start.  If you’ve ever been drunk, pretty damn drunk, and you plop down on your bed and stare at the ceiling and have gotten the spins – that’s it.  Only without the fun and mayhem of the drinking beforehand.
4. It gets worse and worse, culminating in a full-out your-drunk-with-the-spins-while-at-the-same-time-on-the-tilt-a-whirl-at-the-carnival type feeling.
5. Then it starts to subside.  It lessens.  It slows.  Eventually it stops, like it never happened.
6. Until later if I tilt my head backward or lie down again, in which case – yipppeee – it basically starts all over.

When I went to physical therapy for this condition years ago I FREAKED OUT on the poor intern, so sure was I that it would never go away and would happen constantly every minute of the day no matter what I was doing (not the case), and verbally accosted her with:

“How am I supposed to LIVE??  What the fuck am I supposed to DO for the rest of my life…take the BUS?!?”

(That poor girl.  I really dislike buses.  The only time I took a bus regularly, ever in my life, was when downtown Chicago flooded in 1992 – underground.  Remember that Chicagoans?  No subway. Had to take the bus to work from the far North Side to Michigan & Randolph every day.  Man that sucked.)

I feel no symptoms of vertigo while I am driving.  Thankfully I do not drive staring up at the ceiling or lying down.

That very patient intern gave me some maneuvers to do (this and this) which either completely eradicate the dizziness or significantly lessen it.

I did one of them on a park bench once, after leaning my head backward to catch a frisbee triggered it.

When you see people made of clay doing this in public, you’ll know why.

Some day relatively soon, as history has proven, I will wake up and it will be magically gone again.  And it might be months until it rears its ugly head.

What really pisses me off though, is that it’s prohibiting me from pursuing a career in so many things like for instance, figure skating.

How could I perform one of those pretty tilty-head spins?

Come on.  If my vertigo is acting up I cannot do that.

Because I would look like this…

My secret dream of becoming the first 43-year-old, never-trained, never-before-ice-skated Olympic Silver Medalist (I am realistic…Gold at my age would be difficult) in solo or pairs ice skating can never be realized.

It makes me bitter.

And it makes it difficult to write.

I always write while sort of semi-laying on my left side. I don’t like to sit straight up at all while writing.  I am a lounger.

So I haven’t felt much like writing in a damn long time.  But I caved and have been sitting up writing this as if I have a 2×4 shoved up (noooo, not shoved up that) the back of my shirt with my head duct-taped to it.

But it is not at all conducive to creativity.

So if you don’t mind I am going to assume my normal Cleopatra-esque writing position here, reclining on my left side with my head tilted to the left, hoping the dizzies will keep at bay -  because I have been dying to tell you all this one thing that  happened:

h qwpeoi hgpajas ;lhgk.

lkdl lwkneu Piuuake lkwp oiue;lksntnbs;lkjsd.   Destiny lsadfoidE!!!!  Lhkasdkf[p.  l;kjd.  lads0ufgh’sdlkj@@R%.  HA!  Right!? ;lskdfo9lkhetr.

LJlkdf.  &4e8#$dafkj8.  angels singing 0o9e3r4u  daljgj384  adfj[og8add. *&3.  O(dlkfa. =profound 4dlkaf*.  og[a=adfouk.

*&4ew a’w33rmD 0)(*r  WEr9jd’fa09832  dsl never the same kjfa0-9rk=((87r)(r#$.  )98r39kjfd.  It was (*RJjtrLEUjh;ds life changing (ri;lfgnNcbbvnbk, ever.

Hold on…sitting back up now.  Okay.  Okay.  Definitely spinny but not too bad.  That was not as bad a spin session I don’t think.

Soooo….can you BELIEVE that HAPPENED?!  Seriously?  Seeing that changed my life forever and I hope it has as great an impact on you as it did on me.  I had to share it with you.  Please take it to heart.

Ah, it feels good to be back.

Ha.  No, not my age.  As if…

No, it’s just since last April when I began “Hippielib” I’ve made 29 posts.  I’m kind of itching to make 30 for some reason.

I have nothing particularly burning to say, so I’m thinking I will just leave my computer up to this screen and throughout the day write what pops into my head, thusly getting the 30th post out of the way.

I know what you’re thinking – this will be fasccccinnnating:

My hands get really dry in the winter, but there is no real hope of rectifying that situation.  I hate hand lotion of any kind.  I put it on and feel the soothing, yet painfully stinging, relief of the cool lotion and within five minutes I have to wash it off which only exacerbates the problem.

It just feels – weird: slippery and oily and icky. It gives me the heebies.

I accidentally bought some sexy-dance-club-slut type lotion last time – with flashy, sparkly flecks in it – which I suppose doesn’t entice me to end my lotion aversion.

*****

Spongebob genuinely makes me laugh.  Dora The Explorer does not.

*****

I take for granted how wonderful life is when I have my over the counter reflux meds in abundance.  I realize how bad a day can suck when I’m out and forget to buy them.

For dinner tonight I wanted to have stuffed peppers with red sauce, with a side of tomatoes, to be washed down with a gallon of orange juice.  Oh well, not tonight. Not tonight.

*****

My kids have not, and will not, stop talking about Christmas and what they want next year from Santa.  They won’t stop drawing pictures of Santa and the reindeer.  They keep taping pictures of these things to every window in the house.

They went to bed last night asking if I could call Santa to tell them about the cool new toy they saw on a commercial, and I had to make many trips to their room to tell them to zip it.

They wouldn’t stop, man.

My last trip up the stairs to their room led me to proclaim in a very deadpan tone: “Christmas is Dead”.  Then I turned out the lights and walked out with finality.

I don’t feel even a little bit bad about it.

*****

I have never, and will never, have the desire to go on a cruise.

*****

I want to take a 15 hour-long nap, and when I wake up I want it to be the same time on the same day as when I began the nap.  I do not understand why I am not allowed to do this.

*****

I really want to take a dance class with a partner.  Like a Spanish or Big Band dance class.  Maybe that’s so “Swingers”, so 15 years ago, but I don’t care.  I want to.  It would be so money.

*****

I hate money and everything it stands for and represents.  I hate how having a lot of it or having very little of it or having just enough of it makes people act in ways that are unbecoming a human being.

I would like to have more money so I can stop writing sentences like this.

*****

Oh my  God.  I just opened a bag of what I thought was lemon flavored licorice.  It’s mango, not lemon.  That is some seriously gag-inducing crap.

*****

Some creepy guy at the gym today came up to me out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to hear the joke of the day.  I said “Uh, okayyy…”.  He then proceeded to tell me three very off-color Jewish jokes, one of them about why Jewish women prefer their men to be circumcised.

When I said “Stop”, he said, “It’s okay, a Jewish friend of mine told me those.”… and walked away.

Here’s my joke of the day:  You’re a dick.

*****

My nearly 4-year-old son will do everything in his power to avoid going to the bathroom.  He dances around and winces and holds it.  When I repeatedly coax him to go, and tell him he will feel better when he does, he gets MAD. “I’m just dancin’!!!”.

Okay, son, samba away.

He then eventually runs like an insane person to the bathroom at the last possible minute, finishes and comes out mad at ME that he peed “…a little not in the toilet”.

I understand the deflection of his poor choices onto me so as to avoid any responsibility for pee on the bathroom floor.  But what I don’t understand is why it still doesn’t sink in that he can avoid this situation altogether?

I don’t get it.

*****

I don’t know, much like crappy beer -  after 10 or so pieces – this mango licorice isn’t quite as bad.

Ta-daaa!  My 30th Post.  Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

Now let’s move on to 31 and win there.

(Disclaimer to the Disclaimer:  I apologize for the dreck above.  But sometimes you feel like a post, sometimes you don’t).

Filed under: humor Tagged: nothing much to say, stream of consciousness, the 30th post ]]> http://hippielib.com/2012/01/20/disclaimer-this-entire-post-is-a-disclaimer/feed/ 14 hippielib http://hippielib.com/2012/01/17/the-monkey-squad/ http://hippielib.com/2012/01/17/the-monkey-squad/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:19:03 +0000 Lilabell http://hippielib.wordpress.com/?p=1071 ]]> There are quite a few things a parent can do to inadvertently damage a child’s psyche.

It’s been done to all of us; well-meaning parents trying to infuse some sort of loving control over their children in an effort to guide them through the turbulence we call life.

Inadvertently damaging the child’s psyche usually comes in the form of the well-meaning parent (often frustrated at their astounding inability to break through the child’s unique ability to resist all guidance from said parent) resorting to some teaching tool or tactic they would otherwise not employ – were the child not a logic-allergic…child.

**********

Let me take you back to the summer of 2010.  I believe the month was July.

My three boys were outside in the front yard playing with two friends, also boys.

Did I say playing? Silly me.  I’m sorry.

What I really meant was screaming/yelling/wrestling/picking weird stuff up off the ground/shoving weird stuff off the ground into anyone’s face within arm’s length/falling down/scraping body parts/more yelling/asking for snacks every one and half minutes/all claiming they were Darth Vader when everyone knows there can only be one Darth Vader/crying and whining from everyone who couldn’t be Darth Vader because they didn’t call it first…kind of playing.

Aaaahhhhh.  A typical summer day here.

When my kids and neighbor kids are outside playing here (all under the age of 8) I am omnipresent.  Oh, I camouflage myself quite skillfully, usually in a discarded Army tarp and shrubbery remnants which I bungee-cord to myself, so as to disappear….

“…..you don’t seeeee meeeee…..“

I like to think of myself as the Jane Goodall of Moms; living among them but trying not to interfere in the natural order.  The problem is they are out there for hours, dammit, HOURS.  It gets boring.

There is only so much yard work you can do covered in a mobile duck-hunting blind in the scorching 180 degree humidity of a summer day in Chicagoland.

"Dude, is that your MOM???" "Yes (sigh)". "Does she think we can't see her?" "Yes (sigh)". "Dude, that is messed UP!" "Dog, I KNOW!" (High five)

On this particular day my oldest son Boogs (5 1/2 years old at the time) was being uncharacteristically aggressive and testosterone-y with his brothers and friends.  He was also not listening to my admonishments and was generally pissing me off.

I try not to embarrass him in front of his friends with my discipline.  I make every attempt to pull him aside and embarrass him with my discipline.  But on this day he was having none of it.

I pulled out every Mom threat I could think of to get him to stop bullying his brothers and friends into being perpetual mere clone troopers or droids while he expected indefinite Darth Vaderdom:

1. Reason:  Share Darth Vader and you’ll have more fun -  (“No!  I’m the best Vader and you know it!”)
2. No popsicle – (“So, it would melt anyway!”)
3. A time out – (“Good, I’ll get to sit down!”)
4. His friends will have to go home – (“Big deal, they’re not playing right anyway!”)
5. Go inside to your room – (“Mmmm…I’d love to be in the cool air conditioning!”)
6. No TV for a week (“TV is stinky!”)

Arghhh…this kid.  The plain truth was he knew I was bluffing.  On this day the two friends were over because their mothers weren’t home.  He knew they weren’t going anywhere and that I wouldn’t make him go to his room.

Ooooh, he was giving me all sorts of lip and attitude and pushing my big, red Fisher Price-sized buttons to the Nth degree.  And he was just begging me to rein him in.

I was hot and frustrated and was trying at the same time to watch the other boys so I could prevent the “The Lord of the Flies” scenario from taking hold while their indignant leader was gone.

So I gently dragged Boogs alongside me as I waddled in my tarp and twigs to the side of the garage out of earshot of the other boys, and this simple phrase came flying out of my mouth in a forceful whisper:

“Do you want the monkey squad to come?”

Silence and huge eyes from him. Fear.  Then…

“What’s the monkey squad?”  Still with attitude, though faux now.

My first thought was “Ha!  That got your attention smarty.”

But my second thought was, “Oh boy…I wish I could take that back”. 

The week before we had watched “The Wizard of Oz” and it popped into my mind that I had told him the flying monkeys were the coolest, and at the same time scariest, thing to me when I was a kid.

But now I was stuck explaining what I meant and trying not to scare the shit out of him, without completely losing any standing as the Alpha Mother.

“Well, um, the Monkey Squad are really good, kind monkeys that sometimes come and teach kids who aren’t behaving well how to be better and listen to their Moms.”

Oh my God.  What the fuck? Because that is sooo much less scary than flying monkeys in a movie? 

“What do you mean?” he asked clearly terrified.  “Monkeys come and get you?  Where do they take you??”

Ahh, shit.  Think, woman, think…

“Um, they don’t really take you anywhere. They come and talk to you…. They…..oh forget it.  I’m making it up.  There is no Monkey Squad.  I’m sorry.  There is no such thing.  I was just telling you that funny little story to get you to listen to  me because you are not being good today.  I’m sorry.  There is no such thing.  Okay?  Just forget it.  Forget it.  Now go and play NICELY.”

He stood and stared at me.

“Where does the monkey squad live?”

“There is no monkey squad!  (deep breaths)  I was joking.  Sometimes Moms do that when they are frustrated.  Never mind.  I was kidding.  There is no monkey squad.  Seriously.  I’m sorry.  I love you.  Now go play.”

And he walked away slowly, peering ever-cautiously through the trees for the rest of the afternoon.

Good Christ.  I felt terrible.  But damn if he didn’t play nice from that point on.

**********

Okay, so I thought it was done.  Kids his age have the attention span of ducks anyway, right?

That night we were getting ready for bed.  I was brushing his teeth.

“Mom, where does the monkey squad live?”

Son of a BITCH.

“Babe, listen.  I told you.  That wasn’t true.  Really.  I was kidding.  Sometimes Moms make jokes that are mistakes and that was a big mistake.  There is NO monkey squad.  I promise you.”

“Okay….”

Oh holy shit did I feel bad.  Horrible.  In a moment of sheer frustration and anger at my own inability to control a 5 1/2 year old boy, I instead scared the bejesus out of him.

I was sure he’d be riddled with nightmarish images all night long of flying monkeys landing in our front yard coming to take him to a Maury Povich-type troubled-teen boot camp.

But he slept fine.  He was okay. He never mentioned it the next day at all, and yet I was overcompensating still to make up for my “Mommy Dearest” moment.

I just wanted him to never remember I said it.  I plied him with more candy than normal.  Was super-lovey with him, more than normal.  And it seemed to work.  No mention the next day, or the day after that.

Whew.  Bullet dodged.

(I’m pretty sure, Dear Reader, you know that is not true or you wouldn’t be reading a blog entry about it would you?  Am I right?)

**********

Fast forward roughly one year later.  Early August, 2011.

My three boys were upstairs getting ready for bed.  I’m sorry, did I say getting ready?  Right.

What I meant to say was running around and bouncing off the walls like racquet balls as they usually do right before sleep.  You know, just to get it all out.

Teeth were brushed, potties used, jammies on and I was looking through the dresser drawers in my room right across the hall from them.

The two youngest boys were particularly nutso that night and even Boogs was getting irritated.  He kept telling them to be quiet.  But they wouldn’t listen.

I was looking for my night-shirt when I heard this from Boogs to his two little brothers:

“You guys better be good or the monkey squad will come and take you to their camp in the woods for months until you learn to behave.  But they’re not mean, they’re nice.  But still they live in the woods and they’ll come”.

What the fuuuuu………………..

“NOPE…NO….!!!!” I yelled as I tripped over myself running to their bedroom, pulling myself along the walls and busting through their bedroom door in an effort to diffuse the A-bomb I had dropped the year before.

“NO!  That’s not true.  Guys, no.  There is no monkey squad.  Ha!  Ho, man, that was just a funny little story I told Boogs a long time ago but it’s not true.  Okay…so, let’s get ready for bed guys!”

The forced chipperness was oozing out of my pores like molasses and they could smell it a mile away.

“The MONKEY squad?!?  What’s THAT?” my 3 1/2 year old whimpered in terror as he clutched his favorite stuffed animal – a monkey, of course.

“No, Babe.  No Monkey squad!  Hey, you guys wanna go to the park tomorrow and then eat ice cream sundaes for dinner??”

It was done.  The damage.  Boogs had remembered it…of fucking COURSE!  Why wouldn’t he remember the single most terrifying thing anyone had ever told him, much less that it came from his Mother; his ordained protector and anointed truth-teller?

**********

For the next half hour I tried in vain to explain the non-existence of the monkey squad.  The more I denied it, the more they believed.  They laughed some about it, but mostly they stared at Boogs as he kept interjecting more and more outrageous information about what the monkey squad was and where is was stationed (Minnesota, apparently).

It was the proverbial snowball.  From Hell.

They still talk about it.  They’ve told some of their friends about it.  One friend recently asked me if it was real.

“No.  Nope.  It is not true.  I told a bad-Mommy joke because I thought it would be kind of funny and maybe make Boogs listen to me.  Nuh-uh.  Not real”.

The friend turned to Boogs and whispered, “Where do they take you?”

It was useless.  They believed, and my protestations to the contrary seemed only to reinforce its reality.  It was done.

God only knows how many kids Boogs has told monkey squad stories to.  Hundreds?

The only thing I can’t believe is that I haven’t gotten a call from a single parent who had to get rid of their pet chimp because of my 10 second lie.

Parental guilt is rivaled only by Catholic guilt.  In my case I have both.  Such is my cross to bear.

These poor kids, not only will they be randomly subjected to sweat inducing, heart racing nightmares periodically throughout their lives…they will likely one day perpetuate this myth by telling it to their children in dire frustration, despite what logic dictates. 

But here’s a VERY interesting thing…  I Googled “monkey squad” just to see what might come up.  And there was the picture you see further up…”Monkey Squadron”.

Coincidence?  Was that picture created by a collective parental mind at work – by other parents all over the world who have told similar stories to force compliance from their offspring?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, we have direct knowledge as to how a folklore is born…on the driveway of a suburban Chicago home out of sheer desperation, from a little white lie meant to help a Mom on the precipice of losing control of her 5 1/2 year old son.

The whole story has taken on a life of its own.  You know why?  Because deep down kids think – it has to be true… Moms wouldn’t tell a lie. 

Ugh.

One thing’s for certain…I will lose all semblance of street-cred when they find out about Santa.

I’ve been writing Hippielib for 8 months now.  I love it.  I really do.  It’s a wonderful creative outlet, sounding board and soap box for me.  It’s like having a job you love:

1. It’s cheap. (No gas money.)
2. I work only the hours I want. (Which really means the hours I don’t want…during my free time between 9 pm and 1 am.)
3. I get paid extremely well to do it. (The currency being not so much actual money as much as me wishing it was actual money.)

I love writing.  And if no one ever read a single post I made I’d still write it.  The diary obsession, I suppose.  We all want a voice even if no one is listening.

In reality though it thrills me that anyone, anywhere takes even a minute out of their day to read anything I have to say – whether they love it or hate it – and I appreciate all who visit here.

Writing a blog is a sociological experiment on so many levels.  There are so many interesting things about doing it:  the comments you get, what you learn during your research on a post, the very interesting people you meet from all over the world who take time to read what you think is important at any given time, the connections you make when people like what you have to say (or really don’t like it at all), and through those connections coming across all the other voices out there you find fascinating in one way or another.

But one of the most interesting things is that you can monitor your “traffic”.  It’s a very fun and enlightening part of this job.  You can look at your stats every day to see how many hits you get and in a general sense where those hits come from.

You can’t see personal information such as e-mail addresses or anything like that from hits, but you can see if someone used a search engine to reach you and what they typed in to get to your site.

For instance if someone types something into Google, and for some reason my blog pops up in their search and they actually click on it  -  I can’t see who they are or any personal information – only what they typed to get here.

And…you can see exactly what they typed in.  Word-for-word.

When you write a blog entry you are encouraged to “tag” your posts.  Tags are words or phrases which are tied to your post and help categorize it for people who are searching for information on the subject you are writing about.

As an example, I could add a tag to a post labeled “making ice cream” and people searching the web for information on how to make ice cream may be directed to my blog.  But what these tags also do is…blend together.

I call them “BLAGS”…for blended tags.  (Remind me to copyright that).

Anyway, for instance I could tag a post with “eating ice cream at church when it’s hot outside”, but also add the tag “ice cream and your body”, because I write about how eating too much of it may make you gain weight, and the next thing you know someone who Googles “Rubbing Ice Cream All Over Your Hot Body” gets directed to my purely informational and non-pornographic post on holiday ice-cream making.  I was “blagged”.

But at that point it’s done…they’ve Googled it, they’ve clicked on whichever post best correlates with their search and/or blags, and voila!  I now have a record of exactly what they typed in.

There is rarely a day that goes by when I don’t laugh at what someone has Googled (let’s just use Google to encompass all search engines shall we?) to get to my blog.

Some search phrases and words are rather disturbing to read, some make perfect sense and some are hilarious and leave me scratching my head wondering how even the Internets came up with the blag (remember, blended tag) to get them to my site…and why on Earth once they saw where they were, did that particular person actually click on Hippielib at all.

I realize if you are not a regular follower of Hippielib (like most of the population) you may not get some of the references below so I will add links to the posts they are referring to when I think it might help.

So without further ado…the following are just some of the actual search engine words and terms, verbatim, which have shown up in my stats throughout the 8 month existence of Hippielib:

THE LOGICAL

• MEN MAKE ME FEEL WORTHLESS – This phrase, verbatim, has been Googled and directed to my blog many, many times since I wrote the post Hold The Door.  It’s very interesting yet obviously unsettling.  I’m wondering if men Google “women make me feel worthless” just as much.   I doubt it.  There have also been many searches using the phrase: Is it oppressive to hold the door open for women?  Good Lord.  No.  The answer is NO.  Definitively No.  For the woman who views it as oppressive for a man to hold the door open for her, I say…perhaps you are overreaching for shit to get pissed off at men about?  There are so many legitimate reasons to be pissed at them why make them up?  That may be my next post:  “The Legitimate Reasons To Get Pissed Off at Men”.  It’s in the works, ladies.

• ABORTION – This makes sense.  I have written several times about my Pro-Choice stance.  There are many variations on the search terms though:  necessary abortion, what are my choices abortion, my God and abortion, what are my rights abortion, abortion please help.  And not once, as some on the Religious Right would have you believe, has someone gotten here by searching “I’m Pro-Abortion and Proud” or “I’m so excited to have an abortion” or “Yippee I’m pregnant again and can’t wait to have an abortion because I use it as birth control”.  Nope.
  

• ASTRONAUT QUOTES:  Also many who have searched Astronaut quotes about religion.  A Little Faith is where I compiled as many quotes from astronauts as I could find.  There are entire websites dedicated to only the quotes from astronauts after they’ve been in space. Because one can only imagine how that changes a person and we should listen to what these chosen few have to say. Fascinating stuff.

• PREGNANCY AND MISCARRIAGE IVF – So many hits.  Lots and lots.  Also understandable due to my posts Why I’m Pro-Choice and Pandora’s Big, Fat, Sanctimonious Box.

• DREAMS ABOUT BEING IN A BUILDING UNDER WATER – Since The Closet Superhero I’m kind of astounded as to just how many people search for information on dreams about being in buildings under water – which is exactly what I wrote about.  The following phrase with only slight variations in wording has been Googled, I would guess, close to 50 times:  “Wall of water a hundred feet high in dreams”.  There has to be some inborn psychological mechanism within the human brain which hard-wires us to dream of this scenario with such specificity that it must go beyond a simple fear of drowning or Freudian sexual frustration.  Right?

• HERD MENTALITY – Since You Herd It Here First a lot of people have typed this in.  I like to think of these people as unsuspecting hard-core Tea Partiers hoping to find fodder for their dislike and distrust of us Libs, and then…..BLAM!  It’s flipped on ‘em.   I’m kidding.  Sort of.

• FATE VS DESTINY – Easily one of the most frequently searched phrases that leads to Hippielib, and of course to Fate vs Destiny.  Here are some of the variations:  What is Fate vs Destiny?, Which came first fate or destiny?, Can I change my fate or destiny?, What is the difference between fate and destiny?  Gee, I really thought I was the only one trying to determine the difference between them. Just when you think you’re unique in ALL the world…damn.
  

• MID-FORTIES PHYSIQUE – There are lots-o-people stressing about reaching middle age.  Shocking I know.  I hope they aren’t hoping they’ll find any valuable insight from me regarding this milestone, and certainly not from “Dipshit” is the new “30″.  Because as you can ascertain by the title of this post…. meaningful insight is severelllllly lacking here.

• I’M SO SAD MENOPAUSE – Menopause makes me sad, menopause sweating, menopause sucks…all variations on a theme which I assume leads them again to “Dipshit is the new 30″.  And I haven’t even gone through menopause yet.  Wait til I do though.  Only four-letter-words will guide the unsuspecting person to my posts at that time, as I’ll be all pissed off and hot-flashing because I’ve lost my bifocals and can’t remember where I put my estrogen pills.

THE LOGICAL YET HUMOROUS

• JUGGS – Big juggs, Shake your Juggs, huge juggs in corset, Huge juggs pregnant, jingling juggs, Big brown juggs.  What can I say?  People looovvve big juggs.  Lots and LOTS of people.  And with two “G’s”!  I’m proud to say that Just Say No. Well…Maybe and the mention of “Juggs Magazine” is the culprit here.  I feel bad though.  I keep picturing some sweet, little old farmer woman innocently searching for a nice country store that sells “big brown juggs” in which to store her freshly churned butter.  But then poor Mrs. McFarmer gets directed to a post about reefer madness and theft – replete with a mention and picture of a fetish magazine about absolutely enormous boobs.  Sure, I bet that’s exactly who searched “big brown juggs”.  Riiggghhht.

• BEST FEMALE SOLDIER MOVIES- This phrase and its variations rival “Fate vs Destiny” for most Google searches leading to my blog.  The post Ain’t it a Bitch  gets a lot of traffic.  Hollywood should take note:  People are really jonesing for some good female soldier movies.  But sometimes the um, awkward variations get them here too:  Bitch female soldiers, Female bitch soldiers, Women Soldiers in Movies who are bitches.  Hmmm.  Let me clarify people:  A woman is NOT automatically a bitch when she becomes a soldier.  I mean she might indeed be a bitch, but it has nothing to do with being a soldier.  Come on!  Grow up.  And in keeping with that theme:

• SIGOURNEY WEAVER MASCULINE SOLDIER – Lots of searches for Sigourney Weaver as a masculine soldier.  As a woman, I didn’t find her masculine in “Aliens”.  I thought she was hot and I wanted to be her and look like her.  So I got my hair cut just like her.  Only it didn’t look just like hers.  It looked like Ted Koppel’s.  Back in my acting days I actually had head-shots done with that hair style.  I’ll post a lot of shameful things about myself here, but that head-shot won’t be one of them.

• BRUCE WILLIS GUNS – Bruce Willis…With a Complex is a fairly popular post.  People like Bruce a whole lot.  And they’re definitely searching for information on the “Die Hard”-era-Bruce as opposed to the “Moonlighting”/Seagram’s Wine Cooler-era-Bruce.  I sure bet they are disappointed when they realize that the title of the piece belies Bruce’s involvement in it.  It’s a classic bait-and-switch.  I can’t wait to write the post entitled “Justin Bieber and the Exit Strategy”.  It will be about our involvement in Afghanistan and the precise measures I think we should take to get out of there.    I will mention Justin once, only in relation to how little I know about him and don’t know what little girls see in him, but wonder what he thinks of the Afghan War.  And then I will add his picture.  I know it’s wrong, but the title alone will increase my traffic by about 10 billion percent and little girls will get to see yet another picture of The Biebs on yet another website.  It’s a win-win for everyone.

• I FELL OFF THE ELLIPTICAL MACHINE – And:  Can you fall off the elliptical machine, embarrassed I fell off the elliptical.  Apparently a lot of people fall off the elliptical machines at gyms and search for other stupid people who have as well.  I’m very happy I could make them feel less alone in the world with Off-Topic Tuesday: “The Gym” and the Embarrassing Things that can Happen in Them.

• SUPER MARIO ALLEGORY -  This post gets hit a lot.  People actually type in Super Mario Allegory or Allegory Super Mario – and often.  The Allegory of Super Mario is naturally where they land.  I find that so cool, and strange.  Perhaps I should also copyright “You play Nintendo like you live your life”.

• FUNNY THINGS TO MAKE A HIPPIE LAUGH - Yes, tie-dye humor is searched for quite a bit.  What-oh-what will make that crazy hippie laugh?  Also searched:  Hippie clothing, What do hippie women look for in men, Hippies in Video games (are there hippies in video games?  With guns blazing and grand theft auto-ing?), Hippie feminist sexist (Do those exist?  I thought those kind were extinct).

• MY CHEER LEADING UNIFORM SHRANK – Also:  Help my cheer leading uniform shrank, can you unshrink a cheer leading uniform.  Oh, those poor girls.  I understand the inexplicable trauma as described in 15 Minutes. 
  

• CASEY ANTHONY PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES – Also:  What were Casey Anthony’s parental responsibilities, and variations of Casey’s “responsibility”.  They were led to The Mother of All Panic Buttons.  And obviously the answer is:  She fucking had none.

THE DISTURBING

• SIGOURNEY IS NOT THE ALIEN MOTHER SHE’S THE CUNT -  Uh huh.  Wowza.  I don’t know about you but I sense some significant anger issues at play here.  That’s just not right at all.

• ALIEN MOTHER AND PLANET AND I LOVER HER MUCH – I….hmmm.  I’ll chalk this one up to a language-translation-barrier issue.  Please God let that be it.

• DIET PEPSI WITH WORLD TRADE CENTER ON IT -  Also:  Diet Pepsi Twin Towers, Diet Pepsi can with WTC jets, and Diet Pepsi World Trade Center Jet Image.  I understand the blags – I mention both Diet Pepsi and the World Trade Center in my post about 9/11 entitled The Instant-Replay.  But what am I missing here?  Is Pepsi doing some promotional campaign with depictions of the Twin Towers on their cans?  Oi.  Here’s some unsolicited advice, Pepsi:  Don’t do that.  Just don’t…do…that.

• SLUT FINGER ON OVARY POSSIBLY PREGNANT – Yes, I did mention the word “slut” in Dear Diary, but I believe this might be the best example of blagging yet:  I think this phrase blended tags from five different posts, each word coming from a different one.  And for those of you who believe sex-ed is an unnecessary and religiously compromising addition to the curriculum in our public schools, please read this sentence over…and over…and over…and over…again.

THE BIZARRE:

• OLD ENGLISH PHOTO OF A MAN HOLDING A TORTOISE OVER HIS HEAD – Wow.  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  I haven’t Googled this phrase myself yet, but I will.  I’m still too nervous at what I might find.

• FREE TUBE OF HIGH QUALITY BIG FAT WELL SHAPED WOMEN – Hot damn there are some freaks out there on Planet Earth.  Maybe that makes me sound a little uppity, a little better and more “normal” than others.  But that’s only because it’s TRUE.  Come on!

• DOUCHE BAG – I don’t remember writing about douches or douche bags in any of my posts, and I resent the Internets for sending this douche bag here.  Uh, see…now I’ve done it.

• WE HAD 1 STAIR IN THE BASEMENT WITH 2 TERMITE LARVAE.  THE HOUSE HAS BEEN FREE AND CLEAR FOR TWO YEARS.  DO WE NEED TO DISCLOSE THIS INFORMATION TO POTENTIAL BUYERS – Uh huh.  Someone typed that whole thing in and got here, and then not only got here but read the name of this blog and most likely clicked on the post “Ain’t it a Bitch” (in which I mention the word “larvae”) because they were thinking…”Hey, maybe this bitch knows if I have to disclose or not!”  As a homeowner, I believe you do have to disclose for up to five years.  But please check with your state and local guidelines on this matter.  DISCLAIMER:  I’m making that up.  I have no idea.  But I’m glad you stopped by nonetheless.  Good luck to you.

• DIPSHIT -  I know you are but what am I?  What is someone hoping to find when they search with just the word “Dipshit”?  Probably something really inane…oh, wait….Hey.  I resemble that.

• DIPSHIT HAT –   I wonder what a dipshit hat looks like and where I can find one.  Oh, never mind…found it.

• SMART MONKEY -  This one cracks me up because I too searched for this picture to compliment a portion of The Indignity Between 6 and 8, in which I justifiably compare my mathematical intelligence to that of a primate.  I literally Googled “Smart Monkey”.  People have also gotten here several times by typing in Monkey Wearing Glasses.  No one doesn’t like a monkey wearing glasses.

• PRESIDENT OBAMA MAKING A BABY IN A TEST TUBE – So not only do some people think our President is the reincarnation of Hitler, or the Anti-Christ, or a screaming Socialist (as opposed to the not-so-closet Conservative he’s turning out to be)…he’s now a mad-scientist cookin’ up babies in tubes.  I wish I had better health care coverage to help pay for the whiplash I’m getting from shaking my fucking HEAD.

• BRAIN SURGEON MATH FORMULAS – Cackling maniacally to myself.  Oh man, that is rich.  Some poor intern at Johns Hopkins was simply searching for the elusive “Brain Surgeon Math Formula” so he could study for the brain surgery final…and got my blog about how I only got a 7 in Math on my ACT exam.  I instantly made that person feel like the most super-smart person on the planet.  Glad I made their day.

MY FAVORITE:

• FUCK MATH I’M GONNA BE A MUSICIAN – Whoever this person is I love him with all my heart and want to marry him and live happily ever after with him in a commune somewhere.  I assume that he clicked on The Indignity Between 6 and 8 and if he read it, surely realizes we are soul mates.  Call me??

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