Day 6: Scatterbrained

Well, I had a good idea for a short story for We Work for Cheese's "Discouraging Writers Everywhere" aka "30 Minus 2 Days of Writing" challenge...but, as I didn't write it down when it first came to me while I was in the kitchen buttering my waffle, it, like so many of my other stunningly brilliant ideas...dissipated pretty much as soon as it came.

 

It kinda went something like this:

 

"Look, Tom, I'm not gonna do this shit again.  I'm tired of it.  You hear me?  I'm fucking serious as a heart attack, man...I'm sick and fucking tired of it!"

 

It was a really good idea.  It was.  It was going to rival "Pulp Fiction" - and Tarantino would have called me in a few days (not wanting to look too eager by emailing me for my phone number straight away) to firm up the details. Sure, he would have changed the guy's name from "Tom" to "Tommy" or something...just nothing stupid like "Jed" or "Lance"...altho, "Look, Lance..." with an air of Tarantino-ish snide sarcasm in the guy's voice, might have worked.  These are the things we would have talked about on the phone...and later on, in person.

 

And it would have been a great film, too.  It would have made some actors famous...who will now never know what it's like to schmooze and hobnob with Hollywood's "A-List" celebrities...all because I didn't have a pen and paper handy.  I always think I'm going to remember -- I keep repeating it in my head over and over...but...then, in a blink of an eye, or in this case, a swipe of a knife...and it's gone.

It's always the same...I even had one of these things given to me about eight years ago:

 

It's much, much more complicated than this thing...

 

 

...because it has side buttons on the left...

 

...and on the right...

 

 

 

The manual is also about as thick as the one they give to you when you learn to fly the Space Shuttle...and the Space Shuttle people never had to drive down a busy road when an idea...an awfully brilliant idea...popped into their heads.  Needless to say...I am alive (and so are countless other people) because I can't figure out how to operate it while I'm sitting in the confines of my house, let alone out in traffic when all my most viable ideas manifest themselves.

It is, for all intents and purposes...a very sexy looking white gadget which, for some odd reason, reminds me of those old Virginia Slims cigarette packs.  And who the hell wouldn't have wanted to smoke these things back then if you could've looked as hot as Kelly Emberg does is this 1980s advert? (I hope that's her - I think that's her...I'm almost fairly certain that's her.)

Which gets me thinking...Kelly Emberg...I wonder if they used to say she was "hot an ember"?  I bet they did.  I'm going to have look up if they even used the word "hot" to refer to women back then, you know, in the 1980s, when she was in every single Vogue magazine. 

 

I always wanted to look like her, too...and when I had my nose done in the 1980s I was hoping they'd give me her nose.  They didn't. 

 

Speaking of noses...she was in a long-time relationship with Rod Stewart, who I always thought oozed sex appeal.  They also have a child together: a daughter.  I sure hope she has her nose (well, not her nose...of course she has her nose - I meant Emberg's instead of Rod's)...but, I bet she (Emberg) had a nose job, tho...only she got a better nose than I did.

 

They used to do this procedure on the nose...where they'd actually take a bit of your cartilage and form it into a "V" shape and pop it into the tip of your nose, so you could have that "bone in the nose" look which was all the rage in the 1980s. 

 

Alas, my nose doctor, Julius Newman aka "Dr. Nose" (the doctor who invented liposuction, and who had a Rolls Royce with "DR NOSE" license plates)...didn't give me a V-tip.  I did, however, get cheekbones done as well.  I didn't know I didn't have cheekbones until he pointed it out to me in his swanky Philadelphia office.  Once I had them...I realized I must not have had 'em before...because the first time I washed my face...and you know how you lean over the sink? Well, you don't really realize you truly know the contours of your face until your face gets some cheekbones put in -- the first time I cupped my hands to splash the soap off...there they were!  There were now hollows where my eyes are...instead of just a flat surface.  Pretty nifty.  In case you didn't know, they shove cheek implants up through the inside of your mouth...so you have no visible scars - and then they anchor them with a looped piece of string that goes into the grooved portion around the implant...and that's what keeps them tethered in place until they yank the strings out of your face a few days later.  THAT was a weird sensation, I tell you.  I still remember it like it was only yesterday. 

 

Strange the things you remember...and the things you don't.  I guess some people are just scatterbrained that way...but in totally different way than how I was going to have brains scattered all over the place in my Tarantino movie.

 

Yeah...I think I really woulda liked that film.

 

 

 

(Another strange thing: I had decided, for some odd reason to Google "Julius Newman" one day...just out of the blue...and it just so happened to be the day after he died.  I had never Google'd him before, which made it all the more odd.  I was going to work that bit of info into this blog...but I thought it would have been way too convoluted to follow...so I tacked this on as an end note. I still think it's very strange.)

(Also, "buttering my waffle" is not a euphemism for masturbation...but, if it were, it would be an awesome one.)

 

Day 4: When Hell Freezes Over

(My icy bird feeder and snowy bird bath.)

I always figured I was in my own personal Hell here in Alabama.  Oh, I joked about it for years...poor pitiful me, a New Jersey chick stuck in Alabama since 1990 (or thereabouts...I'm not even going to count).

What seriously could be worse?  It's like I'm in a "Twilight Zone" episode...they hate people from the north here...I can't even begin to tell you how many times I heard (with obvious disgust), "Oh, yer a Yankee!" each time I'd mention I was from Jersey.  And, I have to endure countless "Oh, bless your wittle heart..." (yes, they like to say "wittle" for some odd reason) comments each time I say anything remotely sounding like complaining. 

I hear it a lot. 

And they aren't fooling me with their southernisms...I know as well as they do that what they really are saying is the south's euphemism for "fuck you".  I know they are - they say it the same way we say "fuck you" in Jersey, only we say it without the southern accent.. And, I guess you might say that our counterpart to "wittle" would be "frig"...as in, "What the frig did you just say?  Wittle?  You said 'wittle' to me?  Say 'wittle' again, I dare you, I double dare you, motherfrigger..say 'wittle' one more goddamn time!"  (I said that in my best Samuel L. Jackson "Pulp Fiction" voice, by the way.)

But...I know it's my Hell.  People don't even get sarcasm.  I will be all sarcastic saying silly stuff...and they will look at me...they look at me like I'm that Venusian diner guy with the three eyes in that "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" episode of "Twilight Zone".  So, yeah...I know it's Hell...because it's yet another "Twilight Zone" episode I'm in.  They will look at me and stare - and I will say "It's sarcasm...ha ha...sarcasm??" and then they stare some more while I will walk away thinking, "This IS my Hell, isn't it?"

And it is.  And, last Tuesday, Hell froze over.  If anyone nonchalantly remarks to you..."Yeah, sure...I'll do that...when Hell freezes over!" you can tell them that's already happened.

Oh, everyone jokes about it...I was one of the first...it was comical really...a "dusting of snow"...a mere 1-2 inches and Alabama (and more infamously, Atlanta, Georgia) came crashing to a grinding halt. 

In Jersey, two inches was nothing.  It wasn't even child's play.  Real kids waited until there was at least six inches to a foot of the white stuff before we'd throw on a coat and freeze our little woolen-mittened stumps of hands off -- feverishly building a snowman with raw abandon. Snot oozing out of our noses only to be wiped away with our frozen-mittened stumps...only to freeze once more...a nice snot-laden-tiered coating for our hands...layer upon layer of frozen nose mucus -- and it didn't phase anyone one bit.  If it happened during school...we'd still build our snowmen with our snot-coated mittens while all the teachers huddled around the flagpole puffing away their Marlboro's - their deeply inhaled smoke would look the same upon exhalation as our breath did in the frigid weather. And, we, like proper kids of the day, would blow out our imaginary cigarette smoke out - in between getting pelted with rock-covered snowballs and wiping our red frozen noses.

And, no one...no one ever got a day off from school...or at least rarely. You see, we had these things called "plows" and other things called "road salt" - and the plows would be running all pre-dawn hours ensuring they'd put a damper on dashing our hopes of hearing our school's number being rattled off on some Philadelphia radio station's channel by some guy who could talk faster than an auctioneer on crack.  And then you'd scurry to get ready because your bus was going to be there any minute...and you couldn't sit around waiting.

But...to a standstill everything came here...and then we all waited.

When I ventured outside early Tuesday, the sleet had begun...my car already getting a nice glaze of ice.  I turned both the faucets on...the one in front of the house...and the one in back.  I heard a bunch of sirens and I thought to myself, "There it starts...they should really just stay home...these people can't drive in the snow...and no one can drive on ice..."  A few hours later I heard that a man and his 2-year-old daughter had died in a seven car accident on an icy bridge a couple miles from me.  The snow, that was now falling...wasn't magical mitten stuff anymore...it was deadly. 

And, as you all pretty much know...Atlanta's ice froze people in their tracks.  Birmingham had them same plight...and county after county here in Alabama, they shut down their roads.  I sat in disbelief -- county roads were closed, state highways were closed...and so were the interstates running in and out of here.  One of my Facebook "friends" was stuck in his car, on an Atlanta highway, for 19 hours.  Nineteen.  How do you do that?  That...is a bit worse than rosy cheeks and groans of school being open...that, my friends, is what Hell looks like when it's frozen over.

Our roads were closed that Tuesday until Friday. Luckily I was home when all this happened...some never made it home.

So, while everyone up north keeps joking about how stupid Atlanta's mayor was and how uproariously funny it was that the south was crippled by a "dusting of snow"...just shut the fuck up. 



Oh, and bless your wittle hearts.

Today's prompt is "When Hell Freezes Over".  Please join all the other writers over at "We Work for Cheese" - and read their takes on Hell.  :)