Backstory

My daughter likes to sneak up behind me and say Hi! It scares the shit out of me. I think she might be trying to kill me. To test this premise, I decided to call her bluff. I was scrambling eggs when she snuck up behind me and said Hi! I dropped the spatula and grabbed my chest and fell to the floor.

She didn't believe me.

This Sandra Bullock/Jesse James thing also scares the shit out of me. What scares me is that I care about it. But I can't help it, I keep seeing Sandra (is it Saaandra or Sondra?) telling Barbara Walters how she's finally found someone who's got her back, and it turns out the problem is what the guy's been doing behind it.

I mean, what, that's his real name? Jesse Fucking James? Who can believe that? This should've been Sandra's first clue. The fact that he's a bottom-dwelling egg-sucker is written all over the guy. Literally. Which should've been clues two through ninety-seven. I mean, this is Sandra Fucking Bullock, people, she might as well live next door. We should take Mr. James' betrayal of the wee lass very personally. It should irk us no-end that he looked her in the eyes and fucking lied like a rug.

Who says that anymore?

I got a rug burn when I fake-coronaried after my daughter snuck up behind me while I was scrambling eggs. The yayhoo who previously owned this house laid carpet in the kitchen, and my knee took it on the chin when I hit the berber. Not only that, this yayhoo carpeted the bathroom, too. Who can believe that? Even as I write, a new lifeform is evolving beneath the pile outside the shower door.

Once when I was a kid I snuck up on my mother while she was sewing my dance costume. She was sitting in a corner of the dinette at the old Singer, which spent most of its life disguised as a small curio table, until, when needed, it rose up from the bowels of its curious little home like the Phoenix. I remember taking many minutes to tiptoe across the living room to a spot inches from my mother's back, at which point I opened my rosy red mouth and said Boo!

Is it snuck or sneaked?

Speaking of rug burns. You'd think Ms. Bullock would be more evolved than to fall for a guy whose second ex-wife is a porn star and who stars in a show called Monster Garage. I mean, what, is this guy from Chisholm? A town renowned for driving a car out onto the ice of Chisholm Lake every winter, then making book on when the car would sink, which event heralded the arrival of spring. No robins or crocuses or pussywillows for that bunch, nosireebob. Need I mention Chisholm Lake was a source of drinking water for the surrounding populace? Who, in their wisdom, eventually figured things out and stopped using cars for this dubious tradition.

Now they use snowmobiles.

Speaking of dubious. You know how certain childhood events stand out in your memory as if a hidden camera filmed the whole thing? Here's the difference between my husband and me: my husband once snuck up on his mother, too...when she was playing the organ. My mother was sewing, for crissakes. On a sewing machine. With a rapidly pulsating needle. I mean, somebody might think I'm from Chisholm. Where kids have been known to sneak up on people cleaning guns. After my little surprise attack, my mother went on to sew again, but needles, er, needless to say, the finished costume did a good job of hiding my rosy red ass at the recital that evening.

Speaking of rapidly pulsating needles. I wonder if you could rig up a sewing machine to give tattoos. I have a tattoo, I got it when I turned forty. Now that I'm turning eighty, I'm thinking of getting another one. I wonder if Sandra Bullock has a tattoo. God I hope it's not on her back.

Speaking of new lifeforms. I wonder if anyone from Chisholm has ever been a porn star. I'm thinking Pussy Willow sounds about right.

Speaking of getting laid in the kitchen.

Speaking of piles outside the door. This post is one of them.

Getting On With It

I went AWOL last week.

With all good intentions, I sat down to post, only to discover that my computer was on the blink. Again. As was my daughter. Again. And my husband was fixing to do likewise, chasing goofballs, excuse me, golfballs in Florida. I couldn't blinking take it any more. I packed a bag and grabbed the wine and headed Up North of North, into The Wild.

The Wild of the Iron Range, that is. Where I grew up. Though some might dispute that last part. The Range. Where, as they say, the men are men and so are half the women. To which I might add, You gotta problem with that? 

I guess it wasn't officially an AWOL, seeing as how I announced my intentions beforehand.

"I'm going AWOL!" I announced to my daughter and my husband, in a text message and an email, respectively. I didn't get a response for eighteen hours. It was my daughter, asking what AWOL meant. She thought it was some texting abbreviation I made up.

I blasted KQ and drove at the speed of light and made it through the forcefield to my friend's doorstep by the cocktail hour.

In case you weren't aware, there's a forcefield surrounding the Iron Range. Like a restricted zone. Non-Rangers -- known as aliens -- take their lives in their hands when entering. But having grown up there, I'm in possession of a natural masking hormone, which allows me to enter and leave the area undetected. Once inside, I can move about at random, virtually invisible, able to pass for just another local skag who used to shoot rats at the dump with your cousin, or maybe it was you, but who's keeping score.

I careened to a stop and staggered up to my friend's doorstep and she immediately broke out a corkscrew and she immediately broke it.

"I've still got my jacket on!" I gasped, one hand on the doorknob. "I can drive to the liquor store and get another one! Or five!"

The guy at the liquor store always remembers me.

I met him ten years ago, when my mother died. I was in town for several weeks and his establishment was within walking distance of my parents' house. Only twenty miles. He even let my dog come into the store with me, like Petticoat Junction. By the time I left, we were old friends. Now we're ancient.

I think I used to shoot rats at the dump with his cousin.

But back to the story.

My friend and I stood staring at one another, aghast and agog, you might say, the corkscrew lying lifeless between us, when out of the blue, I conjured my mother. Or maybe she conjured herself.

But suddenly there she was, hovering in the darkening air, trying with all her otherworldly might to change the script, redirect the action, affect the outcome. Why, you might ask? Because, dead or alive, my mother recognized that broken corkscrew for what it was: a Sign.

Not that I disagree. The difference being one of interpretation. To my mother, that broken corkscrew was screaming, Do Not Drink Tonight Or Ever Again You Besotted Wastrel! Whereas my friend and I saw it as a suggestion of Power, i.e., our Powerful friendship, our Powerful intellects, you get the idea. As with anything, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

My mother always beheld me as having drifted from her vision of who I should be. Which is the usual case with parenting. But in my mother's interpretation, I didn't so much drift, as get myself hopelessly shipwrecked. On some remote desert island, far from land. From Herland, that is. 

In my interpretation, I wasn't shipwrecked, I escaped. To a private little paradise called My Own Blinking Life. Not that my life is paradise. But it's my life, not my mother's, which makes it paradisiacal enough for me. Just a quiet little wayside where the bar's always open and I can come and go undetected and I have at least one friend who'll light the lamp and break out the corkscrew when I careen to a stop at the curb outside her door.

Robert Frost said, Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in. To which I might add, And they always have a spare corkscrew. Which my friend had, and eventually found, and so we got on with it.

Caution: Reading This May Be Hazardous

It's been a few weeks. Some of you might wonder what the hell happened to me. Most of you don't give a shit. I'm with the second bunch. But I'm nothing if not anal, so I feel an explanation is in order. Actually I'm nothing, but here's an explanation anyway:

My operating system was invaded by a malicious virus.

The same thing happened to my computer.

The virus that invaded my operating system has been documented ad nauseum in these pages, no need to revisit that can of worms. The virus that invaded my computer is a whole different animal. Animalia chordata vertebrata mammalia primates hominoidea homo sapiens, to be exact. (Don't you just loooove Google?)

To be more exact: some limpdick hacked his way into my cyberlife and the cyberlives of untold others via an online newspaper (you know who you are!) which shall remain unnamed, thereby destroying all from within and achieving for himself multi-orgasmic electronic Nirvana or some such fucking thing.

My husband blames Bill Gates. Not that Bill Gates is the above-mentioned limpdick specifically.

My husband hates Microsoft with the intensity of a thousand suns. I don't understand this, but then, I don't understand any of this. That is, any of this electronic mumbo-jumbo. It's all Greek to me. Or is that Geek? Whatever, I am anything but.

Anything but, nothing but, I'm one big but.

But (there I am again!) I'll let you in on a little-known secret about all this electronica: it's based on magic. When I sit down at my computer each noon, I have but (and again!) to type a special hex known only to myself in all the universe, and TA-DAA! It's showtime. This is the way it works. This is the way it's always worked. If you Believe, it will Be.

Imagine my chagrin when I sat down the other day to read the news in preparation for a long day of Free Cell, doing precisely what I've always done for lo these many moons, only to watch slackjawed as everything on my screen proceeded to disappear. First it backflipped around and fireworked for a bit, then it exploded, then it disappeared. Believe me, it wasn't pretty. Like being at a deathbed.

Admit it, we regard our computers as Beings. Entities. As housing the Lifeforce. We spend thousands of our waking hours interacting with these Creatures, and one does not spend the majority of one's life nurturing a relationship with an inanimate object. Unless you're Cindy McCain, but never mind that.

I desperately want to blame someone (you know who you are!), but it's not Bill Gates. He has enough on his plate having to look in the mirror everyday. I mean, that is One Not Very Attractive Dude. You'd think that, as an ONVAD, the richest homo sapien on the planet might at least look into basic cosmetic surgery, if not total facial reconstruction. Come to think of it, after this last virus, I'm starting to look like an ONVAD. And a slackjawed one at that.

Give me H1N1 anyday, eventually one recovers. Not so with Malware, as my husband refers to it. Sounds like a cookie. Another computer term I know nothing about, except that one doesn't ingest it. Unlike my malicious virus, which ingested everything in sight and went looking for more. I swear I could feel it reaching out into the room toward me like some three-D movie monster.

Listen to me, now it's my malicious virus. I need therapy.

The upshot of this pandemic is that my computer had to be put down. I got shitfaced at the wake. And I lost everything. I mean everything. Felix, my electronic pet (is there anyone out there who even remembers Felix?). All my pictures. All my documents. All my Free Cell stats, not to mention proof that I'd actually played over 1,000 games (or maybe it was 10,000, but who's counting). All my email addresses, including 1,142 emails, years of lies and gossip gone in a nanosecond. And my cyber-esteem.

That's the electronic version of self-esteem, only with more cookies. Whatever the hell they are. All I know is they don't make you fat. They make you confident. As in, I can go cold turkey on Free Cell, no problemo, I'm just shaking because it's fucking cold in here! Or, So what if I lost all my email addresses, I still have at least...one friend...who doesn't have a computer...who's still alive (I think)! Or, At least I still have a husband (I think) who can cobble together some sort of set-up so this long-overdue post can finally get out to the masses whose very well-being hangs in the balance wondering what the fuck happened to Six Spruce, all due to the actions of that limpdick whackjob cyber-masturbator referred to elsewhere!

Come to think of it, my very well-being has hung in the balance since 1962, the year I was Queen of Greenhaven. It's been elsewhere ever since.

Be that as it may (or may not), I'm horrified at the straits in which I find myself. Make that straitjacket. Or is it straightjacket? What I mean is, this typeface sucks. These words are writ waaaay too large. This mouse is skittering around by itself on this unfamiliar keypad like...a mouse. This keyboard feels like one of those rinky-dink toy metal xylophones from my childhood. And they don't make those anymore. Not the xylophones, or my version of childhood.

Remember, I'm nothing. If not anal. I hate change. I abhor it. I despise it with the intensity of a thousand suns. And now, due to something new and spiteful from Nabisco, it's all come to naught. Or is that not? The point being, here I am, skittering around by myself on this unexpected clean slate, a new start thrust upon me. Like greatness.

Huh?

What I mean is, I have no choice. The writing is on the...screen. In a big fat sucky font. I'll just have to take it one new Free Cell game at a time. Starting with this one.