A truly ridiculous sort of poem created when asked to describe my muse

My Antagonist Muse

Bleached blond gum cracker
Loud and obnoxious lip smacker
"Kiss my grits"
Good god. She's a transsexual Flo
Talking out of all sides of humankind
Telling me to write about underbellied life

Good Lord? God Almighty? Somebody?
Why send me this one?

She . . . He . . . ?
is all kinds of in my ear
nattering over the gum
about men and women and women and men
about war and peace and children and gin

Shut her up so I can hear what she is saying

just once.

A bit of childhood mystery for you

(As a side note, a lot of things I post will be rough drafts from class. I welcome constructive criticism and fawn under praise. However, if you don't like my shit, just kiss my cracker ass. Thanks! -KAR)

When my oldest child was a toddler, I found an old Fisher Price record player at a yard sale and something from my own childhood called me to buy it even though the world had long moved onto CDs by then. We listened to a few records I’d bought with the record player but Rain never showed any real interest in it and over time I realized I’d been attempting to pass my Fisher Price memories on to her.

My record player was a small brown deal decked out in the wonderful late 70s colors of brown, orange and more brown. A plastic technological wonder of my very own, my record player was an untouchable to all other children, including my brother who still wet the bed. It was mine and was the one thing I ever bothered to take care of except for the Grimace cookie I once kept in the top dresser drawer as a pet. (The Grimace cookie was specifically chosen for its potential long shelf life after I was horrified to discover Grandaddy longleg spiders did not keep very well in a dresser drawer.) Grimace and I spent a lot of time jamming to our records in my little room of closet proportions fashionably decorated in 1978 trailer wood paneling.

We listened to “This Old Man” and sometimes I shouted out the lyrics so the Doberman out in the yard could hear them:

THIS OLD MAN! HE PLAYED ONE!

HE PLAYED KNICK-KNACK ON MY THUMB!

WITH A KNICK-KNACK PADDYWHACK, GIVE THE DOG A BONE!

THIS OLD MAN CAME ROLLING HOME!

I knew this old man had a lot of problems and obviously drank to excess otherwise he could walk home instead of having to roll. For days, maybe even weeks or months, I’d come home from my kindergarten mornings, grab Grimace out of the dresser drawer and crank up This Old Man while I contemplated his life. I kicked off my shoes and sometimes danced around on the gritty bedroom linoleum my mother seemed to have given up on or possibly forgotten about in the struggle to keep body and soul together. It was a very catchy song.

This Old Man was also a very deep song about alcoholism and stalking. I knew this even then. They weren’t fooling me with that knick knack paddywhack business. The man played it all over the place. He played knick knack on my thumb, my shoes, my spine, and my gate. He gave the dog a bone to shut him up when he went on the knick knacking spree and then he rolled on home drunk as my Uncle Timothy Paul. Only a drunk would have to roll home. Normal people walk or drive. I guess paddywhacking was a very stressful sort of life and This Old Man had to drink himself into a stupor to deal with his own existence.

This Old Man captivated me. He was an alcoholic. Possibly a pervert. Maybe he was a few bricks off of a full load and just more child-like than perverted. The answer stood in the actual meaning of knick knack paddywhack. I was captivated and Fisher Price was the key to discovering the truth of This Old Man.

I lost Grimace because it turns out McDonald’s cookies do not have an exceptionally long shelf life . Life, however, moves on quickly for a five year old and I found a new record: Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City.” It was my most favorite song, even more so than the disturbing This Old Man. The 45 single, with it’s blue paper and butterfly symbol, expressed mysteries of wild and unknown places like cities where hungry children were shaped up like something wild and all the young boys wanted to take her home.

Fisher Price introduced me to what I thought was the idea of real freedom, of discovery by young girls of the world and their place in it. We rocked, pigtails and jelly shoes or not, we could be cool just like those kids at the roller rink. I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult wondering about what kind of people my parents were to let a child listen obsessively to a song about child prostitution. My favorite movies were Lady Sings the Blues and Barbarella so I can assume they were not ones to monitor the media content of their children.

I lost the record player sometimes after my parents divorced. I’m not sure what happened to it. Maybe I unknowingly lost it when they split the meager assets. My father often had a habit of taking bits and pieces of advanced technology and taking them apart to create something else. It is entirely feasible my record player became part of a fisher price/RCA/duct tape concoction used to hold a car engine together or play Atlanta sations on the radio. I was 13 before it was ever properly replaced with a wood paneled dual tape player, turn top, subwoofer system bought from the JC Penny Christmas catalogue. I slept between the speakers most nights.

My children still have the record player I picked up from a yard sale all those years ago. Only my youngest has ever expressed an interest in listening to it. He seems to especially like Puff the Magic Dragon. But we don’t ever listen to This Old Man. The guy’s a pervert.

Look ma! No Rhymes!

Fairy Tales

When she said the front yard was haunted

we believed her

because the sky was never blue there

and it seemed on the long drive up

you could see the rocking chairs had

barely visible occupants

only seen by the slightest movements.

So we would not go there

and relegated ourselves always

to the back yard to play,

the freshly plowed dirt in the fields,

and the bales of hay in the barn

where we would sneak away Lewis’s

little bottles of whiskey.

We would avoid the tire swing

beckoning us to come and sit

under the arthritic limbs of the solitary

gallows tree in that front yard.

Only the living had abandoned it –

Instead, we made a playhouse

in the abandoned hog pen

and locked Lewis in the chicken coop

with an angry one-legged rooster -

Always laughing loudly at our own antics

To keep the boogeychild away.

There should have been a picture of my very first campfire here, but my scanner has moved on to the greener pastures of technological death.

A campfire may not seem like much, but there was hella lot of aggravation involved in its creation. In 1998, I was a single mother of a beautiful and terribly precocious four-year-old daughter. (Who is still very beautiful and precocious. But now she is 13 and I'm oft inclined to spit and roast her because precociousness just isn't very amusing on a 13 year old who thinks I am an idiot. However, I digress.) 1998 was the year we went camping with my best friend and her three year old son who was very handsome and also very precocious. If you ever put two terribly precocious small children in a car for a five hour joy ride, then that's a whole lot of precociousness in a very small space and never enough Valium to go around.

At that time, my best friend and I were right tight. Our kids played together, we went out together and over that summer we lived in her Mimi's lake house. We were both decidedly manless and were women set on conquering the world. We didn't need no stinkin men! Men were hell! Men were useless! They didn't help with kids! They couldn't keep jobs! Or they were dead! Let's go camping!

At the time, camping seemed like the logical thing to do when you were setting out to prove women could do everything men could do a million times better. We were mostly right in the assumption. Except for the campfire.

We set up camp in a light rain the first afternoon we arrived. Or maybe I set up camp because I was much more anti-man and infinitely determined to prove I was just as handy as any testicled-being. I taught my friend how to lay old blankets on the ground to absorb some of the moisture before setting up the 6000-pound 8-man tent I'd borrowed from my parents. Then we created a windbreaker and a porch-of-sorts from the plastic canvases we'd purchased from the evile, world-dominating Walmart.

After putting our things away in the tent, there was really nothing left to do that evening. Except build a campfire. No camp is complete without a fire and I wasn't about to let my camp be outcamped by those mancampers around us. Hell no. Of course, we didn't bring firewood with us on a five hour trip to go sleep in a dirty tent in the rain, but that was okay because the camp store gladly offered firewood for a relatively low price. I purchased my wood and set about creating my little campfire. I cleaned all the debris from the previous fires created by mancampers, arranged my little fire rocks in a nice circle and set up my firewood in a nice stack that I deemed to be worthy of a woman campfire.

Now in truth, I'd never really played with fire of any kind before other than the bic lighter necessary in lighting my cigarettes. My house burned down when I was 17 and I'd always been a little cautious in dealing with fire. But I wasn't about to let a little psychological disturbance stand between me and the perfect campfire. I gathered up a few pieces of pine straw that had managed to stay dry through the summer shower and twisted them up into what I considered a nice, tight little bundle. (I'd learned this bit of a trick from my Little House on the Prairie books when I was seven and had filed it away for future reference.) I lit up my little straw bundle and placed it under my stacked firewood and waited with all the confidence of a 22-year-old woman who knew everything.

When that bundle didn't work out, I lit three more bundles and strategically placed them under and in my firewood and blew gently. When I'd worked my way up to 8 bundles of pine straw, a few pieces of scrap paper and an empty toilet paper roll, my friend suggested I should ask the guys across from us how they started their fire. I gave her a firm, but polite, grunt and a"hell no" and went about my business of Creating Fire. There is something very neanderthal about Creating Fire and I found myself in favor of protecting my fire and my fire-starting secret. Except I had neither a fire nor the secret to creating fire. Yet, nearly every campsite around me had a fire. What in the hell were these idiots doing that could possibly be smarter than my pine straw bundles learned especially from Pa Ingalls? WHAT?

Some 45 minutes later, with our young and terribly precocious children waiting with their bag of marshmallows and straightened coat hangers, I swallowed my very unevolutionary pride and walked to a campsite just across from us.

"Hey, uh, so how did you start your fire?"

And that is when I learned about Magic Fire Sticks.

This guy, with all the calmness of an experienced fire starter, pulls out this . . . thing and told me he used it to Create Fire. In all my years of camping as a child, no one had ever shown me this Magic Fire Stick. I knew from its magnetic pull and the special glow of the yellow and red greasy paper wrapping the Magic Fire Stick that it had to be very special.

This Master Fire Starter explained to me that the Magic Fire Stick was a quick way to create the perfect campfire and walked with me back to my own cold, dark and miserable camp to show me how it worked. He showed me how to stick the Great and Mighty Magic Fire Stick under my little logs and light it. I Had Fire. Then he left me with my very own Magic Fire Stick for later use.

My friend clapped in giddy delight over the Magic Fire Stick as I calmly filed it away for future reference. Never again would I be fireless. This man, this fellow compatriot of humanity, had shown me the light. While I was still pretty anti-man for some months after that, it gave insight into my own stubborn attitude and I spent some time marveling over how I have spent my entire life determined to never ask for help, spending hours, day, weeks, or even months proverbially creating useless straw bundles to prove myself right when all I really had to do was admit I was wrong and let some guy give me a Magic Fire Stick.

That sounds a bit dirty rather than thought provoking.

To Blog or not to Blog?

To blog. Yet, what bloggest I?

A year and a half ago, I began a blog in an effort to amuse myself. Two entries into it, I lost interest and it molders in the world of livejournals gone bad. It was funny. I was amused. And then I grew bored and frustrated.

The eternal question of my audience rendered me incapable of deciding anything for myself. Would my audience be amused by my antics? Did they want to read about a grown woman occasionally hiding in the closet and screaming in the pillow when her children were clearly developing a mutiny that would certainly overshadow any smalltime schemes of Fletcher Christian?

Should I espouse my political agenda? What is my political agenda? Oh. George W. Bush sucks donkey balls. I think many other people have cornered that market and made much better use of the material than I ever could. I’m not politically inclined. I’m not socially inclined, either. Quite frankly, I’m pretty happy sorting out all the little introspective voices in my head without some war-happy jack ass invading my personal time.

Should I take a religious approach? And who would be thoroughly interested in redneck cracker transcendentalism? I once told a friend that Ireland is truly God’s country. (According to the pictures I’ve seen because I don’t get out much.) “Which God?” she asked. Hell. I don’t know. Pick one. I don’t care. God is another name for yourself. Or the part of yourself you aren’t prepared to accept responsibility for because it’s too large for you. God is a woman. God is a cat. God is a transsexual Elvis impersonator. Believe what you want. I don’t care. You’re right. I’m right. We’re all right until you tell me I’m wrong. And then you can fuck the fuckity fuck off.

And this brings yet another question. Should I submit to my fondness for base language? Certainly it lowers the overall intelligence of whatever argument I am submitting to the public at large for consumption. And yet, it’s coarse and I am an earthy, barefoot, three-second-floor-rule sort of chick so perhaps it will be fine.

Welcome to my neurotic rants and random things that seem to happen only to me. Strap in, because I have no agenda and no idea where in the hell we’re going.