Cubs and Wolves and Sousas. Oh My

I'm basically a little glad at this point that I've put off going back to school for a master's degree right now. My daughter is a sousaphone-carrying band geek. Then heathen number 2 just joined the school chorus and the math team. Also, my new job (which is pretty cool if I can ever get the hang of how to, uh, count) has rearranged the basic schedule I'd worked my life around the past five or so years so now I'm not available to pick the boys up from school and be home when Tubagirl gets off the bus.

My mommy has been a wonderful help in that she picks the boys up for me.

But on to other ramblings about my mundane life. Being a band mom is very hard work. Whenever I pick her up from practice, there are always parent volunteers there who have obviously been there the whole time. Who are these people? Where in god's name do they find the time? Are their band geek kids their only children? Are they living on residual incomes that don't require day to day work? Do they make their living selling band discount cards on the black market? Do they sleep? I'm not sure they do. Indoctrinated band parents must obviously have some vampiracle (I think I made that word up) qualities about them that the rest of us do not possess.

But the basic point is this: my oldest child has an extra curricular activity. (Not to mention that she has already joined the school chorus for spring semester and is considering going out for soccer.) My middle son has taken on two activities. My youngest son is out free floating because the one activity I'd signed him up for last year is no longer possible with my work schedule.

We're taking on boy scouts. With both the boy heathens. I put an add on facebook a couple of days ago for a wife, but it seems no one wants to be my wife. So it looks like I'm going to have to continue being my own wife and I don't make a very good wife. I'm good at thinking about things. I wish I could get a job thinking. Then I could just think about boy scouts and math teams and band cards in the comfort of my own private little think tank office.

I'm whining and I want chocolate. Shut up and hand me that bacon so I can dip it in some candiquick.

Stop! A head!

Life, at times, can be quite fortuitous. It seems my neighbor's dogs keep finding random hair heads and dragging them to the neighborhood. It's an new day in KARland with a million ways to potentially entertain myself. Perhaps I am too easily amused.

Why, hellooooooo there! New to the neighborhood?
I just so happen to have a nice plate of chocolate covered bacon right here in my hand
and you look like a man who could use some chocolate covered bacon.

What? No. I actually mean bacon covered in chocolate.
No. I didn't mean my vagina.
I'm just not the kind of girl to cover my vagina in chocolate.

A cat fight over the new man. It happens in trailer parks sometimes.
Sometimes it happens in front of the piggly wiggly, too.

Why hello, neighbor! Earning your Eagle Scout Badge? Oh.
She took the trailer in the divorce. I'm very sorry to hear that.

So I guess the appointment with the plastic surgeon didn't go well? So sorry to hear that. But hey, going noseless is all the rage in hollywood these days.
Besides, you can't even really tell. No, really!
Now why don't you crawl out of the car before something else melts?

Gardening is good for the soul.

Going on vacation? You forgot the stamp.

When I Unraveled

When I Unraveled

How can I tell the truth? I did not want another pregnancy, another baby
tugging at tired breasts. Life slips away - self buries self with each child
I carry into the world. Yet, I carried him – sure that life brings purpose
with the bright stabbing beautiful pain. I carried him, pretended life
was only beautiful. But sickness invaded small cells and circulated

in blood, pushing life out of life I’d carried. Only then did I know my need
of him – blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. Oxygen and dripping antibiotics
bonded him to earth. I floated untethered, unraveling in the difference between being
and not being. Life became a bubble – iridescent and molecule thin.

He slept under blue lights, circulated sick blue blood, turned blue when air
was not rich enough for pale, weak lungs. I swallowed, ingested and engorged
myself on guilt and fear and extracted it from it prayerful, entreating balm to beg forgiveness and breathe hope into the gloaming. Life is bright
stabbing beautiful pain and I gashed my hand on its rim.


-cnb

The Weird Attack and Close Ups

Okay. Seriously. What in the hell did he attack her with - a dull KFC plastic butter knife? There has obviously been no blood loss and it's raised like she ran an eraser over her face. (Remember that weird game we used to play as kids? Or was that just me?)


I don't even know what to say about the eyes. No swelling. The "black eye" seems to taper off over her cheek bone. And I guess this 6'4" black man must have had very small hands and no drive behind his punch since it only covers her eye. I was punched in the eye by my 13 year-old 5'8" brother once when I was 16 and that whole side of my face was swollen for days.

Just wanted to post the close ups somewhere.

A small rant

"We are offering non-paid writing opportunities. This is an excellent opportunity to build name recognition and gain experience in the rapidly changing publishing world and be a part of a growing web property."

Sure! I'd be absolutely and perfectly willing to offer up my services for free. Oh, suuuurrre, I only have eighteen thousand dollars in student loans to garner a B.A. with a concentration in creative writing so I can work for free. (I won't mention where this came from as it doesn't really matter since it's a bit of pretty generic crappola that I've seen many, many times.)

I'm absolutely sure that all those psych, education, and business majors are out there canvassing public schools and whatnot so they can offer up free services so they can "build up name recognition" while the revel in relative poverty just so one day, they too, can make the grand sum of $32,000 a year.

I don't go to McDonald's and demand free cheeseburgers then promise the guy at the counter that I'll "really help get their name out there."

Hey! Writing isn't like breathing, miserly ones. It does require some sort of thought process. If you can't afford to offer your writers a pittance of some type (I'll even take peanuts depending on the article length) then write it yourself. I can write for free on my own.

Jesse McDaniel

You know how sometimes you don't sometimes see people for months or years and then one day something comes over you and you have to know where they are right that very moment? I finally wondered where Jesse McDaniel had gotten off to so I called up the boys' father and asked him. What kind of response do I get?

"Hell, Jesse died back last fall."

Now why in the hell don't people ever tell me these things? Everyone knows I don't read the paper, don't look at the weather and don't watch the news so it's very important that someone calls and lets me know if I need to put on a coat, check to see if my Malt-o-meal cereal is being recalled, or buy a dress for a funeral. My best friend always calls me with weather updates and gas price reports and very rarely does she forget to keep me up to date. But other people are falling down on the job.

And really, I'm rather sad about the whole thing because Jesse was his own person and not one of those people you ever forget. I met him 10 years or so ago at the old Huddle House on 441 North. And maybe a random Huddle House doesn't seem like a big deal, but this was the Huddle House and there was always somewhere there I knew. It's where I went for grease to soak up the alcohol when I got plastered and it's where I spent a lot of time with the boys' father before they closed it down. It was old as hell with orange laminate tables, fake wood benches, chipped floor tiles and horrible, horrible greasy dark brown paneling straight from awesome 1972. God. I miss it.

Jesse was always there. He was a veteran of some war, though I can't ever remember which one - maybe Korea. Sometimes he lived at the Veteran's Home, but I guess sometimes he got tired of putting up with other people's rules and shit because he'd leave and rent a room at the New Milledgeville Motel, this little shit dive, right next to the Huddle House.

When he stayed at the Motel, he was in the Huddle House three or four times a day for tea and dinner, or bullshitting and companionship. He wore these ancient old overalls, brogans and had liver spots on his head but no hair. If you ever met him, you never forgot him. At times, he'd talk and talk and you'd have no idea what in the hell he was talking about because the pitch of his voice was so odd at times. Everybody at the HH knew him and everybody tended to him.

Whenever he saw me, he'd pull lint-covered pieces of candy from his overall pockets and say, "Give this to RAINey!" and shove candy in my hand for my daughter. Double Bubble bubble gum or now & laters. Whatever he had on him at the time. He always remembered to give me candy for Rain, although I don't think he ever realized or remembered their kinship. He was Rain's great uncle on her father's side. Maybe he did remember, I don't know.

My Huddle House closed almost seven years ago. People went in for dinner early one evening and the employees were sitting in front of the locked door wondering why no one had bothered to tell them they weren't going to have jobs. Everybody wondered what Jesse would do now because the Huddle House was his home away from the Veteran's Home. Folks fretted about who would look after him and worried about him walking up and down the main dragstrip looking for a new place to bullshit and get tea. Not everyone was going to appreciate a rheumy-eyed, overalled old man with lint-covered candy in his pocket.

I don't know where he went after that. The Huddle House was closed and their was never another grease joint that felt greasy and icky enough with paneled walls to appropriately be called a grease joint. Maybe he went to the new Waffle House across the street, but it seemed more like he roamed from one place to the next. He'd walk to Kroger or Walmart. No place was ever the same as the Huddle House. The last time I saw him, I was walking into Kroger with my youngest and there he was on the sidewalk.

"You tell John SoandSo I said I'm waiting on my hogleg! I need me a hogleg to take care of these hoodlums!" he said.

The boys' father (John SoandSo) had been promising Jesse a hogleg (a long barreled gun) for months. I think it was a bit of quandary for John. Everyone worried about Jesse walking up and down the highway by himself, but it was a more worrisome thing to give a crotchedy old veteran a gun to wield at hoodlums. John gave Jesse a lot of rides over the last few years to try and keep him off the highway.

I told Jesse I'd get on to John about that hogleg for him. Then he asked me,"Where's RAINey?" and I told him she was at school. He reached into those endless overall pockets and pulled out a couple of pieces of lint-covered candy. "Here, give her this candy." I took the candy and stuck it in my pocket.

Jesse passed with hardly a ripple through this town, but there should have been.

KAR slams the poetry

Revel in the oddness of my very first ever "slam poem." Please excuse the shoddy sound. I am but a poor, humble writer devoid of adequate funding. Since there is a bit of static in the background, I've included the poem on this post for you.

I’m not jealous of Freud’s penis
Freud was a dick
I’m not jealous of any man with a penis
because dicked people look crazy
naked Crazy with kibbles and bits hanging off
like a funny afterthought

I’m not jealous of the
masculine testosterone WCW John Fucking Wayne NASCAR drive
to conquer and deliver forth a world of
Fighting gamecocks

I’m not jealous
I’m frigging pissed off

I’m frigging pissed
because I can’t wave my labia around like a
Kamikaze windmill
I can’t get raving piss drunk and piss my name
in the dirt I can’t piss standing up but always
just in my shoe
I don’t get to aim and hit the bull's eye

When I was four years old I tried to pee standing up
because it seemed so much
easier so I got naked
And straddled the toilet backwards ass to the door
and I pissed down my leg

I’m not jealous

I’m pissed because I have to wait in line
to urinate