Author: ME

My Next Husband Will Have Hair

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,
Who cares if that shit is made of glued on horse hair? I WANT IT.

Oh, stop it. It’s not even shocking anymore and it’s barely still funny. I’ve been talking about killing my husband for so long you’d think he’d have dropped dead just from the sheer amount of brain cells that I’ve activated at different times on the thought of offing him. But this post is actually very sweet, I promise.

Whenever I do finally getting around to killing him, disposing of him, putting on a good masquerade of mourning for him, then get myself back in shape (or at least back in my weight class) enough to start dating, I have a list of criteria for Dead Husband # 2 (did I forget to mention that I plan to make a “thing” of this, and that probably all husbands everywhere need killing?).

Here are my criteria, in order of importance:

  1. Don’t be bald.

That’s it. That’s all I’m looking for in my next husband. Stop judging me, I am not shallow. Let me explain.

I don’t care if Dead Husband #2 has a job or not. He can have facial tattoos, although I would prefer not. He can at this very moment still be living with his parents, but even there I really hope he’s not. The only thing he must have is gorgeous hair. (I told you to WAIT! This will stop be shallow in a couple of paragraphs!)

Basically, the only thing Dead Husband #1 DOESN’T have is hair. He has a great job, an almost equally bizarre sense of humor to match mine, he is so afraid of his children that he compensates by being awesome to them, and he has no problem with my obscene book fetish. He is the total package.

Except he’s bald. And I kind of think it’s my fault. He had hair until he met me, that’s all I’m sayin’.

So since I’m not trying to improve my situation with my next marriage, the only thing I don’t have from a man this go around is hair that stays where it’s supposed to. I just thought I’d try something different. Of course, I can’t kill Dead Husband #2 the same way I’m gonna kill Dead Husband #1, so the method will be different too. Or is that called, “My M. O.?”

It Was Pandelirium!

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

Many years ago, I made my glorious television debut. It was artfully done and it made me into the star that I am today. I played the part of Redneck Bystander #3 describing the fire.

I stood in front of the charred, smoking remains of a building with a baseball cap covering my unwashed hair and wearing a giant sweatshirt from a catfish restaurant stretched over my pregnant tummy. I was most proud of the fact that my sweatshirt only had one stain on it and it wasn’t from food and that it actually came down far enough to cover that little stretchy panel on maternity pants…it’s really tacky when you can see that weirded out drawstring bag at the top of the preggo jeans. And if the wardrobe department hadn’t completed the look for me, I think I even knocked out one of my front teeth for this appearance, but I could be wrong about that last part.

Now I just really, really wish it had been made up for a movie or a TV show or something, instead of the local news channel.

Yup, I became THAT WOMAN. Every time something in my part of the country either a) burns down, b) gets blown up by a tornado, or c) is a farm animal born with two more legs than it should have, there’s undoubtedly a woman in curlers and a stained wife-beater tank top describing it. Usually, she’s using a few made up words. Like pandelirium. Or screecherous. Or ungodawful.

And I am now afraid it’s genetic. My daughter had to get her first ever vaccination last week. There’s a long story about how she got to be a full nine years old without ever having someone pin her down and poke her in the butt cheek with a sharp needle, but it is what it is. So I sat her down and had a talk with her about what exactly was going to take place at the doctor’s office. And she was oddly at peace with “getting a shot” because she was under the impression that “shot” meant “sling shot” and she was actually going on some kind of bungee-induced carnival ride.

I cleared that up, then explained what “getting a shot” meant. She was nonplussed by my explanation, but she was brave. I asked her to tell me what she thought an appropriate reaction to getting a painful shot might be and she replied, “I will have to yell, ‘CATASTROPHE!’” And so she did:

I Thank God Every Day That My Kids Are Slow and Untalented

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,
If Reese Witherspoon can't pay someone to take her kids to their extracurricular crap, the rest of us are doomed.

I have to give credit where credit is due: my sister-in-law (completely by herself) started a special needs baseball team in our town and so far has gotten three major corporations to pledge tax-break donations in the amount of about $40,000, gotten two restaurants to agree to feed all the players, volunteers, and family members, and found about 83 people who are willing to donate one or both of their kidneys. No one playing in this league actually needs a kidney at the moment, but now there are several on stand-by just in case.

Then she admitted the truth to me. All of this hard work and dedication was done just so my autistic daughter could play baseball. More correctly, she looked around at the last family reunion and realized that I’m the only human parent in the tri-state area who has not had to sit at a baseball park at least five days a week from April through August (seven days a week if you’re lucky enough to have more than one child playing baseball), and she set about remedying that situation.

Thankfully, if you play on one of the two special needs teams you only play four games, you don’t have practices, there’s no score keeping, and the ratio of volunteers to players is about four to one. There were seriously 48 people on the field this morning. I counted. There were 18 players on the two teams, four photographers from various news outlets, a smattering of umpires to keep things moving, and the rest were the “buddies” whose jobs it was to make sure no one a) passed out b) got hit in the face with the ball c) plopped down in the dirt and made dirt angels or d) actually went to the bathroom while still on the field.

Yes, it was precious. Even when six of the players burst into tears because they were bored and their socks were too tight and they had no idea why they had to keep standing there. Before you judge me too harshly, I should tell you where I got that information. My daughter was one of the criers and she told me she was bored and her socks were too tight and she didn’t know why she had to keep standing there.

Some days, it’s really hard to think, “Wow, I’m so lucky that my kid is autistic and everyone else’s kids are normal.” I have to make myself smile about it sometimes. Then, as I pack up my cooler after a thirty minute “baseball game” and head home, I look around at the hundreds of children whose families have literally set up tents and generators to power their appliances at the ball fields and I think, “I am the luckiest parent ALIVE.”

How to Eat the Soul of a Human Child

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,
That's either his next novel he's writing or it's his manifesto.

I review books. For money. But I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the opportunity to completely destroy another human being. And get money for it.

I received a shipment of books to review today and I started with the children’s books because they’re short. They also sometimes rhyme and that’s just fun. So I started with the first children’s book because it had fewer pages and a larger font than the other children’s book. And I hated it right away.

For no discernible reason whatsoever, this book’s setting is a normal town with normal people in it, but there are also a few residents whose heads are shaped like fruit and they are named after the fruit their heads look like. And the bad guys in this town (this is the John Grisham of kids’ books, by the way) are just a bunch of freaks. One of the bad guys actually eats live chickens, head first. It’s like the author doesn’t even realize that eating a chicken head with the beak still intact means that pokey beak can slice its way through the digestive tract and lead to death by internal bleeding and septic poisoning. He really should have done his research.

Also, the dedication was really, really profoundly stupid. A dedication is so important to the book as a whole that there are whole books about the dedications and they uncover the mysterious story of why So-and-So-the-Famous-Author dedicated it to his cleaning lady, or something cool like that. This book was dedicated to “my family and the color yellow.” The eye rolling was both required and almost painful.

When I actually sat down at my computer to write my review, I began with the pertinent info on the book and my verdict: two stars. It was saved from one-star land by the fact that I really do like the color yellow and I’m only a little bit jealous that I didn’t think of it first. But as I began to tear this book apart syllable-by-syllable and expose every minute thing that was wrong with the universe now that this book exists, I thought maybe I should do a little digging on who this author really is.

He’s a first grader. No, not for the twenty-third time. The author is actually six years old and is missing one of his front teeth because the other one isn’t loose yet. And he’s cute. I learned all that by flipping the book over and looking at the blurb about him.

When I think about how I almost gave birth to a serial killer by writing a scathing review of the atrocity that is this book, I did feel a little bit guilty for this author’s future victims. He’ll probably start with his own parents. And the kid who delivers the newspaper because he’ll walk in on the slaying. I just single-handedly laid the groundwork for the next car driving through a crowded McDonald’s at lunch time.

Fortunately, I was able to delete my review and make a few changes. The encouraging kind, not the kind that suggests maybe he shouldn’t attempt to write anything ever again, including a grocery list. Because with my luck, I’ll be waiting right there ready to argue the lack of character development and a solid plot line on his list of bomb-making items he needs from the hardware store.

Poor, Poor Broken Hearted Millionaire

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

Oh c;mon, Adele! Don't put your hands up and surrender! Deny deny deny!

Admit it. Every time you hear Adele’s song, “Rolling in the Deep,” you want to grin like an evil harpie and laugh at the man who did that to her because now she’s making a freaking fortune off the fact that “it wasn’t her, it was him.” And you agree with me that all girl-babies should be conceived to her sultry voice just to make them genetically predisposed to take-names-not-prisoners badassery.

I just happen to love that she’s no cookie cutter pop-star. She’s big-boned with a smoky voice and she has nothing cheerful to say. And that, unfortunately, would be the problem.

Adele, sweetie…he’s moved on. It’s time to either burn his whole house down or stop singing songs about him. Love ya, really, but we’re all getting a little bit embarrassed for you.

To help you get over the person who made you filthy stinking rich by sucking the juice out of your entire soul, I’ve compiled a list of helpful revenge activities, otherwise known as the Lorca Is Gonna Make You Be Dead List:

1) You’ve already completed steps one and two of the plan. You told the whole freaking planet what a jerk he is AND you managed to make a lot of money doing it. Throw in the hordes of adoring fans and that guy now has the self-esteem of a starfish.

2) Remember when the psycho boils the kid’s rabbit in that obsession movie with Glenn Close? Amateur hour. The bunny didn’t feel a thing; it died as soon as it hit the water. YOU, Adele, need to kidnap his bunny and hold it for ransom, complete with scary photos of what could happen to it. While you’re at it, you need to make the bunny fall victim to Stockholm Syndrome so that it starts to like you better and keeps running away from him to be with you.

3) Posting ugly things about him on Facebook is for dumped high school cheerleaders. Everybody does that. You need to make a Wikipedia page about this guy because those are always the first things that come up on a Google search by say, a future employer. By the time that page is finished, he’ll have killed all the Jews in the Holocaust, shot JFK, AND tried to blow up Apollo 13. Wait, maybe you should stick with stuff that he could actually have done. Think horrible disasters from the last five years. Could he have been responsible for the nuclear reactor damage in Japan? Could he possibly have broken the levees in Hurricane Katrina? Go with it.

4) Phase Two involves mental torture. It means finding scary-looking inmates on a work release program and signing them up to work IN HIS HOUSE. Shirtless and oily. And smiling. A carton of smokes for the first guy who can make him wet his pants in fear.

5) Physical torture is a fine line because there’s a very small boundary between gleeful hand-rubbingly awesome revenge and going to jail for assault. Do you still have visitation rights on his penis? If not, getting the super glue up there could be tricky.

6) Literally anybody can make up rumors and put him in awkward situations with his employers. A true revenge maven will literally pay to educate and train someone to actually do a better job than he does, then make sure that person gets his job. Please, please let it be a woman who gets his job after he’s fired just because she’s better. And time it so it happens right before Christmas shopping begins. In a recession. While gas is four dollars a gallon. And so is milk.

These are all just jumping off points, Adele. You’re a brilliant and creative person. I have high hopes for the shit you pull on the next bastard who breaks your heart. I just don’t want to hear about it on iTunes.

Champagne Wishes, Caviar Dreams, and Deviled Eggs

ME Food stuffs, Overly simple thoughts , ,

A picnic just isn’t irreversibly screwed up until the deviled eggs appear. I’m not a snob or have weird food phobias, but I just have this horrible prejudice against deviled eggs (and sort of against the person who brought them). I know people who cannot achieve a good foodgasm over a turkey sandwich unless it has lots of mayonnaise on it, but I can’t even look at the stuff. It’s bad for you, it’s poisonous if left out in the sun, and I won’t even describe the visual because this is a family-friendly blog (yeah, I just snorted while typing those words) but think “money shot in porn movies.” Yup, I just made your brain go there.

But since it’s just not a family meal at my mother-in-law’s house without deviled eggs (wait, those two things kind of go together nicely), I agreed to make them this year for our Easter get-together. I totally volunteered specifically with the devious intent of not using mayonnaise in the eggs.

Guess what? It turns out that mayonnaise is apparently crucial to the deviling process. Poop.

But I’m not one to be sidelined by a little ick-slime in a recipe, so here is my own version of deviled eggs. Street Style. If that street happened to be in Greece.

Peel, THEN dye the eggs. It's more fun to eat a blue egg.

Lorca’s Sophisticatedy Deviled Eggs

Eggs (I don’t know, how many eggs do you need? Well, cut that number in half.)

Goat cheese (The mushy kind, not the crumbly kind. Oh, and let it sit in the trunk of the car to get soft.)

Those olives that are kind of maroon and start with a K and sound like calamari (but that’s squid)

Salt and pepper

Boil your eggs until they’re hard boiled eggs. Peel them (I love how in real recipes they tell you stupid shit like, “Don’t forget to drain the boiling water out of your spaghetti before adding the tomato sauce.” Anyway, peel those eggs.). Cut them in half and get the yolks out, but don’t throw them away even though they smell like baby fart. Put them in a bowl. Get the goat cheese outta your trunk and mush it up in the egg yolks. Add some salt and pepper. Stuff it back in the half eggs and add an olive slice to the top. It might look a little bland and you might be tempted to put some paprika on top just to make it all Epicurious.com-looking, but I wouldn’t. Anybody can use paprika. It’s practically required on regular old redneck deviled eggs. Use your brain and come up with something else that’s fancy looking instead of paprika. I don’t know, why are you asking me what to put on there? I don’t live at your house, I don’t even KNOW what you have in the spice cabinet! Use arsenic for all I care! Sorry, that was harsh. And here it is Easter and everything.

Enjoy!

Gifted, My Ass

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

STEP ONE: Put fan power switch in the OFF position.

ME: I finally figured it out. The reason you’re coughing and snotty and all plague-like sounding is because you have allergies. I think we should clean your room really well.

UBER-GENIUS GIFTED CHILD: That’s probably a good idea, Mother. I’m so lucky to have a smart parent like you. (shut up, this is my version of the conversation)

ME: Let’s open up the windows, air things out, get it smelling fresh and… HOLY SHIT look at that dust on your ceiling fan! No wonder you’re sneezing! You have to wipe all that dust off!

UBER-GENIUS GIFTED CHILD: I can’t reach up there. But you’re still supremely amazingly smart for suggesting it. (I already told you to shut up.)

ME: Stand on your bed, then you’ll be able to reach it.

UBER-GENIUS GIFTED CHILD: But I can only reach this blade right here. The rest of them are too far to reach. And you’re pretty, too.

ME: The ceiling fan spins, honey. You’ll be able to reach the other fan blades.

UBER-GENIUS GIFTED CHILD: Won’t the fan hurt me if I try to wipe it while it’s turned on?

It would be amazing and incredible and made of bunnies if this conversation had not happened exactly the way I just depicted it. I want a refund on my taxes because the public school system is obviously wasting the money that we give them for gifted programs on things like urinal cakes in the boys’ locker room.

If You Won’t Be an A-Hole, I Won’t Be a B-Word

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

I think I might be a little biased, but as I age I’m becoming more and more old coot-like. I’m a little bit tired of tolerating other people, which is bad news for me because I have (hopefully) about seventy more years of putting up with idiots. Then it dawned on me that there’s a whole segment of the population whose day just got a little worse when they realized they have seventy more years of putting up with me, so I think we’re even.

In order to help everyone involved, I’ve come up with a labeling system. I agree to wear the following warning badge:

I’ll even wear it on my forehead so everyone can see it because I do kind of feel bad that I’m a mean person. It’s kind of like the Parental Advisory stickers that Tipper Gore insisted all the good 80s music have, and the only outcome was everybody ran out and bought up all the music with the warning sticker on it. Maybe people will see my badge and back away, but the really fun people will seek me out as a friend.

Now, in order for me to be aware of who’s an asshole and who’s not, I’m going to need certain segments of the population to adhere to these steps.

  1. If you think women are evil and sinful and shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions involving their own vajajays, you’re going to have to wear a rubber mask at all times like this one, just so I know to avoid you. Or so I know that you’re someone I should trip while you’re carrying something hot and/or pokey:

  1. If you really enjoy driving to the organic foods farmers’ market so you can buy healthy veggies and free-range meat products and be smug about how the rest of us eat crap and don’t care about pouring chemicals into our soil and groundwater, but you drove there in a 3-ton Lexus SUV that only burns premium, please wear your hemp fiber reusable shopping bag that was supposedly woven by Bolivian women at a co-op over your head so I don’t have to see the superior smirk you wear on your face at all times.
  1. If you are twenty years old and have no job and have never paid into Social Security or had to work a minimum wage job to afford your meager supply of Ramen noodles while in college—oh, and you don’t vote because “it doesn’t make a difference”—please wear the free T-shirt you got when you stopped at that table on the sidewalk and applied for another credit card. If they were giving out Frisbees with their corporate logo on it that day, feel free to carry that around with you instead.

  1. Let’s see, what else is pissing me off royally today…oh yeah. If you think school lunches are fine the way they are since ketchup kinda really is partly related to a vegetable, I have your uniform ready:

That’s all I have at the moment, but I’m sure something will come up once my caffeine wears off. If you’ve found a blog post with the guidelines that I should have to adhere to on how to not be such a bitch, send it my way. I’d love to read it because then I’ll have more stuff to write about while judging others. Thanks, and remember:

My Book Signing was Fraught with Peril

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , , ,

Give it up, sweetheart. There's no sex in there, unless you managed to smuggle one of THOSE books into the house.

I’m not really sure what “fraught with peril” means, but it sounds like how a Victorian person might say “jacked-up.” And everyone knows Victorian people were all educated and literary sounding. Well, the rich people, not the ones selling fish off a wooden cart and spreading small pox to each other like it was going out of style. In order to sound literary for my book signing, I should probably have paid more attention to how the pretty people lived.

My book signing was not the rich Victorian kind, it was a lot more fish-carty kind. It started out in the wee hours of the morning with me running over a raccoon in my own driveway, creating a lovely roadkill diorama for the neighbors to see. The raccoon thing got me a little flustered, so I turned the wrong direction away from the squishy tableau and went the wrong way for about five miles, thinking about who I could even call to remove the animal before I got back home.

The book signing itself was great (shameless plug: both of the books on the right-hand side of the screen were available…more people wanted to know about autism than wanted to know about my husband pissing me off royally by stealing my artificial legs and hiding them while I was asleep. No, I don’t have artificial legs. Email me to order these things autographed.). The weather was craptastic at first but then it behaved itself for the rest of the weekend. My parents came to the event because how do you spend an entire childhood going to every cute-assed thing your kid does then NOT come to her first book signing?

And therein lies the problem (Victorian speak for “here’s where it kind of went bad”). My mom, ever helpful and supportive of my career, offered to man my table of books while I went in search of a bathroom, which ended up being a well-used porta potty…or “loo” to Victorian peasants…across from a very long line of people trying to buy barbeque sandwiches from the local high school band. I returned to find her chatting happily with some lovely-looking people who were thumbing through one of my books and nodding their heads thoughtfully. Then I heard this:

“She writes a lot like Jane Austen. If Jane had been on crack.”

After the people who used to want to read books of any kind fled the scene, I had a very polite conversation about Mom’s description of my writing and her general opinion of my career.

ME: WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT???

MOM: What? They asked me what genre you write and quite honestly, I couldn’t think of an answer.

ME: JANE AUSTEN ON CRACK?

MOM: Well, they were dressed like Jane Austen fans.

ME: I don’t recall seeing an empire waist dress or a bonnet in the bunch. What made you think, “I should probably tell them she writes like a fucked-up Jane Austen?”

MOM: No, silly, they were dressed like people from this era who would like Jane Austen. They had socks on with their Keds sneakers. And the drugs were secondary. I probably should have told them opium though, I don’t think Austen had access to crack in her day.

ME: OPIUM???

MOM: Well, you’re not normal. I didn’t want to mislead them.

All in all it was a very pleasant event. Mom and I read several books between us throughout the weekend, Dad walked around the festival and reported back to us on where all the cool yard art could be found, and I met the very specific niche demographic who now thinks of hardcore drugs when they think of literature.

I Used to Like My Doctor But Now She’s Evil

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

So I went back and saw my doctor yesterday to make sure that the piece of my face that crumpled up and fell off wasn’t cancer. She was really nice about the fact that I handed her a three-week-old scab that I had saved in a plastic sandwich baggie, too. She even mentioned that she read the blog post I wrote about her being all stingy with the cryosurgical blowtorch and she had decided not to sue me for libel.

And right about the time I was thinking she was a total class act for treating me like I’m a normal person, she had to go and blow it. This sweet doctor who laughed at all my jokes and didn’t prescribe me pills even after she found out I posted photos of my nose-scab on this blog and let people vote about the diagnosis…GAVE ME A GIFT BAG FULL OF SAMPLES.

Do you know what a person like me would be willing to do for a gift bag full of free shit? It’s like the best present ever because the rest of the world had to pay for all that stuff but NOT ME! I’m a SOMEBODY! My name is on the VIP clipboard so I get my tubes of funky creams for FREE, beeyatches! It’s not about the products themselves because they were just little cool non-terrorist-sized tubes of TSA-approved lotions and sunscreens and stuff (and the joke’s on her because all that stuff will keep me from ever actually getting cancer…she’s just hurting her own business). But I got it FOR FREE!

Then I remembered that giving away free tastes of stuff is EXACTLY how drug dealers work. Sure, that first hit of heroin is on the house, then you’re gonna pay for it by turning tricks out of the back of a rusty Pinto. This “doctor” (I’m gonna use quotation marks around her title from now on) got me hooked on all kinds of good smelling stuff that made my face smooth and shiny and less Shar-Pei-looking. I know when I go back to see her because I’m all out and I’ve just gotta have one more taste, she’s gonna be all, “You’ll need to make an appointment,” and “Sure, would you like me to start you a tab? We can put you on a payment plan for this exfoliant, if you want.”

I totally see through her plan. I’m never gonna use sunscreen again, just to prove to her that I don’t need the goods, that I can quit any time I want to. Heck, I’m not even gonna wash my face anymore, let alone moisturize. We’ll see who needs who. (I’m lying. Doctor, if you’re reading this, I totally love you and I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t cut off my supply of sheep placenta and retin-A.)