I was flipping through a catalog of cutesy home items, mostly out of boredom but never because I ever intend to own a cookie jar in the shape of a pig that oinks when you open the lid. I did, however, find one item in the pages that I absolutely cannot live without, and for that matter, I can’t believe I’ve lived this long without it.
A blackmail organizer.
I had no idea that I could actually purchase a wall-mounted wooden shelf complete with individual dividers that would help me keep my extortion in nice neat piles, organized not only by first letter of recipient’s last name, but also by month that it is due. I hate it when Christmas rolls around and I get behind on mailing out my letters demanding payment to keep quiet about how drunk someone got at the office party or who was caught doing the nasty at the church bake sale.
Because I’m not an idiot, I quickly realized that there was a space missing between black and mail. Further proof of the error was the purplemail organizer just below it. Even more sadly, if we’re going to allow an error like that to slip through, why couldn’t we also have a spelling error so that I can actually have a blackmale organizer? I would totally pay money to have Dwayne Johnson come to my house and put everything I owned in nice neat piles. I have a sick feeling that The Rock will not be showing up to do my bidding, shirtless or otherwise.
Tell me you wouldn't have this man over for some light housework.
Do us all a favor and proofread, you bunch of douche canoes.
These picture doesn't mean anything. But it made me laugh.
HaHa! (cue the rest of my evil laughter…I don’t really have a good evil laugh so this imaginary soundtrack will have to do.) It’s 10:33PM where I live, and you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness! Lorca didn’t post anything today! And to think she was so committed to #NaBloWriMo! She must be DEAD or drunk. Someone send either the paramedics or some strong black coffee to her house STAT!”
You are so melodramatic. The truth is, I simply forgot. That’s what happens when you start the day by getting one kid to school and the other to a field trip in the next city, still manage to make it to work on time, pick up both kids from school, come home, make dinner, write three articles, LIVE BLOG A PRESS CONFERENCE IN HONG KONG, arrange two interviews, clean up some Dachshund urine, bathe the kids, get them to bed, write another article, take a shower, and go to bed.
Suddenly, you sit up in bed and scream, “I didn’t say anything funny on the internet today!” And we all know how my husband loves to be jolted from a sound sleep by a woman screaming weird-assed remarks. And you had the nerve to tell people I was drunk. You should be ashamed.
Guess what happens when they can smell you from a mile away?
I live in Alabama and I am married to a man. In most cases, that simple little one-plus-one would equal three and a half months of the year ruined by the ruthless stalking of fluffy prey like a caveman on uppers. Yes, I am a deer hunting widow from October 15th through January 31st (it’s physically painful that I know these dates); this is in addition to being an SEC football widow from mid-August through the SEC Championship game in early December, followed by a National Championship game in January if God loves us enough.
I actually don’t mind the deer hunting whenever it actually results in a deer that we can eat. Aside from the several deer that my husband has missed and an equally significant number that he has shot and never could find (because it’s easy to get really, REALLY far away with an arrow sticking out of your side), I would be a whole lot more supportive of this habit if actual meat was the prize at the bottom of the box.
The time spent away from the family perched in a rickety aluminum tree stand for countless hours every weekend during the season isn’t what really hurts me, though. It’s the pee. Yes, I said it, there is a pee problem. Not mine, or my husband’s (well, technically it’s his problem).
In order to hunt deer you have to have a lot of pee, presumably the kind of pee that will attract other deer. Usually doe pee is involved, although if you’re lucky you can get your hands on doe-in-rut pee, the kind that will drive those bucks wild with lust and wanting. Where do you get such liquid gold?
At the pee store. Duh.
Yes, my husband BUYS pee. He PAYS for urine. With actual MONEY. Somewhere along the way I forgot to inform him that if there is anything in my life that I feel we have way too much of, it’s pee. My own pee notwithstanding, there are two children and a dog that have been happily bringing pee into my life for years, and I’ve only just in the last several years gotten all three of them to the point that they can take care of their pee on their own. Little bottles with labels like Doe-Eyed Gold and Buck Bomb have graced the shelves of our attic with the hunting equipment for far longer than I can think about without throwing up a little bit in my mouth.
I finally managed to cure my husband of his obsession with purchasing store-bought pee: like a good wife, I supported his hobbies and interests by usually getting him some hunting-related device for his birthday. This year, I bought him a little camouflaged canister about the size of a soda can that hangs from a tree and dispenses…pee. On a timer, even. You simply hang it in the woods near your tree stand, set it to go, and while you sit safely above ground (and away from all pee) this little contraption sprays doe pee all over the ground to draw the bucks to you. It’s like taking pee from a baby.
Only I bought the wrong one and this one wasn’t on a timer. It was motion activated. He walked near it and the mechanical Pee Fairy doused him from the top of his international orange hat to his Cabela’s all-weather snake guard boots. Happy birthday, dear.
I could make my yard look like this if I wasn't an idiot.
It’s October 16th. I’m halfway through the month and have written more blog posts in the last fifteen days than I usually do in three months. I can’t honestly say I’m BORED with the process, but I’m certainly ready for something shiny to come along and grab my attention. Like a Mercedes. Those are scrumptiously shiny, although I wouldn’t know since people who actually own those kinds of cars don’t like me to stand too close to them for fear that I’ll scratch them or drop the already sticker-shocked value.
I have a long history of reducing the property values anywhere I live, mostly because of my nasty habit of just not giving a damn. The grass gets mowed when I can no longer see the dog in it (and I’ve owned a German shepherd). I also purposely constructed these little rock walls around my property so I can just drop a live fern, plastic pot and all, inside the devious little rock wall and no one knows that I can’t landscape to save my own life (well, fern) because I can throw it away—pot and all—when I let it die from neglect.
So it’s a little bit amazing that this blog hasn’t died from neglect yet like the sad little yard ferns. Even more jaw-droppingly awesome, about forty people every day have nothing better to do than read this blog. I’m going to have to fully endorse smoking crystal meth to you people. I am seriously a little bit sad, albeit “give up my firstborn child” grateful, that you keep stopping by here.
In the meantime (meaning, “As this blog gets dumber and dumber as the month of October wears on,”) please keep in mind that this whole month of rambling stupidity is all in preparation for a very serious month of writing THE GREATEST NOVEL EVER WRITTEN BY A HUMAN BEING. That’s because L. Ron Hubbard’s books don’t count since he’s not a person, he’s a reincarnated alien or something. Thanks for watching!
Every once in a while I want to kill someone. It’s not usually because my victim actually did something to me or wronged me in any “Cask of Amontillado” kind of way, but just because I live in a world where this warning label is necessary.
Really. This is an actual photo of the warning label on MY flat-iron. I really wish it was some doctored photo off a goofy website.
Yes, folks, this warning label is on the cord to our flat-iron. An In-Styler brand flat-iron, to be precise, and no, I don’t have to tell you why I own one. For those not in the know (or those of you who are hairless…God still loves you), an In-Styler is a device with a 400-degree metal barrel that spins against a flat-piece of metal, also at 400-degrees. The point is to smooth your hair. Or in the case of this warning label, your eyelashes. Now I want to drive my car straight through a crowded McDonald’s.
These girls are all victims of eyelash ironing burns. Why didn't someone warn them?!? How long must this go on?
UPDATED: I can’t lie to you. The girls in this photo did not burn their eyes with their flat-irons. In fact, I REALLY wish they had. This is a photo from a fetish site…there are seriously weirdos out there who get turned on by woman who are bandaged! In their defense, they don’t want their women to ACTUALLY be injured, they just want them to be bandaged like they’re injured. I SOOOOO wish I was making that up. It’s called Injured Idol. Google, I swear, then you will owe me a Coke ’cause I’m right and you don’t believe me. NOW can I kill somebody please?
While all of America has had the best time laughing at Netflix over the “We’re-a-disc-service-now-we’re-a-streaming-service-no-wait!-now-we’re-either-one-SURPRISE!-it-was-all-a-dream-we’re-kidding,” debacle, the movie service has had one unwavering devotee…my child.
Once the magic of having programming instantly appear on your TV screen happened (you know, like TV has done for years now), she literally spent about two weeks simply scrolling through the viewing options on the Netflix streaming pages. Sadly, there are a lot of shows on Netflix that no one wants to watch.
Unless you’re the only eleven-year-old girl in the Northern Hemisphere who isn’t allowed to watch Twilight yet. Then there are TONS of shows on Netflix that you can enjoy.
I suffered in silence while my daughter watched every episode of Monk ever made, including the school holidays where she would stage a MONKathon, complete with snacks and a chalk outline of a body on the living room carpet. I even tolerated old episodes of The Golden Girls with very little right-eye-twitching, mostly because Betty White is enjoying a pop-culture comeback and her Twitter user name is @BettyFckinWhite. What’s not to love?
But then my daughter discovered The Cosby Show. You know, that completely believable television show about a family living in New York where the mom is a lawyer and the dad is a doctor and they have five kids but miraculously not a single one of them ever snuck out with the car and got pulled over for DUI with three ounces of weed and an unregistered gun under the seat. The worst thing about that show was not the completely fake family with the laugh track and adorable jumping-the-shark add-on characters (uh, hello? Raven-Symone, anyone?). The worst part of the show was Bill Cosby’s sweaters.
We tried really hard to help her over this obsession by trying to convince her that the actress who played Rudy is actually a Greyhound bus driver now, or that Theo’s character became a cross dresser in episode 165. We started to tell her that the actress who played Denise ended up in drug rehab, but that actually happened so that joke is off limits.
Towards the end of this non-stop Huxtable spree, a new character came along. Some convoluted storyline involving a streetwise smart-mouthed cousin appeared in order to breathe new life into the show. Or as my daughter put it, to “reach a different demographic than the show had already been working with.” Weird, I don’t remember sending her to private school.
At last, tonight we reached the final episode. The family gathered in the living room (Cosby’s family, not mine…I couldn’t pay my husband to watch it and I was only there to make sure we saw it through to its end of days) and reminisced before Theo graduated from college. The trip down memory lane took two episodes. I tried to convince my daughter that the whole series ended with a tragic house fire with all the cast members present (except Denise, who was still in drug rehab), but she didn’t believe me.
Now that the series has ended—AGAIN, I hesitate to point out—she has found a new show to love. Storage Wars. Yes, a reality show about people who root through the discarded contents of other people’s abandoned mini-storage units. Where’s a sparkly vampire movie when you need one?
I get to be really lazy today, because technically I did write this post. I wrote it and emailed it to someone named MB Mulhall, who posted it on her blog. Then she tweeted a link to her blog, where I found it on Twitter, clicked on it, and voila`! There were my words on the screen. Somewhere, a budding young astrophysicist is writing his doctoral thesis on how this whole circle just happened.
The upshot is, this is technically MY blog post, so I don’t have to write a different one to put on MY blog. I’m just stealing MINE back. However, I will warn you in advance: it’s not funny and I wasn’t allowed to use any swear words at all. Not even “crap.” Huh. Enjoy!
Look! It's a United Colors of Beneton ad! For choir robes!
It’s been Christmas at our house since May. And no, we’re not those losers who keep their Christmas lights up until April; well, not ever since my husband threatened to ban any and all holiday decorating if I didn’t get the decorations put away in a timely manner. It is kind of my fault that the jack ‘o lantern sat on the porch until it rotted into a scrape-upable puddle sometime in mid-November, but that was years ago and I’ve changed my ways.
No, my daughter has a thing for Christmas carols, so the house, the car, her bedroom, all of it, are currently well-stocked with Christmas CDs in every musical device. Whenever her sister practices piano, our youngest tax-break will undoubtedly come into the room and demand a rousing rendition of “Jingle Bells.” It doesn’t matter that she’s wearing her swimsuit and is on the way to the pool.
Oddly enough, I did notice one thing about the ongoing HolidayPalooza today: a child who can barely speak full sentences in English due to profound autism can sing an amazingly accurate version of “Feliz Navidad.” And of “The Little Drummer Boy” a ‘la Faith Hill, complete with guttural country singer twang on each and every vowel. And the Latin parts of “Ave Maria.”
Years ago, while we were smack in the middle of the uber-lengthy process of having our daughter diagnosed with anything that we could possibly make sense of, my husband had an epiphany:
HIM: You know how our kid is pretty good-sized?
ME: Is that a fat joke?
HIM: No, it’s an age joke.
ME: Is there something funny I don’t know about?
HIM: Anyway, I was just wondering something. Don’t get mad.
ME: You know I’m going to get mad if you have to tell me not to before you even speak.
HIM: Really, I’m just curious about this. (dramatic pause) Is it even a little bit possible that she can’t talk because she doesn’t know English?
ME: (blank stare)
HIM: What if she actually speaks Portuguese, and we just don’t know how to speak her people’s language? (AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was really impressed that he could spell Portuguese, considering there’s an extra U in it, but then I remembered that he was talking out loud and he probably can’t actually spell it.)
ME: (more blank staring) (followed by a deep cleansing breath) Honey, remember when I gave birth to her and you couldn’t look because it was really gross?
HIM: (shudders) Uh-huh. (gagging noise at the memory)
ME: We weren’t in Portugal. We were in Alabama when that happened.
HIM: So?
ME: So that means she would talk like anybody else in Alabama. We’re not Portuguese, ergo, we don’t speak Portuguese.
HIM: (blank stare)
ME: Kids speak whatever language the people around them speak. (slowing the words down because he still looks confused) There’s no way she speaks Portuguese.
HIM: Well, if you’re not even willing to think outside the box, don’t blame me…
The real problem is, whenever Tax Break the Second straps into her car seat and belts out the words to “Dona Nobis Pacem,” my smug-toned argument doesn’t hold water anymore. Okay, Einstein, let’s see you speak Latin with her…
A few weeks ago I finally caved in to the peer pressure from my screaming cervical vertebrae and went to the doctor. It didn’t go well. After the nurse caught me live-tweeting pictures of the blood spatter on the exam room garbage can, the doctor poked and prodded and announced that I have neck arthritis. I guess if you have to have arthritis anywhere, your neck is as good a place as any because even if you have to hold it really still you can kind of function.
The doctor wanted to let the nurse (the same one who frowned when I asked her to pose by the exam glove dispenser for my Tweet) give me cortisone shots in my neck but I had to respectfully decline. These people can’t seem to change a garbage can liner without spraying human blood everywhere. You’re not injecting my spinal cord.
So he sent me home with a steroid pack and I have to say I am really disappointed. I can’t open a jar any better than I could before I took those pills. My neck still hurts and I still can’t lift my car. I was gipped.
This is not a human. It's a balloon animal. Seriously, he can't clap his hands in front of him.
If I’m going to have to suffer the side effects, or rather, make my husband suffer from my having side effects, I should at least get to have radioactive spidey-powers. At the very least I’d like to see through walls so I can find my kids’ shoes in the morning. It would be nice to be able to have super-sniffing so I can find the source of that strange smell without having to move the refrigerator. After all, I’m not strong enough to do that by myself.
I am, however, using the excuse of being afflicted with ‘Roid Rage as an excuse for being bitchy at people. Whenever I snark at someone or jump in front of them in line at the grocery store, I just let them know that I’m on steroids and I could have roundhouse-kicked them instead. Just don’t let them know that I’m not even strong enough to work the can opener.
I know of a few random members of society who cashed in on their dubious relationships with famous people to make a buck or grab their fifteen seconds of fame. Kato Kalin wrote a picture book about his life mooching off the Simpson family, Paris Hilton has written a book (and a sequel, a sure sign of the Apocalypse) about inheriting an ass-load of money from her parents, and of course the most famous of them all, the daughter of the No Wire Hangers psycho made all the money her mom didn’t leave her in the will with her tell-all about the famous actress-slash-drunken child abuser.
But lately, more and more people in my life have been cautioning me not to write about them on my blog. That must mean that A) they must think I’m really influential and my hordes of minions hang on my every word, and B) that the people in my life think that they are, in fact, more interesting than they actually are.
It's so pretty...now try passing it in your urine.
Case in point, a month or so ago my mom and I had nearly hourly conversations in which she updated me on the status of my dad’s kidney stone. Apparently when you lodge a sharp pointy object in the nether regions of a vital organ, it hurts. There’s screaming involved, and from what I could gather through all of the barely-muffled profanity in the background of every phone call, the only way to get through a kidney stone saga is to invite angry drunk people over and let them just shout strings of obscenities all day. That had to be what was happening because there’s no way any parent of mine would ever use THOSE words. That dream was dashed when my father’s voice rang clearly through the phone: “I’d better not read about this on your f***ing blog!”
Scenario number two: my daughter, wonderful perfection that she is, should be used to me documenting every crucial aspect of her life by now. I’ve been doing it since she was born, following her every gurgle and burp with my camera in hand. So when we decided she could shave her legs for the first time this summer and she heard the beep and whir of my digital camera behind her in the bathroom, she didn’t even turn around. She simply stated, “Mom, please don’t post these pictures anywhere. Can this one thing PLEASE stay between us?”
I don’t see why people around me are adverse to having their every mundane activity posted on my blog. It made me laugh, so why wouldn’t the lives of others be enriched by their comings-and-goings? Granted, kidney stones and adolescent leg hair may not be as interesting to the sufferers, but I’m thrilled to near-speechlessness that it was them and not me who endured these tribulations. And now, so are five billion internet users.
Lorca Damon 