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In which I rant a bit about loss and grief.
See, I warned you. But, hey now, don't run away.......I will try to make some of this funny although you may have never considered any of those subjects as having any humor to them. Perhaps I had better begin by passing along a joke sent to me by my dear friend, Bob Ringwald, Master Jazz Musician, Raconteur, proud Father of Molly and provider of almost daily smiles via email, godblesshim. Here's one of his latest offerings.
(even if you have already heard this one, it is still funny,)
The Pickle Slicer
Yossel Zelkovitz worked in a Polish pickle factory.
For many years he had a powerful desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer.
Unable to stand it any longer, he sought professional help from a psychologist.
After six months, the therapist gave up. He advised Yossel to go ahead and do it
or he would probably never have any peace of mind.
The next day he came home from work very early. His wife, Sacha, became alarmed and
wanted to know what had happened.
Yossel tearfully confessed his tormenting desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer.
He went on to explain that today he finally went ahead and did it, and he was immediately
fired.
Sacha gasped and ran over to her husband. She quickly yanked down his pants and shorts
only to find a normal, completely intact penis.
She looked up and said, "I don't understand. What about the pickle slicer?"
Yossel replied, "I think she got fired, too." ~~
-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
***********************************************
And now back to the less acceptable subjects.
Like so many of my thoughts, ideas and convictions, my attitudes toward dealing with loss and grief and guilt are unorthodox and irreverent. I have cockamamie ideas about loss, and grieving. And guilt. I may have to write a whole separate chapter on guilt. We'll see. For now I will just ramble on the first two.
Recently I have done some grieving of my own over loss of a dear, young member of my family and also have suffered with some of my beloved blog family who are grieving and I keep wishing I could help those who have lost someone and are in pain. Unfortunately, it seems that only love and sympathy help a bit..(.and the bringing of hams and casseroles, of course) ....words and suggestions are useless. What a shame, since I have so many of them. But it just occurred to me that perhaps they might be helpful to someone who is not in the throes of grief and so I will muse on about some of the most avoided subjects known to mankind (and womankind too.)
Loss......hell, there is so much loss in life. First you lose your childish innocence, then your virginity, your youthful freshness, your good looks, your ideals, some of your hair, maybe your teeth, your mobility, your marbles, all hope and finally your life. Bummer. The only one you don't regret is your virginity. And you lose your heart a bunch of times, but always get it back, wounded and battered, but take heart (couln't resist) .........with some crazy glue and duct tape you can usually fix that enough for you to go on and lose it again.
And you lose people you love, some people who you didn't love so much (and maybe did not love at all) but who were important in shaping your life for better or worse and you lose some people without whom you are sure you can't go on living....but you can and you will and you do......somehow.
You might never know it by my outward mostly cheerful demeanor, but I have suffered a lot of losses in my life, a lot of mistreatment and a lot of pain from it all. But I cannot and never could stand the process of long, drawn-out grieving over each incident. Like pulling off a bandage fastened to you with sticky tape which you know is going to hurt, I prefer to pull it off all at once, yell one big "OUCH" and be done with it. It just hurts for so much longer if you try to do it slowly.. Suffer and get it over with, I say. Not easy, but a desirable goal.
I know some people who cling to a particular loss, protect it, fan the flame of pain and build the rest of their lives around it as though it were the life project they were meant for......they even form support groups similar to AA (this is true, honest) where they meet regularly for years with others who have the same mindset and supposedly help each other by exchanging sympathy and memories but actually help more (I think) to keep the wounds from healing. I consider this a real addiction and a shameful self indulgence....endless and excessive mourning does not help the dear departed one bit. Does it really help the person with the loss? I dunno.....I can't see how. I have a theory about it (I have theories about nearly everything, haven't you noticed?) It seems to me that they are so angry at God for taking their beloved that they don't know what to do with the feeling (unacceptable) so they convert it into a monster grief (acceptable) which they can express openly. Trouble is, grief will usually diminish in time but rage never does so they are stuck in a very bad place. Kind of like a life lost over a life lost. So pitiful.....what a waste.
For me, I have learned that nothing lasts forever. Even the good stuff changes and evolves. If we can, we should cherish the good while we have it, tolerate the bad until it goes away or we can get rid of it and constantly be grateful for whatever joy we have had and may continue to be blessed with. .
Oh, yes....one more thing. As far as losing a Lover is concerned, that is totally different. I guess am a monster who is incapable of continuing to mourn over the loss of someone who hurts me, uses me, shames me, fails me, abandons, deceives and deserts me. When my fiancee, my first real,, adult (?) love-of-my-life dumped me 2 inches from the altar when I was 20, I wept bitter tears for a few hours moaning about what would I do without him. . Then I suddenly realized what a huge favor he had done both of us by revealing the flaws in our relationship BEFORE we got married. I heaved a sigh of relief, gathered up all the soggy kleenex and said, "Oh, thank you, Dick." (no, no, that was his name). I then went to sleep trusting that tomorrow would be a better day and the hole in my heart would heal and, of course, it did. . As did all of the countless other holes in my heart and wounds of various kinds inflicted over the many years. I have found that losing something or someone is sometimes so much better than having to keep it and live with it.
Ho boy, is it ever!
Horrors! I am totally devastated...........I just lost a draft containing not one but the content for two entire blogs in the blink of an eye and I don't know what I did to cause it to disappear. I doubt if I can ever recreate what I had written because it was done with particular passion and fire and was beautiful and somewhat profound if I say so myself. Sob.
I cannot help but laugh bitterly....I guess my title says it all. It was a rant on my own private and perhaps peculiar attitude about the way we handle and react to death and the dying process and loss in general. I think that maybe I have learned something new here I'll have to think about this a bit.
Meanwhile, if anyone knows of any way to retrieve a lost blog, please, let me know.
Hello, out there. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting an audio post, Fuggedaboutit! Maybe later, but I am not ready yet.
Not that I am not having fun with my internet singing lessons.......... I am indeed enjoying like crazy. After just 2 lessons my cat now runs from the room as soon as I begin warming up, I have a sore throat from so much unbridled vocalizing and my speaking voice seems to have dropped 2 octaves and increased by 100 decibels. (not on my wish list at all) My quaver and excessive vibrato are still with me, however.......but I fear that if I continue like this I may end up shattering glass, which in this house could be a huge disaster since I have (over 40 years) systematically knocked out most of the wood and stucco walls and replaced them with glazing. No, seriously, the first 2 lessons have been fascinating and I am enjoying the process of trying to learn how to relax my throat, care not a whit how I sound and just let go. I still have 2 lessons to go....(supposed to do one a week) and will then see if I have achieved any measure of improvement. Fortunately, my life and my fortune do NOT depend on it. Better or worse, I will still go around singing to myself and if Gussie doesn't like it........well, too damned bad. She will have to hire a servant who doesn't sing, that's all there is to it.
But, actually, that is not what has been preoccupying me for the past 4 or 5 days and keeping me from blogging..........I have been engaged in a vile experiment to discover how much liquid a human being can ingest in the short space of an hour. In other words....I was undergoing the dreaded prep for a colonoscopy which involves several sessions of having to glug down 16 oz. of the vilest stuff known to man followed immediately by 2 more 16 ounce containers of water. That feat itself is beyond toleration, but what makes it worse is that 32 ounces of water is not enough to get the wretched taste of the potion out of your mouth so you find yourself drinking yet more water, more chicken broth, more apple juice more of any liquid which is clear, without pulp and is neither red nor purple and incidentally, not alcoholic. I cannot believe that a human body can hold so much liquid at once without exploding, but amazingly it appears that it can because I did not. Explode, that is.
Anyway, two days of fasting and that abuse took all of my attention........I am not sure but I believe I did not even sing. My tummy, however, gurgled a lot. I do know that I accomplished the totally impossible by spending my fasting (clear liquids only) day watching several football games from morning to night and being unable to munch on a single morsel. Appalling thought, isn't it? I found it is amazing how much more time there is in a day when one cannot eat......ore perhaps it just seems like that when you are NOT having any fun. Not sure how helpful that bit of information will be to saving the world, but I will ponder on it in my spare time. If any of you have some ideas, do let me know.
Anyway, never mind all of that dreck.......I am happy to report that if inner beauty counts for anything, I was found to be not only pristine from epiglotis to my you-know but with nary a polyp to mar the surface.
And, the best news is that I was told I never have to endure another such prep or procedure for the rest of my life. Tenks Gott.
I could just break out singing........
Well, I seem to have survived the transition of the years somehow. Went to bed at around 9pm on New Years Eve, pulled the covers up over my head and only heard a few dim sounds.......either firecrackers going off or gunshots in the vicinity.......if it was the latter, hopefully no one I knew..... and liked.
I slept till almost noon despite Gussie's repeated attempts to get me up
beginning around 7. First the tentative footsteps as she clomps from the foot of the bed up to where my head is resting and peers nose to nose into my face to see if I am still breathing. If fish breath does not wake me she goes to the next step. Having decided that I am still alive she paces up and down beside me trying to decide on the best approach to getting my attention. Finally she resorts to the old standby, jumping with all four paws onto my tummy and futzing around to find the most comfortable (for her and painful for me) position. If that does not result in my getting up and staggering into the kitchen to feed her or give her kitty cookies, she settles down for a nap and repeats from step one every 30 minutes until successful. So far, she has never lost and I have never won this strange duel. Nothing new about that.
So, up at noon on 01/01/13 and having satisfied Her Exalted Kittyness for the moment, I was hunched over my coffee (which I brew strong enough to stand the spoon straight up in the cup) when I suddenly remembered something I had done in a weak moment a few nights earlier and it jolted me upright in my chair. I am not sure I should confess to all this publicly, but, what the hell.......I have been needing something to reestablish my claim to weirdness and this will do as good as anything I can think of.
In checking back over my sent emails, I find that I have signed up with an Online Singing Course to learn how to sing Properly! Yes you read that correctly. Who'd believe it........ Lois loves to Sing.
I don't know if I ever told you that I
have always loved to sing.......When I was 12 I wanted desperately to be the 4th Andrews Sister (singing harm ony not the lead........I was humble even then). Actually, I have no real voice but I can sing on key and carry a
tune, have a rather wide range and, godonlyknows....I remember all the lyrics for every song written
from about 1930 to 1955. I wander around the house belting out "April
Showers" and "Blue Moon" and other such classics all the time. The cats are very accepting and non judgmental and even Florence, my caregiver, has more or less gotten used to my breaking into song at odd moments. I had recently considered joining some sort of chorus, but I realized that was not realistic since I could hardly expect them to congregate at my house and since I cannot get out at night for singing sessions I regretfully gave that idea up. Obviously, even I do not always know what is going on in the corners of my mind, and apparently the notion has been simmering on a back burner waiting for a new opportunity. Which arrived on 12/29 with the word DISCOUNT dangling enticingly in front of it. You know me with bargains.......
Well, (I am taking a deep breath here)..... an online singing teacher
has been pestering me to take his course for years and tossed a
discount in front of me last week and I fell for it. I have NO idea
what I have committed to......I do not own a pitch pipe nor a
metronome nor even a piano.....not sure how he can teach me to sing better via DVD, but
if you see a strange video in the middle of one of my posts and hear a hoarse voice singing "My
Heart Stood Still" you will be able to laugh along with Florence and the cats.
(Don't worry.....I am only joking....I would not do that to you). But
you can wish me luck. In fact, PLEASE wish me luck.
Now, tell me......could you ever in a gazillion years have guessed that
anyone you know would do such a thing or confess to it publicly?
Shitpissfuck,Hell and Damn....... it has been a while since I have had to give up roller skating, and a person needs something
exciting to do, especially something you can do sitting down. Hmmm....I
had better get out my old Arthur Godfrey ukulele....I'll bet it needs new
strings...........
To Ida, Maybelline and all you loyal followers, this won't be much of a blog, but I want to reassure you that I have not yet crossed over the Rainbow Bridge.......I am still here schlepping along.
The past few weeks have been rocky in many diferent ways and I have not had the time or the heart to make merry. However, I promise I WILL blog again soon so don't give up on me.
If you really want the truth, I have had to retreat into the depths of my cave and reassess my life after watching a recent football game in which a player was penalized for "Holding". Now in regular football parlance Holding means grabbing and keeping a grip on an opponent's jersey or facemask or some limb or body part, but in this particular case, the commentator had to review the video of the play and finally determined that one player had simply seized and held on to the other player's HAIR.
Aaaaarrrrrgh!
These days football players seem to either have heads shaven bald and shiny or else have locks braided, crimped, spiral-curled or simply streaming down their backs from under their helmets. What the hell is a simple old person like me to do with that?
I hope to get over it by 2013. Meanwhile, I wish you all greetings of the season and Good Health in the New Year. Happiness you will have to take care of on your own.
Love,
Herself.
The funny and altogether wonderful Joe Hagy at "crankyoldman.blogspot..com" has posted a marvelous blog today about his visit to Disney World. I was tempted to leave a comment to end all comments about that place and it's spawn of clones around the globe but I realized immediately that what I had to say was too long for a simple comment and possibly too libelous to put Joe in jeopardy.
The truth is that I have a long story unlike anybody else's to tell about Disneyland and Disney World and if anybody is going to be exposed to the risk of a lawsuit I guess it's only fair that it should be me.
The fact is that the last 10 years of my lovely computer programming career was spent at Disney Studios and this proved to be something of a mixed blessing for a monster such as myself who, to put it mildly, has no affinity whatsoever for that small irritating race of humans known as children. (as I often point out, I never actually hurt any children….I just prefer to have nothing to do with them until they are a decent size, have stopped dribbling and drooling and worse, and are tamed and trained to do something useful like fetch me my coffee. If that horrifies you beyond endurance, I'm afraid we will just have to part company.… Sigh) .
As I was saying, working for Disney had many pluses and only a few minuses. Well, I guess you could say actually only one major minus. Are you ready for this? Believe it or not all employees above a certain rank were required to spend a week at Disney World or Disneyland as what they call Cast Members. In plain English what that means is that all these high-powered people had to go down to Anaheim or Orlando and work in the cafeterias or as guides or ticket takers or whatever and ultimately,,,,,,, don one of those wretched furry critter costumes including the heads and prance around the grounds tickling and hugging small children and posing for photos with them and talking in squeaky voices and generally making fools of themselves. Now this was bad enough during the months from November thru April, but during the warmer months it was sheer hell inside those costumes. (I was told this by others who returned from their weeks as Cast members. Temps inside were generally 20 or 30 degrees above the outside temps and you were doomed to sweat, perspire and exude moisture in rivulets and streams.......from your pores, that is. At the end of the week all of these folk would pose for a group picture taken in costume, grinning like idiots with their heads off sitting on the ground at their feet,,,,.The characters' heads that is. Something to finally impress and make their children and grandchildren proud of them I guess. Being a Vice President of one of Disney's Divisions didn't mean much, but playing Goofy made you a mench???????????
I have always said that there was no job or task that was beneath me. I guess I lied. Now, I would have gladly washed dishes in a cafeteria or restaurant, would have been happy to go around the grounds with one of those sticks with a nail in the end picking up trash or any other respectable occupation.…… But I drew the line at encasing my body in one of those silly costumes and pinching toddlers cheeks while perspiring copiously under the plush and getting a case of heat rash or worse. And so began this strange dance, this battle of wits between Disney statute and my own standards. Sometimes, during my early years, when they were going around with their vile list of eligible victims recruiting this week's cast members I would hide in the ladies room until it was safe to come out. Later as I became more established as the department troubleshooter I managed to get excused from duty each time by convincing my boss that some emergency had arisen with the main program in the Payroll system and unless I stayed available the payroll might not get produced this week. Any other system failure might not have done it but payroll was something I could always count on even without having a note from my mother. And so, dear souls, 10 years passed without my ever having to set foot in Disneyland and I did not feel the least bit guilty or disloyal. Hell, what is more important than Payroll, forgodssake?. Not to mention being true to my own standards, and besides, what kind of cockamamie, silly rule was that anyway??
I had hoped to go through my life preserving my virgin status where Disneyland was concerned, but I met my downfall eventually, long after I retired and thought I was safe, when some of my Philly cousins visited me in California and expressed the fervent wish to go to that place whose name I will not mention again. My open handed generosity is what finally did me in, dammit. I had given away to other members of my family all of the guest passes which the company issues annually to employees including retirees, and all I had left was my own ID card allowing me free entrance along with my guests. The ID card was not transferable. Shitpissfuck. I was screwed. Sob.
But at least I did not have to wear one of those damned costumes. Nor tickle any sticky urchins under their chins. In the war between Disney statute and Lo's standards I like to call it a draw.
I know, I know.......I suppose all of you have been wondering where in the hell I have been since falling to my knees and gasping with relief after the election. Well, I am going to tell you but you may not like it.
The amazing truth is that once I was relieved of the terror and able to relax, my body wrought vindictive punishment upon me for subjecting it to so many months of misery. "Take that, you faithless coward!", it spat at me. Whereupon I immediately broke out in a case of the most humungous hives a person ever experienced.
I spent the next few weeks groaning, griping and scratching wildly at places impossible to reach like a flea ridden gopher. And, since so may of these hideous itchy bumps arose on my posterior, it was an ugly sight to behold me scratching, take my word for it. Thankfully, the condition departed leaving me relatively unmarred (rumpwise) just in time for me to shed my mangy gopher skin and don the crisp White Cap of Cat Nursie.
Many of you know how it begins. There you lie sleeping peacefully when a loathesome sound intrudes on your dreams......the dreadful urking announcement of a hairball throw-up. Only this was more dire and developed into a serious case of both a urinary and an intestinal infection...........no, no,......the cat not me.
Many days and thousands of dollars poorer I brought Gussie home from the hospital clutching 3 bottles of medication. Now, I do not know how you other animal lovers manage, but I know my own (and Gussie's) limitations. For the first 3 or 4 days I managed to somehow get two of the meds partly down her gullet at least once a day (one dose out of 2 ain't bad) .......the ones with droppers so I could squirt the stuff into her mouth between her clenched teeth. After that, it got a bit dicey......she became more and more wily and clever and elusive and I became weaker and tireder and increasingly incapable of crawling under the furniture. There was also a great deal of crawling under furniture pushing little plates of cat delicacies under same in order tempt the little beastie to eat something and not die of starvation there by negating all my efforts not to mention the waste of those huge medical expenses. Sigh.
All I can say is, tenks gott the diarrhea stopped and the normal peeing resumed and the eating urge returned so I did not have to feel guilty about not administering the 3rd of the medications which was a pill to stimulate her appetite. I can report that Gussie is fine now.........I cannot say the same for her Nursie. It takes a while for me to snap back (ha, that implies an elasticity which I have not been aware of having for the past 15 or so years).
That's OK.......I managed to accomplish something this year that I've never done before in my whole entire gonsa life......and that is to prepare and roast not one, but TWO turkeys for Thanksgiving!
I always make a turkey on Thanksgiving for me and Gussie. Usually she eats two bites while it's warm and I gobble down some lovely morsels while I'm stripping the meat from the carcass in order to package it up for sandwiches later and for the freezer for future turkey delights. Generally, after tending to and inhaling turkey all day, I seldom have much appetite for turkey till the next day.
All you ladies know the process.....You take the damned rock-hard bird out of the freezer about three days before the time is due and begin the process of defrosting. For me that includes immersing the bird in a sink full of water for a few hours, drying it off, finding/making room for it in the fridge, shoving it in before the space disappears, and repeating this process for three days till oven time arrives, all the while praying that the defrosting has proceeded nicely so that I can get the blasted bag of giblets out of the inside of the carcass. The actual preparation and roasting is relatively simple from this point forward but it still requires hourly checking, basting and all that tenting with foil to keep it from getting too brown on the outside while the inside still needs to roast a little longer...........(Oy, I hate pink turkey, don't you?) Consequently, I need to hoist my body out of my comfy chair half a dozen times or more and schlep into the kitchen to peer into the oven and do my magic. Many urghs, umphs and shitpissfucks escape my ruby lips during this activity. You know the drill.
Well this year I had a friend who lives alone and wasn't going to have any turkey so in a mad moment, I offered to do a turkey for her so she could have some on Thanksgiving and then enjoy the joy of leftovers. There's nothing wrong with this idea except for the fact that I can only thaw one turkey at a time and roast one turkey at a time. I should've thought of that much earlier, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, my plan was to start on Sunday with Turkey number one and roast on Wednesday when my friend would be here and could take it home. Then beginning around Tuesday, I could begin the defrost process for my own Turkey which I would cope with on Thursday in the normal fashion. And believe it or not, the plan worked to perfection. I was tickled pink, my friend was tickled pink and we decided that symbiosis was the greatest thing in the world.
I was going to posBobGod dammit lowlyt it up to your thesis up up up up up up upbelated what the hell are you doing stop it, for chrissake......what do you mean please say that again….Okay
...in case you are wondering what the hell that's all about, it is NOT Lo losing her mind in the middle of a blog. It is actually the Dragon speech recognition program which I have been attempting to use to write this blog and which caught me unawares momentarily while I cursed some errors I detected in the previous paragraph. I decided not to delete it, but to leave it for comic effect so to speak. This is how I amuse myself sometimes when I am bored with nothing to do…… I turn on speech recognition and dictate merrily, laugh uproariously over what it thinks I said and thereby brighten my whole day. (the up up up up is how it interprets my laughing). Actually I still have hopes for the program… I guess I am just a cockeyed optimist. But, I digress.
Where in the hell was I? Yes, I remember, I was about to say that I intended to post a belated list of things for which I am supremely grateful, but I gave the idea up because there isn't enough room anywhere for my list.
Let me just say that I am thankful 24/7 for my wonderful family of cousins, for you dear friends and for having conceived the idea of making two turkeys this Thanksgiving and having had the strength to carry out my cockamamie plan. That'll do for now.
up up up up up up up!
