Aaargh

Over an hour to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge, Are they kidding?

Just as I made the final approach to the Tappan Zee after an eleven hour work day/night, I saw the tail lights. It was too late: too late to get off; too late to go the other way and take the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge instead; too late to do anything but sit as the frigging traffic report finally got around to mentioning the construction and the “possibility” that ALL LANES WOULD BE SHUT DOWN!

Are they kidding? All lanes? Oh, yeah… ALL. We sat for an hour while they did God-knows-what on that God-damned bridge. I wanted to scream. I wanted to honk my horn. I wanted the thousands of people in cars and trucks to protest with me but they just sat there, accepting this utterly disrespectful intrusion on their lives. Two cars passed me on the left, rushing to get ten feet ahead before they got stuck like the rest of us. Two cars immediately behind me collided as they vied for the same space at the same time, neither willing to let the other one get ahead in the merge. And I just KNEW it was unnecessary. I knew it in my bones, aching and silently screaming in frustration. Sure enough, after an hour, they merged us from the two lanes we had already merged into, down from four, to one lane, and we crept over the bridge. Why this one lane wasn’t available during the previous hour I still don’t know, but for more than three quarters of the span, there was NOTHING going on. It appeared to be one man’s job to stand still with his arms folded on his chest. Another sat in a truck. A few were drilling up the pavement in the far left lane. Nothing was happening in the other two. Finally, toward the end of the bridge, I saw the real construction site and they indeed were working across three lanes. That still doesn’t explain why the fourth lane was rendered impassable, but at least these guys were working. I’ve never actually seen construction workers on a highway REALLY working before. I’ve seen them standing around CONTEMPLATING working. I’ve seen them drinking coffee. I saw that again tonight as I crossed Danbury: lot’s of lights indicating a construction project; lots of cones, heavy equipment and men standing around talking, but no actual work being done.

Where is our rage? I know where mine was. It was eating its way out of my chest like an alien baby in a sci-fi movie. I lay my hands on the horn on that approach to the Tappan Zee Bridge and wondered why every other motorist wasn’t doing the same. Why weren’t we all protesting? Let’s make some noise! I turned off the motor. I turned it back on and blasted some Dave Edmonds "Crawling From the Wreckage" to vent my increasing internal combustion. Why do we passively accept the thoughtless injustices heaped upon us by governments and corporations simply because they can?

After 23 years of working for a corporation, my husband and others like him are about to have their jobs phased out because management doesn’t like them. They want them to reapply and go to the bottom of the seniority list. Never mind that they have been doing the same job for years. Never mind that they are members of a union. Never mind that they have rights. They simply will not have their jobs. The union is either powerless or unwilling to stop this callous disregard for the people it represents and screaming won’t help. They’ll lay everyone off and, after a year of suffering I am told by those who have experienced such acts before, they will offer folks their jobs back, avoiding a lawsuit but not compensating anyone for the lost wages.

I am so frustrated. How did this happen? How did I get to this point? Everything that I thought would be there at this point in my life is just not there. No jobs. No security. No ease. No relaxation. No retirement in a sunny villa with the assurance that Medicare will provide for me. It won’t. Pension? Pshaw. Inheritance? It’ll all go to debts and taxes. I take the turn off the highway and wonder how fast I need to go to make sure the getaway is clean; that I won’t be left crippled but still alive because, with the evaporation of the job, so goes the medical insurance.

I am screaming inside but not a sound escapes my body. It is late. People are sleeping, I am typing. Life goes on… relentlessly.

Publisher's Clearing House

If August 31st passes without the appearance of a van with camera-wielding, flower-toting, check-bearing, Publisher’s Clearing House emblazoned people, I will be supremely disappointed. Seriously.

I have dutifully responded to every Publisher’s Clearing House email, even fishing some of them out of my junk mailbox where MacMail, with all good intentions, keeps sending them. I have “Transferred” meaningless, virtual “Labels”, “Confirmed” and “Submitted” countless entries. I have scrolled through pages and pages and pages of ads for strange inventions to clean things; organize things; grow things; and more ads for just THINGS. I even purchased one of those “magic” screens for my front door, with magnets that make it shut again after you walk through it (most of the time; occasionally needs guidance, gentle detachment from my metal front door - I didn't know it was metal -, or searching for and reattaching the three-piece magnet-plus-housing unit that tries to escape from its responsibilities), keeping my home freer from summer bugs than it has ever been.

I have been diligent, increasing my odds with every minute spent reading these LONG missives. I deserve this. If someone who submitted a single entry wins the $5000 a week for life, I will be upset.

I have a wedding to go to on Friday night so, PCH Team, please come early. I promise, I will give you a clip worth airing. I will be shocked, disbelieving, skeptical even, but ultimately thrilled beyond measure. I will CRY. No bland Midwesterner I. I will give you a full range of emotion that will please your editor and delight your commercial viewing audience. I am an excellent actress with full access to my feelings. I won’t even take my Lexapro until after your visit so I make sure to experience the highs (and lows) of the emotional spectrum. Be warned, however, that I will be keenly experiencing those lows so, if you DON’T come, and I get a little more than average depressed, I may sue you.

See you on August 31st.

I am a spider

I roll over this morning and watch a spider on the window screen. I notice it is one of those black spiders that will bite me if it gets in. My husband got a spider bite like that on his calf once. Nasty. But this one is not a threat; the window is closed, air conditioning on against the heat and humidity of July. I watch it slowly crawl across the tiny squares, its pincers opening and closing as it looks for food, I suppose, and I think, I’ll squash that later when I open the window. It is not an emotional thought; just a plan, a whim, something I will get to. And I wonder if I am a spider to some greater being, slowly rolling over in some celestial bed, considering this tiny human form below, and thinking lazily, I’ll squash her later. Unsuspecting of the event that lies before me, I plan my day.

Warning!

Let me preface this by saying I am not a smoker; never have been, never will be. I hate smoking. Smokers, even the ones I love, smell. A hug from a smoker is enough to make my nostrils twitch and wake up the desire to cough no matter how many antihistamines and steroids I have pumped into my body that day. I am all for putting whatever disgusting picture on the packs of cigarettes necessary to discourage anyone from ever picking up the filthy habit and inflicting it on the rest of us, with one caveat: those pictures make me sick. I HATE that commercial where the “poor” guy is wheezing and dying slowly from his lifelong disgusting habit. It makes me gag. That said, I’m wondering if similar dissuasion should be placed on some of the thing I am addicted to: things like chocolate.

I have been taking off the same ten pounds since New Year’s Day. I take off ten, put on 4, take off 2, put on three, take off 4… you get the picture. The culprit is chocolate. I cannot resist it. If it is in the house it is in my mouth. And once I start, I cannot stop. I cannot have just one piece. A bag of M&Ms is crack. CVS put the leftover Valentine’s Day candy on sale and I bought a bag of the cherry ones for $.99, took them home, opened them up, and before the day was out I was back at the store for four more bags. I hide them in the closet over the stove. I challenge myself not to open a bag for once they are open they are inhaled. Dark chocolate is my nemesis. I know, it is supposed to be good for you. Perhaps it is… for those people who can eat a serving. I eat a serving, carefully unwrapping the foil, rewrapping it and sliding it back into the paper sleeve. Then I go back, slide it out again, carefully unwrap the foil, get another serving, rewrap, go back again, tear open the sleeve and the foil and devour the rest of the bar. Candy should come with a warning similar to those on cigarettes. “This is your body on chocolate!” When you reach a certain age, even if you take off the weight, the skin just stays there, loose, a reminder of your debauchery. Once you stretch out, you can never again be the hard-body you were at 25. Some say motherhood might have something to do with it but I got my body back after birth. You do not get it back after chocolate.

So I will keep ‘dieting’. I will keep resisting only succumbing at weak moments. I will try not to buy it and will stay out of CVS after Easter. But just know, when all else fails, there is “Spanx”.

March 8, 2012

It’s a miraculous day. March 8th, my granddaughter’s 3rd birthday, and I’m sitting on my deck, sleeveless, as temps rise through the sixties toward seventy this afternoon. Remember last March? I couldn’t find my deck until some time in late April.

I love the warmth of spring. Unlike the summer, we actually get some sunshine because the leaves on all these trees have yet to obliterate it. Yesterday in the late afternoon, another beautiful day, I went out on the front deck and looked up to find five of the biggest birds I’d ever seen up close perched on the tree that looms over the entire house. (I have the white stains on the wood to prove it.) I think they were turkey hawks (I looked it up; I would not know them on my own). One by one they lifted off with wingspans of three to four feet. My son said they were hunting. I said they were beautiful. It’s easy to see how they can carry off a cat.

And speaking of cats, where have all of our stray cats gone? There was an active ‘catch, neuter and release’ program this year, but if you were a cat, would you return to the scene of your abduction? I think not!

The other night, I’m sure I saw an Eastern Screech Owl zip across the path of my headlights as I came home. I found it particularly amazing because I had just done a reading of Mary Louise Wilson’s “Lost” in which an addled woman sees a “bird! A big, beige bird…” fly past her windshield. It turns out to be the purse she left on the roof of the car, but mine really was a bird! It flew into the woods at a low level, also hunting, I suppose.

Ah, spring… mating and hunting and longer hours of daylight. I have so much to do but, for now, I just want to sit here and breathe.

The American Taliban

Rick Santorum says the separation of church and state “makes me want to throw up.”
 
Well, Rick Santorum makes ME want to throw up! He makes me want to throw something! A fit, a tantrum, a brick…

-- Santorum also said this weekend that President Obama is a “snob” for his vision to provide every child access to higher education. Santorum would rather keep them ignorant. Of course, he would; that’s his base! Studid people who need to be told what to do; who see eveything in black and white, good and evil, no shades of grey, no shades of humanity. Santorum said these (places for higher education) are places where people become indoctrinated by liberal professors… Where did he go to school? The Vatican? WHere should we educate our children? In churches where the impressionable get indoctrinated with fantasies of virgins having babies without having sex, or that people can be raised from the dead without benefit of a defibrillator, or that rich people are somehow better and more deserving that anyone else. How can people be SO STUPID!!!!!!?

It would be nice to believe that people can actually rise from the dead. Imagine if our founding fathers rose up and heard some of this crap about church and state. Weren’t we the country people came to in order to escape religious persecution? In order to practice our individual beliefs without fear of government intervention?

These right-wing zealots, cloaking themselves in the disguise of a political party, are as scary as the Taliban, sticking there noses into everyone else’s business and trying to turn this country into something it was never supposed to be: a country where one set of religious beliefs is rammed down the throats of everyone else.

Clutter

Less than two days left on my visit to southern Florida and I have seen the sun for a total of 25 minutes if you do not count its miraculous appearance everyday at about 4:30 when you are on your way to do something else. It’s been a good trip though, seeing family, friends, taking care of business. I’ve managed to get a hint of color despite the constant cloud cover and even dipped myself into the healing salt water. It has not ben a wasted trip. I am committed to de-cluttering when I get home as time permits. As I sit here now, I am staring at a bookcase full of old books that no one will ever read again. Not classics; just old. I’m certain no one even bought these books but that they just showed up here courtesy of a well-intentioned visitor: titles like Playboys Book of Games, and Trump (he probably wrote it himself). Actually, there are one or two that I’m guessing my father read at some point in the distant past: one by Joseph Heller whose jacket is torn so I can’t see the title, and Russell Baker’s Good Times. I might be tempted to pick these up myself were it to suddenly snow instead of rain and if the mall were to close, the car break down and the electricity fail so that I was forced to close the computer and all electronic devices. I could take them home where such things do happen but then I would have to carry them there and that’s ridiculous! These old hard-copy volumes weigh far too much to put in a carry-on bag. I wonder if they are available on Kobo. Then there are the shelves of videos and tapes: an audio version of Grisham’s The Partner; I think I gave him that, when his eyesight was failing and someone suggested he might enjoy books-on-tape. He didn’t. Neither do I. I much prefer the voices in my own head providing character and nuance. Perhaps he didn’t like it because I chose such an ordinary work of non-art. Perhaps he would have thrilled to the words of actual literature. Where did I buy this, Costco? There’s a video of Victor Borge that I might watch again someday, and one called Let’s Go Mets which I will not but might yield a quarter or so on a tag-sale-table. Most are home videos: copies of TV programs the viewer just had to save, and unedited footage of family visits and events that might get played someday and will provide a few hours of reminiscent entertainment until one gets bored with all the static and lengthy moments of inactivity. Would that they were edited highlight reels but, alas… I have easily three times as many of these already in my home library that my husband assiduously transferred to dvd, again without editing them, and then I believe saved the videotapes anyway so now we don’t always know what was re-recorder and what is a potential gem waiting to be discovered but there is never time to watch them anyway. No, it’s just clutter, unless… I suddenly can see myself as an old lady whose memory has gone, staring at these old images hour after hour, trying to put my finger on this or that face, this or that place, knowing it is familiar but having a connection that is a fleeting and delicate as a wish on the wind. Will there be available anything as antique as a VCR by then? Perhaps I should transfer them to DVD.