zombies

Some Enchanted Rednecks, A Few of My Favorite Things, and Improved is My Mood

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I’m not generally the kind of person that goes around spouting sunshine out of my nether regions.  At best I’m pragmatic.  At worst I’m downright fatalistic, and that’s when the panic attacks and confusion set in. Anxiety sucks. I’ve taken that trip before, and I do NOT want to go there.  The past few days I’d been heading down that dark spiral, and letting things get on my nerves entirely too much, but today things are looking up.  I attribute the improvement in my mental/emotional state to the positive power of prayer.  Despite my dark mood last night, I dragged myself to my bible study class, and as usual, the conversation and the study material was both timely and spoke to my own dissatisfaction and melancholy.  There are times when I need a bit of a nudge to keep from falling into the same boring rut and despair.  After all, I have much to be thankful for, and I do have some activities to look forward to.

Saturday night I’m taking Steve-o to the Mansfield Reformatory.  This is the old prison where the movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed.  On the surface that sounds terrible, and normally the words prison and fun should never go together, but there’s an event called the Dead Walk that’s held around Halloween every year where you get to go through the prison, and legend has it, get the holy bejeebers scared out of you.  I love Halloween and all things slasher (I’m the only one Steve-o could get to take him to the Saw movies) so it should be a cool trip.

Zombies are awesome.  I’ll have to find a DVD of Shaun of the Dead to enjoy at the campground.

Next week I have actually arranged to take my three sanity days (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and I’m taking Clara down to the campground for some peace and quiet.  Since the campground is pretty deserted during the week- especially in the off season- I want Clara with me.  If I want to use the phone there I have to go to the top of the hill, and even then Sprint access is sporadic.

Nobody gets past Clara.  Unless she approves.

Clara, on the other hand, is always alert, and I would have have plenty of advance notice should anyone turn up unannounced.   So all I need to do is bring some DVDs, some reading material, the MP3 player, clean clothes and toiletries and stop off at the grocery store in town for a few days’ meal fixings and it’s all cool.   Hopefully Jerry won’t ruin the blissful silence by coming down there. Then I’ll end up driving five miles one way to fetch his beer, smokes, lottery tickets and so forth, whenever he runs out of any of those.   My dream vacation- driving into the nearest town at all hours to fetch for Jerry.  I’d rather be at work.  It sounds mean, but a vacation with him is just work for me.  He gets plenty of rest at home.  I’m always doing his leg work for him.   He doesn’t need a vacation. The idea here is for me to get away and not be pestered.  However, I have a bad feeling he’s going to end up going down there.  If he stays home he might actually have to fix a meal, or heaven forbid, cart his own happy ass to the drive thru that’s just down the road (well within walking distance) to replenish his beer, smokes and lottery ticket needs.

Jerry, it’s not like we live in the ‘hood.  The drive-thru is not in Detroit on 8 Mile Road for heaven’s sake.

I’ve been on 8 Mile Road in Detroit.  Jerry had bought some wheels on E-Bay from someone up there on local pick up.  The dude lived in a very horrible neighborhood, which we didn’t realize until we got up there. I had both doors locked on the truck, and even at a stop light I kept it in first with the clutch in, ready to take off quick should the truck be jumped- and this was in broad daylight. Suffice to say it appears to be a war zone, and so far is the only place I’ve ever been in my life that is worse than both Cleveland and East St. Louis.   I never lost anything in Detroit and have no desire to go back there.  I did enjoy the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, but even getting there requires one to drive in places one should never attempt to drive- unless you have an armored car.

I’m pretty sure Steve-o wasn’t trolling about in the CVS looking for cosmetics.

I’d warned Steve-o about the diversity he might experience in the area around Children’s Hospital when the baby had to go there a few months ago.  We used to live near that area but now the hospital has bought up a good deal of the real estate, and what’s left has either been “gentrified” (aka: made too expensive for rednecks to live there) or ironically, taken over by crack-heads.  Steve-o wanted to walk over to the CVS to get smokes and pop with sugar in it (which they don’t sell in the hospital) so I cautioned him to watch his back because he’s used to rural locales and rural rednecks.  Steve-o no sooner arrives at the CVS when a rather effeminate man taps him on the shoulder and whispers, “Honey, I’ve got just what you need.”  Steve-o is not a small guy, and he’s also not shy.  Steve-o looked the little dude in the eye, shaked his fist, and replied, “I’ve got just what you need right here.”  Fortunately there was no altercation.  I don’t care about other’s lifestyle choices, but the mommy-claws still kind of come out on that one, which is weird, because Steve-o is perfectly capable of fending off unwanted attention.  It’s still creepy – at least to me.

Other people’s lifestyle choices don’t bother me as long as they’re not shoved in my face.  I could care less- until or unless the bull dykes hit on me.  So far that hasn’t happened, and I am glad for it.  Then I might have a problem, should a simple “I’m straight,” fail to deflect unwanted advances.  I probably won’t ever have to worry about it.  I don’t get hit on by men either.

I am no paragon of good parenting skills, but at least I never did this.

Steve-o did get himself duct-taped to a core support once, when he was about nine, but that’s his just dessert for mouthing off to the guys at the body shop.  Nine year old boys do tend to exaggerate their ass-kicking skills a bit much.  I only wish I’d gotten a pic of him hanging off the core support of that F-150.  Call me a mean mommy, but I made him beg and plead and cry “Uncle” so the guys would cut him down.   I hope that didn’t warp him any more than he warped the guy who he decorated with a Sharpie.  I guess it’s not good to be the first guy to pass out at a party, at least if it’s a party Steve-o is attending.   His buddy woke up with the word “PENIS” emblazoned on his forehead in black Sharpie, backward, so he could read it clearly when he looked in the mirror.

If this is how some people treat their friends…

Tacky Christmas Begins at Home, Leave Me Alone, Dammit, and Holiday Angst

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I said I was going to put it up and I did.  What a delightully tacky pink tree, complete with all the Hello Kitty ornaments and so forth that I could scrounge. I know Jerry hates it but (unlike his normal whiny self) he’s not really making a point to protest, even though it is in the picture window where God and everyone can see it lit up from the road.   I have been so unfailingly, maddeningly busy that it’s been an effort to keep up just on survival things like eating, bathing and personal landscaping.  I am surprised I did this much decorating.  It’s sad because I enjoy Christmas for the most part, and this year I am not dead broke like I normally am this time of year.  The trade off is that I don’t have time to do anything extra, so whoever doesn’t enjoy their check and bag of little goodies can go blow.

I think the most frustrating part of the holidays is dealing with crowds.  I detest shopping and traipsing about amongst the unwashed hordes anyway, but from about Halloween to January 15th or so, it’s like perennial Welfare Day at the grocery in every store you have to go in.  

Then the stores compound the problem by having limited time specials.  The Kroger Marketplace ran an interesting special where you got points to buy non-grocery merchandise based on your spending, which was cool, except that the entire Central Ohio area had exactly three days to redeem their points.  Those three days (Dec. 1,2,3) would normally have been “avoid the grocery at all costs” for someone like me already, because the 1st being a Friday AND Welfare Day means the place is going to be a farking zoo.   But my greed got the best of me- since they owed me $90 worth of non-grocery merchandise and I wasn’t going to pass that up- and I ended up getting folded, spindled and mutilated all the way through the Kroger store to get a vacuum cleaner.  Granted, it was a free vacuum cleaner, and the way I burn through them because of the dogs, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity despite my claustrophobia and borderline agoraphobia.   I just don’t understand why on God’s green earth that a store would run a limited time promotion on days when they are already going to be insanely busy to begin with.  Why not do something like that at the end of February when nobody wants to go anywhere or do anything and the stores are pretty much desolate?

If it were up to me Christmas would be in August.  Nothing else happens in August other than it’s bloody hot, but there’s a lot more daylight available for all that traipsing about in the stores.  I don’t like wandering through miles of parking lots at night trying to seek out my car.  It’s dark and there is usually at least one form of precipitation going on too which makes the whole process all the more miserable. 

I am delighted that relatives generally don’t come to stay with us.  Jerry alone is like cleaning up after a horde of hogs.   Being invaded by house guests at this point in my life would drive me positively apeshit.  I don’t mind going to other people’s houses for holiday functions, etc. because I can leave when I’ve had enough.  It’s harder to throw people out when you’ve had enough of them, and truth be told most people wear on my patience very quickly.   The good thing is, not too many people want to stay in a house with three large dogs, especially when two of the dogs only like a very select few people.  Sheena pretty much likes anyone with a pulse who will pay attention to her, including kids.  Clara’s approved list is pretty short.  Lilo’s is even shorter.  All the dogs love Steve-o and Hannah, and Bob and Debbie, but beyond that, there aren’t many people who can come in the house unsupervised.  I like it that way. 

It sounds pathetic to most, but I would genuinely enjoy a few silent sanity days to myself.  If I could do the ivory tower get away for awhile I would- three or four days of silence and contemplation would be a dream, but it’s probably not happening anytime soon.  I’ve not even had a chance to start on the Stephen King novel I’ve had for a month now. 

Jerry has taken it on himself to get into the zombie movie genre.  I’ve always enjoyed the classic ’80’s slashers but the only zombie movie I really got into was Shaun of the Dead.    Go figure, as it’s British humor.  I get to see enough real life zombies every time I have to fight my way through the grocery store at the beginning of the month.

Go zombies.  I saw this one in the grocery store parking lot on an old Crown Vic: