griping

Minor Hunter S. Thompson Moment

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With gentle yet precise shove, I am pushed out of a door into the proverbial never-ending hallway filled with more doors than Monsters Inc. I see my shadow tall in front of me. I don’t recognize the shape. Who is that creature relegated to a cliched semi-hallucinatory state after browning out for over a year to the borderline intolerable?

The ceiling immediately opens up and it starts raining bowling balls. I am mesmerized by the vibrant rainbow of colors tumbling from the sky. I cannot feel the devastating impact created as they pummel my body. Blow after blow bounces off my flesh producing a visible mark and audible wince of pain without response from me. I continue to marvel at the large, polished orbs designed to knock down anything in their path. Finally, as I watch its entire descent from the imaginary sky, a psychedelic tye-dye ball painted with a big smiley face hits me smack between the eyes.

The pain is immediate and radiates down through my body to reach my very core. All the while the ball that struck me is laughing wildly through its now demonic smile. I try to run for cover but there is none unless I open one of the endless doors.

I grab the nearest door knob only to be met with purple slime coating the knob and now my hand. It is impossible to turn it. My movements become frantic and breathing is difficult. There is no air in my lungs to produce a scream.

When I look over my shoulder, I see the bowling balls have morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West’s evil, flying monkeys. They are headed straight for me and their creepy Oz theme music blasts my ears.

I pull back and thrust shoulder first into the door and it cracks open. The thought of trying another door without slime all over it never occurs to me.

My successful escape from monkeys borne of bowling balls is met with an involuntary belly flop into a giant pit that resembles the dungeons at ChuckECheese filled with those bacteria-ridden balls. Except this pit isn’t filled with balls, it is filled with millions of over sized pills. There are capsules the size of my foot, round, powdery tablets that could be used for frisbees, and gelcaps that look more like garden globes than medicine.

The more I struggle to find the edge and climb out, the deeper I sink into the morass of pharmaceutical phalluses. A loud, creaking sound emanates from below the infinite quick sand of drugs and the farther I fall, the louder and screeching it gets. I try to turn my head downward to identify what is generating the now piercing vibrations of high pitched metallic squeals.

That’s when I see it.

A massive hypodermic needle with a shiny tip that glints so bright I have to shield my eyes. My attempts to remove myself from this nightmare shift into high gear to avoid being stabbed with a shot bigger than my beat up old station wagon. The more I grab at the capsules and tablets, the closer the needle gets to my ass. I am like the last salmon in the river willing itself against the current, desperately trying to make it across the final rocky rapids to freedom.

Of course, I don’t and am deeply punctured through the junk in my trunk up through my torso until the once shiny tip emerges from inside my skull covered in gray tissue, dripping with blood.

It has not killed me and, as I reach over to take a bite out of one of the football sized gelcaps,  the only thing that comes to what is left of my brain is “Wow. Wonder what would have happened had I tried to fight it out with those damn monkeys?”

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p.s. Can it be a Hunter S. Thompson moment if I reference Monsters Inc.?

Egocentricity

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It has come to my attention that all of my posts have one major concern – Me.  I write about My feelings, My desires, My fears, My angst – pretty much, if it has to do with Me, I’ll write about it.  I’ve written about childhood humiliations, mid-life crises, relationship joys and woes, every kind of female “issue”, and parenthood challenges – all from behind the very specific Kathleen-focused pinwheel of topics.

Honestly, I did not set out to write a blog with an all-you-can-eat buffet of my emotional stew du jour.   I have some indication that I am a bit of a decent writer with a solid ability to express myself in ways that engage other people.  I intended to marry this expandable skill with the numerous social, economic, cultural and world-wide issues that face the human race, thereby bringing about a crisp commentary from one of the ordinary class of humans – middle-middle class working woman with a husband, two kids, a dog and a mortgage.

Instead, I have a series of blog posts filled with metaphorical anecdotes concerning my hormones, insecurities and day dreams.

Is there something wrong with this?

I must have decided there is not since I continue to write about these things that fill my ever shrinking cognizant capacity.

Clearly, even in this confessional opus, my number one concentration is My inability to write about someone other than Me!

However, before I toss my garbley goulash into the pig trough and start writing about other subjects where I have some great authority like the best ways to get cinnamon gum out of a washing machine, or how to collect old baby food jars until they overflow into the outdoor shed, or remain at a job you don’t like for nearly a decade without literally jumping out the window – I should like to state that I don’t believe any one of us can truly write about anything other than our own experience.

Even if I were to write about the life and times of Mickey Mouse, it would be colored with my intense personal impression of said rat based upon everything that has occurred in my life up to this point.  Suppose Mr. Mouse and I differ in opinion on how to bring about peace without using violence?  Would it then be possible to write objectively about Mr. Mouse’s career in which he engaged his country in not one, but two extended wars?

Maybe a better human than me could, but I am pretty sure I have given up trying to be objective.  (Especially where Mickey is concerned – don’t even get me started on a grown mouse who has a clubhouse full of perky sidekicks who only know how to sing his praises.)

So, I’ve decided – if anyone is 1) actually reading this and 2) in a place of even remotely caring about it – that I am going to continue to write about what I am faced with each moment on a cellular level – Me.

After all, stew is a meal in itself!

Proof of my proving abilities

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I have perfected an annoying art form of attempting to prove the unprovable.

For me, trying to do something – anything – in order to prove a point I have neither been asked nor have any reality-based need to prove is like trying to force an elephant through the exhaust of a mini-cooper. I might actually be able to get it to fit, but I would have to chop up the entire beast into small pieces, stick it in a blender until liquefied and then let it boil into a gaseous state. By that time, there is nothing left of the originally magnificent creature I so desperately wanted to prove I am of kindred benevolence.

I know this because I have metaphorically killed more magnanimous creations than I am admittedly capable of calculating.  I will either make half-failed (or half-successful, depending on your optimism vs. pessimism tendencies) efforts to do it myself, actually do it myself with varying levels of success (or failure), or sit paralyzed in fear of not doing it perfectly thereby not doing it.  The only way I won’t do it is to let someone else do it for me.  I have some switch inside that pulls the choke out at the slightest indication that I may feel left out of whatever wondrous triumph is about to occur.  Unfortunately, I pull so hard that I open up too much and inevitably stall out creating a self made vacuum bag full of words never shared, works of almost art, plays produced in my head, and songs never sung outside my car.

Want proof?

Hollis and Jolleen – a children’s book about two best friends and their adventures through a knot-hole in a tree to the world below filled with talking frogs, daisies and a mole.  Partially written with a TYPEWRITER.

A Way Home – a play I began writing while living in NYC and had a staged reading of in like 2003.  It still needs final edits.  (PS – I lived in NYC from early 1995 to early 1997…;o|)

Bhogobaan ekane ache – a written account of my spiritual journey – first written in 2003 with minor updates over the years.  Sent to some publishers and a monologue from it got me cast in Ochen Chotto Schpiel (see next point).

One Woman’s Voice – a compilation of about 40 poems of mine up until about 2004.  Sent it to a few publishers but figured work got in the way.  And my playwright’s revival in Ochen Chotto Schpiel (which did generate quite a bulk of very short plays that now reside only in my memories – both cranial and hard disk.)

Dreaming Tales of This and That and a Splashing Humpback – another compilation of over 30 poems for kids of all ages.  24 are done, the rest almost – but I need to illustrate it, although I don’t really draw very well.

Numerous visual arts – paintings, fabric, mixed media – that I have more supplies for than actual completed pieces.

Very brief foray into the possibility of an artistic tye-dye business.

This blog which I almost started for years and now only update periodically.

And, oh yeah, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Drama – emphasis Acting.

Whew!  That’s a lot of almosts to cram into one old four-drawer metal filing cabinet stuck in my home office!  And it doesn’t even include the lists of aspirations I swallow deep down underneath rolls of Tums and diet coke – dancer, singer, cellist, elected official, world news anchor, race car driver, motivational speaker, smoking hot babe with perfect cha-chas, covert spy and mime extraordinaire.

Okay – really sounds like I’m headed towards the typical mid-life crisis, doesn’t it?  Yipes.

Katie – Bar the door.  No, seriously – bar it, lock it, nail it shut – goodness knows where this line of opening up and spreading my mid-life cheer will send me!

P.P.S. Truly just kidding about the mime part.

P.P.P.S.  See my point?