Just for the Hell of It!

The room was dark, the machines softly beeping into the silence. I sat in the hard fake leather chair waiting. The surgeon, steel eyes, fake smile, a flesh cutter, came in and said it would be better in a few months. What about today? What about tomorrow? No answer. Asshole.

I thought about how to manufacture a new reality, a brighter stage for her to live on.  The pain would be a minor player. The horror, subdued in violet and pink painted sets, would have no voice. The actors would ask the questions. Do I have a body or does it have me? Am I a body that dies and that’s it; pitch black forever, no thought, no feeling, no sight, no sound, the end of me? Would an eternity asleep be a relief, or would I get bored? What beliefs do I allow into my reality? Do I include poetry, Picasso, pornography, sex, junk food, Bourbon, a cat, a dog? Who judges me at the end? Is it a court of high appeal run by super angels waiting in the wings? Is there a mighty Creator of all things who hovers under the  lights, judging me? Or, is there a piece of God in every one of us and we live forever? And then she would come center stage, smile, and give the answers. The applause would be deafening.

She woke up and looked at me. She said, “It’s not time to die.”

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I should be vacuuming the dog hair on the floor,

Or finishing the yards of paperwork

On the table by the door,

But I’m missing you today.

True, a little less than last year,

But still, I hold the tears at bay

Inside the empty space that once held fear,

And urgent hope that you’d get well.

Most of all, I want you here,

I want more talks at dinner or beside the fire,

More hugs, more kisses,

More laughter, more jokes at who was higher.  

You with your medical pot,

And me with my French wine,

Arguing over what it was, what it was not.

And then, outside my mind beyond my walls,

I see you dancing, laughing in the wind,

Showing me how the dead are not the ones who fall,

That we are forever, you and I,

Always dancing, always free,

That when we truly love, we can not die.

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Until then, most of my life seemed to happen in rooms. My new friend Kenny, a bunch of his friends and I traipsed into the Brass Rail to see Duke Ellington. I’d met Kenny in the tavern where art students hung out on the weekends. At the time, I was taking a leave from college, trying to be a Bohemian. A month before, I’d been in an English Lit classroom looking out the window at spring arriving, thinking how much I didn’t want to be there.

 Smoke in the murky light made it difficult to see the stage. As the drummer and the bass player walked onto the stage and took their seats, the babble stopped. The overhead lights went out. One spotlight lit the stage. He walked over to the piano, smiled and sat down. As his fingers stroked the keyboard, his music seducing the crowd through the smoke, I drank a beer. I didn’t know how special it was to be sitting so close to a jazz legend. I was young, uncomfortable because the bass player was leering down at me, running his tongue across his big lips. I looked away wishing I was back at my gay friend Eric’s lying on the rug listening to the record. It became just another room.

 Afterward we went back to the Park Plaza hotel for a party with the Duke. That room was a large suite overlooking the city. People were talking, smoking and drinking. I was standing by the window, wondering when I could leave. I didn’t know anyone. Didn’t have anything to say. Room Service brought up sandwiches, cocktail sausages, and sodas. I was too nervous to eat.

 Kenny and his girlfriends, he always had two or three with him, went away when I was in the bathroom. Someone said he had gone to buy more booze. I sat on the couch. More people left while I waited for Kenny to come back. I went back to the bathroom and washed my face. When I came out, there was nobody there but the Duke. 

He looked at me and asked me if I wanted a drink. I said no, thank you. He smiled. I was scared. He sat down at the piano and began to play. “You don’t mind if I practice a little?” he asked. I sat back down on the couch.

 He played jazz like I’d never heard it before. Then he played Chopin and Mozart. I watched rain falling past the windows and got lost in the music. I wasn’t drunk and I hadn’t smoked any of the pot that was offered. I was flown out of that room by a man at his piano who conjured a universe of melody and peace. The walls couldn’t hold us.

When he was done, he quietly got up from the piano bench and said he would call me a cab. I thanked him and he helped me put on my coat. He smiled, kissed me on the cheek and said, “Tell Kenny thanks, but I have grandkids older than you.”

 It wasn’t until later, riding home in the cab, that I realized Kenny had set me up as the girl for the Duke to sleep with that night. I didn’t care. I was lost, in the magic of that moment when the walls in a room gave way to creative genius, in the realization that I could imagine my way out of any room.

 I didn’t see Kenny after that until a few years later. He was walking down Young Street with a girl on his arm. In the sunlight, he looked old and tired, she looked like his daughter. We chatted about nothing for a moment and then I walked on, wondering if the girl was as trusting and naïve as I had been. I didn’t want to think about what could have happened to me if it had been someone other than the Duke. I never did get the Bohemian thing down.

copyright: Susanah Morgan 2010. Written for Oscar at Penspark.com

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Over the years one of my favorite analogies has been that a failure to communicate is like ignoring dog turds on the table during a family dinner. Something’s very, very wrong but nobody wants to deal with it despite the stink. So it has been in my other life as a Realtor. It’s not even noon here as I write this but I’m thinking it must be four o’clock somewhere because I really want to drink some wine about now.

In the Real Estate world, we Realtors are like football players. If one owner decides to sell the business, all the contracted players go with it, no permission asked. Each office in a national franchise is independently owned. Well, about a year ago, my excellent boss sold the company to a kid from Canada. We all thought things would be okay because we are independent contractors and pretty much do our own business out of the real estate office.  We each pay monthly rent to the franchise and the owner to work out of the office. It’s a huge monthly fee but I thought the brand name was worth it.

The new owner started paying bills later and then later. The computer fix-it guy had to chase down his money for fixing the office computer with 5 emails and numerous phone calls. He rents a home from one of my cash buying investor-clients. The FAX  repair man won’t come back after not being paid on time. Both the phone and the electric company gave a 24 hour courtesy notice before shutting us off. Some gals in the office, thinking they’ll never get to retire, are selling a multi-level marketing product and having rah-rah meetings in the conference room. It felt like I was in a Far Side Cartoon. This is a giant international franchise I’m talking about here! After a few calls to the international headquarters, I found that they won’t do anything to help.

I tried to  communicate my misgivings in an adult fashion in the office. The multi-level gals got quite pissy when I asked them to go somewhere else with their meetings, and the owner/boss/kid-with-attitude was blaming it all on the receptionist he fired even though she never had access to the bills owing or a check book to pay them. ( Anyone under 35 is a kid in my eyes.) The FAX  man and the computer fixer guy are talking to everyone in town. Dog Turds on the table for sure.

I then gave my resignation in an email to the owner detailing my reasons for leaving. He told me I had to give him a two month notice. I told him that he could pay me $3 thousand a month for the damage to my reputation.

I had to get the  Department of Real Estate for the state and an attorney involved. Finally, yesterday, the kid terminated my employment with the company. He did it just late enough in the day on a Friday, that I will now have to wait until Tuesday, after the MLK  holiday, to put my real estate license under a new company. I am effectively in limbo for 3 days…see why I want to drink?

Maybe it’s a good thing that I take 3 days off.  I inevitably find that things happen for a reason. My guardian angels are a very busy bunch. I had a big, fat itch to grab a camera and go to Haiti as a free-lance journalist. Dealing with the kid kept me home. I find as I age that the itches I get are much more pronounced. Who knows, maybe I have a subconscious death wish. Maybe it’s just that my life is too small and I need a bigger one. I’ll figure it out soon. Your comments are welcome.

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I know, discombobulated isn’t a real word, but it’s been my adjective for feeling weird for years. I’m told there’s something in the ether, some cloud of chaotic emotion that is effecting people across the globe.

It’s been a strange couple of weeks. Osama bin Laden’s protegee, now called The Underwear Bomber, gets caught on Christmas day trying to blow up a plane with explosives in his shorts. President Obama is MIA for 72 hours, letting his staffers who are handling the incident make him look like an idiot, before he gets his butt on TV and comments. Pelosi and Reid are locked in a room designing a health care Bill that will affect all of us, refusing to go public, even though other elected officials, Democrats and Republican alike, are getting ready to break down the door. It’s been so cold in parts of the country that Al Gore is being ridiculed by both environmentalists and conservatives. Brit  Hume, usually a low key newsman, goes rabid and tells Tiger Woods on national television to convert from Buddhism to Christianity to get saved.

On the home front, I find that  two of the top selling real estate agents in my office are now promoting a multi-level marketing plan of green products because they’re worried they won’t be able to retire this century. I discovered that my boss isn’t paying the company phone and internet bills on time and the guy that fixes the copy machine won’t come back.

Not to mention that I adopted a little dog who’s decided that she owns everything chewable in the house, or that the horse went walk-about the other day to visit a mare a mile away, and my 110 pound German Shepherd almost got through the fence to eat the guy next door.

Having said all that, I feel like a spoiled brat when I read about my new friend in China daring to post on facebook even though it could land her in jail, or how a writer friend has to wash everything in his house with beach over and over because he’s taken in boys with Aids who haven’t got any immunity to flu or colds.

As the saying goes, life is what you make it. I don’t think I’m making mine very well right now. My outside doesn’t match my inside, as above is not as below. Whatever Zen I had going is gone.

I have this  little sign. It says, ”I can handle 38 assholes a month. DO NOT be the 39th!” Bowing to my potential for spiritual enlightenment, I withhold my temper until I get to 39 each month. Well, due to Christmas and New Years, I only had about 20 assholes in my life last month and I haven’t got more than 4 this month so far. There’s nobody to yell at except myself.

Do you ever getting that feeling that something’s about to give? Knowing that things I write have about as much influence as a mouse fart in a hurricane, I’m writing this for myself. I feel better now. If you’re reading, I commend your bravery.

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It’s the first week of a new year and I don’t feel any different today than I did last week. I wish one of these New Years I could have an extaordinary revelation or at least a tingling or something on the stroke of midnight leading into a new year.

I went into the office today, Sunday, thinking to get some letters written and emails answered. One of my associates was there with her husband.

The husband is a chubby, 5o something retired accountant with too much money and a talent for turning rapier wit and gay repartee into a boorish mess. What can I expect from a guy who refuses to read books but only listens to them on audio? There’s something queer about that. I gave up trying to have a conversation with him about a year ago.

There I was, immersed in an important reply to a client when the husband, obviously bored waiting for his wife, toddles over to me and says, “You’re looking old today. Don’t wrinkle your forhead like that.”

I know women who would have thrown something at him! I’ ve also met women who would stand up and deck the guy. I told him to go away. He stood there for a moment while I ignored him and kept on bashing away at my keyboard and then he waddled off.

I was feeling a little guilty for being rude until I remembered the office Christams party. He’d come up to me and said, ”I bet you were gorgeous when you were younger.” I replied, ”Thanks a LOT.” He said, “Oh, you’re not so bad now.” 

Tonight, thinking about the incident, I remember that he’d had heart trouble and 4 stints put in his artieries several months back. I’ve had a bit of personal experience with men and their heart problems. One I know completely changed personalities after a triple bypass and still is not the same man I knew for decades. He became angry and insulting, prone to rants about everything, when before the surgery he was kind and understanding.

My father had a pretty blond girlfriend who was vivacious, always up for an adventure, and looked twenty years younger than her age. I saw her a year after she had a heart attack. She’d become snotty, rude and very wrinkled. My father was in the hosptial dying at the time. He finally told her not to visit anymore. He told me, “I can’t handle insults with the injury.”

I guess the point I’m making here is that I must remind myself to be more understanding. Human beings are a complex species. One never really knows the source of an insult. The husband of my associate may have lost some brain power before the surgeons re-opened his arteries. Perhaps his close call with death made him bitter. Perhaps he became impotent and I’m not the only woman he needs to denegrate.

But then, maybe he’s always been an asshole and she married him for his money. There’s just no telling what changes people or what experiences form their outlook on life. I wish I could read minds.

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All of us have experiences that we’d prefer not to repeat. As a result, we want to advise our loved ones against falling prey to similar circumstances. We see one of our kids about to make the same mistake we made in our twenties, we advise and they don’t listen.

We see our elected officials repeating a history that didn’t work. We gripe and complain and maybe write them a letter. Nothing happens, they carry on regardless.

It’s like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it’s done. If it sticks, it’s done…an old crazy idea that actually works. I tell my daughters, when I’m trying to give advice they didn’t ask for, that I’m just doing my Mommy Job, throwing spaghetti against their wall. Maybe it sticks, maybe not. It’s advice without consent. In their minds, I’m just Mom, talking away from another world. They verbally pat me on the head and smile and say, “I love you,” to shut me up. But then, when I was their age, I knew everything. I did not need advice, I needed to live my life.

Sunday phone calls to my mother became a ritual. She never offered advice, probably because she was a lost soul, more or less floating aimlessly through her days. I got to hear about her life that past week and always felt sorry that she had so little to amuse herself, so little excitement. I loved her and wanted the best for her but had no idea how to give her anything other than phone calls, short visits and various gifts.

Many of us come here, are born on planet earth, live our lives out of forgotten purposes, never truly awake in the present moment. There’s a scene from the film, “Joe and the Volcano,” where Lloyd Bridges tells Tom Hanks that most people are not awake, that  they’re sleep-walking through life, and how easy it is to run circles around them.

When Mom was dying of cancer, I stayed with her for her final 6 weeks. Every night she’d wake up about 3:00 AM for another morphine shot. I slept in the same bed with her, my hand in hers, so that when she couldn’t handle the pain she’d squeeze my hand and wake me, and I would inject her medicine into a port in her chest. I’d had training from an experienced RN on how to do this.

We treated her early morning wake up calls like a reason to have a tea party. I made tea, sat on the floor by her bed and we’d talk. One morning she said that she felt like a character in a novel, a prisoner waiting to be executed who’d made mistakes that could not be remedied. She and I talked about the possibility that reincarnation was a fact and that she might have another chance. She told me that in her next life she’d be sure to be fully awake, to live each day to the fullest and have no regrets. It was her way of telling me that there does come a time when it’s too late to change anything. I didn’t wake up until a decade later to find that I had been only half awake, lost in the illusion of living, like the star of my own soap opera who has missed the point of the whole thing.

I thought about Mom this morning when I was grinding coffee beans, still half into the fog of sleep. It’s the first day of a new year and I don’t feel any different than I did yesterday. My kids are busy living their lives. My Ex is rattling around in the old house, building walls and tearing out the bathroom. I sit here in my office, alone in my little house enjoying the solitude, taking stock of my past decade. There is no great epiphany, no Eureka! moment. I am happy in my life, looking into to a universe of possibilty. I don’t fear death but for now, the miracle of this life holds me a willing hostage. I resolve to give no advice to anyone who does not ask for it. My second resolution is to seek advice from those who may know more than I do…there could be multitudes!

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What is it about some people that they can make the most mundane things special? When you’re tired and dreading the necessary trip to the grocery store, they turn it into an adventure. Their enthusiasm for everything big and small is contagious.

Red peppers and dog dishes become things of art. Check-out girls become your new best friend. Life gets better with special people around. You find yourself noticing trees and kids and signs. Colors get brighter, music has more melody, the 6 o’clock news isn’t so bad. A sunset is suddenly the glorious celebration of a wonderful day.

When they leave, it’s like the air went with them. You find yourself trying to mimic their happiness. How do they do it? Is it a question of creating one’s own universe to the exclusion of all else? Is it a state of being. Is it merely a decision to be happy and voila! happiness prevails?

Does your heart stop breaking when you lose someone you love if you’re one of those people? Do evil and ugliness cease to exist? How can they care so deeply about so much and so many? Are they angels just visiting with a mission to show us all the possibilities for good?

They bring out the absolute best in everyone they meet. They love in spite of all the reasons they should not. They inspire when inspiration is gone. They decorate our lives with a mirror image of all that we can be. They are magical beings hidden in the cloak of human bodies.

I want to be special but my Irish temper gets in the way. I don’t like banal conversation. I definitely don’t like coffee clutches or office gossip. I’ve never been a woman’s woman, shopping for hours for clothes I don’t need. I’m impatient and bold to the point of insulting.

Wanna-be’s make my teeth hurt. Political commentators make me want to throw pudding at the TV. I want to go up and slap men with sex on their minds who follow their penises around. Pretty women who marry fat men for the money and then complain incessantly make me want to puke. Other people’s screaming kids make me want to put the whole family in a cage. I get angry when someone promises to do something and then they just fade me; make me feel like a bad movie. I have to work extremely hard at forgiveness. I love having a good reason to yell at assholes. I eat way too much chocolate. I could go one but you get the point; I’m just not special.

I guess you’ll find me slogging along this endless path to enlightenment indefinitely…

copyright: SusannahMorgan2009

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It’s a P.R. world. Public Relations is the technology of communicating management policy in a way that has people adopting it as their own. Or simply, PR is the advertising that gets you to buy an agenda.

Probably the most successful PR campaign of our time was David Axelrod’s campaign to get Barrack Obama elected to the United States Presidency. Apparently, the Chicago political machine decided it wanted the White House. A candidate was chosen. He had to look good, be able to talk and be appealing to masses of young voters. Enter Barrack Obama, a green Senator with only a short time in public office, with virtually no business experience who had charm, wit and a law degree. It was brilliant. Rock bands were hired to perform free concerts. In Germany, one of Europe’s top names performed a free concert just before Obama spoke. Thousands turned out for the concert and then listened to what the man had to say. In the US, Springsteen tickets can run $100s. He was free for Obama. The country was ripe for change after a President who had been hammered ceaselessly in the liberal press for years. Bush’s fiasco with the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq set the stage for a Democratic Party takeover.

David Axelrod has been plotting campaigns for Democrat politicians since 1985. His offices in Chicago hold a second private company called ASK Public Strategies that specializes in campaigns to  bend public opinion for the good of corporations. Axelrod is famous for a technique called “Astroturfing,” wherein front groups are formed to do protests or rallies in favor of whatever the PR firm wants. The client pays. If  there is a fight to eliminate dogs from city parks and Axelrod’s firm is in charge, be sure there will be a Citizens Against Barking Dogs group formed to protest loudly on the steps of City Hall. ACORN was ready made for the Obama campaign. They had thousands of employees and volunteers across the country. The unions joined onto the PR wave. Front Groups abounded across the country for Obama. (Note Mr. Axelrod no longer runs those firms because he is in public office but his long time partners are still plogging away.)

Axelrod had media connections going back decades that were outside the  political arena.  The message formulated by Axelrod et al was “Change and Hope.” “Yes we can,” became a battle cry across the nation. It was  like Woodstock on steroids. Yes we can What? never came up. The Republicans were campaigning in the tired old 1990’s style and had no traction against Axelrod’s PR machine.

So, here’s the formula:

1. Define your goal.

2. Do thorough surveys of public opinion on the subject. Get their “button words,”

3. Concoct your message to push those buttons.

4. Select a candidate or spokesperson to deliver your message.

5. Enlist every press and media contact possible to support your campaign. 

Now comes the interesting part, how to manipulate the press and media for coverage. A good press release needs 4 things  1.) A controversy, 2.) Big names, 3.) money, and 4.) it must put someone in the spotlight who is being attacked. (not really necessary, but sex will send it viral.) Politics is a ripe field for all items.

6. Once you have the media on your side, give the public what it wants and that’s usually something for nothing. Free rock concerts did the job in Axelrod’s campaign.

There’s a pretty strong caveat in the PR world; Don’t tell lies; tell an acceptable truth. Lies are mine fields, sooner or later one of them will blow up. In this case, ACORN was a mine waiting to go off and it did.

Now, after almost a year in office, and only in my opinion, Axelrod’s PR machine for President Obama is showing wear and tear. He apparently keeps throwing his ex-client, now President, back to campaign rhetoric when what the country wants is the appearance of an adult running things. The stimulus hasn’t worked, maybe it still will, Bills are getting passed that aren’t being read and hundreds of $billions of taxpayer money is going down the drain in bail-outs. Jobs are being lost and the economy is not rebounding as they said it would. Like that old commercial, “Where’s the Beef?” people are now asking, “Where’s the Change?” The carefully constructed talking points that are emailed every morning to supporters across the country are no longer carrying the day. That goes for both Republicans and Democrats. It seems to be politics as usual in Washington–all about what’s going on in the Beltway, not about what’s happening in our world.

You can use the formula above for any product or subject. The next time you read an article, try and look behind the words for the agenda it represents. What is the author trying to get you to believe? For myself, I don’t care what your politics are. I do care that you know when someone is trying to bend your mind.

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It’s late but too early for the witching hour. A pack of coyotes is yipping away as they run through the vacant land down the road. I’m playing a Rachmaninoff CD as I sip an Austalian red wine called The Big Kahuna. The wine has just enough of a raw edge to compliment the Snickers bar I’m munching. I can smell my home made chicken soup simmering in the kitchen. Charles Sutton, the ghost in my novels, seems to whisper thoughts straight into my mind. Sometimes my fingers barely keep up. In the light of morning, I may trade parts of this strange reality for something less weird, and maybe I won’t.

In reviewing the first book for the sake of continuity, wherein Sutton struggled with intermittent bouts of insanity, I came across his view of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto#2.

“The only furniture was a crude wooden table, a chair and the piano…One brilliant mandarin red rose stood majestically in a crystal goblet on the piano…I leaned against a wall, captured by that music. Rachmaninoff portrayed my life in his notes. I wept. His concerto described the blackest pits of despair and the quiet solace of sunshine above the clouds. It galloped on horseback with exuberant young men through forests of  the tallest pines, whispered the bewitching pangs of first love and cried out the visceral pain of love lost.  It twittered with the seductive curiosity of innocence and moaned the tired desperation of old age, until finally, it played my madness in all its suffocating defeat…Rachmaninof  saved my soul that summer day in Palermo.”

When I’m stymied or mentally clogged with the seemingly endless barrage of useless information that is daily life, I listen to the classics, let my imagination loose and float away for a while. When I’m driving, I like country music because I don’t have to think about it. I love rock and roll, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, U2, Blue October, and the list goes on when I’m cleaning the house, partying, or wanting a lift. And then there’s the beautiful silence of the early morning hours when even a thought is too loud. The birds are asleep and the only movement comes from me and the dogs trudging along our little country road under the big sky of Southern Nevada.

Shit! The soup is burning…

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Ethel sat in the kitchen across the table watching Joe, her husband of forty three years, as he chain smoked his way through the Saturday Times Sports Section. He coughed incessantly and his face turned a peculiar shade of dark red but he would not stop puffing away. He never spoke until his reading was done. When she’d finished the Life and Living section, paying particular attention to the ads for trips to Bermuda, she grabbed her cardigan off the hook in the hall and went out to prune her roses.

An hour later, she heard a crashing sound through the open kitchen window situated just above her best red rose bush. She smiled and continued her pruning, putting long stemmed blooms into the wicker basket at her feet. She filled the basket and carted the refuse to the compost heap at the far end of the garden before she returned to her kitchen. Old Joe was lying on the floor, mouth agape, his skin a pale blue. Ethel kicked him a few times to make sure he’d actually died before she called the police.

Joe’s demise  was ruled a natural death by the coroner.  The family doctor signed the death certificate, noting the long history of allergies, heart trouble and the fact of Joe being a smoker. Ethel wept copious tears at the funeral and looked suitably depressed at the reception afterward. A few weeks later,  she was found “recuperating from her great loss,” on a beach in Bermuda, thanks to Joe’s insurance policy.

A few months earlier, Ethel had gone into the Smoke Shop on the corner to buy Joe his weekly carton where she’d overheard a conversation about the label FSC on cigarettes. She listened as the talkers discussed the new government mandate to make Fire Safe Cigarettes and how the tobacco manufacturers were putting a plastic compound called ethylene vinyl acetate into cigarette papers to make them go out when not being smoked. At home that evening, while Joe was watching Dancing with the Stars, Ethel googled ethylene vinyl acetate and found that it caused breathing problems. It was afterall, plastic being burned and inhaled by smokers. 

Joe had allergies to latex gloves and a myriad of other things. It had become a full time care-giver job looking after him since he’d stopped working for medical reasons. He always said that if he was going out, he would go out doing what he wanted. He wanted to smoke a pack a day and she wanted him gone, so she kept buying his FSC cigarettes with the plastic in the papers, waiting for the day she’d be free.

My Take:

If you smoke, look on your cigarette package, usually  just above the bar code. If you see the label, FSC, you are smoking cigarettes with plastic in the papers.

Thanks to a 3 year campaign by a Front group called The Coalition for Fire Safe Cigarettes, organized under the National  Fire Protection Association, we now have laws that mandate  fire retardants be put into cigarette papers. The statistics that provoked this insanity are 900 deaths a year from people who died from fires caused by smoking. Nobody  bothered to find out how many of those 900 smokers who caused fires were drunk or under the influence of drugs.

According to Arkema Canada Inc., a manufacturer of  adhesives that uses ethylene vinyl acetate in their process, their handlers of the chemical should, “wash before eating, drinking, using tobacco products or washrooms. Handlers should use safety goggles and impervious gloves and wear a self-contained breathing apparatus. 

Thousands of smokers are now complaining of soar throats, coughs, lumps, digestive problems and eye problems. Don’t bother telling me about all the other chemicals in cigarettes. Go live in Mexico City where the air gives you the same contaminants as 3 packs a day…tell me why everybody there isn’t dead.

copyright: SusannahMorgan 2009

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220 Members of Congress in Washington voted YES to the Health Care Reform bill that has a clause that says if you don’t want health care, you pay a fine or go to jail. Add that to the Cap and Trade bill which came up in May and was passed in June with almost nobody in Congress reading it, and we’re screwed. Anybody in Congress kiss you first? Not me.

That Cap and Trade Bill enforces energy conservation through EPA retrofitting mandates on pretty much every building in the country. If you want to sell your house, you’ll have to have a label that says it meets EPA standards. But don’t worry, be happy; thousands of folks will be hired and trained as energy experts to come out to your homes and investigate whether or not your doggy doors leak heat or cold air. It’s the Green Jobs army! They’ll probably be putting big black Xs on doors of non-compliant houses.

I can see it now. I’m in jail, no make-up, wearing orange–I look like I have leprosy in orange; a big tattooed biker gal comes up to me and hisses,” Whatchoo  info?”

Tightening my sphincter, I reply, “No health care.” 

She glares at me  for a moment before returning to her homies who are bigger with more tattoos. That’s when it hits me that the warden has not segregated murderers and child molesters from us no-health-care criminals. I go back to my laptop, which the powers that be have mercifully let me keep, and beg my kids to send peanut butter cookies. That’s about the height of my visualization process because I’ve lost my house trying to pay my legal bills. I couldn’t have sold it anyway because the EPA mandated retrofit cost too much and I wasn’t poor enough at the time to qualify for the government subsidy. My fur people, 2 dogs and 2 cats are in foster care with friends and neighbors.

Meanwhile, I’ll be getting 3 squares a day and a free room while you’ll be looking for a job–any job. Small businesses provide up to 60% of the jobs in this country. New payroll taxes, mandated energy retrofits, and new rules to provide health care to employees will sink thousands of business. “Trailer for sale or rent. Rooms to let 50 cents.”

For God’s sake all you 1 and 2 line posters out there, say something to your elected officials!

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Raise a Glass to Scorpio…

So here I am about to turn 12 again. My astrological sign, Scorpio, puts me right in the middle of a widely misunderstood group. According to astrologists, we’re either Machiavellian or too good to be true,  psychic or manipulating, flying like eagles or turkeys on the ground. I do know that we’re loyal to a fault and warriors at heart. On the warrior point, I’m in excellent company with, “Old Blood and Guts,” General George Patton.

The 250 year old ghost/sorcerer that I’m spending my nights writing about is pleased about the association with Patton because the General believed in past lives. On the too good to be true side, I’m a glass-half-full-gal when my solid Irish temper doesn’t get in the way. But what the hell fellow Scorpios, we’re human and emotions are what we have, right?

In researching my first novel I had days when I felt tremendously inadequate as a human being. I was an abject failure at reaching that lofty perch sought by so many slogging away on their personal path to enlightenment—Serenity. Apparently, the enlightened are not allowed anger. But then as a friend and real healer told me, you can’t heal if you’re on the same emotional level as the sick and dying. I guess that lets me out as a budding healer until I erase anger or grief as a response to anything.

The folks that I’ve  met in search of enlightenment in India and in the West are very serious about their quest. Gurus espounding everything from 5 hours a day in a sauna to de-tox to 5 hours daily meditation to connect with your higher self are all over the place. Past life regression to rid oneself  of old wounds is a fact in many circles. It’ all about the way you envision your life, say some. No, it must be the affirmations you’re using that are wrong, say others. I will make sure you’re on the road to heaven, say some church leaders. What ever happened to, “Carpe Diem,” for God’s sake?

We’ve only got today. Yesterday’s a memory and tomorrow’s not here yet.  I’m in my rubber room, writing this to you, whoever you are, thinking that I’m missing some excellent weather outside. My daughter’s horse in my back yard is calling to his friends across the road and I’ve got an excellent  bottle of wine ready for opening. On my birthday I intend to count my blessings…it’s a long list…and put some concealer on my face to hide the wrinkles that argue my idea of  being twelve. My motto: It’s all a matter of mind over matter; no mind, it doesn’t matter. I’ll keep on believing what I want. Check out susannahmorganbooks.com for my novel.

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I’m on a jihad to kill flies, hence flyhad. I live in front of a neighbor with 100 birds. Flies love birds. I hate flies. They sneak into my house. But, after a day putting up with every kind of human dysfunction, a flyhad is just what I need. A lovely blue swatter and a dozen flies. Swat, swat, swear, swear, dead, dead. Ahhhhhhhhhhh!  Who needs road rage when you’ve got flies?

As the weather turns colder on my little patch of desert land and the flies die out for the year, I’m turning my attention to other bugs. Take those people who think four letter words are a crime against God and Country when they’re really only a vague insult to the English Language. Do you know anyone, anyone at all who doesn’t swear sometimes? Do the profanity censors at google really think we’re going to not read Rolling Stone because a writer said, ”fuck?”  I got an email last week from a friend who forwarded me an  article on the banking industry from Rolling Stone. It was announced with great fanfare by google telling me that there was profanity in the email. So, I’m supposed to shut my eyes and punch delete? 

My Grandmother once told me that knowing when to say the word and get away with it was a mark of true breeding. I kid you not. She was 89 years old at the time, one of the last Great Ladies, with bloodlines going back centuries, who went to school with major department store owners and skied with Tolstoi. Her father, a drunken Irishman, married her mother for money and then used it to try and corner the grain market while his wife and daughters were on the obligatory 2 year world tour. Some of the money made it down a couple of generations but I was born with silver spoon in my mouth that somebody pawned.

It’s my understanding that the word has been around since the 16th century Holland where it was falsely attributed to Latin to prevent the higherarchy of the Catholic Church from penalizing those who used it.  Keep in mind that 500 years ago, the Catholic Church pretty much controlled Europe and one could be flogged or jailed for having sex outside of marriage. Over time, the word has been used to vent frustration, anger, disagreement or for just plain fun. In Hollywood circles, it’s a punctuation mark. It’s one of the first words a kid learns not to say in front of parents.

So, to all the illiterate pantywaists out there who want to return us to the 16th century, put political correctness above facts, who re-write dictionaries and re-define words to their own standards, it’s my party and I’ll swear if I want to!

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During the day I’m a real estate agent. During the night, I’m a hooker…just kidding, I couldn’t sell this body for more than a dollar unless I sold it for parts and then they’d probably be classified as well used and possibly defective. Anyone over 50 knows how I feel. Or, as my Aunt Vivie once said, shocking her entire family, “Old age is shit!”

They say that beauty is only skin deep. Give me a friggin break! When you look in the mirror and your knees look like sagging pantyhose, you know your world is ending no matter how many aging-gracefully-articles you’ve read. And what  if you hold a mirror under your chin and look down…make a note; don’t be the one on top during sex.

So here you are, the kids have left the nest and if he hasn’t already, you wish your husband had left with them. 30 years of problem solving and ass wiping have got you what, exactly? Sags, bags, a retirement account that shrunk, a failed purpose to do what you really wanted to do back in college, and you’re tired, so damned tired of being the one who must understand and not the one who’s understood. You’re saddled with the label of  “Nurturer,” and it makes you feel like a cow.

This is my place to whine. In our world of all the beautiful people on TV, of all the politically correct mania out there, menopause, wrinkles and PMS should be celebrated as  rights of passage. Well used bodies should be a tribute to having lived life. Laugh lines should be a mark of excellence. Instead, we spend hundreds on jars of stuff that are hyped as wrinkle erasers because youth is in and we’re out.

I intend to use this body until it just drops. Like the kid in the Charlie Brown cartoon said, “Wake up! Do everything!” Who really knows what happens when your body dies. We all  have our views on that.

I wrote a novel, THE SORCERER’S CONFESSION. It’s on amazon if you’re interested. In order to write it, I had to take the viewpoint of being a ghost, of not having a body at all. Now that was  something. I’m working on the sequel. The book got a lot of great reviews but then life got in the way–family illnesses, deaths– finally years later, I’m back writing  about the ghost most nights.  Persistence is the greater part of valor; don’t you know?

So, I go to my day job and try my damnedest to be the consummate professional PC real estate agent. But, I just had to put this sign on my wall. It says, “I can handle 38 assholes a month. DO NOT be the 39th.”

I feel better now. Go ahead, whine back. It’s good for the soul.

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