Specifically, this one, straight from the summer of 1987 :
And the perfect summer sound message, both lazy and judgmental. The perfect thing to get your backdoor party feeling good.
Woke up with this song playing in my head and decided that was as good a place to start blogging as any.
And I need those good vibes because between getting stuck in a weird problem in Pathfinder and whacking my nose on my tablet while rolling over in bed and the fridge freezing a big portion of my leftover Poke Okey, I am feeling a bit besieged.
Oh well, at least I seem to be over whatever infection I had. I still feel pretty tired, but that could just be my usual background level of depression reasserting itself after getting rudely supplanted by an infection for a couple of days.
Plus my nose is running, insert stupid joke here. That’s annoying. Plus there’s an ominous cloud bank of cumulus headache lurking on the horizon of my consciousness that has me feeling squirrelly.
Overall, I seem to be building up stress in way that is both unpleasant and unfamiliar. Perhaps this is part of the process of getting in touch with my id type emotions and I am going to have to face the fact that a healthy, emotionally intact, and functional me will constantly be struggling with the same high strung and reactive nature that made my father such an impatient and intolerable prick.
Well then so be it. Gives me a chance to prove to the world that I can handle it a lot better than him by not feeling like I have the right to take it out on those I love.
But I get it, Dad. If crankiness can build this fast in me right now, in my zero pressure life, I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had like, a job or something.
That doesn’t excuse anything, mind you. You still owed your family the basic decency to learn to control your temper like a grownup instead of throwing a tantrum all the time like a spoiled toddler just because you never learned to stand up for yourself at work.
Yeah I got you all figured out, the late Larry Donald Bertrand.
Still, if this buildup of stress is something I am going to have to deal with in the future, it is incumbent upon me to find some healthy way to deal with it.
And “just keep suppressing it forever” is not, I must emphasize, a healthy plan.
That’s the kind of thing that has led to my being a bit over a month away from turning 50 without having gone anywhere or done anything with my life.
I’ve been so damned sick for so damned long.
And I am going to do something about that in the future.
But in order to do so, I may have to accept that there were things I could have done about it in the past.
And of course, at long last, and by the most circuitous of routes possible, I will work my way back around to the scariest thought of all :
All the things I could do about it right now.
More after the break.
A message from the other side
Of our weekly trip to Denny’s, that is.
Sorry, but as far as I know, I have not yet begun to commune with the dead.
Though that would explain a few things.
Not that I am eager to open a line of communication with the departed. Most people aren’t that interesting to talk to when they’re alive, I hardly see how being dead would change that in the slightest.
If anything, their anecdotes would get even more boring.
“So what did you get up to today, dearie?”
“Oh, you know. Haunted my harlot of a daughter for a while, then had fun freaking out the cat. Then I tormented the soul of my still living ex husband. ”
“Really? And how did that go?”
“Quite well actually. I think he almost noticed this time.”
“Well keep up the good work. As for me, well, you know me. Spent the whole afternoon in the men’s shower room over at the Y. “
“You still doin’ that? What’s the point, it’s not like you can do anything with them. ”
“Yeah, but what can I say? It makes me feel alive. ”
Oh, but what about the secrets of the afterlife, you ask? Think of all you could learn!
Look, darling, the only secret of the afterlife that’s worth a damn is whether or not there is one and if they’re talking to me there clearly is and that’s all I really need to know.
So unless they’re bursting at the seams to tell me where they buried their gold or hid the will or what King Arthur was really like, I’d just as soon wait till I’m dead to know, thanks.
After all, I’ll have plenty of time to hear all about it then!
Everything from the period after “that is” to this point is preferentially to be read in the voice of Madeline Khan.
Ya know, I know I have said this before, but I really should go off on comedy tangents like that before. It was loads of fun to write and it’s quite acceptable mainstream comedy that would work quite well as part of someone’s one woman show or the like.
And I wrote it just for fun, on a whim.
I’m so talented that stuff like that just rolls off me like water off a duck’s back.
With a little modification, it would suit Hettie from Ghosts perfectly. It’s exactly her kind of New England robber baron aristocrat bitchiness and it would work wonderfully with her carefully crafted mid-Atlantic accent.
I could totally write a hilarious and bankable TV pilot script.
I could probably even direct it. I get on great with actors.
Hell, I could even edit it, in a pinch. Or play some minor part.
But that’s about it. For everything else I’d need…. other people.
Other people ruin everything. 😛
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.