I'm on YouTube!

It has happened, to me, of all people!  I'm on YouTube!  I have arrived!

Actually, I put myself on YouTube, after I gave a reading and a book signing today.  I had my friend Joan, who was attending, hold my iPhone and take a video of me.  When I got home, I sent it to YouTube.

It's still a big deal.  At least I think so, and I'm the one in the video, so I get to say if it is a big deal or not.  Those are the rules.

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdqTdLa_z6A

The Ancient Deities Support Society and Dysfunctional Family Primal Therapy Group

I have also posted this on HumorOutcasts.com.

I have an unfinished novel that I plan to finish eventually.  I don’t know when this will be.  It will be sooner if I don’t get sidetracked with other projects.

In the meantime, I thought I would have some fun with a few of the minor characters.  Here goes.

Welcome, everybody to the first meeting of The Ancient Deities Support Society.  I am SO excited that Mum decided to form this group and to make me the leader.  The life of an ancient deity in the 21^st Century is not easy.  My name is Hebe, and I am a goddess.

A minor one.

Who said that?

I did.

I might have known it was you.  I can smell the wine on your breath all the way over here.

You always had the biggest nose on Olympus!

(Laughter)

Dionysus, I told you to leave my daughter alone!

(Whispering and snickers around the room)

Oh, Hera, I cannot do that.  Hebe is such a … how do you call it … spoiled little snob.  All those boring emails she sends to us!  OOF-AH!  And now you make us come to this meeting!  Managgia!  And don’t call me Dionysus!  I am Bacchus!

I will ignore everything you say because you are drunk.

(Sounds of “Ooh!” from other attendees)

And you are the son of a whore, you … you … Italian bastard!

My mother was not a whore!  My mother was a saint!  She was loved by a god – your father.  I am your brother, you little idiot!

MUMMY!!  Make him stop!

It’s alright, Hebe.  There, there, Dear.   Don’t cry.  Just pretend he isn’t here.  You’re doing fine.

Yes, Mummy.  As I was saying, the life of an ancient deity in the 21^st Century is not easy.  My name is Hebe and … never mind.

Snort

Just ignore him, Dear.

This is boring.

This group has been set up to offer help, support and solace to any of us who are experiencing difficulties in this modern age.  Who would like to be the first to share?

I had great difficulty to get here and am now having difficulty to stay awake!

Shut up, Dionysus!  You are disrupting the meeting and making it hard for everyone else!

(Someone shouts, “You tell him, Hera!”  Everyone else giggles.)

Bacchus!  I am Bacchus!  I live in Italy now many centuries.  I grow the best Chianti in the world and the second best olive oil.  I don’t like my Greek name anymore.  And you want to make this group only to keep track of us and make us miserable!

How would you like to be hung by your feet from a cloud?

How would you like me to tell your husband Zeus what you were doing with those two cabana boys last summer?

I wasn’t doing anything with anybody!

I know.  But Zeus does not know that!

(The room explodes in laughter.)

That’s it!  I can’t take any more of this!

Where are you going, Young Lady?  Come back here this instant!

I’m going out for a beer!

Shakespeare and Coffee

(I wrote this earlier today.)

I must be bored right now, because I am reading the quotes on my Shakespearean Insults coffee mug.  I bought this a few years ago in The Strand bookstore, near Union Square in Manhattan.  In my defense, I also bought a Shakespearean Love Quotes mug, but it’s at home right now and I can’t get at it.

The average person’s vocabulary of insults is woeful.  To help remedy this situation, here are some suggestions for creative insults that could be used by people of various professions.  The Bard of Avon was quite a wordsmith, and he knew how to make quite a zing with them.  No, I don’t know which plays these came from.  I’m reading them off a coffee mug, for Pete’s sake!

Butcher:  “Mountain of mad flesh.”

Dentist:  “Veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth.”

Dermatologist:  “Thou art a boil, a plague sore.”

Exterminator: “Beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave.”

Farmer: “Elvish-mark’d abortive, rooting hog.”

Fashion Designer:  “The soul of this man is in his clothes.”

High School Biology Teacher:  “Poisonous bunch-back’d toad.”

Neurologist:  “Light of brain.”

Otolaryngologist:  “Not so much brain as ear wax.”

Psychologist:  “Anointed sovereign of sighs and groans.”

Schoolteacher:  “O gull, o dolt, as ignorant as dirt.”

Zookeeper:  “Bolting-hutch of beastliness.”

I will gladly accept any thanks for sharing these, after I finish my coffee.

 

The Reluctant Homemaker

My Mom and my Grandma made valiant attempts to domesticate me when I was a kid back in the 50s and early 60s.  They were worried because I was a tomboy.  I was not above playing with dolls.  Some of my best toys were dolls.  But I also had baseball bats, tennis rackets and cap guns.  BB guns were forbidden in our house, or I probably would have acquired one of those, too.*  When we played Cowboys, I had to be either Annie Oakley or Marshall Dillon.  I was not going to be some sissy girl who sat around waiting to be rescued.  I was tall for my age, so I made a good western hero(ine) … well, passable for a kid, anyway.

I never wanted to be a boy.  Being a girl was cool.  I just wanted the option of being able to do all the things that boys did, and I wasn’t about to get stuck in a gender role.  June Cleaver was not my role model.

In other words, I was okay with learning how to cook, sew, iron clothes and clean a house like all the other girls, but I wasn’t going to let all that interfere with playing baseball in the park, and I was really pissed that nobody ever made my little brother help with the housework.  He got off scot-free, the little twerp.  All he ever had to do was mow the lawn, and he got paid for that.  The only benefit my sister and I received for washing dishes was not being yelled at.  You can’t save up for a new bicycle with that.

                                                                    

One thing I never learned was how to change a flat tire on a car.  My mother, who was petite and feminine, could change a tire like a veteran mechanic.  You just never know.

Okay, so, like everyone who lives long enough, I grew up and grew older and I am now in my 60s.  My childhood domestic training has come in handy all these years, just because I have never been rich enough to hire someone else to do the freakin’ work.  In self-defense, I have learned to make housework as quick and as painless as possible, with the aid of the following labor-saving devices:

A Swiffer Wet Jet Mop

A Swiffer Sweeper

Swiffer Dusters

(Do you see a pattern here?)

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers

Lysol or Clorox Wipes

Cleanser

A funny looking thingy on a pole that I use to clean the bathtub

A toilet brush

A plunger

I have no rugs on my floor because I hate vacuuming, even though I have a perfectly good full-sized Dust Devil vacuum cleaner sitting in a closet.  I also have a cat.  Cats and rugs do not mix well, for reasons I won’t go into here.

The catch in all this is that I have to keep buying refills for the Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Lysol and Clorox stuff.  What’s a little expense, though, if it means less time spent trying to be a freakin’ domestic goddess and failing at it because I don’t care enough to really get down and scrub.

Grandma, please stop turning in your grave.  I turned out okay.  Really, I did.

                                                                                                                                       

*And I would have shot my eye out.  In addition to being a tomboy, I was a klutz.

Things Nobody Should Have Ever Told Us

There are some wise-sounding sayings that are not as wise as they sound.  It would have been better if they had not been said in the first place, or if they had been rephrased to make more sense.

Age is just a number. (Some anonymous old person).  So is the daily Pick-4.  Your chances of coming out ahead with that aren’t very good, either.

On the other hand, if anyone ever dares to call me old or suggest that I act my age, may all of their hair fall out, may they always smell like a field of dead cannabis and may they be ardently pursued by someone really ugly who only wants them for their money.

Follow your bliss. (Joseph Campbell).  This sounds really good.  The problem is, how do you define “bliss?”  To some people, smoking a joint until their eyes glaze over and they become stupid is bliss.  That’s an easy bliss to follow, too.  All it takes is some Weed, a room with windows and neighbors who don’t mind the smell.  Other blisses are not so easy to follow, such as a career as a writer.

Not only that, sometimes people think that a certain thing is their bliss when it really isn’t.  If you are tone-deaf and your voice sounds like a goat, you will not be very blissful if you labor under the delusion that you were meant to be the next American Idol.  On the other hand, the person who IS meant to be the next American Idol won’t be very happy following Dad’s advice and becoming an accountant.

In other words, this is open to misinterpretation.

The world is also full of other people who have ideas about their own bliss, and sometimes their perceived blisses compete with your perceived bliss.  Two people can’t occupy a stage at one time, playing the exact same role.  To follow your bliss you might have to fight someone else with the same bliss who is determined to knock your bliss out in Round 1.

Joseph Campbell never mentioned that.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry. (Oliver in Erich Segal’s “Love Story”).  Anyone who has ever had any kind of relationship with anybody knows how idiotic this is.  If you never say you’re sorry, even when you have been a total ass, your relationships won’t last long.

Sometimes we even find ourselves saying we’re sorry when we haven’t done anything wrong, just to avoid whatever is on the verge of happening.  This isn’t much fun, but neither is a fight to the death.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.  (Chuck Dederich, but who really cares?).   I’m not sure if this is meant to be an encouragement or a warning.  Enough said.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.  (Some idiot).  Yes … sometimes.  But sometimes even the tough prefer to hide under the covers, eat three pints of ice cream every day and watch cable TV when the going gets tough.  Sometimes they hide, eat ice cream and watch cable TV for a while, THEN get going.  Sometimes it’s vice-versa.  Whatever.  There’s a lot to be said for being a cringing wimp when the situation calls for it.  You avoid having to face unpleasantness until it turns around and bites you in the rear, at which point you’d better get tough or get out of town.

In the meantime, you have had a nice time of temporary denial. 

Confessions of a Hopeless Shopper

I can’t walk into any retail establishment and come out with only what I intended to buy.  I must have inherited this trait from my father, because all of my immediate female ancestors were great with money, even frugal.  My maternal grandmother thought that she was splurging if she bought her bread fresh instead of a day old.  My mother would never buy more than a dollar’s worth of gas at a time for the car.  (This was miserly, even in the 50s.)  My father’s mother once repaired one of my broken sandals by sewing it up with her own hands.  It didn’t look very good, but it held the shoe together.

My father, on the other hand, knew what money was for – to buy stuff.  Buying stuff on impulse made it more fun.  It was I Love Lucy in reverse.  Instead of the woman being the one who was scatterbrained with money, it was the man.  I take after him in this, with just enough influence from the female side to feel guilty about it.*

My typical shopping trip goes something like this:

It’s early evening.  The subway train pulls into my stop, and I get off and take the elevator down to the street (it’s an elevated stop).  “Ooh!” says my brain, “I’m out of toothpaste.  Better stop in Walgreens.”

The Walgreens store is next to the subway, so I push my way in through the door marked “Out.”  I take a shopping cart, not because I need it for one lousy tube of toothpaste, but because I can lean on it while I push it around.  I do the same thing in supermarkets.

The toothpaste is all the way over on the other side of the store.  I now have a shopping cart and many aisles to pass by or go through to reach it.  What happens next is inevitable.

By the time I’m finished, the cart contains a bucket of soft peppermint candies, a bottle of Softsoap Spa Radiant Body Wash, four bars of Irish Spring bath soap (on sale, saving me a whole dollar and twenty-five cents), two bottles of chewable acidophilus, two pairs of white diabetic socks (so comfortable because they are so loose), two pairs of black diabetic socks, four deodorants, and, finally, TWO tubes of toothpaste and a big bottle of ACT mouthwash (because I can't remember if I am running out of mouthwash or not and I don't want to take a chance).

On the way to the cashier, I have second thoughts.  I put the black diabetic socks back.  I have so many pairs of socks at home that I have to fight to get my sock drawer closed.  I never wear most of them.

I need three bags to carry home what was supposed to be one tube of toothpaste.

After many years of this, I have finally come to the conclusion that I am a hopeless case, and I might as well just give up and enjoy my bad shopping habits.  Life is too short to spend it without those extra bars of Irish Spring soap.

*But not guilty enough to stop doing it.

Fun With MRIs

Many people go into panic mode when they think of getting an MRI.  To them, it’s like being stuck in a locked coffin with a jackhammer being piped in.

I have never had that problem.  I like being enfolded in things.  If I had been Cleopatra, I would have loved being rolled up in that rug and shipped special delivery to Julius Caesar.  It was probably a little hot in there, but you can’t have everything.  I just hope, for Cleo’s sake, that it was clean.


Cleopatra's Packing Material

For me, the problem with MRIs is the boredom.  Lying completely still with your eyes closed and loud mechanical noises being pumped into your ears is not terribly amusing after the first 10 seconds.

The one thing I can do is let my imagination run wild:

Ah!  The Rejuvenation Machine!  I shall be made young, strong and thin again, and I will be a SUPERHERO!  I will call myself Magnetic Resonance Woman, and I will fight evil and nastiness wherever I find it, which means just about everywhere.

I will send criminals running for their lives, and they still won’t be able to get away from me.  I will break the power of the criminal underworld.  I will fly to the Middle East and, by force of my super personality, broker permanent peace and brotherhood among warring factions.  I will be given the Nobel Peace Prize.  I will write books and people will buy them, loads and loads of them.

Those noises are the rejuvenation rays being shot into my body!  NICE noises!  I love all of you!  I love everybody!  Just keep shooting those rays into me.  The more the better.  Magnetic Resonance Woman will be on her way!

“Ms. Minicozzi.”  It’s the voice of one of the technicians, and it breaks into my dream like an ax.  Now I know what Walter Mitty felt like.

“Yes?”

“We’re bringing you out now, and we’re going to inject you with the dye for the second part of the test, okay?”

“Will it make my urine come out blue or something?”

“No.  It’s not that kind of dye.”

So they shoot me with the dye, I adjust one of the earplugs so the noises won’t break my eardrum, close my eyes and put my hands in the right positions again, and let them slide me back in.

I am no longer Magnetic Resonance Woman in the making.  I am Queen Neferanankateeta of Egypt.  I am lying in a tomb, buried alive by my cruel husband, Pharaoh Jerkit, who caught me with the great love of my life, Jared the Hebrew.  I lie here waiting for Jered to come and rescue me, so that we can run away to wherever he came from and live happily ever after, having passionate, primal sex as only he can.  First, he will have to break into this tomb, unwrap me from these silly strips of cloth and carry me away.

“Oh Jared, Jared, how I long for your touch, your piercing eyes, your incredibly strong arms around me, for your … ooh!  Ooh!  OOH!  Oh!  Again!  Again!  Mmmmmm, that is so GOOD!”

“Okay, Ms. Minicozzi, we’re finished now,” says the technician.

Shit!  She couldn’t even wait for me to finish my fantasy!

“Great!  I’m ready to get out of here.”

Jared will have to wait for another time.