Tuesday, April 26, 2011

EMP - Envy Mother Preening, Each Monkey Picking, End Moon Ponging, Era Made for Pimples


An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse. It can be used as a bomb. It’s a bomb that’s heck on microwaves and such. I am an electromagnetic pulse bomb. It’s not my fault. I was born with extra electromagnets—also extra pulses.

The evidence:

Example #1 of my EMP capabilities -

I bought a Kindle, which is a nifty machine that uses electric to suck up all the words in the world at the cost of $7.98 per book.  The power cord of my kindle disintegrated like a cracker in a mud puddle. Holding the crumbling power cord in my hands, I tried to show it to my husband.

“Is this normal?” Bits of plastic power cord coating rained down like . . . like . . . well, rain.

Sherwood, my darling husband, did not look up from his electronic machine masters of which there are three.

“Did the dog chew it?”

Exposed wires bulged like worms from the dissolving plastic along the entire length of the power cord. Plastic sawdust coated my hands.

“It was plugged into the wall socket, behind the bookcase,” I said, squinting at the bare wires. “I mean, Ploodle did eat a couple of my computer cords, but unless Ploodle has become a wire eating beaver who can burrow under a bookshelf . . . seriously, look at this.”

Note: Ploodle is our five-pound Yorkshire terrier who has a history of chewing computer power cords, chicken throats, and brassieres.

He raised his bleary eyes from the glare of artificial computer lights—Sherwood, not Ploodle. I held the cord up. It continued to dissolve in my electromagnetic pulse bomb hands.

He gave me a professional diagnosis.

“That’s weird,” he said, turning back to his computer, also known as the mother ship.

“There’s a scientific explanation,” I mumbled. “There has to be.”

Example # 2

When I bought the computer before this computer and the computer before that one, the nice people at the Apple store gave me a free I-POD. It seemed a fun little gadget, and a lot of people tried to take it from me. (You know who you are, you thieving yetis.)

But I said, “No!”

The thieves narrowed their thieving yeti eyes at me.

I said, “It’s mine.”

And then I said, “What does it do?”

There was an involved demonstration in which various of my offspring punched mysteriously at the surface of the silvery gadget and then flashed the results of their strange finger movements to me and said loudly, “See!” and “Hear!”  Then they handed it to me.

I put the gadget my overall’s pocket and went out to garden while listening to Freddy Mercury sing about plump people riding on bicycles and living forever with rhapsodic bohemians.  Every time I bent over to pull weeds it fell out of my pocket into the dirt and worms.

The I-POD no longer works, BECAUSE I AM AN ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE BOMB—Duh!!

Example # 3:

I haven’t had a normal conversation on the telephone since we got rid of the “tele” part of the name in phone and changed it to “cell.” I have a bubble around my head of electromagnetic pulses that sucks up all the cells out of the cell phone the way some people can suck all the fun out of a Facebook status. The bubble also interferes with satellite transmissions, or I have a bubblehead.

Example # 4:

I can shoot static electric lightning bolts from my fingertips, but that’s only any good if you want to set dryer lint on fire.

Conclusion:

I hate being an EMP bomb.  I want to be a bombshell or a super hero.

Linda (Outgoing) Zern    



     



   

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Bomb Shelter


When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It was really annoying.

   The possible end of human existence meant that there was nothing to watch on our black and white television set, because the man I thought of as someone’s grandpa had been talking and talking and talking--forever.

   It meant that none of us kids were allowed outside to play hopscotch or stickball because of where we lived and where all our dads worked. Rose Marie Drive was too close to Cape Canaveral to take a chance on hopscotch. When the moon rockets roared into the sky the ground shook and sliding glass doors rattled. We were in the radius.

   It meant that instead of being at work writing technical manuals, my father was sitting at our kitchen dinette, his fingers fluttering and thumping against the Formica. When he turned to watch the flicker of the television, he looked like a man who’d forgotten where he’d put his glasses when they were on the top of his head all along. When the picture got fuzzy he mumbled bad words.

   The rabbit ears on the top of the TV probably needed someone to crumple the tinfoil up better, but who cared; it was just old people talking.

Based on the latest low-level reconnaissance mission . . .[Redacted] Guanajay Intermediate-range Ballistic Missile Site #1 will probably be fully operational on 1 December . . . [Redacted]

--CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)


   When my father wasn't watching the television, he scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, drawing heavy thick lines. My mother hovered. She complained that her eye was twitching; she pushed her finger against one eyelid while my father scribbled and talked.

   "It's true, what they're reporting. A-1-A is a parking lot, everyone trying to get out of the Keys. The police are trying to keep the intersections clear. No one going the other way, just Army trucks . . . troops. We couldn't get out if we wanted to. We've waited too . . ."

   "Late," my mother said. "The Christensens left yesterday."  I should have listened more carefully to the way she was saying what she said, but I was only four. I hadn't perfected the art of low-level reconnaissance, yet.   

   Still, I watched and listened and colored while sitting on a bar stool at the breakfast bar in our new house on Rose Marie Drive in Titusville, Florida.

   That breakfast bar was one of the big selling features for those cookie cutter row houses, a stretch of crisp, white Formica, jutting out from the kitchen countertop in a seamless length of modern design.  It was where all the neighborhood kids lived when we were inside, to eat our TV dinners and be out of our parent's way. It was where we sat and eavesdropped on the exotic customs and culture of an alien adult world.   

   I loved sitting there with our dog, a stuffed sausage of a Chihuahua, panting at my feet, waiting for me to sneak him all my supper. I would swing my dangling legs back and forth, like a quiet satellite on the fringe of my parent's universe. The space under the breakfast bar was another kind of place--a snug, close, hide-and-seek spot tucked away from grown-up worries, a handy choice for emergencies and pretending, a handy choice for disappearing. Between the garbage pail and the end of the counter, the breakfast bar was a child-sized refuge and retreat, like a card table with a blanket thrown over it, it felt safe under there.  

   The strangeness of my father sitting in the kitchen, drawing on notebook paper when he should have been at work made me uneasy, in a vague, ants-in-the-pants kind of way. My father didn't draw. He didn't come home early. When my father did come home from Cape Canaveral, he flopped into an E-Z-Boy lounger and made me rub his feet. They smelled terrible. 

   Home early, he drew lines and circles and scribbled important looking words. Curiosity pulled me down from the barstool. The glyphs on his paper drew me like a treasure map. The dog trailed behind me his nails tick, ticking against the linoleum.

   I pointed to the notebook paper.

   "What's that say?" My father kept writing and my mother made her fingers into a hard teepee. They ignored me.

   I tried sounding out the strangest of the words by myself, bit by bit, the way I'd figured out by learning to read "Constantinople and Timbuktu" at the end of Hop on Pop.

   "G-en-er-aaaaa-t-or, gen-er-a-tor." I made the G soft and the A short.

   "Long A. G like J. Gen-er-A-tor," my mother corrected. "Is a generator part of the package? It looks very complicated," she said, "and expensive."

   "Butch says that all we need is a rough sketch and this buddy of his can come and dig a hole in a day or two. It's like a pre-fab deal. Dig a hole, dump it in, and then you add stuff. Shelves and shit, any way you want it."

   "But isn't it too late? The Christensens left yesterday. They're probably to Tennessee by now." She sounded like the only kid in class not to get an invitation to the best birthday party of the year. "There's nothing left at the store, worse than a hurricane."

   My father wrote the words B-O-M-B and S-H-E-L-T-E-R in fat important letters across the top of the paper. He pressed so hard the pencil lead snapped.

   "Shit. Get me another goddamn pencil."

   My mother hustled to the junk drawer still muttering about empty shelves and too little time and things worse than hurricanes. My father drew tiny circles on a straight line, inside a rectangle.

   "Are those rocks?" I asked, pointing to the circles, inching closer to my father's side.

   "Food. Cans. Canned goods. Peas. Tuna. Beans." I got too close. He pushed me back with his elbow. "Go eat something. Make her eat something for Christ's sake."


The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war.

-- President John F. Kennedy,  Address to the Nation, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22 1962 (from the American Rhetoric.com website)



   A tiny worm of worry twitched behind my bellybutton.

   My mother and father started to argue. This was back and forth talk I recognized, the cadence of verbal warfare as familiar as any Dr. Seuss book. It started over my criminal, selfish waste of food. It drove my mother crazy that I didn't eat. It made my father crazy when my mother got crazy over me not eating. I watched my father carefully for signs that he might want to teach me a lesson tonight, making me sit in front of a plate of ice cold fish sticks or mashed potatoes for the longest time, because people were starving, somewhere or everywhere. I couldn't remember.

   Then their anger became a tug of war of words over canned goods and ways to hide from bombs and our neighbors leaving yesterday and something called fallout.  My mother wanted to drive away from the fallout. My father wanted to pretend that there was time to build a place to hide away from the fallout by digging a hole in the ground, in our backyard, behind the new chain link fence.

   I knew about bombs from the big kids who went to school and how you had to practice hiding under your desk so the terrible bombs couldn't find you. It was the Russians. Those Russians weren't starving, but they were making missile-bombs to drop on our friends at school and our house and daddy's work and the Spooner family with their seven children and my best friend Teresa and the monkey bars and . . .

   I looked over at the dog, waiting under my barstool for fish sticks to come raining down from the sky.

   "What will our doggy eat when we hide from the bad bombs?"

   "No dog food. No dog. Just people. Tell her."

   That's when the worm of worry started to crawl around looking for a way out, trying to find someplace to hide. I started to worry about how the dog would know to get under a desk if I didn't help him.

   "Don't be like that. It's not like we're actually going to build this silly thing. Let her pretend to bring the stupid dog."

   At some point, I started to cry.

   "I'm not doing this for my health. You can't put a dog in a bomb shelter. Where's a dog going to shit?" He looked at me, and I knew I looked booger-crying-ugly because of the way he stared at me, disgusted. "Shut up that noise. You can't have dog shit in a bomb shelter."

   My mother laughed. "Do you know how stupid that sounds?"

   Then, my father's face started coming apart like a broken coffee cup, all his face lines became sharp points and stone edges.


United Press reports eruption of violent rioting and terror bombing in more than half dozen Latin American capitals. It states that La Paz, Bolivia, was the scene of street fighting near the United States Embassy involving 3,000 anti-American labor union members, pro-American demonstrators, and police reports five killed and twenty-six injured.

--CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)




   "You're blaming me for the goddamn Cuban Missile Crisis? What have you done? There's nothing here."

   He marched to the kitchen cabinets and started flinging doors open, some of them banging closed again, and one door ripping loose from its hinges. It dangled from the one remaining hinge.

   It was always like that with my father and mother, missed cues, vague hints of disapproval, the low burn of rising tension and paranoia, and then the inexplicable blowup. 

   Grabbing boxes of noodles, he threw them over his shoulder, an open box of spaghetti skittered across the kitchen floor. He dropped a jelly jar. It shattered into glittery grape-smeared dust. A bottle of ketchup exploded, splashing across the linoleum. My mother started to back away from the pick-up-sticks of loose noodles, the grape jelly full of glass, and the angry words that were not going to stop, not for a while.

   The dog licked ketchup off of the floor.

   I remembered to shove my fist against my teeth, so I could make the crying stop when I jumped down from the barstool. Scooting on my bottom, I wedged myself next to the garbage can under the ultra modern, Formica covered breakfast bar. Globs of food dripped and drabbed down the side of the cabinet under the bar where I would sneak food into the garbage or the dog. My mother couldn't see underneath the counter to clean the spills. Stuff got stuck under here. I pulled the bar stools in tight, trying to protect myself with a toothpick barricade against an explosion of condiments and pasta. I glued my chin to my knees, listening to my father empty out our kitchen cabinets, listening to the sky falling.

   The dog yelped. He scurried under the breakfast bar and pressed himself against my leg.

   "Bill, stop!"

   The barrage ended. The cabinets emptied. He stomped away to listen to the president explain about the end of the world.

   Kneeling, my mother started putting little pieces of jelly jar into bigger pieces of jelly jar. When she saw me jammed under the breakfast bar she started crying but not louder than President Kennedy talking in the living room.

   I stayed under there for a long time even when my mother had finished picking through shattered glass and sweeping ruined noodles into a dirty pile. I knew to stay put until the all clear sounded or bedtime. I stayed until our fat dog licked my face, making me laugh, because his breath smelled like ketchup. He smelled like dinner, the dinner no one was going to remember to make me eat.


The Cuban crisis, we hope, marked an end and a beginning--an end to violent adventures designed to overturn the equilibrium of world power, and a beginning of fresh initiatives for peace, including a new attack on nuclear testing, disarmament, overseas bases, and on world social and economic problems.

--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Memorandum For the President- "Post Mortem on Cuba," October 29, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)



   When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It wasn't the scariest part of my childhood.


  






Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Tale of the Faux Toupee


Our five-pound Yorkshire terrier, Ploodle, does not go to a dog groomer. His mother puts a bowl on his head and cuts his hair with loving hands at home. I am Ploodle's stylist.

I also own the bowl. 

When Ploodle looks like a possessed oven mitt, I know it is time to "trim him up." When I'm done he often looks idiotic. Sometimes, for a bit of whimsy, I leave the hair on his legs longish so that he looks like he's wearing UGG boots. People laugh at him, but he's a very secure fellow and has a fine self-deprecating sense of humor.

After giving Ploodle a crew cut in honor of crew cut awareness week, I ended up with a tiny haystack of fuzzy Yorkie hair that I wrapped in a towel (for immediate disposal in the garbage), but then I forgot and stuffed the towel with the whole hairy mess in the wash machine, which got washed on the "Heavy" cycle, probably more than once, and then got stuffed into the dryer and dried on "High Heat-Cottons."

The haystack of Ploodle hair turned into a toupee--a bad one.

I called my husband.

"Honey, I can't find it."

He's used to getting phone calls from me, in the middle of the day, that contain little or no context, information--or sense. He's used to not knowing what the heck is going on.

"What? What can't you find?"

"The toupee."

There was a pause. It might have been beyond pregnant.

"Remember?" I said, frustrated anew at my husband's lack of mind reading talent. "Remember? That wad of Ploodle hair I showed you; the wad of hair that kind of got cooked in the dryer into a giant placemat and that ended up looking like it was made of Yeti armpit fur? Remember?"

The memory came back with a thud. I know; I heard a thud sound.

"Oh right, it was disgusting."

"Okay, so I put it in the bathroom garbage, but now I can't find it."

"Well I don't have it." Sherwood is working in Detroit.  He flies home on the weekends so I can keep him up to date on important stuff.

I wandered through the house trying to decide if I had dreamed the whole dog hair toupee incident.

"I can't find it anywhere." I noticed another one of the dogs wearing what looked like a mustache. "Wait a minute. Either Coco is trying out a disguise, or I think I'm onto the location of the missing toupee." I followed a breadcrumb trail made out of dog hair toupee bits.

Still talking to Sherwood, I walked into our bedroom. Ginger, our soldier son's English Bull-dog, looked up, her mouth full of either the butt end of a molting moose or the missing hairpiece.

"Never mind. I found it."

"Thank goodness. For a minute there I was afraid that you were going to accuse me of having packed the darned thing." He clicked off.

Ploodle stood by, looking embarrassed.

"What are you embarrassed about? It's just hair.  I got all the way to the gym with a piece of that white sticky tape from a lint roller stuck in my waistband, trailing out like a castle banner. And some woman walked by, saw it, made a face AND DIDN'T BOTHER TO SAY ANYTHING."

Ploodle had the good grace to blink.

"That's right; just about the time I think I'm looking hip, fit, and cool, it's a safe bet that something ridiculous is going to be stuck in or on the back of my pants."

Ploodle wagged his nubby little tail.  I sighed.

"I'm just glad it wasn't your dog hair toupee stuck to my pants. Wouldn't that have been hard to explain?"

Ploodle, Ginger, Coco and I decided to go play jump over the horse poop piles until dinner.


Linda (Close Shave) Zern 





  

















Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Bucolic Bird Brain


I recognized that look as I stared at vacant eyes, gaping mouth and body language that screamed, "Feed me!" I remembered that look, sitting on my couch.  I knew a hungry teenager when I saw one.

The problem was that this "teenager" was a bird--A BIRD--a half grown scruffy-feathered, gap-beaked blue jay bird, and it wanted to be fed. Typical. I had just scratched up an earthworm with my garden rake. What could it hurt? I fed the earthworm to the scraggly blue jay teenager bird. It was a bucolic, earthy gardener's moment. Charming.

It was also summertime. Our air conditioner was broken. Typical. So, I called the AC man, a nice congenial man with interesting tattoos on his large muscles. He looked like he could tunnel out of a prison or had.  He arrived and got to work puttering around the air conditioning unit. I puttered around my garden.

The entire time I had that strange, eerie feeling that someone was watching me . . . and yelling at me. Typical.

There it was, plopped on a mulch pile--slouching, staring, and yelling--the blue jay teenager bird. Not only was the pimply bird slouching, it looked like it needed a shave and some deodorant. Typical.

I walked closer. Its mouth gaped open. I attempted to shoo it away. Its mouth gaped wider. I talked to it and said, "What's your deal?" Its mouth almost unhinged at the jaw. I recognized that look. It wanted to be fed--again.

Get a job, I thought.

The AC man finished his puttering and brought me the bad AC news. We stood shoulder to shoulder, the invoice on his clipboard a history of AC neglect. He gave me the total.  I sighed. I wrote a check.

Blue jay teenager bird, its tiny brain firing on all 1.5 cylinders, recognized "worm-getting-lady." It sailed, erratically, from the top of the mulch pile, past my face, to land on AC man's shoulder. I screamed. AC man used his large muscles to toss his clipboard. AC man screamed. The teenager bird's mouth gaped open. It didn't budge from its shoulder perch.

I thought I should explain why I had collapsed onto the ground.

"I'm so sorry. The baby bird thinks that I'm its mother. I fed it a worm. It startled me."

AC man tried to dislodge the blue jay teenager bird from his shoulder. It reluctantly flew away to a nearby tree branch.

"Wow, how amazing was that?" I said, trying to sound like Snow White, who had the power to sing birds out of trees and was used to them landing on various body parts.

"Lady, you shouldn't scream like that." He took my check and retreated to his work van.

I took my rake and retreated to my garden just as the blue jay teenager bird (once again recognizing "worm-getting-lady") dove at my head from the tree branch. It crash-landed onto my hair. I screamed the scream of the banshee and began running blindly, flailing wildly, and sobbing hysterically. The blue jay teenager bird's mouth gaped open as it clung to my wildly bobbing head.

AC man's van, its window tinted, never moved even though the engine was running. I streaked across the yard, back and forth, in front of the work van. The bird rode on my head like it was waiting for the eight- second count in a bull riding competition. I thought I detected the soft lilt of laughter, but seeing as how my screaming went on for while, I could be mistaken about that.

Finally, blue jay teenager bird noticed a fat grub on the ground and flew off in an attempt to feed itself. And that's how I became an empty nester.

I promise; this story is true, mostly. It is an example of creative non-fiction, which is the truth dressed up to go to a party.  For example, I could have been wearing a hat, but it's funnier if the bird landed in my hair.

Happy spring,

Linda (worm-getting-lady) Zern  













"Feed me!"
     
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