Tuesday, January 29, 2013

A QUICKIE: Postings that are short and sweet!




SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION
or
THIS IS ME, HIGH ON HUMOR AT HUMORPRESS.COM!



Amnesia Anyone (Semi-Finalist), Hamster Infestation (Honorable Mention), He Ain’t Heavy; He’s My Effigy (Semi-Finalist), Racy Rooster Talk (Semi-Finalist), Coach-of-All-Sports (Semi-Finalist), A Word That is Safe (2nd Place Overall), Weirdo Magnet (Honorable Mention)


LINDA L. ZERN

www.zippityzerns.com
www.facebook.com/lzern
zippityzern@comcast.net
www.smashwords.com/profile/view/zippityzern

Sunday, January 27, 2013

MAKE HIS A MASSAGE


My grandparents worked six days a week, for thirty years, owning and running a bar. To the best of my knowledge they never went on a cruise, took a mental health day, or faked cholera to get out of work. For fun, my grandfather used to chain up his garbage cans to thwart thieves, and my grandmother used to crush empty beer cans with a mallet for recycling. My grandfather called her Crusher. It was a term of endearment.

On Sundays they bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and hung out with their grandkids.

Here’s the real shocker; they managed to live long productive, tax paying lives without a single vacation or having one part of their bodies massaged.

It’s like reading about dinosaurs. Isn’t it?

My husband is a workhorse. That’s probably why I married him. I recognized the type. Until a recent business trip to Thailand, he’s managed to work his way through college, support a family of six, and become a member of the Osceola County Volunteer Mounted Posse without receiving, getting, or wanting a single massage. I admired that.

That’s all gone now. Thailand got him, and he did get massaged—his first ever. His confession was classic.

“I got a massage,” he said as the cell phone made ominous click noises as the signal bounced from Thailand to the far side of the moon to a slip-shod cell phone tower somewhere near Kissimmee.

I was horrified. “A NAKED massage with sexy Thai women?”

He wasn’t surprised at my leaping, jumping, and bolting to conclusions. He’s lived with me for a long time. In fact, one of the kinks in his neck might be me.

“No. Not naked. Just an upper body and foot massage. But it was fantastic. I may not come home.”  He sighed, sounding weirdly mellow. “I can’t believe a woman that small can press that hard.”

“Press what? Are you kidding me? Besides, I thought we were watching the money this month.  What with the middle class not getting slammed with tax increases, right?” Sometime sarcasm is the glue that keeps my bad attitude in its upright and stationary position.

“No worries. The whole thing cost me seven bucks.” He sounded dreamy.

“Seven bucks. What kind of massage was this? How long did this ‘pressing’ business go on?”

“An hour.”

“AN HOUR! You paid seven bucks for an hour long foot massage!”

“Yeah,” he said, contentment curled through the phone in a drowsy wave. “But I tipped her.”

“How much?”

“Three bucks.”

“Three bucks! You didn’t get a foot massage; you bought a slave. Shame on you. Shame.”

“No really, you should get one.” He sounded like a pot growing hippy with an extensive garden. “It would really relax you.”

“Not on your life. I have to stay sharp. I am the point of the spear.” Or was it that I was the handle on the mallet? Whatever. 

I admit I was curious. Life threatening calf cramps in the middle of the night I understood. Relaxation through digital manipulation was as foreign to me as wearing a thong in public, so I asked, “What all did she do to you?”

“I don’t know. They put me in an Lazy-Boy lounger, and I fell asleep.”

“Well, that explains the enthusiasm. We’ve never owned an Lazy-Boy lounger in our lives.”

Silence greeted my observation. I suspected he had fallen asleep and was dreaming of couches that transformed into hammocks.

“Right?” I prompted.

“Harrumph . . . gurgle . . . sure, right. No, I mean it. You should really try it.”

That was enough of that.

“Nope! I’m firmly convinced that it’s the knots, kinks, and muscle spasms that are the only things holding me together. I can’t risk it.”

“Okay, how about when I get home you massage me?”

One of my knots twisted into a kink. I know, because it made a grinding sound.

“Snap out it. The only thing I’m going to massage when you get home is your wallet.”

A snore greeted my tough girl talk. I thought about crushing some soda cans with a mallet or maybe chaining up my garbage to thwart thieves and relieve stress. It wasn’t like getting a deep tissue massage in Thailand, but it is family tradition.

Linda (Crusher Too) Zern











   

  


       



Thursday, January 24, 2013

That's Six for 6


For my essay/blog post "Weirdo Magnet" and my sixth prize for humor writing at Humorpress.com, a national contest for writers who write less than serious stuff. 




































































Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Daily Grind


Because I am so engrossing and we live in an era that celebrates the glory of accomplishing absolutely nothing, I’d like to share with my friends and family a day in my fascinating, engrossing life.

3:00am – I am awakened from a troubled sleep by a circus troop of raccoons assaulting the family trashcans.

3:13am – Motion sensor light comes on as the raccoons form “HUMAN” pyramid. That’s right; I said HUMAN. I imagine the raccoon heap now measures 4’ 11” inches in height and comes up to my chin.

3:20am – I race outside in my fluffy bathrobe with a broom to confront raccoon troop. Trip over garbage slung thirty feet in all directions. Realize raccoons have thrown invisibility cloak over themselves.

3:27am – Shake broom at nothing. Watch hair on arms stand up when the coyotes start howling.

3:28am – Go back to bed. Attempt to sleep.

5:00am – QUIT trying to attempt to sleep.

6:00am – Say a simple prayer of thanks that every man-jack of us have lived to see another day. (Note: We will be the first to admit that our family may occasionally merit Biblical destruction.)

6:09am – Check out cable news. Feel vindicated that every prediction I’ve ever made is coming true. Turn up the volume when it’s reported that a woman in North Carolina was attacked in her sleep IN HER BED by a surly—also rabid—raccoon. 

6:12am – Shuffle to the bathroom and because I’ve caught my great grandmother’s arthritis, I daydream about my granddaughters having to push me to the mailbox in a wheelchair every day. They will chatter happily as they push. Say a prayer of gratitude for such a wonderful granddaughters.

6:31am – Limbs and appendages begin to bend. Postpone nursing home reservation.

7:27am – Feed good animals (not garbage eating night marauders) stuff.

9:00am – Go to yoga and during meditation time, when I’m supposed to be emptying my mind of all stressful thoughts, I try to calculate the force necessary to kill a raccoon with a rock.

10:07am – Declare yoga a bust. Decide to try combat kick boxing next time.

Noon – Eat macaroni or rice or beans. I’m not kidding.

12:00pm to When-I-run-out-of-steam-or-the-coyotes-howl: I scribble and scribble words on virtual paper. Words that no one may ever read, but I still feel compelled to write, in spite of the fact that it makes me look like an agoraphobic shut-in.

Bedtime – When the sun sets and the chickens go to sleep, because I’m saving precious energy and resources for future generations—also I can work in bed while wearing pajamas. Don’t be jealous.

Tomorrow – Rinse and Repeat



Linda (Night Stalker and Fascinating Person) Zern




  

Monday, January 21, 2013

QUICKIES: Postings That Are Short and Sweet

I have strange luck--not bad, just strange. I am a bath taking, soak-in-hot-water-up-to-my-neck kind of girl. My bones require it. Without hot water up to my neck, I'll be reduced to a pile of calcified YaYa toothpicks. The universe knows this. So it declared war on my bathtub faucet. How does this even happen?


See my note "My Fixer Upper" for further exploration of the ways the universe can muck up a tub.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

That's Mrs. Oracle to You!

The Oracle at Delphi after being asked one too many dopey questions.

One of the mystifying parts of my job description as the Oracle of Saint Cloud is being expected to answer unanswerable questions. It ranks right up there with being asked to smell moldy cheese to determine “goodness.”

It usually happened like this:

 While napping—and happy, some miscellaneous kid would shove a block of sharp cheddar under my nose and screech, “Smell this! Is it still good?”

To which I would reply, without opening my eyes, “Sure. Sure. Just cut off the green stuff.”

But that’s not really the oracle part of my job, that’s more the food and drug administration part of my job.

The oracle part of my job consists of being asked stupid questions. Questions to which there are no rational answers. Questions that would stump people who think they know everything—like graduates of state universities. Questions like . . .

“Why did the cat wee-wee on all the Christmas decorations?”

“What is wrong with that crazy kid, and why won’t he quit sucking ink out the red magic markers?” 

“Why is that goat eating charcoal?”

“When will this kid learn to speak recognizable English?”

“What’s the best way to get bubble gum out of buttocks hair?”

Oh wait. That last question is one that I asked, back when my husband sat on a wad of bubble gum that wicked children had spit out in the bathtub. That question actually has an answer, but you’ll need to email me for the information.

And then there’s the ever-popular, “Why can’t anyone in the entire western hemisphere—except me—press the spring loaded toilet paper holder out, slip a new roll of toilet paper on, and pop the sucker back into the wall fixture?”

Oh wait!  That’s my question too. Hey, you know what I need? I need my own personal oracle, and then I could ask her the answers to all those other dopey questions.

Linda (Crystal Ball) Zern













Sunday, January 13, 2013

My Fixer Upper

Islands in the Stream

My husband and I were high school sweethearts. For our first date, he asked me to the homecoming dance. Before he asked me to homecoming, several of my peers told me that Sherwood Zern would be asking me to homecoming. Remember this was high school, so there was a lot of pre-homecoming date warnings and alerts. 

My peers were like the oracles of doom.

“Watch out, that Sherwood Zern is going to ask you to the homecoming dance, and he’s handy,” they intoned.

I thought “handy” meant he knew his way around the business end of a hammer. It didn’t.

Turns out handy meant something else entirely. We worked it out. He joined my church, and I didn’t slap his jaw off.

What we never figured out was why my husband was not so great while using the business end of a hammer, screwdriver, wrench, nail, or duct tape. It’s like he lost some fix-it genetic lottery. Some boys can fix connectery thing-a-ma-nots in the wall socketersocks and some can’t.

My boy can’t. Now don’t get me wrong. My boy is smart—way smart. People call him from the far corners of the earth to figure out why they can’t download the universe straight to their decoder rings. Smart.

He tries to be hammer handy, but he doesn’t have that “fix-it” gene. He has the “stab-yourself-in-the-knuckle-with-a-screwdriver-exposing-ligaments” gene. It’s wildly frustrating, not to mention a strain on our insurance deductible.

I’m pretty good at fixing stuff, if it’s low to the ground and not screwed on too tight. I’m short and arthritic.

Over the years, I’ve learned to be patient waiting for things to get fixed at our house. I’ve also learned to improvise.

Recently the stopper in my bathtub gave up the ghost. Stomp. Push. Stomp. Stomp. Smash. Nothing. Comforting bath water continued to drain away through the worn out tub plug. I looked at my husband. He was taking a steamy hot shower.

It’s important to note that I don’t like baths. I require them. Without hot baths taken in large garden tubs, I will turn into a pile of calcified toothpicks. True story. 

“Want to join me?” he said, leering at me from the shower steaminess. That’s my boy. Still handy in his own way.

“Nope! You hog the hot water and tend to give me black eyes with your elbows.”

Wrapped in a towel I padded out to the yard, scrabbled several ham-sized stones from the garden, dragged them back into the bathroom, and started stacking them onto the defective tub plug.

“What are you doing? I can fix that.”

“I know,” I said, “Because you’re a big, strong, manly fix-it man fixer. I just need to take a bath tonight and for the foreseeable future. It’s nothing personal.” The rocks started to take on the appearance of a tiny but functional pyramid. Water pooled around the stone formation. I took a bath with bubbles and river rocks. As good as fixed.

We have two sons. One can ‘make the shot’ at one thousand, two hundred yards and the other one married Sarah, a woman who’s pretty handy with a hammer.

Good to know. When things get too ridiculous, like when the handle on the shower enclosure stays busted for five years which forces me to have to pry open the shower door with the end of a nail clippers, because I’m too short to reach over the top of the shower door and push it open from the inside, I’ll call Sarah. She’ll fix it.

Linda (Busted Flush) Zern    











        




Thursday, January 10, 2013

Low Hanging Fruit - A Classic ZippityZern


One of my personal favorites. Happy Year that is New . . . 

Girls want their ears pierced because we dress them in pink as soon as they can breathe and burp; that’s what my women college professors taught me in the post-apocalyptic world following the bra-less sixties.  Boys become boys because we tended to hold them by one leg and dangle them over toy fire trucks. Girls become girls because we didn’t toss them in the air high enough or let them bounce when we dropped them. That was the theory—sort of.

 After thirty years of being married to a boy, thirty years of raising two boys and a gaggle of grand boys, and about a thousand years of interacting with boys and girls of all ages in my society, I would like to go on record.  The theory that boys and girls are exactly alike is craziness brought on by pre-menstrual cramping.

 When I was still newly hatched, recently married, and without personal offspring, I continued to cling to echoes of my college discipleship; I was very young. I was idealistic. I was a bright light of feminist idealism. My boys were going to cuddle dolls and reject catapults. I believed that—right up ‘till the boy/girl twelve-year old canoe trip.

 My worldview flip-flopped when I went on a church canoe trip with twelve-year old boys and twelve-year old girls—true, whatever gender identification damage caused by pink and blue booties had already been done, but they were a fairly typical bunch of human offspring. I was in charge of the pink bootie crowd.

 What I learned about twelve-year old girls at the time included:  they cannot canoe; they can bounce off of things while in a canoe (the bank, the other bank, and the giant felled tree in the middle of the river); they worry about snakes, alligators, bears, goats, and humidity’s effect on ponytails; they tire easily.

 What I learned about twelve-year old boys still haunts me.

 As I piloted my little ship-load of chirping girls up the river and back to base camp, I noticed one of the boys seemed to be dangling like a piece of loose fruit from a gnarled tree branch stretching out over the river. He also seemed to have no pants on. The reason he seemed to have no pants on is because he didn’t.

 The dangling tree branch boy was . . . hmmm, how to be delicate when discussing the antics of twelve-year old boys? The mind staggers, but I make the attempt. One of those boys, the dangling one, was in the middle of producing a certain organic by-product by hanging his bottom over a tree branch and allowing the organic by-product to drop into the water—just ahead of us, near a bend in the river.

 Please note: This organic product is produced when enormous amounts of Papa John’s pizza are consumed around a campfire and . . . oh, forget it.

 He was pooping in the river. This idiot kid was hanging his butt over a tree branch and pooping in the river.

 Twenty-two seconds later, coming toward our canoe was a nightmare torpedo of slow moving, softly bobbing, and horror evoking—poop.

 One of the more highly emotional, hysteria prone, sharp eyed girls in my canoe screamed, “It’s coming straight for us.” Then she pointed.

 The pointing was not necessary.

 Then they all began to scream—to a woman. I confess I may have yelped.

 As the leader, I attempted to steady the crew.  “Stea . . . dy. Steady. Steady on, ladies.” The poop torpedo bobbed closer, and ever so slowly—closer.

 Now the point of all this is to simply say that I have never, ever, in my life heard of any female of my acquaintance say, “Hey, Emily, climb up in that tree yonder, take a dump in the river, and then we’ll hang around in the bushes to see what happens.”

That’s what those blue bootie-wearing boys did; instead of hiding their faces in masculine shame, they hid in the bushes to see “what would happen.”

 I’ll tell you what happened. I dug my paddle into the water once the danger had drifted passed after bumping our hull once or twice, and yelled, “Paddle harder girls! We’re going to kill us some boys!”

 So when my daughters have come to me over the years to complain about some inexplicable quality of incomprehensible maleness, I simply make sure they understand some basics.

 “Boys are disgusting and they have poor potty manners.”

 Then I look my daughters, square in the eye, and sigh, “And yet we still want one.”

It has ever been thus . . .

 Linda (Run Silent, Run Deep) Zern

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

HAIR OF THE DOG


HAPPY DOG FACE

My husband and I got rid of our kids the old fashioned way. We swaddled them, wiped them, smothered them, adored them, bossed them, and then firmly and finally kicked them out. They went. It was too late. We were addicted to the swaddling, wiping, smothering, adoring, and bossing. We were addicted to the caring.

The dog arrived just as the kids escaped. That dog, and the fur coat she came wrapped in, was proof positive that my husband and I had lost what little equilibrium we had left. Just as our home became clean, comfortable, and hypoallergenic, we filled it with a mammal that sheds the equivalent of six angora sweaters per lunar cycle. She’s hairy. We have adapted.

We buy lint rollers in case lots from a start-up company in Indonesia. We qualify for the large quantity discount and the company Christmas card. Our account rep’s name is Omja; it’s a name that means, “born of cosmic unity.”

Last night as my husband pointed out that we were closing in on our thirty plus year wedding anniversary I was distracted by a tumbleweed of dog hair drifting languidly through the air. Waving a lint roller like a road flare, I expertly whipped floating dog hair from the air.

“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of a wrist, he ran a lint roller over the back of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I trembled and jumped a bit.

He said, “Sorry, I thought—you know—dog hair. There was dog hair on your . . . back parts.” He gave me a half grin and a shrug. I thought I saw dog hair drift onto his head.  

I nodded and rolled his head.

Climbing into bed, my husband lint-rolled his pillow and then mine, while I ran a lint roller across the part of the bedspread that catches our chin drool. In tandem, we ripped fur clogged sticky strips free from matching lint rollers, wadded them into clingy balls, and tossed the wads over our shoulders.

“Honey, have I told you that the last thirty plus years have been,” I said, pausing, as an errant dog hair floated by, “a thousand kinds of fun.”

He smiled his special smile, and ran a lint roller down the front of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I giggled. A dog hair stuck in my lip balm, making my lip itch.

I smiled my special smile.

Just as he leaned in to kiss me goodnight, our sixty-pound canine hair factory vaulted onto the bed and shook. Dog hair showered down like dandelion seeds in May. We lint rolled our own faces. Pushing in between us the dog flipped onto her back, burped a burped that smelled vaguely of plastic, shoved her four hairy legs skyward, and fell asleep in a puddle of her own fur.

“A thousand kinds of fun,” I repeated, quietly.

We tapped our lint rollers together. They stuck. We left them that way all night. Now that’s love born of cosmic unity.


Linda (Fur Ball) Zern

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