Naked Fear

Naked and Afraid is a show. It’s a television show that attempts to demonstrate that human beings when nude are hopelessly hopeless. The show’s creators strip the clothes off of one man and one woman, drop them in some remote hostile location, and then film the resulting chaos—also starvation.

The producers try to get folks on the show with skills that might come in handy while nude. They search high and low for survivalist types.  It doesn’t matter. Everyone starves to death in twenty-one days. Everyone. Even if the couple survives, everyone has to buy a whole new wardrobe from K-Mart when they get back to civilization. Everyone.

After having watched several episodes, I have come to several conclusions about evolution, survival, starvation, and pasties.

1) You can never be too fat when you’re naked and afraid. Watching the bare-bottomed couples drop eighteen, twenty-seven, forty thousand pounds in twenty-one days makes me want to pack on the weight. Eating dirt, mud, mosquitoes, and sea urchins does not keep a sufficient amount of flesh on your body, and if you’re fashionably svelte to start with you might as well dig your own grave and crawl into it, because you’ll be a skeleton at the end—if you make it that far.

2)   Evolution is bogus.  There is no way the human body evolved so many dangly bits voluntarily. No way. Because when you are naked and afraid in the middle of a thorn torn savannah, people with the most and biggest dangly bits would be the first ones snagged to death on . . . well . . . everything:  thorns, cacti, brambles, sandspurs, and all the other spiked splintery stuff. If evolution were true we would all be shaped like torpedoes or dolphins and snag proof.

3)   Water will kill you. If a naked person drinks water raw it will kill them. If the water doesn’t stop falling out of the sky it will kill a naked person by dissolving their skin or freezing their bones. If a naked person swims in the water there’s a chance that person’s dangly bits will snag on corral, thus killing them.

4)   Clothes are not one of the top three survival priorities. Believe it or not.

5)   I’m too afraid to get naked.

If I am ever on the show, I told my daughter that after finding water, building a fire, and grubbing up some food, my next order of business would be to make myself some pasties.

“Why?” she wanted to know.

“Because I would be constantly worried about snagging myself on something—also unbearable sunburn since I’m not shaped like a dolphin.”

“How do you intend to make pasties?”

“Wild honey and mud.”

“That doesn’t sound like clothes.”

“I know, but how else am I going to get the grass to stick?”

Thankfully, in our civilized world, we do not have to be naked and afraid. We can be fully clothed and mildly insecure.

Color me civilized.

Linda (Honey Do) Zern

                        

  

PUBLISHED!!!!

Linda L. Zern, a writer from Saint Cloud, Florida, was named a Semi-Finalist in the 2nd Quarter 2013 "America's Funniest Humor!"(TM) Writing Contest held by HumorPress.com , one of the Internet's highest-ranking humor contest sites.



For her accomplishment, Zern has earned publication in HumorPress.com 's online humor showcase. Her entry, "Petting Old Goats," is about the joy and travails of old goats and their love lives. 

"Petting Old Goats" will be featured in the main showcase until new results are posted after completion of the current contest, which is accepting entries through September 30, 2013.

Other writing awards and recognitions earned by Zern include eight recognitions by Humorpress in eight submissions.

HumorPress.com 's bi-monthly writing contests provide great opportunities for writers who specialize in humor, and for those with real-life humorous anecdotes to share. 

AS MY GARDEN GROWS

A lot of folks think that when (not if) the world goes into the apocalypse dumper they are going to be able to walk outside, throw some lettuce and tomato seeds on the ground and grow a salad with croutons. A lot of people are going to die hungry and sad.

I am a gardener. I grow things in dirt. I crawl around on my bony knees, scrabbling around among the grubs and weeds, trying to grow stuff in dirt. Once in a while, I succeed but not always.

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being next to the dirt.

DIRT IS NEVER ENOUGH:  Most dirt is a sad excuse for potting soil from Home Depot. Most dirt requires big help to be useful in the growing of anything more than weeds and blisters. In Florida dirt is mostly sand mixed with heartbreak.  

POOP IS GOLD:  The stuff that falls out of the back end of animals is better than cash when it comes to fixing the heartbreak of sand. When other people see nasty rabbit pucky, a gardener sees ambrosia for squash. 

MOTHER NATURE IS A WITCH (WITH A B): The natural world is one of two things, too much or not enough. Not enough rain and the harvest looks like pretend vegetables for a doll house. Too much rain and the harvest looks like the mushy stuff that comes out of the back end of animals. Perfect is not a state known in nature. Quit waiting for perfect. Adapt. Adjust. Anticipate.        

THERE’S A LEARNING CURVE TO EVERYTHING: A lot of people in cities think they like nature, natural stuff, and organic as long as their apples don’t have wormholes in them. News flash! Organic means wormholes!  Bugs chewing on a cucumber means that the cucumber wasn’t raised in a waterfall of bug poison. Think about it!

LADYBUGS ARE NOT THE DELTA FORCE: Organic gardeners like to tout the benefits of buying ladybugs from the ladybug store and unleashing them on the ravaging hordes of “bad” insects poised to eat my garden right down to the sand. I garden in Florida. Ravaging hordes of “bad” insects in my state are like Visigoths mixed with Nazis. Unless ladybugs come armed with flamethrowers they’re going to lose the bug wars. I tend to crop dust.

BE PREPARED TO WEEP:  I have learned over the years that I can do everything right. Right plants. Right soil. Right time. Everything seems to be growing along fine, and my vegetable garden looks like the rosy cheek of a newborn baby, full of promise and life and hope and joy, and      then . . . flood, fire, famine, cricket swarm, cutworm pirates, rabbit herd, deer swarm, the neighbor’s goats or chickens or don’t ask . . . and it’s back to sand and heartbreak.

BE PREPARED TO REJOICE: But when it works . . . Watching my grandchildren pick green beans, that they have helped me plant, makes me hopeful. They have watched and waited and weeded and worried. By watching they learned to look beyond themselves. By waiting they learned patience. By weeding they learned to work. And with worry came the ultimate relief of success.

GARDENING IS ABOUT MORE THAN DIRT. MAKE MINE A GARDEN.

Linda (Growing My Own) Zern        

    

         

WELL MET, GOOD FELLOW

My husband dropped me off at the Melbourne City library, after running up on the curb in our mammoth, politically incorrect pickup truck. The truck looked a little tipsy when he pulled away. I laughed lightly, waved vaguely at the retreating truck, and quipped, “I thought he was going to drive right up to the circulation desk.”

The woman waiting outside the library for her ride laughed with me.

Then she stopped, looked me over, and said, “Your hair looks amazing.”

I was delighted, pleased, and flattered. I flipped my newly streaked and layered haircut.

“My son-in-law is a hair dresser. He’s a genius. How lucky am I?”

“Not lucky. Blessed. It makes you look so young.”

“Thank you so much. You’ve made my day.”

Laughing again, we waved and she left.

It was a pleasant, civil moment on a rainy Florida day. Did I mention that the woman that complimented me so graciously was African American? Or that I’m as white as white can get? I didn’t? I guess it didn’t matter.

SHAME ON ME!

My son pushed a laptop computer screen in front of my face. I squinted at the image. It appeared to be a photograph of a boy biting a girl's thigh.  Not only was it a picture of a young man biting someone's thigh, but I knew the biter boy.

“Is that guy biting that girl’s thigh?” my son asked, and then added. “Hey, don’t you know that guy?”

We began to scroll down to other pictures of the young man in question biting other questionable girl bits and mugging for the camera.  

“Yeah, I know him,” I sighed.

“Didn’t you write that guy a letter of . . .”

I cut him off.

“Yes, yes, I wrote him a letter of recommendation for the college of his choice. Apparently, so he could go to that fine institution of higher learning and study up on preferable methods of biting girl’s meaty leg parts.”

“Wow!” 

I agreed. “Do people on social networking sites not know that we can see them?”

My son looked at me with a puzzled frown.

I closed my eyes while visions of thigh biters danced in my head.

“You know. It’s like my theory of why people pick their noses in their cars. Glass feels solid, even if it is see-through, so people feel safe and private when they dig around in their nostrils in their cars. I always want to yell, ‘We can see you digging for gold!!’" 

But no one ever hears me.  Apparently, glass is also sound proof.

The thigh biting Facebook montage just highlighted, for me, why writing letters of recommendation can be so problematic, because the world has become a leg biting, obscene gesture flipping, booby flashing extravaganza, while I still tend to blush when I fill out the forms in the gynecologist’s waiting room.

The blush is off the world’s rose, that’s for sure.

So I have decided that in all future letters of recommendation that I am asked to write I will include the following disclaimer:

What I know of this student or potential employee does not include personal knowledge of the individual's experience with: thigh, boob, or booty biting; strange or twisted beliefs concerning Marxist mass murderers and their views on the proper running of a gulag; lying to Israeli boarder officials; the obtaining of superficial tattoos to be displayed prominently on bits that can be chewed on by boys whose friends are sober enough to hold the camera steady.

I’m not kidding about the blushing part. My gynecologist once looked at my face and neck, his glasses slipping to the end of his nose, and then he poked my heated cheek with his finger.

“What’s that,” he asked, “on your face?”

I knew immediately, but I refused to admit to my old-fashioned red-faced shame.

“Are you blushing?” He continued to examine my fevered cheeks with squinty eyes. 

“That’s amazing,” he continued. “Nobody blushes anymore.”  He poked me again. “Look at that.” He acted like he’d just discovered an extinct species of pigeon nesting on my head.

Sighing, I shrugged and pulled my exam gown closer to my throat, covering my embarrassed shame with what amounted to a paper towel. I looked at his various diplomas and acknowledgements and wondered who had written my gynecologist his letters of recommendation.

Linda (Once Bitten, Twice Shy) Zern

A QUICKIE: Postings that are Short and Sweet

THE MIRACLE PUMPKIN!

I didn't plant pumpkins this spring, and I certainly didn't plant that pumpkin on top of the chicken coop run. But there it is. I planted pumpkins last fall. I grew one sad pumpkin that was eaten by my rampaging chickens, who then pooped out a pumpkin seed in the planter next to the coop.Water and sun did their thing and the vine grew on the chicken wire, thus proving that life will find a way.

A Pet Called Peeve

A peeve is a vexation. A pet peeve is a vexation that nips at your metaphysical ankles and wets on the sateen pillows of your soul. I hate pet peeves.

One of my most ferocious pets called peeve is toenail clippings. They’re ugly, grubby, and seemingly everywhere. I can take the craziness of reality television (almost), the injustice of modern American tax brackets (with rancor), and the relentless optimism of Madison Avenue marketing tactics (I’m being vaccinated) but I CANNOT take detached toenails. 

It’s a pet peeve of mine.

Once I stood on the second floor of our two-story foyer and looked over the banister, only to see a wad of clipped toenails mounded in a tiny pile below me in the front hallway. Those toenails were not mine. As I stared down, I concluded that some unknown toe-groomer had been clipping their toenails on the second floor landing only to send their trimmings cascading down to the hallway below.

I also concluded that I might, quite possibly, be living with Visigoths.

The same week, I began stretching for my Tae Kwon Do class only to come face to face with several detached toenail clippings—less than a micron from my personal face. They were not mine.  This meant that someone (probably a Visigoth) thought it a great idea to groom their shaggy toenails while practicing martial arts.

During class, I worked out my horror by punching and kicking the dummy, shaped like a Anglo Saxon/Hun invader, extra hard.

Soon after, I spent a few days in a Florida hotel, and you guessed it—toenail clippings—on the carpet, next to the bed. They were not mine. I tried not to black out.

But the worst was what I like to call “The Popeye’s Affair.”  Standing in line, waiting to purchase the best and greasiest fast food chicken ever, I glanced down and spotted—a lone toenail, missing its foot.

Looking at my husband, I pointed and choked out, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep, that’s a toenail.” He ordered the three-piece chicken dinner, extra grease.

A thousand questions popped into my head:  How did the toenail get there? How did it get out of its shoe? Was the toenail running away? What kind of barbarian clips their toenails in line at a fast food joint? Can the second Middle Ages be far off?

Civilization is a fragile agreement between individuals, consisting of written and unwritten rules, one of which is: “Thou shalt not discard bits of ones self where others can find those bits—ever!”  It’s vile.

Let me conclude by saying, “Keep toenail clippings in their place and out of my sight,” and if you know who is clipping their toenails on the landing in my house, do the right thing, and TURN THEM IN. I’ll have DNA testing done, if I have to.  You know I will.

 Linda (Vexed and Peevish) Zern              

CULTURE OVER EASY

The tree trunks here in Melbourne, Australia are wrapped with metal guards. This is the kind of thing that gets my husband and I curious when we travel. Forget the museums, forget the art galleries, forget the fireworks display every Friday night over the River Yarra.  What’s with the tree tin? That’s the real Australia. You can just feel it.

As we ride around the city we develop theories.

“They’re to keep the squirrels out of the trees,” I speculate.

“But where else are the squirrels going to live if they don’t live in trees? Telephone poles?”

“Good point,” I conceded. “How about it’s to keep crazy crap out of the trees. You know like those bear things.”

“Koala bears? No way. You’d think they’d want a koala hanging off of every tree branch. Think of the tourist dollars.”

“Good point.” We continued to scratch our American heads.

Finally, Sherwood asks the cab driver, “What’s with the tree tin?”   

Cabbie tells Sherwood, "That's to keep the possums out of the trees."

"Why don't you just shoot them?" asks Sherwood (Dead Eye) Zern, of Saint Cloud, Florida, near Kissimmee, home of the Silver Spurs Rodeo.

"Because the government took our guns, and we'd get in trouble with the animal people," cabbie says.

"In America, we'd just shoot them."

"In America, you shoot everything."

It’s hard to know where to go from this point in the cultural exchange: to be more curious about the enormity of the problem Australians are facing with pesky possums colonizing city trees, or offended at the gross ignorance and prejudice on the part of the cabbie about our American way of life. I’ll address both.

One) How big are these possums? How mean? What happens if they climb up in those trees? What are the possums tossing at people from up there that makes the citizens of Melbourne have to take such drastic tree trunk wrapping action? Where do the possums go if they don’t go up those trees? Telephone poles?

Two) It is simply not true that Americans “shoot everything.” We don’t shoot roaches. That would be counter-intuitive. We pour gallons of poison over them as if basting tiny turkeys. We don’t shoot the mailperson. We give the mailperson twenty bucks at Christmas and thank her for not throwing our mail in ditches. We don’t shoot the computer. We want to. We want to real bad, especially when it seizes up and threatens to meltdown IN CHINESE.

Possums? Possums we shoot. Especially, when they climb in the chicken coop looking to rape and pillage and thieve eggs. Then possums are going down—American style. Come to think of it, that’s why we wrap sheet metal around the bottom of our chicken coops to help keep nasty possum types out.

Hey! We’re not so different after all.

It’s a small, possum troubled, world after all.

Linda (Foreign Exchange) Zern

PS  Australian possums look like something you win for your kid at a carnival. Adorable. Florida possums look like something in the freak show at the carnival. Prehistoric and toothy. Very toothy.

QUICKIES: Postings that are Short and Sweet

HAVE YOU SEEN ME? ONE EXCELLENT DOG!!

So, my husband and I are in Australia for three weeks. And while in Australia my daughter posts on Facebook that she lost my dog for a day or two. No worries. The dog's probably out looking for Australia, says my smart aleck daughter.

This upsets me. This is a good dog. This is one of those dogs that would drag you from a burning building kind of a dog. Not a hobo dog by any means.

Then she posts, "She's back. All is well."

I'm a sceptic. I demand proof of life. I want a picture of the dog holding a newspaper with the current date.

She says (my daughter not the dog) that newspapers are extinct. No such beast.

She has me there.

WELCOME TO QUARANTINE

On the flight from L.A. to Australia they hand you a skinny yellow card and tell you to fill it out, declaring stuff. Do you have any fruit, nuts, porn, or chicken poop on your shoes? And you’d better, by golly, fess up or they fine you—big hefty bucks.

Honesty is the cheapest policy.

So we declared. No fruit. No nuts. No porn. But things got hinky with the chicken poop question. Well, actually it was more a question of possible exposure to chicken poop.

The question that tripped us up?

Have you within the last thirty days been exposed to animals that poop or produce assorted dingle berries in a rural setting?  (I’m paraphrasing.)

The answer was a resounding, “You bet. Why just this morning or yesterday morning or tomorrow morning before the world turned on its axis, we were hip deep in animals that poop.” We checked the box for yes.

In Australia, railing through the immigration and customs line, holding our skinny yellow card at the ready we prepared to declare our familiarity with organic farm animal by-product.

A pre-screener, a lovely woman of possible Asian descent, took our skinny yellow card, made note of our honesty on question number ten or maybe it was twelve and declared us quarantined, but not before looking at our shoes with squinty eyes.

Panicked, my husband, scrambled to explain our damning poop answer, “We have horses. They poop. We had to feed them before we left Florida, thus the reason for their pooping—all the feeding and eating. The horses not us.” Sweat broke out on his forehead.

I stroked his arm, calming him, and said, “I think she just wants to make sure we haven’t brought our muck-out boots or packed bags of manure in our luggage. That’s all.”

The pre-screener squinted harder at our shoes, made a check on our card, and then pointed us to the quarantine area.

An official of the Australian immigration and customs department squinted some more at our shoes, quizzed us on our manure exposure, possibly sniffed us, laughed a bit when we declared our bodies poop free, stamped our card, and then waved us through the door into the great down under.

On the trip from Sidney to Melbourne, the third plane ride of our twenty-seven hour global trip, I got a bit punch drunk and started to laugh. Snorting through my nose, I leaned over and confessed, “Babe, I hate to admit this, but I think I might have had some chicken sh*t on my shoes, but I was afraid to say anything.”

Horrified, he clamped his hand over my mouth. I licked the palm of his hand. He let me go.

“Kidding! I’m just kidding. But wouldn’t that be crazy to be locked up abroad for contraband chicken poo shoes?” I looked deep in his eyes. “Hey, it may not be a sixty million dollar Air Force One trip on the taxpayer’s dime, but it’s already been quite an adventure.”

He winked. I smiled. And then I double-checked the bottom of my shoes just to be sure I wasn’t breaking quarantine or smuggling dingle berries.

Linda (All Clear) Zern