THAT'S SO NICE

Barnacles!

I don't need end of life counseling from Dave the Desk Sitting bureaucrat. I already have an end of life plan that involves the Gulf Stream, a boat, and a superficial understanding of sailing. 

According to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence or NICE – the United Kingdom’s Version of A Death Panel—figuring out if Granny is worth the cash necessary to keep her hip from falling off is easy. There’s a formula. 

. . . by taking the cost of treatment and dividing it by the years gained an overall cost benefit ratio can be determined as the ‘cost per quality – adjusted life year gained’ or CQG.

That is a direct quote taken straight from literature written by NICE!!!! I can’t make this up. 

See those letters—CQG—you know what that is? I know what it is. It’s algebra. They are using algebra to figure out if it’s worth it to keep me in watery Jell-O and estrogen patches.

It’s the hated, evil creepiness of algebra as it pertains to the lump on my personal arm, my health care, and the fact that the women of my family live for absolutely ever and ever. My great-grandmother was climbing farm fences at the age of ninety-one, because she couldn’t see well enough to find the gates. So if you calculate my “cost per quality—adjusted life year gained” I could cost the “collective good” more money to insure than two or three hundred homeless potheads in Colorado.

It’s algebra. It’s math. And you can’t argue with algebra, math, or the people at NICE. 

My DNA lives forever. It’s horrible. I have barnacles, because it’s a pure fact that if the boat sits in the water long enough, it’s going to get barnacles and require dry docking and scraping. I have barnacles. I’m a big-ticket item—health care wise.

So here’s how my CQG, if I lived in England, would go. My age (fifty-plus) multiplied by my genetic propensity for eternal life, divided by the number of scars on my person from malicious cancer (a bunch—also more than a pirate) over the coefficient of the number of barnacles found on the average rowboat bobbing off the coast of any Bahamian island equals—pull the plug already.

I told my doctor that if any future barnacle lumps turn out to be a malignant anything, then I’m renting a sail boat, sailing into the Gulf Stream, and jumping off the back.

She said, “That’s kind of extreme; don’t you think? And why the Gulf Stream?”

“Because the Gulf Stream is warm. I don’t do cold, and besides I’d like to donate my share of the universal health care pie to someone with less barnacles—also I believe in life, without barnacles, after death.”

"I'll have the front desk schedule your surgery."

"Nice!" I said.

And now that America has decided to go the way of all the other cool countries with death panels, I think we should call our death panel either:

SWELL—Seeing Ways to Eliminate Little Old Ladies or 

GULF—Giving Up on Leftover Folks.


Linda (NICE is as NICE does) Zern

Lying to the End

According to a special documentary on “body language” over ninety percent of all human communication is non-verbal. 

(As I type this, my shoulders are very pinched and close to my ears.)

Everyone lies.  I am told that this is true, because people have seen it on a t-shirt and a fictional character on television repeats it a lot. 

(At this point, my lips are pursed, emphasizing the fine lines and fissures into which my lipstick tends to pour.)

Therefore, if everyone lies and ninety percent of communication is non-verbal then forget about what’s coming out of people’s lips and concentrate on what’s happening between their eyes. 

(A wrinkle shaped like a cavern just deepened near my left eye.)

I hate lying. I love liars. 

(My right eye is twitching so hard I can hear it.)

That is a lie. I don’t love liars. I try to love liars in the “love the sinner, hate the sin” way, but it’s hard, because liars tend to lie, and they can’t be trusted with your automobiles, wallet, lawn mower, good name, daughters, or your female cat, and she’s been spayed. I continue to try to love liars, but it’s a struggle.

No, it’s not a struggle; that’s a lie. It’s more like a wrestle—Greco/Roman style. 

Liars are exhausting, because you have to listen to them lying and “read” their body language all at the same time. Or if you’re not around when the liar is lying then you have to hire someone to watch the liar lie, and if you live in a particularly dishonest society, eventually you will run out of people, to watch the people, who are supposed to be watching the people—in case the people are lying or plagiarizing or faking important governmental reports.

(See?  It’s exhausting.)

 So, if it’s true that everyone lies then we’re screwed.

Linda (Telling the Truth Since 1958) Zern

It's a Scam Shame

We have a very strict policy about talking to strangers; we don’t. Unless they talk to us first at Tractor Supply, need to check our funky looking moles while Doctor Mark is on vacation, or are cooking our pizza. Strangers ain’t all bad, just the bad ones are, but I have no talent for telling one from the other crooks, cheats, and mad dog killers.

Sherwood, the husband around here, is great at identifying skunks and scammers. I’m not sure it counts though; he suspects everyone constantly of everything always. He’s a hard case.

I admit to having weak stranger-danger moxie.

I’m pretty sure that everyone raises butterflies and enjoys watching goldfish swim. I like to walk the extra mile and give people my coat/cloak/Banana Republic shrug, and then they punch me in the eye. I’m a dolt.

It’s true. I’ve befriended a few mad dog losers over the years. One young teenage scammer turned out to be living a secret life. It wasn’t a secret life of charity work in Calcutta with Mother Teresa helping Untouchables. No. It turned out he was the local, neighborhood porn distributor to under aged children and kittens. 

Why is it that people living secret lives are never living GOOD secret lives? Sigh.

So now, there’s a whole world of scam artists and mad dog killers living secret lives, wandering around, out there . . . in the virtual world of my computer.

I’m still a dolt.

Guy emailed me because he found my profile “interesting.” Wanted to be buddies. I saw that we have one mutual friend. I think, “Sure. Sure. Okay, here’s my coat and my watch, but it needs a battery.” 

So I responded.

“Sure, I’ll be your friend unless, of course, you’re a mad dog killer, then no; I have to draw the line somewhere.” Har. Har. Har.

He replied and thanked me for my “kind” response.

And then he emailed me his entire life story. A plot that I’m pretty sure I recognized from a romance novel I read in the eighties. (Rich, successful, widower, lives on or near a boat, darling little girl, looking for women . . . friends.)

What?

My response wasn’t kind. It was funny and quirky and mildly rude like everything else I write. But it was not kind.

Bells went off. 

I ran the cyber incident by my son-in-law.

He said, “Sounds like Scammy McScammer from Scammers.com. Why did you answer him?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about butterflies.”

“That’s your problem right there. Start thinking about the Craig’s List Killer.”

Very wise. Very wise. 

But it’s so tempting as a writer and maker up of plot twists and red herring runs not to write to Scammy McScammer and say, “Oh, Scammy, my husband was kidnapped by Barbary pirates twelve years ago and declared (dramatic pause followed by the sound of lace muffled sniffling) dead after seven years after which I wore basic black for five years, and now I’m a wildly young, mildly beautiful, achingly lonely widow, who is RICH.”

You know, scam the scammer.

Except this guy is probably on the up and up and that would just make me a virtual jerk.

So from now on my response to these inquiries will have to be. “Nope. No friend for you.”

Linda (Mooncalf) Zern

A MENTION THAT IS HONORABLE!

So far I'm batting a thousand; published every time I've entered, because I'm high on Humor @ Humorpress.com

See NAKED FEAR  (July 31, 2013) 

MOONCALF: A book about the moon and other dreams.

"It feels like ancient history, Mom," my daughter said. "No, no it's my history." It's the history of all of us. 

Zern Family Policy on Kidnapping and Other Acts of Piracy

In a great big modern world where travel is supersonic and tweets are faster than lightning that is greased, it’s important to be savvy about the kidnap policies of modern Barbary Pirates, the ransom demands of Somali warlords, and the acceptable amount of time that the terribly young and wildly attractive widow should wait before cashing the life insurance checks. 

What!? 

Listen, the Malaysian government lost an entire, complete, gigantic 747 airliner. My husband has been known to fly on these planes. Big plane goes bye, bye. Husband goes bye, bye. We have to have a ransom/kidnapping/disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth policy!

In the days of Queen Victoria pirates sailed around looking for loot and according to a guy named Wiki: The main purpose of their [pirates called Barbary] attacks was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Muslim market in North Africa and the Middle East.

Today, pirates are still looking for loot and cash and slaves, but those are mostly for sex. Ransom is big. Kidnapping is a career choice. And when my husband flies off to the ends of the earth to help foreign companies figure out their software knots and tangles, I occasionally contemplate the pirate possibilities. 

So here’s the discussion behind the policy:

“So the Malaysians lost a whole airplane,” I observed. “Don’t you fly on that jetliner loosing Malasian airline?”

“Yep.” My husband said. He never complicates our conversations with excessive word use.

“So, what’s the policy? How long should I wait before I cash the life insurance check?”

He looked up from his laptop. He was intrigued. I could tell.

“Okay, here’s the deal. All the desk dwellers are probably going to dither around if they can’t find any floating seat cushions or Skymall catalogs, but Oracle is still going to have to pay me until they declare me dead. CASH THE CHECKS FAST.”

“Got it.”

We both went back to tap, tap, tapping on assorted keyboards.

“Okay, so what if you’re taken captive by angry maroons posing as pirates looking for the pin number to our checking account? What’s our policy? To negotiate or not to negotiate.”

“No negotiations.”

“What if they grab you, torture you, record it, and send me the hideous Youtube video.”

“No negotiations and no second mortgages.”

“Okay, but you have to promise me that you’ll be so obnoxious they’ll kill you all the way dead right off, so I won’t have to worry about you wasting away in a flea infested hut.”

“Got it.”

“But what if they sell you as a sex slave?”

He pondered. “I’ll do my best to make my escape.” He re-pondered. “Or not.”

“And who should I sue?”

“Everyone.”

“Got it.”

So that’s our policy. Cash the checks fast. No negotiations. No second mortgages. And sue everyone.

When I tell people our family policy on kidnapping they tend to be shocked by our cavalier attitude toward tragedy and piracy in general. Then I tell them how rich I’ll be when I cash the checks, and they’re mollified—also a little jealous.

Because money fixes everything, just ask a Barbary pirate.

Linda (Can’t Buy Me Love) Zern 

A CLASSIC ZIPPITYZERN: A Dog's Tail

The Author as Dog Walker!

When you hear yourself screaming, “Sherwood, grab the hose; the dog is on fire!” you know that you are—once again—the butt of some giant cosmic joke, not to mention the dog.

We are country folk. We sit outside a lot. We make fires. We own dogs. We sit outside around fires with our dogs. It’s a lifestyle. You have to respect it. (If we sat outside naked, beating tom-toms while reciting cowboy poetry with our dogs you’d have to respect that too—if it’s a lifestyle. That’s what I have learned in college.)

I am a lazy fire pit builder. I like to hearken back to my Native American heritage by slapping a random length of wood onto the fire, letting the ends hang over the sides. When the log burns in half, you shove the ends in. Easy, peasy. Others in my family would rather court hernias by slapping logs against trees, whacking branches on the ground, or slamming hunks of solid wood over their knees to try to produce the “correct” size. Mostly, they just look like learning-disabled Sasquatches. It’s fun to watch.

The downside to my method of fire building is that blazing hunks of junk sometimes fall out of the fire pit, raining down like space junk reentering the atmosphere.

Sometimes blazing hunks of junk fall into the dog’s tail. No, not sometimes—once, it happened once.

What I learned when the dog’s tail caught on fire: I have the reaction time of a Navy SEAL, Sarah, my daughter-in-law who is very pregnant, does not have the reaction time of a Navy SEAL, and my husband is . . . a learning-disabled Sasquatch. 





CoCo, my very hairy collie/retriever mix, had cuddled up to the fire pit when a blazing bit of junk fell out of the fire into her very hairy tail bits. Her tail fluff began to smoke. She was oblivious. I leapt out of my chair and screamed, “The dog is on fire!” 

Sarah screamed and tried not to wet her pants. Sherwood continued playing Angry Birds on his machine. The dog’s tail blazed up.

Reacting like a ninja taking vitamin B-12, I started kicking sand onto the dog’s tail. I continued screaming, “Sherwood, get the hose—the dog is on fire!”

CoCo remained oblivious. She may have been playing Angry Birds in her head.

A smell straight from Dante’s Inferno rolled over me. Coughing bitter coughs, I started to stomp on the dog’s tail. She lifted her head, confused. 

Sarah continued screaming and doing Kegel exercises.

I stomped on the dog until a giant chunk of frizzled, singed tail fuzz fell out of her tail. She got up, walked to the opposite side of the fire pit, flopped into the sand, and fell asleep—probably wondering when I’d had my stroke.

Sherwood looked up from his machine, annoyed that I was yelling at him.

“What did you want me to do about it?” he said.

I thought about becoming an angry bird and pecking him to death. I threw more wood into the fire pit instead. CoCo snored. Sarah tried to catch her breath. Our lifestyle continued.

And you have to respect that or be labeled a judgmental, diversity-hating, cowboy poetry bigot.

Linda (Fire Retardant) Zern

A Caribbean Vacation Story by Linda L. Zern

A CARIBBEAN VACATION STORY: Walked to the ocean. It rained. Everyone walked back inside. Took a nap. The end.