DRAMA QUEEN

Drama Queen

I am a writer and therefore drama runs through my veins like a red tide on the ocean.

I used to think that mysteries would be hard to write because I could never figure out ‘who done it.’ But now, I see that murder mysterious are easy: someone is dead; someone is going to be dead; someone is thinking about making someone dead. Drama. Built in. And readers love it. Mysteries top the Amazon best seller charts every single year.

Which is weird because social media like Facebook is covered in anti-drama memes. “Get rid of the drama in your life. Go on a cruise. Live in a moss-covered cave.”

It’s a crock. Human beings love drama. Our games are full of it. Our entertainment drips with it. Our literature is not literature without it—conflict, opposition, and goals thwarted.

Drama is queen and I, for one, embrace it. A story, even a children’s story, must contain elements of drama and conflict or we are just humming in the dark. Grimm’s Fairy Tales were, in their original forms, cautionary tales designed to warn children and their parents about the inherent dangers in the dank, scary forests of our lives, and we’re still telling the tales. Sure, we’ve watered them down some with show tunes, but we could never imagine Snow White without the poisoned apple.

Drama gets a bad rap, and it shouldn’t.

It’s why I love writing dystopian fiction. The apocalypse drips with drama. And we love it. I love it. Lights go out, electric fails, and we are thrust into the landscape of struggle and survival. And we love it!  Sex is a big deal again. Food is a life and death struggle. Enemies abound. Drama. Cool.

I do have to laugh, though, when I read the constant touting of all women in dystopian literature as strong, kick-A women. I’m not sure that’s true or should be true. Isn’t it more interesting to have a regular woman given to pedicures and migraines who becomes a kick-A woman capable of skinning a cat and then boiling it?

Just a dramatic thought.

But there’s a downside. I am a writer. My kids don’t call me for two days, and I’ve got them dead in a ditch. It’s a professional hazard.

Oh, and by the way, I can imagine skinning a cat. My great-grandmother refused to eat rabbit all her days. Why? Because during the real apocalypse of the Great Depression butchers in Chicago would skin cats, chop off their heads and feet, and sell them as rabbit. My great-grandmother never got over it, and she was as kick-A as they come.

On a Facebook page, followed by writer types, the discussion faded into whether or not writers should kill off pets in their stories or is that too offensive, too harsh for a modern readership? I commented, “I write dystopian books. Bad things happen.”

Chew on that.

So, here we are—to drama or not drama. In my opinion, kick-A women take drama, stick it in a blender, throw in an egg, and then swallow it down like the ‘hair of the dog’ that bit them. Or we read chick-lit, which can be fun too.

Linda (Life is Drama) Zern

H is for Hysterical Blindness

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One of the hardest parts of the aging process is knowing when “the jig is up.”

It’s important to understand that when a person reaches a certain age, everything starts to hurt: feet, knuckles, muscles, neck, and hair.

True. My hair hurts, but then I wear it in a grandma bun a lot more these days, perhaps part of the problem.

Here’s the dilemma. When everything hurts, how do you know which hurt is vile enough to require a quick call to 911?

I get up in the morning, hit the floor, and proceed to shuffle to the bathroom like a zombie in search of zombie snack food, my feet, legs, knees, and hips protesting loudly.

“Am I dying?” I said to my husband recently, as I shuff-shuffled to the potty.

“Do you want to be?” he asked, answering my question with a question. Still in bed, he was balancing a Pepsi on his stomach as he held a pecan twirl to his lips with his right hand—his version of breakfast. NOTE: He has zero “bad” cholesterol. I’ve had borderline high, bad cholesterol since I was twelve. I live on vegetables and pickle juice. Life is NOT fair.

Two days again, I woke up, got up, hit the floor, and couldn’t see anything. The whole world had gone fuzzy—super fuzzy. “What the what?”

My first thought? Overnight stroke.

Second thought? Hysterical blindness.

My third and final conclusion. Allergies: rectified by allergy drops and a warm wash cloth.

Sigh.

I tell everyone I had hysterical blindness. It makes for a better story, and I’m all about the storytelling.

And so, I shuff-shuffle through life trying to decide if the pain in my hair is bad enough to warrant a lobotomy or a deep tissue search on Web MD.

My oldest daughter went to her doctor with a lump in her wrist which she had pre-diagnosed, after a thorough Google search, as “Viking’s Disease.”

She told her doctor, “I have Viking’s Disease.” Note: Viking’s Disease is a malady effecting Scandinavians. It leaves their hands and fingers weirdly twisted and deformed.

He said, “Good guess. But no . . .”

She had a benign cyst.

My bout with hysterical blindness has taught me a couple of things about health care in America. 1) Care is an interesting word. 2) Unless you’re clawing at your own face or foaming, people are probably more interested in what the English royal family is dissing about each other than your hysterical blindness. 3) Web MD is your doctor’s least favorite website. And 4) Caring about health care is exhausting.

And so, I keep right on shuffling until I can’t anymore, hoping that by the time my jig is up I get struck by lightning.

Linda (Electric Light Parade) Zern

Down on the Hobby Farm

The shadows of cranes, vultures, and eagles coast across the ground of our farm, and at night the lonely cries of Whippoorwills float through the air like ghosts through fog and mist. It’s hard not to be charmed by the nature thumping all around us. That’s one reason we moved here, to be surrounded by the thumping of nature, and to have horses, and butterfly gardens, and grandchildren, and quiet weekends in the country—surrounded by the thump of nature, of course. 

Country living is like having an obsessive-compulsive hobby, and my husband and I are obsessive-compulsive hobby farmers. We bought six acres in Saint Cloud, and then we bought three horses and had someone give us a dog. There’s a cat, but she came with the place. We don’t raise corn, or soybeans, or veal. A hobby farm is a lot like a black hole—stuff (like money) goes in but nothing (like money) comes out. 

My husband has a real job. He fiddles around with computer related software during the week and makes money. I have a real job. I fiddle around with words on paper. I barely make enough money to pay for the paper, but we both play hobby farm on the weekends: by mowing, chopping, digging, burning, nailing, pressure washing, and sheath cleaning. The real point of our hobby farm is horses—the brushing, the riding, the watering, and the feeding of horses, and then there are questions of gelding hygiene, of course. 

One of the horses in our stable is an old sickle-hocked gelding in an advanced stage of aging, or as I like to say, “He has two good legs, one bad leg, and one hoof on a banana peel.” Sonny is a rescue horse, and once upon a time, he must have been something to look at—now he’s a broken down paint horse standing in the shade of a live oak—nursing a bad attitude and gas. Also once, he was a boy horse, but now he’s a gelding with a high pitched whinny, arthritic hips, and sheath issues. He gives our hobby farm an air of slow moving southern charm and the feel of days gone by—sometimes. 

Sometimes he needs his sheath cleaned—mostly in the fragrant, gentle spring. 

“Honey,” I said to my husband, one fragrant and gentle spring, “I think that it’s time to clean old Sonny’s sheath.” The sun drifted over the barn like a fried egg. Flies buzzed in groggy, dopey circles. Horses pooped. 

My husband looked mildly suspicious, his hands instinctively clenching a pitchfork, his knuckles growing white.

“Sonny’s what?”

“His sheath,” I repeated, leaning against the barn door and waving my hand vaguely in the direction of the paddock. “Think, sword and scabbard, like in pirate fighting.”

His knuckles started to look like bloodless doorknobs.

“Scabbard! Sheath! What are you talking about?”

“You know the thing that the sword goes into—the scabbard—you know, the thing that protects the sword.” I pantomimed putting an invisible sword into an invisible scabbard. “Sonny’s scabbard (i.e. his sheath) needs cleaning.” I crossed my arms across my chest confident in my diagnosis. 

Frown lines creased my husband’s forehead, as he pondered all the potential symbolic sword related possibilities. Leaning on the pitchfork like a D.O.T. worker on a break and standing in a puddle of horse droppings, the slow light of understanding crept into his face. Horror etched harsh lines under his eyes. 

He looked at the old grouch of a horse napping in the shade next to the barn, and said, “You can’t possibly mean . . .” He bit his lip, and I though I detected the glint of a single tear in his eye. “That someone has to reach up and . . . grab or clean . . . inside his . . . with what? And how? And more importantly for the love of all that’s decent—why?!”

“Because boy horses, who are geldings, get waxy gick buildup if you don’t clean their . . .”

“Yea, yea, yea, sword holder.” His sarcasm hid despair and mild panic. “I get it.” 

Sonny slapped at one boney hip with his tail. He snorted, shook his head at some imagined slight, and then farted.

“Now there are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can wait until he goes to the bathroom and drops his . . .”

“I am not standing out here waiting for that old grump to pee.”

“Or you can go up in there and grab it.”
 
The horror spread from my husband’s face to his entire body. His limbs went rigid right before he dropped the pitchfork. Then his hands flew to his mouth, and through gritted teeth he asked, “Clean it with what?”

“Well, I’ve seen people use Vaseline, or warm soapy water, or . . .” 

Sonny decided at that very moment to drop his sword and urinate. 

Snapping to attention, I yelled, “Hurry Sherwood, run for the Vaseline.” He froze like a hunted rabbit staring into a rattlesnake den.

“Hurry man, now’s our chance.” I rolled up my sleeves, and squared my shoulders. Sherwood turned and stumbled into the gloom of the barn like a man planning to boil water for an emergency birth on a kitchen table. 

“And Sherwood,” I yelled. He paused and looked back. “Don’t forget the rubber gloves.”

He didn’t.

That’s one reason we moved here, to be surrounded by the thumping of nature, and to have horses, and butterfly gardens, and grandchildren, and quiet weekends in the country, and to be up to our elbows in nature, of course. In the fragrant and gentle spring, the American Bald Eagles swoop down from their massive nest behind our house to tear our neighbor’s baby lambs bloody bit from bloody bit. Watching the eagles take turns turning the baby lambs into Bald Eagle jerky, my husband took my hand and asked, “I wonder if PETA knows about this?”

“I think there’s a lot PETA doesn’t know about Mother Nature,” I sighed.

An eagle’s shadow drifted over the swayed back of our old rescue horse, Sonny, as he dozed in the shade of a live oak.