MORE GUNS!

Not to get too political here (except I'm about to get SUPER political here) but what the hell is wrong with us, collectively, as human American people, that this shit still goes on and nobody seems to care? Oh, another school shooting? Such a shame, guess it must be a Tuesday, oh well, let's get onion rings!

 Totally normal day!

Did you know that in 2014 alone, there were 88 separate school shootings? 88! If you counted Senile Pop Crooner Tony Bennett's age in tree rings, those tree rings would equal the number of school shootings in this country per year, and Tony Bennett was born in the goddamn 1920s!

Look, people. I just want to clarify that we're all totally cool with this. We're all super okay with the sheer volume of deaths in this country due to firearms. Yes? Because the second amendment and guns and tyranny and bibles. Right?  This is where we're at now?

Here's my question: why are we unable to create and enact better gun laws? Why are we so paralyzed by inaction that we can't  even talk about it? How is it that every time we even TRY, the conversation mutates into an ugly game of telephone where the message becomes OBAMA'S TAKING THE GUNS! ALL THE GUNS! WE MUST PROTECT THE GUNS! CONSTITUTION! CIVIL RIGHTS! SECOND AMENDMENT! BENGHAZI! (The second amendment, by the way, only guarantees your right to defend yourself as part of a well-regulated militia, but whatever. Who cares about facts? )

Look, let me make an analogy: you're allowed to own a car. Right? And you're allowed to drive that car wherever you'd like. Right? You want to go to California? Boom. You drive that spunky little Prius right on down to California, girl. You drive like the wind. Say hi to Ryan Gosling for me (and then punch him in the face for The Notebook). Just keep in mind that you are not allowed to just do whatever the hell you want with that Prius. You cannot drive it without a license. You cannot drive it without having been properly trained. You cannot drive drunk. You cannot drive it unregistered. You cannot drive on the opposite side of the road or on the sidewalk or into a fucking Arbys just because you feel like it and freedom! the constitution! civil rights! That is simply not how "civil rights" work. You have the "right" to own and operate a dangerous weapon, you do not have the right to just do whatever the fuck you want with that dangerous weapon. We understand this about cars, but cannot grasp this about guns? Why?

Perhaps because here in America, we worship the gods of unchecked capitalism, which involves  something called profitability, which essentially comes from the marketing of fear: fear of scaaaaaaaary people (AKA black people), fear of being murdered, fear of not fitting in, fear of not being sexy enough, fear of not having enough money, fear of not having enough things, fear of not having the right clothes or enough hair, fear of not being smart enough or fast enough, fear, fear, fear, fear, all the time fear. America runs on fear! It's like Dunkin Donuts, but with 80% more murders.

The bottom-line is this: an unafraid America is an unprofitable America. And unafraid Americans buying fewer guns is totally unprofitable for the gun industry, which in turn is unprofitable for politicians and the NRA-- who by the way are all 100% in the pockets of wealthy gun manufacturers who don't give a shit whether you live or die-- which in turn makes you, my dear gun owning, gun-rights-toting friend, a patsy for the uber-rich and a stupid fucking idiot for fueling a dangerous narrative that kills over 1000 people every year.

To be clear: the government is never (not ever) going to take away the paranoid stash of guns from your Ebola safe room, Billybob J. Moron-- but it's super profitable for the gun industry to let you THINK the government is taking away your guns.  Because if you think people are taking away your guns you'll buy more guns. Just like if you think your child's school might morph into a warzone, you'll BUY MORE GUNS!

MORE GUNS!!!!!!

Yes, it's far, far better to live this this way, don't you think? Mired in an ignorant culture of meritless ethnocentrism, evangelism and fear. And guns. Lots of guns. Lots and lots of guns. Because as we all know, the only thing that solves fear is more guns, and the only thing that solves more guns is more guns, and the only thing that solves more and more and more guns is bigger and bigger and bigger guns with more and more ammo, and the only thing that solves bigger guns with more ammo is assault weapons with more ammo, and the only thing that solves assault weapons with more ammo is more guns and more ammo and MORE GUNS and maybe some TANKS and MORE GUNS and also several copies of the old testament, because clearly what Jesus wanted was lenient open carry laws and untrained teachers in classrooms with guns.

Wake up, people. Wake. The fuck. Up.

There is a fly in my house.

A mutant fly has been living in my house for the past month. He is unkillable. Both my husband and I have tried to kill him multiple times. MULTIPLE. Have, in fact, spent hours, perhaps a days worth of hours cumulatively over the course of a month, trying to kill this one damn fly. But the damn fly won't die. We can't kill the damn fly.

Flies are only supposed to live for several days, right? It's been well over a month. Perhaps even two.  The carcasses of his fallen brethren lie inside my window sill and in various ceiling fixtures and I'm worried that maybe, just maybe, this fly is the Michael Myers of flies and one morning I'm going to wake up and find my husband lying on the floor in a pool of blood, the fly slowly buzzing at me in plodding, measured paces, steak knife in wing. Or maybe this is the Emeric Belasco/Hell House of flies, turning my own home and insecurities and idiocies against me. All I know is Mutant Fly cannot be underestimated. It is only a fool who underestimates Mutant Fly.

My husband asked me to give him the febreeze. We'd made some omelettes for breakfast and the fly buzzed about us closely, brazenly. He landed on my omelette, as always, and I swung at him wildly and missed. Then the fly yelled what can only be described as an obscene series of expletives and flew off.

My husband wielded the can of Febreeze, and I snorted.

"And what do you think that's going to do?"

"We'll spray him to death like the others."

(Truth: we've Household Fragranced many, many a fly to death in our day. As a strategy, we've found it effective. Instead of Raid, which is super-toxic, you just Febreeze the fly into a fragrance induced fugue state, and then let it smell itself to death. As I type this I realize that might perhaps be violently enraging the other flies.)

(Which makes this war?)

My husband waited patiently with his weapon, a can of Apple cinnamon scented aerosol, for Mutant Fly to land on one of the walls. And, once it did, he proceeded to spray the shit out of --well, mostly the wall, not the fly-- and then the TV, and the couch, and the desk, and the dog; he shoved folding tables out of the way, kicked aside wires; he chased Mutant Fly from one end of the room to the other, me yelling out hysterical directions as he steered the nozzle, the two of us operating a tight tactical fly killing unit, creating what I'll just say was an unhealthy breathing situation, a sort of an Apple Cinnamon aerosol prison... and yet, AND YET--

"Where'd he go?"

"Fuck." I sighed. "He's gone. It's over."

"He has to die eventually."

"Does he?" I laid a hand against the wall, touching the space where the fly had once been. "Does he?"

"The room does smell awful."

"Yes," I said, eyes narrowed. "Yes, it does."

And that is how the fly lived. He lives still. And my apartment smells like the anus of a scented candle.

But hear me now: I will get Mutant Fly. I will find him and I will kill him. Not that this makes me Captain Ahab and the fly my giant whale because that would be ridiculous, but I will destroy this entire apartment and everyone in it if that's what I have to do to kill this fly.

Relaxation Sunday!

Worst Job Series! Part One

Worst Job Series!

So I'm trying out this new series about the worst jobs I've ever had. Because, like, JOBS. Amiright? Jobs are terrible. Who doesn't hate their job? (Beyonce. But let's not go there.)

(As it pertains to my current job, I probably shouldn't use the word hate. Hate is far too strong a word [for my colleagues to stumble over when they accidentally read this blog Googling 'hamsters eating tiny pizzas.'] How about I dislike THE IDEA of my job-- as in, how slaves disliked THE IDEA of slavery but... fuck it.)

Which brings us to: Worst Job #1:

Something Something Financial Consulting: Winter Park, Florida

Cut to my freshman year of college.

While most of my classmates are going for business or finance degrees and have been building portfolios and networking and interfacing and interning since, like, Fetal Times, I am what we'll just call a "free spirit" (i.e: melodramatic, tortured, indecisive, and thrilled as fuck to not be living in my parents' house.) As a consequence, I settled on a Creative Writing BFA with a rotating schedule of poetry workshops, fanfic writing, falling asleep in all my non-writing classes, heavy drinking, and doing nothing.  Totally reasonable.

Then at some point, I think by my second or third semester, I started to get "The Anxiety," which, even if you're not a writer, I am sure you're all familiar with. It's the What Am I Even Doing With My Life No Really Holy Shit WHAT AM I DOING?! Death Spiral: My major is a terrible mistake. I've already made a string of terrible mistakes. I will never hack it as a writer. Writers don't even make any money. Holy shit in hell I don't have any money, oh my God blah blah angst depression infinity. I knew I needed a sustainable goal but... what the hell did I know about sustainable goals and anyway, wasn't all office work shitty? I mean really.

Cut to The First Truly Bad Life Decision of My Adulthood.

I asked a friend of mine, whose boyfriend was interning for an "insurance consultant" (Douchebag for "overpaid middleman") if he could get me an internship.  Granted, I had no idea what an insurance consultant did  (important consultations?) but I knew I could put it on a resume and then speak grandly of it, which seemed like a good idea. And as far as internships went, this one paid actual money: $7.00 an hour, which even after social security and taxes was still more than zero dollars, so... a goldmine, basically. Bring it on, Business That Sounds Like A Fake Thing!

On my first day, a Saturday, I was greeted in the lobby at 8:30am SHARP by an extra from the movie Office Space. I'm pretty sure his name was Boring Suit. Boring Suit looked about ten shades of suicidal. Even his suit recognized the futility of having left the house at all. Maybe that should have been my first clue that This Was Bad, Very Bad.

Boring Suit took me up to the fourth floor, which had a grand view of the parking lot and the industrial lot across the street, and settled me in at a computer.

"Do you know of computers?" he asked. (This was olden-times.)

"I have heard-tell of them, yes."

Boring suit frowned. Jokes were lost on Boring Suit. "You may need to troubleshoot," he said, "These hard-drives are pretty old." And then he fake whispered, conspiratorially: "Our IT department doesn't work on the weekends."

Oh the unspeakable horror! Human salaried people not wanting to work the only two days they're not legally obligated to work!

I should also pause here and re-emphasize that this was 2001, so "IT department" was "dude in an electrical closet with some wire and an abacus." But even he, I assume, felt entitled to two days off each week. Two whole days! The bastard.

Boring Suit pulled up a chair and booted us up. He flashed a smile that said Working Here Murdered My Soul and then he showed me how to get to the home screen, which was essentially a financial questionnaire with a bunch of tabs at the bottom and a "submit" button. No internet explorer. No internet at all, really. Again, this was 2001 so it was Colonial Times.

"This is the main form you'll be working with," he said. "Don't click around the other tabs."

"Why?" I asked. "What happens when I click the other tabs?" I smiled and turned up my best Adorable. "Is it like feeding Mogwais after midnight?" This time I even laughed at my own joke. "Get it? Gremlins?" Hahahaha. Ha. No?

Boring Suit sighed the sigh of the humorless and glanced sidelong at me, as if to say, 'look, I've been where you are, but this is a place without laughter or humor or reason and all the other tabs are filled with nothing and lead to nowhere, and frankly I don't even know why we bother with fifty tabs on the homepage if none of them have a purpose, and oh my God this life is a sham.' And then he just opened the window and leaped to his death.

"During the course of the day," said Boring Suit, "You'll be contacting funeral homes."

I feel like, when he said this, I actually heard the needle of a record player screech to a halt.

I said, "Funeral homes?"

Seriously, it was like I was Charlton Heston discovering Soylent Green is people.

"Yes, Funeral homes," Boring Suit repeated. "You'll have to call them after you process each loan. You'll submit them to the bank and wait for the bank to respond. Usually within five to ten minutes. Once the bank responds-- usually with a denial --your job is to call the funeral director and let him know whether or not the loan was approved."

Can I just pause here again point out the awfulness? And to remind everyone that I have a panic-inducing irrational fear of death (or a TOTALLY RATIONAL fear of death), and that I was poor as fuck and basically my job would now be to tell poor people they could not bury their poor dead relatives? Okay then. We're all caught up.

"So..." I didn't even know what to say besides perhaps I should have read this job description better? I cleared my throat. "Just so I, ah, get this.... I'm supposed to process loan paperwork for the bank who will then re-process it and send it back to me so I can call the people the bank doesn't want to call?"

"What?"

I immediately changed the subject."Most loans get denied?"

"Well, not all," said Boring Suit, "Some loans get approved."

"Oh?" I said, stupid eager. "How many?"

"Almost zero," said Boring Suit. "But Saturday's a very busy day so you never know-- the possibility exists. Never give up on it."

Oh God, I wanted to say. BUT LOOK AT YOU. YOU'VE ALREADY GIVEN UP ON ALL THE POSSIBILITIES.

"And what about the families?" I asked.

"What about them?" 

("What about them? Kill them. Release the hounds!" - Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons)

"Are the families usually in the room?" I asked. "Are they present when I, when, you know--"

"Oh no, you won't be talking to the families. No, no, no. You won't have any direct contact with them. A relief, I'm sure." (AND A LIE. But we'll get to that in a moment...) "Delivering bad news is the funeral director's job. Our job is simply to be the expeditor of the news. We want to be as compassionate as possible with an expedient answer."

"So the 'no' is compassion."

Boring Suit sighed.  "Look," he said. "We do not say no. We never say no. The bank hands down the 'no.' We just deliver the no and then we hang up. Immediately. We're just--"

He eyed me pointedly and gestured with an open palm.

My first guess would have been "assholes" but instead I offered, "Delivery men?"

He looked disappointed. "The middle men."

"Oh," I said. "Right."

Boring Suit then showed me the form and how to enter in the information, and then he gave me a script to read to funeral directors: "Because we find this type of work can get uncomfortable."

OH REALLY?

Then he left -- presumably to commit suicide-- and I fell asleep.

(Literally, I put my head on the desk and fell asleep for at least an hour, maybe longer, because by the time I woke up it was nine thirty on a fucking Saturday morning and I was buried in an office tomb underneath a mudslide of loan applications and did I mention it was a fucking Saturday? Yes? Good.)

The first loan I processed, to be fair, DID get approved by the bank (Yes! Score! Funerals for everyone!) and for a moment, for like a split second, I had this glorious clarity. Like I seriously actually thought that maybe this job would somehow make me a better person or change the course of my life or save me from myself or whatever.

And then came the second application - a single mother making less than 30K.

When I called, I could hear a woman on the other line weeping.

"What is it???" She was hysterical.  "What did they say???"

I was super-quiet as the funeral director covered the receiver, badly, and explained what I said to the woman, who then asked, "Are you sure there's nothing they can do?"

I should have hung up. Seriously. On this and every call. And then I should have walked right out of the building. But I didn't. I just... didn't.

And then the woman was on the phone, pleading with me, "Why can't you do anything? Why?"

On the one hand I could have said, Look, I'm just the messenger here, I just needed this job because I'm nineteen and have no idea where my life is going and it pays money and you know how that is, right? But I think this system is fucked, and LETS STORM THE BANK!"

Instead I did what fucking Aetna does whenever you call them, and I reached for my script and recited: "I'm sorry, ma'am. These decisions are unfortunately not ours to make. We'd love to have better news for you but we're merely a third party consulting service for the bank--"

"MY SISTER IS DEAD!" yelled the woman.

I hung up.

Next caller:

"We are of course sorry for this terrible loss but unfortunately must decline the application---"

"I HOPE YOU DIE!"

Third caller:

"We are of course sorry for this terrible loss but unfortunately must decline the application. We're merely a third party---"

"Fuck your party."

"Ma'am, I'm sorry--"

"Fuck your sorry."

Fourth caller:

"We are of course sorry for this terrible loss but unfortunately must decline the application---"

"KILL YOURSELF."

And on and on.

By twelve PM I seriously considered wrapping the computer cord around my neck and hanging myself from the shitty florescent lights and still, STILL I did not quit. All I could think was, "Oh, my God, Hell is a real place and it is called adulthood."

Fifth caller:

"We are of course sorry for this terrible loss but unfortunately must decline the application---"

"HOW ABOUT I KILL YOU."

I should have quit this internship.

I did not. Why did I not? I let this shit ride for approximately two weeks, convinced I needed to make this work, desperate in fact to make it work; the thought of losing my first internship, of losing the very first real office job I ever got, regardless of how shitty, seemed unbearable, just too utterly embarrassing to bear. Until, after falling asleep at work uhhhh one too many times, I experienced another first: my first firing. (Or, if I ever write a book about this: Passive-Aggressive Quitting For Cowards.)

Two days later I got a non-horrible job at Disney World, and I learned something cool: it is, in fact, okay to walk away for something that's not right for you. Because why on Earth would a writer need an internship anyway, right? Someone will surely pay me to write, I'm sure, and in the meantime I'll just put on this enormous mouse costume and do a little dance. (Commence Oh my God WHAT AM I DOING Death Spiral.)

In any case, at least I wasn't processing funeral loans anymore (which is still what I think of when I complain to myself about my current shitty job: "Hey girl. It could be worse. Remember when you had to call funeral homes and tell people they couldn't bury their dead parents? Remember that shit?") and I guess that's the face of progress. Right? Knowing yourself and being okay with your limits. Knowing that it's okay to walk away from the bullshit that's terrible and not for you because at the end of the day, there's something better. Knowing that getting fired from the Funeral Loan Job, or any job, won't break you. In fact, it'll probably make you better and stronger because now you know. Ya know?

So onward and upward, young writer! (Or whatever the opposite of that means.) Who needs a business degree anyway? Or food? Or Shelter? Creative Writing degrees are solid degrees, you guys. Just not for the purposes of making money.

And that's okay!
*headdesk*

I'm not dead yet! (Sherry is dead.)

You ever have one of those restless nights? Like you're exhausted in theory but not in reality?  And so you pull out the old iPad and think, okay, just five minutes on Facebook - five minutes! But then inevitably you go all Pringles on yourself and five minutes = five hours and now you're just uselessly profile hopping looking for... what exactly? I've no idea. I never know. It's always a mystery until I've found it. (Once, at four am, I found this bizarre series of photos posted by some girl I went to school with in Florida.  She still lives in our hometown and, apparently, she hand-crafts uber-realistic Nightmare Quality porcelain dolls, calls them "her children" and gets them professionally photographed.  In the descriptions of each, she writes delightful things like, "Crying for all the babies murdered each year by abortion." Oh, Florida.  You're still the greatest!)

Anyway. Last week I had one of those nights. I was lying in bed and I whipped out my iPad and noticed an ominous mystery status on an old friend's Facebook page, and a bunch of old photos: "Remembering the good times, Sherry. We will miss you!"
 

It took me five whole seconds to grasp this:
 

One: Sherry?
 

Two: Oh ,THAT Sherry.
 

Three: What was her last name? It's something, something with an M...
 

Four: Wait. Is Sherry DEAD?
 

Five: Oh God, I'm next.
 

This is what the improvisation world calls "going A to C." Or, in real life, feeling turbulence on a plane and immediately strapping your seat cushion to your back like a fucking lunatic and screaming, "THIS IS IT! WE'RE GOING DOWN!"
 

So of course I examined all the pictures. Young, impossibly skinny girls lounging on the grass in athletic shorts and these idiotic, embroidered Letterman windbreakers that never actually kept out the wind. (They were expensive and useless and we loved them.) The burned brown practice field, the instruments lying hot in the grass. One photo brought to mind a sort of silent film in my head: all of us gathering under a dirty tent, the sky like a trembling grey sheet. A thunderstorm had rolled in during practice (typical Florida) and we were huddled together. The thing was, I couldn't place Sherry at alll. I mean, she was literally in the photo, so I know she was there... but I couldn't place her in the silent film running through my head. And now she's just an image in a photograph.
 

Commence freakout:

How does it happen that the Universe randomly chooses to murder Sherry out of all the girls in the photograph and what does it say about me that I cannot even remember her and why is all the oxygen disappearing from this room and ahhh why Universe why are you so cruel and OMG am I next??
 

(Honestly, at this point I should have just closed the computer and gone to the kitchen for some goddamn Oreos.)
 

Because now, NOW I clearly needed to know how she died. Right? That only makes sense, right? That's the next logical step? A girl I know dies and I have to know how it happened. Also, which of my college friends on Facebook can I ask, because really is it that insensitive to ask people you haven't spoken to in fifteen years --except to comment "seen it!" on their laughing baby memes --  "So, who wants to talk about dead Sherry? Anyone?" (Answer: never do this.)
 

Which left me alone with the vast, cold internet, which, as it turns out, has zero answers and is even HUGER than you realize -- like Beyonce's basement huge. Like the universe outside of Earth huge. A 34 year old woman had a whole entire life and then died and the internet is so huge it has no idea who she is.
 

Finally, after much dramatic hemming and hawing my husband turned to ask me what was wrong.
 

"Sherry's dead," I said. 
 

"Oh man," said my husband.  Then, "Sherry?"
 

"This girl," I said, "We went to college together and I can't find an obituary or a funeral notice. No memorial statuses or funeral tweets or funeral selfies, you'd think there'd be at least that. How is there nothing?"

"She faked her own death."
 

 "Not funny."

 

"She didn't actually exist. This world is a hologram. We're all inside The Matrix."
 

"Please be serious? Someone is dead."
 

"Right, sorry." My husband went back to his book. "I'm sorry about your dead friend."
 

So I ignored him.  Went back to my ill-advised research gathering.  I had yet to figure out how Sherry died and I needed to know like Captain Ahab needed to chase his stupid whale. So I kept on clicking. Then at some point I  realized I myself had zero photos of Sherry and HOW COULD I NOT HAVE PHOTOS OF SHERRY??

Commence descent into total insanity.
 

"Now what are you doing?"
 

Lunacy, I thought, digging with my entire body into the recesses of the closet.  "I'm looking for photos," I said.
 

"At one in the morning?"
 

I shrugged. Kept looking.

"I don't even remember you mentioning a Sherry."

 

That was because I hadn't. Ever. And I still couldn't remember her last name or what she sounded like or whether we'd ever really hung out (had we??) but that didn't matter. I said, "We knew each other.

 

 

"Were you close?"
 

"Not necessarily."
 

"Then why are you so upset?"

"Why?" My voice dripped with admittedly melodramatic outrage. "Because a girl is dead." Melodramatic Forehead Hair Swipe. "She is dead."

"And?"
 

And???

I wanted to yell at him, And death is upsetting? And I'm actually terrified of dying and being reminded in any way that eventually death will happen to me, that eventually it will happen to all of us, every single person, we will all die, all of us becoming nothingness forever and ever and ever and oh my Christ on a Cheesit  I need a Xanax? And that, maybe?
 

"Listen," he said. "It happens. People die. The universe decided she was done here and so... she died.  It's sad, but... People die everyday."

"I know that."

"Like every second."

"I get it."

"Literally, twenty people just died. Right now. While we were talking."

"Okay."

"And, uh oh, ten more, there they go, just now."
 

"Okay, okay, just stop," I said. I dug out all my shoes, several shirts that had fallen to the floor, a basket of crap, another basket of crap, a rubbermaid container (of crap.) And more crap.
 

"This is a disproportionate reaction."
 

"Look," I said, "Sherry and I took the same classes. I rode a bus to football games with her. We shared lunch on the field together. Probably.  At some point. I'm sure we must have."
 

"You can't even remember!"
 

"That's not the point."
 

"What IS the point?"
 

"People stop remembering!"
 

And, ah, here we were, finally: at the apex of my whole Sherry freakout. This mind-numbing terror I have of disappearing, of being forgotten.  This idea that I (and any number of people) would only ever remember Sherry as teenaged Sherry, a movie-set facade. And eventually, at some point, even that facade would fade and nobody would remember her at all. And then, eventually, it would be my turn and the dead movie facade would be me. ME.

Commence total panic.

 

"Is that all?" asked my husband, still buried in his Star Trek book.
 

"Is that all??"

How does one explain being afraid of death to someone who is not afraid of death?

"I'm going to die," I said.
 

"I see. When?"
 

"How should I know? Eventually!"
 

You know, at least when you find this stuff out in person you can face mortality as a group, together;  you get to find out how the person died and then you can hug it out, reminisce, be sad, but also be glad you're not dead. Not dead! Everyone rejoice and eat finger foods -- we're not dead!

But on Facebook, death is this weird, detached, prolonged experience; a neverending memorial in which everybody and their mother writes "sorry" on your wall even if none of them has an actual memory of you, and the only thing that's left is a collection of photos, cat memes and status posts. This is the 21st Century tombstone.

"What if when we die we become nothing?" I whispered.  "And we disappear forever."

My husband set his book down.  He touched my face gently and said, "What if when we die we become turtles?"

I shook my head. "What if this is all there is?"

"Then you won't know the difference." He turned back to his book and said, "Because you'll be dead. You won't know what's happening." He paused.  "Unless reincarnation. That's a possibility. I'm pretty sure in a past life I was either an indentured servant or else I fought the Nazis in World War II."
 

End Notes and Good Advice: Just stay away from Facebook at one in the morning. Or all the time. Seriously. This is sound advice. Go make some tea or draw a picture or read a fucking Buzzfeed article on The 29 Best Cat Fails or even better, go out and DO something in the world-- but stay away from Facebook.  And maybe CALM DOWN already because whatever it is you're worried about it's just not worth it; life is way too short, you know? Cliche but true. And at least you're still ALIVE. Right? Remember that. Because Sherry is not.

(Until you die, anyway.  And that can happen at any time. ANY TIME!)

Christ, I need a drink.

** For Sherry.

"I'm not dead yet."
- Man Dying of Plague, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

New York City is a garbage pile. And other things.

Here is a photo from my honeymoon in Hawaii:

Both peaceful and lovely.

 



Here is a photo of garbage outside my office:

Times Square, the anus of New York City? Maybe?

 

How are these two images related? Well, one is a relaxing tropical oasis and the other is a shitheap.  Literally. And now that I've been to both I can safely say, with some authority... Times Square is in fact the anus of the United States. (Is it really?) Yes. Not just New York --the entire United States.  So, to recap: while everything below the Mason Dixon is a bleeding constellation of hemmoroids, Times Square is the anus proper.  Let me explain:

 

I don't hate New York City -- I've lived here for more than a decade now and, to quoth the great Winston Zeddemore (Ghostbusters - watch it), "I love this town!" However, loving and hating this city often goes hand in hand. Like best friends who fucking hate each other. I mean, yes we have the best pizza. We have the best Chinese.  We are the theatrical cultural mecca of the Earth (and I don't mean the mainstream pseudo crap currently demanding lunatic prices on Broadway, but off-Broadway, where the real goldmine of creativity and talent is.) It's also nice that we tend to band together about all this, as if New York is our shithead little brother and while we know he's an asshole only WE get to say it. You know?

 

It's just... every once in awhile I get to thinking about living in Hawaii.  I mean, what is that like? You know? Waking up to paradise every single day? To walk out of your home onto a white sand beach, or look out your window into the valley between mountain ranges? (My husband and I drove up through the mountains of Oahu, and the homes are effing spectacular.  Some built right into the sides of mountains.  Mountains! Meanwhile, the view from my apartment is the concrete wall of another apartment.) What is it like to leave work and just go to the ocean, because.... no reason. Because it's there.  What's it like to walk along the beach all the time? Would you actually go to the beach all the time, or would you avoid it because it's always there? Or maybe in Hawaii right now someone is taking a photo of the trash heap in front of her office and wistfully imagining what it must be like to live in a city far from her stressful life and the goddamn beach and all the garbage. Because paradise never looks like paradise when it's where you live, right?

 

Whatever.

 

That person is an idiot.  New York is the worst.

 

(sigh)

Changes abound! The Tragic Hamster Is Back!

The mighty rodent hath returneth! Welcome home! Hooray! After a brief four year hiatus, I have returned to my rightful place here at Tragic Hamster so I may continue my work as a blight on the face of bloggerdom. Everyone rise and slow clap! So what happened during those four years, you ask?

1. I have aged approximately four years, assuming a linear understanding of time.

2. I have not had a relapse of Coney Island Meningitis, which I'm sure is a relief to everyone (mostly just me) although certainly all my readers (all both of you, bless your hearts) who valiantly made the effort to wade through the Game of Thrones novel about Meningitis that was my last post here. In an effort to keep things more concise from now on, I'll be limiting my posts to 500,000,000 words or less. I'm sure this is a relief for all of us.

3. I got married! (Say what, Lady Hamster?) Yes, it's true! I am an old, married rodent now. A Matron of Rodentdom. A rodent owning rodent (marriage means ownership, right?) Of course, both the sass and snark remain despite everything. But more on that later. (For details on exactly how much more, please see above for "Word Count Goals.")

4. I have begun work, slowly but surely (more slowly than surely) on several spec scripts, the content (and/or lack of content) of which I will complain about at length here. So. There's that to look forward to.

5. I have finally watched all of Breaking Bad.

Okay. Now that we're all caught up, we can get back to the good work of posting lunacy and nonsense. You're welcome, America.

Jaime Goes To The Hospital: Part One

"What are you so worried about, Scully? It's just a nice little trip to the forest."

- Mulder, The X-Files

For those of you who don't know (any of of the 9 of you reading this blog), I was hospitalized for two weeks - with an ailment the doctors still don't quite understand because... it only half exists? Or doesn't really exist at all? I don't know, they don't know -it's all very reassuring. What I DO know is after almost a month and a half of tests and MRIs and bloodwork up the proverbial wazoo, I'm still being pieced together, much like an episode of House. Or maybe Humpty Dumpty - just without the shell and the wall and the king's horses. At one point, I even accompanied my neurologist to his monthly conference to help present my case, for which my biggest contribution was springing out of my seat and insisting, to a room filled with neurologists, "I promise you I don't have Herpes."

So. Basically, that's the end of the Great Story Of The Crazy Illness. That said, there's a beginning to it as well - and I've been told by my doctors that I should keep a record of everything that happened - from start to finish - you know, "just in case" (always a phrase you wanna hear from people paid thousands of dollars to keep you from dying.) So in an effort to follow medical advice, I'm gonna begin with the beginning and take you guys on a ride from there - a great blog ride. A great big illness blogocoaster, if you will. Kosher?

Okay then.

To start at the beginning would be to start with all the blame placed squarely on Coney Island. Why? Because objects and places are inanimate and thus easy targets who can't argue that the only person to blame is yourself (shut up world! I blame Coney Island!)

But to go back even further, and to spread the blame around in as convoluted a way as possible, especially seeing as I can't blame anyone but myself (see above) or God (already sick of my blaming shit on him) we can also blame this on my love/hate relationship with amusement parks in general. For instance, on the one hand, my love for them is a bit unnatural - as in, I went to college in Orlando mainly for Disney World, where I played Mickey Mouse for two years - both for the joyful absurdity AND the free passes. But on the other hand, I hate them, too - the ticket cost, the commute, the lines, the aimless wandering, the constant odor of stale candy and moldy children, and the inevitable sunburn/stomach ache/brain ache that follows... And here in New York, the freaking commute is the worst part - as in, the subway ride to Coney Island will be long enough to age you at least ten years by the end of it. So ever since moving here, I have always, proudly, been all, 'thanks but no thanks, Coney Island!'

And yet...

(Undoubtedly, "and yet..." will be the quote carved on my headstone - with a skull and crossbones directly beneath it, and another quote: "Forever made of awesome" and then maybe a famous Dana Scully quote, too - although according to my mother, the headstone has to fend for itself as we tattooed Jewish freaks are chosen in life, but not in death: we're banned from all Jewish cemetaries. Which means if I DO eventually die of Meningitis + Mystery illness, it'll just be me and the Gentiles for all eternity. Can you say Interfaith Post-Death Par-tay?? BYOB, undead friends!)

Where was I?

Anyway.

And yet there was my sister, quietly counting down her last few months in the city, still living in the crawl-space behind my sofa, still eager to do NYC shit she'd never done... And of course there was also the boardwalk I'd never seen, the endless Coney Island funnel cakes I'd never tasted, and the Whack a Moles and the brand new Luna Park I'd had yet to try...

SO MUCH STUFF, GUYS!!!

(DAMN IT.)

So finally, the week before July 4th, during one of the worst heat-waves since the great brownout of 03 - when electrical wires under the streets in Queens actually melted - the two of us made it out to the boardwalk - just two Coney Island virgins getting our cherries popped.

(Except you know how some of us lose our virginity and afterwards shamefully gather our clothes and regret losing it to THAT guy?)

(Yeah.)

The first half hour we spent outside the train on the Boardwalk, excitedly snapping photos of the giant hotdog countdown clock like those tourists who take 100 pictures of the Airtrain subway platform like it's the Statue of Liberty.

Then we rode the tallest, oldest Ferris Wheel in the US and joked that I would be the first accident in 100 years. (Oh, irony. I fucking hate your bullshit.)

Afterward, we wandered out to the crowded beach, where we set up camp not far from a couple of drunk chicks slurring over their giant, $14 Cyclone collectors margaritas: "I'msooooooooover himstooooopidbooooyzzz," which of course prompted a few mock drunken slurs of our own: "Imsoooohotwhydoesn'thewanttooohiiiittthiiiiisss...." until, bored, we got up and walked along the shore, where a lovely - if not utterly stoned - older couple took our photos against the backdrop of the beach and ocean. "You guys should check out The Grateful Dead concert," they suggested. "The ampitheater's right behind you."

"Ooh, Grateful Dead," said my sister. "I love them."

"Sure," I said, "Old people in tie dye is always fun."

"You're old, too, Jaime."

"Shut the hell up, Lindsay."

So the two of us stumbled willingly into a tailgating flea market melee - vegan food, tie-dyed dresses, homemade jewelry, giant homemade glass bongs, old stoners and alcohol galore; Party in the USA, man! Here my sister bought herself a sterling silver ring and I bought myself a burritto. Not too bad for a stoner flea market par-tay in the middle of summer.

On our way out, I was given a free, mostly untouched beer - by a girl who I swear was an extra from Dazed and Confused. A few sips later and the sky had opened up; our meteorological alarm clock - time to head back to the city.

Honestly, it was just a totally fun, lazy time, y'all; Nothing special or unexpected happened; the afternoon passed as pleasantly as most summer days pass - slowly and outside of time, like a drive down the Florida Turnpike on a cloudless, sunny morning - until you realize you've been lulled into a daydream, and actually you've just zoned out for sixteen miles and missed your fucking exit - and also, you've lost an entire half hour of your life now; how the fuck did that shit happen? How do you turn this car around? Holy shi -

CRASH!

So the day after Coney Island, I woke up with a sunburn - not unusual for post-beach; admittedly, I knew should not have used my sister's tanning oil - every time I spray that crap on myself I swear to God I end up grilled like hamburger; FYI: for us translucent people, tanning oil is the kiss of death - like that coating you put on charcoal. Fire up the grill, boys! And this is exactly what I attributed the pain to - a weirdass sunburn.

"It's just all over," I told my sister, and proceeded to pace the length of the living room with arms and legs akimbo like a walking gingerbread man. "My feet are pretty fucked up. Is it possible to cook your feet inside your own shoes? And my hands, too. Like I've scraped them across a dozen feet of concrete. Like I fell off my horse something. Is that normal? I don't think that's normal."

"What now? You fell off your horse?" My sister looked up from her computer, pulled out her headphones. "You don't look burned."

I gave my still-pasty skin a cursory glance. "You're right. I don't."

"Maybe you have an invisible sunburn."

"Yeah? Maybe." I examined myself again. "Hold up. Do those actually exist?"

She put her headphones back on, answering, "No."

Fantastic.

Post-Coney-Island, Week Two:

A new sensation blossomed in my legs; a weird ache - as if I'd been on an elliptical machine for a day - and then carried it through miles of desert. For ten straight years. Much like my Jewish ancestors in Egypt with the matzoh. (Which is where the matzoh comes from, yes? No? See - THIS is why I shouldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetary. Not because I have a tattoo, but because I am Jewish-illiterate.)

So July 4th came and went (happy Independence Day!) and I managed to find my way to Brooklyn for a rooftop party - beneath the blazing hot sun, in a second round of heat wave, of course. There I spent most of the afternoon huddled in the shadows created by the four foot ledge, legs crossed awkwardly, drinking, merry-making, and explaining to my friends about my extended sunburn affliction - also apologizing for flashes of my underwear in my teeny skirt.

"It's killing me. It's fucking killing me."

"How long now?" asked my friend Corey.

"I don't know, a week?"

"You've been sunburned for a week?"

"Yeah. I know. That's a thing, right? That's normal?"

"Sure."

"Really?"

He shook his head and threw back a beer. "No."

Fantastic squared.

At this point in Sunburn Land there was really only one thought circling round my head: Clearly I'm going crazy. As in, there is a physical process involved with a Trip To Crazytown and this is the tollbooth to get on that highway.

"Everything hurts now," I told Lindsay - on that lovely July 4th evening - as a pleasant breeze coming in through the opened window hit my skin like a wall of angry glass shards, and I winced. "It's like I have the sunburn of death. It's like I set myself on fire. Except I'm not red at all. Am I going crazy?"

What I needed was validation, just anything from anyone to reassure myself that my brain had not somehow melted into my eyeballs.

"Yes," she said. "You are."

"Helpful. Thanks a lot."

Post-Coney-Island, week three.

By now the Sunburn of All Things Weird had turned into The Sunburn of Death. So I finally did what anyone would do about two and a half weeks prior to when I actually did it (shut up, world! It's not my fault! Coney Island, I SHAKE MY ANGRY FIST AT YOU!); I finally went to the doctor.

At least I'll have some answers, at least I'll find out I'm not crazy, I thought, as I sat in the waiting room - valiantly trying not to touch my own skin - for fear of screaming out in white-hot pain like a prisoner being beaten in a shower stall with a wrench.

"The good news is there's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor.

I cocked my head to one side and perched on the edge of the exam table; my organs were cooking themselves inside my skin like marinated Shishkebob, like the cartoon chicken from the Cluckin Chicken sketch on SNL, roasting itself. There were tears in my eyes and I suddenly had a precious, fantastic vision of bashing my doctor's head into the blood pressure reader.

"How can there be nothing wrong?" I snapped. "I feel like burnt hair. I feel like when my best friend pushed me into a cactus in the 9th grade. Something's got to be wrong!"

"Well," said the doctor absently, as he typed information onto my online chart, "Muscle ailments are rare but not uncommon. Have you been exercising excessively?"

"No."

"Lifting anything heavy?"

"Seriously? With my entire body including the bottoms of my feet?"

"Well, it could be something like Lupus."

"Lupus!" My eyes went wide. "What the hell is Lupus?"

"A degenerative disease of the skin. Forget I said it."

"What?" Now my brain hurt, too. "Why the hell would you say it if you wanted me to immediately forget that you said it?"

"You wanted ideas."

I blinked in disbelief.

He cheerfully handed me a printed presciption and said, "Naproxen. Once every four hours. It's just like Aleve."

My teeth were grinding. "If it's just like Aleve why do I need a prescription? Can't I just buy some goddamn Aleve?"

"Sure you could," he said, as if talking to a small, stupid child, "But you wanted prescriptions."

Fantastic cubed.

Later that night, as I lay on the couch with my feet perched at a level above my head, painfully munching on a Naproxen cocktail and desperately telling myself that I was fine, perfectly fine, that I just needed some Aloe, that I should listen to the advice of the idiot doctor, I somehow lost the functioning of most everything below the waist. And I realized I needed not just one idiot doctor but a whole slew of idiot doctors, namely an idiot hospital - right as my lower half just shut down altogether, which in English language form I imagine would roughly translate to: "Fuck you, Jaime - fuck you and all your asshole vital organs. Fuck you in your stupid faces and/or nucleotides. Why the hell didn't you go to the ER two weeks ago?"

(CONEY ISLAND'S FAULT!)

Moving on.

The ER was a flurry of doctors and nurses and wide-eyed, frightened, wandering triage patients. As I had come in via ambulance and in howling, obnoxious pain, I had been given top priority, although not everyone moved through the system as fast. Occasionally, waiting patients would be given a bed or a room, although mostly they just wandered around like battered soldiers, stopping only to pester doctors and/or cough hysterically into the faces of other patients, until a nurse would finally come up and beg them: "Please sit, sir. Please cough into your hands, sir. Please, I'm begging you, stay away from the computers, sir." It was unsanitary, but in an ironic way; the Alanis Morrisette of Hospitals.

The beds were parked side by side, like the Citifield parking lot, and seperated by curtain. They faced flatscreen TVs bolted into the ceiling, and mostly, the flatscreens played snow - unless they played silent, snow-covered sports and news. Here is where I channeled all my nervous energy - into a fuzzy screen playing MLB scores over and over - and where I spent most of my Saturday afternoon's focus when I wasn't being rolled into one test or another; chained to the bed by IV, hooked up to a Foley, doped up on something magical called 'Dilaudin,' and desperately trying to read Keith Hernandez' lips through TV snow to see if the Mets had won.

"So when do I get to leave?" I asked the nurse.

"You have a lowgrade fever and an elevated white blood cell count,"she said. "We're not sure what's going on. We have to keep you here awhile. Run some tests."

"Well, it better not be AIDS," I joked. (Trying as I often do to allieviate seriousness with ill-timed and completely awful quips.)

"I'm sorry?"

"AIDS," I repeated.

"Do you want us to run an AIDS test, ma'am?"

"No. I was mostly kidding. I don't think I've slept with enough assholes yet to really get AIDS. But if you think it's AIDS, run the test. Just add it to my queue. Like a line at a theme park? Get it? Say, that'd be fun news to deliver to the last asshole I slept with, right? Hey, douchebag, guess what - I have AIDS! Except I don't. But we covered that already. Have you slept with many assholes? You know how it is with them. Shit, do you really think I could have AIDS?"

"What?"

"AIDS," I repeated louder, realizing I had only managed to sucessfully scare the shit out of myself.

"Ma'am, I just need to change your IV."

"But now I can't get AIDS out of my head. What if I have that? Why do I joke about these goddamn things?" She pushed the new IV into my arm and I sighed. "Jesus Christ, Diludad is amazing."

"It's Dilaudin, Ma'am."

"Whatever." I picked at my new IV. "It better not be AIDS."

About a thousand tests later and my sister finally returned to the hospital to check on me. She stood over me for the final test, a spinal tap, and afterwards, gave me her own diagnosis via text message: "Coney Island Fever Virus."

My (new) doctor's only slightly more informed diagnosis: "Meningitis." Except she had a look - kind of like the befuddled expression my dog gets when we sit together on the couch and I rant about Fox News. "It's Meningitis for sure, just... we don't understand the burning, and we can't tell where you got it from. And you've got something else, too. Or you must. Your symptoms are too weird otherwise. And if not, then we don't know what it is." And then: "Don't worry, you're not dying." Then a tiny laugh - as if terrifying me with vagueness was the joke. Ha ha? Suddenly I wished for Shannon, my improv teacher, to leap up and yell, "No! Where's the justification? Do it again, but this time don't be an asshole with your scene partner."

"Meningitis?" I said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Don't worry, ma'am, it's viral, not bacterial."

"Meningitis?" I repeated. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Meningitis?! What the shit? Motherfucker. Shit. Shit shit. I need to call work. I won't be in on Monday. What else? Is it possible to get some dinner soon? I'm fucking starving." Then, hocked up on drugs, I promptly passed out. This was two am on July 10th. I would not see the outside world again until the 22nd.

The next day, my sister sat beside me in my isolation (sorry- PRIVATE) room wearing the blue decontamination gown my doctors had ordered her to wear - as if she had entered the underground medical bay in Independence Day ("there can be no peace between us! nooooo peeeeeeaaaaaaace!" Man I love that movie) - although I was reassured that I was not contagious. Even though my room had several specialty anti-bacterial scrub-down stations. Even though it practically had an airlock. Not contagious! Nonetheless. I was now an anomaly. A medical mystery. Someone you'd see on Gray's Anatomy, just without the deep dark secret from my past and Katherine Heigl being annoying and Dr. Bailey shooting witty insults at me. And as a result, I had a team of doctors working on me - all with no ideas.

My sister offered up more of her own theories - although hers hadn't changed much since the less fun version of Spinal Tap had offered me Meningitis instead of pithy 70s rock music:

"Who knows what was wandering around that Grateful Dead concert, Jaime. I bet you that chick with the beer was just passing shit out, just handing people beers and drugs and Meningitis. That'll teach you - never accept a beer from a stranger. Now you have Coney Island Meningitis."

(SEE?? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT, CONEY ISLAND!)

Which brought to mind an image of - not rollercoasters or Luna Park - but the adorable monkey from Outbreak, who, with one accidental scratch, killed his nameless poacher and then 3/4ths of an entire California town. What if my desperate need to never be left out of the theme park fun had finally KILLED ME?

Fantastic to the fourth power.

One nice little trip and now I was that bikini clad idiot who'd poached a beer and as a result was the first to be afflicted with a mystery condition - and thus I wouldn't even get an awesome death scene like Kevin Spacey - I'd just get some gruesome cut-away before they incinerated my body and brought in Renee Russo. Fucking great. Thanks for the memories, Meningitis Island! See if I ever come back and ride your hundred year old roller coaster!

Le Sigh.

This we'll just call ground zero: the beginning: an innocent little trip to Coney Island that ended in HORROR. (So head on over to Coney Island, kids: where Meningitis will infect you and kill you. You hear me? IT WILL INFECT YOU AND KILL YOU.

Insert cheerful commercial for Coney Island.)

More Meningitis fun to come in Part Two...