Hump-day Haiku: Amy Winehouse

I love Back to Black
Mix The Supremes with Nina
You've my attention.

Troubled and messy
Familiar with Janis and Jim
Two albums only

I will always be
Wishing for the next project
That will never come

Good news for execs
Death does wonders for business
Album sales liftoff

Hello?

I've heard of it. I've seen it happen on television, usually after the girl living in the penthouse apartment tells her boyfriend she's sleeping with one of her roommates. You think it will never happen to you. You're nothing like those people on the Real World. But then, something happened. BAM! The words being spoken suddenly stopped. 

You sat there, waiting.

While you waited, the idea filters through your mind, like water through a pasta strainer. Nah. You push the thought away, knowing adults don't treat each other that way.

You wait, hearing nothing but crickets.

Son-of-a-bitch, there was no doubting it now. Yes, that really did happen. The angry click made you its hang up bitch, inviting you to the party of done.

Dun, dun, duh, du-un.

The melodramatics of it all dropped your stomach like driving too fast on a hilly road.

You started asking yourself questions that weren't previously in your Rolodex: Did you have it coming? Who were you talking to because you no longer recognized them? How long did you have the phone up to your ear waiting for someone to speak? What was proper after-you've-been-hung-up-on protocol? Was there a support group you could join?

After your internal system settled, you felt it starting in your toes, wiggling up your legs, fluttering over your belly, winding around your head, finally exploding out of you like puss under tightened skin: laughter.

You were sure this wasn't the response the disconnected party intended, but you couldn't help it. You hadn't seen the likes of these Dial Tone Theatrics since...well...never. And you've always been a fan of the theatre. So you wondered why the Real World girl got so angry when her boyfriend hung up his phone and flipped her the middle dial tone finger. It was a spectacle at its Alexander Graham Bell finest, and unlike the people of the Real World, sometimes you had to wait half your life for a ticket to the show. Now, finally, you get to tell others it was worth the price of "admission".

Gang of Dicks

The Gang of Six (working to solve our nation's debt crisis) look like they should be giving a waitress a hard time at a roadside Cracker Barrel. One look at them and their who-just-farted expressions and I know these are the men I want in charge of my nation's credit card. 

I find confidence in a group of men who all part their hair on the same side.

But seriously, they look like they need a calculator to figure out the tip.

Is it too much to ask to get a vagina in the gang? I'm not asking for half a dozen Beavers to build a damn the Johnsons can't penitrate; I'm just asking for one. Two would be better, three would be miraculous, but one is necessary.

Or is it too creepy to have a vagina at the table because it could be bleeding? I know how squeamish a penis can get around a tampon.

Women have come a long way, but not far enough. There's still no room at the old white dick's table for a vagina. If you're a woman and you've ever waited tables--it doesn't have to be at the Cracker Barrel--you know what I'm talking about: Sitting down is never part of the agreement.

Sports Fan

I took the US women's loss in the World Cup rather hard. Not because I'm a overzealous patriot. Not because I'm related to one of the players. And certainly not because I have dreams of playing soccer for the US National Team. It's because I'm crushing hard on Hope Solo.

Now that that's out of the way, I can move on to the US's unbelievable win against Brazil. It was a phenomenally epic, goose-bumps-all-over kind of win. That win made me believe Abby and her fellow teammates were coming home with the cup. But it was Hope Solo's stomach playing peek-a-boo during slow motion replays--Hope landed on the ground as her shirt ever so slowly slid up and away from her stomach--that made my inner sports fan hold on to the arm of the sofa and grunt like a Neanderthal.

Come to think of it, maybe that didn't have anything to do with my inner sports fan.

No matter. I love women who get dirty. Women whose muscles gleam and pop when they run. Women who push physical and mental boundaries. Women who keep going after defeat.

Come to think of it, I love all the women on the US Women's National Team.

They put on one hell of a World Cup show. The sweaty, gritty, ten-heart-attacks-in-two-minutes drama they provided is what makes me a sports fan. Glimpses of Hope Solo's stomach is this sports fan's I-just-swallowed-my-tongue bonus.

No Complaints

When people ask me the obligatory How are you, How are you doing, or How's your day going, my mind often floods with responses:

Happy to wake up next to the person I love but still incredibly pissed I can't marry her. How's your third husband doing?

Sad to see the space shuttle program come to an end. Do you think space exploration is for godless heathens?

Shocked that a United States governor has scheduled a day of prayer and fasting in order to "offer spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face in our communities, states, and nation." That's going to work, right?

Bewildered that the crazier the words out of a person's mouth, the better presidential candidate they make. Now that Trump's out, will you be voting for Bachmann?

Missing Anthony Weiner. Have you sexted with your congressman today?

Wondering if strangers will knock on my door again this weekend to find me wearing my favorite t-shirt with a hole perfectly placed over my right nipple. Does God send His people to your house, too?

Excited the US women are playing in the World Cup final. If it were the men, do you think we'd have gotten the day off of work to watch them play?

Loving reading books better than the one I wrote. But if mine gets published you'll still buy it, right?

Alas, my inner smartass usually responds, No complaints.

Hump-day Haiku: Debt Ceiling

Spoiled rich white men
Hijacked the economy
To prove they're pouting.

They will hold their breath!
Unreasonable tantrums
Belong in Wal-Mart.

Grow up already:
Countries aren't Rent-A-Center
Pay our goddamn bills.

Teammates

I have discussed before that writing is a lonely profession. That's why it's befuddling when some writers dismiss other writers so easily. There are wonderfully open and kind writers out there. There are also writers that seem to think my agentless, unpublished, no MFA degree ass is unworthy of their time and attention.

Golly gee. You sure do look mighty special, standing in the thick of the published heap.

The fuck you do. Regardless if someone has published thirty books, one, or none, the only thing that separates us is us. Bestseller lists, BookScan, Amazon, reviews, etc. separates our work, but that's as far as it goes. What writers think about other writers is what keeps us from being kind to one another, especially when one writer thinks their merit is better than another's.

Writers drink different cups of tea. Writers are vulnerable. Writers struggle and succeed. When you do away with genres, styles, blurbs, agents, publishers, etc., we're all the same. Characters come to us and we can't deny them their stories. When someone can't recognize that in me, the smartass in me wants to tell them to go play in an oven, but the writer in me wants to lift them up even higher.

I can't help it. We're teammates even if I am, currently, only the water girl.

Open Letter: Michele Bachmann

Dear Mrs. Bachmann,

My apologies for interrupting your conversation with God, but this is important. Before you decide to say or do anything concerning slavery, please, consult me first. You're painting yourself as an ignoramus whose ideas on our nation's history play out with nary a bad guy. I'm embarrassingly familiar with Whitey's Golden Years: 80 B.C. - 1964, but nowhere else in history does a document allude to our Founding Fathers working "tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." If I know it's not true, you, as a presidential candidate, should also know it's not true.

And then - my god, Michele - you shot yourself in your pretty white foot when you signed the First Leader pledge that stated "slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." That part of the pledge has been removed, but not before you signed it.

I've heard racists claim they're not racist and then turn around and say something racist thinking their self proclaimed non-racist status protects them from their stupidity. Still with me?

I'm starting to think you actually do believe Washington and Jefferson would have freed their slaves if only there hadn't been so much work to do.

For the love of the melting pot, let me help you.

Here's the plan. Stick to what you know: God's mind, obeying your husband, monitoring uteruses, and the present. Leave the history lessons to the professionals. I know, Michele. I know. This kind of rhetoric raises crazy cash from some seriously scared white people, but I implore you to stop talking out of your ass.

And stop insisting you'll ban gay marriage if elected president. Don't go there. Pandering to the lowest social denominator isn't going to help you this time. People are in the shitter. You need to take into consideration that our nation is socially evolving, Michele. Even if your campaign has been intelligently designed.

Good luck in the primaries!

Whack-A-Muse

Seven Things

Months ago fellow blogger Melanie McCullough tagged me in a "Seven Things About Me" post and it was up to me to turn around and do the same. Bless Melanie's heart, I was touched. Thankful. And frozen.

Insert hyperventilation. These things make me nervous. So let's start there.

One: Being included in chain mails scares me. Not because I think breaking the chain will lend to a burning sensation when I pee, or give me horrible luck for the next ten years, or force me to watch every season of Big Brother, but because I feel pressure to perform. Performing makes me uneasy, which I realize is ridiculous considering if I ever break into the writing world this expectation will increase tenfold.

Two: At the age of eight, I vomited in a movie theater's bathroom sink while waiting for The Empire Strikes Back to start. Combine that with vomiting in my dinner plate after a loud clap of thunder and one might say I was a nervous child.

Three: I was in a play where my character walked across the stage naked. Twice. This also meant I walked across the stage naked. Twice. A few weeks after the show closed I was outside doing yard work. Two women walked by and pointed at me. "You were in that show, right?" one asked. I still - especially when I'm in the open-space produce section of the grocery store - wonder how many people have seen me naked.

Four: No one can ever, and I mean EVER!, grab the front of my neck. If someone knows how I feel about the front of my neck and decides it would be a slap-to-the-knee-riot to pretend to grab the front of my neck, I will rip them in half and bathe in their organs. (Newsflash: it's not funny, asshole.) I can't lean my head back in the car. When I sleep, my chin is tucked towards my chest and the covers cannot rest on my neck.

Five: I think I may have been strangled in a past life. And I never want to have a threesome.

Six: Thankfully, I don't embarrass as easily as I once did; otherwise, one of my most embarrassing moments would have been last week when my butt mistakenly made noise in a room full of people I didn't know.

Seven: My most embarrassing moment was during a farting contest with my cousins while in an amusement park. I went above and beyond and a little shit came out. (But I won, right?) I told my mother, as she scrubbed my unmentionables clean, I was sick to save face. Sorry, Mom; I felt fine.

So now I pass the torch to five of my fellow bloggers. Thank me, or don't; do it, or don't, ladies. No worries. For me, it's simply about sharing the love.

1. Sally Hepworth
2. Claudia C.
3. Johanna K. P.
4. Karolyn Sherwood
5. Angela Kulig

Hump-day Haiku: ExxonMobil

A spill here, spill there,
You are a prince among men.
Royalty is vile.

Off the chart profits:
Five million bucks an hour!
Here's your boom and pads.

Accidents happen;
Lying about the impact
Makes you a fucker.