Untitled Work of Questionable Value

Ho! Ho! Ho!

I'm OH SO NOT in a Christmas mood. Sunday, I went to The
Devil's Playground to pick up some gifts. I found everything on my
list. I even encountered the Wal*Mart geezer I almost came to
blows with over my missing cart full of merchandise. Oh, he
KNEW who I was, all right. We kind of sidled around one another,
keeping an eye out for shenanigans. It was an uneasy truce. The
main reason for my funk, though, was when I left The Devil's
Playground. It was 73 freakin' degrees! I was sweating under my
lady-mullet. I might as well have been in the southern hemisphere.

I have some gifts I need to hide away. This morning, I moved them
from the back of the large SUV into the laundry room. I put them
in a big black trash bag, and put them where the freezer used to be.
Which is two stories, actually. The gifts are safe because nobody
around here is about to carry out a bag of trash without me telling
them at least three times. The freezer is on the back porch, since
HH never brought it back in after the five days with no electricity.
I'm supposing that he'll get around to it one of these days. Oh, he
has it plugged in. In fact, it contains a free Dairy Queen ice cream
cake that I won at Trivia a while back. HH pickup up the cake
for #1 son's birthday party, and they didn't eat it. I imagine HH
has been dipping into it a little every night. I don't care. Didn't
cost nothin'.

Yesterday, after my shopping trip, I got to fix lunch, ride over
to the new field to pick out a Christmas tree, and color my lady-
mullet a new shade of fake brown. Hey! That's the color it
should be! Anyhoo, I'd forgotten how peaceful it is to lock
myself in the bathroom for an hour. Sometimes I take the bills
in there to pay, sometimes I balance the checkbook, sometimes
I stare into space and a little drool drips out the corner of my
mouth. This time, I took three magazines to read: Entertainment
Weekly, Reader' Digest, and Writer's Digest. Yep. I'm a real
Renaissance Woman. I'm a readin', writin', entertainin' fool.

I only got through half of one magazine. Not because I'm slow,
or move my lips when I read, or can't understand the big words.
I get to thinking. This time, I started with Writer's Digest. I love
to read it. Oh, don't think I plan to write anything other than
this blog. That would be way too much work. I plan to write
things, but the effort gets in the way. There's not any money in
it unless I suddenly morph into Stephen King overnight, and I
wouldn't really want to do that because I think my nearly-severed
leg would hurt to much when a storm was a-comin' in, and some
crazy might walk right into my kitchen to stalk me up close, and
I'd still be cravin' those pain pills I became addicted to, and then
I'd need an Intervention, and I really don't especially want to be
on TV acting the fool while I'm higher than a kite. Not that I'm
accusing Stephen King of any of this stuff, because he's actually
one of my favorite authors even though some think he's all about
quantity, not quality.

I've always loved writing things that I want to write. Not like in
English class, where I could never think of an idea. Or just sitting
around, creating stories. Nope. I mean like writing notes or letters
to people I know. They LOVED them, I tell you. No, they were
not in prison where they would love anything they got in the mail.
They were regular people I'd lost touch with after college, or
after switching jobs.

Speaking of college, one of my roommates and I used to write
entertainment for our weekly parties. Can you say "NERD"?
I knew you could. We really packed them in, too. I'm surprised
we weren't evicted, or had our balcony collapse from too many
guests. People we didn't even know showed up with others, we
were so popular. I had more fun writing the stuff than performing
it. I would rather be behind the scenes. I don't want to call attention
to how very old I am, but some of the partygoers would tell us
every week, "You guys should write for Saturday Night Live!"
Which kind of pissed me off, because that was during some very
unfunny years of Saturday Night Live. As my old friend Karen
might say, "So what you're saying is..." Then she would wait for
them to fill in an answer. Too bad I didn't meet her until years
later. Because I really wanted to know if they were saying that
we actually were funny, and could replace SNL writers, or if
we sucked, and would fit right in with the losers at SNL.
I was afraid to ask.

When I moved on to the job where I met my friend Karen, we
used our talents for evil instead of good. Nobody was safe from
our rapacious wit. We created songs about people we worked
with. They were not very nice. The songs, not the people. Those
poor, unsuspecting folks had no idea that we laughed until we
cried. At their expense. Here's a small example. Karen rented
a house from a teacher who had gone on 'sabbatical leave'. That
was the story she gave us, and she was stickin' to it. The school
said the same thing, but we knew better. She'd taught there for
years, and then wasn't coming back one year. Rumor was that
she'd been let go, but to let her save face, word was out that
she was taking a sabbatical leave. Which is not something I'd
ever heard of a 6-12 teacher doing. College, maybe, but not
MS/HS teachers. The school certainly wasn't paying her. In the
five years I was in contact with people still working there, she
never came back. She didn't want to sell her house, but moved
everything out of it. I don't even know where she went. It's not
like she planned a trip to Paris to see the Louvre or anything.
If I was going on sabbitical (whatever the h*ll that is, as we
used to say) I would not move out all of my stuff.

Anyhoo, Karen loved the theme song from the old TV show
'Green Acres'. She sang it all the time: "Greeeen Acres is the place
to be. Faaaarm livin' is the life for me. Land spreadin' out so far
and wide. Darlin' I love you but give me that countryside". Eddy
Albert was the star, along with his TV wife Eva Gabor. Karen
and I kept pondering where the absentee landlord was. Karen
was singing this song 24/7. We came up with verses about this
teacher. I won't go into all the gory details, but after vocalizing her
many transgressions, from making an 8th-grader cry over a color
wheel, to eating a 20-piece bucket of chicken from a local
restaurant while claiming, "I have family coming in this weekend",
it ended with "...and now I'm on sabbitical leave!" Each weekend
we made up a new verse. Nobody was safe. It's a good thing
Karen and I parted ways after I left that school, because we quite
possibly would have taken over the world by now.
And I'm The Brain. Not Pinky.

Gosh, I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but it's been
a sweet trip down memory lane. Wake up now. You can go
on home. I've got some more thinking to do.

What do you think, Mabel?
Will the school give me a sabbitical leave?