The Oregon Trail

Ladies - Do you have a man with marriage and kids on the brain? Does the thought make you break out in a cold sweat? Then, boy, do I have the answer for you. Download the old school computer game, The Oregon Trail, on your boyfriend's iPhone and for hours he can play out his male provider fantasies without the harmful side-effects - horrid white dress, stretchmarks, dirty diapers, college tuitions.

As a strapping pioneer my man protects me and our three beautiful children - Isabel, Greydon and Anderson. And guess what? I don't have to do anything because my gorgeous, dusty counterpart does all the mothering for me. It's a win-win! Of course, two of our children were snatched by bald eagles and the third died of typhoid, but the beauty with the Oregon Trail is that you can always start from scratch and get a whole new set of adoring faces to feed and keep safe from angry natives (who I really don't blame for axing off my arm the other day. I mean, they were there first.)

So, ladies, remember, if wedding dresses make you itch and small children frighten you (as they do me) then take a hint from Blackheart and download The Oregon Trail today... It won't keep him satisfied forever (you can only rebuild so many tornado struck wagons trains before you just give up), but at least it'll buy you some time while you take your biological clock in for repair.

"Oooooh, that smell. Can't you smell that smell?"

The band Lynyrd Skynyrd said it best in their lyrics, "Ooh, ooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell? Ooh, ooh that smell. The smell of death surrounds youuuuu..." And my god, does it surround me. About one month ago, my boyfriend and I woke up not to the smell of coffee brewing... oh no... no Folgers in our cup... no, we woke up to a horrific stench emanating from our heating vents. So far we've tried everything.

1.) Turning off the heaters, which was fine until the temperature in Music City dropped to below 20 degrees at night.

2.) Pest control. Just a few weeks after the smell set in a mouse appeared in our house. We thought, "that's it!" The same thing happened to me in the Santa Cruz dorms. They had to pry the mouse corpse out of the wall and soon things returned to normal (i.e. the smell of dirty socks, cheap perfume and marijuana.) Turns out, however, that our Nashville mouse was a fluke. We did manage to catch some possums living under our house (they were set free elsewhere for all you animal lovers) and my cat, Jade, will never forget the day her stuffed mousy came alive and scuttled across the room (don't worry, we set that critter free, too.)

3.) We recycled that gigantic collection of molding glass in our laundry room (you have to take it to the recycle plant), but all that did was give me more room to dance as I fold clothes.

4.) The plumber thought we may have a sewage leakage somewhere. Nope, we don't. And that theory sounded so good!

5.) We had workers clean up and attend to the mold growing on the ceiling in my bathroom. Nope, not the source either.

6.) Ignore it. This is the step my boyfriend and roommate have now implemented. And I don't blame them. What else can we do? We live in the stinky house now. The one people make excuses not to come over to. We buy candles (the plug-ins just made it worse, yuck) and burn incense and try not to gag. "Oh no..." we tell friends, "it's not our house. It's the construction down the street. Open sewage line." Hell, maybe it is. Or maybe it's a haunting. We haven't tried an exorcist yet. Does anyone have a good number for one? I'll try anything once.

Mission Accomplished

Well, I did it. Yes, ma'am. I wrote 50,000 words of a novel entitled "Anchor Them" in one month. I took the National Novel Writing Month challenge and came up a winner. You know what lesson I garnered from the whole experience? What gem of knowledge was left behind in its wake? What deep insight I learned about myself and my place in the world?... Well here it is...

I don't like writing novels.

There you go folks. I've always pondered in my mind what it would be like to be a famous novelist. To hole up in a cabin by a lake somewhere and pen my memoir. Or rent a villa in Tuscany to hash through my latest best seller. But now I know. It's not for me. I'm a screenwriter at heart. I like to write telling dialogue and to tell a whole universe in one frame. I don't like to bother with in depth description. Bo-ring. Grab the heart of the matter, the soul of your character, the core of your message, throw it up on screen in the most concise way possible and relish in the fact that you did it all in 120 pages.

Thoroughly-good For Your Soul

In Spin Class today I was pleasantly surprised by the sub's awesome and eclectic taste in music, especially her choice of George Thorogood's "Who Do You Love?" What I love about that man and his lyrics is the real sense he instills of the Wild West - freedom, adventure, savage love, all the vices you can handle. I also appreciate his taste for the macabre, something I, myself, am trying to achieve in this National Novel Writing Month challenge - that colorful mixture of life and love and grit and madness and morbidity. In his lyrics you feel death looming around the corner, making his lyrics and you feel ever the more alive. (Kind of like my favorite television show "True Blood", really...) So below I've offered up this tune in all its lyrical glory. Enjoy it if you know what's 'good' for you.

George Thorogood & the Destroyers - Who Do You Love?

I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire, I got a cobra snake for a necktie
A brand new house on the road side, and it's a-made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a band new chimney put on top, and it's a-made out of human skull
Come on take a little walk with me baby, and tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Around the town I use a rattlesnake whip, take it easy baby don't you give me no lip
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

I've got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dying
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Now Arlene took a-me by my hand, she said "Lonesome George you don't understand,
who do you love?"
The night were dark and the sky were blue, down the alleyway a house wagon flew
Hit a bump and somebody screamed, you should've heard what I'd seen
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Yeah, I've got a tombstone hand in a graveyard mine, just twenty-two baby I don't mind dying
Snake skin shoes baby put them on your feet, got the goodtime music and the Bo Diddley beat
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

I walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire, I got a cobra snake for a necktie
A brand new house on the road side, and it's made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a band new chimney put on top, and it's made out of human skull
Come on take a little walk with me child, tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

The United States of Racism

Honestly, I can't take it anymore. When we elected our new president I thought to myself, "wow, we've done it. We've finally grown up as a country." Don't take me wrong, I wasn't under the assumption that's we'd eradicated racism. All you have to do is take the drive along Highway 40 from the West to Nashville, Tennessee to know racism still lurks in the dirty subconscious of our great nation. But, still, I was hopeful. I was also, unfortunately, blind.

This election has only fed the dragon, waking it from it's demonic underground lair so that it can wreak havoc on America, once again. All you have to do is turn on Fox news or flip on AM radio to see and hear the dragon spewing its venom across the airways, making gullible Americans mistake trash for truth. What is the real truth? Well, in things are pretty much the same as they were before the election. The sky isn't falling, Chicken Little. Swarms of locusts are descending on our crops. Socialists haven't taken over the country. The status quo is essentially still in effect. So we have a president who actually wants his people to be able to afford to see a doctor. Oh no! What ever will we do if the country's poor are suddenly leading long, healthy lives? How will be feel grateful for our lives if our fellow man isn't suffering by comparison? The terror!

Change is coming but the dragon is doing its scale-y, slimy best to burn it to a crisp. If you believe the hype the racists put out, you'd think we were experiencing Armageddon. And maybe were are. But it's not Obama ushering in this terrible realm, it's America's twisted hate. It's racism that's taking hold, dragging us down into the muck and mire. Once we as a country can call it what it is, we might actually be able to do something about it. Until that day, I'm going to start stocking up on flame retardant suits.

National Novel Writing Month - Take the Challenge!

National Novel Writing Month has begun, folks, and in my desire to thrust myself off the cliff known as 'the comfortable life' I've decided to take the challenge. From November 1st until midnight November 30th the goal is to have written 55,000 words (about 175 pages) of a novel, the emphasis being on quantity, not quality. Here's some quotes I love from the website:

"Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft..."
"Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing."
"We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together."

After trying, yet failing, to get another writer in my life to take the challenge with me, I thought I'd make the plea here. All it takes is a quick sign-up online. Winners (they count your words after midnight November 30th and then immediately erase your prose so there's no worry of plagiarism - you can also submit it scrambled if you're super paranoid) will get their names in the coveted Winners Circle online. Yes, it's a real challenge, but the point is to just go, man, go! Don't think about it too much. Just write for the mere sake of writing and see what wonderful crap you come up with. And please let me know if you sign up so I can add you as a writing partner.

By the way, the site also has a 'procrastination station' and tons of advice when you get stuck, not to mention motivational emails to get you pumped. So what the hell, let's keep our eye on that finish line and get our creative juices flowin'. Who's with me?!

Cleocatra

Not much to say about this one other than 1.) I'm not a cat lady, I swear, but this is truly amazing 2.) She actually seemed to like it, posing for my roommate, giving us all her good angles and 3.) There is nothing better than cats in disguise. My boyfriend had already searched online for a ninja cat costumes but came up short. As luck would have it, though, while shopping for a gold pen for my Joan Holloway outfit at Target I stumbled upon three marvelous options for $5 - rooster, jester and pharaoh. I chose this one because of the golden cobra (duh) and because it's light-weight; therefore, suitable for her tiny head. Can't you just see her floating down the Nile, male cats fanning her fur and hand feeding her Whisker Lickins? If you can't, you have no imagination. By the way, these photos are a bit blurred because they were taken on my Blackberry. Still, I think they capture the essence of Cleocatra...