A New Start

I've decided to make a new start.

Beginning next year, I will become a 32 year-old single woman of uncertain ethnicities living in Brooklyn with a calico cat named Cattywumpus and two fulvous canaries named Yellow and Yellower. In my Crown Heights apartment with the bird cage hanging from the ceiling on a macrame rope by the bay window I will write stories about my inability to have a meaningful, sustainable relationship with a man or a woman because of my suffocating, shallow, trifling and often drunk mother, who insists that the Rose of Jericho tattoo around my belly button is offensive and unflattering. Using my formidable and exalted abilities to craft riveting and detailed narratives about my slightly overweight body, my anxiety-ridden brain, my oily complexion and oilier hair, and the cavalcade of lovers that come in and out of my life like spectral kangaroos, while employing my celebrated powers of detailed observation, I will become the favorite of literary critics the world over, almost indistinguishable from at least a dozen or so identical writers living in Brooklyn with a cat named Cattywumpus and two fulvous canaries named Yellow and Yellower.

Later that same year I'll fall in love with a tall, graceful Masai warrior after spying him sunning his dusty tallywhacker on the Serengeti plain, where I have gone into hiding after a much publicized affair with the married female director of the Bennington MFA program. My love for the wondrous Masai warrior, his stupendous spear and unintelligible language will backfire when I am accused of cultural misappropriation in my imagined flash fiction stories of sex with lions, hyenas, elephants, rhinos, baboons, orangutans, gorillas, warthogs and wildebeests. Tail between my bruised and battered thighs, I return to Brooklyn as a nobody, a nothing, a has-been wannabe, along with at least a dozen or so identical writers that have ventured to the Serengeti seeking the spiritual equivalent of the storied spear of the tall, graceful Masai.

And so, reluctantly, I return to Coon Hollow, a much wiser but still completely irrelevant and aching 60-year-old man with a beautiful, caring, warm, and understanding wife of 33 years, and two amazingly talented, beautiful and inspiring adult children, and Mr. Boo, a  4-legged ball warrior with a coat of pure velvet cacao, all of whom wait patiently for my next new start.

Grab it! It's not about a 32-year old woman, or about a graceful Masai sunning his dusty tallywhacker, but it's just as stupid!

God's Pronoun

When I walked out onto my patio this evening at the behest of Mr. Boo for a little after-dinner ball, I swept my arm across the forest twilight and the glassy, violet ocean and said "Mr. Boo, this is no accident. This is the work of God." I just can't imagine how such magnificence, such peaceful, serene beauty could be anything else but a gift from the creator and I would have sung allelujah from the mountaintops had not Mr. Boo dropped a muddy tennis ball in my lap.

Writing or even talking about God can be tricky for those that aren't literal subscribers to the Bible. Subscribers will refer to God with male pronouns: "Him", "He", "His", since it's spelled out that out that God made man in his own image, then woman was fashioned out of Adam's rib. So God, as the story goes, must be male just like his nemesis, Satan.

There is a reactionary camp that insists that God is a female, but since that's not the accepted  Biblical story, the idea that the creator is a mother (certainly more believable than a male creator) has not gained much traction. Satan, in this model, is man incarnate.

Then there's the remote yet logical possibility that God is neither male or female, or has anything resembling human characteristics whatsoever. God is the force responsible for the existence of love and the creation of everything good, and not much else. Satan is simply what happens when God's force is drowned out by the noise of human greed.

So what is the pronoun one uses when referring to this force, greater than anything any human can comprehend, with a love so pervasive, free and eternally available that the average Joe is apt to hide under the sofa in it's presence. In the absence of the Biblical structure, how does the believer correctly refer to God when "him", "her", and "it" won't do?

I guess if I had the answer I wouldn't be asking the question. Even the chronic wiseass, he who might dismiss death itself with a wave of the hand, a flippant comment, a clever aside, a quote from Mr. Boo and other wiseguys that would only incriminate him - even such dorks would, at the end of the day, like to get the grammar right.

So, which is it?

Cheap, on Amazon

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Used Identity For Sale or Rent

Why go to the hassle of stealing somebody’s identity when there are plenty of folks that would love will unload theirs for next to nothing. Like me.

 

Identity profile:

Last Name: Jablome

First Name: Heywood

MI: none

Age: 60

Sex: M mostly

Height: 6’1”

Weight: 210 with a bullet

Hair color: pending

Shoe size: 11 1/2

Waist size: 35" to 37” depending on where you belt it.

Inseam: 34” and dropping

Occupation: Writer, 

Employment status: none

Education: BS, English Education; MFA, Creative Writing 

Language: Spanglish

Sign:  Pisces

Race: White

Religion: Catholic Buddhism or Buddhist Catholicism depending on the phase of the moon

Ethnicity: British Isles

Political affiliation: Adelai Stevenson Democrat 

Sexual preference: women that wear Brooks Brothers shirts and nothing else, any ethnicity welcome, blacks and freckled redheads preferred

Options include:

Wife, age TBD

SSN: 012 34 5678

Credit Cards: Ralph Lauren Polo Stores #23894829, Exp. Date. 11/2020; CVS; Safeway; Shell; Costco

Bank account ID: Bank of the Azores, chk acct: #098762347

What you'll get:

A classic "boomer" identity like this is a "must-have" in every identity thieve's portfolio. You'll get what's become a lonely life in a Pacific paradise, wiling away the hours singing nonsense melodies to the dog, Mr. Booper (available at extra charge), writing on ridiculous topics like Smart DNS Proxy and FAA Drone Laws, and a penchant for medicating away the indescribable longing in your heart for...for...well, if you can figure it out, God bless ya. Your mind will feel like a swirling vortex of pain and confusion, and, though you will have memories of greatness an delusions of future grandeur, you're likely to get stuck in a cycle of unending regret for bad decisions and missed opportunities. Unfortunately this somewhat dour mental state and internal spiritual rot can manifest physically in the form of loud and odoriferous flatulence, chills, sweats, scrotal itch, bad breath, insomnia, acid reflux, abdominal cramping and debilitating nerve pain in the lower extremities. Fortunately many of these inconvenient distractions may completely evaporate in the face of fierce, self-flagellating, heart-ripping exercise or in the presence of beautiful women with dimpled cheeks and almond eyes. Taken together (the women and the exercise) the feeling of transcendence may last up to an hour. Additional temporary relief can be found in playing the guitar (bass or Spanish) and singing with earsplitting abandon; drugs; alcohol; audiobooks; painting landscapes; sex; gazing at a pair of natural, full breasts; Star Trek Next Gen episodes (featuring Counselor Troi or Dr. Beverly Crusher); dancing or otherwise gyrating to a real or imagined rhythms; Bitches Brew at high volumes; being with offspring and reveling in the hope of future offspring; helping little old ladies cross the street; prayer; meditation; communion; the beach at Sayulita and Mary's mole enchiladas; skiing or memories thereof; magic and other supernatural phenomena; and free money.

Act now, before it's too late!

This identity is still in workable condition but it's not likely to last much longer! Get while the getting is good! Call 1-800-JAB-LOME today!

Guess He's Just a Limbo Kinda Guy

Oh to be back in Limboland, where the sock monkeys and brown puppy dogs play, where seldom is heard an appropriate word and the skies are mostly cloudy and grey. But rarely all day. The sun shines in Coon Hollow even when Muir Beach is getting drenched with mist. But the seasons are on the move, the northern hemisphere is shying away on it's elliptical plane, soon to trade rain, wind, blue skies and psychedelic fiery sunsets for the summertime fog.

Yesterday (Sunday Sept. 28th) I read the first chapter of Learning to Limbo at an event known as Words Off Paper at Insalata's in San Anselmo. I have done scant few readings but I enjoy it every time, perhaps because I'm so used to standing up in front of a microphone and making objectionable noises: yelling, burping, sniveling, stumbling over alliterations and blowing punchlines, badly imitating Brits, Indians and Mexicans, scaring the little old ladies bussed in from The Tamalpais who've come for the second coming of Emily Dickinson. Imagine the shock. It's a wonder none of them have croaked in their seats.

The only reason I feel compelled to report on such a generally ho-hum experience is because of the truly warm and enthusiastic reception my next novel - or at least the first chapter of my next novel - seemed to get. I was told by the manager after I relinquished the microphone to the next reader that Isabel Allende had stopped in to pick up some food, then stayed throughout my entire bit. Perhaps she was just gloating on the awkward voice of the amateur, or perhaps she had the more common, sexual reaction to my reading - a faint, uncomfortable itching that temporarily glues one to their seat lest they get up and start scratching in public. Isabel didn't leave her phone #. Hmm. Perhaps it really was more of a circus interest. But I also sold a lot of Hack, just not to Isabel.

All the authors were truly pro, from the genre romance of Kate Perry to the beautiful, conversational

poetry of Gail Entrekin, to the great John Macon King, publisher of the Mill Valley Literary Review and author of an awesome novel about 1979 in San Francsico. There are great stories out there right under our schnozzolas, by the folks standing in line at the checkout counter at Safeway and many more who may have never been to Safeway.

Today I also learned that if sales of Hack don't pick up it may soon be out of print, meaning anybody might waltz in, maybe you, and snatch up the rights. Hack needs an audiobook. Maybe the potential publisher of Learning to Limbo will pick up Hack too and make one. But either way, what's needed now is the Hunter Pence treatment for Hack, the old "Yes! Yes! Yes!" I hear the market is ripe in Rapid City.

So I leave you with this thought: the limbo. A dance, yes. But a place as well. A place between heaven and hell, neither here nor there, happy nor sad, loved or unloved, empty or full. A tight spot perhaps, where as time goes on the bar keeps getting lower and lower and lower. How low can you go? Maybe the melody is the message, not the words except some: Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack go under limbo stick...limbo lower now...how low can you go?