x-posted from LJ.

I've been hanging out with my friend, Julie, a lot lately. A lot. We have an almost obsession with staying in touch with each other every few days. We spend every weekend together. She is amazing and I love her. She's like the sister I never had and always wanted. Our lives and experiences mirror each other in some crazy ways. Our dads even look alike. Our husbands are exactly the same down to the clothes they wear and their obsessions with video games. She is an amazing artists (she's the one that designed my back tattoo) and I am the writer. She nudges me to paint and I nudge at her to write. Together we are a force to be reckoned with, both physically and spiritually. Whenever we're together there is a flurry of spirit activity around us.

For those of you who don't believe in ghosts, spirits, or life after death,(and I'm assuming most of you don't) go ahead and snicker and then simply skim the rest of my blog.  If you believe or are just impartial, feel free to read the rest.

To make a very, very long story short I have been able to sense spirits since I was a little girl. I've always pushed it down to near non-existence until a few months ago. A few months ago Julie suggested we do a Ouija board at my 30th birthday party and so we did. I ended up channeling her deceased father and two brothers. I was able to nail down their appearances and demeanors. We decided to go gung ho on it and really start delving.

And delve we did. We would get together and channel whatever energies were around us at the time. Mostly it was like we were the lighthouses in the dark...they simply flocked to us. Occasionally we would specifically ask to speak to someone. Like Sandy. I hadn't done a Ouija board since before Sandy had died. When we did one to get a hold of her dad and brothers and were done talking to them, we asked to speak to Sandy.

Immediately my surrounding area got really, really warm. I felt flushed. It felt like his huge hands were resting over mine on the pointer. We talked a little. I mostly kept all of my questions to myself because, as much as I love Julie, there's still a part of me that keeps Sandy and our relationship very much to myself. I asked him if he had any messages for his mother. He spelled out "have fun", which is funny because she works constantly and doesn't ever really have any time to enjoy her life at all. He spelled out "let go" when it came to Tom, which also didn't surprise me in the least. I don't think Tom will ever be able to let go of Sandy. He's not one of those people that dealt with that very easily.

I then asked if there was something I could tell his parents that might make them believe me more, some way that they would know that these messages were coming from him and not just me making things up. He spelled out the word "hams."
Hams? I kept asking if there was more to that and the pointer didn't move. Ooookay. Finally he spelled out "I love you" to me and was noticeably gone after that. There was the whole withdrawal after that. I saw Tom and let him know what Sandy had said to pass on and then asked about hams. I asked if it made any sense to him...did they share some kind of memory together involving hams? Or was it Hamm's beer? He said it didn't ring a bell but to call Laraine and tell her about it.

When I got her on the phone I told her about what had transpired, and then told her what Sandy said to tell her. I asked her about hams and if that meant anything to her at all. She basically went apeshit and said that Tom had been cleaning out the freezer and found three hams and had made them all that previous Sunday night. She said they had been eating ham non-stop for the past four days.

That really alleviated my concern that I was just batshit crazy making things up. How could I have known about that? I couldn't and I didn't. But yet, there was the proof.

I guess I bring up this one specific incident because yesterday was the 6 year anniversary of the accident and of Sandy's death. Laraine, Tom, Stewart, and Stewart's ex-girlfriend were all posting shit on Facebook about how much Sandy is missed, his pictures, and the like. Can I just say that it's a little disheartening to see that shit when YOU are the one that was in that accident? It's like, oh shit guys...thank you for posting that. I almost forgot about THE WORST TRAGEDY OF MY LIFE. FUCK.

Even one of my good friends from back in high school, Justin, posted about it. Saying how Sandy was his "brother from another mother" and how he's going to "carry on the music" for him. Right, if you guys were so close then how come I only saw you two hang out one time in the two and a half years me and Sandy were together? I understand friends drift apart from time to time but two and a half years is a loooong time to go without seeing your supposed brother. It just bugs me.

Sometimes I wonder if, when I die, people whom I barely knew or who were acquaintances will fly out of the woodwork to claim intense personal relations to me. It's all bullshit.

I feel like, after doing that Ouija board sesh and ever since then I'll catch glimpses of him in a doorway or in a reflection or actually FEEL his hand on my hair, I don't really need to mourn him anymore. I feel like he's still with me, even though I hate it when people say that. He really is still with us, just on a different plane of existence. He'll never leave me side, just like he promised. He's in the quiet moments.

It's all incredibly complicated and probably really hard for people who can't sense these things to understand. I went through a long period of thinking that I was crazy, that I was only seeing what I wanted to see, and other such things. I waited until I had verifiable proof before allowing myself to believe. And believe I do.

I guess that's all. My kid free hours are almost up and I still need to sweep and clear off the table and maybe get to wiping down the kitchen counters. All the mundane domesticated responsibilities have increased since I fired Dani in a hail of fire and brimstone. That was an epic fight if ever there was one. Rachel will attest to that fact.

The Juice is Loose

I am somewhat off-schedule today. I stayed up until 1am looking up information on the juicefast/raw diet I will be putting myself on for an indeterminable amount of time. Mike said he wants to do it with me, which surprised the hell out of me. The man cannot eat a meal without something being fried. Yet, I am about 100lbs. overweight and he is 20. I call a bullshit.

So I decided that I wanted to wait until after Valentine's Day to start the fast, mainly because I'm cooking up a huge meal that may or may not include lobster and filet mignon. And I've never had lobster before. And I want to see if I'm allergic to it. And I really can't wait for that. If it weren't for that I would start the juice fast the minute that I got my tax refund back from the IRS, which should be next Wednesday.

Buh. I felt like I had a lot more stuff to write about but I've kind of fizzled out and my caffeine has worn off. More tomorrow, maybe.

The End of an Era

I broke the news to the contributors yesterday that The F-Bomb is shutting down after the 10th issue comes out. I got the response that I thought I would: Hardly anyone said anything, save for the three other people that ran zines. Karley (The Filth), Keith (Every Reason), and Deirdree (Gag Me With A...) were pretty much the only one that gave a rat's ass. Not a peep from anyone else except for Ben who has been helping me copy-edit for a long time and Jon Kulczar who does the Wicket & Imp comic. It was just as I suspected, though. If people can't even care enough to be bothered to contribute (even after they promise a contribution or whine about getting their way on something and then I give it to them) why would they care if the one thing I've been the most passionate about in my life was shutting down?

I cited the fact that I didn't have the money to print them up anymore as the reason why it all had to come to an end. That's only partially true. One of the main reasons I don't want to do it anymore is because of all the half-assed submissions I keep getting from actual friends that I can't turn away because of friendship politics. Submissions I hated but had to use my own money to print up...it really just killed me. It came to the point that I only liked a few pieces in a 44 page zine and that's when I decided I'd had enough. It was time to for change.


It was also the fact that my main type of submission was fiction. Fiction is fine, don't get me wrong, but when 75%  of what you're getting is fiction and you've always had a soft spot in your heart for creative non-fiction, well...it just gets tough.

Also the bad poetry. OH MY GOD. The poetry I have gotten. Jesus. It was like every stanza of every poem caused me to cringe. That's a lot of cringing.

All in all, I am sad that The F-Bomb has grabbed so many fans and attention from places and now that has to come to an end and be all for nothing. I do plan on another collaborative project...after I weed out all the bullshit contributors from The F-Bomb. No more open calls for submissions. I am definitely going to hand-pick the people that I want for this next venture.

And it's going to be awesome. Trust me.

A Morning Full of Possibilities

Having an entire morning to myself is so rare that I actually have to call attention to it. Is that strange for you childless people? I'm sure you have stock in spare time. Me, though? Yeah. It's so rare that I blog about it. Haha

I've been really rolling around a massive amount of ideas in my head about my very own zine, Loco Pantaloons. I have sososo many ideas and things that I want to do I hardly know where to begin. 

First, I want the cover to be handmade and delicate. I am going to be making the cover by making the actual paper for it with scraps of paper around the house. I am going to hand-bind the zine with embroidery thread or ribbon. I am not going to make more than 100 at a time or at all, for each individual issue. 

When I decided to make my own zine, I came up with a list of things that I loved about zines that not one single zine possessed all of. Here's the list.


Something funny
Something heartfelt
Something educational
Poetry that isn't self-written
Quotes that are meaningful
In-depth zine reviews, but not a bunch of them
A really thoughtful cut & paste layout (No receipts!)
A handmade feel to it
Text-heavy, but a good balance of visuals and words
More than 20 pages. I like thicker zines that I can read for a while.

So after I took a look at that list I decided to write my own zine. And write it I did. Except that I started making a quarter size zine and I realize now that I write way, way too much to have such a small zine. I should have made it half-size. But I love the smallness of the quarter-size. Maybe it's a good thing I have an industrial stapler that will staple through 50 sheets of paper. I may need it.

I just have to remember that I actually have the room to elaborate on backstories now. Before I never did. "Suffice to say" became a regular written phrase of mine. Now I have a whole zine to do whatever I want with! Oh, the possibilities!

So, I will be writing a little bit this a.m. for Loco Pantaloons. I'm also thinking of doing some album art if I can. I have some old records that I want to do something artistic with, but just haven't figured out what I want to do EXACTLY yet. I'll doodle a little today and see if anything comes of it. 

 

Too Late

*Originally seen in Gag Me With A... issue 2*

The sickness. The revelation that the subconscious mind can bury your secrets so well that even your conscious mind can’t find them. The stomach turning. The imminent anxiety. Douse it. Lose it all in the three dollar bottle of chardonnay from the gas station. No good, the tears have loosened themselves up and have convinced your eyes to set them free. No such thing as crying before tonight, now you have to punch yourself in the gut as hard as you can to dry up.

That song. That evil, melodic song. Which one? Flames. It’s all that song’s fault. Relistened to it for the first time in years tonight and it flooded my brain with our handful of memories. Been sitting in a trance-like state since its advent. It’s on repeat. You were the only one I knew that loved that song as much as I did. You are the only one that I’ve ever fallen in love with and couldn’t admit it to myself.

That time next to the river, our second time ever being together. We lay in the grass next to each other. I invited you to my wedding and you said you wouldn’t go because you didn’t want to cry. I laughed it off and playfully punched you. Why did I never give that simple sentence one iota of thought? You loved me too, didn’t you? Why didn’t you say anything? God damn you. Why did you say nothing?

Those times we talked on the phone? I’d never met anyone that made me laugh as much as you. We clicked from the very beginning. And now? Now you ignore me. I don’t even get the satisfaction of staying in contact with you.

We’re married now. To dim shadows of what we loved about each other. The vomit rises up in my throat. My heart races my boiling hot blood through my body now.  It could have been you. It could have been. It would have been. If only we both weren’t so good at keeping secrets.

Scotty Doesn't Know

 *Originally seen in The Filth issue 3*

I’m going to start this off by just letting you know that my brother, Scotty, is a total bumblefuck.

In a world where bumblefuckness runs rampant, he could be their president. Now, it’s not really all his fault. Right before he was born my mother’s placenta removed itself from her uterine wall, thus cutting off his oxygen supply for hours. We never really thought anything would come of it after he was born, but it apparently made a huge impact on him in ways we couldn’t determine until he was around four years old.

Four years old was the age he was when he brushed his teeth with my mom’s Monistat 7 cream. Yes, in a moment of epic decision-making, he chose the yeast infection cream instead of the toothpaste that he used every single day. “Tina, this toothpaste tastes funny.” He said to me, Monistat 7 running down the corners of his mouth while he kept brushing. This was also the age that he decided he couldn’t take a shit unless his entire ass was in the toilet and in the toilet water, to boot.

By the time he was eight years old he had already been held back in school once. By the time he was nine he told my mom and me out of the blue “I put Scotch Tape on my balls and then ripped it off…just to see what it felt like.” To say he was an average kid was to stretch the truth a little too far. There was always something slightly off about him.

At age eleven he got busted (and suspended) at school for handing out URL’s to porn sites to his friends. This was also right about the time that he started getting really sticky-fingered. Anything that wasn’t bolted down ended up in his room. This is including, but not limited to, road turtles (you know the bumps in the middle of the road? Yeah, he’d pry them off the street), paper towel and toilet paper rolls, and those little pencils they give you at the Lottery stands in grocery stores. To this day I still have to do a sweep of his room every few months or so. About a year ago when I did this after being lax about for the few years before I came out with every single lighter I had ever lost in those few years. They were stuffed into old diaper wipe boxes and the grand total was around 150. It was insane and made me really start questioning his sanity.

I wish it were only the things he did that smacked of ridiculousness, but alas, it isn’t. It’s also what he says that makes him seem like a total weirdo. He’ll routinely try to pick up phrases or sayings and make them his own, flubbing the words to the point where it makes no sense at all whatsoever. “You’re the vein of my existence” or “HELLO GOVENOR” meant to be said in a British accent but said plainly and over-enunciated, or just completely mispronounce simple words. “You ‘serf that” instead of “you deserved that” is a common one. There are so many more examples I could give here but the sad fact of reality is that I honestly have flushed them out of my brain. It makes for a good snicker but it’s just so weird that you have to flush it from your mind before you start to incorporate it into your daily language yourself.

When the movie Euro Trip came out a few years back they had a song in it called “Scotty Doesn’t Know”. When Scotty was going to school people would sing that to him all the time. He also got it pretty bad at home from me and my dad, too. To be fair, it just fit too perfectly and I couldn’t help myself. I usually try to keep from insulting him or breaking him down too much, but sometimes I just can’t hold back. I mean, he’s Scotty. And he really doesn’t know.

In high school he got held back again in the 9^th grade, at which point he decided to just stop going. But instead of staying home and just telling my dad face to face that he wasn’t going to go anymore, he elected to walk over to my mom’s apartment and fall asleep in her corvette every day during school hours. When he finally got busted for it, he blamed it on me. It was my fault that he failed high school because I made him stay home to take care of my kids. Um, excuse me, what? Of course, that never happened ONCE in the one year that he went to high school, but it didn’t stop everyone from believing that I did it. Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot to mention. My brother is also a pathological liar. He lies about everything there is to lie about. I’m sure that this isn’t just because of low oxygen levels in his brain during birth, but just from shitty parenting on my parent’s part. 

“Scotty! Why did you eat all of the cereal?” I’ll ask him after finding out that three boxes have vanished overnight.

“I didn’t do it.” He’ll reply, even though the kids are gone to their grandparent’s house and my husband and I didn’t do it. Even when he knows that WE know he’s lying, he still lies. Like, what the hell is the point of that? It happens on a near daily basis about everything you can imagine. 

He still lives with me even though he’s almost 21 years old. He’s never had an actual job, doesn’t have a license, doesn’t have a GED or diploma, and refuses to go back to school. He sits like a lump on a log all day and eats me out of house and home at night while we’re sleeping. It’s ridiculous, but honestly I don’t think he’d survive if I kicked him out. He has no friends (other than the weird girls that send pictures of their vaginas to him via text message) and no family that can afford the space to accommodate him. He’s been living with me for almost the entirety of my life and I can’t seem to get rid of him. It seems as though it’s my duty to take care of him until he’s capable of taking care of himself. My fear is that he’s never going to reach that point. I’m almost resigned to the fact that he’ll probably be living with me for the rest of my life, as my role of caregiver to him when I was nine and he was a baby has just carried on and never ended. I do love him dearly. I mean, after all…he’s my brother.

But in the meantime, has anyone seen my lighter?

I Was Walking With a Ghost

*Can be seen in Gag Me With A... issue 5.*

If you ask her in a joking way, she’ll just shrug her shoulders and an ambiguous look will slide across her face. The truth is she does dance with spirits…has since she was a little kid. 

As much as it has terrified her and made her hide under her blankets as a child, it’s never gotten any easier for her. When shadows slither across the walls she cuddles in closer to her husband, wishing she could hide inside someone so she wouldn’t have to be so vulnerable. When rogue spirits tumble through her kitchen, passing through her body on their course and aren’t prone to asking her permission, she panics. When every room in her house has a cloudy feeling like there are spirits just standing in line, waiting to be recognized or acknowledged, she feels defeated. 

Of course she occasionally has a breakthrough. Like when she was so frightened from the spirit activity she felt like she was fading from this physical plane into the next. When she went to sleep that night, finally, after much consolation and being held in her husband’s strong arms, she dreamed of a woman with long, black flowing hair and caramel colored skin. The woman told her not to be afraid, that she had done this all before and she would remember how to do it again soon. Suddenly there was an intense calm that washed over her.  As the woman started fading away, she begged for her name…something that would keep this real to her when she awoke. “Kimeena” the woman said and then disappeared. 

The next day, when she had awoken completely she began Googling the name. What she found shocked her and brought her to tears of gratitude. “Ki” meant life force or spirit energy in Hindi. “Meena” was short for “Meenakashi”, a warrior goddess who was supposed to be the wife of Shiva. She recounted everything she knew about Hindu gods and goddesses, and there certainly wasn’t anything about a “Meenakashi” in that small pool of information, or any kind of Hindi words, for that matter. She counts this as her first spiritual experience and to this day is comforted by the fact that she is being guarded and protected by the higher-ups.

Life as a medium is not as easy as psychics and TV tell you it is. It’s terrifying to be interrupted by a disembodied “HEY!” when you’re trying to write, or going to sleep and dreaming about how a distant relative died-one that you’ve never heard of and never met, but that you’re able to verify the details of their death with a family member-or receiving names of loved ones that spirits want you to reach out to. The shock of the suddenness and accuracy of it never goes away. The range of spirits that come through is never short of amazing. 

But sometimes she wishes that they’d leave her alone, especially when she’s in the shower.

Pillars of Salt

*Will be seen in Every Reason zine, created by Keith Landrum*

"If God did not exist we would have invented him anyway."  -Nietzsche

I was cleaning and reorganizing my bookshelf the other day and getting rid of books I no longer wanted and making a mental note of the books I had bought and had not yet read. I realized as I was pawing through each shelf that I had at least four bibles and 5 other books written about the bible, talking about scripture, or was Judeo-Christian in some other way.

All of this and I don't even subscribe to religion or the traditional sense of "God".

I'm pretty sure that all of us "non-believers" have Christians in their lives, be it family members, well-meaning friends, or someone on your Facebook wall that posts scripture every day, without fail. I'm also pretty sure that all of those Christians are in some way trying to convert us, even if we have no interest in being converted. Why do they view us as heathens and helpless souls? I think that, for the most part, most of us that choose not to believe in God have a pretty extensive background with religion. I myself have read the bible three times, at least. I went to Catholic school for 2 years, church for eight, and even managed to get wrangled in to going to a tent revival once. I am in no way lacking in being "witnessed" to, either. I get people constantly coming to my door, messaging me online, and...you guessed it...giving me bibles because for some reason it's hard for Christians to believe that you'd still choose to not believe after reading the so-called "Word of God".

To be honest, it was the Christians in the first place that turned me off of religion. Where are these supposed holy examples of Christ himself? How can they be so full of the holy ghost and then go on to publicly condemn gay people or people of color? I think that one of the most important things in the bible is that it says to be "Christ-like", or in other words, don't be a dick. So why are all these Christians total assholes? Why are all my atheist or agnostic friends so much nicer than my God-fearing ones? It's the Christians, I tell ya. It's the Christians that started this atheist ball rolling downhill.

The other reason I don't believe is because of the bible. There's so many contradictions in it and I'm supposed to believe this is straight from God's mouth? C'mon. Is he a loving God or is he a terrifying one that turns people into pillars of salt for simply looking backwards? Is God love or does he hate fags? It's acceptable to lay with your daughter to procreate if you think it's the end of the world but it's not okay to eat cloven-hoof animals? Shut the fuck up. Seriously. This is not the word of God. This is the word of Man. How else would you describe so many inconsistencies and different variations of what God is? All those meaningless rules like being able to beat your wife and resting on Sundays...does that really sound like something God would want to quibble about? Don't you think that if he/she existed they'd be more concerned with how you conducted yourself amongst your peers? What examples you'd set? Your true value and goodness instead of if you ate meat on a Friday? C'mon, guys. Gimme a break.

All this but for the record I do believe in something. I'm not sure what it is. I don't even know if it's a supreme ruler in the sky or if there's a little tiny bit in all of us or if it's the flying spaghetti monster. I feel it sometimes. I can see it in other people's actions at other times. It's goodness. It's stopping to help someone that has a flat tire. It's giving what you can to help someone who has nothing. It's putting out a request for help into the universe and having it answered once you stop pining for it. I believe in the absolutely pure goodness in all of us, a universe that wants to give us what we want as long as we're not totally ridiculous in our requests, and that maybe, just maybe there is some kind of higher force/energy/avatar that watches out for all of us. Wouldn't that be nice?
But for now? Those bibles are going straight into the donation box.

I completely forgot that this blog existed. How funny is that? 

I would like to reserve this blog for actual things that I write, not just whiny bloginess. I can reserve that for my Livejournal account. 

I have a lot of things that I've written over the years for zines that are my own and that are other people's. I also have a lot of totally positive reviews for things I've written that I'd like to post here instead of on Facebook where I'd look like an arrogant a-hole. It's much more acceptable to be arrogant if less people are watching, amiright?

Also, maybe I'll start reviewing some zines on here that I've read and loved/hated. Nothing big, not asking people to send me zines, though I'm totally open to that idea. Just want to get the word out about zines and which ones are worth your while. Especially because for some reason zines seem to be a really difficult thing for people to get into. What's the big deal? It's just a self-published magazine. They're all different. They all have their own appeal. Take a chance and pick one up. If you hate it, give it to someone you think will like it or leave it somewhere like a park bench or a bus stop for someone else to find. I wish more people were obsessively into zines like I am. Especially people that I could hang out with that aren't just online pen pals. I need some real life literary friends. 

See? I'm already starting to get whiny. Hahaha. Shit! Okay, going to forage my computer archives to find things I've written that almost everyone that knows me doesn't know that I've written. Expect more blog posts, people that totally aren't reading my blog!