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 |  It's who we are. It's what we stare at in the middle of the night. It's a bug zapper. |
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My friends, When we were young and newly hatched—also young and in love—my husband and I lived with our four young children on the Space Coast of Florida. The massive propulsion of rocket and shuttle launches from Cape Kennedy often rocked the windows and doors of our little love cottage. We were always properly respectful and impressed by the reach of mankind’s achievements. It was a point of pride to stop whatever we were doing (dishes, dinner, dancing, sleeping, fist fighting, etc.) to watch the eastern horizon—hands on hearts, tears in eyes—as the United States of America raced into the frontier of space. One deep, dark morning (about 2:00 am) I shook my husband awake to watch yet another triumph of human advancement. “Get up,” I mumbled to Sherwood, “the shuttle’s going up. We gotta’ watch.” Sherwood moaned, “The garbage is out all ready. Let me die.” He did not open his eyes. “Come on. We should watch. Night launches are amazing.” He dragged himself upright and clung to the window ledge behind our bed. We knelt, with our chins braced on the ledge, our bleary eyes fixed on a blazing light in the eastern sky. We watched. The light did not appear to move. We stared some more. The light remain fixed. We struggled to focus. The light blazed away. We waited for the light to fade into the blackness of space. It did not. We watched and watched and watched. The light stubbornly refused to move. At last, collapsing back into my pillow I said, “Honey, go back to sleep.” Sounding confused, miffed, and a little whiney Sherwood asked, “Why?” “Because for the last eight to ten minutes we’ve been staring at our next door neighbor’s bug zapper.” He went back to sleep. And I lived to worship at the altar of space exploration another day. This story pretty much sums up who we are, and how we got this way—excessive staring at bug zappers. And this is my blog, a space-age way of recording one’s thoughts, ideas, embarrassments, and foibles for the entire known world. Once upon a time, I would have made this record on papyrus, rolled it up, stuffed it into a ceramic jar, and asked to have the whole thing buried with me in my sarcophagus. I still might. Disclaimer: Some of the stuff you will read here is true. Some of it is not. Some of it is the result of wishful thinking. Some of it is the result of too much thinking, and some of it is the result of too little thinking. But all of it will be written with joy and laughter, because the alternative is despair and weeping, and isn’t there more than enough of that stuff out there? Thank you for your support, Linda (Zippity the Zapped) Zern |
| After the last national election I had to block about a thousand people from my social network. I didn’t want to, but I had to. I don’t enjoy people dancing on my grave or on the graveyard that I believed America would soon become. It hurts my heart, and aren’t hearts the most important organ of the body: full of feelings, and emotions, and irrational hurts, and liberal amounts of sentimentality. Except the heart isn’t the most important organ of the body, and feelings aren’t centered in it. Feelings originate in our brains. Hearts beat to serve the brain. Emotions are a product of our gray matter . . . or they should be. Anyway, after the last election I realized that double standards have become the norm in all things politic. Therefore, I have been working on a set of rules for discussing politics for the coming contest. Rule #1. Everyone gets to talk up why they like his or her candidate without fear of being blindsided by strangers. To be allowed to crap on your guy or gal, individuals out there in the cyber jungle have to be able to name one of the following: the title of one of your books, the title of one of your blogs, the name of your youngest child. Rule #2. Arguments for or against a candidate should be backed up with logical discussion of the individual’s background and philosophy. For example: “I like Hitler because he can really get a crowd going, he is super popular, and he’s Time Magazine’s Man of the Year” are not acceptable. Rule #3. Full discloser is absolutely required. “I think this guy [or gal] will buy all my toilet paper for the rest of my life, and I’ve already worked that into my budget,” or “He’s my boss!” are acceptable declarations. “I’m still waiting for the first Clinton to pay for two years of community college for my kids like he promised,” is also acceptable. Rule #4. Cynicism encouraged. “I’m not sure any human being can—with the force of his or her personality—fix everyone’s everything. I’d have to see the spreadsheet on that.” Rule #5. Name-calling is right out. Smart, sharp witty comments are right in. Whining prohibited. Double standards will be highlighted, targeted, and blown to cynical bits. Rule #5-A. Using the number 19 trillion in a sentence is encouraged. For example: I have 19 trillion questions I’d like to ask American voters who think that coming to the potluck dinner without bringing any food but expecting to eat is a winning, helpful, sustainable lifestyle. Rule #6. Compromise with evil is never a win, implying that absolutes like good and evil actually exist and that humans are capable of free will, and that wickedness will never be happiness (even if someone else pays for all the penicillin.) Linda (Bring It On) Zern |
| Hillary Clinton made the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” famous. She stole it from an old African village but . . . well . . . that’s a worry for another blog, and I’ve got a couple of questions for Bill’s wife. What village? Whose village? Big village? Small village? City village? Country village? And what should the village do with the villagers who can’t keep their drunken tally whackers in their nasty pants, making babies they have no intention of buying insurance for . . . But mostly . . . what’s a village? Please define. From a really, really recognizable source of information that no one lets you use in college when you write an essay: “Although many patterns of village life have existed, the typical village was small, consisting of perhaps 5 to 30 families. Homes were situated together for sociability and defense, and land surrounding the living quarters was farmed.” Hmmmm . . . families . . . extended families: so a village is mom, dad, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa and crazy Aunt Maud. Interesting. But I’m afraid I have some bad news. Young villagers aren’t so village minded these days. One fine day in college, while contemplating the coming Thanksgiving break, I listened to some fine young students talk about heading home to—you guessed it—the village that spawned them. One young man said, “I’m going home, but it’s bu!!$&*#. I hate my family. But hey, they’re paying my bills.” My immediate thought? And another village bites the dust. Villages are closely related people who care about and worry for the health, wealth, and happiness of the next generation of villagers. Boys were valued for their ability to battle off soccer hooligans. Girls were valued for just about everything else. Adults imparted culture. Older members imparted wisdom and opportunities for service. No one went on a cruise. Not only were villages efficient, they were also tough. Villagers who proved to be idiots were often displayed in public stocks, allowing the other villagers—on their way to milk goats or weave something—to express their displeasure by tossing verbal barbs or horse crap at the idiot. Hard work was lauded. Idiots included: adulterers, liars, thieves, slack-jawed losers, and hooligans. Villages that practiced slack-jawed laziness became extinct like the giant sloth. No one bailed them out. To deal with the worry and the insecurity and the global climate shenanigans the village went to church on Sunday, and they did pretty well. They drank raw milk. They ate free-range eggs, and they stored up roots for winter soup. They didn’t live as long as we do—true. But they did manage to give birth to and educate some fairly impressive individuals who managed to realize that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness does not come from the village at all but from some greater, more permanent source: God and Nature’s God. I say, “Bring back the village and the public stocks.” I’ll provide the horse pucky. Linda (Shame on You) Zern |
| Valentine’s Day is for lovers. Halloween is for dreamers and doers. People dress up as the people they dream of being and dream of doing. That sounded better in my head. It’s my favorite. I love dressing up. This year I went as . . . well . . . a figure (a type, a kind) from history, not a person from history, but a figure from history. This year I went as a turn of the century suffragette. Two people knew the word. One person thought I was a cowboy. Alcohol was NOT being served at the party I attended. Most people, who guessed close, knew that I had something to do with Mary Poppins. One individual thought my sash read “Yotes” not “Votes.” I confess that the iron-on V looks a lot like the iron-on Y. One gentleman thought that my sash was a plea to elect a woman for president and was a little bit hostile about it. It got me to thinking about the importance of history and prepositions and the history of prepositions. My sash read: Votes FOR Women. (It was once illegal in this country for women to cast a ballot. Suffrage is the right to vote. Thus suffragettes.) It did not read: Vote FOR A Woman. Or: Vote OF Women. Or: Vote THROUGH Women. Or: Vote ABOUT Women. Or: Vote UP Women. It said: [V]OTES FOR WOMEN. Nothing wrong with that. Right? Like the song says, “Our daughter’s daughters will adore us, as we sing in grateful chorus, ‘Well done! Well done! Sister Suffragettes!” Mostly, I went as an indictment of the public school system! And that’s the scariest monster of them all. Linda (One Women, One Vote) Zern |
| Valentine’s Day is for lovers. Halloween is for dreamers and doers. People dress up as the people they dream of being and dream of doing. That sounded better in my head. It’s my favorite. I love dressing up. This year I went as . . . well . . . a figure (a type, a kind) from history, not a person from history, but a figure from history. This year I went as a turn of the century suffragette. Two people knew the word. One person thought I was a cowboy. Alcohol was NOT being served at the party I attended. Most people, who guessed close, knew that I had something to do with Mary Poppins. One individual thought my sash read “Yotes” not “Votes.” I confess that the iron-on V looks a lot like the iron-on Y. One gentleman thought that my sash was a plea to elect a woman for president and was a little bit hostile about it. It got me to thinking about the importance of history and prepositions and the history of prepositions. My sash read: Votes FOR Women. (It was once illegal in this country for women to cast a ballot. Suffrage is the right to vote. Thus suffragettes.) It did not read: Vote FOR A Woman. Or: Vote OF Women. Or: Vote THROUGH Women. Or: Vote ABOUT Women. Or: Vote UP Women. It said: [V]OTES FOR WOMEN. Nothing wrong with that. Right? Like the song says, “Our daughter’s daughter will adore us, as we sing in grateful chorus, ‘Well done! Well done! Sister Suffragettes!” Mostly, I went as an indictment of the public school system! And that’s the scariest monster of them all. Linda (One Women, One Vote) Zern |
| “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” Kurt Vonnegut I am an artist. My husband is an engineer. We are different. We like different things. See Jane watch “The Walking Dead.” See Dick watch “The Andy Griffith Show.” See Spot run from a zombie Barney Fife. We recently invested in the Roku version of entertainment. It’s another computery machine that allows you to watch your favorite television shows in an orgy of endless viewing. Commercial free. Interruption low. See Jane fall asleep to re-runs of “The Walking Dead.” See Dick in the middle of the night flip the Roku machine over to re-runs of “The Andy Griffith Show.” See Spot scratch. While my husband and I are different in our viewing tastes in television, we are alike in age. We are old-ish. We are becoming acquainted with not sleeping and waking up at two in the morning for nightly wanderings. We have a lifetime of stupid and embarrassing memories that torment us as we try to sleep. Falling asleep to episodes of “The Walking Dead” distracts our bad memory brains. So it’s nothing to fall asleep to zombies eating everyone and then wake up to Barney Fife and his one bullet. See Jane toss and turn. See Dick stumble around, change the channel, and fall asleep just in time to start snoring. See Spot twitch in her sleep. See Spot chase zombie bunnies in her dreams. I love “The Walking Dead.” It’s about characters that the writers are constantly throwing into a pit of writhing, zombie snakes and then daring them to find a way out. It’s Kurt Vonnegut’s writing advice on steroids. I appreciate that. Honestly, “The Andy Griffith’ Show” isn’t all that different. How will Andy and Barney ever tell Aunt Bee that her pickles are NEVER going to win a prize at the country fair because her pickles are absolutely terrible? Same concept. “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them.” Hey! It’s practically the same show. Maybe my husband and I aren’t so different after all? Linda (Dream Weaver) Zern |
| Wearing a lot of hats makes my head sweaty. To “wear many hats” is an idiomatic expression. Idiomatic is a word that means expressions for idiots. An idiot is a person who wouldn’t be able to remember his or her head if it wasn’t attached, and to “wear a lot of hats,” on the head that is attached to you, means you have a lot of jobs and maybe you’re not an idiot. My head is sweaty a lot. Consider this post a disclaimer and an explanation. Here’s a few of the hats I wear: The YaYa Hat: It’s a big floppy hat that I bought in South Korea at the de-militarized zone. It’s the hat I wear, physically and metaphysically, when I have to listen to 101 thousand knock-knock jokes that make absolutely no sense in any reality—ever. The Wife Hat: Hasn’t arrived yet. I just ordered it on Amazon. The Foreman Hat: It’s a Texas A&M ball cap that I stole from my oldest son because he had it broken in perfectly. I wear it to keep the sun from eating off the end of my nose when I’m mowing . . . everything, everywhere, all the time. The Author Hat: It’s imaginary and changes color every time I write a new paragraph. The Book Marketer Hat: It’s shaped like a dunces cap because of the endless learning curve required in the shifting, evolving world of selling books. The My-Name-Is-Dawn Hat: Worn at yoga, it has the name Dawn embroidered on it, apparently. My yoga instructor calls me Dawn. I’ve told her my name isn’t Dawn, but she . . . well . . . insists on calling me Dawn. So, that’s that. Dawn is my yoga name. Dawn it is. Sigh. When I go to Zumba my name is Conchita. The Primary President Hat: Primary is our Sunday School/Children’s Program at my church. I’m the president. There are about seventy children on the rolls in our program. This hat is made of puppets and stickers. The Community Volunteer Hat: It’s a riding helmet. The Science Club Leader Hat: This isn’t a hat as much as it is a butterfly net and a jar with holes poked in the lid. Blogger Hat: For years and years, I’ve worn a hat that resembles Clark Kent’s fedora. As I watch and gather information for the blogs that I participate in www.beyondthestrandline.blogspot.com (serious) and www.zippityzerns.blogspot.com (silly) I try to look like the mild mannered reporter. Once in a while, I take Clark’s hat off and I put on a cape. No hat required. I thought when I got older there would be less hats. Linda (Mad Hatter) Zern |
| A pit bull puppy/dog loped around our yard wagging his tail, wee-weeing on blades of grass, and sniffing random butts. “Oh great, someone’s dumped off another dog,” my husband said. Note: It’s a problem for folks “out in the country.” People figure that the kindly country folks will take in random kittens, cats, parrots, and pit bulls and let them live in their barns where the abandoned animals will write best selling books about their travails and adventures. Then these people (presumably) lie to their children claiming, “Hitler ran away.” The suspect puppy/dog continued to frolic about. His enormous boy-dog parts bouncing wildly. “Nope,” I said. “That’s the neighbor’s dog.” The young, happy-go-lucky puppy/dog sniffed my butt. “I don’t see this ending well.” The pit bull squeezed under our fence into our neighbor’s pasture. A pasture stuffed with baby goats and baby sheep. Our horses stamped nervously. The duck peeked over the rim of his three hundred and fifty gallon water tank. A week later in the dark of night, I came home from school and walked onto our back porch and gagged. The smell made me start speculating as only a writer can. To no one in particular I huffed, “Good grief, someone’s been murdered on my back porch and everything that should be on the inside of a body is now on the outside of the body.” I stepped lightly. I didn’t want to mess up the DNA evidence. Snapping the back porch lights on I realized we had been dog slimmed. Our neighbor’s happy-go-lucky puppy/dog had punched through the porch screen, jumped onto a private porch, and pooped once, twice, and then—for good measure—three times. I lost count of the puddles of happy-go-lucky puppy/dog pee. There was a steaming pile of dog stuff on a couch pillow. Our dogs stared at me from behind window glass. Ploodle, the Yorkshire terrier, rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Oh man, this is not going to end well.” While chatting with our neighbor about the neighborhood dog trouble, which was really not a dog issue but an owner issue, happy-go-lucky pit bull puppy/dog hopped into our duck pool and grabbed our duck by its skinny duck neck. His tail never stopped wagging—the dog’s tail not the duck’s. I screamed and ran for the phone and a leash. The duck survived. The dog was arrested. And the dog’s owner spent the Fourth of July shooting his gun at . . . something . . . from his back porch. He practiced all day long. “Do you think that guy knows I ratted out his dog?” I asked my husband. “How big do you think his gun is? Do you think he’s a better shot than me? How much do you think bulletproof vests are? Do you think a bulletproof vest would make me look fat? Should I invest in a Gatling gun for the roof of the house? How soon so you think you’ll remarry?” I ran out of breath. He considered. “He suspects. It’s a forty-five. Probably. They ain’t cheap. They make everyone look thick. No. I’ll probably bring a date to the funeral.” “Smart guy, statistics show that the sooner a man remarries after becoming a widower indicates how happy he was in his marriage. You must be delirious with happiness.” “You know it.” “Well, I wouldn’t remarry. I’m just going to sit around and wait for someone to drop off a parrot or a monkey or ten cats for companionship.” He smiled. When night fell, our neighbor put his gun away and pulled out a grenade launcher. I started to stack sand bags around the duck pool. Linda (Bullet Proof) Zern |
| It started with the goats. No! A goat. One goat. It started with Tramp the Lovelorn goat. He got his head stuck in the fence trying to make love to the neighbor’s girl goats. So I tried to move the goats around to a new pasture but they kept getting out. So I worried. I worried they were out and wandering the neighborhood with their heads stuck in fences and knotholes under the blood moon and that made me start to wander around in the middle of the night with a flashlight looking for stuck goats. It distracted me, so much so that one morning I got up and found the front door open—wide open—swinging wide open. I think the goats unlocked it. Later that day, still worried and completely distracted, I mowed the yard. When I came into the house—the faucet was running full blast and the fridge door was hanging wide open. I couldn’t remember being hungry or thirsty. Goats stared at me through the kitchen window—bawling. Sleep eluded me. I began to move through the days like a zombie, the nights like a banshee. My truck broke down: five days and five hundred dollars later and the pickup was liberated. The fridge started to wheeze: the sensor was going; the official seventy-five dollar diagnosis? It’s going to crap out. Went to the doctor, so that she could use the word polyp in a sentence. On overload, I missed a really important family event—no, make that—two REALLY important family events. I called my husband on his business trip in hysterics. He thought someone had been killed in a car accident. “I missed the baby’s blessing,” I screamed. “The kid’s primary program. I was so tired. I was on zombie auto-pilot.” The rest was wailing, weeping, and goats yowling in the distance. From Costa Rica my husband dove right into the heart of . . . my darkness. “What???? The primary program????? I thought someone had died in a fire. You forgot? If that’s the worst thing you ever do. Relax.” A red haze of disbelief filmed/fogged/sloshed through my brain. “The. Worst. Thing . . . That’s it? That’s your idea of empathy?” I said something to him that we tell the kids never to say to anyone, and then I hung up on him. It felt good. I’m not going to lie. Today, I got up at three in the morning and put two pork roasts in the crock-pot for a dinner party that isn’t supposed to happen until next week. Truthfully, it may not be the goat’s fault. Linda (Foggy Top) Zern |
| I DID IT! Wrote a full length, bona fide, genuine, novel: BEYOND the STRANDLINE Juvenile/Dystopian: Post Apocalyptic, Romance, Action-Adventure, Grid Collapse . . . 64 REVIEWS ON AMAZON = 4.9 OUT OF FIVE STARS Amazon.com/author/lindazern ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Over the years, Moms learn a lot. I know about “blood” moons, yeast bread, and potty training. I can sew my own curtains, pillows, and clothes. I’ve experienced elementary, middle, and high school five times—a side benefit of being a homeschooler. I can paint a wall and grow a rose. I can’t help knowing a lot of stuff. It’s like barnacles. When you’re in the water long enough, you grow barnacles. I’ve been in the water a while. Besides, I like to watch the Discovery channel. Doesn’t matter. This is the age of Google. My knowledge base is challenged at regular intervals, mostly when I talk. Doesn’t help that I often make statements—out loud, randomly, and without warning. “Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal,” I spout off. Scoffs, scorns, and narrowed eyes greet my statement. Kid #2 yelled, “Google it.” Kid #3 immediately starts scratching at her phone. “Nope,” Kid #3 exulted. “It’s the mosquito. Most dangerous animal in the world.” “Okay, my bad. I should have said land mammal.” “Too bad,” Kid #2 said. “We Googled you.” When the grandkids were studying Egyptian history I suggested, “Hey, you should try building a shaduf.” “What’s a shaduf?” “It’s an ancient Egyptian device for dipping water out of a river.” One skeptic whispered, loudly, “Google it.” Phone scratching commenced. “Yep. She’s right. This . . . time.” Sometimes the Google wins. Sometimes I win. I guess it’s okay. It’s a lot like running for public office. The fact checkers are everywhere, scratching at their phones. “Did you know that koala bears are absolutely disgusting animals?” I offer, after hearing about how adorable someone thought they were. “The babies eat their mother’s poop, eighty percent of them have a sexually transmitted disease that makes them incontinent, and they’re mean. Go ahead Google it and weep.” They did. They wept. Google at your own risk. That’s what I say. Did you know that the end of the world, well . . . at . . . least the end of the part that runs your television and Googler machine, is most likely to come from the giant star in the sky? Solar flares are real. They come from the sun. They have already blasted the earth many times. Because we are SO dependent on the electrical power grid in this century, a real deal solar storm could smash the grid to fried wires and blown transformers. What? Google it. Linda (Candle Both Ends) Zern |
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