Faster Than Kudzu

The Long Lick Good Morning

Four AM. The artist formerly knows as Waffles positions his enormous shaved personage on the corner of my bed and begins a long luxurious bathe. LICK! LICK! LICK! It is a carnival of loud raspy licking fun. It’s GROSS how much he ENJOYS it. It’s so DEDICATED and RHYTHMIC and ENDLESS. There is no sleeping through it. There is no stopping it.

It seems like something he’d want to do in private, or perhaps in SWEDEN, not HERE, on my bed in America, where SALACIOUS FELINE “mleh-tic, mleh-tic” sounds and moist, whistley nostril breathing have been banned and the penalty is NO BREAKFAST which, for Waffles, is synonymous with death. I ask him to stop in English and in cat.

In English, it goes like this, “SCHUBERT! STOP IT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GO BATHE DOWNSAIRS!”

To say it in cat, you simply hurl pillows.

None of it works. I end up pillowless and listening the endless, lugubrious pleasures of the bathe, feeling bitter toward Scott, who can sleep through ANYTHING. SO I get up and come down here and work on Chapter 5.

In other news, I am now getting 40 – 50 penis e-mails a NIGHT. I have to find some way to stop this spam. A lot of them are titled Hi, Joshilyn, which is how a lot of emails from readers are titled. So. I end up opening quite a few of them and reading and rereading and rereading the delightful news that I will

“Notice your penis to be wider during the first week of taking Penis Patch.”

Notice my penis to be wider? Does the patch help it widen? Or help me NOTICE? And do I WANT a penis to…widen???? I emphatically do not. Honestly, the literal translation thing SO RARELY works out.

There IS an upside, as my good friend Jill pointed out. I have 50 possible character names showing up in my box every morning. I will never have to resort to the 10,001 Baby Name Book again. I have this very morning alone received medical advice on how to NOTICE my penis widening by “taking” the entirely creepy sounding patch from

Earlene Slaughter,
Hilario McIntosh,
Annubis Delgado and, my personal favorite,
Jesus Schmegli

I SERIOUSLY welcome ANY advice on how to LOWER my wide penis spam volume while still retaining an easy way for readers to send me e-mails.

zoomzoom

Yes, Okay, I DO Name All My Cars. STOP WITH THE MOCKING E-MAILS ALREADY. I get enough of that from SCOTT.

My family has ALWAYS named its cars. We had Guacamole Gus the Bus (bilious green VW van) and Didey (filthy white sedan) and Merry Miracle (the car that would not die). It was a big thing---the ritual naming of the new car, made even more special because it was a rare event. Jacksons are genetically programmed to drive cars until they start shedding huge chunks of themselves out of pure ancientness, and we don't admit we need a new one until we find ourselves trotting down the highway clutching a disembodied steering wheel with a scrap of sweaty vinyl seat back clinging to our thighs.

My very first car was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit -- a VW rabbit, natch. Because, see, you may not have known this, but WALT DISNEY before he came up with MICKEY MOUSE created a rabbit who looked really a lot like Mickey except with longer ears. I did not make this up. My Oswald was NOT lucky and in fact overheated violently if you stopped him while he was running. Even for a minute. Oswald could overheat at a long red light.

I didn't have a car in grad school, but when I married Scott I got a half interest in a sadly unnamed and unloved station wagon who kept running because it knew no one would care much if it died. Scott was fresh out of grad school and making an entry level salary, I was still IN grad school and making some money baby-sitting to buy little luxuries like toothpaste and Top Ramen (can't have one without the other, really) so we shared the car. We reached a financial nexus when Scott was promoted; suddenly we could afford to become a two car family. OH FRABJOUS DAY. I selected a new aquamarine Saturn (new to ME, anyway) and I spent DAYS ferreting out the perfect name for him, which, I think Scott had SUSPECTED he had married a complete whack job before, but it was smart to go ahead and confirm it for him before we had kids and he was truly stuck.

Finally, it came to me. He was FAUX FRAUNCH. See, because he was sexy enough to be French, but he was made in TENNESSEE, which made him FAUX French, pronounced as FRAUNCH by my friend Yvonne's Alabama aunt who told us, very earnestly, when Yvonne and I were 15, that if we ever 'went out with some rowdy-type boys, who were taking to drinking and what-all, and we didn't want to drink and all, being that we was the nice girls we was, we could simply order us a Perry-er water, because that was real sophisticated, and wouldn't nobody look down on us for not having beer if we was having Perry-er water.' Then she leaned in all confidential-like and said, "That Perry-er water is FRAUNCH, you know!"

I drove him until he fell into chunks, at which point my mom got a caddy (woo) and gifted me with her old car, which was only just beginning to molt. It was a huge Huge HUGE Buick that my mother had named Lovely Pearl or something else girly. My mother's cars always have romantical names. I gave the Buick a sex change (all my cars are boys) are renamed the new him "Boating for Beginners" after an early Jeanette Winterson novel. I called him Boating for short.

Our currant cars are a a Honda named Clovis Sangrail (Clovis is a recurring character in Saki's work, and the Honda is CLOVER green, so), and of course my Kia, Vincent Van-Go, he of the retractable ear. OH WAIT I forgot, Scott gave the Honda to my brother and dad gave Scott his SUV which is named, imaginatively, Suvie. My father DOES name his cars, but being my father (pragmatic to the point of mental illness) they have very FUNCTIONAL sorts of names. He now drives a HUGE Toyota truck, and it is named B-BOT---Bob's Big Ol' Truck. Scott's car shall remain Suvie because Scott says he LOVES "Suvie", which is Scott-code for "I don't want to spend three weeks discussing the cars imaginary personality in order to organically discover its inner name."

When the Kia dies I want an Orange Saturn Vue. By the time I drive the Kia into the ground, they will be making Vues in orange again. Betcha. HE WILL HAVE ONSTAR!!!!!!! I shall call him Pompeii and love him forever and ever, or until his engine melts into a single smoking lump and his doors fall off.

I Seek Spell Check

Remember I got a new computer? Well. My old version of ICQ does not support Windows XP, or Windows XP does not support the old version, or whichever of them is supposed to support the other has refused to send the check. SO! Scott DLed and installed the latest version of ICQ on and...IT HAS NO SPELL CHECK.

*spits*

Okay, well it isn't like I use spell check FOR my icq messages. Anyone I am ICQing is either a relative, a friend from the way back back, or a gaming buddy with whom I will shamelessly use the "to roxxor" as a verb. And any self-respecting spellchecker would IMPLODE if you tried to run "pH3^R mY 733+ness & mAd sKilzzZzz & tiNl< n0t mY n0d3!" past it.

But when I am writing, say, a business e-mail, to some academic smarty-pants who wants me to speak at a conference, I REALLY do not want to choke and say, for example, BREATH when I OBVIOUSLY mean BREATHE. And then sometimes you know how you will be writing along and suddenly a word you use every day, like, say, NECESSARY, starts looking FOREIGN AND ODD and you just HAVE to check it. My email does NOT have spell check. So it has been my habit to use ICQ for a quick check. See, ICQ is always OPEN. Now with new STUPID ICQ, I have to OPEN MS WORD every time, or open a browser and go to dictionary .com, or GOD HELP ME, I have to actually crack open a PAPER DICTIONARY! LIKE A PREHISTORIC SAVAGE! I might as well squat in a loincloth chewing my great aunt's remains and discovering fire.

Also I hate this new version because the GET LAID button is RIGHT BESIDE the SEND button. I keep accidentally opening the MEET SEXY SINGLES advertisement asking me if I want to meet TIFFANY, 27, who likes hiking and macrame and whose breasts are falling out of her tube top. You know what? I don't.

FOR THE RECORD, tech-master-mighty-code (AKA Shawn Box) DID hook me up with older, spell-checkier version that will work with XP, SO IT IS ALL GOING TO BE GOOD. EVENTUALLY. But Scott has not had time to install it, so here I sit with "necessary" looking completely BIZARRE and NO idea of how many U's are legally allowed to inhabit the word "RESTAURANT."

What Really Happened

Mr. Husband was SO circumspect in the comments, saying the ISSUE with COMMENTS has now been resolved. Want to know what REALLY happened?

SOME DUNDERHEADED TECHNO-NOOB (we won't say who...let's just say her name would rhyme with Moshilyn if the H in Moshilyn was silent) was going through the constant stream of PORN and PRESCRIPTION DRUG and GAMBLING SITE comments that the spam spiders TRY to leave that MT Blacklist had stops and puts in a list for me to BAN, and I was wading through that list, banning IPs and URLs with reckless and cheerful abandon:

getabiggerone.com??? BAN!
pxdrugsdrugs.net??? BAN!!!!
glisteningslutz.tv?? BAN!!!!
Texasholdem.com?? BANNNN!!!!
.com?? BAN!!!!!!

Um wait a sec---did you catch that? Yeah. This anonymous moron BANNED anyone with a .com in their e-mail addy or website from commenting. But hey, the .net and the .tv folk were still welcome...HEH. Scott basically unbanned the .commers, and all is well in comment land.

I have to run leap on a plane and head to Memphis. More later!

NO CON

I haven't had a working connection since, well, whenever I uploaded the last thing I uploaded. I JUST got off the plane, but tomorrow I shall get all the things I wrote on the laptop transferred here.

I think my brain just disintergrated. Must go to bed and grow a new one.

Pre-emptive Resolution Meme

1) The DRAWING TO WIN AN ARCis still going, and all you have to do is register. But hurry, registration ends early NEXT YEAR!

2) The Internet Attack Worm is still BOTHERING ME and my site. FOR TWO DAYS I could not upload any new entries and comments WOULD NOT work which SUCKS because, well, I live for them. I feel a big PULE coming on if this doesn't RESOLVE soon. And they could cut out again any second because the worm is still NOSING AT ME.

3) Yesterday THAT RATFINK MIR came over and perniciously dumped an entire glass of PINOT GRIGIO into my keyboard, ruining it permanently. Oh no, wait. That was me. But Mir BLOGGED MY BUTT so the ratfink stands, which is more than I can say for my personal dignity. I TRIED to link to the butt blogging, but the link kept turning into a loop that brought clickers back here, so THE WORM does not WISH you to read about it. Weird Worm. I will try once more.

4) I need a good New Years Resolution Meme � seen any? Oh wait, you can't tell me, because COMMENTS are bound to stop working ANY SECOND! OH! THE SWELTERING IRONY!

5) As I resolute meme-lessly, it's getting out of HAND. I had a list started, and then I realized that all my resolutions were things I had ZERO control over.

SAMPLE: I resolved to get my beloved and yet obscenely overweight and neurotic cat to a) lose five pounds and b) stop plucking out his butt-fur. Um, yeah.

I took him in for his shots and my vet clucked sorrowfully at the cat's MASSIVE, PICKED, BALDING, SCABROUS buttocks and then turned to gaze at me with these cold, judgmental eyes. And all I could say was, "Well, he used to be so fat he couldn't reach around to pluck his tail-feathers out, so this is PROGRESS..."

The vet did not seem convinced. And I AM trying to help the cat, I AM I AM, and I had him on a STRICT diet, I pre-measured his daily food ration and then gave it to him a spoonful at a time ALL DAY LONG whenever he asked, and he lost some weight, but then inexplicably he began putting it back on. Later I discovered quite by accident that beautiful Maisy had been coming along behind me and dumping a GIANT SCOOP OF KIBBLE into his bowl whenever it struck her toddler fancy.

Now I have hidden the cat food from Maisy, so PERHAPS he will lose weight, but HOW can a person get a cat to stop plucking out his butt-fur? It is not MEDICAL. It's just...fun. He LIKES to. It SOOTHES him. What? I�m supposed to take the cat into THERAPY? Trust me, if we decide to shell out for therapy for someone in this house, it will NOT be THE CAT. And yet a healthy crop of feline back-end plumage was on the list of things I resolved to foster in 2005... I might as well set goals like, "Shift the Universe four inches left." I guess I will change this one to, "Get cat a butt-toupee before next vet visit."

I can't set any writing goals�I am not writing right now. I need to lie fallow for a few months and do the editorial revise on Between, Georgia. And I have no control over gods in Alabama at this point. It is it's own creature, more so even than the cat. All this pre-book release stuff is SWIRLING DRAMATICALLY...elsewhere.

SO what am I to resolve? Big NYC publishing is... BIG. My book and I are being toted along in the warm and cavernous maw of a giant machine. And YES YES, YES, it is FABULOUS, it is my dream come true to be thusly chewed. But. I am a CONTROL FREAK... and I have ZERO.

We interrupt this PULE to point out the obvious: PERHAPS GOD IS TRYING TO TEACH ME SOMETHING??? PERHAPS I SHOULD LEARN TO LET GO AND STOP WORRYING ABOUT THINGS I CANNOT CONTROL AND SIMPLY TRUST OTHER, WISER, MORE EXPERIENCED PEOPLE AND HAVE FAITH IN ALL THE HARD WORK UNMPTY HUNDREDS HAVE PUT INTO LAUNCHING THE BOOK AND TRUST MY OWN WORK AND ASSUME THAT IT WILL ALL BE FINE AND KNOW THAT I HAVE DONE ALL I COULD FROM THIS END AND NOW IS THE TIME TO SIMPLY... LET GO and ATTEMPT a MODICUM of, oh, I don't know, PERSONAL GROWTH AND FAITH???

... Nahhh. Can't be that.

Anyway BACK to puling... oh forget it.
Look ye upon the cat's butt, and despair.

&@^)^#$$%)$*@_

Okay, so AGAIN with the site down, AGAIN with the revert, AGAIN with the LOST BLOG ENTRY.

I am scared to post lest it all go POOF a third time and drive me to apoplexy. I am building a back up file and then probably moving. I will try to FIND and REPOST the santa letter blog entry, but it may VERY WELL be gone. I can try to REWRITE IT but you KNOW it will be flat. BAH! Anyone happen to cut and paste it and save it in a file marked, "Writers to obsessively archive in preparation for stalking and eating later?"

AND SPEAKING OF CANNIBALISM, when they find me GNAWING THE THIGH BONE of one of the hapless employees of my hosting service and they say, "WHY did you eat the entire company?" I will say "Because it is bitter, and because it is my web host."

Missing Something?

No, you are not on hallucinogens. Yes, there was an entry called PRODUCTIVE MALAISE posted here yesterday, and it was up for a good twelve+ hours and had generated some comments, and YES! Yesterday EVERY SINGLE BLOG ENTRY on Faster Than Kudzu -- well over 150 -- HAD been sorted into eight very fine catagories, and YES! I HAD posted a menu about what each catagory WAS and OH YES, Scott DID redo the entire links page adding a buncha new groovy, hepcat, all-the-rage links for cheerful one click access to places like The Zero Boss and Buzz, Balls & Hype and yes, SINCE YOU ASK, it did take about five hours of my life that I. will. never. get. back.

And yes. It's gone now. My site went down for some sort of maintenance early this am. I VAGUELY remember getting an email about it last week, saying something like, "Taking down your site blah blah put in subliminal Coke ads blah blah routine maintenance, blah blah mind control, blah blah communism," but I did not pay much attention. I assumed I would figure out it was the time when my site went down one morning.

I paid ENOUGH attention to clock the fact that the e-mail EMPHATICALLY did NOT say, "PS When we take your site down to put in the communism, the five hours of work you bravely put in from your OFFICE CHAIR OF PAIN even though you were PRACTICALLY DYING OF FLU will be as smoke, will become a dream within a dream, a shadow, a vapor, a puff of ectoplasmic glow-light that swiftly fades to sad, sad black. Love, Your Service Provider."

Because THAT I would have noticed.

PS Mir says she believes my Mental Illness Number hit a record high! And that was BEFORE I saw my FIVE HOURS OF WORK had poofed and my head exploded. Thanks to FLU, I have not been able to work out for four days so I got a little squirrelly -- a LITTLE, mind you. My temp has dropped under 100, but I still feel too achey for the jouncing up and down of step or a jog. So. I went for a three mile skate. See, because it's SMOOTH. Skates = No Jouncing, and yet, it is aerobic! Maybe it was a bit much -- I will admit there was some post-skate lying on the floor, some snivelling, a single lung may have been hacked up onto the carpet...But HEY, why do you think God gave me two?

She says this qualifies for a score of 70,000, but I am thinking more like 60? 65 tops?

An Open Letter

DEAR FLU SHOT SHORTAGE,

I LOVE you! SO MUCH! Let�s make out!!! Believe me, FLU SHOT SHORTAGE, if I could find the living of personification of you, I WOULD kiss you. Oh yes indeedy, I would! RIGHT ON THE MOUTH. With tongue. A good old fashioned saliva-swap that would cause a veritable horde of individual Viruses (Virii? Virupoda?) to march from my tastebuds onto yours, and in two days, oh my FINE FEATHERED SHORTAGE, you would be SO FLIPPING SORRY for popping into personified existence in time for me to lay one on you. VERY SORRY INDEED, as you turned into a fevered, trembling, hot-then-cold snot-factory with a HUGE mucus quota to fill.

As I sit here snuffling and hacking and sipping at piping hot Panda Garden Wonton Soup, stoned as a goat on Nyquil, random sentences from student essays I saw ten years ago in grad school keep popping into my head. Funnily enough, I do not think ANY of the sentences were penned by MY students. They were sentences SO INEXPLICABLE that they became the stuff of legend among the T.A.�s
SAMPLES:

I was die of laugh and charm.
The free-flying will eat the pattern.
And my favorite: Uncle Ben�was Death!

I have three things to say about this:

1) I am feeling a lot like Uncle Ben, actually, and shall blog again when I have 4 working brain cells.
2) I wish someone would write an epic prose-poem about the free-flying. I would pay good money for it. Although to be ENTIRELY honest, I would probably wait for the paperback.
3) I forgot what three was ALREADY. My brain is shot. Perhaps it is time to back slowly away from the keyboard.

The Wiener People

warning: I would say this entry is rated a solid PG 13. Maybe PG 15.

PEOPLE! THIS BLOG HAS OFICIALLY ARRIVED!

I know this because the wiener people found it. You know the wiener people. You get e-mail from them (unless you are Shawn Box and have godly filters). The wiener people are very concerned about the state of your personal wiener, even if you, like me, are a girl and therefore do not technically have one. They want to improve the living conditions and emotional well-being of my imaginary wiener -- they offer to make it 3 inches longer, feed it viagra which I can buy online, and show it pictures of the hot naughty teen bubble bath sleepover the wiener people apparently had with their beautiful young naked asian friends the other night. THANK GOODNESS the wiener people's digital cameras were waterproof!

I am generally unmoved by the wiener people. I do not wish to take them up on their kind offer to make my imaginary wiener 3 inches longer. Because of basic math. Walk through it with me on the chalkboard....Since my imaginary wiener does not technically EXIST, it is currently at ZERO, and zero plus three = a disappointing three. If you were a girl, would YOU respond to an email that read, essentially, "GET A THREE INCH WIENER!!!!"? Probably not, unless the very next words in the ad were "ATTACHED TO A KENNEDY WHO WANTS TO MARRY YOU!!!"

OKAY! *reigns self in as we edge toward NC-17*

ANYWAY. The point is, the MILDEST of the wiener people discovered this blog, and they machine gunned my comments section with FABULOUS OFFERS for getting CHEAP VIAGRA ONLINE! Hmph. I was mightily offended and called Shawn in a lather to have him work his godly filter magic on my comments, but he said, "Congratulations, you blog is now successful! You have attracted the spammers."

That's one way to look at it. So. Yay. And it led to my all-new Wiener People Principle which I will share now for the benefit of my fellow bloggers:

If you build it, they will come.

It's all fixed. Shawn turned Scott onto this MAGICAL ANTI SPAM THINGY that promises a WEINER FREE COMMENTS SECTION.

Now there's an ad I'll respond to!

Frumpelina

The other day on this blog I was whinging about the picture of me on my splashpage. It was an older shot taken by my husband so we would have a pic of me to stick on the site. It was taken while Beautiful Maisy who is barely two was still a nurse shark and in it I am still carrying some pregnancy podge and have fuzzy unbrushed hair with cut-them-myself-with-the-meatshears bangs.

That picture wasn't actually a picture of me. It was Frumpelina Momwart, my alter-ego who bakes from scratch, REALLY APPRECIATES a good pair of backless Keds slides from the Target, and has a Pavlovian drool response to anything made by Pampered Chef. She's IN me, but she isn't the whole of me. She isn't even the sum of my parts.

So my friend Shawn Box took matters into his own hands. He demanded my webmaster name and PW and then he all on his own initiative made me a new splash using the same image map that Lily James constructed. He replaced Frumpelina with one of the pictures that Total Genius Photographer Elizabeth Osborne took for Warner to use on the book jacket etc. THANKS SHAWN YOU DARLING. (PS I now have to be very nice to him forever because I don't know how to change my webmaster name and PW, so if you ever come by here and find this site has been completely replaced with pictures of goats in lingerie or somesuch, you can assume I have righteously cheesed Shawn off.)

The pic on the new splash is Glamoricia McExpensiveHair. That's $125 dollar hair you are looking at. WHICH IS OBSCENE. I went to this chi-chi joint in the city and had SERGE go to town on my head and when I went up to the front and they handed me the bill I stroked out and they had to rush me to the hospital right after they finished running my amex.

She isn't me either, but I think she's a better frontman.

BY THE WAY, if you happen to be an agent of the IRS, please note that I would NEVER have 125 dollar hair for anything but the picture that's going on my book jacket and website, so SERGE is clearly a business expense and I ought to be able to deduct my hair without going to prison. La La La.

At any rate, go check out the new splash and let me know what you think!