PART DEUX: A Chick Lit Cliffhanger I wrote - with a Hot & Sexy Man

I am beguiled by your green-eyed goddess beauty, Wilder says.

I nearly faint.

My stomping and galluping heart pierces my throat. Such a rough rider my heart is!

Wilder suddenly swings over to me, madcap-galore, crushes me into his hearty arms, swoops down for a kiss...

NO WAIT!

This isn't REALLY what's happening...that's just my fantasy, my thing to imagine. It's what I do. It's my shtick, my terwilliger-susswilliger, my universe of whaddya-want, my nonsensical faux pas; I am privy to FUN FANTASTICAL EXPLOSIONS of starbursts of wily wild wonder and grandeur in my mind's eye, in my brain! Vivid taddywonkers of joy! Vast vehemently fireworks of images, effervescent and delightful!

ACTUALLY now my boss, Grigbee Ritches, is on his way over to my cubicle, just as Wilder slides over CLOSER TO ME to watch me finish opening the envelope...

Well, Ms. Yates, how are we this morning? Grigbee's voice booms as he greets me and shakes Wilder's hand. Wilder, good to see you after all these months. I look forward to the Grand Master presentation ceremony later this afternoon. Do we have a winner yet?

I nod my hello at Grigbee. Still unable to speak. Wilder remains by my side. The envelope is ripped open. Waiting for me to pull out its contents...

Aha! Grigbee says to me. You must be the win...

CRASH!

Loud plunkerings interupt and I swivel in my seat to see five large Mastodian-like Gnarly Hairy Green Gushy-pussball-looking Aliens burst into the bank! Now there's six, now seven, now eight...they are multiplying!

BOOM!

Oh yeah, did I happen to mention that I work at a bank? The Frontier Wilderness State Grandville Largehouse Bank.

People suddenly stream everywhere. It's a madhouse! Calamity and chaos!

Grigbee motions to Wilder in sign language, for what I recall as a vernacular warning to Sound the Alarm! Everyone at once seems to be moving.

But. One of the Vulturistic-Green Gross Aliens shouts:

"Nobody move! Or I'll shoot!"

I duck down, but Wilder pulls me up and swoops me out of there quickly into his glass-encased corner office. It's a psychedelic office with mad ravaging greens and fiery oranges and cyclone yellows and ravenous reds; it's also an out-of-the-way place from the full frontal nude view of the starkness and vastness of our impressive bank lobby.

It might be a good place to hide! Wilder holds my hand, it's warm and my heart clanks and bangs rabid-fire rat-a-tat-tat against my ribcage!

People stop scurrying. Someone screams. I hear a shot erupt and echo scally-blunder blasting off into the vastness of the lobby, the sound pings up to crescendo into our starry-spangled skyscraper skyline. A scary sound!

I am afraid to look at whomever the victim is. I'm shaking. My heart's pounding again - bang bang bang - into infinity forever!

Wilder looks at me. His beautiful blue eyes dilate, with tiny-shiny black-dotted pupils. He whispers and points down on the ground:

Lie down flat.

So I do, scared-to-riveting pieces.

Then Wilder plunks down on the floor next to me, it happens so fast. He rolls toward his desk, grabbing my hand, rolling me with him, but we stop as the door to his office bounds open with a BANG! and a WONKY THUD!

I hear heavy breathing. And a deep growl.

Anyone in here? It roars.

Wilder freezes, he is so close to me, I feel his big massive body tense.

It doesn't see us...yet.

Wilder pulls me quickly under his hulking-big mahogany wood desk.

I'm breathing so heavily, panting with fear as this giant Green gritchy alien's black boots shuffle toward us like it knows where we are...it hears us, smells us probably, I can't believe that I will be possibly eaten alive any second now...

And then...ARGHGHGHGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! I yell as it grabs us, there are TWO of them, whatever they are....slimy giant gritchily-green fungus interuptus...!!!

FADE TO BLACKNESS.

***
STAY TUNED FOR A STATION BREAK IN WHICH I WILL RETURN AFTER THESE MESSAGES...

A Chick Lit Cliffhanger I wrote - with a Hot & Sexy Man

Here's a chick lit scene I just now wrote - with a cliffhanger so stay tuned for next time! - after watching the chick flick entitled, The Accidental Husband, with Uma Thurman and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I just love romance!

Okay so here's my new scene, as usual, with my heroine, the clueless QUIM (Quirky Uncontrollable Immature Middle-aged woman) Jacy Yates:

In CubicleLand today, I sit sipping my café mocha latte at my cubicle, trying hard not to let Gloria’s moanings and grumblings get to me.

My workload is full and everyone is in a flurry today. My boss is coming back from New York and I’ve got to get my project finished. I’m working while Gloria is talking.

I’m not sure how she gets her work done. I think she bribes her assistant to do all of it for her. Or maybe she bids out her jobs on eWorkHorse.com and they monkeyhump out her work and get ‘er done, just in time…silly as this sounds, it just could be what happens.

It’s a Monday. I look around the office and spy Wilder. I sigh.

He’s across the frazzled fray on such a manic Monday, talking to someone else who’s just as high up as he is. In Vice PresidentLand. Where the norm (and peons such as myself) do not hang. Nor dare. Nor speak. Not ever. Unless spoken to.

Gloria interrupts herself in mid-madhouse rumbling-rama sentence and looks over to where I am looking - at Wilder - and she sighs as well. The man is just so dreamy.

Wilder. He is a sizzling man with the perfect fitting name. A glistening pirate of hearts. He has dark brows, smoldering blue eyes, a tan that tomorrow never forgets.

He’s smarmy sexy frothy-flirty. He is heat intoxicated up and down my spine. His voice is velvet. He is Robinhood. He is Bogie. He works at my company where I’ve toiled away for ten years. He’s never noticed me.

He was dating a supermodel fashionista extraordinaire, but I’d heard they just broke up rather tempestuously. He is passionate. He is infamous. He is also famous. He is a part-time producer for movies as a hobby; a volunteer firefighter, a famous writer of thrillers, a grand master chef.

He is a vice president at my company; he is rarely here because of traveling the world on his book tour. They keep him around for marketing purposes. He lures new clients. He is a big attraction. He is sex on a stick. He is a passionate swarthy sex-god of a man.

I dream about him night and day. Everyone – at least all the woman in my office and all my girlfriends do, too. He is a fantasy.

He can’t be for real. Real mean aren’t like this.

Except…I look up from my cubicle.

And he is walking right towards me.

Gloria stares too and stops talking.

And it takes A LOT for her to just shuddup.

So I’m at work, still, on my project, typing ferociously, and as he gets closer and closer I’m now piling up in sweat. I’m now biting my nails. I am now done typing. He sees me watching him walk towards me.

It’s been real, Gloria says. I better let you get back to it. She is such a cream puff wasteland. She’s been in my cubicle for the past hour and a half complaining about her uber-rich over-bred over-stuffed beau, Victor, and about the new supercharged SUV he’d just bought her in the wrong color. It’s an off-off-off white, when she really just wanted white.

Gloria is a spoiled woman who was/is/someday-in-this-century supposed to inherit millions from her Aunt Ermengarde. When Ermy never died in the 80’s, Gloria decided to go to college, which was a good idea because now Ermy is an octogenarian, still hanging on by a barely-lifelorn roadhouse thread.

Gloria recently decided to start dating someone rich and fancy to fit her inexhaustible shopping habit and uber-charged supercilious lifestyle. And now that Gloria’s dating Victor, she’s now hoping to also inherit millions from his family. (When they got promised-to-be-engaged, she raved and oohed-and-aahed over pictures of his four-story mansion of a house. Even though there were NONE of him.) She tells me it’s always good to have a backup plan.

Gloria is now the caretaker of her Aunt Ermy, which, needless to say, is sort of making Gloria a good person, albeit slowly. So now what am I going to complain about to my friend, Jazhette? Since nothing interesting ever seems to happen to me. I seem to find myself living vicariously through Gloria's richly extravagant life.

I am still not sure why Gloria and I are friends. It might have to do with the fact that nobody else likes her in GirlLand and I’m too sweet and too full of savoir faire to be a meanie to her, like everyone else is. Sometimes I just feel sorry for her. But she can be quite a bore and a tarty blow-hard bitch. The Magnus Opus of infantileness extremes of the world.

So now Wilder’s at my desk station, Gloria’s just left in a flurry of overdone perfume (Este Lauder), and I’m now flustered, sweatrolls farkle down my back, I wipe my brow as nonchalantly as possible and look up at him.

I’m sure I resemble a placid blank-faced cow, hopefully sans the cud-chewing numbness. I hope he doesn’t think that I am wearing all that over-the-top perfume. Este Lauder is not quite who I am. I am more of a Vera Wang kind of perfume.

My cubicle neighbor, Macie Blanders, on the other side of my work station, stops smacking her bubblegum to eavesdrop. This is quite a big deal. Extravaganza to the fullest.

Hiya, he says.

Now I can hear Macie typing madhouse-galore on her computer, she’s perhaps IM’ing everyone in the office about Wilder actually speaking to me. Etc etc.

I can just imagine what everyone’s thinking. Why her? Why NOT me? What does she have that I don’t have? Well, possibly more sweat than: a Chinese sewing manufacturer’s sweatshop, a tax accountant’s armpits, and the inimitable Sweathogs of the 70’s!

All I can do is gulp.

Boy, I feel cheesy, grubby, about twelve years old, looking up at this moviestar hotness glamourama dude, I feel grittiness; really, I feel like a kid in a candy store without coinage.

So then I just grin. It’s all I can do. Gulp and grin. I cannot speak. I’m in whimsical distress, sort of on the fence between golden parachute joy and bitter embroiled hell. Here’s this gorgeous candy and I have no wherewithal to buy it. I have no funds. My soul is normally a parade, but it’s on strike, and so’s my brain.

My Brain? Zip-oid. Nada. Zipland. KAPUT. Over and out!

You’re Jacy Yates, right? He says. Such a golden enriched smooth voice. Such a joy to hear erupt from those luscious lips of his.

Gulp. I go.

I nod. So now I’m queasy, sick, really. My face goes green, I’m sure. I clutch my stomach. I have to hold in my urpiness, a burp about to burble from my boiler-of-a-face. But I think I still have this shit-eating grin plastered on my now greenish-gurgly urpoid face.

Are you alright? He sits in the vacant stale chair in my cubicle. Nobody’s sat there for eons. Nobody comes to talk to me, just Gloria, but she’s usually pacing when she comes over, her crazoid bloody-bore antics, always about her blow-hard self. Self-absorbed that she is. And she is usually complaining about something "wretched." The divine blasphemy of her life.

She has a lot of anger and adult angst.

Don’t we all.

Um, I sort of mumble. But I can just nod.

You okay? He leans in and looks into my face. He’s so close and I breathe in the smoky scent of him.

But. It's too much for me to handle. Now I just want him to leave. I can feel the curious eyes of everyone in the office looking at us. Eyeballs boring into our backs. I do not want or need this kind of attention. I’m not used to it, for one. I’m not going to like the myriads of queries from everyone as soon as he leaves. They’ll be like, what does HE a supergod want with YOU a mere peon?

It will be like a SPIKE in my neon-thwarted stock. My stock is up. I've never in my life had this happen. Juiciness of life usually just skips over me and blunders onto the next cubicle mate. And my stock is usually half-penny-ness.

It’s okay. I know I’m a peon. I’m fine with it. I’ve been one all my life. I’m not ready to NOT be one, not just yet.

He hands me an envelope. This is for you, he says with a white-teeth gleaming smile.

I swoon. I know I am such a loon. I think I smile, but it might look like a grimace.

I reach over for it and I tear at the corners of this envelope. My mouth is dry, I am speechless. I can’t even thank him properly!

What does he want?

What’s in the envelope?

Did I win the lottery? Oh yeah, I don’t remember even buying a lottery ticket.

Death of a Career

My basilisk-eyed, wanderlust once-creature-comfort career has ended abruptly.

It fell through the cracks ending up in bargain bin obscurity. When you shop at a bargainers dreamhouse, weaving in and out among useless countless off-shore off-colors of designers galore: Donna Karan purple plaid shirts, Ralph Lauren futile folds of foreverness, anything-in-abundance circa 1960 through 1989, Izod shirts lampooned into lascivious dryspell dryweave, cold whorish cotton-blended whatevers, lurid lustful polyesters, plentiful paisleys, vomitous greens/mauves/peaches, hellish hues of avenue-blues, whimsically-distressed violets, various vioin-colored old man’s cardigan sweaters, once-bitten twice-shy tawdry yellows and angry oranges, big-mouth toadstool browns, etc. don’t you just ask yourself where did all this crap come from? How did it get here? And furthermore, how the hell did I get here?

Well I happen to know that some of it fell there, just like my crash-bore accident-prone career.

Its fall was deep and crunchy, crusty and dire, harsh and severe…and it just fucking fell…

Like a bad-mouthed irritable screeching baby bird out of its mamma’s bawdy milk-residue-laden nest…

Into no man’s land.

A harrowing gumphawing Harumph! of a wasteland.

Sifted through and possibly pilfered by Jewish American Princesses at Bargain Basement’s R US?

I think not.

Smoothed-over, glossed-through, half-ass-heartily by the glassy-eyed Girl Next Door?

Nada.

Poked, prodded, and breathed-on by the White Trashy Whore Next Door?

No way, Jose!

Rather, ignored impetuously, imperceptively – icy indifference.

Which leads to…

My life is now a big galumphing gargoyle mess. It just stinks. It’s almost like my brain fell out of my head and landed with a clanky KERPLUNK!

It’s quite a killjoy isn’t it?

The brain. If you don’t use it then you lose it.

Yup. My brain.

It’s lost in an abyss of phlegm and flim-flam wading waters surrounding a castle, a moat of mired messiness with gritchy gators guarding its inky ilk. Not to mention the barnacles that have attached to my grimy brain.

So now I’ve got to figure out how to capture my brain from the wild waters in the messy moat from the bitchy beasts, and regain back my career from the blasphemous bargain basement crazy-circus hellatiousness.

It doesn’t help being QUIMMISH, a Quirky Uncontrollable Immature Middle-aged woman. My gut reaction is to consume exorbitant amounts of chocolate and to redux Sex & the City reruns, i.e. to basically escape from everything evil and erroneous in my life.

I’m very good at that. If there ever was a job opening for someone middle-aged to consume large quantities of chocolate and watch girlina chick flicks and write about this stuff, then I’m game.

But. Reality does not play this game well with me. It bites back blue and hard. Insolently, even. And I have vicious teeth-marks from it all over my ravaged body.

So I don’t really know what to do about this tired tangled tragedy. But they do say that tragedy is comedy’s sordid silly sister. And I believe it.

Got Torque? On Torque-blown Tuesdays.

I wrote this yesterday, which was Tuesday. I'm posting it today, which is Wednesday. Sometimes when you're unemployed you don't know what day it is. I meant to post this yesterday, so it's better late than never:

Yeah, it’s a Tuesday.

And how do I know that?

Because today I got torque! (And oh yeah, I survived Monday alright, too.)

I feel good.

I worked out at the YMCA for free (they give you three free tryouts as a guest).

I steamed like a happy new-wave frog dancing a polka (post nouveau style) in the steam room; I heated myself, blitzing like a barking bullfrog, in the sauna. Myriad permutations of animals gyrating in the desert, I see this in my mind’s eye, which is always an interesting place to be. They need steam in that desert, they need water, and they have plenty of deep-fried heat, and love.

I love steam! Bring on that cool song by Peter Gabriel regarding steam.

I love heat! Bring on that cool movie, with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro.

All this, after I walked - and run-walked - on the treadmill.

I am lost in a dearth of wild woolly wilderness of life. It seems that everything’s been squelched this year. I sift through the smoldering wreckage, and I still see steam erupting from under the embers, the cinders, and the messiness of it all.

Steam. It’s like hope. It’s a good thing.

Filing Extension for Unemployment and Fantasy Job Mondays

Fantasy Job Monday

Have I mentioned FJM’s yet? I think not. Only someone like me, a QUIM (Quirky Uncontrollable Immature Middle-aged woman), can think up something this fantastic.

All you really have to do is have a vivacious, fabulous imagination.

Oh yeah, and you have to really truly grittily hate Mondays. I still dislike Mondays, even though I do NOT have to go to cubicle land world (i.e. a job in corporate America) any longer.

Mondays. They come at you full steam sometimes. Not unlike Hard-Core Hellacious Hangovers (rewind this past Sunday morning? No!).

But NOT like Full-Blown Fun-Loving cups of cappuccino, avec Full Steam and Frothiness.

So today I would rather be a Food Taster for a Chocolate Factory. This is my Fantasy Job Monday.

Oh yeah, and I applied for my Extension for Unemployment. Hope I get it.

On The Writing Life and Unemployment Running Out.

On The Writing Life and Unemployment Running Out.

So am thinking about sending some of my chapters from one of my chick lit/murder myster/sexy thriller novels to a Literary Agent. Not sure yet who this Lucky Creature will be yet.

Not sure which chapters, though. Perhaps you, my gentle reader, can help me decide.

Will it be:

Cameltoes

Pussy Go Lightly

Bad Breakup in a Beleagured Bar

Am also thinking about sending something to a Writer's Contest. It would be nice to have some extra money. Especially since my Unemployment MIGHT conceivably run out this weekend. I will find out if I can get an extension this coming Sunday.

Saw a pretty cool contest for Sci-Fi writers, the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest. How hard can that be, right? I will have to grapple with the idiosyncracies of sci-fi, the vernacular, the right ideology, the right voice, style, etc. I'm sure I can do it, I'm a Desperado, right? The good thing about being desperate for money is that you realize your talents increase by the moment.

"Will Wash Windshields for Money," am working on polishing that sign and going down to the street corner next week.

So I've been writing steadily a few hours every day, in between looking for jobs. I might also think about getting a paid writing job, possibly freelance, maybe part time at a magazine somewhere in my town. I called a gal pal, let's call her JoVial, but she hasn't rang me back yet. Hmmm. Maybe I will Facebook her instead. Suspect she prefers her online life more than her offline life.

Wish me luck. I certainly need it.

The Unemployment Office, Astral Projection, and Sex.

The Unemployment Office, Astral Projection, and Sex.

I remember talking to a gal pal in college eons ago about Astral Projection (among other things collegy: Sex, Drugs, and Rock N Roll). She swore she’d done it. She is now a friend on my Facebook, although the last time I saw her she said something shockingly smarmy and rude to me. So let’s call her LouDanne Dumme since it absolutely fits her mediocrity and lack of savoir fare. What she said to me was Just Unforgivable:

You mean you’re Still Single?

Even when she caught my deer-in-headlight reaction to her cold-hearted blunder about my relationship status, like a blow-harded bore she pummeled me with pics of her kids and talked about her perfect life being married-with-kids, she reminded me of the brutal “Smug Marrieds” that Helen Fielding writes about in Bridget Jones’s Diary. And why I so relate to that book!

I’m just glad that LouDanne Dumme thinks she’s BETTER than I am so that I DON’T have to see her or swamp through hoardes of hoaky pictures of her “super-duper” sons.

I suppose if LouDanne Dumme saw me now, she’d probably say:

You mean you STILL can’t find a job?

It takes me a while to come back with snappy comebacks. Usually twenty years later I can FINALLY think of something witty and clever and debonair to say. So to her I’d say to that:

You mean you STILL have your head up your ass? Are you STILL smoking pot, too?

But then she’d probably retort:

You mean you STILL think you can dance sexy? HUH?

We all know very well that I cannot dance sexy; I just think I can because normally I dance when I drink something – a lot of somethings!

I am pretty certain that if I could Astral Project myself Far and Away from here that I would go check out The Unemployment Office to see if I am on the targeted hit list to get an extension for even more unemployment income. I really need it bad. Like a sea-faring scurvey-afflicted sailor craves Vitamin C.

Hopefully this would take a good 15 minutes to do, so I’d have time to then Astral Project myself to Italy to check out the weather, the art, the people, the sex, the fashion, and the food. I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.

I suppose I have a short Astral Project list at the moment of where I’d go:

1. The Unemployment Office

2. Italy

3. My sister’s courtroom when she does her upcoming Big Case for I have a feeling actually showing up might make her nervous. I want her to win. And I hope the judge isn't a curmudgeon.

4. All of my recruiters’ offices. I’d like to find out whether they are really trying to help me find a job, or not. I suspect not. I suspect that they are laughing at me behind my back and busy playing Solitaire on their computers at work. They are also probably masturbating to keep from dying of boredom since the economy is so sucky-ass.

5. All the chocolate factories in the world. I’ve always wanted to know how they do it. I’ve always wanted a chocolate factory. Preferably an organic chocolate factory, possibly reminiscent of the gorgeous astounding chocolate I had in Austria and Germany last summer when I was there with my wonderful family.

6. Publishing companies who publish chick lit/murder mystery/sexy thrillers, or the like. Find out exactly what they’re looking for.

7. Literary agents who help people who write chick lit/murder mystery/sexy thrillers get published.

8. Those cool people who make animated films. The process sounds fascinating. Wallace and Gromit are so great.

9. Wedding cake confectioners. I love the Fancy-Shmancy aspect of it and I just KNOW I could do it if I could see how they did it. Yeah!

10. The next big piano contest, like The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. I play piano, but I’ve never been That Good and I’d like to watch the contestants up close and personal, without having them know I was there, breathing down their fingers rolling clandestinely up and down the piano. Piano is like sex! It rocks!

So where would YOU go? I'd love to hear from those of you reading my blog. All three of you.

On Writer’s Block and Other Nightmares.

Inevitably, this is what happens when a writer does not write for days; it’s called Writer’s Block, and it’s pure evil.

It is the swarthy (Harumph!) and uncomfortable equivalent of a Radio Deejay’s Dead Air.

Or a Porn Star’s Limp Whiskey Dick.

Or a Priest’s Hard-on.

Or a Femme Fatale’s Visit from Monthly Martha.

Or a Serial Killer’s Change of Heart.

Or a Vampire’s New Vegan Diet.

So then I traveled down the jaunty, hopeful, and dusty tour of my old computer’s hard drive to dredge up more - possibly phlegmatic - writing’s of yesteryear…but alas! No dice.

I found that my old writing is as bad as a college kid’s dirty laundry, which stands on its own Wilderness Land’s Two Feet.

Or as bad as that old Slaughtered Salt Lick slobbered on by the Crusty Cows and Hillbilly Horses nearby.

I’ll be back tomorrow. With or without the Nightmares? Who the hell knows.

A Stalker, a Standoff, and Some Death Threats.

It’s true, my beautiful sister, we’ll call her Sheena, who is an attorney is absolutely cool (she was born that way) and is a genius (once again: born that way) and I love her tons and tons. Also: I think she’s saved my ass more than once (but we won’t get into that grisly mess right now!). This scene is dedicated to her, and I hope she LAUGHS A LOT when she remembers this event. Here it is:

Roatney Oatnonny is insane.

Well, hell, with a name like that, who can blame him?

He has always shown PDAs with me – which in his case stand for Public Displays of Agony – being mine!

So when his voice erupts on my speaker phone at work bright and early Monday morning, it is indelicately high-pitched, vulgar, and yes, in-sanest of the freakiest kind.

“But Jacy, I LOVE Youuuuuuu!”

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I pick up my phone to thwart the super-sonic dolphin-happy-hearing ranges of the three bitchy and nosy accounting clerks who work for me. I cannot let them hear.

My job is already in blowhard jeopardy as it is.

Last week Roatney Oatnonny sent a singing/juggling clown to my office, such a nutcase job to have happen to me when they already do not like me at work. And it wasn’t even my birthday so I had to make up some nonsensical excuse. Got pulled into my boss’s office about it, sure was embarrassing.

Uh, yeah, I have a stalker, I told my boss, who looked down at me under his bespectacled countenance, and snorted.

Oh really? And how did THAT happen?

Er, it’s a long story. It’s nothing I did, mind you…

Oh I’m sure! I’d like to hear that one. My boss snorted again and galumphed a chortling laugh.

I met him while I was out with my sister, Sheena. That’s how it started.

Sheena! Is she still single? I’d really like to…be single again!

Okay, well, do you mind if I return to work, we can discuss this later, Miles. I ended it without explanation.

So now my accounting clerks actually don’t notice that I'm hissing on the phone with a freakazoid because there’s always so much chaos in the accounting department, and FOR ONCE I am thankful!

Jeremiah Bravo is harassing Litliana Plutnik, the A/P clerk about screwing up his accounts payable again; Mandolynne Warbler is speaking in her loud British snooty voice – belittled harrumphs erupting – to Cheseapeake, our new-ish accounts receivable clerk. And Daisy Jo Portnal, the billing clerk, is on the phone with our senior partner, Ergle Erwood about his billing fiasco, and her voice carries like a pregnant orangutang laying blame.

“Ohmigad, Roatney.” I hiss. “You’re not listening to me. I told you several times already that I have a boyfriend. You have to stop calling me. Besides, I’m at work and I’m very busy.”

He’d first rung last week and now keeps calling me daily.

“But, Jacy, I will do anything for you.” Roatney cajoles.

“I have to go now. Okay?”

“Wait, can’t we just meet sometime and have coffee?”

“No, like I said last week, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” Roatney pauses. “You said we could have coffee sometime. But I LOVE you.”

“I gotta go.” I place the phone in its cradle and proceed to throw up, on the inside. I am that disgusted. You know those little vomit burps that curdle your insides? My stomach decides to hurt the rest of the day.

Last week when Sheena had told me that some guy had left her a message wanting me to call him, but had not left his name, but did leave a number, why oh why had I decided to call him back from my work phone?

She said he had sounded gay. Keenan Smith? Terence Jenkins? If it was Terry, why would he call me? Why not Jazhette? Some other gay guy friend from my past? Borka Sloaden? Must be.

So when I rang the guy last week, he said his name crisply and clearly: Roatney. Pause. Oatnonny. Proudly. Firmly.

He’s CRAZY!

I cringed on the inside, but my voice was calm. This was the freak I dumped years ago! We talked and I made it nonchalant chit-chatter and low-key.

But then when he invited me to a Marilyn Manson concert I knew I had to get off the phone.

I just had to get off the phone. ASAP. That was my first instinct. Trouble brewing. Like waking the dead. Opening a can of sordid grisly slimy creepy crawly worms.

Oh. My. God.

No thank you, I told him, I have a boyfriend. That was my first mistake. Oh no, right, my first mistake was meeting him several years ago when I was with Sheena at a Halloween party.

Okay, well, he said, we could still go have coffee sometime, right? Right?

Well, I said at the time, just to get him off the fucking phone, sure...sometime. But I was not sincere. I remember hating him and not really being able to pinpoint why or the moment the lust turned to Bitter Revolution Hate. It was never really real hate but he just annoyed the holy fuck out of me. Maybe that’s close enough. Maybe it was the Ska dancing at the Sultan’s Ballroom. Maybe it was the shit in his tub when his toilet/tub didn’t work and his place was fucking freezing cold. Maybe it was that he was poor. And I so hated dating someone who was poor. That was no fun paying for everything myself. It was the biggest turn off ever. Anyway, I somehow I got him off the phone - he did tell me about his school and gave me his address and phone number and all that. Then I hung up but he rang right back and said Now I have your work number. Terror crawled up my spine and snarled, then creeped slimily back down my spine.

Holy Fuck.

Then I said that I had to go and I hung up on him.

The next day I had several I LOVE YOU messages from him on my voicemail that he’d left ranging from 9 p.m. to midnight. Yuck-oid.

The next day I had a few more I LOVE YOU and MISS YOU messages. Vomit Curdling in My Throat. Now. So disgusted.

The next day same thing I had even more I LOVE YOU insane/obsessive compulsive messages. Again. That was a Friday. That night I went to Barnie’s with Jazhette and drank heavily, so bothered by this. And right before Katrinka’s wedding. So I had some big burly macho-voiced tough looking guy who tells him via voicemail to stop calling Jacy Yates.

Well the next day he left about 3-5 crazed gonna-kill-your-boyfriend, gonna-kill-you, gonna-kill-you-and-your boyfriend messages. Then one more that said he wasn’t going to hurt me, he loved me, just going to hurt the boyfriend.

I wondered what to do so I played the messages for my sister, Sheena, who is an attorney and I played some of the sane messages for my family. Sheena said I needed to call the police and tell them. But I pondered this.

And now it is Monday and I just got off the phone with him again, it is torture just being at work. I did tell the girls not to answer my phone. I still do not want them to hear or know what is really going on other than some ex is bugging me. I do not want them to know yet about the death threats.

Last week I had the girls not answer my phone and said some ex was calling and even had the security guard escort me to my car the rest of the week. Was frightened to death of seeing him. Or just freaked out. Somewhat.

I decide to tell Miles about the whole thing for good, come clean and all that, especially about the recent weekend death threat messages saved on my voicemail and am in his office and ready to play my voicemail for him when Litliana accidentally answers my phone and buzzes us and says it is weird heavy breathing and she is really freaked out from him (apparently he’d been sniffing paint all night or something testicular-harming) then Miles says he will call him so I give him the number and Miles says his spiel about harassing an employee and the firm will file a restraining/protective order against him, etc.

Heavy breathing on his side of the receiver. Miles must be getting to him. IT’S ALL SO FUCKING CRAZY.

So now it is Tuesday and Roatney gets up early, armed, and starts shooting his AK-47 or whatever the fuck kinda gun it is at his neighbors. Police show up with teargas, dogs, trucks, etc. I’m at lunch with Sheena wondering about giving her his address so she can do a drive-by during this time, not knowing that he is doing this.

Later back at work, Litliana’s friend who works at the police station tells us that there is a 12 hr standoff at Yadmiral Court and naturally he’d given me his address the week before. So then I check the address and then I KNOW it’s HIM.

I freak out.

Sheena then calls as the entire firm is up in arms about this, watching the television and knowing this is my stalker. Sheena says he apparently called Burn Artin, a bigtime hotshot attorney who takes on high profile cases such as this, who originally ignored him at first until he found out it was as ”public display of affection” or rather, on television the 12 hour standoff with the police. PDA’s are not usually shown on television. Some crazy girls would say, Roatney, how sweet. Or: You really do care about me, Roatney. Probably the type of crazy girls displayed in a made for TV movies starring Juliette Lewis or Courtney, the wife of Kurt Cobain.

The twelve hour standoff ends as Roatney warbles to the ground in a wobbly mess of heartache and craziness, after having shot at several cops, who’ve also reciprocated by shooting back at him. Nobody is killed. It is like a miracle that he is still even alive. The cops are pissed and everyone I know is sorta half ass lauging at me, what a joke that this is a guy that I once dated. What a freak.

My boss, Miles, snorts with laughter and says that I must be really good in bed. Ha ha.

Sheena keeps me posted on updates on his case. He is once up for parole, but doesn’t quite cut that smarmy mustard.

Gee, like he really thought he could get away with shooting at his neighbor, and THEN the cops for twelve hours?

Anyway, he is put away FINALLY and a whole string of court sessions later, he is still trying to get off on insanity. Last I heard, he was saying that I used him. He was still ranting and raving on and on about me. For crying out loud!

I should not always return my phone calls.

I think he is still in jail. He says he wants to kill me and that he’ll get me someday. I’m waiting, oh yes, I have a gun and lots of pink silly string in my bedroom just for the right moment. If he comes after me in my house I’m going to squirt him silly and then quickly take aim and shoot. And I’ll be laughing the whole time.

Katrinka rocks out

Here's a scene I wrote based on my sister, we'll call her Katrinka. She plays the violin very well. She helps my main character, Jacy, who is at her company Christmas party at yet another shitty corporate America cubicle-land boring-ass uninspiring low-paying job. Here it is:

I’m in a state of bliss, my rock star sister Katrinka is on stage playing her violin in her freaking cool rock band. The music is loud and melancholy and beautiful; I am full of masterful wonder. The crowd of cheering fans is HOT and in a state of sheer pleasure-dome madness.

Among the swarm of this crazy crowd in my mind’s eye I suddenly imagine that I am a beetle. Pushed, prodded and then crunched over the edge of a beetle mania precipice. A crag. Especially when I feel a sharp kick which juts rummily into my shins. I stoop to rub it, feeling the warm trickle-splonge of blood.

I fall into the throng and this mass of lunatic people pick me up so then I reluctantly ride the mad crowd wave forever-feeling dragged on the ground for a few feet - enough to freak Katrinka out if she has a chance to notice but how could she not?

I am on that heavy heady wave up high on the pinnacle of the pure raw crowd, hope it doesn’t piss her off so badly - my face reddens with fear, I feel insane and high on life.

This is hysteria.

This is madness.

This is rock.

I float away into the back of the room on this crazy wave of madness. People I know well and others, strangers, jeering, cheering, carrying me.

What kind of a supposedly “tame” rock concert/X-mas party is this? It’s frigging crazy! These are people I work with in cubicle land at corporate America for Chrissakes! All there for my fabulous sister.

Katrinka is a real live legend rock star, after all. I know that. A swell of pride bulges in me. So different than when we were little living with my chocolate uncle, Maurice! We were such Harassed Underlings as children, by loads of other children, who can be so mean.

Katrinka must have noticed this beetle-cum-mania disappearance act of mine because she stops singing at that point, jumps off the tiny stage and bone-picks through the ultra-scary mob to free me. I see her but she doesn’t see me. I yell but she can’t hear me. Her band continues to play and people continue to sway.

It seems that this Goddess-like presence (complete with Cher-like feathers, feather-boa, etc.) make the hord flock around Katrinka but when she holds up her hand and bellows out a throaty BACK OFF! silvery crispy clear demand, they acquiesce. As if magnetized, mesmerized and laden with drippy soup of a celebrity that they wildly adore.

I no longer see her, she is surrounded by a blur of people. It feels like a truck hits me as I am plopped down BAM! BAM! BAM!; sharp bones wrench my body, pushing/shoving/mincing/grinding my outsides into my insides!

The lovely lyrical melancholy music grooves to a descrescendo and diminishes to a very soft waltz, and then I see it:

My sister’s large kind pink hand reaches for me and pulls me out of the frecken fruitless fray.

Thank you dear sister, how I love you!

Katrinka tells me there’s a Vampire Monster in my house…

My beautiful wonderful sister, we’ll call her Katrinka, the one I base one of my characters on as the Famous and Glamorous Rock Star Violinist, tells me I need to throw a Vampire into one of my stories. Perhaps spice it up a bit. Okay, Katrinka, so there’s a Monster in my house! Well, I DO have to admit that I DO like spicy!

So here goes:

THUD!

Yvette jumped. She was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, SUFFERING after some sordidly spicy food. Among other spicy things from the night before.

“Say what?” She said out loud. Someone was in her kitchen attacking all her kitchen gadgets and glasses, breaking things like a mad hyena looking for food. Or something wicked.

WHAM!

Yvette burped. She was STILL in the bathroom, drunk off her hiny, also suffering from too many girlie drinks respite with too much pink, too much vodka, too much froth, and too much gin. Never mix your vodka with gin, she mused. Among other spicy muck and galore things NOT TO MIX from the night before.

THUNDDDER!

“Oh Shit!” She said. It was him. She snapped to suddenly. She just knew it! He MUST be coming back for more sex. It sucks to be as good in bed as she was and have them keep coming back for more.

But she did NOT want to have sex with him ever again. She had dumped him. Just last night.

Oh dear lord! Last night, it all rushed back to her now, screamie-meamie mad-faced gore, they were making out on her bed, and he started biting her on the neck WAY TOO FUCKING HARD.

She’d screamed. She also bitched him out bigtime.

“Atlantis, THAT’s gonna leave a mark. You bastard! I told you, NO HICKIES!”

“Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet!” Then he bit her again, HARDER THIS TIME.

She screamed and thought he murmured something like he couldn’t wait for her to start feeling his love. And madness, she thought. She felt THAT for sure.

Then he’d tied her up. With handcuffs. And sexy satin rope. And the barely flickering candlelight and the mood music of Shade and all those pink drinks, way too many alcoholic intoxications…

Somehow she’d gotten loose and screamed again.

But unfortunately he’d gotten even more turned on. He rather liked her screaming.

And that she had wiggled free.

It was just foreplay to him.

So he came after her for more. Savage blood, dripping, heart-wrenching, she blood-curdled screamed, especially after feeling wan and pale and seeing her blood squirt squishily all over the bed sheets, and having his eyeballs dilate and turn into this sea-faring wanderlust golden, yet a very beautiful and magnanimous gold. Seductive, even.

She suddenly realized that she could no longer move and that she was trapped.

He pulled down her pants and then she was completely bare and ripe, he bit her flesh beginning from her neck and then down.

It was then that he started to howl.

Somehow she’d gotten free again for good and after she’d dumped him for being a monster, well, actually a Vampire (if you wanted to get brutally technical about it), he’d gotten kind of mad and upset at the rejection. You see, he kind of took that rejection personally.

The flashback of last night’s antics made her shiver and wimper. She was scared.

WONK!

She bolted off the toilet – she’d sat there long enough anyway, five minutes ago the Thai Sum Kum Kai Yanni Special quelled any irate acidophilus in her stomach, BUT it also dive-bombed blasted through her esophagus, stomach, and hurdled its way into the abyss of her bowels, then gushing out like a bad blast of a hurricane.

BAM!

In pain, agony, still, but now fear for her life…and too much of her heart lurched in her throat…she realized she had to escape!

WONK!

Yvette cracked open the bathroom door for a quick peek. That was when she saw a huge clunky thing with fangs and blood dripping from the fangs, brandishing knives, clanking clandestinely in her kitchen. Tossing things about with the weapons and its claws.

CRASH!

Her chest heaving, she rushed to the bathroom window, opening it and crunching a couple of her carefully painted red fingernails.

The bathroom door spun open just then. It YELLED at her in a gnarly-ass gritty gruncheled voice.

“Yuh-Vetta my Lovely Princess, you cannot escape me now! I WILL HAVE YOU FOREVER.”

What the hell was happening this time? She gave him a look, rolled her eyes, stuck her tongue out at him, and dashed out the window, landing in bird poop. Oh! squishy surprise!

Great. Like this is SO how my life should not be going thus far, Yvette thought as she started to run down the street with the bird shit on her ass.

Her sucky ass life! It had worsened since bad breakups from tons of bad boyfriends and from being laid off so many times. What sludge and muck and gore and despair was going to gloom and doom her down now? Would she be slaughtered by a vampire, now? She wouldn’t let it happen, she would keep running. Far and away. She wasn’t going to let Atlantis get to her…and it was just like him to break into her home when she was having the runs. Go figure.

Ah! To be a spinster again as she had three weeks ago before she’d met Atlantis. (She’d been depressed then, too, but she’d give anything to have THAT depression back, without the neck bites and the loss of blood from the night before.)

That was then. And this is now.

She was afraid to turn around as she was running with these terrific thoughts piling in her head, on top of another. But she heard heavy breathing behind her and just knew it was Atlantis…

To Be Continued…

Some of My Favorite Writers

I'd like to share with you some of my favorite writers.

1. Lisa Lutz, who wrote The Spellman Files: A Novel. I just read this recently, given to me by one of my writer friends in my Saturday morning (okay, every other Sat. morning) creative writer groups. I haven't given the loaned book back to my friend - as I am really bad about that.

The Spellman Files: A Novel, is a fun, boisterous book respite with splendid snarky characters, lively dialogue, and eons of entertaining tail-spinning chase scenes. It's even got a whodunit. The main character is a strong character with enough quirks and foibles to enchant the reader. She is Izzy, a detective who works in the family detective business. The family unfortunately does not know boundaries when it comes to privacy or the invasion of it. Is it a comedy or chick lit (with some romance) or a mystery? Or all of the above? Read it and you decide. I loved it!

2. Jacyln Moriarty, who wrote The Year Of Secret Assignments.

This review is from Amazon.com:

"Popular Aussie writer Jaclyn Moriarty, author of the smash debut, Feeling Sorry for Celia avoids the notorious sophomore slump with this bouncy epistolary follow-up that is brimming with self-confidence and charm. In The Year of Secret Assignments, a tenth grade English teacher attempts to unite feuding schools by launching a pen-pal project. Best friends Cassie, Emily and Lydia initiate the correspondence, and are answered by Matthew, Charlie and Seb. Emily and Lydia are more than pleased with their matches, but quiet Cassie has a frightening experience with Matthew. When Lydia and Emily discover that Matthew has threatened their fragile friend, the Ashbury girls close ranks, declaring an all-out war on the Brookfield boys. Soon, the couples are caught up in everything from car-jacking and lock-picking, to undercover spying and identity theft.

Moriarty’s captivating comedy of manners reads like a breezy 21st century version of Jane Austen--with no end of ridiculous misunderstandings, angst-ridden speeches, and heartfelt make-ups."

This tale contains the elements of mystery, romance and revenge. I really like fun quirky novels that merge different genres into one smash hit.

3. Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones's Diary.

This fun book is absolutely hilarious. The wit and the naughty parts written in diary format makes you zip through the novel right away until you've realized it's over far too quickly. Spend and enjoy a year in the life of 30 something singleton Bridget Jones, who meets Mark Darcy and decides straightaway (very much like Elizabeth Bennett judging Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen) that he is too priggish for her and acts like he has a gherkin thrust up his arse. She feels pressured by society and her biological clock to marry. However, she now works for a living and is a sexual being who has an ill-advised affair with her boss, whose name is Daniel (which if you scramble the letters spells "Denial"). Mr. Darcy is still a disapproving but endearing stuffed shirt and much like Mr. Darcy for Elizebeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, he cannot resist Bridget's down-to-earth charms in the end.

4. Agatha Christie. Some of my favorite murder mysteries that she wrote are: Towards Zero, The Body in the Library, Pale Horse, Murder on the Orient Express, Sleeping Murder, The Mousetrap, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The A.B.C. Murders, And Then There Were None, Death in the Clouds, The Secret Adversary, Third Girl, Thirteen at Dinner, The Mirror Crack'd, They Came to Baghdad, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Ordeal by Innocence, and more.

A good start would be the mystery, They Came to Baghdad which is quite a fun read and is really more of a thriller. The main character, Victoria Jones, is a bored London typist who loses her job in a typing pool for impersonating her boss's wife and meets a charming young man in a park. Only, he is about to leave for Baghdad. Parting is such sweet sorrow! Not so, thinks Victoria. Undeterred by this obstacle to romance, the resourceful Londoner somehow secures a job paying her passage out to Baghdad. Once there she becomes embroiled in international espionage, flees people who are out to kill her, and finds herself working on an intense archeological dig. Does Victoria ultimately find love? Read to find out! This is a thoroughly absorbing read for any Christie fan.

If you have time and like to read good fiction, check out one of the above writers. Enjoy!

Hangover Madness, Drunken Drive-by’s, & Cyber Stalking

I AM AT LIBERTY. i.e. I am an unmanned ship sailing into the shitty swill of mortgage payments, car payments, and an endless array of bills that make me feel doomed. I am unemployed.

My feckless follies and foibles fester with foppish foolishness.

And on that note, I will now share a hangover madness story, for today began with a hangover for me, post-champagne birthday bliss at a friend’s party last night where lobster, wine, and much rejoicing was shared.

Here’s a very short scene where Jacy and Jazhette quibble, quaff coffee, and muse over meanderings of cyber stalking, and other deviant behavior:

Hangover Madness, Drunken Drive-by’s, & Cyber Stalking

Am in Hell. Am in such Hangover Madness today. Had too many Appletinis last night again. Again.

I’m in line at Starbucks, our best hangout place especially in the late mornings (tennish is fine but nine is far too fucking early). As I’m getting my no-fat, no-whipped grande latte, extra soy I see my best friend sitting in the corner, looking luminous and luscious as usual. Supermodel (but I’d never tell her that because her ego is a bad as a bulbous bobcat on steroids) and a bitch-ass to boot (this I DO tell her from time to time).

“Argh!!!” I say and Jazhette glances up from her internet stalking of Satan (her latest ex who has a new website “business” on the internet). I sit down to join her.

The crusty crumb of madness that lay facilating in my head erupts. I sip my soy concoction and hope for a miracle. I wish just to feel human again.

She looks at me and does a blundering double-take.

“Did you catch the name of that train?” I ask. “It’s just insane how badly I feel.”

“The jagged edge of insanity or the crusty edge of insanity?” She asks.

“What’s worse?”

“Probably the Dahmer crumblike edge of insanity. He got sloppy when he was eating his Sloppy Joes.”

“Oh that’s gross, Jazhette.” But what do you expect from someone wearing a “Swallows” t-shirt with a picture of a bird, who still stalks her ex-boyfriend, dumpster diving in his trash can, spams his email account mainly with Viagra advertisments, doesn’t think twice of looting his mailbox to steal his favorite porn magazine, orders 69 combo anchovy (which he’s hates) and black olive (he’s allergic) pizzas to his house on Superbowl night using his credit card number, and who has a picture of him in her gameroom, using it as a dartboard?

“Big nasty hairy train or teeny toot-a-root tot toy train?” She teases.

“Jesus, Jaz, what the hell do you think?”

Pansy joins us just then. “I vote for the big nasty hairy train,” She says. “I think you drank a little too much, huh. I guess you went to that crazy party last night? I showed up later that night.”

“I don’t even remember leaving. But I lost my notebook, which is really freaking me out bigtime. I hope that Hobert doesn’t find it.”

“Why do you care?” Jaz says. “He dumped you on email. That loser. He has no manners.”

“Yeah, that chickenshit. He can’t even do it to your face?” Pansy grimaces.

“I wrote about him in my notebook and I don’t want him to see what I wrote.”

“And NOW you can’t find your notebook?” Jaz grimaces. “Oh boy, that’s bad.”

“So what’d you write?” Pansy says.

“About how I’d like to murder him,” I say.

“Say what?” Jaz starts laughing. “That’s too funny.”

“Yeah, it is,” Says Pansy.

The next day, Hobert was found murdered exactly the same way that I'd written about in my notebook. I WAS TOTALLY FREAKING OUT. I STILL COULD NOT FIND MY NOTEBOOK. I HAD TO FIND IT.

It was then that I asked Jazhette to help me break into Hobert's house where the party had been held, to look for my notebook, especially before the police found it.

Ex-boyfriends on Facebook? Part Deux

I often wonder what happened to some of my ex-boyfriends.

Oh no, it’s not like THAT, mind you. (When I mean what HAPPENED to them it isn’t as if something bad had to happen to them.) They haven’t wandered off, accidentally tripping the light fantastically over some warbled log in Sea World and drowned, or gotten themselves snaky-snarky snarled and entrapped in a vicious knot of rope, hanging themselves frightfully off some tree, or found themselves tossed tangibly off a torrid cliff…or at least I hope not!

I mean just because I like to read murder mysteries and I like to write murder mysteries doesn’t mean that I would…well you know what I mean!

Of course sometimes I wonder about what happened to some of them when I am completely sloshed out of my fucking mind and have lost nearly all of my senses.

Or I might fantasize about what has happened to some of them…you know, the Bad Egg Ones, or the Bad Apple Ones. There’s always a few Nasty Ass Ones in every heap.

Example: Scotty Steenkerhouse slinked slimily away with sultry-wanna-be Chyllanna Chickonneleggs but got spammed to death by a supersized sea urchin squirting its majestic slime while scrumptiously showing off for a flock of female sea urchins.

But most of the time I wonder about them when I actually hear from one of them, usually through a “Friend Invite” on Facebook.

Facebook. It’s like some weird virtual world, such a pseudo-nonsensical online world, so much vastly and exorbitantly different from the offline real world. In a way, it’s better, having this online world with respect to ex-boyfriends because I don’t have to actually see the ex-boyfriends. But I can still be friends with them, which is just fine.

(I don’t have anything against most of my exes and I like to remain friends with most of them. I just honestly do not want to hang out with them too often. I’ve got a very nice boyfriend now, thank you very much.)

So, yes, sometimes I wonder what happened to some of my ex-boyfriends.

And so it was that I recently got a “Friend Invite” on Facebook by one of them the other day. I was like, OMG OMG OMG! WTF WTF WTF!

And I was like:

ARGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was Mortified. In the Abyss of Ex-Boyfriend Land, THIS one is one of the very worst!

It was the one who dumped me cruelly in a bar, and left me there, to rot. And fester. And torridly anguish the rest of the night away. Drunk, of course.

If you want further explanation on THAT horrid breakup, see my very first post in this blog about it, where NOT, (the initials of a guy named Neville Ormonde Thornbridge) dumps Jacy in the same manner as my dumping.

It’s the opening scene in my chick lit novel.

It begins in a beastly bar, with a bad beleaguered breakup.

Blimey.

This ex-boyfriend of mine who tried to “Friend” me is supercilious, superficial, mean, and nasty. Among other evil warbly-warfled horrid things. And what’s sad is that he’ll probably try to run for President someday. He reminds me of George W. Bush in a way. I wonder if W. ever left any of his girlfriends at the bar, told her it was over, told her she needed to get her own ride home, told her he was now with the new blonde girl (who has chicken legs) over at the bar ordering shots (Jagermeister) for them and all their snooty law school student friends.

Superficial is an important word here. It implies that someone can possibly be hiding something, doesn’t it? Okay, so let us explore the possibilities of what this ex-boyfriend of mine who tried to “Friend” me is hiding:

If you slaughtered open this ex-boyfriend of mine, possibly with a barber’s blade from Sweeney Todd, there would POP OUT two nonsensical organisms who’d be diddly-ass black-hole drunk:

1.The first one being a 90 year-old has-been bloated blow-hard Disco Duck who still thinks he can dance and

2. The second one being a 90 year-old ex-coke dealer wearing a bright maroon pimp-daddy leather jacket scattered with cigarette burnt holes.

Both the duck and the dealer would have stained yellowed teeth and grisly muck-house green polka-dots for eyes, one of each pair being a wandering wormy eye along with milky white residue swimming out the sides of the eyeballs, dripping endlessly down into hell.

Ugh!

If you recall those idiot guys in high school who namedrop and butt-plan their life out - social climbers that they are - who date debutantes and have rich parents and who get everything they want and then stumble on to college (somehow with their drunken-addled low GPA) and join just the right fraternity (because they don't mind paying for their "friends") and wind up living in an uninspiring unoriginal house in suburbia and love and live for corporate America and love and live for money, then you have pegged my snooty ex-boyfriend.

He does not deserve my offline virtual-world friendship on Facebook, or in any world for that matter. And I don’t want him snooping into my life or my universe or my world. I will not even throw him one copious carefully-laden crumb. Or even a dog-eared bone.

If you think I am exaggerating about any of this, his horridness, like I said, please read my Very First Post of this blog o’ mine.

So yup, he tried to “Friend” me on Facebook.

Did you know that right after you select IGNORE to someone’s Friend Request that you can then BLOCK them? Cool! I love Facebook! It rocks!

On the musings of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retail Therapy or Retail Hell? You decide.

Black Friday. Cyber Monday.

Have you often wondered who is coming up with all these nom de plumes?

I often do.

So could it be some Luminous Luminary, possibly named Linus Lapel Lomchamper III, mirrored in tempestuous tandem on Facebook and Twitter with his joint venture old-college-roommate-turned-business partner, the equally egregious Biosphere Bigwig, perhaps named Boyd Bragg Braxton, Jr., who makes blasphemous biochemicals in his biggie bonus time and who blitzes the market blissfully with his ideas, meanwhile blogging about it in the Blogosphere?

Or could it be a Cyberarmy of philanthropist and shopaholic Cyberdogs in space, with popular canine names such as Ginger, Rover, and Fido? On hold from their online loves of internet café and chat room addiction so that they can pursue some offline activities for once?

Or could it be conjoined triplets, with the moniker of Lala, Momo, & Neelie, the Olive Princesses? Who are indeed princesses of marketing ploys! Dubbed LMNOP, for short. And who choose all the best and most popular Mediterranean olives for their chintz-pink colored Girlina Girlie drinks?!

Or could it be their Quaalude-popping Raucous Sting-ray Twins, Urianne & Vivienna, who absolutely LOVE to shop, are Born and Bred to shop, and want EVERYONE to do the same? Labeled QRSTUV, for short.

I’m sure I could research this phenomenon, but it’s more FUN to guess instead! (Although I’ve never been that good at guessing games. I normally hobble at the helm of that dastardly diversion.)

Or could it be some Cyborgish Certified Cryobotic (a merge of Cryogenics + Robot) who is a Cyber-loving wartime effort ex-marine-turned-metallic War-Monger in distress because the wars are not as profitable to his business as he’d like? And quite likely he wanted to use his favorite word “Cyber” merged with “Monday,” one of the most feared days of the week, especially after returning from Thanksgiving Land.

Perhaps this is enough web wackiness to ponder for a while.

So if you are out among ‘em shopping for luxury items or bargains or gifts at boutiques or at the mall or at outlets and so forth, shuffling through the swill and snot of suburbia and/or the urky-ness of urbania in manic Monday mode, trying to maneuver the testy traffic, heartfully hopeful about the holidays, remember to relax, take a die-hard deep breath and try to have some fun. I wish you well.

Chick Lit , Chocolate, and Sex...Oh Yeah!

I want to THANK YOU for reading my blog, and hope that you visit back whenever you have a chance.

I hope I am entertaining you, at the very least.

I’m not sure who ALL of you are - well I do know who a few of you are and I do love you! - and if you can relate to chick lit.

But maybe, just possibly, you can relate to what my chick lit novel is about.

It’s about addiction. I’m sure you can relate to that. I’m sure there is something in this universe that you LIKE A LOT. For me, it’s plenty of things, a plethora of FUN things to do. One of them is to write.

Another is to consume large quantities of chocolate.

I am probably the type of person who’d become a chocoholic, shopaholic, foodaholic, sexaholic, movieholic, relationshipaholic, internetjunkieholic, and others. Gambling? Oh yeah. I like it and games, too. Workaholic too. Writeaholic especially.

So I am writing about addiction in my dark comedy/murder mystery/thriller/chick lit novel:

Ghosts! Sex! Madness! Murder! And Chocolate! Jara Jade and all her quirky addicted-addled friends have serious problems. She has a chocolate addiction, AND she’s just been stabbed almost-to-death by a mysterious X, and the best she can do right now is recover and stay with her sex-addicted best friend, Jazhette, sleeping on an acid pink couch after losing her shitty temp accounting job. Her boyfriend having kicked her out, her “career” in the toilet, and herself a major chocoholic with a tendency to foam at the mouth and hallucinate, she realizes that all she really needs to do is recover and Get A Life. But reality checks in badly when her friend, Chryssa, a spy-in-training (a SPIT) is subsequently murdered. Jacy attempts to solve the crime with help from her quirky and odd friends. Her quirky friends include Gloria, a magician friend who is flanked by a pissed-off ghost; Sheena, a gambling addict (they do daily interventions and now she has an assigned “bodyguard”); Sabrina, who winds up being an ex-serial killer in therapy (a SKIT) turned hit woman, which doesn’t help matters much; and of course, Jazhette. There are several questions Jara needs to answer: whose body was buried next to Jazhette’s newly planted organic tomato plants, will she make it with her new career as a writer, has her dead friend Chryssa really hooked up with Gloria’s ghost/past life ex-boyfriend, Victor, and is there life after NOT having a life, and if so, why does it have to be smack-dabbled dunked-down-deep in the heart of murder and much foul play? This is an acid-spiked black comedy from the quirkiest depths of despair and…well, Hell.

It’s a vast madcap galore roller-coaster ride of glitz, glamour, sex, murder, intrigue, and bathroom humor comedy.

It’s a tossed salad/salad bar of: sex, murder, addiction, jealousy, love, comedy, paranormal – ghosts, exorcist, séance, creative writing groups (and the dynamics of them), girlfriends, girlfriend code of ethics, breakups, bad breakups, dating, crushes, nosy neighbors, serial killers, whodunit, clues, red herrings, threats, stalkers, magic and magicians, spy and snoops, dead bodies, kidnapping, girlfriend dynamics, boycrazy, chocolate addiction, gambling addiction, intervention, secrets, love affairs, getting fired, one night stands, parties, therapy, career change advice and articles, overbearing aunts, loser friends who get great boyfriends, fab friends who get horrid boyfriends, etc.

I’ve posted Chapter One and Chapter Two in earlier blog posts. I will be posting Chapter Three soon. Not sure when. I am very non-linear.

Enjoy and have a fantabulous day!

The Chocolate Loving Uncle

Here's a short scene in my Chick Lit novel depicting Jacy's chocolate-obsessed uncle who finds love in the 21st Century:

Maurice was a mustachioed curio of a man. A champion. A conqueror of many many things, and especially of all things, chocolate. He would, naturally, get it in his moustache, which was a deep dark auburn color, and which a lot of his girlfriends had always suspected was a faux and rather faint impression of years long gone.

His moustache was a euphemism of machismo serenades along sandy shores of serpentine, tenacious journeys. He was an adventurer. Even his prosthetic leg didn’t - and couldn’t - hold him back. He had many walking sticks shaped in many various shapes: elephants, bears, lions, all kings of things he loved and held dear.

Today he plodded up the hill with his chocolate-colored dinosaur walking stick.

And he saw her before she saw him.

He rather charmingly stopped at the ladies’ tea break table to say hello in his whimsical, wry way.

He caught Jessalyn’s eyes and his own eyes twinkled.

He then winked.

Jessalyn blushed. She had chocolate colored hair and and light chocolate golden brown eyes. He really liked that about her.

Maurice sighed happily. Maybe she made chocolate pie? Chocolate cheesecake? Chocolate mousse? Chocolate martinis? Chocolate cake? Chocolate fudge? Chocolate Hoo-hoos? He'd heard she was a very good pastry chef.

Her friends, the ladies’ of 17th Century War Widows of Yore Winding Rivers Southern Tea Party Club twittered uncontrollably and unappreciatively.

One in particular cast her evil eye at his direction and quite judiciously sneered, spilling her tea in the meantime.

He grizzled and stepped backwards, but there was an angry pebble that had somehow snaked itself up and beyond and behind his grandiose dinosaur walking stick - which was his favorite one.

He quite conspicuously stumbled backwards. Over the nasty nugget he fell. He rolled backwards down the hill.

Down he rolled.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Jessalyn bustled. She was a dithery lady who chided the others for teasing him behind his back and snubbing him to his face.

All eyes watched him moving steadfastly, surely, bumbling idiotically.

As he did trailblaze through life, he trailblazed through the field – dashingly and despairingly - as he continued to fall and roll:

Down. The. Hill.

All the way down that one can possibly go until KerPlunk he landed SPLAT! on a stagnate rock, then tottered up into mid-air for a nano-second, then twirled madly over the rock and SPLASHED! madcap-galore into the swan pond.

His body then fell down beneath the surface of the water.

Yes, Trailblazer.

The Splashing of the snarky-blast of contempt erupted from the ducks, the geese, and the wild of the pond from this man interrupting their pristinely peaceful absorption of life.

How dare he!

This uninvited philistine!

The ducks quacked their obstinate fury. The swans honked their rabid annoyance. The queen heron barked her bulky irritation. The turtles poked out their heads from their slumberboxes and chortled their aggravation. The geese cackled their exasperation.

Bubbles appeared - as Jessalyn and her lady friends avidly watched - then finally Maurice spluttered. He rose to the top and splashed his way about.

With watermelon-ic warp speed, he swam clumsily to the shore.

He sordidly clung to the shore and rose with bravado and waved at Jessalyn.

Jessalyn and her friends watched with drooping down mouths, wide open like fat blank-faced mind-numbing whales.

The next thing Maurice could interpret was that they all stood at once to help.

This was when the phenomenon occurred, he later thought.

When the snarky-blast contempt of the creatures of the high afternoon tea decided or had his fall forced upon them metamorphosed into their liking him - or feeling especially sorry for him – and possibly feeling especially guilty for having been so mean to him. At any rate:

Hortensia Blobbhorn-Frensia lowered her brows and her nose from the mid-continental air and erased the furrowness of her manner SO much that she gently slid out of her pale peach cardigan and covered his shoulders with it, then she gave him her pink and green multi-colored quilted picnic blanket from her chair so he wouldn’t freeze;

Gertrude Grazelle gasped that she was so completely sorry that had just happened and how horrific it was and poured him a cup of green tea and eradicated a quite newly minted whiskey bottle from out from under her underling-things from below the tea table and gave it to him, quite gingerly and a little ashamedly;

Mirabella Snyder-Lake sniffed she was crying so hard at her guilt at having snubbed him, she also reached below the underneathed portion of her bosom hiding behind the table and pulled out a fresh handkerchief and dabbed her face, and then pulled out another one from the abyss of her dress and handed it respectfully to Maurice, who took it.

“Thank you, Mrs. Snyder-Lake.” He said. “Thank you, Mrs. Blobbhorn-Frensia, and thank you, Mrs. Grazelle.”

“Please have a seat, Mr. Maurice,” Said Jessalyn.

“Thank you, Mrs. Vossfire,”

“Please. Call me Jessalyn.” She smiled.

“And you may call me Maurice,” He said.

Even right after that, Maurice found himself with Jessalyn in her summer cabin, which was right round the corner of the swan pond, and they bundled up with more whiskey, fire, and solitude from the other ladies.

She looked lovingly into his eyes and this was where the courtship really began.

They were married after a whirlwind courtship, and right after married life took hold of him was where the trouble with Jessalyn began.

He became one of those henpecked hackneyed husbands that we often wonder and worry about. We often say to ourselves, how did this happen to him? How did he get here?

Later Maurice disappeared and Jacy wreaked havoc all over the world trying to find him. Had Jessalyn murdered him?

Are You Fucking Kidding ME?

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Guess WTF I dreamed about?

Yup. That I was At The Mall. The Great Big Gobby Soggy Universe of Retail Hell.

I am SO glad to be awake this morning.

It's a GOOD THING I Volunteered for Nightmare Therapy at the local University nearby. Can't wait.

Getting Fired on Purpose

So here is a scene where my Girlina character, Jacy Yates, in my Chick Lit novel gets fired. Because she wants to. Hope you enjoy it:

Where does bad luck come from?

Do we bring it on ourselves? Jacy wondered.

Why had Neville Ormonde Thornbridge (otherwise known as NOT) treated her SO badly?

And why had she been so stupid to take him back the three times they broke up? Never more thorn in my butt! she thought.

Stuck in purgatory and extremely pissed because NOT had dumped her, Jacy thus tried in vain to get fired so that she could collect unemployment and move back to her hometown. She was so over NYC. She was now working at this horrid shitty temp job that did some sort of Widgets R Us and had NOTHING to do with chocolate. (And she'd always worked with chocolate before.)

Argh! She was appalled that she was there in the first place. It was a sweatshop type of place.

How did I get here? she often wondered.

Oh! That's right, one of her recruiter "friends," Banna Maine had begged her to help with a short term project.

Jacy listed the ways that she could get fired, fantasized about them.

The problem was, this Widgety place was a horribly run company. People yelled non-stop all day long (and they were obviously dreadfully unhappy). It was manufacturing after all. And it smelled really bad. It smelled like mildewed cottage cheese and nobody except Jacy seemed to notice. The noise echoed throughout the day. The stenchy smells emanated and fixated themselves in crusty torrid nightmares under Jacy's nose all day.

Even though she got to wear jeans every day, and listen to the radio, she wasn’t allowed to check her personal email on the internet because they had a filter, and the systems were not run perfectly. So that really pissed her off bigtime.

She had the job of listing all the not-so-perfect parts on a long treacherously endless spreadsheet.

She was actually running out of room on this spreadsheet and realized that she would have to ask her head supervisor named Dena Dilpwater for help.

She was told that if you asked Dena for help that you would get axed.

But she wanted to get axed! But her immediate supervisor named Lorne Vorne Morne forbade her to even try to go to Dena Dilpwater's office. He had one of those wandering eyes and sat opposite from Jacy so she could never actually tell if he was really looking at her, and whenever Jacy got up from her desk, he would follow her.

Dena Dilpwater the head big cheese/supervisor, was slightly over 500 pounds and rarely left her office. Everyone was afraid to go into her office. Some people said that she actually lived in her office. There was an escape route by her desk in the floor and they had to lever her out at the end of the day every day because she was too fat to go through the door. She didn’t even have a chair but she did lay on this big couch-like thing and spoke slowly into a remote voice controlled activated computer to get her work done. It was rumored that she had once had a baby; it was further rumored that she had eaten her baby. Nobody ever went into her office that Jacy could tell. How Dena ever rose up through the ranks, Jacy couldn’t imagine. She was a very bad communicator. She grunted and grumbled from her office to cronies at their cubicles. She had an online sametime demanding things constantly. She was also constantly on speakerphone. Jacy had only seen her once in the interview. Dena Dilpwater looked like Jabba The Hut. Except uglier. And her favorite color was Pondwater Scum Green.

Sometimes people rumored that Dena was atropied and never actually left her office and that there was actually a body double that would be transported out of the office via this lever.

For fear of the wrath of Dena, people neglected to confront Dena when they had a problem. As such, there were a lot of problems at this Widget-ous company.

So instead of confronting Dena about the problem of running out of room on the spreadsheet, Jacy just stopped doing the spreadsheet.

Maybe she would finally get fired!

Maybe Dena would notice and fire her ASAP and then Jacy could get back to being In Misery from being dumped from NOT (her supercharged asshole ex-boyfriend) and think about finally moving back to her original hometown where all her friends were still. She missed her old life.

She looked out of the window, she doodled, she drank 13 cups of coffee everyday and spent 10 minutes making each cup. It had to be JUST the right color, with plenty of cream.

She sametimed or IM’d all of her friends back home.

She fixed the email filter problem and played on the internet and emailed her friends. She downloaded porn sites. She was rude on purpose to the IT guy so that he would discover the downloaded porn and help get her fired.

She ate beans straight one day and spent the bulk of the day farting the alphabet.

Nothing happened the first two days, other than Ella Meyers aerosal sprayed her cubicle and complained that someone or something was truly vile and had had too many onion hamburgers, or something wicked like that.

The third day, Jacy brought out the big guns: a People magazine she read blatantly at her cube and as she walked down the hall, and she brought out her big Crayons and started coloring in a coloring book.

She decided if this didn’t do the trick, she’d do some more things.

She brought a Playgirl the fourth day and wore her hot pink jammies AND brought her stuffed teddy bear named Bernard to work. She dubbed it "Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day." She made stickers and passed them out. They were of Jabba The Hut.

But she noticed that Lorne Vorne Morne was suddenly on vacation, so nobody really noticed her with the Playgirl magazine. She also noticed that the other girls in the surrounding cubicles started wearing THEIR jammies to work AND bringing THEIR stuffed animals.

All of a sudden it was: stuffed bears, stuffed birds, stuffed Beanie Babies, stuffed dolls, stuffed lions, stuffed zebras, stuffed Panda bears, and even a stuffed monkey.

The IT guy developed a crush on her and never told anyone about her downloaded porn.

The fifth day she’d brought her vibrator and hung out in the bathroom for the bulk of the day, moaning loudly and wearing her short short hot turquoise and hot pink Victoria Secret jammies. She even brought her colored candified pacifier (also from Vicky's Secret) and sucked on it worse than a babboon sucking three-year-old sucking a lolly pop. She made obtrusively loud sucking noises.

The next day the girls in the office brought their own loudly sucked lolly pops and hoards of candy.

It suddenly became a nice happy place to work.

One girl was stuck in the bathroom for 30 minutes and came out looked quite relaxed and happy. (Jacy heard her later asking the IT guy if he knew where anymore batteries were.)

The sixth day was like Halloween: she dressed in Black Asshole Goth princess mode and did matching blackish killjoy Goth makeup. She got several complements from the ladies in the office. Even some of the men in the office wolf whistled her.

People were having so much fun that nobody told Dena what was happening.

But nobody told on Jacy to Dena!

But everyone watched Jacy when she would slink by Dena's office. They did NOT want Jacy to leave. They did NOT allow Jacy to talk to Dena.

This sixth day she was doing all this cheesy crap to get fired, they noticed that she wasn’t actually doing her work. They took the spreadsheet away from her and gave her something even worse and more boring to do. She had to now log the phone calls in an even more nightmarish screwed up spreadsheet.

The lady training her, Elvertal Myrtle, told her that it would be less challenging work and that she could doodle or play on the internet in between logging the phone calls. "We know how creative you are, Jacy," she told her.

She decided that she wouldn't do THAT logging spreadsheet either. It was like there was no way out, no matter how hard she tried!

But they did send a memo saying that candy was allowed and stuffed animals were a plus. They wanted a better comfort level for their employees.

Very much like House Arrest! Jacy just could not believe it!

After the seventh day of THIS, Jacy, in her Superwoman cape outfit with a mask, tried to get fired again. She suddenly had a case of the runs and let everyone know. She would get up in mid-conversation with a customer and go to the bathroom. And she ran.

Later that afternoon a sign magically appeared that said: No Running Please.

She thought the War of the Job was over when she actually squirted ketchup down her leg and left a big stain in the chair, pretending to have her period. When they didn't even complain about this to her she pointed to the sign that said “No Running” and that she could not get to the bathroom in time. They simply murmured their sympathetic responses. Most of them were women, after all.

But surely this latest disgusting fake period thing would creep out Lorne Vorne Morne when he returned?!!!

She still fantasized that whenever Lorne Vorne Morne returned from his vacation he would say:

You are out of here! And I don’t have to get Dena’s permission to get rid of ya this time!

Finally! Freedom! Jacy would ring Banna and ecstatically tell her what happened.

You win, Banna would say. I’ll try to get you something OTHER than accounting for god’s sake. You told me it was not the right fit for you anymore and you were right! So what about sales?

But that didn't happen. Jacy stayed for another month longer.

She continued to bring fake blackbirds to work and fake black crows and would place them on her computer screen.

When she was rude to people they said she had her period again.

When she was supersweet over-the-top annoying to people they said she was probably overworked and they would lighten her load.

She continued to drink tons of coffee and eat tons of beans and fart the alphabet.

Everyone started bringing potpouri to the office, they even started selling it.

Some of them sweetly brought Jacy presents of perfume and deodorant and sweet smelling candles.

One girl brought her Beeno to control her flatulence. "My husband has the SAME problem, honey! Don't worry! This should help you."

She wrote her entire erotica porn novella at work. She caught two girls at work looking over her shoulder, laughing hysterically. "Oh Jacy, you ought to re-write our training manual!" One of them giggled. "You have such a way with words!"

She finally started attending meetings and would start insulting everyone in the meetings. For some reason, they seemed to think she knew what she was doing. "You sure are assertive and such a go-getter, Jacy! We might put you up for a management trainee position! Maybe you aren't being challenged enough?"

It was only until she burned the popcorn in the microwave that she got let go.

The smell of burnt popcorn is the worst smell ever.

It had set her free! And she was filled with glee!

Creative Cussing

I have two sisters and I’m the MIDDLE sister. My younger sister had a baby and when the baby turned two the baby repeated EVERYTHING that we say, which is rather unfortunate, thus we have had to completely redirect one of our favorite things to do: our cussing.

My older sister who cusses a lot now has to do something that I like to call: Creative Cussing.

I actually rather like it.

Instead of “Mother Fuck Me Running,” which is something she says when she is driving, especially on a certain expressway in our universe,

She uses:

“Son of a Mother Monkey!”

If she just stubbed her toe, she adds “run” and “sucking” to the mix:

“Son of a Mother Monkey Run me Sucking!”

Instead of “Dick in the Butt,” which is what she says to stupid people doing stupid things, which is ubiquitous in our world of the universe, she yells:

“Corn Dog in the Buns!”

Instead of “I Feel Like Ass,” after a heavy night of partying with a morning-after hangover, she says:

“I Feel Like Mash!”

Etc.

None of the words are considered cussing but they actually really work. Just Try it. You might like it better.

Now go run and suck mash! Mash potatoes, that is. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Big Dick Blow-Off (or why a Man should Not Brag about the Size of his Penis)

This is a scene of a breakup/blow-off that I wrote last year for one of my characters, Jacy Yates. She does NOT like penises that are too large (more on that later).

Four score and several swarthy bad dates later, I went to the drugstore to pick up some Magnum Condoms. My new boyfriend, Peter Goldstone had been bragging about his elephantine dick.

“I have a Very Big Dick,” He told me. I hadn’t yet touched it for it was like saving hard expensive special candy for later.

“Oh,” I’d say, whenever he brought up this ravaging topic of conversation. “Really?”

“Yes, it’s Very Large.”

“Well…” I’d act all impressed and all that…but…I was Very Hesitant about the whole thing.

Frankly, I was a little scared.

He bragged SO much about that it was starting to freak me out. Like I was some swarmy Stealth-Bomber Girlfriend that could handle the ride. And I’d just gotten back from the yucky doctor, too.

But I decided to brave it.

So one afternoon I drove to an out-of-the-way drugstore in the Very NorthWest-West region of my universe to pick up the goodies.

After getting Ginormous Condoms in bright obnoxious-orange neon-thwarted packaging, that made me feel like Madame X-acto Butterfly-Blade from some bad ‘70s porn-o, and having the drugstore clerk look me up and down suspiciously several times, and then asking me if I needed any Ryder-Glider or Jelly-DoNutt’ry Butter with that or anything else at all, I stiflingly said NO THANKS, shoved the cash in her face (not wanting any change), then stormed out, and jumped in my getaway car speeding away. I then did an about-face U-turn right round and headed straight home like a big fat chicken ass.

What an ordeal.

A day later, he rang me, mad.

“What’s the deal, Jacy? You stood me up last night."

Oh Man.

We had scheduled to Do It at his place. He would supposedly make a gourmet meal with some fantastic uber-auspicious wine imported by his priggish parents (who were quite snotty – I wouldn’t miss them). I was to supply the Magnum Condoms.

“I must’ve fallen asleep.” I muttered.

“What’s wrong? Jacy, Jacy…” He murmured. Then he started singing. This always drove me up the wall. I dropped the phone “accidentally” on purpose.

The next day we broke up but he completely started stalking me and still does to this day.

So WTF is a META Tag anyway? and other Internet Marketing Foibles…

I just want to hire some nice mild-mannered computer geek who can build me an empire to make millions blogging on the internet.

Okay *REALITY NOW PLACED PLACIDLY IN CHECK* I just want to hire some computer geek (who doesn’t have to be NICE or even particularly mild-mannered, albeit having a personality is optional and would be rather nice) who can help me get some traffic to my Chick Lit blog and show me the ropes/solution/logic to this marketing madness so that I can replicate this internet ideology on my futurama blogs.

Someone who knows about META tags and what-not. And, NO, you QUIMs back there in the Peanut Gallery acting persnickety, that’s NOT META standing for:

Murky Erotic Train-wrecked Assholes

or for

Men Eating Taffy Asshats

or for

Miles of Elephants Trumpeting Agog

or anything whatsoever quirky or silly like that. And stop throwing your peanut shells on the floor!

META?

Well, does it stand for:

Milkdud Eating Twits Asplender?

Meat Eaters Transgender Aplomb?

Mannish Elves Twiddling Aloud?

Millisecond Ever-ready Twitter Absorption?

Marketing Etcetera Twats Aging?

Millicent Elvira Tweets Alot?

Monsters Effervescently Twaddling Altogether-now?

Mountains of Evolution Twatting About?

Mrs. eHow Taunts-a-lot Again?

I’m not even sure myself really what a META tag is!

After all, I’m just a Jobless Wonder and QUIM (Quirky Uncontrollable Immature Middle-aged Woman) who has read more than her fair share of internet jargon, enough to make those back in the Peanut Gallery snigger, snarl, and smirk. Enough to make the irascible lesbian morph into a Transgender Transyberian Transylvanian and grow her own penis. (Must admit have been reading too much about Sony Bono and Cher’s daughter-turned-transgender-now-son, Chaz. Well good for him, to thine own self be true and all that!)

BTW – I’m NOT on Twitter and I STILL have NO clue as to what that is…but Don’t Even Get Me Started…and NO, I have NO idea how to Twat, Twit, Tweet, Twiddle, Twaddle, Twort, Twout, Twonder, Twondle, or the like. AND I DON'T WANT TO KNOW! (People keep asking me if I Twitter. I have a lot of sharp retorts to that. I finally succumbed to Facebook and THAT was bad enough. It will take me a while to Twitter. Someone will have to seduce me. Possibly with LOADS of chocolate.)

Wonder if I should put an advertisement on Craiglist for internet marketing help or at one of those coffee shops where I hang out pilfering swarthy, swaggering (and staggering!) amounts of my once semi-precious time?

Thank you for reading! Enjoy your day and have a terrific Thanksgiving!

I write Chick Lit, and NO, that’s not Chiclet as in the gum!

Monday finds me diligently scouring my weekend-warped and blasted brain trying to think of an inexpensive way for internet marketing help since not many are reading this Chick Lit Blog O’ Mine, and it’s lost loquaciously and sadly in the Blogosphere.

So here I am at the local junior college querying for help at the Help Desk, trying to find someone CHEAP and pithy and uber-savvy on the internet, whether it be an eager pimple-faced knock-kneed 19-yr-old boy or a 30-something computer software designer, preferably male.

The guy at the Help Desk IS someone who looks like he could help.

Here’s how the convoluted, rather cumbersome conversation went:

Hi, what is your question, ma’am? This young spry skinny pseudo 20-something-year-old asks me. He pushes up his wire-rimmed glasses.

There’s a woman standing there already, whom he is in the midst of helping. I kind of look at her apologetically, not wanting to bust in line ahead of her. We trade wan smiles.

Yes, hi, how are you? I need to find someone – possibly young and technology oriented - who can help me with my blog, someone who knows internet marketing, like, um, how to help me make money on the internet, you know, who knows how to navigate the net pretty well. You know? I say.

The women standing next to me smirks.

What for? What precisely are you trying to do? He says.

Oh I need help with that, too! The woman next to me says, understanding exactly what I am so sadly trying to convey.

Sure, she understands but HE does not seem to get it.

Hello? I just SAID I am trying to find someone to HELP ME. But I say to him:

Well, I know that I'm just a middle-aged woman who doesn’t know all the right terminology, but I have this blog, you see, and I am trying to get traffic to my blog. Nobody’s reading it, you see, except for the random mix of sympathetic friends I’ve sent my URL to…so, um, I just need help.

The woman standing next to me, let’s call her Abigail Everheart, laughs out loud. I’m middle aged too! She exclaims.

I throw her a smile.

What kind of blog is it? He asks, and while we're at it, let's call him Worley E. Wormwood.

Oh, um, I write Chick Lit.

Worley E. Wormwood gives me a blank stare.

Oh I love Chick Lit! Abigail Everheart says. How wonderful!

Chiclet? What’s THAT? Worley's eyes immediately glaze over. I’ve seen this look before. It’s usually what I get once I tell someone what I used to do for a living, which is analogous to boredom-ensued careers such as tax preparer, undertaker, and the like. But at the moment I am a Jobless Wonder and I don’t have to tell people what I do anymore so their eyes don't glaze over, like a wandering-eyed deer in headlights.

There’s a semblance of how I perceive myself: overweight, under-employed, over-educated, middle-aged, quirky, bizarre, idiotic when it comes to a zillion things, including technology, the computer, and the internet. In this mixed bag of what-I-don’t-understand or relate to also includes men, specifically young men aged 12 through 29 years old, except if I’m making out with them IF THEY ARE OF AGE. For those of age, our libidos DO seem to match, but that’s altogether another story.

Abigail Everheart laughs again and I laugh with her.

It’s literature for women, you know, like those films your girlfriend might make you see. I explain to him.

But I don’t have a girlfriend, he says. Chiclet? Worley E. Wormwood repeats.

Okay, well have you ever seen a movie with Meg Ryan? Or seen the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary – romantic comedy stuff?

Oh yeah, right. But his eyes glaze over AGAIN.

We're not getting anywhere here.

So this is how the rest of my day’s been. It’s such a Monday. And it's dragging on whimsically distressed.

I did happen to exchange phone numbers with Abigail Everheart. But Worley E. Wormwood and I have NADA in common, and he was never able to help me.

Maybe it’s time for Fantasy Job Monday, in which I dream about what I’d rather be doing.

Well I am blogging and I do like to do this. I’m just not getting the traffic I’d like. Maybe that will change soon. I certainly hope so. Maybe I'll send Abigail Everheart this Chick Lit blog URL!