Back in the days, before you would be surrounded by administration and campus police because you climbed out of your dorm room window, these were my staples.  Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Front 242, Hole, or no matter who it was I cranked it up loud.  Sometimes, I didn't climb outside of the window of room 32; my dorm room didn't have a ledge to sit on, but my friend's room did.  Sometimes,  I would sit under the tree outside the dorm and the music and dark sunglasses would tune the rest of the world out.  I smiled when I found this "Walkman".  They were all a Walkman back in the day.  The volume is still cranked to max.  The way I left it the last time I listened to it.  It still has the batteries I left in it.

I had seen the glasses lying around my parents' garage for a few years.  They looked familiar, but I thought they belonged to someone else. I tried to say they were my dad's, but I knew if they were his, they would have been Ray-Ban.   I knew I would blog about the Walkman and thought the wayfarer sunglasses would go with the picture.  I laughed and showed the Walkman to my mom.  She wanted to know where I found the awful glasses and told me that they used to be mine, too.  They always felt familiar; like something that reminds you of a past life that may or may not have existed.

  

Your body controlled by this other thing

that is supposed to be you

but it is not and no one else can see

you are a zombie

you are gone

everything is light speeding

life runs away from you

you think you are moving forward

but you are only falling behind

with the ghost girl weaving a blanket of sadness, pain,anger, and joy

that you no longer recognize as your own

and she doesn’t recognize you, the stranger with her eyes

so old

the world is at absolute zero

and you are the Higgs field

in a moment everything is different and the same

the past, present, and future are one

Today, at John's garden, I spotted a humming bird.  It was the most unusual humming bird that I had ever seen.  It was smallish, at first I thought it was a bee.  It had what appeared to be antennae, but I told myself they were feathers on its head even though I had never seen a crested hummingbird in Alabama.

Please excuse my crappy photo.

   
I was pointing at said hummingbird to show it to John, when it came and landed briefly on my finger.  That was another thing that made me think the hummingbird was unusual.  I continued to try to snap a picture, but was even more unsuccessful than this one.

John was less excited about the hummingbird than I was.  He was more interested in skipping rocks and recalling his experiences in the Children's and Butterfly Gardens and the Tree Platform.  I may share those pictures some other day.  John and I unintentionally explored most of the Arboretum this morning.  My husband wouldn't come and I suck at reading maps.  My anxiety caused me to turn around on several of the paths because I wasn't sure I was going the right way (because I suck at reading maps and the paths were through the woods and I thought Bubba or Jimbo might be hiding out there.  It's by the railroad tracks, too so Vince, Vinny, Vito, and Vino may have hitched a ride b/c they were bored with killing the Snookies of the world). I may share those pictures another day.

When I was finally able to pull John away, I went to Google to figure out what kind of hummingbird it was.  I wanted to figure what would be the most likely time to find more of them and where and the arboretum I should go.  I discovered that it wasn't a hummingbird at all, but a complete and total poser.

It was a hummingbird clearwing moth.    John saw this picture and thought it was the humming bird.  I didn't think he was paying attention.  I'm going to have to cut him some slack.  He apparently inherited my multitasking skills.  I've wanted to see a butterfly or moth with clear wings every since I saw pictures of windowpane butterflies when I was pregnant with John.  I wonder if they have any in the Arboretum.  I'm going to have to keep my eyes open. 

The next time John and I go together, I won't be cursing my husband for making me have to figure out how to read a map.  I am lucky that I have a logical side that reasoned it was impossible to get lost when a) you have GPS and a Map and b) you could walk toward the railroad tracks if for some reason you get discombobulated and lose your map and phone and/or Vinny Bob Bubba decides to come after you.  Actually, I think I would have more fun if I could tune down the hyperventilance a bit.  I don't think I want it completely off to the point I get lost and become unaware, but I don't want to be constantly making escape plans in case of psychopath (living or undead).

This place will be an awesome place to teach John about the seasons.  Next year, we will be able to see the frogs when they are tadpoles and watch them turn into adults.  Maybe by then, I will have a digital camera.  I have one, but prefer my phone, that's how bad my digital camera is.  I want to invest in one, but know little about them.  When I go to buy one, I will definitely ask here.  When I was shopping for vacuums, you guys gave great advice.

When I was younger, I thought that when you became old any little bit of sexuality faded away.  Little old ladies baked pies, cakes, and cookies.

Perhaps they collected cats.

Sometimes, if they were hippies and they did too many drugs, they acted like this.

My poor, naive little mind was broken one year when I was chosen to be one of the representative students at the President's mansion. 

I am not exactly sure why.  This was back in those days where there was no such thing as a digital camera and if someone told me that one day I would communicate with people on the internet, I would have taken away their keys and vodka.  I have one picture of my drunk in college and I will post it one day.  I am just too lazy to switch computers.  I've posted it before.

So we put on our Sunday best and headed to the President's mansion.  I even left my combat boots at home and wore non-platform heels.  I was thinking is a free meal really worth it?  Old people are so boring and some of them are gross.  Then to top it off, these were snobby rich people that donated megabucks to the college.  That meant they were even more boring.

So my friend and I thought we had found a spot away from everyone else, we saw this cute little old lady sitting by herself.  We smile and say, "hello" because that is what they told us to do.

She smiled and said a bunch of stuff that I no longer remember.  It was 18 years ago.  We smiled and pretended like we were interested, at least I was pretending to be interested.  I really just wanted to go back to my dorm.  Somewhere mid conversation, something must of possessed the sweet little old lady because she started talking about how pretty and young we were. (Well, damn...we had just ran away from the old men)

We politely said thank you because I am pretty sure the president would have been angry if we made people that donated money mad.  I was looking at my knees trying to think of a way to escape the old lady and her weird flattery and I think my friend was, too.  I mean at a frat party you can say, "I'm going to go stand over there now."

It was when she made the comment about our perfect lineless mouths, said something about sucking on straws, and did the blowjob gesture.  We were totally like:

They didn't say anything about dirty old ladies in the orientation.

Fortunately, a man, that was apparently her son, saw our expressions and ran over yelling at her.  "What did you say, mom?"  The lady dropped her eyes.  "I told you to not talk to anyone."  Then we dropped our eyes.  After getting no response from her, he then asked what she said to us.  We shook our heads.  How do you tell someone that your mom made a joke about blowjobs?  He asked if she said anything racist.  My friend was Cuban, and I suppose how he could make the assumption that his mother may have said something racist.  I finally got tired of him asking if she said something racist despite the fact we insisted that she didn't and I told him, "that his mother made a joke that would have just been kind of funny if she wasn't such a cute old lady.  She looks like someone that would bake you pies not make dirty jokes."  That calmed him down a bit, but then he wanted to know the joke she told (and if it was racist).  I think maybe he was the one that was racist and not her.  So I told him that he really didn't  want to know what his mother said because he was a guy and I would be horrified if my mother said it and I'm a girl.  For some reason that got rid of him.  It didn't even sound logical when it came out of my mouth, but he bought it. 

After he left., The little old lady apologize mostly for her son.  She explained that she had Alzheimer's and sometimes she said things that she didn't mean or that she could even control.  She thanked us for not telling her son what she said after saying that he didn't have to be so mean to her and he could have left her at home if he was so embarrassed of her because it was humiliating enough without him making a big deal over it. 

She then went on to tell us stories of her misadventures as a young woman during the 1920s and 1930s.  The stories involved lots of shotguns, cars that always broke down, moonshine, tons of sex, and then falling in love.  It was an eye opener.  Not only did I think that old people never had sex ever, they didn't even have sex when they were young because before the hippies, people wore chastity belts and didn't have sex until they were married.  Then when they were married, they only had sex to procreate and I am only exaggerating a little bit. She blew all of that thinking way out of my head.  She talked about fighting for women's rights and how proud she was to see us going to college and not just a finishing school or woman's college like women did in her day.  She was bewildered by the way we talked about our escapades.  She heard all the other young people talking about the party.  I would love to have seen her reaction to Facebook where they post pictures.  It is too bad we didn't have Smartphones back then because  I would have recorded her story because she was that awesome of a lady.

I imagined that if she didn't have Alzheimer's and she wasn't under the wings of her apparently ultra controlling son, she would have been something like this:

We ended up talking to her until the end of the party and most people had begun to leave.  Her son seemed shocked to see us still talking to his mom.  I hugged his mom, and then put his hand in hers and told him that he should talk to his mom, I mean really talk to her, because she was one awesome lady.  If he chose not to, then it was honestly his loss.

 
Whether I am watching it or not, my TV is always on the Sci-Fi Channel, Discovery ID, the Science Channel, or Bio.  My reason for having the TV always on is another story.  I know it is a waste of electricity.  Tonight it was on the Sci-Fi Channel and they were showing Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  I look and see that John was watching it.

I start telling him that when I was his age, I really liked the movie.  The movie is in fact, it is one of the first movies I remember liking that didn't involve the Muppets or Disney.  He continued to watch for a few more minutes and he finally said, "It doesn't have any puppy dogs or kitties in it."  "So since it doesn't have any dogs or cats in it, it's not a good movie?" I respond.  "It's a very bad movie."  He said.  "It doesn't have puppy dogs and kitties."  So there you go, any movie that does not have cats or dogs is a very bad movie.  I am sure there are exceptions like Cars and Thomas, but those are few.

  I've always had a knack for creative writing and I've wanted to be a writer every since I can remember.  When I was a kid, I would write about typical girlish things.  There would be princesses, fairies, and the occasional witch that always lost in the end.  That is until the first time I read Edgar Allan Poe.  I was in the second grade and we were visiting my relatives in Boligee, Alabama.

(source AL-DOT website) Boligee is one of those places that will make you hear the Theme Song from the Movie Deliverance.  It is one of those places that when you drive over it on the freeway you wonder where all the people that are driving the cars live.

 Image Source. It makes me sad that they've graded the backyard and "the pond" will no longer be a part of our lives.  The kids loved it.  It makes me laugh how much people try to fight mother nature.  We live in a swamp, get over it.  I wasn't kidding when I told my Northern Facebook friends that I didn't understand their fascination with Swamp People b/c I could find those guys in my backyard (there used to be a restaurant that advertized gator soup on the window).

Back to the point.  So back in 1982, when I was visiting relatives in Boligee, I was bored.  Extremely bored and my allergies and the heat kept me stuck inside.  My mom had packed the novel set she bought for me.  I didn't think I would read any of them since there weren't any pictures, but boredom can drive you to do crazy things.  I started with Mark Twain just because everyone said good stuff about Mark Twain.  I liked the stories, but I was unimpressed.  I barely made it through Oliver Twist and Moby Dick made me want to stab my eyes out.  Only when I was a child, I wouldn't have expressed my feelings that way.  I may have been cynical, but I wasn't morbid.  I hate Moby Dick so much that I elected not to read it in my college literature course because even if I failed that test, I would still have an A in the class.  In fact, I would have opted to get a B instead of reading that story.  The last author that was left was Edgar Allan Poe.  I thought, "who is he?"  "why haven't heard of him?"  "most important,  what is wrong with his eyes?"

I didn't remember any of my teachers talking about Edgar Allan Poe.  They should have.  He is a better writer than Mark Twain.  I read the Raven first and I liked it.  Then I read the Telltale Heart and I was in love. 

 
(Image Source)
I even went into my grandparents' bedroom to get the copies of his short stories that they had.  I felt ripped off when I read the full versions.  It was then that I thought....THIS is what I want to write.  I wanted to be able to create words that would haunt people and stay with them forever.

I tried for a long time when I was a child to be like Edgar Allan Poe in my writing.  I thought about all the tales my grandparents would tell me, the ghost that rose from the grave to steal your fingers, haints, you know those disembodied spirits that sit in the middle of roads waiting to suck out your breathe, Grimm's fairytales (the originals not the American and definitely not Disney's versions), the devil disguising himself as a white dog to tempt children to play with him, and of course the Bible as told through the mouths of demented Southern preachers.  I still could not do it and I knew it.

The problem was I didn't have any life experience of my own.  It wasn't until I was in high school that I started to find my voice.  I used to share my stories with the other students in my classes and they loved them.  I would share them here,  I still have a couple somewhere, but I don't think I could ever just type them the way I original wrote them without feeling embarrassed, but then again, maybe I can remind myself that people grow as life brings more experiences.  Perhaps I may have been more talented in high school because I could still create stories around characters who didn't have troubled lives.  But for now, this picture depicts the protagonist of The Crazies perfectly.

In my mind she did not have any particular race, but I saw this image (source) that was taken in Boligee, Alabama and I thought, now she looks like a woman that ain't going to die with her top off.  Now, I can't disassociate this image from my character.

All of the images I have been showing have been pictures of places in Alabama (except the beer can one, that was actually New Jersey) and I should have linked their sources, but I didn't.  The ones that I said were Akron, Alabama are actually in Akron except the downtown picture, that is Northport.  At the time, I couldn't find a picture of Akron, but this is what downtown Akron actually looks like.  There are so many towns in the South that look like ghosts.

(source)  However, Northport is more romantic looking so I am keeping it as the setting and calling it Akron.  I think Northport is what people imagine when they think of the South (outside of Swamp People obviously).  In towns like Boligee and Akron, save for the few families with "Old" money (and wealthy to middle class people who move there to buy the old homes for cheap), if you were to tell a true tale of the people's lives who live there it would be a story of the poor vs the really poor.

I decided to help John with his fine motor skills by teaching him to use scissors.  I was struggling with the task so I found a video on-line and John figured it out by watching the video.  I had no intention of him seeing the video, he is just nosy.    Soon, he was cutting fairly well.  He can use the scissors with either hand.  I am beginning to suspect that his motor skills are not the problem, I think he just doesn't like his special ed teacher for some reason.  I don't know why.  If the behavior continues, I may have to request that he work with the younger lady that he was making flirty eyes at or just someone else.  It's a shame because I do like her.  However, I am digressing.  I told my mother about what we were doing and she wanted to know what I did "that" for.  "That" being teaching John to use scissors when I already knew that he liked to rip paper into tiny microscopic pieces.  I told her that he isn't exactly all that great with cutting paper so if he is working on something he needs help with while doing something he likes, I am happy.  Well, today my floor was covered in tiny pieces of paper.  I vacuumed it all up only for it to accumulate again.  Who knew my mother would come up something sane?

When he gets better with holding the scissors correctly, I will teach him to cut out specific shapes.  Until then, I may be buried underneath a mountain of scissored paper.
 

Only John could make duck lips look cute.
 

I love my mom, but becoming a grandparent has made her somewhat illogical.  John is terrified of Buddy.  It is a fear that he just recently developed after having a nightmare that Buddy hurt him and the dog was barking.  My silly mother is convinced that secretly, when we are not looking, the cat is torturing John.  Obviously if we are too daft to realize that John had the croup, there is no way we would hear any kind of ruckus associated with a cat attack.  If John had any scratches or bite marks on him, we would automatically assume he did them to himself since we are letting him run wild like a heathen.  Moreover, we couldn't possibly have the cognitive ability to distinguish and animal bite from a human bite.  We go to doctors that won't even diagnose our child with a disease that he had, the croup.  She honestly believes that the cat plots and torments John when we are not in the room.  If he doesn't scratch and bite John, he employs psychological torture by staring menacingly, growling, or hissing at him.  This evil behavior is something the cat ceases the moment we walk in the room.  When we are around the cat pretends to be afraid of John or sweet and docile.  Everyone knows that's exactly how animals operate.  They decide to torture things for no apparent reason and they can switch personalities like Jekyll and Hyde.  By the way, the dog barks at the cat to let us know that he is doing it again, but we are to ignorant to realize it.  For this reason alone, I should perhaps invest in a nanny camera.  It is plausible that Buddy is plotting to harm our child.

When she could not convince me that the cat was plotting to kill John, she tried to convince me that John's dream was a premonition and John knew that it was going to come true and that was why he was afraid of the cat.  I think she thinks my life is a movie and she is watching re-runs of the Halloween episode.