The witch at the
beginning of the post has a very similar appearance to yours truly,
although I stopped dyeing my prematurely graying hair blonde twenty
years ago. My hair is thick and resistant to most color formulas, so
I have to bleach it first. That process made it brittle. It was
coming out in clumps, so one day I said “fuck it.” That moment
was freeing.
I will never
understand why society treats people who aren’t conventionally
attractive as if we’ve committed some sort of crime that we need to
be punished for. Couldn’t you just leave us alone?
Fat.
Old.
Ugly.
So what?
No, you don't have permission to use my photo to ridicule me. Go fuck yourself.
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
If you have legitimate reason for wanting to use all or part of this work in a for-profit project, drop your email in the comments and I'll contact you.
"Adapt or die, foolish little fool!" the intimidating alien rumbled.
I, however, refused to be shaken, no matter how he grumbled.
"Hah!" I snorted. "For something so impressive in appearance, you certainly lack cleverness.
"Anyone can see that I am far from little.
"My ass is large, and so is my middle."
"Yes, and you've had to find the key to adapting to such undesired conditions, haven't you?" the being inquired pensively.
"Your luck has not been exactly stellar, wouldn't you agree?
"What you found when you were transported over the rainbow was not what you hoped to see.
"When you shuffled off to the pier to see if your sacred ship had come in,
"Mawkish mediums informed you that your destiny was arriving at the airport too far in the distance for you to find redemption."
"Indeed, and when I asked them to elaborate, they promised to do so for a small fee equal to several of my paychecks," I replied. "I had a suspicion that they might have lied, so I decided I didn't care a shingle for their advice and proceeded to do things my way from that day forward."
"And how is that working out for you?" the alien, who now suspiciously resembled Dr. Phil, pressed.
"Probably better than the flashy fairy tale I once believed was my destiny," I sentimentally surmised, as glimmers of dreams of what might have been glittered in my eyes, overflowing down my face. "I'm pleased that I'm not surrounded by fake people to annoy me, but there have been times in my life when loneliness threatened to destroy me.
"I've discovered first-hand that no one cares how the disabled, elderly, and downtrodden fare.
"If you aren't young and you aren't pretty, nobody wants to see you anywhere.
"The liberal elite as much as the rigid right would prefer that the likes of me die and decrease the surplus population.
"Society cares only about the up-and-coming, not those nearing their destination.
"Age bias is rampant, the outsides given more weight than what lies within.
"If I were at all religious, I'd say it's a goddamn sin.
"Being a caustic agnostic, I'll just say it's a crying shame.
"Every year I hope for improvement, and every year it's always the same."
"Yet still you keep on kicking," the alien said, impressed. "I hope to meet more folk like you in my travels--ugly, angry, disabled, fat old women are the best!"
As the alien took off in his spaceship, I couldn't help but grin.
If we'd care more about what's on the inside, a better world could begin.
~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~
Ornery Owl
Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors
Free use image by Clkr Free Vector Images on Pixabay
Hangry Wyrm sez:
"I really ate this story up. Five out of five stars! Can we have breakfast now?"
Get your groove on with this melodic deep house mix.
Here's another Deep House mix in case you happen to be bogged down with formatting an hour later. Like, you know, not me. I never get bogged down with formatting, or editing, or, you know, anything, because I'm completely perfect and do everything right the first time. First draft? Hah! You mean only draft, Sunshine, because I'm just that good!
I'm off to find someplace to hide my metric butt-ton of bullshit now. Here's the link in case you can't see the player.
"For this challenge, let’s go on a wild walk together. Report on what you’ve found and the lessons you’ve learned."
While my piece did not address nature as such, it addresses the sometimes difficult lessons I've learned about myself in my nearly 60 years walking this planet. I honestly don't think I would have survived those "Hollywood dreams" I had in my youth. I'm a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned.
I almost forgot about this prompt. I'll probably play catch-up with it over the next few days. Today's suggestion is:
"Another form of being has just communicated something to you...Write down 5-10 words, to fix the moment forever in your mind then use those words to write about something else."
This prompt gave me the idea of the alien communicating with me.
The November PAD Chapbook Challenge prompt for today was to write a "free" poem. So I decided to move over, Rover, and let Sly take over and write a free verse about breaking free from the tRump tyranny. No putting a fine point on this one. Impeach the illegitimate bastard.
Yes, Pence is his own brand of awful. We'll deal with him next.
Even more worrisome to me than the fact that Lord Dampnut and the Gentleman Serial Killer ran for office is the fact that there were enough people willing to vote for them that they got elected. Anyone who thinks that we live in a country where racism, sexism, classism, and all the other shitty little isms are a thing of the past is, as Flavor Flav once said, blind from the facts.
I've come a long way in keeping my temper in check from the days of my youth, but there are a few things that make me really hot under the collar, and then I overreact just a teeny tiny little bit and hit the red button with the nearest sledgehammer, sending the verbal nukes a-flyin'.
One thing that sets me off like nobody's business is the implication that I'm a liar or one of those self-important twits who would create a puff piece minimizing the struggles of a person with a cognitive, physical, or psychological impairment to prove how Deep and Poetical (TM) I am. I have ripped shit more than once on the kind of people who say things like "he's so autistic" or "she's so bipolar" when what they mean is "he's withdrawn and not socially adept" and "she's mercurial." Do NOT use people's health conditions as adjectives. It's really fucking rude. Recently, I fired a real estate agent who believed that questioning my credibility would inspire me to "move quickly." Say whaaaaaat???? In what Universe does that even make sense? I remarked that this guy must have watched American Psycho and thought that it was a business training video. The lack of logic in this line of thinking is astounding.
Having my credibility questioned is a real sore point for me. All my life I've had people imply that I was "just looking for attention" or "being dramatic" or straight-up lying about my symptoms. I have a lot of physical issues that have never been resolved, and the scars on my arms are not the result of "seeking attention," fuck you very much. They are the result of having been in one whole fuckload of psychological pain and feeling like no-one was on my side.
Point of trivia: my ex-husband has Asperger's syndrome and I have bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. This combination proved to be oil and water. He is one of my great friends in this life and I have been very worried about him as he is having some serious health issues. But a marriage between such polar opposites in the neurodivergent spectrum proved to be a volatile combination and not sustainable.
Our son is autistic and has ADHD. He's strikingly intelligent, but his way of thinking and problem solving does not jibe with the modern education system. He learns by doing and is incapable of learning by reading textbooks. Yes, he can read. He is a prolific reader of the likes of Roger Zelazny (whose works I sometimes have trouble wrapping my brain around), Fred Saberhagen, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He simply is unable to conform to the textbook-and-lecture style of learning.
I feel like the world is missing out on a lot of great talent by insisting that everybody look alike and dress alike and think alike and talk alike. The Stepford Wives was not an instruction manual.
One of the things that I loved about AC/DC, outside of their badass marriage of the blues to garage rock, was the fact that these cheeky-ass working-class bastards gave the middle finger to propriety at every turn. This doesn't mean they believed in being mean and stomping on other people. They themselves had been bullied and belittled and had quite enough of it. They were speaking up for the "mongrels", for the "ugly" people, for the people who had been told that they would never amount to anything because they were weird and different and not conventionally attractive.
They were not a band for the ever upper-class high society. They were a band for the outcasts, like me. So, when I stood up for them when people started accusing them of "devil worship," I got pigeonholed as a devil worshiper too. It was pretty funny in retrospect. I went around throwing devil horns and evil grins at the idiots spreading the rumors. I was probably the biggest excitement they had in their narrow-minded lives.
Fun's fun, but the reality is that I always felt bad for these guys who really weren't doing anything wrong. I had a particular affinity for Malcolm Young, because he was painfully shy (like I am by nature), because he tended to be depressive (gee, I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm just your dyed-in-the-wool ray of fucking sunshine), and because I could see that he was actually a lot more sensitive than he let on.
I have to confess that I was a bit jealous of the powerful bond of friendship that Malcolm had with Angus. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the other half of their soul born in the same lifetime. Forget having the other half of your soul be your guardian angel. Having them be your best bud is the way to roll!
In truth, most soul mate relationships I've observed have been platonic rather than romantic. Too much is made of the romantic soul mate bond.
In fairness, I think that (romantic) love stinks, so take my previous statement however you wish. Take it with a couple of grains of sea salt. I use sea salt in my cooking. I recommend it.
All this is leading up to something. Bear with me.
I honestly think that there is a degree of elitism in the insistence on rigidly adhering to certain concepts. People who do not have access to higher education don't get to learn the niceties of iambic pentameter (I didn't even know what the hell that was until I was in my 50's) or what the hell ever.
I didn't know the difference between a Haiku and a Senryu until I was in my 50's. I just liked the 5-7-5 pattern that I learned in the third grade or thereabouts and I enjoyed using it to express my dumb and worthless thoughts.
There's a lot of shit that I still don't know. It doesn't mean that I don't have the right to express my shit.
Similarly, there are a lot of musicians who are self-taught, who didn't have access to higher musical education, and, frankly, a lot of the time I like their work better than the works of those who have been properly trained. For instance, Chris Isaak (who, by the way, is an incredibly cool person) can't read music. He couldn't tell you what a pentatonic scale looks like, but if you were to play one for him, he would play it right back at you, embellish on it, and turn it into a really amazing song.
The slaves who sang the heart-rending spirituals on which the blues (a.k.a. the backbone of modern music) is based certainly did not have access to higher education about music or poetry. They sang to comfort themselves and their fellow slaves. They sang to convey messages. They did not express themselves in a "proper" fashion, but they damn well expressed themselves. They told their truth. They told their stories. And they had every right in the Universe to do both, propriety be damned!
As well, the idea that using profanity shows a lack of intelligence is elitist fuckery, and I don't have a whole lot to say to anyone who adheres to that foolish line of thinking.
I think I would have thrown myself from a precipice long ago if it weren't for the rule-breakers and "mongrels" of this world. I couldn't bear the idea of being shut in a room with a bunch of hoi-polloi. Pair me with the proletariat any day.
I do like to share my work, and for a while, it seems to go well enough. But I invariably learn the lesson that my truth is not pretty or polished enough and I am not sweet and sunny enough, and I end up saying "fuck it" and oozing back down the back alley from whence I crawled forth in the first place.
I will never be acceptable. For the most part, I think that's a good thing. But it does get kind of lonely, so now and then I go against my own rule about not engaging and I engage. This is generally a mistake.
Live and learn. Again and again and again.
Now I have to unruffle my feathers so I can prepare the latest Carnal Invasion manuscript for publication via my seedy little company, Naughty Netherworld Press, purveyors of high-quality Kindle smut. These are supposed to be gleeful romps featuring a group of randy, shapeshifting aliens having a go with elementals, humans, vampires, werewolves and such, not a heaping helping of angry argleblargh by a pissed-off editor. I need to switch gears toot sweet.
~Cie~
Cracks me up every time. I did see an interview later where Malcolm revealed that the director for this set of videos behaved like a drill sergeant and they couldn't wait to get away from him. Angus spent the entire interview doubled over with laughter. Reporters had a tendency to interview the brothers separately because when they were together they tended to start smirking and chortling about some joke that only they were in on, and one couldn't get much useful information out of them.
Pardon my brutal honesty, but my endocrine system is a fucking trash fire. My thyroid decided to immolate itself when I was sixteen. My ovaries became cystic, shitty little bastards. My periods were from hell. I developed endometriosis. I don't know when I started developing fibroids, but I have a uterus full of the damn things, and it's coming out at the end of the year.
At least with the thyroid, I just have to take pills, although sometimes the dose has to be adjusted down because they can jack up my blood pressure and pulse rate. My thyroid may still have some of its own function, but it's completely abnormal.
Then there's my pancreas.
My pancreas waited until I was 49 to decide to fuck me over.
At first, I took pills, but then they stopped working sufficiently. Besides, I don't like having to carry around a spare pair of pants, and the less said about that, the better.
Then I had to start injecting long-acting insulin (Levemir).
Now I inject the long-acting insulin at noon and midnight and the rapid-acting insulin before meals.
"It's soooo much fun having a zombie pancreas," declared the queen of sarcasm.
By the way, diabetes cannot be cured, so don't tell me about how if I just drink a gallon of vinegar at every full moon while pouring ice cubes down my pants and sprinkling pepper in my hair I will be cured of diabetes.
In rare cases, type 2 diabetes goes into remission. This is not the same thing as being cured. Like cancer, a person with diabetes in remission is always more vulnerable to a recurrence of the disease than a person who has never had diabetes.
Further, I would like to see the word "diabetes" stricken from the medical lexicon and replaced with "hypopancreatism," which is a much more accurate term.
Diabetes is an ancient Greek term which translates loosely to "evil pissing" because of the increased urination that is part and parcel of the hell that is this stupid disease. Besides, it's a loaded term. People love to say it with a sneer as if those who end up with it "brought it on themselves" by "eating too much sugar.'
The cause of hypopancreatism is having a genetic trigger for the disease. A person who does not have the genetic trigger will never get the disease no matter how much sugar they consume.
People living with food insecurity are more vulnerable to activating the genetic trigger for the disease than people who have a reliable supply of nutritious food. However, the disease can strike anyone with the genetic trigger, regardless of their physique or social standing. Age increases the likelihood of developing type 2 hypopancreatism.
So, I am not calling the disease by its ancient Greek name anymore, although I do think that "evil pissing" is a pretty cool term. I would like to see the stigma attached to the condition eradicated.
And now, I need to go inject my wonderful basal insulin.
People who don't have the condition think that having to poke oneself with needles is the worst part of the disease. It really isn't. Often I don't even feel the needle. If I hit a tender spot, I experience minor pain. No big whoop.
What I hate the most is the way the disease curtails my independence.
And that is why I leave this with a big FUCK YOU to my zombie pancreas and my crap endocrine system as a whole. I sometimes wonder what my life could have been like if I hadn't been easily fatigued and depressed for most of it and accused of being lazy every step of the way.
BY: credit must be given to the creator.
NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
