All posts by Licketysplit

Stoned & Dethroned: defending our lives

I don’t think I like it here at Promises at all. First of all, they expect you to eat the food. We don’t eat! I can’t even find the champagne locker. “Home-like” environment my perfect ass.

Let’s not even discuss where I had to conceal my fentanyl patches during intake. And Lambchop isn’t even allowed to be my roomie. She is locked down clear across the campus. We hope to rendezvous in the day room soon.

Mel Gibson is really taking that therapy puppet business to the next level. I preferred the old Mel, who knew his way around a jacuzzi. A real party guy. At least Alec Baldwin will be stopping by later to teach a class on voicemail etiquette. Hint: no one uses the phone anymore.

Tara Reid will be teaching Life Skills, and Lindsay Lohan will doing a seminar on “How to explain gaps in a résumé.” She is also co-moderating a panel on dressing and accessorizing for success with Winona Ryder.

Damn it, Lindsay, you are persuasive. I guess I could stand to revamp my résumé. What am I really good at? Why do I deserve to be Vomitola?

Well, I’m a people person, so I usually handle HR back at HQ.  I, like Tyra Banks, can tell within 3 seconds whether I will have any use for you at all. Not smizing? We have a special diversion program for that. Never let it be said that Vomitola does not nurture the staff. Sure, we may toss the occasional platinum cell phone, but how can we be responsible if someone opts to step into its path?

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is what we were born to do. No faceless corporation could ever understand the creative process that is our lives. We’re going to have to appeal to the fans on this one. We’re going to have to cry on TV.

The expendables: Vomitola on the chopping block

We are sure of few things in life.

1) There is no situation that cannot be represented via a Google Images search on The Sims.

2) We are all born terminally ill. It is only a matter of time. Please, have a Kleenex. Get your affairs in order.

3) In the meantime, we may be quotable, but we are always replaceable!

Just the other day, we read that John Galliano had been fired not only from Dior but from John Galliano! Apparently it is a foolhardy idea to allow someone else to own over 90% of your eponymous brand.

You could say we sold our souls years ago, so Lambchop and I have been getting nervous: recently she was asked to fill out a self-assessment, and I was asked to fill out a job application. On paper. These are clear signs that we are dealing with lunatics who do not understand our devil-may-not-particularly-care approach to modern life.

So we wondered: could our very existence in its present form be in jeopardy? Sure, we’ve had our rough patches, our little stunts and tantrums, but we’ve always apologized! Could Vomitola be fired from Vomitola? What will happen to our 401(k)s? Can we elect to use COBRA? Will we deny ourselves unemployment benefits because we were terminated for cause?

Times are still so hard that they make John Boehner cry, so we have decided that we must protect our livelihood by proactively pleading our case before a jury of our peers. As soon as we secure some, for where might we find those can match us in wit, intellect, and beauty?

In the coming days or hours, depending on our schedules, we must dust off our resumes (do people still print those on giant panda skin?) and don the leotards of fierce physical competition.

We will defend ourselves to the death!

 

Oh do you believe in love there

I went swimming the other night, in one of those bath-water-warm hotel pools where I can stand flat in the deep end and still be barely chin-deep. Granted, I am a fine specimen, lengthy of leg and smooth as a dolphin. Others might not be so fortunate. They would submerge and sputter and get swimmer’s ear and die a painful death, overwhelmed by the bacteria of a thousand lost Band-Aids.

The child will not enter water without hot pink arm floaties, not trusting that water will hold her up. Subcutaneous fat isn’t really one of her strong features, and Mr. H did allow her to get swept out into the Hyannis boat basin that one time. So she has a fear of whales, thinking one crept up underneath her and carried her off. We allow that it certainly must have been a shameless starving whale, and in no part adult negligence. If she’s ever actually eaten by a whale, she is to tickle its throat until it sneezes, and then she will be fine. There are no whales in a pool, I remind her.

After a few turns around the perimeter, she finally realizes she can walk in the shallow end, and off come the floaties. She makes me walk around the pool with one hand under her chest as she furiously and ineffectively paddles with clenched fists. We get to the not really deep end again, and I step on the pool intake cover, which is surprisingly sharp and puts an impressive dent in my toe. Of course I think of this.

Back on go the floaties, and I decide to totally ditch her and practice the aquatic skills shamed into me from Girl Scout camp. Don’t you want to be a fucking minnow? What is wrong with you? Look, Jessica is a carp! I do the crawl, the breast stroke; I even break out the butterfly, which is met with derision. I also remember swimming caps are vaguely important in these endeavors if one wishes to see where one is going. The bottom of my swimsuit almost comes off because food is no longer of interest.

One highway exit away, someone we love is having trouble breathing. He is also tired of eating, yet still not tired of living. We have called it a night after visiting and gone swimming to wear ourselves out.

I decide I will pass the life guard swimming test and tread water for ten minutes. I could totally cheat if I wanted, owing to my superior leg length and the inferiority of the pool, but I keep at it. I am a floundering veal calf. If I were in the middle of a river or ocean, I wouldn’t have a prayer. I could flip onto my back and float, but I would forget to do this in the panic of screaming muscles and waterlogged lungs. I sink. I come back up. I’m going down for the second time.

People who are actually drowning find it physically impossible to speak. Still, we do our best until the point of no return. Lord willing and the water don’t rise, in two weeks I will play Scrabble with a fine man.

 

 

Trampy Thursday: Hints around the house

Did you know over 80% of all sex occurs in the home? And only 45% of fatal injuries occur in the home. So we must be doing something right, as a nation.* Safety first!

I like to start the day with a little laundry. It’s a real turn on when your beloved leaves a trail of  used garments on the floor, a saucy scavenger hunt if you will. Then it’s up to you to get soapy with those socks!

See how much I am enjoying myself? There ought to be a law against this much pleasure.

Then I move on to the outdoor chores, like the pioneer woman I am. I have to water the horses and mockingly withhold affection:

Then I would cook dinner, but not eating results in a far sexier frame than tossing back a pot roast every night. So I open the fridge and look at things disparagingly, and then I close the fridge with a sassy bump of the hip. Ouch!

Then the nude housecleaner comes over to do the grout, and the rest is Miller Time.

*97% of all bloggers admit to making up statistics.

The Day Before Friday: water is wet

After a long, sickness hard day, check I like to relax with a hot shower as well as this guy!

I suppose it might be fun to bring friends, if they have suffered a similarly dull and taxing day:

Or sometimes I go for a swim:

The real secret to teasing the neighbor boys peeping over the fence is modesty. Let us never forget that sexy, sexy virtue, America. Clothe your desperate, orange housewives, put your teen pop stars in Catholic school uniforms, and only let them near a pole on May Day.

 

Low and slow

How are we remaining healthy these days?

  • Regurgitation due to realization that calories in pills might cause weight gain.
  • Avoiding setting foot in Catholic churches, lest we explode. True story, I walked by one today, and I got this tingle in my thigh like one does right before spontaneous human combustion. I read about that in the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series when I was nine. Beware the hot spot.
  • Springing for surgery in Thailand vs. the DIY version.
  • Daily consultation with Morrissey, who reminds us just how much worse life could be. At least three to five people love me!
  • Remembering that it’s almost Friday, the day sandwiched after Thursday but before Saturday. This concept is followed by the soothing or horrifying realization that all things are possible in America.

And all this healthy living is seriously threatened by Sunday, the worst day of the week, while we’re on the topic of the predictable and inexorable passing of time. You may think it’s Monday, or even Tuesday, but Sunday wields the power of dread, the very prod that stokes the fire of my soul.

If not for the eleven perfect minutes that elapse from my first sip of wine to the end of family dinner, I think I would opt out of Sundays. But then again, AFV is on! Tough call.

Run around in the radiation

Looks like we are in for a #winningweatheradvisory, chipmunks. Yeah, I wrote that hash tag a few weeks ago, and then a shiny object caught my attention, and I spent numerous hours drooling on myself and refreshing TMZ to see if Charlie Sheen did anything depraved or predatory in the last 18 minutes. And the world is ending, but I’ll be damned if I am paying for The New York Times to find out exactly how and when. I am sure someone on Facebook will tell me. Or some part of my body will actually sizzle and fall off. Whichever.

I have some kind of granite-like writer’s block, but I realized the problem was that I was waiting around to write what I wanted to write. I so very much wanted to write something good. Until I can do that, I should keep my thoughtcrime to myself, right? Except the real world doesn’t work that way. He who blabbers most frequently within the confines of 140 characters wins the future! He who deploys the most ordnance without approval from Congress gets to… well, you can’t really win with that one.

So why am I torturing myself, holding out for inspiration for the perfect screenplay when I could just write a Katherine Heigl movie? I am going to cast my cares unto the Lord and torture the internet instead. That’s right, I’m going right over to Sheen’s house to borrow a cup of hypomania, and then it’s balls to the wall here in the United States of Vomitola. I am calling in Steve Strange, Pete Burns, and that walrus with a bucket if I have to. Content is irrelevant anyway. You can please half the people half the time, but you can never please Morrissey.

Whatever happens, I love you

I ventured out to see the glorious world, and I soon got a warm, tingly feeling in my lower regions. Then I realized it was only the ass warmer in the car seat, and for the first time in 3 months, I shut it off with a flourish. Could spring be here soon? I might have to shave my legs.

I saw no real signs of Valentine’s Day in the streets, besides the occasional fly-by-night carnation/bear operation on a street corner, but the child did come home with a paper bag poorly stenciled with hearts and stuffed with little valentines. I want! Where is my paste-slathered offering? I suppose failing glitter and foam dove stickers, I would accept one of these.

Say hello to my little yellow generic friend

Look at that. Purty, right? So shiny. Although I think these have been styled for the photo shoot. Probably brushed with Elmer’s glue. Either that or my pharmacist has been sucking the coating off mine. We are on a first name basis. I would hate to think of such betrayal.

I already had pizza today, per Lambchop’s excellent advice. So that leaves running around like a banshee, or settling in for a little assistance, assistance that renders me sadly only functional, not hepped up in any delightful way. Drugs are far more fun when you don’t actually need them. Damn nervous system, thwarting, always thwarting.

There, now I can face finishing my taxes and unloading the dishwasher. Score one for financial planning and domestic drudgery.