Category Archives: true life 2006

Words fail me

It’s a rare and special day (or in this case week) when I can’t find words to adequately describe something, but the extraordinary creepiness of huggable (cremain) urns is just one of those products that stops me short. (Thanks for the link go to Matt, although I’m not sure “thanks” is the right word…)

If it was a pet-specific product, I’d just shudder and move on, but if you actually visit the site and look at children clutching the alleged cremains of their dead siblings, the yuck factor just goes right through the roof. I actually emailed a contact in the funerary industry (because I do, in fact, have one of the weirdest rolodexes ever) and they confirmed that this is an actual product. Whether the testimonials are real, I have no idea. Nor, I think, do I want to know. Ewww. I know one person does not a good sample make, but, really, would you spend a lot of time devoted to thinking about this? I didn’t think so.

I find these things so disturbing that I left this post in the draft file for days because I just kept thinking I’d find words to describe the yuckiness, but, well, there just aren’t enough of them.

(Two more days later)…I realized I still hadn’t posted this, but in the meantime I’ve spent (wasted) more time contemplating these things. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it must be a Southern company, because if you think about it it’s a pretty Southern product.

And as creepy as those testimonials are, when you get right down to it, is this product any tackier than the dolphin urn from Costco, which they helpfully explain can be used for either cremains or other keepsake items?

In a Southern household, that elderly relative everyone has who’s been announcing she’s on death’s door for approximately, oh, her entire life, would use this bad boy as a candy dish. She’d wait until you took one of the A and W rootbeer flavored hard candies she’d offered from the dish, then she’d tell you that someday said dish was going to house her earthly remains. And that could just be any day now. Not that I know anyone like that.

But I digress.

I was kind of surprised to find the company is located in California rather than, say, Georgia or Florida, but I guess you can insert your own California-themed joke here. I know that California is known for it’s wackiness, but I doubt very much it can hold a candle to the South in terms of death-obsessiveness.

The truly excellent Southern columnist Celia Rivenark had an essay titled “Where Were You When Stringbean Passed? A real Southerner would know the answer to that question” that began:

Southerners are preoccupied with death. As far back as I can remember, new of the recently dead was the number-one topic at any get-together. I have friends who can spend a solid forty-five minutes eulogizing a fifth cousin twice removed (don’t ask me removed from what) without coming up for air.

(This appeared in “We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier” – a truly hilarious collection of essays. I hear that “Bless Your Heart, Tramp”, her first book, is equally funny. Oh, and Stringbean was a character on Heehaw, or so I’m told).

These thoughts really are somewhat tenuously connected, as Matt and I are no doubt (some degree of) cousins (some degree) removed, although his brother and I never did get around to sitting down and figuring it out. And that, in itself, is very Southern.

"soon to be famous first lines"

The Sunday Source section of the Washington Post has their obligatory yearly article about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

An online piece accompanying the article is a list of some Soon-To-Be Famous First Lines from local novels in progress. There are a lot of good ones, but since mine is the first one listed it must be the best, right?

You can still sign up and join in. You have 18 days left – you can catch up! Come on, if I can do this with my old-lady arthritis hands and inflammation in my rib cage cartilage making it feel like rabid weasels are living between my lungs and our Area Coordinator can write in intensive care (seriously, read the article. she totally takes away my whining rights) – you can do this too.

Plus – It’s the perfect alibi for why you can’t possibly host Thanksgiving at your place. You have a novel to finish.

Obligatory election-day post, starring Katherine Harris, Rick Dakan, and a possum, with a special guest appearance by a pigeon-eating pelican

I could post about Virginia politics, but I really don’t have one ounce of energy left to devote to ranting about Macaca Goldstein, the Marriage Amendment, or, well, any of it, anymore. (In case you’re concerned: Macaca’s ok for a Jew, I have been assured by some of our local self-professed Right-Thinkers. After all, he still eats ham. Well praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! I know I was relieved, I’m sure you were too. Shame though, I guess he won’t be available to help light the giant Menorah my passive-aggressive side wants to put in our front yard this year).

So no, I won’t rant about Virginia politics. Or about robocalls, other than to mention that both our landline and my cellphone are being robo-called half to death and I’m going to go completely insane if this isn’t all over soon. Being stuck in the house all day, most days, all I can do is turn off the ringers and periodically clear out the voicemail. It’s annoying. I guess I shouldn’t feel too sorry for myself. Today’s Washington Post has an article about the phenomenon with this heart-breaking paragraph:

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

How horrible is that? There has to be a way to stop these things, or at least get a nationwide ban on numbers listed on the Do Not Call registry.

So if not robo-calling or Virginia politics, what to babble about?

Well, I guess that leaves me with Florida. That’s good. Katherine Harris is a goldmine of ranting material, right?

(an hour later)

Well, my post about what an absolute loon Katherine Harris got derailed before it even really got started, which is just as well because, really, who doesn’t think that Kathering Harris is a total loon?

I was going to preface my rant by noting that I’m possibly a bit biased in my loathing for La Harris as a native of Sarasota and the former President of the Sarasota Young Democrats. Then the post (which still sort of existed only in my brain at that point) digressed into a question of whether I was the President or Vice-President. It was never really clear to me. It wasn’t the best-organized organization of all time. I thought I’d try googling the group to see if it still existed and, if so, if there was a list of past officers anywhere because I was kind of curious.

So, I hit google.

The first hit is a blog post about attending a dubious-sounding meeting of the newly reconstituting Sarasota Young Democrats. (20 years later and they’re still trying to get organized? Yup, those would be Democrats).

So I click on the main page of the guy’s blog and see that he wrote Geek Mafia, a book I’ve had on a wishlist for a while. Then I take a better look at his name. Rick Dakan.

How it could have escaped me that Rick Dakan would be the same person as…Rick Dakan. Who I not only went to junior/high school with, although I am a bit older. (Still, total population of the entire school for grades 2-12: 800 students). Additionally, we also went to the same undergraduate college. Small, strange world. Or, possibly, I just have a brain like a steel sieve. Or, more probably, both. This is excellent (albeit old) news for Rick and I think it’s swell.

(The URL, which I glanced at before I ever even clicked on the first link probably could have also supplied some clues for me, since it’s rickdakan.com, but that kind of assumption hinges on me having enough caffeine in my bloodstream to think straight and, well, a little more common sense than I seem to be in possession of at the current time).

So, in summation: buy all of Rick Dakan’s books because he’s always been a mad genius. And never, ever vote for Katherine Harris because she’s a total and complete loon. (Do a google search for Katherine Harris and Israel and marvel in her sheer nuttiness. For extra credit I recommend the recent Washington Post article that contained this nugget:

“Former chief adviser Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan’s reelection to the White House in 1984, said working for Harris was like “being in insanity camp.”

And let’s not forget my personal favorite image from her whole campaign: Katherine Harris and the Possum.

Or, just skip the whole sordid mess and watch this video of a pelican eating a pigeon, which didn’t happen in Sarasota.

stranger than fiction

Despite recent posting evidence to the contrary, I’m the last person to suggest that life is anything like the movies. Nevertheless, I must describe the events of today because even I thought them a little too cleverly and conveniently plotted.

I ventured out of doors today (which is, in itself, newsworthy since I have been sick) and met a friend at the local coffeeshop.

We hadn’t chatted in a while and I was going to tell her of the NaNoWriMo novel I’m trying to work on when I feel well enough to write. Then I was going to write a little.

Before I could even tell her title or premise, this random guy joined our conversation. Even when we very aggressively ignored him, even moving to a more distant table, he continued to leer and just generally be creepy. It was appropriate, though, in it’s own way, as I was trying to tell my friend about Freak Magnet, my novel in progress, and about the phenomenon of, well, attracting freaks. I was clearly exhibiting my natural freak magnetism, so she got the gist quite quickly.

Inn passing, I also mentioned how I am The Finder of Lost Dogs. The novel isn’t autobiographical, but freak magnetism and lost dogs are important to the plot.

So after we chatted, I spent a little time writing. Specifically, I finished the chapter started yesterday: about a fire at a place rather like Gatorland. Later, she and I walked home.

A dog came bounding down the sidewalk and greeted me like a lost littermate. Fortunately, his owner wasn’t far away, so we didn’t have to go through the prolonged ritual that includes the catching of the dog and the reading of the tag and the calling the owner. (I keep a leash in my purse, very handy in these situations).

Then I returned home to catch up on the news. Needless to say, the headline concerning today’s massive fire at Gatorland caught my eye.

I never go to movie theatres because most movie theater seats don’t play well with my arthritis, plus the whole adventure usually just wears me out for days afterwars, but I may have to try and see Stranger than Fiction, because, well, things just have been.

On the other hand, I’d probably just end up sitting behind someone who would converse, loudly, with their invisible friends throughout the entire movie.

Or, possibly, the woman who sat next to me during The Matrix, but that’s a story for another day…

I am a murderer

I have a confession to make: I murdered Sven.

In cold blood. In our house. In our basement. In the bathroom, to be precise.

I think Sven now haunts our basement. I should probably put a little Day of the Dead shrine down there.

In my own defense, I feel I should put it on record that this was not a premeditated crime. Sven was an intruder.

I knew something was wrong the minute I walked into the basement on the way to the laundry room. I could hear something banging – well, splashing – around in the bathroom, but I was the only one home.

Honestly, when I first saw Sven, franticly swimming like his little life depended on it (and, as it turned out, it did) I assumed he’d come up through the toilet. It seemed logical. Why else would there be a rat in the toilet? I then did the only logical thing, I flushed. And flushed. And flushed.

There was also some screaming. And more flushing.

By “logical” I mean, of course,”logical at the time.”

Then I called Husband at work. He thought I was insane. He was also as deeply traumatized as I was about the possibility of rats coming up out of the toilet. While I was explaining the situation, and insisting that the rat had to be long gone because I’d flushed the toilet many times, Sven re-emerged.

Rats are amazing swimmers.

This was followed by more of the screaming and more of the flushing.

Later, Husband admitted to me that although he was disturbed by the goings on at the time, later he found the sounds of me screaming and flushing pretty damned hilarious. Husband is lucky he only admitted this much, much later.

Then I made calls to the plumber and to various exterminators.

The exterminator I talked to was very nice. He was probably periodically putting me on hold to laugh hysterically, but who could blame him? Our conversation went kind of like this:

“I think there are rats coming up through my toilet.”

“And why do you think this ma’am?” Asked, I might add, in the same soothing tone one might use with the mentally unstable.

“Because there was a rat in my toilet.”

“Is he still there?”

“No. I, um, flushed him.” At this point, even I realized that was a stupid thing to do, but the dispatcher was nice enough to at least pretend he would have done the same thing.

“We don’t handle live animal situations, that requires Pest Services.”

I took down the information he gave me about who to contact and then he continued, “It’s not like we can really send a guy over to sit there with a baseball bat and wait for the little guy to run back out from wherever he’s hiding.”

I laughed nervously, probably too nervously, prompting him to ask, “You aren’t sitting there with a baseball bat, are you?”

“Uhhh. Nope.”

“Broom?”

“Nope.”

“Shovel?”

“Nope. Golf club.”

“Wood or iron?”

“Putter.”

“Good choice. You’ll have better control.”

Obviously, he’d never seen me on the golf course.

At that point the plumber called, so I didn’t have to admit to the nice Rodent Death Merchant that I had weighted down the toilet seat with a pair of 8 pound dumbbells, just for good measure. Rats are very strong. And very strong swimmers. Have i mentioned that? The exterminator gave me a lot of information about rats, probably more than I will ever need to know, but now I’m never short on cocktail party smalltalk.

In fact, the rat took on the name Sven during this conversation because we determined that he was Rattus norvegicus (a Norway rat).

The plumber, in the meantime, assured me that, because we have an ejector pump, it was pretty much impossible for a rat to come into the house through our pipes. Then the plumber came over and inspected the whole thing, just to be sure, and also to make sure that I hadn’t destroyed said ejector pump. I also learned that it costs close to 1000 bucks to replace an ejector pump.

I was very, very happy to learn that the pump had not been damaged. My happiness was short-lived because he also explained to me that, since Sven was now long gone, I’d probably killed him by forcing him out through the pump.

Great. So now I had that on my conscience.

As near as anyone can tell Sven got into the house because we left the backdoor standing open while we moved some furniture. This apparently happens to neighbors with sliding doors a lot, but no one talks about it. Rat experts have no problem telling you about how your neighbors call them screaming like little girls when they find that their dog has cornered a feisty rat in their upstairs closet. I, of course, would never scream like a little girl when spotting a rat in my home. (I screamed like a banshee that had been set on fire).

Many experts have examined the house and that open door seems to be the only point of entry.

A few days later, I saw an exterminator at a neighbor’s house and I quizzed him about all things rodent. While we were chatting, a rat strolled down the road past us like he owned the place. Yes, Alexandria is a city by a river, but come on. This seemed a little weird, even to me.

The wayward exterminator told me about the City rebaiting the sewers after months of construction. The City confirmed this. In fact, the rebaiting process had started just hours before Sven entered our house and got trapped.

At least the mystery of why the rats suddenly streamed out of the sewer was solved.

One of my neighbors was convinced there was an alligator in there on a rampage and this was the first sign. I think the “fleeing disruption and poison in their nests” story fits the facts better, seeing as we live in Virginia.

Tip: it turns out you’re supposed to call animal control for a situation like this, which I did. In my own defense, I started calling them when Sven first appeared (on Friday) and they didn’t call me back until Tuesday because it was a holiday weekend (Memorial Day) and I wasn’t calling the emergency line, so even though the exterminators and plumbers kept referring me back to the City, I didn’t know for sure the right things to do for several days.

An article in the Washington Post that appeared during this time period confirmed that rats are in abundance in our area and living the good life. No kidding.

Somewhere around here I have some publicity images Mark Lewis gave me when he was here (in 1998?) to screen his excellent documentary, Rat, for the Environmental Film Festival. It’s tempting to frame one of the posters and hang it in the bathroom. It has the image of of a rat emerging from a toilet. I suspect I’m the only one who would find that amusing. (On a Mark Lewis tanget – I have no idea how long this link will last, but here’s a BBC page with video intros by Mark of all of his films, including perennial PBS faves Cain Toads and Natural History of the Chicken. Fun!)

I bring all this up because I’m more than a bit traumatized by ads for Flushed Away, the heartwarming story of a pet rat who accidentally gets flushed down a toilet. Husband has pointed out to me that in the movie, obviously, the rats are the heros and so by extension we can pretend that perhaps Sven survived his ordeal. Then I can take comfort in the film. We’ll see….