I’m not sure about this. I did it quickly and it began going one way and went into an entirely different direction I feel uncomfortable with yet need to explore

The fear that has gripped her tightly refuses to abandon both her body and her mind. She wants to scream. What would that do? Anybody who hears her would just think she’s crazy. Really her scream would be similar to the sound of one hand clapping.

Once she had a good life. A great life really. She remembers the days of champagne and music. Men crowding around her. Wanting to make her laugh. Her low giggle would turn into a contagious roar she was incapable of stopping. Tears would come from her eyes. Somehow that was attractive.

She never really understood that. There was a lot she never really understood, she thinks, as she reaches for a cigarette in the overflowing crystal ashtray on the glass and sterling silver vanity; vestiges of the life she used to have.

He walks into the room. He’s like every damn cliche she can imagine: unshaven dark hair, half bald he makes up for that by dying his hair with shoe polish, she thinks. A wife beater showing his hairy chest and grungy white boxers that don’t quite hide the parts of his body he forced on her last night.

“You’re late for work,” he says in that accent that’s a combination of uneducated and illiterate.

What would you know about work? she thinks but doesn’t say. Instead she smiles. “I changed shifts. Doing the lobster one.”

It was a gamble to tell Mavis she would be happy to change so that Mavis could be home when her husband comes home from his cross country truck run. She didn’t know how Eddie would take it. Didn’t really care at that moment. For once she wanted to do something good for somebody.

Eddie’s cigarette manages to look like a baseball bat:
“I told you, you can’t change shifts without checking with me. I’m having the guys over for poker.”

“I didn’t know you changed nights.” It’s her job to serve the food, clean after the game, go into the bedroom and be available for any friend who might want her. Though really she’s getting so old. Then again so are they. Sometimes there are young ones. They really like her. For an old broad she’s hot.

Every morning Eddie watches her when she goes on the scale. If she gains anything he won’t let her eat all day. During her breaks and lunch at the factory she eats exactly what Eddie tells her to. She thinks figuring out her diet is the high point of his day.

She sits by herself, during breaks, at the factory. Eddie has his spies everywhere. Sometimes she talks to Mavis, who is new, in the ladies. Mavis doesn’t realize she’s persona non gratis. Mavis likes her educated accent and her look that is as defeated as anybody there but still has a hint of her former life.

She tries to remember how this life happened. It was all so gradual. Except for being fired from the publishing company during the dot com bust. She was an editor with nothing to edit. Nothing personal. Yeah right. For some reason she couldn’t work past the firing and would spend hour upon hour at the bar Eddie hung at mooching drinks off her and everybody else.

One day they drove to Point Hell as all the locals called the town that Eddie’s family had lived in forever. She didn’t remember much about that time. Once she had a great memory. “The memory of an elephant,” people would say as she would give a precise recount of some adventure that had happened years before.

Somehow they ended living in an apartment in a 40′s court. Eddie went back to New York and brought back what he liked of her furniture. He threw out everything that was personal and that she truly cared about.

Her parents had died years ago. Her brother lived somewhere in California. He wasn’t really the family sort. Her friends must have wondered but not cared enough. Or maybe they did and just couldn’t find her.

Eddie brought her out of her reverie. “Call your friend now and tell her you can’t do it.” He brought the cell to her. Usually it was locked along with other things he didn’t want her to get. He stood and watched her make the phone call.

She wished she had the nerve to tell Mavis to call the police. She wanted to be saved. Jesus she wanted to be saved but she didn’t have the strength.

Remember the pink and the pinup? Miss it? I do but want it more sophisticated and can’t afford a custom design right now.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Lianna had to run from the beach and then the field as fast as she could. She wasn’t a very fast runner but adrenaline kicked in and—she tripped.

She looked at the sky with more dread than she could ever remember feeling. To her distant right she could see a large funnel cloud. She couldn’t help but stare as she had never seen one before. To her left were more familiar lightening bolts she had been running from all her life.

Yet the sun was blinding. None of this made sense. She pulled herself up and fast walked to the beaches edge. The field, though a protected bird sanctuary, was filled with cars. Many were turned over; some were on their sides. The people, ohmygod, what had happened when she had been in the water?

She wanted to grasp the people and breath life back into them but she was scared. Should she go back into the ocean? Was that the only safe place?

One person. One live person. That’s all she needed to see. One person; alive, walking and talking would pacify her, but there was nobody.

She opened car doors and grabbed cells. This was no time to be a lady. The fourteenth or fifteenth cell worked. When she tried making calls to those few numbers she knew by heart: her mother, boy friend, best friend and sister, the calls went straight to voice mail.

Now she tried radios. Nothing. Lianna became crazed.

Somehow she made it into town and saw people frozen on the streets and in stores. Would they come back to life she wondered as the lightening kept just missing her and the funnel cloud hit something far away.

Was she the last survivor? She didn’t want to live in a world alone. No she sure didn’t.

Marinade Dave (Dave Knechel) was one of my early close blogging friends. Dave goes to the Casey Anthony trial–her daughter Caylee was brutally murdered and blogs about it. His blog has become a sensation. I’m a true crime junkie and fascinated by it. But lately he’s been getting some horrible comments. Knowing a …lot about horrible comments I wrote a post for it–and you get to see my old blog template!

Click the photograph to see the filthy signs. Read them and try not to be offended. “Pray for more dead soldiers.” How frigging sick! “God hates you.” Not my G-d. Mine is a just one.

Sage linked to a much more explanatory coherent post he wrote several years ago. I was too angry.

Westboro Baptist Church came to North Myrtle today and I went to my first demonstration in the South.

As a New York Jewish liberal I don’t often talk religion or politics here with anybody but my friends from home. It’s easier and I don’t really want to.

I say all this as I had problems understanding why Westboro was picketing churches, especially an Evangelical one. After all don’t they have the same basic aim? To baptize people into Christ’s love so they can go to heaven?

Then I realized the word love isn’t a word anybody associated with Westboro would use. Love is a concept they wouldn’t understand. They understand hate and only hate. It’s difficult to get anywhere near their mindset.

There are people who go to Barefoot Community Church I consider to be friends. It’s a church I have spent much time in, not for religious events. So I hope that nobody from Barefoot is offended by anything I say or do.

I will be demonstrating on Friday when Westboro hits schools and other public buildings because as a Jew I know how Hitler began. He was a radical fringe idiot people said “don’t listen to. He’ll go away.” Six million Jews and countless other people later he did.

I come from a long tradition of protesters.

Being silent sounds good. But turning the other cheek doesn’t work. I was raised on stories about my great grandparents and grandparents escaping the programs of Russia, about the Scottsboro Boys, and yes I was a young teenager during the civil rights movement who wanted nothing more than to be old enough to be a part of it. I proudly worked against the Viet Nam war but never once disrespected a troop and find it insulting when people assume that all of us who protested were against the troops.

I love North Myrtle. I put a lot of time and resources into my home. I have been developing a good life here.

I hope that my beliefs are respected also. It’s not me who is preaching hate. It’s not me who boycotts troops funerals or calls every American who doesn’t have Westboro’s beliefs “sodomizers” and “murderers.”

This is my blog. It’s not protected under The First Amendment. That means I can delete any comment I want to. Fortunately I don’t get the comments or the readers I once did. But this post–this post is important to me as I will not sit silently when messages of hate are being spewed in my front yard.

“one need have no ‘evidence’ beside the fact that she is single and
seems to be lacking in any emotional or relationship history to ask a
question not about her private life but about her public identity.”

I’m speechless and sickened by this.  Are women supposed to cry publicly about men they have desired who haven’t desired them back?  If a woman doesn’t have a long history of relationships with men does that make her a lesbian?  And if she is does that mean she will make a lousy Supreme Court Justice?

Sullivan says she can simply say whether she’s Gay or not.  But if she says she’s straight won’t that lead to more questions?  Questions no Supreme Court Justice candidate has ever been subjected to or should be.

As a single woman this bothers me.  I think it would bother me if I had been married since I was 12!  But I’m always hearing people talk about other people–usually single men–and wonder what they say about me when I’m not there.  Though I have a long history of relationships I haven’t had one in this decade.

I long for the weightless summers of youth before the fear became omnipresent and I could ignore the subtle individual problems that taken all together would become huge.

Once I was filled with pure potential.  It didn’t matter that somethings were too hard.  But the fear became so great that I began to ignore important things and now I’m scared it could be too late.

Or not.  I could be taking everything way out of proportion.  Letting the nightmares  take over the day.  Even dreams that I’m weightless and flying seem to have sinister connotations.

Last week I faced the past despite my fear.  I learned that I missed the friends of today who live in the city I was visiting.  Still they are there for me.

Here I have a good life.  But not one I’m totally comfortable in yet.  I’m scared that if I continue to ignore certain things the good life will become shallow and weighted with problems I have spent too much time imagining and problems I have not yet begun to think about.

It’s beautiful today and I plan on doing what gives me pleasure and thus makes me productive.  My life.  My dreams.  My way.  I care way too much about pleasing others.  If I learn to only please myself the fear will go away and I won’t ignore the important.

I know.  Most people learned this lesson in high school!

I had to make a decision today about something that seemed good for me and was for awhile.  But now it’s only depressing–nobodies fault and the right decision was to end it.  But  get into the “you can’t quit,” mindset and sometimes that’s exactly wrong.

I really hate getting up at 4AM too tired to do anything but think and/or write.  Not able to fall back to sleep.  Forgive this post.  The words bore into me.

By the time I got to the airport on Monday I was exhausted from the long activity packed weekend, rain, and search for a cab.  I expected security to be more stringent than normal after the near miss in Times Square on Saturday night.  I had been there around 4:30 PM and and a bit after One AM and hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

I was totally spacey Monday morning as I stood on the security line.  In the summer of 2001 I had bought a pair of clogs that have Botticelli’s angels on them.  They were pretty and different.  I didn’t know they would become my designated airport shoes–first because I thought it was clever/cute to walk on the wings of angels.  Then for all the reasons people would wear clogs with angels after 9/11.  Maybe they did have special powers.  Sure.  Definitely because they’re easy to slide on and off.

The man in front of me had coarse gray hair tied into a messy ponytail.  (Love long hair on men as long as it’s neat and this was the opposite.)  I stared at his beige tee shirt.  For a few seconds I thought the beautiful lettering was advertising a new drink company.  “NJ teaparty…”  Then I woke up.  I live in the South and have never seen a teaparty tee shirt.  The writing underneath said “save the country from tyranny.” It was a beautiful shirt.  Retro looking as if it were advertising a late 60′s rock concert.  Not  a concert I would want to go to or a tee I would want to wear.

I felt physically sick.  He was with a much a younger boy who would probably set the alarms off from all piercings he had.  Maybe not but I’m too or something to appreciate pierced unkempt eyebrows.  Maybe I wouldn’t have been so turned off had the eyebrows been tamed just a bit.

The older man turned to me and smiled:  Going to Ohio?

Ohio?, I thought, oh today’s May 3, 2010.  Tomorrow’s the 40th anniversary of Kent State. Please god if there is one don’t let this man be a former hippie going to mourn the deaths of four people I never met but have always felt a connection to.

There were National Guard stationed throughout the airport.  I heard the man say to the boy: See them?  You never saw them before Obama.  It’s an infringement on our rights

I wanted to tell him what an idiot he was. And I was confused.  Don’t Tea Party people like having military or quasi-military around?  Aren’t they into national security and think Obama is screwing that up?

Had he never been to Penn Station?  Manhattan in general?  Airports for the last almost nine years?  I remember seeing many more when Bush was president and never thought it a horrible thing.

I felt almost physically ill.  Kent State and Tea Party people mixed together.  Not in my America.

The National Guard went crazy in Kent State.  Now they are troops, good people usually who don’t shoot just to kill Americans they disdain, and serve too many tours in wars I don’t understand.  President Obama is trying to do something about that.

I changed lines to a faster one.  Really I changed so I could get away from the man and boy.  I didn’t want to spend the morning after a great weekend feeling sick.  I did anyway.