Tackle It Tuesday: Happy Fucking Birthday to Me

 

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Linus the Penguin is here to wish me a happy 57th birthday. Thank you, Linus! Come on in and join the bitch-fest!

So, I was born 57 years ago in the middle of a literal raging blizzard in Denver, Colorado. The car slid off the road and my father, who was very sick with a respiratory infection, had to push it back onto the road while my mother, who was in labor, steered. That's how the fuck I started my life, and it's been a premonition of what was to come. I ain't ever been nothin' but trouble.

Spirit of the Universe, could you please help me make some good trouble before it's time for me to leave this cluster fuck? I believe I can still wring a few years out of this crappy old carcass, but one never knows. Amen.

All right, it's time now for a few party games. Let's answer some questions from 52 Weeks of Writing! If you'd like to purchase a copy of this workbook for yourself (you should) there will be a link at the end of this torrent of profanity and kvetching.

Our first question is:

Where do you want to be ten years from now? How will you celebrate?

I want to be alive and not any more disabled than I am now. I will celebrate with a Costco pizza and cake. You know, like I always do. 

Yeah, but Ornery, what about the BIG WINS? Don't you want to throw a BIG PARTY for all your supporters?

All what supporters, Annoying Disembodied Voice? I doubt there will be any BIG WINS. I don't believe in setting myself up for disappointment. I imagine there will be me and my son, and if my son isn't here, there will be no reason for me to be here. That's the fucking reality. Now, piss off and let me enjoy my Costco pizza and cake. You're fucking pissing me off right now.

I'm already sad because my grandcat Giorgio probably won't be here in ten years. He's nineteen now. My mother could still be here in ten years, but she also might not. She's going to be 83 years old this year.

Maybe my brother will be here to join us for Costco pizza and cake. I hold out a little hope that he will decide to move up here to the Lone Prairie. He doesn't really like living in Arizona, but it's what he's used to.

If the above rant seems fatalistic, it probably is. I gave up on the whole big pie in the sky dream thing years ago because it always left me in worse shape than it found me. I don't believe in lying to myself.

Anyway, since the year will be 2032, I expect to have a flying car and a laser.

Where do you want to be in five years? How will you celebrate?

I want to have the miracle happen where I'm raking in the bucks like the female Stephen King that the world damn well ought to see me as so I can tell disability to kiss my fat ass and stop preventing me from trying to build up some fucking savings. 

Since I refuse to be an unrealistic fuckface, I don't expect this to be the case, so see the above scenario except that I'll be 62 instead of 67. Shorter of breath and one day closer to death, but probably not quite as close. I'll celebrate the same way that I always celebrate. Costco pizza and cake.

Hell, even if I hit the Big Time, I'll celebrate the same way. My partying days are long behind me. I get tired too easy to enjoy that shit.

Where do you want to be in three years? How will you celebrate?

I'll be 60 and I'll probably be having an existential crisis. I hope that David Bowie will visit me in my dreams like he did the last time I was having a serious existential crisis. He had some excellent thoughts and was very nice. 

You're welcome to think that it wasn't really David Bowie but a manifestation of my subconscious. However, if you try to insist that I need to think that, I will tell you to fuck off into a vat of liquefied pig shit. There are some things in this world that we just can't explain. My subconscious is a fucking asshole. It would never be that nice to me.

Hopefully, a few more fuckers will know about my writing and maybe I'll have my shit a little more together than I do right now, but I won't hold my breath.

 Celebration tactic: Costco pizza and cake.

Where do you hope to be in two years? How will you celebrate?

Hopefully, a little better off than I am right now. Again, I won't hold my breath. The manner of celebration will be Costco pizza and cake. I'm nothing if not consistent. Maybe I will have figured out a way to murder this annoying grammar checker. It's a useful tool but sometimes it's a right fucking prat.

Where do you hope to be in 52 weeks? How will you celebrate?

I hope to be partway through this workbook. I hope to have Ed's Red Wheelbarrow (my family-friendly story about a misunderstood vampire) published and bringing in a few royalties for me and my illustrator, Kami Diox.

You can find Kami on Instagram (@kamidiox) and on Deviant Art. 

https://www.deviantart.com/kamidiox

https://www.instagram.com/kamidiox/

She is best known for her Chibi fan art, but she also takes commissions and can bring your OCs to life as she's doing for me with Ed's story. 

So, wouldn't it be nice if I could be making my artist friend's life easier as well as my own?

Fuck yeah, it would. 

Which is why you fuckers want to remember the title "Ed's Red Wheelbarrow" and be ready to snap that fucker up when it is (hopefully) released around Halloween this year or next year.

I'd love to celebrate the triumph with Kami, but she lives in Mexico City. With my health issues, traveling is difficult for me. But maybe if Ed is very, very good to me, I'll be able to roll out first class.

That is the closest you'll see me get to rolling in a big, impossible dream like a pig in slop. I don't do that shit very often. It's kind of like snorting cocaine. It leads to unrealistic expectations and horrific letdowns. Magical thinking has fucked my life more than it has helped it for sure. I don't let myself indulge in it very much. I only allow for controlled bursts. Kind of like how these days Nikki Sixx only lets Sikki Nixx out onstage. If Sikki is allowed free reign, he fucks things up. 

Too much of either magical thinking or Sikki Nixx is more destructive than the Tsar Bomba. You can take my word on the magical thinking part. For further thoughts on Sikki Nixx, you can consult Nikki Sixx via The Heroin Diaries. 

https://bit.ly/GetHDCH

If I ever meet Nikki Sixx, he can join me for Costco pizza and cake.

In nine months? How will you celebrate?

It's possible that Ed's Red Wheelbarrow will be released in 9 months. I will celebrate with Costco pizza and...

Pie!

Costco makes giant pumpkin pies. We slice it up and freeze it for a tasty treat throughout the winter months.

In six months? How are you going to celebrate?

In six months it will be August and I will be sweating my tits off. I won't yet be able to celebrate turning the fan off. At least this house has better ventilation than the horrible mobile home where I lived for 20 years.

I feel like I wasted a lot of my life being tossed about on the waves of anxiety, trying to live up to other people's expectations, not realizing that I had ADHD and was dealing with PTSD from things that had happened to me years ago.  I have to forgive myself for the ways in which I fucked up, but I wasn't the only one that got hurt. That reality still hurts.

I'm wiser now and I will hurt forever.

If reading my experiences helps someone else avoid making the mistakes I did, I will feel somewhat vindicated.

Not validated.

Never validated.

Chasing validation is destructive.

I will celebrate whatever win I get with Costco pizza and an ice cream sundae.

In three months? How are you going to celebrate?

In three months it will be my son's 32nd birthday. Yes, I am old. I am also fat. I am also not conventionally attractive. None of these qualities are reasons to treat me or anyone else like shit. I celebrate the fact that I now stand up for myself and others in telling bullies to piss the fuck off. Fuck you if you think it's fun to make other people feel bad about themselves. Fuck you if you're that kind of shitty person. Seriously, have a look at yourself.

The first round of Sixfold begins on May 1. I have written about Sixfold here and invite you to take a look. 

https://poetryofthenetherworld.blogspot.com/2022/02/sixfold-needs-writers-mfrwauthor.html

Sixfold is a writing competition and writer's workshop in one. I hope you will consider joining me there.

My son and I will celebrate his birthday with Costco pizza and either a sundae or pie, his choice. He prefers pie to cake.

I actually cheated and wrote this post 8 days before publication. I'm slick like that.

Spirit of the Universe, help me see the good and celebrate the blessings. I love you. Sometimes anyway.

Ornery Owl is Old and Gives No Fucks

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Resource Books:

52 Weeks of Writing

https://amzn.to/33sESxd

Self-Help Sucks

https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp and Naughty Netherworld Press.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Come check out Readers Roost, the online book store featuring works by indie and small press authors. Discover your next great read at the Roost! It's the link you need when you wanna read.

https://bit.ly/ReadersRoost

Buy me a coffee

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Come as you Are Party: What's Behind the Door?

 

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

Spirit of the Universe, is there any hope for me? I go through periods where I do better but then I go back to seeking validation from people who really couldn't care less about me. Am I really this broken, Spirit? Am I really this goddamn stupid and pathetic? Am I really going to spend my entire fucking life being nothing but a worthless wannabe? 

I say I don't need people to like me, but I obviously still care about people's opinions enough that I can't set myself free to just write what I want. I say I don't care about people's opinions, but I obviously care enough that I avoid working on this project because I worry readers will think that I'm just rehashing the same subject because I'm too thick to understand it and too much of a whiner to do the work to make the changes. 

I think I'm fucking hopeless, Spirit. Truly I do. Why bother trying? I'll never be anything but a fuckup and a reject. I truly was crafted from the leftover dregs of whatever rejected souls were cobbled together prior to mine. I'm a reject's reject. I want to give up but I can't stand being just a passive observer. Why was I born with such big dreams when everything I do turns out to be just one more disappointment? Why the fuck do I keep doing this?

I am and always will be fucking entirely alone in it.

Nonetheless, I enjoy analyzing things. It's another annoying and not particularly productive quality of mine. So here we go.

For each struggle and roadblock in your writing, can you determine which are internal and which are external?

Sure. 

Being on disability, which doesn't pay enough to actually live on, is external. 

By the way, I give no fucks if anyone reading this dislikes my split infinitive. 

One reason I want to eventually publish one of my shitty volumes of crappy ruminations is that I want to show how utterly goddamn demoralizing, Draconian, and just completely shit the disability system in the United States is. When a person must either suddenly amass such significant wealth that they no longer have to worry about SSD and its plethora of shitty rules or they must keep their savings to less than $2000, it's bullshit, and it's downright abusive. In other words:

“I'm not totally useless. I can be used as a bad example.”

― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Right, now that we've got the demoralization of being perpetually broke and afraid to do anything to better my circumstances bit out of the way, let's address the internal fuckery.

I've been unhappy writing nothing but pieces for consideration in anthologies, which is what I've been doing for the past six months. My labors of love, reviled though they may be by others, allow me to get to know my characters and through my characters, myself. I told myself that this was childish, and I needed to become a grown-up writer doing the adulting and filling my inbox with rejection slips.

 While I think I should do more of that than I have in the past, I deeply dislike being depressed and utterly alone, so I've gone back to prioritizing my LOLs (Labors of Love), and anyone who doesn't like it can go fuck themselves. I realize I'm a friendless loser whose characters become her friends. Why the fuck should anyone else make it their business to sneer at this? Fuck off entirely.

People who sneer at the pain of others are shitty excuses for human beings anyway, and I wouldn't want to waste my time in their presence if you paid me. This includes those who ridicule the homeless, those who mock someone who can't afford the latest fashions (of course some of us simply don't give a flying fuck about the latest fashions), those who mock the physical appearance of others, and those who mock another's psychological pain. 

If you're the kind of person who does any of the above, I'll say it nicely this time. Have a look at yourself. I mean a really long, hard look at yourself. If you realize that you don't want to be the kind of person who does this, then congratulations, you don't have to be. If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who truly enjoys doing this shit, then fuck you.

The next three thoughts come from the 52 Weeks of Writing journal.

We avoid things for a reason, and my reason was that I was afraid to uncover the truth about why I wasn’t happy.

I've avoided writing my thoughts or working in this journal for that reason. I actually know why I'm unhappy but I feel like there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm unhappy because I live in poverty. Things would have to change significantly for this problem to resolve.

As for the writing aspect, I love the creative part of things, obviously. I enjoy editing. I enjoy formatting when it's going smoothly. I love self-publishing. Mostly.

Here's what I don't love about self-publishing.

I hate networking and promotion. I feel it eats up time that I'd prefer to spend creating. I'm shy and socially awkward, so interacting with others is always precarious. I'd rather leave the promotion of my books to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're doing, but when one's advertising budget is zero, one really doesn't have that luxury, so guess what? I'm stuck with my shitty networking and promotion skills.

I’d journaled before in my life, and it had always felt like a useless exercise.

This! I don't want to be spending time contemplating my navel or telling myself that:

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

--Stuart Smalley

Somehow those types of affirmations always feel like a bold-faced fucking lie. I don't feel like I'm anywhere near good enough or smart enough and I don't think that most people like me. I think some people put up with me, some of them feel sorry for me, most people aren't even aware of me, and very rarely, someone sees a spark of some sort of potential in me. I don't think anyone who really knows me could like me because I'm such a colossal garbage fire of a human being.

It can take an awful lot of times of writing down the exact same answer before the next layer surfaces or before you’re ready to take that deep breath and acknowledge what you couldn’t in the previous weeks.

I always worry about this. Why the shit would someone want to read a book where I reiterate the same thing fifty kazillion different ways and I still haven't figured that shit out yet? Why haven't I internalized my own bullshit enough that I can be a fully functioning adult at just nine days shy of being 57 years old as of this writing? I mean, fuck's sake, how much of a pig-headed fuckup can one person be?

Why would someone even want to read a free blog post about me trying to figure the same goddamn thing out for the bajillionth time but phrased slightly differently?

That's why I've been avoiding doing these journal exercises. Not because I think they're useless but because of what other people might think. 

Fuck's sake.

Am I ever going to get beyond needing validation from people who wouldn't blow a fart in my general direction if they saw me lying in a gutter bleeding out?

Fucking pathetic.

For each struggle and roadblock, what do you need to overcome it?

For the poverty thing, I'd need the goddamn miracle of having a sudden influx of readers gobbling up my writing like I was the female Stephen King. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

For the other mess, I guess I need to keep needling myself until I genuinely no longer give any fucks about needing validation from others. I need to truly accept myself as I am.

That's another split infinitive, and I don't give a fuck what my grammar checker thinks.

Maybe that's a start.

~Ornery Owl is sick of her own shyyyyt and wants coffee~

Image by Comfreak from Pixabay

Here's what I was listening to while creating this post:

Here is the direct link in case you can't see the player.

https://odysee.com/@TheEmbracedOne:1/gothic-ambience-bar-brawl:d?r=GTwnGJ4fFBQfzuJgpHVpfKBKaC9b8B16

Resource Books:

52 Weeks of Writing

https://amzn.to/33sESxd

Self-Help Sucks

https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp and Naughty Netherworld Press.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Come check out Readers Roost, the online book store featuring works by indie and small press authors. Discover your next great read at the Roost! It's the link you need when you wanna read.

https://bit.ly/ReadersRoost

Buy me a coffee

http://bit.ly/NNPCoffee

Or buy me a coffee here

http://bit.ly/NNPKOFI

Join me on Patreon!

Subscribe for as little as $1 per month.

http://bit.ly/NNPPatreon

Get the latest literary happenings and slices of life in your inbox!

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Abra-Ca-Duh, I Answered an Old Question

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Note: I am combining the questions from the Open Book Blog Hop with today's entry in my 30-day log that I'm creating by working through Self-Help Sucks by Tony Blankenship. https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

I just realized that this was an old blog hop. I'll post my answers here anyway.

Day 19

17 September 2021

Spirit of the Universe, please set aside everything I think I know about myself, about my story, about my need for validation, and especially about you, Universe, so that I may have an open mind and a new experience with myself, with my story, with my need for validation, and with you, Universe. Please help me to see the truth. Amen.

I am having trouble remaining consistent with this project. I’ve noticed that the middle of the month tends to be an absolute fucking black hole. A whole bunch of things seem to hit in the middle of the month. Perhaps the beginning of the month starts out hopeful, and at the end of the month I feel like, “well, thank fuck that shit’s over with.” It’s always the middle when I have emotional collapses because I feel overwhelmed.

I’m going to tie this entry with the question for the Open Book Blog Hop.

https://daryldevore.blogspot.com/2021/08/my-inagural-visit-to-openbook-blog-hop.html

However, rather than share it on either the Naughty Netherworld Press blog

https://bit.ly/NaughtyNetherworldPress

or Readers Roost

https://bit.ly/ReadersRoost

I am sharing the answer at the Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp.

https://bit.ly/CCCCBlogger

Here are the questions:

What’s something you look forward to as you age? And what do you miss from your youth?

And here are the answers.

The thing I was looking forward to as I aged already happened.

Menopause.

I had 40 years of periods from hell. I had a relatively easy menopause starting at age 52. I never had the full-on blast furnace hot flashes that some women describe. I had what are known as ember flashes. These last longer, 20 to 30 minutes on average, but I felt warm rather than hot.

The only part of this experience that wasn’t so great was the post-menopausal bleeding that I experienced. 2018 was the year that revolved around my plumbing, and I didn’t enjoy it one single bit. A D&C revealed that I have simple hyperplasia with normal cells and a uterus full of tiny fibroids.

This condition presents with a 1.6% increased chance that I will eventually develop endometrial cancer, as opposed to a woman who has no endometrial hyperplasia. For that small an increase, I opted not to have a hysterectomy. If I had presented with complex hyperplasia or abnormal cells, the increased chance of developing endometrial cancer rises to 36%, and with both factors, the chance increases to 50%. If any of these scenarios had been the case, I would have had a hysterectomy.

I will have a hysterectomy if there is ever a compelling reason for me to have a D&C again. It felt like someone went up in my business with a cheese grater. I’m not using my uterus, so if I must suffer the indignities of invasive procedures, at this point I’d opt to have the damn thing removed and be done with it rather than enduring another cheese grater incident.

In any case, I think I’ve enjoyed what I was looking forward to with aging: the end to miserable menstruation. My periods were always painful and heavy to the point of hemorrhage. I’m glad to be done with them. As far as the rest of the aging process, maybe I can look forward to becoming even more of a curmudgeon while giving ever fewer fucks. Other than that, I’m afraid it sounds like more aches, pains, and things breaking down. Yay? Nay!

What do I miss from my youth?

That feeling of starry-eyed hope.

At this point, I’m too god damn jaded to ever feel that again without some sort of significant win. I’d have to get The Big One, and to be honest, I’m not particularly hopeful about that transpiring.

Sorry if my honesty is a bummer, but I prefer to tell it like it is.

Ornery Owl has Spoken.

Dear Divine Spirit of the Universe, please help me to keep learning and growing at every age.

 

Ornery Owl

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors