TERMINATOR COMETMy mom called me again the other night just before midnight. She does a couple of times a week. And that’s another reason I’m getting out of here. No wonder I lived at the far end of the country for the last 35 years. New Jersey no less. How many people flee to New Jersey to get away from their mother?
She lived in Iowa so l first ran to Arizona. Then she moved to Arizona and I moved to Nebraska. She moved to Texas and I went to California. She went to Kentucky and I went to New Jersey. Cause and effect. If she got closer than 500 miles I was out of there. Then I wound up in Kentucky too.
Around midnight she called again to tell me who was on the Art Bell Show on radio that night. I never should have answered the phone. As I understand it, her being an old Democrat and all, there is a certain hierarchy in the universe consisting of John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, God and Art Bell. Whatever is said on the Art Bell show is gospel truth.
Every 20th call from her I turn on the radio in case someone other than a nut case is on. So she calls the other night and says someone Art really trusts is on and I have to listen. Sure mom, I got nothing better to do. Seems Art has some guy on talking about the dreaded Terminator Comet.
Now I follow comet sighting. Hell, I follow all kinds of potential disasters. Hurricanes, floods, monsoons, tornadoes, earthquakes. You name it I track it. Where would I have been without the internet. Been attracted to disasters since I chased fire engines as a kid. Come to think of it, I needed the preparation. My life was a disaster ever since.
There were tornadoes. Three homes where I lived in three different states were hit by them. Could that happen to anyone but a disaster? Even stood in a parking lot watching as a tornado roared over my head and smashed into downtown Nashville. Worked the sandbag lines during flooding on the Mississippi River. Caught in floods and earthquakes in California. Blizzards in Nebraska. Hurricanes in New Jersey. You name it, it found me.
I was an expert, a Disaster Master. And I’d never heard of the Terminator Comet. So I listened to Art that night. Seems his guest was my kind of person. Nuts. The guy said the Terminator Comet was headed right toward Earth and the government didn’t tell us. It was supposed to hit November 7. Today is November 20.
Then he posed the ultimate dilemma. He said it actually did hit Earth nearly two weeks ago. Since no one but the military knew, there was no warning. And when it hit, it was a giant comet remember, everyone was killed instantly. It happened so suddenly the entire human race died simultaneously. Imagine that.
If I believe him. I’m dead already. Ending it now would be redundant. And if we all died instantly, no one had a chance to think about their life after death. So whatever their thoughts were prior to death, and whatever their life was at the time of the comet, that’s where they remained after death. Everyone dies and nothing changes.
What the hell kind of a deal is that? You remember being killed by the Terminator Comet last November 7? Take my word for it, you wouldn’t. So we either solved the mystery of death and now know nothing changes when you die, or the guy is full of shit. I lean toward the latter. Beamish would have told me if I was dead.
Don’t think I’ll be answering the phone at night anymore.
LOOKING GLASSES
Look through someone’s glasses at this world we call our home
Put yourself in their head and then let your mind just roam
You see a view you could not share where you were once before
The window now will take the place of where you saw a door
THE PHONE CALLGot trapped into answering the phone tonight. Circumstances beyond my control. Had pretty much given up answering the phone. No one calls, at least not for me. Get several calls a day for the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association. Phone company gave their old number to me.
So I get calls all times of the day and night asking about breeding horses. Was fascinated at first. Then it started to get to me. People plotting which mares to breed with which stallion. Bad as an arranged marriage. Guess the horses didn’t care though.
So I quit answering the damn phone. Let the machine take a message. But I got trapped. My brother-in-law, we dubbed him the Rasta Man, was getting ready to leave for a trip to the Bahamas to help rebuild a home after the hurricanes hit. I had made my first trip to the Bahamas earlier this year for my sister’s wedding. Then the islands get hit by the first hurricane in a century after I leave. Karma.
Even though he was just going to help out a friend, foreign countries don’t take kindly to foreigners coming in and taking work away from the locals. But there aren’t any skilled carpenters and master builders like the Rasta Man in the Bahamas. So he gets a call from a friend on the islands warning him the Bahaman Immigration people were not going to allow him back in the country to work.
Now that scared the holy shit out of him. He was there a few weeks earlier and the rebuilding supplies didn’t arrive so he loafed on the beach for 2 weeks. No one saw him working. Yet they report him just when the supplies arrive and he is returning. Guess some local had told the authorities he was coming back to work. Finally his friend convinced him to go, that he wouldn’t be arrested and deported or jailed.
I told him if he was arrested he’d spend the end of the millennium in the Bermuda Triangle. He was scheduled to return one week before New Years. Knowing his luck he’d be locked in jail as an 18 foot tidal surge came boring down on the place. That just happened a few weeks earlier. But I told him he also might just be there for the raising of Atlantis. He ignored me and asked me to answer the phone for the next few days, in case he needed to get out of jail.
That’s how I got trapped into answering the phone, and getting THE PHONE CALL. It was my mother again. Complaining at first how I never answered my phone. Of course not. Then the conversation took a decided sinister mood. She blasted me for not taking her to the store shopping. Hell, I don’t even go shopping.
And then, she told me about the airplane contrails in the sky, crisscross patterns like trails of billowing cotton stretched as far as you could see to the east of town. Next thing I knew she told me about the black stuff that was all over her apartment. She said it was like a shredded, black, plastic, garbage bag. Little pieces were all over everything.
Then a stupid question came out of my mouth. I asked her where it came from. She said they were dropping it from the planes. It was a chemical concealed in the harmless looking puff balls they left across the sky. Seems the government was poisoning us. Art Bell told her.
I asked if it might be normal air pollution. With Indiana and Ohio to the north of Kentucky, there were plenty of sources of industrial waste. But she insisted they were big chunks. Too big for air pollution. So Art Bell said the government was bombarding us with poisonous chemicals from airplanes.
I told her I usually found evidence of pollution on my car, because it was white. She found hers inside the apartment. Imagine that, the government bombarding the inside of my mother’s apartment with shredded, black, plastic, garbage bags covered with deadly chemicals. She didn’t know if it was on her car too, she hadn’t been outside.
Finally I pointed out that the winds were blowing to the east. If she saw the contrails were east of town, the chemicals would have blown the other direction. How did they manage to blow straight into the wind? Why was the poisoning our problem and not West Virginia’s? Stumped her on that one. So she ignored the question.
NOTHING VENTURED NOTHING GAINED
The time it is today
we can’t wait until tomorrow
the things we have to say
may get lost in time we’ve borrowed
So live today like it’s your last
forget tomorrow and the past
don’t hang on to what is not
or think of what you haven’t got
Don’t say it might have been
THE SECOND PHONE CALL
But even THE PHONE CALL paled in comparison to THE SECOND PHONE CALL. From the Ex. First time I’d heard from her since weeks earlier when I was declared Satan. Seems she had e-mailed me and felt it necessary to explain things. That was the second mistake that night, answering the phone again.
First she gave me a thumbnail overview of how I destroyed her life, her family’s life, her ex-husband’s life, a couple of psychics, boyfriends, and on and on and on. I was accused of many, many other things as well. And then I was accused of driving her into the arms of her new boyfriend, which she had just dumped.
I was confused. She was dating him before our last encounter weeks ago. So she gave me a detailed explanation that she was vulnerable, and he moved in to protect her. She really liked someone saying he loved her and wanting to do everything for her. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, for the next couple of weeks. Finally he was literally camped out in her driveway, I guess waiting to get me when I came after her.
He was now getting pushy with her. Demanding she go with him to Atlanta for Christmas to meet his parents, then on to Florida with him for a cozy New Years. That’s not even the best part of it. After she had to drive him out of her driveway, she said she felt real sorry for him because she hurt him. She couldn’t love him back. It was my fault, I had ruined her attitude about men.
Who the hell am I? Dear Abby? I told her I didn’t think it was appropriate for her to discuss her boyfriend problems with me, after all I am Satan. Maybe she should call her psychic hotline for help. They worked wonders with our relationship. Maybe she will.
So then she said her brother-in-law, a cop, told her to get out of town because I was the unabomber. No transition in the conversation. From hurting her boyfriend to the mad bomber. Here I thought the unabomber was in jail. Guess that’s how versatile Satan can be.
And the next morning she was moving back to Illinois. Selling her house and moving. Oh yes, moving back to her old house with her ex-husband and kids. I told her there was a good chance the move might also hurt her new boyfriend, not to mention how odd the entire concept of moving back in with her recently divorced ex-husband might appear. But I was sure she was doing the right thing.
I still had difficulty finding out what I had to do with all this. Then found out I had traumatized her daughter, she couldn’t even go to school, so they had to leave town. It had been weeks since I had seen or talked to her daughter and the last time we were together I had taken them out for a nice dinner. She didn’t seem too threatened then.
So she explained how I did it. It was the psychic that cleared things up. She and her daughter were talking to the psychic about her revelations of how much a part of the dark side I was. At least that was the psychic consensus after several hours of discussion. No one even bothered to talk to me about it. And I couldn’t very well go over and argue my defense. The sniper in the driveway would have picked me off. The one she just threw out.
The psychic got the daughter terrified with her descriptions of the danger they were in, so much that the poor kid couldn’t go to school anymore. Of course, she had already been warned by the school about too many absences, and the new threat did result in unlimited time for e-mail and television. It was great. The kid gets constant TV and the internet with no homework, the Ex gets her horseman parked outside protecting her, and I get trashed and blamed for everything,
There was more, lots more. But it only deteriorated from there. Made me wonder what the purpose of the call was in the first place. Hell, I was no threat. She was never alone long enough for me to get close to her. Guys were even camped out in her driveway to take care of her every need. Not to mention a visit by her ex-husband.
That’s it for answering the damn phone. I’m done. So what if my brother-in-law sits in jail in the Bahamas. Answering the phone only gets me into bigger problems.
DREAMS THAT CANNOT BE
Shadows on the wall are chasing dreams that cannot be
trying to bring them home again so that my eyes might see
happiness has come so close but slipped right through my grasp
when love was handed out it seems I passed
So now I’m taking memories I’ve borrowed from my dreams
some memories that cannot be and ones I’ve never seen
believing that I’ll find myself when after I’ve been there
when it’s too late to capture whatever’s out somewhere
So I will go on searching for those dreams that cannot be
living in my memory of times I did not see
wondering if this journey that I’m on will reach an end
hoping that before I’m gone my broken heart will mend
THE SUICIDE
Yet another chapter in the mother story. My mother is old, like 80 something. Long ago I gave up training her. But she still insists on tormenting me to my or her grave, whichever comes first. A few years back when she was having a rough time she used to threaten suicide. I would send her tips on how to do it right. Even sent her a Dr. Kervokian gift certificate one Christmas. It shut her up for a while.
So yesterday she has a friend call me to tell me they just set fire to mom’s kitchen. Seems a plastic lid was stuck to the bottom of a pizza pan they were cooking and the damn thing went up in flames. Of course they didn’t know the lid was stuck there. They both checked the oven before cooking since my mom stored all kids of shit in there. She put three pans under the pizza. Not one, but three. And the lid was stuck between the bottom two. I discovered what was left of the lid later when I inspected the scene.
They felt the fire was some kind of mystical experience. Perhaps a sign of the end times I guess. Didn’t remember reading anything about mom’s pizza fire in Nostradamus, or Revelations, or even from the Hopi Indians. When they called they said the toxic smell of plastic was a bit overpowering so I told them I would meet them for coffee while the smoke cleared, then go check it out. They wanted to come over to my place but that wasn’t going to happen.
At a coffee shop they told me how it was like being in the twilight zone. (Here I thought their every minute was like living in the Twilight Zone). Mom whispered to me that perhaps some evil force was trying to stop them from getting out the word about Mary. Now that threw me. My sister was named Mary, but it couldn’t be her. So I asked which Mary they were promoting this week.
The friend rather haughtily says, “well Mary Magdalene of course,” as if I should know that. “You mean the hooker from the Bible?” I asked. She didn’t like my attitude. “And what was it”, I asked, “that the Devil would object to in you discussing Biblical hookers with people? If anything I would think the old boy would be pleased.”
Ignoring me, the friend related a vision she had in California when this Mary came to her. I asked what Mary did or told her and she said nothing, just appeared. I asked how that constituted spiritual insight. She didn’t know. But she had seen this particular Mary and it may or may not have changed her life. I said perhaps there was another reason a hooker came to you in your visions. Again she didn’t like the attitude.
After explaining to her that I preferred to focus on the other Biblical Mary, the Virgin one, we changed the subject. So mom tells me, in front of her friend, how her friend is contemplating suicide. I noted that she certainly came to an authority. Hell, mom has been threatening suicide for the past couple of decades.
Her friend was going to use the stove. She was going to lay down with her dog and cat, turn on the gas, and just end it all. I thought that was reasonable, if the animals had agreed to share her plight. Problem was her gas had been turned off. Same with the electric and phone. I gave her a better idea. Just get in her old smoke belching Mercedes in the garage and take the final ride. The way that car spit out fumes it would be over in no time. Didn’t even need a hose. Less mess.
She said life was hopeless. After raising a family she had no idea why she was here, what purpose she was meant to serve. I asked what made her think she had any purpose. Why do people always think everyone has a purpose? Do we really think we are that special? Seems she didn’t like that advice either. No wonder I don’t have a radio show offering personal counseling, Dr. Laurel Hardy.
In the end I told them I didn’t think the Devil was responsible for the plastic lid melting and catching fire in the oven. I mean I would have known. And I could see no good reason for Satan to want to harm that pizza. And I didn’t think a kitchen fire was necessarily a sign of the End Times from God. As to what any of this had to do with that Mary, I hadn’t a clue. Besides, if mom’s friend was going to commit suicide the fire might just have been a welcome home card.
I went back home to my sanctuary. It’s not safe anywhere anymore. I’m returning to my old ways. From now on I’m just sending out Dr. Kervorkian gift certificates. No more crisis intervention.
BRIEFCASE BLUES
Sitting in the airport waiting
while the world is dissipating
endless hopes and endless dreams
times that I have never seen
And reaching back to where I was
can’t hang on got no cause
a mind with nothing left to think
eyes that stare, and never blink
So please let me off this journey leading to no end
when I get to where I want I start it all again
I’ve been down before and I know just where I’ll be
please let me off, all I’m asking’s to be free
Cause nothing’s all that’s left of me
a broken shell of what would be
as I travel to no where
shades of darkness fill the air
and reaching back to where I was
can’t hang on I got no cause
a mind with nothing left to think
eyes that stare, and never blink
So please let me off this journey leading to no end
when I get to where I want I start it all again
I’ve been down before and I know just where I’ll be
please let me off, all I’m asking’s to be free
