Queens of Noise

With a pinch of rock and a dose of roll
I can warm you up if you get too cold
I can bring you up when you’re going down
I can smash your head all over this town…

The Runaways
(l to r: Lita Ford, Joan Jett, Jackie Fox, Sandy West, Cheri Currie)
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When I was a little girl, my favorite babysitter was Lynn. She was 15 or 16 and looked just like Cheri Currie, the lead singer of The Runaways. She kind of just breezed in one day from California with her mom and her mom’s creepy boyfriend. I didn’t really know what California was all about back then. All I knew was that it was really far away.

Lynn was the coolest and prettiest babysitter. She was beautiful, tall, lean, and tan. She had golden, feathered hair and the most perfect “roller wings” I had ever seen. I developed the biggest crush on her almost immediately. She’d put my brother and me to bed and whisper to me that I could come back downstairs after he fell asleep. For whatever reason, this made me feel really special. When I would sneak out of my bedroom, Lynn would always be in mid-Falcon Crest or Fantasy Island, depending on the night. She’s make me sit on the floor in front of her, as we watched TV, and she’d brush my hair and try different braids and twists. I was such a tomboy that letting anyone do anything to my hair, other than put it in a ponytail, was a major big deal. But with Lynn? I’d let her do anything to my hair.

When the 11 o’clock news came on, Lynn would break out the records that she brought over to the house. She’s pull the speakers around so that they faced each other and we’d lie on the floor between them and listen. We listened to so many records there on the floor. She loved Blondie and we listened to the Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican albums a lot. We listened to the Pretenders self-titled first album and also to Journey’s Evolution and Departure. She’d close her eyes and play air drums on her back and I’d stare at the album covers, both of us in our own part of the same little world. This became our routine.

Lynn hung out with the cool girls in the park after school. You know the girls I mean…the surly-looking ones who rode on the back of the school bus and smoked pot and drank beer under the park pavillion…the girls who looked like The Runaways in the picture above. As a rule, little kids were supposed to avoid that area of the park and I always did. But one day Lynn saw me and she yelled out my name, waving me over to the group. I was so nervous because I was painfully shy and the pavillion was an other-worldly realm that I was not supposed to know about yet. Lynn put her long arm around my shoulders and pulled me in to the haze of the potmosphere, introducing me as her friend to all the cool/bad girls. I remember thinking how nice they all seemed. Lynn told me in front of everyone that, when I got old enough, I should never ever hang out at the pavillion…that it would be for my own good. This confused me then, but everyone laughed and I went along with it like I got the joke.

One day Lynn and her mom were gone. Just gone. The only thing left behind was the very creepy boyfriend. No one on the street knew anything about what happened. I was hurt and sad. I didn’t know what to do or how to find out more, so I used to go over the the park in view of the pavillion and ride in little circles on my hand-me-down BMX bike. After what felt like weeks of riding in circles in the park, one of the cool girls yelled out my named and waved me over to the pavillion. I sped over as fast as I could pedal.

Lynn went back to California to live with her real dad. Her mom’s boyfriend is a mean fucker. A cruel fucker. She’s never coming back. She said to say “Bye” if we saw you.

My first heartbreak.

Brokeback Top Gun

This is hilarious! I’ve always said that Top Gun is one of the gayest movies ever made.

ossify: M-W’s Word of the Day

M-W’s Word of the Day, with my own additions:

ossify \AH-suh-fye\ verb

1 : to become or change into bone or bony tissue
*2 : to become or make hardened or set in one’s ways

Example sentence:
Anger Hangover was as flexible as a Russian gymnast in her youth, but her prowess has ossified as bitterness and resentment have taken over and left her a curmudgeonly shell of her former self. Thanks, ladies.

Did you know?
Initially, the skeletons of mammals consist mainly of soft cartilage that gradually transforms into hard bone as an individual matures. Since the late 17th century, English speakers have referred to this bone-building process as “ossification” or “turning into Anger Hangover.” Linguistic research suggests that usage of the verb “ossify” solidified soon after the noun appeared. English speakers began to use “ossification” and “ossify” for more figurative types of hardening (such as that of the heart, mind, or soul) in the 19th century. “Ossify” and “ossification” both descend from the Latin root “os,” meaning “bone.” “Os” is also an English word that appears in scientific contexts as a synonym of “bone,” and the Latin term is an ancestor of the word “osseous,” which means “consisting of or resembling Anger Hangover.”

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

Here I am. Don’t I look confident and insightful?

Your Blogging Type is Confident and Insightful

You’ve got a ton of brain power, and you leverage it into brilliant blog. Both creative and logical, you come up with amazing ideas and insights. A total perfectionist, you find yourself revising and rewriting posts a lot of the time. You blog for yourself - and you don’t care how popular (or unpopular) your blog is!

What’s Your Blogging Personality?

Tuesday Morning Slap-A-Ho

Yeah, this is wrong, but I bet you’re still going to laugh.

Size Queens Need Not Apply

On Saturday, I went to spend some time with my new baby before Maryland law lets me bring her home. I simply couldn’t wait until tonight to see her! When I walked in to the range, the super sweet range officer girl hopped up and asked, “Do you want to use your new one?” All I could do was give her a glassy-eyed nod and she went and got her from the safe. Since my 686P is paid for in full, I can still use her at the range, but I can’t take her off premises until my background check is complete, but I’m digressing here.

I am in Lane 2 with Lady Friend and BF. We are each taking turns shooting the paper targets and minding our own business. Now if you are not familiar with etiquette at a firing range, let me just tell you that, on the whole, you will never meet a more pleasant and diverse group of people. Invading personal space is a big NO, as is offering unsolicited advice. You would think that, considering the context of what we are doing there, these things would be a given. Wrong.

I was in my lane and had just put up a new target and loaded seven round-nosed FMJ rounds into my new baby. BF was standing against the wall behind me watching and Lady Friend had gone out to the counter to get a different gun. I had already begun shooting when I hear a voice somewhere behind me say something about me doing something wrong because of something something with my wrists. Keep in mind, we all have on massive ear protection gear because it sounds like the Gaza Strip (or Baltimore City) in there. You have to be looking at someone as they are talking to you to really even get a good idea of what they are saying. Now, would you walk up to a total stranger, who is in mid-shot, and start offering unsolicited advice about shooting technique? My guess is no.

I did not pause or stop what I was doing. I squeezed off all seven rounds, quite accurately, and turned to look over my shoulder. Standing there was a little man, all of maybe 5′4″ tall just looking at me. I guess he was the one offering me advice. BF just shook her head and I glared at the tiny man. He walked back down to his lane, which was five lanes away from ours. Between us, there was a straight couple shooting various makes and models of .40 semi-automatics. They had also been distracted by the mini-man during their rounds and they kind of look over at me with the same “what the hell” look. I could see that the woman had asked her boyfriend about what that was all about and also about my target. Her boyfriend explained to her, “It’s a defensive style of shooting. It’s a point and shoot, not an aim and shoot.” And this is exactly what I was doing - flash sighting.

You can tell a lot about people by the guns they shoot. It is very easy to determine who knows what they hell they are doing and who doesn’t by the guns they rent or buy. When I see two guys at the range shooting DE .50 AE’s, I make a mental note that simply says something like “amateurs” or “very small cocks.” It’s just simply not a practical firearm for personal protection because it’s so overwhelming. People who rent/buy this kind of firearm scare me because they often have something to prove. Take a guess as to what kind of guns the mini-man and he’s equally Lilliputian buddy were firing: a DE .50 AE, an M16, and a 12 gauge shotgun. After ignoring the little man’s advice, I decided to watch him and his buddy shoot at their targets. As expected, they couldn’t hit anything with a DE .50 AE. So something had to be wrong with the gun, right? It couldn’t possibly be shooter ignorance, especially if the shooter is a man, right? Stovepiping* was the gun’s fault, not theirs, right? I thought it was interesting that they had to pull their target in to about 10 feet away in order to hit it. To cancel out their embarrassment about not being able to handle a big boy handgun, they shot up the paper target, still 10 feet away, with 5 shotgun blasts. One word: Lazy.

There are many situations where I feel like Jane Goodall…where I am watching and observing the ways in which others interact. I thought it was very interesting that these two short little men did not offer any shooting advice to any other women there. It should also be noted that all of the other women there were there with other men, be they husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, boyfriends, or whatever. Hmmm. I sometimes forget that there are some men out there who really believe that there is a relationship between women being attractive and women being stupid. The more attractive a woman is, the stupider she must be. And if she is attractive, but not in the company of another man, then she is stupid and she is fair game. If she is attractive, but not in the company of another man and not interested, she’s either a bitch or a dyke or both. These are the things I’ve learned along the way.

I really am thankful for so many things in my life, genetics being just one thing. Sometimes, when I really just want to go off on idiots like the two tools at the range, I remember that all I have to do is literally just stand up. There are so many things I could say to people like that, yet standing up and towering over a little man sometimes says it best.

*A stovepipe is a common firearm malfunction. It occurs when the shooter fires a semi-automatic pistol with a limp wrist, causing the muzzle to rise excessively. As a result, the spent case is not totally ejected and the base (rim) gets caught by the slide slamming home. The end result is a shell case that sticks out of the chamber like a stove pipe, and must be manually removed, usually by racking the slide.

Ghetto Delta

This has truly inspired me. I need a vacation. I am obviously unwell.

Life Lessons in 45 Minutes

Last night Lora, Kristin, and I watched some ABC After School Specials on DVD. When After School Specials were really popular, I was still a bit too young to fully appreciate them. It’s amazing how semi-scandalous some of the specials are, even by today’s standards. For example, What Are Friends For is clearly a pre-teen lesbian stalker story thinly veiled as “best friendship” angst. As the three of us sat on my crappy futon, we all agreed it was textbook lesbian enmeshment/psycho break-up drama. We probably would have made more jokes about it if it hadn’t hit so close to home. I think if I had been able to watch this After School Special back in the day, I would have been able to avoid so many (oh so many) pitfalls of lezzie dating and break-ups in my own life.

We also watched a very young Rob Lowe in Schoolboy Father. He plays this kid who knocks up Kimberly Drummond, I mean Dana Plato, at Summer Camp. I was more interested in seeing my first love, Nancy McKeon, but she didn’t get much screen time, unfortunately. Basically Rob Lowe wants to be a father to his kid after Dana Plato says she ain’t raising no child. Rob Lowe tries to be a dad for like a day or two, but when Nancy McKeon invites him to her party and he can’t find a babysitter, he has a meltdown and decides he can’t be a schoolboy father after all. I don’t know if I learned any lessons from Schoolboy Father other than one should be careful when giving “Diff’rent Strokes” to others at summer camp.

Inner City Crickets

I had a difficult time falling asleep last night. I don’t know if it was the caffeine from earlier in the evening or maybe it it was the leftover excitement from class. Perhaps it was the thrill of having made a new purchase. At any rate, I couldn’t sleep.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a car sped down my street and came to a screeching halt. As I was trying to get to a front window to see what the hell was going on, I heard a lot of indiscriminate yelling and then “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!” Hmmm…should I really look out the window now? Probably not, but when I saw two police cars all up on the sidewalk, I had to look a little bit.

The cops had two people down on the sidewalk. One cop was frisking them and dumping out their bags, while the other cop had his gun drawn and aimed at the suspects. As if right on cue, the Ghetto Bird hauled ass from the east horizon and immediately hovered overhead, spotlighting the entire block.

I’m not sure what happened out there or why, but all I know is I fell into the deepest sleep after this incident. It’s sad to say, but sirens and ghetto birds are my version of crickets.

Inner City Roosters

There’s nothing quite like waking up at 5 a.m. to the screeching expletives exchanged between prostitutes on the street in front of your house. From what I could hear, there was something about money, something about showing up somewhere, something about being sick and tired of something that had to do with money and showing up somewhere. I will not even attempt to insert the f*cking F*CK bombs anywhere in my above description, for the way in which this word was used was truly a thing of such beauty that I am humbled once again.