I'm an excellent driver

I listened to a radio show from 1952. It was a space thriller set in the future. 1987.

That was twenty-five years ago. 1987. The year I went to France, fell in love, came home, met my future husband, made choices that altered lives. If you could boil down a life, it was probably my most significant year.

In an instant, I became obsessed with the passage of time. I started timestamping everything.

MathMan and I have been living together twenty-four years. It's been thirty years since I got my driver's license. I haven't seen my family in two years. It's been (mumble, mumble) since I wore a size 8, fourteen years since I was pregnant for the last time, six years since I started blogging, three years since we moved into this house, almost five years since I last colored my hair, going on twenty-two years since I've seen Ethan if you don't count Skyping, three years since my 25th high school class reunion, nine months since I've been in Chicago, five years since I lost my head, twenty-three years since I graduated from I.U., three years since I've been on an airplane, fourteen years since Seinfeld went off the air, too long since I've seen some of my friends,  two years since I began working on the now fallow novel, six months since I've had a drink, six months since I started taking the anti-Ds, eleven weeks since I started working.....

MathMan says sometimes it's like living with Rainman. With boobs. And slightly better social skills. Read:  I can, and often do, make eye contact. And I'm an excellent driver.

My husband tries to engage me in conversation about Calculus and I want to talk about how Nabisco has gotten freakin' stingy with the cream in the Oreos. No, really. I swear the cream used to be thicker and it reached almost to the edges. Now? It's a shrinking circle of delicious fat and sugar. Life is so unfair.

More idiot than savant, I became so enthralled with our past that I created a Spotify playlist so I can immerse myself in the early 1990s while I work. Pathetic? Perhaps. But so many of my mistakes were ahead of me, you know? The naivete of potential and a seemingly endless future are enough some days. Enough is nice.

Six days in a hotel with airline pilots brought my six months without a drink to a swift and bubbly end. It isn't so much that they're hard to be around - they're actually quite delightful even when they're busy making sausage.

See, each night they host a hospitality suite with a well-stocked bar. Tough gig, right?

In light of that stifling pressure, my alcohol fast dove head first into a sparkling glass of Prosecco. Chloe gets some of the blame, too. She joined me at the hotel for the evening and we finally had a drink together. Strange on one hand, really cool on another. Daughter peer pressure. Having her holler Chug! Chug! Chug! and make chicken noises at me was too much for me to resist.

And then I realized that Chloe is closer in age to some of my colleagues than I am. Excuse me while I schedule a Botox treatment.


I was just sitting at the kitchen table having lunch with my colleagues at my first real job. They were telling me about how cool it was to be post-menopausal. Sex without consequences! I listened politely, trying to keep the horror from showing on my face. That was 1990 when the idea of being their age (over 45!) was as foreign to me as the idea that I would one day resort to eating Dominos Pizza because it was so easy to order online.

There was a time when I would have eaten liver before I'd touch a Domino's Pizza because the founder was such an anti-reproductive rights bumblenut.

Time has a way of making us reluctant believers, hypocrites, sinners against ourselves.

By Friday night I'd taught my favorite bartender how to make a Monaco, relearned the secrets for warding off a hangover and embraced my inner beer drinker. There may have been karaoke, hijinks at Zocalo (try the guac), my successfully wheedling the stories of how they got their nicknames out of a few pilots, and cigars. However, I'm bound by a confidentiality statement so....

The good news is that the days spent in the hotel were productive. The bad news is that alcohol is still made up of delicious, empty calories, still likely to cause mild silliness and will definitely alter the passage of time if you consume enough of it.

Which brings me back to the beginning.

Imagine 1987 as the future and not the shrinking image in the rearview mirror. What do you see?

The One Where I Discuss Unruly Members of Congress

Recently, I was unfriended on Facebook by someone from my hometown because I used the proper term for the male genitals in a blog post. Apparently, that word offends some people, especially when used by liberals who are the only people who use that term according to the person who unfriended me. It's all such a silly thing, but now I know that I should warn people before they go reading this stuff and stinging their eyes with bad words. So consider yourself warned. Don't read this post if you are:
1. Under the age of 18
2. Related to me and therefore embarrassed by me and want to avoid dying of shame in your chair right now
3. Offended by words and phrases in general and by those of a somewhat sexual nature specifically
4. At work

Oh dear lord, this business about Anthony Weiner's wiener is making me crazy. How can I not address this hard issue? I am a fan of penis and have conducted extensive studies so it seems wrong to remain silent while the world is talking about this particular Member of Congress. Of course, I have my penis preferences regarding length, girth, curvature, cut, color and ability, but let's just say I haven't really seen a penis that would upset me to the point of demanding that every news organization run hour long specials on it. Well, unless you count that unfortunate situation involving Anthony Kiedis back in 1995. I contend it was his fault for wearing nothing but a sock, but the conflicting accounts make speaking about it with any certitude difficult.

So while I've been busy driving kids around trying to find someone to buy them for a decent price and brandishing fistfuls of coupons at the grocery store cashier, I gather the political media and otherwise has gotten its rocks off via close examination of this photo.

And I'm all - we're in three wars, the debt ceiling dropping chunks of plaster on Wall Street has Chicken Little squawking all over the box, fourteen gabillion people are out of work or underemployed, aliens and tornadoes are attacking the United States, kids across the nation are singing or are preparing to sing the Alice Cooper standard and it was 95 degrees at 11:19 a.m. today and you're enjoying a freak out over this allegedly tweeted photo of a dingler? Once again, our media uses all its resources to fail us in our quest for the Truth. Even a little Truth.

Go ahead and point and laugh, but make a Federal case out of it? Absurd. It's a penis. Cock. Johnson. Willie. Member. Summer Sausage. Tallywhacker. Schlong, Dong. Dick. Choad. Rod. Pickle. Wang. Prick. Chubby. Junk. The One-Eyed Wonder Worm (thank you, George Carlin).

I know. If the media is still after this story because Rep. Weiner has said too much or said not enough, then there must be something there, right? Well, certainly. There's something there and it's dressed to the left and shyly erect just the way I like my emailed and tweeted wiener. I mean, seriously, I don't mind a photo when done right and this one is minimally artistic, draped and pointing away from the camera instead of staring at you with that one demanding eye.

But is this a big deal? Why?

Oh, I hear Andrew Breitbart, of the Truth Challenged Breitbarts, is involved. A friend of his uncle's neighbor's poodle saw the Wiener tweet and alerted the ever vigilant Andy B who undoubtedly clicked the link to see the photo and, instead of winking back as required by the International Penis Protocol, shrieked like a little girl (who should never be exposed to a man's penis, FYI), clutched his pearls and made straight for CNN to report it before it could ruin economies and bring down Middle Eastern Dicktators.

Such sacrifice for his nation. As an antidote, I've been tweeting photos of my vagina to Breitbart all afternoon. Lucky him, I beautified downtown this morning and I did most of my tweeting before god punished Georgia for electing Nathan Deal as Governor by putting the state under the cosmic broiler and oh my word, I never new labia could sweat. Gee, I hope Andrew B. doesn't faint or anything. I did my best to make things extra special employing a jaunty chapeau, the plastic mustache borrowed from Mr. Potato Head, and I even cracked open the new Vajazzling kit I'd been saving for a special occasion.

So why am I spending all these words on such nonsense? Well, because my brain is seriously fried from the heat, I'm tired of being all serious and grown up and shit and because I do, in fact, really like penis. Not to put too fine a point on it, but penises are fun! Exclamation point. I'd suggest all members of Congress swan through the halls of power stark naked all the time and thus we'll become desensitized to the idea of Congressional nudity and then we won't have to waste so much media time on such things, but then Congress is kind of like Hollywood for people who either never had it in the looks department or who have fucking given up and so that's a really bad, bad, bad idea.

In the meantime, I suppose we'll endure this scandal which just isn't as much fun as Republican sex scandals because theirs possess the added element of weepy hypocrisy. They're the ones who keep bringing up Family Values and all that other bullshit coded language which essentially means People Like Us. After this dies down, we'll move on to the next one.

In the meantime, I'm waiting to see if any eyerolling media "professional" will ask the right question that has eluded them all day. I mean, it's not that damn hard. It goes like this: "Representative Weiner, have you taken photos of your penis clad only in gray boxer briefs?"

And if he answers yes, I want him to know that I, too, follow him on Twitter. (@lisagolden)

In a Mood

Oh, she's got a bug up her ass. A burr under her saddle. A bee in her bonnet. She's been thinking again. It's a bad habit she really ought to break before she loses her some friends or gets her teeth knocked down her throat.

- Someone during/after reading this post

I've been thinking about all the people I'd like to hear shut up. I've been developing a mental list of the people from whom I'd enjoy nothing more than some pure, unadulterated silence. Not a peep. Not a sound. As a teacher at an elementary school said this morning "Your bottom lip should be touching your upper lip."

Like that.

Here's my list, along with some commentary because goodness knows I don't know how to be still. Hell, I'm struggling with being concise. Quiet is problematic. Silence? Wholly unachievable. Hear me shout it now. I am a hypocrite.

Labels aside, I still want to go days, weeks, months, years without hearing from or about the following:

Sarah Palin. Please. Tick a lock. It's embarrassing to see someone who just isn't that intelligent pontificate about things and suffer from a complete lack of self-awareness. Don't make us pity you. It diminishes us all. Have some respect for this nation and its people. Stop telling them that it's cool and awesome to be small-minded, mean-spirited and exclusionary. They believe you and that is not healthy. You - mouth - closed.

(Stop looking at me like that and put down that mirror. I'm very self-aware. My therapist says so.)

Anyone still joking or reporting about Tiger Woods' sex life. Sorry people, but cheap shots? It's been done to death. Sex scandals are funny? Maybe if you're in the seventh grade. Listen up - sex scandals are only truly funny when the person involved has been a sanctimonious twat about (drumroll) S-E-X involving other people. It's when the faux-moralists fall that the real humor begins. Then, by all means, laugh yourselves silly. I do.

As for the media that has jizzed itself exhausted over this? Time to wipe up and shut it. Story over.

My son. When he is on the xBox live, his mouth runs nonstop. And negatory. I will NOT come to the cold basement to listen to the French kids and attempt to translate.

Joe Lieberman. (Seriously, people of Connecticut, why?)

Anyone who doesn't think we need universal, single payer health care. Yeah, yeah, England, yeah, yeah, socialism, yeah, yeah, I got mine - screw you. Here's what I wish for you - a terrible illness - not deadly, only bad enough to make you wish you were dead. Follow that up quickly with the form-letter bad news that you can't afford the care or the cure because your private health insurance won't pay for it. Then let's hear you tell us again how having yours and fucking everyone else is so spectacular.

People who don't "believe" in climate change or that we greedy, resource gobbling humans don't have anything to do with it. Oh, really? I invite you, then, to come stand with me next to the big black candy mountain that fuels Plant Bowen. Watch as the baby-shit brown ribbon of noxious gasses forms and coagulates so that it can float south toward Atlanta. So you don't see the point in cleaning up our ways? Well, here, open wide. Let me stick this hunk of coal in your gaping maw so you can shut up and think about that.

The voices in my head. I hear you - failure, death, destruction, naked snow boarding, sex, drugs, rock and roll, chocolate, debt, pain, self-loathing, guilt, sedimentary rocks, Mad Magazine, and cookies. I hear you. If you don't clamp it, I will seek pharmaceutical duct tape for your mouths.

Sheeple of any stripe. Please. Close your mouth and try to use some critical thinking skills. You can't talk and think at the same time, obviously.

MathMan. Every time he tells me it's time to go the gym, I want him to shut up. What does he not understand about the fact that once I'm in and done for the day, that means I am done. Except, of course, he does run with his cute butt on the treadmill in front of me, so ...... nah, I still want him to shut up.

Whichever cat it is who continues to repeat meow at me even though I am in the process of putting the food right in front of their faces. I get it. You're hungry. Here's the food, now shut up and eat.

I have oh so many more, but MathMan is sitting here right now not shutting up and telling me it's time to go to the gym. I better go, because now I hear him muttering under his breath about cattle prod purchases.

Please feel free to tell me who you'd like to hear shut up. And you'd better not say me because (1) I will hunt you down and probe you ungently with MathMan's new cattleprod; and (2) Clearly, that's not true or you wouldn't come here and read this nonsense, silly.