Grandma De Voss Finds Some Old Movie Posters

Grandma De Voss was up in her attic again, cleaning. The last time she sent me some books. This time she found some old movie posters from the around the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. I thought they might look good on the loft wall.

Thanks Grandma!

The Air Vent

(This is fiction.)

I was 6, my brother was 10, and we had the whole house to ourselves. Grandma and Mom were at the restaurant getting it ready for the morning crowd. The crowd wasn’t very large, maybe 10 to 15 people at the most, but it was enough to keep the business alive. Those who came, came for the biscuits and gravy.  Grandma was known for her famous biscuits and gravy in at least a three county radius.

We would have about 4 hours in between being checked on through the day to fill with whatever adventures I would device for us to do. The restaurant was just a stone’s throw away from the house so we could not get to crazy.  My brother being the oldest was in charge of me, and I being of little attention span was in charge of figuring out what we were going to do that day. Luckily my brother was game for whatever I could come up with, even if that meant being Barbie’s best friend for an hour.

The house was old, with creaky wooden floors and yellowing wallpaper peeling at the corners. Grandma was frugal with the air conditioning, so the house would heat up slowly throughout the day. She seemed to have it down to a science when to pop the air conditioner on the give just enough relief to the dwellers as to not turn them into melted pools of human laziness. In the older houses the air vents were in the floors as oppose to the ceilings of modern structures. The air would kick on with a ticking noise, and then a grunt from the house as if it was so inconvenienced by the thought of cooling off it’s occupants.  Then with a strong whoosh the floor would blow sweet cooling relief strong enough (in a 6 year old’s mind) to float on to the heavens.

We would grab one of Grandma’s good top sheets from the bed whenever we hear the telltale ticking and run to the nearest vent. My brother and I would duck ourselves under the sheet, holding all four corners down between us as the air would start it’s travel from unknown origins of the inner house workings and into our sheet. The sheet would fill with air encasing us in some sort of air igloo. Our skin would goose bump with the cool air and I would watch the sheet rise as it filled. We had about 10 minutes to cool down and exchange stories in our air tent. My brother’s would always be about pirates or dragons or cars, typical boy stuff. Mine would be about princesses, my future jobs, and how to care and raise unicorns. We would listen to each other’s stories with faked interest if we had too. That was the number one rule of the air tent. No fighting. We couldn’t waste the time with fighting.

I loved the days of staying at my Grandma’s. It felt like we had a freedom there not afforded to most kids our age. I was allowed to let my imagination take over and fill our days with adventures and games.

When we got older, Grandma sold the restaurant when her old bones wouldn’t let her stir the batter to make those famous tri-county  biscuits anymore. My brother and I stopped playing in the air vents eventually. Now when we would visit Grandma we would sit at the dinning room table with the adults and listen to adult topics like changing car batteries, the weather, and stories of the restaurant regulars.

However, whenever the air would kick on in the house, I would look at my brother, and he at me, and we would smile.

Christmas Reflections 2012

As Christmas is over and wrapping paper and scattered toys are littered all over the floor, I turn on Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 to induce TV comas upon the children. This allows me to quietly reflect on this Christmas 2012:

1) I realize that I did not plan for any dinner on Christmas and with the stores being closed my choices are: 1) Chinese a la A Christmas Story or B) International House of Pancakes. IHOP wins as it does every year, for I forget about dinner every year.

2) No matter how much you clean up those little ties that bind the toys in their cardboard packaging, you will eventually step on a stray one with your bare feet.

3) The best, most expensive  Christmas gift you bestowed upon your children ends up not being their favorite.

4) Looking at the tree, now bare of presents and half leaning on it’s side from when the dog ran into it, while running from the children’s screams of delight, all I can think is: Damn, un-decorating it is worse than decorating it.

5) I wonder if Hanukkah is cheaper to celebrate…

6) Is a law that at least two Christmas ball ornaments must break a year, one by shattering and one by the top wire part coming loose?

7) Pumpkin explodes as a taste sensation at Halloween, yet Eggnog and Fruitcake have such mixed reviews during Christmas…

8) I really need to invent a retractable Christmas light system for houses, where with a press of the switch they flip back into the house for concealment until next year.

9) Any board game purchased will have at least two pieces missing by the end of the day.

10) Grandma and/or Grandpa get more inappropriate with each passing year.

Goodbye Christmas 2012, considering you were never suppose to happen in the first place. I guess it’s good I went ahead and spent money on my loved ones and didn’t bet on the Mayans. Imagine explaining to the children why Santa never came due to the impending Apocalypse which never came to be…

Stupid Mayans.

Randoms Pt 15

I’m doing the laundry, a chore I hate immensely. While my head was in the dryer I hear the Toddler call from the other room:

“Daddy!”

Me: “What?”

Toddler: “Grandma gave me a surprise yesterday…”

Me: “Oh really. What?”

Toddler: “Jesus!”

Me: “Oh. Okay. Wait, what did you say?”

Toddler: “I said Mommy gave me a surprise yesterday. Chuck-E-Cheese’s!”

Me: “Oh, okay. I’ve got to get my hearing checked.”

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Words of Wisdom From The Teenage Boy:

I’m going to get a tattoo of a shirt, so it looks like I’m wearing a shirt even when I’m not. You can’t go wrong with a shirt tattoo.

Me:

Except when you want to wear a different shirt…

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The Teenage girl is obsessed with a boy band called One Direction. She has been obsessed with them for a long time.

A really long time.

A really, really, really, long time.

So she was looking at her Twitter the other day and says this out loud,

“(One of the boys in the band) He has perfect collarbones and he is ruining them with tattoos. And he has perfect arms and he is ruining those with tattoos of random objects that are important.”

Wife: Like refrigerators and toasters?

Then she shows us a picture of his perfect collar bones.

And his arms.

Me: What the hell are perfect collarbones?

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I like to send random texts to my friends because I think it’s funny.

They…not so much.

Here are some recent messages:

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My Tips on Creative Writing

Here are my person tips on successfully creating content to fill a book, a blog, an essay, term paper, letter to Grandma, spam email, hate letter to Grandma, comic book, or any other writing medium you may need or come across.

Tip Number One:

Come up with a good idea. One that no one else has ever come up with, one that will blow the doors off of everyone who reads it. One that will change the world. One that will bring nations to their knees.

No pressure.

(By the way: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure has already been done, so think of something different.)

Tip Number Two:

Write that idea down. Preferably on something non-flammable, or not easily lost, or not easily stolen. Not like a post-it note, toilet paper (unused), or a cocktail napkin, or the side of a hobo. I prefer an app called Evernote. Not everyone has a smart phone…so if you don’t, make sure to write it down with something that does not easily smudge, like chiseling it on a rock, or like a fine tip Sharpie…

….not like a piece of chalk, charcoal briquette, or cheap yellow highlighter.

Oh yes, that reminds me…make sure you can read it. Make sure you write it down in your native language and not some encrypted tongue you made up while on a drunken marathon of Lord of The Rings, Storage Wars, and/or the NASA channel.

Tip Number Three:

Set yourself a schedule to work on your thoughts and ideas…and stick to it. Find a nice quiet place to work, free of clutter, free of distractions…like children, spouses, strippers, construction workers, TV, radio, ham radio, turkey radio, bar flys, YouTube, the ice cream man, and/or strippers.

(Strippers are very distracting to the writing process. That’s why I listed it twice.)

Tip Number Four:

Set yourself goals and deadlines. Make them realistic enough to keep, but tough enough to keep you motivated. When you don’t meet these goals, cut off a chunk of your hair with some dull scissors. When you no longer have hair, you have failed yourself. If this happens, become a Buddhist monk instead. All you will need is the Orange Robes.

Tip Number Five:

Panic.

Panic when you don’t have any ideas. Panic when you miss your deadline. Panic at the disco. Panic like no one is watching. Panic like your life depended on it.

Panic.

And cry.

Tip Number Six:

After you panic…drink. Drink vodka and cranberry. Drink rum and coke. Drink Colt 45. Don’t drink and drive.  Drink at that nice work space you made for yourself, free of distractions and clutter. March around your writing space, in your underwear, drink in hand, and tell every inanimate object that you hate them:

“I hate you pencil. I hate you laptop. I hate you desk lamp. I hate you voodoo doll. I hate you 99 cent half eaten burrito from 711 that I probably shouldn’t have gotten because it makes me gassy but kind of looked good sitting in that little roller thing that keeps food hot all day but doesn’t keep them fresh so it takes like George Lopez’s butt hair. I hate you vodka and cranberry.*”

*Side note: Avoid run-on sentences. (Apparently people who smoke a lot of pot hate run-on sentences.)

Tip Number Seven:

Find some strippers.

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I hope that helps. Good luck to all you beginning budding writers out there. I’m sure Marc Schuster will be asking me to substitute for his writing class if he ever gets sick, so I will let you know the dates on that…in case you want to attend.

I will leave you with a simplified version of someone’s list on being and staying creative. I have taken out all the irrelevant parts:

Optional steps: 3) Cry 4) Strippers