You suck.

I don't think I have ever received so many rejections in my life. And they are so passive. I would feel better if they just punched me in the face or kicked me in the ass. Glimmer Train rejected "The Key Collector." Only they don't even use the term rejection. It just states "complete." Meaning they have looked at my shit, and they don't want it, but thank you anyway. No letter about how much I suck or why I suck or how I could suck less. Or maybe I need to suck more or suck at something else.


I have never been rejected by any colleges/universities that I applied to--graduate or undergraduate. Until 2004, I had never been denied a job that I applied for. Now that job applications are mostly on-line, you get these pre-canned messages. "Better qualified candidates were selected". Or you just don't hear back at all. And you're damn lucky to get an interview. I even signed up as a volunteer at the literacy center. You think I've heard back from them? I can't even give my services away.

Naked Moms & Notes on how to be more pathetic

Goddamn it. Mom wants to be my Facebook friend. WTF? She's not the most computer literate person. But I'm sure one thing will lead to another, and she'll find my irreverent blog. Fucking A. So much for getting myself out there.


Any suggestions? I can’t not friend my own mother. I’m sorry you gave birth to me, but you can’t be my Facebook friend. Letting Mom read my stuff is like being naked. It's not cool to be naked in front of your mom. Not cool at all.


Speaking of nakedness and mothers--not to be confused with naked mothers. Mom's been wearing this rather thin, worn night gown. She needs a new one. It's so thin she wears a robe over it. She says they don't have nightgowns anymore only pjs. I find this hard to believe. Anyway . . .I ask her what’s wrong with pjs. She says that she wears a nightgown because Dad likes easy access. I can't believe my mother is saying shit like this. My mother who doesn't like to discuss sex, religion or politics.


On another note --the bitching about work note--I applied for the ICU/TU position again. Never got an interview the last time. That’s pathetic. Not being able to even get an interview with the organization I currently work for. Please hire me. I'm pathetic and poor. I can be cute too if you just give me a chance. Smart? We'll have to work on smart.


Changed my cover letter. Cited specific examples of how awesome I was the last time I worked on their floor. If this doesn’t work, I may have to resort to a fictional resume or maybe a creative non-fiction with a disclaimer. *Certain facts were embellished. *Certain events were manufactured. *References may be manufactured for aesthetic reasons.

Copper Flames

We had big plans to go camping Up North. Only it started to rain a little before we got there. Light, misty, warm drizzle. Jacks drove us to Loon Lake. It’s on a seasonal road. If you’re not from there, you’d never find it. There’s one shitter, a hole in the ground. You better bring your own shower. Otherwise use the lake. We put down our tarp, assembled poles. Red to red. Blue to blue. And we raced to get the tent in standing position with rain fly. Every so often the wind would rustle the branches, sending us a pseudo down pour.


These were last minute big plans. We were doing this in the dark, using the car head lights. But we managed. Had a tent. 2 air mattresses. A shower/shitter. A screened in picnic area—only that soon turned into a Daddy Long Legs Haven.


We had hot dogs to roast and marshmallows to toast. No firewood. Anything that might have been used as kindling was soaked. No paper to start. Not that we could have fit anything more into my little hatchback Kia anyway.


Uncle Smoothie saved the day with dry logs and a can of gasoline. He brought Cousin T along. We had invited him to camp with us. Gasoline fire is quick but doesn’t last. The logs wouldn’t start. Cousin T threw some scrap paper in the fire. Only it wasn’t scrap. It was Uncle Smoothie’s truck title. Oops. Mostly we had a smoke signal. The fire didn’t really get going until it really started to rain. We retreated to the tent and fake farted until we fell asleep laughing.


The rain subsided by morning. We were able to get a second fire going from the coals. French Press Coffee and drinkable oatmeal. The coffee was good. Then it started to rain again. We played cards with Cousin T and then switched to scrabble. Only we gave up on that because he kept cheating. Hiding letters in his hoodie.


The tent started to leak. Wet pillows. Wet bedding. Wet ass. We packed the valuables and drove to Grandma’s where we dropped off Cousin T. We headed over to Mom’s for a shit and a shower. We thought things might clear, but there was a permanent cloud. We ended up throwing the muddy wet tent in the back of Mom’s truck. Nothing folds up nicely after camping. There was no way it would fit back into my little Kia.


Mom fed us a garden vegetable dinner. Beans with bacon. Zucchini & summer squash with butter. Corn slathered in butter. Sliced tomatoes. And oatmeal cookies. I think that’s all we ever do when we’re Up North. Eat and drink coffee.


When it stopped raining that night, Mom drove us to Head Quarters. Deeper into the woods on seasonal roads somewhere on state property. That’s where her boyfriend, Rob had been camping for the past 2 weeks. It looked like Rob had been out there longer than 2 weeks. The disorganized random shit he had out there—garage sale items that he had picked up: craftsman tool boxes, miniature pewter statues, lamps, kids toys.


Uncle Hiram was out there against medical advice. Mom wouldn’t shut-up about his congestive heart failure and COPD. Said he was killing himself with the drinking and his smoking. He’s an adult. Maybe killing himself was the point.


And Mike Kane had been living down the hill for the past 2 months in a reconstructed shack with a shitter on the lake. Seriously, you could sit on the toilet and look over the lake. He was the peaceful hippy type with a longish beard, a wooden stick for a cane, and stocky black dog. Jacks and Mom had talked about the Kane curse. Something bad happens to all of them by someone else’s hand or their own. Suicide, murder, cancer. I wondered how he was cursed.


I didn’t know it until we were driving away that Mike Kane had only been out of prison for 6 years. Stabbed a guy for $50 dollars while he was fucked up on crystal meth. Did 25 years. He was the nicest guy.


Uncle Hiram brought his stash. Said he paid $50 for 1/8th. He got ripped off. He’s blind. The shit was brown. So they smoked the oregano and pretended to get high for Uncle Hiram’s sake. He would fall asleep intermittently and wake up in the middle of a conversation and just start right in. I don’t think it was from anything he was smoking. I think it was a combination of lack of oxygen and elevated blood sugar from the beer.


I sat on an old boat seat low to the ground watching the copper flames. Every so often I would pick a Daddy Long Legs off my hoodie and throw it into the fire. There we were surrounded by trees and dark sky. And the only way to get in or out was by a two-track dirt lane.


It’s weird how the most peaceful, beautiful night was a night with a bunch of old men. Far away from the sulfur smell of the city and the orange night sky. No houses. No hum of traffic.


Jacks and I went 4-wheeling the next day on a different seasonal road. Traveled 30 miles and hardly saw a house. We were even lost for a little while. But we felt so free.

Flexibility

http://tigerlilydust.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/flexible/

Steps to Dependence and Self-Loathing

It won’t matter how much determination you have. Or how hard you work. Or how long you go to school. The more educated you are, the higher your debt to the government. Unless you have rich parents or win the lottery or marry a sugar daddy or sugar momma.


If you happened to get caught smoking, growing or selling weed before you started your education, you can forget it. You might as well keep smoking and selling it. A felony limits your career opportunities to under the table, completely illegal or dishwasher. A felony drug charge eliminates the possibility of a student loan. Yet felons who committed violent crimes qualify for student loans as long as it wasn’t drug related. How the fuck does this make sense? An armed robber can get a student loan, but not a weed dealer. My theory—drugs have a way of opening up new ways of thinking. Drugs = liberal, peace-loving, possibly anti-government hippy thinker. Can you imagine a higher education for someone who thinks that way? They might change the whole world.


Obama started this program that will allow people to volunteer to reduce or eliminate their school loans. That doesn’t seem so bad. However, there are rumors that these volunteers will be used to create a civil servant army separate from the U.S. Army. One that would be used to keep the peace in times of upheaval. Like if we decided we wanted to rise up against an unjust government, this civil army would throw us into detainment camps. This is one of the conspiracy theories.


I was delighted when he created that program for loan restructuring. Yay, something that might actually help me. My friend Q, single-parent, makes jack shit in a factory has been having trouble making her house payment. They wouldn’t help her because she has been late. Well no shit! That’s why she is asking for help. I also applied for restructuring, because I have lost hours and soon I will have to pay back student loans. They said I didn’t qualify because I paid on-time. They didn’t see the problem.


Those tax refund bonuses that were handed out a couple of times. People who really needed them, didn’t get them. I know several people who had their refund bonuses garnished for debts that were greater than 7 years old.



The new programs that are out there to help people--exist only in name not in reality. They are there to make us think that someone gives a shit— to appease us.


Look at the new Cash for Clunkers program. On the surface, it appears the government is doing us a favor. $4500 for any intact car when we buy a new one. I don’t know anyone right now who has money to buy a new car even with $4500 off. I bought my little Kia in 2005 for $15,000. So that would still be $10,500. That’s $300 per month for almost 3 years. A used car is still cheaper. But the dealerships aren’t allowed to resell these clunkers--not even their parts. Instead the government requires that dealerships pour sodium silicate into the engine. This turns to glass. Afterward, they can be flattened into metal pancakes. This means less parts for used cars. This will make used cars more expensive to repair and also to buy. And then when the government stops the program we will be in a worse place than when we started—not able to afford either a new or used car. I’m not sure if they don’t think when they institute these programs. Or if they know exactly what they’re doing and don’t give a shit. I think perhaps the government made a deal with the company that manufactures sodium silicate. Just like the government made a deal with China for these energy efficient light bulbs that contain MERCURY.


The government will own us all through our enormous debt. We’ll be dependent on them for everything. Everyone will have to move in with everyone else. Bunk beds in every room and beans & rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner.



These are just steps in creating a larger gap between the elite rich and the rest of us.

The Manufactured Nursing Shortage

In 1986 my Allergist told me there would be a nursing shortage in 2000. I was 10 years old, I believed anything my doctor told me. I’m not sure why I remember him telling me that. Why would a 10 year old care if there was going to be any kind of shortage in the future unless it was chocolate ice cream or pizza or something of immediate value. Besides, I had plans to become a doctor, an Allergist or a Pulmonologist. I could see the years of schooling stretched out before me.


At 13 writing seemed like the profession for me. I would create these stories and write my friends in as characters. I made them laugh. I had no problems with chemistry and biology. And math—I could do it. But every night it was a struggle, Dad helping me with my math homework and me crying. Some story problem about polka-dot shirts. I don’t think we ever got that one right. English made sense. I wanted to be Anne of Green Gables. I wanted to be V.C. Andrews. That’s before I realized that V.C. Andrews was not good literature.


But I sobered up and chose a nursing major. It was practical, and I didn’t know what else to do. I could always write in my spare time.


In 1996 there weren’t waiting lists to get into GVSU Kirkhof School of nursing. And you didn’t need a 4.0 to get either. There seemed to be plenty of instructors.


Currently, there are not enough nursing instructors to teach the amount of students who are waiting. But this is manufactured. When I was in nursing school, they were starting to phase out all the instructors who did not have their doctorate. A masters degree in nursing wasn’t good enough to teach it anymore. This completely eliminated the number of available instructors thus creating a “shortage.” With fewer instructors, GVSU was forced to admit less nursing students to its program. And this created the waiting list and ridiculously high standards. Especially when I hear that they are picking students based solely on grade point averages. I’m sorry this doesn’t make a good nurse.


I didn’t remember this until just last week. But they told us in 1998 that hospital nursing was on its way out, because hospital stays were not has long and many surgeries were being done on an outpatient basis. Since I started in 1999, I have seen a decrease in admissions for rotator cuff repairs and ACL repairs. People go home the same day. I have seen people have microdiskectomies and go home the same day.


The hospitals in the area have very few positions open for RNs. The ones listed are part-time, prn or on-call. Hospitals w, x, y, z. Hospital W mandated a wage freeze, laid off nurses and restructured. Hospital X is not doing so well after building a new hospital. They have cut employee hours. I expect them to go under and be bought about by Hospital Z. Hospital Y is also not doing so well after building a new hospital. Hospital Z was in a hiring freeze for about a year. Hospital V seems to be doing okay—they have the most job postings. Hospital U is a floundering small hospital that closed one of its specialty areas. I really don’t know that they do much of anything.

I can definitely say that there is not a nursing shortage in the hospital industry.

Following Directons

Jacks was driving us to Holland. We had to pick up Judah from the dog-sitter. Jacks always says Holland’s not on her map. She says this because she’s from Up North, and until recently none of these places existed in her mind. Anyway she couldn’t remember how to get back Rachel’s house. So I called Rachel and she gave me her street address. I scribbled it on a scrap of paper.


“Okay,” I said and hung up the phone.


“So where’s it at?” Jacks asked.


“I don’t know.”


“What do you mean you don’t know?”


I looked at the address laying in my lap.


“I’m not sure,” I said.


“Didn’t you grow up here?” she asked


“Well, yeah . . . .But”


When I was 15, I didn’t really care whether I learned how to drive or not. It seemed like too much of a bother. Really I was scared shitless. It was much safer to have Mom cart me all over town to all my extra-curricular activities. There’s so much a person had to pay attention to while they were driving—lights, signs, pedestrians, other vehicles. I’ve never been the most mechanically inclined even with the simple things. I still prefer not to drive. I’m content to be the anxious but mostly oblivious passenger.


On my 16th birthday, I was not waiting in line at the DMV with a learner’s permit in hand. I was in New Buffalo setting up camp for the Shoreline Bike Tour. 360 miles in 1 week—on a bicycle, not a motorcycle. This only bought me another week of blissful ignorance. Needless to say I got my license--forced would be a better word. My parents wanted to retire from the taxi business.



My first car was a 1985 Chrysler New Yorker. It talked in this gentle manly voice. Your lights are on. Don’t forget your keys. It had turbo boost —not like Night Rider. It just had a label on the dashboard that said Turbo Boost. Maybe because it was a 8 cylinder.


It must have been my first winter driving. I was on the highway, driving home from church when my windshield clouded over with frost. I didn’t understand. Warm air was blowing through the vents like it should have been. I had cranked it up to the last number. This was bad. Instead of a clear windshield, everything was white. I tried to clear a hole with my warm hand. I slowed the car down to 40mph, then 35mph, then 30mph, trying to drive in a straight line--trying not to plunge into the deep ditch--until I could manage to pull into a parking lot. I shaved off the thin layer of ice from inside the windshield. Some pieces curled. The rest made flakes. It had snowed on my dashboard. I attempted to make my way home again.


Only it didn’t take long before the windshield iced over again. I scraped with my finger nails and pushed my warm palm into it. I drove slowly making an effort to stay on my side of the yellow line. I did this until I pulled into the driveway of a high school friend. By that time I was crying. She wasn’t home, but her dad was working in the garage.


I rolled down the window and blubbered. He looked at the window and peeked in.


“Did you try the defrost button?”


“The what?”


“The button that says defrost.”


I pressed the button that he indicated. Miraculously, the ice melted.


For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having computer issues. I know it’s despicable that I own a Dell and not a Mac. But I don’t have that kind of money and this was a gift. The previous laptop (also not a Mac) fried. Anyway, my laptop wouldn’t connect to the wireless network. Jack’s laptop connected just fine, and I was able to directly connect. So it didn’t seem to be a network issue. It had been so strange. I had been on the internet when it had mysteriously disconnected. I tried to repair the connection, but I couldn’t even view wireless networks. The little Blue Tooth icon was no longer blue.


I tried the Dell chat room first. I chatted from the desktop computer while trying to follow the tech guy’s specific instructions.


Dell tech guy: You’re wrong. That’s not the problem at all.


I hadn’t even fully explained the problem.


Dell tech guy: What does it say when you try to connect?


Myself: There are no networks available to connect to.


He was obviously exasperated with me and instructed me to connect directly to the internet. He would look for himself.


Myself: How is that going to work? If I do that, I’ll lose the chat session.


Then he wrote something about if I would just follow his instructions. Finally I told him that I would deal with it later and closed the chat room.


On my second attempt, I called Dell’s 1-800 #. I gave them my service # and product # and explained the problem. Then they transferred me. Each time I gave my info and problem, they transferred me--3 times. I’m sorry ma’am you’ve been transferred to the wrong department. Each person had a thick Indian accent, and I felt ridiculous when I asked them to repeat the information. The phrase Wireless Network sounds quite different depending on the accent.


Eventually, I was transferred to the right department. Or maybe the guy on the other end felt sorry for the dimwitted American.


“What’s the name of your computer?”


I hadn’t realized my computer had a name. It was a Dell.


“Check the upper left hand corner, Ma’am.”


And there it was just as he described, printed nicely in English letters: Dell Precision M4300.


He talked me through the different screens, the Network connections, The Control Panel. Everything seemed to be working.


“Hit your internet button,” the man instructed.


“Internet button?”


My old computer had a nicely displayed internet button, clearly marked with a diagram on the top right hand side of the keyboard.


“It should be on the left side of the computer,” he said.


I looked on the side. There was a slide button. I had seen it there before, but hadn’t known what it was for. I wasn’t using it, so it didn’t concern me.


I slid the button over.


Miraculously, I was connected to internet.

The Bust

Someone asked what the background picture to my blog was. I thought it was obvious. But then I looked at it more closely—from an outsider’s perspective. Seriously, what the hell is it?
I think it was an attempt to resuscitate the dead through the living. Instead, it was a reminder of what I wanted and what I couldn’t have. In the photo, it sits ready to burn in a fire pit. Only it was too windy that day, and there had been no rain. I threw it in the pit anyway. Covered it with some clumps of dirt and gave it a dead bouquet. It was my way of moving on. I had wanted it to be some dramatic, engulfing fire, melting shimmering blue beads. But moving on isn’t dramatic like that. One day you wake up and realize that you don’t need relics of the dead. They are in you.


I remember Rhiannon laying on the carpet in her underwear, gooped up with Vaseline as I placed moistened plaster cloth on her body. That’s what you see in the picture. A plaster cast mold of Rhiannon’s bust, decorated in a celestial theme with blue beads and silver paint. Those were the days when I think we understood each other more; not that we talked, because that really wasn’t Rhiannon’s style. I did the talking. She would half listen, grunting in response as she simultaneously chatted on Yahoo messenger. She was silent and emotionally distant unless you got her drunk, and it took more than a few shots to get her there. I never saw her cry, not even when Emery died.
I had expected Rhiannon to be like Emery. Emery was born first; Rhiannon 6 minutes later with the cord wrapped around her neck. Their mom didn’t know she would be having twins. It was 1978, and the doctors always heard a slight echo when they listened to the heart beat. They blamed it on faulty equipment until Rhiannon came out second. They were together for the next 23 years—inseparable shadows of each other, speaking their own language.


Rhiannon and her three cats moved into Crooked Tree Apartments with me in 2001. That is how I came to know Rhiannon.
“Is that the last box?” I asked Rhay.
“Think so.” She peered into her car window.
A neighbor approached us.
“Hey, you doing alright?” He directed this question toward Rhay.
Neither one of us had ever seen the guy before. He must have noticed the confusion.
“I’m the one who found you on the steps,” he said.
Oh god. He thought she was Emery.
“That was my sister,” she stated evenly. She looked a little grey.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” An awkward pause. “Is she alright?”
“She didn’t make it.” Rhiannon was trying hard to control her voice. She focused on the cement.
The neighbor guy didn’t look so good.
“Was she diabetic? Was there something more I could have done?”
“There’s nothing you could have done.” I assured him. “Nothing anyone could have done.” I repeated more to myself.
I wondered if he too would relive those moments on the stairs, asking himself what more he could have done or what if he would have gotten there sooner. I never saw him again.


Perhaps I had forced a continuation of my dream onto someone who didn’t want it.


One day I was pulling the vegetables out of the crisper, and I looked at Rhiannon’s face. After living with her for so many years, I didn’t really see Rhiannon. I had this image of what she was supposed to be and stopped really looking. Maybe it was the new light in the kitchen or the angle as I stood up from the crisper. I noticed that she didn’t have any dimples. I looked at one cheek and then the other.
“What?” she asked.
“I just thought that you had a dimple.”
“Nope.”
Emery had had a dimple.

My Dead Wives

You’re probably wondering about the title to this blog. Why Postmortem Life and Black Widows? That’s so morbid. Okay, so I’ve never been married. I have never had a wife in a legal sense just girlfriends or partners. Maybe significant other is a better word. There have been four main ones, two of which have died.

Melynda was a redneck with a mullet. I met her at a church outing when I was 16, and she was 20. She grew up with chickens and goats in the house and a schizophrenic father. She was the only child to graduate from high school let alone go to college. They lived in a double-wide off a dirt road and had government cheese in their fridge.

That’s when we spoke in tongues and raised our hands and knocked on strange doors in Cabrini Green and inner city Detroit, because we believed in Jesus and hell and the Republican party. It’s true. I voted for Bob Dole. That’s when I wore Addicted to Jesus t-shirts and didn’t swear for 4 years. And when I hid my Bible from my parents because they didn’t approve. Only they approved even less when they suspected something else.

It started with phone sex only we would never have called it that. We were only privately masturbating simultaneously over the phone. But otherwise we did very Christian sort of things like watch 8 hours of Anne of Green Gables and then have sleep overs in a twin bed. I kissed her first and couldn’t stop.

Melynda told me that she wasn’t in love with me anymore over a Slim Jim at Russ’. She had met someone on the internet--someone older and more exotic. Melynda is still alive and well somewhere in Nebraska.

I met Emery through yahoo personals when they were free. We lasted 2 years and 26 days. Or maybe I should say that she lasted. The doctors told her she was young. Wrap it. It’s just a pulled muscle. Two weeks later, Rhiannon and I stood next to the stretcher that held her lifeless body. She had an endotracheal tube shoved down her throat and a useless IV in her hand. Her gray hoodie and green corduroys were filleted open. A neighbor had found Emery, barely breathing on the apartment steps. That’s where the large clot had dislodged from her calf and entered into her lungs.

Sylvia worked at the group home with Emery. Eight months after Emery died, Sylvia and I started dating. She would leave poetic and sometimes ridiculous messages on the answering machine. “Why are frozen pizzas kept in the freezer section?” She made house calls when I was sick, forcing me to drink cinnamon tea. Soon we were going out a couple times a week to Jupiter Moon, the twenty-four hour coffee shop to play Scrabble and watch the privileged kids act pretentiously sophisticated. I won’t lie. We argued a lot and broke up several times.

We had been separated for about a year. She was headed eastbound on I-96 when she lost control of her vehicle. I imagine a vivid sequence of events. And I see her in her purple Jeep Cherokee, driving too fast down the freeway, skipping to the next track of her Bob Marley CD. Her long dreads decorated with beaded poetry and twisted wire, clinking together as she leaned forward, partially obstructing her view of the road. With a sudden swerve and screeching tires, her short, heavy, body smashed through the glass landing with a dead thud on the pavement.

And then there’s Jacks, my current partner and personal chef. We didn’t want to meet. Manuel set us up at his Halloween Party. I was a bitch and she was nothing special. Until we sat down in the wet grass and talked while everyone else was smashing the adult piñata. Jacks and I were delighted when we discovered that this is the longest relationship either one of us has ever had. I worry a lot that she’ll die. I know it’s inevitable. We all die. I just don’t want it to be too soon.

Shameless Prostitution

Maureen suggested that I start a Blog to create a web presence. She suggested I do that rather than mope on the couch and eat brownies for breakfast and be depressed about being graduated and mostly unpublished with nothing to look forward to except for $40,000 in student loans. This is where I insert a commercial for bringtheink.com. That is where you will find my dystopic short story “People Factory.”

Someone asked me if I felt differently now that I had my MFA. It’s not any different than turning 33. But that was silly of me to expect that I would feel something else. That’s like an alcoholic trying to find happiness at the bottom of the Popov—when there’s nothing but a cheap head ache.

This is my shameless attempt to get myself out there. My family is waiting for me to create the next Harry Potter so that I can put them in a luxurious retirement community rather than a stinky nursing home. I keep telling them that I write short stories and that nobody pays. It’s like playing the lottery. I submit a short story with a $10 to $25 fee for contests with higher odds of being rejected than accepted. So in actuality I have a gambling problem. I’ll be lucky if I can give my stories away.

I’ll be prostituting myself on Division Street. Instead of wearing short skirts and fishnet stockings, I’ll be standing there in Birkenstocks and a bathrobe with an extension cord running to my laptop from the independent coffee shop (because they feel sorry for vagrant writers). I’ll scream of cheapness. I’ll give you my story for free. Just pick me up and we can drive around the block. I’ll tell you that it costs more to print it out than it does just to lick the screen. After a while, I’ll start to worry that I have some sort of disease for pedaling my stories to strangers. I’ll wonder if I have brain cancer from sitting in front of the computer screen too long or maybe the electromagnetic waves have effected my girl parts from too many late night lap dances.

Every writer is a narcissist. Even when we’re not writing about ourselves, we’re still writing about ourselves. We project ourselves onto real characters and into the fictional ones—they’re all versions of ourselves. But this blog isn’t going to be all about writing. Writers writing about writing—Jesus, isn’t that what they always do?

So it’s a good thing I have a real job, so I can bitch about nursing. In my real life, I’m a Registered Nurse. RN also stands for Registered Narcotics Pusher and Registered Nag. Or maybe Registed Narcissist? Due to the unfortunate circumstances with the Michigan economy, my place of employment has felt it necessary to restructure. My hours were cut. Instead of working 60 hours every 2 weeks, I’ll be working 40 hours every 2 weeks. This brings me back to prostitution and homelessness. All that bullshit about a nursing shortage—not true.

So I hope to blog about injustice, politics, health care, LGBTQ issues, various current events, food, death, tattoos, mental illness and myself. Not in any particular order. Names may or may not be changed to protect guilty or innocent parties. And some seemingly non-fiction parts may or may not be fictionalized