Mama Dying

I don’t think anything in this world scares me as much as the thought of losing my mama to death. Almost all my life, my closest family was Mama, her father Papa John, and me. Then Pa, my stepdad came along and then I married Budge. Mama, though, is the one who has always and forever been there whenever I needed her. She and I buried Papa John three years ago yesterday and tonight, Pa called me from the hospital ER. Mama had started having sharp, shooting pains in her chest. She was released four hours later, but it’s still shaken me down to my core. I was born with two parents, four loving grandparents and even four more wonderful great-grandparents. One by one over the last very few years, I’ve watched each of their caskets lowered into the ground. All I have left is Mama and my Budge.

Mama’s health is getting worse. She suffers from emphysema and some other breathing disorders and, ever since Papa John died, she’s not seemed to have had much will to fight on. I know the day is coming. Tonight’s scare was just a reminder of what lies ahead, but I have no idea how to prepare for it. Many, many things terrify me, but most things, like huge natural disasters, will at least leave me with others who understand what’s going on.

When Mama dies, it’ll just be me and my loss. I was ignorant of the pain of losing a loved one until I was well into my twenties, and maybe that’s just made it harder, but nothing that scares me even touches how I feel at the thought of watching my mama’s pink casket being lowered into the ground.

The worst part is, I can’t prepare, I can’t put it off, and I can’t know when that shoe is going to drop. All I know is, when the call comes, the funeral home may need to hold the hearse.

Blogging Lineup Announcement!

Hello to my three loyal readers!

As most of you know, I’ve been out of work since June. I won’t go in to details, other than to say my former district shut down a school and so I became the sixth librarian in a five school district. So, I was bumped from my job in favor of a person with less than a quarter of my ability but three times my seniority. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Anyway, I’ve been casting about for ways to keep my questionable sanity intact. To that end, I’ve launched some more blogs. Each blog will now have a focus instead of being a catch-all for whatever jumps into my head at the time. The new lineup will go something like this:

“Granny Beads & Grocery Store Feet” will remain my flagship blog. It will actually improve now because it will now take over as the repository of my memoir, story, and anecdote collection about my life growing up and living in the small-town South. This will now be a “politic, employment, and hopefully angst free zone.” I’ve been asked to write a book. Well, this is where it’ll get written.

“Insomnia Inducers” is a niche blog that appeals to the neurotic, OCD, paranoid side of me. To call me a pessimist would be to defame good pessimists throughout the world. “II” will be slavishly devoted to publishing the growing list of horrible things that keep me awake at night. Truthfully, if it’s on “II”, then I’ve literally lost sleep over it.

“The Idiot Patrol” is my attempt to point out the overwhelming plethora of people in this world who should have the common decency to do us all a favor and stop breathing the air that other people so desperately need. Each update will point out a person who fits my very liberal definition of an idiot for some reason. They could be mean or a boor or a leader who is incompetent to the point of criminality. Each and every one will get my undivided attention for around 500 words. This blog will be political, employment related, and probably riddled with middle aged W.A.S.P. angst masquerading as righteous indignation.

Finally, I’m launching “The American Reality”. This blog, located at nomoredream.wordpress.com since I couldn’t get the address I wanted, will be where I play pundit and solve every problem the world has to offer with wit and the wisdom passed down to me by my ancestors. Here, I will hold forth on education, politics, movements (bowel and otherwise), and pretty much all the rest of the hot-button issues of the day. If you want my opinion on all things public, this will be where to turn and I’ll go ahead and guess that y’all probably won’t like it.

In time, I hope to launch a one-page web site that gives a jumping off point to each of these endeavors as well as including other items of interest to me. I hope you all like the line up. It’s what I’m praying will keep me from going off the deep end of the shallow pier.

Check them out and keep your feet clean, y’all!

Biological Warfare

Bacillus Anthracis, better known as weaponized anthrax.

Okay, so I’m scared of nukes and I’m terrified of burning up, but at least with nukes, it’s not going to hurt . . . much. I mean, if you are near ground zero at all, you’re just a puff of vaporized atomic smoke. No muss; no fuss.

Then we have biological weapons. Who thought this was a good idea? I mean, really? Really? Hey, yeah, I know, let’s get some of this stuff that kills the crap out of people naturally and ENERGIZE it so it overcomes medicines and the body’s natural defenses. It’s efficient and best of all, IT’S CHEAP!!

Thanks to that kind of thinking, the world is now home to vats and vats, veritable warehouses even, of wonderful little bugs like anthrax, plague, ebola, and the granddaddy and Cadillac of germ warfare SMALLPOX!! Yes sir, thanks to places like Fort Deitrich in Maryland and a similar Russian site in Siberia, we’ve got enough nasty little germs to kill the whole world a bazillion times over. What’s more, none of these little beauties gives an easy death. No vaporization here. Instead, you break out in welts or your eyes explode from pooling blood. Just Google “biological warfare” and take a gander at the images that show up. This is dying the HARD WAY. Still, it’s cheap!!

Nukes and even the more sophisticated chemical weapons take a lot of know-how and big time investments in materials and ingredients. Not bio-weapons. Nope, got a kitchen? Get hold of some spore off of the black market branch of “Deadly Diseases ‘R’ Us” and you’re ready to go. Of course, it’s a little more to it than that, but not much. What’s more, this stuff packs a lot of punch into a little package. Some genius figured out that enough weaponized anthrax to fill a standard pill bottle, properly distributed, could wipe out an entire CITY!! Nice.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my hands and put on my Level 4 containment suit to get ready for bed.

House Fire

Okay, so this is a little more personal, but it is a terror of mine, nonetheless. I cannot begin to tell how many times I’ve turned the corner into our neighborhood and have been irrationally gripped with the fear that I was going to see our home ablaze.

I don’t know where the roots of this gut wrenching terror I have of fire come from. I do know that when I was a child, my grandmother wouldn’t leave the house until she’d checked and rechecked the stove and the pilot light at least five times. Perhaps I picked up on her paranoia.

Or perhaps the genesis lies in my having lived in mobile homes almost my entire life. I’ve never felt slighted for having lived “over wheels”, but it is difficult to deny that mobile homes are much more likely to burn to the ground and when they are kindled, they burn much quicker than a comparable sized house.

It doesn’t help matters any that my wife’s childhood home burned just two months after we married. Luckily, we’d already moved a great deal of her stuff to our new home, but some items, like her childhood Christmas ornaments and Nativity scene, were charred. She also lost a huge number of irreplaceable pictures.

What scares me the most about a house fire, however, is the idea that I couldn’t get all five of my indoor furry and scaly children out of the house. Burning is never a pleasant way to die and I almost break down in tears if I even think about one of the cats or turtles suffering through such a horrible end.

It’s enough to keep me changing smoke detector batteries on a daily basis!

Nuclear Holocaust.

Any child of the ’80s like I was probably suffered from this same fear. I know it was bad during the ’50s and ’60s with the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in the ’80s, we had something no one else had — President Ronnie Raygun. Now I loved President Reagan as a kid. He talked nice and he sounded and looked like my papa, but he had it in his head that he was going to END the Cold War once and for all. As a result, America started gearing up for a war and in the ’80s, that would mean a nuclear war.

We sat through TV mini-series on “Life After the Mushroom Cloud” and “Nuclear Explosion!” and other such wonderful names. Here locally, we even had a show that dramatized a nuclear attack on Charleston Naval Base in the lower part of the state. Back then, I had nightmares about dying in a nuclear war. I still remember one very vivid dream to this day. I was standing in a field and saw a mushroom cloud in the distance, then I saw missiles coming out of the ground (silos maybe? I dunno, I was like nine years old) and streaking off into the distance. I woke up screaming, which scared the poop out of the rest of the kids on the field trip bus with me.

What I didn’t know then that I do know now is we didn’t have to worry nearly as much as I did. See, I found out later that we shared something in common with the Soviet . . . neither one of us REALLY wanted to die in a flaming radioactive cloud of doom. The whole “Mutually Assured Destruction” thing was a reality and Communism might have been great and all, but those Russkies didn’t want to DIE for the ideology anymore than we poor saps wanted to evaporate in searing heat for Capitalism. As a result, we all made it through.

Until now. Now, countries like India, Pakistan, and (dear lord!) North Korea have nuclear weapon capability. Dealing with these boys is a whole new ball game and none of the old rules apply. See, in North Korea, you have a leader of a fanatical population who is himself about two heifers short of a herd. He doesn’t care about dying as long as he takes a good number of “Westerners” with him. Then you have India with its HUGE population of Hindu adherents. One strong tenet of Hinduism is the idea of reincarnation. When you fully expect to come back for another go ’round, it makes you a lot less careful of that trigger.

Finally, we’ve got Radical Islamic Jihadists. (Notice I didn’t say, Muslims . . . Muslims are a peaceful folk, mostly) The RIJs of the world think we’re going to Hell in a handbasket anyway so the best thing to do is just speed up the process. Now with Iran doing everything it can to get The Bomb, how long will it be before some RIJ terrorist group has nuclear capability? And this time, we don’t have Ronnie Raygun to save us.

I don’t know about you, but it’s enough to make me curl up in the fetal position in a dark room and watch endless episodes of the Home Shopping Network.

Asteroid Impact

Sometimes, I lie awake at night wondering if a chunk of space rock the size of Texas is hurtling towards Earth with aspirations of causing a nice little extinction level event.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have abundant evidence all over the world of our celestial lifeboat’s storied and tragic history with big rocks from outer space. Even casual scientific readers and fans of Disney’s Dinosaur are familiar with the Chicxulub Crater that most “*”-ologists believe is the remains of the Earth w/ asteroid collision that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Even that little slice of Hell on Earth is dwarfed by the impact that produced “The Great Dying” or what scientific types call the Permian-Triassic Extinction. That impact, over 250 million years ago, wiped out an estimated 95-98% of ALL LIFE ON EARTH. That, ladies and gents, is a bad day at the office.

If all that doesn’t bother you much, within living memory (albeit a very small, very select, and quickly shrinking number of memories) SOMETHING blew up in the sky over the Siberian forest near the Stony Tunguska River and flattened half a million acres of the aforementioned forest. The most likely culprit has been pegged as a meteor ONLY 100 feet in diameter FIVE MILES over the Earth. We’re talking a Hiroshima / Nagasaki type explosion almost four decades before the birth of the Atomic Age (which is another I.I. in my life). A similar event over any modern city today would flatten the place and that’s just a baby meteorite.

The fact of the matter is, we know some big space rocks (or more sexily scientific “minor planets”) are out there close enough to Earth orbit to eventually wander into our path and impact us. Some of those are big enough to reset the biological clock on this rock back to ten minutes ’til bacteria. I live in fear of something out of a movie like Asteroid, Deep Impact or Armageddon. As recently as March of this year (2009) a Tunguska sized asteroid passed within 44,000 miles of Earth. That’s WAY closer than the Moon. Then we wait and see what happens in 2029 when a rock named 2004 NM4 will, theoretically, pass between the earth and SOME SATELLITES. For all the laypeople like me in the audience, that translates in to “holy crap that was close!”

I know a lot of people will think I’m nuttier than Aunt Alice’s rum laced fruitcake for worrying about getting hit by an asteroid. After all, as smart as the governments of the world are, they could protect us, right?! Right?!! Well, just in case your faith in them is about like mine, check out this video of what COULD happen again because it’s ALREADY happened before . . . twice . . . at least.

It’s things like asteroid impacts that keep me reaching for the warm milk.