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.