Callithump Thunderblog

As you might recall, my last post was full of advice for my son, Ellis, who is starting up his own humor blog. Or at least he said he was going to start one, but this could be like the time he said he was going to take over the world and insist that people eat more hot dogs. Or something like that. I am not sure about the details because the fact is HE DIDN'T DO IT. Poor follow through, if you ask me.

As might be expected, he has not read the post, the one I wrote especially for him, nor does he seem to have any interest in reading it. In fact, to get him to read my posts, I pretty much have to read them to him. Or hold his dinner hostage. And then read them to him while prying his fingers out from his ears.

As you, avid reader, might recall, one of my wise words o' advice for the boy, in that post that I wrote especially for him, was "Keep posting. Keep posting." This post falls under that category. The "keep posting" category. Do I have a theme? No? An idea? No. The desire to write? Not really. But I am doing it anyway. That is known as wasting everyone's time being brave. In fact, I am sick in bed. Only the second land-me-in-bed illness of this craptastic fall, the most craptastic fall in my history of falls. And autumns too, come to think of it.

Keep posting. Keep posting.

I used to only post when I was seized by an idea. I would know for several days that a post was incubating. When it was born, it was almost like I had nothing much to do with it. It just poured. I edited and revised in a frenzy and then, once it sang sweetly, I hit publish. Then I would realize that I missed a bunch of edits and I would edit some more. And then I would hit publish again and feel satisfied. Job well done. Another piece blogged. But lately, I have decided to challenge myself by writing more often, and seeing what happens. I figure that the only way I can become a better writer is to practice more. This is the idea anyway.

This isn't pouring. And no sweet singing is happening. This kind of writing is hard.

Perhaps if I had a topic. A funny story. A witty observation. Friends often try to help me out. "Blog about that!" they say. "That would make a great blog!" they cry in unison. I love that about my friends, how they are always crying things out in unison. I wish that they would break out into unison song and dance too. That would be really cool. I would invite them over more, if they did. Do you hear that friends? The reason that I don't invite you over more is because you don't break out into spontaneous song and dance. Not even that Tell Them Soldier Boy hip hop dance or the that Chicken wedding dance or anything. How hard would that be? Seriously.

So, anyway, friends make suggestions and I always laugh and say that I should use their ideas, but I never do. I don't really like being told what to do, I guess.

Hmmm...this just occurred to me. Maybe Ellis has inherited this trait from me.

WOAH!!!

Dear reader, you have just been a witness to one of those infamous, "AHA, DUH!" moments in Sondra Stinglash's life, where in an instant, I realize something that feels profound, yet in reality is simple and should be completely obvious.

Hey! Babies have big heads relative to the size of their bodies! I just noticed that!

AHA!

DUH!

Hey! You mean there is a shoe specifically for the left and another shoe specifically for the right?!

AHA!

DUH!

I just thought that shoes were meant to be uncomfortable, like half the time.


Yeah AHA! DUH!

Having a teenage son is full of challenging moments in parenting. But recently, my son, Edric, said something to me that made me beam with pride! Straight A's, you wonder? An after school job? Did he tell me that he thought that it would be good if he started taking responsibility and giving back to the community by volunteering at the children's hospital on weekends?

I am going to dash off a very quick post. Like I have 10 minutes before I leave the house kind of post; many would not attempt such a thing, but I am going to dazzle you with an act of brilliance of such caliber that my commenting audience will accuse me of cheating. "This post reeks of hours upon hours of earnest effort and hard work too, coupled with a liberal dash of Edna consulting; so fine craftedly honed it is," they will cry.

Or maybe not.

Probably not. Stop getting your hopes up.

It's just a stupid blog post anyway. If you want fine writing go to the library or something.

Here we go. An on-the-go, off-the-cuff, drive-by post. Problem is, I am a slow writer. It wasn't always that way, however.

I used to be a slow choreographer.

I don't make dances anymore on account of in the post college real world you have to pay for rehearsal space by the hour and the usual rule of thumb which is going to sound super slow to all you uninitiated folks who have taken choreographers for granted your entire lives, is that it takes one hour to come up with one minute of material. For real. That is a long time. So, next time you watch the ending of The 40 Year Old Virgin, where they burst out into song and dance, the "Age of Aquarius" number, just think about that. For me it took longer. No. Not the 40 year thing. THAT didn't take quite that long. I was talking about choreography, remember? The rule of thumb?

I liked making dances. I could be all arty and weird and tell people to do things like FLAIL FASTER and EMBODY THE TREE and the pieces that I came up with were great to watch and fun to make. But if I did it now, if I had to hire dancers and hire a space to rehearse and a space to perform, I would pretty much be spending all my time and money on making dances. So I make writing instead. It is cheap. But it isn't fast for me either.

So, that just took me 2 hours. Sigh.

But what I really wanted to tell you is that the other night I was sleeping and it was great because it took me awhile to get to sleep so I was really happy and felt like I was doing a good job of it but then it was great no longer because I got awakened by my son, Everet, who woke me up by yelling

MOM!

And I pretended I didn't hear him.

And then he yelled another word

BAT!

And then my heart sank and I wished I could shrink down really small in my bed or make myself invisible by squinting my eyes up real tight. But no, I can't do any of that as I am the grown up. Being the grown up means that when my son, Everet, yells that there is a bat in the house, it is my job to get up and do something about it.

So, I pull myself out of bed. I go downstairs.

Everet has the situation well in hand.

He is wearing a pair of white evening gloves. ??? (Should I be worried?) He has goggles on. There is a shirt wrapped around his head, a scarf protecting his face and he is brandishing a PVC pipe. He looks crazed, in an insane cross-dressing bat-killing kind of way.

"What do you plan to do with that pipe?" I ask.

"Beat it to death."

"Put that down," I say.

We sneak around the downstairs real quiet-like, spying for the bat.

We find it hanging from a window sill trying to be all nonchalant, like, "I'm a bat and I am all wrapped up in my wings, hanging here upside down in my special bat way which makes me invisible so you can just move along because there is nothing to see here." And it was actually kinda cool in an Addam's Family kind of way and for a minute I wished I were right then and there having a Halloween party instead of doing what I usually do on Halloween which is turn out all the lights and hide in my bed, willing the trick-or-treat-ers to go away with my mind. My Halloween party guests would like the bat. "Very realistic," they would tell me.

We devise a plan. I hit the bat with a broom and the bat falls to the floor and then flies up and nose dives behind a pile of laundry while we shriek alot. After all the shrieking, we manage to trap the bat under a overturned basket.

Job well done. We congratulate ourselves.

Then the bat began to echo-locate which means it made creepy bat sounds and then it tried to escape by sticking its wing under the edge of the basket. More shrieking. Much more shrieking.

Did I tell you that bats freak me out? Apparently it is hereditary.

Anyhow, after we stopped shrieking, we managed to scoot the basket and bat all the way to the back door. Then we opened the door and kicked the bat and basket out, which made us feel all successful again until we realized that the basket had landed overturned on the bat, meaning that we were going to have to open the door and free the bat and then close the door real fast so that the bat didn't fly back in the house.

Yes, fly. They fly, people. That is what makes bats so freaky. The fly all erratically and swoop and I am pretty sure that they build nests in people's hair especially if their hair is naturally curly and beautify and shiny like mine is and if that happens you pretty much die of fright.

In the end, we watched the bat fly into the night sky and felt pretty good about the whole thing. No one died of fright. The bat wasn't harmed. And the whole ordeal took ten minutes or less.

It took me 2 hours to fall back to sleep.


And it took me 2 1/2 days to write this.


Happy Halloween.







Go ahead and click on the teeny envelope icon and send this post to a friend. Don't be jerky and claim that you wrote it because I wrote it, damn it.

Another transcript of a real conversation that took place this morning in the Sondra Stinglash household.

Person 1: That's my coffee mug.

Person 2: It's mine. I have squatter's rights. Besides, you never drink out of this mug.

Person 1: That's because MY MUG is never available.

Person 2: You drink your coffee out of a drinking glass.

Person 1: I am forced to. You have my tall mug. I like drinking my coffee from tall drinking vessels, so I use a glass.

Person 2: That's stupid.

Person 1: No it's not. It is very European.

Person 1: No it's not. It's stupid. You're stupid.

Person 2: No. You're stupid.

Person 1: No, you are.

Person 2: No, you are.

Person 1: You're so stupid that every day you have a date to go on a picnic with the Stupid Fairy.

Person 2: You're so stupid that you are the lead singer for the Idiot Island's Polka Band.

Person 1: Oh yeah. You're so stupid that you got a bad score on your SAT exam and had to go to a community college.


OK. So I took some liberties in the recording of this exchange. The word vessel was not really used. That would be a little pretentious.






Go ahead and click on the teeny envelope icon and send this post to a friend. Don't be jerky and claim that you wrote it because I wrote it, damn it.

I have family in town and you know what that means- the perfect opportunity to scare the crap out of someone! If you're like me, you enjoy a good practical joke that scars for life, like the time my brother was in town and I got really sick and had to be taken to the hospital and when we got home, I hid outside and my brother told my 6 year old son that I had died and then when he was registering the news and getting all teary, I jumped up and twisted my face all up against the window and made crazy zombie sounds. That was hilarious. Over the next five years there was a lot of bed-wetting around our house, but it was totally worth it.

So the other night, my brother, Hank Torgit, and his girlfriend, Babette, were due at the airport at midnight. While we were awaiting their arrival, we cooked up a plan that had us giggling for about an hour. I have an older house and in the basement there is a root cellar that has a bunch of wine racks so it could be called a wine cellar except there is no wine in there on account that who wants to store wine in the cellar when you could be drinking it? Calling the room a wine cellar makes it sound nice- as if we are the kind of people who shop out of the little Sky Mall Catalogue. But the wine cellar is not nice. It's creepy. It has a cement floor, I think, but the walls seem to be leaking dirt, so when my brother called and said, "Babette is a little worried about the accommodations, let's make her think we are going to have to sleep in the dirt room," I knew exactly what room he was referring to. "You mean the guest room," was my reply. "I'm on it." Lots of giggling later, and we had cozied up the room a bit. Two old pillows that I have been meaning to throw away and an old sleeping bag on the floor- we toyed with placing a pot in the room and telling Babette that our plumbing was broken, so they would have to use the pot, but the basement bathroom is scanky enough so we didn't really need to go over the top with the whole you have to shit in a pot and then dump it outside routine.

As you can imagine, after traveling the whole day and arriving after midnight, my brother and his girlfriend were tired and were looking forward to a nice cozy bed. We led them and their luggage downstairs and opened the door.








Except for in the morning I found out that the real reason she was so nonchalant about the room is that when she saw it she sped through Kubler Ross's stages of grief, straight to acceptance. As she looked around and took in the accommodations- the dirt floor, the cobwebs, the crumbling walls, she felt a sense of relief that her imminent death meant that she would only have to spend one night there.





Go ahead and click on the teeny envelope icon and send this post to a friend. Don't be jerky and claim that you wrote it because I wrote it, damn it. But, you SHOULD totally try this joke on your family.