I give up...

...and I fully admit that I came to the South on my own. It wasn't my idea but I wasn't in shackles and I was a full grown woman when I got here. I could have left any number of times. Now I'm stuck and I can't figure out how to get the hell out of here. Someone needs to come and get me.

My birthday is next Monday and when people ask me what I want, I don't know what to tell them. I pretty much just want to get the hell out of dodge. How can I tell the locals that my birthday wish is to leave them and they're pick up trucks and get as far away as I can? Oh well, my official answer is that I want to go on a vacation, far, far away from here.

The 23rd was the anniversary of my mother's death and the night before that, I dreamt about her. I hadn't been thinking much about her lately because of all the stupid shit I've been dealing with. But, when I woke up that morning I remembered that I dreamt my mother won 23 million dollars in the lottery. So, since she died on the 23rd and she won 23 million in the dream that I had on that day, I had to take that as some sort of message. Naturally, I bought lottery tickets. I rarely do that because I don't have the kind of luck that it takes to find a decent coupon for dog food, there's no way that I would think that I could win the lottery. But, that day I did. The drawing is on the night of the 30th, come back then and I'll let you know if I'm rich or if I'm still just an idiot with rotten luck.

I walked to the store that day because I had to walk the dog anyway. As I was walking, I looked up in the sky and saw a perfect X made out of clouds. Of course I took that as another message and kept walking to buy my lottery tickets. Then, a couple of minutes later, I looked up to see the X but it was gone and had been replaced with a great big cloud heart. My sisters are usually more into that kind of stuff than I am but what the heck, I'll play along.

Once more, as I tried to have a pity party, I was smacked in the face with people much worse off than I am. Remember when I had the worms on my ceiling that turned out to be moth larvae? I bitched about that until some woman had a real worm removed from her brain. Now, I'm sitting here nursing my injuries from the weekend and other people are dropping like flies.

When I was much, much, much younger, my father would let us stay up long enough to watch Johnny Carson's monologue before he sent us off to bed. I never missed Ed McMahon's deep voice saying "Here's Johnny!" When I was discovering boys, there were a couple of them who took my world by storm and one of them was Michael Jackson. When my son was a baby, I would drive from Petaluma to LA to visit a cousin who happened to live in the same complex as Dick Van Patton. His wife's best friend would be there occasionally and I was lucky enough to meet her a few times. Her name was Farrah Faucett.

OK, Ed McMahon was an old man. But Farrah wasn't that much older than I and Michael Jackson was 2 months younger. This is getting creepy. I guess I'm getting to that age where people I know are going to start croaking on a regular basis. My grandparents would read the obituaries daily to see what acquaintances had died. I won't be doing that. I'm sort of freaking out over all the dead people and I don't need to look for more bad news, it always seems to find me sooner or later anyway.

I remember having great-grandparents, grandparents and parents. They always insured that I had a bit of a death buffer but now my father is the only one left, I'm on deck and I'm rather unnerved about that. And my father isn't really much of a buffer because that SOB is gonna live to be 104 and I'll be gone before he hits 80. He asked me to die after he dies but I can only do so much. He needs to take up smoking or some other unhealthy vice or he's gonna bury more kids than this one.

Now I'm really freaking myself out so I must go do something to get my mind off of my own impending death. I'll be back soon...I hope.