"Instant Karma's gonna get you"

I've been watching a very disturbing trend on Facebook lately in the form of videos posted by bullies of their "victims" being beaten.  Often, realizing that the beating is being filmed, the victim is  rising up against them while one of the bully's friends is busily filming - and oftentimes, laughing at the beat down rather then coming to the defense of their bullying pal. It has spawned a bunch of anti-bullying videos lately, but I have a couple of questions about these videos whenever they appear in my News Feed:

1) Who in their right mind would "get ready" for a video that, if the proper authorities get their hands on it (i.e. it becomes "public domain" because you're dumb enough to post it to You Tube or Facebook), NOT ONLY will the bully get caught and punished (because the biggest "excuse" for these people is "I didn't do anything and don't know WHAT this so-called victim is talking about"), but YOU, whose voice comes in several times over this video, will also be punished as an accomplice? ("Accomplice", for those of you skipping classes with your bully friend, is defined by Merriam Webster as "a person who knowingly helps another in a crime or wrongdoing, often as a subordinate".) You DO realize that, when your bullying buddy convinced you to film them beating down some poor sucker you've been beating on all year, that you are "knowingly helping", right, and that, if this goes to a news station, as one did last year in my local area, that you will also be suspended and taken to court along with that bully you've been hanging out with?

2) When these videos hit "big time" on Facebook and such, do the parents ever look at these and say "Good job on bullying that kid who's smaller than you are, son. How did his foot taste when he broke your nose with that roundhouse kick?"

3) Do the parents of other kids that the bully hangs out with see the video and punish their own child for bringing this nasty person home with them, either by taking better stock of the people their child is hanging out with or by flat-out grounding their child for not having the common sense God gave a gnat?

4) There are parents out there (like me) who, on seeing these videos and realizing that school hasn't changed since WE were in school, are getting their bullied child self-defense lessons, so that the next time you perform a sucker punch on your favorite victim, you may be picking your head up in the next county when your victim takes what they've learned in self defense to put your bullying heinie into the hospital so you can think about how Instant Karma did just what John Lennon predicted and "Gonna knock you right in the head"?

For all the parents out there who are too busy trying to make ends meet to pay attention to what is going on in your child's life, I sincerely hope these videos are waking you up to the fact that BULLYING HAPPENS EVERY DAY! If you aren't paying attention to your child enough to know if they are the bully or the victim, you're adding fuel to the fire for the next child who decides that the only way to feel safe is to bring a gun to school and blow a bunch of people into the next life. By ignoring your children and letting the day care and the schools raise them with NO value when it comes to human life, you AREN'T part of any form of a solution.

This, when it comes right down to it, is why I'm hoping that Bernie Sanders beats out the others vying for President and also accomplishes a major shake-up in the people that we send to represent us in Washington - especially those who aren't seeing that, by keeping minimum wage at less than $8 per hour, parents BOTH have to work, leaving their children to be raised by surrogates who encourage this bully behavior because they can't instill the family values we need so bad. We need to stop the "business as usual" atmosphere in the US and start having parents at home who see their child instigating these bullying videos and start taking action to change the way our children see the world.

We need the moms to be at home, as mine was, to see the bully in action in their own home and put a stop to it before pain and fear are all we know, as that is what John Lennon was saying in his music:

"Why in the world are we here
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on earth are you there
When you're everywhere
Come and get your share"

May your share of the instant karma be peace and goodness all the rest of your days.

Blessed be.

Do you think God sometimes stirs the pot?

My deceased father had a lot of sayings that sometimes still come back to me at the oddest moments. One of these was "Stir the pot and see what floats to the top". Some days, this was a disturbing thought, as he would include the word "shit" before the word "pot" if things were really not happening in a nice way....

But I now wonder if that's what the past couple of years have been about. Perhaps God is stirring the "shit pot" to see what part of my personality floats to the top when I'm under intense pressure.

Not that I haven't been under pressure for most of my life, mind, but the past 10 years have been particularly trying, and with all the medical ailments that come with getting old suddenly coming due within just the past 3-4 years, I'm starting to wonder if the God of my ancestors isn't just a little bit nasty to those who try to be good and obey His words....

Take, for example, the health issues I've chronicled just on myself here in this blog. In less than one year, I've been treated for both a hernia and menopause issues that, until I mentioned to my mom what my elder sister had told me, I was unaware that both were genetic via my maternal grandmother. They've been a pain in my nether regions, but since Memere lived to be 89 despite her problems, I'm hopeful that I can side-step her diabetes, excess weight issues and strokes by the exercise that I've been doing to get myself down to my ideal weight for my height and age....

My hubby, on the other hand, has refused to allow me to hunt down information on his paternal side (he was the product of a nasty divorce and refuses to admit that the man who raised him from the time he was 11 isn't a biological father and therefore isn't the health profile we need) and doesn't admit that the history on his mother's side simply isn't any better than the mess on my mother's side...

Take, for example, the blood clots he had back in the fall that he's just managed to battle off with the help of Xarelto. His maternal grandmother, when I met the woman, was in a nursing home after having a couple of strokes - which are caused by blood clots breaking loose from another part of the body and blocking off important arteries. I've been worried about strokes and heart attacks, but he's been worried about how this will prevent him from going on another paddle down the Allagash....

and just when he got taken off the Xarelto so that he could think again about his big paddling trip, he got the sad news this morning that he's going to have to have surgery on his ankles (which have been bad since before I knew him and getting progressively worse from damage he did back in high school and college, but that were never that important to him until he started having them go weak on ladders he has to climb for his job). From the first part of July until early September, he's not going to be allowed to put weight on his legs except for trips from the bed to the bathroom.

For him, this puts the kibosh on not only his Allagash trip, but also on our Anniversary Week Vacation that we always take at the end of July. If he's not allowed to bear weight on his legs, he won't be allowed to take that trip - and he's more concerned with getting out for our vacation before he has to be stuck at home for two to three months. Having had to practically sit on him to get him to stay down long enough to heal from a black ice car accident in 1989 in which he broke 37 bones, I'm more concerned with finding enough things that he can do from a sitting down position so that he has the chance to heal properly and not end up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life....

and I've been joking with some of my friends that, if things don't go well, I may need to have a good place to hide a body before the end of August, as I'm apt to kill him if I come home (as I did several times during the recovery from the accident) to find him pacing the driveway because he was bored, but didn't have a car available.

So, while I go into my job to tell them the bad news, see if perhaps the vacation I already got approved for at the end of July can be moved up a month, and try to come up with things to keep a man with the personality of a giant toddler amused for two to three months, may I ask that you all pray for me? Please ask whatever deity you believe in to grant me patience, because if He or She grants me strength, I'm also going to need that place to hide the body, or maybe bail money if I just resort to beating him into submission.....*grin*

And for all of you who haven't reached the age of 50 yet, please make this your mantra: Getting old sucks, so live it up while you're young!

Blessed be, my lovelies, and thank you for your visits.

Saying Goodbye Is Often The Hardest Thing To Do

This weekend proved to be harder than I thought it could be, because even though I was warned, I wasn't quite prepared for someone posting photos on Facebook - and they hurt in a way I can't really describe, despite the fact that I have a dictionary and thesaurus easily available. There are just some times that the pain is so intense, so deep, that even the darkest of words can't really hit the nail on the head...

This is what I'm talking about:

This photo, taken shortly after the current owner of the property took possession, is the place where I grew up in a small town called Exeter, Maine. Not to be confused with the big city of Exeter, New Hampshire, the town I grew up in was mostly farms, the largest of which belongs currently to Crane Brothers Potatoes.

As you can see, it's nothing special, just a house with an always shabby looking garage where my dad used to spend a lot of time working on things like old television sets and things. My sister's room (and briefly at times over the years, my room) would be the two upstairs windows that face the road. My bedroom, for most of my life, was around the back side of the building with a window that looked out at the back yard. To the right edge of this photo, that building and roof are part of the former general store, where everyone in town came to shop unless there was something special they had to buy in Dexter or Bangor.

The red metal roof was brand new at the time I took this photo, which was after visiting with my mom at her new home and hearing her tell me "I didn't raise you in Howard Johnsons!" (A famous restaurant/hotel that featured a red roof when I was growing up.) I've driven past several times since I left home in 1981 to move to Fryeburg with my then-boyfriend (now husband), as my dad's grave is just a half a mile from here. I've witnessed the way the town is slowly changing from a center of commerce, as there used to be auctions at a big barn that stood on the property to the left of this shot and a rooming house across the street - both torn down now - and saw the general store become a sandwich shop, because EVERYBODY drives to the larger towns to grocery shop these days....

So I got to see the work in progress when the new owner painted the house a dark grey (which my mom hated), then the other work he did, such as removing sheds where we used to pile wood for the wood stoves in order to build a deck overlooking the back yard. As others noted over the years, it seemed to be smaller all the time, especially the "back forty", as we called the acre or so that we had to mow every summer...

Then, via Facebook and my mom, I was informed that the new owner had rented the place to people who really didn't care for it. They let the furnace blow out one winter, and instead of doing anything to repair it, they broke holes in walls and removed all the copper piping in the place to turn in for scrap. By the time the owner realized what had been done to the place by his tenants and got them removed, it was going to cost him more to fix the place than he'd paid for it in the first place...

So this past weekend, it was burned down by the local fire department as a training exercise - and some days, it doesn't pay to have relatives who are firemen, policemen, etc. who have never left the local area...

I had purposefully avoided going to see the "festivities", as the house held so many memories, including being the place where my father breathed his last when cancer got the upper hand in July 1980. Jim included photos and a couple of videos of the "training exercise" - and even trying to share these here, I have tears flowing down my face three days later...

The little boarded up window above the space we always called the "porch" was my brother's bedroom for a number of years, and it was the window Dad always insisted we should crawl out of if there was a fire, as the drop from the edge of the porch roof was less likely to injure us if we had to jump. Even if we couldn't get to that window, however, he always emphasized that it would be better to have a broken leg than to burn to death. The boarded over windows on the lower floor looked in on the cot where he lay the night he passed away...

This picture hit particularly hard, as there was one blizzard when I was a child in which the snow was piled up to the edge of this roof - and we all (meaning my sibs, myself, and a half-dozen of the neighborhood kids we played with) got into MAJOR trouble climbing up with our sleds and sliding down the back into the drifted snow in the back yard...

The last shot Jim posted before going to video to tape the "final burn" - and for some reason I can't seem to fathom, this seems to be the worst of them all. As when Dad last painted the house, the back side never got finished, and from that little vent on the wall, this strikes me as the window in the former shed that Dad and Pepere and remodeled into a laundry room/the place where Mom had her stove. The little vent cover would have been from the hood that took the steam (and occasionally smoke) that came off the stove.

What has been eating at me is this: it's the fourth place I've lived that is no longer there. The home in Fryeburg where my husband spent most of his life from the age of 11 until we moved into an apartment at the far side of his folks place burned flat after someone left a candle burning. 7 Oxford Street/6 Smith Street in Fryeburg was never rebuilt after it burned in the early 90's and is a parking lot. 

The place we were living when his mother died and where we had our second baby was taken down a few years ago when the guy who owned it after us sold it to Poland Springs for their new, wide driveway to their bottling plant in Fryeburg. Poland Springs had jumped the gun a little, buying the property and taking down the house before they had permission to put in the road, so it also is nothing but a cleared space of lawn. Although Google Earth still shows a photo that includes the house and garage at 46 Portland Street, it's been gone almost 2 years now.

The place in Gorham that we only lived for one year, which had multiple code violations for a rental, got torn down and turned into a parking lot as well. I had less of an emotional tie to that one, but it IS where we "adopted" a white cat we named "Zippy" and where our elderly black cat, Avatar, suddenly started coming to the door and calling "Hello" when he wanted to come in....

Maybe I should look up our old addresses and, after confirming that THEY are still there, I should notify current owners/residents to be careful. I seem to have cursed the places I've lived to total destruction......

In the meantime, I'm going to give the earth some time to heal once they've pushed the remainder of the house into the old cellar hole, dumped dirt over, and put in grass seed before I go visit for another photo. After watching the homes of both grandparents fall into neglect and slowly fall down piece by piece, I'm much happier that we won't watch that happen in the home where I grew up...but I'll never be able to go back like this song from Miranda Lambert speaks of...

There's no place for me to "touch this place and feel it"...not any more, anyway.....(Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me" is at the other end of the link)

https://youtu.be/DQYNM6SjD_o

ADDENDUM April 4, 2016:  Going to visit my mom for her birthday with the grandkids, I took a ride through Exeter on a mission. I wanted to get pictures of "the places I used to live" for a tongue-in-cheek post later this year showing all the parking lots and grassy knolls that have taken the place of some of the places I used to live in. I was hoping that the current owners of the "old homestead" would have the dirt pushed over the remains....but I was wrong and it became a very hard task to take the photos below....

Taken from roughly the same angle as the pic at the top of this post, the lack of the house is a little disturbing, but livable. I noted a very burnt tree that I didn't recall being that close to the house, so I walked several feet over, to where there used to be a garage that housed the oil delivery trucks that my dad drove when I was young, and took a "straight back" shot (below). As I was looking at it from this angle, I realized that the giant pine tree was one my sister planted when we were kids, and was once short enough that we were playing "Leap Frog" over the top of it. It's been 35 years since I moved out, so it's entirely possible that the unfamiliar tree was planted by an owner after Mom sold the place......

Then I moved in for some close-up shots.....

This was the one that hurt my heart, as that crumbled bit of metal was the hot air furnace that Mom and Dad had put in shortly after they bought the house. As you can see, the cellar didn't go all the way across the length of the house, so there was just cellar under the living room and dining room areas, and crawl space under the kitchen, porch and sheds. The small blue building near the trees marks where we used to slip down into the "woods"  between our house and the neighbors cow field and have "adventures" - mostly living out stories we were making up as we went along....

As I was taking this last shot, I almost started laughing at myself, remembering when I was given the duty of going down into the basement to get potatoes from the large wooden bins where we dumped them each fall after collecting them from local potato fields (the "leavings" after the harvester had worked the field were free for the taking, so we took a lot.....). I always hurried, because I was certain a velociraptor lived somewhere in the basement. The fact that there were no velociraptor bones in the cellar hole should have made me feel better, but I'm wondering where it moved to before they burned the place.....

So, I'm going to call it an end to this particular post and try to make another trip out in a year or so to take the photo I was hoping to have this time, with all the "remains" properly buried and the grass starting to grow. In the meantime, I'm making a list of all the places I've lived so I can do a complete "warning system" for those who happen to be living in places I used to live. Considering that this makes the FIFTH place to be taken down, I feel it's only fair to let those who might be caught in my House Karma Backlash to be aware that they should be VERY careful.....

*grin*

All That Glitters Must Be Fool's Gold

I just opened an email that I probably shouldn't have opened before coffee. It was titled "Get your book noticed by libraries and bookstores", and since that's what I've been trying to find a marketer to find out how one does such things, I opened it....

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as the old character, Gomer Pyle, used to say on the Andy Griffith Show.

The email says that a review needs to be placed in a certain magazine in order for the bookstores and libraries to see my books and note that they are worth buying. The review needs to be done by one of the magazines staff members. The staff member needs to be paid $350 for each month one wants the review to appear for this magazine.

Obviously, the company that hit up my email address for this kind of cash infusion into their business so that I can get mine off the ground doesn't realize that, although I doubled my income between the re-issues of two books and the publication of the third over the past 18 months, I still only made $50 on the year in royalties for the books and Kindles sold on Amazon. No one at all bought my books from Barnes & Noble over the year.

Considering that I'm spending more per month than I made on the year for the business credit card that I used to hire the models for the front covers, and that I took a HUGE gamble to try to boost sales (which didn't happen as I'd hoped, so I gambled and lost), this "marketing scheme" doesn't appeal to me at all, even on the off chance that someone would actually put my books into a library should this magazine ACTUALLY be a legit thing that gets into the hands of those in charge of buying for the libraries. I'm thinking I'd be better off to do as I did before, and just get a couple of copies of the books to put into the libraries in the towns where I lived and grew up here in the state. At least if people in Gray, Bangor, and Dexter can pick up a book at the local library and pass the reviews on by word of mouth, should they like them, I might manage to get a few more people to go and pick up copies at Amazon or Barnes & Noble for next year - and it certainly WOULDN'T cost me $350 per month to do so.....

So, for those who follow this blog in the hope that I'm going to spill the beans on some major secret of how to get your books into bookstores and libraries, therefore giving your indie book a chance at becoming a New York Times Bestseller (which is ENTIRELY based on book sales through book stores, mind), I'm going to leave you with a word of caution, as I've obviously skipped something along the way that would encourage people to buy, buy, buy......

Be very careful where you spend your money when you start gambling on ideas of how to boost sales. In my own experience, the beautiful covers I have from hiring models and the sweet people who've modeled for me (and brought TONS of engagement to my Facebook fan pages when I post their photos as the characters I asked them to portray) didn't pan out as sales, but I've made some very marvelous friends. The advertising schemes also didn't pan out as well as simply keeping this blog and writing about such things as I've shared this morning. In short, for the indie authors and publishers out there, the best thing that can happen to you is to gain free advertising from those who have purchased the books and put their reviews in places like Goodreads or Amazon.

Now I'm off to file my tax paperwork, produce the proof that I had a major loss in my business (with proper documentation for the US government so I get a little tax break because of the gamble that didn't pay off), and pray that somehow, some day, I'll be able to get my books into at least the LOCAL bookstores and libraries so that my fellow Mainers can at least wander through and find one on the rack. Otherwise, that cover gambit won't EVER pay off......

Blessed be, and thank you for the almost 3000 views that I've gathered on this blog since I started it in 2013. Even if the books aren't selling, it's still a major thrill to see how many people in other countries come and visit this place where I can share my thoughts with y'all.....

Name That Ism!

I'm not really into politics. If you were to ask me what was happening in Washington on any given day, I would look at you blankly and ask you "What?"

But it's an election year. There's no escaping it. And the one most of the people I speak to on a daily basis want to be in the Presidency isn't doing well with the big money "superdelegates", and big money is the biggest reason why the popular vote no longer counts for anything any more...

And the other reason hinges on a pair of words that to some mean the return to things as they used to be BEFORE big money took over our country....and to others, the same two words mean we're all going to Hell in a handbasket:

Democratic Socialism

If one looks it up in a dictionary, this would be the definition:

Democratic socialism is a political ideology advocating a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system, involving a combination of political democracy with social ownership of the means of production. Sometimes used synonymously with "socialism", the adjective "democratic" is often added to distinguish itself from the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism, which is widely viewed as being non-democratic (from Wikipedia)

Now, to me, this kind of goes hand in hand with how the country was MEANT to be run when our forefathers and our first ever President, George Washington, were getting everyone working in unison to chase out the British and establish a new nation. But I took a lovely class in my senior year of high school called "Worldisms". I know how to tell the difference from one of those other -isms that some people think is socialism:

Marxism: The political, economic, and social theories of Karl Marx including the belief that the struggle between social classes is a major force in history and that there should eventually be a society in which there are no classes. (Merriam Webster Dictionary)

Or even worse, they insist it is the same as:

Communism: a way of organizing a society in which the government owns the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) and there is no privately owned property. (once again, Merriam Webster)

Their solution to the cry that we need the government to stop allowing the already rich to just keep getting richer and pay their fair shaire with people who display a few other of those -isms I learned about.

Fascism: a way of organizing society in which a government, ruled by a dictator, controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government. ) 

One hopeful candidates has said "I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money." in response to negative press. The scary part is that no one seems to realize that the President can't just make laws...

Racism: Do I really have to define this?

But I suspect the worst of the election year has to be the debates, especially with some of the candidates we've had.

When I was a child and we only had three stations that came in on the old rabbit ears (held on the head of the tricerotops, for those who wish to believe that living in such times was absolutely primitive), I used to watch the debates because they were on all three stations. They were calm. They were polite. They were dignified. Each candidate was given questions to answer and a moderator controlled the whole show as each strove to describe what he could do to help the country become a better place.

Watching even a few minutes of this year's debates is like watching a train wreck in action. Calm? The candidates yell over each other. Polite? Name calling is the least of the foulness displayed. Dignified? These candidates wouldn't know the word if it walked up behind them and took a chunk out of their rich derrieres!

I've been allowed to vote since 1979, but each time I need to assist my country in putting someone into a special place we call The Oval Office, I get more and more depressed. The more history I read in research for an historical romance I'm writing, the more depressed I get about what this country has become and the fact that we no longer seem to be a country By the People, For the People, but more of a land of rich people buying the vote so that they can continue to get richer while the poor are ground under their heels.

We the People, if you happen to be the party that calls themselves Democrats, can be voted down by a group of Superdelegates, who pretty much have already chosen who will represent the Democrat side even before the popular vote is finished. In the general election, it isn't the popular vote that choses the President any more, it's the points earned in the Electoral College.

Perhaps it's time for me to practice one more -ism:

Escapism: a mental dicversion by means of entertainment of recreation, as an "escape" or dissociation from the pereived unpleasantries of daily life. (kind of Wikipedia, but edited)