Mars, 2001, with the southern polar ice cap visible on the bottom. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

During the pubescent Salkin years, I used to think humans were Martian spawns. I don’t know where that idea came from. I guess the same place all the weird ideas came from – the sky … and the UFOs.

Sometime later during my teenage years, after I got my first typewriter, a thought hit me between the eyes.

You have an imagination and like to write about weird stuff, which makes up an imagination. I sure do like puns.

It was around the same time I realized I was a bit off center of what was expected of a girl my age. I enjoyed staying home in my room and tapping the keys more than hanging out with friends.

I’ve always been an obsessive key tapper, putting my fantastical thoughts on paper, some scary, some funny, some just  weird.

The thoughts always followed me around – from morning to night then through my dreams.

The thoughts are as much a part of me as I am of them. We have always been a family of sorts as well as a one-woman creative team.

I don’t like to brag. But I was born with a movie studio in my head.  At any given moment, my movie studio is working on a project.

When the studio is not in production, my thoughts like to rummage through the “note-to-self” box in the back of my brain and return to the idea about being related to Martians.

Imagine my delight when scientists recently discovered water on Mars.

“Aha,” my thoughts said, and then added another idea to the “note-to-self” box. “You might not be as weird as you thought.”

I don’t know about that …

“You used to enjoy watching ‘My Favorite Martian’ when you were a tot.”

Another coincidence that bonds to the red planet.

“Earth to Lauren. ‘My Favorite Martian,’ Mars, descendant of Martians. You probably got the idea from the TV show.”

But my Martian relatives and I never had an antenna sticking out of our heads. We must have been from a different town in Mars.

“You grew up in the suburbs –”

The suburbs on Mars. That’s why I’ve always loved the color red … like the red planet.

“You used to swim in lakes and pools on earth when you were a kid … like earth children do.”

But I’ve always liked Mars candy bars.

“Like Earth children do.”

So, what are you saying?

“Your antenna is inside your head and it doesn’t get Martian Wi-Fi.”

WTF?

“Your antenna picks up the ideas that drift in the sky. That’s why you travel to so many places in your head. One of the places might as well be Mars. That’s what happens when imagination follows you around.”

Maybe this is a good time to visit the old neighborhood.

Scrambled Words and Toast.

Do your words lay in clumps across the page, like scrambled eggs? Do they yearn for something more than a comma or a period? Do they need a fork to guide them, a menu to organize them?

Do your words lose their meaning and look more like toast?

It happened to me.

Just me and my scrambled words and toast. Food for thought or thought for food?

No matter. They both end up in the digital crapper. I press the delete key and flush.

Lately, I can’t figure out if I should be writing humor, fiction or humor-fiction. And then there’s the dark stuff. Love the dark stuff. Chocolate cake for the brain.

No matter how far I dig I can’t seem to find that comfortable place for preparing a recipe of words.

What kind of words? Big ones, small ones, made up ones, as in badoodling crappy stuff on the page, the leading cause of scrambled words and toast.

Should I write with a knife? Use a pen as a toothpick? It’s all so confusing. Betwixt and befuddled. And in what direction should I point the keyboard?

scanned from 1900 Wizard of Oz book (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I feel like Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, at the crossroads where she meets the Scarecrow, when she asks him, “…But which road should I take?”

The Scarecrow crosses his arms, his fingers pointing in opposite directions, and says, “That way!”

That’s where I am, stuck at “that way,” heading in two directions at once, getting nowhere. Stuck on the breakdown lane of the Internet highway.

I’ve never had a blogging niche. I’m not a food blogger or a mommy blogger and don’t know anything about gardening, except for weeds. I know how to grow them but not get rid of them. That’s why I’m stuck in them.

I’m not an expert on anything.

I just enjoy observing the world and interpreting what I see.

And what about scrambled words and toast? That’s Paul McCartney’s fault.

“Scrambled Eggs” was the original title for “Yesterday.”  One evening, I watched an old performance of his on the public broadcasting channel. He described how the song, “Yesterday,” came to him in a dream. He didn’t know what it was at the time and so he called it “Scrambled Eggs.”

Hence, scrambled words and toast, or let’s call it what it really is – scrambled brains.

Do you have scrambled brains?

A conversation with myself because no one else will listen.

Why don’t I feel like writing? – Arctic spring weather? Green goop in China? Wrist Apnea?

Lame, lame and lame. Just strike the damn keys until something appears –

Black-and-blue words, broken letters…

Cut the crap! You’re being lazy. No one gets anywhere by being lazy. You’ve got to park your butt on the chair and exercise your fingers. Just do it, if that is what you want to do. The hell with everything else.

What about that Mt. Everest pile of laundry in the hall or the dust bunny colony in the basement?

Fuck ‘em. You can’t let repetitive chore motions strain your brain. They’ll beat you up, steal your thoughts and turn you into a robot before you’ve finished polishing the silver.

Who beat whom?

God’s last disciple, Self-fulfilling Prophesy. Look it up in the Book of Job.

Read something longer than 300 words…I don’t think so.  Flash fiction with long breaks in between is what I need for a jolt of inspiration, a creative defibrillator as it were. I want to write but don’t know how to get there.

Booyah! I wish I knew yah but can’t find yah in the crap.

I don’t know why I can’t write.

The answer is hard to find in a pile of guano, also known as crap brain.

How do you get rid of crap brain? A Gastro-Neurologist? Crap Brain Specialist on Craigslist?

Sure, if you want to meet a creep that will snuff you out like a dying ember on a cigarette.

I don’t smoke.

No, it blackens your lungs like Cajun snapper. Food for thought. Something to digest on a rainy day that stretches into rainy days, etc. This is spring after all. But seasonally speaking, this year we’re a month behind. Global warming you know. Something about trapped gases in the atmosphere that fucks with Mother Nature’s hormonal levels like PMS.

I don’t understand the concept of global warming, as most folks don’t. I’ll be dead before I get it, probably freeze to death in July.

Global warming sounds boring, doesn’t sound as sexy as tsunami. Perception is everything in the weather biz. How do you explain to a nincompoop that every reaction has an opposite affect, as in Newton’s theory, “Every Action has an Equal and Opposite Reaction?” You push something. It pushes back. You fuck with Mother Nature. She fucks with you back.

That’s how Al Gore should have explained Global Warming to the masses, not with a PowerPoint presentation. Too many numbers to absorb in one tiny brain, especially a brain like mine that has an aversion to math, which incidentally is a four-letter word.

A brain is like a sponge. Add too many thoughts and it can’t absorb all the information.

Try the sponge experiment at home.

The sponge is your brain, the floating cesspool in the sink are your thoughts.

Drop your brain, er, sponge in the sink and watch it soak up some of the sewage.

However, you’ll soon discover that many more sponge dips are needed to soak up all of the crap, unless you have hundreds of sponges.

The same is not true of the brain. You’ve only got one of those and many folks never get the opportunity to use it. Just turn on Fox and Friends or CNN. The news has become what the film, “Network,” had satirized in the 70s.

And like the producers of “Network,” God and Mother Nature also enjoy a good laugh in their collaborative effort to mess with Plasticine TV meteorologists.

God and Mother Nature often exchange late night chuckles while roasting marshmallows in a burning tree during a forest fire, started by lightning, the Supreme BIC Lighter, a result of Bizarro world weather tormenting our dip-shit planet.

Maybe that’s the answer. Dip it in shit.

Done that. Been there. Won the t-shirt in a shit storm – the ultimate wet t-shirt contest.

Because I can’t taste you anymore.
At least, not in the way I used to.

Several months ago, I noticed that
trusted flavors lacked their usual zest.

Garlic, yogurt, onions…all tasted bland.

Granted, I’ve never been much of
a cook…Well, food tasted blander
than that.

At first, I thought I was imagining it.
But as time passed, I realized it was real.

Food had lost its zing. It was just plain, tasteless.

Sure, at times a hint of peripheral flavors slipped through the vague ingredients.

I was able to detect gobs of garlic, onions and even burnt toast. Sweet foods tasted sweet but not in a savory way.

All the flavors smushed together into one muted lump that confused my brain.

While I was eating a piece of cake, my brain sent a note.

Hey, you. That’s supposed to be chocolate you’re eating. But I taste nonspecific sweet, not dark chocolate sweet. What’s up with that?

I don’t know what to say. It looks like cake. But…the sights, textures and taste of foods just don’t jive.

I knew what I was eating but there was a communication problem between my tongue and brain. After being BFFs for so many years, suddenly they stopped talking.

My brain sent another note one night while I was eating pepperoni pizza.

Hey, that’s cheese. Isn’t it? And spicy pepperoni with garlic. But all I taste is a hint of spice. Not a specific spice. Again, totally generic and bland. What’s up with that?

Well, I’ve got this stuff in the sensory area of my brain. Lesions force the neurons to take the scenic route, on the back roads, to where they need to go. Instead of the short cut they’re used to.

Oh, yeah, 2001. Now I remember being zapped with electrical impulses during the Sensory Evoked Potential Test.

Hey, I was zapped. You just reacted.

Well, it sucked just the same. But what’s that got to do with the taste of food at a Chinese restaurant?

Sensory, my friend. Senses, lack of taste…

You’ve always been a bit tasteless but never with food.

Well, now we’ve come full circle, or rather full oval, the actual shape of my head.

Just do me a flavor. I mean favor. The next time you eat chocolate cake, smother it with hot fudge, mint chocolate chip ice cream and whip cream. Lots of sweet stuff. Maybe if you inundate your tongue with a potpourri of sweets, you’ll get dessert justice.

Thanks Brain. Now I know why you’re in charge. But you still have my ass to answer to.

Scientists using the focally-challenged as lab rats.

The Internet is more addictive than crack because it’s as pervasive as air.

Earlier today, the Fantasy News Network (FNN) uncovered a massive secret program in which ADHD individuals are unwittingly being used as test subjects in one of the most ambitious experiments in human history, in cooperation with Google, Bing and social media sites.

An unnamed and unverified source reportedly told FNN’s John Jester that in 1970, the military and Al Gore secretly co-founded The Shiny Object Project, a.k.a. the Internet ADHD Experiment, to monitor the behavior of ADHD individuals while surfing the Internet, to determine how it affects their brains.

Funded by the military and private investors, The Shiny Object Project (SOP) has been secretly studying ADHD test subjects through their search criteria, i.e., Googling old flames and searching for dirt on obnoxious co-workers, in addition to monitoring how many hours a day a test subject spends on Facebook playing Farmland and posting adorable pictures of their pets.

Several years after launching The Shiny Object Project, the SOP brain trust became frustrated with the limitations of desktop computers and in 1972, expanded the program to include “The Simon,” the first Smartphone developed by IBM.

The Internet was now accessible to ADHD test subjects 24/7, on their nightstands and bathroom sinks, in their pockets and handbags, literally at their fingertips. Literally, and I mean literally.

By monitoring Smartphone devices, SOP scientists were able to study:

• How often an ADHDer has to call their Smartphone every time her or she misplaces it.
• Their physiological response whenever a Smartphone buzzes, beeps or plays Beethoven’s Fifth, and its affect on heart rate and sweat gland activity.
• The number of hours of Internet usage required before the brain evaporates into a gaseous cloud, a theory based upon the elusive brain-melt, time-continuum.

Like the military’s secret experiments in the fifties in which they provided LSD to criminals and mental patients, The Shiny Object Project endangered ADHD test subjects by exposing them to harmful Wi-Fi nanobytes and HTML carcinogens via their Internet providers, ensuring their brains would be more susceptible to cyberspace stimuli than non ADHD individuals.

By doing so, the SOP was able to ascertain how many Internet carcinogens a test subject had to absorb before they could gain control of the brain and/or damage it.

My brain was damaged years ago by Captain Kangaroo, Soupy Sales and Leave It to Beaver – a plastic couch-cover philosophy that embraced “the nothing bad happens in suburbia” paradigm. That every outcome is positive, every ending, happy. It was only years later that I discovered that a happy ending meant something completely different.

Of all the Internet ADHD experiments, the most notable involved YouTube and how a test subject’s brain reacts to videos of people doing extraordinarily stupid things in their desire to be publicly ridiculed.

Highly successful, the YouTube test results provided SOP scientists with invaluable information involving the brain-melt, time-continuum, and because of it, was able to determine that the ADHD brain deteriorates more rapidly while a test subject watches a YouTube video.

The experiment continues…

How has the Internet affected your brain?

CNN, the Crap News Network

Hi, this is Blitz Geezer in Boston along with John Bland, Lance Fancy Pants and Tapioca Pudding.

ALL THE NEWS BOBBLEHEADS NOD INDEFINITELY.

BLITZ GEEZER

Since we don’t have anything new to report, we’ll talk incessantly about nothing, Tapioca.

LANCE FANCY PANTS

No thank you. I just ate.

TAPIOCA PUDDING

I think Blitz is talking to me. Well, Blitz, my source tells me that shortly before the bombing, Lance bought a pair of Dockers at the Saks Fifth Avenue that had provided authorities with key surveillance video of the bombing suspects. Lance reportedly sat down, got a salesman’s attention by waving his arms and then tried on several pairs of shoes before buying the Dockers with a credit card.

BLITZ

Can we get a shot of Lance’s shoes?

CAMERA CUTS TO LANCE’S SHOES.

BLITZ

Nice!

ALL THE NEWS BOBBLEHEADS NOD INDEFINITELY.

BLITZ

With all the walking we did around Boston, we all need a new pair of shoes. TOUCHES EARPIECE. One moment. We have breaking news…on Twitter. Swat teams have surrounded Suspect #2.

JOHN BLAND

You’re kidding. I thought Suspect #2 was in custody.

BLITZ

Apparently, a homeowner called authorities after seeing blood on his boat in his backyard.

JOHN BLAND

Who keeps a boat in a backyard the size of my bathroom?

BLITZ

Wait…more breaking news on Twitter. A police chopper, hovering above the yard, has infrared images of the suspect hiding inside the boat.

JOHN BLAND

Are you sure the suspect’s not in custody. My source told me hours ago there was an arrest.

BLITZ

Lance, what can you tell us. What are you seeing on the ground?

LANCE

A hot, steaming pile of dog shit. Apparently, a neighbor who walked his dog after the lock-down was lifted, didn’t bag the poop. I almost stepped in it with my new Dockers that I bought at the Saks that provided key video evidence to police.

BLITZ

Lance, are you hearing anything from your location?

LANCE

Let me check Twitter. HE CHECKS SMARTPHONE. Yes, Blitz. I’m hearing an exchange of gun fire and several explosions.

BLITZ

How ’bout you Tapioca?

TAPIOCA

On Facebook, their reporting that hostage negotiations are taking place.

LANCE

I’m listening to a live police radio broadcast from a link I got on Twitter…They just apprehended the suspect…and I’ve got a blister on my big toe from my new shoes.

TAPIOCA

Twitter reports that people are celebrating in the streets, and I just found a great Sushi place on Google Maps.

BLITZ

Now that Suspect #2 is in custody, we can replay hours of nonstop speculative yammering by reporters that preceded the arrest.

JOHN BLAND

Blitz, my source tells me that an arrest has been made…

I’m participating in Silly Sunday, hosted by Sandy of ComedyPlus.

As a child in the sixties, my innocence and the innocence of the nation, was shattered by three assassinations, one, years before the others, the others, just several months apart.

My generation could no longer hope for the clichéd, happy resolution at the end of a story. Our world, once a pocket of predictability, had changed. It was no longer a blasé place with innocuous consequences. The evil characters and scary plot twists in films had migrated from the movie screens to our backyards.

Fantasy and reality had synthesized into one glaring truth. Society was damaged. Evil had infiltrated our communities; our futures determined by uncontrollable forces, our lives affected by unnecessary wars that benefited corporations and by violent sociopaths with their fingers on the triggers.

The blood that had spilled from our larger than life heroes, and lesser unknown heroes of the Vietnam War, spilled into our national consciousness and created a generation of lost innocents, once content with the bland, black and white stories of suburbia portrayed in the TV show, Leave it to Beaver, and the Cleaver family, the perfect American family with uncomplicated lives.

The colorless, black and white images of the fifties gave way to blood-stained Technicolor images of the sixties and seventies, of students murdered on college campuses and soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

From Vietnam to Kent State to Jackson State, my generation was traumatized by indiscriminate shootings of, and by, our protectors, and the victims who fell from the force of their guns. On the ground, spurting blood, a generation of innocent lost to senseless violence.

For my generation, many of the tragedies we witnessed on TV were a result of social change in society, with the exception of the deaths of our three larger than life heroes, whose murders we watched on TV sets in our living rooms, footage replayed night-after-night in prime-time.

This generation of children today, unlike my generation, never had the luxury of black and white simplicity. They never had the peaceful pause of silence before the next raging storm. Their innocence was taken from them soon after they were born by the violent images they see on TV, perpetuated by sociopaths who emerge from the shadows with their fingers on the triggers.

The murderers of innocence should heed the words projected on the wall of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Photo by Chris Roan

Thought I’d never see you again. But here you are, staring at me like a white light at the end of an airport ramp crammed with waitlisted souls.

God, you are not. If I were to compare you to an omnipotent being, it would be the devil. You torture me like he does and are as unforgiving as he is.

You burn my eyes with what I thought was desire but is eyestrain instead.

As I stare into oblivion, not a word on the page, only a nagging internal voice harassing me about stupid shit.

You idiot. The Word document language is set to French. No wonder the dictionary didn’t recognize the word ”blank” or “obnoxious.”

That could happen to anyone.

Doubtful!

Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy me?

Yes, but this is much more fun. Don’t you have laundry to do?

I still have “B” drawer clothing.

Not those old ratty jeans that are so faded the holes have holes.

I’ve got a long blouse that hides them.

Another hair-brained “I love Lucy” solution. Anyway, I thought you were trying to write…if that’s what you call sitting at your desk with eyes glazed over like a ham. 

I was making progress until you interrupted.

No, you were brain-dead at your desk.

Well, it’s late. I’m fried

Brain-dead, like I said. Why waste your time trying to squeeze out a thought. You could be sleeping, two dogs deep in bed with the snorer.

I just elbow Jim when I can’t take it any more.

I was talking about you.

I’d be able to sleep if you didn’t blab incessantly about nonsensical shit. What’s a Goople anyway?

It’s the dying civilization of the Goop; distant relatives of swamp people who coexist with crocodiles with which they fight for food. But often the crocodiles win. And the Goople race continues to dwindle in numbers while the crocodiles thrive.

And you wonder why I can’t sleep.

You can’t write either. Remember, blank page, whiny babble.

Well, this time, your obnoxious cynicism and outlandish ideas have actually helped. See the words!

Damn you! I’m not finished yet. As soon as you’ve finished belching from your lousy cooking, I’m going inundate you with more crazy shit.

I’m participating in Silly Sunday, hosted by Sandy of Comedy Plus. Laugh and Link Up!

River (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn)

Swiftly down the river, a canoe rides the current, crashing into rocks and sediment, swaying with each bump of cascading water. Shoes and other evidence of human residue slosh back and forth inside the hull.

Words scribbled on an envelope, stuffed inside a pocket, soaked from river wash, disintegrate into flotsam. “I tried to call, but the river took my phone,” Ron wrote. “I did this for you, but you’ll never know why.”

I’m participating in Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction Challenge. This week’s prompt – Words.

My dog Jenny smells coyotes and cats with her superpower nose that can detect animal life through closed windows. It amazes me what she can see with her nose.

I stand at the window staring at trees and grass, and bits of sagging sky through the hills, and see nothing living or breathing. Though the hills may be alive with the sound of music.

Jenny doesn’t hear the sound of music. She smells it with her nose, a magical nose that interprets each scent with scientific accuracy, while I squint to read a street sign in the dark.

I wish I had a nose that can see.

My magical nose would find a Caribbean beach to wade in warm aquamarine sea, the sunlight hugging me, warming my brown skin, wet and salty, but not like taffy. My skin is dry like wisps of windswept sand as the ocean speaks in a way it only can.

The tide rolls in and my toes sink into wet scalloped sand. Above, gossiping gulls scan the beach from atop a thatched roof. They kvetch because they caught air instead of food. The gulls need to take a break from gulling and rest on a fence or light post; their squawks drown out the drone of voices from humans sauteing in the sun.

The gulls stretch their wings and jump into sky, circling the human world below, shielded by baseball caps and straw hats. Humans need protection from the sun and each other. Gulls just need table scraps and then to crap on ornamental humanity.