The other night we had a friend from my old corporate servitude days over for dinner. I’ve already confessed to having a Facebook account and I just randomly began typing names in one day. Bella’s name popped up and I was equally as excited to find that she lives one town over in Newburyport. To put it mildly, we had a blast. We shared stories about where we worked together that neither of us told each other about in the past.

The other aspect that was great is that our career paths since our corporate days aren’t that different. I was almost embarrassed to tell her I’ve been shucking coffee to the entitled masses for the last four years until I found out she was a cashier at Whole Foods for six years. Life is great, isn’t it? Where else but in America can you be the absolute best at what you do and end up kissing retail butt? It’s the new American dream…sort of like a reverse mortgage in drag.  Today she’s designing  jewelry and taking her stuff on the road to shows, and I’m trying to make money writing.

Anyway, we had a person in common when we worked together that I can best call certifiable. In the corporate battle of the wills between Bella and someone I’ll call Mr. Anal, Bella got the short end of the stick.  He was the problem. Not her. However, even I didn’t know how whacked he was until I had gotten fired and started using him as a freelance designer for my business.

To call this guy anal retentive would be mild. We’d miss every freakin’ deadline because he would bounce around between ideas for so long. Then, when you got the material from him, there were the inherent errors. Typos. Bad line breaks. Missing punctuation. You name it. Things that should never have happened. Sloppy. He was just plain sloppy and it drove me fucking crazy because it invariably created more delays in delivering the product. It was then that I began to realize what Bella had been up against.

The long and short of it is that this guy was obsessed with colonics and his internal piping. He was (and I hear he still is) a whack job. His wife, however, Mrs. Shrew, really wore the pants in his family. She pushed this guy around like he was a pile of trash and she was a broom. Since my Beth always calls me Freud, let me exercise my pathetically appointed psychological knowledge: Mr. Anal was obsessed with his internal piping because he felt like a pile of shit most of the time. I mean, you could almost feel like he was the worst person on the planet…until you spent more than an hour with he and Mrs. Shrew together. There would be no taming of this shrew.

Anyway, it came to the point where my business was falling apart and, believe me, I owed a lot of money. He was one of the people I owed. I mean, when I say I lost everything, I’m talking a homeless type of everything. I’m not ready to talk about that today, so don’t hold your breath. The long and short of it is, in spite of this fact, he dogged me to the point where he paid to have me arrested. You know, aside from torturing someone who did something unintentionally, there was no purpose to that. But then again, I annoyed the crazy person.

Standard coward’s disclaimer: With the exception of Beth (my wife) and myself, none of the names here are real. I’m not going to do that unless people feel comfortable enough to be named. And, as you will be able to deduce, some given names mean something while others do not. There’s no real reason for using the name Bella. It was just top of mind. There is, however, a reason for using Mr. Anal and Mrs. Shrew.

Shhhhh. We’re trapped on Cape Cod. STOP. Doing yearly family duty exposing small children to family members. STOP. Limited web access or exposure to sane people. STOP. Evil mother-in-law/mother/grandmother (take your pick) in control. STOP. It’s at these times that wifey says the most incredible things, like “Yeah, she hates us. But not enough to leave us alone.” So, I ask you again: WTF is with my life?

You know, the one thing a blog does is allow you to remember things as flashbacks. That’s probably the only way I’ll be able to remember my early life. This flashback requires the way back machine. I must have been around nine or ten years old, my dad had passed away and we were living in Everett with my grandmother, my aunt and my uncle.

My grandmother was pretty old at that time, and she had suffered several strokes and heart attacks over the years. Oddly enough, I was the only one who could tell when she was going to have a heart attack and that’s because it was usually preceeded by what I now call “nonsense talking.” She would be awake and alert and carrying on a conversation with you but she was making absolutely no sense.

Around this time she also began to hide eggs in her bureau drawers. This is never a good sign, people. If this isn’t an indicator that something is seriously amiss, then there’s something seriously amiss elsewhere as well. In my mind, eggs didn’t get hidden in drawers or anywhere else unless the Easter Bunny was coming.  However, I was just a kid so I accepted whatever I was told and/or asked to do.

So, they asked me to sleep with my grandmother since I was the only one who responded to her heart attacks. Okay. So, if anyone is wondering why I have this thing about sickeness and death, don’t wonder. I mean, seriously, no thought was ever given to what psychological effect this might have on me, particularly so close to losing my own dad to cancer. Of course, it wasn’t that my mom and aunts were callous. They just didn’t get it. There was no focus on psychology whatsoever.

When people ask me about my childhood, I genuinely have no complaints. I consider myself fortunate to have had the parents and sibilings I have, particularly after I see what others have been subjected to. But you’ve just got to admit that this kind of request of a child is a bit over the edge. No? I mean, it could very well be why I avoid doctors and health care in general. Who knows. I don’t like psychiatrists much either, so we’ll probably never find out.

Yes, it’s Easter. I just got back home from Easter dinner at my sister’s house. It’s days like these when you realize just how dysfunctional families can be.  But that’s a different story for a different day. I should say that I really do not celebrate Easter from a religious perspective.  I was born Catholic, but I’m Buddhist by choice.  The folks on my mom’s side of the family are traditional Catholic. However, I’ve found a much more eclectic mix on my dad’s side.

I have a Facebook account and I have “101 friends.” Of course, some are truly friends but most are people you meet electronically. I enjoy it. I’ve got friends from many other countries. I have a group of friends from Starbucks 9269.  But I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to connect with people from my dad’s side of the family, a part of the family I’ve not really been exposed to. They’ve branched out more. They are different, and they are not all practicing Catholics.

My parents were older when I was born. I never met my grandparents on my dad’s side. I only met his brother, Angelo, and his sister, Phyllis. I never had exposure to the rest of the family, but we’ve managed to find each other on FB. It’s been fun because we’re all trying to figure out how we’re related. We’re not quite sure yet, but I hope we get there.

Now, let’s talk a bit about Easter at my house. I sometimes feel that I am the master of what I call fringe parenting, and today was a very close call.

Last night my son, Aaron, and I colored eggs and then we put them in a bowl in the fridge for the Easter Bunny. I was up late writing and didn’t hit the hay until the early morning hours. At 6:00 a.m. my alarm went off. It was planned that way because I wanted to get up and hide the eggs. I woke up and looked at the clock and rolled back over. The egg hiding didn’t hit me at all. Then, at 8:30 a.m., Aaron ran up to wake me up. I told him to wait downstairs and I’d be there in a few. Then, it hit me. Easter Sunday. The eggs are still in the fridge. Shit. That was all I could think.

When I got downstairs, Aaron was curled up under the blanket, leaving me the opportunity to really be sneaky, grab the bowl out of the fridge, and hide the eggs. It was pretty pathetic, the sight of me running around the house hiding eggs. I managed to pull it off this time, but I may not be so lucky next time. No issues for my daughter around the Easter Bunny. Nope. The bunny isn’t real. Neither is Santa or the tooth fairy.  She’s done with that stuff, and she is chomping at the bit to announce her findings to her brother. She refrains only under the penalty of death.

Welcome to my world, such as it is. I didn’t start this blog because I’m famous or I’m going to be famous. If I haven’t achieved that in 55 years, it’s unlikely that I will now.  I started this blog because people have encouraged me to do so. My sister says, “You can’t make this stuff up, Deb.” So here I am.

You know, I’ve hit bad patches in my life before. But this latest one has been hanging around since about 2002. My mother would call that a “doozie.” I think that’s more than a “bad patch.” Am I working on a bad life here? I mean, of course, I’m going to get into the events of 2002 and beyond, but right here today I’m looking at my significant other more than likely going into a psychiatric institution for a short-term stay and my children (ages 12 and eight) having to come to terms with it. That’s just the beginning.

I’m also willing to concede that the economic downturn certainly has the upper hand in my household and I absolutely hate deciding between the electric bill and food. I’ve got more than thirty years of experience in advertising and public relations, but I’ m slogging coffee to the entitled masses that shoehorn their way into Starbucks. Worst of all, I have been awaiting the first decent tax return I’ve had in years and just found out that the IRS is about to stick it up my…well, anyway, I think I’ve been born under a bad sign.

Stick around. This is only the beginning. The future looks messed up enough, but wait until you take a look in the rear-view mirror of this vehicle!