New Jack Crazy

Wow...J-ma. Ummm, maybe mommy needs a little drinky drink? There's this drink called a Yogi where the guy puts his...ummm, never mind. That may have been a dream...anyhoots...

You know I have a list, a mental list. On this list are situations that I am pretty sure I never want to see my mother in. Situations that if I actually saw them I would pry my bloody tear-dropping eyeballs out with a rusty spoon and feed them to rabid ferrets.

What, pray tell, Lady Crazy Pants, could inspire such self mutilation? Well here’s a little sampling from my childhood.

My grandma had size double G milk bags. They were some biggins girl. Titnormous. She also lived in a house with no air conditioning. So in the summer, every night before bed, she would sit on the couch and force my grandpa to help remove her sweaty bra (cause she couldn’t reach the back) and unleash the beasts. This is the point at which I would high tail it the fuck outta there because she would sit there, a melon teat in each hand, and scratch em like they were winning lottery scratch offs. Then, yeah it gets worse, she would have to pick the sweaty skin dirt out from under each fingernail. So it sounded like…scritch scritch scritch…flick flick flick…scritch scritch scritch.

Wish you had that fucking rusty spoon now don’t you?

Now my head editors and I worked LONG and HARD on this list, girl. Cause I wanted to be PREPARED. I wanted to have a Stop Drop and Roll evacuation just in case. So you can imagine my dismay when the Grand Dame Crazy Pants called the other night, interrupting my sacred mommy wine time (of the pinot noir varietal), and dropped this bombpop on my ass.

Crazy: Yeah, mom…ummm, I’m walking out the door. (LIE) What’s up?

Grand Dame Crazy: Oh, I just have something real quick to tell you.

Crazy: Yeah, okay.

Grand Dame Crazy: Oh, ok.

Crazy: This is the part where you start talking mom…

Grand Dame Crazy: Did J-man get his Valentine’s day card?

Crazy: Oh yeah! He’s sending a thank you for the money (LIE). Alrighty, talk to you…

Dame Crazy: That’s not what I wanted to tell you. Did you get the box from QVC with the 24 bags of toffee popcorn?

Crazy: Mom! The WHAT? What I in the hell am I going to do with 24 bags of…

Dame Crazy: Oh shut it, it’s not for you anyway. It’s for my grandson. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. I want you to promise me that you will never ever trust your step-siblings. They’re crooks. Each and every one of them!

Crazy: Is that what you wanted to tell me?

Dame Crazy: No. I’m taking a dance class!

Crazy: A whuuut?

Dame Crazy: Yeah, a dance class. I’m learning the Hip Hop.

(Silence)

Me: HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Dame Crazy: What’s so funny?

Me: Mom, do you even know what hip hop is? I mean, you know it’s not a class where you put you hand on your hip and hop up and down.

Dame Crazy: I know what hip hop is! I watch B-nonsense and Jay X and P Diddlee and Atrocious B.I.G. and all those fools all the time on BET! I’m not crazy! The girl at the Y…

Me: Whoa, at the what?

Dame Crazy: At the YMCA, I joined it and the girl was showing me around and took me to the dance studio. It looked fun with all those crazy dances, so I signed up. Isn’t that a kick?

So yeah. Girl, now my mom, MY 65 YEAR OLD MOM, is going to try to be cool. I just have visions (oh god here comes the bloody tears) of her in a Kangol Hat with a Jheri curl, gold plated grill, alarm clock around her neck and sporting some Adidas kicks with phat strings running around yelling “ Yeeeaah boooyeee, fuck the police!”

Suddenly Tit scratching doesn’t seem so bad.

Slumdog the 13th

So, Slumdog. Saw it…loved it. I even stayed for the WHOLE Bollywood dance at the end. Yeah, this crazy bitch loved that shit! But…let me give you one reason why we should hold on to our men with Wolverine claws of steel.

Is it because, as the movie showed, a good man is hard to find? Is it because love conquers all? No. It’s because I would never, and I mean never, have the following conversation after experiencing an stellar Oscar winning movie as I had the misfortune of overhearing a young couple having as they were leaving the theater.

Girl: (gum chomp)I swear to God if we had gone to go see Friday the 13th and rented this on video I woulda been pissed.

Boy says: Uh, really? (Chuckle. Giggle. Snort.) Yeah, I suppose.

Ummm, what? You ACTUALLY had a conversation about whether to see Friday the 13th or SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE? Where in the hell did you two meet? A meat raffle? A Brett Michaels concert?! In line trying to sell your prized 8-tracks and cassette tapes at the neighborhood Cheapo to get some extra cash? The extra cash you knew you’d need to stand inside the lobby of your local AMC movie theater and have a debate on whether or not to see Friday the 13th or SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE? Who the fuck are you people? And chickie, why are you dating this man? Do your head editors hate you? Do they con you as you try to sleep at night into believing that your friends aren’t laughing at you, but are merely convulsing with jealousy every time you walk into the room because they too believe, as you do, he’s a hot loaf of stud muffin in his Green Bay zubaz? And he's yours. ALL yours? Please, pray tell, share the info with me toots sweet so that I can immediately warn all my girlfriends with daughters that if they see any signs of this kind of dumbfuckery in their offspring they will put everyone out of their misery sooner rather than later.

I wish I had gotten their names simply so I could post warnings on Craigslist, every personal section in America’s free-zines, E-Harmony and Match.com warning people that if by chance these two yahoo’s come up single…Do. Not. Date. Them. Especially if there is a movie involved. Friday the 13th? What the hell is wrong with people? Mama needs her elixir (of the cabernet varietal). Stupid people.

The Ex-factor #12

Well, I had my own little helping of Masterpiece Theater served up the other night, which involved me, The Future Mr. Crazy Pants and of course…an ex. Let the drama unfold.

So because of that fucking online phenomena for the socially inept, which we will call FB (yeah, I’m on it, go take a sip of shut the hell up), I was contacted by an old BFF from high school. He’s in the same biz as I, would like to meet for drinks to catch up, yada yada…I’m like sure, why not. Now, as part of my Crazy Pants Therapy (CPT), I’m trying to make “good decisions.” Consulting my head editors (you know the voice of reason that I never listen to before I unleash the batshit crazy) when situations such as these arise. So I’m thinking is this one of those times when I go and meet an old BFF, especially a BOY BFF by myself? Thank God I wasn’t drinking the crazy juice when having this negotiation with Enrique-From-Guatemala Head Editor – whom at the time was covering for Olga-from-Belarus Chief Head Editor in Charge who was back visiting family in the gulag. He’s okay…a little slow on the response, but hey with my stellar thought processes, I’ll take what I can get. So we unanimously agreed, "NO" was the appropriate answer.

I set up a meeting with the BFF, invite the Future Mr. and all is good. The Future Mr. and I get to the bar a little early, order some small plates of eats and he begins to go through the run down of previous conversations on how I know this person.

You went to high school together?

Yep.

You were part of a group…ah skaters(boarders), right?

Yeah, did I mention I was totally goofy foot?

And you never dated, right?

Nope…just went to Prom together. (INSERT RECORD SCREECH. Apparently I failed to tell the Future Mr. this little tiddy bit of info)

(Me backtracking) But you know…it’s cool. It wasn’t like THAT kind of Prom date…it was like we didn’t have dates and took our first cousins. Seriously.

So Future Mr. is totally cool. Whew!

BFF shows up, we order beers and the nostalgia begins. And all through it I’m making sure Future Mr. is comfy and involved. When prom night is brought up I quickly deflect with a Stimulus Package joke…Hey! What do you think about the Stimulus Package cause the only one I want is one that’s not going to get me pregnant. HA HA HA.
So all is going great…until…

BFF: Oh hey! I meant to tell you, I called (My ex).

Me: whoa, wha? You did what???

BFF: Well yeah, we’re really good friends and I told him we were meeting for drinks and he said he’d stop by. He works next door.

Son. Of. A. Bitch. So yeah, I get the crooked evil eye from Future Mr. which I quickly deliver to BFF. And in walks the Ex-Factor #12 whom we’ll call Snake Boy.

Side note: I would like to point out at this juncture that Snake Boy is Ex-Factor #12 and that the guy whom I would date after him, Future Ex-Husband, was Ex-Factor #13. Had my head editors been on duty that year, I probably would have known that Ex-Factor #13 would be an Ex. But hey, I rolled the dice. A few highlights from my relationship with Snake Boy.

-Four months into our relationship, we got into a fight in which he started calling me MOM…yeah, MOM. As in “MOM don’t yell at me. MOM let me explain.” MOM. I mean like did his mother have a yeast infection while he was gesticulating and he never got over it and so now anything with a vagina and a stern glare sends him back to the womb? What the flying fuck. Mom.

-This was also the man who clung to the outside of my car while I drove 35 mph down the street…same fight as Mom fight (see above).

-We moved in together…again before CPT. He owned a snake. And not just any snake a BOA CONSTRICTOR which got loose in our 1 bedroom apartment and went missing for 3 damn months. When he finally found it, the f-ing thing it was sick and starving. Snake boy had the brilliant idea of turning up the thermostat in its cage, which in turned cooked the vile thing. I will never forget him crying out, “He’s dead, can’t you smell him?!” Vomit.

-When my head editors finally ended their strike against me, it was time to move out. Which I did in 20 minutes using large garbage bags.

So here we are, all “Lady Crazy Pants this is your life,” and Future Mr. is just being amazingly cool. And I’m getting scared. Because he’s being amazingly cool. Because you know…when I’m being amazingly cool something amazingly bad is going to happen. Bad as in “ordering two bottles of Crazy Juice (of the Chardonnay varietal) and a straw, drinking one, cutting a bitch’s eyebrows off with a butter knife right there at the table and hitting him over the head with the other bottle” kinda bad. Trust me, it woulda been a hot time in the ‘ol Crazy Town that night.

But no..not him. He listened. He laughed. He threw out looks of concern at the right points of in-depth conversation. It was an Oscar worthy Supporting Actor performance that would have rivaled all. And I’m sitting there going, God DAMN am I lucky. I mean really, what dingo saving piece of humanitarianism have I done to deserve this man? IN LOVE.

So with this revelation and a full Love glow goin, I turned to the ex and asked, “Hey how’s your mom?”

Seriously?

So yeah, the economy sucks. I know I'm not dropping a big f-ing news bomb on you, but like everyone else I'm all freaked out about my job and if I'm going to have one tomorrow. Just bought a freaking house. I mean, I'm not talking about being worried if I can buy a Gucci bag at this stage, I'm talking about being panic stricken about being able to afford the chuckle-sized bag of Funyons. And it's been making me a serious crazy pants. I've been having nothing but flippin nightmares. Every single night. Seriously. But last night was the craptastic of all nightmares! I was a survivor on this plane crash. There were like 10 survivors or some crap like that. My awesome little boy, J-man, had died in the crash. I was a wreck. Couldn't formulate sentences. But for some reason the airline forced us to go on Oprah and talk about the experience. So there I am, on Oprah, crying like a banker's wife on the corner of Wall Street and Jack Shyt, and I'm looking around me and realizing that all the other survivors are like "oh, you know Oprah, we're just fine. Scary stuff, couple a scratches on the old chin, but you know...just great, big O!" And I'm like what in the f-inheimer is wrong with you people! And so I'm all upset and grieving and trying to hold it together. Finally it's my turn to talk. And...I poop my pants. Plane crash. Dead son. Oprah. National TV. And I poop my pants.

And it makes you realize, no matter how bad things get...shit is funny.