Month: March 2018

Los Angeles.

“You’ll never run out of things to do in this city. Believe me,  I’ve lived here over 50 years.”

Her Classic Red lips spoke in between yellowed teeth and drags of her cigarette.  The tiny old woman with her wiry, yet styled platinum hair, dark eyebrows, fake eyelashes, sunken nose, and sage advice walked us through an empty apartment in The Valley stopping when she opened a door exposing a huge hole in the ceiling of one of the bedroom closets. The popcorn texture around the hole bled from brown to yellow.  

“Oh. That hole is being fixed next week. What brings you girls to Los Angeles? Actresses?”

This is the first time in my life that I had ever been to L.A. 

It’s been nearly 21 years to the day of this encounter, and I can confidently tell you that the David Lynch side character lady was correct. Los Angeles is massive. And magic. She didn’t tell me that, but I know that’s what she meant.

That brings us to Tree People.

I went to Tree People yesterday. It’s this amazing hiking trail in like, Beverly Hills maybe? off Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive. This place is FOUR miles away from me and I didn’t even know it existed until recently. You are in the middle of seemingly nowhere and YET you can see all of the valley. It’s absolutely…peaceful. 

Except I was hiking and there were bugs around and my kids were walking real close to the edges of cliffs so there might have also been some complaining. But it was peaceful complaining. Everyone we passed was talking to their hiking buddy/on their phone about the last show they worked on and how much they loved/hated the main actor/actress/director on the show. FYI, be nicer if you’re any one of these.

This is when, maybe? my life has been changed, blessed, though I didn’t realize it at the time.  I think that I may have hiked past Lady Gaga. I’m not kidding. She was very dressed down, white tank top, dark sweats, walking a dog and I don’t even know if she has a dog. I was yelling at kids at the time.  I tried to keep my conversation going, unhickuped with Book Friend, who was also there,  because I didn’t want to stare at her or expose that I know who she was, so I can’t be 100% sure it was her, but hear me out, it was her. I searched her name on Twitter to see if she’s even in LA and she’s trending. Also, probably in LA. I’m weirded out that people on twitter know this. 

“Oh my god!”, I think, “She was spotted by TMZ while hiking with some dog! I’m part of her trend!!!” Not quite. 

Apparently, it was her birthday yesterday. I still haven’t accurately located Gaga, which is fine, but I DID find out it was her birthday so I’m forced to assume that, if not her on the trails, then she’s a witch materializing in front of people so they google her. – It’s a birthday ruse. I was visited by Gaga. 

Sadly, she was NOT hiking in Louboutin’s. If it was even her, but I’ll tell you I was upset when I googled and found out that that was a thing that I could possibly have witnessed.

So whether Gaga was in LA, hiking on her birthday or not, I was visited by her astral projection on her birthday so I’m forced to believe that Lady Gaga is of supernatural skill if I was not blessed by Gaga, herself.

I also re-fell in love with LA, as if I needed another reason. I did drive on Mulholland Drive which is always a strange drive, and I reaffirmed the truths of my probable guardian angel, Old Lady Lynch Character. Also, the Essence of Gaga came to me on her birthday.

Los Angeles is as magical and weird as the first time I stepped foot in it, creepy apartments and all. The platinum blondes have blessed me.

The Facebook Hiatus

pexels-photo-267350.jpeg

The husband and I have been binge watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and the Tina Fey episode was on. I’m in awe of Tina Fey. I don’t know how she has accomplished what she has while also somehow living with two small kids. I can’t even type this sentence with both hands because my 6 year old is currently hanging off my right arm, crying about his turn on the Xbox, and wiping his snot on my shirt. The main take-away from that episode, though, Tina Fey doesn’t use social media. I do. A lot. I’m going to assume that this is the only reason I am not as accomplished, and smart, and funny, and driven as Tina Fey. It’s the internet’s fault.

I don’t know if you’ve clued into the fact that I’m obsessed with the internet. I have been for years and years and years. It’s been a problem since high school and I graduated in 1994, so like, 7 years ago or something like that. My high school years were THE years that the internet started to take hold. It was real underground at the time and they charged you by the hour so we took the internet SERIOUSLY.

But my fascination with the internet has always been more specifically, on the social media wing of the mansion.  I think it started a million years ago with Prodigy, the online service provider that read all your emails, not to be confused with the guy with two mohawks, but I might also trust him to read my emails.

You know what? Anyone really can sign up for the job to be my email reader and email replier. Maybe then I can realistically pretend that I contribute to society.

Prodigy was amazing! There was nothing like it! I was OBSESSED with the Prodigy bulletin boards, most specifically, the Kids in the Hall bulletin boards. My moniker was Mr. Sizzler, or something.
Side note: I met two really amazing people on Prodigy and formed a comedy troupe with them, even though we lived thousands of miles away from each other. We wrote sketches via private Prodigy messages and emails, flew to each other and filmed sketches in snowstorms, and eventually we sent our best three sketches to MTV and Comedy Central which ended in us thisclose to being hired on as writers for a new comedy show for kids on Nickelodeon. We were Serious Artists so we said no. Ha! sigh, there went my beach house.

In the early 90’s, it was all about Prodigy. And then it wasn’t because everyone started jumping ship and going to AOL. So naturally, I too went to AOL because I need my internet attention!

All my online buddies were there!!!!! And we chatted and we danced. (we didn’t dance) And it was magical and wonderful.

I stayed up ALL. NIGHT. LONG. chattin’ up people. But this time it became weezer chat rooms.

I don’t even know what we chatted about but there was none of this looking stuff up on google crap. Google didn’t exist. You kind of had to know the web address, the whole http:// thing to get any info on the World Wide Web. So you’d talk to people that called themselves “paperface” who claimed to “bake cookies for the boys” (codeword weezer) and that’s how you got your info.  Because you were talking to people who KNEW weezer. Nobody lies on the internet.

I just realized that I was probably being catfished…

And then I moved from Denver to Los Angeles without a computer and the internet was ripped from my life. And for years I didn’t even care about it. And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote poems and stories and plays! It was the most productive I’ve ever been in my life. It was probably about 6 years before I got back online and the internet had me in its hold again.

Because MySpace.

I thought MySpace was the coolest thing EVER. I had my own webpage. Holy crap! I didn’t have to search for people, they could search for me. I became like the queen of the internet in my mind.

 

And then people stopped coming by my page because facebook officially arrived. I already had a facebook but I never used it because the only other person I knew on there was my sister-in-law who was in college at the time and I wasn’t in college anymore, I was like a 30 year old woman or something so no one wanted anything to do with me on the facebook and I didn’t want anything to do with them. And then a couple of years later, everybody flocked to facebook, so I adapted because, don’t leave me, guys.

Now I tweet. I tumblr. I pinterest. I instagram. And then there’s facebook. I hate facebook.

The internet for me has gone from always being fun times and meeting cool people that I think longingly about with a smile on my face to wanting to punch a handful of people I know in real life in the head. Making mental burn lists used to take up a great deal of my time and emotional space. Politics was finally the thing that helped me slowly back away from most of my facebook feed. My life vastly improved. I’m not inexplicably angry at someone I met at work 15 years ago because of her rants about chemtrails. I’m free from that baggage. I’m not totally gone, though. Something will pop into my head that I think is kind of funny and up it goes to facebook ’cause that’s the only place people pay attention to me anymore, and there I am. Back in the fray.  Every like and funny comment drags me back in like a sparkly vampire.

 

So here’s the thing. I’m not trying to make any promises because we both know me. But I think I’m going to attempt to stay off facebook for like, a couple of weeks or so. Because I need to write. I have like 7 novels rattling around my head.  All my dumb status updates will come here to my blog. Maybe I’ll actually get a lot more done if I’m not all caught up in the other nonsense. It’s completely terrifying at the same time because people will forget me! Won’t they? Whatever, a lot of the great people I know and want to keep up with either aren’t going anywhere, or aren’t even on facebook anymore anyway. They’re on Instagram. I’m bad at Instagram, too. I’m not a great photographer and I can’t tell my dumb jokes in the medium they require. I’m not an instagram influencer. And the feed is all over the place! but I’ll try to keep up.

Alright, I’ll focus it all here, on my blog. Think of this as myspace. Come visit my page! Look at my glitter gifs! Leave me a comment! I promise I won’t make you listen to music as my blog pulls up.

 

For now.

 

 

Ghost Eye for the Alive Guy

pexels-photo.jpg

I sat down to pee last night and I got hit in the head by my son’s plastic, Halloween sickle that was propped up behind the bathroom door. That’s how Death is going to take me. Not slicin’ and dicin’ like some garden variety Freddy Krueger, the Grim Reaper is too sophisticated for such dramatics. He’s just going to jump scare me into a heart-attack on the toilet. Like Elvis.

Now, if I would have met my eternal demise then and there, we would be in quite a pickle. The obvious, number one reason being no pants. I probably want to be wearing pants when I die. Secondly, my bathroom is a disaster. Like biohazard zone disaster. I should probably take some Scrubbing Bubbles to the sink soon and like, a flame torch to the rest of it. I can’t be found naked and slumped over in a truck-stop resembling bathroom. It’s embarrassing. Not only for me, but future generations that have to relive the humiliation in stories told and retold ’round the campfire in vivid detail.

I’m going to need a cleaner. Like a personal assistant but like super loyal that will take care of all of my indiscretions before the news teams and nosy neighbors arrive to find all my photoshops of Prince as a ghost in purple undies. This might be hard to coordinate though because, as my super loyal personal assistant life restorer, you’d have to be on call for like, ever because I don’t plan on ever dying. I’m going to be like one of those Twilight vampires with the glittery skin that live well into their 1,000s. The easy thing to do would be to just keep my life together while I’m alive, yes, but let’s be honest, this is not a skill I currently have on my resume.

Now that I think about the logistics of this, someone call up TLC, this is a show idea! I need either Theresa Caputo or Zak Bagans to team up with like, Oprah and the What Not to Wear team to come in with a camera crew and sort me out. They can help me throw away my underwear with the holes in them, sort through my emails, vacuum, make friends with current ghosts already in the building, etc.

I base a lot of my knowledge of the afterlife on what I’ve seen in the movies, mostly Ghost and Beetlejuice and here’s the thing, once you’re a ghost, you’re stuck in the clothes you died in. I don’t make the rules. So do we want comfort or haute couture? Like, do I have to walk around in Gucci the rest of my life? Is this why you see so many ghosts in ballgowns? Or am I okay haunting the halls in my sweatpants? Dying on the toilet will still be a problem, but that’s what you hope your family is for. Emily Dickinson’s family published her poems after she died, I’m just trying to get mine to agree to pull up my pants.

This could be my new life path. Live in a way that won’t embarrass me when I die. Although, what kind of life is that boring nonsense? Maybe I would have a better shot if I live my life preparing those around me for my embarrassing ghost phase. Like openly weeping in the hallway at various times throughout the day and adding photoshopped pictures of Prince to my email signatures.

Just please, someone’s gotta pull up my pants if I’m on the toilet.

 

 

 

Sent from my

The Ghost and Mrs. Ferg (that’s me)

pexels-photo-304875.jpeg

Yesterday I was having a day. One of those days were I question everything, my writing, my sense of humor, my lack of talent, etc. as you do, but instead of spiraling down THAT hole,  I set the timer and made myself write it all out for 30 minutes. My goal was to just stop thinking and letting the thoughts grow, but releasing them into nature so they can go bug someone else, like a weed. One of those dandelion seeds. Woosh into the wind, mean thoughts.

It’s raining, it has been and the light is weird and I think it’s making me feel. The sky is too light but not sunny or blue skies. It’s just that dull white/light gray and I hate it. It feels like dusk.

And then a woman started coming through. She just started showing herself, turning on a light, her rings clanking against the emerald colored glass of the lamp. Not a real lamp, by the way, this isn’t an Official Haunting. I would be screaming a lot louder if it were, this is just a mental haunting. I can’t see her yet. I’m only getting glimpses of her like mist. Like a dream teasing you hours later with tricky flashes of memory. Like a peep show. That’s what I imagine dementia feels like.

I wrote down everything she was showing me.

I see an older house. In the foyer looking in from the door, huge staircase on the right, does it wind up? Sometimes yes, but curved only slightly. Table with phone and lamp sit against the wall underneath. Library a bit down to the left. I’ve written about this library before… There was a man in a red velvet chair last time. No, it was a burgundy chair. Smoking. Does he belong to the woman??? Does she live here? Who was that guy?? Will I be able to remember? I wrote about him when I lived in Denver. I think. Why does it matter if I remember him? Why does he want to be remembered?

This woman is coming through like a spirit. Like I’m the medium and she’s trying to tell her story and I can’t hear her properly like I’m Whoopi in Ghost when she has to yell at all the other ghosts to be quiet so she can hear Sam. Except instead of ghosts being too loud, it’s the internet. 

I’m going to try to listen to her again today. She’s probably going to be spilling all her secrets when I’m in the back of the Uber on my way to this fancy gala I have to go to in Hollywood tonight. Because of course she will. Everyone else will be drinking and laughing and dancing to “Havana” and I’ll be sitting in the corner of the party typing this woman’s entire life into my phone on 23% battery, with my clumsy, drunken fingers.

God, I don’t have anything to wear.