hot coffee girl

I was attacked this morning on the way to work.

It was quite brutal, actually. There I was, driving along, minding my own business. The sun was shining. And then…

This horrible, drooling, snarly green-eyed monster whacked me over the head and almost knocked me out. The sun was no longer shining, and all I could see was terrible shades of gray and green. (The eye-bursting type? Hmm. Be careful what you wish for.) He dragged me to the side of the road and proceeded to beat the living shit out of me.

“Your parents went to the casino this weekend and won a thousand bucks and the last time you went, you didn’t win anything!” Whack!

“Those cute new shoes that you wanted last week just went on sale and your best friend bought the last pair! Ha!” Thud!

“See that impossibly thin girl across the street? She eats whatever she wants and never gains a pound because of her amazing metabolism. She doesn’t even work out, fatty.” Smash!

“You can’t even cast on properly and look at that gorgeous scarf she knit in an hour.” Whomp!

I lay there…beaten. It all seemed too much to take. Then he started making fun of me.

“Awww. You feel so bad for yourself don’t you?! It’s not enough to have food in your belly and a roof over your head? You have to want stupid shit? You know those shoes you thought were so great? Well, they hurt her feet and she had to charge them anyhow. You don’t have a credit card balance and no mortgage or car payments.”

I spat out some blood and tried to protest.

“Shuttup!” he shouted. “You want that girl’s metabolism, and yet you are healthy while there are plenty of people who are sick and just want to survive. You want a vacation, but have a job that sends you all over the country for free…”

“Seriously?! What the hell do you want?” he growled.

I picked myself off of the ground and wiped my mouth. I looked that malicious, awful, nasty monster straight in the face, and said, “Your eyes are so green. Are those contacts? Really, I wish my eyes were some interesting color and not so boring brown.”

Spring has sprung in NE Ohio. The birds are chirping. The flowers are blooming. The bees are buzzing.

Which is why, in part, I am so stupid.

Allow me to explain.

About, oh, 30 years ago, the five year old version of Hot Coffee Girl (she was known then as Demi-Tasse back then) was swinging on the swing, enjoying a beautiful Spring day, such as today. She smelled the sweet air, looked at the blossoming flowers, swung so high that the slack of the chains clicked in her hands…all with an innocence and purity that only an unsuspecting tot can possess.

The pleasantness of the day was short-lived, however. For there, coming towards her on the swing was a vicious, ferocious beast. The sun was clouded over by its shape, and its fangs dripped with blood. A ziggety flight path belied its very target…it was headed in the most bloodthirsty way to feast on my delicate five year old flesh. A bee. A yellow-jacket, to be more specific. But like none you have ever seen or heard about. No ordinary insect, this. Zipping towards me with unrivaled speed was a spiky-furred, blood-fanged creature with death and destruction on his mind. Weighing my options, I did the only thing a young child could do in such a situation.

I screamed at the top of my lungs.

For a very long time.

So loud and so long, in fact, that it brought my mother, the neighbors next to us (and the neighbors next to them) out running. Sensing that he was outnumbered, the monster flew off just before they arrived, leaving me to try to explain the situation to the crowd that had now gathered.

“Big.” <Sniffle> “Bee.” <Cough. Gag.> “Gonna. Get. Me.” <Gagcoughsniffle.> It took me a few minutes to get my breathing under control enough to see the skepticism in their faces begin to register. Which brought tears of a different sort. Indignation. “The BEEEEEEE. You saw it. It was gonna KEEEEEL ME.” Then fear all over again thinking what I had been through.

My mother grabbed me and took me upstairs to my bedroom, assumptively to protect me from future bee attacks. In reality, it was me…not the creature…that her irritation was directed at. Apparently, screaming loud and long enough to empty the neighborhood was not good behavior. I plead my case, “But the thing was soooo biiigg! It was going to kill me!” When that didn’t work, I tried playing the sympathy card. “My head. It really hurts.”

Her response? “Well, of course it does. You probably screamed out part of your brains.”

Which is why every Spring I think of how the bees made me stupid.

It’s a right of passage.

I had a bad dream.

In it, I must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. I thought that I was going for a rest, to stop for a moment and breathe in the fresh air and let the sun beat down on my face. I lay down and closed my eyes, stretching out.

When I opened my eyes, the sun had faded considerably. I thought that maybe it had just set for the day, as the sun always seems to do. I was surprised at how late the day had grown, but I did not worry about the diminishing light. I settled back into the soft grass and breathed deeply again.

It wasn’t until I woke up, restless from too much sleep, that I realized that it was much later (or was it earlier?) than I thought it was. My body told me that time had passed, too much time for the sky to still be as inky as it was. I shivered, as much from the absence of warmth that surrounded me earlier as from the creeping coldness that began spreading inside of me as well.

I took the sweater that was around my waste, and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders, shielding myself from the breeze that was starting to pick up. I looked around, trying to remember where I was heading, so I could continue on. I recognized nothing from earlier (hours? days?) when the daylight was still overhead. I walked ahead for a while, but I quickly grew tired again, and sat down against a tree. I began crying, although I wasn’t sure why exactly, before falling asleep again.

When I woke up, it was still dark out…darker somehow than I remembered. The stars that had blinked through the tops of the trees were all but gone, either faded or swallowed up by the blackness. I thought that I could still see one or two shining, but wasn’t sure if it was just the memory of them deceiving my eyes. In the distance, I heard voices softly laughing and talking, and I tried to head in that direction. Every time I thought that I was getting closer, the direction the sound was coming from seemed to change and I was no closer to finding the source of the merriment. After a while, I decided to just tune out the din, frustrated that I was unable to find its source. It became quiet again, except for the sounds of my tears, which seemed to come with more frequency and force. I sometimes wondered why the laughing, talking people couldn’t hear me if I could hear them. I finally decided that they had long ago tuned me out, as I had eventually done with them.

Was anyone looking for me, I wondered? How long had I been gone? Surely, it had been long enough for someone to have missed me. I thought about all of the people that I missed. I wondered if they missed me. Were they sick with worry or did nothing in their lives really change? I started to wonder if no one missed me or was looking for me how I would ever get back to where I was. As I curled up on a soft bed of moss, I let myself imagine if they weren’t looking for me, maybe they wouldn’t miss me if I never found my way out. Tears streamed down my face as I fell into a fitful, terrible sleep.

When I woke up with a start, I thought I sensed someone near me. It was so dark out now that I could barely see my hand in front of my face, nonetheless someone a few feet away. I called out to them, but all I could hear was their shallow breathing. I tried to feel around for them, to no avail. I stopped being able to hear the breathing, and it was so still I began to wonder if I had imagined them at all. If perhaps I wanted so badly to recognize someone in the dark that I had made them up altogether. I had long since lost a concept of time. But I sensed so many people out there at various points that I grew accustomed to them, almost thinking of them as ghostly company. I got used to the feeling that someone was watching me, someone who wasn’t in the dark … trying to scream to me, to get my attention…but I was too deep in the forest to be able to make out anything that they were saying.

It was sometime in the midst of listening for the voices that I realized it had snowed. I awoke one morning to a thin layer of the white powder covering me, so fine that I wondered if it was dust. Maybe it was a mixture of the two. It then struck me that I didn’t recognize it at first blush because it did not seem cold to me. I was not warm by any stretch, but I had just gotten so accustomed to the cold that it no longer seemed to chill me. The soft grassy beds that I had been sleeping on didn’t feel soft any more, and the rocks that I leaned up against no longer seemed hard. It all felt the same. The snow had no more effect on me that the lack of it had. I prided myself on becoming inured to the elements, not realizing how dangerous that condition would quickly become.

I was wandering around, long since having given up the search for the road out when I looked down and saw that I was leaving a trail of blood in the fresh snow. I sat down and tried to figure out where it was coming from, what part of me was spilling out onto the ground. I searched frantically over every part of my body, finding no mark, no gash, nothing that I could apply pressure to at least slow the outpour. I curled back up in a tiny ball, pulling my knees to my chest and drawing myself inside of me for protection.

I fell asleep again when the bleeding stopped, and I hoped that tomorrow I could find the trail that led out of this place. I dreamed of laughing and talking and the warmth of the sun on my face as I drifted off.

When I really did wake for the day, the sun was streaming in my windows and I could swear I heard birds chirping...almost like it was spring. I snuggled down in the covers, relieved I wasn't lost after all.

Do you ever have one of those days where everything seems just a bit more odd than usual? Off-kilter, or unhinged, if you will...

Where the sound of the rain seems louder and there seems to be an almost eerie, peculiar fog hanging in the air all around you? Where the hair on the back of your neck stands up for no particular reason and you jump at every little sound?

No? Umm. Okay. Me neither then.

It's Friday the 13th. Be afraid. Be very afraid. If you are, you suffer from Paraskevidekatriaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th.

But who's really afraid of that? Not many. Here are the top 5 most common phobias:

1. Fear of snakes (ophidiophobia)
2. Fear of giving a speech (glossophobia)
3. Fear of heights (acrophobia)
4. Fear of rodents (musophobia)
5. Fear of flying (aviophobia)

I suffer from none of the above fears...but I have a few of my own.

  I am afraid that this man will continue to breed.
(Hasselhoffiphobia) 

I am afraid this man has bigger tits than I do.
(Gnarlestitaphobia) 

I am afraid that the latest Nobel Prize Winner is actually Fletch.
(YunusFletchaphobia) 

I am working through it.
Thanks for your support.