Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Oh Noes! I've discovered the Blackadder Quote Generator at the BBC. It has ensorcelled me.

Flashheart: If word gets out that I'm missing, 500 girls will kill themselves and I wouldn't want them on my conscience - not when they ought to be on my face!

- Private Plane

...here's another:

Blackadder: Baldrick, does it have to be this way? Our valued friendship ending with me cutting you up into strips and telling the prince that you walked over a very sharp cattle grid in an extremely heavy hat?

- Duel and Duality

...and another:

George: My head... oh, my head... feels like the time I was initiated into the Silly Buggers Society at Cambridge. I misheard the rules and tried to push a whole aubergine up my earhole.

- Corporal Punishment

Anyway, I'm okay. This is the sort of thing I've been doing instead of posting in my blog like I aught to. And reading novels. Lots of novels. Bad ones with no redeeming features.

Happy Holidays everyone. Well, I know you are all wondering what sort of things you'll be saying about me tomorrow and Christmas Day in my absence. Never fear, Rumor Control is here with the best maybe true, maybe false fun fax about Rosie Griffeth. If this is your first time coming across a Rumor Control post, you'll want to bring yourself up to speed with Rumor Control and Rumor Control, Too. Feel free to scroll down to the good parts if you are in a hurry.

Complicated explanation in a nutshell, this is my random post in which I give you a dozen rumors to spread around about yours truly. Some are true. Some are false. Some are half-true, half-false.

The Rumor Control Dozen:

1. As you all know, I was born with a tail. While I now think of it as that "special", "fun" part of me, believe it or not, I did have my awkward moments as a teenager. Kids can be so cruel. Anyway, there was this boy I had a big crush on--I had a crush on his sister too, which in hindsight was typically bent for me--but anyway, he asked me out on a date and I was so thrilled. I must have spent an hour with the Tooth Pik shining my braces up. I found out later he only went out with me on a dare to find out if it was true. The tail thing. He got his answer while we parked at the beach that night. He never called me again, but his sister sure was interested in me after that.

2. I cut down a Christmas tree with a chainsaw. Indoors. A fully decorated Christmas tree. With lights. I wore my big boots. And I stomped on all the glass balls making a shiny carpet of green, red and gold slivers of glass. I was about to take my boots off and walk through the shards when I was interrupted.

3. One of my lovers was a bisexual surgical assistant with a name like Christmas. Noel. Every thing about him smelled like Betadyne. He either wore green scrubs or black leather and rode a motorcycle. He kidnapped me one day, took me out in a boat and sabotaged the engine. I had to lie, promising I'd see him again, to get him to fix the boat and take me back to shore. I got a really bad sunburn that day. There were sharks.

4. I played rugby. I was a prop. Rugby players eat their dead. I liked mine with a bit of salsa.

5. Nobody knows I'm a heterosexual.

6. This is really private and embarrassing. Anyway, you know I had this really bad series of surgeries back in 1997. It was really grim and I was in the hospital for six months. They removed my sternum. Obviously, it makes a mess of your chest when they do this--everything gets cut up and--well--it took some pretty radical plastic surgery to put me back together and make me look normal, with clothes on anyway. Well, somehow, all of my nerve endings to my nipples got reversed. Basically, everything that touches my left--I feel on the right and vice versa. Like I said, it's really private and embarrassing--but sort of cool and fun too. My extra two nipples aren't a problem--just the main ones.

7. I've eaten balut before. It's a bit soupy and eggy. Mmmmm, balut. Hot sauce.

8. I've had reams of bad lesbian love poetry aimed at me, which explains my aversion to poetry. One called me an "omnipotent angle".

9. My best friends and I ended up in a strip bar/brothel in a port city. It was chock full of Greek sailors. We were afraid to leave because we thought it would be impolite to do so without first having a beer or something. Anyway, we were really looking for a gay bar for our gay friend who was with us and sort of appalled by all the exotically clad women who kept approaching him. I guess they thought we wanted to watch or something. We asked the sailors if they knew where a gay bar was. And you know what? They knew exactly where one was. Who would have thought a bunch of rough and ready, macho sailors would know where a gay bar was? We were so surprised.

10. I singlehandedly caused 3 pub brawls while I lived in the UK and was banned from the pub. Permanently.

11. Nobody knows I'm extraspecialomnisexualexpyaladocious. But isn't it great they have words to describe everything these days?

12. Okay, this is really embarrassing too. But it's not like something I remember or anything. Just one of those little physical abnormalities they correct in infancy you never remember. Perhaps it's because of the tail, but I was born with another really rare medical condition called vagina dentata. Yeah, it's pretty much like it sounds. But they were just baby teeth and they pulled them shortly after I was born. This boyfriend of mine had a friend who had this fear of women with my condition. We explained to him that the teeth were removed and I was for all practical purposes vagina no dentata, but he'd just run screaming from the room every time he saw me. It was awkward. But the cool thing is, my mom saved the teeth. I had them made into a necklace and earrings and they are quite the conversation piece. People are always asking me what they are and boy are they surprised when I tell them they are vagina teeth.

It was really cold today and I drove into town. So cold I started the jeep up so it could idle and the frost could melt. I love cold as long as I don't have to do much in it. Chopping wood is okay as long as my ears are covered. But the frog pond is frozen and the cow pond across from the little church is covered in ice. I'm still having to skitter up Greene Mountain to get to the road. Those bridges will be like that for a while I guess. Everyone is enjoying wearing their Carhardts.

I've been listening to a lot of The Arcade Fire recently. Wonder if I'll ever grow out of listening to moody emo-esque music that makes me cry. Will I? I'm just asking. As I approach the entire "change" thing--I have to wonder if maybe there's a way my emotions could be a little less accessible--'cause I've never had particularly good control. I'm just sayin'.

I'm watching Yimou Zhang's Curse of the Golden Flower tonight. Chow Yun-Fat and the gorgeous Li Gong star. I'm quite sure I won't know what to do with myself. Costumes, beautiful Asian people, martial arts and wire-fu--what's not to absolutely love? I'm going to eat sushi, watch the movie then I'm going to bake cookies. At least that's the plan.

I got an unexpected acceptance today. At least I think it's an acceptance. They just sent me the contract and W-4 stuff for my honorarium, so I assume they are not giving me money just to be nice about it. I'm guessing they are actually using my story. It's just the first time I didn't get a letter saying, "We really liked blah-blah-blah and want to use it in our X issue."

Welcome to my sleepy, disjointed Sunday posting. AKA--I Gots Nothin'.

I've been thinking of sense memory, particularly of smell. My sister-in-law once pointed out how potatoes baking in the oven smell like brownies at a certain point. She's right and for some reason a story is gurgling up inside of me using that as a jumping off point. One of my unhappily domestic stories probably. Every time I start a story indoors it becomes funny and unhappy at the same time. I'm not sure why that is. Okay, maybe I do, but I don't want to talk about it. Senses are funny that way.

I haven't wailed on my arch nemesis Newport Utilities in a while. Last night we had one of our frequent power outages. Went off at 1:30 a.m., right in the middle of my anime night. I do so hate having my "stories" interrupted. It shuddered back on around 3:30, but by that time I was in full insomnia mode and didn't get to sleep until 5:30 this morning.

Wondering what Friend Scott is up to--must give him a call and see.

Great police blotter title in the Newport Pie Hole Plain Talk last Sunday.

Mullet-man makes off with purse

Self-explanatory really. Mulleted man makes off with purse, but I now have:

Have you seen the mullet-man, the mullet-man, the mullet man.... running through my head. Oh, Caleb Abramson--you witty devil, you. Thanks for the ear worms.

Happy Sunday

And it's beautiful! And thanks to the magic of alphabetization--I'm across the fold from Kathy Fish!

It's a gorgeous big glossy magazine color thing. My handwriting is some of the worst there--except maybe Blake Butler's or Dennis Mahagin's (whose writing is also crazy creative as you would expect from those two), but everyone's stories and poems are so wonderful! It's neat to see a little of everyone's process. Handwriting always says so much about a person. Mine, for instance, says I can't pass a sobriety test when I'm stone cold sober.

Order Keyhole #5-- The Handwritten Issue

I've got some other stuff coming out this month and the next and on into June 2009. It's getting hard to keep up with them all. I've got a pieces upcoming in Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, Pank, Diet Soap, MsLexia, Southern Fried Weirdness, Pocket Change, The Potomac, The Dogs: Wet & Dry Anthology and Weave Magazine. So, yeah--I guess life is nice in publishment land.

I do need to catch up on my subs. I have this one piece I think is brilliant I'm having a hard time getting to stick anywhere. I am very excited about "Kurosawa's Rain" getting picked up by the Potomac and my head is still really swollen over MsLexia running "48 Years" next month.

I'm included in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature's Holiday Homecoming Issue! There are some very fine writers sharing space with me there...all with wonderful Southern stories. I always wanted my work to appear in The Dead Mule--it's a perfect place for much of my fiction.

The Scent of Peaches, while a summer story, is very much about homecoming. I'm sure you will enjoy it.

While you are reading it, you might want to go back and read the Peek-a-bo Peach Brandy post--one of the most visited posts on The Smokey Mountain Breakdown. The Christmas season was when Mother would pull that brown paper bag from under the wash stand the TV sat atop. The brandy was served in little liqueur glasses and we'd pour the brandied peaches over vanilla ice cream.

Peaches will always stir strong feelings of home. I must have dozens of stories where they pop up.

When I woke up today, the sky and the air smelled of snow. The gravid clouds hung in the pink sky like men with big bellies. Those clouds weren't going anywhere soon. They needed a nap. The odd thing about when the weather changes to cold in the South is the strangely warm day that precedes the drop in temperatures. Today was that day.

It's not a day where you become happy and rush outside to do things because the weather is so nice. No, this day threatens. The warm wind in ominous, dry with the promise of hurt. Bad things seem to be promised on such days. Bad things sometimes happen on the oddly warm day before the snow and ice and hail.

Today, Rose Goat fell from the 300 foot cliff, breaking her hip. The local farm boys shot her for me. I couldn't get to where she was across the creek, but they were kind enough to come tell me. Yang, her boy, is home now. I don't think he'll stray. Rose was the one with wanderlust. I'm philosophical about it. I can't get too worked up--the little bitch never would stay where she was supposed to. But who would have thought something as sure footed as a goat would fall? It may have been the bobcat after her--he lives up there somewhere.

So, I'm in the Walmart today and saw the most outrageous mother/daughter pair--each with extreeeeeme two-tone mullets. Mom had clipper cut the front half of her head and peroxided it and left the permed caramel colored back hang down her back. Then, the daughter's had grown out a bit and she had the opposite color scheme--dark brown front and bleached perm down the back.

Well, I was like, Holy Crap! Get a load of those mullets! There was something almost Pictish about these hair cuts--the line bisecting their skulls was behind the ear so there was a sort of domed forehead effect. Like the Bene Gesserit nuns in Lynch's version of Dune--but sort of hillbilly. Suddenly, I looked around me and noticed how many other mullets surrounded me in Newport, TN.

Mullets aren't just Appalachia--they are a below the Mason-Dixon sensation--a true Southern classic. Mullets have successfully migrated from the South to the midwest to the Pacific Northwest. Hell, they are as Southern as KFC and you can't spit in Asia without hitting one of those. Yep, we are going for world mullet domination.

They are what happens when you grow out a nice head of hair and become conflicted about cutting it. The other way it happens is when you try to cut your own hair, but--you know--you can only really reach the front part. Then you walk around pretending you meant for that to happen. Before you know it, all your friends are doing it. Once it's done and you realize it looks sort of funny---the really long part next to the really short part--you run out in a panic to get a cheap perm because for some reason, you think curly hair will look less weird next to the short stuff.

It made me a bit nostalgic for my rattail. Yeah--I had an asymetrical 80's do with a foot plus long rattail hanging from the right rear. It was splendiferous. Sometimes, I think I feel it--Phantom Rattail Syndrome. I sort of cried when we cut it off.