Shorts anyone?



So, I have connected with a friend from High School and we were talking about our various writings. Come to find out.....She kicks ass! I want to, in the next few days, give you a little taste of Janessa Moore (PBHS Alums will remember her as Janessa Lawyer). If you would like to see more of her Humor, click here.

BEEP!
October 11, 2004 (Happy Birthday Sam!)

Some online friends of mine have been having fun with me about a story I told them a while back. Oftentimes, when I come online they beep at me. It has to do with a story I told them a while back.

A few years ago, somebody started calling me on the phone and beeping at me. I haven’t a clue as to who it is, but they’ve followed me to three different houses, in two different states. Not even caller ID has given me an idea what this mysterious beeping is. Initially I figured it for a fax machine, but I’ve tried letting my fax machine answer and it is just too annoying for all the human callers I get (about 99.9% of all the telephone calls I get are from actual people; well that is if you generously count telemarketers as human beings and not 6-limbed aliens – for faster dialing, you see - from a commerce planet bent on domination of Earth through starvation of all mankind by making strategic telephone calls at dinner hour). So I scrubbed the fax machine idea. The non-alien callers were appreciative. They don’t like getting beeped at any more than I do.

The mystery of the beeping caller has gone on for about 6 years. Every three to six months, sometimes several times in a day, I get a rash of these calls where I answer the phone:

“Hello?”

“BEEP!”

“*sigh*” and I hang up. The beep has been known to leave messages on my answering machine, as well:

“You have 62 new messages…message 1: BEEP!…message 2: BEEP!….”

I explained this odd occurrence to some of my online friends. The general rule for chat room behavior where I like to spend some of my free time (free as in “stolen from my children and husband – costing me a proportionate amount of time spent dealing with behavioral and neglected feelings issues as time spent talking to friends and strangers whose faces I’ve never seen) is: 1) be as cheeky as humanly possible on a regular basis and 2) have more fun in your room than they do in the other guy’s room. Not really bad rules, as they translate into competitive good-times for everyone. I stay away from the more adult chat rooms. Very little conversation of any value occurs there. But science fiction fans tend to be a jocular bunch, so we congregate and spout off as much as possible. It is good for releasing the tensions and stresses of RL (netspeak for real life).

Our banter led us down the corridors of this story one evening and they decided to assign my sub-nick (sort of a second nick name) as such: BEEP! And now the common belief is held among a certain group of people that I am actually a government-programmed assassin. The phone calls are actually my handlers calling to activate me and now whenever someone BEEPS at me online it is expected that I will take up arms, stealthy arms, and seek out someone to eliminate.

Today it was my neighbors across the street. They are playing the car stereos again. To quote from a favorite columnist of mine: they were going boom boom boom in my ear in a very honky tonk fashion (quite possibly the funniest quote I've ever read). I understand that there is something very desirable in most cultures about having the biggest, loudest, and shiniest of anything. The family across the street from me is very popular among those who drive colorful and loud cars. I don’t mean loud-looking, although that applies (metallic chartreuse with fuscia for a car color…just…um…wow). I mean loud enough to rattle my concrete house so violently that the lighting fixture over the kitchen table dances to hip-hop. It’s actually quite talented. Perhaps I should enter it into that Dance 360 show competition. Surely there is a reality show out there somewhere for lighting fixtures looking to make it big in pop stardom. All kinds of lamps, track lighting, and chandeliers doing their weekly turn in front of millions of screaming fans who call in to vote for the jiggliest of the bunch. Lighting Idol.

I digress. The point is, someone BEEPS and I then grab my weapon and take out the family across the street for making my kitchen light break dance. It all sounds terribly amusing. It’s just a little imaginative play, right?

Until you take into account that their car stereos tend to wake up my sleeping toddler on a semi-regular basis. Have you ever lived with a toddler? Do you have any idea how a mother yearns for naptime? Unfortunately, instead of naptime becoming a time when mom relaxes, it becomes the time when mom obsessively tries to keep all noise from reaching the sensitive ears of her sleeping child, in theory buying her an hour or two of time to do something besides change diapers and clean up smears of peanut butter off the television…or the drapes….or the cottage cheese ceiling (yes, its happened. Don’t ask me how because I haven’t a clue.) And when you are the parent of children older than said sleeping child it becomes something that goes a little like this:

“Son, what are you doing?”

“Going to the bathroom.”

“Are your feet actually touching the floor!?” (whispered in maniacal fear)

“Well…um….yes, mom.” He gets that look that says ‘this isn’t going to be good for me.’

“Do you realize that your sister is sleeping?! Can’t you do that without your feet actually touching the floor? They make so much noise!”

He thinks for a minute, eyes up and to the right obviously trying to find a way to avoid what comes next. “I can’t.” He begins to lean from one foot to the other, doing the ‘I really gotta go, can we hurry this along’ dance.

“Okay…just be quiet!” She winces as he tiptoes hurriedly to the bathroom.

A few moments later you hear the flush.

“Son!” Mom whispers, about to come complete unglued as she flies to the door of the bathroom. “What do you think you are doing!?”

“I was going to the bathroom.” His look says, ‘We just went over this.’ He really is a bright boy. (His mom is a figgin’ genius, but he’ll not learn that until he is a middle-aged man because the stresses of raising four children DO THINGS to a woman’s mind.)

“I know that. I’m talking about all that noise! What was that noise for?” She takes him by the arm and sweeps him out of the bathroom (which is unfortunately located directly across the hall from the sleeping child’s room) his feet never touch the floor.

“You mean the flush? You told me I have to flush!”

She’s caught now. There is no way out of this one. Of course she told him to flush. They weren’t doing it and it started getting quite scary in their bathroom, untold number of “uses” started to float a distinct and unsavory odor through the house. They were actually starting to flush regularly and now she stood on the brink: contradict herself and possibly keep her precious sleeping child ASLEEP, or enforce the more rational rule and look like she’d gone ‘round the bend to her 8 year old child (she really didn’t want to consider that she already very much appeared that way to her child, as anyone would except other mothers who have been through this daily dance). “You’re right. You have to flush. It is just so loud and you’re sister is sleeping.”

“Yes ma’am.” He now has the ‘I really want to get away from this crazy woman’ look.

“Okay? So just try to be quiet, PLEASE???” And he is gone. Mom glances furtively at the baby’s bedroom door, and not hearing any cries for release from her crib, she tentatively returns to her computer for a little “me-time” in the chat room.

About that time the people across the street decide to grace the entire neighborhood with their current musical selection and the whole house is literally rockin’. The baby wakes. Naptime is OH-SO-OVER!

In that moment, the idea of the BEEP! and getting activated and having a target and eliminating a true threat to the peace becomes a very attractive concept. Very attractive, indeed.

BEEEP!
Posted on 12:04 PM by Esquire-Nizzle and filed under | 0 Comments »

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