Ten things that might always make me bitter

1. My dumb stepmonster spent more than we see in a year to remodel a kitchen and the bitch can’t cook.

2. That dumb bint on the news whose job it appears to be to go out clubbing and get paid. If people weren’t so narrow-minded, I could do that, and write my own copy too.

3. Florida and Ohio. Because crime makes you stupid
. 4. After telling me taking me out would be too “complicated” my current crush fell for somebody with bipolar disorder, a colon complaint, and kidney stones. Sounds simple to me. Not.

5. I’m still into him anyway.

6. All the schmucks that borrowed pens off me in college have Very Good Jobs and I still have to answer “What do you do?” with “um...”(On the plus side, I usually got my pens back.)

7. My first love got over me in six months after acting like he couldn’t live without me.

8. I’m still not Steven Bochco.

9. That whole “God’s Special Spirit” thing. Total booby prize, and a lie on top of it.

10. I stayed in and studied and still wound up fucking indigent. If I come up a crip in another life it’s gonna be all about hallucinogens and “dates” with strangers, since I won’t have a future to ruin.

In no particular order.

Woo hoo! That's GREAT bitter!

Belzer just got a shiver, I'm sure.

More literal bitter
Beer, Age Ten
My mom and dad had a party last night, and I guess Mom hadn’t cleaned up yet because there are popcorn bowls and glasses out and stuff. I ate some popcorn from the bowl, even if it’s morning. My brother finds some beer, just a couple drips in a bottle and tastes it. He tries to act like it’s good, but his tongue comes out anyway. “How was it? Really?”

“Sour. You want the last sip?”

He hands me the bottle. I look in, sniff it. “I can’t believe they really drink this stuff. It smells really bad.”

“You’re not supposed to smell it.”

“I’m not trying. It just reeks.”

My brother makes his new Girls! Face that he learned from the boys across the street. It’s a new one but I’m getting tired of it already. So I close my eyes and pretend I am having the nastiest cough syrup ever, or getting a bandaid ripped off really fast. But I do it because Mom says we’re tougher than they are. It takes until Mom gets up for me to get the pucker off my face.

Are we doing a Ten Most Bitter list? I can do that.

1 (with a bullet): Lynda with a y, aka Dolly. Same nickname as the aunt who raised me, a woman I cordially disliked. Lynda-with-a-y the Second was the black hole who had everything I wanted, held on to it for all the wrong reasons, and pissed all over it. She won, I lost. Fuck bitter - pass the bile.

2: I finally got to offer payback to #1 in fiction form, and wound up being fair to the bitch.

3. My youth was completely wasted on me, because, as it happens, I was a bloody idiot.

4. Wrong decision, a long time ago. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Still paying.

5. See #1.

6. Ibid

7. Ibid

8. Ibid

9. The fucking NeoCons.

10. Multiple sclerosis.

11. This list goes to eleven.

Your drabble topic is: EAT IT!!!!

No, not really.

Sorry, folks --I was busy blowing things up Monday (because somehow blowing shit up is patriotic....), and today I was fighting with a computer all day (though I finally won, tra la). But I bring you your very late drabble topic, finally!

Challenge #64 (trust) is now closed.

Challenge #65 (and I thought we did this already, but I checked -- we haven't) is blood.

(Yeah, I watched a few too many Buffy reruns over the weekend -- what can I say?)

The First Time

“How old is this quilt?”

“I dunno. It was my grandmother’s.”

My eyes grow big and I get back to scrubbing.

Scrub scrub scrub.

The smell of the detergent and the blood mixed makes almost as nauseous as I was 10 minutes ago. I must get this quilt clean.

Scrub scrub scrub.

The only sound in the room. I’m no longer breathing – breathing will make the stain set. My brain is full of “Get it out. Get it out. Get it out.”

Scrub scrub scrub.

And it occurs to me: Am I trying to clean this quilt or myself?

Scrub scrub scrub.

Oh, Aimee. Damn.

I love that.

Thanks, Deb.

Bad Medicine

I'm eighteen, tough as old boots. Eighteen, and my life is a chronically ill musician, ten years my senior.

Actually, right now, he's with his wife in Surrey, and I'm at our supposed house in Mill Valley. I'm sitting in my favourite rocking chair, his chair, emptying a bottle of tequila: rock, chug, swallow.

He's gone. Again.

I don't know it yet, but later on, when I finish the bottle, I'll fill a bath and take a razor in with me, water going scarlet, bloodletting him out of me, friends pulling me out, interfering fuckers.

Like I told you, I'm eighteen...