My life in glasses

 \

This is one of those rare (rare, RARE) photos from Facebook that provoked an almost visceral response in me. 

For nothing but a photo could sum up what it is really like to lie down with your glasses on.

And how's this for AWK-ward: having to wear two pairs of glasses at the movies, the 3D ones on top of your regular pair? Double your nerdness, double your fun.

It's hard for me to even find illustrations for the next few points: getting your hair caught in the hinges of your glasses. Trying to put makeup on when you can't see a bloody thing.

Trying to read a magazine at the stylist's when I have all that colorizing goop on my hair and can't wear my glasses. Shoving the magazine two inches away from my eyes and moving it around.

Worst of all, trying to find a new pair of glasses that flatter you, when you HAVE TO TAKE YOUR GLASSES OFF to try them on!

This hasn't happened to me for a while, but it did in high school for some reason, back when lenses were actually made of glass and weighed as much as an average schooner. People would snatch them off my face and try them on and bleat, "Gawd, are you ever BLIND!" I even had a clerk at Pearle Vision look at my prescription once, and exclaim, "Whoaaaa!" Needless to say, I never went back there.

This is a mighty shiny couple, and it's easy to imagine our glasses clinking together. When I met Bill his glasses were held together with a paper clip and tape. Practically love at first sight.

It's hard to see the thickness of these, but it's nearly the same as the width of the frame. In those days glasses used to leave a bleeding trench on the bridge of my nose that never quite healed.

Cute babies, though!

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

What am I doing wrong?

No less a Hollywood legend than Kirk Douglas once had a pet project that didn't get off the ground.

For TEN YEARS.

He had read an obscure novel by an eccentric writer named Ken Kesey, formerly known for writing a stoner road trip story called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This one was set in a state mental hospital, extracted black humor out of desperate circumstances, and was treated like rat poison by every major movie studio in Hollywood.

It was called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Yes. That one.

Coming up empty again and again - movie executives were appalled at the very idea of making a comedy about mental illness - Douglas finally arm-twisted a playwright into adapting the book for the Broadway stage. He starred as the hell-raising rebel who crashes the doors of the hospital, Randall P. McMurphy. As Douglas writes in his memoir, The Ragman's Son:

"The reviews were murderous.Walter Kerr in the Herald-Tribune said, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is such a preposterous proposition for the theatre that it could be dismissed very briefly if it weren't for the extraordinary tastelessness with which it has been conceived.' Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote, 'Do you find the quips, pranks and wiles of the inmates of a mental hospital amusing? If you do, you should have a merry old time at One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

And so on, and so on. Do you hear the sound of a chainsaw in the background?

Not to be deterred, Douglas continued to shop the film script around, only to be told the same thing, or ignored outright.

"I crawled back home to Los Angeles like a wounded animal, defeated in my last battle to become a star on Broadway. I licked my wounds and moaned to (his wife) Anne, 'I gave New York a classic and they don't even realize it.' In between movies, I was busy taking Cuckoo's Nest to every single studio. They all turned it down."

Needless to say, the film finally got made and became a classic. No one complained about the setting and characters being in poor taste. There was an underlying compassion and tense drama just beneath the dizzy surface humor that gave it substance and humanity.

And Kirk Douglas was nowhere to be seen. The man who had pushed and pushed his pet project relentlessly for ten years until it was finally realized had been shoved aside. When it came time to assume his plum role as McMurphy, they told him he was too old. The role went to a relative unknown named Jack Nicholson.

So what am I getting at here?

I am trying to figure out where I am with my novel. It has been excruciating to pursue (or try to) what I'd really like to see happen with it. Can you guess what that might be?

The Glass Character isn't a Lloyd bio, but Harold Lloyd is its centrifugal centre. It would fly apart without him. He is the magnificent obsession who returns again and again, illuminating everything and trailing stars and comets in his wake.

It's a movie.

Let's get to it, let's stop pretending: it's an embarrassing proposition for me, a nothing little Canadian author whose books don't sell, to get a movie adapted from her story. And that's exactly what I want to do, need to do, and even believe is quite possible to do, though at this point (at THIS point!), no one else seems to agree with me.

I have no contacts in the film industry, absolutely none, and even if I did, I doubt if my communications would ever hit home or create any real interest. The idea of a Lloyd bio has been tossed around for years, far back enough that Jack Lemmon was once considered to play him (since Harold admired his brilliant combination of anxious comedy and poignant drama, with leading man looks thrown in for good measure).

So I am left with an embarrassed feeling. Why embarrassed? Because everyone else is embarrassed. For me. Part of it might be my Canadian-ness, that deeply-ingrained feeling that we are not ever, ever, EVER supposed to aggressively promote ourselves. It's somehow shameful to call attention to yourself like that. So there is this feeling of, OK, Margaret, here, take your medication now and take your dream home and put it to bed for good.

I feel this deep humiliation in myself, because it is such a ludicrous, almost insane idea. At the same time, I am absolutely certain it could happen and even would happen in the right hands. But I have not found those hands yet, in spite of what seems like truckloads of books sent out and hundreds of dollars of postage paid, all in the name of total futility. They just appear to fall into an abyss, proving I never should have called attention to myself to begin with.

I am an embarrassment, that woman who won't go away, who seems to think she has something here. She won't stop bugging me so I'll ignore her, maybe after some initial interest (leaving me to wonder: just what did I do wrong? Did I care too much? Did I not show that I cared enough? Am I just a natural-born, dyed-in-the-wool failure?)

Such is my reality, on some days, but I am not even supposed to say so.

This will not happen, reality tells me I am doomed and being silly and embarrassing myself to even want it. And yet, and yet. I know it could be realized. Nothing will kill that hope, though God knows I have tried to kill it a million times.

I try to comfort myself with Kirk Douglas' ten years of slogging to get a movie made that he couldn't star in, because by the time he got someone to pay attention to him, he was "too old". Unfortunately I will be too DEAD by then, in which case it  truly will be too late.

When this world began
It was Heaven's plan
There should be a girl for ev'ry single man.
To my great regret 
Someone has upset
Heaven's pretty program for we've never met.
I'm clutching at straws, just because
I may meet him yet.

Somebody loves me, I wonder who,
I wonder who he can be.
Somebody loves me, I wish I knew,
Who can he be worries me.
For ev'ry boy who passes me I shout, "Hey, maybe
You were meant to be my loving baby. "
Somebody loves me, I wonder who,
Maybe it's you.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

 Voyage Into The Golden Screen

In the golden garden bird of peace
Stands the silver girl the Wild Jewels niece
Paints and pretty colors Children's drawings on the wall
Look of doubt I cast you out be gone your ragged call





In the forest thick a trick of light
Makes an image magnet to my sight
Gown of purple velvet enchanted glazed eye
The sound of wings and sparkling rings behold a crimson sky

Tread so light so not to touch the grass
Breathe the air so slowly as you pass
Silent sudden dewdrop lies unseen until
Eyes to fall to hidden call the power of Love and Will

Symphonies of seaweed dance and swoon
God's celestial shore beneath the moon
See the dark and mighty peaks pierce the cumulus
Violet and mauve they sit power you can sus'

Tread so light so not to touch the grass
Breathe the air so slowly as you pass
Elvin fingers clutch a deep black cloak of fine damask
Aged rock in Mexico reveal a bejeweled cask

In the golden garden bird of peace
Stands the silver girl the Wild Jewels niece
Paints and pretty colors Children's drawings on the wall
Look of doubt I cast you out be gone your ragged call

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Ooooooh, I love Onions! (or: Go Get a Book Deal)

Child’s Description Of Heaven During Near-Death Experience Specifically Mentions Book Deal




NEWS IN BRIEFJuly 17, 2015

VOL 51 ISSUE 28 Local · Death · Books · Kids


NEW YORK—Speaking for the first time since waking from a medically induced coma following a devastating car accident, 8-year-old Aiden Miller recounted an extremely vivid near-death experience Friday that reportedly contained detailed descriptions of heaven, angels, and a six-figure book deal. “I was walking up in the clouds and met friends, and strangers, and all these famous people who talked with me about all kinds of things and brought up the possibility of selling the rights to my story to a big-name publisher,” said the second-grader, who attested that during the five-minute period in which his heart had stopped on the operating table, he ascended to a shining, golden paradise where he says he met with the archangel Gabriel and a literary agent who has helped a number of authors secure multi-book deals with lucrative worldwide book tours. “Jesus was sitting at the right hand of God and my grandfather was right there, and they looked at me and smiled at each other and said I should ask for an $80,000 advance with 10 percent of back-end profits.” Miller added that he felt a profound sense of peace and well-being when Jesus told him to go forth and seek a blockbuster deal for the movie rights.

(And The Onion is always right, folks. This kid must have the same agent as Harper Lee.)

Hot town: screams in the night

It was one of them-thar hot, HOT summers in Chatham, in the heel of Southwestern Ontario, when it felt like someone was holding something to your nose and mouth so you could not breathe. Sweat accumulted in layers on your skin, but if it evaporated at all, it provided no relief from the relentless, doggy heat.

We didn't take showers then, because you just didn't - women washed their hair in the sink and wrapped a towel around their head, turban-style (God knows why, or how they ever dried it). If you were so hot you were turning into melted rubber, you lay in a bath tub full of tepid water, drained it, and felt more moist and clammy than ever. As far as I know, people didn't bathe every day, nor were clothes washed as often, but perhaps the predominance of natural fibres kept us from keeling over from each other's stench.

The humidity devil did not let up often. But on certain nights the sky suddenly cracked open, and floods of lukewarm rain caused some of us (mostly kids, or a few heat-crazed adults) to strip down to our bare essentials and go out in it, dancing around, hair streaming, mouth open. The cracks of livid electricity almost made my hair stand on end, and sometimes I felt it zip up my arms as if it wanted me for some awful unknown purpose.

But the buckets of rain did not help. Soon everything was just steaming, the air more choked with water than before.

Cicadas buzzed their long, almost sexual-sounding arches of sound on those summer afternoons in which time seemed to hang suspended. We didn't like finding the adults - "June bugs", they were usually called, big fat things with wings - but the cast-off shells of the nymphs were magical. They appeared all over the bark of the elm trees that would all-too-soon be felled due to disease, never to be seen again.

But at night, there was this - this sound! A night bird, one that I called "the Skeezix bird" because that's what it sounded like. On damp, hollow, star-filled Chatham nights, the Skeezix would begin to swoop in the sky, the sound swinging near and far so that you couldn't tell exactly where it was. I don't think I ever saw one.  It had to be some kind of hawk or falcon. But nobody ever referred to it or talked about it. It was just there, like the sexy drawn-out tambourine-hiss of the cicadas. All part of summer in the city.

But when I heard the Skeezix bird, every so often I also heard the strangest sound, halfway between a burp and a groan. Short, hollow, and - stupid really, because obviously it had nothing to do with the bird, yet there it was, persistent. I even asked other people about it once, and no one had ever heard it. It seemed like nobody really wanted to talk about it. At least they looked at me strangely, though I suppose by then I should have been used to that.

Then one time, my older brother said, "You know that booming noise? It's sound waves from the hawk bouncing off buildings."

It wasn't. In fact, until this very moment I didn't know what the hell it was or how it could be related to the Skeezix bird.

Then came this answer, this beautiful, golden Answer. Simply laid out. Not even any video, just a clear audio explanation with pictures. There WAS a Skeezix bird, even if it was called something else. If it was creating that groany boom out in nature, obviously it had nothing to do with sound waves and buildings.

The real explanation is exotic and a little far-fetched, but it must be true. It just took me fifty years to find it. Play the video above, and be enlightened.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Just like the heat, it'll be all right

Classic Phil Spector wall-of-sound genius

Gigantic cat head conquers Tokyo!

A group of students at the Japan School of Wool Art have created a startlingly realistic, gigantic wool felt cat head that can be worn as a mask. The project was led by the students’ art teacher, Housetu Sato.

The head will be on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from April 18-23, 2015. Although there are no current plans to make more or sell the giant cat head, the recent online attention the artwork is generating may change things…

[via Laughing Squid]

Introducing the EGG MASTER!

Kitchen gadgets review: the Egg Master – a horrifying, unholy affair

I can’t look at the hot sweating mess that emerges from the Egg Master’s opening, let alone eat it

The egg roll writhes like an alien parasite in search of a host body … Rhik Samadder testing the Egg Master. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

What?

The Egg Master is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured into the plastic tube are heated by an embedded, wraparound element. When ready, food spontaneously rises from the device.
Why?

Because there is no God.

The Egg Master has to be observed in all its slow-mo action to be truly appreciated.

Well?

This week’s gadget describes itself as “a new way to prepare eggs”, which is accurate in the way that chopping off your legs could be described as a new way to lose weight. Let’s start with that name, its unsettling taint of S&M, an overtone consistent with the design. In hot pink and stippled black rubber, Egg Master’s exterior screams cut-price, mail-order adult toy; its funnelled hole suggests terrible uses. And it has a traffic light on it, for some reason.

“Spray non-stick agent into container”, the box advises, which definitely gets the tummy rumbling. As instructed, I crack two whole eggs into the hot tunnel, trying to ignore the gurgling sound from within. It’s impossible to see what’s going on – but it smells bad. I squint into the dark opening. A bulging yellow sac peers back at me. Minutes pass; the smell does not. Then, without warning, a flaccid, spongy log half jumps from the machine, writhing like an alien parasite in search of a host body. It’s horrifying, like a scene from The Lair of the White Worm.

I can’t look at it, let alone eat it. To stall, I consult the badly photocopied handbook, which suggests other delicious treats this baby is good for. Egg Master Egg Crackers, which is mixed-up crackers, egg and cheese; Egg Master Egg Dog; PB&J (peanut butter and jelly) Egg Master, and the tantalising Cuban Egg Master. It’s a dossier of culinary hate crimes (barbecue Pork Egg Master has two ingredients, “biscuit dough and three teaspoons of precooked pork”). Nervously, I try the sulphuric, sweating egg mess before me. The taste is … not the best. As I dry heave into the sink, I try to remember if I read about this machine in the Book of Revelation. Why is it in the world? Who created it? Maybe no one. Perhaps soon, sooner than you think, we will all bow to the Egg Master.

Redeeming features?

It’s quite space-efficient, being so dense with evil. The box contains free wooden skewers, to defend yourself from your food, and a pipe cleaner to swab the device, although no holy water to soak it in.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?

Under the floorboards. 5/5. Just kidding. 0/5.

Wait, there's more!

I'm sorry. . . no, really.