ZippityZern's Uncommon Nonsense - A Declaration Read online

  Adam says to his sister, “Does it ever bother you that So-and-So (we’ll call this superhero So-and-So) knows more about what’s going on in your life than you do?”

  Maren says, “Yeah, but I just try to ignore him and stay in my room.”

  Adam, incredulous, asks, “How does So-and-So do it?”

  Because So-and-So is a superhero, that’s how, you silly mortal. He’s a superhero just like Wolverine and Storm from X-Men. By day we may look like mild-mannered parents fumbling through the kitchen trash looking for our car keys, but at night we retire to our secret lairs of truth and justice to hone our super abilities.

  Why, I myself have the little-understood and little-appreciated power of super smell. My children discovered early in their lives that I am able to detect the presence of germs and microbes simply by sniffing. Many times my offspring would wake me from a perfectly decent nap (hanging out in your lair of truth and justice all night, honing, can really drag on you) by shoving a slice, chunk, or stack of something into my face and asking, “Smell this. Is it still good?”

  With their lives hanging in the balance, I draw upon my super, mutant powers, sniff, and say, “Smells okay to me. Just be sure to cut that black stuff off.”

  Once they woke me up by shoving a garter snake in my face, but they didn’t want me to smell it; they just wanted me to look at it. So, I did. My super neutronic screams can still be heard in Bhopal. If you have super protonic hearing, you can still hear the distant echo of me saying, “New rule—never wake mommy up with a snake in the face.”

  Yes, in addition to super smell, I also have super protonic hearing. I know when things aren’t fine in a kid’s life, even if that kid says, “Everything’s fine,” and even if I’m talking to this kid from six states away.

  I say, “So, how’s everything?”

  Kid says, “Fine. Everything’s fine.”

  I say, “No really. What’s going on?”

  Kid, in shock, asks, “How did you know? How do you always know?”

  “It’s a gift, kid, and it’s a curse,” I always say.

  With great, mutant, super abilities come great, mutant, super responsibilities—like never-ending vigilance and excessive, unrelenting paranoia. I don’t know about the rest of you superheroes out there, but I wouldn’t mind a break from it all—or one uninterrupted nap. The kind of nap where no one wants you to sniff anything, get up and stop the global conflict in the family room, or come see what the cat did on the stove.

  Do superheroes ever get time off? They certainly deserve it. Is there a superhero union? There ought to be, don’t you think? I wouldn’t mind organizing a little rally and a fundraiser, but you’ll have to excuse me—I have to go sniff a newly opened can of tuna.

  Keep your capes clean and your Batmobile gassed up,

  Linda (No, I will not sniff your socks to see if you have a fungus!) Zern

  ~~~Increased Chatter~~~

  Dearest Fellow Undercover Agents,

  I feel very bad for the CIA, FBI, and spies that are out in the cold. They are constantly trying to figure out what people are really up to, and not what they say they’re up to. Then they always have to interrogate, question, unearth, discover, uncover, and interpret. It must be so hard to walk into a room and have everyone go instantly quiet, and to always have that sneaky, creepy suspicion that someone somewhere is hiding something, or everything. Oh, wait, that’s what mothers do! I feel very bad for mothers—and the CIA, FBI, and cold spies.

  All this criticism of the intelligence gathering community is really starting to wear on me. I mean; I get it. I understand the difficulty in trying to dig down deep, under all the accumulated layers of dozens of years of collected deception, and get to the bottom of a thing. The problem is that you have to start thinking like the bad guys. This can be tricky because the bad guys are often crazy or teenagers. I use the term “bad guys” in the sense that the person themselves have individual worth, however their actions are bad. Or, as we like to qualify bad behavior in our house, “That [behavior] was as dumb as a stump.”

  The following case study is an example of the difficult nature of the role of a mother-spy. The names have been changed to protect absolutely everyone.

  Case Study #347 or They Never Teach You How to Deal with This Kind of Junk in Sunday School

  Claudia, a young, extremely beautiful mother, began her spring cleaning in the summer of 1988 by flipping the mattresses in her home. She started, as was her habit, with the children’s rooms. Claudia can best be described as intelligent, but somewhat naïve—also beautiful, of course.

  As she strained her liver struggling to flip the mattress of her oldest son’s bed (we’ll call him Dolt), Claudia noticed a magazine of ill repute. The magazine was of such ill repute that Claudia could not recall having seen similar depictions of the female body outside her gynecologist’s office wall charts. With the strength of an Amazon, Claudia held the single bed mattress over her head with one hand, and clutched her chest with the other. Claudia’s immediate reaction was horror, mingled with a twisted kind of satisfaction. She had long suspected Dolt of everything, and here it was.

  “Wow,” she thought, “I don’t remember this lesson in Sunday School. But if we had this lesson in Sunday School it could have been called The Christian Lady’s Response to Finding a Hustler Magazine under Her Son’s Mattress, or How to Destroy Sodom and Gomorrah in Three Easy Steps.”

  Reacting instinctively, Claudia raced to the kitchen and snatched up a pair of salad tongs and a plain, unmarked brown paper bag. Returning to the room, she picked up the offending piece of trash literature, using the salad tongs so as not to soil her hands, and placed the offal into the plain, unmarked brown paper bag as Exhibit A. She intended to show her husband, Dolt’s father, the evidence as soon as he walked through the door.

  In the meantime, Claudia did not openly confront Dolt. Instead, she chose to take the slow drip Chinese water torture approach to interrogation by saying things to Dolt like, “So how was your day? Did you have to hustle much to get to class?” Dolt remained oblivious.

  The family responded to the crisis by allowing Dolt’s father to counsel with Dolt. He said, “Are you trying to give your mother a stroke? Knock it off.”

  Conclusion: Dolt and his father began a more open dialogue on the pitfalls of pornography hidden in stupid places, and Claudia began a systematic program of nightly raids, wiretaps, and satellite monitoring. Dolt is now a highly functioning member of society.

  Recommendations: Read everything. Search everywhere. Trust no one. Paranoia is your friend. The FBI is your friend. Spies are good. They may not always be right, but they’re always worried—just like moms. Stay tuned for my next e-mail entitled Teenage Terrorist Chatter Decoded.

  Roger that,

  Linda L. Zern (Code Name—Bubble Buster)

  ~~~Sell It, Flush It, Smoke It~~~

  Hey Dudes and Girl Dudes,

  I found pot in my garage yesterday. I should end this communication right here. No, that would be cruelly unusual. Okay, so I found pot in the garage yesterday.

  I was throwing some storage boxes around, pretending to simplify and organize, when one of the box lids came loose. Stuff flew out. Bending, I scooped up a bit of desiccated leaves and seeds wrapped neatly in clear plastic wrap and tied with a blue twist tie.

  “What’s this?” I mumbled to no one in particular. I shook the bag in front of my face. Seeds jumped.

  “Wow, this sure looks like pot,” I said, also to no one in particular. Our cat, Charlie, meowed.

  I glanced at her with narrowed eyes and asked, “Charlie, are you smoking pot?” She meowed again, and that’s when I got paranoid.

  First, I made a mental note that the pot had flown out of the box belonging to the kid that I’ve always suspected of everything. Then I made phone calls. I called my husband, my best friend, my oldest daughter, and a drug awareness hotline. I also confronted the only kid at home, with the righteous flourish of
an 11th century crusader.

  I said, “Sherwood, what’s the worst thing parents can find in their own home?”

  “A used condom,” he said.

  “No. Good answer, but wrong,” I corrected him. “The answer is pot. What should I do with it?”

  He said, “Sell it.”

  I hung up the phone and tried my best friend Mindy. I said, “I found pot.”

  Mindy said, “Really, where?”

  I said, “On top of some Mother’s Day cards and Boy Scout awards.”

  She said, “How much is there?”

  I said, “A nickel bag.” I actually used the words nickel bag. I don’t even know what that means.

  “What should I do with it?” I asked.

  She said, “Flush it.”

  I called Heather, the oldest daughter. “I found pot in the garage,” I said. “I think your dad is smoking pot.”

  Heather laughed—sort of.

  “What should I do with it?”

  First, she offered to take it to college and give it to her reprobate dancer friends then she said, “Flush it.”

  I shook the plastic baggy at Maren, the youngest daughter, and said, “Is this yours? And is this why you’ve been in seventeen car accidents in two years?”

  Maren said, “Nope, I’m just a really bad driver. I don’t need marijuana to make it worse.”

  I asked, “What should I do with it?”

  “Smoke it,” she said. My paranoia grew.

  What if there was a kilo of pot hidden in the Christmas decorations? What if the neighbors were hiding their stash in our garage? What if the pot had been there awhile and we have been transporting it across state lines every time we moved? Would that make us drug mules or drug traffickers?

  Going into my super mom crime scene investigator persona, I started pawing through the suspect storage box. That’s when I found the plastic bag full of black cocaine.

  When Adam came home, I shook the pot and the black cocaine at him.

  “What’s this?” I accused.

  He took the plastic bags stuffed with drugs from me. He handed the bag of black cocaine back to me and said, “Well, this is dirt.” He handed the other bag back to me and said, “And these are grass seeds.”

  I shouted, “Exactly! Grass, marijuana, ganja, wacky tobaccy—DOPE.”

  He spoke slowly and clearly and said, “No, I mean grass like, ‘I’m going to mow the grass.’ It’s an object lesson from church.”

  I stared at the pot and the black cocaine.

  He continued, “You know—seeds, fertile soil, faith, planting, harvest.”

  “Wow, that’s a relief. I thought our cat was smoking pot in the garage.”

  Adam laughed—sort of.

  That’s how my Monday went. Do I feel stupid? Gosh no. I feel I learned an important lesson—I know now who really loves me. Mindy really loves me, and Heather really loves me, because they told me to flush the drugs, thereby avoiding capture or death in a drug shoot-out. In contrast, Maren tried to get me hooked on drugs, and Sherwood tried to turn me into a drug pusher. Adam just tries to avoid me as much as possible.

  Have a great, drug-free week,

  Linda (Sell it, Flush it, Smoke it) Zern

  ###

  About the Author:

  I am the matriarch and co-founder of a new tribe of carbon-based human types—the Zernites. We are known for our extensive use of plastic and the belief that life is for laughing—also snickering. Our fossilized remains can be found in the lowlands of Saint Cloud, Florida. As the matriarch of our tribe, I am frequently called upon to boil meat, gather pre-washed hydroponically grown berries, cast out emotional demons, and keep a record scrawled on possum hide with sharpened charcoal. This collection contains a few of the tales of my people. Some of it’s true. This is the first of what I hope will be many ebook scrolls wrapped up and stuffed in virtual clay jars—also plastic milk jugs.

  Connect With Me Online:

  My Website: https://www.zippityzerns.com

  My Blog: https://zippityzerns.blogspot.com/