My journal of life and those lives that surround & influence me, both positively & negatively

Saturday, June 24

Keeping Up With The Joneses-Big Mouth Style

Big mouths have a way of getting cold feet, real fast, real well. It's almost like that great classic story of a fantastic lovemaking session, when either the man or woman has spent a great deal of time and effort of pleasing their partner, only to find out that they themselves are unable to climax! How frustrating is that? Yet it happens, nonetheless and often too, I might add!

Big mouths are fuck-ups in my book.

These are the people who have worked hard in their college careers for the past several years at a fufilling degree, only to decide after all their great efforts and joys in their selected field, decide to abandon their goals & dreams, to take a job mopping floors and scrubbing toilets at their local friendly neighborhood McDonald's restuarants for their rest of their natural lives.

According to a national study done years ago, most big mouths hail from the South (states like Florida, Texas & Kentucky mainly) are largely uneducated, behave like rednecks and believe they are the shit.

Interesting.

Big mouths make huge promises and then turn up later empty-handed. Big mouths make idle threats to do great harm, while only thinking of themselves and their needs, but oh my god! What fucking, selfish assholes they are! It's always them; it's always their needs first!

Big mouths are primadonnas; lousy actors and actresses who will never make it onto the real theatrical stages, small or large silver screens, so they practice their bad method-acting skills on their family and friends with often disasterous results. Their idols are often bad attitude sports figures like former basketball player Dennis Rodman, who played with the Chicago Bulls for a few seasons and current Chicago White Sox team manager Ozzie Guillen, whose mouth is bigger than a black hole in outer space!

They admire egocentric actors like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartzenegger (before he became governor of California), Claude Van Damme and others, because they portray the ultimate in big-mouthedness. They listen to talk-radio and watch television and write extremely bad blogs, because they have nowhere else to spit in.

Big mouths have lofty goals and supersized dreams that are often split into two like two eggs cracked over a hot frying pan.

Big mouths always expect to have their way and when they don't, they pout and kick and scream and cry and make idle threats to kill themselves.

Big mouths behave like spoiled children, twist their own words onto others to fit their own agenda and pretend like they don't know what they've done.

Big mouths tell bad and often stupid racist and sexist jokes because they have no pride in their souls.

Big mouths take credit for everything they know they could never acheive in real life.

Big mouths piss in the wind and moan when it flies back directly in their faces.

Big mouths never have fufilling relationships in social circles and wonder why they can't find a suitable match for life. They are often lonely in life, save for their hands, fingers, vibrators and a blow-up doll and without a doubt turn to alcohol, gay porn and overeat.

Big mouths are often depressed and refuse to seek treatment in any way, shape and form, always relying on the old mindset, "Well, there's nothing wrong with me."

Big mouths are ALWAYS right.

Big mouths talk louder than everyone else because they need to hear themselves and they are always looking at themselves in the mirror like goldfish, constantly admiring themselves.

Big mouths hide behind words, computer screens and other falsehoods. They are in essence, their own worst enemy.

Big mouths ALWAYS have the last word.

Oh really? Not in this space!

Friday, June 23

The Botox Frankenstein Poetry Series>Sometimes

Good evening friends! I extend a quick tip of the kippah to you one and all! Aha! Friday has arrived at long last after an experiencing an exceedingly difficult early week, which got better as it progressed, but at last! At last! Mr. Sweet Capper has arrived, leading us into a gentle weekend once more. And now, it's brand new poem-time! Remember my dear readers, please tell someone you love them and always-always-always-always enjoy!

Sometimes

Sometimes
the blue sky is full of black clouds
until the passing rainbow
parts the darkness

and the voices
leave my head

like wisps of ash
swirling in the wind

Thursday, June 22

The Obsessive Love Terrorist

There are crises in this world that are at time unavoidable, some are mind-numbing, while others are numb-skulling and some never should have gotten out so much out of control to start with.

Love is a tricky business; it can affect us all sorts of ways and cause the most unimaginable, the unthinkable and unintentional.

Spurned love is one thing, but love perceived as love when it’s not, can unfortunately turn into an obsessive-compulsive disorder that can easily go outside the normal and considerably safe boundaries.

With love I’ve learned that relationships do not always go the way you so painstakingly planned it to go; it happens to everyone, including yours truly, The MishegasMaster and circumstances can spin out of control, to the tip of a boiling point that reached its peak so long ago.

Love fuels ours brains; simmers our hearts; heats up our passion into overdrive; sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the center and sometimes it goes for the whole shebang.

On the hand, when love fails us, it works itself into a momentary lapse of revenge, secretly supplying the ammo and unloading it into the intended victim when they are least expecting it. In the true hateful moments, we sometimes don’t see the bright floodlights burning down and directly into our eyes.

If we’re not careful, we might bump our heads or burn ourselves very badly and sometimes the burn doesn’t really hurt us at all, it just stings a bit, when in reality our souls may be burning with the blindness we wear when we wage war with our exes.

Love wars are often bloody, leaving lots of bruises, both physically and psychologically. Anyone who says otherwise has never been in love before.

And love doesn’t mean only between man and woman, but man & man, woman & woman and human & beast.


Even after the war has been waged, both parties may never see eye-to-eye again. The anti-love extremist will behave like a love-obsessed terrorist who turns into a blood-thirsty cannibal and who will for the rest of their life get revenge for their loss for someone that was never really theirs to begin with.

And that’s the saddest reality of them all.


Wednesday, June 21

Defusing A Human Time Bomb Within 48 Hours

Marriage should be a happy time of life for everyone involved. Should be, but isn’t. there’s a lot of headaches and negotiations on-going both in public and in private, you know everything from the kind of cake the couple gets to whose in the wedding party to who gets invited to the actual ceremony verses the reception and the list goes on and on from there. Ideally, the bride and groom have a great task on their hands and that is to make everybody happy, but that doesn’t always happen.

Having never been married, I cannot speak for what’s all involved, but being engaged a couple of times, I can say that at least I know how to take the first few steps toward the willowy path to holy matrimony.

While we hear always about the happiness of it all, it’s a rare occasion to hear about the true sad ugliness underbelly of departed anger that doesn’t go away, at least for the other side, even after the relationship has ended, no matter how and where each party ends up.

Take the case of the upcoming marriage of Montana residents Steve Varro and his bride-to-be Christy Helms. On their free website link, which I've listed here,
http://www.plantowed.com/site1/pictures.asp?userID=3334&offset=10#, they list the usual stuff like who they both are, how they met each other, members of their wedding party and their bridal registries, plus the usual amount of lovey-dovey photographs interspersed in between individual commentary.

On their link, Steve & Christy paint a very pretty picture of their lives and their oh-so-happy future together.

Now personally, I don’t know them all that well, not Christy at least, but I know Steve, only by, might I add, through word-of-mouth, from a human time bomb.

Please allow me to introduce the human time bomb, none other than Jason Moors, a friend I’ve known for a little over 22 years.

I’d be the first to tell you that I’ve never gotten along with Moors, because of his behavior, as some of my friends and family, including The Arizona Babe & Rex Pâtér Homo can attest to.

Moors has made several attempts to contact Varro who has from all accounts, blown Moors off. Moors continued to persist and has emailed Varro several times and is met with no volleys in return. Moors is aggressive. Varro doesn’t like being bothered by a relationship that seemed to never go anywhere outside of friendship, although Moors insisted that Varro is a closet queen and is still in love with him.

Yes friends; Moors is gay and proud of it.

Yet in the law’s eyes, Moors unwanted emails after being told to stop sending them to Varro is called stalking, a sad, but legitimate crime in this day and age, a Class X felony I believe and if I’m not mistaken, if convicted can give a person like Moors a lot of unnatural free time, including room & board.

Despite receiving an email from Montana police telling him to “cease & desist” in contacting Varro, Moors persisted and doesn’t take the word “No” for an answer.

On Monday evening, I emailed Moors and asked him if he had a plan and indeed he did. His plan consisted of actually flying to Montana and configuring himself into the wedding ceremony somehow, and wanting to “freak” Varro out with a note of some sort affixed to the windshield of Varro’s car.

It’s enough that Varro will be sweating bullets during the ceremony to have to worry about a stalker at his heels.

On Monday, June 19, I contacted Moors’ father and made him aware of the situation at hand and the next night, we both decided to join forces by conference-calling his son to see if we make his son think twice about possible jail-time for his actions.

When at least the magic moment came, we called Moors, but he hung up on us, hiding behind his computer screen and communicating that way only.

Alas, like a runaway bride, Moors got cold feet and backed off.

Thank god! Persistence paid off and I’m eternally grateful for that.

Varro and Helms are to be united in holy matrimony on Saturday, June 24; heaven help them both.

Friday, June 16

The Botox Frankenstein Poetry Series>If Rod McKuen Wrote Poetry Like Shakespeare

Gosh oh gollies it's been so long since I've posted a poem in this space, but better late than never, so good evening and a quick tip of the sweaty kippah to you all! My, my, my, it's the third week in June and it's hotter than a sweat lodge outside. My week was an easy one, yet the days are nearly as long , but thank goodness it's Friday and that sweet capper is waiting to ease us into a gentle weekend once more. And now, for a golden oldie of a poem! Remember my dear readers, please tell someone you love them and always-always-always-always enjoy!

If Rod McKuen Wrote Poetry Like Shakespeare

Resting below cottage trees
Thy bosom doth rise, doth fall
Soldiers marched drunkard asleep
I asked she molest thy wicked way
To free the dying soul beneath
She obliged.

Wednesday, June 14

Waving American Pride Joyfully & Happily On Flag Day: New National Anthem Song Lyrics Extension

Nearly a year ago I, your most faithful, kind, clean, caring and very obediant servant, The MishegasMaster, launched a brand new initiative, namely a new national anthem song-writing lyrics contest on this very blog entitled "The First Annual MishegasMaster Lyrics-Writing Contest." I have received only very few responses to it, so today would have been the deadline and in light of the situation, I have decided to put an additional two-year extension on it, making the deadline January, 2009, but read on.

These last several months have shown me how most deep-rooted and disturbing most American citizens are, preferring television over getting involved, but I guess that can be said about most things, can’t it?

Strange as that may look on the screen, there seems to be a more concerted effort by the American people to show our wonderfully lame duck president George Bush how he is truly fucking up American persona, especially in light of his latest effort of assassinating a leader of a terrorist organization.

If you ask me, George Bush is one international terrorist that needs to be stopped by any means necessary.

Funny thing about terrorism is, the more you realize who accuses the other side of being terrorist the more you realize who the true terrorist is, especially in light of the fact that this U.S. terrorist has his eyes on his special interests that being his precious oil reserves, which he cuddles to no end.

Then our terrorist decides to show support on taxpayer’s dollars by making a secret “surprise” visit to Iraq and telling them they have nothing to fear, because the USA is behind them 100 percent.

Personally, I’m a little wary of those secret surprise visits, because it’s in the same vein of a “secret surprise guest” that in actuality is a staged event, like the stage events you’d see on say on Dr. Phil, Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Springer.

For some, it’s all well and good that he killed another man with his little army, but the real question still lingers on; where the fuck is Osama Bin Laden!!!

Where is Bush’s little pet terrorist whom he so conveniently let go, when he had him within reach days after the 911 attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York City?

The question gets asked over and over again; in offices, in barrooms, in backrooms, in bedrooms, in comedy clubs, on live TV, in newspaper editorials, on radio talk shows, both liberal and conservative with the same result almost every time…nobody knows!

But could it be that Bush let Bin Laden get away intentionally, so he could pretend to pursue him in an old-fashioned cops and robbers game?

I think so.

So in honor of this terrible horrible mini-Vietnam quagmire of an illegal war, I’ve decided to extend my “write a new national anthem contest” until George Bush is permanently out of office; this includes sudden death Kennedy-style, impeachment or when his second presidential term in office ends, whichever comes first.

To see my original post, click on this link I've provided for you with details on how to enter. Please ignore the original deadline date, as it now stands at January, 2009.
http://themishegasmaster.blogspot.com/2005/11/1st-annual-mishegasmaster-lyrics.html

Let’s get our America back, dear friends! Just remember; you don’t have to be a member of the red, blue, green or multi-colored parties to enter this contest. All you really need is to make our nation great once more!

Tuesday, June 13

The Death Of Fear And The Birth Of Sid Yiddish

Coming off of extreme highs and falling off into low lows is typical of an older me whenever I left behind my dreaded space that kept me alive day after day after day after day after day.

I don’t seem to make much money at my craft, which is my one true passion as a living, breathing artist, but what I have learned that in order to survive you have to live lean and learn to eat and nibble on what you can get by in order to get into the next corridor.

It made me unhappy that I constantly saw others making those connections so easily, while I sat idly by and struggled because I don’t have those same kind of networking skills.

I wasn't that great a schmoozer; I knew there were plenty of sacrifices to be made and often I made them with half & half results. I knew what my own personal struggles were, but I’d been doing this performance thing half-assed anyway for the past two decades without much happiness or fulfillment.

Yes there were accolades. Yes there was positive results, but compliments only stretched so far. I knew how I behaved before, during and after a performance and it’s the same way; true happiness…thrillsville; meeting new people, building up lasting relationships with venues, artists, other performers…it’s all in the mix and in the heat of the moment.

And you never wanted it to end ever, but you packed up and went home however long the distance was and you sat and waited for the next opportunity.

That was my biggest problem to date; how did you make the opportunities happen more frequently, I used to ask myself How did you go from struggling with whatever you were trying to attain to perfect achievement and be successful every single time, I wondered aloud?

There were one thousand guys out there all doing the same thing you were doing. All were trying to achieve their own individual success rates, yet only very few made it work and worked it well.

I didn’t have anyone to fall back onto. I had been going at this performance career for quite a long time now, my local bridges might have been burnt out back then, but who really knows for sure these days?

I never did feel good about my future in this lifetime…oh, it was really a combination of factors that made me feel that way, but I had to swallow it all whole…or did I?

The answer was a mystery to me, really it was.


Read into it what you care to. Comment how you wish. Criticize and destroy whatever part of me you see fit. Laugh at all my failures if that makes you feel much more of a man.

Fear is bloody. Fear is dead! Long live fear!

Watch those negatives turn into positives.

Watch the game change for the better.

Cry no longer, dear friend, cry no longer.

Sid Yiddish is here to stay.

Thursday, June 8

A Trip Down Memory Lane With The Mishegasmaster

It must be the end of the school year in suburbia, because local school bus drivers are getting kind of sloppy with their driving skills. How can this be possible you ask?

Well, there are several examples, including; An All-Town bus driver whose license plate I couldn’t get (fortunately for him), made a right turn into the right lane, using a left-hand signal. Then were the two buses I saw racing with each other, zooming at 55 miles per hour in a 40 mph zone, heading north along McCormick Boulevard in Skokie.

Often times I wonder if they’ve hired the right people to drive children in school buses, but it’s not the first time I’ve wondered about that.

No, my wondering takes me back nearly 28 years ago to 1978, when I was a sophomore in high school at Niles West, in Skokie, Illinois.

I remember how fast buses used to travel as a teenager and that was when buses were unequipped with safety belts and god help us all when the bus driver had to make a sudden stop.

Imagine the chaos that would ensue. Bodies flying everywhere with injuries amuck, but there would have been no lawsuits for back then, times were far too gentler, there wasn’t that vengeful kind of motivation that so often interrupts our seemingly normal lives.

Back then, if some great tragedy occurred, the bus company would have accepted the responsibility suspended or fired the school bus driver in question and the local newspapers would scandalize it. End of story.

Somewhere along the line, anger grew up around it and realized a huge bale of hay could be made out of tragedies like this, so up sprang the era of the frivolous lawsuit, based on the zany choices that people made and the fun that ensued.

This is not to say that more serious accidents including permanent disabilities and fatalities do occur because they do, it’s just that this mentality of money more the motivator and not the principal of the idealism behind it, for when money talks, bullshit walks and it’s bound to go to people’s heads, all this money, for it leads to book and film deals, TV talk shows, magazine articles.

It’s called instant celebrity status and it’s ridden out until the rest of the world gets sick of it, especially people like me.

It was probably individuals like Gwen (one of the first African-Americans in my high school and who also rode on my bus); back on that school bus I used to ride home on during my sophomore and junior years of high school, who got the movement rolling, with her big mouth and griping to no end.

And that’s the way the movement began, thousands of voices all crying out for the same thing: “Give me something and give me something good or else!”

The “Or else” part is the one that got out of hand, a little too much. Yet back then, it was only the complaining and the griping was as satisfying as a teenage orgasm.

Or, as our bus driver drove over a large ridge in the road, causing a lot of us on my bus to be jarred and tossed around a little bit.

Gwen nonetheless, summed it up within a single sentence, leaving a stench in the early morning air as it occurred. Whenever Gwen had issues, she’d announce it to the world, whether we were ready to hear it or not.

“God damn it! You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

She should have begun the movement earlier and sued the lousy motherfucker!

Tuesday, June 6

Military Coup On You...Thwarted! An Occupational Hazard>Act 29

Disclaimer: Our institutions belong to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their rights of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it. We will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category. Fiction can be that way sometimes. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental & should not be taken or misconstrued as such. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably believes that the masses are far more likely to believe a big lie than several small ones.

This just in…The Fraternal Goon Twins have been located!!!

Yes, it’s true. The long & often exhaustive search for the destructive behavior-challenged twosome who act more like wired robots that have been programmed to destroy any significant aspect of positive life found to be thriving here on Devil’s Island & end up making it seem all sour have, at last been found!

It’s apparent they were never lost to begin with; rather they were hiding out in an unused corridor within the prison system, studying survival tactics manuals & pouring over several books on how to overthrow governmental bodies. It looks as if the long-lost duo has been planning a coup against Devil’s Island for several months.

“Tsk-tsk,” says Upper Prison Brass & The Barnaby Boys in the same breath, “Tsk-tsk.”

The Fraternal Goon Twins’ living conditions tells a great deal of the story, indeed.

Squalid, smelly, rat & roach-infested living quarters. Empty plastic water bottles strewn about. Empty boxes of food containers scattered on the floor. Wretched, raw brown bottles of whiskey, beer & mauve, makeshift boilermakers stacked neatly in rows like bowling pins.

There are also many Molotov cocktail parts, together with stacks of yellowing newspapers & oily rags, along with books & boxes of matchsticks. Firecrackers & explosive materials smuggled in from the outside courtesy of The X5 Unit; homemade bombs, splint-like knives, stolen guns & rifles from the Devil’s Island guard tower & hollowed out bars of soap concealing boxes of bullets in case any unforeseen elements got in their way.

Also found were lists of contacts from the outside world and within Devil’s Island itself, both as reinforcements and innocent bystander recruits who didn’t have a clue as to what they were told they were doing, verses what was really going down.

One of the first orders of business was to give each of The Fraternal Goon Twins a good scrubbing down and a shower, as each stank horribly. After several hours of interrogation by Upper Prison Brass, The Fraternal Goon Twins were transported to the Devil’s Island psychiatric insane asylum for an indefinite period of time of observation.

From there, The Fraternal Goon Twins were placed in solitary confinement, where they remain as of this moment. What did The Fraternal Goon Twins seem to think they were doing or attempting to do? Nobody seems to know, not even Broadcast Betty since The Fraternal Goon Twins nor Upper Prison Brass aren’t talking.

Times on Devil’s Island seem strangely calm these days without the idling threat of The Fraternal Goon Twins doing the goosestep every 20 minutes or so past prisoner cells, but don’t let that fool you.

Just when you least expect the bottom to fall out, it will, creating more havoc and chaos than you might have ever experienced in a single lifetime; here and only here, on Devil’s Island!

Monday, June 5

Doing The Dog On A Murphy Bed With Rice

Have you ever noticed that when people don’t want you to become aware of their own personal problems, that they talk about something else just to take the focus off the immediate eyesore?

It’s pretty obvious that our wonderful buffoon of a lackluster lame duck President George W. Bush Jr. has been doing a lousy job according to the American people. When your approval ratings have dipped down to 29 percent (perhaps it’s 31 percent now), you know you’re sucking eggs and sucking them well.

So by knowing he’s the worst leader EVER to serve as President of the United States, he has to execute a good back-up plan that will make himself look good in the public eye, thereby moving those percentage points back up the political charts and come out smelling like a rose or at least better than last year’s New York Yankees!

Already in trouble for an undeclared war on terrorism in Iraq and unreasonably high gas prices, what does he do? He proposes an amendment to ban same sex marriage. No surprise there, as he’s just trying to please his old buddies and giving out the high “fuck you” sign to his old enemies.

It is interesting to note however, that even though he previewed his intentions for it this past weekend in his weekly radio broadcast, he chose to press onward with it today, this also being the 25th anniversary of the discovery of a “mysterious pneumonia,” that was found within five gay men in Los Angeles in 1981, that later turned out to be AIDS.

Bad timing? Precise political angling? Coincidence? Perhaps it’s all of the above and then some. Could it also be that the homophobic heel is might be hiding something else so secretly exclusive that he wouldn’t want anyone else in the world to know, including the press?

Is Bush hiding behind this amendment proposal just to show his manliness and to take focus off his…extra-marital affair he’s been carrying on with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (source: Wayne Madsen Report, among other news outlets).

Sounds crazy, no? But yes, it was reported in the press some days ago that Laura Bush moved out of the White House and into a nearby hotel.

Very interesting scenario for a president who is so beloved among right-wing Christians, Aryans and the Ku Klux Klan, that his affair with Rice, a high-level black woman within his cabinet would be screwing around with Bush, a white man, would make the purest of the pure white race cringe and make them shit in their pants!


Desperate move you say?

Well, it is far easier to make light of others’ troubles than ones’ own pile and it is far easier to build a house of cards within a glass house without worrying about all the little cracks within the foundation, until the cracks grow bigger and the glass starts breaking at freight-train eardrum-splitting breakneck speed.

He who kills first, dies last.

Charity begins at home and not at the office.

Sunday, June 4

I Wish I Knew A Good Mechanic

Sometime ago, six years ago this fall to be exact, I traveled to London, England to meet with someone I had been corresponding with online, someone who claimed she were single, had a couple of kids and was a Modern Orthodox Jewish female…well two out of three ain’t bad. She had the two kids and she was a Modern Orthodox Jewish female…but she was married!

I was unemployed at the time, in between jobs and going to England was the last thing on my mind. I was more focused on trying to find a job and keeping focus on my own life.

Over and over again I was encouraged by both her and my other three Chicago roommates to go to England. I had no money, was truly near bankrupt and living off of unemployment didn’t pay for a whole heck of a lot; besides I was already up to my ears in bills, like the Internet and telephone and car payments on my second and current car, a 1999 Blue Midnight Saturn.

My first car, a 1992 fire-red Geo Prism, died in the previous winter in a nine-foot snowdrift from rocking too hard out of it, with over 92,000 miles on it. From that day forward, I treated my Saturn with kid gloves…anyway….the bills were higher priorities, so I thought carefully and looked at my almost non-existent funds.

Then suddenly, my female friend made an offer I couldn’t refuse; she told me to pay for the entire ticket and when I got to England, she would pay me back half of the ticket money. Such a deal I thought at first, but since she insisted she would pay me, I went ahead and bit into it like a greedy Jewfish, hook, line and sinker.

In the meantime on the other side of the pond, The Times of London reporter Eve Ann Prentice (also the author of the memoir/biography, One Woman's War) was working diligently writing stories for the newspaper, for which she had just returned from a long stint, covering the Serbian-Croatian civil war in Kosovo.

Eve Ann by all accounts was friendly with a great personality, yet a true scrapper of a person; always fighting the good fight for the common man, the underdog and the little guy all rolled into one.

But some blokes just don’t like reporters. Blokes who especially feel threatened when a reporter does a better job gathering information than an official government agency that’s built its reputation on information-gathering for decades.

Enter America; always sticking its hands and nose where it she shouldn’t, but does so anyway. Seeing that an American governmental agency didn’t like the fact that Eve Ann had built up a good resource pool of foreign contacts, sources we call them in journalism terms, for her stories that she wrote while covering the civil war.

Contacts that even that American agency didn’t have, making them look bad and pale in comparison. It was a late Monday night near the end of August, 2000 at approximately 10pm that Eve Ann and her boyfriend heard a knock on the door of at her home in St. Albers, a tiny village outside of London.

The street on her block was as narrow as a Chicago city sidewalk. It was truly a miracle that the black-stretch limo fit within that space. Her boyfriend peered out their window of their tiny homestead.

There in the front of the door stood two men in black suits, sporting dark sunglasses and wired earpieces within their ears. They stood outside on the sidewalk until they were let into her apartment…reluctantly, perhaps.

Once inside, the two men questioned her constantly about the scads of information she possessed regarding the civil war in Kosovo. According to all known accounts Eve Ann chose NOT to cooperate with the two men. It was in fact, within her inalienable rights within her own country to rightfully refuse to divulge such gathered information. She had held her ground and her journalistic ethics as well.

The boys in black didn’t like that one bit and left almost hurriedly. After that visit, Eve Ann discovered that her home and newspaper office had been wire-tapped and bugged. The boys in black weren’t playing nice anymore. Eve Ann didn’t particularly care for their shit and moved onward.

Fast-forward six years later; word on the street is that Eve Ann is living in Ireland dying of cancer, something she's been inflicted with since age 17 and is being treated for chemotherapy.

Damn! Double damn! Triple damn!

Pray that Eve Ann makes it through this suffering as painlessly as possible.

On the other hand, I just wish I knew a good mechanic to fix those boys in black permanently.