My life is like a country song.

No, really. It is. Here’s how it goes:

My oldest spawn left for college. My dog died. I bought a pickup truck. My youngest is a ukulele prodigy. I blew out my favorite flip flops. I shook my groove thang on the Flora-Bama line. We chopped down a dead sycamore tree. My job doesn’t pay enough. It took two years to settle my mother-in-law’s estate and she didn’t own shit except the property we now live on which was falling apart. That being sad…

Hubber is renovating our house. I lost 20 pounds. I can now shoot a 9mm and an AR15. We’ve misplaced the keys to the gun safe twice because we put them in a spot where no one could find them but us. Turned out we’re better hiders than we thought we were. We now have two cats. I gained 20 pounds.

My mom learned tarot and “the good kind” of voodoo. She can also do your numerology… in case you need a life plan. My peach tree died. The high school in my neighborhood looks like a prison, complete with barred windows, barbed wire fencing, and armed guards. My new neighbors blast Spanish reggae music in their backyard every Saturday night. I lost 20 pounds again.

We survived a few mental breakdowns. Stray cats shit in my garden… Hubber is trying to use them for bb-gun target practice now. My sofa is gone so we sit on camp chairs in the living room. I learned how to smoke meat on my new pellet grill. (Smoke meat. That's what she said. Heh.)  I still have no swimming pool and summer is almost over. I bought too many plants to fill empty pots, so now I have to buy more pots, but I’ll probably get too many, so I’ll need to buy more plants. It’s a delicate science I haven’t quite mastered.

I twisted my ankle three different times while sitting. I have started plucking white eyebrow hairs. White.  I won a calla lily plant as a door prize at my first neighborhood civic club meeting… I was so happy I forgot I was there to complain about my neighbors.  I have a self-diagnosed gluten allergy. My sister got married in Vegas and I wasn’t there. My house was haunted, but we cleaned that bitch out.

Hubber falls asleep when I’m talking to him and sometimes while driving – especially if he’s loaded up on carbs. He’s like that guy from that movie who fell asleep in that car that was going over a bridge and he just floated around and didn’t break any bones because he was all relaxed and asleep. WTF was the name of that movie? My boyfriend Robert Downey, Jr. is in it.

Turns out the spaghetti squash I planted is a honey dew melon. The tax man calleth. Twice.

My oldest is a grown-ass woman… but she’s not… but she is… or, maybe not… we’re all still very confused. My parents are falling apart. I tinkle a bit if I laugh too hard… or sneeze… or cough. I tried to quit blessing people when they sneeze, but I kept forgetting to stop, so I just gave in to the madness and resigned myself to my inevitable sainthood. My alcohol threshold is not what it used to be. Alien bugs that won’t die (no matter how hard you smash, zap, or stomp on them) sneak into my house to plot the destruction of mankind.

Put some music to that shit, Blake Shelton!

And, I better get royalties.

It's a bird... it's a plane... NO... It's SUPER ME!

I have a superpower that I keep forgetting to tell y'all about. It's the power to tune shit out. This power didn't come naturally. It started out small... a spark here and there. But over the years, I have fine-tuned that shit into the superpower that it is now.

I can be in the noisiest environment imaginable... kids screaming, dog barking, TV blaring, nuclear bomb dropping... and I won't hear a fucking thing. I can type away on my computer and tune it all out. I can even read a book peacefully while thunder rolls, the neighbors beat on drums, my kids slam doors and the my dog howls. No problemo. Unless I hear the word "Mom" in all the commotion, I don't give a rat's ass what's going on around me. Sometimes, I don't even hear "Mom" when I'm deep down in the alternate universe of the superpower.

I can tune the shit out, is what I'm saying.

The only problem is... it falls dormant when I'm asleep.  The superpower gets confused when it's too quiet, I think, because it ain't nowhere to be found when I need it most.  I can hear a pin drop on a pillow 100 feet away behind a closed door WHEN I'M A-FUCKIN-SLEEP. I have a feeling the god doling out superpowers in Krypton is a really short man with a tiny penis who hates women.

Me: <bolting upright in bed, mid snore, startled beyond belief> What the fuck was that!? 

Hubber: You mean, this.... <puts finger on computer mouse and clicks> ?

Me: No... something is going on in the girls' room.

<Hubber goes to check>

Hubber: Your oldest spawn just flushed the toilet.  You want me to ground her?

Me: Yes. You people need to learn how to shut the fuck up when I'm trying to sleep!

The asshole neighbors don't make it any easier for me.  Hubber will make fun of the fact that I can fall asleep on demand... but what he never mentions is the fact that I wake up every 15 fucking minutes because the dicky god of superpowers put restrictions on my abilities.

Wait a minute.

I just thought of something.  Maybe the hearing-pins-dropping-mid-sleep is another superpower!  Maybe I'm one of those freak superheros who is burdened with managing TWO powers.  Beat that shit, x-men alumni!

How NOT Drinking Alcohol Can Kill a Mofo

Much to Patsy's dismay, I recently fell off the wagon.  Well, it wasn't really to her dismay in that I never actually TOLD her I started boozing it up again.  But, if she DID know, that heifer would be dismayed for sure.  Know what I say to that?  Fuck it.  Fuck Patsy and her skinny ass self.  I did my research, bitch!  A single shot of straight vodka only contains 100 calories... and ZERO sugars.  That's right.  NO SUGAR.  And, according to Lance Armstrong's peeps, wine has even fewer calories.  At first I was like, "should I trust Lance's peeps?  Lance is a crack whore... maybe I should do some fact checking"... so I dug a little deeper and found some amazing news from the Calorie King. Only 96 calories in 80 proof vodka!  If the fucking king of calories says it, it must be so!

Also, 96 upside down is 69.  My lucky number! And... I made it six weeks without consuming alcohol. That's gotta be some kind of world record or something.  Where's my fucking prize?

During this time, I learned a very important fact: Being sober for long periods of time will give you homicidal tendencies.  No joke, people.  Why do you think sober people are so fucking loony?  It's because they are fighting hard, every second of their lives, not to kill a mother fucker.  When you consume adult beverages (in moderation, of course), you enjoy that "I don't really give a fuck" attitude.  Which is nice when you're like me, genetically prone to craziness.

My excessive sobriety almost made me kill:

1. my neighbors for being inconsiderate assholes every fucking day
2. a waiter for accidentally looking like that creepy red-headed guy on CSI Miami
3. my daughter's friend for suggesting that I was too fat for my jacket because it wasn't zipped up
4. my sister for suggesting that I am fat by asking me to go to the gym with her
5. my dog for taking a gazillion hours to find the perfect spot to take a shit
6. my nail lady for suggesting that my entire face needed waxing
7. the ice cream truck man for charging $2.25 for a fucking popsicle
8. the snow plow driver who splashed me with slush when I was scraping ice off my windshield in a fucking blizzard

...and that's just to name a few.  So the fact that I'm officially off the bandwagon pretty much means that I bought a one-way ticket to heaven.  I'm like Mother Teresa - except way hotter.

What's the proper protocol for telling your neighbors they're a buncha assholes?

Until now, I had never lived in an apartment complex.  I take that back.  When Hubber and I first got hitched, we leased a swanky condo in the Medical Center.  But that place doesn't count because it was badass and the neighbors weren't assholes. Our neighbors were doctors and scientists and geniuses who went to bed at reasonable hours and minded their own fucking business on a regular basis.

Those were the days.

Back then, we were cool in our multi-family residential community.  Now, we're just a tired married couple with kids that drive us batshit crazy living in a shoebox apartment in the suburbs under the assholiest neighbors in the universe.  Not all our neighbors are assholes.  Most of these peeps are nice and quiet.  But the mofos directly above us need to be hung by their balls from the rafters.

Seeing how I'm not all that experienced at sharing my ceiling and walls with others, I'm not privy to the proper protocol for telling the three guys living above me that I'd like them to all die horrible, bloody deaths.  Do I just knock on the door and when they open up, simply punch them in the face with the pointy end of Hubber's ninja sword?  Last night I dreamed that a tornado struck all Wizard of Oz style and took out their apartment.  I looked out of my window and saw all of those assholes swirling around in the tornado on their way to back to Kansas (the land of Kansasholes, a place they are obviously from).

Wanna know why I hate them so much?  Let me lay it out for you:

1. Their fucking dog is an asshole. He whines/cries/barks non-stop when they aren't home (if Bobo the Sasquatch hunter lived here, he'd swear the dog was a squatch in disguise). These episodes usual occur during the day at my most optimal writing times. Which, NATURALLY, makes me want to kill a mother fucker.

2. They skateboard in the house above our living room and down the stairs right outside my bedroom.  Why they haven't fallen down the stairs proves that the universe is against me and I must take matters into my own hands.  An invisible wire strewn across the top flight of stairs might do the trick.

3. They sit on their patio and smoke and toss cigarettes down onto my car.  This tells me they might enjoy being blown to smithereens by an anonymous package of dynamite delivered to their door.

4. They think they're UFC fighters.  They wrestle around all night... banging into walls, slamming doors, screaming and pounding the floor. ALL. NIGHT. Or maybe they're a gay trio and they're just into kinky shit.  Either way, I'd like them to keel over and die.

5. One of those mofos is so heavy-footed our dishes rattle any time he moves.  This is the same mofo that has to get up to pee every night at 2:30 am.  You can set your clock to him. I don't want to set my fucking clock to him.  I want to sleep!

6. They don't scoop their dog's poop. You might think I'm hating on their dog, too... but I'm not.  It's not that crybaby dog's fault that his owners are inconsiderate assholes.

7. Sometimes they smoke the most potent weed in all of creation; leaving our apartment smelling like dead skunk for days.  Try explaining that shit to a 6-year-old.

So, those are my grievances, in no particular order.  All our other neighbors are fine.  I don't wish explosive diarrhea on any of them.  But the assholes upstairs have got to go!

I should get my mom to start a petition.