So. I want to shoot myself. I…just…want….to fucking…shoot myself. Anytime I think I’m getting better, anytime I think I’ve gotten a handle on just how crazy I am—I need to stop whateverthefuck it is I’m doing and grab a gun. I’m so fucked up that I’m starting to worry that I’ve contracted more mental maladies than just the vicious case of the ADHD and mild dose of obsessive-compulsive disorders from which I know I suffer.

When I write, I self-edit as I’m key-stroking after every five words. Why? Because I’m a hunt-and-pecker typist who looks at the keys as he types, AND I FUCKING SUFFER FROM ADHD! That forces me to stop typing and look up to read this silly shit I’m writing every ten seconds.

After finishing a paragraph, or a couple paragraphs, I read what I’ve written to determine if it has some thread of intelligent thought. If I can’t make heads or tails of it why foist it on you?

Then there are the many times that my ADHD fully grabs my brain and hijacks the several thoughts at the top of my heap of thoughts. Those multiple thoughts get spun into logic strands that resemble human DNA. When that happens, my writings resemble conflatulated post-nuclear anti-war protestings aimed at ridding America of Rick Perry and ending the drought.

After such brain hijackings I’m required to rewrite entire sections of whatever stuff I’m writing. If that isn’t bad enough, every time I stop writing—either to go to the bathroom, take a call, get a beer or even to think about what it is I’m writing about—I have to reread my recent writings, again, to get back into the swings of things.

Of course, I reread each page as I finish a new one and then I reread the entire thing when I’m finished. After that rereading, I minimize the document and take a break. When I come back, I reread again. Each of these rereadings always includes an edit.

As I wrote my book, all of the above self edits and rereadings were performed five-words-by-five-words, paragraph-by-paragraph and page-by-page for more than 400 pages. All of that shit was then edited by professional editorators, and several times at that. I self-edited the manuscript, what we authors lovingly call the “mss”, and stop the fucking presses. Whereinthehell does that last comma go? Just look at that little fucker sitting there mocking my ass.

I’m going to put all of my punctuations involving quotation marks, which are NOT affiliated with an actual quotation, in brackets. Like this: “…what we writers call the “mss”[,]…” I’m sick of dealing with that shit.

I self-edited my entire mss at least forty times. Honest to God.

After I sent the finished, final edited mss to the publisher the first time, I opened it up on the computer to show Gram what it looked like and discovered an error on the first fucking page. The first fucking page. I stopped the presses and sent the mss back to the editor to be re-fixed. Again.

Turns out my fucking Vista operating system screws things up. But Justine, my main editor, fixed it and then I resent the re-re-re-re-fixed mss back to the publisher.

Today, all fucking excited and beside myself, I received the UPS package containing the proof copy of the book. Sent to me by the publisher as a final “take-a-gander-at-what-you-have-done” [,] I was more excited than a five-year-old boy on Christmas morning. I grabbed a beer and called everyone in the house to the big kitchen table. When they got there I said, “Grab a cold one everybody, I’ve got a surprise.”

Gram fetched a Carta Blanca from the walk-in cooler, and Mother asked me to make a big pitcher of Margaritas for everyone else. Sister and her wife Anna the Amazon were here, as well as the P-cubed, Squirt and Honor the cat, Rush Limbaugh and the ostrich Rick Perry. My big pet pig has a summer cold and he was snot-snuffling like crazy through his giant snout. He was blowing these sticky snot bubbles the size of a basketball.

“Tell yer fuckin’ pig ta blow his nose, Mooner. Er I’mma git my 12-gager and blow it fer ‘im.”

I grabbed a dirty bath towel from the laundry room and wiped my piggie’s snotty nose. His face crinkled at the dirty cotton towel, but he blew anyway. He acts like a spoiled two-year-old. Appropriate, I guess, for a 500-pound domestic hog with the brain power of a kid of two years age and the manners and shitty attitude of his radio talk show host namesake.

After depositing the snotty towel back to the laundry area and washing my hands, I returned to my place at the head of the table. “This,” I said as I held the UPS package high in the air, “is the proof copy of my book!”

I ripped the package open with greedy hands, grabbed the book waiting inside and brought it to my lips for a big, juicy kiss. After lip-smacking a wet spot on the cover, I held it up for all to see. They applauded and Sister said to me, she said, “Read a little, sweetie.”

Sister sometimes calls me “sweetie” and that warms my heart. Since I haven’t let anyone close to me read the book, I relented to read them a few passages. I always hesitate to read aloud as my ADHD induces frustrating orations. But I opened the proof copy to the first page of Chapter One, found the line where I wanted to start and said, “Holy fucking shit! There’s a typo on the first fucking page!”

I scanned the next few pages and found typos on each. “Mother—fucking—Vista operating-fucking system!” If I had a gun in my hand I’d have shot the book first, my computer second and then myself.

“It’s OK, Mooner,” Mother said, “it’s a proof copy. You get to make corrections before the book goes to print.”

It didn’t matter, I was beside myself with frustrations.

Sister stuck her hand out to me and said, “Pass it around, sweetie. We want to see it.”

I handed her the book and sat on my chair with my head in my hands. Each family member oohed and aahed as they flipped through the pages of the proof copy of Full Rising Mooner. Each had something nice to say, things like, “It’s a nice jacket—clean and simple,” or, “It’s so brave of you to write about your murder charges, son.”

When it arrived into the iron-fisted claws of my grandmother, she looked the cover over with her beady little eyes, looked at me, looked back at the cover and looked back at me. “Who tha fuck you callin’ ‘centric?”

Huh?” the best I could manage from the depths of my self pity.

Mother said, “It’s “eccentric” Gram. You know Mooner has some strange acquaintances.”

Gram gave Mother the evil eye and then shifted her devil’s gaze to me. “You callin’ me strange, Mooner?”

With my head still in my hands, I responded,“Oh for shitsakes, Gram, it’s just a teaser to catch people’s interest in my book. It’s just bullshit like all marketing crap.”

I’m still getting the evil eye—I can feel the heat of Gram’s gaze. “I can take your name off the cover if you want me to. It’ll be no problem since I need to reedit the entire fucking book.”

“Ah it’s OK, sweet cheeks. Maybe I’ll get all famous an shit and it’ll help me catch more boys.”

My randy old grandmother is always looking for an edge as she trolls for college boys in her Ferrari at Texas’ major universities.

And speaking of trolling, fuck it—I’m going fishing. Manana, y’all.

PS: don’t forget to check in on my August 13/11 bloggie and enter the FUCK RICK PERRY Haiku Contest. You can win a free autographed copy of the aforementioned, totally fucked up book.

So. As if there didn’t already exist enough evidence that I am crazy, additional forensic science has emerged to further underscore the depths of my lunacies. It seems that I am destined to be crazy for the entire length and breadth of my time on this Earth.

I have spent most of my lifetime in constant psycho therapy and many months of that time was spent by me, months at a time, inside the padded-wall confinements of Shoal Creek Mental Hospital here in Austin, Texas. I have been incarcerated over to the loony bin for “observation” and “protection” and “aberrant behavior” and then this one time for “murder of a particularly maniacal nature”.

The murder indecent will must go undiscussed, as it is a central thematic story in my soon-to-be-published book, titled Full Rising Mooner. Which brings up something. I’m working with my Publisher to get the cover designed for the book and we need to have a phone conversation in order to talk through some things. The Publisher is a busy person, so we have been working with a moving target time to converse with each other.

We had a date and time set, said date and time when I would be at home in my office out to the ranch, so I asked to be called at the home phone number. Of course, the Publisher needed to reschedule and since my schedule is flexible, I agreed to a new time when I would be fishing out to the dock with my menagerie of animals, late yesterday afternoon.

And I, again of course, forgot to provide my cell phone number to provide access for the communication.

So, at the appointed time of the call setting, I somehow managed to get my animals quiet so I could enjoy an uninterrupted business call. How I managed this was to give each of them an entire Carta Blanca beer of their own. “If each of you will promise to shut up and not cut up while I’m on the telephone, I’ll let you have a personal bottle of beer,” was how I enlisted their quiet.

Squirt looked be dead in the eye and said to me, she said, “Was ist der Trick, Bwana Mooner? Qui etes-vous tenter de tromper?”

“There’s no trick, little lady. I’m not attempting to fool anybody. I just need you guys to be veeeeery quiet so I can do some business on the phone.” I’m finding that as I mature, I’m becoming a better, more patient parent. When my own actual kids were the age of this batch, I would have said something like, “OK, you little shits. If you don’t remain quiet while I’m on the phone– I’ll drown you and tell your mother you ran away.”

Have you ever seen a cat drink beer from a tall brown bottle? Honor the cat treats it like a big brown bird that requires 100% of her cat hunting skills to stalk, capture and torture before consuming. Hell, watching my motley crew drink Carta Blanca is a circus of giggles. Rush Limbaugh, hog that he is, grabs the bottle in his snotty snout and sucks it dry in one noisy gulp. Rick Perry struts around his bottle in circles and poses like a fucking peacock before upending it.

For the Squirt, she has been trained to drink only by the caps-full so she requires my assistance, often, to finish an entire beer. And fuck me running. Should that be cap-fulls, or maybe caps-fulls? When I first decided to become a man of papers, a literary writer and author, I made myself the promise that I would make the maximum efforts to insure that I accurately communicated with you guys.

Early in life, I was educated to the fact that communication is the responsibility of the communicator, not the communicatee. Communicatered? See what I mean? Right there is a fine example of what I’m talking about.

If you were to follow the classic example of modern communication theory, I would be the “communicator” and you guys would be the “receivers”. But to call you “receivers” would not properly express my true idea because I want you to actually experience in your thoughts what it is that I’m saying. I don’t seek for you to “receive” my words, I want you to fucking understand me.

In the effort to adequately communicate two paragraphs ago, I attempted to fill a gap in the English dictionary and make a new word to fit my needs. I first tried “communicatee” as that would seem to illustrate a yin/yang relationship to my role as “communicator”. However, my ADHD-addled brain quickly rejected communicatee as possibly inadequate in that particular instance because I wasn’t speaking to our relationship, but rather to the action of communication. So I tried “communicatered”, and I have to say that communicatered might be one of my worst word inventions to-date.

That sounds like some fucking political word-spinning asshole attempting to make a cut in social security benefits sound like a message from God.

Fucking right-wing Christian Republican shitballs.

Holy shit is my brain fritzed! I couldn’t rub two sticks together and make a fire if I led the horse to water. I need a beer.

I’ll stop while you can still follow my train of thought. I feel my communication skills are now getting derailed by the multiple racing thoughts in my skull. So, please allow me to say the one last thing that I know with absolute certainty that I can communicate with perfect clarity.

FUCK RICK PERRY!

Manana, y’all.

So. Since it rained stuff has started to grow here in Central Texas. I guess we’ve been under drought conditions for so long our plants have decided they live in a desert. The entire area was brown and wilted as I drove across town in Monday afternoon’s 105-degree heat. Today, I’ve got my green Austin, Texas back. Bing, bang and boom– we’re green again.

The benefits of a Nitrogen-rich rain are visible everywhere, but no place more than in our big garden. Tall plants, like sweet corn and okra, were looking like old men– stooped and tired. They now stand like proud soldiers at full attention.

All of the fruits in the garden have soaked their fill and swollen to bursting. That includes all the melons, cukes, and squashies. I took the animals down early this morning to harvest for the Food Bank. Yesterday was our usual harvest day but it was too muddy. Rush Limbaugh would have made a huge mess if I’d let him slop in the waterlogged trenches.

After dropping the bushel baskets of food off, we stopped by Ciscos over on East Cesar Chavez and I got us all huevos rancheros for breakfast. We love huevos rancheros and Ciscos makes them mighty fine. OK, since I don’t take Rick Perry and Rush Limbaugh to town as a routine practice, I got Squirt and Honor the cat a similar breakfast plate to my own.

We sat on the tailgate of the farm truck and ate our eggs with a single bottle of Carta Blanca beer. Any Mexican foodstuff goes better with Carta Blanca beer, and at any time of day. La cerveza es mas fina– Cerveza Carta Blanca.

This was Honor’s first plate of the runny-egged goodness that is huevos rancheros. She was a hoot as she poked the jiggly yolks, gently prodding until the first one broke. The single dollop of bright yolk that stuck to her paw was carefully examined with kitty eyes and nose, and then, very carefully, her pink tongue edged from her mouth to barely touch it.

Thirty seconds later her plate looked like it had been through the “Heavy Wash” cycle on the commercial dishwasher back to the ranch.

This will be a short bloggie dealie because to date, today has been just that uneventful. For some reason my ADHD and its little brother, the ADD, are in some sort of remission. I know they’ll be back and back soon. Manana, y’all.