"DIVA"s

I fucking hate "news" stories ripping exceptional, successful, hard-working, super-busy, extraordinary women apart for being "divas". It's always for super fucking dumb sexist resentful hateful reasons, too.

You know what kinds of people eat these stories up and drive the market for these teardowns of boss bitches? I'll tell you who they're written for; these kinds of exposés are written FOR WOMEN. They are written FOR WOMEN, who love to hate on other women. These stories are made for bonafide dark-hearted BITCHES.

These stories and the fearful misogynist hate that fuels them are designed to hold each other down, devalue women's work, and man ... I hate to say it, but protect and defend the (literally) motherfucking patriarchy.

The article I saw today that inspired this rant is 

Barbra Streisand Canceled Her Jimmy Kimmel Interview After The Host Refused To Use A Different Camera Angle

Like ... fuck off. It doesn't make you a "diva" if you don't want to look like shit on TV and wake up the next day to everyone talking about how old and ugly you look, and/or inexplicably different, spouting insane guesses at WHY you are so fucking grotesque, and list all the ways you are still a spoiled DIVA making far too many demands on the world in order to continue doing your 24/7 jobs and providing gossip rags and fan-stalkers access to you so THEY can make money destroying you.

Four Signs of the Fall of the U.S. &/or Civilization

Okay it's not a good title. But here are four things that signaled everything was going to a special kind of shit and continue to contribute to our decline:

I'm just going to list them for now:

• birth of "Young Country" as a music genre
• car alarms
• inviting and allowing unmoderated comments on news sites
• the loss of phone booths

I just outlined these to my friend in an ice cream shopPE, so I'm feeling extra confident and focused on these points tonight, and it's a full moon, and this is how bitches like me "wolf out" and ruin a perfectly pleasant evening of treats and companionship.

Old Bitches Want PLEASANT TV: a (Partial) Tale of Two Grandmas

 I’ve turned into my grandma. But mot the sweet one I was named after. No, I’ve turned into the grandma I actually take after. Solitaire-playing scowly owl-faced big-ass gunny-sack-tits-under-her-housecoat grandma.

The grandma I was named after decorated cakes, played piano for schoolchildren, and fried chicken at midnight for friends in need of borrowing Grandpa’s tools. I’ve got her middle name, but I inherited my actual bitch personality from the other grandma, the one who chain-smoked and went fishing (and drinking) alone, catching big fish and being pulled over waterfalls … reeling them in without her cigarette even getting wet.

But that was before I knew her. She’d aged out of fishing and drinking by the time I knew her. Playing cards in her old-lady apartment, collecting adorable knick-knacks my daddy bought her: birds, kitty-cat, Hummel figurines …. detailed little treasures I wish I could picture more clearly now.

This grouchy loner grandma I took after had tastes that didn’t line up with her bitchy personality; sure she read thick bestselling historical fiction by James Michener, but she also devoured romance novels. Thin cranked-out sexless “Harlequin Presents” titles. Her crackly voice sounded the most joyful (and least bitchy) when she called daddy by his little boy nickname … and somehow managed to make it sound like a guilt trip for him at the same time.

My sweet grandma I was named after got her silver-white hair set in bubbly rolls and wore housecoats that were soft cozy pink velour with embroidered pastel flowers appliquéd above her breasts. But the grandma I take after had peppered pewter hair chopped off mid-neck, sticking straight out like a greasy bird’s tail feathers. The drab powder-blue fabric of her housecoats was thin, like cheap sheets with skeletal white flowers reverse-tattooed by some cold kind of soldering iron freeze-burning all the blue out of the cloth leaving behind decorations of white scars serving as chalky ribbons denoting time served as a matron: the chest candy of an old woman.

I’ve turned into this grandma I remember barking at me in the care center where she went to slowly die of lung cancer, complaining about how there wasn’t anything good to watch on TV. When I suggested a riveting program to her, she acted like I’d suggested flaying her flakey skin with pus-coated razor blades for fun. “WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I WANT TO WATCH THAT DEPRESSING SHIT?!? CAN’T THEY MAKE ANYTHING ***NICE*** ANYMORE?!? EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SO VIOLENT!!!”

This from the same woman my dad and his twin sister would recall yanking Daddy out of bed as a child in the middle of the night just to beat him. When they asked her WHY she said just because she felt like it.

Fortunately I do not have any kids to test my worst genetic tendencies. What I do have though is a growing resentment of alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the super-dramatic crisis-riddled conflict-heavy tears-to-the-eyes hyper-realistic “binge-worthy” “entertainment” we have to choose from. I’m so fucking sick of it, and how hard it is to just find something PLEASANT to watch. I want to relax, not be sucked into the tortured lives of imaginary characters just SUFFERING and being threatened and enduring frightening soul-sucking depressing PROBLEM after ATTACK after LOSS after INJURY after NAIL-BITING CONFRONTATION in ULTRA HD 4K SUPERMAX DETAIL. I don’t want to be on the edge of my seat. I want to watch something funny with someone familiar who wants me to have sweet dreams, not nightmares.

I am not one who appreciates the segregation of people from different age groups, but this desire for “pleasant” entertainment instead of stress-inducing media is, to me, something older people crave more than younger folks. And the bitch-ass irony of we old ladies reacting with such unhinged violent fervent cunty anger to even the mere suggestion of another UNPLEASANTLY upsetting tv show or movie … well … it’s pretty fucking funny. I DON’T WANT TO WATCH THAT NASTY DISQUIETING SHIT YOU DUMBASS MOTHERFUCKER!!! I WANT SOMETHING FULL OF SWEET SMILES AND SUNSHINE FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!! Isn't my preference OBVIOUS?!? Can't  you tell by my PERSONALITY?

MISIDENTIFIED TREES, MISPRONOUNCED TOWNS & DUMMIES

We don’t have cable or regular TV, but we do have access to our local live CBS affiliate, KIRO (aka channel 7 as I grew up knowing it) via our Paramount subscription through Amazon Prime Video. So every so often I try to watch the news that way to see what mainstream priorities and coverage of stuff looks and sounds like these days. There are a couple of super hot blondes on it. Like I think I’ve got it bad for the weather”girl” (man I grew up with some bullshit, didn’t I?). But I digress …

Here’s the thing; I hate it when the local news doesn’t know local things that every local person should know. ESPECIALLY if they want any credibility as a source of reliable, factual information.

Growing up the thing that would drive us nuts was when they’d pronounce “Duvall” (a small town neighbor just north of our even smaller town) incorrectly. They’d pronounce it like the actor Robert Duvall, with the emphasis on the last syllable (doov-ALL). But people who grew up in Duvall and Monroe and our town all pronounce it DOO-vall.

That wasn’t the only one they’d mispronounce (and we do have some doozies in Washington, like Seiku, Sequim and Puyallup) and maybe they’ve gotten better about it (and/or enough new people from California have taken over and overruled everyone pronouncing things the old local ways), but yeah … annoying.

So anyway, I’m watching the news the other night about our big windstorm(s) and apparently it’s a news-worthy phenomenon these days that LEAVES COME DOWN off trees in the fall, especially when the wind blows (who knew?!?). And when you overdevelop land like people have been doing and cut down so many trees that only a few are left exposed to the brunt of the wind, TREES FALL DOWN.

So the news people visit houses that trees have fallen on, like this one guy in Woodinville, and they show a downed FIR tree, and with an ominous voice say “... like this PINE TREE” (emphasis is my own) but it’s a fucking FIR tree not a PINE TREE omg why would anyone trust any shit that you’re saying.

We do have pine trees in Washington, but mostly in Western Washington they are FIR trees. People just -- ugh. It’s like the only evergreen tree they know the name of is PINE but man they are so different. You can’t learn to identify and distinguish between even the top three or five (fir, cedar, spruce, hemlock, pine)?

How do these people GET these jobs?!? Like oh “your source for LOCAL news and nonsense” you don’t even know what the most common plants are here and you can’t tell the difference between one kind of salmon and another, one kind of crab and another, a mussel from a clam? How is anyone supposed to trust your expertise in local matters?

Oh yeah, it’s not about expertise or reality or truth … it’s about spoon-feeding people what the most people want to hear: that nature encroacheth on your little enormous senseless grotesque immodest poorly-built boxes of ticky-tacky. That rain ruins your alcoholic weekends on the water terrorizing orcas with your sea-doos and destroying any peace and quiet with your reckless motorboating.

No wonder these dumb fuckers are always on TV and social media complaining about the rain like ohhh wow what a disappointment PRECIPITATION instead of sunshine. Move back to California. Set yourselves on fucking fire. Go to that shithole of corruption and brutality that is Arizona. Get the fuck out of here, dummies. The FIR trees need RAIN, not more houses to fall on. The trees aren’t the ones threatening your houses … your houses are threatening the trees. Get some birth control. Leave some forestland. Go away, you lazy simple-minded non-learners.

Sorry I got a little off track here. I just kind of lose my mind when I think of neighbors who are like "I hope we cut all the trees down around here so our gutters won't be clogged anymore by pine needles". Except they are FIR needles, and you are a dumb ass regardless.