Writing through the stress…usually in a unicorn onesie.
If you need to know one thing about me, it is this: I love my name. My name is boss. To be clear, my name isn’t actually “boss,” which would be weird. But it is boss as in the slang (that dates back to the 1880s!), meaning super hip and with it. Somebody should give my parents a medal or something for coming up with this spectacular moniker for their firstborn child.
My name is Lindsay Rae. Currently, I am standing over a garbage can in my unicorn onesie, eating a chicken leg and typing on my laptop with fingers…
The dangers of niche writing
Every time I sit down to write, before my fingers even touch the keyboard, I rub my hands together maniacally. Like I’m the evil antagonist of my own story. I don’t know why I do this. Maybe I’m trying to hone the ancient comedian writing gods and we all know how dark and twisted those folks are.
There I’ll be, staring at a blank Google docs sheet, the sound of my dry palms chafing one another, with a glimpse of a joke tiptoeing through my mind.
I must figure out the joke.
That’s what my ego tells me. It whispers…
A story about loss and healing
We eat well. There is a duck (freezer burned) thawing in the sink. I found it in the discount bin at the No Frills market. My husband, James, is making Duck A l’Orange for dinner. We stand side by side in our galley way kitchen, bodies close as we cook for our children.
I turn down the Iron Maiden blasting from his phone. Talking while we prep reminds me of better days.
“Does it make you sad?” I ask.
He turns to me. “Does what?”
But he knows what I mean. Cooking together. Our muscle memory working around each other’s…
Or maybe it was because I was too fat — the jury’s still out
“This thigh is twice the size of a ham hock, Leslie. What have your parents been feeding you, girl?” The chef asked as she smeared on the cooling gel and wrapped a bandage around my scalded upper leg. I told her my name was Lindsay, not Leslie, and she replied by ignoring me.
Moments before, I had been running hot water out of the industrial sink faucet and leaned over to turn off the tap when the spout hooked into my apron, and steaming water ran directly down the fabric and onto my stomach and inner thighs. Hello, second-degree burns.
…
A hard but true list of facts
It occured to me the other day as I was walking my German Shepherd, Lucy, that she is hotter than me. This may seem like an odd admission because, well, we are of a different species variety. Nevertheless, the evidence for this hypothesis has become abundantly clear.
- Her hair is shinier than mine. Although she loses her hair at an alarming rate, it always is so beautiful and lustrous. With patches of dark chestnut peppered throughout her dirty blond, it makes for the perfect mix of dog-next-door look.
- She cares about her personal hygiene more. In all honesty, she does…
Adventures in driving around aimlessly trying to figure out where your apartment is.
It sounds absurd, I know. How does one forget where they live? To answer this question, I will first reveal something highly embarrassing for this country girl to admit.
I am directionally challenged. Yes, me! The girl raised on a farm and made to drive old beater pick-ups at the ripe age of twelve cannot, for her life, follow a map. In truth, I’ve never been much of a driver. All the other vehicles and the road rage and the vast highway mazes just really freak me out.
So although I spent many days driving around our acreage illegally, I…
That’s me, the sad clown in the picture.
There are many things a writer like myself might want to go down in history for. Epic tomes like Atlas Shrugged or Moby Dick. World shattering articles about the economic crisis our small businesses face during these strange and challenging times. The prophetic works of Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale or the MaddAddam trilogy.
Not me, though.
I seem to have made it my lifelong goal to speak loudly about my boob falling out of my dress in front of a door-to-door salesman. …
Reminiscences from my clowning days
Did I ever tell you about my time spent clowning around? Who am I kidding? Of course, I haven’t. I keep that story close to the vest. My multicoured pokadot vest.
For posterity’s sake, I wasn’t a clown. I was a clownicer. Patent pending.
What’s a clownicer, you might ask? A clown and a character smooshed together.
Why clownicer, you may be asking as a follow-up question.
Because I am a very perceptive person.
I noticed early in my clowning days that many people were quite frightened of clowns. I still don’t understand this, but I suppose it may have…
Obstacle courses and other indignities
The first gym teacher I remember having in school was Ms. Roberry. She was a fierce, solid woman with a greying buzzcut and bad knees. Actually, I don’t know if her knees were bad, but I do know they were awful to look at. She was a heavy-set woman, so when she stood at her full 5’5”, her bulging knee muscles would create a scary face of sorts at the cap. Dimpling just in the right places to make it look like two pupil-less eyes had appeared in the thick flesh below her quads.
I only remember this because, as…
Lindsay Brown
Mother, writer, user of too many hashtags.
