Audio: What song do you listen to when you are sad?
Submitted by Nat.

26-Let It be

The Beatles

I played this song at my mom's funeral. Her name was Mary Carole. There were five very large and beautiful flower arrangements from five internet friends from a group I spent much time with. It was a Latvian Reality Show chat room.

We all actally tried to learn Latvian so we could understand the show but were content watching and posting along with a foreign language Big Brother Show called Fabrika. Best Show ever! Best net gang in the world. It was like Most eExtreme Elimination Challenge. We did the play by play ourselves along with whatever was going on in Fabrika. They were completely uncensored and much wierd/funny stuff went on.

"When  find myself in times of trouble mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom....Let it be............................................................................................................

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If you could recommend your top 5 favorite Voxers for someone new to Vox to read, who would they be? 
Submitted by Lili.

I would recommend     mo crankypants IslandGirl mariser Lauri Kirk kelli Zola Kathryn Lilia

Okay, so I cheated and posted more names than were asked for.  I call that a bonus.  I have clearly given you more than you asked for therefore I am the best. I gave the most! I am a giver! Let's hear it for me!!!!!

I have a loner who makes me pee myself, a core of people who Vox co-operatively and look forward to interacting together and seeing them respond to each other's posts. Two literary masters, independant of each other but also in each others neighborhoods, and a firecracker. The artiste caps us off with a well rounded, entertaining, politically charged, shop-til- you-drop, articulate group of people [friends]. I'll leave who's who for y'all as they say down here. I deliberately left Kevin off because I don't want to pander (grovel) just to promote my love life. It would be uncouth after all the giving I have just done. He already knows he's the best and I don't want his neighborhood to grow any larger. We have joint custody of the computer and I am only getting weekends and holidays at this point. I don't want to get into a "Voximony" situation.

Vox till you drop!

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Millie

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Bad Monkies

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Dadmiral

Dear Carole,

    I miss you so much. I have been under water for almost three months and it doesn't seem to bother me much.  I could get used to the tight quarters I guess.  I miss you and can't wait to get home. How are you liking Connecticut? New London is prettier in the summer when you can go to the beach. I can't believe we're having a baby.  Can you believe it? Hopefully this won't happen every time I get leave!   We are headed for Japan and it will be another month at least before I get there to be with you.  Can you wait to have the baby? This is me in the Admirals study.  I could get Court Marshalled for this but want to look sharp for my best girl. I love you honey and miss you so much. I still can't believe we're having a baby. Until then, my love, I will keep you in my thoughts and dream of you every night.

Bob

Mom

.....I wish you were here.  I hate being away from you. Japan isn't much from underwater. I still love being on the ship.  The place is tight but we all get along so it isn't too bad at all. Can't wait for some of your home cooking. Well, it's getting close now and I can't wait to get home. I hope I get there before the baby is born. I am sorry you had to be by yourself all these months and know it's hard being away from your mom. I hope the dog is keeping you company. I get my orders when I get stateside and rumor has it that we'll be headed for DC. How do you feel about that? You'll be able to live on base and have some neighbors closer and not have to spend so much time by yourself. They won't let you have a dog on base so we'll have to find a home for Lady. I bet you are glad the weather is getting warmer.  How big is your stomach getting? Have you given any though to names yet? Until then my love.

Bob

I just made this up but included some details of what was going on for mom and dad back in the day. Dad snuck into the Admiral's Study and took pictures to send mom.  He was "impersonating an officer". I wondered where I got my lack of respect for authority.  Mom was posing for a photographer.  Pretty fitting attire. We have so many of mom's old modeling pictures and I break them out whenever I'm feeling that loneliness inside and miss her.  I am just getting used to "the Admiral" not being here anymore. I love to look back at these old pictures and remember gentler times. How tough it is for the family left behind while their loved ones troop across the globe protecting us. I get angry when I think about the folks "over there" currently because it was for bullshit reasons and lies. I think they have sacrificed enough and knowing what I know about the hardships my mom faced boggles my mind.  When my dad was in Alaska, my mom was in Wyoming with 5 small children living on a base in the middle of nowhere.  She couldn't drive and had to pack us all up to go grocery shopping and ride a troop transport truck 60 miles to the nearest town.  Of course they only got about 5 feet of snow every other week so I am guessing it was worse than I will ever know. I was 3 or 4 at the time.  How many times we moved.  I was in six different schools in the second grade.  I would meet kids and then leave them just in time to start all over again. Hey, you did what you had to do back then and my dad took care of business. He made sure we were fed and clothed and had medical care and everything else. Whenever I hear from someone to support our troops I ask them if they really fully comprehend what that entails. In addition to the family member "over there" are the families left behind with very low incomes, sometimes substandard housing, and generally not a whole bunch of support from our Government.  They look for loop-holes to disqualify soldiers from benefits and write fine print paragraphs all over the place excluding themselves from responsibility once they return home. How many other little kids are raised pretty much by one parent while their dad or mom are off saving the free world. So when Mr. Bush "decides" to send more troops "over there" and then stands on a platform and says that children should be raised by two parents I wonder how he feels tearing so many families apart for his own ignorant ego. Face it you little wimp, you fucked up.  Now bring these families back together and get ready for your impeachment.  Of course we will have to have Cheney removed first because nobody would stand for that evil doer as President. How was that for a round-a-bout way to slam the chimp! I hate him.  I hate everything about him.  He is an evil man and I despise him. He is a ruthless dictator and a murderer and should be tried for crimes against humanity. I am so glad he believes in a different God than I do. I am proud of my father's 60 years of service to our great Democracy.  Now, if only it still was one. Hail to the Chimp.  We'll all be dead with him in charge. Or at least broke and hated even more than we already are. He'll get his in the end but in the meantime there have been hundreds of thousands of lives ruined by the "Evil Decider". When will it all end. Support those troops and the families they have been forced to leave behind. D-i-s-m-i-s-s-e-d! ! ! !

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I am tagging five women of Vox and asking them each to post five things about themselves and I hope you all join me in joining them. Some are from half way across the planet, some are from deep in the heart of the USA. There are others who I would have tagged if you hadn't been tagged already.

Zola Kathryn  Southern Belle and fun, fun ,fun! Kevin and I have vowed that if we were to win the Vox World Tour we would make Zola go with us.

country_cinderella Who loves animals? Country Cinderella does.

Sol Vox Italian style

The Owlcat From Finland and a very sweet and sensitive lady.

Lilia Photographer, artist, uniquely interesting and talented.

Please visit them and enjoy them as much as I have.

mo you just dodged a bullet.  If anybody loves the spa then you should take mo with you. You're skin will love you for
it.

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5 of 5.  My friend's mother used to do an impression of me looking at a stack of bricks.  She would pick up about twenty "imaginery" bricks one at a time and look at each side of them. She would then laugh and say that I would accidentally leave the baby on top of the car and drive away.  To that I say "What baby"? I have strange fascinations and total disregard, respectively.  Sometimes I am more fascinated with completely ridiculous things and would not notice Queen Elizabeth passing me on the street. I can find a pebble in the sand and stare longingly at it but may drop gold nuggets in my sink and not bother looking for them (a previous post). Some of my very favorite things are the least valuable of my possesions and things that may be worth something could just as easily be left in a box in the junk room. When I was seeing a therapist many years ago he had these little diagnosis tests where he would give you paper and markers and describe things and ask you to draw them to diagnose you.  "Contrast the relationship between two animals".... "Now, which one are you"? I did a Hydra and a Jellyfish. "What's a Hydra"?,lol! The long and short of it and the complete truth that fucked me up for the rest of my life (other than when he fell asleep while I was talking once) was when he said to me "You are right.  It is the rest of the world that is wrong".

 "Oh".  "Anything you'd like to add to that"? "Perhaps you could clarify that"? 

"You heard me". "Your time is up". I took that as a sign that I was cured and never went back.  I am just as fucked up as ever but at least I'm right and the rest of the world isn't,lol! Thanks for nothing Doc.

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4 of 5.  One thing that has made my life difficult is that I can't "not" feel for other people no matter how bad, evil, awful, or even good they are. I sometimes cry when I hear somebody was executed even if I don't even know what they did. I feel worse for what other people go through than I do for myself and I wonder if I have just numbed myself to my own feelings because they can sometimes be self defeating.  I have all the time in the world to empathize for others, strangers, dead animals along the highway. I cry when I pass a dead dog on the street. Even a skunk or possum.  Just saying that lets me in on why I am this way. Even a skunk or a possum. As though any life is any less valuable than any other. We are all here but for a short time. When that time is shortened abruptly, or deliberately I feel physical pain. I mourn the loss of everything. My mother and father at one point regretted getting a swimming pool when I was a child because I would lay by the pool and pull insects and frogs out of it.  I would not sleep at night because I would know a chipmunk may have fallen into the pool and might get sucked into the filter. When Saddam Hussein was hung I did not dance in the street nor cheer. I did not like what he did of course but I do not like what was done either.  I loath and despise the deliberate taking of life. Of course I might feel differently if somebody hurt my dog, or kidnapped Kevin, or hurt his mom, but instead of killing them I would rather try to get through to them. I spend many hours each day drifting off on seemingly morbid thoughts yet somehow manage each day to laugh and carry on and act as though it is all just part of life.  It literally causes me pain when something, someone suffers. I am not scared of death, I just despise killers. I am realistic when it comes to the cycle of life but I am confused when people step in and alter it's course. When I hear that our Government is torturing people I go into a tailspin. I am so full of shame by association.  I want desperately to help them no matter how bad they are.  Torture is the least human trait in a person. When I see the Coliseum in Rome I don't hear romantic music, or think of beauty and love.  I think of torture and death and I grieve for all those who perished as a spectacle for the masses. I do not take the human condition lightly.  I feel your pain. I try every day to cause as little as I can.

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3 of five. I am an alcoholic.  I have been sober this time for about 14 years and before that 10. If you add the years prior to picking up my first drink I have been sober for more than 3/4 of my life.  People often ask that if that is the case how can I still be an alcoholic.  I tell them they would have to have seen my behavior in that other quarter of my life to comprehend that. I relapsed the day of my 10th anniversary of sobriety.  I stayed pretty drunk for a year and would "garden" until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up and go to work. I didn't drive because I didn't need to. I would move into a place that had a neighborhood bar and hang out there instead.  I drank alone. I drank with friends. I did stuff I shouldn't have done. Frequently. I went to my first AA meeting in 1972.  Some of you neighbors were not yet born. I was twelve.  When I relapsed it was with a bottle of Listerine and a year later when I snapped out of it I probably still smelled like it.  I chose my parents wedding anniversary as my sobriety date. I woke up and thought of them and February 27th is that day. I am not tempted nor curious, nor confused.  For me it is like drinking Clorox. I don't do that. Plain. Simple.I have spent the better part of my life completely present.  I have not dulled the pain of death, quieted the fears of life, or run from myself and my own thoughts.  I have participated in my own life and taken notice of every little detail. I am a fun drunk, and a loud drunk, and an instigator.  Kevin has never seen me drunk.  Kevin would not like me drunk. We met at an AA meeting in LA and have been together ever since. One of my last drunks was in Vegas and I was invited to a Michael Jackson concert by Marlon Brando's son. I went with friends from London, New Zealand, and Australia. My eyes were bleeding when we left and I boarded Gulliver for the first and only time at a kennel for 5 days. I won tons of money but all my friends lost so I paid all their tabs and we came home and I was tired, broke, angry, pathetic. There was an AA meeting hall a few blocks from my house and I ventured in and have yet to leave. I am many miles and years away but I still have that place deep within me to carry me through the toughest of times.  I have seen more death and sadness than most battlefield soldiers.  I have lost hundreds of friends to drugs and alcohol, Aids, and just regular life.  I have lost tons of family in the past few years and still have the ability to see that nothing good would come of me fooling myself into believing I could "get away" with it just one more time. I am an alcoholic and I try my hardest every day to remember that.

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2 of five. I moved to LA many years ago and my first apartment was previously occupied by the GoGo's.  All of them. I moved to Beverly Hills shortly thereafter and I managed the Premier Hollywood Stationery Store "Alexanders'". I did that and loved it for many years. After a long relationship ended I decided I wanted a garden and pets so I moved to Los Feliz in the Eastern Hollywood Hills. I lived a few doors down from where the Manson Family killed Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. Walt Disney lived next door to them and you never hear that.  Can you imagine if they knocked on the other door how differently life would have been for all of us? When I moved into my new home it was next door to Gwinnett Paltrow, her cousin Hilary, and Park Overall. Gwinnett moved out right as I was moving in but her cousin Hilary and I were very good friends. Keri, a model lived next door and the big house on the side of our hill was occupied by the writer for the Simpson's.  He had a studio at the bottom of the hill that the original Mickey Mouse "Steamboat Willie" was first drawn in. I had a Rap band across the street and the father from the Fresh Prince of Belair lived across from the La Bianca's house.  He had Giant Snouzer's and we would see each other walking dogs at night. I had a pond, citrus trees and a Lanai.  I took care of the four yards to get a rent break from my landlady. I built a vivarium and when I met Kevin we had our own little zoo. We had many reptiles and birds, and fish, dogs, cats, spiders, turtles, Iguanas, frogs, and all manner of fauna. It was a chore laden life but a labor of love. I met Kevin and he moved in a few days later. I left Alexander's and became a Wedding/Party planner and a personal shopper in BH, Brentwood, and Belair. A favorite occurence was one day sitting at my desk and seeing O.J. pass Monica Lewinsky right at my window.  At the time they were soooooo notorious. My office was in a private little enclave of the "Rich and Famous". My mom got sick so we left paradise and moved to the frozen Northeast and lived in Albany, New York until we just couldn't stand the cold weather any longer.

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