Maxine 's Radio Weblog

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:17:07 GMT

To All Of Maxine's Blogger Friend's

I'm so sorry to have to inform you that my mother (Maxine) passed away this past Monday October 12th of complications from a recent fall. I'm sure all of you feel as we the family do that her passing is a tremendously sad event. I know that her blog was special to her and all of you. My mother's blog was her "link" to the outside world and an opportunity to express her never ending creativity.

I love my mom and I will miss her greatlly.

Bruce Locker

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:42:00 GMT

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:09:01 GMT

LIFE: a trip of a thousand thousand miles that's over in five minutes.

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:21:21 GMT

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:59:40 GMT

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:59:47 GMT

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:41:48 GMT

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:44:20 GMT

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:29:38 GMT

…Classic Arts Showcase plays all night on my TV because I cannot sleep in a silent and dark room. A thin stream of green light comes from the TV which labors for me hour after midnight hour, but at least it is a hint of day light to come.. Doctors will tell you the last thing you need is light and music when your body is trying to sleep. Doctors, as they so often are, are wrong. A gentle, comforting blanket of music and an occasional soft spoken documentary delivered by an intellectual, who knows when to shut up, is enough to keep me from fingering my covers. The all night PBS program features music videos, orchestras, and opera. I cannot abide just any old opera. I am a Puccini person just like millions of others and require a melody to justify all the wailing and rending of garments.. Opera often wakes me up, I’ll admit. The women are always metaphorically tied to the railroad tracks and bleating for help. In empty castles, they clutch at the men in their lives who are forever abandoning them, as they are taken away to be executed, or who are simply getting out while the getting is good.. They beat their breast over the loss of love from men who turn their backs on them. They hang onto waistcoats and plead for mercy from departing men, as they drag them along the floor in their dusty gowns. Almost every woman in every opera is in dire need of male succor. It is dismaying to hear them keening, even through the pillow in which I bury my head when they come screeching to life. There is one opera where the diva actually seems to be yodeling and she never stops until I hallucinate that I have jumped out of bed and slapped her silly. One of my late day TV favorites is a rerun of a sitcom in which a character describes opera as “fat women screaming.” That pretty much sums it up..

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:53:22 GMT

PLEASE UPDATE MY LAST TWO POSTS AT 10a.m. .....

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:52:15 GMT

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:12:41 GMT

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:09:38 GMT

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:05:27 GMT

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:03:51 GMT

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:33:43 GMT

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:00:04 GMT

"When you give more thought to a thing than God would....you are being sentimental"--well known writer, but whether or not you agree depends on which God you believe in.

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:59:36 GMT

When the last winter comes and it will.

When tall grasses lay sere and flattened

When the earth is frozen underfoot

And small things tremble in their burrows

Those who run with the wolves

Will be food for the wolves.

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:56:13 GMT

THOSE LIPS, THOSE EYES, THOSE GLUTES

By M.E.Daley Author of Attack of the Movie Stars

Kindle Ed.

Ted was a sometimes bartender and a sometimes personal trainer. But bodybuilding, which he referred to as body shaping among female clients, was his mission and livelihood.

If I watched him flexing before our full-length mirror he would ask me how his back and ass looked. Poor dear, we didn't own a three-way so he could see for himself. I yearned for a certain antique cheval mirror that preyed on my mind like a lost lover, but Ted said it was too gussied up with carvings on the frame and, anyway, it was still just a plain full-length mirror even if you could flip it over. So, instead of going to Crate & Barrel, or even Cost Plus for a cheap Asian import that would also serve as a three-panel screen, I let him have his way and left the original old unframed shard

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on our bedroom door, which meant he had to scrooge around to view his hallowed body parts.

During today's flexing ritual, I tried to interest him in what the Tolliver twins had wrought in the way of roof gardening, and he asked if his penis seemed smaller, perhaps it was over-shadowed by newer musculature? Were his muscles now competing with the organ, reducing it to a Michaelangelo afterthought?

When I was finally able to convey a tidbit, I told him the Tolliver pricks had landscaped their adjoining condo roofs, one in the manner of Provance, the other, early Tuscan, featuring a pergola awash in wisteria, and a border of diminutive lemon trees that perfumed our morning air. His answer was that our over-flowing kitchen trash thingie perfumed the air, too. He was so outrageously butch that, at times, I found myself in the role of hand-wringing woman. Other times, he was my sword and my shield. This day, he started mechanically jerking off in front of the mirror, followed by the usual contortions trying to see if a full erection, in profile, could hold its own with his ever-burgeoning glutes. .

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Looking back, Ted had arrived in my life like the welcome Spring rain. I was walking my little dog, Mitzi--despite the weather--.for if I failed to take her out, the little turd would punish me by pissing on the very center of the white flokati that, I might add, I brought to my predestined union with Ted.

At the corner where I usually turn back, a BMW had pulled over to the curb, don't know if it was new or old or what, never pay attention to models. But it was still a gleaming and expensive sedan. The driver leaned out the window and said, "Hey, kid, you have curb appeal. Hop in."

God, but he was a handsome bastard. I did indeed hop in without another thought, and smiled winningly from somewhere deep in the upholstery. He didn't say a word for ten blocks, just gave me the benefit of his bella figura profile.

After a while he realized that I was holding my shivering rat-like dog. "Are that animal's paws wet?" he asked, not looking over.

"No, but mine are." I said.

Ted laughed and took his eyes off the wheel for the first time.

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The fuck was as if choreographed, a melting each unto the other, a pas de deux, if you will,-- for only my meager French can describe the elegance of our coupling.

End of story? I wish.

***

When Ted wanted to hit the late night trenches in West Hollywood, I went along. Unthrilled is hardly the word. I had already lived that life and thought of my new one with Ted as blessed sanctuary. Picking up wet towels, cooking dinner, setting a lovely, candlelit table, keeping his condo immaculate, and filled with fresh flowers was my joy. Even putting up the antique flocked paper in the dining alcove, for which I had to bargain like an Arab, in our local design Casbah was love made visible. Robertson or La Brea, who gives a shit? All in all, my life with Ted amounted to a never-ending round of chores, all of them acquitted with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.

Be that as it may, this night we ended up in a blatant sump on a side street where Ted is the relief bartender. The regular man greeted him with a half-

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bear hug across the bar. "Teddy, my lad," he said. "Where the hell have you been? Haven't seen you in at least four hours."

Ted was gassed, and gave the reg a big mouth kiss. The Tolliver twins down at the far end of the encrusted bar went OOOOOO in shrieking unison. Men we know, and men we've seen a thousand times in a thousand places, looked up from their drinks, or momentarily pulled back from their embraces. Ted is a symbol of masculinity to these bums, as opposed to femmes like the Tolliver fucks. Thus, he is much in demand in the area's moldier environs where they like to pretend that I do not exist. Of course, they are jealous of me, of my sexual access, and my life with Ted in an architecturally designed condo in West Hollywood.

The bartender handed Ted a fresh rose from a bouquet behind the bar.

"One of her lovers sent the flowers. She won't miss it," he said, referring to the owner of the redoubt, a fag hag from the old school.

This brought both Tollivers flying around our heads like the fairies they were. One twisted the long stem of the rose in a circle until it met the bloom, and placed it on Ted's head. "Pouf, he said, "You are Mab, Queen of the May."

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"Queen of the Fairies," I muttered, ignored by the illiterate sex fiend.

When Ted got up to pee, I had to help him to the back. He was one demented drunk. In the bathroom, he rolled up the short sleeves of his tee as far as they would go, tied the bottom into a knot at one side and pulled it up, past his nipples, and let his pants fall to his hips and cinched them there. All of this whilst drunk as an ass-fucking hillbilly, apres a wallow in his own homemade.

Showtime! Ted elbowed me aside, adjusted the wreath on his head, and walked out, unaided, with a kind of rolling hip movement, forward and back and then sideways. Showing off his muscles, to be sure, but also stirring up the dank encampment. Was it all just too too deliberate? This shameless offering up? I am certain it was.

Wretched Tollivers marched in Ted's wake, humming and imitating humans. Soon, others joined in a conga line of drunks. As the lurching serpent came to the open poolroom door, it took both Tollivers to push Ted inside. But he brushed them away like houseflies, and lay down on the table, curling himself up like a sleeping baby. I think he really was asleep when the Tollivers managed to turn him on his back, and started pulling

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down his jeans. Or, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he let those two mutants from Outer Labia do it, just for the hell of it.

Once again, no underpants. Son of a bitch! I had told him, over and over, to put on underwear like a civilized person. But I think he likes the feel of the rough denim, especially the chaffing and, later, me rubbing Desitin on it.

A Tolliver--who knows which one--grabbed Ted's comatose dick and went to work. But he was soon out of business when a big guy from the front of the line picked him up and heaved him out the poolroom door. The other Tolliver ran screaming after him. I swear they act like one person. In fact, their heads are slightly flat in back, so my guess is they were once conjoined, and some gifted surgeon down in Brazil separated them.

Men were already in a line formed by the march around the room and they stalled that way at the door of the poolroom. Yet, within minutes, they began crowding in by twos and threes. At that point in the festivities, I went back to the empty bar and ordered a drink. The bartender, supposedly Ted's big buddy, kept on shining and re-shining glasses as if assigned to the job by God. For a full minute, there wasn't a sound from the back room, then a low, melancholy lowing like cattle in a field. After a couple of loud thuds, there was a burst of laughter, and a kind of nervous giggling, even scattered

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clapping of hands. But it soon changed to grunts and groans that signaled serious work was afoot, then a faint scream and another. I took my fingers out of my ears and begged the bartender to go in there and please for chrissakes break it up now, this very second. I almost tore a glass from his hand, but he dropped it when I lunged, and it shattered at his feet.

The guy sighed and bent over to pick up the pieces, some from the tops of his shoes. Down near the floor, he muttered. “Boys will be boys.”

I had a flash that we were about to re-make Suddenly Last Summer, only without the cannibalism and a traumatized Elizabeth Taylor.

Ted was smeared with blood, and I cleaned him up as best I could with cold water and paper towels and, though far from strong myself, held him around the waist as we went out the front door, escorted by dead silence. By the time we reached the car I was dragging him, and it took every ounce of mind and body to cram him into the passenger's seat. There was a trickle of blood from the wreath he still wore, and I wiped it with my handkerchief.

At home, in bed, cleaned up again by me, he didn't look all that bad and passed out immediately. I finally fell asleep beside him.

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In the morning, we were stuck together. I pulled away and tore out of a bed painted with Ted's blood. When I saw the nest of starchy organdy pillow shams and pristine white Chenille spread from the Forties dyed red--nay, more like a bright cerise mottled with maroon for it was already beginning to dry--I knew it was sans esperance.

Please forgive my snippet of French. It's my way of trying to play it cool, don't you know?

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:57:21 GMT

TWO SISTERS

M.E. Daley

I was crouched on my unmade bed doing my toenails when I had to have a drag from my ciggie like I always do when I am in the middle of something half way difficult or merely ticklish. A sliver of light shone through a broken louver, and struck me between the eyes like a knife. It occurred to me that I was wasting my allotted time on the planet smoking.

I took one last puff and another puff and carefully tapped it out before I headed down stairs still in my nightgown. Today, I would not be held captive by my obsessive introspection. Not one more time. Today, I would act out. Be the person I was meant to be. I would have self- control. Stop smoking first. I would quit the meat rack where management treats its minions like nuts in a can of cocktail cashews, coming around every five minutes to fray our nerves by barging into our cubicles unannounced and braying orders. I would take only two mgs of Valium to sleep, and stop keeping it in my desk during the day. I would show them I was a woman to be dealt with. I was a person of parts. I would use my clichés sparingly and wisely in my ad copy. I lit a cigarette, now number two and a half for the morning, and started to put the coffee on when I saw it was already made. God, now I had lost my sense of smell, being so far gone with my childish self-absorption

“I put the coffee on,” my sister screamed from upstairs. “Can’t you smell

it? Keep smoking. You are losing your short-term.memory.”

I yelled back, “Stop monitoring me, you purist asshole. Try living without your daily

six-pack of Coke.”

***

My beautiful sister was tall, rangy, blue-eyed, smart and dumped by her fiancé of five years. As for me, I was short and wiry as a distance runner, had springy black hair, and a poor attitude. The truth is I was happy to see her brought up short when her guy took a walk.

My sister’s beauty flattened me, and made me acerbic and ready to pick a fight with her or almost anyone who said, “Hello,” and gave me one of those fake smiles affected by people with two personas.

After years of loitering on the fringes of my sister’s limelight, I felt twinges of schadenfreude when she told me, “He never came back when I sent him to the corner for Tampax.” With that, she took to her bed like some heroine in a clammy romance novel. I knew that if she closeted herself in her room and read her books and stuffed her face for any length of time, she would get fat. I was glad. Yes, glad, glad, glad, I tell you. I fulfilled all her wishes, picked up the greasy burgers, shagged all over town for her kook books, went to our moldy library, craned my neck to look at the topmost shelf, got down on my knees to wrestle with the lower shelves, all so she could read her garbage. Now she could fulfill just one of my wishes.. She could get fat..

My mind, weary of my broken promises to reform, dropped me into a cartoon strip my father used to turn to before the morning headlines. His favorite character was “Lonesome Jones,” a citizen of a town called Dogpatch. The poor guy went around, day and night, with a cloud hovering over his head, not unlike the larger cloud that floated above me and my band of hopeless illiterates as we cruised Second Avenue on our lunch break, smoking and looking in shop windows at vintage clothing, and checking the faded paperbacks in front of a used bookstore. As we furiously lit one cigarette from another in the free hour we had, the smoke drifted above our heads and formed one enormous cloud. Nobody stared. Even the out-of-towners were used to seeing smart ass New York locals acting like they owned the sidewalk.

Weeks went by like calendar pages flipped in a movie, before she loomed in the doorway of the kitchen. I had failed to hear her dainty steps coming down the stairs. Strange the way fat people seem to waft about an inch above where they plant their feet, seeming almost to float. Perhaps their fat buoys them up.

“Good to see you out of your lair, starch tank,” I said.

“The diet starts soon, so stop feeding me so many carbos. Just leave what I ask for at my bedroom door.” “I will need exercise as well,” she added.

“Picking up a fork doesn’t count,” I said.

“I think I’ll use the stairs. Go up and down them twenty times a day. “

“ If you fall, it’s the end of our house.,” I said.

She ignored me. “I can hold onto the bed and do squats, too. And try to remember, the house was left to me. I can level it if I want. “

I was sure that sooner or later she would re-appear, having squeezed into one of her pricey outfits. No dice. She stayed in her room and told me to leave food, magazines, and the crazy books she read when I could find them.

Her fare was simple enough, and I had no trouble supplying the three huge greasy hamburgers with two slabs of half done beef patties, super extra thick, chocolate malts and lattes with more whipped cream than coffee and, much later, pizza from the all night place, delivered by a smirking boy, who kept staring at my chest looking for my non-existent breasts, while I dug in my purse for money.

I’ll say this for my sister, she never slacked off on her reading. Besides newspapers and magazines she read her usual tomes, and over-sized paperbacks. She read “I & Thou” by Buber, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Ralph Ingersol, Allen Watt’s “The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex,” Arthur Koestler’s “Synchronicity,” Jung, Woody Allen, David Sedaris, Kubler Ross on “Death & Dying,” Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, (one of her dead favorites), Perlman, Thurber, Steve Martin, Didion’s “Play It as it Lays”, (and especially “The Year of Magical Thinking” (because she was a death freak), Michael Chabon, Brett Easton Ellis, John Updike, Alice Munro, and, Fran Leibowoitz, . After a lacerating day at the agency, trying to improve on “:New and Improved!” I would gather up some of the books she wanted at the library and thrift stores, When the books were again stacked outside her door I could tell if she had read them, or at least leafed through them, for they were smeared with grease. She kept the last Didion book and paid the library dearly for it. I never saw it again. I told you she was riveted by the idea of death.

My sister had one close friend, a Marcie Bloom, who was allowed in her grease pit at any time. Weeks went by while we lived our separate lives. I worked and ran the streets for her books and food and left it all outside her door.

Her transformation began when she asked me to shit can the burgers, and malts, and pizzas, and, in their stead, we were awash in the food brought by this Marcie Bloom person, who never acknowledged my presence, as she staggered upstairs with grocery bags bulging with cartons of cottage cheese, yogurt, (no sugary fruit at the bottom) oranges, hard-boiled eggs, and greens, and pre-cooked chicken strips.

***

“Dearest One,” my sister said gently, for her precious Marcie’s sake. "Don’t wake up Marcie. She spent the night, and needs her rest after another round with that rancid man.” My sister’s ex had changed his mind and if I would let him in the house, he would tear upstairs and scratch at her door. Sometimes in the middle of the night. She always opened it wide so he could see that she was as fat as ever, and maybe more so, and now her newly plump breasts, he had always coveted like a hungry newborn, were straining at her pajama top. I heard every word she yelled at the poor fool, “Get out of here,” she bellowed, “You craven, duplicitous, twit.” I guess the ruined man didn’t leave as requested, and spent yet another night curled up on the cold hardwood floor in front of my sister’s door.

. ***

Every morning Marcie locked arms with my sister for their morning walk, increasing it to four or five blocks before I lost sight of them.

The two were conjoined. My sister would put her arm around Marcie’s waist. She was still somewhat pale and tottering, caused, no doubt, by withdrawing from all the Whoppers. And long weeks, spent lying on her bed, her head propped up reading and laying waste to a box of Mr.Goodbars.

Eons later, when she finally came downstairs again,, my sister was dressed for tennis. Tennis? Who was she kidding? But she wore her treasured diamond tennis bracelet, her hair was clean and shiny, and pulled back with a barrette, and she was almost as slim as before. As she skipped down the stairs, she swung a tennis racket, back and forth in a showy arc while I hunched like a cement garden gnome on the lowest stair step. My god, would she never fall apart?

“Beat it, lamphrey,”I called to my sister’s ex as he banged on the front door.

***

It took me all of five seconds to figure it out: My sister had staged the whole fucking mess from the beginning. She was the dumper and His Thinness was the dumpee. The thing was the ex had a coterie of friends who were doing the twenties. The bony women wore Louise Brooks hair-dos, gowns cut on the bias, made with low-cut backs. And navel length ropes of pearls. The women twirled a lot to show off their clever haircuts, my sister told me, clutching her sides with laughter, causing those nearby to take cover as airborne necklaces flew about the room. The men were sticks, including the ex, in the Brit clothes of the day. Short suit coats nipped in at the waist. Shellacked hair. Diamond pinky rings. They looked like gangsters, and perhaps they were. The ex wanted my sister to be as thin as the women in his crowd, but she was far too wholesome looking to fit in.

If my sister gained a pound, her fiancé railed at her. The man was obsessed with weight. He would check her dresser drawers to see it she had moved her belts to the next buttonhole. Once, when she was cooking up a burger for herself, he came roaring in our front door, yelling that he could smell it outside. My sister put the patty on a spatula and held it out to him. She told him, in a small voice, that it was a veggie burger. He threw it in the garbage anyway, spatula and all.

Once we were quasi-friends again I got up the courage to ask her about sex with the dofus. “Sex?” She hooted. “I felt like a precocious teenager had splayed his body on top of me. He was one of those “Dare I eat a peach” people. He had dieted and exercised himself down to one twenty five and was proud of it. He was all sharp elbows and kneecaps. There was no heft to the man. I fought the urge to swat him off me and onto the floor. Why did I agree to the betrothal? Money, what else? He has enough to keep us high kicking into our eighties.”

If you want to know what I think, I think she locked herself in her bedroom so she could eat her head off, get fat, and be free of him for good.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:10:41 GMT

Some CEO's may enjoy special benefits such as obscenely large "executive incentive" bonuses.and what is called a "golden parachute" when they finally retire because they know too much.

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:50:00 GMT

Life IS pain. Anyone who says "not so" is trying to sell you something.

Current reading, forgot writer

Life: All plot, no nuance.

M.E. Daley

The unexamined life is happier.

M.E. Daley

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:19:02 GMT

"What is mine will know my face." --Emerson

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:58:37 GMT

Old Age is like a fruit that is rotting on the tree, and refuses to fall to the ground.

Old age is a bright orange apricot with rosy coloring--but when you pick it you find out the smart birds have pecked away the whole side you can't see.

Old age is when you listen to your ears, and bite your teeth.

I can write these supposedly bitter words and get away with it because I am old, and speak the truth as I see it. M.E. Daley

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:14:27 GMT

OUR HEART-BROKEN, PISSED-OFF MEN

Men were not put here to nurture us. It is quite the opposite. They are our protectors.

Unknowingly, women have been chipping away at male dignity.Some of them would hoot at that—Are you talking male entitlement in this day and age? Get in touch, crazy lady, we have the same rights that men have. No we don’t. Men have the right to get blown to bits in wars. We don’t, if we choose not to. Men have the right to provide for their families, but we compete for the jobs they need to accomplish this, often winning out by working more cheaply. Men have the right to come home from work at night, find sanctuary in an orderly house, flop on the sofa, turn on the TV and crack open a cold one. They didn’t come home to change wet diapers. That’s a woman’s job, even when the woman works. Women seem to forget that they are the nurturers, and if it takes an exta hour or two in addition to working outside the home, that's just too bad-- men have to leave their jobs, or halt their careers to go fight our bloody wars. The men need our paychecks because the squeeze is on them from the upper five percent who run this country and have all the money and the power to destroy the dignity of men by taking away their work.

I am watching three to six men put up a two level house across the street. From laying the foundation, to dry wall, to the installation of bathroom fixtures, one can tell by the way they carry themselves that they love their work and are proud to be doing it. When they can find it to do.

Working men are getting the shaft from the five percemt who have turned the country into their personal bank. Many of the wealthy are candid about the need for a certain rate of national unemployment--it helps their investments.

Five percent of the people have ninety five percent of the wealth. When will the men wise up and rise up? We are all working to support not just ourselves, but the top heavy privileged who are scamming the country with their obscene salaries, perks, and bonuses. We are the serfs out tilling the fields for our masters in their lavish manors.

Yes, women have been, and still are being treated unfairly, that’s one reason why it takes two paychecks to float a houseboat.

More about unfairness to women when I can sit up and take nourishment.