The Murder At the Pool

Let me tell you about the time I thought someone had been murdered at the pool and how the crazy-smart killer returned to clean up the evidence. No one noticed but me.

The pool is a great place for things like:

• Swimming
• Chatting
• Reading
• Listening to music
• Sunbathing
• Committing the perfect murder

The pool I go to is rarely that busy, yet, it's still loud as f**k with kids. I don't mind kids being kids, I just don't like being around kids and being made to appear like it's the greatest thing possible.

Since I go to the pool on, generally, the same day of the week at the same time, I see mostly the same people. Like the father who obviously spends a lot of time on his lats and probably has a "leg day" and who also parents the HELL out of his kids - and other kids.

That's a story for another time...

Here is the actual events that happened...

First, we have the lifeguard. We have a couple lifeguards, but, this guy is the only one who goes into the pool and romps around with the kids. He seems cool, earlier he had been helping a kid swim underwater for the first time. And not by holding him under until he squirmed away. He's hands-on. Talks to people. Gives out information on stuff. Probably has a moderate amount of time for someone else's sh**.

Then we have the shirted gray-haired man who arrived sometime after I did and walked to the other side of the pool where he had set up camp at one of those umbrella-table things. I think he had a kid with him. I don't know. How do you know what kid belongs to what adult? You don't.

Shortly after setting up shop, he walks on over to the lifeguard:

Shirt-Man: Do you have an bleach spray or anything?
Lifeguard: Uh, no. Why?
Shirt-Man: Someone must have gotten a bloody nose last night, there is blood all around that table
Lifeguard: What?
Shirt-Man: Probably one of the kids got a bloody nose last night at the movie night and there's patches of blood all over there. I was going to spray it down.
Lifeguard: I don't have anything, no. I didn't see anything before through.

Then the two of them walk over to the umbrella table and the man points out all these patches of blood. Blood on both sides of the table, against the pool rim, against where the pavement meets the grass. On the table. On the chair. 

I turned to my husband:

Maddie: I bet someone committed a murder here last night.
Husband: Yep.
Maddie: Are you watching this? The guy probably committed a murder and he was now cleaning up the blood in order to remove evidence.
Husband: Yep.

Plot twist - he was buried deep in his favorite book, The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. He was not concerned with the literal bloodbath only a short pool-swim away.  

Shortly after pointing out all the blood stains, Shirt-Man gathered his meager belongings and went home. For someone choosing an umbrella-table, he did not have a lot of stuff. People who bring kids to the pool tend to bring enough matched-luggage to survive for three months.

About 30 minutes later, Shirt-Man came back:

Shirt-Man: I got some cleaning solution. I told my wife about this and with my line of business, you need to clean that up
Lifeguard: Yeah, sure. Thanks, man.

While I give Shirt-Man full marks for taking such care of generally public property, the plot def thickened as he told the lifeguard - "...in my line of business..."

What is your business? Cleaning up blood? Where is your wife - "home". . .? WHY ARE YOU TELLING THE LIFEGUARD YOUR WIFE IS ALIVE?! YOU HAVE NO ALIBI!

The only logical conclusion to this situation is that he obviously murdered someone after the movie night, when the pool was open later and he had a lot of alibis around. People are tired, they didn't do extra sweep checks and once movie night was over, the pool would be the last place anyone would be. After doing the deed, he returned early the next morning to clean in up the blood. 

Killers walk among us.

Also - I have a strong suspicion is was not blood but some type of red-6 from all the snacks. Probably like a Popsicle or something. I mean, blood doesn't stay red THAT long on baking and cooling concrete. I checked.

OR COLD BLOODED MURDER

...you decide...

How I Met My Baby-Daddy

Back when I was just a wee facilitator in the grinding corporate machine of training, I decided I was going to try to network. I really didn’t decide, in all honesty, I was told I needed to network which means “make friends” with people or something - no one in management could explain what it was or how I would know if I was doing it right. Being that I mostly refer to people by color of their shirt, this was a bit of a leap.

I submit this typical conversation as proof:

Maddie: Hey, green-polo, what's going on?
Green Polo: ...uh....
Maddie: Great. Thanks for asking!

Also, I know I’m freaking annoying.

What am I going to do? Annoy someone into being productive and happy so they continue grinding out work or do favors for me? Networking is a mystery to me.

So, anyhow, I decided I would give it a try because I love failure. It's how I feel alive.

Besides, humans are social creatures, we live in families and packs, how hard could it be to strike up a conversation with someone? I spent a good two weeks with these trainees as part of my water-hose-of-information-to-the-face training methodology and the least I could do was try to remain friendly with them – even if most of my brain was on autopilot for those two weeks...

I'm on auto-pilot about 85% of the day at work.

There is this guy who I trained. He seemed fun and I remembered his name – super rare. Let's call him...Leandro. I was going to MAKE AN EFFORT. Not just for networking and because someone who doesn't know how to pronounce my last name told me to...but for HUMANITY.

Maddie: Hi.
Leandro: Hi.
Maddie: How are you?
Leandro: Good. How are you?
Maddie: Good, as well.

I knew he was married for a couple years maybe, ring-check, yep, so I said to myself: Listen, you want to make this conversation sparkle like a diamond in the sky?! You want to be a hero - you want to rock his world like no conversation ever has: ask him how his kids are. Parents love that sh**. You are going to be the networking boss! DO IT!

My brain-thoughts have always been wrong so I said:

Maddie: How are your kids?
Leandro:…What are you talking about? I don’t have kids.

[Add awkward silence]

Maddie: I thought you had kids.
Leandro: I don’t have no kids.
Maddie: …what about our kids?
Leandro: ...
Maddie: ...
Leandro: ...
Maddie: ...
Leandro: Yeah, how have out kids been doing?

We had a conversation about our fake kids. In fact, our entire relationship of 5+ years is currently based on this conversation.

So we now have three fictional kids. One is pretty dumb, I don't know much about the other ones. I harass him for child support in the form of office candy and chips mostly through Twitter.

I get neither chips nor candy, which is really a critical fact here.

To be fair, he never sees his kids so he can't provide them much support as a father-figure. He has a strong fictional argument, there.

Let's just say, I never attempted this sh** again. I don't need more fake kids. This is a lot of work, people. A lot.

As a fun addition to the start of this story about networking, I was later told the type of networking I needed to do was with what I call the "titled class" not the trench workers. I needed to pop into the offices of directors and vice presidents to be seen and heard rather then the gen-pop.

Labels and Structure

I got three major labels or concepts I’m working with here. 

Stories

These are just my take on situations I have been in. I guess I have generally told these types of things to people and they were amused. I don’t think I live some type of exciting life or anything. These are just situations I find amusing and then I write about it.

Lists

I like to make lists. Not lists like to-do list or honey-do lists or list that serve purposes. I just like grouping things together into lists. I normally don’t write these lists down, I just keep them floating around in my head in these groups. Things are less likely to get lost if they are clustered together into bigger things. Right? I don’t know if I am normal. I’m going to be posting the lists that I  keep in my head.

Culture Consumption

I don’t really do a lot of culture consumption – I don’t watch a lot of movies or TV shows. Generally, this means I have less to talk about with people. I figured I could do little write-ups on the type of consumption that seems to be pretty common in my circle and world. A lot – and I can’t emphasize this enough – a lot has to do with children. Very little has to do with Halloween.

This is sad. 

Production

I try to produce content and one of my goals is to finish the Calpurnia Mission and try to get it published. I realize this is probably never going to happen, but, stuff like lack of talent or overwhelming self-doubt and crippling depression hasn’t really ever been a bleaching deterrent.

Anyhow, anything I produce or do, for lack of better words, I am going to tag and write about.

I don't know when I'm going to post stuff. Let's assume frequently until I give up and then not at all and then I'll be back. That's how I work.

If you want me to write a story or something - email me at Stories by Maddie at gmail dot com.

The Time I Got The Ingress Onyx Sojourner Badge And An Existential Crisis

I actually had once been only 20 some days from getting the Sojourner Badge in 2016 and, when on vacation, I totally lost it. I was devastated.

DEVASTATED.

For like DAYS I gave up. I literally gave up and just writhed in my own seething failure.

Let me back up a hot minute. In this real-time, global geocaching type game I play called Ingress, you can get these badges - as is the trendy thing to do these days - for actions you take in the game. You need these accomplishments and other action points in order to level up. Each badge has five color-levels, so, you earn the badge and sort of get a nicer color or whatever the more you do the same thing.

I can't really tell the difference between some of the colors, but, I digress about Ingress...

The Sojourner Badge is earned by hacking a portal every day. So, you have 24 hours after your last hack to hack again to count. For 359 days I have hacked a portal every 24 hours.

Every f**king day, I have hacked a portal.

I have taken at least one action everyday in this game for 359 days straight. No breaks. Flu. Fatigue. Travel. Rain. Snow. Drunk. EVERY DAY.

So, anyhow, back in 2015-2016, at like 322 some days or something I missed a day when in Lake Placid and was back to square one. And then I was devastated.

This badge was the easiest thing in the world for me to accomplish. It required nothing from me. Other badges require you take more involved actions like linking portals, destroying other peoples portal-stuff or putting up portal-stuff or playing a mini-memory game or to walk kilometers - and I'm an American so I don't know how to walk a kilometer, I only walk in miles . .. or like. . .feet.

Pre-marriage, I had a portal I could hack from my couch and at work I (still) have a portal I could hack from my desk - so losing it when it was so easy during that time made everything seem totally overwhelming.

This badge came out on March 5th, 2015 meaning I have no goddamn reason not to have acquired it on March 5th, 2016.

360 f**king days and you are at day 1? What's the POINT of life?!

And here I am.

Anyhow, to make it more horrible, I moved shortly after and lost my couch-portal. I actually had to leave the house every day to go hack a portal. "Hey, I got to hack a portal." I would say. And then get myself together to drive to the closest portal to click a series of three buttons and then drive back home.

Oh, and I lost my count again at some point because I wasn't use to leaving the house on weekends. So, fantastic! I'm sure someone could do the math to figure out how many times this sucker got reset from March 5, 2015 to July 19, 2017. That sounds like something that's fun. . .this is fun.

After losing it for the second time, I decided I needed to get this badge. It would be the only way to wipe away the corrosion of failure after failure from losing something that was built as if an angel came down and saw how easy it would be for me to do and made it a real thing. People who had it far worse than me - who lived in the sticks or like another planet - got this badge.

And I am here with a couch-portal and a desk-portal and I f**ked it up.

To psych myself up, I would tell myself that in the summer of 2017 I would be done. I tried to make the numbers look different and not look so intimidating and overwhelming - maybe if I told myself I only have 11 months or 300 days or if I just calculated the day - everything would seem better.

It did not. The perpetual motion of trying to make something change by squinting at it doesn't actually change the truth you are looking at. Because at the end of the day, everyday, I had to hack a portal. I stopped thinking about it and just did it.

As I stabbed my hazard lights on next to a portal one day, I thought, once this is done I will NEVER have to leave my house on the weekends. I would not have this extra clock ticking in my head telling me I better hack a portal and that I hacked my last portal at 3:30pm today, ok, let's say 3pm, so, tomorrow I have to be sober and ok get out at 3pm just to make sure. And was I out on Saturday and it felt like it was 2am but I think it was 11pm and that means I can go out at 8am to hack it because Monday I will have hacked something at 7am when leaving the house to go to work and if I got up early on Saturday and hacked a portal at like 8am I wouldn't be able to sleep in on Sunday because I would need to be back at a portal before 8am or I would lose it so I need to leave the house at, let's say, 3pm so that I can sleep in...

....The anxiety of "DID I HACK A PORTAL?!" will be gone, I told myself! It will taste like the wine of victory - I will be a pantsless, shoeless, carefree soul, cavorting with anything I wanted whenever I wanted and if I never left the house for weeks at a time - it wouldn't matter. I will have the badge. I would have earned my freedom! I will have cleared out the consequences of not appreciating my luck and status and also not paying good enough attention. HA!

It's not anxiety, though.

I mean, without this little game and this little badge I probably never would have left my new house. I would never have found at least two cool historic-type-landmark-type spots. Or a bunch more right outside my door. I would never have explored so much on my own. I would never have been connected to other people who understood something about me without question.

Then I wondered, what if I never left my house? How easy would that be? Why, pretty easy! I mean, I'm an idiot in my internal conversations as much as in my external conversations - it would be easy. It would be the freedom from the failure I created and structure I had to create. That's the point, I said to myself. Duh.

And then I wondered - what if what I became while trying to acquire this badge was a better version of who I would be after I accomplished it?

Now, I have the highest level Sojourner Badge and an existential crisis.

The Calpurnia Mission

I have always wanted to write full time as some type of fiction or. . .like. .a writer. So, I am writing this thing called The Calpurnia Mission. This started like 24 months ago, I have been trying to write a chapter a month but some months I just don't cut it. Inspiration, dedication, commitment and time are hard to align. 

But when you do - holy moly.

Anyhow, I’m going to be writing about writing.

I know. HOLD ON TO YOUR F**KING TEETH!

What would you want to know about from a general failure of the creative, written arts? I mean, I do have a professional writing minor from a not-important school and I did write a lot. I do write a lot. And I edit. 

Sure, I can edit your stuff, but, you still will want a professional. I'm more of a style girl than a mechanics girl and mechanic are important. 

IDK, what can I do to impress you, fair reader?

I Said I...

I said I was going to make a new blog. This will be my third or fourth attempt. Maybe I won't stick with the convention of posting on a regular schedule, first, I got stuff going on:

• Work (got to pay the bills)
• Fostering kittens (yes, they are adorable, no I don't want to keep them)
• Riding my bike (I call it training for the MS City to Shore)
• Writing my series fiction or novella or novel

I like to write and having some outlet for this stuff is cool. However, mostly what people seem to like about me is my stories. 

I don't think my stories are that unique, but, maybe I can record them here in my favorite method of communication, which is the written word, and. . .uhh. .that's about as far as that thought went. 

So, here is my blog. If you wish to contact me about anything, hit me up with your non-spam junk at Stories by Maddie at gmail dot com 

Cheers!