“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But they never realized just how fragile life is or how very short it can be.
They say “The hottest love has the coldest end.” Now in my opinion and throughout my 6-decades of life that is painfully closer to the truth.
They say “The eyes are the window to the soul.” Yes. This entire week my eyes have been swollen with tears bearing open my ripped and bleeding soul.
It is sometimes said by them “It’s a broken heart when you’ve lost a soul mate,” but that’s only part of it. I hurt in my whole body, to the marrow.
But enough of what they say.
On Thursday, June 29, 2023, my lovely Hat Burglar boxed up and shipped my fourth or fifth package of what she always called “Surprizzles.” If I made a list for you of everything she has shipped to me from Georgia, USA, I’d have a 3- to 4,000 word post. So suffice it to say that she lives and loves to make people’s lives a little easier and a lot happier. And she is the Queen B at it. She is just as gifted in calming you, making you burst out in laughter, while simultaneously sorting out the berserko chicken-pen with chickens running amok with heads lopped off. She rightly earned the title of “Supreme Chaos Manager.” It is sheer black or white magic, a sight to behold actually, to watch what she can make happen; the consummate Doer! And with that my Doer did and with no delay, my box of Surprizzles was on the way …to my door.
But I want to jump back to and ahead in this story.
In the United States we have a non-existent FTC that is supposed to protect individual American consumers and phone users from insane amounts of telemarketing sales calls, AI spam callers, and other invasive businesses blowing up your phone’s call-log and voicemail capacity. A few wireless carriers offer a very basic spam-protection feature and/or app, but they too are near useless. I hate this infuriating marketing with an intense bitterness and our nation’s defunct economic model these wireless phone-cancers feed off and breed from: Free-enterprise or Hyper-capitalism. My fury is boiling just below atomic eruption when one listen’s to my cell phone voicemail greeting aimed at all telemarketers and AI spam-dialers.
Growling, my attempts to waste as much of their time as they would mine with my 2-3 minute greeting-of-torture, are not as effective as I had hoped for several reasons. One thing that is recognizable in my tone and attitude to this American AI plague is my enormous growing aversion and maddening for all-things-technology and their blatant abuse by sales and marketing departments upon my precious time. I mean, I’m ready to push the red-button labelled “Never Push This Button.”
Unknown to me, my lovely Hat Burglar often called my cell just to listen to my polite rage, or in her message to poke me with the proverbial stick inciting her grumpy grandpa (me) and make me either more grumpy or tolerably grumpy, just for her own amusement and entertainment-fix. Here are a few of her voicemails I will treasure for the rest of my life:
April 8th, 2023:
May 16th, 2023:
May 23rd, 2023 with her son Jay calling me:
June 29th, 2023 – her latest, and last VM to me:
∼ ∼ ∼ § ∼ ∼ ∼
In the late morning of July 2nd, 2023, between 10:31am CDT, my time, and 1:40pm my time, my Soul Mate and Twin Flame, my Hat Burglar, who I’ve written about so affectionately since May 11th and she wrote about me/us June 6th, died suddenly of a severe heart-attack. Her husband tried to revive her several times with CPR, but the attack/seizure was simply too harsh and too swift. She was 47-years young. I don’t want to let her go…
Her box of Surprizzles arrived, wanted and unwanted, three days later on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023. It had her typical flashy, Gothic, dark stickers smacked everywhere on the box. One sticker was the Jolly-Roger skull and crossed bones. It said on it in large pirate-script: Poison! I knew inside there were specially baked chocolate-chunk cookies (lots of them!) along with my various surprise items of shock-n-awe and/or uncontrollable laughter. In this reaction Jodi never failed; she was undefeated against me at 8 — 0. But her box sat there in a living room chair all morning, all afternoon, and into the evening. I could not muster the courage to open what should’ve been a sensational Cloud-9, Made-my-day moment… that instead would make all the life-long memories very different than intended.
Around six or seven PM, I don’t remember exactly, with Mom nearby I opened the box. There were eight to ten containers of big cookies, a book she knew I would love reading (she was spot-on, 10x better than Robin Hood’s second arrow through his first arrow), and then the real kicker; another envelope with her handwriting.
Out of all the surprizzles she included in this, her last shipment to me, this one in particular item/envelope evoked the most intense mixed emotions I have experienced in my life to-date. Forgive me, but to fully understand its profound euphoric and devastating impact on me, it requires some past context.
One afternoon in June when I was out running errands she called my cell. I always have the car stereo semi-blasting (not), playing my many favorite songs from several genres. This one time she called me while driving—then I pulled over of course for public safety reasons—and after 3-4 rings and her call almost ready to go to my voicemail greeting, I caught her just in time! However, I had not had a chance to mute/turn-off my loud music. Hence, she immediately heard this song (we both love) blaring on my stereo CD’s. Try to listen to its entirety and lyrics:
My Hat Burglar has or had an exquisite talent for imagining, creating, and manifesting serendipitous, life-long moments and memories for everyone around her, especially those she adored and loved most. For example, my heart-wrenching, gut-punch special envelope with cinematic directorship of exactly how we would part after finally meeting in person after a long, trouble-making, breathtaking weekend with sore face-cheeks from too much smiling, on top of sore ribs from laughing non-stop, she included this:
“They say crying makes the heart lighter.”
If that is true, then my heart is weightless; it is gone missing… with her. The rest of this earth-shattering, upside down, euphorically crushing, unfair life, for me, will NEVER be the same until my last breath. This painful emptiness, why? How?
— Photos below of Jodi, my Hat Burglar, added July 12, 2023 —
The Professor’s Convatorium © 2023 by Professor Taboo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Dwell in a lonely house I know
The Professor's Convatorium 