Mercenaries and Toilet Tissue

I’ve been walking around the house singing, “Stop the world and let me off. I’m tiring of going round and round.…” I’ve had those lines suck in my head for days. I can’t remember the rest of the lyrics but I’m pretty sure they don’t have anything to do with a Pandemic or being on a path to environmental suicide or being a flaming liberal living in a country run by an alt-right president. Nope, belting those words out this week may have started as a reaction the Pandemic but on closer examination I found nothing but good memories attached to the song including the first time I was introduced to those lyrics. It was back in 1958 and Patsy Cline was crooning them out from my cousin, Shirley’s record player. It was the summer I was unofficially indoctrinated into the country/western music fan club.

That summer she and her three toddlers were living in a small travel trailer parked behind our cottage, while her husband was overseas in the Army. She was a good singer and in the evenings when she wasn’t playing the likes of Hank Williams or Johnny Cash records she was playing her ukulele and leading us ‘cottage kids’ in sing-alongs. Other nights she’d make a batch of fudge or popcorn that we munched on while we played poker sitting at a picnic table under a single light bulb strung in the trees. It was a good summer of laughter and music and a naive belief that the world would always be that way. Shirley was a beautiful woman back then and not much older than we teens she entertained. Her life filled up with bitterness not long after that summer and I never saw her happy again. “Stop the world and let me off.” If only it was that easy to escape our woes. 

I got my credit card bill for the month when I went crazy reading books on my Kindle. $55 worth of downloads, mostly books about Navy SEALS, Mercenaries and Delta Force military types. I took one look at that $55 and went directly to Amazon and signed up for Amazon Unlimited, hoping I understand the fine print correctly. For $9.99 a month I get to read unlimited books and I can cancel at any time. With the state of our clusterfucked nation I can’t seem to stop reading trash books about muscled-up men who are out to save the world from all the bad guys. I have, however, branched out to other authors than the first one who got me hooked on the “military elite” genre. I'm shocked at how many of them are out there.

Today I had to laugh at myself, though, when I realized I used military lingo in a conversation with my brother: “We need more intel on that” and “copy that” I said in our phone call. If I start swearing like a Navy SEAL please do an intervention. If these books are 75,000 words long (just guessing) at least 7,500 of them are the F word. And if I start planning a trip to California with aspirations of becoming a Frog Hog (aka a slutty woman who sets her goal on bagging a Navy SEAL) handcuff me to a chair in a shrink’s office until I’m cured of turning fictional alpha guys into my safe place. The world doesn't need anymore cougars.

I woke up at 3:30 a few nights ago and couldn’t fall back asleep. My niece is very sick. She says it’s the croup. Her two grandsons had it and she was taking care of them. Then her daughter and son-in-law got it. My brother stopped to visit and he said she was really mad that he walked in the house, fearing that he’d get it too and she made him march right back out. If they all get the coronavirus on top of the croup, when their immune systems are so low---I don’t even want to think about it. Apparently my subconscious mind has no such qualms about doing just that. Since I couldn't stop the world and get off, I grabbed my Kindle at 4:00 and relished the thought that I, too, could be a sniper who gets a clean shot of an international terrorist, making the world one less bad guy safer. Yup, some of the women in those books are as badass as the guys.

Seriously, these books are so out of character for me that I’m afraid to reveal that I’m reading them except to my blogger friends. Not that that’s anything new. I tell you guys things I wouldn’t blurt out in my offline life. For example, I rub my eyes way too often, given the fact that it's one of the ways you can put the coronavirus into your system. It’s eerie how something I’ve probably done subconsciously all my life suddenly becomes a death threat. God, where is my SEAL when I need one? I'm pretty sure he'd have a cure tucked away in one of the pockets of his cargo pants. Oh, yes, you know you're old when you find yourself lusting after what's in a man's pockets rather than what's behind his zipper. (Did I just type that? Ya, I'll do anything if it makes someone laugh.)

I haven’t been to my first senior shopping day yet at the grocery store. Tuesdays and Thursdays between 7:00 AM to 8:00. (Health care workers get other special days and times.) Ohmygod, how am I ever going to get up that early? One of my friends who has gone said most of the shoppers were wearing plastic gloves and the employees were all cleaning floors and the check-out lines. Toilet paper is being limited now that they have it back in stock---why didn't they do that early on? Stories of people helping each other are all over internet and the funny memes about toilet paper are making me laugh right out loud. There’s the bouquet of toilet paper a florist cooked up and an 18-wheeler that had a single pack of toilet paper strapped down on the bed of his trailer going down the expressway. The miniature toilet paper earrings and a cake made to look like a roll of toilet paper both tickled my funny bone. Did you ever think you’d see a day when the world would be obsessing about toilet tissue?  ©

Reading Susan Stoker

I’ve been such a good little worker bee for so long I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I went off the rails. Yup, I’ve been binge reading again. And late into the night, dragging myself out of bed with only five hours of sleep just to pick up my Kindle again to polish of a few more chapters before breakfast. Four days, seven books downloaded and read and I don’t want to stop. What bothers me more than binge reading is the type of books I’m reading and I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve gotten caught up in Susan Stoker’s Navy SEAL books. I’ve never been a fan of military themed books and movies and her fiction seems to be a cross between action-adventure and romances but she labels her writing: contemporary romantic suspense. Unfortunately for me, Susan is a prolific writer. Since her first book debuted in 2014 she’s written over 60 and at the rate I’m going I’ll be dead from sleep-deprivation if I keep downloading a new one within minutes of finishing another. (I should examine why I'm avoiding my 'real life' by binge reading...but time for that in another post.)

If you google Susan Stoker you’ll find the following paragraph all over the place: “Susan Stoker is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose series include Ace Security, Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes, SEAL of Protection, Unsung Heroes: Delta Force, and Mountain Mercenaries. Married to a retired army noncommissioned officer, Stoker has lived all over the country—from Missouri to California to Colorado to Texas—and currently lives under the big skies of Tennessee. A true believer in happily ever after, Stoker enjoys writing novels in which romance turns to love.”

I’m a little old lady---well, two out of three of those words are true---I’m old and a lady and a worry-wart who can’t even go across town without leaving a note behind in case I come up missing. I also don’t drive after dark and I have an irrational fear of dying under water in a submerged car. So why am I fascinated by the kick-ass and survival skills navy SEALs have? The only thing I have in common with any of Susan’s male protagonists is the cargo pants they wear. Let me explain. One of Susan's female protagonists called her guy’s cargo pants ‘magic pants’ because of all the life-saving stuff that he could product when needed. I don’t have ‘magic pants’ but I've been known to carry a magic purse. I once went on a day trip sponsored by the senior hall and was aghast that the woman next to me on the bus only brought with her a debit card in her jeans pocket. But guess who could produce a Kleenex, cough drop, safety pin and an aspirin when others near-by needed them. Now I’m lusting after a pair of those cargo pants to go with the cinematographer’s field vest with a million pockets that I’ve lusted after for twenty years. Wouldn’t it be fun to pack all those pockets up with essentials? If I had magic pants one of my fast-draw, bellowed flap pockets would be filled with raspberry chocolate truffles in a water tight box. If I’m going down to the bottom of the river, I’d want chocolate.

I used to read a ton of historical romance books back in the ‘80s and ‘90s and I credit them fondly for me FINALLY finding the joy of reading after struggling with mild dyslexia for the first 40 something years of my life. They also got me interested in woman’s history. I’d read something in a romance and not believe it was based on actual events like the authors claimed. Back then I didn’t google like I do now but I sure made plenty of trips to the library to research historical details until I learned which romance authors could be trusted for her accuracy. I don’t have much frame of reference for Susan Stoker’s accuracy but my instincts tell me her depiction of the military rings true. 

Another thing I find fascinating about Stoker’s book is how differently she handles sex and love scenes from the historical romance genre books I read in decades past. No more Rhett Butters throwing women over their shoulders aka taming the “wildcat" plots so to speak. Stoker’s guys are asking are-you-sure-you-want-this sort of questions and talking birth control. One of her older characters even told a young woman she’d have to make the first move because in this day and age guys had to be careful not to put pressure on a woman lest he be accused of sexual harassment. That's not to say that Stoker's men are not Alpha types. They are and a few of them were not all that likeable in bed. (Did I just type that?) And while Stoker is writing genre fiction, they are not what I'd call hardcore formula. Case in point: after finishing one book, I realized it didn't have a "hot and heavy" sex scene like the one I read before it, and another SEAL book had a few too many crude details for my tastes.

Susan also writes some of the best cliffhangers I've ever read. She might as well not even format chapters in her books because I’ve been blowing right past the intended pauses. And like a lot of books marketed in the historical romance section, her contemporaries seem to have the classic damsel-in-distress element with a modern twist of the damsels saving the guys a few times, but I've been enjoying the action-adventure side of the equation almost more than the romance which led me to wonder whose reads Stoker. I could see some men liking them. I googled and found a Susan Stoker fan page on Facebook and read some of the posts and comments. Didn’t find any guy-fans but there were some military wives. Duh, why didn’t think of that?

I will get back to my real life by Monday. I have to! I have places to go and things to do---one of them very exciting and the other just plain fun assuming I don't get snowed in. If I do I'm going to call in the SEALS. I'll bet they'd have folding snow shovels in their magic pants.   ©