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Death Be Not…

I have come to the conclusion that I am either a green-eyed cat; a creature from some Galaxy far, far away… OR I’ve had an Angel living on my shoulder since the day I was born! Nothing else explains why I have survived no fewer than seven scenarios that should have rendered me well and truly dead.  Truly!

December, 1995: It was the week before Christmas and all through the….no, that’s not right.   It was the week before Christmas, 1995, and I was finishing my Holiday shopping in the Pasadena Mall.  Having recently suffered a lower back injury, I was unable to walk without a cane.  So, with a cane in one hand, and a large purse stuffed with small gifts in the other, I hobbled on to an empty elevator, for a trip to the parking garage.

Just as the elevator doors were about to close, two young men, one tall, one short, both with the words “If you can read this, you’re #×*$×!” written in Neon on their foreheads, slipped into the elevator.  Wearing baggy pants; over-sized sweatshirts and grins that Great White Sharks would envy, they stared at me and my cane, and suddenly every cell in my body was screaming “Get out!”  “Oh shit!” I said out loud as I raised my cane, shoved it between the nearly closed elevator doors and hobbled…no, more like gimped (“gimped” is a word, right?), okay, so I gimped for my life.  Behind me I could hear my two would-be assailants laughing and one saying “Oh shit is right lady!”

I was shaking from head to toe as I walked “gimpally” down one flight of stairs and entered the large shopping mall garage.  “Are you okay?” asked a Security Guard who, I’m fairly certain, was at least 14 years old, and appeared to be dressed in his Daddy’s Uniform. “No…nope, not okay. No, definitely not okay”…I babbled, then described my elevator companions. “Yup, sounds like the same guys” Security Guard Baggy Pants said to me, as he sent an urgent Security Guard message on his Dick Tracy Decoder Ring (well no, actually, it was his Walkie Talkie), then he added: “Lady, it’s a really good thing you got out of that elevator cause a woman about your age was killed there last week.  We found her body in a dumpster.  Her throat had been slashed, and the two thugs who did it match the description of the two guys in the elevator with you!” [cue Twilight Zone Theme Music]

January 17, 1994:  It was 4:30 in the morning and, sitting at my desk in my home office, I was putting the finishing touches on a spec script I had written for the TV series “Frasier”.

My make-shift office consisted of one desk, one high-back desk chair, and six 2×4’s, each six feet long, upon which sat a computer tower (you remember computer towers, don’tcha?); a printer; a Boom Box (please tell me you remember Boom Boxes); dozens of books, and half a dozen potted plants in some major league terra cotta pots.  So, there I sat, typing the words “Fade Out. The End” and poof — out went the lights. Something felt wrong — very wrong and very dark — and a voice in my head SCREAMED “Get UP!!!, so I got up. I dove out of my high-back desk chair and, as I did, I heard a thunderous CRASH…then everything started to shake as a 7.1 Earthquake rocked the world of everybody in Los Angeles.

From her bedroom down the hall, my then-twelve-year-old daughter was screaming “Mommy, help!”  “I’m coming, honey” I shouted, though I doubted she could hear me over what sounded like a freight train barreling through our home.  The walls shook and anything not nailed down was flying through the air.  I tried to get to my child, but something was blocking my way, and in the darkness, I couldn’t see what it was. 

Knowing, as all southern Californians do, that, when in a building during an earthquake, standing in a doorway is the safest place to be — second only to standing in a doorway of a building a few thousand miles away — I shouted to my terrified child “Stand in your doorway” as books, dishes, and framed artwork flew through the air. I could hear my daughter shrieking, but I couldn’t reach her.  Dinner plates had become flying projectiles and they were slamming into my back from the open cupboards behind me. All around me everything breakable was shattering.  I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I couldn’t move. I was trapped by objects that, in the total darkness, I couldn’t even see.  The noise was deafening, and the shaking of the walls wouldn’t stop. 

Suddenly I heard a neighbor calling my name and then he appeared, flashlight in hand.  Somehow, he made his way to my daughter’s bedroom, picked her up and carried her down the stairs and outside, to safety, with me following close behind. Dozens of neighbors were gathering on my front lawn and in the street.  The rotten egg smell of ruptured gas lines filled the air.  A young man pulled his Zippo lighter from his pocket and, as he flipped it open to light the cigarette that was dangling from his lips, he was tackled from two directions, and his lighter fell to the ground, unlit. “That’s gas, you idiot!” a chorus of neighbors shouted. 

As the first rays of dawn peeked over rooftops, I borrowed my neighbor’s flashlight and carefully made my way up the stairs and into my home. My living room floor was more than ankle deep in plants, potting soil, bits and pieces of broken pottery, shattered mirrors and a bazillion multi-colored, jagged shards of what had been my treasured Fiesta Ware service for six.   My living room had been rearranged – nothing was where it belonged.  My cozy, over-stuffed couch was on the wrong side of the room, with my over-sized TV nesting, upside down, on the middle cushion.

I picked my way through the rubble, into my little office, and what I saw caused a wave of nausea too overwhelming to control. The shelves that had stood around my desk had collapsed, and there, in my high-back desk chair, at a 45-degree angle, was a six-foot long 2×4 that, had I remained seated in that chair one second longer, would have decapitated me. [cue Twilight Zone Theme Music…again]

November, 1975:  What began as a party ended abruptly with my death.  Drugs can do that!  This time, the inner voice that could, and often did protect me from harm, was silent and so…I died.  But my death was short-lived.  Eight minutes long, to be exact and, how, on that occasion, I was able to return to the Land Of The Living was the strangest experience of all.  So strange, in fact, that I wasn’t sure it had actually happened. I needed proof that my ‘Divine Experience’ really had taken place, and that’s exactly what I got… and it was proof that no one could deny! 

One minute I was alive. The next minute I was dead! That should have been the end of my story but it was only the beginning! I met God! I talked to God and God talked to me! You may not believe my experience was real, but that’s okay because Reality is real, whether you believe it or not!

So, am I a cat who is now living the seventh of her nine allotted lives?…am I a creature from some distant Galaxy?… OR…has an Angel been living on my shoulder for lo these many years? I don’t know the answer.  That wasn’t one of the questions I thought to ask God during our Question-and-Answer Session. Oh, sorry…I neglected to mention that during those eight minutes when I was well and truly dead, I stood at the front door of Heaven and had a Question and Answer Session with God. I did, really, and I can prove it!

— Brooke Jones

Amazon Best Selling author Brooke Jones is the author of “WHY ARE THERE MONKEYS? (and other questions for God)” — the absolutely true, deeply inspirational, laugh-out-loud funny story of her Near-Death Question and Answer Session with God. (If you think a conversation with God could not possibly be FUNNY, you’re in for a very BIG surprise!)

The Memoir that the US Review of Books called “Profound…Hysterically witty…Not to be missed!”, “WHY ARE THERE MONKEYS? (and other questions for God)” is available in eBook, Paperback and Hardcover from online retailers and Bookstores everywhere.

(A portion of every sale is donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation)

For more information, please visit: http://www.WrittenByBrookeJones.com

Waiting For A Train

A hood covered his bowed and bearded face. If he were to stand erect, he would have been more than six feet tall, but he could not stand erect. The remains of his long and difficult life appeared to be contained in the torn and tattered knapsack strapped to his hunched back, and the two overstuffed WalMart bags held in his swollen, weathered hands.

Leaning on one crutch, he stood, precariously, in the center of the train station. I watched as he inhaled deeply, an effort, or so it seemed, to gather what little strength he could and then, one half-step at a time, he made his way to the man behind the plexiglass window. 

I couldn’t hear a word that passed between them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of him and, as I watched, a movie began to play in my head – an old movie of a ten-year-old boy playing baseball on a golden summer day, many, many summers ago. I saw him swing his bat, connecting with a blistering fast ball and sending it deep into center field.  His teammates cheered as he rounded the bases with ease, smiling from ear-to-ear. As he crossed home plate, he looked up into the bleachers, searching for that one special face that would shine will paternal pride.  Before he found it (did he ever find it?), the conversation at the plexiglass window ended and the broken man who had once been a ten-year-old, baseball-loving boy, began a slow, half-step at a time trek across the train station waiting room.

The man behind the plexiglass held up three fingers as I approached him. “That’s the third time today that he’s been here” he said. “What does he want?” I asked. “Each time it was the same thing – did I know of a restaurant where he could get something to eat. Some woman found him wandering around WalMart and brought him here. She said she thought I could do something for him. I don’t know what she thought I could do, I mean, I’m just the Amtrak ticket guy. I’m here all alone so what did she think I could do?” He didn’t know, but I think he wished that he did.

I bought my train ticket, and, as I turned toward the middle of the room, I saw another man standing beside the first.  Younger and slightly less broken, though obviously on the same painful path as the first, and there they stood, side-by-side, silent in their brokenness. Without conscious thought or premeditation, I opened my wallet, and when I did, I was overwhelmed by an energy that seemed to be coming from the cash within. It pulsed – it felt alive – and I swear I heard it say “I don’t belong here”.  I’m not sure that was what those bills were actually saying, but I do know that the minute I saw them I knew I wasn’t meant to keep them.

I pulled out three twenty-dollar bills and approached the two men.  Holding the money at waist-height in front of the knapsacked man, I interrupted his staring contest with the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice.  The second man gently touched his shoulder and said “She’s trying to give you some money, man!”. Slowly, one inch at a time, a hand more swollen and bruised than any I had ever seen – the skin and nails blackened with the accumulated filth of countless dumpster dives – reached up and cautiously, tenuously, accepted what was being offered. “Get something to eat and a room to sleep in, please” I said, softly. In a voice broken by time and tragedy he asked “How much is it?”, as he folded the three bills once, twice, three times, then stuffed the perfectly folded square of cash into a pocket of his worn-out pants.

“It’s three twenty-dollar bills – sixty dollars” I answered. His head seemed to bob once, or twice, (a response to my answer, or an affliction? I haven’t a clue), and with his eyes never leaving the floor, he hobbled, one half-step at a time, toward the door. “What’s your name?” the second man asked. “That doesn’t matter” I said.

As I stood, rooted to the floor of that train station, watching those two broken men make their painful way out of the building, I felt something I cannot name. I may never know its name, but that too doesn’t matter.  The only thing of which I was certain, in that ironic moment, in that train station, was that I hadn’t given that man something that belonged to me – I had given him something that probably would have been his some yesterday ago, before his life went so tragically off the…tracks.

—Y.Not?! (aka Brooke Jones)

WrittenByBrookeJones.com

FOR WHOM THE (LIBERTY) BELL TOLLS

There are few things more dangerous in this world (or, for that matter, to this world) than a very wealthy, very ignorant man, but one of them is a very wealthy, very ignorant, very mentally-impaired man. Having been diagnosed, many years ago, with severe mental illness, caused, at least in part, by countless blows to the head, inflicted during his decades of football playing, the latter is precisely what Herschel Walker is. Sadly, however, that is not the only “issue” swirling around this dangerously-confused man.

Herschel Walker, a man with a certifiably-limited IQ, has been taking orders from wealthy white men since he was a sixteen-year-old football protege.  From that day to this, Walker has been told where to go to school, what teams to play for, what to wear, on what dotted lines to sign, where to buy a home and now, a cabal of Southern, White, Racists (oh, sorry, I mean Republicans) are telling him that he has what it takes to be a United States Senator!  That would be hilarious, were it not so utterly, disastrously  horrifying! 

If you desire any more proof of his grotesque lack of suitability – any proof beyond what he, himself, has so generously, if unconsciously, provided, consider this:

Only a stupefyingly ignorant, mentally unwell human would believe that anyone as uneducated and blatantly morally bankrupt as he has any business occupying a seat in the U.S. Senate.  The mere fact that Walker signed on, thereby accepting his candidacy, proves that he is not even remotely qualified for the job! If he’s too ignorant and too ill to know that he is ignorant and ill, then he’s definitely not the man who should be casting votes that will help determine the future of your life, your children’s life, or the life of this country!

    Ladies and gentlemen, our vote is our voice and if we don’t use it, we will most certainly lose it! If we don’t stop this insanity on Tuesday, November 8, 2022, by Wednesday, November 9, 2022, if may very well be too late! The die are about to be cast and, seven come eleven, American Democracy will live or die by the outcome. 

Don’t ask “for whom the Bell tolls” because, unless we act, our Liberty Bell will soon toll for Liberty, Justice and…well, with a nod to Superman, the American Way!  

— Y.Not?! (aka Brooke Jones)

WrittenByBrookeJones.com

We The People Have A Duty!

Before you can legally drive a motorized vehicle on America’s highways and byways, the law requires you to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the fundamental “Rules Of The Road”. Only a knucklehead (or a Libertarian) would dispute the appropriateness of that particular regulation.

In America, you can’t simply declare yourself to be a Brain Surgeon and then wield a scalpel on whatever brain you may encounter. We have laws about that sort of thing. Before you cut me open, you must do me the courtesy of proving that you know the difference between my Cerebellum and my Cervix. That’s the least you can do, no? Call me crazy but, honey, if you don’t know how my stove works, you’re not qualified to be my Chef!


The logic seems sound: before we hand you the keys to our government, you must demonstrate a working knowledge of the fundamentals of our government. Anyone who doesn’t know how an idea becomes a law should not have the authority to make laws. Is it too much to ask that elected officials have a working knowledge of the history of this country? Is it too much to expect our lawmakers to be familiar with the U.S. Constitution — the document that is, after all, the very foundation of this nation’s judicial system? The answer to both of those questions should be a resounding, unequivocal “NO”!

In order to be eligible to run for any elected office in these United States, a prospective “Servant Of The People” should be required to take, and pass, the same test that everyone who seeks to become an American citizen is required to take and pass. If that had been the law in 2016, Donald Rump would never have become the Occupier of the Oval Office. If that had been the law, Marjorie Gazpacho Green and LoRent Vomit (or whatever that nauseating excuse for a human’s name is) would not now be occupying seats in Congress.


This is not rocket science, folks! We The People are the custodians of a form of governance thousands have given their lives to establish and protect and we have a duty to every one of them. We have a duty to elect leaders who have the knowledge, the decency and the determination to safeguard this nation and see to it that American Democracy survives. Every time we elect candidates who know next to nothing about how Democracy works, and care only for people who look, sound and believe as they do, we dishonor those who came before us and we doom those who will come after we have gone.


America The Beautiful, this alleged Land of the Free, is teetering on the edge of a deep and dark abyss and her only hope for survival is if We The People recognize that the Ballot is all that stands between Freedom and Fascism.

–– Y. Not?! (aka Brooke Jones)

WrittenByBrookeJones.com

Guess Who’s Spreading Covid…

As of this writing (June 6, 2022) there are more cases of Covid than there were one year ago, and because people are foolish, or ill-informed, or uninformed (pick one), not only is the virus known as “Covid” not gone, it is spreading, and it will continue to spread, and to kill, until we wake up to these realities:

#1) Covid is a virus

#2) Viruses are alive

#3) Covid is a living (alien) force

#4) The Human Race is under attack by a Life Force known as Covid

#5) As of June 6, 2022, Covid has killed more than one million Americans

#6) As of June 6, 2022, Covid has killed more than six million people world-wide

#7) As of June 6, 2022, more than 500 million people around the world are sick with Covid!

The longer we allow Covid to live, the more it will mutate. The more it mutates, the sooner it becomes immune to our vaccinations and treatments! The more it mutates, the more it spreads. The more it spreads, the more it kills!  What more do you need to know???

If you go to a theater…if you go to a concert…if you get on a bus, or a plane, or a subway — wear a mask. If not for your own safety, then for your Granny’s, or your nephew’s, or for the safety of that Bag Boy at your neighborhood grocery store, who might have grown up and discovered the cure for Cancer! 

To those who believe that America is under seige…to those who feel a patriotic duty to protect this nation from invaders…to those who decry the presence, in America, of immigrants, foreigners and natives of other lands — your fears are well-founded — the foreign invaders are here — and every time you fail to wear a mask in the presence of others, you are aiding and abetting that invading army known as… Covid!

We are under attack, and the bottom line is this:

To be unvaccinated and unmasked, or vaccinated but unmasked, while indoors in public, is to contribute to the continued existence and spread of an invading life force that has already killed more people than have been killed by every war ever fought on planet Earth, combined!  

On behalf of every human being currently drawing breath, I beseech you: WEAR A MASK OR STAY HOME!

— Y.Not?! (aka Brooke Jones) 6.6.2022

(To see more, please visit: WrittenByBrookeJones.com)

A Punishment Befitting…


THOSE WHO PROFIT FROM THE PAIN OF THE INNOCENT MUST BE MADE TO SUFFER!
If I had the power to do so, I would gather up every elected U.S. lawmaker who refused to vote to outlaw the sale of assault rifles and/or has failed to vote for legislation that strictly limits and controls the purchase of all guns. I would gather them up and I would lock every one of them in a tiny, windowless room, alone. Once securely strapped into a chair, each of them would spend the next twelve hours being bombarded by images of the Uvalde victims, projected, floor-to-ceiling, on all four walls. For twelve hours, these alleged “Servants Of The People” would see nothing but pictures of the maimed and mutilated bodies of dying children, and they would hear nothing but the sound of every rifle shot and every horrifying SCREAM of the innocent victims, amplified to ear-drum shattering levels.

That is what should be done to every elected American lawmaker who has failed to vote to BAN the sale of the WMDs (Weapons of Mutilating Death) that are being used to maim and murder! That same punishment should be experienced by every policy-making official of the NRA as well as every CEO, Director or Owner of any company, organization or corporation that manufactures, distributes or sells those guns and accompanying ammunition.

When the subject is Guns In America, there are only two categories of people: those who cherish human life more than money or power, and those who cherish money or power more than human life. Which category do your elected officials belong in? Their voting history will provide you with that answer and, because votes cast by members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives are a matter of public record, how your elected officials voted is available for all to see. Go online and see for yourself, then, armed with that ammunition, each and every Election Day, vote — vote as if lives depend on the ballots we cast because… they do! Ballots can stop bullets!
Those who profit from the pain of the innocent must be made to suffer!

— Y. Not?! (aka Brooke Jones)

WrittenByBrookeJones.com

From Soup To NUTS!

For years…and years…and YEARS … bloated, bloviating white men MANdated that only white men were smart enough, educated enough, wise enough, to determine what their country would permit its citizens to do, and not do. When a small semblance of sanity reared its conscious head and the law of the land granted the vote to men of color, the bloated bloviaters decided that, in order to maintain their control of all things American, they would have to implement laws that made the possession of “hangie-down parts” no longer sufficient criterion for the casting of ballots. With that dubious decision was born the “Literacy Test” — exclusively given to illiterate, uneducated men for the sole purpose of preventing them from voting.

I mention this… why? Well, because this girl has had e-flipping-nuff!  Raise your hand if you agree with the following suggestion:  From this day forward, (only because it can’t be done retroactively…more’s the pity), no American citizen should be permitted to hold any American elected office unless he or she has passed  the test that anyone who wishes to become a citizen of this country is required to pass. 

If the law of the land required that one who cannot pass the current American Citizenship Test, cannot hold any American elected office, this country would have been spared the likes of President George W. “Africa is a nation…” Bush; and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor “Gazpacho Police” Greene and, of course, (p)Resident Donald “the Moon is part of Mars” Trump. [and if that  sentence were any longer, it would be on Death Row]

I could go on. The list of idiotic statements uttered by elected American idiots is, after all, painfully long, (and getting longer by the day), but a girl can only take so much pain and, frankly, Greene’s Gazpacho Nazis have exceeded my daily limit.

Please, I beg of you America, let us ensure that our nation is ruled by sentient beings whose IQ is greater than their waistline, and whose education includes a working knowledge of history, geography, and the difference between right and wrong. Let us, at the very least, be governed by people who find ignorance abhorrent and education laudable.

To quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard, people, can we please just: “Make it so!”

— “Y.Not?!” (aka: Brooke Jones)

WrittenByBrookeJones.com

“She Said WHAT?”!!??

What with everybody running around with their hair on fire over the words that fell out of Karen Johnson’s face on “The View” the other day — Karen Johnson is Whoopi Goldberg’s birth name, by the way –this would be an excellent time for a brief History Lesson. Well, actually, this will be something of a HERstory Lesson. (Take notes. The way things are playing out in this sorry world, it is inevitable that there WILL be a test at some point in the not-too-distant future!)

I begin today’s Lesson with the following piece of Reality: Judaism IS a Race – a “Tribal Race”– and one is Jewish if, and only if, one’s Biological mother is Jewish. The “Religious” aspect has to do with the “Belief System” to which those of the Jewish Persuasion tend to adhere. However, unlike Christianity, or Catholicism, or Hinduism, (or dozens of other “Religions”), Judaism is quite literally “rooted” in GENEOLOGY, which is why, while one can adhere to or practice the basic tenents of the Jewish “Religion”, one cannot choose to become Jewish because in order to be Jewish, one must be born the biological off-spring of a Jewish woman, whose mother was the biological off-spring of a Jewish woman, whose mother was also the biological off-spring of…etc, etc, etc. (my condolences to the late, great Sammy Davis, Jr). Of course, this matriarchal lineage dogma rather crumbles if you go back 5,000-plus years, at which point you arrive at an interesting piece of work by the name of Abraham, who is known as “The FATHER of Judaism”…and please do not ask me to explain THAT!

If you are not already sufficiently confused, allow me to include another interesting “factoid“: Abraham is also known as “The Father of Islam“. Why? Well, because before Abe (who, at the time, was a randy 900-plus-years-old) fathered a son named Isaac (the original “good Jewish boy”), he (Abe), ably assisted by Hagar, his (euphemism alert) “maid“, fathered a son he named Ishmael (yes, we shall “call him Ishmael”, Mr. Melville) — a son he and his 900-plus-year-old wife, Sarah (who was the biological mother of Isaac, though NOT the biological mother of Ishmael — don’t get me started) — soon EVICTED (thus giving us the original “Real Housewives of Palestine”)…AND from Ishmael came… Muhammed, and from Muhammed came…”Islam“…making old Abe the father of the world’s two oldest Religions: Judaism and Islam, BOTH of which are rooted in… Genealogy. And thus ends today’s episode of “She said WHAT???”

Shalom and As-Salamu Alaykum.

— Y.Not?! (aka: Brooke Jones)

Want more? If you’re “twisted” enough to answer that question in the affirmative, please seek professional help AND visit: https://www.writtenbybrookejones.com