Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Blowers in the Wind

When humans wish to demonstrate that their species alone has true intelligence, then they must be very selective about the evidence they present. My case in point is the human capacity for operating a “blower” to clear leaves and dirt from pavement. Possibly even more astounding is the human capacity to pay someone else to do it.

Perhaps they never have heard about our friends “wind” and “rain” who humbly perform the task with neither clamor nor pollution. Maybe they are unfamiliar also with “brooms”. Mother nature decorates with fallen chlorophyl factories and bits of dirt the asphalt zones that defend our feet against contact with earth. This is an offense. Instead of Varoom why not a broom?

The problem is, and I truly believe this, the broom is not a stupid enough solution to their neurosis . Why can't some transient dirt and leaves lay upon the paving? And why must the space support for all time no sign of the organic? It is in the human brain that nature once vanquished shall remain vanquished. She may mount no comeback however pitiful and ineffectual.

There you have it. At any time of the day you may hear a man with a blower moving leaves off pavement as wind blows more on. Just yesterday I witnessed a man blowing leaves off a public highway. No other animal is interested in this project. It is either sheer genius and unavailable to my ordinary brain and the platypus' or clear evidence that humans actually are the only animals without true intelligence.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Field and Stream

For some reason I get free copies of Field and Stream in the mail. They could leave off the stream part. It’s almost all hunting. Hunting these days, I have learned, is buying a can of deer whiz to splash on a tree, then climb up the tree and sit on a platform waiting for some deer attracted by those pretzels you’re eating, and bushwack him or her. The purpose of all this is to make the deer glad to pose for pictures. If the deers had any sense, they’d scope the pattern and make themselves more friendly, saving everybody a lot of trouble.

Say what you want about hunters and hunting, like them or revile them, I have learned that people who read hunting magazines, presumably hunters, have something many have long suspected of conservative talk-show hosts - little dicks. Yep – that’s right – three full page ads again this month – get your bigger dick right here!

No kidding. And in case you’re worried that ordering a bigger dick means you have a small one – don’t be. Apparently even guys with way too big dicks wish it was bigger. Of the purpose I’m not sure. The only reason I can see why every guy wants his Johnson to be a Johansen is so we don’t have to walk so far to pee. You know, stroll halfway into the men’s room and Put out that fire! Over a lifetime that could save lots of strolling. Of course Field and Stream is famous as a wholesome magazine that can lure the coming generation off the streets and into the woods, so we must assume today’s kids will be ordering their dick dip or penis pills in preparation for manhood. Probably the younger they start the bigger it gets. Maybe they won’t even need a super high powered rifle. They’ll just sit up there in the tree and whack down Bambi with their giant appendage. I guess that’s another use.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

I have watched my self retreat from life’s pleasures....

Over the last month and a half I have watched my self retreat from life’s pleasures. It began with the morning I awoke with a balloon where my left foot had been. The affliction stayed and so, lacking a personal physician, I drove down to the emergency room at 7:30 Thursday morning. I lucked into an empty waiting room, a circumstance I had dared to hope for with my early arrival. I was ushered quickly into my own room where the doctor believed it might be gout until my blood test indicated otherwise. He was an oriental sort of guy and dove right into my complaint. He ordered X-Rays and then connected me to an intravenous anti-inflammatory drug bolstered by anti-biotic in case it was an infection. Five hours later I was free to go and the deflated foot felt fine enough that I took the boys and their friends to Blue Springs and had a great time swimming and snorkeling. I began the course of prescription antibiotic that night yet by morning the foot was back looking like a balloon-animal rooster, my toes as the comb.

I hobbled back in the next morning but not early enough and a bad choice of days. Progress was slow, the triage nurse informed me, because on Friday people don’t come to work. Many people who arrived after me went in ahead of me, I was told because they didn’t require a room. Six hours later I was beckoned through the swinging doors of hope to wait with a personable therapist of some sort who finally said, “I’m going to go get the man. This guy knows everything.”

He returned a half hour later with a dumpy guy in a doctor suit who looked at my foot from a comfortable distance and admitted he didn’t know what was wrong with it. Then they let me go with advice to keep it up and iced.

It has been a month with my left foot up and regularly iced. At first the pain was like having a kidney stone in my foot but that eased. The boys’ mother, not a terribly solicitous person by nature, treated me kindly at first, even bringing me food. This lasted a few days. After that my constant presence on the couch was tolerated with no thick veil of impatience. Sympathy also drained from the boys and my inert state became a source of amusement for them. Many times I rose to hobble to the bathroom, a dreaded and painful move at best, only to find one crutch shorter than the other. Rare was the morning I did not awake with a penis drawn on my forehead. Disabused of any chance at retaliation, I was poked, prodded, squirted and farted upon with clear similarities to the wolf pack when the leader has gone down. I could easily imagine the affectionate tricks they would play on me if I were attached to a breathing tube. And I saw plainly what fun they will have with my body should I chance to die. I also knew with a certainty that when I go to my grave it will be as a dickhead. This will be the last sight of me on earth and how I will be remembered. Of this I am sure.

I paid another visit to the Emergency Room to complain of my malingering. It was early and not a Friday and I got right in. This doctor was a middle age woman who called me “kid” as if she were Bogart and I Bacall. This had the intended effect of showing me things weren’t so serious after all and I felt immediately at ease.

“How ya doin kid?”

“Been better.”

She held my foot. “This isn’t you, kid. You’re too healthy for this kind of thing. This is for diabetics and overweight people.”

She looked at the X-Rays which indicated arthritis to her so she ordered a cat-scan for greater detail. The cat-scan showed her that my foot and ankle bones are perfect and arthritis free. This result didn’t help her diagnosis so she gave up although she did opine that the earlier antibiotic had been pointless. Humphrey prescribed more anti-inflammatory drugs. I suspect I’ll be back with a kidney problem.

I spend my recumbent days now plotting revenge on the children, should I ever again be capable of it. In the meantime my left leg has atrophied practically to a skin covered series of bones, an almost unending source of hilarity for my loving offspring.

I have gone to the Jewett Orthopaedic Clinic and been examined by a doctor who specializes in ankles. At last I must get my answer. He tries to twist my ankle, compares it to the right one which he can twist, pokes and finds the tender spots, makes me try to stand on my toes, views cat scan, X-Ray and blood test and at the end of it says he doesn’t know what’s causing my problem though he’s sure it isn’t gout; but I should take some more anti-inflammatory drugs and he gave me a prescription for a five hundred dollar ankle brace.

I’ve decided I’m just going to walk on the damn thing how it is, come what may, because I may never get another chance.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Belly Button

The first time he saw his belly button – that remarkable socket into which the universe had plugged itself, through which all living had flowed as he blasted from the great eternal oblivion of notness into a seventy year battle to live and exult on a planet he had evolved on but never known about - it was no longer connected by anything and he chased his belly to find the rest.

It was an early epiphany, a huge moment full of running, swimming, rolling downhill, escaping your mother and ’57 Corvettes; but it lacked the impact of the first time he didn’t see it.

“Uh, what the hell?” he said to the world as much as to his wife in the bathroom.

“What the living hell?” in a voice more panicked than picnicked, betraying a tone of realization usurping disbelief.

“Did you say something, honey?”

He tried to find the words but didn’t want her to know, was suddenly ashamed as a fetid, unclean thing. She wouldn’t have him anymore. He stole another glance at his toned, hairless now featureless belly, ran a hand over it with wonder. He wanted desperately to get her out here, have a look, for surely she would see what he couldn’t for some reason. But he couldn’t win that one. He had no navel or no mind and he couldn’t decide which he wanted to keep.

He heard the shower start. “Well, you see, honey, it seems my belly button has gone missing. Isn’t that kind of funny?”

“What do you mean, you silly freak? Let me see.”

She would pseudo-seductively waltz over, bathrobe loosely tied. “That’s odd, she would say on close examination, the bathrobe involuntarily closing up. “Do you have a hernia or something?”

You can see Kirk Douglas in everybody’s torso if you stare long enough. She’d run her hand across my uninterrupted abs. “No dimple, where’s Kirk? Come on, Kirky Kirky, where are you hiding?” she’d say in the calm before the storm. Then, “what are you??!?” she’d scream terror stricken, running out the house naked onto the admiring lawn.

The shower stopped. “That was quick. Maybe she already knows. Hell, I’ve been laying here asleep all damn night. ‘Honey, did you take my navel? Come on now, where is it? I need it for work you know. Suppose Mr. Feeney saw me without it.’”

“Strict policy here. Proper bellies only. No navel, no job.”

“Wouldn’t want me to lose my job would you?”

“You still there, darling?” the voice came from the bathroom.

“Of course. Why?”

“Oh, I just thought you might have already left. Do you happen to have my belly button?”

Remember when you had that horrible stomach ache, then farted for about a minute until it went away? Or when…..

“You too, eh?

And then she exited from the bathrobe in front of the mirror and he saw his belly button on her back, not even opposite her own but between the shoulder blades. It was all out in the open now. He went to her and felt it.

“God damn honey – look at your back,” he said, relieved that it wasn’t just him and happy to at least see his belly button somewhere.

“I can’t do that, you know. Why? What’s wrong?” she said a little panicked and picnicked.

“Do you feel this?” he said gently, inserting an index finger and scouring for lint.

“Ai! What are you doing?”

“Listen. I think we’ve entered a transmigratory phase where our body parts start mingling,” noticing a familiar breast hanging from his arm at the moment she screamed.

“It’s time we got divorced.”

“I believe you’re right,” he said through a mouth he’d known before only from the outside.

That’s when the ominous sucking started up. He followed the sound to its source that was his belly button turned wide vacuum cleaner nozzle and his wife an old fashioned Electrolux, great for picnics and panicking. Sure, it got him and he went into the most amazing strawberry Jello and a giant stuck his huge spoon in and his belly button moved on.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Trump Card

Once in a while I get talking politics with someone who finally must point out that the United States is the greatest country in the world although he's never been to another one. This is his trump card, the one he pulls out when all else fails, usually in an heroic attempt to defend something indefensible, like the last eight years; intended to validate all his previous arguments. I mean, right. Shouldn’t I surrender? How can anybody argue with that?

I got to wondering where this comes from. Is it important for the person's self esteem that he live in the world's greatest country? So if he hailed from Andorra his rallying cry would be the same? Or does he truly believe the U.S. is the world's greatest country even without that title being conferred by a three person panel? And so then, considering how great all those other countries are, that means the U.S. probably can do no wrong and is above reproach?

After watching the All-Star game I'm thinking this country needs to be greater; for is own sake and for those other countries that need something to shoot for and not at. It needs to be a country that doesn't demonize marijuana while informing children trying to watch the All Star game without becoming emotionally scarred by Flomax ads, that they can't enjoy life without Miller beer and certainly, there is no real beauty in a summer day without Budweiser. (An optimist would hope kids will notice the correlation between beer and Flomax use and conclude that beer damages one’s ability to pee right; so then beer drinkers will need Flomax someday. They may even suspect collusion there; but that’s a lot to ask of a nine-year old concerned at the moment for the strength of his stream.) It needs to be a country that doesn't blatantly breed its next generation of alcohol and coffee addicted sheep who would rather sit around watching other people play games on tv then play games themselves. Hey – maybe it’s because Americans have learned not to try to enjoy a weekend without beer and it’s hard to engage in sports while inebriated. Easier to follow our swilling orders from the couch. The pusher man isn’t only on street corners. He’s in your living room.

If marijuana is a gateway drug to worse things, then a greater case can be made that beer is. Sure hard alcohol advertising was banned on television. Why not? They don’t need it when they can hook eight year olds on what a great idea beer is. The rest will follow. Beer companies get quite a bang for their television advertising buck and hard alcohol companies get a free ride.

So, yes –maybe we live in the greatest land in the world but its hyper-dependent population seems somewhat less magnificent.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Palatka

Palatka – most memorable Memorial Day parade ever – no floats, no marching band -– the lead old vet got to stand in the back of a pick-up truck, hands on the cab like a friendly bag of fertilizer. Next came walking vets in plumed hats. The Viet Nam vets looked more like they were there to protest the whole thing. And every little girl in town was Miss Something To Do With Blue Crabs, all in Tinker Bell dresses and gold hair bands. The absolute queen had the wave to an amazingly robotic degree. Her whole body seemed to pivot around the elbow. Most memorable, some guy riding a more gigantic Brahma bull then ever I imagined existed – like Mongol in the world’s greatest movie – followed by Barak Obama’s lost twin in a convertible, mayor of some other town around there. I yelled, “Barak Obama.” He looked around a bit sternly until he spotted me, then gave a wry smile and pointed his finger. He was followed, for some unknowable reason, unless it’s just because he offered to do it, by a George Bush look-alike. This mock-up was no slouch, a real pro with his career reaching for the bottom of the toilet. He was so authentic I felt like punching him. One guy got in just because he had a 70’s Eldorado convertible in pretty good shape. That was almost a float.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

This is the story I want to write

So here it is. This is the story I want to write. George bush and his cronies get kidnapped by an enterprising movie company/terrorist cell and sealed up in a pit somewhere with ventilation and a hidden video camera.

There they are with sufficient water to drink, immersed in the smell and feel of each others’ excrement, fighting over the random bits of food tossed down to them, revealing all their sorry character traits, strip em down to their elements, see if they’re better people without power or even worse - all live, bigger than the first Bush War, 24 hour coverage on CNN, sponsor revenues through the roof. Sponsorship becomes a bigger issue than saving them, like what products are too tasteless to represent the government in exile, after a period of conditioning it’s a free-for-all, hilarious toilet paper ads featuring administration look-alikes. It’s such a hit, nobody really wants to find them.

Coverage is not actually instantaneous. The signal can’t be broadcast straight from the hole or officials would have to admit they could find it and go rescue them. Videos are dropped off at different locations called in from phone booths.

But I can’t write that because I lack the expertise. It has to have a suspenseful buildup, kidnapping strategy, how they get around the Secret Service. I don’t know about any of that stuff. I’d just have Dick and George, Don and Richard and Condi runnin around nekkid out the back forty givin love to pigs and pullin the feathers out of live chickens. Secret Service is off pukin somewhere, helicopter comes over, drops a wide castnet on the whole ugly scene and hauls them up and off.

That’s what I’d write and it just ain’t good enough so I’m skipping all that and cutting right to them in their hole. Action.

It’s their fourth morning of captivity and Donald Rumsfeld is just waking up. “George, what the Hell is this?” he exclaims venomously, pointing at a small pile of feces with a tiny American flag stuck in it.

“Looks like Iwo Jima to me,” Bush smirks, then starts shaking and snuffling uncontrollably.

“That’s not what he’s talking about, George,” Dick Cheney puts in from the limit of his patience. “Rummy wants to know why it’s in his area.”

“Look. I’m the President of the United States . I can crap all over the free world if I want to.”

Richard Perle grabs him by the collar. “This isn’t the free world, you moron. If you don’t learn to…”

Rice squeezes Perle’s shoulder. “Let him go. We could be on camera.”

Meanwhile you’ve got George Bush’s father on tv proclaiming, “This will not stand,” and people all over the world wondering if he’s really just been talking about his penis all this time.

Rumors start flying around that some American special ops guys are behind this because nobody hates the Bush Bunch more than the CIA except General Boykin who thinks it was God stepped in and stole the election from Al Gore by creating Ralph Nader, disenfranchising black people, immaculately conceiving the butterfly ballot, getting Joe Lieberman to say, “Let’s don’t check all those phony military absentee ballots” and finally, after he couldn’t influence the Florida Supreme Court, by getting the United States Supreme Court to do the dirty work.

Back in the hole, these guys are getting skinnier because they’re not getting enough to eat and Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condi and Perle get thinking how they might get the same ration no matter how many of them were dining. And they’re all pretty tired of George Bush, whose presidency has reached his head and he expects special consideration.

“You know, I let myself be the president so you guys could do what the hell you wanted, have your war, whatever. But the blame’s all gonna go on me. I’m the one history’s gonna remember as the world’s worst president. So now it’s your turn to let me have most of the food,” he whined.

“We may need a constitutional amendment for this,” Rumsfeld says pensively. “If you eat the president, does that make you the president?”

Cheney clears his throat. “I believe most cannibalistic tribes assume they get the powers of whomever they eat.”

“That settles it then,” says Rumsfeld.

Network officials are horrified that with Bush gone the ratings could slip but just then Wolfowitz dumps a load of delicious tv dinners in the hole. It would just go on, kind of like that, forever. It would be funny. Anyway, that's the idea. Don't think I'll ever get around to writing it.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Yep, Indians are nice like that

I was just thinking about how we finally got shed of the Bush family, kind of like getting all the leeches burnt off your body, and how seems like it took George Bush to make even a black man look good to the American public. And then I was thinking how excited the remaining Americans Indians must be about how we overcame race and all like that; after the Europeans pretty much exterminated them and then had to reach clean across the Atlantic to find a minority to exalt so magnificently. You know – to show how far we’ve come. Yep. Haven’t heard much about it from the Indians’ viewpoint but I’ll bet they’re squatting in their teepees talking how glad they are for us getting over our prejudices and all and being just one big happy family now. Yep. Indians are nice like that.