Political Correctitude

This blog is in crisis. Reviews are in and they are not good. A visitor here recently read one of my entries, “Free To Be Me, At Last” and became incensed enough to drop me a few lines of damnation, describing the post as a “witless homophobic manifesto.” Another reader reamed me vigorously for the “misogynistic” tone of a bit I put up called “Animal Husbandry.” The accusation that I hate women unsettles me; if my critic only knew how much Internet porn I consume on a weekly basis, they would know unequivocally how much I respect…no, idolize… beautiful women.

That was a joke.

Rather, it was supposed to be a joke and I am the butt of it, as I am in all of my dispatches. I mistakenly assumed this was obvious. You don’t have to read too deeply to grasp that fact. Or maybe you do. A reader I count as a friend and supporter offered that my blog posts were “too intellectual.” She went on to describe them as “ventose and atiloquent” so now I’m not sure who or what to believe. I could not disagree with her because I am not an etymologist. Yes, I tend to ramble in long-winded fashion, using fifteen words where fourteen will suffice about matters of no consequence whatsoever to anyone but myself… in 25 words or less. I apologize, something I do well because I do it compulsively, even for minor transgressions. Waiting on line at Starbuck’s, I routinely ask people ahead of me if they mind that I am sharing their air. I send condolence cards out at Christmas, apologizing to lost friends that I’m still around. When I arrive at parties, I issue preemptive, blanket apologies for anything I might do after I get a few Crantinis in me. I recognize I have a problem and I’m working on it: I signed up for “Timidity Management Classes” just yesterday.

Here is a deal: I will make an Act of Contrition for my run-on sentences if my critic will withdraw that hurtful crack about my being an “intellectual.” I also resent the homophobic charge: if I knew how to make friends, I’m certain a fair number, even a majority of them would be gay because so-called “real men”…average guys and regular Joes; the kind of men who plumb, electrify, and, unlike me, do real things for a living while following professional sports, for example… don’t want to hang with me. They tend to view me like most women do, as an underachieving weenie and a party poop extraordinaire.

Outside of  a small circle of friends, I do not have many buds who could pass for that Brawny paper towel guy who would be more handsome, honestly, if he would just lose the Fascist dictator moustache. (Note: for the record, I just checked my pantry and the Brawny paper towel guy does not have a moustache. I stand corrected. Never mind. )

A misogynistic homophobe doesn’t have much wiggle room sexually. Where do I place my passions? What remains for me to love? Cars? Food? Sheep?

Awww, baby…

…You’re My Everything!

The only category left is eunuch. I am too ugly and my feet are too big to be a concubine though I like to think I clean up well enough to make an excellent male escort for women with cataracts.

It’s as simple as this: we are all needy. We all have moist, empty holes we need to fill. How consenting adults…in any combination of sexes or species… choose to plug up those voids is none of my damn business and I would never make it so nor pass an opinion on such activities… except in any cases where small domestic animals might get hurt. If I’m guilty of anything, it is lazy writing; I reach too easily for hackneyed gags to pad out my page count. In future, I will be more thoughtful…at least up to the point where I have to expend energy and/or the effort cuts into my Angry Birds playing time, in which case I may have to fall back to uncomfortable clichés and stereotypes. Sorry…again.

As far as women go, well…I will go there too especially if it’s all the way, if you know what I mean. Despite anything I’ve posted, women are by far my favorite hominids even when they’re dressed in plaid shirts and jackboots. If one of them happens to have an axe to grind because of something I wrote, they are free to grind it here with me. If they want to peel off their clothes and maybe throw in a little bumping to make it more interesting, why that would be just peachy, too.

Something To Sneeze At (Part 3)

(By the way, if you’re just joining us, the topic du jour is Munchausen By Proxy and because it’s almost Mother’s Day, my saintly Irish Mom is the star of this continuing story. )

I wonder occasionally how my mother can afford these luxurious weekly visits to the clinic. She beefs non-stop about the lack of money in our household and my Dad’s unwillingness to assume any financial responsibility. The power company shuts off our electricity every other month for unpaid bills yet Mom drags us around to doctors like a professional dog-walker handling a pack of hounds. Mom’s idea of a weekend getaway is a belabored junket to the E.R. for whatever might be ailing one of her kids on any given weekend; she took me to the hospital on more than one occasion for what turned out to be constipation.

An hour or so of additional waiting passes and I am called at last into a private session with an actual doctor. His name is Dr. Fox, the Head Cheese of this weird outfit; he examines the injection sites and details any reactions in a file.

“Looks like you’ve got a good reaction there,” he mumbles while he mercilessly squeezes a huge, red bump on my arm. “And there, too…” as a sore spot bursts and bleeds under his therapeutic thumbnail.

“So… what does that mean?” I ask him as humbly as I can. He continues to make notations; does not even look at me when he answers, “Looks like you’re allergic to chocolate…and cherries…and, let’s see, dust mite urine, coyote spore, jet fuel and spent nuclear fuel rods…” And these are only the result from this week’s testing! He closes up his paperwork and prepares one, last injection for me, sticking me almost painlessly being the pro that he is. I say thanks, see you next week, etc.; on my way out, he tells me to send in my brother or sister next. I exit his office feeling relieved that the ordeal is over, for this week at least… and the unthinkable slowly dawns on me: the doctor is lying.

Nobody gave me chocolate… which I normally consume on a daily basis, without adverse effects. And there was no syringe containing anything even remotely resembling cherries. Dust mites, I don’t know about, but there are dust bunnies the size of buffalo under my bunk at home which are utterly harmless, so far as I can tell.

The doctor is lying and this is not an allergy clinic and I will be dragged, protesting all he way, to at least another year’s worth of Tuesday morning hospital visits after this one, for the same treatments and disinformation when I’d dare to ask the question, “Uh, excuse me but, like, what the f**k’s going on here?”

The question will never get answered. I’ll never know what was so wrong with me that I had to be needled so constantly by student nurses and mysterious doctors.

And I’ll never know exactly why, whenever I watch a documentary about vivisection, I empathize abnormally, often to the point of tears with the test subject monkeys, stuck full of spikes hard-wired into their brains, who get nothing but a couple of bananas to show for their eager participation and “Gallant” good conduct.

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Something To Sneeze At (Part 2)

It is two hours later; we are at the clinic still awaiting our turn with the doctor and nurses. The hospital itself is an old, renowned Catholic institution; still outfitted with turn of the 19^th century fixtures like cage elevators, lead pipes over dingy yellow tile, and doctors who still wear headbands affixed with little mirrors that serve no purpose I can even imagine. The blood-spattered linoleum has been relentlessly polished over the decades into a surface so slick, you could play ice hockey on it. Or some annoying variation of the game my brother and I would improvise to kill boredom, like using wadded-up newspaper for a puck and whichever dormant old lady’s legs sat far enough apart to make a reasonable target for a goal. The stench of alcohol and formaldehyde is inescapable; so is the moaning and weeping coming from the nearby ER. There are sad, ancient folks parked in wooden wheelchairs with IV stands, left alone in hallways to mummify; some with cobwebs in their wheelchair spokes. I nod hello to one of these prehistoric patients, wearing a faded War Veteran’s cap and he grins back at me, revealing a deep, black hole, not a tooth in his head. The odor from his rotted gums starts to peel skin from my face just as my Mom drags me away by my earlobe.

In the waiting area, we sit on rock-hard, mahogany benches; row after row of them filled with antsy kids and harried Moms. My sisters argue between themselves, hissing, and hair pulling, fighting over dolls and a pitiful selection of phlegmy, old toys provided by the staff to entertain their younger patients. My younger brother, uncontrollable even in his most passive state, is always notorious at the Allergy Clinic. He fidgets and whines incessantly, “I wanna go home!”; “When are we leaving?”; “I hate this place…” and he picks fights with other kids to keep himself amused. Mom referees us with what I initially regard as saintly patience: I will discover later that her secret formula for infinite tolerance is her “nerve pills,” a steady flow of tranquilizers.

Now I’m working my way through the same old pile of Highlights For Children magazine, alleged “fun” for kids in the form of puzzles, jokes, stories and comic pages, all of which contain sub-textual or overt instructions on how to be a good boy. By this point, after dozens of Tuesdays in a row, I have the whole pile of back issues memorized, especially the comic adventures of “Goofus And Gallant.” “Gallant,” who does everything correctly, is a total dickhead. As I see it, his counterpart “Goofus” is the far cooler guy because he is slovenly and rude like I am. He leers at girls and, as he is drawn, in filthy clothing, with flies buzzing around his head, I get the sense he has disgusting toilet habits, which makes him a free and kindred spirit in my book. Finally, after what feels like a century of uncomfortable bench warming, we get the nod and go inside for the first part of our “treatments.”

Allergy Clinic is all about injections. Nervous, rookie nurse nuns who study at the school next door to the hospital administer these with conspicuous trepidation. Allergy Clinic is their Proving Ground. They sweat; they work far too slowly, procrastinating with meaningless chat, asking me what I’d like to be when I grow up, or what’s my favorite sport while they take an unnecessary minute to coax the needle into my skin, dispense the juice then, tug the emptied syringe out. Typically, I receive five or six injections of clear, mystery liquids in the span of about ten minutes from antique syringes, the old school, reusable kind, made of crystal and stainless steel; sterilized in pressurized steam cookers between customers. These are bigger and nastier than the disposable sort, which will become popular soon. This needlepoint is new curriculum for the budding Sisters of St. Phlebotomy who often break off needles during the stick…or go as deep as bone, or casually pop an artery… on their first attempts. Some need two or three sticks to get it just right. Once, while I was ogling a young novitiate who was Way Too Hot for the nunnery, she accidentally left the sharp embedded in my arm. I take my torture stoically because that is how Goofus would handle the situation: he would never admit to feeling pain, and probably say something like “Is that all you got, honey?” Then, hospital or no, he’d spit his sloppy bubble gum wad casually onto the floor. But inside, both Goofus and I are desperate, terrorized by the nursing nuns, smarting from the stings of five clumsy injections in a row.

My nurse and nun in training knows she blew this one because she skipped the chapter on the remedy. She paces back and forth, calling in a polite whisper for another Sister to come and bail her out ASAP, but not necessarily “STAT” so she can avoid embarrassment… or discipline. While we wait, we chat. She dabs alcohol on the blood seeping from my arm. Truthfully, I’m not really feeling a lot of pain because she’s got her arm around me now for comfort, she’s tending to my tiny wound and pressing her uniform-constricted tits against my head. No sloppy green scrubs here; nurses still starch themselves tight and white for work in this era. She’s no more than eighteen years old; she smells like the most perfect gardenia on the bush and it dawns on me that I, Mike, already the Crown Prince weenie of my second grade class, may well be the only young man who ever sullies her gorgeousness. Help finally arrives in the form of an older, more experienced nurse who patiently shows her rookie how to locate the embedded sharp and extract it, something the veteran nurse does in one, searing nanosecond of pain.

My wild brother fears needles intensely and bolts when the tray of loaded syringes comes out. After a few minutes of tearing like a rabid dog, he is subdued and restrained to get his shots. All the while, my sisters bitch and bawl incessantly.

I cannot fault them for their fear. Why all these needles? What are they giving me, I wonder while they bustle crisply about their duties. After these first shots are administered, we move on to phase two of the procedure: more waiting on hard wooden benches. Another hour and a half of memorizing old magazines or, if we’re lucky, someone will bang the ancient TV set in the corner of the room back to life and finagle its rabbit ears until we get some cartoons on the box. And we all wait…waiting for reactions to the injections we just received. Sometimes, nothing happens; occasionally, my biceps will blow up to Macy Parade Popeye size. Or a rash will come over me, with terrible, itchy hives. In rare instances, one of us might puke or pass out to be revived after a minute by the reek of ammonia burning straight up your nostrils from a little, broken glass vial a nurse is holding to your nose.

I ask my mother what this place is all about and she says, “It’s an allergy clinic, smartass.” She fumbles in her purse for a nerve pill. “Why do you think you’re here? To find out what you’re allergic to!” At this exact moment, a gurney wheels out of an adjacent room. There is an old man riding it; his face is beet-red, what is left of his hair is standing on-end and he has a big chunk of rubber something clenched in his teeth. His spine is arced up and he is shaking all over.

“Jesus, what’s he allergic to?” I ask my Mom. She leans in close and whispers, “He just had electro shock therapy…and if you’re not good, you’re next!”

“Electric shock?! What’s that for?” I raise my voice a little too loud so that people still waiting, peer over their magazines and newspapers at me.

“Shhh! He’s probably got a brain tumor!” Mom whispers her answer but I am still not buying. “Then what the hell am I here for?” I am so spooked by this point that my bladder leaks a few drops before I can consciously squeeze its valve shut. “Because,” my Mother leans down to my level, glaring bullets, “…you’re always sick!” And she tugs my ear painfully, which is how she always punctuates the end of conversations she does not care to continue.

(To be continued…)

Something To Sneeze At

(Today’s offering is another true story from the archives.  In deference to the readership’s busy blog-hopping schedule, I have divided the story into three roughly equal posts. Here’s part one. I’ve ALMOST all but given up on the goal of getting a laugh out of these stories but I’d be equally pleased if the story elicits, say, a bemused smile every other paragraph.   Like most of the stories I’ve posted here, this one is eerie fare so readers beware. For maximum fun, you might want to read this aloud while affecting your very best Rod Serling, “Twilght Zone” narrator impression.  As always, feedback is welcome, even craved but you can relax as there will not be a quiz when you’ve finished reading the material. )

We are in a community just outside the city limits of Philadelphia. It is the very early morning of any given Tuesday circa 1962. I am fourth in a quail line of siblings, scurrying behind Mom, hustling to catch a bus so we will be on time for our strange, Tuesday morning ritual at the hospital. My mother does not drive so this trip, which might take twenty minutes by car, will cost us more than an hour and involve a complex transfer to yet another bus line mid-journey. Miss either of two busses and we will miss our appointment. Show up tardy, the clinicians will bump us to the end of a long line of sickly pups and force us to wait overtime to receive our “special treatments.”

Finally, we catch our bus by chasing it down, pounding on the closed door, and crying out for the driver’s mercy just as he accelerates away from the curb. For any bus enthusiasts out there, all three or four of you, we are riding in a “Wolverine” bus of a design popular in the era, a green, smog-farting, and diesel-grimy aluminum whale.

Busses suck when they’re packed past capacity. This morning’s bus creeps behind traffic so slowly you’d think a dozen, whip-lashed movie slaves are pulling it. Every other block, the driver stops to discharge passengers and take on more riders. One lucky passenger escapes out the back door for every three who climb aboard in front. We find seats in the rear, inside the dome-like humpback, where it reeks of urine. Diesel fumes and soot spew up through cracks in the floorboard. There is no hope for ventilation; the windows seem welded shut. There is no air conditioning in summer or too much heat in winter, compounded by the continuous crush of bodies that squeeze in at every stop along the way. Our bus is overloaded now; so top-heavy, its undercarriage gouges chunks of asphalt from every pothole, and it tips dangerously at every wide turn.

I grow more nauseous by the minute, struggling to keep from blowing breakfast into the SRO crowd pressing against me. A tired, greasy guy, heading home from his graveyard shift, casually lights up a cigarette as do many others in our trash-compacted throng, despite the conspicuous “No Smoking” signs. A chubby lady, puffing on a Camel, presses her disgusting tummy roll against my head; she glares at me because she wants my seat. All little gentlemen should relinquish their seat immediately to unfortunate women who are forced to stand, but I am not feeling all that knightly right now. I cannot even open my mouth for fear blueberry Pop-Tarts and soft-boiled eggs will fly out instead of the courteous offer Mrs. Impatient Lard Bucket desires.

I hate this regular bus ride because I dread our ultimate destination. We are bound for our weekly visit to the “Allergy Clinic,” an Inner Circle of Hell Dante forgot to catalog.

(To Be Continued)

Another Random Excerpt

( I confess. I’ve got nothing new tonight. Zilch. Nada. I’m bereft. I have a huge writer’s blockhead ache, the ghastly migraine that comes from staring at a blinking cursor for too many hours at a stretch. Also, I spent the better part of this evening trying to figure out why Lindsay Lohan got an invite to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner last night and I did not. That’s a genuine headscratcher from where I sit…she never goes anywhere without me…except jail, of course.)

On these desperate occasions, rather than post yet another obscenely cute picture of my dog dressed in a shirt and tie, pretending to be an accountant, I opt for an even lazier tactic and scour through old files for material to cut and paste into this space. As always, these are absolutely true stories culled from a sprawling, unpublished epic concerning my formative years growing up as one of a family of serious nutjobs.)

…the whole disaster was my older sister Mary’s idea; we were only following her orders.

A series of hot and humid summer days had spawned some nasty weather that week. While Philadelphia is no Tornado Alley, we would get our share of spooky thunderstorms in their season. Occasionally some ugly weather worked its way north of the Mason-Dixon, bringing tornado alerts and a rare funnel cloud.

This particular day was the worst of that summer. The sky was greenish-black; hail came sideways on Armageddon wind with end-of-the-world thunder and lightning. Dire reports on the TV and radio warned residents to prepare for the unimaginable and watch the skies for funnel clouds.

Since Dad was usually absent, often M.I.A. on benders, and Mom worked full- time, my oldest sister Mary became surrogate parent designate in our family. Unfortunately, her charges were four junior siblings with varying degrees of mental illness and pre-juvenile delinquency. While she tried her best to maintain order, even going as far as attempting to tame our table manners, she would have had a better shot teaching feral cats how to play, and lose graciously, at Scrabble.

Despite her white trash upbringing, Mary has always spoken the Queen’s English…the Queen of Planet Mars, to be precise. In an over-eager attempt to distinguish herself from the savages with whom she was reared, Mary started putting on airs before she even reached high school, enunciating every “syl-LAB-bue-well” as if she were a Royal Princess ruling over a polyglot of interplanetary exchange students and UK upper crust. On the infamous Tornado Day, young Mary was at the helm. As the weather worsened, she implemented the single weirdest emergency disaster plan I have ever heard and we younglings were too frightened to do anything but obey.

Voracious reader and by far the most academic in the family, Mary learned how to prepare for a tornado from a library book. Her first step involved opening all the windows and doors. This would allegedly prevent the house from imploding by equalizing the pressure… or, as she put it, “ecch-qwawl-eezing thee press-ssee-yore”… between our shanty and the vacuum inside a tornado.

The next key step and in her mind, the most important, was to turn over all the furniture, pull all drawers out of cabinets, rip mattresses from beds, and upset every single thing standing in the house. The house had to be trashed thoroughly to prevent the tornado from trashing it. By preemptively turning the household into rubbish, none of us could be killed by flying debris or falling objects… because, obviously, these would have already flown and/or fallen. Again, Mary’s logic made sense because she brought home the good grades and I had standing orders from my Mother to do what my sister said.

This twister from Hell would meet its match in the Sadowski kids. A tiny, overmatched Polish clan of plucky youngsters would deny the storm its wrath with our combined muscle and brainpower. After a cheer of solidarity, we nominated our older sister for a Nobel Prize and with the Angel of Death leaning on the doorbell, all leapt into action. Everything got toppled and overturned. We ran shrieking from room to room, a midget wrecking crew hopped up on pure panic. We spared no room.

The last step in Mary’s Disaster Plan was to gather provisions and head for the basement, specifically the southwest corner of the basement. According to Mary, this was the safest spot when tornadoes strike. Each kid grabbed a packet of Pop Tarts, a raincoat and, with her perfect flare for melodrama inherited from my Mom, Mary allowed each to carry one, and only one, favorite stuffed animal. This was the worst agony for me; not only did my stuffed animals have names and individual personalities, I had major career plans for all of them. To choose life or death for them at such a tender age was heart-rending so I drew straws. The losers staunchly said goodbye, facing their fate with supreme courage, like Londoners in the Blitz. It was surely one of the Finest Hours in the history of toys.

We went down to the basement just as the deluge broke. Rain poured in through open windows and doors; the basement began to flood, filling the corner where we were cowering in a huddle. This was probably the closest the family ever came together though I was convinced at that point, we would all be blown into different counties by evening.

When the storm peaked, the power went out, doubling the terror of it all. Wave after wave of thunder showers battered the house for hours that afternoon while we moaned and cried down in the cellar, waiting for the freight-train roar that would signal an approaching whirlwind and our certain doom.

Gazing back on the scene now through my gigantic, Wicked Witch o’ the West crystal ball, we all look fairly stupid, like some junior acting troupe auditioning to play kids on the Titanic, especially because we kept cringing until well after the storm blew over and rainbows came out; until Mom came home and our harrowing ordeal with the thunderstorms turned out to be the actual calm before the cataclysm.

The anticipated twister never actually arrived but my Mother raged well into the evening with the force of a Category 5 hurricane. Everybody caught hell. Mary could not make her case; her scientific explanations were utterly lost on my mother who barely had a cup of coffee in high school before dropping out to become a “beautician,” the popular and high-sounding euphemism for “hairdresser” back then.

Anyway, it was almost impossible for my sister to expound such a complex theory while being flogged around the back yard by a strap-wielding, crazy woman. Later, my Dad came home stewed as usual. It took a good ten, confused minutes for him to grasp the bizarre situation but he finally got it and doled out complementary spankings.

It only occurs to me now, many decades later, there may have been some method to Mary’s mania. I now suspect wrecking the house might have been her way of covering up the fact none of us had done our chores that day. She would testify we had done them but damn if a twister didn’t come along and screw up all our hard work! How’s that for dirty luck, Mom? If this was the case, Mary should have at least gotten a C+ for creativity instead of a bruised bottom.

Groaners : James Cameron’s Balls

( Here are a few items I’ve been preoccupied with lately. Actually, I don’t spend that much time thinking about James Cameron’s ‘nads. Certainly not as much as that old lady on the “Titanic” probably did. I mean, when they were making the movie…not sinking the ship. She was only a kid when the ship sank. And Jame’s Cameron wasn’t even born so how could she have been obsessing about his testicles. Whatever. This morning’s groaners represent the first installment of YET ANOTHER EXCITING NEW FEATURE here in The Sunny Corner; something to tune in for; something that sets it apart from all of the other websites devoted to James Cameron’s scrotum. Jokes deliberately designed to make you groan.  Read ‘em and weep; I’ll be off pursuing another career today : a job in the Secret Service! Black Op Blowjobs…now that’s my kind of work. )  

Filmmaker James Cameron recently took a submarine to the deepest part of the ocean and HE WENT DOWN THERE BY HIMSELF!  James Cameron has the hugest cajones in the solar system. We’re talking IMAX balls.

He dove down into the Mariana Trench, the bottommost place in the whole planet. I’m not sure how low he went but I heard he passed the guy who made “John Carter” for Disney along the way.

Obviously, James Cameron brought back pictures. I hear he’s got a really good one of Osama Bin Laden. Of course, we’ll all have to pay to see the film in 3-D on the movie screen. But here are a few pictures he leaked to the public.

He brought back a picture of the rotting carcass of a dead whale. 

Some weird-looking sea monster. 

And an as-yet-to-be-identified new life form!

Your guess is as good as mine.

James Cameron’s a trillionaire. He built his own submarine to go and visit the deepest hole in the world. He brought his own lunch, too. Sushi…

He might want to talk to a psychiatrist about the fact that he spent a billion dollars… he calls it his “folding money”…to go to the deepest, darkest pit in the Pacific Ocean. I wonder what he does when he wants to have some real fun. If you gave me a billion dollars, I would not use it to visit the deepest, darkest hole in the whole ocean.

If you gave me a billion dollars for an ocean cruise, you can bet I’m going somewhere where there are a lot of girls in really small bikinis.

I read somewhere that James Cameron actually did meet a mermaid on his dive. He met her on the way down, married her on the bottom, and got a divorce on the way back to the surface. I feel sorry for the guy; I’ve heard he’s had bad luck with women.

Excuse me but… he was only married to the woman who saved the human race from extinction, Sarah Conner! I would not call that “bad luck with women.”

Bad luck with marriage, maybe. He actually made a movie about being married. I think the movie won a special, technical Academy Award for best title. It was called “The Abyss.”

I can understand why it might be difficult to be married to a guy like James Cameron. What woman wants to be married to a guy with such low expectations?

The deepest canyon in the ocean is a seriously lonely place. I’ll bet when James Cameron got down there, he was sure sorry he divorced Sarah Conner.

Jesus, can you imagine what James Cameron’s “To-Do” list must look like?

“9am. Breakfast on Mars. ” “10am. Meet with real estate agent. Purchase Milky Way.” I think “Make history before lunch” is on every day of his calendar. Next, he’ll be the first guy to go into space on Richard Branson’s spaceship, the Virgin Millenium Falcon.

James Cameron will make a movie about going to the deepest part of the ocean then, he’ll go up in the Virgin Millenium Falcon and he’ll be the first person in outer space to watch his own movie about going to the deepest part of the ocean.

How’s that for a bi-polar disorder?

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Hair Lips

Git that damn dawg off my lawn or I'll eat him for lunch!

Few things in life puzzle me more than men who deliberately cultivate bizarre facial hair motifs. I’m not talking about scruffs like me who occasionally forgo the daily, bloodletting ritual of scraping hair off their chins at sunup. I’m talking about men like the asshole neighbor who accosted me earlier today and bitched about my dog’s pooping on his berm even as I was dutifully cleaning it up. I don’t know his name but we’ll call him Jerkoff Jim for the purpose of this essay. He’s a beefy, older guy; an ugly bastard. I’d peg him for a disgruntled Vietnam vet, carrying an outsized chip on his shoulder into a forced, early retirement from some greasy job that’s been outsourced to Honduras. He looks like the kind of guy who collects guns and “swings” with his fat buddies’ wives when they all pile into his RV, a condominium-on-wheels for weekly outings to Vegas.

Despite some nasty ideas I may have blogged here in the past, I’m actually an easy-going gentleman. (A euphemism for coward.) When Jerkoff Jim started his rant, I rejoined meekly with my standard subservient litany of apologies, the wrong tact with an aggressive moron like Jim because signs of weakness only rile him more deeply. He was so ticked off you’d think my Jack Russell crapped an I.E.D. on his lawn.

Under any other circumstances, I would have ignored him after a cursory apology and beat it out of there but my feet were frozen in place and my tongue went numb because Jerkoff Jim’s tirade came at me through the largest, stupidest handle-bar moustache I think I’ve ever seen in person. It was wider than his fat face and so shellacked with what I assumed must be “moustache wax” that I first thought it was a prop. Maybe Jim was an actor who just essayed the role of an old Western sheriff and had forgotten to remove his makeup. On closer inspection, I could see that the moustache was in fact well rooted in Jim’s unkempt nose hairs.

I couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing; couldn’t stop wondering how a man could size himself up in the mirror every morning with something that resembled a dead but neatly coiffed ferret on his upper lip, and think he looked even remotely “good.” What special insanity motivates a person to cultivate such a thing? 

Lookin' good !

The choice to wear a handle-bar moustache in this day and age is nothing more than a decision to advertise your own silliness. By extrapolation, the same goes for all, deliberately strange looking facial hair motifs like foot long beards, or those “pencil  moustaches” which make a man look like he just took a sip of shit soup, or the “goatee” in all its variations including the infamous Van Dyke, where the facial hair is groomed into an exaggerated point. This was an invention of early magicians, by the way, to distract onlookers from their sleight-of-hand. A weird facial hair motif might is excusable if it’s an accident of nature…like the occasional monkey-faced boy you read about who has a face full of out-of-control follicles… but the idea that men actively groom their facial hair so fastidiously underscores their absurd vanity.

I don’t trust men with beards. A guy with a beard is hiding something, like a cosmetic surgery scar, or a double chin or terrorist intentions. God knows what Santa Claus is concealing, considering the thickness of his beard and his fondness for taking children on his knees. I’ve never completely trusted Santa Claus because of that beard. In general, I think moustaches and beards are dopey and being a huge dope myself, I must confess that I went through a period where I wore a goatee and actually paid a barber to keep it on straight. When I started growing it and groomed it myself, the damn thing was so lopsided my mirror image looked like a figure from a Picasso sketch. I find photographs of myself from that brief period and routinely rip them up because the “goat” essentially sent a message to the world that I myself would never deliberately advertise: it was supposed to look “cool” and suggest to people that I was, in fact, a “cool” guy. Once, feeling a little too “cool” for my own good, I tried to grow a “soul patch,” a tiny beard that fits into that cleft between bottom lip and chin. My wife rightfully ridiculed me into shaving it off before I ever took it out in public; she said it looked like a pussy on my punum. She also reminded me that I can’t wring three decent chords out of a guitar and no one but rock stars and heroin-addicted jazz musicians can pull off  the “soul patch” look.

Just too sexy !

 I’m curious about the derivation of the expression “soul patch.”. I suspect it has some kind of sexual connotation and the notion that it’s lost on me makes me depressed; the word sex isn’t even in my active vocabulary anymore.

The truth of the matter is that shaving sucks. It hurts. You could take a surgeon’s laser scalpel to your morning stubble and it’s a still a pain in the face…which is actually a very sensitive area of the body because it contains so many nerve endings. Because I loathe razors, I once let someone talk me into trying an electric shaver. I made the almost fatal mistake of applying its whirling blades to a week’s worth of growth and wound up in an E.R. where the attending surgeon had to extract the rotating head from my cheek because it had become hopelessly…and painfully… entangled in my beard.

I consider myself lucky because I’m not so swarthy that I have to shave every day and I don’t have a job that necessarily requires me to look clean and trustworthy when I punch in. So I can get away with a few days growth here and there; nothing too eccentric just that alcoholic-coming-off-a-Lost-Weekend-bender look that women find so attractive. Which brings up another truth of the matter of facial hair: I’ve have yet to meet a woman who thinks a man with cultured facial hair is sexy although I haven’t really met that many women. Maybe there are some women who cream for guys with pointy goatees and pencil-thin moustaches but I’d really like to know why.

Let’s be honest here: beards and moustaches, it seems to me, must create impediments to any intimacy that requires close facial contact with sensitive erogenous body parts. Without going into detail, and because I’m not a woman and can’t vouch for this theory, I would venture that the man’s elaborate facial hair motif engenders itchiness and a lot of irritation where tenderness would be the order du jour. (Or nuit.) Put it this way and pardon my clumsy mixture of metaphors: I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus but I never saw Santa get to third base…or is it home plate?  And I’ll bet you all the presents under the tree it was because of that damn, stupid beard.

Love Me Do...or else!

      

Odds and Ends

A very generous reader answered my recent call for suggested sub-titles to this blog with a recommendation saying that he felt “peculiar” and “disturbing” might be better handles. I responded with appreciation for his constructive critique noting that the idea that he read deep enough into the site to cite examples of poor grammar and punctuation, and my apparent obsession with scatology thrilled me immensely.

The gentleman chided me for using “five dollar words” too frequently and noted that he could not find the “so-called humor” in some postings “even though he used a magnifying glass.” Again, thank you for the scrutiny, sir. I take constructive criticism well because it signifies that something I have written piqued a reader enough to reply. He should also know that I get my big words at a discount because I purchase them in bulk.

“Peculiar” reads to me like a four-star review. It has a ring of uniqueness about it; I like to think readers might discover items here, however  indigestible, that they cannot find elsewhere. “Disturbing” puzzled me because the reviewer implied that some parts of these articles indicated the author’s mental health was questionable.

I assure you it is not though I sometimes hallucinate that there are actual people out there who find my horseshit entertaining. In my e-mailed response, I asked my new follower not to begrudge me this one, meager fantasy because it is small part of my larger American Dream, which is to find an audience who might laugh at me and pony up a few bucks worth of compensation for these efforts of mine.

Am I being unrealistic? Certainly some other parts of my American Dream might be, such as the one where I’m a billionaire, philanthropic tech mogul or the one that finds me at the helm of an Academy Award winning film in the making that stars my girlfriend, Nicole Kidman. (Should she prove unavailable, I would happily substitute Rachel MacAdams or Anne Hathaway as long as they promise to sleep with the writer/director.) Still another part of the larger goal places me on the receiving end of truckloads of cash, golden accolades for my accomplishments and even more sexual favors from Hollywood’s leading ladies. (Christine Hendricks, are you reading?)

I am a modest guy, however and a steady flow of moderate-sized royalty checks from published material would suit me fine, thank you, as would the pending sale of my current screenplay, tentatively titled “Trash and Action.” The thing is practically writing itself as I am drafting it with Ryan Gosling in the lead so I’m having no trouble with dialogue. I have whole pages where my protagonist stares into the audience while they attempt to figure out what the f**k is bothering him. Jesus, I can almost feel the gusts from spinning turnstiles. Is that a winner I smell or is it just more manure? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the man who pegged me “peculiar” and “disturbing” went further in his review, indicating that he found most of these essays “unreadably over-written” and “unmarketable.” For the record, the fellow is a critic with honest credentials so I feel obligated to address his concerns and tailor future material accordingly.

Like I said, I take notes well and I mentioned to the man that I always write with an audience in mind. He saw likewise, describing my potential crowd as “nerds with Thesaurus’s”…which I cannot even pronounce… and “pretentious, artsy-fartsy, New Yorker, Vanity Fair magazine-o-philes.” I disagreed but I had to applaud the chap for his coinage, which is in itself, a bit wordy and pretentious, if I am permitted some honesty here.

In the end, a writer must always acquiesce for fear of confounding his readers or losing them altogether so I promised I would finish all future postings with a big K.I.S.S, pledging to Keep It Simple and Stupid…which oddly enough was the previous, questionable sub-title!…if he would do likewise and kiss something big, fat and hairy for me in return.

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A Full Thimble

Owing to circumstances beyond our control right now here in Mike’s Sunny Little Corner, we have a little too much time for idle speculation and the deeper sort of contemplation one does in a medically-induced coma. Frequently, the quiet reverie of financial failure and the solitude of agoraphobia lead to all manner of philosophical and occasionally scientific conjecture, such as how many parallel universes are as much fun as this one, and do they have any Kardashians there? Ennui can actually be enlightening if you skew your perspective with a positive attitude and the right combination of chemicals. Why just this morning while checking my bank balance and employment prospects, I was inspired to draw up this list of a few other things that will fit into my thimble this week.

- The collective grey matter of the Disney execs who green-lit “John Carter.”

- Rich Santorum’s chances of getting laid in Lincoln’s bedroom. (Still a chance, tho’)

- Geraldo Rivera’s fashion sense. (Hoodies = Targets)

- Rush Limbaugh’s “member.” (Or is that still on his shoulders?)

- Mitt Romney’s campaign manager’s gift for analogy. (Etch-A-Sketch for Prez.)

-And sadly, all of the Justice you can find in Sanford, Florida.

Random Excerpts

***EXCITING NEW FEATURE***

***All in Good Fun***

It occurred to me recently that, just as there is a time and place for every purpose under heaven, to paraphrase a popular psalm, there must be a slot for material excised from past writings. A very smart man once said save everything you write, even the crap you cut because you’ll eventually find a way to use it. Sorting through vast, disorganized files the other day, I had a small epiphany of sorts so arousing that I actually smoked a cigarette in its afterglow, something I haven’t done since 19xx:

Why clog up numerous hard drives with paragraphs deleted from stories when I CAN DUMP THEM HERE, ON MY BLOG where they’re instantly transformed from throwaways and discarded one-offs into INTRIGUING “CONTENT” to fill up my little corner of The Cloud. I initially drafted many of these items under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and so completely forgot them, I didn’t recognize them as mine. Poring over these retired discards, I was struck by how appropriate they are for this ongoing blog. As I am currently struggling with a case of Writer’s Block bordering on Existential Panic, I decided to recycle some old gems which still sparkle even out of context.

Think of it this way : I will post these paragraphs as some other bloggers might post superfluous photos of kittens dressed as uniformed employees, hookers or military personnel. You don’t really need to know why the kitties are dressed up or where they came from in their cute, little outfits to enjoy their pictures. Likewise, you don’t really need to know…or even want to know… where an occasional, stunningly inane paragraph or two comes from to marvel at it, right? I sure hope so because I don’t feel up to posting any more than this right now and I don’t have time to get my Jack Russell into her scuba gear for the camera.

Hence, this EXCITING NEW FEATURE that’s sure to titillate my seventeen million and TWO subscribers, all of whom owe me a thin dime, at the very least, for the pleasure I continue to provide them. I’m really bad at math but ten cents X seventeen million and two add up to a pretty swell nest egg, I think. In any case, it’s yours gratis for the nonce to make what you will of it. Perhaps one day, some perspicacious editor might find a way to glue it all together into a speedy download of pith for Nooks and Kindles everywhere but for now, I’m happy just to put it up here to confuse the crap out of anyone who happens across it.

Today’s RANDOM EXCERPT comes from an unpublished story about my earliest youth.  This and all future Random Excerpts are absolutely true-ish and only slightly embellished for best dramatic effect.

Other than that, I don’t know what to say save read ‘em and weep. Or chuckle. But no “giggling,” please. I’m not in this to elicit “giggling,” which is for children, not literate, thoughtful adults like us. You either laugh or become hopelessly confused. Those are my goals and I think these are indicative of good, mental health and a sunny outlook in general. If you don’t agree, well, I don’t care what ANYONE thinks of me ANYMORE and, in my incomplete book, that’s progress. Isn’t it? Yes, it is. Move on.

“…Peggy’s young mothering borrowed more pages from a Pit Bull Training Manual than Dr. Spock’s books, which were popular right around the time I did my years of diaper duty.

For reasons of her own I still cannot fathom, my mother nicknamed turds “Foodies.”

My inability to grasp the important distinction between the two items, excrement and sustenance, created a lot of much-needed mirth about the house though Mom, designated diaper wiper, rarely laughed. An offense like a double-dump in the diaper then, using the leakage for an impromptu Jackson Pollock on the wall, or an experimental snack to sustain your vigor in the playpen for hours at a stretch, would occasion an educational thrashing. She’d whack me, point to the pile of steaming fecal stuff, and shake her head back and forth slowly, admonishing “Noooo…bad! Ewww! FOODIES! Bad! Yuckee! FOODIES! No!” Each reprimand punctuated with another crack upside the cranium for emphasis…”

Please feel free to infer that it gets worse. You don’t need to see any more than what I’ve posted. I am curious, though. Has anybody else in the whole universe EVER heard ANYONE refer to stools as “Foodies?”

Or am I the only one?