Chuckleheads in the Inferno

Hello, seekers!

My dad used to pull out the greatest word from time to time. Whenever he was observing some assholish behavior, or even the genial-type stupidity on display at virtually every moment of every last living day, he would refer to the offender as a "chucklehead."

A chucklehead was generally the type of person I would later come to call an "asshole," but my dad is a gentle soul and preferred to call them chuckleheads.

I always liked this coinage, and someday I should ask him where he got it. It obviously has its roots in "knucklehead," but it seems gentler somehow, as if the person who is a chucklehead is a stoopnagle but not really in a horrible, bloatedly offensive way.

I also liked it because it reminded me of Chuckles, those horrid candies I would not now eat on a bet but loved as a kid even though I was never much of one for candy and that sort of thing. Do you know what Chuckles are? I think they still make them. They're little rectangles that come in a clear pack, and they have the dubious distinction of being little patties of colored sugar dusted with even more sugar. I became diabetic in my 40s, and eating one of them now would probably be the equivalent of stuffing a puffball mushroom in my mouth and waiting for the toxins to suck the life right out of me.

Chuckles were also notable because they were brightly colored, and the color was supposed to indicate the flavor of the particular Chuckle, but I am certain that was a ruse. Those damned things didn't taste any different from each other, no matter how much the package tried to persuade you that one was grape and one was orange and one was cherry and one was whatnot.

The flavor stuff was nonsense. I just associated the color of the Chuckle as being the actual flavor, like the red one tasted like red and the purple one tasted like purple, and tasting colors was a valuable skill for a child because it prepared me for what used to happen to me at Grateful Dead concerts.

So anyway, back to the point. I thought of my dad's "chuckleheads" comment when I passed an interesting event on the way home from work at 1:30 a.m. the other day.

There is a commercial strip near the town in which I live. This street has the usual collection of crummy little strip malls that no one goes to because you could never possibly get in and out of them, a few bars, a few diners, an off-track betting place and a number of other businesses, like one of those Sprint stores where when you go in you wonder how in God's name they ever produce enough suckers to make their nut.

So on this stretch of road there's also a strip club. It looks oddly out of place amid mattress outlets and whatnot, but there it sits, and next to it is a hellhole called Smokers' Paradise, where I would imagine they sell about 1,200 different brands of cigarettes. So since these places are about 20 yards apart I am guessing the town planners got exasperated and decided to put all the disreputable businesses in one little spot, maybe in hopes they get wiped out by a falling satellite or something.

I don't care much for strip clubs at my age, and if you need to know I think it is because I long ago adopted the theory that if you have seen two you have seen them all, so I can't quite fathom why someone would go in there and sit among a bunch of other men and watch such a display. I went in a few in my youth and it was always a bad experience. The first time I went in one, I was drunk in New Orleans and wound up getting a little grabby, if you catch my drift, and wound up getting tossed facefirst out of the place. So if nothing else, it was an instructional experience, but it sort of gave me a Pavlovian bad reaction to such places.

I did go in a couple in Philadelphia with friends a few years later, and the experiences there weren't exactly stellar, either. The places always had a vague piss smell, which puzzled me, because I cannot understand who would sit there and piss their pants in public. Maybe it had something to do with something else, but I never did put my finger on it, and in fact never wanted to.

So between the piss and the chuckleheads and the memory of a face full of New Orleans pavement, the concept of paying $50 or so to look at women undressing really never did much for me. This is in no way an attempt to convince you that I am not a chucklehead in many, many other ways, mind you. It's just that it isn't my thing.

Anyway, I passed the little strip club on the way home the other night, and it was a wild scene. There were four or five cop cars there, and there was a goddamned fight spilling out into the parking lot. It was hilarious. Did you ever see Blazing Saddles? Remember the part where Taggart and Hedley Lamarr and the Waco Kid and all those guys got into that ridiculous fight on the Warner Bros. studio lot? Well, that's what it looked like. And it was just great. All these chuckleheads, and every damned one of them pulling and pushing and yelling and shouting at the cops. It was like a testosterone frenzy in some kind of monkey colony.

I guess it wound up not being that big a deal, because I checked it out with the cops the next day. Somehow the cops got all these chuckleheads under control, so I guess they all went back into the club, which no doubt smells like piss, sweat and misguided pheremones, and had themselves a jolly old time handing all their money over in exchange for looking at women's chests.

I think these guys are called chuckleheads. I'll have to ask Dad what he thinks.

Another Day in Asshole World

I know, I know. The subject I am about to tackle is like shooting catfish in a teacup. It's an easy one to get exercised about, and I got myself good and exercised about it today, so here goes, like it or not.

While I was on my way to someplace or other today, I noticed that my car's registration sticker had a big "2" on it. Back in the days when things made more sense, that meant you had until the end of February to renew your registration.
But a couple years ago, I was heading home from work in a blinding frigging snowstorm at 2 a.m. and a cop started following me. I thought for a moment that this guy was making sure I was getting along OK, seeing as that it was snowing like a blue-balled bastard, but after about a mile his lights went on and he pulled me over. I risked going into a ditch pulling over, and the reason this asshole guardian of vehicle and traffic law stopped me, as it turns out, is that my registration was three days out of date.

It turns out my state had changed the law to make it so there is an actual date it expires, and you no longer have until the end of the month, but rather to whatever date is in that tiny type on the sticker. To make that long story short, I went to court over it just to be a jackass about it and wound up getting away with a $50 fine, and somehow avoided the temptation to wipe my ass with the money before giving it to those goddamned thieves at the court. I made it plain to the judge that I was none too happy about my tax dollars in my town paying cops to harass people in the middle of blizzards, and was probably lucky to get out of court without being charged with something else. I think the judge got the impression that I am a bit of a nut, but you know what? I don't care.

Anyway, that was that. So today, when I saw that "2" on the sticker I figured I better damned sight take a look at the registration and see what was what, and sure enough it had expired a few days ago. So since I didn't have a whole lot else to do I figured I would go to the Room 101 even Orwell couldn't have imagined, and of course that is the Department of Fucking Motor Vehicles.

I hate the DMV, and so do you, of course, unless you get around by rickshaw or something. I would rather be Vaselined from head to toe and shoved up an elephant's ass for an hour or so than go to the DMV, and the experiences are not too much different except that I would imagine an elephant's lower colon smells a little better.

The one I go to is in a little city across the Hudson River from my little city, and as DMVs go it really is not quite as bad as some I have been in. But it is still a horrible experience going in there.

I cannot for the life of me imagine where the people in line at the DMV come from. I have no idea why there seem to be so many horrific souls in those places. It is as if everyone born under a trailer and cursed with a misshapen head is in DMV every time I go in there, and they are all given these fucking forms that old Steve Hawking couldn't figure out even if he were wearing Tom Terrific's thinking cap.

So they are all trying to figure out the forms, and of course they never have pens even though for some reason people like that buy cars every 10 days or so and by their 600th time waiting in line in the fucking place should realize there are no pens to be had in there.

This place has an actual information line before you get to the real line, which is where they have some poor bastard who has to puzzle out exactly which of these forms you need and then circle which parts of it you have to fill out. It always seems I get stuck behind some guy who just bought a World War I tank and wants to figure out how to register it as a recreational vehicle or something like that, something so complicated that even the woman behind the counter doesn't know what to do with him,

So after waiting for 10 minutes behind yet another clown with some unsolvable motor vehicle riddle, I got up to the woman and explained that I wanted a registration renewal form. She was so delighted to get something easy that she actually threw...THREW...a pen at me, fully expecting me to not have one, which really amused me. I didn't see anyone else giving out pens to any of the wretches in this place, people who were wearing World Wrestling Federation dungaree jackets and the like, so I wondered why she singled me out as the jerk who would not have a pen. Well, bucko, I had TWO pens, for I wanted to make sure I had a backup in case the other shit the bed on line 4, so I just left the pen there and got in line right behind some guy who looked just like that old country singer Johnny Paycheck. I don't know what Mr. Paycheck's doppleganger had for lunch, but unfortunately I can tell you it wasn't pleasant.

So I wait and wait. And wait. And meanwhile, this asshole behind me decides to start a conversation with a guy from India who was in line behind him.

I have told people that the worst conversation I ever overheard was two rummies in a dive bar in Chicago arguing over which are boxer shorts and which are jockey shorts. (The guy who was wrong used as his supporting argument the idea that since jockeys wear pants with legs - as if anyone wears pants without legs - the underwear with legs are jockey shorts.)

This one today may have topped it. This asshole, this jerk, started this incredibly loud conversation with the guy from India. The asshole was a guy about 40 or so, and you could tell he was the kind of guy who just prided himself on being a man of compassion and worldly understanding, the kind of guy who has to tell everyone how fucking compassionate and understanding he is and how much he knows everything. He was like a bastard son of Cliff Clavin and Mother Theresa, and I will probably be struck dead for saying such a thing, but I can think of no better way to describe him.

This guy was unbelievable, and I mean it. He was going on and on and on with this poor guy from India, who it turns out was here doing a doctoral program at the local university. The guy from India had an accent, of course, which was a cue to Mr. Asswipe that he HAD TO TALK LOUDER, BECAUSE PEOPLE WITH ACCENTS WHO ARE DOCTORAL STUDENTS UNDERSTAND ENGLISH BETTER WHEN IT IS SPOKEN AS LOUDLY as possible, of course.

In the course of this conversation this guy mentioned at least nine times how he heard things on PBS or NPR, and you could tell how he was just proud as hell of himself for being so fucking smart that he could sit in front of a TV and watch shows on PBS. And he kept showing off how smart he was. He even asked the guy from India if he knew that Mumbai used to be called Bombay! The guy is from fucking India, jerk, and he is a doctoral student. I think he may have heard that a huge city in his country now goes by a different name.

This was all so unbearable that I dug around inside my coat to see if I had any earplugs. I wear earplugs in the office sometimes when I am trying to concentrate on something when there is a lot of noise around me, so the thought of having earplugs in my coat is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Sure enough, I had one earplug, and I ripped the son of a bitch in half and put half in each ear in hopes that I would not have to hear another word from this bleating son of a bitch, who at this point was telling the guy how he should rent a car and...guess what?...drive around and SEE the U.S., and was even giving pointers on nice highways to take. Meanwhile, this guy from India was probably wondering if he could get diplomatic immunity for killing this asshole, and I most certainly would have spoken in his defense.

I finally made it to the counter. The conversation continued behind me. I ripped out the earplugs and did my business. At which point the clerk's printer broke down, and that took more than 10 minutes to straighten out.

The final indignity, and you will probably not believe this, but it is true: the clerk made an error that caused my debit card to be charged $190 instead of $95. She told me that she could not undo it immediately, but that the charge would "probably" be taken off in a day or two, or five at the most.

Great. When it is, maybe I can send the extra money to PBS as thanks for all the entertainment.

My ass and your Facebook

One of the other reasons I got away from blogging for a long time, in addition to the relentless shoulder piss-ups and various other idiocy, is that I have become beholden to the ridiculous Facebook god.

This is just so stupid, but I can't stop it. I love posting "updates," which unlike an update you might see on the AP wire (I am a newspaper copy editor, if you are new here) in which they tell you how many more are dead in the latest bus plunge in Mumbai, these are "updates" on what is happening in your life RIGHT NOW.

I now have 400 friends on facebook, a few of whom I actually know, which means I receive updates on people's "status" (not whether they are married or gay or whatever, not that there is anything wrong with either of those situations one way or the other) almost continuously. I remember belonging to a stupid Web chat board about something or other about 10 years ago, and one guy was always chiming in that he was eating something or other, or what kind of soda he was drinking, or what shade of beige his latest turd was, and it seemed just damned pathetic.

Now, it turns out he was years ahead of his time. These status updates keep you posted re everything that goes on with these folks every damned three minutes, which is amazing when you think about it because if they are looking at Facebook chances are they aren't doing a fucking thing to begin with, and then they feel a pressing need to "update" you with whatever they are doing, or pretending to be doing, at that very moment.

All this is tres stupido, to coin a phrase, because they often aren't really doing it at all. An example: A few minutes ago, I posted on my "status" that I was playing a particular fiddle tune, which I had been a few minutes before I updated my status but certainly was not doing at the time I posted the update, because how could I be posting an update on stupid Facebook and fiddling "Waynesboro" at the same time?

This would be mind-blowing stuff it was 35 years ago and I was sitting around at a Dead concert with a head full of peyote and bloviating about the whole riddle of time and space and all that other shit we used to talk about to impress ourselves with our own intelligence. (You see, I am most certainly no less of an asshole than anyone else. I want to make that perfectly clear.) Today, minus hallucinogens and after all these many years of my humbling fucking existence, it doesn't seem interesting or important.

But really, sitting around and doing these Facebook updates is about as productive as playing spin the bottle with yourself, which of course never did anyone any good.

But I can't look away from these things, these dumb goddamned "updates," and the worst part is that people can even comment on your updates, and you wind up getting involved in extended electronic conversations about trifles, things that you were doing at the moment a little while ago that weren't even at all important or interesting. Or, worse, things that you were pretending you were doing, and if that is the case for God's sake do us all a favor and go plant your head under an elephant's ass and beg it to sit down as hard as it can.

Oh, by the way, I am having a beer and going to bed after I get finished with this. I'll post an "update" after all that plays out and let you know how it worked out for me.

Would you like saliva with that?

I don't mean to make it look like my return to blogging is going to be a daily thing. I like to write this blog when the need arises, and it just so happens that the need is arising just one solitary day after I went charging back into the waters here.

I will try to be brief about this, but someone really disgusted me today. I mean really, totally, completely, horribly. And I cannot get past it right now, so I guess the best thing is to tell you and let you get disgusted, for misery certainly loves company, and I think the same thing goes for being disgusted. If that makes sense at all. So we will embark on a little disgust together.

There is a small supermarket not far from my house. I feel bad for people who work in supermarkets as cashiers. I did it for six years when I was a young man and was trying to launch what sort of passes for a "career" as a journalist. It is a horrible job.

But this woman at the market did something today that I consider repulsive. I have seen other cashiers do it, too....she is not alone in this repugnant habit, and somehow it has to be stopped.

As you know, most markets insist on putting your groceries in crappy plastic bags that split open like a cheap pair of pants after you visit a Chinese buffet. And I guess these bags tend to stick together, or are hard to get apart or something, and you will occasionally see cashiers actually lick their fingers to get the bags apart.

That's right. They produce a little bit of spittle, put their hand to their mouth like Gaylord Perry in his prime, and then pick up the groceries to put them in the bag, disseminating (perhaps an unfortunate word here) saliva on the very food that you will be eating. How nauseating is that? Why don't they just french-kiss your green peppers, or suck on the peaches a little bit before they put them in the bag? Or how about depositing a phalanx of your personal germs and phlegm on the package of hamburger, which was probably wrapped too loosely by some guy in the meat room who was half asleep or half hung over or whatever? You can almost imagine all those filthy personal germs just strolling right on top of the meat and having a real bloody picnic as they await the chance to roll down your throat and strangle the life out of your digestive system?

Please. If you are a grocery cashier, or some horrible twist of fate makes you one someday, keep your hands out of your mouth while dealing with other people's food.

The rest of us thank you for your salivary discretion.

I Is Risen (Thanks, Bill)

You can thank Bill in Texas for all this. That is, if you care to thank anyone at all for this horseshit.

Let me explain, as if there can be an explanation for any of this. I used to write a blog in this space. Then things got all sort of, you know, fucked up, as they used to say down at the cannery when I worked there.

I lost my password, repeatedly, then kept supplying the wrong address to get it sent to. At least that is what I think happened. And you may remember me complaining about some ailment that I think was called fucked-up shoulder. Well, this turned out to be a corker, let me tell you. I had one operation on it that hurt to beat the fucking band twice, and if that wasn't enough the surgeon decided it was still FU and had at it again like five weeks later, before the morphine haze cleared from the first time he stuck me.

Please do not read anything negative about the surgeon into any of this. He is a nice guy and did a crackerjack job of returning the use of my right arm, as did the cute young physical therapists who yanked my arm around and whipped the living shit right out of me three times a week for nearly 10 months afterward. When those women were tormenting me, I could not help but think that some assholes would probably pay $200 or so for some beautiful young woman to crawl around on their back and pull their goddamned arm until sawdust came out of their armpits and their breakfast dampened their undergarments, and I was getting it for an $8 co-pay.

I hope the doc went to Tahiti with the money he made off me, for he bloody well deserves it. Anyone who can put up with an asshole like me for a patient deserves every penny he gets, in spades. I would even mention his name, but believe me, anyone in the medical community does not want anything to do with an endorsement from the likes of me.

So back to the story of how this blog became a fart in the cyberwind. I was still suffering from this shoulder business, which made working my regular gig painful enough without spending more time at a computer, and then dealing with the password business, and life in general, and my various vices (to my credit, I do not smoke, but I do damned near everything else, and don't bloody care if you know it) and well, you know how it is. I gave up trying to get into this blog and figured it would remain as sort of a Flying Dutchman on the Internet, to be spotted by a few unfortunates along the way whose lives would run aground on the rocks within hours of having wasted time perusing it.

And then, guess what? My left shoulder got the same fucking thing my right shoulder had. It is called frozen shoulder, and if your heart can stand it you should look it up. If you do a Google search on "shoulder" and "excruciating," you are sure to find it. At least this time I recognized it for what it was early on, for once you have been through frozen shoulder, if it sets in again you hotfoot it to the doctor within minutes and beg to either have it dealt with or have a .45-caliber bullet go through your brain, for no one deserves this, not even George W. Fucknut Bush, and in his case I would laugh until I pissed myself frontward and backward at nearly anything awful that happened to him. Anything except frozen fucking shoulder, that is.

So Liz took me to the hospital, sweetheart that she is, and the doc put me out and went to work again. The nurses even recognized me. Can you believe that? I think they recognized me because I set the world champeen record for morphine injections in the hours that followed the last two operations, and I was so fucked up that God knows what I said or did to them. I have always wondered what all those people in the operating "theater" say while you are out of your mind on whatever that is they put in you to put you "to sleep." But I guess that is something best not thought about.

So now I am recovering from this operation, and instead of having cute young women crawling all over me and yanking my arm around while telling me I "can do better," I now go into an Olympic-size pool while a muscular young fellow named Ken pulls me around. He is a good sport and a good therapist, and puts Grateful Dead on for me while he does it, which tickles the shit out of me because there usually are other people in the pool and they usually are all over 130 years old. I am sure they have no fucking idea that it is the Dead they are listening to, and probably think it is some kind of death metal or something, which would suit them because death is not far off in any of their cases, metal or not.

Ken can talk your fucking ear off, but I enjoy listening to him. He is a terrific therapist, and seems to really be helping me get better. So I have to thank him, even though there is a small part of me that would prefer the young women be tormenting me. I am not sure what that says about me, but it sure as shit can't be very good.

So anyway, I gave up on the blog and started spending a lot of time on Facebook. I think Facebook is great. I have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook, which is a pisser to me because among all these friends are people I love, people I hate, people I don't give a shit about, people I don't know, people who don't know me and people whom I can't for the life of me recall how I became "friends" with them in the first place. But I shoot the shit with them about nothing, and waste a lot of time, and if I could somehow harness a way to make money at wasting time I would be a fucking skillionaire by now, let me tell you.

So in the course of "befriending" all these people I ran across Bill in Texas. I do not know Bill, but we do the same job at different newspapers in the same newspaper chain, and know some of the same people, so we became friends. I guess Bill was checking me out, which of course I do to people too, so I hold no grudge about that. And in the course of doing so he found this blog and mentioned it, and asked me why I wasn't posting here. It was embarrassing, sort of, to tell him I don't post here because I am such an asshole that I lost my password and didn't have the energy to try to recoup it somewhere.

But having Bill tell me he got a kick out of this horseshit motivated me to get the password back, and I managed to do so and am back in business. I have a lot to tell you, for in no way did the world become any less fucked up than it was when I went on hiatus, so I guess I can get back on the stick and start making amends to the people who actually looked forward to this nonsense.

So thanks for stopping by, and I hope not to let you down again. I have made disappointing people my life's work, so if it happens again, let me give you an unsincere "sorry" in advance.

What a supposed friend we have in Jesus

I am not sure what to think of religion, or at least the kind of religion most people have. I understand the purpose of it and all, but a lot of it is a mystery to me and, frankly, it just doesn't float my boat, if you know what I mean.

My parents were really cool when it came to religion. Their theory was that I should be at least given an exposure to the various religions and then make up my own mind what I wanted to do. My maternal grandparents were Southern Baptists, but it didn't really rub off on Mom at all, and I don't know what the hell my dad's parents were. They were probably so busy trying to scratch out a living on an apple orchard during the Depression that they didn't have time to think about what God was up to, and I can't say I blame them under the circumstances.

I went to every church imaginable when I was little. My parents would drop me off there and I would sit there and take it all in. These were different times, back nearly a half century ago, when there wasn't a goddamned pederast on every corner, so it was safe to just drop a kid off at church and then disappear. I guess all the child abusers worked in barbershops back then (see entry The Barbers of Seville).

There isn't a whole lot I remember about all those church visits. I do remember being given a little hat to wear during my visit to temple, and that an usher started to give me wine by mistake at the Catholic church and then realized he should be giving me grape juice instead. Other than those two things it was all a blur of the same old shit. The one cool thing was at one church they had a portrait of some guy named Zoroaster or something like that hanging up, and he had a great big beard with all these curls in it. I'm still not sure who Zoroaster was or why his mug was up in that church, but it was a cool picture.

But I did have two brushes with religious education. The first was at a Sunday school at the church I liked best. I must've been in about third grade. We had a blast and sang songs, but there was one thing I could not get past. The church graveyard was right outside the window of the room where the classes were held, and there was this one huge monument right smack dab next to it. It was from the '20s and was one of those really big ones, and I used to look at it in amazement.

This was a great distraction while I was being taught about God and Christ and the rest of that crew, and I am sure they were all wonderful folks but I just was fascinated by this big monument. It had a huge ball and an eagle on top of it. I wondered why someone would want an eagle on top of their gravestone. But I could not look at it without thinking of the poor guy buried there. What did he die of? What was it like to die? Did he have any idea that he had been lying there for decades? And it was interesting to think that he would be there forever. He is there right now, by gum, and when I draw my last breath he will still be there and he will be there when my children's children's grandchildren pass into old age.

Well, we moved, and that was the end of that. And I really didn't want to spend my Sunday mornings going to Sunday school anymore. The alternative was watching this TV show called Davy and Goliath. It was the standard religious Christian propaganda show for kids way back then. Did you ever see it? It was a weird puppet-stop-animation-type thing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was a little creepy. And I figured watching this show was as good as hauling my ass out to Sunday school.

The basic thing of this show was that Davy was the kid and Goliath was his dog, and they always got into some kind of jackpot that provided a chance for a religious message. The theme song for this show was a hymn that I later found out is called "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." It was a powerful damned song, too, bleated out on an organ that you could just imagine was about 150 feet high.

But the whole God thing never really made sense to me, even as a kid. I mean the standard Christian concept of God being a big guy with a beard who rewarded the faithful and smote the wicked. I saw too many good people being fucked with and not enough assholes being smitten or smoted or smited or whatever the hell it is you call it. For example, why was that fucking barber who did that to me (see Barbers of Seville) allowed to live to a ripe old age? And how about the neighborhood tough, older and much larger than me, who for laughs grabbed me from behind, knocked me down with a suckerpunch and then straddled me and beat me unconscious and then kept beating me until a kindly stranger came running and probably saved my life? Why was this monstrous fuck allowed to survive the day after that?

Who built God's throne? How did this huge throne sit in the sky? Who made his clothes? How did his robes get washed? Did they have Tide and bleach in Heaven? Where did he pee? What about No. 2, for that matter? I am sorry to engage in such blasphemy, but these are the kind of things I thought of when I was a kid. I guess I was a practical little bugger in some respects.

So for a while the sum total of my religious training was this TV show, and you can see from the questions that crossed my mind it did a piss-poor job of providing me with a healthy faith in God.

The other thing that bothered me about the show was that damned hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." I never liked Sundays as a kid. I've always had a terrible tendency to not live in the moment and to be pissed off or depressed about the future. My wife says this is my most contemptible quality as a human, and believe me that is saying something.

So I hated Sundays because it was the day before Monday, and Monday meant my Dad was going back to work, and in my life there has never been anything as wonderful as the time I spent with him and it just tore me up to know he was going back to work the next day. Plus it meant there was school the next day, and that meant getting up in the morning, and who the fuck in their right mind wants to do that? So hearing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" set off this flood of angst and depression over the fact that Monday was just a day away.

Well, after a couple years, when I was 11 or 12 or so, I took the plunge back into religious training. The local Methodist church had something called Vacation Bible School, and they had all kinds of neat posters in school advertising it, something that of course would never happen today. The posters had a depiction of Christ looking something like a guy who would have hung out with Jack Kerouac, and there were crew-cut boys with freshly scrubbed faces and little strawberry blond girls hanging out with him. This seemed OK so I signed up.

There were about eight of us in the class, and I will be damned if there were any cute girls with strawberry blond hair there. It was all boys, and two of them were pig farmers, and God bless these people for what they do but when I was a kid the pig farmers were the untouchable caste and I assume it will not strain your imagination to figure out why. So here it was hot and all and of course there was no air conditioning, and here the eight of us sat in this stifling room, and two of the kids were covered with pig slop, which is something that you don't wanton your clothes, especially in a room in which it is about 97 degrees.

The woman who taught the class was about 30 and was not married, which in those days and in that particular place was nothing short of a scandal. She seemed pleasant enough, and despite the pig farmers and the odor and the heat we did our best to have fun. I would have liked it if Christ had showed up so I could see if he really looked as cool as the poster made him look, but I guess he had other things to do, or maybe he didn't like pig slop and 90-degree temperatures and I cannot blame him for either.

But virtually everything in my life that was touted by others as being a good thing has come to a bad end in one way or another, and this sure as hell was no exception to that pathetic rule. On the last day of this Vacation Bible School class, Miss Whatsherface seemed like she was in some kind of weird mood when we all showed up. I thought maybe one of the pig farmers was especially ripe or something, but turned out it wasn't that at all.

Once we got settled, she pulled the shades. We figured this meant she was going to show a movie or slides or something, but how wrong we were. After making sure all the shades were down, she became really stern and told us all to get on our knees on the floor, right now, and started really laying it on about how sin was the ruination of the world and the ruination of all God's little children, especially us, and how due to sin and the devil little boys did things like, well, amuse themselves in an impure and disgusting fashion, and how this was the sort of behavior God has no use for.

And here we were, poor little bastards, on our knees on the hard tile floor, with this sexually repressed nut coming around and berating us individually for our sins. CONFESS, she said...give TESTIMONY to how evil we were, how we were bad and had done bad things, especially the bad thing we were probably doing in private, and you can just imagine what that was. We were told that we had to confess to doing that, and if we did not confess it was too bad for us because God knows everything and that we were appearing before the eyes of God at that moment to cleanse our souls and the only way to do so would be to lay all the sin out on the table so it could be wiped away.

We were reduced to tears and did all sorts of confessing on our knees, and it was an incredibly traumatic experience. After what seemed like an eternity of this, she told us to get back in our seats, opened the shades and then went about her business as if none of this had happened.

That was it for me, I am telling you. Just as I think about that pervert barber I told you about, I think about this woman from time to time. As the years have passed, I've come to think that she was the one who engaged in self-abuse late at night while thinking about browbeating us poor kids with all this dogma and brimstone and talk of sin.

Well, sorry if that upset you, but this life is not an easy one. And people like that sure don't help us along the way.

The Stoopid Bowl

(reprinted from last year...it's the same old shit, after all)

Well, here it is again. It's time for the Super Bowl, and you know what? I don't give two shits from Sheboygan about any of it.

My mission regarding the Super Bowl is that every year I try to make it through till after the game without knowing who is playing in it. I know that in my business this probably isn't right, since I am supposed to know what is going on, or at least have a vague idea. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail, but at least I make the effort to remain clueless on this idiocy.

I hate the fucking Super Bowl. I hate everything about it, from the hype that begins in August to the discussions I have to endure in bars and coffee shops in which people who can't find their asses with two hands and a GPS make "predictions" on who is going to win or what the "over/under" will be.

And then there is the television hype, though I am spared that, thank Christ, because I had the good sense to get rid of my television several years ago, which has turned out to be one of the smartest things I've ever done.

I don't like sports. Actually, I take that back. I don't like pro sports. At least high school and college sports "build character" and help young idiots like I was back in the day meet girls. I especially don't like football. I played one year of it in high school, and I was made into an offensive guard, which has to be the worst position in the world. Anyone who plays offensive guard, a position in which you get the living shit beaten out of you every minute and half, has to be a fucking moron unless they are getting at least half a million dollars a year for it, and all I got out of it was a few lousy dates and a JV letter.

And I think rec sports are fine, too. I played hockey in some pretty decent rec leagues until I was 34 years old, and since I am a singular species of idiot I insisted on doing it without a helmet or a mouthguard. If you ever saw me without the seven front teeth I spat out from that nonsense, I can guarantee you that you'd be scared to death to eat corn without a mouthguard, much less play hockey without one.

But I think I started hating pro sports when the salaries got completely out of control. I had a friend who was a bit of a visionary, and way, way before salaries started going through the roof he used to say how unfair it was that players didn't make more money seeing as that they are the best in the world at what they do. I don't really buy that argument, because I bet some of the people reading this are pretty goddam good at what they do, and I bet they aren't pulling down seven figures for it.

I have a case to cite from my own family regarding pro salaries. My mother's cousin played nine years of major league baseball. This wasn't just the usual family bullshitter claiming to the young'uns that he used to be a ballplayer. I remember when he was playing, and even have a baseball card from when he was with the Phillies. His first name was Jimmie, not James, which may be a clue that I am not descended from urban sophisticates from Philadelphia's Main Line.

Anyway, he was a second-string catcher and never made shit for money, at least compared with what a second-string catcher makes today. But I imagine he was happy with it, seeing as that he got to spend all those years sitting around on the bench and signing autographs and chewing tobacco and warming up pitchers and pinch-hitting once in a while. He did actually start once in a while, I guess when the main guy had a hangover or the clap or something.

Jimmie died on his farm when he was in his early 50s. He had finished his ballplaying career and gone back to farming. Can you imagine that happening today? Guys who play nine years in the majors, even if they spend most of it playing pocket pool on the bench, are obscenely rich. In fact, most kids who sign their first big-league contract can immediately fill a railroad car with money if they for some stupid reason wanted to do so.

The one good thing I can say about the Super Bowl is that it isn't basketball, which is about 40 times worse than football. If Orwell's "1984" ever came, I would imagine that when I would be summoned to Room 101 - and you know sure as shit that I would be, and pronto -- there would be three TVs tuned to basketball games, a coffeepot just out of my reach and a few sundry asskissers hanging around asking if I needed anything (other than coffee and a change of fucking channel, of course).

So enjoy your stupid Super Bowl if you must, but just don't waste my fucking time telling me about it.

The whole thing sickens me. Here you will have millions of people having parties at which they drink shitty beer and eat mayonnaise-based crap that has been sitting out for hours, and at the end of the game half of them will be running around in their $79.99 "official" jerseys bought on $8-per-hour Crap-Mart salaries and screaming "We Won!!!"

You didn't fucking win, folks. So knock it off.

Two's a crowd

Hello, seekers:

Well, long time no see. I've been busy with a lot of shit, and a lot of it has been shittier shit than I wanted to deal with and shittier shit than I want to talk about. But I am still here, and I actually remembered the password to get into this "blog," which is a minor miracle because I have forgotten more passwords than you'll probably ever have to know. But that's beside the point.

What brings me here today is to tell you about another ridiculous event, and it's yet another that will be burned into my brain forever. And the best part is that now it will be burned into your brain forever, too. Lucky you. But listen up, because it is a good tale. It might be better in the oral tradition, but unless you are sending plane fare and promise me single malt scotch on arrival I am not coming to your house to tell it. So you'll have to settle for this medium.

Anyway, the setup. I went to Montreal for two days last week. Montreal is the greatest city in North America, and I say that full well knowing I have not been to all the cities in North America, and even if I had time and money to go to all of them I wouldn't bother because I know that Montreal is the best of the lot.

It used to be better, back before the American dollar became about as value as a wad of used asswiping paper. But it's still marginally worth a little more than a Canadian buck. But the sights in Montreal are great, and the food is the best around. Lots of great restaurants for a reasonable amount of money. Also, for some reason it amuses me to hear people speaking a foreign language. I don't understand a word of French (OK...merci, pardon, menage a trois...that's about it), but it's kind of fun to walk down the street and wonder what the hell people are talking about. Like mysterious, you know? Is this store clerk telling me that the newspaper is a dollar, or that my zipper is down and everyone is having a big laugh on me? I think it's fun not to know, because in my real, non-Montreal life there is a whole lot going on that I wish I could not hear and understand, so I have a rare chance not to know what the assholes around me are talking about.

When I go to Montreal I usually go by bus. It is about a 220-mile drive from my house, and I am far too fucking lazy to drive that far. I would take the train, but for some reason the train from here makes 300 stops along the way, and by the time I would get there it would be time to turn around and come back, so that's out.

So it came time to leave Montreal, and I went to the Greyhound station. I was early, so I went next do to a little cafe called Le Shithole or something like that and had a bite to tide me over for the trip. I had something called poutine, which is a horrific French Canadian dish. It's basically French fries with some kind of oily cheese glop all over it. (See photo at beginning of screed.) I don't know why I enjoy eating this low point in Quebecois cuisine; perhaps it's because even though no one in Quebec actually likes it, eating it makes me feel like one of the Montreal hoi polloi rather than some asshole American.

After I finished my poutine (it was horrible, of course), I had poutine "gravy" all over my hands, so I decided to go into the restroom to wash up. I went to the door that said MEN-HOMMES on it, and it had a push-down handle, and for some reason I assumed it was a regular restroom. So I pushed the door open and started to walk in...only to find it was a one-person bathroom, it was occupied by a squat, beady-eyed man with an insufferable moustache who was sitting on the crapper. Our eyes locked, and he immediately became enraged.

"Pardon!" I said (with the French accent, best I could manage), and started to retreat.

"Why you poosh, poosh, poosh on de door?" he demanded. I started skulking away, and I could hear him yelling as I retreated. "Why you poosh on de door! Fuuul!!! Fuuul!! Poosh on de door! Fuuul!!!" Pardon me for writing "fuul," which does not do justice to the word he was saying, which was "fool" in heavily accented Quebecois and as such sounded laughingly like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau berating a parking offender.

If you have been here before, you may remember that I'd had an incident in which I'd barged in on some jackass sitting on the crapper at a Borders bookstore while reading a pile of unpaid-for books. This was somehow worse. The Borders guy was embarrassed. This guy was enraged, and I do not like enraging people in foreign countries. You never know what they are going to do, you know? For all I know, it could be legal in Quebec to shoot someone who walks in on you in the shitter. Or it could even be a social requirement. I am reasonably sure this is not the case anywhere in America, but for Christ's sake they speak French in that fucking place, and God only knows what kind of nonsense might be part of local tradition.

So I humped back over to the bus station and sat and waited. When it came time to get my bus, I walked out the door and there, for the love of Christ, he was.

He was the fucking bus driver. The guy I'd walked in on while he was taking a dump would have my life in his hands for more than 200 miles.

His eyes locked into mine, just as they had in that little mini-crapper, and they were as red as a high school kid's nuts on prom night.

And there were only three people waiting to get on! This meant it'd be unlikely there would be someone else on the bus who would be a big enough asshole to distract this guy from his thoughts of hatred about me. I would be the subject of this guy's personal Five Hours Hate. And Christ...there was nowhere to escape!

And so I sat there the whole trip, knowing he was hating me for what I had done, even though the truth is that the bastard should have known enough to lock the door. Why should I have knocked? It didn't look like that sort of operation.

About four hours into the trip we stopped for a meal break, and I got out and got some coffee. The driver got off, too, and sat across from me at the counter, and glared at me the whole fucking time. He looked about as happy as if he'd caught me buggering one of his sisters or something. And he wouldn't stop starting with those red eyes and that stupid moustache.

All this because I ate some poutine and got my hands greasy. Maybe this is why Wet-Naps were invented, because some poor asshole wanted to wash his hands and wound up unwittingly waltzing into the middle of someone's treasured four-minute private shit party.

So that's twice in a year I've had this happen. Enough is enough.

Coffee break's over; back on your heads

Several months ago, a friend suggested it might not be a bad idea for me to blog less. I am not sure what he meant by that, seeing as that I was not blogging very much to begin with, but I tend to listen to friends because if you don't listen to them they cease to be friends, and when too many people cease to be friends you are going to be seriously out of luck when you need to borrow $20 for a payday or two.

So I took an extended break from this, and in the process lost both my user name and password for this account. But luckily the Web leaves magic beans all over the place, pebbles along the road for those who lose their way (I know that's two different fairly tales, but fuck it...it is too early in the morning for some kind of proper simile or metaphor or whatever it is). So I managed to reacquire the right to be a jackass in this space, thanks to a little Internet hocus-pocus. For better or worse.

This probably doesn't qualify as a "real" post. It's more serving notice that yes, I do want to invite myself back into your hard drives (you know what I mean...stop it) or whatever it is, and yes, I do feel refreshed, and no, in the interim I was not bitten by any poisonous spiders or anything.

So right now I have to go to a goodbye party. I don't like goodbye parties, but if you know someone who is leaving (in this case, she left weeks ago) and you don't go to their goodbye party you are a social retard at best and the world's biggest asshole (temporarily) at worst. So I have to go for now. See you soon.


PS: The title of this post is taken from what was my favorite joke from age 8 to about age 13. Then I discovered girls and forgot about jokes. It's pointless to tell you the joke now because the title of this post is the punchline. Sorry I ruined it for you.

WBA title holder

Hello, seekers:

Here I am recovering from a long run on a beautiful day. I have just enough time to choke down enough alcohol to make working on this beautiful day tolerable, but while I am doing so I wanted to tell you a WBA story.

WBA is not what you think it is. I think at one time WBA largely meant World Boxing Association, which I think was one of the main organizations in professional boxing before Don King and his Eraserhead 'do got involved and fucked it all up. Now I think there about about 600 boxing federations, each of which has a champion. It is not like the good old days, back when my dad and I used to sit in front of the black-and-white Motorola on Friday nights and watch the Fullmer brothers, Gene or Don, or one of those tough-as-shit guys from the late '50s and early '60s really pound the pissbuckets out of each other.

No, the new "WBA" is something that started at my office several years ago, and it stands for World's Biggest Asshole. Actually, it started out as Asshole of the Night, which I guess means that while having lots of variations of a governing authority (like boxing does) can be confusing, it doesn't hurt to allow for just a little bit of natural evolution when it comes to these things.

The original Asshole of the Night started when a friend and I used to occasionally (try nightly) go out drinking after work. While doing this we would discuss particular incidents of aggression or, worse, passive aggression in the office that night, and both of these traits are seen on a regular basis in my line of work. After we would hash over the most appalling of the night's incidents, we would come to a decision as to who the Asshole of the Night was.

Mind you, we were not high-hatting everyone on this. Either my friend or I were Asshole of the Night on occasion; of course, there were a few people who were the Cal Ripkens of being Asshole of the Night.

But my friend moved on, and eventually a small cadre of the newer crew came up with an even better contest: the now-coveted WBA title, or World's Biggest Asshole. But the criteria have changed, just like the big league strike zone is no longer from the shoulders to the knees like it was back when baseball was worth paying attention to.

Being aggressive or passive aggressive will get you nowhere on the road to the WBA title. What you need to get in on this one is to be the biggest fucking chump on the job that night, the person who gets the biggest load dumped on them, the person who winds up getting a cowshit pie in the face from one of the "bosses" for no real good reason. Stuff like that.

We thoroughly enjoy awarding the WBA title at the end of the night. This event is either not known to the "bosses," or they try to ignore it. I suspect the latter. We have not come up with an official belt yet, like one of those idiotic jewel-encrusted
things boxers get when they pound the bejeezus out of some tomato can to retain one of the 600 or so titles that are available. But we are working on it, and I am always up for ideas in that regard. I guess the crown of thorns is already taken, so we will have to do better.

However, there also is a subdivision in the WBA that occasionally calls for the awarding of a title, and this is probably more in keeping with the World's Biggest Asshole concept that Denis Leary sang about in his unforgettable song "The World's Biggest Asshole," which would be sung on a regular basis in the office if we weren't too tired or stupid to remember all the words.

I need to tell you that on Saturday one such person crossed my path. Seeing this person made me wish that there was a real WBA organization, and that WBA title winners were real professionals who made ridiculous salaries, because if that were so I could have been this guy's agent and signed him to a WBA contract for seven figures and pocketed a nice little bit of change out of it my own self.

I took my daughter, my daughter-in-law and my grandkids out to a small restaurant for brunch in a small city near where I live. This place was unbelievably crowded, and it took forever to get served, but that's what you come to expect when you put the preparation of your food into someone else's hands, and whenever you do that and survive without a near-fatal case of dysentery or food poisoning you should thank your lucky fucking stars for your good fortune in life.

About 25 of the people in there, or so it seemed, were from one family or group, and they were making about the equivalent amount of din that you might hear from the left-field bleachers during the seventh game of a World Series. Amid this buzzing, teeming nest of assholes (I call such gatherings NOAs for short) was one guy who was an asshole for the ages.

He was about 35 or so, and was decked out in full asshole regalia: snap-brim golfer's cap endorsed by Payne Stewart or some other dead asshole with a little kangaroo logo on it; wraparound "shades" that were alternately up on his forehead, covering his little rat eyes, or hung down the tip of his skinny-assed, long pointy nose so that he could "peer" at you while telling "jokes"; a T-shirt that inexplicably said ALCOHOL TOBACCO FIREARMS on it (two out of three isn't bad, but he can shove his tobacco up his ass), and some kind of nylon sweat pants with a stripe down the side, even though by looking at this guy I daresay he hasn't broken a sweat since Reagan was in office.

You could just tell that this guy once got a fortune cookie that said he is the life of the party and took it fucking seriously, because he kept braying and guffawing and shouting and cracking stupid one-liners, after which he would look around at the poor suffering hordes to see if anyone else was laughing at them, and if you have to check to see if people think you are funny chances are you are not very funny.

There is a terrible tendency that lies within me for some stupid reason. That tendency is to think that things can't possibly get worse, and of course this is a painfully wrong canon on which to base your faith. Just as I am starving and looking at my fork and thinking that on their prior visits to this place people like that have had that very one I am about to eat with in their mouths, he stands up again and, guffawing at his own incredible cleverness, shouts out "Git 'er done!!"
This line, along with the standing and some weird arm motion that looked something like what Jackie Gleason used to do when he would say "And away we go," was repeated several times. If I weren't sick of this fucking jackass before, believe me that did it because it stirred up a painful memory.

I have a brother-in-law whom I love dearly. He is an educated man and a high school teacher. One night when I was visiting him and my sister, he suggested we watch a DVD featuring L---y the Cable Guy (note that I continue to carefully avoid revealing identities in here. You can't be too careful in this world).

For about 55 minutes or 55 hours, and I really am not sure which it was, I watched open-mouthed as this jackass L---y delivered his "routine," which basically consisted of being an asshole in not too different a manner from the guy in the restaurant. This is fucking funny? And L---y's catchphrase is the selfsame "Git 'r done," whatever that means, and God only knows that I have no interest in finding out.

So hearing "Git 'r done" from the guy at the diner really sealed the WBA deal for me as far as he was concerned. Former pitcher Jim Bouton wrote a very funny book in the late '60s or so called "Ball Four" in which he revealed the shocking fact that young big-league players are often drunks, whoremongers and womanizers, which really sets them apart from regular young males, doesn't it? Anyway, in "Ball Four" there was a coach or manager or something who would yell out "Have an idea out there!" whenever a player would do something stupid. (If anyone recalls the identity of who said that in the book, please let me know. The suspense is brutal.)

But that was exactly what I thought when this guy kept saying "Git 'r done" and thinking it was the funniest thing since Cheney shot the lawyer. Have a fucking idea out there. If something isn't funny when a comic making seven figures a year says it, it sure as shit isn't funny when you say it, pal.

So if you decide to get into the business of crowning WBA titleholders on your own, just learn from this experience and remember that no matter how good you are, there's always another contender right around the corner.

ADDENDUM: And now for an opposing point of view. I want to preface this by saying I take neither side in this little tiff, but I must say the music on the Web page is an inspiration to all. Looks like a job for People's Court or Judge Judy or Oprah or something: http://www.disinfotainmenttoday.com/hakim/andrehakim.htm

And if you are Andre or his tormentor, don't bother seeking my opinion, OK?