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.