Tongue In Check

While I am more than willing to admit that I am not fully comfortable with the complicated physics of the following notion, I must admit that while I understand the neatness of measuring time in an “Einsteinian” linear fashion, I am not completely convinced that time itself could ever succumb to such a simplistic notion.

For instance, and bear with me for a moment while I indulge myself, I firmly believe that on some level, I am being born and dying at exactly the same time. This notion is nothing new for me. See, I have always known that I was making love for the first time and the last time at EXACTLY the same time. I have been drunk in Columbus and London at the same instant. I have been out on a limb and over the waterfall at precisely the same moment in time. I have been on the operating table with my internal organs fully exposed and a smooth operator hiding his every intention all while practicing my single “line” for a church play:

“It was indeed; I saw a strange light in the distance.,“ the 11 year old me in the coal fields of West Virginia said while at exactly the same time in a bar in a Holiday Inn in London, England, the 55 year old me said “I’ll have a double Gin with a splash of tonic. ” Oddly enough, the distinctly German bartender who reminds me of my wife’s youngest sister in Michigan said “Yes, and what is your room number?”

Semi-colon’s haunt my dreams!

I was, as a child in a church play, and one of the 3 wise men. Oddly enough, as an adult, I feel strangely disconnected to that child who stood before the church congregation and recited those words in quotation above, yet somehow, I know that we share some almost imperceptible common bond, and being a “wise man” had nothing to do with that bond.

Time is a red-haired, green eyed bitch that only knows the word no! That’s correct, a big fucking NO with an exclamation mark!

!

(Did you ever notice that people who use a lot of exclamation points rarely have anything important to say?)

Digress is what I do best.

I’m sitting in a hotel very near London’s famed (although I can’t for the life of me remember why) Heathrow airport listening to airplanes take off just outside my window and the notion of how they cross time zones with ease convinces me that the actual measurement of time and time itself are two entirely different things. I am in the backseat of a 1964 Chevrolet Impala attempting to make love to a girl for the first time (her name was Nancy I think and I came and went at exactly the same moment in time) and at the same time, I am in a hotel room after drinking 3 double Gin and tonics ( a slight jump from the wagon) thinking that the distance from then until now does not seem like a lifetime.

It was, as they say, only yesterday.

But yesterday, is such a “linear” thing.

The lovely young french woman asks me how I liked my meal. Fine I say and I am instantly transported to Marquette, Michigan and the young lady from Finland who smells of luetfisk and ginger brandy asks “Are you finished?” And at exaclty the same moment that I am in a restaurant in London being served a roasted leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary, I am on the Greenbrier River in southern West Virginia eating and corn on the cob and freshly killed squirrel with the head still attached.

“It’s looking at me,” I say to my cousin who is 3 years older than me.

“Don’t worry,” he giggles, “in no time at all you will be in London eating lamb served to you by a beautiful woman half your age who speaks French and has big tits.”

I kick my 7 year old legs beneath the table and ask him what “tits” are.

“Don’t worry about it, you’re going to live forever,” he says as I take another bite of squirrel.

I was standing outside this morning enjoying the warmth and thinking about how this time tomorrow I will be in the UK probably freezing my ass off. The high there the other day (in human numbers) was 66. I think it supposed to be 90 here in Texas today.

The  person that seems the most  unhappy about all of this is Carmen. She has been following me around ever since the suitcase came out of the closet Wednesday morning. I’m sure my wife’s not too happy about it either, she just shows it differently.

Anyway, the idea of sitting on an airplane for 10 hours is not as appealing to me as it used to be. Of course when crossing the Atlantic, sitting on an airplane is infinitely preferable to any of the alternatives.

Of course there’s always the hope for this:

Which almost always turns out to be this:

Just my luck.

Oh well, at my age neither option seems very likely.

There was a time when a 10 hour flight meant a 10 hour drunk, but those days are certainly over with.  Now I get to sit and stare at the TV for 10 hours while listening to the inevitable baby crying and the endless kicks to the back of my seat from the restless fat man sitting behind me.  Certain things about flying are inevitable for me:

• I will be singled out in security. It has been happening since the late 80’s. Apparently I fit a profile.
• There will be a screaming over-indulged child within 10 feet of me.
• There will be a fat man behind me.
• There will be an old(er) man somewhere near me who feels like he has to stand up for the entire flight.
• The stewardesses will get upset when they catch me trying to catch a glimpse of their panties while they sit in the “jump seat.”
• An old lady will sit next to me and have to get up exactly 156 time during the flight.
• I will land in England and the customs agent there will be an Indian who cannot speak a fucking word of English and then he/she will get mad at me because I can’t understand him/her.
• I will have a headache when I land and my throat will be sore.

Y’all play nice.

You simply can’t imagine the horror of it all.

I warn you now, this tale is not for the faint of heart. Men should especially turn away now. Go ahead and run back to your internet porn, you Fox News, your endless Glenn Beck fantasies now because this story is scary.

This past Saturday, I was sitting here minding my own business. I wasn’t bothering anyone. It was then that I heard the dreaded words coming from the other side of the apartment.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she bellowed said.

I pretended not to hear her hoping that she wouldn’t have the strength to say it again.  Naturally, my plan failed miserably because just a few seconds later she appeared in the kitchen saying again, “I think we should go somewhere.”

“Where would you like to go, ” I asked fearfully.

“Huntsville,” she said.

For those of  you who don’t know anything about Huntsville, Texas, let me explain. There’s a big prison in Huntsville, Texas, and generally, where there’s prisons, there’s convicts and convict’s families.  It just happens that way. Prison towns are generally not your picturesque showboat of a town.  Huntsville was no exception.

But, we went anyway.

Boy, it seems like just a few short years ago, I was getting drunk on Saturdays and chasing strippers with big tits. Or was that big girls with tits?

I don’t know, I was drunk.

Now,thanks to kidney cancer,  I am going “antiquing.”

Damn you to hell, cancer.

Anyway, we went to an antique store and I was at the very  least, a bit amused by it. There were all kinds of things that I found fascinating and intriguing…..

Oh hell, I am lying through my fucking teeth. It was a store full of old junk that nobody wants anymore. Mountains and mountains of old rusty tools, toys, busted up furniture, crappy dishes, ash trays (?) old scratched up records, and nick fucking nacks of every fucking kind. The whole place smelled like “old.”

The creepiest thing to me was all the old pictures of just ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Some were pictures of of folks getting married. Some were family portraits.  Others were just random shots of old couples.  Imagine that  you live your whole life not bothering anyone and minding your own business and somehow you die and pass on into obscurity and someday someone finds our pictures and says “who the fuck are these old codgers” and your picture winds up in an antique store in a prison town in Texas being looked at by families of ex-cons and former drunks with one kidney. Damn, that’s sad.  I hope when I die somebody burns all the pictures of me.

Especially this one.

And this one too:

Anyway, you get the point. There are things you leave behind in a very innocent fashion–maybe forgotten and left behind in a drawer somewhere and you never know where you might end up.

Now that’s a kind of antiquing I could get into!

Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a Glenn Beck Sucks Cocks blog because this blog is more about making fun of things than it is telling the truth about entertainers who work for Fox News, but I did want to ask you folks this:

Why isn’t Glenn Beck answering any questions about the woman he raped and murdered in 1990?

Tell me what  you think.

Oh, and for you foreigners who don’t know who Glenn Beck is, thank your lucky stars above.

I don’t really have much to add to that. I just wanted to see how many hits I get for that title.

For those of you who don’t know who Glenn Beck is, go here.

For those of you who do, perhaps this will help:

UPDATE: I just went to Google and typed in Glenn Beck Is A Cocksucker and I am number 1 with a bullet!

Pair of Dimes

 

Pair Of Dimes Shift

See, here’s the thing. My body, old and beaten as it may be, knows that fall should be fast approaching.  Without any interference at all from me, my body is aware of the changing of the leaves on the trees and the cool nights. My body is aware that dark is coming a few seconds earlier with every passing night.  Yet the reality that surrounds me is so different. It’s still 90+ degrees every day and the overnight lows have not dropped below the mid-70’s.

It’s funny, but after almost 7 months here in Texas, I was hit with a colossal bout of homesickness last weekend and the only thing I can figure is that my body knows it is fall back in Michigan and it has been an endless summer here in Texas.

Sometimes I just miss standing on my deck late at night and listening to the coyotes somewhere off in the night.  I could never tell you if they are fighting, fucking, or just talking to the moon because they always sound the same. I suppose there is something to be said for that.  Coyotes wear their howl on their sleeve.

I can’t tell you how many times in the last month I have started to write something here but just can’t bring myself to it. I would start a post and then delete it or else just leave it unfinished.

What’s the word I am looking for?

Blah.

A friend of mine who emails me on an almost daily basis ends almost every sentence with the word “blah” and I often wonder if she is even aware that she does it. Blah!

I added the exclamation point on my own.

Let’s see, what’s been going on that is worthy of writing about.

Well there was….

No, that’s not really worth writing about.

But we did….

No, that’s not worth writing about either.

Oh, check this out….

Shit. Fuck. Piss. That’s not worth writing about either.

I think you might be able to see where I have been for a month now.

Anyway, I went to Home Depot this morning to help out a little old lady who needed a new entry door on her garage and made myself incredibly homesick. I miss my garage. I miss my tools. I miss my yard and most of all, I miss my mower with big tits. Texas is fine, but it has been one fucking endless day after another.

The company I work for has been taken over by another company. Get this. The old company was like the Mercedes Benz of the oil fields. The new company is like Wal*Mart. I have gone from feeling like an integral part of great company to feeling like a fucking greeter at your friendly destroy America faster store.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. This was funnier that shit. About a week ago….

Ah hell, that ain’t worth writing about either.

I had a bit of an interesting epiphany this week regarding race and racism. Let me preface this post by telling you that I am a bit of a racist. Okay, maybe when it comes to certain things, I am a bit more than a bit of a racist. I will freely admit that the n word is no stranger to my lips. I don’t justify my use of it simply by pointing out the fact that certain black entertainers throw the word out for cheap laughs or shock value every few minutes, but that fact does not hurt my cause in the least.  Apparently, hypocrisy is not yet part of the black experience.

Racism, however, is not just about calling a spade a spade (pardon the pun). It’s a whole complex system full of all sorts of subtle nuances that we white folks simply may never understand.  In the end, we may just have to take the word of our black brothers on the subject and move on.

Or not.

So this week’s whole dust-up about the black professor being arrested by the cops for breaking into his own house prompting Obama to wrongly call the police stupid was kind of a wake up call for me and maybe not for the reasons one would expect.

Let me explain.

First of all, I am no fan of cops. Don’t get me wrong, because I appreciate the job they are doing, but I, by no means, believe they are sacred and should not be questioned for their actions.

Warning, tangent ahead:

Did you ever notice that when a cop gets shot in the line of duty, he gets like a major funeral and all sorts of news coverage and pity? Well, don’t hate me for this, but I never feel that way. See, here’s the deal. Cops get to carry guns and wear bullet proof vests and sign up to do a job where they are paid to fight the bad guy. Sometimes shit goes wrong.  I would much rather see a parade and all sorts of accolades being heaped upon the unarmed innocent schlep that gets shot simply because he or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than a cop who signed up to do a job.

But hey, that’s just me.  Anyway, back to racism.

As a white man who grew up in a very racist part of America (Appalachia), I always figured that our problems with race would eventually come to a head and that the typical urban Ubangi wearing his pants down around his knees, hat on sideways, and a 9mm Glock in his back pocket would be leading that charge.

However, after this week, I realized that the “charge” is going to come from an entirely unexpected direction. The forces that are going to really change America’s views on race are going to be lead by intelligent, well-educated upwardly mobile black folks like Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and not by opportunistic niggers like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. ¹

For me, the pivotal point in the arrest must have been the moment when professor Gates asked the arresting officer, “Do you know who I am?” Can you imagine the feelings that went through this white working class officer’s mind when he was asked by an “uppity” black man “Do you know who I am?” Hell, that’s the white equivalent of offering a black man a plate full of watermelon and fried chicken. Shit bound to go horribly wrong.

So who stands to lose the most when the playing field gets leveled a little. In my humble opinion, the folks that are going to lose the most are those white people that, simply by the virtue of the color of their skin, have managed to somehow convince themselves that they matter.  I could write volumes about who they are, but in an age where a picture is still worth a thousand words, why wouldn’t I just show you who they are?

Interestingly enough, these stereotypical Americans are the same ones who are most “bothered” by having a black man as president. If you don’t believe me, just take a stroll through the heart of Appalachia. These folks firmly believe that Obama is not a citizen, that he is a Muslim, and that he does not have their best interest in mind. I would say they are right about one of the three, but from my experience with some of  these people, scoring 33.3% on any test is a step in the right direction.

But I digress.

Anyway, let’s sum this up by asking what America has learned from this little media created moment, shall we?

• A president, no matter the color of his skin, should keep his fucking nose out of matters such as this–especially when the nation is in such sorry shape.
• In the future, if you are an educated black man and you find  yourself being arrested for breaking into your own home, you might want to try an approach other than asking the white working class officer “Do you know who I am?” Just a suggestion here, but from what I’ve seen, other black folks have had tremendous success by saying things like “DYN-O-MITE,” or “I don’t know nothin’ bout birthin’ no babies Miss Scarlet,”  or “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis.” You might want to try one of these tried and true statements as they seem to placate the white man and make him smile. Apparently “Do you know who I am?” only makes him reach for the handcuffs.
• The media loves a controversy–especially if they can draw our attention away from real issues like jobs, two wars and the threat of two more, and an American way of life that is falling the fuck apart.
• The free ride for white trash America is about over.
• Black chicks are hot.

¹ The word nigger was invented long before Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson gave it meaning.

There is one thing about me that the people I work with simply don’t understand. Hell, they will probably never  understand it.

While I am sitting there dazzling them with reams of complicated and meaningless data designed to make folks think I know what I am doing…….

I am wearing underwear with little red chickens on them. 

Cause that’s how I roll.

That’s right, don’t fuck with me because I have chickens on my underwear…..bitches!