Tongue In Check

I think I might have mentioned to you before that we are keeping Jackie’s Carmen Wannabe dog Fred this week, but something dawned on me about Fred today. He looks like someone famous, but I couldn’t remember who it was.

Then I was thinking about an old friend of mine named Bill who moved to Colorado and I never heard from him again and how his wife once said that I reminded her of Alf and it dawned on me where I had seen Fred before.

Judge for yourself:

Fred

Me Alf

Those noses were definitely separated at birth.

****UPDATE****

Phoebe made a suggestion and I had to go see for myself. My God, the similarities are astounding. It’s almost scary.

The Joker

The Bonehead

Does anyone really know what can happen when you thumb your nose at the great cosmic organizer in the sky? No, of course you don’t. However, as luck would have it, I know exactly what can happen when you tempt fate.

Take a good look at the picture below:

The day after I wrote this post, guess who showed up on my door step? Ladies and Gentlemen of the Blogworld, I would like to introduce you to the newest member of our family, Dusty. Dusty made his appearance along with two other equally minuscule kittens who weren’t nearly as friendly or trusting of humans. They are still outside dodging coyotes and hawks while Dusty is inside enjoying the comfort of his new home.

Naturally, Dusty has upset the order of things around here. Some “people” won’t even look at me without shooting stink eye death rays from their little bug eyes.

On a slightly related note, we have Fred (Jackie’s Carmen Wannabe) for the week while Jackie takes her much ballyhooed bar exam. Why these young lawyers don’t just cheat is beyond me, because as we all know, cheating is very much a part of what they will need to do when they “ply their trade.” Anyway, as if the applecart wasn’t already upset enough with the addition of the evil Dusty, we now get to throw Fred into the mix for a guaranteed double stink-eye treatment.

On a totally unrelated note, my computer is falling apart and I would like for all of you to send me money so I can get a new one. My evil wife won’t let me get a new one because she wants to spend all of my hard-earned money on practical things like food, gas, utilities and medical bills. I say fuck the medical bills. What are they going to do, put my diseased kidney back in?

Anyway, here’s the thing. My “M” key is gone, my “C” key is going, and my touch pad mouse thingie has a hole in it.

I have a medical question out there for all of the 99.9999% of my readers who are doctors. Before I had my kidney removed, I was addicted to over the counter nasal spray. Yeah, big deal. I get addicted to everything. Right now I am addicted to popsicles and porn. Anyway, the medical establishment had a fit about all of this over the counter nasal spray stuff. Apparently $4.59 nasal spray is bad for your blood pressure so they gave me a prescription for some kind of high tech nasal spray that cost over a hundred dollars for a couple of ounces.

Does anyone besides me smell a racket?

I rarely use my left hand for anything except holding my fork. I use my right hand for pretty much everything.

So why do I have carpal tunnel syndrome so bad in my left hand?

¹ Kurt Vonnegut, “Cat’s Cradle.”

Of course that title is misleading because it makes it sound like I am going to tell you the history of all cats and even I am not that pretentious.

Well that is not true. I am that pretentious.

Here is the whole history of cats:

A dog was born without a brain and it slowly devolved into a cat.

End of story.

Now I will tell you the history of my cats.

I don’t remember much about my very first cat except that after I got it I told my dad that I didn’t like it. The next day it was gone.

Life has never been that simple since.

My next recollection of a cat happens when I was about 19 years old. I took a semester off from college and I was working at a US Steel plant. I found these kittens living in my girlfriend’s dad’s garage. I took one and named it Kimba after a popular cartoon of the day.

Only Kimba wasn’t white. He was kind of a multi-colored tabby cat. I liked Kimba, but he didn’t last long. I let him out one morning and he never came back. As a result, I went for a year or so relatively catless, although I did have a pussy or two along the way which may or may not have anything at all to do with this story.

Anyway, a little while later my new girlfriend gave me a pussy. And then she gave me a cat. I named this cat Blue after a popular color of the day. Blue was a lot of fun but he was also a male and I discovered that male cats like to piss on everything so I got him fixed. It didn’t matter. He still liked to piss on everything. I took him home for the summer and my mother stole him. I pretended to be upset about it, but I wasn’t really because Blue pissed on everything.

One morning my mom let Blue out and he never came back. Are you starting to see a theme here?

My girlfriend felt sorry for me so she gave me another pussy. And then she gave me another cat. I named this cat Shady after a popular song of the day.

Shady was a female so she didn’t piss as much. I kept Shady for a few years. After I graduated from college, I moved back home with Shady.

One morning I let Shady out and she never came back.

It was at this point that I had another revelation regarding cats. Cats must be kept in the house.

By this time, I was with Anne. She wasn’t my wife yet, but she was going to be. A few years later Anne gave me a pussy. And then she gave me a cat. I named this cat Cleo after a popular queen of the day. Cleo was pretty cool. She was a Siamese and about as dog-like as a cat can be. She was also an inside cat that lived for 20 years. She got up one morning and couldn’t walk so my wife had to take her to have her put to sleep because I was crying like a baby and couldn’t do it.

Now that Cleo is gone, I don’t have much use for cats anymore. Especially my daughter’s six toed cat. That cat, as they say, ain’t got no sense.

Anyway, as a loving tribute to cats, I offer up the following:

Oh, and if anyone has a pussy they want to give away, just give me a call.

I don’t need anymore cats though.

Does anyone besides me find it interesting that the first person to publicly call Barack Obama a nigger was none other than that bastion of civil rights himself Jessie Jackson? Don Imus refers to a bunch of nappy headed hos as a bunch of nappy headed hos and he loses his job. Jessie Jackson calls Barack Obama a nigger and no one even raises an eyebrow.

Honestly, everyone either needs to stop using that word, or everyone needs to start using that word. Either way, as long as it is in the hands of one group or the other, it’s a power thing, and as long as it is a power thing, it is going to be misused.

My granddaughter can’t say her “p’s” correctly yet. She pronounces her “p’s” as “f’s.” So when she has to go pee, she says she has to go fee. Naturally, we don’t discuss hockey pucks around here.

I have become hopelessly addicted to popsicles. Seriously. I cannot stop eating them. Interestingly enough, the aforementioned granddaughter calls popsicles foppasiddles. She keeps trying to get my foppasiddles and that is fissing me off.

My little dog is getting old. She seems to spend most of her time laying around and sleeping, and I am pretty sure that her eyesight is going because she now barks at everyone that comes to the door (including me) until she hears a voice. If she recognizes the voice she will stop barking. If not, she keeps barking.

When I went to high school, geeks hadn’t been invented yet. I mean we had them, but they didn’t have a name yet. Our geeks didn’t have computers to get all geeky about, but they did have Heathkits.

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day and I fucking hate it. Worst thing about it is that it won’t let me go back to my old Firefox. Nothing on it works right and my fonts look all messed up. It’s taking all the fun out of using this computer for me. The worst part is that the spellcheck doesn’t work worth a damn!

I have had a Hotmail account for over 10 years now. Recently though, it has become very undependable. A lot of my emails come up missing and it is starting to piss me off. I am slowly getting rid of that address and moving everything over to my gmail account. Kind of sucks really, but if something doesn’t work anymore, there’s no sense hanging on to it.

I am re-siding my garage right now. Boy is that ever a nit-picky little process that is not even the least bit forgiving. Being out of level by as much as 1/16th (.0625) of an inch can throw you into a world of hurt a few feet down the road.

Some people act really weird when they find out I’ve had cancer. It’s not contagious and I don’t think it makes me smell funny.

My wife and I were just discussing how our lives are at a crossroads right now and we have a bunch of stuff all coming down at once–or at least on the verge of coming down at once. It could turn into a “perfect storm” of sorts with a lot of major changes ahead for both of us. I only hope they are good ones.

My daughter Jackie has been studying for the Bar exam all summer long. The exam is like a week away or so and I can tell it is starting to get to her. It must suck to have to take a test like that with so much riding on it.

I think things are about to go south with my Utah employer. It’s okay though. They’ve paid me to sit on my ass for a year. They are probably going to demand that I move to Utah soon and that ain’t gonna happen. Going to have to do something though because Michigan is becoming a vast wasteland as far as finding meaningful employment goes.

For some reason the other day I almost drown in a memory. It’s such a vivid memory that I find it hard to deal with sometimes. I was thinking about this one time when I was living in New Jersey. Someone at work had a party. It started on a Saturday afternoon and went on forever. It may still be going on for all I know. I left the party at 5 in the morning in no shape to drive home. There was some kind of bad combination of Gin, cocaine, and marijuana in my system and I had to drive from Middlesex to Somerset and there was no one on the road that morning but me and the cop that followed me most of the way home.

It’s not an unpleasant memory at all. It’s just a very vivid one. Of course I had to drive home that morning because otherwise it would have been a Long Walk Home.

I think I need a foppasiddle now.

Sorry for all the spelling errors, but Firefox blows dead rats.

Okay, everybody is doing some kind of review post about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, so I thought I better get my 2 cents worth in before it has all been said.

Here’s my review:

Ummmm.

I didn’t see it.

And probably won’t.

Until it comes out on pay per view.

Thank You & Good Night.

You know, the more I look at this post, the more I think I might have done something wrong.

Oh well!

The other day I did a post about some garage projects that I have been working on and I felt like I needed to do a follow up post because things, as they say, have changed.

First of all, I am not gay, so please don’t accuse me of such things. Why would I say that, you ask? Well, because I actually painted a border on the wall.

I know. Totally gay.

When I looked at the picture on my last post, I just didn’t like the way one of the walls looked, so I added a red border.

Once I did that, I started thinking about the wall on the other end of the garage. See, here’s the thing. The hacks that used to own this place were not good at anything. They were lousy farmers. Lousy carpenters. Lousy plumbers. Lousy electricians. And the absolute world’s worst masons. But with all that in mind, they were pretty good at messing things up. Boy, could they mess things up.

Anyway, every time I looked at that wall at the back of the garage, all I could think about was it looked like they might have managed to somehow change their oil on that wall. Or maybe gut a deer. Either way, it was a mess.

So, I fixed it.

I put up some new wood on the wall (if you actually count OSB as being wood) and I painted it a manly color (almond–as in nuts, like I actually have a pair) and then I added a border. Another red border. I know, that totally negated the manly almond color.

God, I feel so gay right now.

But for what it is worth, I made the border out of crappy old wood and cut it down to size using a table saw. That’s manly, isn’t it?

Note the old wall on the left in the picture above. It is made from grease stained, deer gut plywood that looks like it came off of a shipping pallet or something. I will probably change that too. Paint it pink or something.

Maybe I will just add a border.

A big gay border.

Jesus, I need a fucking intervention.

It just gets worse.

Remember this? I called that (the link) the never ending art project for a reason. That link is the way it looked a few days ago. Here’s what it looks like today.

To the left of this “thing,” there is another more or less identical “thing.” I had started painting it a few weeks ago, but abandoned it to become obsessed with the “thing” above.

Well the other day, I was looking at the “thing” and decided that I like the ordered geometric look of the one above, but i,t in no wa,y is like anything in my life. I mean it is the way I would love for my life to be, but it is just not the way it is.

My life is a lot more like this:

Another view of my life:

Obviously, this will never be finished either. That’s the nice thing about using thin gauge metal as a canvas. I can just keep adding paint to it. Next week both of these may be totally different.

Or they may not.

Also, I would like to respectfully point out to a couple of readers of this blog who mentioned in the comments that my shop is neat and well organized. Well now it is neat and well organized and has borders. Sadly though, my garage is not all that neat and well organized. I wish it was, but it isn’t. Here are a few random pictures that might give you a little better view of the way things really are around my “shop.”

Totally cluttered work bench.

Totally cluttered wood storage area. Hey, wood storage area? Isn’t that a vagina?

Somewhere under all that crap there is a manly table saw.

Okay, so I have to admit that part of the reason I enjoy doing all of the painting out in the garage is that I might be getting just the slightest buzz from the paint. To show you what kind of scrutiny I am under around here, my wife and son figured that out pretty quickly and they brought out a fan and put it in my shop.

Of course I don’t turn it on–ever, but they stop by on a regular basis and turn it on for me. Ladies and gentlemen, meet my family, The Buzzkills.

I think that picture is additional proof that my shop does get a bit messy from time to time. Of course messing it up does give me an excuse to go clean it up and cleaning it up does give me an excuse to huff some paint and huffing some paint does give me a little buzz and……..

God Damn. I am coming up on 4 months of total sobriety. I would have never thought it was possible, but I have done it and I have no idea how.

The other night my granddaughter Satan was over and I was trying to keep her from eating the cats, so I picked her up and starting spinning her around in circles in the kitchen. Naturally all that spinning made me dizzy and it reminded me of everything I liked about drinking. I’ve been spinning in circles ever since. The doctor said I couldn’t drink, but he never said anything about putting my liver in a centrifuge.

Anyway, in the absence of anything worthwhile in my life (drinking), I have resorted to doing all the things that old men do. For instance, I spend hours on end in my garage cleaning and building things.

This is my “shop.”

If you look at the picture above, you can see three work benches. Ever since we have lived in this hell hole house, there has only been one work bench. The bench on the left side of the picture is “the original.” I built the other two (mostly out of scrap lumber), added a few lights, cleaned the place up a little and now have a place to hang out and think about drinking. Or not drinking.

Occasionally though, I build things. I mean like actual things. A few weeks ago, I built some flower boxes out of scrap lumber for my wife. Well, my kids saw them and decided they wanted flower boxes too. Unfortunately though, I ran out of scrap lumber so now I have to build them out of nice new lumber. Actually, I am building them out of cedar because that is a great rot and insect resistant wood. Eventually I will build some for my kids, but these are for my mother and my mother-in-law.

Actually that is not true. I am going to give one to my mother-in-law. I am going to stuff my mother in one.

I know. I know. Don’t quit my day job. Actually, I would never quit my day job. I am getting paid to do nothing, why in the world would I ever quit my day job? I can just keep building and cleaning things and getting paid forever.

Probably not.

Anyway, I am tearing out shit that has been in this garage since we moved in. It is a total mess, but it is getting better.

For example, the pictures below shows how one corner of my shop looks now.

To the left there used to be an old door that wouldn’t close. I tore that out and framed in the whole area that used to be a door. The area to the right of the door used to have these awful old wooden shelves that smelled like paint, oil, and gas and were all split and warped. I tore those out and put insome new fangled plastic shelves. They are cheap, relatively sturdy, and easy to assemble. What more could an idiot like me ask for?

Oh, and those old shelves I told you about. I tore them out but I saved the wood. Now I am building bird houses out of the old crappy wood. See, that is what you do when you get old and you can’t drink or smoke or chase women anymore.

I don’t really know what happened, but at some point in my life I woke up and the question became–bird houses? or death?

I’ll let you know the answer to that question in a few more months.

Oh, and check out the gazebo thingie above. My wife spends all of her time sitting in the gazebo reading and doing sudoku puzzles. She really needs to consider building bird houses or something.

In addition to all of my building projects, I have decided to become like a famous artist. Like Malach or something. Probably not as famous as Malach. More like that Picasso guy or some other not as famous as Malach guy. Which artist cut off his ear? I want to be that guy. Only instead of cutting off my ear, I cut off a kidney. Do you actually cut off a kidney?

No, probably not.

Anyway, here’s how my “art” started. There were these rusty old steel peg-board things in the garage. I decided that I was going to paint them white. Only I didn’t stop there. I just kept going.

This is going to be my “never ending art project.” I plan to just keep adding to it everyday. It may never be finished.

Or maybe it is finished now.

10 years from now will any of this matter?

Probably not.

Oh, remember the tree? Piles of wood just like this one are about all that is left.

Well, piles of wood and this part. I am going to have to cut this down sooner or later. I am not sure how old the tree was, but some of the branches were at least 25 years old. Once we cut down the main part of the tree we’ll get to find out how old the whole thing is.

Random pictures of stuff:

Can a person ever have enough clamps?

Probably not.

Okay, I am going to admit it right now. When it comes to work gloves, I am totally gay. I have these two pairs plus a red pair and a brown pair.

Soon I am going to get a blue pair. (Don’t tell my wife though).

Hey, wait a minute? Isn’t that my lawnmower with tits up there? And my Chihuahua? Oh my God, it is.

Maybe I could train Carmen to mow.

Probably not.

During a recent trip to Texas, I had what some might call a startling revelation. Others of you might just call it gas. I guess it all depends entirely on your point of view. This revelation came about when my wife and I were sitting in the hotel at about 8 o’clock one night doing what old people do, which was wishing we had a cup of coffee. There we sat with our nice little hotel coffee pot, two coffee mugs and no coffee.

My wife, being the smart one of the two of us, decided that she should call housekeeping and ask them to send up some coffee for our little hotel coffee pot because we were old and didn’t have anything else better to do at 8 o’clock on a Thursday night than sit around and drink coffee. She’s a genius, I thought to myself. Anyway, to make a long story short, my wife called housekeeping and ordered us some coffee.

Yippie-kai-yay mother fuckers, we’re partying like rock stars now.

About an hour later, there was a knock on our door. Naturally, we were both expecting coffee because now it was a little after 9 and a cup of coffee is exactly what two old people need at 9 0′clock on a Thursday night in Texas when the entire hotel is partying and throwing “nekkid wimmen” in the pool and we are just sitting there watching each others body parts dry up and fall off at an alarming rate. Alas, it was not to be.

When I opened the door, there was a little Mexican man standing there with one of those little apartment sized refrigerators on his back. He said something to me in Spanish that I did not understand which is not the least bit surprising since I don’t understand Spanish and then he walked into my room and sat the little refrigerator down on the floor. At this point, I began to worry a little bit. I mean seriously, what if he had some kind of miniature Pancho Villa in that refrigerator and he was going to turn him loose on me and my wife. There’s no telling what kind of destruction a little miniature Pancho Villa might cause. Or worse yet, what if he had the Frito Bandito in there? My God, I would have had to offer him an Hawaiian Punch.

My little Mexican friend proceeded to install this little apartment sized refrigerator with alarming speed all the while blabbering away to me in Mexican. Or Spanish. Are they the same language or are there subtle differences that only an afficianado of that language would understand? Anyway, after a few minutes, the refrigerator was installed and the little Mexican man went on about his way. He probably had burritos to make or smething.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was on the verge of a revelation. Just hang on, I am getting to it.

A few minutes later, my wife and I awoke from our dementia induced coma and said to each other….

“What the fuck just happened here?”

Of course I would love to blabber on endlessly here taking you all around in circles just to get to the point I am trying to make, but life is short and getting shorter, so I am just going to take you right there to my point and tell you here is exactly what happened:

We ordered coffee for our little hotel-sized coffee pot and somehow, we got a refrigerator. That’s it in a nutshell.

I mean obviously, this is a bit more than a misunderstanding. This is just plain not communicating at all. So at that exact moment in time, I wondered if maybe we do need to have a common language here in America and since the majority of us speak English, why shouldn’t it be English?

What do you think? Should we all learn a common language so we can communicate effectively with each other, or is that whole Tower of Babel thing going to be okay with you?

Of course it doesn’t really much matter what we come up with here. Our politicians will never make a decision on this because someone would get pissed off so we will just let this whole controversy continue to brew and simmer and go unresolved for all time because we are America and we are pretty much incapable of resolving anything.

As far as I am concerned, there are only two kinds of people in the world.

Person number 1:

Those that believe that the whole jury selection process in the free world is the most excruciatingly mind-numbing, projectile vomit inducing, fuck all process you will ever go through with in your entire life…..

And

Person number 2:

Those stupid fucking idiots that believe being selected for jury duty is some kind of wonderful privilege or something.

I sat through 5 hours of this mind numbing process this morning and I hereby make this declaration:

I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what the penalties are for skipping out on jury duty because I will never take part in the process again for as long as I live. Seriously, I would rather spend a week in jail than 5 more minutes in that fucking courthouse listening to idiots blather on about the law and murders and forensic evidence and prior convictions and blah-de-fucking-blah-blah.

Clerk: So if any of you cannot perform the duties expected of you, please let us know now.

Me: I won’t be coming back after today.

Clerk: Excuse me.

Me: I am flying out of here on Thursday so I won’t be coming back after today even if I am selected.

Clerk: Well the judge will let you know.

Me: It makes no difference what the judge says, I won’t be back after today. Just trying to save us all some time.

Clerk: Please take your seat.

Okay, so armed with that knowledge, you would think that any rational human would do one of two things. Arrest me, or let me go. Either way would have been fine, but nope, these legal douche bags are not rational human beings (sorry Angryman and Jackie) because they made me go through the whole excruciating selection process anyway and at exactly 5 minutes until 1, the judge calls the prostituting attorney and the dense attorney up to the bench and whispers something into their collective ears which probably sounded a little like this,

“Will you two please just select a jury so we don’t have to buy these stupid fucks lunch.”

Miraculously enough, the two craptorneys are suddenly “completely satisfied” with the jury and the rest of us are set free. If I had been selected, I was going to hold out until the criminal was executed by a firing squad because 5 hours of my life were wasted and I will never get those hours back.

Oh, and before anyone tells me that serving on a jury is an honor in a free society, please feel free to go fuck yourself.

Thanks in advance.