May 2010 Archives

Milk the Prostate of Human Kindness
'Tis a vector for what's good and fair
For I must state that what's behind us
Is the nectar of our derrière

I press my digit against the flower
That's in my tail, my honeysuckle
At first I fidget and then full power
Right past the nail and to the knuckle

Quite on a lark with deep affection
I sally forth, I can't resist
She now is marked for my inspection
With a stripe due north of lips I've kissed

What are the chances my little birdie
Less sweetly sings as a soiled dove
And can a Sanchez be so dirty
If it's a thing that's done with love?

I'm looking back at the last weekend and saying to myself, "wow, that went fast."  It wasn't exactly a Lost Weekend as it was in the eponymous film where Ray Milland gets perpetually shitfaced, though in a cool and noirish sort of way.  Nor was it like some of my behavior when I was at my worst, a wrestched and excessive Friday night followed by a Saturday and Sunday where I was able to do little but lie on the couch and bemoan the sorry state that I brought upon myself.

That is not to say there were no excesses.  I just showed some moderation in them, that's all. 

On Friday after work, I had a pint of Trumer Pils at the Argus before heading over to Oakland on BART.  When I met up with Paula, she was hobnobbing with hipsters at 23rd and Telegraph and taking photos of the local art scene.  I have a lot of anomosity toward people who are hipper and cooler than myself, which is to say pretty much everybody.  I spent the next hour or so in a cafe with a coffee and a book of Etgar Keret stories.  When Paula was done taking pictures, we went over to the Heart and Dagger where I proceeded to down two PBR tall boys and a shot of something that had a color not occurring in nature.

That may sound like a lot of alcohol to some but compared to some Friday nights, I was a regular Carrie Nation.

Saturday was about the same, though I got a later start.  There was a software release at work which required, among other things, that I phone into a conference call and not slur my words.  At about nine, I was cut loose and celebrated my bit of freedom by heading down to the Argus for a drink.

The plan was to keep it at two whiskeys because if I managed to show that level of restraint, I am therefore not an alcoholic and paradoxically allowed to drink as much as I want.  I would have managed to pull that off, at least I think I would, if it weren't for the execrable film showing on the TV above the bar.  The movie was "Virgin High," released in 1991, and the acting and dialogue were surpassed in their awfulness only by the hairdos I I never see another John Oatesque perm, it will be too soon.

I pulled out my iPhone and did an imdb lookup of the flick to see if there was any reason why I should not cut my losses and flee the bar right then and there.  And there he was, given second billing.  Burt Ward, who played Robin in the old Batman series from the sixties.  I don't remember him in a lot of roles after that show, probably because he was too short to be cast as an action hero and too bad an actor to be cast as anything else.  I couldn't leave.  I needed to see his valiant effort to jumpstart his career in the early nineties. 

He sucked.  I was on my fourth Jameson's when I realized that I was not a Burt Ward completist and did something considered unthinkable in some quarters.  I left the bar with half a drink undrunk.

Sunday just evaporated.  I had no hangover but no motivation to do much with the day either.  I spent most of it playing a computer game where where I was the builder of an empire.  I entertained myself by starting unjust wars and naming cities after various sexual atrocities.  By late afternoon, I regretted not getting out of the house but there was one thing I learned from the experience.  If I ever get the chance to rule the world, I probably won't do much to benefit humanity but atlases will be a lot more fun to look at.

Billy spent most of the summer afternoon playing in the backyard.  Every so often, he would go into the kitchen, and eat a cookie from the jar.  It was during one of these trips that he saw his mother standing next to the cookie jar.  The lid was off.  Her arms were crossed.

He reached to grab another cookie.  She reached for his ear.  She was faster than he was.

"Sixteen cookies!" she screamed, giving his ear a twist.

"Ow!" screamed Billy.

"You ate sixteen cookies!" she continued, tightening her grip and shaking his head back and forth.  "That's going to give you a stomach ache and spoil your dinner.  Don't you even care?"

Billy wasn't thinking about his stomach or his appetite.  He was thinking about how much his ear hurt and whether his mother intended to rip it clean off.

"Nobody cares," she said and released him.  She put her face in her hands and sobbed.  Billy ran out door.

After his escape, he climbed a tree in the middle of the backyard.  There was a robin's nest high up but reachable from a limb that was big enough to support him.  He got up there, removed the nest, and carefully carried it back down with him.

Billy knelt and looked at the nest with its five blue eggs sitting on the lawn.  He then clenched his hand into a fist, drew it back, and smashed it into the center of the nest.

"Take that!" said Billy.

The contents of the broken eggs had made it about halfway to becoming baby birds.  They had transparent skin, little pot bellies, and beaks that had not yet hardened.  Billy may have only been nine but his fist was mighty.  They never had a chance.

He was startled by the sound of his father's voice behind him.  He must have come home from work and pulled into the driveway without Billy noticing.

"Son, destroying that nest isn't going to make your mother any less crazy," his father said.  "Come out to the car with me.  There is something important I want to show you."

Billy followed his father up the path along the side of the house.  There was blood on the car's front bumper and one of the headlights was broken.

"Come along," said his father.  "What I want to show you is back this way."

They got to the rear of the car and Billy's dad opened the trunk.  There was a dog inside, Margaret Sawyer's Rhodesian ridgeback mix to be precise.  It was quite dead.  Its back was twisted into the shape of a question mark and blood was leaking from various parts of the animal's body.

"What do you think killed this dog?" Billy's father asked.

"Your car?"

"Don't be a smart aleck, Billy.  Of course my car was involved but the real killer was irresponsibility.  Your little girlfriend no doubt left her gate open and when she did, she signed her pet's death warrant."

"She's not my girlfriend, Dad."

Margaret was about Billy's age and they lived not far from each other, but the two seldom spoke.  She had red hair, wore thick glasses, and there were so many freckles on her face the sides of them often touched.  Billy could barely stand to look at her.

"Whether she is or not, that girl needs to be taught a lesson and you're going to watch."

"What are you going to do, Dad?"

"What I am going to do is to put a little accountability back into this world.  I'm going to drive over to that girl's house and demand that her parents fix my headlight and punish their daughter."

"Do I really have to come along?"

"Billy, I want to make a man of you.  I want you to grow up strong and confident enough so you don't end up marrying a woman just like your mother.  I know you're too young to know what I'm talking about but someday you'll understand and perhaps even thank me.  So yes, Son, you do have to come."

Billy and his father got in the car and drove down the tree-lined suburban street toward Margaret Sawyer's house.  Billy stared out of the window and up at the trees.  His father cursed under his breath as the car approached Margaret walking along the sidewalk.

"What's the matter, Dad?" Billy asked.

"The wheel alignment is all out of whack.  One of the front tires smacked into a curb when I hit that dog."

"You're saying that the dog was in the middle of the street and you swerved to miss it.  That's what you're trying to say, isn't it, Dad?"

Billy's father said nothing.  He gripped the wheel as the car approached the young pedestrian.  Despite the pull he felt, he managed to keep the vehicle pointed straight ahead on the road.  At least he did this time.  At least he did for now.

It's Wednesday morning already.  In less than an hour, I have to shower, go to work, and make myself look useful.  The story I've been fiddling with, one that may or may not suck when it's done, is still a bunch of disjointed scribblings in my notebook.  I was going to post it today.  It'll be done on Friday.  Maybe.

Anyway, have a happy Cinco de Mayo.  It's an important American holiday where we honor Mexico for killing a lot of French.

I can't remember what her name was, much about what she looked like, or even what grade I was in at the time, but I will never forget what I learned when this one substitute teacher came to teach my class.  She was either unaware of the lesson plan for that day or chose to ignore it. She handed out a sheet of paper to all the students and told us all to make a wish.

Actually, that's not exactly true.  We were told to write what we would do if we had a million dollars, which was more or less the same thing.  A million bucks was not a finite amount to us kids.  Instead, it was some ridiculously large number that we could relate to in just one way.  If you had that much money, you were a millionaire.  If you were a millionaire. you could buy anything you wanted.

Most of us were middle-class kids.  We may not have been rich but none of us had any experience with real hardship either.  We were used to coveting small luxuries like some toy or a trip to Disneyland.  When we had a chance to wish for something big, we had to wing it.  Some wrote that they wanted to live in a huge mansion.  For others, it was a stable of horses or a new car.  For me, it was a chance to travel around and visit exciting places forever.  Of course, we didn't need all that stuff, probably wouldn't know what to do with it, and it was debatable whether it would even make us any happier.  Still, I think we did all right in this exercise that allowed us to think big.

The substitute teacher did not agree.  After reading our answers. she told us what greedy little monsters we were.  None of us gave our money to those less fortunate or did anything with it that made the world a better place.  So disappointed was she in us that I began to like I was a rotten person as well.  I wanted to change my answer and drop the entire wad of cash on charity.  I didn't really care about anyone else, mind you.  I just wanted people to like me.

Years later, I wonder what the substitute would think of the kind of person I eventually became, hypothetically of course.  There is very little chance that she is still alive when you boil it down to simple arithmetic. She was old then, I am old now, and old plus old equals dead.

I recently gave myself the old wishing exercise just to see how I'd do this time out.  There were no million dollars involved though.  In the fullness of time, I have gained some grasp on what a million will and will not buy.  No, this was an actual wish in the rub-the-lamp, on-a-falling-star magical sense where you could make anything happen. 

A good wish would be an end to cancer.  Everyone who had it would be cured and no one would ever get it again.  That would not only lay to rest any doubts about my character but would be a wonderful thing for humanity.  I decided that if I ever got granted a second wish, this one would definitely be shortlisted.

Ultimately, I decided I would wish for every garden gnome on the planet to come to life.  Think of how much fun our boring world would be then.  Granted, it wouldn't make much difference in gnomeless places like Somalia but in Germany or the Netherlands, people would definitely take notice and I'd be the talk of the town.

The downside of all this is that word would get out that I could have put an end to cancer and didn't.  All those people who lost parents, spouses, and bald little leukemia children would be too consumed by grief to remember that this was my wish and not theirs.  They'd call be all kinds of names, including "murderer," and ask me how I can look in the mirror or sleep at night.  I wouldn't let them get me down though.  It's kind of hard to have a low opinion of yourself when there are countless thousands of living breathing garden gnomes who revere you as a god.