the end of 2020

can i get a choir of non-angelic creatures to sing a chorus celebrating the coming demise of 2020? one more year of this kind of senseless torture…that i cannot imagine. can we just round up the bad actors and send them all to the Romulan Neutral Zone now…

next year, we should just skip January. I mean, who would notice? nobody makes any money in January anyway, unless they are running a ski resort…so why not start with February?

we could start the whole year on Valentine’s Day. Does anybody even remember the first part of February? Most of the time in my neck of the woods, our necks are frozen solid from January 1st to February 13th. We simply cannot move them. When my truck skids on a hockey-rink-thick slick of ice, i simply cannot, will not, turn my neck to see my progress. if I am in a snow bank, that’s grand too because i can always build an igloo…without turning my head. who cares what happens on ice? we have better things to do….like wait for Valentine’s Day.

Then, we could have a Chocolate Friday the weekend after Valentine’s Day. The following Monday could be Reese’s Monday, because…nothing goes better with old melted-down chocolate than peanut butter. With such a kickstart of love, we should be ready to rocket into the “New Year.”

There is precedence for this. Somewhere in the middle of the deep dark Middle Ages, the pope changed the calendar, and gave everyone a jumpstart into the year. Skipping January and part of February would likewise give us an excuse to forget about the plague of insanity birthed in 2020, so we could go back to living Our Best Medieval Life….I mean Our Best Life Now.

But….in order for this to work…we must be in this together. No one can get out of bed in January and early February…except to gorge themselves on ramen noodles to prepare for more hibernation, after “releasing the kraken” to the white porcelain goddess. Since a huge swath of the first world (and the darkest 3rd world) will have endured endless days wearing face masks, no one will be able to smell us until we are released from our quarantine cocoons as dawn arises on Valentine’s Day.

This will also ensure that faithful men everywhere will shower or bathe prior to enjoying the company of their women, as the great New New Year’s Day begins with celebrations of roses, chocolates, and other sweet aromas.

I cannot think of a more appropriate way to say goodbye and good riddance to one of the worst years in the history of the world…

Picture this…

after a long hard day of work, I come home like a old wet dishrag, slump into a Lazy Boy, and ponder how in the world my years of experience have not made me some kind of an authority on anything. everywhere I look, some super genius has a technologically superior website that makes me feel like a third grader at a talent show. sure, I can still write like I have at least half a brain, but the real world has forced me into making a living with somewhat lower level critical thinking skills. And always…there is someone above me making decisions on a level comparable to my dog’s IQ (if I had a dog, but I don’t have time for one). You would have thought Momma would have told me there’d be days like this….

So, every day, I do the same old thing…get dressed, eat some dippy eggs and buttery bread, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, open the door, close the door, go back and open the door, go back and put down the seat down…and finally, get my gear and head for the car…

now, my neighbor has a dog…Raymie…who never shuts up. He barks at mashed potatoes, he barks at running water, he barks at street lights, he barks at car doors. when I climb into my Wreck to go to work, he runs away from the fence and into the house and back out the front door to say good-bye. I appreciate it, because at least someone thinks I am a little more outstanding than a car door. But it shouldn’t be this way. I have talent. I have skill. And I have a longer attention span than a poodle…

But you wouldn’t know it, if I sat in the same room as these profiles you see online. no, you surely wouldn’t. so what if i am trilingual…they are the feckin’ easter bunny. and don’t you forget it. they will charge you $297 to show you how you can take photos that no longer look like Mister Potato Head in a friggin’ snowstorm. Color palettes of shades you never dreamed of because you were born in a hovel somewhere and your education never gave you a pallet, except one to lay on the ground. and your likes? right, they have enough likes from over 1.7 million subscribers, you will never be in their league. so how can I compete against these know-it-alls with mysterious acronyms behind their names?

sure, it may take me awhile…but after awhile, the reality beyond our temporal reality will kick in, and I will see things more clearly. I will remember again that I am certainly as valuable as that narcissistic eejit hawking earth-shattering photography lessons for hundreds of dollars online. No, I am not idiot. If I was, I might be spending thousands of dollars on a course of photography from a business-savy technophile making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of foggy-headed consumers. But I am not. I am not going to have any delusions of being the next Ansel Adams. I understand there are gifted people out there with thousands of dollars of equipment, while I am a simple gardener, happy to get a few crops in that produce a winner…

So I may never be a grand photographer, even outside my current career, but at least I know that, and do not present myself as something I am not. I sincerely hope that you do as I do, and be content to be you, the unique one God created you to be. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i love my starches

OK, so I will admit, I don’t just like my potatoes. rice, potatoes, pasta- I love my starches…

….but hey, right now,  I am definitely down with noodles…

 

The weaker week

In the course of human events, the ancient world was rife with conflicting schedules for the unit we call “the week,” from five days to ten days, with some societies choosing alternating numbers of days in the week to balance the year. In the so-called “West,” it was a Roman Emperor, Constantine, who endowed us with a much more reliable measurement, standardizing the week into seven days….which, of course, made him look like a super genius. Constantine, who appears to have been a wee bit of a super narcissist, stole the idea from the ancient Hebrews, Babylonians,  and other empires….and God.

The average man or woman in 322AD, in the area influenced by the Roman Empire, went to work on “A” and might go shopping on “H.” The Romans were less original with their days of the week than just about any other civilization ever to wake up from a bed in the morning. This might explain why there were so many murders among the imperial family, who must have taken the blame for not exciting workers into more production on “Day E,” and for the shopping day fiasco “Black F,” our predecessor to “Black Flag,” which is always a nasty surprise to insects, infidels, and 16 year old Snowflakes…

And while everyone- including the Hobbits, elves, unicorns, My Little Ponies, Democrats and Cybermen- could rationally argue which day Christ was born in Bethlehem, and which calendar should be consulted for that….and which day is the true seventh day…and which element should be used to calculate when a day is officially over…and which calendar is the most accurate for predicting the end of the world…there is  enough history revealing how corrupted and inaccurate ancient time-keeping was that it is simply a waste of time in the end.

What does not make sense is that the names used for the days of the week in much of the western world is still attached to long forgotten pagan mythology that makes little sense to use in the 21st century. And while there have been mostly forgotten attempts, like those by Pope Sylvester, to change the names to more reasonable and useful references, none has shaken, nor officially changed the days of the Western World.

Strangely enough, Sunday, the first day of the week now, is closest to some semblance of usefulness. Sunday, like Son-Day, the day celebrated as the day when Christ rose from the grave, at least makes a bit of sense. Monday, on the other hand, sounds like “Mun-day,” the Day of The Mundane.

Many of us have to get up early and go to work on this Monday, Mundane Day, not nearly as happy as Son-Day, because it is most likely to be the least exciting day of the week. Hence, it is more appropriate to rename it “Munday,” short for “Mundane Day.”

Tuesday…well, who knows what in the world that refers to, other than it is “Twos Day.” On Twos Days, we know that it is the second day of the standard Western workweek, still so far from the weekend. Twos Days are good days for Two For One specials because we…those of us who must take time to stop into a restaurant to eat our meals while working in our fields…are more likely to succumb to this two-for-one deal as it is early in the week, and we are still hungry from the terrible day we had on Munday (Mundane Day).

The third Day of the week, sometimes called Hump Day, which is not helpful for the chronically single, is Wednesday, which makes absolutely no sense. No one I know says “Wed-ness.” Can I get a Wed-ness that it is Wed-ness-day? Wind, yes. Winds-day- that I hear all the time. Of course, this Winds-Day is the day when it can go  either way- good or bad- being the third day of the work week, and the day when you do not know which way the wind blows, nor which way the week will blow…

The fourth day of the week is Thursday, or “Turzday.” I prefer those who pronounce it in the latter form, as it reminds me of just how frustrating the day can be. Turz is like Turds, and while it is not Friday, you can certainly smell it from here…

Back in the day, I remember the lads talking about “getting fried.” Well, if you have a really terrific job, you don’t have such pathetic days. But if your job is a pile of Turds, Fry-day is the day you either eat all the fried chicken, chickfry (deep fried breaded anything fried in the same grease as fried fish), or some other ghastly grease-enriched gastrointestinal adventure…or….because your brain is so “fried,”you need to go do something stupid like watch every season of Deep Space Nine until your eyeballs bug out, or you collapse like a three-toed sloth on the bedroom floor…

And then, there is Saturday. What can you say about Saturday? Nothing bad, surely. It is a good day to relax from all the hectic work days. Some of us do have to work on Saturdays, but even then, there is something uniquely pleasing about Saturday that says to us that it is a good day to sit at some time. So, Saturday is not too far off from Sat-ur-day, or sit down and do nothing so stressful as what was done the previous five days. But then again, some of us do not have this freedom.

And that is a shame. There should be some kind of freedom to call a day what you will, as long as somebody out there relates to the idea. So, Turds Day might be more popular in Ireland than in the USA, where it is more like to be The Day After Hump Day, or Humpless Day, which is not good for just about anyone.

While there is currently no mass movement to change the names of the days of the week…this post should inspire you to come up with your own ideas for new names for the days of the week. After all, how long is the western world going to be writing “Wednesday,” when practically nobody pronounces it that way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

dreams of love

she’s a bit stiff around the edges….a bit pale, pasty, and tender…but I love her. her aroma sets her apart from the others. when I walk by, I cannot but stop and stare. she’s a looker, that’s for sure.

sure, she’s had her ups and downs. some says she’s a bit twisted. but I like her that way. she’s genuine, never pretentious.

I met her in a restaurant. I sat down, she sat down. we became acquainted. she was so inviting, I could not resist.

maybe I should not have invited her to sit at the table. maybe I should have behaved. but life is short, and sometimes you can miss love as it passes by. 

but now I dream of her in the night, and sometimes, I can feel myself smiling at the thought…the two of us together again…until I wake up and realize she is gone forever…

 

 

Rare and fatal bleeding, or “how to order a juicy steak”

When I met my wife- the original- she could cook a steak in a frying pan without adding butter or cooking oil. She simply lit the burner and watched the blue flames heat the skillet until the steak was nicely browned on both sides….the consistency of a shoe insert.

In my own endearing way, I expressed great pleasure with her inedible creations by shoving pieces under the table for her cat, while wiping my mouth with a paper napkin. It took me months before even revealing that I actually knew the secret to making an edible steak. Of course, this would come at a price- the price was that she would have to relinquish the job of chef if I was to share this wonderful revelation. 

I do not recall her making me any more steaks…ever…

When she got pregnant with our first, she had a craving for steak. This is not necessarily a good thing for a struggling new husband, who worked like a dog for The Man….I mean, who labored for hours doing menial work that older men would not do. But, life was a bit more fair in those days when it came to getting a meal at a restaurant, especially one with a buffet.

One buffet was all the rage- all you can eat steak, with salad bar, for $4.99 a piece. These were not ordinary steaks, these were juicy ribeyes, sirloins, New York Strips, all cooked to perfection and brought to your table. The servers would explain in detail what each preparation method would entail…by showing us sample glossy photos of steaks with different strips of red, or no red at all, which must be adhered to, in order to get one’s steak.

The now familiar scale of rare, medium rare, medium, and so on was shown the customer, as if the customer were going to take a written test on the material after the meal. One could not, at that time, order a “lightly rare,” or “extremely well-done” steak. You could not “have it your way.” You could not order “a 4 inch wide red streak” in your steak or any other deviations from the photo list.

Now, some of those restaurants are closed…gone forever…and their salad bar heavens have gone the way of the Cabbage Patch Doll or the one-stringed ukulele from Odd Lots. Now, we have choices, so many choices. So many choices that one can create choices and claim they have always been choices. Like the choice to mate with furniture…or live life as a life-size Raggedy Ann Doll. So, it should not come as a surprise that food choice has entered a new frontier, where “rare” and “medium” are rarely mentioned, and new ideas of steak-readiness have invented a whole new series of phrases.

For, just like the newly discovered symptoms that appear from taking a newly advertised drug on TV, the newly prepared steak comes in a wide range of philosophically friendly cooking choices, from “lightly killed,” to “murdered in wine sauce.”

The pharmaceutical world, which rules the life of average American adults, has slipped into the food preparatory culture and brought us more than nine steak grades, from “Raw” to “Fatal.” The raw steak is organically pure with only Himalayan Pink Salt rubbed into the surface structure of the meat, while the “Fatal” is blackened on all sides, including the ends, to seal in the “taste of black death.” “Fatal” can be cooked with “Rare and Fatal Bleeding,” which is an episode that may or may not occur, if the steak is slashed at just the right angle. The purpose is to create “in cold blood” on a plate, an artistic arrangement of the finest charred yet rare steak to ever be created, mixing both ends of the flaming spectrum. 

To say it will not be your father’s steak world is an understatement; refining the steak preparation philosophy to include such choices should create a niche of steak culture the world has never seen.

 

 

 

random concerto # 3, by Konstatin Kaffeine, in b minor

that moment you realize… you will be up for the rest of the night…

is there no antidote?

why is there no antidote?

why can’t I have all the benefits of caffeine…no more headaches, a lighter bladder, sharpened ponderings at unearthly hours of the night…

without insomnia?

drinking too much caffeine when you are already tired is like being stuck on a twelve hour flight to the Vatican with a plane full of nuns…no way out of this sluggish spiral…

…until you crash land in your nice, comfy bed.

but first, let’s all go to the restroom…

again and again.

and again.

of course, we can solve all this….at 3 AM…by making a sandwich. Yes, a sand-which or -wich. Whichever works for you. Excuse me while I  go eat another lunch…

 

Well now, that was nice. Kind of reminded me of yesterday. Only yesterday was not a day  separated by a sleep time, a night.

it does help make me sleepy. a little bit. maybe. possibly. if I crawl into bed, maybe, just maybe I will fall asleep.

 

between a rock and a hard place

how does…a series…well, maybe it was three, no four…times of nightly trips to the cupboard to eat peanut butter….only by the spoonful…effect a wee walk on the wild side?

throaty breathing and slight dizziness….have I walked too far for the state of my body type?

• should I phone the doctor after I get back to the land of network service?
• is that a pain in my side, or a sadistic side of pain?
• should my fundamental plan of action blame it on “old age?”
• didn’t my grandmother suffer from the same thing at this age?

if you go too far into the woods, you have gone too far.

I know. I went too far. ever have a washing machine in your stomach?  the agitator is active…your innards swirling around. but the worst sensation in middle age is build-up in the muffin gut. I have heard of this malady…and it sounds terrifying. almost as frightening as eating the wrong kind of moss, succumbing to a vegetative breakdown, while armed with a “Foraging In The Wild” Guidebook in the deep, dark woods, too far from the parking lot.

they say there is nothing like vacating your colon in the woods. it is part science, and about 3/4 art. one must be careful not to fall into the….

…butt first. green leaves work better than spotted ones. or ones with that burnt-toast look. and, in light of certain Quranic references, small pebbles are really not a good idea…

but…a clean colon is a happy colon. and a happy colon abruptly ends prolonged sentences…of…

so forget about the body type…you can morph after a simple vacation. a walk in the woods can expand into a session long enough for a youtube series on “survival in the wilderness within two miles of your vehicle.” just carry plenty of hand sanitizer, soap and water, or other essentials necessary for your vacation…

back out on the trail…the weight that so easily pulled me down was gone. the trail ahead opened to new possibilities. the topography that once seemed so strenuous became a joy, and I danced up the trail like a young buck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a bad day to be a fish

imagine…if you will…that you have the intelligence of a fish. why? because, my dear friend, that is your brain on public education.

now, imagine, if you will, that you have spent a long futile day attempting to cross the lip of a pond edge to another inlet where the water appears….appears…to be more pleasant, more tasty…with tasty things floating around in it.

you squirm your way to the edge and hit dry land…and find the pebbles irritating your scales as you try to push across the small piece of land and into the most glorious looking bright shiny water you have ever seen…since you last had a conscious thought about geographic locations.

but…you have no hands, you have no feet, you are a fish. and it is a really bad day to be a fish.

so bad, you have decided not to be a fish.

you would rather be a seal. or a porpoise. or a proctologist. you would prefer to be a creature with legs…to go anywhere you want…to do anything you want…even if they had to be hairy.

but as you lie there imagining…some wise guy will come along, pick you up, and throw you in the trash can…

so thank God you are not a fish. worse yet, you could have been created a weasel…and had weasel breath. isn’t it good to know that your chances of amounting to anything here on this blue-brown-green spinning ball are infinitesimally more likely than that of your standard blue whale, your average red snapper, and even you most delicious sea bass?

sure, you may have a bad day…or two.. or several thousand. that never entitles you to become an ugly, loathing, ten-toed sloth, moping your life away because you think No One on planet Earth seems to care if you live, die, or play Ultimate Pokémon. things could be worse…oh yes, they could be worse. you could be married to the Cat From Hell, live alone in a hammock tent all winter and have icy butt syndrome, or be married to someone who has all the warmth of an Angela Merkel. you are infinitely more valuable to the Universe than you can imagine.

you are too complex to be an accident.

who me?

are you breathing? are you alive?

you know there is no one else in this world who looks like you, who sounds like you, who even smells like you. how could you be an accident? you were no surprise to your creator – you were planned by forces higher than hormones and the wrong time of the month.

it is a good day to be a human…even if it is a bad day to be a fish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donut Love, Not Drama

The “Capital Rotunda” is not a very nice sounding name, and, I believe, should be changed to something less inflammatory, like The “Round-looking Room.” I mean, “rotunda,” sounds so prejudiced, like you are tearing down their self-esteem. It makes me embarrassed for the capital building. And we just don’t need that kind of anti-extra large verbage anymore.

I thought we grew up waaayy more than that. I mean, look, it’s the twenty first century. We have robot love, tolerance for little people, and rights for canines.

If you cannot be more tolerant, you should just go off to Greenland or somewheres. Leave us tolerant people alone. We have issues to champion and have no time for petty little arguments over what is right and what is wrong. I mean, you’d think we actually had to think about life for an hour or two instead of playing games until 3 am like most normal people.

So, when your loser friend came by and told me that I looked like some kind of Pillsbury DoughGirl, I was offended. First, it was clearly retro of you, and so retro I cannot deal with it. Yeeaaah. So, why don’t you retro someone else with your drama? And, by the way, if I want to take selifes with my cream cheese sandwich and post them to instagram, I have every right to make myself look like a creep. Anyone can do that, We have freedom of speech. 

Second, and this makes me the maddest, why a DoughGirl? What is a DougGirl? Like anyone uses Pillsbury anymore. Haven’t you ever heard of Krispy Kreme? They are the double latte of the donut world! They deserve your respect. I mean, if you do want to diss me, why don’t you call me “Krispy Kreme,” or “Crueller?” That’s what I eat, not this Pillsbury whatever. what is a “Pillsbury Doughboy” anyway? is it something from Tim Horton’s? Cause I don’t speak Canadian.

You have a problem with that? I bet you and your friends eat dog poop donuts, like those Bunny Bread bakery things that taste like they’re a hundred years old. Yeeaaah.

So, why don’t you just back off on my blog, girls, and take your doritos and guacamole and go back to middle school where you belong because I am what I am and if I want to wear a XXXXXL and stuff my face with creme filled, then you will just have to visit me when they put me inside that piano box on the last day. Cause I’m an American and I will eat whatever I want. And I like the taste of Red Dye Number 40 and Blue Lake # 2. So, if I wanna eat High Fructose Corn Syrup cause I don’t want to chew that sawdust crap they call “Whole Wheat,” then why can’t I? It’s a free world. You can’t make me eat something called Whole wheat. Or vegetables and fruit. Who eats that crap anyway?

Besides, the doctor is stupid. So, I got diabetes from eating too many donuts and white rice. White rice? Is he racist or something? the high fructose corn syrup is rotting my brain- that’s what he says. i really don’t believe him, my brain is fine, I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I can trig and logorhythm. he’s just prejudiced against people who drive with blurry vision. really, that is so retard.