Blog #346                            October 26, 2023

 

Live one day at a time.  Enjoy life to the fullest.  Wake up and smell the roses. 

If not now, when?

 

Bullshit!  All those phrases were invented by self-indulgent flower-sniffers who have relied on someone else to pay their bills while they enjoyed life to the fullest by smelling the damned roses.  We, on the other hand, the hard-working slobs of the world –we, “who lived faithfully a hidden life” have worked all our lives smelling exhaust fumes in order to take care of our families and to subsidize with our taxes and our charity the tired and huddled masses.  Live one day at a time?  You’ll starve by the end of the week.

 

Ok, I feel better now.  Sometimes you just have to let your brain explode for a second or two.  Sorry.  The quote about living a hidden life was by George Eliot.  Hey, any girl who lived in the 19^th Century and called herself George is alright by me.  Nowadays, who knows?  My granddaughter, Charley, has girlfriends named Jo, Ronnie, Danny and Sam.   I believe they do that to intentionally confuse old people.

 

I feel like writing today.  That’s what I do best, you know.  Ask me to write a poem, a song, a speech?  No problem.  Ask me to speak in front of a crowd?  I’m comfortable.  Ask me to check out at Kohl’s?  I turn into an uncoordinated, blithering fool with the Intelligence Quotient of an eggroll.   Your item, Sir, was $60.00 but it was marked 40% off, plus you have a 30% off sticker which is calculated after we take the 40% off.  Plus, you get $20 in Kohl’s cash which you can use anytime – but not today.  It all makes me feel like I’m talking to the Cheshire Cat.  “We're all mad here,” said the Cat.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue (Hamlet). The Cheshire Cat can talk, but I can’t.  Except to you of course.  For Pops, I just purr and look him in the eye and he seems to know what I’m saying: “Open the door to the porch” or “Turn on the faucet so I can drink from it”.  We understand each other.  Mostly, he’s not as dumb as he looks.  Purr.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and not quite as confused as I am.  Do you have all your Halloween shopping done?  You’d better hurry!  Pretty soon dangerous ghouls and insane monsters will be roaming the streets.  No, I’m not talking about the Republican presidential candidates.  I’m talking about Halloween.  They used to give us dimes for Halloween when I was a kid.  We’d collect them for a charity called March of Dimes, and I guess that was a fine gesture, even though we were nine and hoping for a caramel-covered apple on a stick like Mrs. Steinberg used to give us.  What a disappointment!  It’s as if you were expecting to have lunch with Taylor Swift and Matt Gates showed up instead.

 

Sometimes I think it’s already Halloween.  The other day, at a fast-food restaurant, I was waited on by a young woman who had so many tattoos, she looked like the funny pages and so many metal rings and piercings, her face looked like the dashboard of a Tesla. 

 

I can’t wait to go Trick ‘r Treating this year.  At first, I thought I would wear a yellow wig and some prison stripes and go as Donald Trump, but I changed my mind and have decided to go as the Tooth Fairy.  But what should I wear?  Is the Tooth Fairy a man or a woman or some other gender?  And what difference does it make any more?  Hey, I’m in favor of dressing like you want, acting like you want and loving who you want, but – I don’t know, it’s getting so confusing.

 

Your sex I can no longer guess

By whether you’re wearing a dress

Cause now the Tooth Fairy

Is really named Gary

And Santa Claus has PMS.

 

Maybe I’ll just grab a broom and go as Joy Behar.  Or maybe I should just move to Mudville.  There is no Joy in Mudville. 

 

In the last few paragraphs, I have managed to offend men, women, gays, straights, Catholics, dentists, people who like the Republican candidates, people who like Donald Trump or Joy Behar, and the entire March of Dimes.  About now, I’m about as popular as Hamas. On the slim chance that anybody is still reading this, let’s move on.

 

Maybe it’s the anticipation and the reality of my Mohs procedure that has made me so truculent.  There’s a good Weekly Word:  truculent means aggressively defiant and quick to fight.  You know that I never call my doctors by name; I call them by the part of the body they treat or the procedure they perform.  I have Dr. Heart and Dr. Tooth and Dr. Eye and Dr. Asshole.  What should I call the Mohs doctor?  I can’t call her Dr. Mohs, because there was a Dr. Frederic Mohs (1910-2002) who pioneered the procedure.  I’ve decided to call her Dr. Scrape.

 

And if the war in Israel and the war in Ukraine and the rampant dysfunction of the United States government and all your own personal problems haven’t brought your spirits as low as a snake’s belly, there’s always the weather.

 

There’s a big Tropical Depression, unprecedented heat index, record temperatures, hurricanes, storm surges, Bomb Cyclone, flooding, forest fires right over there.  None of this weather is anywhere near you or will affect you in the slightest, but we have our reporter there, standing in nine feet of water and watching the cars blow away in the wind.  Take it away, Rex.

 

They give you all this world-wide weather drama because they honestly have no clue what’s going on “in your neck of the woods”.  If you want to know that, open a window.  But be careful when you open that window – it’s a jungle out there.

 

Time to go for now, but I want you to stay well, pray for Israel and for peace and count your blessings.  Can you remember all that?  And don’t forget to be here next Thursday.  As Alice said, it gets “curioser and curioser”.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com