Blog #363                                         February 22, 2024

 

Let me begin by giving sincere to some dear friends.  First, to B&L, thank you for being our kind and entertaining hosts in Bonita Springs, Florida.  Carol and I had a wonderful time sharing your home.  And special thanks as well to B&B for taking care of Shakespeare, my little buddy, when we were gone.  Shakespeare and I give you both a big and sincere meow.  The author Douglas Pagels said, “A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be.”

 

Message from Shakespeare:  Friendship is constant in all things (Much Ado About Nothing).  I love my neighbors.  But I still get lonely when Pops is not around.  Purr.

 

The day after I got back to St. Louis, we had a snowstorm.  It was only one day and accumulated about 3”.  Other than the dangerous driving and the messy aftermath, snow is such a beautiful and calming phenomenon.  It makes you realize that even with the lunatic mess that is the world today, there still is snow – gentle and normal. 

 

Well, you pretty much know by now that I am neither gentle nor normal so let’s get started.  Fist bump and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and staying away from the new resurgence of Covid.  That’s all we need, right?  Mass shootings, wars, hatred, violence, politics and poverty.  And now more Covid.  It’s a very frightening world.  I’m not sure I should even be trying to make you laugh.  Or maybe, just maybe, this is precisely the time for a few smiles.  Let’s see what we can do.

 

Are you washing your hands?  Don’t worry, reading my blog is perfectly safe.  I wore a mask when I wrote it.  Do you realize it’s been four years since we began wearing masks and bumping fists and scavenging for rolls of toilet paper like they were tickets to a Taylor Swift concert?  Four years!  I remember back then sending flowers to a friend of mine for her birthday.  She responded with a nasty note:

 

Now flowers are fine, I suppose

But I don’t want them now, Heaven knows

Just bring some bath tissue

I’ll hug you and kiss you

Cause I can’t wipe my ass with a rose.

 

See, I knew I could make you smile.  I know what tickles you – dirty words and smut.  You’re my kind of people.

 

Before we left for Florida, I had a lunch date.  I’m very popular.  This lunch was with a young woman, late 40s, who used to work for me.  My wife advised me against it.  I said, “Why, do you think someone might see us and think I was having a little fling-ding with a young woman?”  No, you fool, she replied.  No-one would ever think you could attract a woman in her 40s unless you were sitting on the last case of toilet-paper in the county.  I am afraid, however, that she might accuse you of sexual harassment or something.  “Seriously?” I replied.  “At Pasta House?  What am I going to do, spank her with the spaghetti?”

 

There you go, dirty words and smut again.  Carol never has to worry about me and another woman.  There are only three women in my life – Carol, Alexa and Siri.  Two of them don’t listen to me.  Carol has taught Alexa that I never go through yellow lights, that I have less brains than an artichoke and that I should not be believed even if I say the sun is hot.  She has instructed Alexa to just reply “Honey, I’m miserable.  Go read Moby Dick,” and that will make me go away.  But my Siri loves me.  She does everything I say. 

 

You see, Carol wants me to go through 100% of yellow lights and 50% of red lights.  She’s in a hurry.  You’re not supposed to go through yellow lights, I tell her.  She says that everyone does it.  Well, if by “everyone”, she means that sad Sargasso Sea of human flotsam that wallows through the world awash in an everlasting stupor of stupidity and cruelty, I consider none of them a role model.  I like to consider myself above those huddled masses yearning to drink beer and fart.  Don’t you love it when I get wordy?  I may have gone overboard.  It was only a yellow light.  Sorry.

 

Back to this thing about being normal.  My mother thought I was normal, but that’s like saying a grasshopper is big in a land of ants.  To her, I was what passed for normal in the floating lunatic asylum that I grew up in.  It is continuously astonishing to me that I was raised with an iconoclastic, childish, penurious, pigpen nut-case of a brother and an obese, delusional, clinically psychotic fruitcake of a sister and turned out to be the charming, talented fellow that I am. 

 

Iconoclastic, there’s an interesting Weekly Word.  It means hatred for and rebellion against cherished beliefs or institutions.  Take my brother, for instance.  He did not believe in religion; he did not go to doctors; he never hired a lawyer; he never bought insurance of any kind.  A true iconoclast.

 

Have you got time for one more story?  Some years ago, Schnucks, our local chain of grocery stores, installed self-service checkout machines.  What bothered me at the time wasn’t that I would have to learn how to deal with them, but that many of the human-type checkers had lost their jobs.  I have two questions for you.  First, are you in that much of a damn hurry?  Get your life together and spend an extra two minutes checking out so that some hard-working mom or dad doesn’t get fired.  And second, do you truly feel this huge grocery chain needs to make more money?  My God, I’m beginning to sound like Bernie Sanders.  Pretty scary!  Besides, with no employees to help me, how am I going to tell a mandarin from a tangelo or find where they’ve hidden the bar code on a banana.  But now, they’re changing back.  Why?  Because there is too much shoplifting at the self-checkout.  What a world!

 

And it’s time to get back to that world now, ‘cause I’m done.  Stay well, count your blessings and be back next week for more big words and little jokes.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com