Trash Crusade

TCG: I’m going to take a couple of trash cans down to the curb. I wanted you to know, in case I didn’t make it back by Tuesday.

UCC: Don’t worry. These days, the trash is picked up early Tueaday afternoons. There will be plenty of daylight for them to spot your body.

WISIMH: Ooops. I said that out loud.

Moby Dick and Lemon Drop Martinis

Dinner w/DOB and TCG at fancy sci-fi place decorated like the bridge of the Enterprise, lots of gauze curtains with gold thread. Wine, who wants wine with dinner? Give me a raspberry lemon drop vodka martini, and give me some bread and butter, and make it fast.

DOB: mutter mutter, mutter.

TCG: We can’t hear you. You’ll have to speak up.

DOB: MUTTER MUTTER. MUTTER.

UCC: That’s better. Thanks.

WISIMH: Hurry up with the martini, Brittney.

TCG: (To Brittney, as she hands UCC her martini) I could take you away from this: dinner, a movie, a weekend in Acapulco.

Brittney: (To UCC) Does he always do this? Hit on the waitress?

UCC: Yeah. Why do you think I wanted the martini so urgently? I’ll take another martini, please. (To TCG) Best waitress reply, ever.

WISIMH: Have I ever mentioned I hate when you hit on women when I’m sitting next to you? Oh yeah, only about a zillion times. You dick.

DOB: What do I want for dinner? I’m not really that hungry. I want spaghetti and meatballs.

TCG: They have macaroni and cheese.

DOB: I’m not really that hungry, mutter mutter….

UCC: (Reading menu) How about chicken parmigian? You can get a side of macaroni and cheese.

DOB: Ok, but as you probably know, I will have completely forgotten this by the time Brittney comes back with the bread and butter, so you’ll have to remember, and when she asks me what I want, I’ll look at you completely mystified and that will be your signal to order for me.

OK, she didn’t really say that. What she actually said was lost in the spittle and dribble, as she daintily sipped her pink wine, and stared in hella surprise at the bread and butter that had magically appeared out of nowhere. Let’s see now, whose diarrhea shall we talk about first….

TCG: How’s Sandy?

DOB: He’s a good boy. I just tell him I’m going to the store, and he goes to his bed and lays down to wait for me to come home.

WISIMH: Ahhhh, THE scintillating dinner conversational topic. It’s not like we haven’t covered this ground a million times either. Why does my life totally feel like Groundhog Day?

UCC: What do you think about the symbolism for homosexuality in Moby Dick? Does the very book’s title suggest a phallic preoccupation, do you think?

Brittney: Here’s you (second) martini. And no, I don’t think the title foreshadows the many men-on-men relationships. I think it refers more to Ahab’s fatal obsession, and how there’s a tipping point where the classic heroic flaw, e.g. Achilles’ heel, overtakes a man’s soul and he goes over to the dark side.

Busboy: (removing my first empty martini glass) Actually, I think it’s an allegory about the conflict between good and evil, with a bit of an oral fixation involving Ahab’s pipe that might suggest either fellatio, or a dependence on tobacco to face the ugly reality of a one-legged whaling ship captain’s life. In my Master’s thesis, I focused on Melville’s treatment of race and class, and concluded that the author wasn’t a fan of racism.

TCG: (To Brittney) You’re working very hard. Here’s my 25% off coupon, but be assured, your tip will be based on the pre-discount value of the meal.

Brittney: Oh, be still my beating heart. What a good man you are. Your wife must be so lucky to have you.

Ok, I made up most of the above conversation. I maintain that the world inside my head is often more interesting, lively, stimulating, and funny than the stuff that happens in the actual world, even after two raspberry lemon drop martinis and a glass of pinot noir. I also admit I haven’t read Moby Dick since high school, although I’ve been halfway through re-reading it since, approximately 2002, but I can’t seem to overcome the inertia to get back to it.

The Circle

What’s worse than waking up in bed with a blurry black and white photo of a one-armed man, a post-it note that says “Warning: zombies will eat your br---” four feet of braided twine with a tin can on one end, and a handicapped parking placard?

I’ll tell you what’s worse. Waking up with a premonition of doom, opening your eyes and staring into the green eyes of a cat who is invading your personal space, smelling your morning breath, and purring ominously. How can a cat’s purr be ominous?

I’ll tell you, how a cat’s purr can be ominous, and by the way, remember that my mom says cats don’t have souls. Purring cats are ominous only in retrospect when, at the end of the day, you realize the cat’s blank eyes dramatically foreshadowed the subsequent realization that your day turned out to suck worse than a draining bathtub when only the hair-infused grey soapy scum is left.

My day also included the near-death trip du jour, with a driver whose skills are declining sharply. This was after a dinner or waffles in which TCG poured 4 Tablespoons of HFCS on his waffle. Did I mention, he’s hypoglycemic. Usually his post-dinner sugar crash coincides with is post-dinner nap on the couch and no harm is done. Last night, it happened like a kick to the back of his head, halfway to Spring Valley to pick up eggs. Clammy sweats, woozy head-shaking that could easily be mistaken for a swoon of love. He made it to our destination. I drove home, amid rumblings of diarrhea .

I went to my happy place where there were no conversations about practicing my skills at fellatio or other metaphors about sucking. I made myself mad crazy cranberry vodka martini with enough tomato juice to make me feel like a youthful werewolf, at twilight, drinking the blood of a young virgin goth boy, with facial piercings and a blue-hair dye-job that would outdo my Grandma’s blue hair circa 1965.

We must have had angels on our bumpers as I drove home in the dark with only the light from my white knuckles reflecting TCG’s shiny face, scrunched into a rictus of cruciatas curse. Kidding. We do have the saving grace of growing old together, still making each other laugh, bugging the crap out of each other, and getting the heck over it. Whether it is for better or for worse, we’re in this together. And what could be worse than that? I’ll tell you what’s worse…

Putting the “Say What?” in Conversation

TCG: (Returning home after smoking his daily cigarette running his daily errands). They wouldn’t give me the certified form when I went there.

UCC: A foolproof plan? An airtight alibi? A Little context? A fucking clue what you’re talking about?

WISIMH: As Jane Austin might say, I have not the pleasure of understanding you. As Herman Melville might say, No smoking in the parlor, and no suicides. As Sister Merciful God in Heaven might say: why have I wasted my life as a bride of Christ when I took a vow of chastity and masturbation is a mortal sin? As Raymond Chandler might put it: Your ramblings make as much sense as a frightened chicken in an orange jumpsuit. As I simply say in my head: what the fuck are you talking about?

TCG: The hearing aid people. They need you to come in first.

UCC: Ahh, you’re saying they won’t give us the hearing aid insurance form unless they can see and inspect my aids to be sure they exist before they insure them against loss.

TCG: Touching the tip of his nose with one hand and pointing to me with the other: What you said.

Counting the Interruptions: An Amusing Game

Yesterday morning I decided to play a new game. Here’s how it began:

UCC: Good mo-

TCG: Come here and look at this….

The game is to count the number of times TCG interrupts UCC in a single day. Let’s play along. This should be fun, particularly since we had to go out in public to run some errands, and that is always its own form of adventure, albeit often with some creepy details best left to the imagination of someone like Clive Barker.

Driving often provides opportunities for interruptions because there are so many shiny things to catch TCG’s attention. To try to catalog each interruption du jour would have required either a tape recorder or a court reporter, both of which are against the unwritten rules (query: since I just wrote the rule, is it now no longer unwritten?) of WISIMH. Some typical examples will have to suffice.

UCC: What does Jamacha mean in Span-

TCG: do you realize that building over there has a red roof?

…

UCC: When we get home, will you pl-

TCG: When we get home, I’m going to take a nap.

Now, UCC has a strict policy of never resuming an interrupted sentence once the interruption subsides. I could give you several reasons for this, such as it’s not worth the trouble to try to have a conversation, or I was just trying to make small talk to get TCG to use his words, but mostly this policy was instituted because I was pissed and remaining silent avoided what might be considered felony assault no matter how justified.

UCC: I’d like you to glue these dog refrigerator magnets onto so-

TCG: They’re broken, right? Here’s one of the missing parts.

UCC: (Yeah, I know about the rule not to resume, but I actually need him to do something, so I persisted) Indeed, that is the missing part of one of the magnets for one of the refrigerator dogs. Notwithstanding the foregoing however… (when I was a lawyer, that was one of my favorite verbal flourishes) …as I was saying, I want the dogs glued to something else, not to the missing magnet that would enable them to resume life on the refrigerator door.

TCG: Why didn’t you say so?

WISIMH: That’s already the fourth interruption of the day, and I haven’t even made coffee yet.

UCC: I might have said so if you had refrained from interrupting while I was trying to explain.

By the end of the day, I had cataloged 17 interruptions. Exactly two of these required me to violate the (now written) rule about not resuming when I’m interrupted. The first exception is set forth above. The second involved reminding TCG of one of the stops on our route of errands that he seemed to have forgotten:

UCC: You just turned right. Don’t we want to go left to get th-

TCG: I’m just trying this shortcut because I have to pee.

UCC: Good to know. However, I thought we were go-

TCG: I told you I had to pee when we left the grocery store.

UCC: Thanks for the updates re peeing. But I thought we were going to swing by the post office to mail the Netflix.

TCG: I wish you’d told me this before I turned right back there.

WISIMH: I wish I had a nickel for each interruption. I’d probably make ten bucks a day. I also wish I’d learned the Rule Against Perpetuities in school, but I could never get past the Doctrine of Contingent Remainders. Had I done so, my life might have been filled with joy and peace and bunnies, instead of becoming a shipwreck that left me beached with you amid the empty packing crates once filled with all my dreams.

If I Ruled the World

WISIMH: These days, you can’t take two steps without tripping over another war being fought by one or another global schoolyard bullies for ideologically stupid reasons. Now that the aging populations of the dying global superpowers are so last-century and decadent, we no longer have ideologies worth fighting and dying for. We can, however, send our own poor and uneducated cannon fodder; or fund client states with younger and stronger populations to fight and die on our behalf. That we got rich from raping them and their resources is just one more factor that tips the balance from sad to genocidal.

So, I was pondering these heavy thoughts this morning over my iced coffee with lots of heavy cream. Then, I sat down to detail my cogent observations about how the world is going to hell and how I’d fix these problems if I ruled the world. You may be asking yourself, what makes me different from millions of other bloggers with opinions and idealistic plans to solve problems ranging from climate change to road rage. (Or, maybe you’re asking yourself how did I get here?, but that's another post). Well, me - because, I’m special. If only I added my advice to the world about how to solve problems, things would be better, trust me.

Here’s an example. If I was in charge, the lady in front of me at the green light yesterday wouldn’t have kept her foot on the brakes and waved a car out of the ahead of her from the freeway exit to our right. I would have explained to her that right turn on red thingie still gives us the right of way if we’re going straight and our light is green, you imbecile.

But, here’s the thing. If I was in charge, the world would only be better if I had some enforcement authority to back up my sage advice. You can’t just issue advice (let alone fatwas against bad drivers) and expect people to listen, particularly if you do so on your blog, Facebook, or if you tweet the deet. I mean, who listens to Aston Kucher already? Heck, people don’t even pay attention to Suzanne Summers since her mansion burned down.

I heard somebody deny they were racist and call Prez Obama “uppity”. That’s like claiming to be a Christian and killing abortion doctors. Crazy, right? I think the world needs me to mediate disputes between those who fear and distrust facts and those who rely on them to operate. I think I should have been entitled to walk up to that lady’s car, open the door, smack her on the back of the head, and tell her to think next time. And notice how I haven’t mentioned she was Asian. That would be, well, racist, which, of course, I’m not.

Here’s another example. In surfing the innernetz the other day looking for signs of intelligent life, I stumbled upon a random blog that explained in the “about me” section, that among other jobs, the blogger had once worked as a “domestic violence advocate” which doesn’t seem to me to be something you should brag about. It’s like including the info that you’re a registered sex offender; a retired porn star; or a racist, or bragging that you drive like an Asian on Ambien. (Apologies to all my Asian friends who can drive. Wait… never mind).

WISIMH: If I ruled the world, I’d make everybody grow and eat at least one vegetable per growing season. I’d make an exception for AIDS orphans who are too busy keeping the flies off their baby siblings’ eyes and boiling muddy water for dinner. Wait, I’d probably solve the problems that led to them becoming struggling orphans living in a house made of mud. Then, I’d tell them to stay in school, not do drugs, and raise and eat at least one vegetable per growing season.

Or, in the alternative to fixing the world, I thought I could go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep for another hour. Tough call, but as you can probably tell from the way the world is still fucked up, I opted for the extra sleep.

Famous Last Words

The purported last words of Karl Marx were: "Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.” This is a particularly rich contrast with the purported last words of Pancho Villa: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

Given this, it’s advisable to have something ready in case you realize in a sudden moment of clarity that you have only moments to utter your own last words. I’ve given this some thought recently, and I have a pretty good idea of where I’ll end up. My last words are probably going to be something like this:

"I got a new bracket for my oxygen tank yesterday, mounted on the wall of the trailer near the plasma tv. The best part about it is that now I won’t risk knocking the tank over on my can of diet Pepsi every time I reach past it for some nacho cheese doritos, and plus, there’s room on the bracket to balance my ash tray so I don’t have to worry about starting a fire by flicking my ashes into an adjacent trash bag. Best of all, my cats also seem completely uninterested in climbing on the wall bracket and marking their territory, deterred most likely by the barely audible hiss where the hose doesn’t quite snap tightly into the tank. So, now that my life is perfect, I’ll just sit back, tune in Oprah, and light up this here Cigarillo…"

At least my loved ones can console themselves by saying I died doing what I loved.

The Ship of Fools Hits a Submerged Reef

I was roasting tomatoes to can. TCG left to smoke a cigarette to get lunch. I was in the process of grinding up the lovely sticky mess, which has to be done in batches in the food mill. (Note: this stage in the process also involves a glass of red wine: I self medicate during happy hour) The house phone rang. I almost didn’t get it. But, I did. It was about 4 PM on a lovely September Sunday afternoon.

UCC:   Yellow.

TCG:    Will you please go check on DOB? J just called me in the car. She has been trying to call DOB all day but she doesn’t answer her phone.

UCC:    Hold….

WISIMH:    O my god the stench in here is overwhelming. The white wale is indeed beached, rolling on her side on the kitchen floor. The beginning of a lovely Sunday September evening.

UCC     (As I return to the kitchen phone, iTunes playlist, apparently having evolved the iPod shuffle option into some interactive Artificial Intelligence, is playing Ship of Fools. Ahhh, Jerry.)

                     …  Oh yes. She’s down by the kitchen sink. Seems to be ok but pretty incoherent. I’ll get back to her. Assume you’re heading home. Bye.

DOB:   I don’t know what happened, I was trying to get up to go to the… but I didn’t make it.

UCC:   Not too important about the fall. Pretty obvious about the not making it. What happened after that? Where did you fall? When? How long have you been down?

WISIMH:   (During the following game of 20-questions, in which we negotiated some version of what actually might have happened, I had plenty of time to go to my happy place inside my head, from where the following musings took place.)

                     And why did you crawl across the room, leaving your freaking cell phone by your bed where you first fell, not to mention why is your walker halfway between you and the bed? And see those pressurized air horns strategically placed on the floor by your bed and your dresser? You had to crawl past two of them to get over here to the sink where you decided to spend the day. The emergency air horns were placed around the floor so you could summon us if you stupidly didn’t use your walker, and stupidly fell, and stupidly couldn’t reach one of the 3 house phones, your cell phone and couldn’t, it goes without saying, pick your own fat ass up. Or why didn’t you use the air horns to summon us several hours ago, like if you were a teenage boy at a high school football game, or a new Associate of Arts in Risk Management at your community college graduation ceremony.

UCC:     (Slurring her words like a sloppy drunk or an incontinent old woman with a blood sugar it later turned out was 210, and by the way, that’s after not eating or drinking all day, which means it was probably much higher when she fell) 

                     I don’t know what happened. I was over by the, over there by the, and I was going to g…

                     (insert what, if you understood it to be a thoughtful pause, you couldn’t be more wrong)

                     And the next thing I knew… I didn’t make it.  That was after I started to make my breakfast. I don’t know…

WISIMH:   ALL TOGETHER NOW:

UCC AND DOB:   …. WHAT HAPPENED !!!

WISIMH:     I can smell the didn’t make it part from two rooms away, even over the lovely garlic and roasting tomato smell. So, you’ve been here for almost 8 hours. Incontinent. How charming.

UCC:    So, let’s get your diaper off, and I’ll put this towel under your butt. Help me lift now…

DOB:    (Heaving while she lifts her butt)

                     I need to go to the bathroom but I didn’t make it. I don’t know what happened. I must have fallen.

UCC:    (Cringing)

                     Not important now. Here’s your cell phone. Answer it and talk to J who is calling again.

DOB:    (Making less than no sense talking to J, wandering around in the endless loop that unravels when a giant dose of low blood sugar is added to dementia, and incontinence is involved)

                     …my pajamas are in the… by the…. I don’t know what happened…

UCC:   (Taking the cell and talking to J)

                     She’s ok, but let me get her upright and cleaned up and we’ll call you back.

                     (Calling TCG)

                     What’s your ETA?

TCG:     (In that oh-so-refreshing way he has of ignoring and interrupting me)

                     Just to let you know, I’ve taken Abuterol and a couple of Tums.

Later, TCG arrives, huffs and puffs into DOB’s room. She’s been on her ass, leaning her back against the kitchen sink, with pillows and a stool to support one arm. Note: if not propped, DOB tends to list sideways from sitting to slumping.

The list eventually turns into a collapse exactly, if you’ve ever seen one, of a what geologists call a long-run-out avalanche in which huge boulders behave as if they were drops of water in a stream. This is quite likely what happened when she made her fateful run for head.

DOB:    I was trying to go to the bathroom blah blah

TCG:     huff, puff, whooo, whoo, blah blah

UCC:      (Handing DOB some juice, and TCG his soda, which he left in the computer room when he stopped to rest on his way in from the car to DOB’s room)

                     You’ve got to drink this. You’ve been on the floor since you were starting to make your breakfast of peanut butter on bread and you’ve had nothing to eat or drink all day. You’re dehydrated and your blood sugar is probably too low. I’ve got to get back to the kitchen (remember, I was canning roasted tomatoes). You guys just sit there and settle down and I’ll be back in a few minutes.

TCG:   (Later, Returning to our kitchen, leaving DOB propped up on the floor.) 

                     She has to go to the bathroom and I wanted to give her some privacy.

UCC:    Did you get her onto the potty chair?

TCG:     No, I gave her the bowl from the potty chair. She’s still on the floor…

WISIMH:    Did you consider the physics of how she’s going to get her pee etc. from between her legs into the plastic bowl? Did you consider that she’ can’t lift her ass off the floor? Oh yeah, and that’s she’s completely incoherent?

TCG:     … I wanted to give her some privacy.

UCC:     (bringing a bowl of soapy water, a wash cloth and towel and cleaning up the necessary places on DOB)

                     Ok. You sit where you are. I’m going to lift the potty chair over you to the other side. Then, I’m going to put the bowl back into the chair. Then I’m going to get TCG and we’re going to get you onto the chair.

DOB:    (We tried several times to explain what we were going to do, we really did. But she’s not only incomprehensible, she’s not receiving any better than she’s broadcasting. And who can blame her? That would be UCC. Finally, watching TCG and UCC mime how we’re going to bend her knees, put her feet flat on the ground, each take an arm and haul her onto the chair) 

                     That would be a good idea. I was going to the bathroom when I fell. I don’t know what happened.

WISIMN:    No Shit? But wait, do you know what happened?

DOB:    (After she’s sitting on the potty chair, having been hauled in several stages to that point, managing to lift her filthy dress and get a towel over the most disgusting parts)

                     I don’t know what happened…

UCC:     Here’s the thing. I have tomato paste to can. First I have to sterilize my hands. The jars are sterilized and I’ve got to fill them and get them into the canner. I’ve got pasta cooking, and sauce, and garlic bread. It so happened I was making a killer dinner as well as canning. I’ll return and get that done. Drink your juice.

DOB:     (After I’ve managed to push her (thank god) wheeled potty chair next to her bed, removed her filthy clothing and put on a nightgown (on her, not me), soaked up the worst of the nasty stuff on the rug at the foot of her bed (remember, she was trying to get to the… and didn’t make it when she fell, and it’s been marinating in the shag carpeting all day) cleaned up the dried blood where she smacked her forehead in the course of falling)  

                     I’ve moved the handle hanging from the chain over your bed. Grab that, and try to stand up. I’ll aim your butt at the bed, and we’ll get you in. I’ve put a towel over the sheets.

WISIMH:     Actually, mostly a wordless scream, and then the lyrics to ship of fools.

Later, after DOB has been given a Vicodin and tucked into bed, sitting in the living room, drinking my second martini, eating delicious if cold pasta, and watching the 1958 movie Long Hot Summer on TCM, and explaining plot changes and characters to TCG who couldn’t follow a trickle of water downstream with a mission plan and a trained guide.

TCG:     I don’t do so well under stress.

UCC:     No shit.

WISIMH:    Your judgment is almost as impaired as hers, and your inability to move the empty potty chair indicates more than a weak pulmonary condition. BTW, excellent cold pasta, eh? Not to mention the idea of giving DOB a vicodin so she won’t wander around at night.

TCG:     Can you get me a pudding cup from the fridge?

UCC:     So you want a pudding cup, do you? You know, we can’t always get what we want. I wanted a pony.

TCG:     And I wanted a walk-in humidor.

UCC:     (getting pudding cup for TCG and vicodin for self)

                     It sucks to be us, but at least we can self-medicate. Here’s your pudding cup, love.

TCG:   Wanna do it?

UCC:   I’d really prefer not to. (paraphrased)

Daily Fiber

This is what happened when we went to the grocery store together, the third stop in a delightful trip to the pet store for cat litter, and the medical supply store for XXX adult diapers for DOB, so in fairness, TCG was late for his nap and had already walked over 100 (!) steps.

TCG: (White knuckles grasping the bar of the shopping cart, leaning over and gasping for breath) What’s on the list?

UCC: (Turning right heading toward the item) Fiber.

TCG: Ignoring UCC and, pursuant to the dictates of Brownian motion, and wandering off in a random direction.

Rendezvousing improbably at the fiber section of the vitamin aisle.

UCC: How about these psyllium capsules, much easier than the gunk stirred into a glass of water?

TCG: What else is here? (patiently waiting for UCC to read the labels and explain the difference between “cleanse/detox” and generic Metamucil)

UCC: In the best impersonation of Sister Teresa, the Little Flower, soul of patience, reading the entire shelf. Aloud. Slowly.

TCG: Looks like the psyllium caps are easier and better than the powdered stuff.

UCC: Think so? Ok.

WISIMN: Hilarious, and I just never see that coming! I explain. You decide. Which is one of the typically, annoyingly, clinically insane things I love about shopping with you.

UCC: (Reading the next item on the list, as TCG turns, amazingly, in the exactly opposite direction. Calling out wistfully to TCG’s retreating back) I’m going this way to get A, B and C.
(Duly finding said items and staggering off looking for TCG with the shopping cart, several aisles away, out of earshot and with his back turned, inviting himself to join the conversation of some passing strangers.)

WISIMN: I have arrived at this point in the universe where Irony met Cynicism, fell madly in love, became an unwed mother, and Parody was born. Do you ever why is it that the best stuff is that which may cause drowsiness? Or, why I could never watch that meercat show after Shakespeare died? Or especially why I find solace by crawling inside a water pipe and insisting on roasting tomatoes while the outdoor temperature is in the 90s? (Aromatherapy).

UCC: Ahhh, I forgot to bring in the grocery bags. While you’re unloading and paying the cashier, I’ll run out to the car and get them. Returning with the grocery bags to find half the groceries already bagged in plastic, TCG having not mentioned to the cashier about me bringing in the recycled bags.

UCC: (Impatience bleeding through like brown crusty blood on a badly bandaged amputated leg) Ummmm…

TCG: (Innocently) What?

WISIMH: Going out in public with you reminds me of my attempts to furnish my first cramped apartment with freeway furniture – it takes almost infinite patience and lots of driving; and even then, the result may end up smelling like some strange cat’s piss. If today had a subtitle, it would be Today: as long as an alcoholic blackout, as shallow as a cookie sheet, but with the rich aromatherapeutic fragrance of a complex cesspool. If today was a metaphor it would be: when grocery shopping, TCG is as helpful as a snow plow in a monsoon.

Sandy

Today’s errand/excuse for smoking is to go to the pet food store for Sandy. Who, is Sandy?

Sandy is a 400-year-old dog (in dog years) who is as animated as Rowdy on Scrubs, and considerably more vocal, especially in the middle of the night. He weights about 300 pounds (in dog pounds, heh) and has a bit of arthritis making it hard for him to stand, sit, move, lay, and making it impossible for him to roll over unless you were to roll him into a rug and kick it down the driveway.

Sandy lives with DOB (remember: food is love) and he’s the alpha in the pack. One of DOB's recurrent Tourette-dementia phrases is: Sandy's a good boy. That this creates no cognitive dissonance in DOB's little mind is another indication that there is no cognitive left to dissonate.

Sandy has a skin condition. Probably resulting from his diet of 1 part of dog food to 4 parts of people food, keeping in mind that a balanced people meal back there is a starch, starch and a starch, unless I cook for DOB, which I often do out of pity. Then there’s about .5 parts of dog bones made up of the most hyper-allergenic ingredients known to Big Ag and made in China (150% of your minimum daily requirements of lead). Sandy gets a bone to reward him when he stops barking at dead people – or whatever the hell else it is that he sees that we can’t see – and has thus trained DOB to give him a “cookie” whenever he feels like it. This happens between 12 and 380 times per day.

But the skin condition. Well, for exercise, Sandy eats himself, and, surprise, that is bad for his skin. He licks his front and back legs, butt, flanks and wherever else he can reach, until said spot bleeds. The open sores are somewhat mobile, depending on where and when DOB remembers to apply “medicine.” Medicine can range from actual OTC hotspot remedies, Vaseline, vinegar, generic brand Nyquil (!) and whatever else DOB’s daughter (who, I remind you, knows more than you think you do about any given subject) suggests. We can’t take Sandy to the vet because “he always charges $400 whenever we take him in.” It’s probably just a coincidence that vet bills are high when we persuade DOB to let us take Sandy to the vet because that has happened twice in almost 20 years. Yes, a coincidence. Besides, on any given day, those running sores are "going away" anyway.

Besides, he’s not in pain. What I think is his crying – a sort of squeaky moaning interspersed with violent licking – is merely his way of joining the conversation. Which, has a certain kind of logic given the types of conversations we have with DOB.

Hide and Seek

“From the list of things (Vladimir) Nabakov bragged about never having learned to do – type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book’s pages, give the time of day to a philistine – it is easy to deduce what Vera (Mrs. Nabakov) spent her life doing.” Stacy Schiff, “Vera” (biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

I’m doing laundry in the laundry room. From several rooms away:

TCG: Mumble, mumble, think I found the mumble mumble you were looking for.

UCC: Dropping the laundry I’m working on, and heading down the hall for the computer room. Nope, I didn’t hear you from the laundry room, but I don’t see you in here… so I’m going back to the laundry room to finish what you interrupted.

TCG:HEY, I THINK I FOUND THE PILL YOU WERE LOOKING FOR.

WISIMH: As much as I enjoy playing 20 questions to guess what the fuck you’re talking about, I’m too tired to play just now. Have you even the remotest clue that this is rude, annoying and possibly a motive justifying, if not first degree homicide, possibly sufficient to mitigate punishment for old-manslaughter.

UCC: Thanks for the 4-1-1.  Well worth the interruption and running around and whatnot, but I’ve got to be about My Father’s Business.

TCG: I told you I was at the kitchen table!Mumble, mumble, blah, blah…

WISIMH: But we don't have a kitchen table! I thought you meant the counter and stools in the kitchen, but apparently you meant the dinning room table. My bad. I’m going to interpret the mumbles to mean you’re abjectly sorry for being such a lazy dope – never moving farther than your own shadow all day while I do laundry, pick up the place, clean the kitchen, mop the floor, eat my heart out with bitter regret, and cook dinner. It’s like we're Parody and Cynicism and our child, a bitter postmodern overeducated thirtysomething named Irony, has now flown to greener pastures, leaving us with an empty, increasingly fouled nest, populated by increasingly incoherent people who can’t seem to use their words. And you're sorry the pill you found was merely for high blood pressure, not cyanide. Yeah, I’m sorry too.

Egg Night at the Crazyhouse

TCG:  Before we go for eggs, will you check in with Mother and bring her today’s mail, tell her we’re going for eggs, and ask if she wants us to bring her a parfait from Foster’s Freeze.

UCC:  Uh, okay…

WISIMH: I know you’re sick of her too, bless your little heart. Then again, she is your mother.

Later

UCC:   (To DOB) We’re going for eggs. Would you like us to bring you back a parfait?

DOB:            No thanks. I’m in bed for the night.

WISIMH: Of course you are, bless your heart.

UCC: Would you like me to close the blinds?

DOB:            If you like.

WISIMN:             Then, I probably won’t bother, bless your little heart.

UCC:  Do you want me to close the…

WISIMH:  …fucking…

UCC:             ….shades or not?

WISIMH: I know you never ask for anything, thus justifying inside your little mind that you are indeed not the slightest bit of a bother to us. But you know what? You are. And you would be a butt-load less of a bother if we didn’t have to fucking guess what the hell you need, perhaps even as a matter of life or death. Much less of a bother.

DOB:            (Hating to be such a bother as to ask me to close her curtains) Okay then.

WISIMH:  And….. thank you?

UCC:  Ok, they’re closed. Have a good night. ‘Night, Sandy.

Later, on the drive to get eggs:

TCG:  How as mother?

UCC:  She didn’t want the parfait.

TCG:   (shocked)

UCC:            Yeah, she was in bed for the night. If you can call kitchen light on, laying on the bedspread fully clothed and covered with a ratty blanket “in for the night.”

TCG:            She thinks you hate her and you’re trying to steal her money.

UCC:             She’s half right.

WISIMN:    BTW, it may surprise you to know that I don’t hate her so much as I resent her. And the fact is, she’s stealing my money. Not to mention sending my spouse into ill health and an early grave. He is a 67-year-old man with COPD who has to sneak out of the house each day to secretly smoke a cigarette- the high point of his day, both pulmonarily and relaxatory. He doesn’t have the energy to care for himself, for all the aggravation you give him. So guess who does? Plus additional aggravation we both know I give him for being not wild about having lived with his mother in his house for every minute of our entire fucking 22 year marriage. 

Then there was that argument we never speak of where you shamelessly said you had to put up with my spoiled latchkey daughter during her terrible teens, and I replied perhaps you’d like to do the math on how long she was under your roof vs. Yo Momma.

I even admit I nurse childish fantasies about having you predecease her, and me giving her 30 days notice. I also admit to feeling catholic guilt about having such bad thoughts. But she’s such a demented pain in the ass. And having the two of you sucking at my soul and draining my energy like a teenage girl alone in her car in a snow storm, mashing her foot on the starter as you hear the battery turn over and finally emit that slow death-rattle of a drained battery. I feel like that girl’s car’s battery. I also fear getting old and crazy myself, but there’s not much time for me to wallow in such day-mares. Besides, it might already be too late.

Great Muppet Expectations: Adult Content

TCG: Listen. (Doing your best Milhouse impression with the inhaler) I’m taking albuterol.

UCC: I’ll alert the media.

TCG: I’m going down (a driveway with the distance and elevation change of two full flights of stairs) to get the mail. I’m taking my phone so I can call you, or maybe call a cab if I can’t make it back.

UCC: Well, if you call, use the house phone (here beside me) because I have my cat asleep in my lap and I don’t’ know where my cell is.

WISIMN: Actually, what I did was go to my happy place, which is greatly aided by having a cat asleep on my lap. I asked myself the question vis-à-vis Muppets: where are they now? Note to self, always keep a list of daydream topics handy, like that list of emergency numbers to call if reality suddenly turns ugly on you.

Back-story
In case your lost recreational drug generation wasn’t spent watching the very early Sesame Street, you may remember that some Muppet characters were children when you were. So, you may be wondering how they did when they grew up in the real world, miles and miles from Sesame Street. To save you the trouble of trying to choreograph a lucid dream about where they are now, I share my vision.

Take the androgynous, mysterious dynamic duo: Bert and Ernie. Gay or not gay?
It’s been said they are meterosexuals™, but the plain truth is that they died before they ever came out. You may recall that Bert was clubbed to death by some White Supremacists who thought (sadly, incorrectly) that he was the guy who started the Stonewall Riot, aka the beginning of the End Times. Ernie’s fate is best not brought up in polite company unfamiliar with the appearance of a Muppet corpse discovered about six muggy summer months after an overdose of crack.

Beaker, for godssakes, what happened to Beaker?
Think about it. His fate probably depended on whether or not he was covered by Worker’s Comp. If you’re a socialist liberal Nazi, then Beaker is now blissfully medicated and attended 23/7 (sic) by his special care assistants in a lovely private home in some upper-class suburb you could never hope to inhabit unless you too won a personal injury lawsuit. If you’re a burnt out cynic who figures that Obamacare is a Bad Idea, and if Jesus Christ is your personal savior, then Beaker died of complications associated with untreated bedsores, exacerbated by the effects of years of chronic incontinence.

The prototypical, archetypical Imaginary Friend, Big Bird?
Dude. You’re a grown up now. Do you still have an imaginary friend? Big Bird was put on the Endangered Specious Creatures List during the Clinton administration. The reign of Bush II however, left us with more than thousands dead and continuing to die in an Imperialist Grab for Oil, a greater rift between the upper class and the proles, or an economy flatter than road kill on Route 8. Don’t you remember my best-selling expose, “The Big Bird Conspiracy”? Sorry, it’s no longer in print. I’ll summarize.

Following a warrentless wire-tap, a BB was tried in a secret FISA Court for plotting terrorist activities, including but not limited to: engaging in enhanced interrogation activities and brainwashing of innocent children whose own imaginary friends tended to be Illegal Avian immigrants; causing troubled adolescent nightmares of BB dressed in a TSA uniform and putting on rubber gloves, and thus requiring years of counseling; shoplifting at Starbucks; Identity theft; and associating with fellow travelers who are registered as independent voters and failing to cooperate with the authorities in his own prosecution.

So, now that we have all put away our youthful recreational drugs in favor of Big Pharma prescriptions and Internet searching for the drug that killed MJ, you can take it. Sorry to harsh your mellow. Dude, Big Bird is dead.