Ah, thanksgiving. When we tell our family members we really love them despite their passive aggressive behaviour and their level of stupidity which surpasses the stupidity of my toaster oven. DOB had diarrhea, which I know because I was grooving to my iPod and working on my doll house when she wandered in asking if I had any Keopectate. No wait, Immodium. Whatever.
The next day was thanksgiving, but she didn’t want to join us for dinner. Here’s how that went.
UCC: We’ll be eating about 4 o’clock. Will you be able to join us?
DOB: Actually, no. I can’t get up, or else I just go like (moving both hands down and away to the righ quickly). It just comes out like water whenever I even stand up.
UCC: Thanks for the detailed report. Maybe if you stood up, it would all come out and be over rather than rolling around inside your gut. Would you like me to bring you in a plate of food?
DOB: No, because whenever I stand up, I…(hand motion, but this time down and to the left) and I haven’t eaten anything all day, except I’m drinking water.
UCC: Hmmm. Nothing going in but liquid, and nothing coming out but liquid. I wonder how you could go about remedying that? You say you haven’t eaten all day? You should at least drink some juice so your blood sugar level doesn’t get too low. Remember how the doctor said diabetics shouldn’t skip meals?
WISIMH: Remember any good knock-knock jokes? Ahh, yes, the one about what happens whenever you stand up. Reasoning with you is like trying to explain the second law of thermodynamics to my cat. Reasoning with you when you have low blood sugar is like trying to explain the second law of thermodynamics to a dead cat.
So, I reported this to TCG, but he took no action despite my concern about how when her blood sugar gets too low she tends to fall over and foul her diaper. Later, he took her a plate with some butternut soup and a gob of mashed potatoes smothered in gravy. Later:
TCG: She took her blood sugar and it was 64. So she took a sugar pill. Wasn’t that smart?
WISIMH: And then you did another blood test to see if she’s still in the stupid zone and encouraged her to eat and/or drink? Told her not to take insulin which would bring the number down ever more? Told her to eat something solid, like, say, fiber? No, of course you didn’t you moron. Much better if we wait to see how this all comes out.
TCG: Well, isn’t that good? We can’t do anything right?
UCC: Don’t go there.
WISIMH: Do something right? Do you really want me to answer that honestly? Ok. I wanted her son to take charge and implement some common-sense measures that will prevent the need for me to wipe shit off her fat ass later, and consequently, the need to increase my prophylactic dose of alcohol.
TCG: Seriously. You’re mad when she doesn’t take your advice to eat, and then when she eats a bit of food and takes measures to raise her blood sugar, you’re still mad. What do you want from her? What do you want us to do?
UCC: You need to drop this subject now. You don’t want to be asking me what I think we should do with your mother.
WISIMH: Breathe. Breathe and keep your mouth shut. And visualize a Spring meadow covered with yellow flowers, a starry night sky, a deep dish of apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream, anything but that hand motion about what happens when DOB stands up. And whatever you do, don’t waste your breath trying to explain how whenever DOB does something stupid, TCG frequently makes it worse. Breathe. Happy Thanxgiving, everybody!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Here's to Good Times
Tonight is Kinda Special.
We're all about supporting small local businesses. Passionate. We're at the Greasy Chinese food buffet next to the Days Inn Adjacent to Route 8, with rows upon rows of tables with steam trays filled with three kinds of pudding next to the macaroni salads, or anorexic crab legs next to grey dough balls labeled dim sum and six kinds of fried rice. Our fellow diners look like they shop at Wal*Mart and/or live at homeless shelters. We fit right in, even though English as a First Language is hella optional here and we're not wearing beer paraphernalia or sleepwear or anything marking us as cowboys.
DOB: This food is good, they have everything I like.
TCG: And it’s cheap too, about $25 per person, including this amusing little $20 bottle of cooking wine labeled Pis Du Chat '02.
DOB: Yeah, I don’t know why people go to more expensive restaurants when you can get this kind of good food so cheap. And you can get as much as you like. We could spend the whole day here.
WISIMH: (Contemplating the prospect )And that’s not even taking into consideration the scintillating conversational topics which include such old favorites as how good your mangy dog is, how you were up all night, and how we “need to go to the store” for you (which we "need" like we need an ice pick in the ear. As much as I like the crab legs, I also enjoy chicken wings coated in dark red 30-weight sweet grease, and fresh spring rolls that you could also use as chocks to level your motor home on your front yard. And plus, I like to eat at restaurants where they have tablecloths).
UCC: How’s J? (your daughter in Florida who calls every day) Has she called today?
DOB: Well, she’s tired at the end of the day, so she usually just comes home from work and gets into bed before she calls me. Sometimes she’ll go out with one of the other girls for a sandwich.
WISIMH: (To myself) This is conversation #4. You already know the script, why do you do this?
WISIMH: (Back to myself) Well, because the other options are equally disappointing. We could have had conversations:
#1 - Sandy is a good boy…
#2 - I just tell him I’m going to the store and he lays down by the window to wait for me…
#3 – this food is good. They have everything I like…
WISIMH: Yeah, but there’s always the chance you can spark The (always entertaining) Mystery Conversation. The one where she tries to talk about some news story she saw on TV but which ends up as a game of 20 questions as you try to figure what the fuck she’s talking about.
(Begin dream sequence in Vaseline focus with scary music like a disco Star Wars medley or barely recognizable cover of Cindi Lauper’s Time After Time in a minor key by Alvin and the Chipmunks)
Rod Serling Voiceover (RSV): The mystery conversation usually begins something like this…
DOB: J said we’re wrong about shootings in Florida. Fort Hood is in Texas…
Or
He was trapped on an ice flow with three polar bears and a condom. In the day room eating prunes. If I had a knife, I’d cut you...
Or
Garlic mashed potato recipes from the Civil War have always been a matter of great curiosity to me, which I can trace back to the food I enjoyed so much as a child at the dawn of the Age of Fast Food: the best nouvelle cuisine fusion of What Mexicans Who Have Scurvy Eat and Pan-Asian-Thai smug things with too much msg, on vegatibles and fruits in suspiciously tropical varieties, with a sprinkling of roasted garlic. And why, accordingly, today, many patriotic citizens see gay marriage as a threat to the institution of monogamous marriage between a hypothetically straight man and a (ditto) woman as exemplified by some of the best fallen christian preachers. Salt to taste of your own tears and top with a sprinkling of majnoon (crazy) …
Or
As Antigone said, to Electra, on Oprah, you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, Bitch, or was that what Oprah said to You? I’ve put up with your smartass crap with as much patience as I can muster between diaper changes, and what do I get? More smarmy ironical bullshit, pardon the execrably bad pun. I’m old and senile. I get it. Let’s move on…
Or
If our intertwined lives together had a subtitle, I nominate:
An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times with Some Wackjobs
Look Who’s Fallen and Can’t Get Up And I don’t mean Lily
You Need to Do Something for Me. Can you guess what? Me neither.
We put the fuck you into dysfunction
The Story of the Founding of Duchebagonomics by the Family that Personified the Term
Who ARE These People Anyway?
You get the idea.
RSV: But mystery unravelling isn’t the only fun. Try to cover up the smell of piss with too much cheap perfume, have dinner where this fragrance marries with the odors of a saltwater tank of Garabaldies, seafood just beginning to go off, and burnt trans-fat-laden oil byproduct and corn syrup. Hilarity follows as the sea follows the moon above. Well, not quite so steadily, you understand.
(End Dream Sequence effects)
Insert standard ‘Goodnight-John-Boy’ scene and fade out to happy ending. Get your mind out of the gutter.
We're all about supporting small local businesses. Passionate. We're at the Greasy Chinese food buffet next to the Days Inn Adjacent to Route 8, with rows upon rows of tables with steam trays filled with three kinds of pudding next to the macaroni salads, or anorexic crab legs next to grey dough balls labeled dim sum and six kinds of fried rice. Our fellow diners look like they shop at Wal*Mart and/or live at homeless shelters. We fit right in, even though English as a First Language is hella optional here and we're not wearing beer paraphernalia or sleepwear or anything marking us as cowboys.
DOB: This food is good, they have everything I like.
TCG: And it’s cheap too, about $25 per person, including this amusing little $20 bottle of cooking wine labeled Pis Du Chat '02.
DOB: Yeah, I don’t know why people go to more expensive restaurants when you can get this kind of good food so cheap. And you can get as much as you like. We could spend the whole day here.
WISIMH: (Contemplating the prospect )And that’s not even taking into consideration the scintillating conversational topics which include such old favorites as how good your mangy dog is, how you were up all night, and how we “need to go to the store” for you (which we "need" like we need an ice pick in the ear. As much as I like the crab legs, I also enjoy chicken wings coated in dark red 30-weight sweet grease, and fresh spring rolls that you could also use as chocks to level your motor home on your front yard. And plus, I like to eat at restaurants where they have tablecloths).
UCC: How’s J? (your daughter in Florida who calls every day) Has she called today?
DOB: Well, she’s tired at the end of the day, so she usually just comes home from work and gets into bed before she calls me. Sometimes she’ll go out with one of the other girls for a sandwich.
WISIMH: (To myself) This is conversation #4. You already know the script, why do you do this?
WISIMH: (Back to myself) Well, because the other options are equally disappointing. We could have had conversations:
#1 - Sandy is a good boy…
#2 - I just tell him I’m going to the store and he lays down by the window to wait for me…
#3 – this food is good. They have everything I like…
WISIMH: Yeah, but there’s always the chance you can spark The (always entertaining) Mystery Conversation. The one where she tries to talk about some news story she saw on TV but which ends up as a game of 20 questions as you try to figure what the fuck she’s talking about.
(Begin dream sequence in Vaseline focus with scary music like a disco Star Wars medley or barely recognizable cover of Cindi Lauper’s Time After Time in a minor key by Alvin and the Chipmunks)
Rod Serling Voiceover (RSV): The mystery conversation usually begins something like this…
DOB: J said we’re wrong about shootings in Florida. Fort Hood is in Texas…
Or
He was trapped on an ice flow with three polar bears and a condom. In the day room eating prunes. If I had a knife, I’d cut you...
Or
Garlic mashed potato recipes from the Civil War have always been a matter of great curiosity to me, which I can trace back to the food I enjoyed so much as a child at the dawn of the Age of Fast Food: the best nouvelle cuisine fusion of What Mexicans Who Have Scurvy Eat and Pan-Asian-Thai smug things with too much msg, on vegatibles and fruits in suspiciously tropical varieties, with a sprinkling of roasted garlic. And why, accordingly, today, many patriotic citizens see gay marriage as a threat to the institution of monogamous marriage between a hypothetically straight man and a (ditto) woman as exemplified by some of the best fallen christian preachers. Salt to taste of your own tears and top with a sprinkling of majnoon (crazy) …
Or
As Antigone said, to Electra, on Oprah, you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, Bitch, or was that what Oprah said to You? I’ve put up with your smartass crap with as much patience as I can muster between diaper changes, and what do I get? More smarmy ironical bullshit, pardon the execrably bad pun. I’m old and senile. I get it. Let’s move on…
Or
If our intertwined lives together had a subtitle, I nominate:
An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times with Some Wackjobs
Look Who’s Fallen and Can’t Get Up And I don’t mean Lily
You Need to Do Something for Me. Can you guess what? Me neither.
We put the fuck you into dysfunction
The Story of the Founding of Duchebagonomics by the Family that Personified the Term
Who ARE These People Anyway?
You get the idea.
RSV: But mystery unravelling isn’t the only fun. Try to cover up the smell of piss with too much cheap perfume, have dinner where this fragrance marries with the odors of a saltwater tank of Garabaldies, seafood just beginning to go off, and burnt trans-fat-laden oil byproduct and corn syrup. Hilarity follows as the sea follows the moon above. Well, not quite so steadily, you understand.
(End Dream Sequence effects)
Insert standard ‘Goodnight-John-Boy’ scene and fade out to happy ending. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Name That TV Show
TCG: (Walking in from the TV room) Thought I’d visit you.
UCC: (At computer) Well, hi.
TCG: There was a commercial.
UCC: In what?
TCG: In what I was listening to.
UCC: What were you listening to?
TCG: So I didn’t have to listen to it.
UCC: What TV show were you listening to before the commercial?
TCG: Oh. Heavy metal something like.
WISIMH: Duck! Here comes Abe Simpson’s gathering darkness. Such diminished conversational capacity that it could probably rise to the level of a successful defense against a charge of acting with premeditated passive aggression. We still make each other laugh, but that doesn’t make up for provision of mutual solace and support as we approach the scary door. I wish that that which will not kill us will make us both stronger.
UCC: (At computer) Well, hi.
TCG: There was a commercial.
UCC: In what?
TCG: In what I was listening to.
UCC: What were you listening to?
TCG: So I didn’t have to listen to it.
UCC: What TV show were you listening to before the commercial?
TCG: Oh. Heavy metal something like.
WISIMH: Duck! Here comes Abe Simpson’s gathering darkness. Such diminished conversational capacity that it could probably rise to the level of a successful defense against a charge of acting with premeditated passive aggression. We still make each other laugh, but that doesn’t make up for provision of mutual solace and support as we approach the scary door. I wish that that which will not kill us will make us both stronger.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
