Soulless Bastard

Entry for my writing group. The topic is "ghosts".

Souls are stupid. So is Hell. Heaven’s even stupider. Though I don’t often feel that life itself is all that sacred, I’ll go ahead and give you that life could be perceived as being pretty goddam amazing. But souls? Gimme a fuckin break! We’re not that fuckin special. We don’t have souls, we’re just narcissistic, organic robots. One of nature’s mistakes. And if human beings have souls, then everything else gets one, too. Don’t tell me that I have a soul but that the cat that I telepathically communicated with while I was on Robitussin doesn’t have a soul. Not to mention that the Dalai Lama’s also gonna tell you to get fucked. He thinks everything has a soul, too. But who cares what the Dalai Lama thinks? Buddhists, that’s who.

For the sake of argument, I’ll say that humans have souls. But I’m not giving up on everything else having a soul. If I’m going to Heaven (which I most assuredly am not) then I better get to hang out with all my old dogs. And I’m really not gonna have that great of a time sipping on gin and tonics in Heaven knowing that plenty of halfway decent folks are getting anally raped by demons with razor wire penises while they’re being boiled alive and eaten by spiders for the rest of eternity. That happens, according to the Bible. Maybe it doesn’t say that. Who knows? It says a bunch of other insane nonsense so it might as well throw in the razor-dicked demon thing while it’s at it.

So maybe you go to heaven, maybe you go to hell. Maybe you come back as a hamster who belongs to a malicious 10 year-old. Perhaps you become poison ivy. You just never know. Somehow though, in all of this there’s a possibility that you won’t go anywhere, that you’ll be trapped in this world without a body or a voice. How long you’ll be sentenced to this is unclear, as is the whole goddam idea that that would ever happen in the first place. It’s kinda fun to think that it might. It’s also kinda fun to think that this isn’t the life you get and that when it’s over, it’s fucking over. We all want one more chance. Another shot. Some of us want vengeance, some of us want true love. Personally, I could totally go for some chili cheese fries.

But that is neither here nor there. I’m talking about ghosts.

I’ve gotten the heebie jeebies before, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve entertained the idea that there might be ghosts because it’s fun to do it. I’ve also talked into a banana and pretended that it was a phone cos it was fun to do. I didn’t believe that the banana was a phone any more than I believe that there are bodiless souls hanging around intent on bugging the shit outta everybody. Still, it was fun and I’m glad I did it. I won’t go to my permanent grave regretting not having talked to a ghost on a banana. Take that one off the bucket list.

So, okay. In the movies, there’s always an Indian burial ground or some schmuck who got killed cos he or she knew who the real killer was or whatever. And in real life there are folks who claim to have seen or been accosted by ghosts. I don’t have the stats on this, but do you have any fuckin idea how many people have died since homo erectus has existed? I would think that everywhere would be fuckin haunted by now. Christ… You’re just minding your own business, waiting for the bus, and all of a sudden you’re tapped on the shoulder by some putz who got clubbed in the head with a rock by some asshole 5,000 years ago. He tries to explain why he’s haunting the bus stop but you don’t understand his forgotten language. He makes you spill your coffee. You get on the bus and don’t even think about it.

How old is humankind? Who knows? A quick google search said 400,000 years. Holy shit! That’s a lot of ghosts! I’m assuming that right before that there were a lot of pre-humans. Neanderthals and what have you. That’s a lot of neanderthal ghosts! Where the fuck are they? And getting back to the idea that every animal has a soul, are the parks haunted by squirrel ghosts? When I get an inexplicable itch on my arm, am I being tormented by the ghost of a fly that was swatted by a wooly mammoth right in this very spot 20,000 years ago? For that matter, why are we not hearing the thuderous footsteps of that wooly mammoth who died and whose soul still stalks the earth? Are the oceans seething with the ghosts of jellyfish and tuna and seahorses and whatever the hell lives inside seashells? Wow! We’re fucked! Are the ghosts of bacteria that I killed with antibiotics still coursing through my system? Christ. Do you have any idea how many brain cells I’ve killed? Maybe I’m possessed by them.

Yep. I’m haunted by the ghosts of all the brain cells I’ve slaughtered. That would certainly explain all this gibberish that I’ve been going on about for way too long…..

Tennis Anyone?

This week's entry for my writing group. The subject is "Invasion of Privacy".

Well, I wrote a little essay or rant or something on the subject of invasion of privacy that had something to do with how a convicted felon can’t get a goddam job or an apartment cos every prospective landlord and employer just has to click a button and find out his or her criminal background. Christ, they even have my DNA. In that essay, I mentioned that it must’ve been cool to live in a time when you could rob a bank and outrun the cops and the only witnesses were scared people who could barely remember what you looked like. Nowadays, the police have helicopters and GPS and every asshole on the street records the whole experience on their iPhones.

I didn’t even think to mention Santa Claus. Fuckin A. He knows all kinds of secrets about us. Nevermind God. That fucker’s EVERYWHERE. He’s hiding in the Port-O-Potty. Watching.

Instead, I thought about this.

I recently watched an interview with Tom Araya, the frontman for one of my all-time favorite bands, Slayer. It’s a great interview. He’s being interviewed by a couple of junior highschool-aged girls. He’s old and grizzly, plus he’s fuckin Tom Araya, but he’s sweet as pie when he’s answering the little girls’ questions. At one point he reveals that he used to play the broom before he ever learned how to play bass. He asks the girls if they ever played the broom before and they look at him like they don’t know what the fuck he’s talkin about. He laughs. So do I whenever I watch that interview.

When I was 13, I could totally jam on the tennis racket. I’d be playing the opening riff of “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath like nobody’s business. Hell, I could play all the songs on the Sabbath tape that I commandeered from my big sister without her seeming to have noticed. One time when I was rockin out, my 17 year-old sister walked into my room without knocking. I froze. I looked up at her. She didn’t even bother to roll her eyes. She just looked at me like “you gotta be fuckin kidding me”, turned around and shut the door. I rigged up a way to lock my door after that so I could practice and hopefully one day become a star.

(I never post links but I will this time. If you wanna watch the interview, it's really cute and it's right here.)

All Dogs Go To Hell

I keep not writing a story (or a novel, really) about me and my old dog. I mean, I write stories about me and my old dog, but there are so many stories and there’s so much confusion and so much meaning and so much realization that I can draw from my years as a young dumbass with a big, smelly dog that I can feel a story brewing. Kinda like a zit that you gotta pop. Like the kinda zit you invite your buddies into the bathroom to watch you pop.

My dog was nothing more than that. He was a fuckin dog. An old friend of mine who I’m certain remembers me far less often and far less fondly than I do him had once stated that “All Dogs Like The Butthole Surfers”. He may not even remember saying this, but I remember it. Hell, I’ve adopted it as an idea of my own.

Here’s why:

My old dog wasn’t very noisy. Good dog. Fuck noisy dogs. The only time I ever heard that dog howl was when he’d sing with the violins at the tail end of “Creep In The Cellar”. Not being a howler, he’d kinda gurgle instead. And he’d get embarrassed. You had to kinda look the other way or leave the room, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But he’d do it. That dog liked the fuckin Butthole Surfers.

And really, who doesn’t?

Co-Winky-Dink

This week's writing group topic is "coincidences". 

I walked outta the Kroger with my bags of groceries. In retrospect, I probably should’ve left them in the cart. I had just bought eighty bucks worth of shit that filled about seven bags, plus a ten pound bag of charcoal. I had joked with/scolded the bagger while she put my groceries into the bag, telling her that I wasn’t walking to California and that she didn’t need to put each individual item into its’ own fuckin bag. I only need to get to my car, after all. She smiled the smile of a minimum-wage earner who couldn’t care less as she began cramming as many canned goods into a flimsy little plastic bag as the bag could possibly handle. I understood how she felt. I wouldn’t have given a fuck about me or my stupid cans of whatever I bought either if I was her.

The bag with all the cans in it was beginning to weaken as I reached my station wagon. Plus, the bag of charcoal was slipping out of the back of my armpit and threatened to blop onto the parking lot. That might not’ve been a tragedy but I hurried even faster to avoid looking like the idiot who splattered all his groceries in front of the store. I’m not sure how cool anybody else thought I looked, but I was feeling pretty cool. Dressed in all black with my newest Bathory Tshirt on, the one with the giant white pentagram on it, I was lookin like a bad motherfucker and I didn’t wanna blow my cover by crawling around picking up cans of tomato sauce, etc. I don’t panic, so I know I looked nonchalant as I made it to my Subaru.

I opened the hatchback and gently placed my groceries into the back of the car, though by then my triceps were burning and I realized that maybe I should’ve taken a leak in the store while I was in there. The car smelled somewhat strongly of vanilla with a vague after-smell of cinnamon. My urge to piss had taken over pretty heavily all of a sudden so I didn’t give it much thought, but my car usually smelled like wet dog and empty beer cans. I don’t even really like vanilla all that much. Whatever. God I really had to piss all of a sudden. I shut the far back door of my Subaru, walked in a brisk criss-cross pattern along the side of the car, opened the door, and slid in.

Holy Christ! I reached into the passenger seat and grabbed the nearly-empty Gatorade bottle that was laying on the floor. It had a little bit of blue Gatorade in it. I never drink blue unless I’m hard up and somebody gives it to me. It’s always raspberry flavored. Why the fuck raspberry flavored stuff is always blue just boggles my mind. But man, my eyes were turning yellow I had to piss so bad so I let all these thoughts fly out the window. I also neglected to wonder at the presence of a small harness that might fit a cat or a Chihuahua laying next to the plastic bottle as I snatched it up. I fumbled to unscrew the cap with one hand as I unzipped my pants with the other. I stuck my thing in and let it rip.

Goddam… Good thing it was a quart-sized bottle. I felt like I was nearly floating as I relieved myself. As I peed, I looked up and wondered where the hell the steering wheel had gone. And where was my dashboard? I briefly panicked. ‘WHO THE FUCK STOLE MY DASHBOARD AND STEERING WHEEL WHILE I WAS IN THE STORE?’, my brain shouted at itself.

‘Hold on, dude’, my brain reasoned to itself. ‘Let’s finish pissing and we’ll figure it out’. The wide-mouthed bottle was rapidly warming in my hand and I elected to follow the logic that I should solve the Mystery of the Missing Steering Wheel once my bladder had permitted me to. As I thought this, I detected movement out of the left side of my field of vision. An extremely fat white lady in her mid-50s clad in polka-dot scrubs was walking between my car and the SUV next to mine. She was cradling a Pekingese dog in her left arm and from her left hand a grocery bag dangled. It looked as if she had ran in to pick up some sour cream or maybe some cottage cheese. I looked up at the back of the front seat of the car as she opened the driver’s side door and grunted loudly with her effort to climb in. Her frizzy home-perm was the only thing visible from the top of the driver's seat, looking like a crazed woodchuck preparing to strike.

Her dog emitted a blood-curdling bark/howl as the lady’s and my eyes met in the rearview mirror. I was in mid-piss, the Gatorade bottle’s capacity nearly filled. I attempted to stammer an explanation when she shrieked and whipped her head around and saw me overflowing a bottle with pee onto my hand and all over her seats. The Pekingese continued to bellow shrilly. The woman did her best to evacuate her car and she joined her dog in loudly alerting anybody within a mile that there was an intruder, that she was in danger.

I dropped the pee-bottle on the seat, where it upturned and spilled fresh, warm urine into the crotch of my cool-looking black jeans as I opened the door behind the driver’s seat and scurried out. Other patrons turned their heads in alarm at the woman’s screaming. My penis was still protruding from my unzippered jeans as I ran across the parking lot, though it quickly and wisely had shrunk from view as a turtle withdraws its head from what it knows is certain death. I heard shouts of “HEY!” and “I GOT YOUR PICTURE” from concerned store-goers as I bolted around the side of the store and hopped over the fence into somebody’s back yard.

An hour later, after I had changed clothes and returned on my bicycle to find my car parked where I had left it a few spaces down from the lady who had run out of sour cream, I chucked my bike in the back of my car and drove to a Burger King. I was starving and really had my heart set on a burger and all my food was at some fat broad's house getting fed to Toto or whatever-its-name was.

Whine-O-Genics

I haven’t written in a minute, in part because I’m a lazy bum.  I have other excuses that make me out to be something of an innocent angel, but nobody wants to hear about all that.  Nobody wants to hear about me being a lazy bum either.  In fact, I should probably just shut the fuck up.  But I won’t.  It’s not in my nature.  

But I really have been doing other stuff.  No shit, huh?  What’d you think? I’ve been cryogenically frozen?  Of course you didn’t.  You’re not a crazy moron.  Or maybe you are.  Something’s definitely wrong with you if you’re reading this nonsense.  Perhaps you’re convinced that I’ve been traveling time, that I’ve interfered with major events throughout human history, that I’ve done a terrible job and that I’m solely responsible for the human condition.  You’re ready to kick me in the balls the next time you see me.  You’re seeking to hire thugs to have my fingernails torn out.  Yep.  You’re a maniacal idiot.  

Get a fuckin grip. If I were a time-traveler I’d be playing Black Sabbath songs before Tony Iommi invented them, shooting coke and screwing groupies and letting Motorhead open for me on my tour.

Sorry, folks.  I’m just some guy. I’m not the Master of Reality. I guess I’m the master of my own reality. Sadly, I’m not even that. I’m more like my reality’s slightly younger sibling. Me and my reality squabble quite a bit. We pinch each other and pull each other’s hair in the back seat of the cosmic station wagon with the fake wood paneling as we careen around the blind curves along the rocky cliffs of life. Once in a while our dad tells us he’s gonna pull the goddam car over and kill the both of us, to which me and my reality say, “fuckin go for it”.

So far, Dad keeps pussying out. I’ve lost all respect for him if I ever had any at all.

Man, I don’t even know what the fuck I’m talkin about here with all this Dad shit but I like saying it so I’m gonna keep on typing.

I’ve been inudated with foks who have aversions to bugs lately. Not that I’m a big fuckin bug fan or anything, but we’re talkin about crickets and some unnameable, unidentifiable biting bugs that don’t seem to identify themselves to me, nor do they bite me. So I easily fall into the role of the guy in the horror movie who’s rightfully but obnoxiously skeptical about all the bugophobia. Jesus Christ! It’s a fuckin cricket! And you don’t like spiders or bats, either? WE’RE FUCKED!

As a piece of side info, I can’t fuckin stand spiders. I will, however, permit them to survive in my house as long as I know where they generally are, as long as I know they’re not poisonous, and as long as where they are is somewhere where I don’t have to look at them or deal with them. If there is evil in nature, spiders are the epitome of it. So are hyenas. Damn. I’ve seen young cats tear the entrails out of baby rabbits and let them live just so they could keep trying to catch them. Are cats evil?

Evidently they are.

The other morning I heard some kinda awful racket going on in the back room of the house. It was early and I was waiting for the coffee to get done. When I finally poured a cup and walked through on my way out for a cigarette, I saw an upturned cicada on the tile floor being simultaneously gently and violently batted at by the cat who was hiding behind the coat rack. Cicadas aren’t evil. At least I don’t think they are. I mean, they gotta eat so they probably ruin something’s lives, but they’re not like wasps or anything. Maybe if you’re a dandelion or something then cicadas are Freddy fuckin Kruger but overall, they’re pretty harmless.  

They look evil though. Holy shit! They look like something outta H.R. Giger’s nightmares. Perhaps they are. They’re all black and huge and noisy and semi-robotic looking. Fuck. Maybe the thing was a late-model NSA drone. The cat was having fun with it but he looked a little scared of it, too. I forgot that the cat wasn’t a dog so I kept urging him to “get it” to which he didn’t seem to respond any more than if I would’ve never walked into the room in the first place.

I thought about squishing the goddam thing except that the cicada seemed like it had no desire to be in the house and it wasn’t trying to bother anybody. Of course it was bothering me cos it was making all kinds of cicada noise but what the fuck did I expect? Plus, if I woulda squished it then I’d just have a big dead bug to clean up. I’m not real squeamish, but grabbing it didn’t sound appealing (especially before I’d had any coffee) so I scooped him up with a newspaper and chucked him out onto the patio where he promptly got eaten by one of the iguanas that lives on the deck.

Just kidding. We don’t have any iguanas. They might attack the cat.

The Boat Man

This is for the writing group I'm involved in. This week's topic was "past lives".

I sat in the dark, sandwiched between two other weirdos on the couch as we stared at the TV. We were watching some crazy-ass underground horror flick. I had drank a substantial amount of cough syrup not long beforehand and it had finally kicked in pretty hard. I squirmed a little on the sofa, feeling uncomfortable to be squished up next to people and feeling uncomfortable for feeling uncomfortable. I didn’t know if they were touching me or if I was touching them and I didn’t know why it mattered. I tried to pay attention to the movie instead, but I had no idea what the hell was happening in it. I glanced briefly around the room at the other folks, some with whom I was very close and others who were casual acquaintences. Their eyes were unanimously glued to the television.

‘I feel like an alien’, I thought.

My friend Steve’s voice rang clearly in my brain. ‘You are an alien’.

I looked over at Steve, his full attention seemingly to be on the movie.

‘Yeah, man’, another voice piped into my mind, the voice of a girl I had only met that evening who was sitting next to me on the couch. She was pretty but she didn’t seem to like me all that much, and as much as I might’ve liked to have been snuggled up next to her, I didn’t wanna appear to be creepy by enjoying our thighs touching one another’s. She shifted a little next to me and I wondered if she had done it intentionally.

‘Don’t you remember?’, she continued, sounding a bit frustrated at my ignorance but friendly and warm too, as if she were trying to coax a scared kitten out from under a bed. ‘Watch.’

I turned my attention to the television. On the screen, there was a pond with the sun shining on it and countless toy sailboats bobbing happily on the gentle waves. The image filled me with a sense of peace and happiness as well as with a sad, empty longing for a time that was now long gone. I felt embarrassed for being so emotionally overwhelmed by a bunch of goddam boats in a movie that was about people getting killed by a chainsaw juggler or whatever

the hell it was that we were watching.

‘It’s okay’, her voice said soothingly. ‘Yellow sailboats were always your thing. It was one of the things we all loved about you.’

‘Yeah, bro’, my friend Jake’s voice chimed in. ‘Remember when me and you had that boat race and you totally kicked my ass? You were always the champ when it came to racing those things’.

I looked around me somewhat wildly. Nobody was exhibiting any sign of paying any attention to me. I looked back at the TV. The boats were no longer an important part of the storyline. There were hundreds of people who had been watching the sailboats, one of whom I somehow recognized as my mother, though she bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mother I know. In the movie, the spectators were smiling and lazily enjoying the warm afternoon. A thought tugged at the corner of my mind that I knew these people, that they were family. I thought I saw myself, a small child standing on the shore of the pond, holding my friend’s hand while we watched the dippy little sailboats fighting to not capsize in the breeze.

‘This is what they did, James’, Steve’s voice cut in suddenly. Sharply. ‘This is what they do’.

In the movie, large, black military-style vehicles descended quickly over the hill that lay behind the crowd who stood on the bank of the pond. The friendly chatter of the people turned to screams, their smiles twisted into grimaces of understanding and horror. The children looked confused and began crying, including the little boy who I somehow recognized as being myself and my friend who I was holding hands with. Some of the people threw their hands in the air as a sign of submission. Others turned and tried to find safety by plunging into the pond, some of them carrying children in the crooks of their arms.

The black not-tanks had arrived. Large people clad in masks leapt from the huge trucks, their faces concealed by black helmets and mirrored face masks, wielding large, two-handed truncheons and wearing pistols on their hips. A cold, loud voice bellowed from a speaker ordering the crowd to stand still. The people were crying and shouting in protest. Within seconds, gunfire erupted from one of the vehicles and was quickly joined by the others. I saw myself crying as my mother stooped down to hug me, to protect me, to tell me that we were gonna be okay. The gunfire silenced as the mean guys in black bore down on what remained of the crowd. One of them pulled my mother from me by her hair and threw her to the ground on her back and began stomping on her face with his heavy boots. He yanked me from the ground by my arm and carried me by one arm towards the now silent and smoking black trucks.

The camera panned across the now-bloody crowd, mothers and fathers dying in the grass, gurgling goodbyes to their children where the camera view finally set on the pond where bullet-ridden corpses lolled amidst the idiotic yellow sailboats.

Steve’s voice cut into my mind evenly. ‘You know how you and me were like brothers from the first time we ever met? I love you, James. We’ve known each other for thousands of years. You have to remember, man. We need you back. You’re the Boat Man.”

God of Thunder, of Rock n Roll

Writing assignment for our writing group. This week's topic is "Thunder".

Christ, I started writing a story about how they used to set off some kind of explosive charges to scare away the pigeons and grackles in San Antonio whenever I hung out there. They did it every fifteen or twenty minutes. The city viewed the birds as pests and somehow reasoned that thunderous explosions echoing through the city, sounding like fuckin World War III, would be appealing to all the empty-brained assholes with cameras hanging from their white, pasty necks. In that thing I was writing, I mentioned how my buddy and I had pissed on the Alamo just like Ozzy had famously done years before us. I pointed out that we might never have peed on the Alamo had Ozzy Osbourne not demonstrated how cool it was to do such an irreverant thing. As my friend and I drained our main veins upon the Alamo, we wistfully marvelled that every weirdo and reprobate who had ever visited San Antonio had probably followed in Ozzy’s footsteps and taken a squirt on the stupid Alamo. I wrote a whole buncha shit and then I deleted it, where it is now lost like a man who had died of dehydration in the desert sun. A man who had only days before had a full bladder that he had emptied on the side of the Alamo. Now he is nothing more than a memory, and not much of a memory at that.

So yeah, that was my goddam thunder story. But now it’s this.

Not that this promises to be much better.

Very early in my freight train-hopping career (my first trip, actually, though it was a few days into it) I found myself in Ogden, Utah. I had been following my friend’s lead (it had been his second trip so he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing either) from Seattle to San Francisco. So there you go. We were all the way the fuck out in Utah. My pal jumped on some goddam train that was heading outta the yard (which I would later learn was a surefire way to not get where you were going. Don’t just jump on “some goddam train” if you don’t wanna wind up being completely fucked). It was going fast. Real fast. I managed to get on it too, but there were a couple of old tramps on the car that I got on and I thought fast. “Fuck this” is what I thought in those few seconds and I exited the mystery train. So there went my guide who had managed to get us both lost. What did I do? I got on the next goddam train and wound up in Green River, Wyoming, even further from my initial destination than I had been in the first place.

I woke up on the train in the yard in the morning. I gathered my belongings and walked with what I imagine to be a stride that declared that I really didn’t fuckin care at this point if they kicked me outta the stupid train yard or not. Trains could kiss my ass. I asked the first person I saw where I was and he told me I was in Green River. I asked him where the fuck that was. He told me it was in Wyoming. I asked him how the hell do I get back to Utah, a place where I had absolutely zero desire to be. He must’ve realized that I had no idea what in the everloving fuck I was doing cos he called it in on his radio and then told me the numbers that would be on the lead unit (the engine) of the train I wanted later that afternoon. I told him “thanks”. He gave me five bucks. I bought a couple of forty ouncers and hung out at the library and researched giraffes until it was time to go get on my train back to Whereveresville.

By the time I staggered up to the train and got on it, it was getting pretty late in the day. It was still light out but the sun had sunk behind the mountains. Not long after I had climbed onto the grain car I found, the train lurched forward and I was on my way. Somewhat drunk, I stumbled around and looked off the sides of the train and screamed out the vocals of various songs by Millions of Dead Cops, the Ramones, the Misfits, Rudimentary Peni, and whoever the fuck else I felt like singing songs by. I probably masturbated. Why not? You can’t exactly do anything on a freight train, but whatever you can do you can be sure that nobody’s gonna hear you or see you doing it. Eventually, I passed out.

When I awoke, night had fallen and I had no idea where I was. Not like it would’ve mattered if I had known. I was stuck on a goddam grainer either in Wyoming or Utah. I crawled out of the cozy little hole on the grain car that I had nested in so I could look around while I smoked a Bugler. There was nothing to be seen. Clouds had rolled in and the night was black. I could feel the mist of a steady rain that blew in from the sides of the train. Still new to riding trains, the rhythm of the train rolling somewhat quickly along the tracks caught my ear. I was mezmerized. Intermittently, the sky would erupt in silver like the flash on an old polaroid camera, revealing for a second the mountains that I was slithering between, leaving their images etched upon my retinas for the five seconds or so that followed. The boom that followed those strikes joined the symphony that that the train rolling on the tracks had created. It was so loud and so beautiful, so sad and so angry that I could feel it in my heart. It echoed the thoughts that I was incapable of expressing to the nobody who was my companion.

Mr. Coffee, Mr. Spock, and Grandpa Munster.

I haven't written in a bit cos circumstances haven't permitted it, but this is an entry for our writing group. The topic this time is "Coffee".

Looking back, it’s hard to tell whether Mr. Coffee was a fat, bald, sniveling asshole or I was a snotty little punk-ass kid. I’m guessing it was at least a little of both. I was definitely a dumbass little snotball. But I’m reasonably certain that if I were to run into Mr. Coffee today, he being the same guy he was then and me being the guy I am now, the man would still be a ridiculous penis. Mr. Coffee was the principal of my high school that I attended in St. Paul for about 4 or 5 months before they finally kicked me out. I spent a fair amount of time in his office, looking at him scowling at me as he sat behind the name plate on his desk that read “Mike Coffee”. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Mr. Carleson on WKRP in Cincinatti. If you don’t know what WKRP is, Google it. Screw it, after you Google it go ahead and watch a few episodes. WKRP was a comedic gem amongst the terrible situation comedies of the late 70s. 

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that one of the secretaries in the office at that school looked a lot like Mr. Spock and another one totally looked like Grandpa Munster. What made it even funnier was that both of those secretaries were women. While my best friend and I at the time would sit in the office waiting to get suspended by Mr. Coffee, we would giggle our asses off as we made up possible back stories about how Mr. Spock and Grandpa Munster became women who worked in the office at our high school. We were pretty goofy. Plus, we were always really stoned. It would be funnier than hell until the door that said “Mr. Coffee” on it would open and we’d be called in separately to face our fate. Our fate really didn’t seem like that big of a fuckin deal but it would make us temporarily quit giggling all the same.

I seem to remember this scenario unfolding at least once a week: I’d go into Mr. Coffee’s office where he’d impotently chide me for not being in school the day before, whereupon he’d doom me to exile from the campus for the rest of the day. He’d ask me my grandmother’s phone number (my legal guardian at the time), he’d dial it, and then he’d hand the phone to me so that I would have to explain to her that I was in big trouble. He’d never talk to her first though, so I’d just let her answer the phone and I wouldn’t say anything. “Hello?”, she’d say in her sweet, grandmotherly voice. I’d remain silent. “Hello? Hello?”, she’d repeat until she’d give up and hang up the phone. “She’s not home”, I’d tell Mr. Coffee with a shrug, after which he’d tell me to leave the premises. I’d go across the street and wait for my buddy to pull the same trick and come and meet me, then we’d get stoned and drink coffee at the diner up the street and giggle about stupid shit until it was time to go home and get bitched at by our folks.

The Night Of The Dying Leg

Well, I have good news and I have bad news.  The good news is that my lung cancer seems to have gone back into hiding.  It’s also good news that I don’t have lung cancer.  Unless you fuckin hate me, in which case I’m sorry to disappoint you.  But I felt like I had inhaled a flathead screwdriver for a while there and now I don’t.  Problem solved.  The bad news is that my leprosy has taken a turn for the worse.  I’m not sure what caused it.  I may have been nipped in the knee by a zombified squirrel.  I just don’t know.  At least he didn’t get me in the nuts (which seems like what a zombie squirrel would naturally go for) but the fucker got me nonetheless.  Whatever the reason, if Jesus existed I’d ask him to rub my thigh.  But that’s it.  I don’t wanna get any freakier with Jesus than that.  He can go masturbate about it later.  Though, anybody who masturbates about my leprotic leg deserves to be nailed to a cross.  Hell, they’d probably get turned on by that too.

Anyway, my leg’s all fucked up.  I went to the doctor to see what he could give me.  He said, “Son, son, you’ve gone too far.  Cos smokin and trippin is all that you do.  Yeah.”  Oh wait.  That’s what Ozzy Osbourne’s doctor said.  What my doctor said was, “Yep.  Your leg’s all fucked up.”  I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much how it went down.  She gave me some antibiotics and creams and whatnot and sent me on my not-so-merry way, instructing me to go to the emergency room should I develop a fever and blah blah blah I forget what else she said.  I hobbled into the pharmacy where all the pharmacy people were pretty and friendly women, me looking haggard with my rotten, pussey, oozing leg.  What a charmer I can be!

I got home after a while and felt progressively lousy.  I didn’t have a fever but my stupid leg was killing me.  It looked all horrible and it was leaking some kinda terribleness that hurt when my shorts rubbed against it.  In fact, it had swollen to the point that my shorts were tight on my thigh, whereupon I donned a slinky little skirt that I borrowed from a friend.  This prompted a few “The Kevitron 6000’s wearing a goddam skirt” jokes that weren’t all that funny but which were to be expected.  I eventually got hold of a colleague of the doctor I had seen earlier and he told me to get my motherfuckin leg into the E.R.  Again, I’m paraphrasing.  Doctors don’t talk like that to their patients around here.  They’re much more professional than that.

Except for the doctor in the emergency room.  Holy wow, that guy was a piece of work.  He stood about 6 foot 2 and had to have weighed at least 300 pounds.  He wore black sweat pants and a black pocket t-shirt from Wal-Mart with his name tag hanging from a lanyard.  His wild, gray hair swam in every which way from his enormous head.  He scowled down at me in condescension from all of the space that he managed to occupy while I lay on the E.R. bed.  With every question he asked about the history of the progression of my miserable-looking wound, he seemed to imply that I probably deserved whatever it was that was happening to me.  And maybe he was right.  But it’s difficult to accept admonitions regarding healthy living from some morbidly obese slob who’s probably gonna get his own goddam leg amputated next month due to the Type 2 diabetes he’s developed by gobbling down a box of Twinkies for a pre-breakfast snack every morning.  Christ, I just got bit by an undead rodent.  What the fuck you want me to do?

He told me that they were gonna have to keep me on an I.V. overnight, so I told my friend who was kind enough to drive me to the hospital that she could go home, that I’d get hold of her the next day.  Not long after that, after I was all hooked up to the I.V., Jabba the Hutt asked me if I had health insurance.  I told him that I don’t, that in fact I’m between jobs and had only recently moved to the area.  This caused his monstrous gray slug of a unibrow to slither and to form the letter “V” in the middle of his fat forehead.  “Hm”, he sniveled snottily.  “Well, I’ll be back in a while”.  He then lumbered out of the room, momentarily getting trapped in the privacy curtain that hung near the door.  Whatever they gave me for the pain must’ve kicked in pretty good cos I awoke 4 hours later with the T.V. on some stupid channel that I would’ve never landed on on purpose.  The grouchy white giant loomed over me and told me that I was all done, that it was time to go.  I was healed.  I exercised an impressive amount of self-control by not telling him to go fuck a Pepsi machine as he waddled away.

The RN’s were generally pleasant and respectful.  I mean, they looked like they could walk down the hall without risking a fuckin cardiac arrest like old Jumbo.  They also had  professional bedside manners.  I politely bitched that I was 10 miles away from my friend’s house out in the country at 2 in the morning with a fucked up leg and wearing a dress.  I tried to be pleasant when I pointed out that I had been told I’d be kept in the hospital for a day and that there was a significant difference in lengths of time between 4 hours and a fuckin day.  I also didn’t mention that I’d had this skin condition a few times before and that they’ve never decided to kick me out after a few hours before, that they had always kept me for at least 24 hours.  After all, I didn’t wanna question the blob’s professionalism.  One of the nurses convinced a deputy to drive me home which is never my first choice of travel, but under the circumstances I was glad for one of the few times in my life to get a ride in the back of a cop car.  The cop was kind of a douche but at least he was friendly enough.

Long story short: fuck you if you don’t have any money.

Soap

[My submission to this week's topic in the writing group I'm in. "Soap" is the topic]

You ever used Dr. Bronner’s?  Sorry, I don’t wanna talk to you like you’re an idiot or anything, I just wanna make sure that you know what the fuck I’m talkin about before I get started.  Dr. Bronner’s is soap.  It usually comes in liquid form but they also sell bars of it.  The bars kinda suck though.  If you find it on the shelf in the soap aisle, the label that covers the cylindrical bottle has about a thousand little quotes and facts and who knows what all crazy shit written all over it.  So yeah, the packaging alone would catch all the weirdos’ attention.  But it’s also natural or organic or something and the company that makes it isn’t a bunch of assholes or something, so the weirdos buy it.  

Dr. Bronner’s comes in a bunch of different flavors.  I don’t know if it still does, but somewhere amidst all the oddball shit on the bottle used to declare that one can use the soap as a mouthwash.  And you can.  That said, you can use any liquid as a mouthwash.  Christ, you can gargle with Drano if you feel like it but don’t.  Don’t rinse your mouth out with Dr. Bronner’s either.  Out of the two, I’d definitely go with the liquid soap though.  Drano might clean you out a little more than you need.  Still, the only time you should swish soap around your mouth is if you call your big sister an asshole in front of your dad when you’re 7 and he’s in a lousy mood.

Anyway, Dr. Bronner’s comes in peppermint, almond, eucalyptus, lavender, hemp and maybe one or two more that I either forget about or which I never knew about in the first place.  My favorite one is peppermint cos it smells nice and it makes my scrotum buzz.  Just gotta love a buzzing scrotum.  Unless the buzzing is from flies zooming around your crotch, but they shouldn't be cos you just washed your junk with peppermint soap.  I’m not a big fan of the almond or eucalyptus.  I like lavender but if I’m buying I go for peppermint.  I was showering next to a guy once who had the eucalyptus stuff and teased me for using my girlfriend’s lavender stuff.  He called me a “girly man”.  I told him that at least I didn’t smell like a goddam cough drop.

That little mental and verbal sparring match took place outside the camp showers at a blueberry harvest in Maine.  A bunch of my friends would go out there for the month of August to toil in hot miserable fields all day.  Some of us would walk away with thousands of dollars in our pockets.  Others of us would stagger outta there at the end of the month with maybe a grand and a terrible hangover.  I generally fell into the latter group.  The company we worked for provided us with a campground and with hot showers, but we were expected to supply ourselves with all the other necessities and niceties.  That year, I was there with my longtime girlfriend.  We had been traveling in our van and were well prepared to set up a really nice camp.  In fact, I think that that was the coolest camp that I’ve ever personally set up.  It was a good summer.

We had carried most of the stuff in our van up to our camp.  A lot of rakers don’t have vehicles and if even if they do it makes sense to carpool, so if you owned a van and weren’t some kinda prick your old Econoline would likely be jammed full of dusty, blue-stained, filthy blueberry rakers with their dogs and their grimy water bottles and whatever kind of squished-up insanity they had crammed into their bags for lunch.  We did have a milk crate with some odds and ends in it behind the driver’s seat.  I forget what all was in that box, but that’s where we kept one of the bottles of lavender Dr. Bronner’s.  The other bottle was up in the camp for whenever we needed it.  You can wash dishes with the stuff.  You can do your laundry with it.  The shit’s absolutely amazing!

My girlfriend gladly took on the chore of picking up weirdo soap at the hippy store.  Back then Dr. Bronner’s wasn’t as easy to find as it is now, but they always had it at co-ops and places like that.  Hippy stores always get on my goddam nerves.  I try being nice, but most of the people seem to look at me like “how the fuck did this guy get in here?” and then I glare back at them like “I can do any goddam thing I want, ya snotball bastard and right now I want some fuckin peppermint soap and maybe gimme a couple of those stupid honey-filled straws that you morons have by the counter”.  I can handle sourpuss jerkoffs like that, but who the hell wants to deal with a bunch of horseshit just to get some soap?  

My girlfriend liked wandering around in those kinda places, largely cos she liked natural products and whatever kinda nonsense they stock their shelves with, and not least because she was a decent shoplifter.  She’d also buy things in bulk and change the codes on them to reflect the prices of less expensive items so that she’d be buying organic virgin olive oil for the same price as the eco-friendly dish soap, etc.  They usually have semi-translucent, 16 ounce squirt-bottles in which to fill with whatever liquid, but you can refill your old ones if you keep them.  There weren’t any crazy labels on the empty bottles that they sold, but my girlfriend  labelled them well enough.  So yeah, 5 bucks later she’s proudly exiting the store with a priceless trove of overpriced hippy crap where I would be waiting, smoking cigarettes and having glaring contests with any of the store’s patrons who looked like he or she might be up for one.

We had driven a few folks with us to the showers late one afternoon, shortly before dinnertime.  The showers weren’t that far from the campground, but far enough if you’d been stooped over in the heat raking blueberries all day.  Plus, it was still hot in the sun at that time of day and you’d have to carry your towel and then your grungy, smelly blueberry clothes back with you so yeah, fuck walking to the showers unless you were trying to prove that you’re weirder than everybody else.  My girlfriend had already walked into the women’s shower from the van while I finished a brief conversation with somebody in the parking lot.  When I went to find my towel and clean clothes, I noticed that the bottle of soap had rolled under the bed that we had built in the back of the van.  Probably some dirty knucklehead or his dog had accidentally kicked it out of the milk crate where it was supposed to be.  I grabbed it, grabbed my towel and some clean undies and went to take care of business.

They had nice showers there.  Well, they were hot and the water pressure was adequate anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s nice and anything beyond that is extra credit.  They even had five shower stalls with doors on them just in case you were shy or in case you had bigger plans than to simply get clean while you were in there.  I got the water going how I like it, stepped in, squirted soap in my hand and began lathering up.   I wasn’t getting much of a lather, though the soap went on smoothly enough for me to know that it wasn’t watered down.  I poured a little more, soaped up my junk and was moving down to my legs when I noticed that it wasn’t foaming up at all.  I’m certain that I had succumbed to the placebo effect because I had been smelling the lavender scent this whole time, though it wasn’t very potent.  I stopped, stood up straight, snatched up the bottle and sniffed it.  It didn’t smell like anything.  

So exactly what the fuck, then, had I been slathering all over myself?  I tasted it.  Fucking olive oil.  I shouted goddammit and jesus fuckin christ and all this, then I started laughing.  I shouted to whoever was in the stall next to me to please lemme use his soap.  This wasn’t an uncommon request in those showers, but whoever it was asked me didn’t he see me with a bottle a minute ago?  I was still a little pissed off that somebody didn’t label the goddam bottle or something but it was cracking me up, too.  I hollered back that no, that what he saw was a bottle of oil masquerading as a bottle of soap.  He asked if I had used any and I shouted back an exasperated “yes”.  The men’s side of the showers erupted in laughter, friends piping up with jokes that were funny but which would’ve been a lot funnier had they been about some other putz who had just made himself all slippery and gross.

Cleaning that stuff off was a bitch.  I was both giggling and cursing under my breath watching the water bead up on my skin.  It was still beading by the time I finally said “screw it” and got out of the shower to dry myself off.  Exxon and BP have demonstrated on a titanic scale how difficult it is to clean oil from water, but I tried my own home experiment and I’m certain that I didn’t get all that shit off of myself.  I probably had nice, soft skin though, which my girlfriend wouldn’t have noticed cos she was all bent outta shape about me dumping all the goddam olive oil on myself in the shower and now we're almost outta oil and all this, while I was trying to act like I wasn’t a total dumbass, that maybe she should label shit better and anyway why the hell is there a goddam bottle of olive oil under the bed in the first place? and whatever else might make it sound like I wasn’t a big fat idiot.  Actually, I was more of a skinny, greasy idiot.