Haters

                I work for some goddam place.  Some goddam place that requires us to wear uniforms.  Uniforms that make you look like you’re workin at some goddam place.  “Are these uniforms blue?”, you’re probably not asking yourself.  No, dear reader.  No, they are not.  They consist of green pants and a tan shirt, tucked in, with a tan belt to match.  I don’t feel embarrassed to wear the uniform.  Fuck it.  At least I’m working and I look like it and who cares?

                I’ll tell you who cares.  Fuckin just about everybody.  I’ve never felt so consistently disrespected in my entire life than when I’m wearing the TruGreen uniform.  And I’ve been the kinda guy that you’d think generally draws some pretty disrespectful looks.  I lived on the streets for years, rarely showering or washing my clothes.  I’ve driven around for days on end breaking down crack with Koolaid and shooting it up in my beat up, hot pink Geo Tracker that had no muffler and sounded like a goddam Cessna airplane.  I’ve walked into stores with blood all over my elbows and hands, hallucinating and sweating and walked the hell out with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise without drawing any suspicion at all.

                I’d think that if you look like a working Joe, shirt tucked in and stopping in to get a Gatorade or a donut or something that the people at the stores would smile and tell you to have a nice day and all that.  They don’t.  They look at you like you’re the scum of the earth.  If I had been up for 3 days and was writing bad checks they’d be sweet as pie.  If my hands were black with filth from being unwashed for weeks on end, they’d kiss my ass out of fear.  But since I’m in a TruGreen costume they’re sullen and they watch me to make sure I’m not stealing a Twix bar. 

                So you know what I do?  I steal 2 Twix bars and glare at them on my way out.  Fuck it.  Time to go to work.

The Worst

                Goddammit.  I’m worn out.  I oughtta work on writing a book.  I barely have time to write a blog once every 2 or 3 weeks though, so I dunno how I think I’m gonna write a book.  Plus, my book idea is depressing and potentially psychologically damaging for me to write.  I dunno why that’s a problem, but it seems like it could be.  Christ, I’ve done plenty of psychological damage to myself, not to mention what I’ve inflicted upon others.  Might as well write a goddam book.  What’s the worst that could happen?

                Speaking of worst that could happen, when I’m driving with my phone in my hand I always feel like chucking it out the goddam window.  Same with my wallet.  I’ve had false teeth since I was 18 and I can’t tell you how many times I’d be riding in the back of a pickup truck and wind up being kinda half-ass ready to chuck em out onto the fuckin highway.  Now, none of these things is the WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN, but they’d certainly be regrettable.  And not necessarily in the order in which I mentioned them, either.  In fact, I’d say teeth would suck the worst, then wallet, then phone.  But yeah, this cumpulsion is similar to the one that you might feel when you’re standing at the mouth of a canyon, admiring nature, and get a weird itch to jump.  That would be closer to the worst thing that could happen.  Still, there are worse things that I won’t endeavor to explore right this second.  Burning alive, being drawn and quartered, sticking pencils in your nose and doing a swan dive down a staircase.  Etcetera, etcetera.

                This is reminding me of fake teeth situations.  Like once when I pulled them out for the hell of it in front of my friends’ 4 year old daughter.  Her jaw dropped.  Then she frowned and started tugging at her teeth, to no avail. 

                Or the time when my buddy who was a genius at fucking with passed out people took my teeth while I was in a stupor.  This was back when I had first gotten the things.  I woke up and realized that I had lost my goddam teeth and went into a panic.  Especially at that age, cos not only would I be missing the function of having front teeth, but I’d be the only guy around who didn’t have any fuckin teeth.  Anyway, that was funny and haha now don’t fuckin do it anymore.  Except that there was another buddy of ours around who was wasn't exactly the sharpest bulb in the turnip patch who’d try to take my goddam teeth out all the time after that.  You know what it’s like to wake up with some filthy moron sticking his fingers in your fuckin mouth?  It makes you punch that person.

                Oh yeah, and back then we were 19 or so and I was the designated alcohol buyer.  I’d take out my fake teeth and make sure that the person working behind the counter saw that I didn’t have any goddam teeth.  I hated doing it cos it was embarrassing but it worked better than a fake I.D.

                Then there was the time that I was staying with some friends at their farmhouse in Eastern Tennessee.  They didn’t have indoor plumbing.  No big deal.  I mean, plumbing sure is nice but we didn’t have too many problems hauling in drinking water and using an outhouse and showering elsewhere.  Anyway, my friend who I was staying with was a total fuckin stoner.  Me?  I’ve always been a lightweight with that stuff.  So the whole time I was visiting I was baked outta my goddam mind.

                One day I did a few bong hits and decided to brush my teeth out by my pickup truck.  To this day I’m a bit self-concious about removing my teeth in front of people.  Back then I was a bit moreso.  So I took my fake teeth out and set them on the tailgate, planning to brush them when I was done brushing my real teeth.  So I’m pacing around like a zombie, listening to the birds and looking at the sky and all that other stoner hippy shit and when I’m done brushing my teeth, I rinse my mouth out with a bottle of water and rinse off my toothbrush.  Then I go back to my truck and shut the tailgate, even though we’re out in the middle of fuckin nowhere and there’s no reason to shut the tailgate.

                I start walking back to the house  and realize that I’m not wearing my denture.  My stoned brain quickly realizes what probably happened.  I go into a medium panic.  JESUS FUCKIN CHRIST NO FUCKIN WAY! I think to myself.  I jog back to my truck and open the tailgate.  Yep.  There they were.  My fake teeth, all smashed to smithereens.   They looked brutal and gory like, well, like a bunch of smashed teeth in the back of a beat up Toyota.  I didn’t have to feel like the odd man out this time though.  For one thing, I was 30 and enough of my peers were missing a few teeth at that point.  Plus, I was in Cocke County, Tennessee.  Being toothless, I fit right in out there.  So I made an appointment with the dentist and drank some moonshine. 

                When in Rome…

Honkee

    Fuck.  Or as my beloved Welsh/Canadian/Minnesotan grandmother would've said in her heavy Minnesota accent, OOFTAH!  Say what you want about shit like Prozac but it sure keeps me from focusing on the futility of existence, a bitter, sad and cynical realistic philosophy or worldview or whatever you wanna call it that constantly taps at my conciousness.  At least it's not kicking my brain in.  Still...

What a stupid fuckin world.

A couple of weeks ago I was driving the work truck and had to hit the brakes.  A big machine in the back of my truck flipped forward and landed upside down, probably spilling gas all over the bed of the goddam truck.  Great.  I started looking around for a place to pull over once the light turned green so I could deal with it.  The light turned green, I went, the fuckin machine uprighted itself and then tipped over backward and knocked the tailgate open.  At that point it was hanging precariously on the tailgate and I said "fuck it", put the truck in park and jumped out to fix it.  This was gonna be a 10 or 15 second event.

The crowd went wild.

I had fuckers honking and shouting outta their cars at me.  A couple of kids drove by and flipped me off, hollering whatever they were hollering.  I'm not a badass but I always feel like one whenever crap like that's going on, figuring I'll beat the fuck outta whoever wants to pull over and yell at me.  They don't know I'm not a brawler or a goddam psycho or something.  Fuck em.  For all they know, I might've killed a bunch of guys in prison for yelling at me for holding up the line in the chow hall.  Nobody missed the light except me.  Oh well. 

Oh yeah, and the phone number for the company I work for is emblazoned on the side of the truck, so if I really piss anybody off they can call and complain.  Then again, they can kiss my ass cos it doesn't really matter.  Still, I like the drama to stay at a dull throb.

Then last week, I was pulling up to a busy intersection and some oblivious little moron of a dog was running amok in the middle of the street.  Jesus.  If you're gonna teach your dog anything, teach it not to do shit like that.  Even if it's an idiot.  If the dog's too fuckin stupid then it's probably gonna have a short life.  I saw a little boy on the corner calling the dog.  He was probably 6 or 7, a scuzzy little fucker wearing only cutoff jeans, the kinda kid the NO SHOES NO SHIRT NO SERVICE sign is talking to. 

Supressing my Darwinist phlosophies, I decided to rescue the stupid little Benji-looking dipshit that was chasing his tail in front of a bunch of garbage trucks and buses at rush hour.  Time was of the essence.  I threw her in park and got out and went for the dog.  The kid was doing a good job of not being a 6 year old who runs out in the middle of an insane intersection.  It suddenly occured to me that Benji might not be too cool with some dude walking up and grabbing him.  I mean, I could've kicked Benji's ass but that's not why I was getting outta the truck.  Like the cop in the Police Academy movie that shoots the cat to get it outta the tree, or when Dirty Harry pulls the guy who's threatening to jump off the ledge through the window into the apartment and beats the shit outta him. 

Nope.  That wasn't my plan.

Benji didn't like me very much but he didn't wanna get beat up.  Again, he has no way of knowing whether or not I'm a psycho asshole.  Just like everybody else.  So I snarled and bitched at the dog while yapped at me until he had backed himself up to his boy.  The kid grabbed Benji's harness and got the fuck outta there.  I jogged back over to my truck and got in just in time for the light to turn green.  Fuckers were honking at me again, but I'd like to think they were applauding rather than bitching.  I wouldn't be surprised either way, but either way:

Fuck em.

Blue Penises, Red Dogs

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I changed my mind about writing a continuous story on a blog site.  At least not that story.  There's a lotta shit to tell about my old dog and everything involved with that, I could probably write a novella about that if I tried.  I don't try though.  Instead, I'll get to the meat of the story.  Well, maybe not the meat.  Like maybe the ribs.  Sure.  Ribs.  Ribs are delicious.  But ribs are a small percentage of a carcass.  The rest of the carcass is pretty damn good, too.  Well, maybe not the whole carcass.  And we also have to factor in that we haven't even mentioned what kinda carcass we're talkin about here.  It might be a bloated rhinocerous carcass, left to rot on the scorching plains of Kenya after poachers had taken it's tusk.  Tusk?  Sure.  Fuck it.  Horn?  Tusk.  Anyway, that carcass isn't cool at all.  And it probably isn't all that delicious.  But I'll bet there's some big ribs on it. They'd probably be alright if you had enough barbeque sauce.

Wait a minute.  What the fuck was I talkin about?  Oh yeah.  My family dog I had when I was growing up, and how I wasn't gonna tell my whole goddam life story in order to relate to any of you who are so misfortunate to be reading this the one little anecdote that I had on my mind.  And honestly, if you know me very well you've probably already heard the goddam story.  If you wanna read the novella you're gonna have to use your imagination.  I'm sure it'll be more exciting.  It certainly couldn't be a helluva lot more depressing.  Well, probably but the story isn't a real cheery one.

O.K.  So if you read the other thing I posted last week about my dog then you know that he was a big, hyper Irish Setter.  If you didn't read it, now you don't have to.  I already spoiled it.  Fuck.  Whatever.  So anyway, when I was 10, I had two friends who were brothers who lived across the street from me.  One of them was a year older than me and the other was a year younger than me.  We would get into some weird shit.  We were all becoming interested in sex if we hadn't been interested in it already.  I think our interest in sex corrolated with our ages.  The older the hornier.  But none of us knew what the hell was going on.  At least I didn't, and I'm pretty damn sure that those kids didn't have much of a clue either.  How could they?  Well, there are many terrible answers to that question, but I don't think they apply in this case.  We were little kids.

I remember once that the older kid, Matt bet his younger brother, Aaron five bucks that he wouldn't stick his dick in the snow for five minutes.  Maybe it was ten bucks.  I'm done worrying about how much money was riding on the wager.  Anyway, we weren't in school that day for whatever reason and Matt, their big sister and I all crowded in the warm entryway and laughed as Aaron lay in the snow with his pants to his thighs, red-faced and screeching.  Way down the block some guy was shoveling his driveway and kept looking up to see what all the excitement was about.  He was too far away to see any details though and there's no fuckin way that he could've guessed what kinda game we were playing.

So yeah, Aaron stuck his pecker in the snow for five minutes and then Matt welched on the bet.  Welched?  Maybe it's Welshed.  My grandma was Welsh enough to have a PROUD TO BE WELSH bumper sticker on her car until they took away the keys.  That makes me pretty Welsh.  I resent myself for saying that Welsh people don't pay off their bets.  What a prick!  Anyway yeah, Matt wouldn't pay up and Aaron was too little to kick his ass so he took it to a higher court.  He told their folks.  I wasn't actually standing there when he approached his parents and told them that he had stuck his dick in the snow in the front yard and that their other son had cancelled payment.  Nobody got yelled at, I know that much.  And they made Matt pay up.  Thus ended that crisis.

Yes, but what the hell did all that have to do with a dog?, you wonder in irritation.  Or you don't.  You're probably doing something else right now.  Perhaps you've smashed your computer in frustration.  Perhaps you simply clicked a couple of clicks and you're reading the news or watching porn or trying to find cool pictures of tigers.  There's even a weird possibility that you're still reading this.  If so, I shall now answer your question.  My 9 year old friend freezing his penis in the snow has very little to do with my old dog.  Yet it is related, as you will see as this epic tale unfolds.

I'm assuming that everybody who speaks American English knows what a smurf is.  And it doesn't matter how old you are cos they just came out with a couple of smurf movies over the past couple of years.  That said, you probably don't have to be all that familiar with American English to know what a goddam smurf is.  You probably just have to be exposed regularly to American garbage, and I'm pretty sure that most of the 1st and 2nd world are subjected to that terribleness on a regular basis.  Hell, they're also subjected to U.S. drones and troops and aircraft carriers and tanks and all kinds of other terrible things.  Might as well terrorize the poor fuckers with the smurfs too, while we're at it. 

But in 1982-83, when I was 10 years old, the Smurfs were one of the more popular Saturday morning cartoons.  I wasn't a super fan of the Smurfs but I definitely watched my fair share.  I'm not sure if they have the same song in the movies that they used to have on the cartoon in the 80's.  They fuckin better.  But they probably don't.  They probably have some watered-down hip hop crap song for their theme.  Bastards.  If you don't know how the old Smurfs song went, go check it out on YouTube or something.  When you're done, you may continue reading this nonsense.

O.K.  I have no idea how we figured this out, cos it's really not the kinda thing we did.  I mean, we did once we found out what the results would be but I totally can't remember how we ever discovered it in the first place.  It turned out that if we joined hands and danced around in a circle while singing the Smurfs song, my dog Mac would get pretty riled up.  So riled up, in fact, that he couldn't restrain himself from trying to hump one of us.  He was a big dog, and when I was 10 if he stood on his hind legs Mac was easily as tall as I was.  So Mac didn't just try to hump one of us.  Mac would fuckin hump somebody.  You never knew who it was gonna be.  It was like Russian roulette.  We'd dance around and around singing "la la lala la la" until the dog would haul off and rape somebody.  Not only was he big, but he was a strong adult dog so he'd straight up knock you over and start fucking the back of your head and there wasn't a goddam thing you could do about it until he decided that he was finished.  The other two kids would laugh hysterically while their friend curled up in a ball and screamed.

I remember a few times some kid or another that didn't usually hang out would come over after school or something and we'd tell him to jump around and sing the Smurfs song.  "No really, man!  Do it just one time!  It's really funny!" 

Mac part 1

The happiest day of my life was the day that a big crazy Irish Setter puppy jumped out of my dad's car when he got home from work.  Maybe he didn't get home from work.  How the hell do I know where he came from?  I was five.  So it was 35 years ago.  Who remembers a detail like that?  Not to mention, when you're five you have absolutely no idea where the hell anybody went or where they came from.  But all this is neither here nor there.  For all practical purposes, in an effort to get this story going, let's all agree that it really doesn't fuckin matter where my dad came from when the dog jumped out of his car.  If we were to analyze this very much further, we might reason that my dad hadn't been returning from work.  He was a captain in the Air Force at that time, a navigator on a B-52.  So just how the hell was he supposed to have gotten this dog at work?  It doesn't add up.

Yet it happened.  Pretty much.

I really haven't met many other Irish Setters in my lifetime, and those that I have met were kinda stupid and annoying.  Not only that, but they seem to have been owned by stupid and annoying people.  That probably goes with the territory.  I'm not gonna drag Freud into this or anything, but the odds are that if your dog's an annoying idiot, he or she just might have learned it from you.  And Irish Setters aren't usually that big.  I'm not gonna research this cos I really don't give that much of a fuck but I'm pretty sure that that breed of dog is usually about 60 pounds or so.  And they have somewhat pointy snouts and look a little bit prissy.  Then again, maybe they look prissy cos their people want them to look prissy.

Mac wasn't prissy.  He must've been mixed with something else.  I mean, he was red, had long fur that hung down on his belly, his tail and his ears like an Irish Setter.  But he was pretty solid, with a big head and a fatter snout than a purebred.  Plus he weighed around a hundred pounds.  Whether or not my wild guess at the average weight of an Irish Setter is anywhere near accurate, they don't weigh a hundred pounds.  O.K.  I let curiosity get the best of me and I googled it.  Male setters weigh between 60 and 70 pounds.  So I was on the low end of correct.  Mac was much bigger than that.

Irish Setters are pains in the ass.  Ours was anyway.  All dogs are pains in the ass at one point in time or the other.  Now that I think about it, everybody's a fuckin pain in the ass at one point in time or the other.  And that's being kind.  Most people are aggravating nuicances from the time they're conceived until after they're finally buried.  Even when they're dead, some poor jerk has to dig a goddam hole to put them in.  And how annoying is that?  So let's give dipshit, hyperactive, inherently disobedient dogs a break.  Especially if they're nice to have around.  That's more than I can say for most humans.  To quote a bumper sticker my friend used to have on his truck, the more people I meet the more I like my dog.

Guess You Had To Be There (Wish You Were Here)

I haven't written in ages so I'm outta practice. Plus, I doubt this little anecdote's gonna fly too well in writing. Hell, it's not even funny to other people when I tell it to them in person. And I'm a fuckin master comedian in person. That's why I'm writing this goddam blog. Master comedians have nothing better to do with their time than to write stories that they know that nobody who wasn't there will think are funny, and that even the folks who were there probably don't remember cos they really weren't all that funny in the first place.

Let me set this up: A short, fat Mexican lady, a pimply-faced 19 year old kid with thick glasses, and an old bald guy tried to jump me at Lowe's for walking out of the store with the shit I just paid for.

Just kidding. That's not a joke. That just happened an hour ago. I'm no Bruce Lee, but I'm pretty sure I could've knocked all three of their heads together and skipped to my car had I actually been stealing anything and hadn't felt compelled to go to jail.

Moral of that little story: Go down and steal yourself some shit from Lowe's.

Nevermind about the story I was gonna tell. It was a real knee-slapper but, as my friend J.P. who was in on it said at the time when our buddy walked in and asked us what we were all laughing about:

You totally missed out on the lightbulb joke.

The Hit Parade

You know what I've always hated is parades. It seems like it's always too hot or too cold and then you're stuck in the middle of some crowd of dumbasses watching a bunch of stupid shit that you don't care about and then you can't fuckin leave til it's over.

I would always find myself stretching my neck to find out how long this whole goddam thing was gonna take so I could get the fuck outta here.

If you like parades, great. Go watch one. Have a fuckin ball.

One time when I was 15, a few buddies of mine and I lied to our folks and we drove down to Austin from Dallas to do acid and drink beer and fuck around. We were in a beat up Datsun station wagon with a bunch of stupid punk rock nonsense spraypainted all over it: Anarchy signs and fuck you's and DK's and crap.

We were all coming down off acid and driving north on Congress on a Sunday morning, heading straight for the Capitol bulding, when we noticed that the traffic seemed to have pretty much disappeared. There were cops all over the place and everybody and their goddam mother was standing around on the sidewalk, gawking at us.

We were driving pretty slow cos we didn't wanna get pulled over. We must've showed up right before the street was officially shut down for some parade, but it sure felt like the crowd was there for us. We started waving at everybody and honked the horn a couple of times.

It was the best parade ever.