Tourette’s Week

PAT:

Welcome back. And if you’re just joining us, we’re still on our very first puzzle of Tourette’s Week. I kid you not. All the consonants and vowels have been in place since Monday, and it’s—well, I wanted to say it’s just a matter of reading what’s up there, but just just doesn’t seem to be the case.

VANNA:
Amen to that! Hah!

JOAN:
Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! SLUT!

PAT:

Heh-heh. There we go again, heh-heh. We can’t seem to get past—what’s it called again, Charlie?

CHARLIE:
It’s called cop-ruh-LAAAAAY-lee-uh, Pat. Coprolalia!

PAT:

By Jove! I think he’s got it. Coprolalia. Good ol’ coprolalia. Okay. So, how’s about it, Justin? We’re around to you again. Think you can just read what’s up there this time? Remember, just read what’s up there.

VANNA:
Please! For the love of almighty God!

JUSTIN:
Okay. Here goes, Pat. All’s ... well ... that ... FUCK ... ends ... well. Shit!

PAT:

Uh ... gee whiz. No, Justin, that’s not quite right once again. Joan? How about it? Feelin’ lucky? Can you just read what’s up there this time? You’ve got a cool eight grand and a fabulous weekend getaway in the Pocono Mountains riding on, as I’ve said so many times, just reading what’s up there. That’s all there is to it, seriously, in all seriousness, that’s all it’s gonna take to win here.

JOAN:
Penis! Fart! Ballsack! Melons!

VANNA:
You BITCH!

PAT:

Easy, Vanna. Heh-heh. Who’da thunk coprolalia could be contagious? And speaking of ‘thunk’—who in the name of all things holy thunk up this theme week? Was it you, Charlie?

CHARLIE:
Not me, Pat! Not in a miiiillll-yun years.

PAT:

Well, a venti raspberry mocha with a double-pump of strychnine for whoever did. All right. Let’s take a slightly different tack with Sheila. Sheila, it’s down to you—for what? your twentieth try?—and this time I just want you to repeat after me. Just say each word right after I say it, okay? And don’t say anything else. I repeat: Do not say anything else. Got it? Think you can do that? Heh-heh.

SHEILA:
Yes, Pat, I’m ... ASSWIPE ... pretty sure I ca ... PRICK!

JUSTIN:
Scrotum!

JOAN:
Ballsack! Penis! Fart!

VANNA:
Jesus!

CHARLIE:

Will everybody puuuuuh-LEEZ shut the fuck up! All yours, Pat.

PAT:

Aaannnd thank you, Charlie! Very much. Now, Sheila. Sheila! Over here. Look right here—at me. That’s it. Ready? Okay, say all’s. ...

SHEILA:
All’s ...

PAT:
well ...

SHEILA:
well ...

PAT:
that ...

SHEILA:
that ...

PAT:
ends ...

SHEILA:
ends ...

PAT:
... well.

SHEILA:
... well. BASTARD!

VANNA:
You fucking WHORE!

PAT:

She wins, Charlie, right? She said the whole thing, right? Bastard doesn’t count, right? For the love of Christ—somebody tell me BASTARD doesn’t count!

# # #
© 2009

Babbler Excerpt No. 10

"I bought you your birthday present, Dad"
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Earl sets aside his study guide, shuts off the associated cassette tape of Spaniards speaking Spanish, and removes the headphones of his Sony Walkman. He's been in the parenting game long enough to discern the opening line of a meaningful conversation.

"And I spent my ten dollars, too," six-year-old Daniel adds, before El Gordo (The Fat One) can reply.

Remembering his son's first, and only, ten-dollar bill, El Feo (The Ugly One) finds this news dismaying. "Oh, Daniel, you shouldn't have spent so much!"

"I got five one-dollars back."

"Ah, that's good—"

"And some coins."

"Well, then I—"

"And I bought something for myself, too."

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 9

Step to the bar, ladies
Let no cups runneth over

Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

The idiom "in her cups" has acquired special meaning for the always luscious Susan E. Beemer. The former indispensable but not worth an extra four bits an hour pharmacist's assistant for Arbor Drugs has secured a post befitting the elegance and femininity that radiate from her like Roentgens from plutonium.

"I've more or less evolved from a Marianne's girl into a Hudson's woman in the twenty years I've been married to my present husband," she explains, "so becoming a Hudson's employee seemed like the next logical step."

And the logic of assigning someone so chic to their tony lingerie department must fairly have smacked top Hudson's brass like a board in the face.

"I'm 'manning' the bra bar, as they call it, measuring bustlines and helping women tame unruly boobs with brassieres of exquisite fit," she says. "And I'm loving every minute of it and making a buck-and-a-quarter more an hour than I made at Arbor. Plus, I get a twenty-five percent discount on everything I buy!"

Standing suddenly, she hoists her mid-length rayon skirt, fawn with subtle checks of muted black, and exclaims, "I even get free panties, too—see?"

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 8

First million
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

The Beemer children's millionth "shut up" occurred last week in a brief but spirited altercation among Thea, Kelly, and Remy concerning which of them will initiate all or most of the verbal combat predicted for Easter vacation by their anxious mother.

The honor of notching number 1,000,000 fell to the copper-haired Thea, 14, who recommended that Remy shut up after Remy had posed the identical suggestion in Thea's direction and sought parental authorization to "sock" the girl.

Asked how she felt about missing the one-million mark by a single shut-up, Remy, 15, answered, "I'm not surprised Thea got it. That little wench gets everything, including all the babysitting jobs."

"Oh, shut up, Remy—I do not!" Thea offered.

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 7

Apocalypse now
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Stung like someone who's just had her knee whacked by the burly henchman of an unscrupulous female figure skater of trailer-park provenance, an anguished Susan Beemer could respond only by collapsing to the floor, clutching her head with both hands, and shrieking, "Whyyy? Whyyy? Whyyy me?" She'd all but forgotten Easter break, and the sudden realization that her children would be home from school and in her face for 11 straight days would have sent her through the roof had it not sent her to the refrigerator for a goblet of psyche-salving Chardonnay.

"If they think they're gonna hang around the [unprintable] living room all week and argue, they're out of their [unprintable] gourds," Susan exclaimed, crossing her shapely gams and smoothing her black pleated skirt for emphasis. "I'll [unprintable] 'em up but good, and I'm not kidding."

Pressed for a reaction, an indignant Thea Beemer insisted, "It isn't me—it's Kelly and Remy. They start everything, and so does Erin."

"That's a lie, Thea!" retorted Kelly heatedly. "You're the one who starts everything, so shut up!"

Leaping to her feet and striking a menacing stance, Remy Beemer interjected, "Why don't you just shut up, Thea. You're such a little wench. Dad, can I sock her?"

"Oh, shut up, Remy!" came Thea's prompt rejoinder.

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 6

Tent boy takes off
He'd had it up to here!

Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Daniel Beemer packed his sack and headed for the door and when Remy caught up with him on that cold, moonless night he was almost to Gardenia Avenue.

Having misbehaved and been banished to his room while his parents were out looking at computers, he'd taken stock of his home life and decided enough was enough. So, into his Power Rangers backpack went two stuffed toys, a jacket, his jammies, and his blanket, and on went his parka, his mittens, and his rubber boots, and out the back door went Daniel Lee Beemer, 6 years old.

"I had to pick him up and carry him back home," noted Remy, 16, who'd been left in charge of her siblings. "And he was kicking and screaming like crazy."

"He said he hated everybody and everybody hated him and he was running away," added sister Kelly, 11, who witnessed the incident aghast with incredulity.

Naturally, the news of their son's narrowly averted departure sat poorly with Suffy and Shortboy, occasioning sanctions swift and severe.

"The tent came down and I mean pronto," said Shortboy, referring to the nylon pop-up camping shelter which Daniel had once again erected in the middle of his bedroom and in which he'd been spending every night for nearly a week. "And I pulled the plug on his Sega system, too, and gave him one heckuva scowl."

Susan nods affirmatively. "You were brutal."

"You gotta be tough or it ain't 'tough love,'" her husband soberly suggests.

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 5

"We're having fun, aren't we, Dad!"
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

He is telling a fish story and it contains what he calls a golden moment—one of the transitory, transcendent experiences that can make the afflictions of parenthood seem worthwhile after all. They occur, these golden moments, about as routinely as the flash of ultimate insight known as Zen satori, and it is this spiritual brilliance that makes his eyes go wide and his face register the soul-plumbing awe of a pilgrim beholding the Holy Land.

"It was a couple of years ago," he begins, "maybe three, and Danny came upon some rods and reels in a Sears catalog, and he says, 'When me and you go fishing, Dad, we need to get poles like this.' And it was all his idea, see, because taking him fishing had never crossed my mind—but, of course, it became a solemn promise from that point forward."

The subject of promises apparently strikes a nerve, and "Shortboy" Beemer wrenches his corpulent corporeal self from the sofa and begins pacing the room like a hog on amphetamines.

"You think kids don't remember promises? I got news for you: kids never forget them. I trace my cynicism to that night when I was twelve and a friend of my parents named Larry McCann stopped at the doorway of my room on his way to the crapper and said, 'Have you seen Revell's model Corvette with an electric motor and upholstery for the seats? Hey, I'll get you one.' That's what he said. 'I'll get you one.' Well guess who's been waiting 34 years for his model Corvette, Jack. And Larry's been dead for 20 of 'em. Oh, the horror. The horror!"

Which brings us to the promise kept to take Daniel fishing.

"I hadn't wormed a hook since my teens," explains the Short One, "but it all came back pretty quickly. Fortunately, my former future son-in-law knew of a lake out in Oxford where the fish had been biting like crazy, so I took the lad there. Man, were the fish ever biting! Danny and I caught 17 in the space of two hours."

Okay, so the biggest of the bunch was perhaps three inches long, but size mattered not to Daniel.

"I'm threading up a worm, and my boy says to me, 'We're having fun, aren't we, Dad,' and I said, 'We sure are, buddy, we sure are.' And it struck me right then that I was standing in the middle of—"

A golden moment?

"Exactly."

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 4

Got a staring problem?
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

The ranks of the myopic have swollen by one at the little beige house on North Connecticut affectionately known as "904." Kelly Beemer has slipped-on the spectacles, making Remy and Daniel the last two Mohicans in the tribe of the normally sighted.

With both of their parents and now four of their siblings the slaves of supplementary refraction, what are the odds that Remy and Daniel will never take a number at the optician's?

Pretty dang good according to Gloria Beemer, their paternal grandmother and one-time darling of the radio airwaves. As geeked as ever to cop herself a mention in The Babbler, she speculates that Remy and Danny won't sport specs before middle age.

"It's in their DNA," she asserts. "They're both left-handed and I'm left-handed and I didn't need glasses until I hit the double nickel."

She grabs a section of Remy's cheek and pinches it with vigor. "We're just a couple of lefties, aren't we, Thea."

Batting her grandmother's hand away with a crisply applied karate chop, Remy rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and stomps out of the room while Kelly looks on, aghast.

"Wow! I saw all of that really clearly!" she exclaims. "That was cool!"

But, generally speaking, how cool does she find wearing glasses?

"Well, everybody thinks I look great in them—which I do, of course—so image isn't a problem. And I really love seeing all the details I used to miss, like Remy's eyeballs rolling up into her head. But there is one big drawback, and I'm not sure if I should mention it, 'cause it has to do with my dad—"

She pauses a moment as though expecting a proffer of cash for the intelligence.

"Well, I hope he doesn't get mad when he reads this, but Dad's always saying he's fat and ugly, and now I've either gotta keep my mouth shut or figure out something else to say besides, 'No you're not.'"

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 3

Thea: Remy gets everything
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

The flesh of her neck still bearing scarlet testimony to Erin's displeasure [see Babbler Excerpt No. 2], Thea Beemer directed a salvo of bitter resentment toward a new and perhaps more dangerous target. Contending that her sister Remy is really the one who gets everything, she cited 1995 all-district varsity softball honors, a recently acquired State of Michigan driver's license, and a steady supply of male admirers as support for this hypothesis.

When presented with her own long inventory of recent and forthcoming acquirements—to wit, her elevation (in only her sophomore year) to the role of starting forward for the Dondero varsity soccer team, her selection for Royal Oak's premier U-19 soccer squad (with a personal apology from the coach for passing her over last time), her attendance and spectacular performance at Oakland U's five-day soccer camp for advanced players (her fourth such program), and the new varsity jacket her dad's going to buy her this fall—she responded angrily, "We're not talking about Thea, we're talking about Remy!"

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 2

Who needs Ex-Lax®?
Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Had it not been for the fact that she was already on the "john" when she opened the envelope from Oakland University, Erin Beemer, 18, undoubtedly would have "pooped" her pants.

"They'd sent me a bunch of stuff previously, so I just thought it was a reminder about orientation, or something just as mundane," remarks the eldest issue of the conjugal union of Susan and Earl Beemer. "But—like, omigod!—it was a two-thousand dollar scholarship I hadn't even applied for!"

"They must have discovered that Erin was one of the top ten students in her high-school graduating class," her mother offers from across the room, where she's buffing her exquisite fingernails while sucking cheap wine from a 12-ounce plastic tumbler. And although not asked for the information, she points out nevertheless that her wine comes in a box.

"Suf's right," Shortboy declares. "It's a feather in OU's cap to land a crack student like Car Driver Girl. They wouldn't want to lose her to the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts, for instance."

Thea Beemer, 15, strides brusquely into the room and flops onto the recliner, scowling. "Erin tinks she's SO bu-luh-ee great," she rails, superbly mimicking a working-class Dublin accent. "She awl-wise gets every-ting. Ih maykes me wan-uh pyook!"

Erin counters in a staccato Valley Girl delivery: "Oh—my—gawd!" she exclaims. "I do not either!"

Someone outside expresses disagreement through the open living-room window. "You do too get everything!" shouts sister Remy, 17, who until then had been discussing various aspects of Jeff Hagen's former girlfriend with Jeff Hagen on the front porch. "What about your job teaching ballet for fifteen bucks an hour?"

"I haven't even started that stinkin' job yet, you imbeciles!"

Springing from the couch, she leaps on Thea and begins strangling the astonished adolescent with fingers chewed to hideous bluntness by more than a decade of nail biting. Dropping the faux brogue, Thea implores her enraged sister to choke Remy or Kelly instead, but Erin isn't having any.

"Sure, I'm getting two grand from Oakland and fifteen bucks an hour from the Rochester School of Dance. But I do not get everything—and I can prove it!"

She lets Thea slip to the floor and produces yet another letter from the hip pocket of her mauve Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. "Aren't you all forgetting this?"

It's the notice from the Dayton-Hudson Corporation advising that she's no longer eligible for her mother's employee discount now that she's over eighteen.

"So there, buttheads! Read it and weep!"

Ex-Lax is a registered trademark of Novartis AG.

# # #

Babbler Excerpt No. 1

Oregon man sues own sister for $1.25 million
"She turned my babies into aliens!" he contends

Reprinted courtesy of The Beemer Babbler

Diligently, vigilantly, Robert Burr had strived to protect his young daughters—Ema, 6, and Megan, 5—from the corruptions of modern life. He'd removed them to the verdant depths of the Oregon wilderness some 300 miles from the nearest urban cesspool. Had taught them the lore of compost heaps and horse poo. Had nourished them with hand-pumped water, home-baked pumpernickel, and fresh-picked produce from his wife's organic garden.

Then poor Robert Burr miscalculated big-time. He took the girls to visit "Aunt Susan" while he was attending a convention in Detroit.

"I hadn't seen my sister in 17 years, mind you," Rob groans, and there is that in his voice which pleads for absolution. "So just how in the [unprintable] was I supposed to know she would ruin my babies?"

Grabbing the closest object at hand—an antique cheese vat—he hurls it in evident frustration toward the bucolic tapestry adorning the distant wall of a room which, in another time and place, would have served rather nicely as a mead hall. The vat lands short of its mark and smashes to bits on the anvil Rob uses when forging up homemade shoes for the mares.

Rushing from the kiln room, caked to her elbows in wet terracotta, Jan Burr notes the wreckage and looks at her husband quizzically. "Who broke my colby chessel, Rob?" she casually inquires in the soft and musical voice so befitting the unalloyed sweetness that made Midwest in-laws adore her.

Rob blames the incident on Megan, waves Jan back to the pottery wheel (where she's cranking out a dinner-service for 12), and expands his diatribe.

"Can you even remotely comprehend the electrochemical mayhem a bowl of marshmallows can cause?" he demands, poking a slender finger into the breastbone of his visitor, as if to impale him with the question. "And it didn't end there, man. She fed my babies Froot Loops too—and gummy candies resembling teddy bears."

He drops like a shop rag to the hand-hewn oaken floor and, rending in twain his Guns N' Roses T-shirt, shrieks, "Oh, the horror! The horror!"

Meanwhile, in Michigan, Susan Elizabeth (Burr) Beemer, the nefarious sister in question, produces the lengthy legal document cataloging her brother's copious complaints and expectations for redress to the tune of $1.25 million.

"Rob must think I make quite a bit more than five-fifty an hour working the bra bar at Hudson's," she says with an air of amusement. "And I love the part where he claims the girls came down with attention deficit disorder from watching our Back to the Future video and playing Sega with their cousin Daniel. It was Aladdin, for godsake! Had I known Rob was going to sue me I'd have loaded up Mortal Kombat."

She lets the summons slip to the carpet and slumps in her corduroy armchair and shields her moistening eyes with her hand. "I did what I had to do," she sobs. "I mean, my nieces were serving us play food, and when Ema called the toy Twinkie 'butter,' I knew what I had to do. ..."

# # #

Hearsay

Something occurred to me while I was out mowing the lawn yesterday:

Although hearsay evidence is inadmissible in every court of law—including Judge Judy’s—it nevertheless provides the bedrock for all religions.

The true believer not only swallows hearsay whole but pins his hope for Life Everlasting on it (not to mention his equally fervent hope for a postmortem cashing-in of Brownie points). He’s got everything riding on hearsay when it comes to his so-called immortal soul, yet would scream bloody murder if burned by hearsay for a forty-dollar judgment in small claims court.

Here’s what Thomas Paine had to say about the powerful, pervasive, and often pernicious form of hearsay called “divine revelation”:

[A]dmitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person alone. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

To which I append a resounding “Amen!” as well as my belief that there are not nearly enough Doubting Thomases in this world.

Strictly as a postscript, here’s another prime example of human paradoxy from Steven Wright, master of the deadpan one-liner: Have you ever noticed how many people standing in line to buy lottery tickets ... are smoking?

It took me a while to grasp the Orwellian Doublethink at work in that scenario—people believing, on the one hand, that they have a good chance to be among the small percentage of lottery players who are going to win, and just as sure, on the other hand, that they will not be among the small percentage of cigarette smokers who are going to get lung cancer. Man, you just gotta love dodo sapiens.

# # #

Nature's nasty ways

I think Nature is a mean Mother. A leering, spiteful perpetrator of nastiness aforethought. How else to explain the three cases-in-point below?

Case 1. Sweet Little Helpless and Hapless Baby Bunnies

We had a female rabbit living under our deck. A pretty cottontail who, for easier entry and exit, courteously gnawed the merest amount of material from just one diamond-shaped opening in the deck's latticed skirting. I'd see her from time to time—in broad daylight, no less—sitting or lying in our backyard. Sometimes the wind would swirl her thick fur as if to punch the last bit of breath from me with her beauty.

Then came the day my son was scattering clumps of poorly mulched grass after mowing the lawn, and accidentally raked away the clump emplaced by momma rabbit to conceal her nest—a shallow circular depression smack dab in the middle of the yard. Daniel looked down and saw a half dozen squirming baby bunnies, bald and blind. Susan and I hurried out to behold their inexcusable preciousness before he reconstructed the covering as best he could.

It started raining a few hours later, rained all night, and was still raining when I checked the nest the next day, fearing the babies might be flooded. They seemed okay, but I called animal control anyway and was told no worries, mate: Rabbits commonly situate nests in open areas; the mothers never come around during the day; if the babies get too wet she'll move them.

Well! All well and good. Nature knows best. The three of us felt enormously relieved—until about noon the following day, when I looked out the kitchen window and saw a huge, brown, frigging cat hunched over the nest and blatantly polishing off a fresh-meat meal.

Now, I ask you. Wasn't it a nasty bit of business on Mother Nature's part to make mother bunnies plant baby bunnies out in the open—and leave them unattended from sunup to sundown with nothing more than a thatch of grass for protection? Especially when sturdy wooden decks featuring predator-resistant skirting stand thirty feet away? I mean, that's just mean.

Case 2. Our Dog's Bottomless Pit

I am one-hundred percent certain I could kill our dog by ripping open a 25 pound bag of Kibbles 'n Bits, spilling it all over the floor, and saying "Bon appetit." Our dog seems innately unable to register, much less obey, a message of fullness emanating from her tummy zone. She would eat until her insides explode, I'm convinced, and with no discernible diminution of speed or urgency right up to detonation. What is the deal with that? How come our dog's eating-light glows eternally green? And listen, this is more than theoretical: She got hold of a large loaf of discarded cornbread one time and ate until she collapsed. Wiring her brain like that strikes me as kinda mean. Even gorging lions have the sense to push away from the table and leave a little carcass for the hyenas.


Case 3. Romantic Love Between Human Males and Females

Permit me to tell it like it is: Men equate romantic love with yee-haw love; women equate it with cuddle love. And each expects the other not only to supply the brand of romantic love desired—both regularly and profusely—but to really, really want to. Could anything be rigged more effectively for failure?

I rest my case.

# # #

Screw you, Proust

Now see, this is exactly what I was talking about in my recent post entitled My personal approach to literature:

Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile, and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim.

It's an excerpt from the Marcel Proust (rhymes with "roost") novel Swann's Way, the first of seven volumes composing In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past) and the reason I won't be reading the other six.

My copy comprises 444 pages of sentences about as numbing as the one above. The translation, from the original French, is widely hailed as masterful (so I can't blame the translator), much as the entire work is widely acclaimed as a masterpiece—even, in some literary circles, the finest novel of the twentieth century.

To which I say talk to the hand.

I've been using Swann's Way as a combination self-imposed penance and prescription-free sleep aid, and boy does it get the job done. The sheer monotony of page after page (some nights just page) of Proust's labyrinthine prose must surely be as effective at eradicating venial sin-debt as it is at rendering me senseless.

And it's not just the book's torturous syntax; it's the action—or more precisely, the inaction. Prime example: Proust took the better part of two full pages explaining how the narrator's family sat down for lunch an hour early on Saturdays—at 11:00 rather than at 12:00—such that Saturday visitors showing up at, say, a quarter past 11:00 would be not only surprised to find the family elbow deep in dining (on the basis that the family usually lunched at noon, remember) but constrained to cool their heels until the meal was done.

Hoo-hah! Almost two full pages devoted to inspecting microscopically that fascinating (I'm being facetious) detail. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. What I am sure of is, Proust bores me out of my gourd. For which he roundly gets rejected. By me.

# # #

My personal approach to literature

I read every author purely on one-on-one terms. Doesn't matter who. He or she either has something to say to me or doesn't.

I read every author as though I were a member of his or her contemporary audience; not as a student in a classroom accepting greatness as a given and swallowing spoon-fed thematic insights from the swooping-airplane of an instructor's hand.

I read every author with one simple condition in place: Entertain me, inform me, challenge me, inspire me, shake, rattle, or roll my soul. Be ye literary giant or novice novelist, do one or some or all of these things—or suffer utter rejection by me. Bitch.

# # #

"Maybe the dingo ate your baby"

I've written before about the problems I have with Wheel of Fortune (see April 2 post entitled I have big problems). Well, now I have one more:

A few evenings ago, the ostensibly thoughtful Pat Sajak thoughtlessly said, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby," in response to something a contestant uttered. The audience found the remark typically so-darn-cute. But I didn't find it at all funny.

I found it, once again, insensitive, offensive, inexcusable.

See, there was a baby that got eaten by a dingo one terrifying night in August 1980—a baby who drew breath and was adored by her parents for just nine short weeks, and whose name was Azaria Chamberlain.

Azaria's disappearance from a camping site at Australia's Ayers Rock and the wrongful incarceration of her mother, Lindy, for her presumed murder were documented in the 1988 feature film A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep.

I'd seen that film and therefore immediately recognized the provenance of the "dingo" line so famously—and, judging from the overwhelming online evidence, admiringly—delivered by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine Benes in a 1991 episode of Seinfeld called "The Stranded." It so startled and offended me that I wrote the following piece for my copywriting portfolio, illustrated with a grainy, slightly out of focus black-and-white photograph of a baby and a dingo-looking dog sitting in a kiddie car.

Not even from the mouths of babes!


"Maybe the dingo ate your baby," Elaine derisively rejoins in an exaggerated Aussie accent. And of course the live studio audience splits its sides at yet another outrageously hip Seinfeld riposte.


Only me, I'm gaping slack-jawed at the boob tube, dwelling on the outrageous part. As in outrageously offensive.


Because, I'd seen that movie too—the one the Seinfeld writers had obviously seen—where Meryl Streep plays a real-life Australian mother whose real-life little baby got dragged from a camping tent by a real-life dingo. Dragged into the night forever.


And sitting there, I could easily imagine, if only in some grossly thank God rudimentary way, the magnitude of that poor woman's horror—could infer its submerged mass from the visible part containing my unrelenting fears for my own children's safety.


How could anybody who knows that story (no urban myth) exploit that unspeakably tragic thing? How could anybody write that joke, approve that joke, deliver that joke (with pertinent regional inflection, no less), and above all find it uproarious?


Yeah, I'm something of a roiling cauldron of repressed irreverence, professionally speaking and personally speaking as well. Yet all hail the tempering spark of common human decency. May it eternally glow.

I blame everyone associated with that Seinfeld episode for investing a regrettable reference with pop-culture cachet.

As for Pat Sajak, maybe I'm being unfair in taking him to task for serving it up for the hundred-millionth time; it's been 18 years since "The Stranded" first aired, and as near as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world raising even a single eyebrow over "Maybe the dingo ate your baby."

I couldn't find anybody else offended by the line on Google, you see. But I did find an assload of dingo-ate-your-baby T-shirt offers.

Read the Wikipedia account of the tragedy.

# # #

That's just twisted, sister

I saw a television commercial last night in which a young guy with a guitar was singing about how much he resented his wife and wished he'd never married her ... because of her bad credit score.

Furthermore, had he known her impropitious credit history up front, he sings, he would never have tied the knot.

But now he's stuck with this asshole loser of a wife and has to dwell within objectionable premises instead of the house he'd reasonably expected to occupy—four bedrooms, presumably, with granite counter tops, cherrywood cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, Mediterranean marble, and open floor plan—all on account of her crappy credit.

The whole point of this juvenile musical cautionary tale is to convince you and me to go to some Web site for the free credit reports capable of saving us from all the bitches and bastards in the world who would marry us without divulging unpaid cell-phone cancellation fees. Our disgruntled balladeer would be happily "batching it" today, he asserts, had he had access to such a service as this (as we now thank-God do).

Well, speaking as the father of five daughters, I wish he had had access to it. His wife's the one who got the shit end of the stick ("short end" being the sanitized form) from that superficial shit-heel.

This free-credit-report commercial troubles me, though, on a more fundamental level than troublesome credit scores:

Have we, as a society, or worse yet a species, reached the abominable point where we can sympathize with and be persuaded by the crybaby plaints of some shallow-wading simpleton who despises his brand new wife for something as fundamentally meaningless as her marginally blemished credit history?

As much as I hope not, I reckon we have. A commercial promoting reasoning as twisted as this, however comically cloaked, would seem to say so.

So score one for due diligence over tender understanding, abiding love, and a marriage of two hearts.

# # #

Saved from squalor and sloth

Here's a quote from an Alice Munro story called Meneseteung. It sums up rather nicely the enchanted effect my wife has had on my existence in the world of things:

A man may keep his house decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking.

To set the record straight, I do not smoke, nor do I excessively sleep (would that I could). I am not consciously parsimonious. I drink hardly at all, read voraciously, and am most definitely susceptible to protracted bouts of freethinking. I find much to like, too, in the concept of luxuriant sloth.

Left to my own devices, as Ms. Munro notes, I will keep a place decent, but won't do much to decorate it. The dishes will get washed, the bed made, the toilet scrubbed, the socks picked up from the floor. But the walls and various horizontal surfaces will remain, for the most part, unadorned.

So, yes, for the 34 years I've been married to Susan I have indeed lived amidst "more ornament as well as sentiment" than would otherwise have been the case. But Susan in no wise has forced these conditions upon me. She has just gone about doing what she does, which is to say casually and instinctively shaping our surroundings into an ever more lovely home.

Everywhere I look I see and relish her graceful hand, feeling privileged to dwell in a world of her creation.

# # #

The last time we went bye-bye

My father was a pack rat and his house was a pack rat's house on a street called Regent in Detroit. For our final outing together—another unknown ending (see Feb. 8 post)—my seldom heard-from half brother Charlie and I gathered there to take lunch on the day of Christ's Passion with the parent we strangely shared.

I arrived just after noon. Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt over unbelted jeans. My father was typically attired: tuxedo-shirt; gold chain supporting cross and anchor pendants; dark slacks; black boots; navy blue boating cap with patent-leather brim just like the cap Frank Sinatra wore in Pal Joey. I have no idea what I had on.

The first thing I did on stepping inside was avoid being peed on by Fleur, Pop's yapping, wriggling, poodle-terrier mix. Dad scooped Fleur up and tossed her on the sofa (I would see her leap up and pee on it later) and made his way to a pile of second-hand overcoats he wanted me to try on for size with a view toward unloading the lot on me should they fit.

I humored him while eyeing an unbroken panorama of junk.

Assorted glassware and gimcracks covered the dining room table. The living room furniture—a pastiche of rummage-sale oddments—looked like it had been set down willy-nilly by moving-men who had then left for lunch and not come back. The upholstered parts were threadbare and grimy. A pink chenille bedspread served for drapes. Opened and unopened mail, crumbling paperbacks, yellowing magazines, water-stained photos, and battalions of kitschy figurines obscured most surfaces like preposterously thick dust.

But, seriously: What should I have expected from a man who flushed his toilet by removing the tank-lid and dropping a jumbo bottle of shampoo onto the flapper? ("I’m gonna call a plumber one of these days," he assured me on demonstrating the technique.)

The plan, it turned out, was this: through the tunnel to Windsor, Ontario, then down Front Street to this great seafood restaurant he knew of in Amherstburg. Detroit River view and everything.

We snaked our way to the attached garage through gaps in the waist-deep clutter and climbed into Pop's winter ride—a four-door Chevy clunker he drove to keep road salt off his latest pre-owned Cadillac. Heading south toward the Windsor tunnel, we made a brief detour through the neighborhood off Gratiot where I'd lived with my grandparents before my mother remarried.

The two-family house on Townsend still stood, but amid a sorry host of debris-strewn vacant lots—including those once containing Tommy Trumonte's red-shingle home and the corner market with the striped roll-up awning where my grandmother bought me banana and root-beer Popsicles.

We bemoaned these changes and change in general all the way to the tunnel, Charlie interrupting from the back seat now and then with hysterically funny impersonations of deadpan actor Sterling Haydn droning Broadway show tunes. Thirteen years my junior, Charlie was one of the world's true geniuses without a cause.

"We must have looked like narcs driving down Townsend," Dad kept remarking throughout the afternoon. Yeah: his no-hubcaps jalopy and funky skipper's cap; my full beard and aviator sunglasses; Charlie's mutton chops and manic mane. A trio of grubby undercover cops cruising Murder City, U.S.A. (I found myself liking that idea, actually, for suggesting a personal reality substantially more exotic and exciting than writing sales brochures about Ford medium and heavy-duty trucks.)

On the Canadian side of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, my father said to the customs officer, "You've been here a long time, haven't you."

"Thirty-six years."

"I remember you," Dad said. "I used to work here in Windsor. I came over through the tunnel every day."

"Oh ... yeah!" the man said, recognizing him. "How are you?"

That was the thing I admired most about my father: his genuine interest in, and generous kindness toward, strangers. Unless you've seen the movie Harvey, starring James Stewart, you can't appreciate what a compliment it is when I say my father was as close as it gets to a real-life Elwood P. Dowd. ("Here, let me give you one of my cards.")

In the parking lot at the riverside restaurant, Dad, who'd promised to buy, turned abruptly to Charlie and me and said in a weirdly severe tone, "You can have anything you want except beer, because I am not going to pay a buck twenty-five for alcohol." I was taken aback. Me, a father of six, talked to as though I were ten! I bristled a little, but held my tongue and obediently ordered coffee with my fish and chips.
Our post-lunch conversation heading back to Detroit degenerated inexorably into yet another Charlie-bashing. I'd cringed at them before—pretty much every time the three of us had been together—and therefore only halfway listened while Dad held forth on Charlie's inability to stay off welfare ... all the things wrong with Charlie's marriage ... the various deficiencies of Charlie's children (Bryanna doesn't mind, Jason is a wimp) ... the lackadaisical approach to discipline displayed by Charlie's beleaguered wife.

So sorry, Charlie.

It was dark before we got back to the rat house on Regent. I'd had my fill of surrealism and was happy as hell to blast off for home with just two secondhand topcoats in the trunk.

# # #

21 years ago

... Kelly hunted me down to tell on Erin.

It seems Erin had left her book-bag somewhere where Kelly could trip over it, and Kelly had gone ahead and tripped over it and fallen hard on the hardwood floor. An affront of this magnitude, Kelly felt, could be remedied only through swift and sure corporal punishment at the stinging hand of me.

So she stormed out to the kitchen and demanded a pound of Erin's flesh by parental proxy, expressing in no uncertain terms the length, width, height, and depth of her older sister's culpability.

Fortunately, generously dished commiseration was enough to carry the day, and, mollified, Kelly began scribbling a circular pattern in the condensation on the kitchen window—that irresistible magic slate. After a moment or two she settled into inscribing her name:

She formed the K, the E, and the two L's before running out of room at the frame; then, without hesitation, drew the Y in front of the K.

And this is what our children teach us if we're paying attention: All things are possible. All things make sense. Boundaries of thought and action do not exist. But, alas, the sublime solution of placing the Y before the K becomes ever more elusive the older we get.

# # #

Were Raymond and Peter mostly Gordon and Polly?

In the 4-17-09 issue of The Week, the book page featured six "best books" chosen by author Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City). One of his selections was Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, by Raymond Carver, about which he said ...

Carver’s first collection, with its pared-down, colloquial language and its working-class settings, almost single-handedly revivified realism, and the short story itself, when it appeared in 1976. It remains astonishingly fresh and powerful to this day. Like Hemingway, Carver stripped away the cobwebs and taught us a new way to see and hear the world around us.

That statement, with its references to pared-down language and stripped-away cobwebs, brought to mind an article I'd read about Raymond Carver's relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. Gordon Lish, it seems, wielded an active and unhesitant red pen, and was wont to pare down Carver's original short-story manuscripts by anywhere from 30 to 70 percent. That kind of cobweb-stripping begs the question, Was Raymond Carver mostly Gordon Lish?

Sure, the story ideas and fully fleshed drafts were Carver's. But one can't help suspecting that the trademark "Carver" traits so lauded and applauded by literary critics and Raymond Carver fans—that pared-down language and those stripped-away cobwebs—were largely Lish's doing. Just look ...

Raymond wrote it like this:
I shrugged. "I'm the wrong person to ask. I didn't even know the man. I've only heard his name mentioned in passing. Carl. I wouldn't know. You'd have to know all the particulars. Not in my book it isn't, but who's to say? There're lots of different ways of behaving and showing affection. That way doesn't happen to be mine. But what you're saying, Herb, is that love is an absolute?"

Gordon changed it to this:
"I'm the wrong person to ask," I said. "I didn't even know the man. I've only heard his name mentioned in passing. I wouldn't know. You'd have to know all the particulars. But I think what you're saying is that love is an absolute."

Judge for yourself.

In a similar vein, many believe the creative force behind famed film director Peter Bogdanovich was his first wife, Polly Platt, who collaborated with him on his two masterpieces, The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973). Their fruitful collaboration—along with Bogdanovich's cinematic triumphs—came to an abrupt halt after Peter moved on to the perceived greener pastures known as Cybill Shepherd. By 1975 he was writing and directing the likes of At Long Last Love, one of the worst films every made according to The Golden Turkey Awards, a 1980 book by film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry. Seems like Peter just might have been mostly Polly.

There's a moral here which I'll let you define, because I now want to move on to this important ...

UPDATE

Furthering my 3-30-09 screed properly equating political lobbying with organized crime, I found this tidbit from The Washington Post quoted in the 4-24-09 issue of The Week:

Lobbyists spend $3 billion a year in Washington, D.C., and they get their money's worth. A University of Kansas study found that a single corporate tax break in 2004 enabled 800 companies to save a total of $100 billion.

Judge that for yourself, too (when you're done throwing up).

# # #

Is there anything everybody's for?

Okay. Let's try World Peace. May I assume that everyone is for World Peace, that World Peace, at least, is something nobody's against?

See, I'm not convinced I can make even that claim any longer. Not after what happened with Cancer.

I used to jokingly quip that if someone discovered a cure for cancer, somebody somewhere would be against it. That was supposed to sound utterly absurd. That was supposed to be an utterance whose utter absurdity would serve to draw ludicrous attention to and pointedly rebuke the swelling numbers of gainsayers in our society, the people eager to oppose or find fault with just about anything, if only to grab a turn in the spotlight.

Well, look what they've done to my song, ma.

Along comes the HPV vaccine a few years ago, and instead of universal joy over a medical breakthrough affording potentially surefire protection against cervical cancer, what do we get? Gainsayers! People against protecting women from cancer. People who feel it will make young girls promiscuous, and reckon death the more desirable alternative.

As Nancy Kerrigan once wondered, "Why? Why? Whyyyyyy ... ?" Why does idiocy have to figure so prominently in the makeup of Dodo sapiens?

I know I won't live long enough to find the world verging on World Peace; won't be around when the gainsayers start saying gain on that score. Would that I could, though. I'd like to laugh myself to death over their lunatic line of reasoning.

# # #

O brave new world that has cheeseburgers in it!

If a small child can be said to have a worldview, my worldview expanded exponentially the joyous day my grandmother bought me my first cheeseburger.

I was around five years old then, and the idea for franchised McDonald's outlets had yet to crystallize in Ray Kroc's imagination. But you could get a thick, juicy hamburger topped with American cheese, together with a side of salty fries, at just about any drugstore lunch counter, including—thank gods!*—the one in the Cunningham's drugstore at the corner of Harper and Gratiot in Detroit.

We walked up there, my grandma and I, from the old house on Townsend, and I had not the merest inkling that my small world was about to be changed for the better, forever. I would truly be a much altered, much happier kid on the hike back.

Sure, hamburgers had been around for eons, or decades at any rate, and cheese-topped hamburgers for almost as long. But not in my experience, because ours was not a hamburger family. My grandmother, who did all the cooking, didn't cook them. My grandfather knew not of the charcoal grill.† My mother knew not of the kitchen. My personal knowledge of ground beef began and ended with meatballs and spaghetti.

So, can you imagine my very first bite into a cheeseburger? Can you grasp the magnitude of the revelation which that was? The profundity of its impact on my worldview?

Had I known about the Big Bang theory back then, it would have been instantly relegated to second place in my hierarchy of cosmic consequence.

Oh, the thrilling mouth feel of high fat-content beef and semi-melted cheese! Oh, the savory, piquant union of impetuous mustard and impertinent pickle chip! Oh, the fabulous festival of flavor revealing to me a heretofore hidden host of possibilities in a new universe containing such unexpected truths as cheeseburgers!

Listen, I could not have been more gobsmacked had I been Moses tripping over a talkative shrub sporting non-scorching flames.

And once again I ask, how about you? Can you recall a similar worldview-expanding experience from your childhood? If so, I'm all figurative ears.

* Homage to Battlestar Gallactica.
† A grill is what you cook on; a grille is what you find on a car. Feel free to point out this distinction whenever you dine at somebody's "Bar & Grille."

# # #

Snowbanks north of the house

So I was watching this episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine is dating a guy who's been shaving his pate for several years. She catches a glimpse of his driver's license photo and goes gaga over his gorgeous head of hair. He agrees to stop shaving his head just for her, and within a few days discovers he has pattern baldness. He'd gone bald while he was bald.

Then I was watching this episode of Dateline NBC in which a woman whose husband had been wrongly imprisoned for eight years worked day-and-night to get his conviction overturned. She succeeded, but much to her alarmed surprise, discovered within days of his release that she had stopped loving him that way while he was imprisoned. They went their separate ways.

Now, with the foregoing by way of introduction, I invite you to click here for one of my favorite poems of all time, Robert Bly's "Snowbanks North of the House."

# # #

"The opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares"

John Updike wrote that line in the December 7, 1963, issue of The New Yorker, in reference to the horrible connotations such ordinary things as an aging movie theater and a particular row of parking meters acquired in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

I happened upon it in a posthumous retrospective of Updike's New Yorker contributions, and it set me thinking about the duck-shaped ceramic planter out in the garage; an innocent object Susan and I can't bear to part with—or bring inside the house.

I was sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom when Susan came home from a routine obstetrician's appointment and told me with a quavering voice that the doctor couldn't find our baby's heartbeat.

Gina should have been our sixth daughter. Should have arrived on February14, 1986. But our precious valentine died at 20 weeks in Susan's body, and was delivered stillborn on September 19, 1985. Fully formed. Impossibly tiny. Her cord—no thicker than two twisted strands of yarn—terminating at the partially detached placenta that had caused her death. A doctor placed Gina tenderly in a white plastic bucket, and I regret to this day that I did not kiss her little head before he fixed the lid.

I can't begin to fathom Susan's grief at Gina's loss. I can only imagine an exponentially more wrenching anguish than the crushing heartache that took me completely by surprise. I'd never really wept before; and in the ensuing days and weeks found myself crying at the smallest provocation: a few bars of poignant music on the car radio; a little girl in a pink parka playing in the snow.

Friends sent cards, bouquets, and the duck-shaped planter mentioned above. Hand-painted in muted tones. Overflowing with ivy.

Three years later I wrote this in the journal I was keeping at the time:

9-19-88. I am thinking about you today, Mary Regina, on this third anniversary of the night we lost you forever. You would have been two years and seven months old by now. Toilet-trained and talking. Full of fun and mischief. An angel when asleep. An angel when awake. In my mind I can see me doing for you the things a daddy should do. Holding you on my lap in my corduroy chair. Strapping you into your car seat. Hoisting you into the shopping cart at Farmer Jack, while saying, "Such a big girl!" I always think of you as having reddish-blond hair like your sister Thea's. Blue eyes, of course. There, at the end of the hall, by the clothes hamper, you sit on the floor wailing about the toy Kelly grabbed from you. I come, full of sympathy, lift you and hold you near, feel the cool skin of your cheek against mine and the wet trace of your tears. God bless you, my daughter.

Well, that journal entry was about 20 years old when I was viewing an episode of Medium one Monday night and got weepy all over again for Gina.

The principal character, Allison DuBois, was dreaming that she and her grown-up son—who had died as a child—were driving somewhere in a car. And as I was looking at that vivacious young man, I began envisioning Baby Gina as a vibrant young woman of around 22, and completely lost it.

# # #

My most awkward moment

You know, I have absolutely no idea what my proudest moment was, or if any moment in my life deserves that distinction. I ponder and ponder, but nothing moves to the fore. On the other hand, I can tell you with absolute certainty what my most awkward moment was.

High-school play rehearsal. Couldn't find fellow cast member and best friend. (Omigod! I actually did have a best friend once.) Finally checked darkened backstage music room. Found friend slumping over covered keyboard of upright piano. (Playing dead, I quite naturally assumed, because pranking was his, like, métier.)

Ran bellowing across darkened room. Leapt onto friend's slumping back. Began pummeling friend's head with blunted blows while assailing friend's ears with chortled obscenities. Then I heard him ... sob! (His adored girlfriend, I later learned, had broken up with him only minutes before.)

Yes. He was weeping.

And there I was, right up there on his back. My knees digging into his ribs, my palms resting on his shoulders, my mind struggling for a way to extract my stupid self from that surreal situation in something resembling a dignified manner. (I mean, really, how does one go about climbing down from a distraught friend's back graciously?)

Yup. That was my most awkward moment by a country mile. Care to share yours?

# # #

Yeah, yeah, the walls are cracking ... but get a load of this brochure!

Out driving today, I noticed that a nearby subdivision providing a handy shortcut to my home enjoys award-winning status, according to a prominent sign on the grass island at the main entrance.

Turns out the award was for best marketing campaign for residential properties in the $200,000 price range.

Now, how's that for a source of pride and peace of mind?

# # #

On buying retired library books

Whenever I buy a used book from Amazon.com, I always choose, if possible, a copy once owned by a library. In fact, I'd much rather possess a retired library copy than a brand new copy of just about any book.

Why? Three words: fun discoveries.*

Example 1. My retired library copy of Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Formerly owned by the Salt Lake County Library System, my cello-wrapped hardbound copy of one of Alice Munro's uniformly marvelous short-story collections came with an equally delightful surprise inside: a computer-generated checkout receipt.

The receipt shows that on the twenty-seventh instant of December 2006, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a woman named, incredibly, "JAMES, JOYCE" checked out what is now my precious tome along with three other books: When I Loved Myself Enough; Finding Peace: Letting Go and Liking It; and Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.

Could the possibly unwary Ms. James have assumed that self-help would likewise be forthcoming from Alice Munro? I certainly hope not, because, while invariably brilliant, Alice Munro stories can be whopping downers.

Example 2. My retired library copy of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.

This sturdy little linen-bound gem came from the library of Cleveland High School, Portland, Ore. It was published by Harper & Row at some indeterminate point after 1950, as part of the Harper's Modern Classics series.

And here's the fun discovery: a pasted checkout label showing just two withdrawals—twelve years apart.

On September 30, 1964, my little red Hardy book was checked out by a Miss MaryAnn Hillstein. It then collected dust until September 8, 1976, when a Miss Vickie Peck, bless her heart, condescended to withdraw it too.

See what I mean?

* Intentional homage to American Idol.
And "Happy Birthday!" Kristin.

# # #

Help me Rhonda

Rhonda, I'm having a heap of trouble deciphering what a Pulitzer-Prize winning author was trying to express in these two sentences from one of her early short stories (emphases mine):

1. She has spent her life trying to escape from the parlor-like jaws of self-consciousness.

2. Her late marriage has set in upon her nerves like a retriever nosing and puffing through old dead leaves out in the woods.

Parlor-like jaws, Rhonda? As in doily-draped jaws, or jaws protruding from a yellowing linen lampshade bedecked with dingy tufted fringe? How can "jaws" be "parlor-like," Rhonda? Feel me?

While you're chewing on that one, let's move on to the retriever.

There's something amiss here. The author doesn't say how near or how far those specific woods might be vis-a-vis the nerves being set in upon by the retriever's allegedly objectionable nosing and puffing.

What if the woods lies waaaaay down the road from the cozy, parlor-like parlor in which the aforesaid nerves sip herbal tea while snugly wrapped in a fleece throw; a calico cat perhaps comfortably curled up and purring in their (the nerves') lap? Under those circumstances, a retriever, acting in the capacity of a metaphoric proxy for marriage, couldn't do much "setting in upon" anything, I wouldn't think.

And what's the big deal about a retriever snorting around in dead leaves anyway, Rhonda? That's a totally idyllic image as far as I'm concerned. Consider this not implausible scenario:

It's a brisk fall afternoon. Twilight's setting in upon my by now ginormously soothed nerves as I stroll homeward through the idyllic autumnal woods, anticipating with mounting relish the mug of piping hot cocoa—all tricked up with midget marshmallows—awaiting me at the kitchen table, thanks to the infallible thoughtfulness of my good wife. And notice how ol' Big Feller, my loyal and hale retriever, fuels my equanimity even further as he trots hither and yon, a-nosin' and a-puffin' through the lush carpet of old dead leaves. "What'cha lookin' for, Big Feller, huh? What'cha lookin' for, boy? Heh-heh."

I believe I've made my point.

So. What's the deal? Is it that the leaves crackle inordinately? Is that it, Rhonda? Or is it that the sonofabitch retriever is so goddamn single-mindedly persistent?

If that's the case, the author's meaning might more lucidly have been expressed with a few deft revisions (in bold):

Her late marriage has set in upon her nerves like some crazy-ass relentless bloodhound nosing and puffing for the waning scent of a fleeing thief's stinking B.O. through old dead leaves ... etc.

Or something.

# # #

How come non-Catholics are better Catholics than Catholics are?

This has nothing to do with the specific moral issues I'm about to cite. It has everything to do with self-deception on an Orwellian Doublethink scale. Or an Emperor's New Clothes scale, take your pick.

Imagine attending a vegetarians' convention and discovering that barbecued ribs and brisket are getting the most play at the buffet table. That's what I'm talking about here. Vegetarians lovin' their barbecue. As in ...

Sex Outside Marriage
The Catholic Church says, "No, no, no." Sixty-seven percent of Catholics versus 57 percent of non-Catholics say, "Yes, yes, yes." The better Catholics? Non.

Homosexuality
The Catholic Church says, "No, no, no." Fifty-four percent of Catholics versus 45 percent of non-Catholics say, "Yes, yes, yes." The better Catholics? Non.

Divorce
The Catholic Church says, "No, no, no." Seventy-one percent of Catholics versus 66 percent of non-Catholics say, "Yes, yes, yes." The better Catholics? Non.

Unmarried Motherhood
The Catholic Church says, "No, no, no." Sixty-one percent of Catholics versus 52 percent of non-Catholics say, "Yes, yes, yes." The better Catholics? Non.

Embryonic Stem-Cell Research
The Catholic Church says, "No, no, no." Sixty-three percent of Catholics versus 62 percent of non-Catholics say, "Yes, yes, yes." The better Catholics? Non.

These are Gallup Poll stats, by the way.

So. My question is, How can you be something and not be that thing at the same time? I'm of the opinion you can't, any more than you can shun your meat and eat it too.

In other words, Catholics whose beliefs deviate from their Church's position on any issue are de facto non-Catholics. Furthermore, I think the world would be a better place if they stopped kidding themselves and did the right thing by dropping out.

In too many ways we all, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, cut ourselves too much slack. Pay too much lip service to too many matters of major and minor import. Especially major.

We commit ourselves partially; which amounts to not committing at all.

# # #

Son of look it up

Speaking of deficient dictionaries, I wrote an unanswered—or more accurately, an unsatisfactorily answered (same diff)—letter a year or two ago to a vice president at Wiley Publishing, where the default dictionary used by the Associated Press comes from, suggesting the overwhelming need for a compact dictionary (i.e., 60,000 entries or fewer) containing big words only. And by "big" I don't necessarily mean syllables up the butt.

I asserted in my letter that there's a niche going unfilled for a compact dictionary for people who already know the definition of tree, but not necessarily of twee. A dictionary a grad student could conveniently carry around in a backpack, or a dude (e.g., me) could effortlessly snatch from the nightstand while reading by flashlight in bed.

I mean, what in the heck are all these compact-dictionary publishers thinking? Ninety percent of the words collegiate types and voracious readers of challenging content want to look up aren't going to be found in a compact dictionary. And a regular dictionary is too doggone heavy to lift through a smooth arc with a single outstretched arm while supine in the sack—short of incurring tennis elbow.

So I think they need to publish a compact dictionary chock full of such less commonly encountered words as dirigisme and quiddity, with words like dog and quiet left out. I've already written the letter; somebody else can do the petitions.

Oh-oh. The clock on the wall says it's Tangent Time. Let's go off on one. ...

My son and I were watching Wild Things the other night. The episode concerned the Thompson's gazelles inhabiting that stupendous grassland known as the African savanna. It focused almost exclusively on the growth and development—from birth through first birthday—of one adorable little male gazelle. At the end of the program the narrator noted that the yearling would now have to fend for himself. To which Daniel quipped, "So he has to find his own grass?"

# # #

I have big problems

... with Wheel of Fortune. Problems I'd like to share with you.

First off, the producers are cheapskates. They go out of their way to make sure contestants don't get to take home all that much coin. In support of this thesis I offer the following particulars:

1. Prize placards cover the dollar values on too many of the wheel's wedges. A contestant gets to pluck the placard if he or she calls a letter that's in the puzzle, but receives zero dollars for doing so. A big ouch! when there's like five T's.

2. There are way too many BANKRUPT spins. This not only holds down the cash awards by regularly erasing accumulated sums, but makes contestants leery of trying to spin their way to big bucks. They routinely jump straight to solving for fear of losing even the meager monies amassed to that point.

3. Eighty percent of the time, spinning the bonus wheel at the end of the show yields the bottom-level prize ($25,000 or $30,000 depending on how recent the episode). That's because, even though they make the bonus puzzle ridiculously difficult with off-the-wall solutions like ZINC COATED, the producers urgently want no one to win more than the minimum cash award if humanly possible. Which turns out to be very humanly possible, in most cases, for those relatively rare, uncommonly creative thinkers who can indeed sort out ...

_ _ N _

_ _ATED

... within ten seconds.

Next, the contestants themselves. My main problem with the contestants themselves, apart from the intimidating (and therefore excitement-extinguishing) effect all those BANKRUPT spaces have on them, is that even when they obviously know a puzzle's solution they'll frequently go ahead and buy another vowel and wastefully shave another $250 off their potential haul. Or worse still, they'll call a letter that appears just once in the puzzle instead of an equally obvious letter appearing two or three times, thereby earning only a thousand dollars, say, instead of two thousand or three thousand for the spin. In other words, they too often shoot selves in feet.

Finally, my biggest Wheel of Fortune beef of all: THE INCESSANT, POINTLESS CLAPPING.

Man! Every damn time a contestant spins the damn wheel they all stand there clapping like trained seals until it stops spinning. Clapping for what? FOR WHAT? I ask. Why do you clap, people? WHY? Why not pop and lock until the spinning stops? The Pavlovian clapping would be delightfully bizarre were it not so freaking annoying.

As for Vanna White, I have no problems at all with Vanna White.

# # #

When Erin and Irene were ten

Erin's stomach was in knots that morning about homework gone undone, and the drive to school had thus assumed the dreadful aspect of a trip to certain doom.

I could see fear distorting her features as we traveled up Catalpa, and offered some unsolicited (what other kind is there?) fatherly advice about attacking it head-on. Go straight to the teacher, I proposed. Tell her you forgot to bring home your math book. Ask for a day's grace on the homework assignment. That's all you can do, and you'll feel better after doing it no matter what.

Maybe she took my advice, maybe she didn't. I can’t recall. But I do recall what Irene Henderson, an amiable business acquaintance, told me later that morning.

Irene, a thickset, hyperactive woman of winning disposition and grizzled hair haphazardly piled above perpetually twinkling eyes, spoke of her childhood in Poland. ...

Of standing twice against a wall to be shot by Nazis ...

Of trudging bootless and coatless through knee-deep snow ...

Of dislocating both wrists hauling buckets on labor gangs ...

Of almost going crippled from rickets.

Then Irene pulled up a pant leg to show me the scar on her calf from a bullet that had grazed her leg when she, like Erin, was ten.

# # #

Organized crime

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right? And yet a pile of shit by any other name does not necessarily stink. Let's take for instance the pile of shit known as bribing members of the United States Congress. We call it "lobbying" and—voila!—nobody seems to notice the odor anymore or care all that much about it.

Oh sure, some of us may wrinkle our noses or even pinch our nostrils. But the practice is generally relegated to the category of business as usual.

Um ... hello! LOBBYING IS BRIBERY. I can't put it any plainer than that.

So where's the media furor? Why isn't, say, Brian Williams furious? Why doesn't he go purple with indignation and sputter vituperation on NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams? No, it's not because he's sworn to impartiality as a network news anchor; it's because this insidious activity gets waved through the barricades via the odious agency of euphemism. It's like everyone just accepts that nothing can—or even should—be done about it. Thus ...
BRIAN: This bill or that bill failed to clear the House or Senate today because this lobby or that lobby wielded its considerable influence.

[Shrug shoulders. Simper like Stan Laurel. Cut to 30-second Viagra spot.]

Huh? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that this bill or that bill failed to clear the House or Senate because the bribery specialists spread an assload of moolah around?

As Napoleon Dynamite so perfectly put it ... God!

Our country's legislators take bribes from lobbyists as casually as you and I take coffee breaks—and with an even greater sense of entitlement. They get away with their sleazy conduct because most of the bribes they take take the form of campaign contributions. Well, here's a tell-it-like-it-is-Dandy-Don newsflash from the Crapsack Department of Revulsion:

ACCEPTING CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM LOBBYISTS IS GRAFT.

Let's put it this way: If you tried to "lobby" a certain daughter of mine on the issue of not issuing you a citation for public intoxication, you would find yourself in handcuffs for attempting to bribe a peace officer faster than you can say "cash donation to the Police Athletic League." On the other hand, if she accepted your "contribution" and let you go your merry way, what would that make her?

Get me?

The unfortunate distinction where Congress is concerned is that the foxes are in charge of the chicken coop and aren't about to deprive themselves of all the poultry they can eat. Meanwhile, you and I get our pockets assiduously picked by the credit card industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial industry, and especially the oil industry thanks to the tons of anti-you-and-me legislation bribed onto the books by lobbyists.

So, with all that in mind, I've got another name besides "bribery" to propose for this revolting bullshit. Let's really put the putrid back in the poo and call it ...

ORGANIZED CRIME.

It's organized. It's criminal. And it's being regularly and reprehensibly perpetrated on "We the People" by the very men and women elected in good faith to represent our interests, not theirs.

Click here for the full lowdown on one of the most blatant and infuriating examples of our elected representatives' grabbing the graft while giving all of us the shaft.

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