I’ll see your Rice Crispies, and raise you a chicken

In responce to: Everyone has a gross food story, The Captain's Rebuttal, and my own Filthy Tart.

There are all of these really nice food carts down by the Main Library. There’s a Sushi cart, Greek, Southern, Athenian, Jamaican, and a couple Thai carts. Two winters ago I went to one of the Thai places for curry chicken. It was really good. There were still a few bones in the chicken, but I was famished, so I was happy to throw them out. Being winter, I kind of had a cold. About a half an hour after lunch I felt a sneeze coming on. I grabbed a Kleenex just in time. Thanks to the gallon of snot that came out, it didn’t hurt at all to have a two inch long chicken bone come flying out of my nasal cavity.

How do you like them apples?

Filthy Tart

Reading about Sparklestone trying to overcome his phobia of bananas has reminded me of something you all may find useful.

For a good long while I could not eat pop-tarts. It didn’t matter what flavor or what frosting they had, they just grossed me out. The trouble was just a little trauma suffered around the time I was 8 or 9.

I came home from school one day early, so I was home alone. Pop-tarts were like candy, which meant we couldn’t have them whenever we wanted. It had to be for breakfast. Being home alone, I figure I could choke a couple down before anyone showed up to witness it. So I pulled out a package, tore open the sealed bag, and this little black ant ran onto my hand.

I wasn’t sure if the ant was on the outside of the package, or just the box, or what. You see, there was a period of a few years when our house had an infestation of little carpenter ants. They’d show up in this incredible two lane highway running from one end of the kitchen to some unsealed container on the other end of the kitchen. To an eight year old, it was actually very cool.

I figured the toaster would be hot enough to kill any germs if the ant had actually been on the pop-tart, so I threw it in and started looking for a happy trail of ants. I couldn’t find one, not a single ant anywhere. That little guy must have been a solo scout.

Anyhow, my Pop-Tarts finished cooking. I let them cool a bit, and then I took a giant bite out of the end of this Pop-Tart, and wouldn’t ya know that those damn ants had carried away every drop of gooey filling. All that was left was the crispy ashes of about a million carpenter ants that fell out onto the counter as I tipped the Pop-Tart upside down.

Those bastards ate my Pop-Tart, but the real kicker was that I wasn’t suppose to be eating the Pop-Tart. Hence, I was unable to warn anyone the next morning...

Got a license for that truck?

I stopped at the local convenience store on my way to work today for my regular dose of caffeine. I love the people who work at convenience stores. They’re truly the salt of the earth. They have no job security, and definitely no dental insurance, yet they smile that lovely toothless smile every time they see you. I actually served three months in a Seven Eleven store right before grad school. It was a marvelous experience.

Anyhow, Thelma was at the register this morning all bright eyed as usual since she probably got up a 2 a.m. The guy ahead of me in line had just put $57 worth of petroleum into the biggest SUV I’ve ever seen. Thelma, being the connoisseur of man toys that she is, asked the well dressed man:

“You got an 8-cylinder in that thing?”

“Huh?”

“Your engine, is it an 8-cylinder?”

“Wa.., It’s real big.”

You go get ‘em Thelma. You beautiful thing, you.

And the Curtain is Razed

We finally got a new shower curtain, but I think the event deserves an explanation as to why this issue was so important to our Nation of Two.

We already had a shower curtain, of course. It was this creamy off-white color with leaves on it. The leaves were randomly either brown or pastel blue. It seemed like an okay shower curtain to me, but what do I know? I have a penis, and I’m part of the 90% of all penis owners who could care less about such things. SB, my wife, however hated its very existence. She said it was hideous. That may be true, but that wasn’t the problem either. The problem was that she didn’t pick it out, and since I’m part of the 90%, SB knew that I didn’t pick it out either. She knew it had to have been the work of ‘the other woman’.

SB told me once “How dare you marry someone who’s not me.” She can’t complain too much though, since she took wedding vows about a year before I did. She was okay with the curtain at first. When we moved in together we both had a lot of crap invisibly tied to someone else. SB still has a pinky ring she keeps to remind her of the folly of marrying a self loathing closet transvestite. She has (or had) my old wedding ring too as weird as that sounds. No idea what she has planned for it.

When I moved here for my job the other woman did all the decorating, and then never made the move herself. Hence, I ended up with the shower curtain. I remember she insisted on getting a ‘nice’ shower curtain from Bed Bath and Beyond. I insisted that she get one that was on sale. It was still $78. When my frugal wife heard about this, she nearly lost all respect for me.

“Eighty Dollars for a fucking shower curtain?!!”
She followed this with the sinister laugh of Aku, complete with the flaming eyebrows.

Now you really have to understand something about SB. She avoids math at all costs. If she sees a price tag that says $9.99 she’ll say “Look, it’s only 9 dollars.” So when she rounds up from 78 to 80, you know she means fucking business.

The new curtain is up for a mere $24 (the decorator’s math). The old curtain has been razed to the bottom of the heap for Goodwill. That fluorescent green duvet cover is probably next to go, but I have an even more pressing problem.

How much do we claim that shower curtain was worth on our taxes?

Shower Curtains Revisited

Okay Sparklestone, I put your heritage to the test. I did some solo grocery shopping yesterday. Yes, our network had a planned outage all day, and I didn’t plan on doing any work anyhow, so I decided to do the right thing for my karma, and I officially took the afternoon off.

Anyhow, I had three directives from the Head Cook: milk, orange juice, and eggs. The skim milk and the generic OJ were found without incident, but then I got to the eggs. I have never been properly instructed in the buying of eggs. I mean, I know you have to check and make sure they’re not broken, but which kind does the Boss want? How much should they cost? Then I saw it; a large sign that read:

IGA Eggs
Buy one dozen get,
Get the Second for FREE.

The voices in my head commenced chattering. In one ear I heard St. Nat “Take the eggs you sorry sap. What’s wrong with you? Get four dozen. Can't you read FREE?” In the other ear I heard the Head Cook “These eggs expire on April 11th. How are we supposed to eat that many eggs in 20 days?” And underneath all of the chatter I heard Sparklestone’s mocking giggle.

I was reminded of the Boss' thoughts on the necessity of a decent knife block, but I still chanced bringing home two dozen eggs.


The Head Cook and I have differing opinions on the utility of expiration dates on consumables. In her mind they are absolute barriers that will be adhered to without question. The fact that I consider them mere recommendations does not absolve me of the fact that she IS the Head Cook.


Needless to say, we had eggs for dinner.

The Truth About Shower Curtains

After some grocery shopping we went to Panera Friday night to get a loaf of Sunflower bread. It was late, a snow storm was coming, and all I really wanted was to get home and drink one of the beers I had just stashed in the trunk. We ordered the bread and the girl says “We’re giving away free cookies tonight. You can each choose one.”

My wife’s eyes lit up as she said “Ooh, what are the choices?”

“We have Chocolate-Chip or Chocolate Chocolate-Chip with Walnut.”

“I’ll have the Chocolate Chocolate-Chip with Walnut.”

Then they both turned and looked at me. The pressure was unbearable. You see I don’t eat sweets. I survived the entire summer of 1991 on $26, and ever since then desserts have been anathema to me. When I started my current job, they bought me a cake. I ate one piece for the sake of morale and the sugar high nearly did me in. Now I force myself to eat two pieces of candy a week just so I can maintain my dignity the next time I have to choke down a fist-full of sugar frosting.

Why don’t I ever get asked to choose the right Scotch for a picnic? What beer goes with mahi-mahi? I can even do pretty well choosing wine, but this? This is as foreign as choosing which frequency of ultra-violet light I’d like to have shooting out of my desk lamp.

“Uh, I’ll take that one.”

My wife knows full well that she’s getting two free cookies. I see it in that satisfied grin she’s wearing. The question however, is did I pick the right one.

“Sweetheart, did you want two of the double Chocolate whatever, or one of each for variety?”

“Well, one of each of course.”

“Crap, I chose poorly.”

“Wait, did you get the same one?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what I want.”

“What? You’re just trying to make me feel better. I wanna know the truth.”

“Baby, there is no truth.”


I’m going to remember that the next time I get asked if I prefer the blue shower curtain or the yellow one.

I See Dead People, but I don’t walk away.

It happened two Fridays ago. A guy walks into my office and says “There’s a dead body in the bathroom.” I hurried to the toilet to make sure it wasn’t just a bum passed out under a newspaper, and upon opening the door saw a frequent library user on the floor. I told the guy to go back and tell my staff member to call 911, and I approached the body to see what I could do on the spot. I knelt down and felt his hand to see how cold he was, and that’s when I saw the pool of blood around his head.

I’ve had to do CPR on a friend before, so I was surprised by my reaction. I’ve witnessed much bloodier scenes too, but this caught me off guard for some reason. Maybe I wondered if foul-play was involved. Maybe my life has just been normal for too long, and I’ve turned into a panty-waist. I went back to the door to wait for the police to arrive, and the two students standing there were anxiously waiting to hear what I had to say. The blood flashed across my memory, and I could still feel his hand in mine. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”

Within two minutes a couple police came running in. They were a block and a half away when we made the call. They went in and started CPR, and hooked him up a portable defibrillator. The machine voice giving them instructions echoed through the door and all the way down the hall. I could see the two students who saw the body before me were getting more and more freaked out by the minute. I took them into a side hallway and asked how they were doing. The guy who came into my office seemed stressed, but he was not on the brink of a meltdown. The other student was on the verge of collapsing. For a moment I feared that he had walked in on a friend, and was about to start bawling. Then he told us what he had seen.

I had thought I was the third person to see the body when I walked in at 9:35am. I was not. The guy who walked into my office was third. The person I was talking to now walked into the bathroom almost ten minutes before I did, and even he wasn’t first.

He had walked into the bathroom to find a faculty member standing at the sink filling a coffee pot with water. The faculty member turned, smiled and said hello to the student. Because of where the faculty member was, the student could only see the body from the waist down. This poor man had literally had a massive heart attack while standing at the urinal, so his pants were still undone. The student, not really wanting to consider what might possibly be going on, assumed that whatever it was, the faculty member was taking care of the situation. Unfortunately, that university professor didn’t have the flexibility to derail his routine for a dead body at his feet.

There is only one office with a coffee pot within reasonable proximity to that bathroom. And the description the student gave fits one of the three people who have access to that room. They swear it wasn’t them. Whether or not I believe that is irrelevant. What kind of person could stand right next to a dead body and do absolutely nothing? Were they in such shock that they tuned it out? Was the student in such shock that he invented the faculty member? The Detective said it’s pretty common for people to see dead bodies and not do anything about it. I know it’s not a crime to mind your own business, but it pisses me off to think a university employee wouldn’t even call 911. I may not have done everything I could have done, but at least I didn’t finish my coffee before going to check it out.

The only thing that pissed me off more was at 3 o’clock when the reporters started to call. Fucking vultures.

Pardon me, but I think you've pissed me off.

You know, the beauty of blogging is the record it provides; the road map to my stream of consciousness. I like being able to go back and reread my rants. Without a doubt, it appears that avoiding an allusion to my parents is nearly impossible. Even when I talk about my cats I’m describing my expectations of a parent.

Why has it been so difficult to just come out and say it? Is it because I’m ashamed of myself for not having the courage to face them; to make them own up to their mistakes? Or at least to try to make them? Yes, I’m angry. I’m angry that I have Cerebral Palsy. I’m angry that my parents, acting like children when they were 30 years old, MIGHT have caused it. I’m angry that they had to tell me about that. I’m angry that their judgment wasn’t sufficient for them to know that I already had enough to deal with without wondering about whether or not they wanted me in their lives.

I’m angry that not only were they less than perfect parents, they were oblivious to my needs while I was growing up with a disability. I can’t seem to separate those two things. I mean, were they horrible parents, or just horrible parents to a child with a disability?

"I'm glad you’re doing real good in school." I used to hear. "You’ll need a desk job, since you won’t be able to get a real job."

A real job? ‘Fuck you’ just doesn’t seem strong enough, does it?

I remember once when I was little I was playing at the end of our field after school. I saw my dad’s volkswagen bug drive around the corner, and I immediately started running the 100 yards or so to our house. I was running, and waving my arm to greet my dad, excited that he was home from work. Sometimes he used to let me sit in his lap and steer the bug. When I finally opened the door to the house I heard my father telling my mother, that he had seen a little kid running towards the house from the end of the pasture. And he knew it was me from the ‘funny gait’. I hate the way he made me feel. He made me ashamed of myself; ashamed for running funny. He made me ashamed to have to 'settle' for a desk job.

About that same age I remember going out to the pump house for a handful of chocolate chips from a Ziploc bag my mother kept in the freezer. My older brothers had shown me where it was. I put the chips in my front shirt pocket so they wouldn’t melt in my hand, and then I ran into the house to get back to my toybox. In my haste that last step across the threshold was just a tad bit higher than I had calculated, and as I fell to the floor my frozen chocolate chips flew across the linoleum like marbles. My father started to scream, but I didn't hear him. I was too busy calculating the optimum route to pick up all of my chips. When my father’s steel-toed boot lifted my entire body up off the floor, I began to wonder if we were supposed to be getting into the freezer. I wasn’t running to hide or to be sneaky. I was running because, I was a little kid. Too little in fact, not to wonder if I had been kicked in the ass just for being clumsy. Maybe if I didn’t have Cerebral Palsy I’d be laughing about it now.

I just don’t know.

"So much, and no more! Never more than a spot! Or something will happen! You never know what!"

My father likes to quote John 8:32 – “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

I am sure you can already guess that I find that statement, in and of itself, to be a large pile of yellow baby shit. He spouts it with ultimate conviction. He uses it like a mantra that somehow empowers him with supernatural wisdom. It was only recently that I hypothesized as to why this one verse was so damn important to him. “The truth shall set you free.” - Baby shit.

This is a perfect example of a great idea in theory, but in practice it becomes a childish excuse for being incapable of making decisions on your own. Children’s books do the same thing. Follow this order, follow it well, for if you stray " something might happen, you never know what.”

So, why John 8:32? Because he wants it to absolve him of his poor judgment. He wants to believe that telling the truth was more important than tempering action with wisdom. He had no right to tell me the truth. It wasn’t done out of love or respect for honesty. He did it for his own benefit. It served only to satisfy his own conscience. I suppose that in his mind telling the truth did set him free, but knowing the truth sure as hell hasn’t set me free.

So many Christians, so few Lions

Despite my devotion throughout high school and even a little beyond, my first disagreement with Christianity happened when I was actually quite little. My parents were both raised by fairly religious parents, but they too got bored with it for a while during the 80’s. So, until I was eight we went to church twice a year. My father had a religious experience somewhere in there and we started hitting church three times a week, sometimes four. Of course, they believe that their poor church attendance in the 80’s is the direct cause of all three of their sons being heathens now. (They can’t think for themselves, why should their sons be able to?)

So as a kid I had only a cursory understanding of Jesus and his teachings. I remember my best friend at school was a Mormon. And at some point I was told that poor Clyde was going to H-E-double toothpicks because Mormonism is actually a cult that had been led astray by a false prophet named Smith. Now, it could have been Colonel Mustard for all I cared, my friend was going to hell, and I was powerless to effect change in the matter. How could this be? He’s a kid. He didn’t choose his parents or the church they took him to. Why should he suffer eternal damnation?

Well, like all the other nutters, I devoted two years of my free time to reading that giant book which most hypocrites claim to believe but never really bother to read on their own, and I came to the mind boggling conclusion that I am almost a bazillion times more compassionate than Jesus or any of his contemporary followers.

Now I could list all the social advances the Jesus people have fought against, from abolishing slavery right on up to equal rights and the current gay marriage debate, but that would no doubt belittle the epiphany of a 10 year old kid that I'm trying to share. And I think this one example, if carefully considered, should not only cause Jesus himself to take a good look in the mirror, it should also be accessible to anyone with a 5th grade education. An open mind would help, but I don't think it's necessarily a requirement.

I don’t personally like getting pissed off at people, and I certainly don’t think that my kicking the shit out of some asshole is going to make them a better person. Take any insane lunatic, Hussain or Hitler for example, and I’d have to agree they should be locked up and maybe even beheaded just because they probably don’t deserve a free lunch for the rest of their days, but I would never think that torturing them was in any way a benefit. Sure it might satisfy my sense of hate, but is that who I want to be, a hollow man amused by the suffering of another human being? No.

But this Jesus character, you cross him and he’ll put the fucking screws to you. You’ll end up spending ETERNITY in a pit of fire and brimstone. Is that compassion for a wayward child? The Jesus people think so. It must be that ‘tough love’ they talk about. Spend an eternity in torment, hell-fire and damnation, not just for being a mass murderer, rapist or thief, but for being a 10 year old kid whose parents take him to the wrong church.

This Be The Verse

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

According to the Advisor

March 2005

Question
Can you tell just by looking at someone if he or she is lying to you? -- R.T., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Answer
Most people aren't accomplished enough liars to conceal their guilt. Jack Trimarco, a former FBI profiler who hosts a Court TV show called Fake Out, says you should be suspicious of a person who:
(1) changes his usual speech patterns -- a person may also pause as he invents a lie or repeat the question to buy time;
(2) subconsciously lowers his voice because he's ashamed of the lie he's about to deliver;
(3) denies specifics, such as insisting she didn't cheat with the neighbor because the guy actually lives three doors down;
(4) remains calm while working hard to convince you that you're mistaken -- an innocent person is more likely to grow angry, and his denials to grow stronger;
(5) changes the subject;
(6) displays conflicting verbal and nonverbal behaviors, such as saying no while nodding yes;
(7) changes her story over time ("A lie is hard to remember, while the truth is easy," Trimarco says);
(8) avoids eye contact.

Someday you may not need intuition to ferret out untruths. A few British insurance companies are experimenting with voice-analysis software to identify people who call in with false claims (initially, about 10 percent have been identified as suspicious), and scientists are scanning the brains of volunteers to see if they can identify which areas light up when a lie is told.

Natural induction: Does castor oil work?

http://parenting.ivillage.com/pregnancy/plabor/0,,midwife_3q39,00.html

About a year ago my wife read “Who’s to blame.” She did some research and found out that castor oil is more commonly believed to be able to induce labor. Neither one of us has found any written record of miscarriage being an expected outcome of taking castor oil at any stage of pregnancy.

Of course this only adds to the list of unknowns. Did she believe it would cause a miscarriage, or did she know it would likely just induce labor? Did she tell Dad in a fit of rage that it would cause a miscarriage? Did Dad actually believe castor-oil would cause a miscarriage, or did he know better and just wanted me to believe it?