monkeys monkeys ted & alice

When I put dad in the nursing home two years ago, gas was $1.50 a gallon. Now when I drive him across town for lunch at Heinemann’s, we pass the $3.49 a gallon sign at the Citgo station and he gets all bug eyed and squirrelly. We drove by the sign yesterday. Dad made little whimpering noises and rubbed his glasses. Until I said “yes pop, things have sure changed, it’s three and a half dollars a gallon now…AND THE WORLD IS RULED BY APES!”. Then I quick stuck on my big gorilla head mask and screamed ooooooga booooga while swerving the car across all four lanes. That’s how the car wound up going through the front window of a wig shop while dad clutched his chest and screamed in Irish that he’d disinherit me and pay Shriners to have me killed.

Brick through the windshield that says I love you…

My dream relationship ends with throwing lamps at each other in a $32 Texas motel, at 4:30 a.m. I’ve never had one of those. Never drank whisky in the bathtub while my girlfriend practices stripper moves and wraps aluminum foil around her ankle monitor before going to work. Have not had to take out multiple restraining orders on each other, including ones for fictitious names, like “Poonflang Dammerung” which is the name I use for ordering pizza. No girlfriend has waited all night behind the dumpster of the Gas ‘n’ Go, so she could run me down with a rusty Camaro while screaming “whooooooore!”. Our children have not had to go to school in plastic garbage bags belted with little extension cords because everything was lost in the meth lab explosion. Googling my name doesn’t bring up news articles about me running naked down the middle of an Arkansas highway shrieking HEP ME JEEBUS while my ex-wife takes wobbly shots at me with a crossbow. My current girlfriend does not keep a prison shank concealed in her wig. This sucks. Lately, I’ve been getting dumped with alacrity. But it always ends with me getting lured to Baker’s Square and told “you’re a really sweet boyfriend, it’s not you, it’s me…”. Just once I want my car torched.

Coffee. Money. Lust. Guns.

First of all, my coffee maker is a bit tricky. You don’t want to unplug it. Ever. Plugging it back in dims street lights and sets off car alarms. Also, that would reset the timer, which is currently on “random”. It basically brews 8 gallons of coffee at a deliberately unpredictable moment sometime during the day or night or possibly next week. You can tell it’s happening because the house shakes and thick smoke fills the kitchen, and it smells like a bonfire of lost Czechoslovakian luggage. Also, the coffee maker simply vanishes sometimes, which is unsettling.

Drinking the coffee is also unwise. You tend to wake up in another part of the house with no memory of getting there, and something written on your forehead in black sharpie like “COP KILLER”.

The phenomena known as “yiffing”

If you don’t know about Tina Ballerina, go there NOW. (orange bottles/silver cans) Reading her is like stumbling into a Filipino drag queen knife fight at Chuck E Cheese’s. Or getting chased by bees.

Speaking of which, my current job is wearing the six foot rat costume as the Chuck E Cheese mascot in South Milwaukee. Before hiring me, they filled the costume by kidnapping felons from the halfway house down the street. So I’m always finding cool stuff stashed in the leg of the costume. Prison shanks, mostly. And the inside of the costume smells horrid, since one time for maybe 3 days Management stored a dead body in it. Not that I complain. You know I have that hobby of sniffing gasoline. I keep a plastic baggie of Amoco Silver wadded up in the “nose” of the rat costume, that’s all I can ever smell. Keeps me sharp for work. Sharp and angry. I tend to lurch after the kids barking gibberish out of that rat head, there’s usually a mob of terrified children fleeing from me. Really. When I’m at work it’s like a prison riot at knee level. Waves of kids slamming into my legs, wailing and scrambling bug eyed for the exits. Which is cool with Management, they like to keep things edgy. What was my point? Right. My new girlfriend made me switch to Marlboro menthols because that’s the only thing I can steal out of her purse. So I’m smoking inside the rat costume as per usual, when strangely enough the menthol cigarette ignites the gasoline fumes inside the rat “head”. I’m aware of the blast of mint flavored flames shooting from the eyes of the mascot, but I remain heroically calm. Not so much the children. They were already agitated when I was thrashing through the plastic ball pit shrieking that I would drink their blood, and now demonic flames are pouring from Chuck E Cheese’s eyes. Children are so alarmist.

Retraction: Holiday Recipe

Last week I checked out Claire’s blog, and she had me beat. Recipes! Damn her! Chicken And Dumplings! Lasagna! In a desperate ploy to catch up, I posted my own recipe. Unfortunately, there were a few errors.

Let me apologize. My recipe for Zesty Holiday Jello did say “…add 1 cup of Polar King brand antifreeze.” True, automobile antifreeze does have a “festive green color”. But antifreeze contains the potent neurotoxin Ethylene Glycol. Thankfully, blog readers caught the mistake and emailed me.

Readers also pointed out that Ethylene Glycol has a chemical structure similar to Ethyl Polystyrene, the flammable ingredient in napalm. My “stove-top” directions for boiling the jello did not take that into account. Again, my apologies. If your Thanksgiving or Christmas gathering was marred by a kitchen fire, I feel terrible about that.

Worse still, I included directions for heating the jello for an hour in a high temperature pressure cooker. The resulting detonations were spectacular, and caused structural damage to many a reader’s kitchen. Phrases like “the Very Fires of Hell whipsawed through our home” and “helplessly watched as a 24 pound frozen turkey became a deadly missile” were emailed to me. Again, sorry. Judging from the letters that poured into my mailbag, people were amazed at the velocity reached by objects that had rested near the boiling jello. Christmas trees that flew outside and speared through parked cars. Cans of cranberry sauce that vanished off kitchen counters and were found miles away, embedded in the roof of a nursing home or church steeple.

Though the explosions and apocalyptic walls of flame were tragic, it was after this point that things took a decided turn for the worse. Distracted by kitchen fires and hurtling kitchenware, people left their beloved pets unattended. Let me point out that when I worked for Minnesota Poison Control in the 1990’s, I only took calls about *human* poisoning. True, I did know that antifreeze can cause blindness and liver failure in humans. I can’t be expected to know the range of neurotoxicologic problems that antifreeze will cause in a dog or cat. “Homicidal psychosis” being the chief complaint. This is just a temporary side effect, and most animals recover fully. That is of little solace to the poor readers who battled kitchen fires, unaware that their pets were lapping up spilled antifreeze, and who then bundled their pets and family into a car or minivan to escape the inferno. Locked in a crowded minivan, driving toward the fire station at 100 m.p.h., is perhaps the worst time to have a beloved cat or dog spring into a homicidal frenzy. Apologies.

Disquieting Items in the News

Direct quote from news:

"Medical school professor Robert White said his monkey-to-monkey head transplant was a partial success."

That's it. "Monkey-to-monkey head transplant" is now my favorite phrase in the world. Just yesterday I hadn't dreamed of the concept. Dang. How did I live without it? Imagine the sparkle it will add to my conversation! Spoken lightly, before I pause to refresh my drink. Or muttered ominously. As I lurch down the bus aisle wearing welders' goggles and plastic garbage bags instead of pants.

The full news story (an experiment conducted at Ohio's Case Western) is actually kinda dull. But I'm still marveling at how a "monkey-to-monkey head transplant" can be a "partial success".

The disturbing trend continues:

This was also in the news. Same day. Look it up if you want. New York Times, April 22 2001. "Inspectors at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport reported an increase in contraband meat products smuggled by foreign travelers, including a monkey's head and carcass on a stick found in a passenger's carry-on bag." The large number of severed monkey heads in the news does not escape me. It's rather unsettling. Is it just me? Is anybody else disturbed by two prominent monkey-head stories in one day? Let's be honest. The prospect of uncovering a monkey-head-on-a-stick in a vacationer's luggage left me shocked and agitated. My mind reeling! Maybe it's because I live in Milwaukee? Stories like that appear in The New York Times with regularity. A cosmopolitan reader, such as yourself, sneers at my Midwestern innocence. In New York, we find severed monkey heads all the time, you say. Bought a Prada bag at Macy's, and there was one inside. We still blame Giuliani.

Stay The Hell Away From Japan

"Japan Firm Apologizes After Toilets Smoke, Catch Fire"

Not that I'm alarmed. Thank christ I built that panic room out by the garage, and designed it to withstand the blast from a Wayward Exploding Japanese Heated Toilet. I'm blogging by flashlight from there right now.

I'm guessing CNN is chaotic with images of panicked mobs surging through the streets of Tokyo, pants ablaze. We should be safer here in Milwaukee. Still, this is not my favorite news story of the day. That honor goes to the Portland newspaper with an account of a midget induced medieval siege weapon tragedy peripherally involving surplus pumpkins.

Again, I make nothing up. Check out The Oregonian, October 30, 2006. "A weekend accident involving a medieval weapon of war redesigned to toss pumpkins..." That's how the article begins. Let's summarize. A family of midgets owns and operates a pumpkin farm. The family also, inexplicably, owns a medieval siege weapon known as a "trebuchet". The trebuchet is twenty-five feet tall. It uses a two thousand pound concrete counterweight to hurl surplus pumpkins far over the horizon. The family is also reported to have 200,000 pounds of pumpkins laying around.

At this point a horrible trebuchet accident occurs. A midget, or possibly midgets, or possibly the entire family, are launched. Must confess I didn't finish the article. With a buildup like that...midgets, siege weapons, deadly flying surplus pumpkins...I had already bolted to the panic room that I presciently built next to the garage, and was breathing rapidly into a paper sack, scanning the skies for incoming pumpkins or midgets. Remember me in your prayers.

Alarming new purchase from Panda Fireworks: the sinister and bewildering “Birthday Cake”. Maybe children’s birthday parties weren’t traumatizing enough. The house invaded by kids whacked out on sugar treats, a bloodcurdling rental clown or two, blindfolded kids swinging pinata bats. Now Panda Fireworks ups the ante with a birthday cake that explodes.

Explodes spectacularly. Like a car bomb. I was thinking there’d be a cute sparkler effect. No. Sorry. Basically there’s a quarter-stick of dynamite lodged in the center of the “cake”. You can see it poking up in the picture. That thing with the fuse attached. You light the fuse, maybe read the CAUTION warning directly below it, and then the Fires of Hell scorch upwards. Makes for a memorable birthday party. Kids staggering around like shell-shocked Vietnam War veterans at the tender age of 8.

Moving past the issue of What Kind Of Freak Designs A Pink Cake That Goes Off Like A Terrorist Weapon, let’s just check out the graphic design on this menace. On the front, two pictures of girls riding broomsticks. Umm. I’m guessing that was the result of a translation error. Somewhere in China, at the headquarters of Panda, Inc., a middle manager is screaming “I said happy birthday WISHES! Happy birthday WISHES!”. Below that, an official seal that says ‘registered Safe and Sane’. Again, umm. As opposed to what? The other fireworks are rated ‘Unsafe and Sane’? Can I get a box of ‘Safe yet Demented’ fireworks? How about ‘Perilous and Dodgy’?

ON FIRE FOR THE LORD

Typical morning. Woke up under a stranger's couch with cigarette butts in my hair. While crawling toward the door, found a UPS uniform roughly my size, so at least I wasn't naked when I scampered out. Made it to Alterra in time to meet H Bomb for breakfast. She's sweet as hell. Bought me a mocha and told me that her christian neighbors started a new business, Hands Of Faith Christian Massage.

Now this is spooky to end all spooky. For an extra $40 they will pray with you during the massage. Pray vigorously. Animatedly. I mean, you will cower naked on a cold table with only a cheap K-Mart towel between you and two lunatics rubbing you and leaping about shouting GLORRRRRY BE TO JEEESUSSS! Now you know what I'm giving all you fuckers for presents. Gift certificates.

I walk a dog.

So the neighbor and I are having a feud over a parking space. No biggie. Friendly words exchanged. A flurry of notes left on windshields. He kicks out my headlights. I slither under his car at midnight to wire 7 pounds of rancid bacon to his muffler with coat hangers.

Now I’m in it for the long haul, see? Broken headlights. That’s childish. You swing by the auto parts store on the way home from work, replace the lights for $20. Or forget about it. If the cops pull you over, you fashion a quick turban out of a beach towel and plead in halting English that Islamic law prohibits using headlights after sundown. But the bacon? A work of genius. The stench builds, matures, especially during August. He never quite knows what hit him. Coworkers shun him, dates decline rides, he sniffs his own shirt quizzically more and more often.

So I’m watching a friend’s dog this week. Bazootyhead. That’s the dog’s name. One of those low stumpy things that weighs more than a bag of cement. I’m a saint for taking care of this creature, believe me, I’m a saint. It’s early this morning, I’m taking Bazootyhead out for walkies, we’re wandering merrily through the parking lot. And I step too close to the car. Neighbor’s car. Christ I’m dumb. I notice Bazootyhead pause and take tentative sniffs…then WHAM he shoots under the car like a rocket. Horrible gobbling noise from under there. RANCID MONTH OLD BACON flashes into my mind. I hurl myself down and grab his little rear paws, nearly throw out my back hauling his thrashing gobbling lumpy 30 kilo dog self out from under the car. He must have gulped down half the bacon. Swear. In like 15 seconds. Freak. And he’s not looking much better for it, either. A bit wobbly. He’s standing at a slant, listing to the right. Odd noises coming out of him. I’ll get back to you when something happens.