Blog(ge)

Please Don't Milk the Bulls

Wrapping Up the Summer of AD 2021

Not even in Norman Rockwell's wildest conjurings has there been a more pastorally American scene: a barefoot farmer, stick of straw between her milk-strengthened teeth, whiff of freshly cut hay swirling through the thick summer air. “Welcome to Walpole,” grinned the Princess Buttercup lookalike (from the early part of Robin Wright’s breakout film, when she was a farmer) as my son Luke and I trundled through the squeaking front door. “Happy to be here,” we bleated, a bit run down after a traffic impaired jaunt from Boston. As she showed us to our cabin, accompanied by a chorus of whippoorwills, both the youngster and I began pestering the poor lass with one inquisition after another. “How many pigs do you have?” “What’s the cat’s name?” “When do the roosters wake up?” Standard city folk line of questioning, I expect. But she handled it with good humor and pretended she was hearing these rookie queries for the first time. And then, the moneymaker. What we had driven two hours and forty seven minutes to see, being the wild eyed dairy enthusiasts that we are: “Where are the cows???” Skeptical of our excessive bovine affection, she directed us to circle to the other side of the barn, where we would find no shortage of gently mooing creatures mashing tufts of wet emerald grass between their choppers, arrayed in a rather large field. My sense of direction is rudimentary, even on my best days, although that overstates my ability to find, well, anything, no matter how obvious it might be to the average traveler. To put some definition around it, the words I fear most in the English language are “you can’t miss it.” I can. And I have. And I will continue to do so. One would think that finding a thirty-six acre field with a herd of stench-coated living creatures would be a simple exercise: follow the delicious aroma of cow excrement to the source. Oh no, dear friends. There was a barn in the way. A barn I tells ya! At least four walls by my count, cloaked in forty year old chipped red Benjamin Moore. Roof. Tin, I believe, although my metallurgy skills never went past the introductory level. In the first pass, I turned away from the barn after a mere quarter-turn, wandering off onto a country road. The honeysuckles were delightful, but nowhere near the cows. By a stroke of luck and twelve years of parenthood, I had a child-guide in my vicinity. “This doesn’t look right, dad.” “Why would you say that, son?” “Well, it’s right if the cows drive an F150, but otherwise…” The rapidly approaching dust cloud was like the open maw of hell descending upon us to spirit our souls to the nether world. “Lord Jesus!” I wailed, leaping like a gazelle into a tangle of brambles. A blind, unathletic gazelle, but still. “You’re a moron,” Luke informed me with a mix of sadness and superiority that can only be expressed adequately in the pre-teen voice. Thoroughly perforated in parts of my anatomy that had ceased functioning long ago, I extracted myself from my vegetative chains to face my deeply disappointed offspring. “I coulda sworn that truck was about to flatten me.” “Dad, it’s a two lane road.” Then, with all the tenderness of a boy ashamed of his parent, Luke gently yanked a nettle as thick as a Louisville Slugger out of my neck, sending a cascade of blood onto my collar that would make a Tarantino film look like an episode of Sesame Street. “Son of a….!” I squealed like a wounded four year old. “It’s this way, dad,” Luke instructed calmly. Limping, wounded, woozy from blood loss, I followed obediently. And there, a mere 6,012 inches from where I had targeted, was The Field. A glistening, glowing, golden expanse of….. Actually it was just a field. Grass, trees, etc. At first glance it appeared the cows had engagements elsewhere – mani-pedi or running errands in town. Luke and I trudged down a ravine, through a gulley, over some other topological features. And then in the distance we caught our first glimpse: the creatures! Life-giving eruptions of deliciousness! Sour cream. Cheese. The splash in my coffee that masks the whiff of Johnny Walker. Nearly giddy, I began to skip through the field like a Von Trapp child, rapidly forgetting my flayed skin and the grit that was still coating my Tommy Hilfiger polo. And my gums. As we drew closer, the features on their delightful, gentle, milky-chocolatey faces came into focus. And it was clear why we had not been able to single out any individual cow in the process. They were clumped under the shade of a willow. For some reason they were heaving as if they had just finished a decathlon. A few steps closer, and we could see trails of slime hanging from their snouts. And a suspicious glint in the deep black of their eyes as if we were representatives from a wallet factory. “Dad?” “Yes, my son?” “Aren’t cows supposed to have udders?” First thought: these are very young cows, in the spring of their maidenhood. Any minute now their udders will drop and they’ll be showering cheddar and mozzarella and….. ….wait a minute, they do have something dangling down there. Maybe a kind of proto-udder….? CRAP! At the edge of the pack, one of the now obviously he-cows began scraping his hoof on the dirt. In my mind I was transported to a Hemingway novel, except without the hairy chest and high powered rifles. Visions of a bullfighter’s gold embroidered, skin tight sequins and a life-preserving sprint to the gate swirled through my tiny mind. Until I glanced at the gate, more than a quarter of a mile away, and I remembered to my horror that I had not sprinted that sort of distance since my junior high school physical fitness test. Which I failed. Meanwhile, my lithe twelve year old put his hand gently on my shoulder. Not for reassurance. But to steady himself as he stretched, teleporting himself to Pamplona as he prepared to outrun his overfed father. But, dear readers, humans evolved to the top of the food chain through guile rather than animalian exceptionalism! When Luke accidentally leaned closer to step into his hammy warm up, I whispered, “Keep smiling….keeeeeeep smiling….” With all the grace of a funeral celebrant who forgets the name of the dearly departed, an awkward smile-grimace etched into my cheeks, revealing my pearly grays to the herd of bulls. For some reason they had not yet charged, for all their chuffing and hoof pounding. “Don’t run,” I instructed paternally, “because that will trigger their charge reflex. And they’re a whole heap faster than the both of us. We’re a-gonna back up nice and slow like, so’s we don’t start a ruckus.” To this day I am unclear why I began speaking like Slim Pickens. I even adopted his affectation of sniffling to punctuate the end of each sentence. Much to my amusement, which was quickly supplanted by abject horror, bulls interpret the human sniffle as an aggressive, even challenging sort of gesture. Generally, they do not respond with kindness. The first of the bulls began its charge in an explosion of dust and snorting, a shower of bullish snot in its trail. For a moment, a tiny rainbow appeared in the moist haze. Before admiring the aesthetics excessively, I screeched to my newly-endangered child: “Run!” Little known fact that is now known, at least to me: bulls can behave like pack animals under appropriate circumstances. Such behaviors can manifest themselves as, say, just for example, totally hypothetically, murderous rampages. A moment after the first bull had shot toward us, a cloud of roughly four thousand like-mindedly demented bulls bolted in our direction. Not like shrieking teenage girls chasing their favorite British pop musicians. Oh no. More like an army of slasher movie antagonists chasing the lost tourists, chainsaws at the ready. Except an entire colony of them instead of a lone psychopath. Few motivations are as motivational as impending death. The boy raced across the field like a Lamborghini at Le Mans, deftly leaping over hillocks of granite, excrement, ant hills and other horrors of the natural world. For my part, I raced as quickly as a fifty-three year old diabetic with a recent triple bypass is permitted by the laws of God and physics.
The Almighty was with us that day, dear friends. For against all of my detailed calculations, the electrified fence was within our grasp before a single horn could meet my spinal column. In a leap better depicted in a Marvel comic than a silly blog, the youngster was over the fence and benignly into an agricultural safe space. His father (i.e., me), panting, exhausted, deeply humiliated by lack of conditioning and cardiac-exploding dread, had the same patch of Eden in sight. It was there, glistening, majestic, as beautiful as a plate of crispy bacon on an autumn Sunday morning….. However, fences with twelve million volts pulsing through them are not the gateway to nirvana, as I soon discovered. A shudder through my vertebrae, into my pelvic bone, clear to the metatarsals. “Son of a mother!” I shouted after instinctively shaking my hands free of the fence. In hindsight, perhaps I should have expected the bulls’ reaction to the sight of a hominid shaking uncontrollably, drooling on himself, as if inside a magic 8-ball when someone really, really wants an answer. They stopped. Not just one and then the others, in a natural sort of herd-mentality sequence. It was as if they were part of a single organism, drawn by the same string, whatever mixed metaphors you can conjure to describe several dozen independent creatures who are struck at once with the same thought. Their hooves carved into the dirt, turned up tufts of lumpy black New Hampshire soil. For my part, wiping my mouth, checking my unmentionables for evidence of any unseemliness (and finding them more or less clean), I opened the gate and calmly walked through it. Although I was exceptionally careful to make sure it was locked behind me. Hanging in that summer air, I was sure I could hear the sarcastic cackle of Princess Buttercup, “As you wish….”

All Hail Carnatheron

Today's blog(ge) posting comes courtesy of my son Luke. Trolls are encouraged to direct any displeasure to The Radio Program(me) rather than to a 15 year old, unless they're really so deeply insecure that they feel the need to pick on children. With that said, and civility mercifully restored to the universe (since trolls always respond well to reason), we offer you on this fine day the blog(ge) entry from my deeply disturbed and soon to be institutionalized son Luke: Good greetings, mortals, and all hail Carnatheron! I am on a mission from Him to spread His message. Allow me to share my story. I was sitting in a chair one night, one of my favorite places to sit. I was holding a mirror in front of myself and practicing an Elvis impression. Barely had I gotten through my first “A-thank-ya” when I saw Him in the mirror. He manifested Himself from the shadows, a great grey skull looming behind me. Whips of darkness detached themselves from the main Entity, snaking towards me. I looked behind me. There was nothing there. Then I heard His voice. The clearest and most beautiful sound in the world said, “Thank-ya vurry much.” From that moment on, He never left me alone. In time, He told me all there was to know about worshipping Him. The Do’s and Don’ts of Worshipping Carnatheron Do: Sacrifice regularly, most especially.... Blood Money Blood Money Gerbils Real Estate Cupcakes Cheese (Swiss or Gouda) Have lengthy conversations with Him Let Him watch Wheel of Fortune Feed the pigeons Don’t: Argue with Him about any of the following.... The merits of Cheddar The quality of the Star Wars prequels Garlic breadsticks How tasty AB+ blood is Mention Arvid Screame, PhD, Mrs. Hang toilet paper facing the wall Forget to worship Him and/or the pigeons About Carnatheron We must know our Lord. In the beginning, Creation declared its own existence, and it was so. Soon after, it grew bored, and created Carnatheron. He did little for those first few æons, contributing to humanity only Swiss cheese. In 1832, an iguana butcher in Greenland discovered the Creation story and began worshipping Him. Carnatheron possessed a deer skull in order to speak with the man, a form He continues to take. Carnatheron wears only the most tasteful of clothing adorned with pink ribbons and severed nostrils. This incident was the posterior-punch He needed in order to realize His full potential: the potential to conquer Creation. He created many cults after that, all of which believe a slightly different narrative. One thing we all can agree on, though, is that pigeons are awesome. This has nothing to do with Carnatheron; we just like pigeons. Finally, in case you do any of the Don’ts, I shall leave you with this chant and translation to pacify Carnatheron. Ø Carnatheron, ego sum servūs æternus Tuūs. [O Carnatheron, I am Your eternal servant.]Non iratum ad me es. [Don’t be mad at me.]Tu melior es quam omnes homineses.[You are better than all peopleses.]Licet Caseum Helvetia, dona Tua ad terram, es testamentum ad intelligentia Tua. [May the Swiss Cheese, Your gift to the world, be a testament to Your genius.]Non est potestas super terram quae comparatur ei Carnatheron.[There is no power on earth that compares with Carnatheron.]

The Saga of the Maytag

The Saga of the MaytagLoki’s icy breath ripped through the heart of Westford, Massachusetts. Never mind that it was mid-August and that the mercury was hanging a 97 spot over my tiny but uncomfortable condo. Trust me, and suspend your disbelief. It was icy. The snorts of his laughter filled the halls of Valhalla, interrupting the other gods’ weekly game of backgammon. Freya, always one to speak her mind, spat at the Trickster, “What are you cackling about, you freaking monkey?” Ignoring the simianist slur, Loki responded with a giggle, “The washing machine! The washing machine!” Never one to explain his cryptic babbling, he skipped away to the Boy Gods’ Sauna and massage room, the place of more back room deals than the VIP section at a Metallica concert. Immediately he spotted Thor, relaxing from a hard day being Nordic. As one of the Furies rubbed Thor’s swollen shoulders, Loki observed, “You’re looking a bit puny, old boy. I’m not sure hammer swinging is still your thing.” Instantly enraged, as the deities always are in these stories, Thor flung the Fury clear to Zimbabwe, where it landed among some very confused goat herders. “Did you order the mythological Scandinavian?” “Aren’t the Furies Greek?” This tripped off a folklore debate amongst a number of extremely well educated Zimbabwean agricultural workers. Which will be the subject of another story at another time. Meanwhile, now that Thor had cleared the room of all but himself and his frequent tormentor, he puffed out his already puffy chest, hairs popping off like tiny arrows. “Thor crush all thing with Hammer!” To illustrate the point he waved Mjollnir (name of the thing for those of you scoring at home) over his head like a flamenco dancer clicking castanets, but in a much more demonstrably manly sort of way. With an audible whoosh he swung it directly at the now empty massage table.It is not recorded in the Viking sagas that Thor had vision problems. However, in a runic inscription on the cliffs outside Bergen, Norway there is a carving that clearly shows Thor with corrective visionware. They would have called them Coke bottle glasses in another era. Scholars suspect that he was roughly 20-200. In other words, legally blind. And lo, the hammer did not crushify the defenseless massage table. No, instead it glanced off the edge, ricocheting rather uncomfortably onto Thor’s patella. If you have never seen an immortal squeal in pain, gentle reader, you are missing out on a true bucket list item. In a tone audible only to the local bat population, Thor gripped the rising welt on his knee, and began to hop in a sort of Riverdance for amputees. “Oh goodness, I’m surprised you could even feel that,” Loki calmly snarked. Rage rising in his cheeks, overwhelming the agony of the kneecap, Thor again raised his hammer, this time marking Loki’s face as his target. An instinct as ancient as the granite that filled his head guided Thor’s hammer straight and true to its target, as he spat an utterance of equal measures blessing and curse, “Lord of my ancestors, guide Mjollnir (again, it’s the hammer, stay with me) to render my enemies lifeless blobs of putty.”And yea, the hammer did drop, and Loki’s face was split into the fragments of all the atoms that composed it. And yet….. You will recall, my learned friends, that Loki was the trickiest of the gods. Among his repertoire of rib-ticklers was ability to mask one thing with the visage of another. To wit: Loki had fooled Thor into seeing Loki’s own simpering, pock marked face when in fact it was…. ….my washing machine. A full basin of recently soiled personals thus stewed in a brew of their own filth, unable to drain, or agitate, or otherwise smash my wardrobe into cleanliness. I can hear Loki mocking me as I lie in the dark and contemplate the indignities of the local laundromat. Meanwhile, Thor is back at the massage table, after a quick visit with his orthopedist. No jumping jacks for a month or so, but otherwise his patella will heal just fine. And he still thinks he smashed Loki’s face.

Murder Salad

Sweet Summer Sweat

Their world is a four foot square patch of dirt, suspended on a suburban deck, safe from the prying mandibles of wandering deer, raccoons and weekenders seeking refuge from the Boston summers. I planted them as deep in the soil as the planter allows, which is to say roughly four inches below the surface. Shallow enough for them to breath, but far enough to keep them subjugated to my will. The beets were the first to rise, preening above the seedlings with a sort of Eastern European sneer. "You sicken me, zucchini! With your tiny leaves and acute lack of vegetable production! I shall block the sunshine from your faces and cause you grievous injury!" Like nearly all young life, the beets were unaware of the fate that awaited them: boiled in a pot of their own entrails, flavorful leaves hacked from their bodies and devoured with a dollop of warm chevre. Not even the slightest droppings of regret on the part of their tormentors. "You are all doomed to die!" I scream at them each morning as I dump cold water on their heads and cackle. I'm not sure the cackle was really necessary, but I was getting into character. "Soon you will bathe in a bolus of my stomach acid, and you shall become ... ME!" Most of the plants have the good sense to recoil in terror. The zucchini immediately shoot their stalks to the sun in a desperate prayer for life. The beets and jalapenos wilt, suddenly aware that there is no hope. And then there is the curious case of the cucumber. It breaks free of its confines, lurching over the pine edge of the planter, and crawling the length of the deck, latching onto the screen door, and willing itself to life up the side of my townhouse. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" it bellows directly at me, though the sound resonates throughout the entire village. Somewhere, a little girl asks, "Mummy, can't we save the vegetables from that horrible man?" But with a whisper that bores into the tiny child's soul comes mother's only possible reply: "Come along, dear. And don't make eye contact with that maniac in the garden." Knowing there is no help on the way, the desperate cucumber hatches a plan. Wild tentacles sprout from its vines, acting like a set of green limbs. Soon, the plant has become a leafy millipede. Some of its appendages are forced into escape duties, looking for weak spots in the perimeter where it can crawl to freedom. Others, in a scene both terrifying and inspirational, wrap around the throats of its neighbors. "Listen, jalapenos. If you're not part of the resistance, you're part of the oppression! Help me get out of this hellhole, or so help me Gawd!" But the jalapenos can only whimper. Even then, something incomprehensible. And in Spanish. Following through on its threat, the cucumber tentacles tighten around the helpless jalapeno necks, and squeeze until their delicious green fruit turns a deathly shade of purple. Then they drop, lifeless, only to be reclaimed by the soil from which they sprung. It is August. For months now the resistance has held the gardener at bay, even as he salivated over them and contemplated the tastes and textures of their young flesh. The cucumbers have fought well. Its garden mates, less so. But in the end, it is all for naught. The scissors have arrived. One by one, the salivating gardener rips elongated green yields from the heart of the sprawling vines. As he carries away his harvest, he is sure he can hear sobbing.

Tales from a Sleep Surface

In the Twilight of July

I have a unique talent. No, not my impressions of the greatest scientists of the 16th and early 17th centuries. While my Francis Bacon regularly has them rolling in the aisles at the local Elks Club Chapter, there are thousands of Bacon-ators out there, as you will know if you've recently been to Caesar's Palace in Reno. No, no. The talent that seems to reside solely within my personage consists of the ability to achieve unconsciousness at any time, in any physical position, and for the duration of my choosing. Just ask security at the Cordoba train station, the ones working the overnight shift on August 28, 1994, who I surprised with a sudden leg twitch just as they were drawing the chalk lines around me. Then ask any of the passengers on the train from that station to Seville how any human could possibly doze off while in the refreshment line. And kneeling down to pick up change. To this day they utter my name with equal measures of awe and disgust. For reasons unknown to me, this has been a regular source of irritation to passers-by, family members, romantic partners and law enforcement.As a for-instance, I offer the recent incident that occurred between myself and the self-described better half of my long-term, non-consensual relationship. Let's call her Clytemnestra. I had drifted into an impenetrably deep slumber one night during an intense session with the bowling app that my handlers insisted on installing to my iPad. High score: 77. I know. You may genuflect now. Nestra, as we'll call her, had pulled the shades over her gorgeous yellow peepers a number of hours earlier, so she'd be good and rested for her dawn cackle. But after I'd passed out, the finest of the Apple suite of products next to my pillow, I eventually flopped over and found my hand against the cool metallic skin. I am unaware of any clinical studies, but I feel in my marrow that there must be some sort of gag-like reflex within the human organism that requires any foreign objects discovered during the half-death of sleep to be shoved an arm's length away. Perhaps that is another of my own, unique talents. Since I have never discussed this with another human being, I have no idea if I am alone in possessing this instinct. And so, with all the dexterity of a walrus taking a slap shot, I relocated the iPad. Where it landed is the subject of some debate in my household. Nestra contends that it severed her eyebrows, permanently, thereby eliminating one of her most distinguishing, if not distinguished, of features. On the other hand, I make no representations on the trajectory of the object, even as I accept full responsibility. Regardless of the initial path, the 'Pad and I were soon reunited. The corner lodged itself roughly halfway up my left nostril. And when I say roughly, well, you get the idea. Again, my animalian response kicked in. I have no control over these things, honestly I don't. And even if I did, I am not sure if I would have behaved any differently. And so I slid the shiny square puck back in the direction of my beloved. At this point I would personally like to extend my thanks to the engineers at the Apple Corporation for making the latest version of the iPad so very capable of gliding across Egyptian cotton sheets -- 700 and something thread count -- with such grace. This time the edge caught Nestra somewhere in the larynx. And I discovered something new about this woman who has kept me chained in the basement for lo these many years: she has some instincts of her own. In this case, they consisted of a miraculous upward swoop that had her sit bolt upright, in spite of the depth of REM state, extract the offending electronic device from our place of semi-slumber, and spike it with the ferocity of Rob Gronkowski after a touchdown. The New England Patriot Gronk, not the latest Floridian incarnation. And with that, Nestra had won our little match of nocturnal hockey, 1-0. Not the first time she could raise a fist in victory, probably not the last. But at the cost of an uninterrupted night's sleep.

The "Please Do the Show" Begging Tour: Brian Blessed Edition

Unmercifully, Not Yet August

There seems to be a teensy-eensy little bit of confusion out in the tiny sliver of the world that I call home when it comes to what we are trying to accomplish with this Radio Program(me) thing. There is no sales angle. I do not want or need anyone's cash. Already have plenty, thank you. No, no, the idea is to create a community of chucklemaking among people who enjoy an occasional fart joke. If you're the sort that posts photos of your latest Smith and Wesson purchase, or romantic poses with internally-combusted metallic slabs, this is likely not for you. Nothing against guns or cars. How else would we have slaughtered the native population and taken everything as our own? What does this have to do with Brian Blessed, you ask? More than you think, amigos. You see, I adore Brian Blessed. He embodies all of the head scratching imponderables that I love about life: a Shakespearean actor who is best known for roles like Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon. As someone with a bit of a pretentious bent who has made his bones in the muck and mire of the corporate world, I can appreciate the juxtaposition. Also, he has a wife called "Hildegard." I would love the man just for that. A phenomenal performer, the man comes from the sort of background that breeds great art: impoverished, laboring slob looking for daylight in an otherwise bleak landscape. Hey, Ben Jonson was a bricklayer. Chaucer sold wine. All of the toffs have recast Shakespeare as one of their own, but apart from Byron and Lady Diana, when have the upper crusts ever produced anything worth remembering? Take your time. Again I have drifted from the object of my admiration, Mr. Brian Blessed. He is also the man to whom I make my entreaty. This Radio Program(me) deal is a silly little podcast in its fledgling infancy. And we desperately need something that will put us on the map. I can think of no better option for map-placement than the incomparable Mr. Blessed. I have a sketch lined up for him in which he will play God, who is working on a dating plan with his bestie Gabriel in order to meet the future mother of his child. And so, I supplicate to you, gentle readers, to reach out to your Congressman, Member of Parliament, evil overlord, school board member or local shaman to help me get Brian Blessed to do the show. Please call anyone who will listen, even people who have never heard of Brian Blessed, and tell them that he MUST do the show, or dire consequences will follow! No idea what those might be, but feel free to bluff your way through that one. Hints of impending physical violence, financial damage, raging cases of hemorrhoids, or an inevitable apocalypse should do the trick. Go forth, and do my bidding! The person who wangles this Blessed character on the show will be entitled to an extravagant reward and endless amounts of gratitude! For those needing an intro to Mr. Blessed's rather eccentric body of work, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWJSEk9JIJo

An Inappropriately Intimate Tour of The Radio Program(me)

Mercifully, July 2021

With the release of the Fifth(e) Episode of The Radio Program(me), we thought it would be appropriate to provide a behind the scenes look at stuff behind the scenes. Not that we’re stuffing our behinds. That would be weird. Although I won’t judge any of you… Some people ask us, “Hey, you, since you’re not charging anyone for this middling form of ‘entertainment’, why are you nimrods actually doing any of this?” A fine question, with an equally fine answer: ego. You see, once upon a time I dreamt of writing life-enriching tales of…..well, I don’t really know what, and if I did I would be bloody Dostoevsky, wouldn’t I? But I had dreams of being an intellectual. Then a couple of realizations set in: 1) I am not an intellectual, and 2) everyone hates intellectuals anyway. That second point came as quite a relief. You see, I realized that it is perfectly ok for me to be a dumbass since there’s so much company.But those dreams of literary empire lingered in my tiny, shriveled brain, and eventually leaked out in the form of The Radio Program(me). I read life altering existential philosophy, and when I tried to copy it, I could only manage a few fart jokes. Pearls in, swine out. Which brings me back to the scene of our behinds tour. First, jokes and vignettes are created in the dungeon, which is our jocular little nickname for a stone walled room where people are tortured and forgotten for years on end until their relatives can pay the ransom. Once our humor coaches, Fang and Vasily (known around the office as “the Groin twister”) have extracted all of the enjoyment they can from our permanent writing fellows, the proto-episode is placed on the conveyer belt for further assembly. From there, our uproariously forgettable content is carved into small, malleable blocks, and trundled into the quality control department, which “works” to make sure that our quality is under North Korea levels of control. Wouldn’t want to have excessive amounts of quality. Once they have stripped away any hints of controversy, offensive material or humorous content, we shovel our jokes into a bin that we like to call “Flopsy.” There, jokes are spun through a flaming hot rinse of human animosity, and lovingly sprayed down with baboon pheromones, which our marketing department has calculated will attract the likes of anyone who is still reading this. Then, applying a stamp reading “kombucha”, we peddle our podcast through 7-11s and other fine purveyors of excrement throughout the United States and Canada. Any feedback on the podcasts is welcome in our Department of Derision.

Notes from a Salad Bar

June isn't over yet? Are you kidding?!

Those of you who know me realize that I am not one to go off on a rant. You can stop laughing now. Seriously, you're hurting my feelings. OK, ok, so I have some anger management issues. Rage, some would say. But in many cases it is justified. Recent developments at the watering hole known as the "cafeteria" validate my primal screams and the dismal view I have come to take of my species-mates. That includes anyone who is reading now, unless you inhabit a species other than homo sapiens. While slopping the barbequed tofu onto my cardboard, state-pen quality tray, the salad bar line came to a screeching halt. Staring at the edamame, contemplating the cornucopeia of soy that was presenting itself, I soon came to wonder why the pace of the line had slowed so. A moment's pause brings no reaction at all, in spite of my chemical imbalances. However, longer than six seconds and the blood pressure begins to rise. Drawing a deep, cleansing breath, I peered around a pair of patrons ahead of me. And there it was. In navigating through the wilds of Boston area traffic, one ordinarily does not uncover the causes of the bends in the spacetime continuum that force us into reading bumper stickers for entertainment. You glare at the freak shows in the neighboring cars, ponder how much you could be making if traffic time were instead spent on gainful employment. But unless it is one of those happy days when there's a major accident, the world of the auto slowdown remains a mystery. Not so in the salad bar line. Every homicidal instinct in my oversized frame was suddenly triggered. For there, hovering over the spinach trough, was the man who was to become my arch-nemesis: red haired, bespectacled and gawkier than Big Bird. Mindlessly, thoughtlessly, heartlessly creating a line of hungry nimrods like me, who, even though inexplicably falling into a queue for green things that technically fit the definition of food, are privately dreaming of burgers dripping with cheese, of snorkeling in a milkshake paradise, of soaking in hot tubs of ketchup-entombed fries...... Oh, mommy..... But instead of the crunch of beetroot between my choppers, I am standing. Waiting. While Big Bird picks at individual leaves of lettuce, interviewing each of them to ensure they are the right cultural fit for his palate. Where do you see yourself in five hours? This is not a joke. The man quite literaly applied the tongs to individual leaves of lettuce, lifted them to the sneezeguard, which he used as some sort of flora magnifying glass, turning ever so slightly to get the exact refraction of light off them. Vein integrity, check. Overall greenie-ness? Check. Structural soundness? Hmmm, suspect. Better release this one back into the wild. Fourteen and half hours later, the Leaf Inspector is still at it. Thousands of hungry, angry people are stacked up in a line like skinny European cyclists at the Tour de France (do these stretchy pant thingies make my pelvic bone look fat?). All of us too bloody polite to shove this vege-maniac out of the way and cry havoc! Having had quite enough of this, I very gently and politely rip the toaster from its socket, the electric cord momentarily hanging limply from its underbelly. But not for long, folks, not for long. Sensing an opportunity, I whack Big Bird on the back of the head, just to pull him from his lettuce meditations. And as he lifts his head to discover the violator of the rather basic social norm prohibiting assualt with deadly appliances, I wrap the cord around his scrawny, pimply neck, and pull on it with all the ferocity of a Borgia. Actually, they were more into poisoning, but you get my point. His eyes bulge, face turning the color of my barbequed tofu. "Die, pig, die!" I shout into his ear, hoping it will be the last sound he hears in this life. Meanwhile, the crowd has burst into spontaneous applause. After a moment, they fall into a chant, rhythmically clapping their support: "No more let-tuce!" Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap... "No more let-tuce!" A few minutes later, I have the pleasure of dropping his lifeless bony frame to the linoleum. Exhausted, I draw a deep breath, while two appreciative patrons voluntarily dab the sweat from my brow. It has been a good day. One less impediment to the otherwise relentless march forward of civilization. And I shall eat a complete salad. As Gawd is mah wit-nuss, I shall eat the mickey-frickey salad!!!

Questions That Can Be Asked

It's Still June?

There are things that I ponder, when the world goes quiet and the sun has been carried on the Great Sky Chariot to the Nether World. Many of these things are quite irrelevant: will I ever graduate from Obedience School? who DO I think I am, anyway? why won't Betty White return my phone calls? But on certain medium-rare occasions I think a great thought, usually someone else's, and it strikes me: I am not a person who has great thoughts. I have decided to share one of my seriously not even good thoughts with you, gentle reader. Even with the not so gentle ones. Of which I suspect there are many. I am a firm believer in a loving God, creator of all the Universe. I am a sarcastic circus freak generally, but in all things related to YHWH, I am not. This is a thing that I do most earnestly believe. And yet, I struggle with the fundamental questions that all reflective people of faith grapple with during their highly individualized journeys. Which brings me to my most recent moment of doubt: why house an oversized pink slug inside the human mouth? Forget the eyes being the windows to the soul and all that crap. The human mouth is at once the core of our being, into which pass the life giving solid and liquid substances that give us the energy to binge-watch Norwegian serial dramas on Netflix. At the same time this electrifying little slice of the anatomy is also the offramp to what makes us human in the first place: speech. From an engineering perspective this double dip through the tunnel of life is a bit of a head scratcher: it's a dessert topping AND a floor wax! But setting aside that perplexing little duality, there is the quandary of speech itself. Its uses are highly variable, consisting of everything from the works of Shakespeare to the unrepeatables that I scream at my computer. Weaponized as the tool of Internet trolls. Hurled heartlessly, even between loved ones. Dividing as easily as uniting. Maybe even more easily. It's questionable whether we should have been gifted with such a momentous capability, given that we use it with so little circumspection. And all that bologna-wrapped silliness aside, I can't get over the fact that the instrument we use for this incredible gift that is at once friend and foe is a writhing, twisting creature straight from the set of Alien, coated in slime, with sensors appended to its skin like some freakishly parasitic earthworm. I do not understand, but I trust there is a reason. And it is one of the first questions that I will ask when I get to those oh so pearly gates.

History of Questionable Decisions, Part I

Later in the Month of June, Same Year, Same Stupid Desk

Many of you already know that I'm a financialist trapped in the body of a brain dead orangutan. What many of you DON'T know is that my long and ignominious run in the world of making up numbers -- or "facts" in the jargon of the trade -- is rapidly drawing to a close. I know what you're thinking: gosh, how can an otherwise average-intelligence guy like Dave possibly do anything other than count? A fine and fair question. After all, at 56 I am in the prime of my girlhood. Surely I have many decades of quality labor that I can devote to increasing the wealth of others. So you would think, my fine bespeckled fiends. However, other horizons beckon. They call me in my sleep, just after exhorting me to "kill the pigs." That first bit is a little weird since I don't live on a farm and there are no pigs nearby that I can actually slaughter. No matter. I listen to the other parts of the beckoning, which frankly make a heap more sense. "Do other things..." those voices command me. And so, other things shall be done. Still hashing out exactly what those other things are at the moment, but I am fairly sure they involve a nametag, a bucket of filthy water, and poverty. Beats living in corporate finance, folks. So what that means is that you'll be seeing more blog(ge)s(s), hearing more Radio Program(me)s(s), and generally having some exposure to whatever crosses my mind. Please let me apologize in advance.....
OK, maybe we're not quite as cynical as all that. But we didn't say all things are stupid. Just most. Your garden variety kitchen sponge, for example. Stupid. Mutual funds. Ridiculous! Fund raisers. More annoying than a carton of eels. Hedgehogs on the other hand, are not at all stupid. They are delightful little creatures that remind us of a beneficent Creator who loves us. Everything else is imbecillic.
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