Glass Santa, Eighty Dollars! EIGHTY DOLLARS!

Sixty years from now, when I am a geriatric crank with a squint and a facial tick and a hump and Joyce Carol Oates eyeglasses (or a monocle- we'll have to see what's available), I will order my obese orphaned nephew to set up a tent at the foot of my driveway. From this tent we will sell everything from abandoned toilets to butterfly-shaped crap to stick in your garden. Everything will be priced to suit your budget, but you will have to haggle with me anyway, and I plan on being hard of hearing. In deference to Little Edie, I will wear skirts as turbans and coo at the raccoons that show up to eat the dog treats I hide in the roadside toilets. At night my nephew will pack everything into his seventy-year-old Geo Metro and sleep on its roof, while I hobble back to the house to take a sauna in my socks. This will happen only if I become a homeowner at some point. You can't run a tent business from a studio apartment.

Generic Diflucan For All!

Who cares?  They ought to be selling it over the counter.  You see, everything should be sold over the counter.  Arsenic, heroin, uranium, leaded gasoline, organic produce, tiny Chinese toys with no age warnings, civil war-era cannons, latex gloves, Tab soda, babies, and so forth.  In reaction to this terrible market freedom, we would perforce break up into small "fear tribes" and fight each other to the death.  Some of us will sack Rome.  Some of us will live in bailey huts and exchange our farming and fighting skills for the protection of of the local lord.  Most of us will wrap our homes in thirty or forty layers of barbed wire and live off canned meat and the flesh of dead relatives.  It's not a pretty picture.  Let's pretend I never brought it up.  Here is a pretty picture:

This is the best show ever!  Today, Ferny thought he wasn't really Irish because his dad came from Spain!  Piggley thought he was ultra Irish because HIS parents were Irish, but then his Mom told him that Granny was from Germany!  Dannan discovered that she was also Danish and Welsh!  Then Cobi Jones showed up and drove the point home somehow!  Jakers!  JAKERS!

He Burns the Jungle for No Reason

I have never read The Heart of Darkness.  I have opened the book several times, and every time the words "cruising yawl" reach my retinas I snap the book shut and return it to the shelf with such speed and fury that the walls shudder and the cats scatter in three directions.  I haven't the patience to sit through Apocalyse Now, either, and for this failure I am regularly excoriated by strangers and chums alike.  If you are like me, and bless your exquisite, bloated heart if you are, this site is the answer to none of your prayers, because you never knew to pray for such a thing.  You're welcome. 

See? Women Don't Really Pay Attention to Politics.

First, I liked Tucker Carlson.  I liked the cut of his jib.  I thought he was as cute as a bug's ear.  Then I discovered that he keeps a wife and four children, and looks like a silly ass in posed photographs.  So now, about Tucker Carlson: I don't like him, and he doesn't like me.  If I ever see him on the city bus, and I'm sure I will someday, I'm just going to stare out the window at a cloud or examine my manicure.  "But you would never get a manicure," you might say, and you'd be correct.  Salons are not sanitary.  But what Tucker Carlson doesn't know won't hurt him.

And to think that I liked the cut of his jib.  Bug's ear.  How I embarrass myself.  Oop, look at the time.

Shut Up For a Minute

I went outside with my binoculars to watch for intruders.  I didn't see any.  I hid in the ivy for a moment and ate a few pecans.  Either those outlaws are getting trickier, or I forgot to take the caps off the lenses.

I've Been Busy, and For Nothing. Nothing!

If you're like most people, you're probably wondering what I've done to prepare for the Democratic National Convention.  First, I've ordered the help to steam the table linens and reorganize the decorative mallard hunting decoys that line the mantle and fill the basement to knee-level.  Second, I've burnt two loaves of bread and set them aside for the poor.  Third, I've fired live ammo at the tubercular fellow who repeatedly creeps into my lawn to commit random acts of kindness.  Fourth, I've wished evil on at least four people from afar, though I would have done that anyway.  Fifth, I've stumbled through the entire internet, only to find that a.) the Convention will be held in Boston, and not at my country estate, as per my agreement with Mrs. Kerry, and b.) dear, sweet Owain may or may not have gone through with his threat to lock himself in a cupboard with his laptop to discover how the self-trepanning procedure affects his blogging.  Despite what you may have divined from his writings, he does more than pace the parapet at dusk, chattering in his hooded robe like a mad monk.  He also teases chubby children through the megaphone built into his watermelon truck.

I've Missed the Hell Out of You, My Darlings

Where did dear old Stanislaus disappear to?  He was off to camp the Adirondacks and he never came back.  Moreover, he had my only copy of TV Guide’s '1000 Most Exciting Television Moments.'   And yes, he tended to have bad breath, and his hair was falling out due to his extreme fear of mountain cats.  But was he all bad?  Let us consider his other issues:

-His taste in rugs and window treatments was unconscionable
-He maintained massive inventories of over-the-counter medications
-When he farted, he blamed it on his shoes
-When he wasn’t large and in charge, he was large and sleeping heavily
-He did not notice when the city water had an odor
-He could barely speak for weeping
-The local tavern carried special freezer steaks just for him
-Mother’s health was all a joke to him
-When Walter Mondale was in town, he was nowhere to be found
-He took his interest in tunnels too far and collapsed the root cellar
-To this day I’m paying off his Ax-Man account
-Eight years of Little League taught him nothing
-He had “actionable ideas” for outwitting the Amazing Randi
-Tight socks concerned him
 
When I stop to really think about Stanislaus and where he could have gone, I usually fall into a larger, more metaphysical think-hole.  Where have ALL my friends and acquaintances gone?  Sigh.  I suspect that spiders have eaten a great many of them.  Probably because of something I did.

Nobody In Here But Us Anchovies

I rarely eat brie cheese.  When I do eat brie, I do not eat the rind.  I eat up to the rind, and then I stop and move on to other things, like the grapes, or television.  This seems to baffle regular brie eaters, who, upon noticing my uneaten rinds, stare at me from behind their feedbags in confusion and hurt.  When they come to their senses, they usually eat my rinds for me.  This pattern has repeated itself for as long as I’ve known brie. 
 
I would like to tell you more about my experiences with cheese, but it’s very difficult to remember cheese anecdotes.  While you’re waiting for my next anecdote, why not enjoy these loosely phonetic lyrics:
 
HEY, durDAY, BABY I GOT chur MUHnay DONcha WURRay, durDAY
BABY I GOT chur MUNnay, said HEY,  (x2)

Accept No Invitations to My House

We have ants. We have no multi-ant melees – we have solitary ants, who wander lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills. Since we encounter only one ant at any given time, we cannot rule out the possibility that we host only one ant, and he really gets around. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call him Emmet. Yesterday Emmet was dragging a third of a beetle shell across the floor. Post coming soon: We have beetles.

This One's For the Ladies

No amount of ram-sacrifice or idolater-slaying will lift the plague on the term “bimonthly.” Does it mean twice a month? No. Does it mean every two months? No. It means that every tomfool or dictionary I consult has a different effing answer for me. This naturally raises a sensitive issue: are the triumphs of medical science destroying natural selection and ruining our chances of evolving into gigantic, sexy, emotionless brainpods with wheels for legs? Maybe. And, since I am obviously opposed to the progress of medical science, does that mean that I want all asthmatics to die preventable deaths? Hell, no! Not the asthmatics I know! But all those asthmatics who’ve made no attempt to get to know me? Eh.

Why do birds suddenly appear every time I am near? The answer is simple: I am a one-stop bupkis shop.

Modern Art Ruined My Summer

If you’ve spent your summer sulking in the driveway, drawing lines in the gravel with a stick, don’t make the mistake of imagining the new Walker Museum Sculpture Garden Miniature Golf Course to be a balm for your wounds. The course is permanently immobilized by a baying, roiling mass of children, many of whom are visibly sticky and audibly miserable. Listen, you Walker people! Not all things miniature are for children! Many miniatures are, in fact, choking hazards. Lo, mini golf courses are for teenagers and tipsy adults, their wonders to perform.

Emboldened by nothing, and for the potential ease of potential readers, we’ve enabled the comment feature on this website. Be warned, however: this does not mean that you are to skid into our website on three hooves, initiate gunfights in the wagon dust, or urinate and cuss within view or earshot of our ladyfolk. Put on some shoes, at the very least, and wipe the toothpaste off your cheek. You’re a man now.

It was a remarkable feeling, that feeling I had. There I was, posed on the stair like a decorated hero, glaring into the wind and suppressing the urge, when, like a lozenge to the throat, the soothing reached the strep: something that used to blight me was gone. Not only just gone – it had been gone for some time, and the blissful interval between the exit and the realization was as a second youth wasted. It was foolish, really, to let a milestone of such rare quality pass without a jolly drunk or a tray of cookies.

And who was this grisly offender that passed silently in the night? Was it Emmy Award-winning “Frasier”? Was it the California recall election? Was it George magazine, trucker hats, or Greta Van Susteren’s first face? No, no, nothing like. It was merely the passing of that hideous vintage clothing fad.