Notice of intent

Just popping here to let you guys know that there is, in fact, stuff on the way, and no, I am not making that up. Not right now, of course, but certainly by Sunday, I think. Until then, enjoy the comforts of hearth and home, kith and kin, this and that, you get my drift. Meanwhile, here in the Vampire State, the leaders of both the State Senate (a Republican) and the State Assembly (a Democrat) are both under indictment for being more crooked than a pig's penis. Bipartisanship, it's a wonderful thing.

UPDATE: I am sitting here at my desk in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  This is not unusual; I often sit at my desk here, except when I go for lunch, whereupon I will leave my desk and this building behind in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to break free of the suffocating bounds of a rotting Christian morality and establish myself as an avatar of the Nietzschean Ubermensch with a Subway's meatball marinara sandwich and two chocolate chip cookies,  instead of the increasingly decadent roast beef  sandwich with mayonnaise and black pepper; but what is striking me as very strange is that I am the only one who seems to be doing so. Sitting at my desk, I mean, just in case you lost the thread of the previous sentence as thoroughly as I did. The place is empty. Did someone declare a national holiday today, and if so, how come I am the only person who didn't get the memo? Curiouser and curiouser, Akaky said to himself, and then wondered when the rabbit with the watch will going to show up, preferably with some not stale lemon danish. Cherry danish is acceptable as well, but raspberry danish is not. Standards must be upheld, lest the fabric of civilization disintegrate completely and leave us all in a Hobbesian state of nature without any clean underwear.

Pot shot

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.." The former junior senator from Illinois, bloviating on January 21.

Why not, I wonder?  He does it all the time and he seems to be doing quite well with the strategy, unless, of course, this is not a strategy but rather an example of what the psychologists call projection, wherein one imputes one's own faults and shortcomings on to someone else. In either case, it hardly seems fair that He gets to project stuff and the GOP does not, and since fairness is the great mantra of the Illinois Messiah and His minions one would expect that conservatives would sue this maladministration for violating our equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment. I don't think it will happen, though; the trial lawyers are on His side. Such is life, I fear.

Just stuff, or more pathetic excuses for not writing

I have not been posting, which I am sure you’ve already figured out for yourselves, but I am sure you will be happy to know that the reason is not that I have been lazy or suffering from writer’s block [again!] or any of the other reasons I usually give for being neglectful of my duties here. No, indeed, I’ve been busily working away on a project that first originated here on The Passing Parade and now I am trying to see if I can stretch this thing out a bit.  If it works, I may share it here…or not, as the case may be.  I am still working out whether it is physically possible for a 215 pound man to escape from a burning building in a large cardboard box held aloft by eight giant sex dolls filled with helium.  

In any case, I will admit that 2012 didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would: the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series, I didn’t hit the number in the MegaMillions lottery, and the former junior senator from Illinois is still gainfully employed, assuming that is the correct adjective to describe his situation these past four years, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.  As you might imagine, this disturbs my digestion no end and makes me want to ask Ann Coulter, whom I otherwise think the world of, if Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican, why didn’t the electorate elect him?  Abraham Lincoln was not wrong—Abe was never wrong—but it does cause you to think that maybe he wasn’t entirely correct when he said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. As the recent election proves, you don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time; fifty-one percent will do in a pinch.  

While I am at it, I am glad to see that the former junior senator from Illinois is finally doing something to end the scourge of gun violence in this country. I do not expect that these efforts will come to any good; there are 300 million guns in this country, nearly one for every man, woman, and child here in this our Great Republic and you can no more get rid of them now than Mississippi can ban kudzu on pain of boiling importers to death in piping hot vats of hominy grits, but it will make the gun banners happy for a little while and checking people’s backgrounds is certainly a better idea than His original one of exporting the problem to Mexico. I am sure the Mexicans think that this is a good idea as well.

LEAVE OF ABSENCE: Hi there. If you are a long time reader of The Passing Parade, you will, no doubt, have noticed the extreme paucity of new posts here these past few weeks. I wish I could say that this sudden shortage was the result of yet another of one of my frequent dry spells, and I have to admit the idea of attributing the decline to writer’s block was a tempting one. I am, however, not running for office this year—my presidential bid in 2060 is still on, though, and I am currently going this year’s crop of kindergarteners looking for a suitable running mate—and therefore I have no immediate reason to fudge the truth: it was hot and I was lazy. If you have paid any attention to the Weather Channel for the past week or so then you know that we here in the northeastern United States have endured temperatures in the high 90’s Fahrenheit and humidity on the order of 157.973%. In short, we are all sweating like Mrs. Murphy’s prize pig—even the mosquitoes are sweating blood—and the heat is making us all wish we were dead and that you were, too. It is not enough that we must suffer, said Sigmund Freud in one of his many throes of autopsychoanalysis brought on his need to rationalize the high price of gasoline for his four door Oedipus complex sedan with optional sunroof and an antilock brake system that is the best on the road, according to Car & Driver magazine, others must suffer as well. The calm devotion to rational thinking and sweet reason that distinguishes the population of the Eastern Seaboard from the more emotional and irrational sections of this our Great Republic is buckling under the weight of the heat, as the calm devotees of rationalism transform under the meteorological duress into a maddened perspiring stinking mob of foul-mouthed guttersnipes prepared to gut their own mothers with a dull fish knife to get into a building with working A/C. The picture is not pretty here, folks, not by a long shot. Five will get you ten that if we had a nuke, we’d use it on someone.

The other thing about the dry spells is that while I’m in one, I usually can’t think of anything to write about. This was not true in this case. I’ve got any number of good (well, I think they’re good, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Most people are not all that objective about their own ideas until large numbers of their fellow citizens point out how really awful the idea really is. I mean, come on, Michael Dukakis—what the hell were they smoking when they dreamed that one up?) ideas—I’ve even started a couple of different pieces, but I haven’t bothered to finish any of them yet. Sloth, as I’ve mentioned here a couple of times, is my abiding vice, except for that silly thing with cold cuts and lemon Jello, and I haven’t been able to work up the willpower to sit down and finish what I’ve started writing. Maybe I’ll get around to it when the weather improves in the fall.

In the meantime, I am busy with obituaries. You may not believe this, but at one point or another just about everyone in the known universe passed through our happy little burg and some of them stayed just long enough to drop dead. This may seem strange to you, but after going through the fortieth obit of a man or woman who was born here, lived eighty or so years, and then died without every moving more than a couple of hundred yards from the place he or she were born, the obits of the commuting corpses are actually a relief from the relentless sameness of small town American life. Don’t get me wrong—I like Americana and Norman Rockwell just as much as the next guy—but too much is too much. I am pretty sure that I could drop some of these obits (I am doing 1954 at the moment) into today’s paper and no one would notice it at all. Obviously, I’d have to rearrange the dates a little, but other than that, I could leave the rest of the obit alone. A lot of the family names are the same; even the first names are the same, in many cases. I’ve already found about nine decedents whose descendants I went to high school with. I don’t often criticize the goings on here in our happy little burg, but all in all, I’d say a lot of us are in a bit of a rut these days, and apparently we were all in the same rut in those days too.

Now you may be wondering why I am bothering about obituaries at all, especially obituaries from 1954. Except for the Roberts Taft and Capa, did anyone you ever heard of die in 1954? Probably not, and it’s not that I haven’t tried to find them. But the local newspaper, which, I should point out for those of you who don’t know this already, was the worst newspaper ever published; Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared to the local rag, whose owners apparently believed that the John Birch Society was a Communist front, although in its defense I should say you could roll a pretty good-sized joint with the paper, not that I would know that from personal experience, of course. But they did publish the local death notices and the attendant obituaries, and the equally attendant advertisements for the funeral homes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found ads for funeral homes particularly ghastly. No matter how gently you phrase your spiel about attending to the needs of the grieving family, you’re all about dumping dirt on dead people, unless the deceased is going the cremation route, whereupon your business is turning dead people into dirt (just a stray thought: is there a point in that oven when, for the first and last time in your terrestrial existence, you are medium rare and go well with a nice red wine?)

In any case, I am compiling an obituary index, so that travelers from such exotic places as Oregon and Massachusetts can come to the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and look for the obituaries of their ancestors. The travelers tend to be very nice people; they are usually on the cusp of old age themselves and I figure that they want to trace their families back as far as they can before they join the ancestors in the choir invisible themselves. This is an inspiring, even noble, venture, I think, and one I applaud wholeheartedly; it’s just that I see no earthly reason why I should be the one who has to compile this damn thing in the first place. But there are times when we are not the masters of our fate, I fear, and this was one of those times. My contribution to the mold pit’s genealogical resources is wholly involuntary, a command performance if ever there was one; in short, I was drafted. Our leader was very nice about it, as she is wont to be, but my plaint that I was ill qualified for a task so burdensome, that I was slow of speech and tongue, found no more resonance with her than when Moses used the same excuse with the Almighty when he tried to duck the Ten Commandments gig. At least I won’t have to split the Red Sea, unless you count parting the waters on the men’s room floor this morning, but I didn’t need the Lord’s help for that; I had a mop. The Lord helps those who help themselves, you know.

DRY SPELL: In case you haven't already guessed, I've been trapped in a prolonged dry spell for the past week or so. You wouldn't think I would have a problem with this sort of thing; there's a presidential election next year and all the hopefuls are out like so many hungry fleas on a fresh dog, but while the times do not admit of satire, as the saying goes, I have been so bereft of things to write about I even spelled my name wrong on my electric bill just to see if that would provoke a reaction. It didn't, but I am happy to report that there is now something in the pipeline and with any degree of luck, there's be something new here by tomorrow or the next day. And the Yankees won, 8-4, last night, so you know that there is joy here in our happy little burg.

MY 700TH POST HERE: First off, I just want to make it clear that, contrary to anything you might have heard to the contrary, I like dogs. You will find no greater supporter of canine rights anywhere in our happy little burg than myself and I think that is it is altogether fitting and proper that a professional football player should face more time for killing a dog than for killing his wife; wives are replaceable, whereas a good dog is not. I do not support or condone cruelty to animals in any way, and I like to think that if I saw someone abusing an animal that I would try to save the poor beast from its afflictions. I think I would do this for almost any animal you care to mention, with the possible exception of hagfish, certain species of vulture, and that stupid mutt howling out in my garage right now. The hagfish and the vultures explain themselves, I think; both creatures are loathsome in both appearance and in their personal habits, like the sort of people you’d find shopping at Wal-Mart at 4:15 in the morning, but you might be wondering just why I would include the dog in the garage in this list and, purely to satisfy some misguided sense of curiosity, ask yourself just why it is that this dog is in the garage in the first place.

Curiosity may kill the cat, I fear, but won’t do anything for dogs, especially this dog, unfortunately, even though the beast is hugely curious about everything. I should point out that the dog does not belong to me, but to my brother; I am not really a pet person, which may account for why I’ve never had one. I had a pet geranium named Hubert once; my father named him, assuming you can call a flower a him and not an it, after the then Vice President of the United States and Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey; but a deer of deeply held Republican sympathies ate Hubert one night, leaving me largely indifferent to the loss. Then there was a mob of six-toed cats that chose our back yard as their base of operations, but you really couldn’t call them pets; my father would not have them in the house and would not let us feed them at all. They were predators, he reasoned, so let them go predate and leave us alone. All in all, if I were to have a pet, I’d have a cat. I know that lots of people can’t stand cats, but I enjoy their whole supercilious look, let’s not kid ourselves here, you porcine dolt, I’m doing you a huge favor by staying in this pestilential dump attitude towards being a pet. If I were a betting man, I’d guess the reason that cats ignore you when you talk to them is because cats only speak French.

My brother, however, has little use for cats. No indeed, the youngest brother is a dog man from way, way back. He always wanted a dog, but my father wouldn’t have one in the house, and now that the brother has grown and lives in his own house, he has his own dog to go with it. He got the dog about ten months ago, when it was a puppy, the kind of ugly pooch with huge floppy ears and woeful countenance that makes everyone who sees it go awww, isn’t he cute, he looks just like my cousin’s oldest boy when he was that age, which doesn’t say much for the kid at that age, I think. In any case, it’s been a little more than ten months since he got the dog, and while I can’t prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, I am fairly certain that there are steroids, lots and lots of steroids, in this dog’s food.

I got stuck with this canine behemoth in the usual manner; the brother, who is cavorting away in Cancun with his girl friend even as I write this bitter screed, told our mother a sob story, something about the dog having a urinary tract infection and that it wouldn’t be right for him (the brother) to board the dog at a kennel, since they would keep him (the dog) in his cage all day long, allowing the infection to get worse and so could he (the brother) keep him (the dog) at my mother’s house, just until he (the brother) got back from Mexico? This is an old story in this neck of the woods, what with the youngest brother spending his life getting away with this kind of thing simply because of the lateness of his arrival on the scene. In any fairly large family (I have four brothers), the oldest children traditionally bear the brunt of the discipline, simply because they’re the ones who have to put up with amateurs trying to raise kids. By the time the youngest sibling arrives, the parents are usually too exhausted to care much what the youngest one does; so long as he doesn’t smoke dope or contract an incurable social disease, he can do whatever he wants without too much negative input from the parents.

The thing of it is, however, that the brother tried to fob the dog off on my mother the next day and she took one look at the size of this beast and said, no way, bring him to your brother’s house. So he did, and when I grandly proclaimed, Get that dog out of my house now, the brother took the opportunity presented by my going to answer the phone to hop in his car and drive to the airport, leaving me with Rudolph. Rudolph is a purebred bloodhound, although why my brother would want a purebred bloodhound in the first place is one of those Rosicrucian mysteries that defeat even the oddest of imaginations. While there are a fair number of prisons within driving distance of our happy little burg, cons busting out the big house is not exactly a major problem around here, and consequently there’s little need for a bloodhound named Rudolph, whose nose, for all its olfactory prowess, does not shine at all and therefore will never have the honor of pulling Santa’s sled on Christmas Eve. Maybe on the day after Christmas, when Santa hunts down the escaping elves, but for the big gig, it’s reindeer only.

Rudolph, as you may have guessed, is a large dog, weighing about a hundred pounds and standing about six feet tall on his hind legs. This latter fact I am sure of, since Rudolph likes to jump up on me and look me straight in the eye while he slobbers all over my face. I hate dogs slobbering all over me, but I should not feel angry in this case, I suppose, as Rudolph slobbers over everyone and everything. The dog lives to smell and to slobber, smelling and slobbering the unsuspecting without regard to the race, religion, or place of national origin of the person or thing slobbered upon. And, as you might imagine, trying to walk Rudolph while at the same time keeping your shoulder firmly in its socket poses something of a challenge, as does actually holding onto his leash and keeping your balance. Chewing gum or thinking about baseball is not advisable in this situation, as it may present one challenge too many for the human mind to cope with. The dog’s original leash was a heavy chain, which I no longer use; I like my fingers—they are invaluable for typing or picking one’s nose, for example—and I want to keep the undamaged ones in a continuing state of undamage, if there is such a word.

It’s been like this for a week now, but all hope is not yet lost: the brother returns from his romp in the Mexican Riviera tomorrow and will take Rudolph off my hands once and for all. I was so ecstatic about this turn of events that I put the dog in his crate tonight, just to make sure he didn’t try to hide somewhere on the premises, and one of the other brothers promised to walk him tomorrow morning, just so I wouldn’t have to look at the beast ever again. I am so happy that I can hardly contain myself anymore, a happiness tinged with much anger, however, as this episode has turned me into something of a criminal. I do not like confessing to this in such a public forum, but there are pooper—scooper laws in effect from one end of our happy little burg to the other, and I have spent the better part of a week violating that law. I know that I am an evil person, a criminal, a threat to the public’s health as well as to its shoes, a knave and a varlet and a scoundrel for my vile flouting of this important municipal ordinance, but I am not cleaning up after a dog, any dog, and especially a dog I didn’t want in the first place. Fraternal obligation will only go so far and then it’s every man and his dog for himself.