As the New Year is almost upon us, it is time to reflect.  We should take stock, looking back to review lessons learned and looking forward to imagine ways in which these lessons might be applied.  It is also a time to criticize that most annoying of Christmas traditions, the dreaded Christmas letter.

Of course, there was a time when no one wrote a Christmas letter.  If you wanted to know how someone’s year went, you asked them.  This question implied interest.  When you didn’t ask it meant that you really didn’t care all that much (or knew everything you needed to about that person’s family).  It was a good system.  But, as with all good systems, it came to end, due to people’s desire to talk about themselves.  If you will recall, this is how human beings ended up with the threat of hell.  Eve, feeling that Adam was not giving her enough attention, grabbed some fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  She did this as an excuse to talk about herself and, as a consequence, many of us will now burn for eternity.  Stupid first woman.

Anyway, when people talk about themselves they are almost always compelled to embellish upon their story.  This “one upmanship” is taken to heretofore unknown limits relative to the Christmas letter.  Christmas letter writers are both literary and charitable, their children athletic savants and academic prodigies, their spouses experts in their chosen fields.  They also completed their first half marathon.  The challenge, of course, is to sort out the truth from all of this Holiday fiction.  Luckily, the MO is here to help you do just that with his Christmas letter translator.  Pay attention, because this information is free.

Letter content:  My husband was promoted to Sales Manager this year.  Of course, with the new job comes a lot of travel.  We all miss him, but we are all proud and look forward to using those Frequent Flier miles when we go to the Dominican Republic in January!!!  Smiley face

MO Translation:  My husband can’t stand being around me.  He now has carte blanche to chase women because I never know where he is.  At least he is making more money and I can get out of this frozen hell hole during the winter.

Letter content:  Jimmy continues to excel in sports.  This year he played both quarterback and made the A traveling team in basketball.  Not to be outdone, his older sister ran Cross Country this fall and is participating in forensics this winter.

MO translation:  Jimmy is a dumb jock like his philandering father.  His sister is a dork.  We want her to lose weight and thought that running would help.

Letter content:  I have been helping out at school and spend three days a week at church working with the Food Shelf.

MO translation:  I am too lazy to work a real job.  I spend my days trying to influence my son’s teachers so that he can pass his classes and be eligible for baseball in the Spring.  I also have a crush on the new pastor.

Letter content:  My mom and dad are still spry as ever.  We had a good visit with them before they went to Florida.  They have been Snowbirds for the last five years and show no sign of slowing down.

MO translation:  My parents freeloaded off of me for two weeks.  They are pissing my inheritance down the drain.  I hate their guts.  

Letter content:  In closing, I would like to say Merry Christmas and I hope that all of you have a great New Year.  Don’t be strangers.

MO translation:  My life sucks.  The only thing that could make it better is if yours is worse.  Only talk to me if you have a problem greater than mine.

Letter content:  And I completed my first half marathon this year!!!

MO translation:  I’m getting in shape so I have options when I get a divorce.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the MO!!!

Translation:  I don’t even know who the hell half of you people are but I needed a convenient way to wrap this blog entry up.

 

 

I love lists.  Lists are the lifeblood of civilization.  After all, how did the caveman conquer the mighty Mammoth?  He made lists.  Mammoths, lacking the opposable thumb and language, were unable to make lists.  To whit:

1- Check wife for lice   2- Pray to sun and moon god and the Flying Spaghetti Monster  3- Kill neighbor for trying to check wife for lice  4- Find recipe for caveman stew (caveman meat provided by clan who lives down by the river)  5- Arm everyone with spears  6- Find mammoths  7- Stampede mammoths toward cliff  8- Put other neighbor in front of stampeding mammoths as he also seems to want to check wife for lice  9- Try and figure out why apples fall down and not up

Here is the mammoth list ……………………………………….

As you can see, the mammoth (as well as a couple of overly friendly cavemen) are about to meet their demise.  Lists are the chasm that exists between man and animal.  Just for fun, a mammoth list would look thus:

1- Eat grass  2- Crap grass  3- Eat grass  4- Crap grass 5- Take a nap  6-Eat grass  7- Crap grass 8- Stomp the shit out of some stupid bipeds who are trying to stampede me off a cliff 9- Eat grass

If only mammoths, if only.  But, as we know, mammoths exist only as frozen mummies in the Siberian tundra.  Idiots.

Anyway, I bring up list making because my wife refuses to make lists.  She abhors lists in the same way that nature abhors vacuums.  I, too, abhor vacuums.  I can’t stand the noise they make.  I know I am talking about two different kinds of vacuums.  It is just a pet peeve.  Like when people don’t make lists and then we have to go back to the grocery store on back to back days during the Christmas break and stand in line with a bunch of fat people in Packer jackets and camouflage whose kids have crap all over their face.  Gross.  I don’t understand this lack of hygiene.  It’s not like soap and water are in short supply.  The first item on their list should be a damned wash cloth.

As noted, lists make life worth living.  Without them, the world descends into a Dantean chaos, fraught with blue devils and Virgil.  (If you have ever read the Aeneid, you have known true boredom.  On the top of lists of What Not to Do: 1- Read the Aeneid.  No wonder Dante sent Virgil to hell.)

List of people in hell:  1- Hitler  2 through 27 million- Hitler’s helpers  2a- Ronald Reagan 3- Stalin  4- Darwin (God did that, dummy!)  5- Virgil

Other things not to do:  1- Ride horses described as “a little headstrong”  2- Fly in a plane (I just watched Sully which confirmed everything I already feared)  3- Roller skate in a buffalo herd  4- Call bison buffalo   5- Vacation in Buffalo  6- Urinate on a wire that doesn’t appear to be electrified  7- Pick lice from your neighbor’s wife (It’s in the bible you know)  8- Drink a mystery shot  9- Drink six mystery shots  10- Pull someone’s finger  11- Listen to someone who says you have “plenty of room” when backing up your new truck  12- Believe in “trickle down” economic theory  13- Be urinated on by a woman in Buffalo after drinking half a dozen mystery shots.

I will refrain from adding the aforementioned finger into this final list item.  Decorum is also on my list.

Of course, the above list is inexhaustible.  I’m just using it as an example.  The list could also be Things to get at the grocery store so we don’t have to be tortured on the return trip.

For example.

There is something special about being off on a workday.  You feel superior, better than those simple folks who have gone trudging off to their stupid little jobs who work for those stupid little capitalist bastards.  Pow!  The MO is sitting in his pajama bottoms.  He wears a hooded flannel shirt and a stocking cap.  He is unshaven and unkempt.  He can’t remember the last time he had a shower and he does not give a damn.  (Okay, the last part is not true.  I took a shower yesterday and my wife would make me take one if I went too long.  It’s called artistic license.  Kind of like when Trump tells people how smart he is all the time.  He really isn’t.  Just like I’m not really stinky.  But I would like to be.  Maybe in another life.  I am wearing a stocking cap, though.   I call my look “Ode to Grunge.”  Trademarked.  I can’t trust you people.)

I spent the morning reading a book by a local author who grew up in a small Wisconsin town much like the Hometown of MO.  (I would have liked to have slept in.  Alas, the Stepson of MO regaled me with a medley of Top 40 tunes this morning.  “Cake by the ocean.  Cake by the ocean.”  These lyrics make no fucking sense.  And they don’t even rhyme.  “Cake by the lake,” perhaps.  The vampire version could be “Cake by the stake.”  Actually, that would be the vampire hunter’s version.  “Van Helsinngggggg!!!!!”  Once again, I digress.)

Anyway, this local author is actually fairly well known nationally.  And he seems like a nice guy.  But he has Lake Woebegone syndrome- and not in the sarcastic, tongue in cheek way of the Keillor.  His characters are simple, perhaps a bit flawed, but ultimately decent people once you get to know them.  While this makes nice copy for people in New York City, it is nevertheless a misrepresentation of the facts.  In the interest of homespun simplicity, this author glosses over a few things like racism, misogyny, and cousin fucking.  In fact, his hometown lies on the edge of the famed “Cousin Fucker Triangle.”  On occasion, I have had a few beers in the town and its immediate vicinity.  A simple look around at one’s fellow bar patrons – cross-eyed, snaggle-toothed, gimping, fundamentally asymmetric –  provides immediate and irrefutable evidence of rampant incestuous activity.

As I read this author’s book, I can’t help contemplate the dissonance between his representation of these rural folk and the reality of their existence.  Is there some psychological need for him to make them better than they are?  Is it personal insecurity or some sort of deep-seated loyalty?  Perhaps he merely sees them as tools of his trade.  Taciturn, surprisingly literate farmers are surely more palatable characters to your stereotypical tea drinking, NPR listening reader than are gun crazed, sister humpers wearing “Make America Great Again” caps.  Yet, what happens to the truth?  It is stomped into the ground once again.  For shame.  Sister humping should not be swept under the rug.

On second thought, it should be swept under the rug.  But that is not the point.

The point is that I don’t have to work on a Thursday.  I could even start drinking if I wanted to.  You know what time it is?  10:04 am.

But I will probably just go back to reading my book in my jammies and stocking cap.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh can’t take an afternoon hangover.  More’s the pity.

There goes a retired lady, taking her morning walk.  Hello, retired lady.  I am like you today.  I am, however, much further from death than you are.

Statistically speaking.  I don’t want to tempt fate here.

Though it would be pretty hard to have an accident in this chair.  It’s way more likely that lady will slip and hit her head on the pavement.  Be cautious, my non-working compadre.  I am not wishing you ill.

I am just pointing out the facts.

 

On occasion, I read the Comments section of news articles.  This is an interesting exercise.  Certainly, it is a way to find out new information.  For example, only a week ago one commentator noted that black people smell.  I did not know this.  In fact, I never would have guessed.  I wondered if there could be any truth to it.  But then another commentator replied and wrote that it was true.  Black people do smell, confirmed this Southern gentleman.  “What the heavens?” says I.  The MO decided to investigate.

Almost immediately, I ran into two problems.  The first is that there aren’t very many black people where I live.  This makes smelling them rather difficult.  As Mr. Miyagi said, “Worst way to smell black folk is for none to be there.”  Wax on, my philosophical friend.  Bonzai.  It would be a while before the opportunity presented itself unless I was willing to drive to an area where black people were more prevalent.  I decided to merely wait for an opportunity.  Patience is a virtue when determining the odor of one’s fellow man.

If you wait long enough- even in Eau Claire, Wisconsin- a black person will happen by.  They can’t hide forever.  Of course, this truth brings me to my second problem.  To get an accurate smell from someone requires the smeller to get extremely close to the smellee.  Thus, if the black person was a woman, the MO ran the risk of being branded a Creeper.  More importantly, the smelling of other women, even in the interest of science, was sure to draw the wrath of the Wife of MO.  The MO fears no man.  But the MO does fear the Wife of MO a little.  At the very least, the MO has no desire to incur her wrath.  This left only black males for the MO to smell.

As you may surmise, smelling other men may be hazardous to one’s health.  It would take a very imaginative pretext to get that close and yet not alarm the individual being smelled.  I regret to inform the reader that the MO has been unable to find such a pretext – at least as of this writing.  If you have any ideas, the MO encourages you to write in.  Perhaps the reader with the best suggestion could win some sort of prize.  Though that is doubtful.  The MO frowns on a society were everyone gets a ribbon.  Knowing you have been of help to this blog should be reward enough.

In conclusion, this issue remains unresolved.  At this rate, America will never be great again.

Yes, those comments were really made.  Didn’t you read the tagline?  “It’s Darker Than You Think.”  What the hell do you suppose that means?

Keep in mind that I wrote that tagline way before Trump was even a possibility.  Add prescience to the list of qualities the MO possesses.  Pow Pow Pow.

This clown needs an enema!

I’m just trying to cheer you up a little.  Nobody likes dour people.

OK.  Goths do.

Yes.  Pilgrims do, too.  Sometimes I want to pop some of you right in the gourd.

Not too long ago, three people were killed in one day in India.  Guess how they died?  Forget it, you’ll never guess in a million years.  They were killed by kite strings.  Time to update the old Thousand Ways to Die movie.  If you ever watch a Thousand Ways to Die you’ll have two takeaways.  The first is that people are so stupid.  The second is that you probably only have a few weeks to live before you are crushed by a round bale, or contract a rare heart virus, or step on a wasp’s nest that has been hidden in your bathroom all this time.  Your wife wanted you to fix that lock so the bathroom door won’t stick at an inopportune time.  But you did not listen and now the insect venom is taking its toll.  Pow Pow Pow.  Our six legged foes are everywhere.  Bzzzzzzzzzz.  Bzzzzzzzzz.

Anyway, in India they coat kite strings with powdered glass.  This is not something that I personally would have imagined to be a good idea.  But what do I know?  I am not an Indian.  I am a human be-ingggggg.  Elephant Man jokes never get old.  The funny thing about the Elephant Man is that I don’t think he looks like an Elephant at all.  Maybe that was another Elephant Man joke.

If you were not already aware, glass can be sharp.  In fact, it will occasionally cut a throat or two (three, in this case).  Needless to say, three people having their throats cut in one day tends to draw the attention of the authorities.

“Glass kite strings are a terrible idea!” they bellow.  And then they call for immediate kite reform.

What these Indian kite reformers do not understand is that the deaths by kite string, while seemingly unfortunate, were the will of the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster).  For reasons that surpass understanding, the FSM wanted these three Indians gone.  No human can no why.

My best guess is that the FSM is just trying to suggest population control.  Like Spock, the FSM believes that the “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or one.”  It’s logical.  What isn’t logical is making kite strings out of glass.  Good thing we have a supernatural explanation to fall back on.

Hang on a second, the MO is getting an update from his Indian correspondent, Todd.  Todd says that these glass strings are used in kite fighting.  He also notes that this is not the first time anybody has been killed or injured by them.  Todd says that those are the vicissitudes of kite flying.  Everybody knows the risks.  Todd is such a typical, cynical Asian person.  Regardless, thank you very much and have a good day, Todd.

Todd just flipped me off.  I guess Todd is a Hindu.  Or Buddhist.  One of those pussy religions.  If you were a real man, you would challenge me to a fight instead of merely giving me the finger.  You don’t want any of this, Todd.  I’ll eff your shit up, Todd.  I’m like an orange Monsoon.  And that rain is your blood.

Sorry about that.  Those Indian people are a bunch of malcontents.  Ask the British.  I wonder if the British are the ones making glass kite strings.  It sounds like something they would do.  If they still had manufacturing- which they don’t.  They even outsourced deadly kite string making.  Somewhere, perhaps in a slum of Liverpool, there is a small English boy, his face covered in grime, his teeth crooked and rotting.  He holds out his hat toward strangers who pass by.

“Alms for the poor, governor?”  the dirty moppet asks.  This poor child has been reduced to begging.  The glass string factory shut down years ago and now there are no jobs for little people with little hands.  And Hogwart’s isn’t taking any applications.  Unfeeling bastards.

I’d like to cut Potter’s head off with a damned kite string.  Pfffffffttttt.

You’re on a roll now, Potter.  Take that, you job killing libtard.

I was home watching television the other morning.  It was my intention to completely remove any vestige of intelligence from my head (Haha, why bother?  Funny one.  Did you know Trump was going to be president, jerkoff?  That should temper your enthusiasm for making fun of me.  Actually, that should probably temper your enthusiasm for most activities.  Though the Germans were happy for a while- up until 1943 or so.).  Anyway, where was I?  These damned asides.  Who do I think I am, Shakespeare?  Thinkest I am, rather.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.  Did you know that the Jerry Springer Show is still on?  Twenty five years and going strong.  I thought it was off the air fifteen years ago.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  In fairness, the show is exactly the same as it was in 1998.  First, Jerry talks to some trashy woman who doesn’t know if the child she is carrying is Leroy’s (Switch the camera to backstage where Leroy is waiting nervously.  Leroy is either a black guy with a gold tooth or a white guy with a neck tattoo.  It doesn’t really matter which.).  The woman says she hasn’t told her Baby’s Daddy because, gasp,  the Baby’s Daddy is also her brother-in-law.

“So, you’re telling me that you have been having sex with your sister’s husband?” Jerry asks, feigning surprise and indignation.  Did you know that Jerry Springer has said several times he would never watch his own show?  He says it isn’t for people like him.

The woman looks down.  “Yes, Jerry.  But she don’t treat him like she should.  She’s been hooking up with her husband’s best friend!”

Here is a twist we didn’t see.  Well, we saw it two weeks ago.  But you know what I am saying.

Jerry looks perplexed.  He walks out into the audience.  “So what you are telling me is that your sister, who is married to your Baby’s Daddy, is having sex with her husband’s best friend?”  Jerry rolls his eyes toward the audience.  The audience says “woooooooo.”  Jerry puts the microphone in the face of a pretty young college age woman.  “You got all of that?”

The woman laughs and stands up.  She points at the woman on stage.  “So you are having sex with your sister’s husband and she is a married woman having sex with his best friend?”  The pretty young college age woman shakes her head.  “You all are a couple of whores in your family.”

While this is obvious, the woman on stage takes great exception the audience member’s comment.  She stands and, wagging her finger for emphasis, lets loose with a string of expletives toward her accuser.  The accuser, along with the rest of the audience, laughs like hell.  The censor hits the “bleep” button like crazy.  Fun fact.  The “bleep” button is hit between 85 and 130 times on a typical Jerry Springer episode.  WTF?  At least Jerry keeps somebody working.

After a little small talk, Jerry says, “Let’s bring out the Baby’s Daddy, Leroy.”

Here comes Leroy looking sheepish.  The crowd boos.  The crowd always boos.  They are so negative.  The people on stage need validation and understanding.  But there is none coming from this pessimistic group.  Bastards.

Leroy makes up a bunch of stupid excuses.  After a while, Jerry tires of his rhetoric and then calls out Tammy Jo, the aggrieved wife/sister.  Tammy Jo is fighting mad.  You know how I know this?  Because she comes out swinging at Tammy Lynn, her duplicitous sibling.  This is something of a twist.  Generally, they head straight for the guy first.  I suppose it is just a matter of personal preference.  The crowd chants, “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry…” and a ring bell dings.  Tammy Jo has Tammy Lynn by the hair.  Or is it Tammy Lynn who has Tammy Jo by the hair?

Then my brain oozed out of my ears.