A Real Pro

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 30, Verse 20

"There is another thing too: how a prostitute can sin and then say, 'What's wrong with that?'"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When I was a budding adolescent, there was a wonderful VHS tape that I was rather smitten with.  It was called "COPS: Too Hot for TV".  I ordered this through the mail.  My parents didn't know.  Parents don't need to know everything.

Right?

Of course right.

"COPS: Too Hot for TV" wasn't exactly like what it sounds.  There was mostly just a lot of obscenity, you know, that is omnipresent on regular "COPS" broadcasts, and is just bleeped out by the very busy censors who censor these types of things and are probably chronic masturbators who drive Philips head screws through their penis heads while strangling themselves with white tube socks, lying underneath the boardwalk drunk on paint-thinner and wearing underwear made of old Time magazines. 

Anyway, what I mostly found enjoyable were the bloopers-- yes, COPS has bloopers.  There's the veteran officer who gets out of his car to initiate a traffic stop and, the second he is about to walk up to the suspect vehicle, an old Cadillac with tail-fins, it backfires loudly causing the officer to scream "HO--LEEEE SHIT!" and then crack up once he realizes he's not about to be killed. 

There's a very old, short clip of two detectives barreling down a city street in an unmarked car and they can't get the blue flashing light on the dashboard to work, and then the siren won't turn on, so the inventive detective riding shotgun grabs the radio mic, turns it to speaker function and yells "EEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR-EEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRR-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!!!!" doing a great impersonation of a siren while his partner cracks up and says, "Unbelievable", shaking his head.

Once I became an EMT and one shift happened to be piloting an ambulance that had a siren that sounded like the noises an elderly basset hound being raped by a cow might make, my mind traveled fondly to that clip from "COPS: Too Hot for TV" and I smiled and said, "Unbelievable" to my partner.

I guess lots of people bought the VHS for the same reason I initially did: they were sure it was gonna have boobies.  And don't get me wrong-- it did.  There were boobies.  Like the oddly triangular, tattooed (blue flames) boobies the toothless crack fiend displayed while impulsively taking off her shirt for two stoic officers who accused her of hiding drugs somewhere on her person.  During the unceremonious striptease, she muttered something absolutely incomprehensible-- even after multiple viewings, I still have no idea.  Teeth are really good to have if you want to be understood in this world.  I have a dentist appointment on August the 27th at 4.

There are better looking boobies in this VHS.  The ones that really stand out belonged to a young prostitute who was caught in a police sting operation in Las Vegas.  The undercover officer was Middle Eastern, and he was playing a wealthy tourist from some Arab country or other, white dress shirt, necktie and headscarf.  Mustache.  Classic.  The prostitute's face was obscured, but you could tell she was no toothless crack fiend.  She was probably a Lady of the Pills.  You know, classy.  She had very tiny nipples, I remember that.  Thinking, God-- they're so tiny.  Like little M&Ms.  Of course, back in the days when I was watching this, I had never seen a woman's nipples in the flesh

PUN INTENDED

and so what the fuck did I know about nipples?  I knew a hell of a lot more about M&Ms.  And Doritos. 

Every time I watched that tape, and, yeah, I watched it, um, a few times, I got sad when they arrested her.  Not because I didn't get to see her do terrible things on that polyester hotel bedspread, but because she had M&M nipples.

They say you can tell a lot about a society by the people whom it imprisons.  If that is true, then America is racist, sexist, idiotic, paranoid, uninformed, irrational, and it is also just, moral, unflinching, righteous and thoroughly insane. 

FREE THE M&M NIPPLE'D ONES!  MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

Prostitution's a funny thing.  You pay someone and they have sex with you and then it's over.  Is that wrong?  I don't know.  I suppose it's wrong if you're in a committed relationship with someone and you do it, or if you're married, or if you don't use a condom, or if you get/give an STD, or if you knock the prostitute up, or if the woman is forced into the profession against her will, or if she's a minor, or if you inflict physical harm on her, of if she's mentally ill, or if she's supporting a drug habit, or if you're doing it near a school and some impressionable minor sees it and gets irreparably damaged for life because of that unfortunate visual, but, barring any or all of those aforementioned qualifiers-- is it wrong? 

I don't know. 

People say pornography and prostitution objectifies women, and I'm not so sure that's true, anymore than slapstick objectifies Moe, Larry and Curly.  It's a service they're getting paid to perform, and you get something out of it.  If anything, it's mutual exploitation.  I don't know if I was objectifying anyone by buying "COPS: Too Hot for TV" back in the day.  It's not something I'm particularly proud of-- I'd much rather brag about how I watched the 1939 film adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" with Laurence Olivier when I was eight (I didn't)-- but we've only got what we've got in this world.  Our stories.  Our M&Ms.  Our bits and our bobs.  Our thoughts and our feelings. 

Unsupported, unsubstantiated, undercooked.

Understood.       

A Lion in the Street

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 13

"The lazy man is full of excuses.  'I can't go to work,' he says.  'If I go outside I might meet a lion in the street and be killed!'"

---  

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Usually, when I'm asked how long I've been anxious for, I answer, "since 1985".  That goes one of two ways with people-- it either abruptly halts the conversation in its tracks, which is almost always my preference, unless I'm talking to a young woman with size 34-B breasts, or it prompts more questions, which only make me more anxious.  People want to know if I'm "kidding" when I say that I've been anxious since I was five.  

No, I'm not.  I don't kid.  I don't know what "kidding" is.  Harvey Korman once said, "Funny is when you're serious", and I find that I'm never not serious, especially when I'm trying to be funny which, I guess, is what "kidding" is.  I don't like that word, though.  "Kidding" sounds like something a creeper uncle does in the basement to his nieces and nephews and then tells them not to tell.  I don't "kid", I tell the truth.  It's much funnier than trying to "kid".  

Once I learned about what death was, courtesy of "The Jewish Book of Why" (Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch, hardbound edition, currently housed on a 2nd floor shelf at my mother and father's house [the book, not the rabbi]) and I realized that death applied not only to me (which upset me) but also to my parents (which upset me greatly) I began my gentle descent into anxiety.  I thought about it, um, often.  That is to say, constantly.  While I was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  While I was reading "Ziggy".  While I was yelling to my mother from the toilet that "My penis does tricks when I think about Vanna White!" While I played the cantankerous old man in my elementary school's production of "The Gingerbread Man".  While I slept.

Oh wait-- I never slept.  Because my parents could die while I was sleeping and then I'd have to wake up and pad down the hall to their room and find their bodies.  

(Of course, they would perish in unison-- that's how it happens, you know.)  

In my second grade picture, I have hair down past my shoulders and a terrible blue sweater and bags under my eyes to match it.  I'm trying to smile but it's hard when the photographer is saying, "Say, DEATH!" and you can't say it because you're too busy deathing about death.  Also, I'm leaning against a log in the picture, too.  A log?  What are we-- in Vermont, for Christ's sake?  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

In my brain, there are always lions in the street.  They're in the trees and in my bronchioles and in the cake batter, too.  They're in my shoes and in my heart.  I am filled with fear and dread and worry and petrified that, if I let down my guard, if I become a smidgen less hypervigilent, my parents will die, and I will go broke and the house will implode and my twins will go mad and my wife will combust and the car will get leprosy and I will, well, probably be relatively untouched except for a social disease or two that I'll have mysteriously contracted from having a nocturnal emission in the same time zone as a prostitute (or a quarrlesome woman) and I'll just be left there to watch it all happen.  Impotent.  Powerless.  Vacant, like a dream.  

A lion in the street?  Bring it, motherfucker.  Maybe that's what being anxious really means to me-- not being lazy.  I look at people who take a more cavalier approach to life and, mentally, I scold them.  "You're clearly not working hard enough at being cautious," I think, "at being miserable, at wringing every last drop of fun out of your life because life is scary and bold and furious and there are deer crossing and there are trains coming and there are pitfalls and layoffs and takedowns and there are lions in the street and you just have no idea and one day you will stand at a gravesite and say Kaddish or whatever over your mother and your father and maybe then you will understand and there'll be lions in the coffin and they're waiting for you with fur and teeth and eyes and claws and don't you ever stop looking over that bony shoulder of yours, mister, cuz I love you and you don't understand."

Okay.  You call it "laziness", I call it "anxiety".  All's fair in love and war, Mr. Potato Chip Man.

Wrong, Sir, Wrong!

"What's wrong with the world?"

That's how it begins.  I mean, who wouldn't want to read on, right?

I suppose you'd like to know what's this all about, what is he doing here, what does he want from us, and why should we stop by here to visit?  Well, these are all good questions, and I want to be up front with you right from the start that I don't have very many answers.  At least, the answers that I do have aren't very good.

After two tries at anonymous blogging, I've decided to out myself.  To go public.  All natural.  Less sodium.  Full retard.  Why?  I don't know, because I'm stupid, I guess.  Because anonymity was too easy, too safe, too... fun?  Well, I'm a married man with twins, and Christ knows I shouldn't be having too much fun.  Or sodium.

Anyway, I was sitting at home one night this week picking my feet in Poughkeepsie when I had to pee.  "Bodily functions are so annoying," my wife frequently opines, and she's right.  They get in the way.  They're tiresome and routine, more so for some than others, and they interrupt moments of brilliance.  I know, I know, you're going to say that your bowel movements have inspired moments of genius, right?  You realized you just had to propose to so-and-so in mid stream, or you had that idea for invisible, razor-flavored chewing gum while you were straining for glory.  Well, you're just silly, that's what you are.

And I'm silly, too-- cuz it happened to me.  There I was, standing before the toilet when I looked up at our shelf that contains several literary offerings.  There's "What's Your Poo Telling You?" which is more reference guide than light reading, and there's a book I stole from Muhlenberg College's health center back in 2002 before I graduated called "Making Responsible Decisions About Sex", there's "Instant! Maori" and I've looked at that several times and I don't know what the fuck that's all about or how it got into our house much less our bathroom.

And then there's that other book.

Before my wife and I had kids, we used to do silly stuff together.  I don't mean stuff with Saran-Wrap and dental floss-- I mean quixotic adventures, stuff that every young couple does when they're all lost in schmoopiness and they have no clue about the cost of a tank of gas.  One day we decided to take a field trip to the Herr's Snack Factory in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, a mere 47.2 miles away from where we lived at the time.  We were the only adults on the tour not attached to any children, but that was not an experience totally unfamiliar to us.  We tagged along with the random, tow-headed, mulleted kiddies.  We saw the big machines and the ladies in hairnets and surgical-style booties, we tasted chips that probably came off the factory floor and we were unceremoniously dumped off at the gift shop where we were expected to plunk down five times the price of our admission ticket on shit we can buy at WaWa on the way home.

But the best thing that you could possibly take home with you from the Herr's Snack Factory wasn't on sale at the gift shop at all-- it was free.

Fucking.  Free.

While my (not-quite-yet) wife visited the ladies room-- see?  bathrooms feature prominently in life, I'm telling you-- I wandered around the large waiting area between the restrooms and the gift shop and there, on a bench of sorts were strewn hundreds of little pale blue books that featured the Herr's logo on the bottom of the front cover, and the words

Chips of Wisdom

in the middle.

I picked one up and leafed through it.  Scanning the pages, I saw a lot of stuff about Proverbs, quarrelsome women, and prostitutes.  An eyebrow warily raised, I put it in my pocket.

A few minutes into the drive home, I pulled the book out of my pocket and tossed it over to the passenger seat.

"Here," I said to my short haired, bespectacled companion, "this should keep us entertained along Route 1."

And it did.  We laughed.  We wept.  We learned that we shouldn't visit our neighbor too often, or we might outstay our welcome.

Well, neighbor-- you'll never be able to outstay your welcome here.  You can visit as often as you like, and I encourage you to bring your friends.  You can even bring your Friends.  I hope you Like my new blog.  I hope you learn a thing or two about neighbors and prostitutes.  For instance, did you know that, "a prostitute is a dangerous trap; those cursed of God are caught in it"?

Well, apparently, it's true.  I know because I read it in a book I got at a potato chip factory.

Jim Herr, in his introduction to "Chips of Wisdom" states that he frequently referred to the Book of Proverbs when making important decisions in life and in commerce (I guess there aren't too many "quarrelsome women" in the Herr's Snack Foods empire, probably not too many prostitutes either) and he sought to edit and compile some of his Proverbs favorites into this neatly packaged, accessible little book.  Yes, I find some of it funny, and that will be reflected in this blog, but I hope I come across as genuine when I say that the goal behind this blog is not to poke fun at Jim Herr or "Chips of Wisdom" or Proverbs or Christianity or God.  If I poke fun at anyone here, it's going to be at me, because that's sort of what I've been doing ever since I learned how well self-deprecating humor fit my skin.

I want to use the Proverbs, and Jim Herr's quest and desire for wisdom, as springboards for my own personal wrastlin' with faith, existential issues, my religion, my professional and social struggles, to make sense of my family and my life-- and, sure, to have a little fun, too.

But, not too much, remember?  Because I am a devoted husband and a father of two fifteen-month-olds and a soon-to-be-again dog owner, we're going to limit the fun to Monday and Thursday postings, and see how it goes.  I hope you like it here, and I hope you come back for more.  Otherwise, you're WRONG, SIR, WRONG!  You LOSE!  You get NOTHING!

Sorry.  Jim Herr, Willy Wonka, same thing.

"Chips of Wisdom" seeks to answer "What's wrong with the world?".  I suspect you already know, and that's good.  That means you're going to be my friend.  So hold on.

Here we go.