I'm Trying to Look Like Slim

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 1

"To learn, you must want to be taught.

To refuse reproof is stupid."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

The psychiatrist likes to ask if I'm "cured yet".

Maybe it was cute on the first follow up visit (it wasn't really) but it certainly wasn't on the third, and especially not after he kept me waiting for thirty-two minutes, only to see me for a grand total of three-and-a-half.  

"Well," I said, crossing my legs like a girl the way I do, "I think I'm cured in a manner of speaking."

"Yeah?" he said, staring confusedly at the keys on his flip phone, which I wanted to grab out of his hand and eat.

"It's cured me of a desire to talk about myself."

He furrowed his brow-- you know, wrinkled it up a little bit, put his phone down in his lap and he looked at me.

"Well, that's a little unusual," he said blandly before adding, for good measure, "Maybe you're incurable." 

Cute, isn't he?

---

It is, I have to admit, getting to be a little much.  I mean, I go to therapy once every other week-- every week, if I'm feeling someone shy of thrifty, I see a psychiatrist-- what is it-- every two weeks to talk about pills that do nothing for me-- and I blog about myself twice a week.  That's enough to make anyone who isn't a complete, bow-wrapped narcissist throw the hell up.  So I'm giving serious consideration to bagging the whole enterprise: therapy, psych, the meds, all of it.  Who was I before?  A skinny, sour little bastard.  Who am I now?  Well, I think you can see where this is going.  Since, however, I am getting awfully sick of talking about myself but still, apparently, like to write, I suppose I ought to spend tonight talking about somebody who isn't me, myself, or I.  

But, who?  Who's the lucky little fuckeroo?

It's Veterans' Day, so I thought maybe I'd talk about my father.  He's a veteran, after all.  Of the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.  You know, not an American veteran.  He's American now, but he wasn't then.  So I don't know that he counts.  I don't know what he thinks about on Veterans' Day.  I don't know if it means anything to him.  Probably not, since other "days" that are applicable to him: his birthday and Father's Day, for example, he eschews with a certain vile, vulgar verbosity.

"FACK DAT SHIT!" he screams, twisting his face in disgust, "BUNCHA FACKIN' RETARD DAY, PLEASE!  LIKE I NEED SOME FACKIN' ASSHOLE TO TELL ME TO FEEL SPECIAL?!  GIVE ME A BREAK ALREADY!"

And you're standing there holding a card or a present or something and then he kisses you tenderly on the cheek.

"I love you, Mummy.  Thees ees bee-yoo-teeful."

I'm not really related to many other veterans, I don't think.  My mother's father was in the Navy, as were his brothers.  I'm not sure they saw much combat.  My great uncle Morris was, though, shot in the stomach in South Philly by some asshole who was trying to rob his fruit stand.  Legend has it that Morris collapsed on top of the guy and wouldn't get up until the police got there.  

That's what my people do: we scream obscenities, then kiss you, or we lie on top of people and bleed.

---

I don't think I'd do too well in the armed forces.  Fortunately, I don't think it'll ever come up.  Between the asthma, flat feet, scoliosis, mental health "problems" and the projectile bed-wetting I think I'm pretty much off Uncle Sam's dance card, but, if it did, I think there'd be some problems.  I don't mean necessarily with cowardice.  There have been plenty of situations that occurred at the hospital that required me to summon up some courage and risk getting seriously assaulted by some psychotic guy (or gal) who was much bigger, stronger, and hyped up than I, not to mention someone who didn't have to play by crisis intervention rules, and somehow I did it.  So I don't think that would be the main problem, I think the main problem would be that I wouldn't know where to shoot.  

See, I know what you're supposed to do in the army.  You're supposed to be there, standing there, holding that M-4, or RPG or whatever the fuck it is, all square-jawed, trying to look like Slim, and I don't think I'd be able to pull it off.  I'd probably kill someone I'm not supposed to.  I'm not a real visual learner-- and I hear in the military they use a lot of maps and pictures and visuals and shit like that.  But see, I'm not a very spatial learner either.  And forget kinesthetic.  My body's about as useful as a eighty-seven-year-old paperclip that's been left out in the rain.  And auditory?  When people talk to me I tune them out almost instantaneously.  I asked a coworker a question today.

"Didn't we talk about this, like, on Friday?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered, "but I wasn't listening."

"I'm gonna kick your fucking ass," she said.  Then she repeated what she told me.

"Okay," I said, "got it."  Then I stood up, walked four steps towards the door and forgot most of what she'd just said.  She was talking about 50/50 raffles.  I could care less about 50/50 raffles.  I won one once.  I bought tickets, but I didn't know what I was buying them for.  Then someone gave me $96 a couple hours later.  It was the greatest fully clothed moment of my life.  

---

He wanted to up my dose, or change to something "a little more potent."

"No, I don't think so," I said, staring at the ten year old phone he was playing with, "let's just stick with this and see what happens."

"Hm," he said, pushing buttons, "most people aren't that patient."

"I'm not patient," I said, "I just don't care."  

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?'"

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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.