Goddamnit

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 26

"Reverence for God gives a man deep strength;

his children have a place of refuge and security."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Kermit once complained-- well, maybe it was more of a statement than a complaint-- that, "it's not easy being green".  I was going to write that "it's not easy being Jewish, either, pal", but then I got to thinking a little broader, a little bit more outside of myself (not easy to do when you're a self-centered, miserable little git) and I don't particularly think it's easy being anything at all.  The world is so cock-heavy with stereotypes and mythology, prejudice, ignorance, violence and hatred, inanity and obscurity, enough fuckedupedness to last a thousand lifetimes that, really, at any given moment-- who can there possibly be who's out there, yucking it up, having a great fucking time?

I mean, except her.  Some roid-loving jock's doing Jell-O shots on her right about now.

Everything's fucked up now that there's children here, and I mean that in a good way.  Everything I think about God and religion, it's all a hazy horrible blur.  Why am I responsible for teaching and guiding, molding and melding?  How didn't I know that this was going to happen?  That one day, I'd be at Yom Kippur services with my two children, shamelessly mouthing along and futzing my way through Hebrew which might as well be Cantonese.  How is it that I will be in charge of a family seder?  Did other 33-year-olds a hundred years ago have this wrenching, tortured dilemma of faith and duty?

No, I'm guessing they didn't.  People didn't have time to be such narcissistic pussies back then.  They were all running around patching holes in their vests and trying not to get killed by influenza and trolley cars.  

See?  It all goes back to menswear.  As soon as guys stopped wearing vests, they had all this extra time on their hands all of a sudden to fixate on their "place in the world" and to write about their insecurities on blogs.  This is why I hope the three-piece-suit makes a comeback, in some place other than my own closet.

I remember years ago going on a tour of an Amish village in Lancaster County, and the tour guide was talking about electricity and technology and about how, "The English (that's you, blog-reading asshole) seem to think that technology brings people together.  We see it the opposite: we see technology driving people apart.  And I see that.  I see the impediment it's cleaved between my wife and I, how we both, at times, tune each other out in favor of Pinterest (her) and a "French Connection" text message quote war with a friend (um, me?) and it saddens me, and I don't quite know what to do about it.  These are the issues this generation is going to have to cope with as we move forward and as the situation deteriorates.  

That smug fucking Amish bitch was right, and I hate her.

The thing is, though, I see the same thing with religion.  I think lots of people have this Kumbaya-my-Lord view of faith or religion, that it's "bringing people together" and I think there should at least be a little asterisk there after that phrase.

Bringing people together*

* now, for a limited time only!

* sorta

* but at a cost

* only certain kinds of people  

* so they can feel holier than thou

* to want to kill you or at least discriminate against you for believing something different

It drives me further away from people-- people I really want to be with, except for my immediate family, of course-- but friends?  Where are they?  My mother and father?  Off doing their own thing.  Spiritual leaders I actually have some sort of connection with and affinity for?  No.  God?  I didn't think about God once while I was in synagogue for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.  Maybe it's because I was chasing my son of the fucking stairs seven thousand times, or maybe it's just because it's hard to think about something at an appointed day and time of the year in a specific place.

"Be Pious, and..... GO!"

Sorry.  I can't fart on command either.  And God knows how I try sometimes.  And now you know why I never went to law school.    

Eh, eeezokay.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 11, Verse 15

"Be sure you know a person well before you vouch for his credit!

Better refuse than suffer later."

---

She was nearly an hour late this morning.  That nanny of ours.  

How nearly?  I don't know that it matters.  I don't know.  Not anymore, I don't.

We were spoiled at first-- a miracle-nanny.  Obliging, unstoppable energy, knew where everything was, loved our children in a beautiful way, the answer was always "yes".  She went out of her way to help our family and, in turn, we did the same for her.  

Then she went off and got a real job.  People do that, you know.

This one?  This new one?  This nanny of ours.  

Jesus.

Now, I'll admit that it's very First World Problem of me to be complaining about my nanny's ineffectiveness.  On a BLOG, no less.  I know, I get it.  Sue me.  But, first, can you run my nanny down with your car?  Then we won't have to go to court, I'll just give you anything you want.

You don't know a person when they come and interview for an hour.  You don't know a person even after someone vouches for their credit, their backbone, their work-ethic, their ability to understand numbers on a clock and put spoons back in a place that's so painfully obvious spoons go it makes you want to strangle tiny marine animals.  You only know a person once they've infiltrated your house and your life for a month.

And now we know.  

So we've been interviewing.  The first one was on something.  She terrified my wife and I.  We hope she's forgotten our address.  Speed makes you forget things, right?  

The second one, I fell in love with.  Now, I know what you're thinking: for me to have fallen in love with a nanny, she must have been eighteen and showed up here in a white tank top and cotton shorts and had the ubiquitous pony tail bobbing around on the back of her head.  

Well, that would have been okay, but, no.

She was easily in her sixties.  Russian.  Sort of beached herself on our dainty orange couch.  For the purposes of blognonimity, we'll call her "Pronshka".

Pronshka punctuated many of her sentences with an ambivalent shrug of her shoulders and the catchphrase, "Eh, eeezokay."  Like, "Oh, you no chhave yarrrd?  Eh, eeezokay", and "Zay cchave vaffles for brakfost?  Eh, eeezokay."

From the first minute of her, I was hooked.  I'm a novelty-person kind of guy.  Give me an aberrant personality type or an immigrant or a dwarf or a hot girl in a tank top and cotton shorts (sorry) and I'm just good to go.  Pronshka was dynamite.  A goldmine.  For starters, she's nannied longer than I've been alive, once for a family for twelve years.

"Boy vhen I start he vos two, now heez fourrdteen.  Vee play bask-it-bol, bee svim togedder-- eh, eeez okay."

I closed my eyes for just one moment after she said this, silently relishing the absolutely amazing vision of this coptic hassock bounding down a local middle school's basketball court and doing cannonballs into the crisp, blue water.  

IT WAS TOO.  FUCKING.  MUCH.   

Throughout the interview, she mopped her brow, chin, neck and ample mustache area with a handkerchief.  Every time she did it, I got closer to heaven.  This is hilarious, I thought-- I want my children to go off to work and I'll stay home and she can nanny me.  I want to play basketball with forehead-sweat Pronshka.  Hell, I'd even swim with her.  And that's saying a lot.  

I know that, with her, she'd be the boss, not us.  My wife doesn't like it when I say, "Good girl" and "Good boy" to the children for doing something right, "because they're always good boys and good girls-- praise the action" she implores.  And I do, I've gotten MUCH better over the months, but, during the interview, when my daughter acquiesced and plopped an animal cracker in my mouth at my request, Pronshka approved and said, "Ah, she giiv dehdee a cookie-- good gell".  I said to my wife after the interview, "If you think you're going to tell that sweaty Stalin-loving missile-silo not to say "good girl" to our daughter, you're crazy".  

But, who cares?  With her, our children will not want for anything, our house will be cleaned and orderly with frightening efficiency (except the bathroom, she doesn't do bathrooms, and she expects Christmas off as a paid holiday, and one paid week of vacation, and she probably wants День защитника Отечества off, too, but, eh, eeezokay) and she knows what the fuck she's doing, in contrast to our nanny now, who knows just southwest of nothing.

She spoke at length about "vot she doo vit zeh behbehs" during the day, how she is a big fan of taking them outside, and she doesn't care if it's fucking snowing or now-- Moscow, you know-- she takes them out to play.  During a fractional lull in the conversation, she looked at my wife and she looked at me and she said, 

"You are Jew."

 And I don't put a question mark there on purpose because I'm reasonably sure there wasn't one.  I sucked in a pained breath and said,

"Yup, yea.  Yea, we are."

"Yiss," she said definitively, "I know.  My fadder vos Jew, no my mother," her brow knit as she repeated,

"Fadder, he vos Jew."

She saw us staring at her.  Or, maybe she didn't.

"In Rah-sha, used to be no goot, you know, to talk.  Jew.  Thees ees, bat now, eet ees, eet ees diff'rint.  I cchav friends-- Tel Aviv-- eh, eeezokay."

And, to tell you the truth, if I were a different kind of man, I would have stood up and ended the interview right there.  But I'm not that kind of man.  I'm the kind of man who falls in love with folksy, bizarre fat Russian women plotzed down on my couch, wiping themselves down with their husband's old pocket squares.

As we saw her out after around an hour that could easily have been recorded for television, she said, "Look, if maybee you don' like me bekoss my age, I am too old or too fat-- I am good.  No bad habeets, no drink na-tink, no smoke na-tink.  I strong and I work."

Oh, Pronshka.  Not like you?  Never.  

Не могу жить без тебя

Literal translation: "I can't live without you"  

Short version:  "Eh, eeezokay."

Licked

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 11, Verse 17

"Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Preamble

I might have used this Proverb already, but I don't think either of you will notice.

Amble

I quote "The Love Bug" a lot.  It's an annoying habit, I'll bet, and I'm right up there with guys who quote obscure Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch lines (I'm not talking "Dead Parrot" like every other Brit-loving asshole, I'm more talking about "Flying Sheep" and "The Architect Sketch") and guys who turn everything into a G&S reference.  But I'd never do that.

What, never?

See?  Makes you want to blowtorch my eyes out, doesn't it?

Anyway, in "The Love Bug", Peter Thorndyke, just before doing something terrible to our star Herbie, turns to his obsequious, horn-rimmed little sidekick and says, "Havershaw, it's times like this where I really don't LIKE myself very much!"  Thorndyke, like all decent, upright Anglo-Saxon villains, says this line while grinning like a psychopath, baring all his thoroughly British fangs disturbingly.  

For he IS an English-MAN!!!

Sorry.  There I go again.

Well, all this to say is that I get where Peter Thorndyke is coming from.  There are times where I really don't LIKE myself very much either, and I don't get quite the delicious charge out out of that self-directed antipathy that David Tomlinson's character does.  I guess I'm just not quite cut out to be a Disney villain from the 1960s.  And, as disappointing as that is to know, better to know it now.  

I really didn't LIKE myself very much at the post office.  I was there on some errant errand, as sometimes happens to one, and I was standing there behind a very well-appointed woman, one might even be so bold and so condescending as to refer to her as "handsome".  She reminded me of a vintage Bentley, or a heavy drapery.  A drawing room or a study.  She was put together in muted, conservative colors, but very tasteful and elegant.  She had obviously just been to "The Beauty Pah-lah" (women of this vintage, no matter where they're actually from and what regionalisms they adopt or eschew, invariably pronounce "Parlour" this way-- it's like a whole thing) and of course she had the obligatory family pearls clasped to her slightly dangly earlobes.  

She clutched onto her clutch and peered over the counter hopelessly at multiple sheets of stamps stapled to the beadboard walls of the post office.

"What about the Poinsettias?" she asked.

She wants Poinsettias.  

Instantly, I felt my heart seize.  Well, unfortunately not exactly "seize", but tighten, as if someone was stone-cold-Steve-Austin heart-wrestling me.  Instead of thinking, "Oh, this interaction will add three additional minutes to my sojourn home", I thought, "Hey, I've heard Poinsettias are poisonous.  I'd like to shove a fistful of them up this lady's handsome drapery ass."

Well, they were October stamps.  Not available till October.  Poinsettias for October.  Hey, what the fuck do I know?  I'm Jewish.  

Then she wanted Harriet Tubman.  Are you fucking kidding me?  Who thinks it's a good idea to put Harriet Tubman on a stamp?  For everything that she did?  The Freedom Trail?  Risking her life and limb?  And we're going to put her on a piece of paper the size of a big toenail that people lick and stick on the envelope that contains their fucking miserable mortgage payment?

Jesus Christ.

Hey!  When are we putting HIM on a fucking stamp?

But I digress.  Now she wants to trade a Tubman for a flag.  

"I'm sorry I'm taking up so much time," she says, in that innocent, begging way that requires the conversational partner to say, "Oh, no, ma'am!  It's not time, it's business."  Then, for good measure, he adds, "monkey business!"

No, monkeycum, it most definitely, assuredly, unmistakably IS MOST CERTAINLY TIME.   

There should be a law.  You want stamps?  Okay.  It's a 1"x1" piece of lickable paper and, on it, it says

LICK

That's it!  They should all be Forever stamps, and they should be white with black lettering, and say nothing but fucking LICK, so you know exactly what it is and you know exactly what you're supposed to do with it and that way you don't go around licking things you shouldn't.

LICK

Now, you might have me pegged as someone who's against personalization.  Well, not entirely.  Don't forget, I'm the guy who took a 2001 yellow VW New Beetle, had it painted white and turned it into Herbie the fucking Love Bug many moons ago-- I personlize the shit out of things.  But not at the inconvenience of anybody else.  You want Yellowstone National Park on your goddamn checks?

GREAT!  Doesn't impact me whatsoever.  Maybe you'd like to name your private parts or have pink shutters on your house?  Awesome.  Feeling the urge to tattoo your mom's maiden name on your left shoulder blade?  I know she and your maternal ancestors would be honored, and I would have absolutely nothing to say about it.  But when it's 4:30 on a Monday afternoon and there's an impatient, sweaty, anxious bastard who's been at work since 6:10 and he's got to get home to his fried wife and his needy twins and his whining basset hound and there's a line a'brewin' back there and you're prattling on in your precious little way about taking up so much time, about POSTAGE STAMPS?  ABOUT THINGS THE POST OFFICE CANCELS AND MAKES SQUIGGLY LITTLE BLACK LINES OVER AND THAT THE MAIL RECIPIENT CARES NOTHING ABOUT-- NOTHING!!!!!!!!-- well, what else can one say but,

Havershaw?  It's times like this where I really don't like myself very much.   

The Comic Javert

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 7, Verse 4

"Love wisdom like a sweetheart; make her a beloved member of your family."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

People think I'm wise, but I'm not.  If you're reading this blog to soak in the words of a sage, well, there's more wrong with you than there is with me, and I suggest you see a doctor and get rid of it.

I was, at one point, however, wise enough to know that I should be seeking wisdom from people who probably had it.  My criteria for people who have wisdom is admittedly narrow in scope.  They have to be men and they have to have white hair.  

When I was lost in my life at one point, I think it was 2003 or thereabouts, I wrote to Andy Rooney.  A friend of mine who worked in show business got me his email address, and I wrote to him to ask him what I should do with my life.  It's kind of embarrassing to tell you that I did that, but he wrote back.  He told me that advice was like spinach, and that, if I wanted to be a writer, that's what I should do.  His email, I hasten to add, was absolutely littered with punctuation and spelling errors.  I suspect that, if it had been a letter, banged out on an old Underwood typewriter, it'd have been letter perfect.  

Before Andy Rooney, I aimed a little lower, one might say, and wrote to James Best, who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on "The Dukes of Hazzard".  While Best himself acknowledged once in an interview that "all I'll be remembered for when I'm gone is 'cooo cooo cooo!'", he is himself a Shakespearean-trained classical actor, was once a very handsome leading man type, and also not too bad of a painter.  This was in my should-I-be-a-cop-or-an-actor phase-- probably 2002, just after graduating college and breaking up with my girlfriend and moved back into my old room in my parents' house and feeling the bottom of a monkey cage.  I figured he'd be a good person to write to, being an actor who, for years, played a police officer, albeit a terrible, corrupt, and inept one: the comic Javert.  James Best told me I should give acting a shot because, "there is no career this side of Heaven more rewarding".  I guess he must have seen Catherine Bach naked in her dressing room once.

I didn't do that.  I did buy one of his paintings, though.  And, more than ten years after writing to him, I adopted a basset hound.  In memory of Flash.  

The fact is that I've always been more reliant and more trusting of the advice of people I respect and admire than my own intuition, which I have to believe is faulty, flawed, unfortunate, disordered, and dopey.  My poor office mate at work, who has the misfortune to be older and white-haired, is constantly peppered with and judiciously fields what he (I hope) affectionately calls "mother-may-I" questions from me as I sit hunched over in my chair, fidgeting, staring endlessly through the screen of my laptop, nervously sipping from my brushed aluminum decaf coffee dispenser, clearing my throat, crossing my legs, changing a word in a proposal, as if that word, that fucking word will make the difference between getting a project funded or not.  As if one word will somehow offend the recipient.

Is this alright?

Do you think?

What if I said?

Should I?

Could I?

Is it okay if I?

Will?

Won't?

Why?

Does?

Know?

No?

One day I'll show up to work and the lock on the office door will be changed, and I'll understand.  

It's funny to me to think that, some day, maybe thirty or forty years from now, some naive little pup with dubious evaluative standards will look upon me as someone to go to, someone at whose knee to gaze up and ask questions and expect answers with meat on their bones.  If I've gained any wisdom through the decades I'll tell the guy or gal that I'm having a stroke and to come back later.  

I do know some things-- but I don't think they make me especially competent or wise.  Here's a summary of what I've learned to date:

* Don't be a theatre major.

* Alcohol is guaranteed to make you an idiot, but not drinking isn't guaranteed to make you not an idiot.

* Marry for love, not because you're worried about what people, especially your parents, will think or say.

* Once in your life, drive, if not own, a huge, old American car that gets less than 15 miles a gallon.

* Short cuts are meaningless-- take the route you like the most, just drive fast.

* The skin on the chicken might shorten your life, but who cares?  Eat that shit.

* People who have been dealt a terrible, striking blow by life are special, even if they're kind of assholes.

* Listen to a Howlin' Wolf album really, really loud in the car in the summer with all the windows down.

* Women in tank-tops are a lot hotter than women who are naked.  Generally speaking.

* If your father's ever hugged you tightly while you're both sobbing, you're both doing something right.

* Humor is very, very powerful.  

* Writing is very, very dangerous.

* Live as far away from other people as you can reasonably afford.  People are horrible.

* Golf is completely fucking stupid.  So are most sports, but golf's at the top of the list. 

* Bowling's okay.

* Don't be afraid to write to old guys with white hair.  Just try to keep the mother-may-I's to a minimum.

To Mock a Killingbird

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 1, Verse 26

"Some day you'll be in trouble, and I'll laugh!  Mock me, will you?  I'll mock you!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Terry Gross did a "Late Night Week" thing on her show all of last week.  She interviewed Letterman and whathisname with the chin already-- Conan and Jimmy Fallon, too.  It started on Monday when she played an older recording of an interview she did with Fred de Cordova, the Executive Producer of "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.  This guy, as far as I can tell, was a legend, from a time where legends knew how to tie a Windsor knot and they all smoked and somehow lived to be 90, their skin was tanned and leathery as a handbag and they could get away with white socks and dress pants.  

de Cordova lorded over "The Tonight Show" and the legend of whether a comic made it or not being determined by receiving a wink from Johnny turns out to be not so much-- it was really getting "the wave over" from de Cordova, as Jay Leno himself spoke of when he got the wave over in 1977, while wearing a suit that looked like it was made from a skinned lizard.  That's how you knew your act killed and it was time to take a seat next to Johnny Carson.  Kings were made, empires fell, who knows how many useless schmucks killed themselves after not getting that de Cordova wave over, but that's show business.

There was a lot of introspective navel-gazing (the technical term for this is: "omphaloskepsis", in case you were wondering-- and, hey-- save some dirty lint for me, okay?  Bloggers gotta eat too, you know.) during these interviews about comedy-- what is it and how do you find it?  Is it under a rock or inside your navel or does it grow in Brooklyn?  

Jimmy Fallon was talking about how most of his humor is "nice", that he's "not too mean".  

I like that.  I respect that.  But I don't particularly understand it.  I don't know, I don't think, how to be funny without being mean.  Dirty.  Cruel.  Harsh.  

My meanness was honed at our family's dining room table.  They say good things happen when families eat dinner together, and maybe that's so, but, when my family ate together, it was show time.  There was no need for a tv or a radio, I was Johnny and the guests all rolled into one.  Impressions, sarcasm, voices, songs, faces-- it was all there.  Passover was the high point of the year for me, because it meant that

a.) I got a MUCH bigger house and,

b.) I got to dress up (Windsor knot and everything) and,

c.) My lines were already WRITTEN DOWN!

(You know, in the haggadah.)

In our house, the 4 Questions were done in Indian, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Irish accents, depending on the year and what films I had seen recently.  Sometimes, they were done in the voice and manner of people our family knew-- friends, and doctors, mostly.  Sometimes, I improvised a little.  Sometimes, I got in trouble a little.  But, for me, it was like being on tv, and I loved it.  

But being funny at the dinner table as I got older got a little bit harder.  It's easy to be precocious and get a laugh or two when you're impersonating your rheumatologist (yes, unfortunately, I had one of those, and he was Indian, and he was hiLARious) as a younger kid, and it's another to still be funny when you're a smarmy little fifteen-year-old that nobody likes, not even you.  But I found that something usually worked, and that was meanness.  

Being offensive, which I was sometimes inadvertently as a younger child and which was severely frowned upon (especially at Seder), was somehow not only okay when I was a burgeoning teenager, but something that was rewarded with a prize all boys, no matter how old, endlessly seek: their mothers' smile.  Whether it was a cutting remark about someone we all knew, or some outrageous comment about something going on in the news or the family, the darker and more sinister it was, the louder the maternal laugh.  And I didn't think too terribly much about trends I might be setting for myself or the family, I just knew what was working and, like any comic with half a brain, I kept at it.  

Look, at dinner, I killed.  Who could ask for anything more?

Of course, I sometimes wonder what I would have been like had I been encouraged to "be nice", or at least "nice-er".  What would my personality have been like?  Who might I have attracted, or turned away?  What would my omphaloskepsis on comedy yield?  I'll never know, and I suspect, unfortunately or not, that the kind of children I am going to rear are going to realize that what gets daddy going, what will win them the wave over, is raucous and unrefined, imitations of an unflattering nature and a heavy dose of envelope-pushing.  

And I guess they'll roll with what works.  And maybe, hopefully, they won't get quite as addicted to the results as I did.     

Missa in Angustiis

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 30, Verses 2 & 3:

"I am too stupid even to call myself a human being!  

I cannot understand man, let alone God."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Orson Welles once said, "I don't pray because I don't want to bore God".  I guess I feel kind of the same way.  I suppose, in some sort of perverted, disorganized and unfortunate way, these blog posts could be construed as a type of prayer.  Something is created, if you want to be kind and call it that, and it is sent out, maybe sent up.  Prayers are pleas, right?  They're missives intended to be heard, if not heeded.  

Hear us, O Lord.  We beseech you and so forth.  

I'm doing the same thing, if artlessly so.  Hear me, O Best Beloved.  I beseech you and so forth. 

Whether we're secular or pious, we've been sending things out, and maybe up, for a very long time.  Whether it's been psychotic scribblings on walls or Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", a tumultuous and terrifying play about Vietnam by David Rabe, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet on a deadline or a whistleblowing expose of greed or incompetence or worse-- it's all prayer.  Every raspy, erotic exhalation and every turn signal and each creak of the rocking chair and each diaper change.  Every cough and every tear.  

Every, every minute.

And I suppose that's why people think they need religion because, without it, we don't know what the fuck we're doing.  We're like fumbling with buttons in the dark.  We're too stupid even to call ourselves human beings.  We're lazy and scared and there's a mess on the desk and dog shit out back and twins tenuously asleep in the next room and everything is precarious and we're all holding it in or holding back or waiting for the next thing.  

What is the next thing going to be?

I remember when my brother-in-law died of cancer.  He was thirty-four.  And the babies had just been born.  And I was thinking, what could it be?  The next thing.  Even in the couple of months from his diagnosis to his death, there were many "next things".  More MRIs.  More scans.  More tumors.  More texts.  More calls.  Every time the phone rang or went "bleepboop" it was bad.  It was so bad.  And I don't think I ever prayed for him.  Not formally.  No Hebrew.  I mean-- he wasn't Jewish, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten translated right anyway.  But there was plenty of prayer.  My kind of prayer.  

This.

DO YOU HEAR ME UP THERE YOU FUCK?

I love it.  You pray to the guy who did it. Hilarious.  A scream.  A howler.  Crazygonuts.  Fucking phonies.

The high holidays are coming again.  They always do.  We're going to go to services and march around with the children behind the torahs.  It is what it is.  I don't believe in it any more than I believe in Santa Claus.  Hell, I believe in Santa Claus more-- at least I get to play him at the psych hospital.  And read "A Christmas Carol".  I love that.  There's no prayer more prayery than that.  Dickens in the Day Room.  

It doesn't heal a soul.  It doesn't do a thing.  But it does what art is supposed to do: take you out of the place you are in, for a moment or two.  Take you out of yourself.  Out of your own psyche.  Your own troubles.  Your own shit.  It does it for me as much as it does it for them.  

My children are having what my wife calls "The Language Explosion".  In laymen's terms: they're talking their little asses off.  

mamadadacarshoessipcupuppacrackercookiewatercookieavodacoballbeepbeepbearblankieandalltherestofit

One day, they're going to start asking me about God and religion and humanity and why people use nerve gas on each other and why the former president put a cigar in that idiot's vagina and why the neighbor doesn't like us and why are there little shiny bits in the street that glisten like diamonds and why diamonds are a girl's best friend and why they don't have any friends and what were we like before they were born and what happens when we die and why do birds suddenly appear and bluebirds say.

What the fuck do they say?

What the fuck do I say?

What will I say?

I'm kind of hoping they befriend an old man.  Not a creepers old man with a dirty trench coat and a comb-over and a ubiquitous white van, but a wizened old man, all crinkly behind his gold-rimmed glasses and his well-worn wingtips and his faded corduroys who'll sit on his porch and tell them stories about the way it was and he'll have clever, quaint, slightly biting, deadpan and droll way of looking at the world.  And they'll soak in his words and his wisdom and they'll repeat his aphorisms at school and their teachers will call them "old souls" and they'll know things-- they'll just know.  

You know?

Because I don't.  I just don't know.  And I know that's supposed to be one of the bravest things you can possibly say, but these are troubled times.  They're always troubled times.  And I just don't know.   

With Stern Judicial Frame of Mind

HI.  Sorry about this fucked up color shit.  

Something happened.

Deal.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 25, Verse 8

"Don't be hot-headed and rush to court!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Are you fucking kidding me?

I'd rather get a teddy bear stuffed with Ricin.  But, alas, no such luck for me.  It's Jury Duty.

They tried this on me once before.  Back before I had a smart phone that I dutifully put appointments and important things in, my life was a haphazard, disorganized mess of scraps of paper in my trouser pockets or in my glove box or on my bureau.  When we were getting ready to dump my wife's PT Cruiser in favor of my Volvo S-40, I was cleaning out the door pockets and found a piece of paper that looked strangely similar to the paper pictured above.  My heart dropped immediately to my bowels and floated in a pool of half-digested lunchmeat.  I stared at it, hoping it would go away, like a neighbor I don't want to talk to-- but that never works.  Things and people don't just go away because you stare at them.  

I would know.  Can you imagine just how many people have stared at me, hoping I would go away?  And fuck if I'm not still here.

So, I grabbed the juror notice and the date I was due to report was three months prior to the date I had the paper in my hand.  I immediately expected a Sheriff's Department van to pull up in back of the PT Cruiser and have a cadre of deputy dawgs cuff me an' stuff me.  Certain that there was a warrant out for my arrest, I shakily called the number on the paper and rambled some crazy mess of excuses for why I didn't show.  The clerk on the phone was actually pretty nice about it.  She said I was "fine" which, I guess, meant that I wasn't in contempt of court and didn't owe a $1,000 fine and that the police weren't going to rappel through my bedroom window that night and whisk me away to Night Court to face that annoying magician judge.  

This time, my Jury Duty notice is pinned proudly to the kitchen cork board and the reminders are in my Outlook calendar at work and my iPhone.  I was going to have September 24th tattooed to my forehead, but I didn't want everyone thinking I was publicly raising awareness of the birth date of my two favorite people: the Ayatollah Khomeini and Jim Henson.  

While the idea of earning roughly the daily wage of a Chinese factory worker, while doing none of the actual arduous physical labor, is oddly appealing to me on some twisted level, I'm not altogether excited about the prospect of serving on a jury.  I guess lots of people feel this way, but for different reasons.  They don't want to miss work, they "don't have time for that", it's boring and annoying and you can't talk about what you're doing, etc.  

Me?

I just don't fucking like people.  

And, when you're on a jury, I expect, you have to deal with people.

LOTS of people.

I mean, you're all crammed the fuck up in that jury box with at least eleven of them.  The attorneys.  And the bailiffs.  And the stenographer.  And the goddamn courtroom frustrated Rembrandt with her little oil pastels and artsy glasses.  And there's the suspect, looking like a shithead.  And the victim, looking all victimy as hell.  And the families.  And the orphans.  And the vendors selling T-shirts and the cops and Jem, Scout, and Cousin Dill up in the balcony and Sam Watterston with his fucking eyebrows and 

For these kind words accept my thanks, I pray. 

A Breach of Promise we’ve to try to-day. 

But firstly, if the time you’ll not begrudge, 

I’ll tell you how I came to be a Judge.

It's never like it is in the movies.  Or on TV.  Or in the Victorian operetta. 

It's middle-aged women farting in the sequestration room and cold sandwiches on stale bread and people wanting to get home before "Jeopardy!" and if justice was ever served at an American court proceeding I'm sure it was by complete accident.  

Please.  Don't put me in a room with those people.  Whoever they are.  Women.  Men.  White, black, plaid, I don't give a fuck.  I'll tell them my daddy's daddy's daddy was a cop.  I'll tell them I collect Jim Crow postage stamps.  I'll pee my pants.  I'll pee the guy next to me's pants.  I'll come on the 24th wearing a Hitler mustache and no pants.  I'll wear a bra, on the outside of my shirt.  I'll faint.  I'll shoot fake blood out of my eyeballs.  No-- real blood.  I'll steal the gavel.  I'll call myself "H. Rap Brown" and I'll do the black power fist thing when the judge walks in.  

Please.  I'm scared.  I'm too dumb to decide someone else's fate.  I can't even decide my own.