All the news that’s fit to… ah, screw it.
I always kind of realized I wanted to be a writer. By “kind of,” I mean that I always enjoyed writing even when I couldn’t figure out how to make a buck at it, and by “writer,” I mean someone who makes his living by sitting on the couch most of the day eating Doritos and watching C.H.I.P.s reruns. It’s all gone through fits and starts. Today, I sometimes write articles for magazines (though they ALMOST NEVER contain farting or zombies, or farting zombies if that’s at all possible, and actually, I kind of figure it is not only possible but LIKELY, given the amount of decomposition that occurs in the zombie digestive tract as well as on his face, hands, credit score, etc.), and before that I sometimes wrote copy, and before that, I sometimes wrote on napkins. (The trick is to not press too hard. That fucks up the napkins. Upcoming kids, learn from my mistakes.)
A word here and a word there, and sometimes they’d come together in a wonderful ejaculation of synergy and you’d end up with a funny new phrase, like “doucherocket.” But it kind of all began when I was on the staff of my high school newspaper.
For some reason, high schools think that creating a newspaper will teach kids about journalism. What journalism has to do with reporting current events, I’ll never understand, but we had it nonetheless and were tasked with encapsulating the entire goings-on of the school into a weekly 8-page document that had to be released at least once every two months or whenever it was convenient. At our school, the newspaper staff had a dedicated period (the last of the day) to research stories, write them, and submit them to one person to do all of the work. So each day, we’d have 45 minutes to work on our stories, and of those 45 minutes, most staff members used between zero and a half to work, and that tended to be accidental, like knocking over the photo morgue while Indian wrestling.
Like any great journalistic endeavor, our periodical’s staff was divided into beats. Someone covered the sports beat (taking sporadic and inaccurate notes on a football game while making out in the bleachers), someone covered politics (who will win class president? Probably Gretchen, who I think was the only person sucker enough to run), someone covered current events outside the school (we broke news of the first gulf war fully six weeks after it was over), someone took photos (of girls’ asses) and someone (usually Mark) was in charge of gathering our advisor’s hair into wads and stapling it together.
I petitioned to be a columnist.
“What would you write about?” asked our advisor, Miss Chamberlain.
“I don’t know. Stuff,” I answered.
“And why do you want to be a columnist?”
“I have many opinions. And I’m very interested in the fact that I wouldn’t actually have to do any work.”
The cool thing about American freedom of the press plus the fact that your advisor clearly doesn’t give a shit is that high school Dave Barrys like me have virtually zero oversight. Occasionally, I’d have a fight on my hands come press time, but I had a mullet haircut and hence won all such confrontations.
“You can’t talk about decapitating Barney the Dinosaur,” Miss C. would say.
I’d turn on my indignant face. “Why not? The people have a right to know.”
“It’s gruesome.”
“More gruesome than the September 11 attacks? More gruesome than the swine flu or SARS, or the Marines scandal at Guantanamo Bay?”
“Those things all happened well after you graduated high school,” she’d say. “Are you maybe getting confused while writing about this fifteen years from now?”
“Perhaps you haven’t noticed that I have a mullet,” I’d reply.
And the story would run, because of the importance of the third estate. Or first estate. I can never remember the estates. Which one is alcoholic clowns?
Mine was an embattled existence. I was constantly having to fight for my rights. Miss C. protested the fact that none of the scholarships that I wrote about (”Fund for people whose ambition it is to strap a roll of toilet paper to their heads, burrow into the center of a Toledo Mud Hens baseball game, and pop up yelling, ‘Mabel, did you feed the cat?’”) actually existed. She bristled when I wrote about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer telling Santa, “Up yours, fatso.” She had second thoughts about the relevance of Elvis being alive in Michigan. There were problems with the piece on my friend Gary using his Ford Escort to plow fields, on the bizarre hairstyle of a student teacher (it looked like a badger), on a supposed mule lottery, on Winnie the Pooh being mildly retarded. But I won them all.
Unfortunately, most of these great relics have vanished. My friend and rival Melissa, who has finally admitted that I’m funny, found some old newspapers in her basement or walls or something, so you can go ask her if you’re interested.
All I have is my interview with Matt Kern. It wasn’t a column, but it does reflect the hard-nosed journalistic integrity and grit that our student body relied on the Advocate to provide approximately every once in a while, whenever we got around to it.
No Barney, but there are nighties and toasters involved. Enjoy.
(Oh, I should mention that this Toaster Lovers’ Association was in fact formed and that I attended its meetings regularly at Uncle John’s Pancake House. I even won the door prize, a toaster named Eugene, on the basis of my extreme merit and the fact that everyone else left. Have I written about the TLA yet? If not, I should do a piece. The Toaster Lovers’ Association and its sister organization, The Flame Squad, were the very types of monuments to idiocy that deserve more press.)
Sometimes I tell a story over and over and over again until you just want to hang yourself with some kind of nylon rope or like a bathrobe belt, or maybe something silkier, and hey, where's that ham I lost?
A lot of you out there think I’m funny. I mean, if you don’t, why the hell are you reading this blog? Why have you read it in the past, and why will you read it in the future? And if you aren’t planning on reading it in the future, why are you being an asshole? I’d read your blog, so why won’t you read mine? Except that actually, I probably wouldn’t read your blog. I’d pretend to, but then I’d end up tracking down bizarre memes online instead, like OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!! and GIRUGAMESH!!! But I mean, I’d pretend. Although I probably wouldn’t pretend, and would instead end up searching for this image I found once of a sailor on the deck of a ship with a horse’s head. Holding a cat. You know the image I’m talking about.
You may think I’m funny, and at least 75% of you have decided it must be a laff riot to live with me like it must be a laff riot (or highly disturbing, or both) to live with The Bloggess, and probably you fantasize about it constantly or at least use a calculator from time to time, which, let’s face it, is pretty much the same thing.
My wife is always telling me how hilarious I am. Just the other day, after I wrote a particularly funny piece, she came upstairs from her basement office and told me, honestly, with zero false praise and zero thought to pumping me up and making me feel good, straight from her heart, she goes, “Did you remember to buy shrimp when you went to the store this weekend?”
And I was like, “Did you read my blog?”
“Um, yeah.”
“And?”
She shrugged in a noncommittal manner. “It was good.” Then, to make sure I knew how much she truly enjoyed it, she added, “But seriously, did you buy shrimp?”
Look, it’s not her fault. And it’s not my fault, either. You’re around something enough and you stop noticing it, kind of like how America has stopped noticing that Ryan Seacrest has no talent. It’s why ambulances vary their sirens every so often, so that people who have gotten used to an approaching WEE-OOO-WEE-OOO are startled back into paying attention when it changes to WEEOW-WEEOW-WEEOW. If I really wanted to keep my family on their toes, I’d adopt similar tactics. I’d start talking about something interesting that happened today (clown caught in escalator, man hit by pie, floating baby) and then start making siren noises.
But really the bigger problem is that I have a fixed repository of stories. They seem interesting to you, but that’s because you’re a fresh audience. Wait until I start repeating myself, like I do in front of my family.
For instance. You spend enough time around me and you start to realize that that story about my friend who tried to go through the Canadian border with large electronic equipment, gore-clotted hooks, a bloody hatchet, and a giant bag of unmarked pills in a car whose owner was apparently missing is one I tell to everyone. It’s funny when I tell it to you, and it’s kind of amusing the first time you’re near me when I tell it to someone else. By the second time, you’re correcting inconsistent parts of the story and by the third time, you’re sticking your tongue into the toaster.
And then what happens is I try to tell you the story again. You’re faced with a decision between being polite and mocking me. If you’re creative, you can do both.
This is pretty typical:
Me: “I understand why it’s supposedly illegal to yell ‘FIRE’ in a crowded place. But do you think you could yell ‘INSTANCE OF COMBUSTION!’ and get away with it? I mean, it’s technically the same thing, but most people wouldn’t understand what you were talking about. Of course, that would defeat the purpose, but just for the sake of argument, I’m wondering if it would fly.”
Robin: “What?”
Me: “Did I ever tell you about the Penis Game?”
Robin: [Ignoring me]
Me: “This guy in high school used to want to play this game in the lunchroom where he’d say ‘penis’ quietly, so that nobody could really hear it, and then the next person would have to say it a little louder. The game went on until someone chickened out and would back off from yelling ‘penis’ to the lunchroom.”
Robin: “I think the TiVo is broken again.”
Me: “But the problem was that when the game got to my friend Travis, he’d stand up on the table and yell ‘PEEEEEENIS!” at the top of his voice. Then he’d ad-lib for a while, like ”MONUMENTAL PENIS! SUPER-PENIS ERECTION MAN!’ Hey, are you listening to me?”
Robin: [Starting at the TV]
Me: “I’m turning gay and running off with the dog.”
Robin: “What?”
Me: “Did you hear my penis story?”
Robin: “Yes. You’ve told it like ten times.”
Me: “No I haven’t.”
Robin: “Did Travis eventually start yelling, ‘Big clit!’ ”
Me: “Yeah, but…”
Robin: “Ten times. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with the TiVo?”
So I’m going to have to start keeping records. Walk around with a little notebook. Create an Excel chart of everyone I know and how many times I’ve told them a certain story. Create an algorithm to determine when I should tell a story to a new party if a second, overexposed party is within earshot. Develop a way of shuttling said overexposed people out of the room, possibly by tossing snacks in one direction and running in another, or else yelling “PENIS!” and disappearing in the ensuing melee.
And when I start running low on new ideas, I’ll just suggest that you go get Rob “Diesel” Kroese’s new book Mercury Falls because it’s sure to be hilarious. And I doubt there’s any penis in it at all because I don’t think angels have them. That would explain the rapture, maybe, when you think about it.
All's Fair in love and rectal explosives
It’s county fair time here, and that means three things:
1. Yes, I actually go to the fair.
2. Yes, seriously.
3. No, I’m not kidding.
I have a love/hate relationship with the county fair. I love that it’s here because it showcases everything that’s wrong with humanity (and who doesn’t like that?), but I hate that it sort of heralds the beginning of the end of summertime. This summer in particular seemed to go really, really fast, and that’s not cool at all.
But the people-watching I get to do on the fairgrounds kind of makes up for it.
See, you forget that these people exist if you stay at home, avoiding the fair like some sort of black plague that ushers with it human mutants wearing matching mall-photo-booth t-shirts stretched out over gigantic, distended Orca bellies, fried foods running in congealed little balls down their protruding and exposed torsos, long rat tails of hair hanging down their sweaty backs, teeth akimbo and fighting to be free from the confines of their gums, glottal hyuh sounds coming from their throats while they smoke through yellow teeth, having abomination sex with their three-thumbed sisters. You forget that there is still a literacy problem in this country, and a racism problem, and an oral hygiene problem, and a bestiality problem. Without the fair, you wouldn’t realize that sometimes people injure themselves with a hatchet while removing a corn on their toe, receive third-degree burns about the buttocks while launching bottle rockets creatively, or are accidentally shot by their fathers while hunting delicious squirrel.
Not everyone is like me: cool as hell sitting in front of a computer all day, laughing at math jokes and knowing a shitload of Star Trek trivia. I go to the fair to see that which is unlike myself, and unlike this blogosphere we’re all so comfortable in. To people-watch. And to feel better about my teeth.
Our local fair is actually exceedingly dangerous, so I kind of feel like a thrill-seeker when I go. One year, a steam-powered vehicle on display exploded and killed a few people. Another year we made headlines for an e-coli outbreak thanks to a leaky water supply used by all of the concession vendors. One year, it’s sure to be an escaped monkey rampage. There aren’t actually any monkeys on display, so this scenario requires a hidden cache of monkeys somewhere on the premises, or possibly a monkey-stocked train derailment in the vicinity. Fingers crossed.
My wife Robin always looks forward to the fair because it’s a chance to forget that the rest of us exist. After eating a gyro made of what looks suspiciously like grocery store Steak-Ums, she typically falls into some sort of trance or fugue while watching horses parade around a ring at a painfully slow and uninteresting pace. This leaves me not only totally alone conversation-wise (”Robin, do you want any of this funnel cake? Robin? Robin?” or “Robin, I’ve been shot. Robin? Robin?”), but also leaves me in charge of the kids, both of whom eventually begin to roll down a steep slope toward the ring and become hazards to everyone involved.
This is a nostalgic coma for her, I believe. Back in her high school days, she used to bring horses to the fair for the entire fair week and ride slowly and uninterestingly around that ring herself, avoiding children and fat adults rolling haplessly down the slope, as part of the local 4-H club. I’m sure our children will have to join this boonies club which gets you beaten up if you ever move around city folk. I do think you can be part of 4-H (a farm organization whose 4 H’s refer to Hands, Hedberg, Hadron Colliders, and Hermione) without learning to change the oil on sheep or cows, though. I think you can just do activities with horses. Like backgammon and tax planning.
So this is how it goes: Gyro, horse show. Children rolling haplessly downhill. Mullets, dangerous ferris wheel. Inappropriate midriff shirts. Realization that there are a ton of 12-year-old sluts in the world. Funnel cake. Fin.
That starts tonight. I’m trying to blend in, if possible. I’m wearing a Skynard shirt and a confederate flag doo-rag. Now wish me luck shooting these bottle rockets out of my ass.