Christmas Memories Flooding In (Cigar Smoke 12-30-10)

As I’m writing this the rain is falling on my head like a song. The only problem with that is that I am inside my house. Hey, it’s been quite a rainstorm, huh?

But as I sit here at my desk, something else is flooding in: Memories of a Christmas past.

In 1964 I was living up in Northern California in a little town called Arcata, in Humboldt County. I had just gotten married and I was 23 years old. My wife was getting her teaching credential at Humboldt State College and I was working on the green chain at Pacific Lumber Co., out on the Samoa Peninsula.

And that December we lived in this dumpy, upstairs apartment which we climbed up to on dark, shaky, unlit stairs. The main thing I remember about the place was that it had linoleum floors that were coming up at the sides of the rooms and I thought we would be the first people ever eaten by bad floor covering.

But that wasn’t the scariest part of living there. From our window on the second floor, we could look out and see our neighbors across the street. And our neighbors just happened to own a mortuary. And sometimes at night, when we turned off our lights to go to bed, we would hear suspicious noises and we would go peek out the window and we would see these shadowy figures carrying rolled up carpets or blankets with something heavy in them.

I am not kidding you here. (Would I lie to you?) We were absolutely certain that these guys were doing something evil. Stephen King evil. And Stephen hadn’t even started writing yet. The weirdest thing was that sometimes they would carry these rolled-up carpets into the mortuary and sometimes carry them out of the mortuary. We were sure they were dead bodies, or on the way to being dead bodies.

It was really scary. One time I was so scared I whispered to Sue, my then wife, “Honey, maybe you better go down there and check this out?” She tried to backhand me with the flashlight she was holding, but the rising linoleum knocked her off balance. Ah, the memories.

Anyway, I was working out at the lumber mill that Christmas season and I learned one of the many life lessons that I torture my kids with to this day. We were working very, very hard. And the green wood would come down the conveyer belt (the chain) and we would wrangle it off the line and stack these 20-foot boards onto pallets. Grueling, tough work.

And we would all bitch about how much work there was to do. We didn’t think those boards would ever stop coming down the chain. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. And then one day there were no boards on the line. We couldn’t believe it. We were all so damn happy.

Lots of yelling and relief until the next day. That’s when the foreman told us that, since there wasn’t any more work to do, he had to fire all of us. And he did. On the spot. Two weeks before Christmas. So I always tell my kids … ah, you know what I tell them.

And right after I got fired from my job, it started to rain. I mean, it rained. Hard. For weeks. And the water kept building up and the flood level kept rising and the bridges started to get washed out and thousands of dead cows were all floating in the Ferndale Valley and, boys and girls, we were right in the middle of what they call a 100 Year Flood.

And it was really something. We were isolated up there in Arcata. Completely cut off from most everything and everybody. And we couldn’t travel at all that Christmas. Just hunkered down in Humboldt County. Me crying and Sue just telling me to shut the hell up.

But it was kind of fun, too. We didn’t have hardly any of the Christmas shopping hassle and we didn’t need to make up any lame excuses for not seeing certain relatives, and school was out for Christmas vacation, and I could pretend that Sue would make me pot roast dinners and ask if there was anything else she could do for her man, her lord and master.

And I remember we went out to buy a Christmas tree and, of course, there weren’t any trees on the lots due to the flood. So we actually went up into the forest and cut down some scraggly little sucker and brought it home. This was one hideous tree, baby. It was just waiting for somebody to write a book about it — “The Ugly Christmas Tree That Nobody Wanted Unless There Was a 100-Year Flood and Maybe Not Even Then.”

But we liked it, dammit. We decorated it with beer can pull tabs and uneaten pizza crusts and strange shapes we crafted out of aluminum foil. I think Sue even painted a few eggshells with her toenail polish and hung those. (Now you know why I married her.) Ah, the memories.

I hope you all have great Christmas memories, too. Even you commies.

Giving Thanks for a Shotgun Christmas (Cigar Smoke 12-16-10)

Hello everyone this Christmas season. Or as we say here in the United States, hello everyone this holiday season where it would probably kill us if we said the word Christmas without some kind of qualifier. Yes, I can still be pissy during this time of year. Pissy knows no season.

By the way, do you think Muslims would protest if we said they shouldn’t celebrate Ramadan because it offended four people in the United States? Just wondering. We wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

I’m just going to write a shotgun column this time. Shoot from the hip or shoot from the lip. There’s just going to be some shooting, but you won’t know where it’s coming from. Duck.

We had a really nice Thanksgiving at our house. We like to celebrate an old tradition (as opposed to a young tradition) by all sitting down at the Thanksgiving dinner table and giving thanks for all we have, and then taking a brief pause to sample the wine and then wait to see who will be the first one to ask my two sons, Mike and Casey, who are 41 and 36, why they aren’t married yet. Man, it’s heart-warming. I get shivers.

We’ve been doing this for the past 10 years. And no, we don’t care about their feelings. At first, we just hinted at it, and we’d say, “Would everyone who is a normal person and is married please stand up.” And they would be the only two people sitting, and we’d point at them and mock them and laugh at them and call them sissies and they would just look at us and say something defensive like, “It’s my life, Fuddy Duddy Face,” or, “pass the gravy.”

We tried everything over the years. Becoming more vicious each year. One year my son-in-law, Michael, said that if you were an unmarried man over the age of 30 in Alaska, Eskimos would put your “sorry asses” on a raft and push you out to sea and shoot at you with flaming arrows dipped in goat piss as you drifted away.

And another year, my daughter-in-law, Anh, who is Vietnamese, suggested that in her country men who weren’t married by a certain age were poked with large sharp sticks with poison tips and when the wounds got all bloody and filled with pus the elders would walk over to the unmarried losers and hit them right in the nose with the butt of a rifle.

We all put down our wine and clapped.

Personally, I tried to use guilt. I’m pretty good at making my sons guilty. I’ve had a lot of practice. A couple of years ago I asked them if they could hear that sound. And they said,

“What sound?” I said, “The sound of your mother crying. The sound of the teardrops hitting the hardwood floor and splashing up as your mother sits on an old wooden chair with splinters in her semi-aging buttocks while listening to a Pat Boone record.” We’re still waiting for their response.

I’ve taken some pretty good shots at ‘em, too. I remember back in 2004 I asked them if they actually liked being with a different, young, beautiful, teddy-wearing vixen who used birth control pills, and not settling down and having a bunch of rug rats so their father could finally be happy with life and live out his few remaining single-digit years with the sound of little pitter-pattering feet to soothe his sick and dying soul. “How selfish can you be,” I yelled! “Still gotta a ways to go, Pops,” one of the losers answered.

This year, after exhausting our arsenal of fear and guilt, all of us married good people had a secret meeting to plan our strategy. We decided to insult their manhood and try to humiliate them and even traumatize them, if that’s what it took. The vote was 8-0. Of course, I was the one who had to implement the plan. Somehow Mike, the older non-married loser, got wind that something was up and he didn’t come to dinner this year. So I had to try it on Casey alone.

Excuse me, I started, “Would any so-called man who is not married yet and has erectile dysfunction problems please share them with us? We are here to be supportive, and we know with the right drug and an understanding mate, you can solve this problem. Would that unmarried person please stand up now, and we will call them Ed (as in E.D.) to make the conversation flow a little easier?”

There was a silence for a long time. Then the silence was broken. No, it was not by a tear hitting the floor. It was the sound of a ball of mashed potatoes hitting the forehead of a never-to-be grandfather.

Life is Good (Cigar Smoke 11-18-10)

Sometimes don’t you feel almost guilty when everything just seems to work out right? Man, I have been on a roll here lately. Yeah, the last 69 years have been awesome.

OK, that’s probably a little too macro (and sappy) to be believable. Let’s get down to the micro. For the last week or two, everything I do is golden. It all started when I got a parking ticket over on South Lake Avenue when I went to the Souplantation for lunch. I park my car. I pay the parking fee at the meter with my credit card. I put the salad and muffins and bread and cookies on the tray. I eat the muffins and bread and cookies and dump the salad. I go back out to the car and there is a ticket on my windshield.

Sumbitch. (No, that’s not the happy part.) I decide to fight the ticket, so I write this heart-breaking letter to the city of Pasadena, sincerely informing them that I did indeed pay the ticket and I had used my credit card and the meter showed me a big OK after I slid it and I thought I was a good citizen. I told them there was no way I would cheat them and not pay, and I mentioned that maybe I was an orphan, and that they shouldn’t worry that I was the only person to get polio since 1973, and that I was an LA Kings fan.

Well, in a couple of days I received a short letter informing me that I did not have to pay the ticket. I, of course, yelled, “Yes,” to the gods and did an end zone dance that would have made Terrell Owens pee in his pants. Was my luck changing?

Yes, it was. I go down to serve jury duty and they sadly informed me that my services were no longer needed. I told them that they were the second governmental entity in two days that had done right by me and I asked if it was appropriate for me to kiss someone. Maybe a young intern who had just celebrated her 18th birthday. They suggested I send them a note.

On the way home from the courthouse I stopped for gas and as I was filling up I see a promotion to get a $50 Dining Card if you buy 100 gallons of gas. I say, “Sheeeit, Big Fella, you gonna buy 100 gallons of gas anyway, huh?” So when I get home I go on the Internet and sign up for a Mobil Exxon card and in a few days they send me the card, and they also send me a $50 Dining Card ahead of time. And they say I will receive a second $50 Dining Card after I buy the 100 gallons of gas. Yes, that sound you just heard was me clicking my heels. Life is good. Maybe Randy Newman wants to go to Sizzler with me.

So now, as long as I am on the Internet, I decide to go into my American Airlines account to see about my upcoming trip to Cabo, and they have this little note asking me if I would like to print my boarding pass right now and save time at the airport. How can one guy be so lucky. This is America.

I go out to the kitchen to tell Marge about my good fortune and she tells me that on Friday night we are going to a play and having dinner. (OK, my luck had to run out sometime.) I said what is the play about, Peachy Lips? She said, “About a font.” And then I said maybe the dumbest thing I have ever said, “Which font?” And Marge just looked at me cooler than Tony Soprano talking to a fish and said, “Futura.”

And you know what? The play was actually good! I couldn’t believe it. I enjoyed a play about a font. I was all set to fake liking it, but I didn’t have to pretend. My luck had just gotten a second wind, baby. And then we went to La Luna Negra on Green Street and ate these incredible sinful shrimp tapas and carnita tapas and bacon pork tapas and had margaritas and dipped bread into this oily olive stuff. Pinch me.

The next day, after squeezing the residual oil out of my cheeks, I decided to press my luck and tried to install that new Apple TV box. You know, that little attachment where you can now stream TV shows and movies and music and photos to your TV set. My record with installing things is similar to the record of the French army in warfare. But with my recent streak of good things happening, I went ahead.

And — hold on to your shorts, Aunt Bessie — I did it! I hooked the HDTV cable to the TV, I hooked up audio wires, I put in Wi-Fi codes, I figured out the remote, I got a FLICKR account, I uploaded my photos, I did it all. And it worked!

I am one happy bandito, baby. Getting ready to go to Cabo tomorrow and maybe toss back a few Cabo Wabo Tequilas and toast my run of good luck. Damn, I just hope this little streak makes it past the head-lopping-off part in Mexico. Ole!

Lanky Secrets (Cigar Smoke 10-21-10)

I really hate to write this column. It’s kind of like exposing the secrets of a magician. But, for some dark reason, I have decided to do it. May my lanky soul burn somewhere south of heaven.

When you are a semi-lanky guy such as myself, you develop ways to make sure that you will always have access to the five food groups: chocolate, cinnamon rolls, cookies, chips, and candy. (I can’t believe they all start with the letter “C.” Eerie.)

Anyway, over the past seven decades I have honed my hiding skills down to a damn professional and razor sharp point. I challenge other lanky lugs out there to meet this level of deceit and disgust.

So what are some of my deceitfully disgusting tricks? Let’s say I have been out shopping and I bring home the groceries and Marge, my wife and food group cop, just happens to be standing out in the kitchen when I haul the bags in from the car. As I am complaining about how hard it is and how much of an imposition it has been for me to even have to shop in the first place, and that a real woman would have done the grocery shopping like she had promised in her wedding vows, I am secretly plotting on how I am going to hide the package of Oreos without Marge catching on.

So I take all the stuff out of the grocery bags and put them away, and then I throw the empty bags into the trashcan and I go out and watch a football game on the tube. Did you see my slight of hand? I am really slimy. You see, one of the empty grocery bags was not quite empty. It had one Oreos package hiding in it. And as soon as the Food Police went back to the other part of the house, I retrieved it and hid it again. In the freezer. Under the frost-covered package of green beans.

I told you this column would not be pretty. You are seeing a side of me that is even uglier than the regular side of me you see. I’m sorry. I just expose my faults to make you guys feel better about yourselves. Other than journalism, it’s my life.

Another disgustingly cunning trick I use is to repackage the groceries when I get out to the car in the Ralphs parking lot. I’ll put the three Snickers bars and the package of assorted sour Jelly Bellies into the same bag with all of Archie the Dog’s dog food. And then when I get home, I take out all the groceries, put them away, right in front of Marge like I am a decent honorable person, and then I take the bags of dog food items out to the laundry room and stack the dog food on the counter. And then (even Archie thinks this is lower than dog doo doo) I take out the Snickers bars and the Jelly Bellies and I bury them in the 10-pound bag of dry dog food, way down under the kibbles, close to the rat turds.

Sometimes when I’m just returning from running some errands or coming back from a Kings game or something, I will stop and buy, say, some Jalapeno lemon Chipotle salsa lime chili chips or maybe some Red Vines, or maybe both, and when I get home, I come in the house like I’m not the cunning sneak-ass low-life lanky loser that I am, and I’ll give Marge a coming-home peck on the cheek, and I’ll throw my jacket on the chair like a casual galoot. And yes, my jacket will have the aforementioned food groups stashed in the zippered pockets. I know. What kind of galoot would do such a thing? My kind.

I’ve got other equally nauseatingly tricks. If I go out to get the morning paper when we are at a motel on a trip, occasionally, (OK, a lot of the time) I will have a Holiday Inn cinnamon roll rolled up in my copy of USA Today. And I have been known to unwrap certain food group items early so as not to bother Marge with all that crackling paper noise at night when we’re watching TV.

I guess the worst, most pitiful thing I have ever done to sneak something healthy to eat was when I put some peanut M&Ms in the onion dip. Yeah, I put a huge glob of dip in the bowl, and I buried the M&Ms at the bottom. And then I would take a cucumber slice and dive for an M&M and put it in my mouth, nobody the wiser, and then I would lick the onion dip off, wait a few seconds, to clean my palette, and then eat the M&M to experience its essence of true chocolate.

I’m feeling uneasy even talking about these lanky secrets. I hope Marge doesn’t read this column and start checking the freezer and the dog food bag and the bottom of onion dip bowls. It would destroy me. Do they have a self-help group for this? I sure hope so.

I wonder if I went to their meetings if they would check my jacket pockets.

The Headless Columnist (Cigar Smoke 10-7-10)

Hey, what have you guys been up to? I’ve been sitting on Mr. Right Buttock and Mr. Left Buttock trying to remember what the symptoms are for shingles and rickets. I don’t think I have either of those maladies, but I never can remember what they are, and I always look up their meanings, and then I forget what the hell they mean. This cycle has been going on since 1974. And you thought you had problems.

Anyway, I was thinking there might be a new disease called shickets when Marge said, “What are we going to do for our 20th anniversary?” And I said, “When is it?” And that’s when the shickets hit the fan. No, no. I’m just kidding. Even I’m not that dumb. I said, “Honey Pumpkin Snuggle Face, what do you want to do?” And she said since it was our 20th anniversary she was thinking of China. And I said, “You want to go to China?” And she said, “No. Maybe you could go. On a slow boat. I know a good travel agent.”

I was kind of hurt so I mentioned that our marriage had outlasted my first marriage, which had lasted a measly 15 years. And that if she dumped me now, it would probably take me at least five years to fool someone else into matrimonial bliss, and then I would have to try to stay married to them for 25 years to break the record, but to do that I would have to live until I was 100 to make that happen. And I’d probably get shingles or rickets and not make it.

Anyway again, Marge sighed that getting-heavier-every-year-of-marriage sigh and out of nowhere said, “Why don’t we go to Cabo? I’ve never been to Cabo.” And I said, “Isn’t Cabo in Mexico, Sweet Snookums Smore’s Face?” She sighed so loudly over this question that she scared Archie the Airedale and he actually moved, something he rarely does.

I cautiously mentioned that I thought Cabo had not been moved lately and could very well still be in Mexico and I gently asked if she knew that the drug lords and the corrupt cops and the bought-off military thugs were fighting for the right to cut the heads off of arrogant gringos such as myself and myself’s spouse. She said she knew all that but she was remembering when we went down to Ensenada a number of years ago and had that incredible grilled lobster and then went into this little crummy bar and we were the only ones in the place (except for the health department inspectors) and that we drank Margaritas and washed them down with Dos Equis before the Most Interesting Man in the World was even born.

Just that one never-ending sentence brought back a lot of memories. God, I remember stumbling out of the bar and going back to our room in a flirty-frolicking kind of way and falling onto the bed and asking Marge if she would like to have the most earth-shattering, temple-busting, sweaty sexy sex she’d ever had, or would she like to make love to me. And I remember when she said, “Neither.” And I remember watching her go into the bathroom and I remember how daintily she hugged the toilet and recycled the margaritas and the Dos Equis. Ah, the memories.

So I was getting a haircut the other day and I mentioned the Cabo idea to my barber, Steve, who is of Mexican heritage and has owned a Chihuahua and has been known to pull back a few Tecates when he wasn’t butchering someone’s hair. (I kid my barber of Mexican descent.) And Steve said something like, “Hey, Cabron de Stupido, I’m Mexican and I won’t go down there. After they cut your head off they’re going to put it on a big stick and roast it over a burning trash barrel while they sing La Cucaracha.” And then he said in his entrepreneurial way, “And, of course, without your head, you wouldn’t be coming in as often to get haircuts.”

I related this thoughtful information to Marge, but she still wants to go. So, we are going down to Cabo, dammit. And we’re going to have fun, or as they say in Baja, “Vaya con Dios, and get el liquored uppo,” and we will celebrate our 20th anniversary and look death right in its cowardly eye and spit a tequila worm in its cowardly face and step on its cowardly toes and laugh loud like bajanian bonteros or Antonio Banderas and then run like hell and shoot back at them over our shoulders.

And you know what were going to do for our 25th anniversary? Well, I found out for you. I asked Marge and she said those three little words (plus one extra word) I love to hear, “How about North Korea?”

The Yard House (Cigar Smoke 9-23-10)

I was sitting on the end of the couch last Friday night and Marge said, “Do you want to go out tonight?” And I said, “Can I take the couch with us?”

So we decided to help out the local economy and grab some dinner and check out the new ArcLight Theatre in the Paseo de Plaza de Weirdo de Layouto in semi-beautiful downtown Pasadena. I love making online reservations to overpriced movies, and then strolling past the lines of non-online user losers and smirking at them over my shoulder as I waltz by with my officially printed letter-sized bar code document. Besides sitting, it’s my life.

But before we get to the theater we have to eat, and before we eat, we have to navigate the plaza to get to the restaurant area. So I do what I always do: I get on an elevator or escalator purely by chance and go up to the supposedly correct floor and then I walk out in the plaza to always determine that I am standing across from the restaurants with a chasm between me and the restaurants and no way to get there. I curse to myself. I curse to Marge. I curse for the honey-covered-ant-hill death to the guy who designed this place.

Eventually, we are in the restaurant section, and Marge suggests that we eat at The Yard House. I don’t want her to know, but I don’t exactly know what a Yard House is. I know what a yard is. I know what a house is. I know what a house with a yard is. But I do not know what a Yard House is.

So I say to Marge, “Sure, I love eating at yard houses. It’s three times as good as eating at The Feet House and 36 times better than eating at The Inch House.” Her laughter rocks the plaza.

We go inside and the waitress looks at me and my companions, my drooping eye bags and my Caucasian hair and suggests that we might be more comfortable eating outside on the empty, chilly patio, behind a concrete column, far, far away from the regular customers who we wouldn’t want to mislead and have them think they have stumbled into a rest home.

We are sitting down, looking over the menu, and then we notice at the table next to us that they have three giant, and yes, yard long glasses of ale or lager or some damn beery thing. They’re happier than three Democrats spending a Republican’s estate tax money.

When the waitress comes over to take our order, I ask Marge if she would like a yard of malt liquor or a yard of Bud Light. She says she would like a yard of duct tape and a yard of trade-in credit for a new husband. The waitress curls her lip in appreciation, and I say, “Just bring her a yard of Riesling and I’ll have a yard of nachos and a yard of guacamole and a yard of Beano.”

An hour later, we go into the ArcLight to see the No. 1 movie of the day — “Inception.” I really wanted to see this movie. I loved the director’s “Memento” of a few years back, and it just looked like it would be intellectual and flashback fun to figure out, kind of like “Pulp Fiction,” which is probably my favorite movie of all time. (So, yes, I am kind of commie in this regard using the word intellectual in public.)

We settled into our bitchin ArcLight center-ass seats right in the middle of the theater with our yard of popcorn. And then the movie started, and then the explosions started, and then people were walking up sides of walls and streets were coming apart and turning perpendicular to reality, and guys were chasing and beating and shooting other guys and acting terrified and it was like a video game for training psychopaths but, thank God, it was only a dream because they all had wires sticking out of their heads and then the dialogue was so frigging weird that I was hoping it was a dream, too.

We saw about 40 minutes of this and I realized that there was still another two hours of big-screen entertainment ahead of us and that there wasn’t going to be an intermission so we could make a civilized escape like we did when we went to see that “Sweeny Todd” piece of barber garbage at the Music Center.

So, I leaned over and whispered to Marge, “Do you really give a shit if somebody gets inside somebody else’s dream?” Marge said, “Uh, no I don’t. I don’t give a yard of piss about this whole premise.” I hugged her shoulders, and said, “Nobody has ever said premise to me before. I love you. Let’s blow this joint.”

As we were clambering over these two guys sitting next to us, one of the guys says, “Are you leaving?” And I could tell he was being pissy about it like we were just too old and too square to get this kind of hip, modern movie. So I said, “Cut the shit, Theatergoer! I could get in your dream in a flash, and make you go see “Dinner With Schmucks” with us next weekend.”

And then I accidentally spilled the remaining two feet of popcorn on his “Inceptional” lap. He said, “Why in the hell did you do that?” “Do what?” I said, “You must be dreaming.”

Nat King Cole Speaks Chinese (Cigar Smoke 8-26-10)

OK, I was doing something very out of the ordinary the other night. I was sitting on the couch watching TV. Usually I’m out volunteering for charities or out trying to save the environment. But on this particular night, I was just sitting there watching “Hung,” and trying to explain to Marge that the title was not in reference to the first name of an Asian gentleman.

Anyway, we are watching the show and out of nowhere we hear some Chinese guy speaking in Chinese. I said, “Marge, do you hear that?” Marge said, “Hear what, Couch Potato Face?” I knew it was hopeless, but I said, “There is some Chinese guy speaking in Chinese on our English-speaking television set, that’s what.” And Marge said, “What?” Variations of this conversational exchange went on for 14 minutes.

Before I continue with this TV tale, I must tell you that what I am about to relate to you is the damn truth. I know I have had the tendency to maybe fudge the truth a little in some of my past columns. But there is no truth-fudging here, baby. I is speaking da truth, so help me secular somebody.

I must correct something already. Before we started hearing the Chinese guy speaking Chinese, we did not hear anything at all. The sound had gone deader than an overweight doornail. No sound at all.

So I fiddled with the remote and I fiddled with the TiVo box and I fiddled with the Charter box, and I would have fiddled with my fiddle if I had a fiddle, but I couldn’t get the sound to go on. And just at that time, we started to hear the Chinese guy Kung Powing in Chinese.

It made me exclaim to Marge, “Holy communist plot, what is happening?” Marge had decided to ignore me and was reading her Kindle, but that didn’t stop me from talking to her. (Many of our most rewarding conversations have occurred while she was ignoring me.)

I inquired as to how could the sound be in Chinese. I thought maybe we had accidentally set the language to Chinese like you can set it to Spanish or subtitles. So I clicked through the settings and discovered that there are no Chinese settings, which I liked, but it didn’t help me figure out what was going on.

So then, with monumental effort and appropriate cursing, I got up off the couch and went over to the TV and refiddled with the boxes and then got up on our little step stool and checked out the speakers. I figured sound comes out of speakers so maybe I flipped some speaker switch, although I was doubtful that had made it go into Chinese instantly.

And then (I am not kidding you) the sound went into Nat King Cole singing Christmas songs. At least it was in English. Nat King Cole singing “Oh Holy Night” in commie would have killed me. So I yelled at Marge, “Are you hearing what I’m hearing?” She said, “What are you hearing?” I said, “I am hearing Nat King Cole singing Christmas songs.” She said, “Hmm. Are the bats in your belfry flapping their wings?”

So I went back to the end of the couch to think this thing through. Should I call Charter? Well, I would probably get some Indian techie guy and when I told him I was hearing Chinese coming out of my TV and then it switched to Nat King Cole, he would hold his hand over the speaker of the phone, and turn to his buddy in Bombay and laugh his tandoori-ass laugh and regain his composure and ask me, “Sir, vat is a Nat King Cole?”

I didn’t call. I just sat there. Weeping. And wondering what Richard Feynman would do. I speak to Richard quite often. After a while I heard Richard say, “Maybe you could just figure it out, Ass-wipe? It’s not rocket science. It’s only Nat King Cole Chinese science.”

So damn it, I did figure it out. Yes, sound does come out of speakers. But it has to come from somewhere. So I asked Richard where it came from, and Richard told me to buzz off because he was trying to rest peacefully, being dead and all.

Then I went up to the control boxes and hunted for the sound source. And damned if I didn’t find it. Get this. We had a Bose sound system, which we hadn’t been using, stacked between our Charter box and our TiVo box, and the Charter box had slightly moved a little and had fallen onto the Bose on/off button. It had turned the AM/FM tuner on. That was where the Chinese was coming from. And then when I fiddled with things, I must have nudged the damn Bose system into the CD mode and that’s when old Nat King Cole started singing his Christmas carols to make me think I was going insane and make me weep.

I looked over at Marge, who was still reading her frigging Kindle. I said, “Richard and I are going out to that dive on Colorado Boulevard to look for some babes.” She said, “When you get back, could you fix the TV. I didn’t know Nat King Cole was Chinese.”

It's Ironic, Isn't it? (Cigar Smoke 8-12-10)

Do you know what the word irony means? Oh, sure, you think you know what it means. Hey, I thought I knew what it meant. But try saying just exactly what irony means in one short sentence so that even someone like me who has a two-digit IQ can understand. OK, I’m waiting. I’m not hearing any short sentences. I don’t have all day here, folks, I’m writing a damn column.

You can’t do it, can you? You know what it means, but you can’t actually say what it means. I feel your frustrated, pissy little pain. Well, I am going to quell that pain (and your thirst, if quell shouldn’t be used with pain) and tell you what the dictionary says.

As per the Encarta World Dictionary found on my word processor, irony is “something that happens that is incongruous with what might be expected to happen, especially when this seems absurd or laughable.”

Hey, that is exactly right. Those dictionary guys are pretty happening, huh? That is exactly what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t. And because I know you couldn’t either (you’re probably still stuck on incongruous), I have decided to do yet another public service and help you semi-lowlife ingrates out with an example of irony, which hopefully will stick in your minds. So in the future, if someone asks you what irony is, you can say that you knew this jerk-off columnist guy and you can tell them a little story filled with irony and little else.

As you may recall, I informed you in my last column that I had accidentally backed up into another car. Well, in this week’s column, I am going to inform you that I have backed up into a boat. No, I wasn’t in a car when I hit the boat. I was in a boat when I backed up into the other boat. And why did I back up into another boat? Well, I did it just so I could help you remember what irony is. That’s the kind of guy I am. Selfless.

Altruistic. And a vocabulary-enchancing giant.

Here’s the deal. I bought an old boat to go with my hovel up in Oregon, and the boat needed, shall we say, a boatload of repairs. The motor wouldn’t run, the batteries were dead and there was no reverse gear. And I needed to have a kicker motor mounted, too, for safety reasons. As in, if you are out on the open seas and your first psycho motor goes out you can use your kicker to get your sorry ass back in to land to be able to watch future episodes of “Mad Men.”

So I had the work done. (That noise you hear is my wallet weeping.) Everything is supposedly cool, so a friend of mine and I decide to take her out for a little test cruise. And because I was interested in you learning the meaning of irony, we thought it would be safer if we just used the kicker motor and stayed in the harbor before we headed out to sea and probable death.

The kicker motor started up on the second pull. Mike was at the tiller and I shoved the boat out from the slip, hopped on board like Errol Flynn and we were off. Mike puts the outboard in first gear and off we go. Until he tried to turn the outboard, and he discovered the boat guys had not mounted the outboard motor correctly. And he couldn’t turn.

So he yelled, “Start the main motor and get us out of here!” I jumped into the captain’s seat, turned the motor on and immediately threw it into gear. I floored that sucker. It really took off. Kind of too bad it was in reverse.

So, in two days, I had backed into a car and a boat. (Don’t take me to an airport.) Mike inquired as to just what my reasoning was to have put it into reverse. I told him that my Pasadena Weekly readers were the most important things to me, and that I needed to show them what irony meant with some concrete example that they could use in the future, and that my personal safety, credibility, pride and being referred to as a dangerous, dumber-than-a-donut-hole driver were just not that important to me.

If I wouldn’t have tried to be safe and prudently decided to just take the boat out into the harbor instead of risk going out to sea, and if I hadn’t spent $479 to fix that frigging reverse gear, I would not have been able to use that frigging reverse gear to slam it into frigging reverse and back into that boat with expensively paid-for full reverseness.

Ironic, isn’t it?



Looking Back On It (Cigar Smoke 7-29-10)

You know what sound you don’t want to hear? The sound of silence? No. You can’t hear that anyway. The sound of senility. That’s the sound you don’t want to hear.

I may have heard it the other day. I was tired of all the damn beauty and scenic stuff up here in Oregon, so I went to a Rite-Aid to do some ordinary shopping, and I purchased some necessities — wine, beer, ale, hard liquor, malt liquor and Peanut M&Ms.

And life was good. I sauntered — yes, sauntered — out to the car and placed my purchases on the seat and unwrapped a Look candy bar I forgot to mention I had purchased because I hadn’t had one for 37 years. And I took the first bite of that dark Look bar chocolate and that white gooey, chewy center and it brought back childhood memories of overeating and precursors to Type 2 Diabetes. Life was good.

Then I started the car. I looked to my left and saw some dummy coming the wrong way down my parking lane, and I wrenched my back trying to give him the finger while eating my Look bar. Very, very painful. Then I put the car into reverse, looked out to my right and saw no cars, and started to back out of my parking spot. Then I heard the sound — that sickening sound of metal hitting metal — and I knew I had either backed into a car or hit a chubby pedestrian wearing a suit of armor.

Yes, Virginia, I had backed into a car. Are you happy, Virginia? And that sound of metal going into metal is just so damn jarring. It just jars you into reality. And I’ve always tried to avoid reality. But that metal-ass sound of metal running into other innocent metal just got to me. It was just so damn real.

I dropped my head to my chest in senior citizen resignation and was irritated that I had to leave my Look bar with one bite out of it in the car while I faced the metal music. I get out of the car and the first thing I hear is some guy’s enraged voice yelling, “Sonny, you just bought yourself a Dodge!” Well, although I was pleased that anyone would call me “sonny,” I really didn’t want to buy his Dodge. It was all dented up.

I asked him, “Where did you come from?” And he said, “I was born right here in Brookings, dammit.” (I thought to myself, this would be a good time to play a little poker, if this guy only had a full deck.) I said, “No, I mean where did your car come from, other than Detroit?”

He said he had just turned after that dummy came through going the wrong way. And I told him that is probably why I didn’t see him. But I inquired as to why he didn’t honk at me if he saw me backing out. He enquired as to my parentage. It turned out to be a short conversation.

We exchanged information. I gave him my name and address and insurance details. He gave me the remaining piece of his mind. As I was driving off, I told him to call me if he had any questions. I don’t think he heard me. He was stretched out over his car and had both arms fully extended like he was trying to contact some demon god and was pounding both of his palms down onto his hood. It was pretty loud. And he may have caused more damage to his car than I did.

When I got back to my hovel, I called my insurance agent. I told her I had lost control of my car and had driven through an orphanage and would she like to speak to one of the surviving nuns? I kid my State Farm agents. She asked me if I got the other party’s driver’s license number. No. Did he have insurance? I don’t know. Is your head hooked on to your neck? Lemme check.
She asked me if anyone was injured. I said no. She said that was good. I said to tell that to the four people who were killed. She said I shouldn’t joke about car accidents and suggested I switch to GEICO. I said I would, but I don’t like lizards. She said that it wasn’t a lizard. I said yes it was.

After listening to a series of rather heart-breaking sighs, I asked her if there was anything else she needed from me. She thought for a few seconds and said, “What have you learned from all this?”

Hell, I don’t know. “To finish your Look bar before backing up?”

I Got Your Friendly Right Here(Cigar Smoke (7-15-10)

You know, I try to be friendly. I really do. I am not quite as much of a pissy turd as I make myself out to be in this here column. (See, I added the “here” in that last sentence to show off my folksy, friendly side.)

The reason I am bringing up all this friendly stuff is that I am now taking a much needed break from my stressful retirement so I can vacation up in Oregon for a month, and it’s a state law to be friendly up here. I mean to tell you, everybody is friendly. It’s a little eerie. But I am trying my best to adapt to this foreign environment, and if it doesn’t kill me, I should be friendlier when I come back to LA.

You notice it right away. I go into a Fred Myers grocery and everything-else-ever-manufactured store and the checker is talking to someone a few people up the line from me. She knows the woman. The woman is in her 60s. The checker went to elementary school with her. Yes, I now know that their old schoolmate, Johnny Dayton, just got kicked out of the American Legion hall for something I think she called “non-wife fondling.”

The next woman gets to the checker and they start chatting. Nothing quite as chat-worthy as Johnny Dayton’s sexploits, but they do give the gossip tidbits the necessary time to fully flesh them out. I am just kind of standing there, acting like I think this friendly shit is OK, and it’s getting harder and harder to fake it.

After five full minutes of staring at my four non-moving items on the conveyor belt, I give them my LA hurry-up cough. I cough a few times. Cough. Ahem. Cough. They both glance at me. I know they want to tell me to take a Menthol Luden’s and insert it in a body opening that is not my mouth, but they just smile at me. The bitches.

Finally, the lady hands the checker a copy of the latest National Enquirer, and says, “Jeez, that Al Gore would be quite a load, wouldn’t he?” And the checker says, “Looks like a little global squirming going on.” I crack just the beginning of a smile at these remarks and they look at me again. I apologize for listening in on them with a lame hands-up sissy gesture.

I get to the checker and say, “Hi.” She says, “Can’t talk now. I have customers behind you.”

I probably shouldn’t have told you that first anecdote first, because the people are generally just friendly, and they don’t usually say mean things to us potential Luden’s users. Like I was in a restaurant and the waitress came over and said, “What’ll it be, darlin’?” And I said, “Did you call me darlin’, darlin’?” And she adjusted her apron, and said, “Why, yes, darlin’, I did call you darlin’, darlin’” (I was going to say, “But you never even called me by my name” but I knew she wouldn’t get the reference. Neither will you. So that’s why I didn’t say it.)

Everybody is friendly. They take time with you. They appear to maybe even like you. They have faking sincerity down to a science. The gas station attendant fills up my tank and tells me about the salmon run. The bookstore owner walks me to the book section I need and personally wipes the dust off the row of books I will look at. The frame-store owner sells me the cheaper picture frame because he thinks it will work better for me.

And a couple of days ago I had a guy come out to give me a bid for a fence I’m building for my dog, Archie the Airedale. And this guy was so nice I thought he had the wrong house. He was nicer than Pat Boone, baby. He called me “sir” so many times I thought I had been promoted to corporal. And then the next day, I go out on the dock to just walk around and I notice a guy standing there with a rod and reel and I look at him like I sort of know him, but I’m puzzled and he finally says, “Yeah, it’s me, the fence guy! Wanna go fishing?”

“It’s me, the fence guy. Wanna go fishing?”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would have heard that in LA. It’s just too damn friendly for city slicker talk. But I do have mixed emotions on all this friendly stuff. I know they will eventually find out I’m not really all that friendly and then I will be rejected and continue on with my lonely, unfulfilled, tragic walk-through life.

So I tentatively said something to the fence guy about his choosing me to go fishing with. I said, “Do you really want to go fishing with me?” And he kind of looked at me like that was a bit too touchy-feely, and said, “Yeah, sure, you look like a good guy.” And I smiled my manly hug-smile and he continued. “And my buddies are all working today. And, by the way, you think, maybe you could buy the bait?”

Have an Enlarged Prostate? Urine Big Trouble. (Cigar Smoke 7-1-10)

OK, I know this problem doesn’t affect most of you small-prostated people and all of you non-prostated female people, but for us enlarged-prostated guys, it’s, well, it’s a pisser.

We now have something we officially think about more than sex. Yes, urination is now the king. It passed thinking about sports without looking over its shoulder, and now has taken over the top slot in old guy thoughts.

I’ll be on the end of the couch watching the World Cup (I’m kidding, of course) and I’ll get up and Archie the Airedale will instantly get up in anticipation of something fun, and I will head off to the bathroom, and Archie will sink down in disappointment. Ten minutes later I will get up off the couch and Archie the Mensa Airedale will again jump up to follow me down the hall for some serious fun, only to be crushed again when I go into the bathroom.

This goes on, maybe 30 times a day. Marge tells me this is the only way I get any exercise, and that I am keeping Archie in great shape, too. I mention that a little spousal abuse would be a pretty good workout, too, but I don’t have time for that. I have to go pee.

A bigger problem with this damn enlarged prostate deal is that it doesn’t just happen at home where I have access to a toilet bowl that cringes when it sees me coming. No, it happens everywhere. I will be in the car and my enlarged friend will rear its pissy head and I will have to find a bathroom — fast. So I have had to scout out all the places I can shoot into that have a public bathroom that I can borrow without looking like a homeless guy who molests orphans.

My two favorite water-delivery holes are at McDonald’s and Starbucks. At McDonald’s I take the side entrance, and while everyone else is ordering Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and some psycho is getting a salad, I am slipping into the unlocked bathrooms to feel good about myself and think life is worth living for a few short precious moments. It makes me happy just writing about it. Oh, excuse me a second, I have to go pee.

I’m back. The second great place to pee is at Starbucks. Their bathrooms are always at the back of the store, and you can walk in like you’re a real customer with the intention of buying an over-priced cup of coffee and nobody will give you any grief if you stop at the bathroom because they are even more health conscious than the AMA. You can go tinkly-poo and pop back out to your car without buying anything and life is semi-good.

One time a manager at Starbucks saw me coming out of the bathroom as I was heading for the door and he looked at me funny. I knew he was thinking, “Who the hell washes their hands after they have their coffee?” So I preemptively said, “Left my wallet in my car. Be right back.” When I got to my car, I looked back, and he was still looking at me. So when I drove past him I yelled out the window, “Left my wallet at home. Be right back.”

But at least I am not the only guy to have this problem. Most of my non-commie buddies seem to be going through the same thing. A friend of mine came to visit a few weeks ago, and when I came to the door, I was about to say, “Hey, Big Guy, what’s happening?” and he flew right by me and said, ‘I have to pee!” Hadn’t seen the guy in two years. When he came out of the bathroom, he said, “Sorry, I just couldn’t wait.” I told him to shut the hell up, I had to go pee.

We sat down to shoot the shit. “Hey, Dribbles, where you been peeing lately?” “Oh, lot of cool places, Mr. Tinkle. I’ve just discovered grocery store bathrooms hidden back behind the produce section. Those are pretty cool.” “Yeah, those are OK. But if you really want to have some fun, I like to jump those Dutch door gates and burst past an old Chinese woman in a donut shop and use the bathrooms that aren’t supposed to be there.” “Yeah, wish I had the guts.” “You always were a wuss.”

“Hey Dribs, you got any good urine puns?” “If you have an enlarged prostate, urine good company.” “I guess urine old hand at these puns, huh, MT?” “Yup, don’t stand in the hall, baby, because when I have to pee, urine the way.”
Oh, the fun we had. We laughed so hard we had to pee — into our Depends.

Smelling Assaults (Cigar Smoke 6-17-10)

I got up the other morning the way I get up every morning. I’m lying on my right side and I have somehow dislodged my attractive C-Pap machine mask and matching designer tubing, and my head is hanging over the edge of the bed. And then I feel a nose on my face and I open my eyes and there is Archie the Airedale, wagging his big, squirrelly tail like a damn outboard propeller. At least one of us is happy.

And then I pet his big-ass Airedale head a little and he comes in closer and puts his nose right next to my mouth. And then you know what he does? He takes a whiff of my morning breath and he backs off. Yes, he actually takes a step backwards, staggers a little and turns his head to the side.

I am not kidding. He is repulsed by my morning breath! OK, I get that. Many people have been repulsed by my morning breath. Marge, a few unlucky women companions, an ex-wife, Boy Scout tent mates, golfing buddies, nurses, sleep clinic personnel. But, hey, it really frosts me when my dog, Archie the Psycho, turns away from me.

Archie does not turn away from, well, other dogs’ butts. Nope, nothing better than taking a whiff of Rover’s rear end. I take him to the dog park and he seeks out butts. He runs from one butt to another. Sniffing like there’s been a jailbreak. He likes the smell of dog butts.

And he seeks out piles of certain things that were formerly in said dog butts. And he sniffs the bejabbers out of those, too. If he had arms, he would wave over his dog buddies. “Hey, get a whiff of this steamer, Rinty.” I know he would. I am sure of it.

I have seen my wonderful dog actually put his discerning nose into dead animals that have lower forms of life crawling in them. I have seem him nose-nudge something that used to be alive. I have wiped things off his nose that would scare chemical hazard teams. And his tail would be spinning.

And yet. And double yet, he has to turn away from only one thing in life: my morning breath.

He just can’t take something that smells that bad. Nope. Worse than dog butts, dog butt results, and worse than mounds of decaying animals with worms in them. Nope, just can’t quite take old Mr. Laris’ morning breath. Sumbitch. I oughta see
how he barks tilted.

OK, I am trying to calm down. Give me a second. OK, OK, I’m ready. After that morning breath episode I decide to take him to the dog park anyway. Even though he doesn’t deserve it. Yes, I am just that wonderful and forgiving.

So we get in the car and I stop at the 7-Eleven for some coffee and a breakfast object so I can enjoy something while I watch Archie smell some new buttmobiles (and not be repulsed.) By the way, do you know why I like to eat at 7-Eleven? Because of their motto: Our Food Will Kill You Just a Wee Bit Slower Than AM-PM Food. Hey, that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, I get my Styrofoam cup of Brazilian bold coffee and I take it out to the car and I put it on the closed cup holder area. Yes, usually I have the cup holder lid open and I put the coffee in the cup holder. Not that day. I get in the car and I turn to tell Archie that I still think he’s a sumbitch, and I nick the edge of the cup, and it falls on my lap. And I spill some lava java on my pants and my thigh inside my pants. Holy scorched skin. That was hot.

But it was not over. As I am picking up the coffee cup I knock the lid off and all the rest of the coffee spills on my inadequately Polyester-covered flesh. I let out this murderous scream. A really loud urgent scream. Nobody responded. (I think they thought I was just eating the food.)

Archie just looked at me and sniffed his own butt.

I jump out of the car and brush off the coffee that hasn’t quite scalded me yet. I take a long defeated breath, and I get back into the car. I scream again. I had sat down in a puddle of still incredibly hot coffee that I had not cleaned up from my first spill. Yes, I had done a three-banger. Scalded myself three times in three different places in less than a minute. This time I got my right butt cheek. Only my wallet saved my other buttock.

With an even more defeated and resigned sigh, I tell Archie that I have to go back into the 7-Eleven to get another cup of coffee. Archie sniffs a couple of times. I think he can smell my burning butt cheek. And he says to me, “Uh, while you’re in there, you think, maybe, you could pick up some Scope?”

Not Stacking Up (Cigar Smoke 6-3-10)

I noticed something about my behavior the other day that I thought I would share with you. I still buy a lot of books. Yep, even with the Internet and e-books and the Kindle and the iPad and the Nook and the Cranny, I have ignored these pissy little fake books and I continue to buy real books. Why? Because I am a good American and I want to help out the economy and actually hold a big, heavy hardbound book bought from Vroman’s in my hairy-knuckled hands and just lean back and smell the new-book ink. (I’ll wait for the applause to die down.)

And even though my pinko wife, Marge the Commie, has drifted over to the other side and now reads almost all her books on the Kindle, I still hold out for decency and apple pie and wrongheaded stubbornness. Sometimes when she’s not paying attention, I try to jam her Wi-Fi connection to our home network by running around the living room in my boxers waving an old antenna and tying aluminum foil to Archie’s collar. So far it hasn’t worked very well, except we have noticed a drop in Jehovah’s Witnesses in the neighborhood.

OK, I know you’ve been dying to ask me just what books I have been reading. Well, I am going to tell you that, but first, I have to make a little confession. Although I continue to buy a lot of books, I have noticed that I am not reading a lot of books. What I am doing is stacking a lot of books. I am a really good stacker of books. I love to stack books. It’s just so cool. It makes you look really intellectual and the chicks love the long stack.

And the art of stacking is pretty easy. I learned it in only a few days. Once I caught on to the trick of putting one book on top of the other and continuing that, I pretty much knew how to stack.

So what books do I have in my stack? What books am I not reading but have purchased to help me give the impression to houseguests that I read a lot? Is that what you want to know? OK, here’s the list of my perfectly stacked, and as of now, unread or just barely partially read, books:

“Animals Make Us Human,” by Temple Grandin
“The Wagon,” by Martin Preib
“Perfectly Reasonable Deviations,” by Richard P. Feynman
“iPhone: The Missing Manual,” by David Pogue
“The Quants,” by Scott Patterson
“The Last Empty Places,” by Peter Stark
“Going Rogue,” by Sarah Palin (I bought this to just piss off people)
“Open,” by Andre Agassi
“The Poker Bride,” by Christopher Corbett
“Hollywood Moon,” by Joseph Wambaugh
“Mao: The Unknown Story,” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
“The Book of Genesis Illustrated,” by R. Crumb (By the way, did you know that when you spell check R. Crumb, the spellchecker gives you “rectum?” Try it yourself.)

Now, if I had actually read those books, I may have had an outside chance of being a somewhat interesting person. But, as you now know, I have only stacked these books. But I think I have stacked them very well. I put the large, R. Crumb oversized coffee table book on the bottom and then put the giant-ass 800 page Mao monster on top of that one, and so on, up to the shortest one — “The Wagon,” only 167 pages. Pretty damn good stacking, huh? What if I had put “The Wagon” on the bottom of the stack and created an unwieldy stack? What you have still respected me? Would you have let me stack around your children? I doubt it.

Although I am a damn good stacker, and I think my stacking would stack up to any book stack I know of, I have felt a little guilty about not actually reading the books. At first, I didn’t quite know how to remedy the situation. Oh sure, I could have actually read the books. But that’s pretty time-consuming.

So I decided to buy an iPhone app to help me read more. I hit up iTunes and clicked on the Apple App Store and damned if I didn’t find an app to help me read more. It was called Read More. (That Steve Jobs is something, huh?) So, even though I couldn’t stack it, I bought the Read More app to help me read more. (They didn’t have a Stack More app.)

And, get this: You enter all the books you are reading in this Read More app, and then when you actually start reading a book, you start a timer! Then, when you finish a reading session, you stop the timer. That way you can go from book to book and keep track of exactly how many pages you have read and you’ll know your official pages per-hour reading rate.

But, hell, I already knew how many pages of each book I had read. Zero. And I knew my official reading rate. Zero. And I already knew what people thought of me. A number less than one. So I wasted my money on this damn Read More app. But at least I could stack my iPhone, which had my Read More app in it, up on my stack of books. It’s the perfect size to be on top of a stack.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

That May Be Stretching It a Little (Cigar Smoke 5-20-10)

OK, I know it may not be possible for you guys to resent me more. Let’s just say that something incredibly wonderful has recently happened to me that should cement your previous resentment.

Of course, in the past you have resented me for my lanky body. What can I say? God has graced me with litheness. You are just going to have to work that one out yourselves.

And I know you admire me for my political views and my general wisdom. And I know you don’t like me because I have a better dog than you do. And my sincere, well-deserved humbleness probably turns you off, too.

But most of all, I know you resent me because I am retired and I don’t have to work anymore and can sleep in and do what I want and take meaningless trips to even more meaningless places. Yet you still have to work and make money and deal with blood-popping stress levels and read my bullshit week after week. You still have kids and families and spouses to provide for and you can’t quite believe you’re still reading about someone who’s biggest concern in life is getting up in the morning and trying to figure out what day of the week it is.

Now, after saying all that, something so wonderful just happened to me that I almost hesitate to tell you what it is. But, what the hell, your mental health has never really meant all that much to me before. And I’m going to say it fast, so sit down, maybe with a loved one, or take a shot of Chivas or grab your Teddy bear. Are you ready?

OK, here it is: I had an incredibly wonderful experience with the cable company.

I’ll give you a minute. Just relax, count to 10, chill out. Just accept the fact that some people are meant to have things that you will never have. Just let that burning resentment drain from your brain. Let it go through your ulcer-ridden stomach and through tortured rectal areas and eventually seep out of your toes, on to your carpet.

Yes, a few days ago my cable went out on me. I could not get any premium channels. (And you thought your life was tough.) There was no way I could live with only basic cable, so I called up Charter. The woman who took my call was so damn nice I asked her if I had the wrong number. She laughed, and I said, “Where’s the usual bitch who doesn’t give a shit? She on vacation?”

The nice Charter lady told me to turn off my cable box and then restart it. I looked over at the shelf next to my TV. There was a TiVo receiver, a DVD player, an old VHS recorder, some Bose Surround Sound stuff, four speakers, a WiFi transmitter and a phone doohickey that put the phone number on the TV screen. The shelf looked like a damn Fry’s store.

I confessed to the lady that I needed a Boy Scout troop to help me find my cable box. She laughed again. I asked her if she would like a job as a column reader. She laughed. I hired her.

Eventually, she delicately told me that maybe she should send a technician out to help me. “Would this afternoon be OK?” This afternoon? I couldn’t believe it. Same-day service at the cable company. You think I’m a Charter-ass rookie? I double-checked. “Didn’t you mean to ask me if the third week in June would be OK?” She laughed. I gave her a raise.

That afternoon, a half-hour before the appointment, I got a call from Charter asking me if it was OK if the technician arrived early. Early?! I thought one of my commie friends was jerking me around.

Nope. The nicely dressed, well-groomed and polite young man inquired as to how my day was going, and he asked me where my cable box was. I said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” I don’t know how he found it, but he did. And he got me my premium channels back. One day without the NHL playoffs on Versus — I don’t know how I lived through it.

He smiled and said, “Anything else I can help you with, sir?” “Probably not,” I whined. But I pissily mentioned to him that I had another TV in my office that I’d had for four years and I hadn’t been able to hook it up to cable. “I’d be happy to take a look, sir.”

He looked. And told me all I needed was a splitter to go from my cable modem on my computer to the other TV set. I said, “Sounds good, but you probably don’t have a splitter with you, huh?” “Got one right here, sir.”

He hooks up the splitter. And says, “Oh, you’ll need a new cable box, too.” I said, “Probably have to order that? On back order, huh?” “No, sir, got one in my truck. Be right back.”

He comes back. Sets it all up. I blurt out, “OK, hit me with the bad news. How much is all this gonna cost me?” He chirps, “Only $5 a month.”

I sat down at my desk and quietly wept. I sobbed out, “You Charter people are the best! This is the best day of my life! My readers are going to have green poo poo.”

He said, “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

I hesitated, and didn’t want to press my luck, but I said, “You guys ever do any penis enlargement work?”

I'm Looking to See if I have a Look (Cigar Smoke 5-6-10)

I bet you didn’t know I was a fashion plate. Well, you would have won that bet. But, you know, I don’t even want to be a fashion plate. I really don’t. But I would like to have a look.

Most of my friends have a certain look to them. And it seems to fit them quite well. One guy I know lives out on a ranch, and he looks like a damn rancher kind of guy. Jeans, Western shirts, belts with buckles bigger than bull genitals and stallion-dung-encrusted boots. This guy looks the part. Jesse James would walk on the other side of the sidewalk if he saw him coming.

Another guy I know has a great, what I call urban casual look. He just looks so damn comfortable in his soft leather moccasins and cuddly corduroy pants and flannel shirts. I want to hug the guy. But I’m afraid I would become gay and have to spend all my time lobbying for same-sex marriage, so I don’t. Instead, I just tell him he looks like Pat Boone, only he looks older and poorer and uglier than Pat.

Another friend has an earthy look to him. His clothes are all in shades of brown and beige and green and burnt orange and pomegranate pumpkin. He just blends right into the damn planet. Sometimes I’m not even sure if he is really there. I’ll have to say, “Hey, Eggplant Lips, you here? Has your biodegradable ass blended into the moist, black, organic sod yet?”

Even when I was going to school up at Humboldt State College in Northern California, I never quite fit in. My look just didn’t work. All the guys looked like damn lumberjacks or outdoorsmen. They had these big, black caulked boots that would make a Hell’s Angel sob into his pillow, and they all wore wide-ass suspenders over Pendleton shirts. They had a damn look! They looked like they were ready to fell a Redwood or punch an elk in the face and skin it right there.

Me? I didn’t skin too many elk, because the elk blood and elk guts would get on my polyester pants. Yes, I’ve always liked polyester. What can I say? When I was born, the doctor told my mother, “Ma'am, you have the first baby we’ve ever delivered who is not naked. Too bad he is wearing polyester.”

I don’t think my mom ever got over that. In fact, when she breastfed me, I remember reaching up with my eager lips, searching for her tender breast, and she would turn me away and say, “Polly, my breasts are on my back.” Oh, the trauma of being called a girl’s name and searching for the breasts that weren’t there. I only got over it 37 years later when I heard Johnny Cash sing “A Boy Named Sue.”

You know, I kid about polyester. But I have always liked it. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because it never needs ironing. It’s cheap. And it’s easy to wipe mustard and spittle from it. And you know, come to think of it, I may have always had a look after all. Here I have been bitching and crying about everybody else having their own damn look and all the time I have had a look, too. I was just too envious of others not to have seen it.

And my look is more than just polyester, too. It has a lot of other, shall we say, accessories to it. Yes, I have inadvertently accessorized without even knowing what accessorizing is or does. I also like to wear SC T-shirts. Or Dodger T-shirts. Or LA Kings T-shirts for variety. They seem to go well with polyester.

And all my T-shirts end up with holes in them. Cigar-ash holes. (Stop. Don’t say it. You wouldn’t be the first one to call me a Cigar Ash Hole.) I don’t try to put holes in them. They just seem to mysteriously appear after I’ve been driving and smoking, and after I smell something burning.

I also wear a navy blue jacket that used to be a nice jacket. Sixteen years ago. Yes, it’s 16 years old, but it goes well with my T-shirts, and it’s made out of some kind of synthetic material, too, so my polyester pants don’t get their panties in a bunch, either. Polyester, sports tees, synthetic jacket. It’s starting to come together, isn’t it?

All you would need now is some really nice shoes. Kind of a shame I don’t have any. I wear black Rockford old-man shoes with orthotics in them. What’s that sound I hear? Could it be the pounding hearts of you lady readers out there? Thump. Thump. Thump.

All this fashion talk reminds of when I was younger, and I hate to say it, but I will. I looked pretty damn good in my leisure suit back then. It had pale blue polyester bellbottom trousers with a Nehru kind of button-less jacket. And a puffy shirt that would have given Jerry Seinfeld a woody. I mean, I looked pretty damn good. Really good. John Travolta walked by and fainted.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

For Better or Worse (Cigar Smoke 4-15-10)

In this case, let’s go with worse. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

I got up the other day and I went out to the kitchen and sat down at the table and I pulled a little clump of my chest hairs out and counted them. I have found that my best days occur when I have an even number of chest hairs. Well, I ended up with 13 chest hairs. Yep, I should have gone back to bed.

Anyway, I’m sitting there reading the paper, and out of the wild smoggy yonder, Marge says, “You know, I never knew that President Taft became a Supreme Court justice after he was president. Can you believe that?”

And I said, “Of course I knew that. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. What kind of woman are you? Who did I marry? When I stood there at the altar that day and agreed to that ‘for better or worse thing’ I never thought you would disappoint me like this. I can’t believe you married me under false pretenses. The fake pregnancy I could understand. But this? You’ll be hearing from my attorney.”

But before I called my lawyer, I noticed that my new dog, Archie the Airedale, was pressing his big horse head up against my leg urging me to take him for his morning walk. So I ran the Taft thing by him and he just shook his head in disbelief, too. So I told Marge I didn’t want to interfere with her learning any more new Taftinian revelations in the Times, so I was going to take Archibald for a run. I don’t think she heard me. She was lost in her educational dream world and was mumbling something about Warren G. Harding as I left. For worse had kicked for better’s butt.

Archie and I get in the car and I asked him if he could believe what he had just heard. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there like a dog. I told him my other Airedale, Hadley, the good Airedale, would have answered me. Archie still just sat there. He’s got that down pretty good.

Because Archie was disappointing me almost as much as Marge was, I decided to take him to the dog park over on Orange Grove instead of his usual walk. When we get there, we have to go in this little gated buffer neutral area before you can let your dogs out in the main area and Archie is throwing himself at the fence in a fit of rage. He’s growling and snarling at the other dogs on the other side of the fence, and mothers are picking up their kids and guys are wishing they had brought their firearms in with them.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I said, “What the hell. Let’s see what these so-called dogs are made of.” And I opened the gate and Archie rushed out there and people gasped. And what did vicious Archie do? Vicious Archie smelled more butts than a proctologist. That’s what Archie did.

I was relieved. I really didn’t want to have to deal with Archie killing a miniature poodle while I was still digesting Marge’s Taft remarks. And it was kind of cool out there in the main dog park of life. Archie just ran his semi-mangy self all over that place. He was doing that thing where they run alongside of each other and bump their shoulders, and he was hauling ass, baby. His Airedale life was good. So was mine. I could just stand there and watch and not have to do any physical exercise of any kind. And be a good master without exerting any energy. I’m trying to patent this.

Well, Archie ran his big canine furball butt for about a half-hour and was panting harder than Paris Hilton on YouTube. And I was panting just thinking of Ms. Hilton.

When I stopped panting, I started talking to some woman as I watched my dog embarrass himself, and I mentioned that I had just taken Archie to the vet and it had cost me more than $200 for the vet to determine that my big-headed dog had too much gas in his stomach. I said, “Can you believe I dropped two large ones because my dog would NOT fart?” The woman did not respond. She just walked away. Quickly walked away.

When I got back home, I opened the door, and yelled out to Marge, “Hi Honey, your soon-to-be-former-husband and your non-farting dog are home.” She didn’t answer. Probably too excited learning that Millard Fillmore only had one testicle or something.

Talking to Myself (Cigar Smoke 4-8-10)

OK, I talk to myself. And not only that. I answer myself. You may ask why I talk to myself. And I may answer, because my self is the only one that will talk to me. Can you hear that little slurping sound? That is the sound of all the shrinks in Pasadena licking their lips.

And not only do I talk to and answer myself, I talk to the imaginary people I have conversations with and answer them, too. Let me give you a recent example. I go into my favorite coffee place the other day, and I am carrying a container of yogurt with me. As I am going up to the counter to order my coffee, I say to myself, “Self, is it OK that you are carrying a little container of yogurt that you have not purchased here, because they don’t offer any little yogurt containers?”

But then I think the manager will see me and he will say, “Uh, excuse me, yogurt carrier, but do you think, maybe, you could buy something from us since you are in our store and we are a small business trying to survive in this suck economy, and we are providing you with a comfortable and safe place, cleaner than your house, to drink your coffee and lead a nice middle-class life?”

And I say to either him or myself, I can’t quite figure out whom, “Well, what if I just bought a cup of coffee and I wasn’t carrying a cup of yogurt with me, would I then be considered a responsible patron?” The answer remains a mystery because, obviously, the manager has never even heard my imaginary question and I myself do not know what the answer is, although I lean toward being on the side of myself.

So I get my coffee and I go to my table and sit down. I take my yogurt in one hand and I notice that the top of the yogurt container has a little secondary container of nuts attached to the top of the main yogurt container. Are you with me? (I would talk to you more about this, but I don’t want that many people in on the conversation with myself.) So I take the nuts container off, and I notice that there is a tinfoil lid on the yogurt container. And that there is a little tinfoil flap on the tinfoil lid that you have to pull up to gain full yogurt access.

So, of course, I pull up on the flap, and I hear this little spritzy sound and a glob of strawberry yogurt squirts out and lands on my shirt. It kind of startles me. (I startle easily.) And I lean my head back to look at it, and I notice the guy next to me looking at my yogurt glob on my shirt. And then he notices me noticing him, and he looks away like he hasn’t really seen my yogurt glob. And then I quickly talk to myself and wonder if I should acknowledge somehow that I know he saw my yogurt glob, and tell him that I’m usually a person whose shirts don’t have yogurt stains on them, and that this was just a one-time act of sloppy and careless flap-lifting. Or maybe I should just tell him to just buzz the hell off, or maybe even walk over and smear some uneaten strawberry yogurt all over his Dockers. I talk myself quickly out of that last option. Because I am a sane, civil human being? No. Because he’s bigger than I am.

So now I am sitting there with a yogurt glob on my shirt and a flap full of yogurt on the underside of its lid. So I ask myself if I should lick the lid. And, of course, my self says I should. So I lick the lid, and then place it licked-side-down on one of my napkins. And I can’t help myself, but I glance over to see if my favorite yogurt-glob observer has seen me lid licking. Thank God he hasn’t; that saves me one imaginary conversation.

So then I grab the little container of nuts, which has its own little flap on it. But this damn flap is too small for me to get my semi-fat fingers to pull on, and I have to use my teeth. But before I use my teeth, I ask myself, “Self, should I use my teeth? Self, is using teeth to pull nut flaps off a yogurt lid in a public place OK?” And apparently my self has given me the OK, because I start using my teeth like a pirate.

So now I empty my little packet of nuts into my strawberry yogurt, and I am all set to thoroughly mix my nuts, which are on top of my yogurt, deep into the yogurt beneath the nuts, and then finally eat my evenly distributed nut yogurt and drink my coffee and lead a relatively happy life.

But then I realize something — I do not have a spoon. No frigging spoon. My head drops to my chest, just missing the yogurt glob.

I sigh a long, audible sigh. I ask myself if I think the manager would give me a spoon to eat snuck-in yogurt not purchased in his store. I answer myself that he would probably use a phrase that had “over my dead small-business owner’s body” in it.

So I ask myself if you can eat nut-filled yogurt with one of those little coffee-stirrer piece-of-crap thin wooden dealies. My self said, “No, but if you use two of them together, it should work pretty well, Dummy Butt-Face.”

Well, my self was right. It did work well. But why would my self call me “Dummy Butt-Face?”

Should Have Named Him Jughead (Cigar Smoke 3-11-10)

Well, I knew it was going to happen. Yes, I shot a few Democrats just to watch ’em die. No, that was Johnny Cash in “Folsom Prison Blues.” I always liked Johnny. No, no, I didn’t shoot anybody.

What I did was get another dog. Yup, my life was just getting too comfortable and I was enjoying myself way too much to not have another fur ball around. And, of course, my good friend Paula Johnson had something to do with it. She suggested that I get a rescue dog from the pound and not get another damn purebred like my last dog, Hadley. And she kept giving me subtle hints, like, “got another dog yet, you jerk-off commie heartless bastard who likes to see dogs put down at the pound?” (Are you able to get new friends at the pound?)

So, as it happened, I had recently joined the Airedale Rescue Society, and my main function was to help them haul rescued dogs to kennels and homes. So they called me and had me go down to the animal shelter in Downey to pick up an Airedale who had been picked up off the street.

Well, I went down there and got him. And he was one ratty-looking dog. His hair was all matted and his head was bald and he was scary skinny and he had a trailer-trash long tail, and he smelled like No. 2 and he had just been neutered. I got him in the car and he nipped at me. (Hey, I would have nipped at someone too if I had just had my nuts snipped off.)

We got him home and he started to get acclimated by taking a dump on the living room carpet that was bigger than any dump Hadley had ever taken and would have given a rhinoceros dump a good challenge for both texture and total volume. I scolded him and he instantly rolled on the floor in a submissive posture. I told him I didn’t want him to be submissive because that’s what I want out of my wife, not my dog.

Then we had to give him a name. My first choice was Dumpy, but I didn’t share that with Marge. So, because he was bald, I said how about ArchiBALD? She thought that was just a little too cute, so I came up with Jughead because he has a jug-horse head. That didn’t fly, either. Then we remembered that Jughead used to hang out with Archie in the comics. So his name is officially Archie. Archie the Airedale.

I asked him how he liked his name and he didn’t say much. Then I asked him how he liked being rescued from the shelter and being with us, and he paused and said, “I would have preferred the 8-year-old boy on a Montana ranch, but seeing as I am nutless, I might like it here in the old folks’ home.” I told the Rhino Defecator not to press his luck.

Let me tell you a few things about this dog. We’ve only had him for three weeks but we are starting to see a trend. And the word “psycho” is in a lot of the early data. He likes to dig holes in the backyard; he likes to eat shoes; he is sneakier than Pete and waits until we leave a room before he shreds our valuables; he has squeezed under a fence and run away three times; and he likes to seriously haul ass around the house just tucking in his Airedale butt and crashing into things that used to be whole. I mean this sucker moves like Clinton after an intern, baby.

And one time while I was out playing Scrabble, and Marge had to go out for a few hours, she put him in the laundry room. When she got back, she opened the door and there was Archie, looking at her eyeball-to-eyeball. He had jumped up on a counter and ripped open some dog food packets and was trapped up there. But not before tearing down the curtains and overturning his water and food dishes. Psycho. Archie, not Marge.

And get this: I have never seen Archie either pee or go dumpy-poo. Never. Not once. Yes, I see the results, but I have never seen him do these things. Hadley would do these things until I cried. Archie is different. Oh, and Archie does not lick, either. Have you ever heard of a dog that doesn’t like to slobber on you? Me neither. He’ll put his mouth up to yours to smell what you’ve just eaten and try to remove it before you can swallow it, but he won’t lick. I think this is a case for The Dog Whisperer. Maybe even The Dog Hollerer.

But we love the big lug already. He’s very sweet. He is just a gentle giant of a dog. He now weighs more than 70 pounds and you can’t feel his bony sides anymore. And he’s getting healthier after the antibiotics and the de-worming and the deficit-building vet bills. And his hair is starting to grow out. And he smells a little better after the industrial bath and chemical dip.

But he’s still pissed off about his nuts.

The Handyman Can (Cigar Smoke 2-25-10)

Is it just me or do things like this happen to you, and I don’t know if things like this don’t happen to you because you don’t have a column, or is it that these things may happen to you but you don’t give a flying fraguzzi, and I do give one of those?

Anyway, I’m up in my little Hovel by the Sea in Oregon last week and I need to do some work on my so-called house. I have to hang a large clock on the wall and I know from experience that if I do it myself I will leave a large hole in the wall and the anchor bolt will just hang there like Saddam Hussein and the clock will just be holding its breath until the first earthquake. And then it will fall on some luckless pet and I will be sued for every penny I have in my lousy shack hovel life. That is a pretty good summary of my handyman experience.

So I need to get a real handyman. So I go to a furniture store up there that I know fairly well, and I ask for a referral for a great handyman, and this guy standing near us hears my request and he says, “I am a great handyman.” So I looked at him and I said, “How do I know you are a great handyman?” And he said, “Because I drive a ratty pickup and I wear a tool belt.”

That was good enough for me. So we arrange for him to come over in the morning and do the work. He gets over to my place at 8 a.m. sharp and I have high hopes. (These hopes will be lowered very soon.) As he’s coming up the walkway, he seems to be wobbling just a bit. Nothing alarming, but there is definitely a wobble waiting to come out.

I asked him how he was doing and I didn’t want him to answer, but he did. He said he went to his brother’s bachelor party last night, but he had to leave early so he could help me out. Yup. Straight from the naked women and Chivas to old Jim E. Baby’s hovel handyman job. The hopes were pretty much at my ankles about then.

But, because I am a what? I am a dumb shit, that’s what. I let him continue. He comes into the house to analyze the job and he reaches for his tool belt, but his tool belt is not there. He says, “Oh shit, I left it with that stripper last night.” I said, “Hmm.” He said he would go out to his truck and get something. He did. A hammer.

He came back in and he had some kind of punch thing and he took a relatively straight swing with his hammer and he, well, he punched out a big enough hole in my cowering wall to put his fist through — and then crack his knuckles. He looks at me and I look at him and he says, “You got any Spackle?” I swear on my handyman’s manual, he said, “You got any Spackle?”

I said, “No. But I have a Colt 45 in the bedroom.” The humor went right over his hangover. He told me to sit tight; he would run down to the hardware store and get some stuff. He was back in 20 minutes with some hardware bolts and bullshit. And he worked awhile and the only thing I could see change was the size of the hole in the wall. He inquired as to whether I might have a bigger clock to hang.

Well, he went back and forth to the hardware store five times. Five frigging times. He kept coming back with wrong sizes and medieval attachment devices you may have seen in prisons in the Middle Ages. He was there for three-and-a-half hours. To hang one really tacky heavy clock. Three-and-a-half hours.

But finally he says, “Got ’er done. Come on over here and take a look.” I look and sure enough, the damn clock is on the wall. I kind of gingerly touch it and it seems secure. He asks me if I would like to see his work behind the clock and I tell him no, because I have a bad heart and I’ve seen large rat-entrance holes before. He laughed his handyman laugh.

I said, “Well, how much do I owe you?” and he said, and this is the God’s honest handyman fee truth, “how about five bucks?” Being from LA where I have been charged $120 dollars for a guy to come out to the house to look at a problem, I was pretty much stunned. Only five bucks.

I couldn’t believe it. Three-and-a-half hours of work for five bucks. I didn’t know what to say.

Finally, I said, “Would you take four?”

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Circus Lion Meat (Cigar Smoke 2-11-10)

Well, the little woman and I decided to go out for an evening of dinner and entertainment the other night. (By the way, I use the term “little woman” not because I am a sexist pig, but because Marge is indeed a little woman. She’s only four inches tall and I hold her in my hand.)

Anyway, before we left for the entertainment venue, I thought I would try out my new navigation app that I bought for my iPhone. I set everything up, I put in the address, I punched the buttons, and it seemed to be ready to go. I did a little app jig in the living room. Then we get in the car and, as I was driving, Marge was in charge of holding the iPhone, which was tough for her because the iPhone was also four inches tall. And as we were driving I kept asking her what the directions were. The app was supposed to talk to us in its little app voice. And guide us to our destination. But there was no response. Nothing. Just the silent treatment.

And I was getting all whacked out of shape and cursing and screaming and Marge was encouraging me with a “just drive, dumb ass” every once in a while. I had to just say to hell with the supposedly talking app and find the place myself. I don’t know how, but we got there and we got our table and I looked at the iPhone and I noticed that I had forgotten to turn the sound on. The app was talking to me after all, but I had not let it express itself fully. Marge wants to know if there is an app for being a dumb ass.

So we order dinner and we get two appetizers. Marge gets some commie French thing and I get the quesadillas with the guacamole dip that will jet propel me back home even without a car. Then we get two really great salads with killer crusty rolls and life looks livable again. And then our entrees arrive.

I had ordered a tri-tip with some special Roquefort sauce and that sucker was sitting on the plate like it had been there since it had been grazing in the pasture. And it was looking back at me. And it was not happy. I couldn’t quite tell, but I think it was giving me the finger.

I said to Marge, “Have you ever seen roast beef with semi-liquid white fluid on it before?” “Only when I worked at Huntington Hospital that one year,” she replied.

I kept looking at the tri-tip out of the corner of my eye, because I didn’t want to make direct eye contact with it and piss it off even more. But because I was hungry and because I will eat almost anything, I decided to take a bite. Holy Hoofed Dead Animal, that was not my best decision. It did not taste good. It did not taste healthy. It did not taste edible. It not only made my skin crawl, it made my tongue crawl. And I don’t blame my tongue — I was trying to crawl someplace myself.

Then I looked over at Marge and she was trying to crawl away from her dinner, too. I said, “Come back here. What did you order?” And she said, “I ordered the stuffed trout.” I said, “What was it stuffed with?” She said, “Rotting intestines and wolf feces.” I said, “Hmm?

Pretty creative.”

I ask you. I implore you. What are the odds that two people can order two completely different dinners, one dinner from the earth and one dinner from the lake, and have both dinners be so bad that we wouldn’t even try to trade them to each other? It was unbelievable. Both dinners looked gross and tasted worse. I wouldn’t have fed this stuff to enemy soldiers.

But all was not lost. Most of it was. But not all of it. We did find one shining blessing in the entertainment. While we were consuming an extra order of the killer crusty rolls and downing a few alcoholic beverages to give hope to our mortally wounded taste buds, some actor on the stage yells out, “I am going to jump down my own butthole and hang myself!”

I am not making that up. The actor guy said, “I am going to jump down my own butthole and hang myself!” Marge and I laughed so hard we spit up booze-drenched bits of crusty rolls, which made us laugh even harder.

And then, as we were leaving the theater, the hostess asked us how we liked our dinners, and I said, “If I ever eat here again I am going to jump down my own butthole and hang myself!”

Then we ran to the car like eloping teenagers and started driving home. After a while, I asked Marge to check my email. She flipped on my iPhone and it started yapping out directions. At the next street, turn left. In a half a mile, exit here. Yap, yap, yap.. And I grabbed the phone and yelled at it, “If you don’t stop your little app yapping, I am going to jump down my own butthole and hang myself!”

Right Cross (Cigar Smoke 1-28-10)

OK, I am sitting here at my desk basking in the right-wing-nut glow of the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts. I still can’t quite believe what happened. The Democrats lost the Kennedy seat. The decisive 41st seat. Un-frigging-believable. Holy Political Moly, the irony is just too delicious to not gloat over it.

But I know it is unbecoming to gloat, so I won’t be gloating very long. I’m a short-term gloater. Something will piss me off within the next hour and there won’t be a Scott Brown truck to run it over.

So I would like to spend some time talking about being a right-wing nut. I think us right-wingers have gotten a semi-bum rap. All of us aren’t Bible-toting Ku Klux Klan racists and war-mongering insensitive capitalistic greedy scum who hate gays. Although, I would admit that most of those groups could be in the Republican Party. What can I say? I don’t sleep with any of them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think we should all chill out a little and take a closer look at who is on the other side. So I thought I would share with you some of my so-called right-wing views. So eventually you will love me, and send me nice gifts.

And I realize this will be a short and somewhat shallow revelation of my positions. However, I don’t have the space or the talent to present a more in-depth offering.

First of all, I am an atheist. I am not a big fan of religion. However, I would side with the religious right over the spiritual left. At least, the religious right has some kind of moral standard. They hold themselves accountable for their actions. Most people on the left seem to just want to be spiritual, whatever the hell that means. They all just want to move to New Mexico and gaze at sunsets or navels and take a few hits on something and be mellow. Seems to me they just don’t want to acknowledge any of the hard stuff.

I warned you it would be short and shallow.

I’m also on the right because people on the right actually show their love of the country. They are not embarrassed by being patriotic. People on the left always say they love the country, but they always say that when complaining about how bad things are. They never seem to show it with flags or pins or bumper stickers like us right-wing-nut jobs do. Is it really that hard to say that you love the country and not put a but after it? People on the left want us to be more like France. People on the right are comfortable being Americans. People on the right are proud to be Americans. Are people on the left proud to be American?

Maybe. But it would be nice if they showed it once in a while.

I like FOX News. Sue me. But I think Bill O’Reilly is an arrogant jerk. Just like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is an arrogant jerk. I’ll admit my guy is a jerk-off if you will throw yours under the bus. At least we could make a stab at being civil. Let’s get rid of those two guys, huh? You go first. I’ll drive the bus. Then maybe Scott Brown can swing by in his pickup.

But you can’t take away FOX News. You keep all the other stations. Just let me have my one poor little stepchild of a station. But hell, some of you lefties don’t even like the fact that us right-wing-wackos have any TV news stations at all. If it were up to Obama, FOX would be gone. What a whiner.

And in my simplistic right-wing view, global warming is the biggest hoax in my lifetime. It is such a crock that Betty should name a cooking pot after it. First it was that our poor planet was getting too hot and then, when the facts wouldn’t support that, they quickly morphed it to climate change. And just this week the United Nations acknowledged that they made a slight mistake in their prediction that the Himalayas were melting. They had said they would melt by 2035. Seems as if there was a typo. It should have been in the year 2350. What’s 315 years among us scientists?

And lest we forget, the other little UN global hot air goof: Remember when they said all this supposed melting would make the seas rise by 18 feet? They eventually confessed that they meant 18 inches. Feet? Inches? What’s the big deal?

And the polar bears are going to all die. Doesn’t anyone even give a leftist crap that the polar bear population is increasing? But that wouldn’t fit with the agenda. I’m glad I’m enrolled in another school. Remember, I’m not trying to be too heavy or critical here.

I’m extending my little peace pipe or lotus leaf or outstretched crushing right-handed manly handshake to help us see each other a little better. I love polar bears, dammit. But whatever global climate change there is (which may or may not be happening) is making the polar bear population go up. There are more polar bears. Shouldn’t having more bears be a good sign?

Finally, I’m on the right because the right is grateful for and honors the military. The Berkeley left tries to ban them from being able to recruit near college campuses. The left sings songs about how bad they are. John Lennon wants us to Imagine. I want us to imagine what the world would be like without the US military.

OK, I’m stepping down off my soapbox of gloating. Oops, I have to get back up there again. “Air America” just went under.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Coffee with a Little Ire To Go (Cigar Smoke 1-14-10)

Being retired has enabled me to get into a number of things I didn’t have time for when I was a real person. I’ve been able to sit on the couch for very long periods of time until someone puts a feather in front of my nose to see if my nostril hairs are moving. I’ve been able to buy an iPhone ap that lets me track my FedEx packages and look at it every day to see if my packages are in Lexington, Ky., or en route to the delivery center in Austin, Texas. And most recently, I have been able to check out a different place to get my coffee every day in and around Pasadena.

Yes, I have had coffee at every Starbucks within a radius of 10 miles of Old Town. And I’ve enjoyed most of them. I usually go out and buy a USA Today and solve the crossword puzzle instead of solving my own life problems. And I always order a small coffee of the day and the clerk person always says, “Do you mean a tall or a grande?” And I always say, “Small.” And they say, “Tall or grande, you white-haired geezer bastard?” And I say, “Let’s compromise. How about a smande?”

After I had been to all the Starbucks in the area, and after many of the managers had put me on their no-sip lists, I started going to other coffee places. I would seek out semi-lowlife kind of spots where I could feel comfortable. Places with almost acceptable coffee and lots of open tables. Hole-in-the-wall spots. AM-PM stores. Hawaiian drink places with coffee signs in pencil. Donut shops. Enjoyed them all.

Except for the one on Colorado Boulevard that was so damn fancy that I felt like I had walked into someone’s living room. This place had poofy couches and nice chairs and carpets and — scariest of all — table lamps. Holy roasted coffee bean, baby. Table lamps! And then this nice Japanese woman asks me what I would like and I ordered a coffee and felt obligated to get this little mystery pastry goodie that was on a really nice plate with a lace napkin on it. And I paid her and she bowed and she kind of hesitated, so hell, I bowed back. And she bowed again. And I bowed.

And then, when I’m sitting in my stuffed chair with my table lamp on, she comes over and bows again, and I bow, and she bows, and I bow and I stick my nose into my coffee. She is startled at this, so she asks me if there is anything she can do, and I say, “Maybe bow one more time.”

Haven’t been back there. I found a new place out in Monrovia. Just my kind of place. Has coffee with sizes that you don’t have to be bilingual to order and is fairly big, so I can find a seat, and is far enough from my house that I can smoke a cigar on the way over and back. I love this place. I just take my iPhone and drink my coffee and observe all the other patrons with their electronic rectangles and am happy that we will never have to actually talk to each other. It’s perfect.

Well, almost perfect. I’ve been going there for a couple of months now, and it’s been great. And then a few days ago I go there and have my small coffee without flak and I go back out to my car. And some coffee-juiced jerk-off has parked his car so close to mine that I can’t get in.

How do people do this? He pulls into the stall next to me and parks right up against my car. He is literally within six inches of my door. He barely missed my rear-view mirror. There is no way anybody can get in my car. Twiggy on a diet couldn’t get in my car.

At first, I think of how I could beat this lowlife with a crowbar and tell the jury straight out that I did it and I know they’d let me off. But, of course, I am a semi-civil person. I will not club the guy to death. I try to stay calm. I accept that I will just have to live with the fantasy of clubbing the guy to death.

So I walk back into the coffee place. I say in a loud voice, “Excuse me. May I have your attention? Please put your hand-held devices down. This is a real person speaking to you. I am not voice- activated software. I am rage-activated human. I would like to know who the owner of the car is who parked his car so close to my car that I cannot get into my car. That’s what I want to know.”

Nobody raised his or her hand. So I said, “OK, here’s the deal. This key in my hand is my car key. I am going to walk out to my car and take this key and scratch my name and phone number on the side of your car so you can be sure to know who to apologize to. Or you can take your own car key and back your car out of the parking space where you have parked your pissily parked piece-of-shit-and-Shinola car.”

I turned and started walking out. Some lady ran by me and whisked that Escalade out of that parking spot before I could say “club to death with a tire iron.”

Damn soccer moms!