jimlaris

So Long, Sailor (Cigar Smoke 8-18-11)

2011-08-18T11:31:00.001-07:00

Well, I don’t have an exciting sea tale for you, mainly because I never actually got out to sea. I thought I was going out to sea. I even bought a Greek fisherman’s hat. And since I had the hat, I decided to buy a boat so I would have somewhere to wear it. However, all I did was go out to harbor. I was trying to go out to sea, dammit, but I backed my boat into another boat in the harbor and that’s as far as I got. Let’s just say it was not a Kon-Tiki kind of story.

I did have pretty high hopes at first. I had just bought a little hovel up in Brookings Harbor in Oregon. And I’d look out over my hovel deck and see all these boats and I asked a friend of mine if he thought I would make a good boat owner.

He said, “No.” I asked him if he could expand on that a little. He said, “Sure. Hell no.” So I said, “So you’re saying that you don’t think I would make a good boat owner. Is that what I am hearing you say?” (I learned that in a communication workshop.)

He then gave me a non-workshop finger gesture he had learned in the Navy, and said, “Laris, you are 70 frigging years old and you are as agile as a statue with arthritis. And your head contains the same material that the rest of the statue is made of.”

So I took that as an endorsement of my seagoing skills and bought a boat that was built in 1976. It was named the Bicentennial Baby and it cost me $2,800. And then it cost me $500 to actually have the motor run. And then because I am a what, I am a mature adult who wears Rockport shoes, I bought a backup outboard motor for $1,000 to ensure my safe return from the devil ocean if my main motor conked out. And then it cost me maybe $400 to buy sea crap for it like life vests and emergency flares. And it cost me $375 to license it. And it cost me $150 to license the trailer its little bicentennial butt sat on. And then it cost me $50 a month to store it. And it cost me $200 to insure it. And it cost me … it’s hard to keep typing while I’m crying.

And then I went for a test run with my so-called friend, and we got in the boat and unhooked the lines from the dock and the motor actually started and we drifted back a few yards, and then my SCF (so-called friend) said, “Hit it!” And I pulled the throttle back with all my 70-year-old might. And the motor roared to life. And we backed straight into another boat. And it made this really loud banging sound. But I was still able to hear my SCF say, “You push the throttle forward, Statue Head!”

Anyway, those 34 feet of harbor travel were as far as I got out to sea. (Thor Heyerdahl, eat your heart out.) So I decided to put the piece of crap, I mean, the boat, back into storage for a whole year. And then just last month, I made the decision to bring the boat back to LA and only use it on lakes, where I thought I would probably get three or four trips out of it before I keeled over. (Sailor talk.)

So I put new rims on the trailer and knocked most of the rust off the fenders, and Marge and Archie the Dog and I took off. The first day went great. We covered about 430 miles, and made it to Elk Grove, near Stockton, where we stayed at a Holiday Inn and ate pizza and life was good.

And then we got up and life was not quite as good. During the night some low-life scum pig had slashed open the boat cover and stolen everything in the boat that was worth anything. I was really glad I had bought the high-end boat crap to make the thief happy.

Then we got on the road, and we drove about an hour or so on Highway 5, and then this guy pulls up along side of us and honks like crazy and points to the boat and trailer. We look back and the right rear tire seemed to be engulfed in flames and smoke. Maybe lava was coming out. I stop, take a look, and I amazingly discovered the tire was actually still good but the trailer infrastructure was falling apart. Pieces were actually missing.

The boat was just barely hanging on. It was incredible that it didn’t fall off when we were going 55 in traffic. (I guess God’s a Greek fisherman.) We had just passed the metropolis of Westley, so we lucked out, and were only about three miles from Patterson. We decided to just limp along the freeway in the slow lane with our hazard lights on and Marge whimpering. Archie didn’t seem to give a shit.

I’ll cut to the chase. We drove straight to an RV camp where I asked the owners if we could store the boat and trailer. They said, “No.” So I said, “Well then, would you like to have a free boat?” They said, “A free boat?” I said, “Yes, a free boat. On one condition. You have to take the trailer, too.”

I drive a hard bargain. But cannot drive a car, a boat, or a car hauling a trailer.

Good Boy, Jim (Cigar Smoke 7-21-11)

2011-07-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at the dog park the other day, just watching my dog, Archie, sniff a few butts, most of them dog butts, and it came to me in a Fido flash. Nobody ever names their dog Jim!

At first, it kind of pissed me off, but then again, most things kind of piss me off. So I thought about it for a few seconds and tried to mellow out. And I had to admit that nobody names their dogs Joseph or Marge or Vic or Davy, either. And although Johnny Cash sang about “A Boy Named Sue,” he never named his dog Sue. I couldn’t keep feeling persecuted and not liked and generally dismissed by uncaring, insensitive dog owners. I was almost mature enough to accept it.

And yet, I still fantasized. God, wouldn’t it be cool if there was, say, a big shaggy sucker drooling dog drool and someone was calling it in a masterly voice — “Here, Jim. Come here, Jim. Thatta boy, Jim.” Kind of brings a tear to my human eye. “Sit, Jim. Stay, Jim. Roll over, Jim. That’s a good boy, Jim.” Man, I haven’t heard those words since my first marriage.

Hey, this whole naming-your-dog thing is pretty interesting. I live in fear that some guy will ask me what my dog’s name is, and the guy will be 6-4 and weigh 270 pounds and have a tattoo of a bunny with a knife sticking out of it and I will say, “Uh, my dog’s name is Archie.”

And he will grab me by my chest hair and throw me up against a chain link fence and say, “Archie? That’s my name, too, asshole.” And I will say, “How did you know my name was Asshole?”

By the way, do you know why we named our Airedale Archie? (By the way, do you care?) Well, Airedales have a long horse head kind of head, and at first we thought of calling him Black Beauty, but he wasn’t black, and he wasn’t a horse, and that name had already been taken. And Trigger didn’t quite work, either.

Anyway, we struggled with picking a name for almost a week. And Archie was getting a bit ticked off. He had this sic ‘em look that said, “I’m not coming or sitting or staying if you just call me with that weak-ass ‘Here, boy’ shit?” And he had a point.

We had named our first Airedale, Hadley, after the English crime writer Hadley Chase. So, for a few minutes, we actually thought of calling Archie Chase. It was kind of different. Had the Chasey-kind of dog-fetchy reference and all, but ultimately we decided it was too cute and sweet and sappy, so we didn’t, and that decision may have saved a diabetic’s life.

So, after going through literally hundreds of dog names and after hearing one of our friends say in a loving way, “It’s just a dog, dammit! It’s not your frigging kid, you morons!” for some reason, we thought of the Archie comic books. And then Marge yelled out, “I have it! How about Veronica?” She was pretty disheartened when I told her Archie was a male.

And this is where that horse head thing comes into play. I suggested that because our yet unnamed dog had a long head, it kind of reminded me of Archie’s pal, Jughead. Marge said, “I just can’t name my dog Jughead. Somehow he would just know.” And I said, “Oh, I know he’s really smart. He only licks dead animals and dog feces. We wouldn’t want to offend his sensitivities.”

But that was not the final determining factor in our dog-naming pursuit. Yes, we had Jughead and a horse head and the Archie comics’ thing. But then we noticed his mangy, hairless head. We had gotten him as a rescue dog from the pound, and yes, he was bald.

So I said to Marge, “Why don’t we name him ArchiBALD? He has a what? He has a bald spot? And we can call him Archie for short.” Marge said, “How about Baldy or Spot?” I said, “Unless you want to experience male pattern spousal abuse, it’s Archie.”
And the rest is caninacle history. Archie it was. And Archie it is. “No, Archie! Get down, Archie! Bad dog, Archie!”

And it turned out kind of funny. Just after we finally named him Archie, I got a call from an old buddy I went to college with, RinTinTin Schwartz. (Yes, we called him Rinty in the dorm.) Anyway, he had married this little lassie from Scotland, and they were also trying to name their dog.

So I asked RinTinTin and his lassie, what they finally ending up calling their dog, and they said, “Schwartzie.”
“Here, Schwartzie. Roll over, Schwartzie.” I like it.

Naked Shower Panic (Cigar Smoke 6-16-11)

2011-06-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

The other day, my son, Mike, said something very nice to me. He said, “Dad, I really love coming to your house.”

I puffed up and got my big, goofy parent grin on and said, “Wow. That makes me feel good. Is it because you think I am a wonderful father and maybe even your role model in life and I am very similar to Gandhi?” He said, “No. That’s not quite it.”

So I said, “Is it because your mother follows Anthony Weiner on Twitter and I don't want to see, um, a member of Congress?" He said, "No, that's not quite it."

“Is it because you can use my washing machine for free and sometimes make me put your washed clothes in the dryer while you’re watching TV?” “No. That’s not quite it.”

“Is it because we go out to dinner every time you come over and you can sponge off me to get meals that you don’t get toys with?” “No. That’s not quite it.”

“Well, what the quite is it?”

And he said, “I love to smell your shampoo.”

I am serious. That is exactly what he said. And you know I would not lie to you. (Unless I had a good reason to.) He said, “Yeah, you always have such cool shampoos. Like the Strawberry Essence of Waterfalls or Ocean Breezes of Lilac in a Thunderstorm.” And he’s right. I do have wonderful-smelling shampoos. A lot better than Gandhi’s, I know that.

So, why am I telling you this? Because while I was in my shower smelling my shampoo the other day, I had a semi-near-almost-kind-of-tragic-death experience.

Yes, I had just finished washing my elderly, yet still incredibly manly body and I put a big gob of Tropical Coconut with a Hint of Mango Guava shampoo on my wet hair. And as I put on the shampoo, I breathed in that wonderful aroma of Hawaiian lushness and I knew exactly what Mike was talking about. God, that shampoo smelled good. (And I think it was probably the reason why Don Ho got laid so often.)

But then, after I finished rinsing off my hair, I tried to slide the shower door and it wouldn’t open. It was stuck. Would not budge. I tried the other side of the door. It was stuck, too. So there I was, stuck in the shower. And even though my hair smelled terrific, I felt a twinge of concern.

I pushed the damn door. And I pulled it. And I talked to it. And I cussed it out. And then I started yelling to Marge, “Marge! Marge! Help me. Your naked, hairy husband is trapped in the shower. Help!” But, after a few yells, I realized that Marge is getting a little hard of hearing and she would not be able to hear me. My concern was now a little closer to panic.

After about 10 minutes of pushing, pulling and shaking the door, I thought about just breaking the damn thing down. And that would have worked. Even I am stronger than a shower door. But I hesitated to take such a destructive path, mainly because we had just put in a brand new shower door. A relatively expensive shower door. A new shower door that did not work as well as the old, piece-of-crap shower door we replaced. God, how I wished I still had the old shower door, the ugly old shower door with stains and cracked, cheap, painted plastic and the one that smelled like caked-on dried shower filth had collected for at least 15 years. Oh, how I missed that smell.

At that point, I was pretty much in a state of panic. Nude panic. Naked jaybird panic. And I was mad because there wasn’t a phone in the shower, like they have in good hotels. And I was going to sue these damn homeowners until I remembered that the damn homeowners were me and Marge. And that pissed me off even more because I couldn’t figure out if I was going to be the plaintiff or the defendant.

Finally, I sort of gave up and sat down on the scummy, wet, cold tile floor and thought to myself, “Is this how I am going to buy it? Is this how this lankly, semi-old cowpoke is going to ride off into the sunset?” I could see the news report: “Altadena Resident Dies in Freak Shower Trapping.” Paramedics were astonished to find that even though the body hadn’t been discovered for four weeks, the deceased’s hair smelled really good. Kind of like a Mai Tai Hurricane of Dolphin Splendor.

But alas, I did not buy the wet, scummy farm of bathroom stuck shower door deadly death. No, I survived. After a full half-hour (Is that logically possible or legal?), yes, after a full half-hour of panic and crying and screaming and thinking I was a goner, I figured out how to get out. Yup, I figured it out, and I did it, and I got out.

How did I do it? I would tell you, but I kind of hope this happens to all of you, and I don’t want to spoil your fun. And, of course, I like to fantasize about other naked bodies trapped in showers.

Hey, from now on, be safe. Bring your cell phone in with you when you shower. If you get stuck, give me a call. I’ll bring the shampoo.

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

I'm Even More Pathetic Than You Are (Cigar Smoke 5-19-11)

2011-05-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

I know many of you see me as a pathetic excuse for a columnist, and as a pathetic excuse for a human being, and incredibly, as a pathetic excuse for a lanky person. And yes, many years ago, an artist did ask me to pose for a painting he was going to call “Pathetic Guy.” And I asked him if I had to be nude, and he said, “You’re pathetic.”

I don’t have time to go into all the reasons why I possibly may be pathetic. Let me just give you the most recent one. I have become a Costco addict. No, no, there’s nothing wrong with Costco. They’re a great store. Great prices. Efficient. All that. And I don’t feel as if I am an addict because I go there a lot.

I am getting ahead of myself a little here. Before I reveal the true depths of my patheticism, I do have to admit that I love shopping at Costco. The last time I was there, I bought a year’s supply of soap. Yup, I got a giant package of 36 bars of Irish Spring. I calculated that I should be relatively clean through August 2014. (And that’s taking into consideration that I will use some of the bars as stocking stuffers.)

And while I was there, of course, I just had to get the 48-unit box of Five-Hour Energy Bottles. I figure I can now drive nonstop across the country four times without ever having to stop at a motel. I’m just going to slug that stuff down and floor it, baby. My eyelids may never close again. I’m getting bug-eyed hyper just thinking about all that Five-Hour fuel pumping through me. I want to take an exam or something. I want to watch a Three Stooges movie marathon. I want to sell my bed. That Berry flavor rocks.

Another time I was there I got an industrial-size package of tubes of toothpaste that had flaws in the tubes. Now every time I brush my teeth, I squeeze the tube and the toothpaste oozes out of one of the sides of the tube, and usually it gets all over my fingers, but that is the price I have to pay for being such a savvy shopper and all-around wonderful person.

No, I am not to the pathetic part yet. A few months ago I was in Costco and I needed two AAA batteries. So they were just happening to have this sale on this special shipment of batteries that they just got in, so yes, I bought $114 worth of batteries. Hey, I couldn’t pass that up. And yes, I did need a truss and a handcart to get the batteries up to the counter. And yes, I now annoy strangers by walking up to them and asking them if they need a battery for their flashlight. Many of them don’t even have flashlights.

I’m retired. I have the time.

As you can see, the above examples have all been positive examples of shopping at Costco. But, because I am what? And because I compare this quality to what unit of time? Because I am as honest as the day is long, I have to tell you about a couple of failed Costco adventures.

First, I do not have the courage to buy something from their meat and fish counter. I was having a barbeque last summer and I walked up to the butcher guy and he suggested a reinforced rack of ribs that looked about the size of a Mini Cooper. I told him I was only having four people over. He said, “Hey, that’s only 14 ribs each.”

And once I just glanced over at the fish section, and I saw these huge crab claws, and I know they were still alive. They were moving and they had broken through the cellophane wrapper, and they were crawling down over the crushed ice. And they were laughing. I still have nightmares.

OK, the pathetic part. I’ll say it fast. I now go to Costco when I don’t know what I am going to buy! I do not need anything. I’m pretty well stocked up on Costco crap. I have unopened packages of stuff I bought last year. But I’m sitting there at the end of the couch, and I say to myself, “Hey Jerk Lips, wanna go buy a large quantity of something? Wanna go get something that we don’t even know what it is yet?” And damned if Jerk Lips doesn’t say, “Sure. Can’t dance.”

So, Jerk Lips and I went the other day to see if we could find something we didn’t need or didn’t even know existed. And hang on to your shorts, Aunt Martha, we found it!

It just called out to us. From the liquor department. Lips and I were just ambling around and there it was. A five-foot tall bottle of Jose Cuervo in the shape of Pancho Villa with a big-ass sombrero on. It was just so cool I could hardly stand it. Five feet of booze. With a hat on.

And only $149!

Going Green, Baby!

2011-04-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Well, my editor, Kevin the Tormentor, suggested that I might consider writing a column on seniors and environmentalism to go with the special issue you are now reading. I suggested that maybe he could get another writer, someone older, who actually cared about the environment. He suggested that if I wanted my check, I would reconsider. His exact words were, “Do it, dickhead.”

So dickhead just turned 70 the other day. I was actually really happy to have reached 70. It would have been a real pisser to check out at 69. Now, when I buy it, people can say, “He had a full life.” When you pop off at only 69, all the talk is about how you died too young. And then people feel guilty about eating the free food at the services. Now they can ask for seconds.

To help me celebrate my 70th birthday, we decided to have a semi-birthday bash over in Vegas. There were five of us. Marge and I, Casey and his girlfriend, Jessie, and Mike and his imaginary girlfriend.

We all flew over on Jet Blue for $29 each. Hey, that is literally cheaper than driving. I only mention this to display my keen awareness of the environment. I’m not exactly sure about what we specifically saved the planet from by not driving, but I am damn sure we did good. And, because I live to do good, I was happy. Although, I was not completely happy, because I am still waiting for some sort of thank you note from the planet, the environment, Al Gore, or my editor. Hopefully, on biodegradable paper.

Hey, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. (There’s a flash.) The reason I decided to go to Vegas in the first place was essentially an environmental one. I wanted to be green. Whenever I think of green, I don’t think of trees or grass or beautiful scenes in New Zealand or somewhere. Nope. I think of money. That’s as green as it gets for me. I feel more at one with nature already.

So we get to Lost Wages and we check into a semi-snooty new hotel, the Aria. Hey, it was my 70th birthday, dammit! And all you need to know about this hotel is that we could control our room curtains by using the TV remote. Thank God we didn’t have to manually pull back those heavy, complicated curtain rod things. And the Aria had an honor bar, which automatically computed your charges when you took a $7 Snickers bar or a beer and shot that info directly to the front desk via the Internet. How did we get by before?

The first thing we did after checking in was go play some video poker. I wanted to make sure I passed along my interest in being green to the younger generation. My older son, Mike, was sitting next to me, and I had just told him how I had won over $1,100 playing video poker the last time I was in Vegas.

And now, I told him, I was going to do it again. He looked at me like he had looked at me when he was in high school and I told him that sex was no fun and he shouldn’t do it until he was married. Yes, he had a smirk. And then, after a few plays on the machine, I dealt a hand and I had the Ace, Queen, Jack, and 10 of Hearts up there. All I needed was the King of Hearts and I would have a royal flush and I would win the jackpot and permanently remove the smirk from a doubter’s face.

So I told him, “Watch this. I am going to draw the King of Hearts.” Mike was a bit less sure than I was. I hit the draw button, and a card flashed up on the screen. We both held our breath, and damned if the King of Hearts didn’t jump into place. Ace-King-Queen-Jack-Ten of Hearts!

Sheeit! Bells went off. Lights blinked. I had hit the jackpot. Royal Flush city. I won $1,000. One thousand big ones. I had gone green, baby!

And then my younger son, Casey, rushed up and said, “Give me the money, Pops. I can double it at the roulette wheel.” I replied in a fatherly way. “I have gone green. I have not gone stupid.”

And Mike just sat there and finally said, “I will never doubt you again, Dad.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yes. Really. Except for the sex advice.”

Hey this really did happen. I won pretty big. If I’m lying, I’m dying.

And I would tell you about some of the other fun stuff we did, like when all five of us wore the Elvis shades that Jessie gave us, the shades with the cool black-flared sideburns and went to see the Cirque du Soleil Elvis Show. And everyone chuckled at us in open admiration. And we nodded our heads in unison in open acceptance of our own strikingly clever humor.

Or when we went out to the pool and had Mudslides and after my fifth Mudslide I challenged some guy in a Speedo next to me to a spelling contest on the word CIRQUE and I yelled out to him, “No, it is not SERK, you JIRQUE!”

Yes, I would tell you about these things if I weren’t so humble, and so young for a man of 70 and, of course, so dirty poker rich. I just couldn’t bear to make you green, with envy.

I Don't Even Know Where Peruvia Is (Cigar Smoke 3-17-11)

2011-03-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

I’m an addict. No, it’s not alcohol. Or tobacco. I don’t snort cocaine. I don’t shoot up heroine. I don’t even know what the hell meth is. I’m into something much, much worse. Groupons.

If I were at a meeting, I would have to step up and say, “Hi, I’m Jim. I’m a Groupon addict. Please, I wish all of you wouldn’t give me the finger at once.”

First of all, maybe some of you don’t even know what Groupons are. No, it’s not some kind of new group sex thing. (I could never find more than one person at a time that could even tolerate me.) No, Groupons are simply coupons you get online. That’s it. They send you emails every day, which offer you 50 percent discounts on most everything. I guess they feature restaurants. I know that’s what I feature.

It all started a couple of years ago. I received this innocent little email offering me a $50 coupon to eat at a BBQ rib joint and it would only cast me $25. And I said, maybe there is a god. I bought the coupon, I mean the Groupon, and off I went into a spiral of uncontrollable gluttony and complete abdication of what remaining sense I had. I was hooked.

I went down to The Smokin’ Joint on 3rd Street in L.A. and I plopped down my Groupon and said to the guy, “Here’s my Groupon that I bought for $25 and I would now like my $50 worth of BBQ shit.” I really thought I had been had, and that the guy was going to throw me out of the place or something. I thought it had to be too good to be true. But alas, it was not.

He limped over to my table with this enormous stack of BBQ’d animals on a plate and I kept waiting for some kind of catch. I was more paranoid than a chicken at a KFC, but I just ate my food, and I waddled out of the restaurant. And, like I said, I was hooked.

So, they kept sending me these emails and I kept buying them. At first, I only bought the ones in the San Gabriel Valley. I figured, being a member of MENSA, that I would probably be more likely to go to restaurants close by. But after a while, I wanted to use the Groupons as a way of forcing me out of my regular, boring routine into some new, boring routine. I wanted to seek out a new comfort zone that might possibly be even more comfortable than my current comfort zone.

Therefore, I started to buy Groupons for Vietnamese places in Claremont, and for Moroccan restaurants in Glendora, and for Greek Tavernas in La Verne. I even got one for some Ethiopian little hole-in-the-wall somewhere near Duarte, but I haven’t gone yet, because I know I’m going to feel guilty about eating what little food the Ethiopians have left after their famines. Nobody ever said life would be easy for a Groupon addict.

And just the other day, I sprang one of these little Groupon suckers on Marge. We were doing a crossword puzzle and she actually knew that one of the answers was LOOFAH. And this was just after she had told me that she had never heard of Duke Snider. (You’re right. I don’t know why I am still married to her.)

Anyway, I said, “My little Loofah Love Toy, how would you like to go to a nice Peruvian restaurant tonight for dinner?” And she batted her eyelids and said, “Where the hell is Peruvia?” I told her it was very close to Loofah.

Well, as you might have guessed, my little Love Toy was not speaking to me there for a while. So to win her back, I told her that because her happiness is what I lived for and because my only goal in an otherwise wasted life was to please her, I wondered if she would like to go have some gourmet French food. She hesitated for a second, and I pounced. I whipped out a Groupon from my hefty, alphabetized stack of Groupons and threw it down on the table like the Queen of Spades in Hearts. “Duke Snider is going to take his Loofah Love Toy to the Café Massilia in Monrovia,” I announced with an appropriate romantic flourish.

She said, “I thought you didn’t like French food.” I said, “I don’t. I hate it. But you’re not going with me. You’re going with Duke. I hope you have a nice dinner.”

Hey, I didn’t know a small woman such as Marge could throw such a large object at an even larger husband and throw it accurately and with such force and I was just wondering if maybe the Groupon people were going to offer a nice discount on Huntington Hospital Emergency Room services.

A Super Prediction (Cigar Smoke 2-17-11)

2011-02-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here, right now, on the end of my couch writing this column on my iPad. (I’ll give you a few minutes to self-medicate.) Usually I write it on my Mac desktop computer in Word. This is the very first time I’ve used the iPad. So now you will be able to say to yourselves, you know, when this sucker writes on his iPad using the Pages app, it’s very similar to the drivel we have to read when he uses a real computer.

I love Super Bowl Sunday, or, as I call it, the only Sunday of the year when you can eat really, really bad food — food even worse than deep-fried Twinkies smothered in chili — without your wife assuming the moral high ground. And if she even thinks about taking that high ground, I gently remind her about the record number of spousal abuse cases that are reported on this particular Sunday. They don’t call me Mr. Subtle for nothing.

By the way, I used to predict the actual score of the game in past columns. I would disclose that I was writing the column before the game was played, so everyone could be assured of my integrity. But, alas, after predicting the exact score of the game for three years in a row, my more alert readers, and even readers such as you, became suspicious.

I tried to defend myself by saying that, although I had submitted the column before the date of the game, I did happen to catch the error in my predictions after the game was actually played, and then I had emailed the corrected scores to my editor before the column went to press, because I did not want to jeopardize his job or submit anything that was not up to my journalistic standards. I am nothing if not a what? No, not a liar, dammit! A journalist.

I was brought before the FCC — the Fairness in Column-writing Commission. And I knew I wouldn’t get a fair hearing because they had ruled against me in another case where I had an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction and had accidentally exposed my man-breasts while writing a column in my living room and, according to them, I had irreparably harmed the psyche of my under-aged Airedale by making him witness “a wanton act of downright disgusting dog cruelty.” And not only did they rescind my column-writing license and fine me more money than I make writing the column, they were also going to refer my case to the SPCA — the Society for the Prevention of Columns written by A-holes.

Sorry to interrupt myself, and yourself, with such painful memories. Getting back to sitting on the couch watching the game. First of all, I like to use Super Bowl Sunday as a convenient way to check up on how my New Year’s resolutions are coming along. It’s been over a month since I made the resolutions, so it’s a fair test.

I resolved to not be so offensive. I resolved to be kinder to my commie socialist green politically correct flag-burning wimpy misguided peacenik salad-eating family and friends. I resolved to be less arrogant when I won all of my arguments. I resolved to write sentences that were not over 300 words. I resolved to eat more and exercise less. Hey, one out of five ain’t that bad.

And then after I get through analyzing all my resolutions, I trash the 51 weeks of accumulated magazines on the coffee table and I start putting out the Super Bowl spread. I put out the cold cuts and the special olive bread. I put out five kinds of pizza. (My favorite is the cheese and lard.) I arrange the beer mugs. I put out the chips and dip and practice saying guacamole in that guttural throat sound with just a tilde of Spanish el flaro that I have perfected over the last half-century of Super Bowl games. And, finally, I put out the bowls of corn nuts and M&Ms that I have become justifiably famous for. Both my friends and the reception people at the Huntington Hospital Emergency Room always ask me about them.

And then Marge usually comes into the room and says, “What time are your friends coming over?” And that’s the time every year I have to admit that I don’t have any friends coming over, and that I have put out this incredible Super Bowl spread for just my imaginary friends. And then Marge asks me with her questioning eyes, “why”? And I answer with my non-questioning mouth, “Because they eat less than real friends.”

Hey, before I get back to watching the commercials, I would like to predict that the score of this year’s Super Bowl game will be Green Bay 31, Pittsburgh 25.

How’d I do?
Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of The Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Me and My Butties (Cigar Smoke 1-20-11)

2011-01-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

I just got the word that my column will only run once a month. It used to run every week until they cut it back to twice a month, and now its only once a month. It’ll probably be cut down to one sentence a month soon. But I can live with that. I can write a 1,000-word sentence easy.

It kind of reminds me of when this guy was in the army and his parents were killed in an auto accident, and then the sergeant had all his troops line up, and he asked anyone who still has both their parents to step forward. And this one guy steps forward, and the sergeant says, “Not so fast, Johnson.”

Anyway, I’m going to keep writing as if I’m not an orphan yet. But don’t worry — I’ll try not to make the columns any more meaningful than before.

So I go into the hospital the other day to have a colonoscopy. I’m getting to that age where they recommend this procedure be done on a daily basis. I had done the prepping very well the previous evening and I was emptier than Barney Frank’s head. I mean, there was nothing in there, baby.

I get into my hospital gown with the open back and I walked up to the nurse and she said, “Ah, geez. Tie that thing.” So I did, and as we walked down the pre-op area, I noticed that there were about 15 other presumably empty-bowelled people lying in their beds waiting for the grim reamer. I thought I would lighten it up a bit, so I said, “Hey guys, why don’t we all be butt-ies?” I really emphasized the “butt” in butt-ies to ensure the forthcoming mirth. The mirth is still forthcoming. Nobody laughed. Not one butty out of 15 butties laughed.

So the nurse put me in a bed and I had this warm sheet on me and me and my tushie felt all cozy. She asked me if
I had eaten anything this morning. I told her just some pizza and a couple of Snickers bars. She did what all women do: ignored me.

I asked her if this was going to hurt. She said, “Not me.” And then she gave me the sedative and I went semi-beddy bye. I was just awake enough to feel the intrusion of my nether region and was able to gasp in desperation at the violation of my soul and dignity and buttmobile.

When I came to, the doctor told me everything had gone well. I asked him if he if found anything, and he said, “No, except for the three peanut M&Ms and the corn nuts.” Finally, the mirth had arrived.

And then he showed me this X-ray picture of my colon. And he told me it looked great. I asked him if we were looking at the same picture.

Then he said he would like to see me and my colon again in 30 years. I told him I would be about 100 then. So he asked, “How about 20 years?” I said, “Doc, I probably won’t make it to 90, either.”

I suggested he see me again in five years. His face went ashen and he pleaded with me. “I just can’t look at that thing in five years. They don’t pay me enough.” So we compromised on 10 years. God, I hope I’m still here then. I’m going to put a little lily in there to cheer him up.

Anyway, I’m recovering from the colonoscopy and from the trauma of the doctor’s bedside honesty, and I’m lying down on the couch watching television, and I turn on “Men of a Certain Age,” which is one of my favorite shows. And what is the theme of the show? The theme of the show is about three guys having colonoscopies. I am serious. Check it out.

But because they are more creative than I am, and because they may possibly have more photogenic butts than I do, they decide to go on a three-day weekend to Palm Springs, where they can combine having fun with their buttmobile procedures. They do a little gambling, they check out the babes, they go to a steakhouse and get in a big barroom brawl that cements the bonds of their friendship. Did they invite me? No. The bastards.

So then they all go into the hospital and they try to make their nurses laugh, but their attempts are just as futile as mine. And then they have their colonoscopies and they reflect on the meaning of life and they bond even more by fusing all three of their butts into one gigantic butt, and music played and life was good.

And I felt alone on my couch watching three nice-looking masculine butts fuse into one even better manly butt and I was depressed because I hadn’t gone with them to Palm Springs even though they had one empty seat in their car. But they did finally cheer me and my colon up.

One of the guys says to one of the other guys, “You know, even after the colonoscopy, you’re still full of shit.”

I bet the nurse would have laughed at that one.

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

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

2010-12-31T12:25:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-12-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-11-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-10-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-09-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-08-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-07-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-06-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-06-03T12:50:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-04-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-04-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-03-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-02-25T08:57:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-02-12T13:39:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-01-14T19:01:00.000-08:00

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!

Wanna Sleep With Me? (Cigar Smoke 12-31-09)

2009-12-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

Would you like to sleep with me? (Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you spill your coffee.) Actually, I’ve asked that question to many women over the years and, of course, they assumed that I meant would they like to have sex with me, and their answers have ranged from “With you?” to offensively feminine finger-pointing pissy laughter to being nailed on the side of the head with a purse to having to excuse myself before the police came — and once, to having to dodge projectile vomiting.

OK, forget the sex thing. I get it. I’m talking about actual sleep. I seem to have a few quirks when I get in the sack. (And that’s not counting that spaced-out country music groupie in Bakersfield 30 years ago who mistook me for Buck Owens.)

Here’s what I do when I get in bed. First of all, I have to wear boxer shorts. I cannot sleep in briefs. I just can’t do it. And I can’t sleep naked because of the restraining order. And I can’t wear pajamas ever since I went to college and wore them once and my so-called buddies ripped them up and waited until I got back from my classes to burn them in front of me. And I can’t wear a T-shirt. Just boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts. Big, loose, oversize boxer shorts.

And once I am actually in bed I have a set of rituals I must go through before I can even think about going to sleep. I am not joking here. I have to do the following. And in this particular order. No variance at all. Variance is for sissies. First of all, I have to sigh and moan. I just lie down and it seems as if the weight of the world lies down with me. And I sigh and I kind of moan “Oh, God, that feels good.” And I throw in a couple of other moans just because that is always what I do.

Then I consciously start addressing various body parts that need attention. My back is always first. I have a chronically bad back, and I have to press it down into the bed until it hurts. And it hurts every damn night, and I keep pressing it harder and harder into the mattress and the hurt kind of feels good and I moan out a few Oh, Gods to somebody — I’m not sure who.

Then I take the heel of my right foot and push on the inside of my left knee maybe three or four times. I’ve had two operations on that knee and it, like me, is somehow just not right. So when I push it with my heel that stretches it out — and the pain is both expected and welcome. And then I moan just a little louder than my back moan.

Then I take my right heel and continue down below the knee to my left calf. And then I massage my left calf a few times to take the pressure off of it, and it seems to relax me. And then, because I want to be fair, I take my left heel and go over and massage my right calf so it won’t feel neglected. I am not making this up. I do this, dammit. Every night.

Then I take one heel and put it in the ball of one foot and massage the bottom of that foot and then take the other heel and massage the bottom of the other foot. This allows me to draw one final moan-sigh out of my excuse for a functioning body. “Oh, God, that feels good.”

Then I pull the covers up around my neck and tuck the left covers under my left cheek really securely, and then I tuck the right covers under my right cheek, and it’s all very snug and tight like a Boy Scout mummy bag. It makes me feel, well, toasty. And then I rub my bare chest vigorously for a few seconds, and just before my chest hair catches on fire, I stop and enjoy the warmth.

Now, I move into my final phase. (No, not senility.) I interlace my fingers and rest them on my toasty chest and start to crack my knuckles. But I don’t just crack my knuckles. No, I count the number of successful cracks for each hand. For some reason, I can crack more of the fingers on my right hand than on my left hand. Usually I crack, maybe, three fingers on my right hand and only two on my left. Only rarely does my left hand ever win. And even rarer still are the nights when I successfully crack all my fingers. I think this has only happened three or four times in the last 10 years. And when it did happen, I was so excited I had a hard time going to sleep. But, like I said, that hardly ever happens.

Usually, I finish my knuckle-cracking ritual and I give one final sighing moan to the gods of sleep, and I lie perfectly still and let myself metaphorically melt into the bed like a drunk Zen guy. And I fall asleep within 30 seconds. Like a damn clock, baby.

Next week, I’ll tell you how I brush my teeth.

Giving the Gift That Never Starts Giving (Cigar Smoke 12-17-09)

2009-12-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

I try to give good gifts at Christmas time. In fact, most people think I am very trying. Last year I asked someone who had received a gift from me how they liked it. And they said, “You are very trying.”

Like I was saying, I usually give pretty good gifts. But I do have a tendency to push Santa’s chunky envelope just a little. A couple of years ago I gave someone in our extended family a gift that I didn’t know what it was until after she got it. Really. I bought this kind of psycho-looking funky metal art object with arms reaching to Pomona kind-of-statue thing. At the time, I felt a little uneasy buying it, but I thought it looked pretty cool so I pulled the Visa on it.

Then when the unbelievably happy recipient of the gift opened it, she was very excited. She said, “Wow! I’ve always wanted a jewelry butler.” I am not kidding you. I had purchased a jewelry butler not knowing jewelry butlers even existed. She asked me where I found this and I had to tell her the truth — that I had searched the Internet for months and talked to jewelry experts around the country until I had found just the perfect jewelry butler I knew she would love. (Please don’t tell me what a jewelry butler does. I don’t want to know. My ignorance and I are very happy together.)

I admit I do try to give gifts that are a little off the beaten track. I like to give gifts that nobody would ever give themselves. I look for gifts out in left field, just north of the power alleys. Once Robert Frost told me one of my gifts was on a road that shouldn’t even be considered.

Yes, I am the guy who gives you that purple elephant footrest. I can’t think of a better way to rest your tired feet than propping them up on the back of a foot stool that looks like an elephant, a purple elephant. You know you wouldn’t buy that for yourself.

I once gave a newlywed couple I knew a Christmas gift of a power drill. I thought to myself, just how many pretty, useful things can one couple use. So I sprang for a Black & Decker beauty that could drill through cement, and I’ll never forget what the wife said to me after she opened it: “When did you get out of prison?” You talk about a moment of Christmas joy.

But last year something very unusual happened. I was visiting the house of someone whom I had given what I thought was a really nice gift and, hot damn, they actually had it in their kitchen and were actually using a gift that I had actually given. Actually. It was incredible.

I said, “Do you remember the wonderfully thoughtful person who gave you this stunning gift?” The woman whom I had asked, at first, tried to not tell me who it was, but I held her down near the sink and had my knee on her apron-covered upper torso until she said, “You did. You did. Thank you. Stop.” I said, “Yes, it was me who gave you that cool gift. Thank you for remembering.”

I had given them one of those combo coffee pot and tea-water-heating units that lets you use individual packets of specialty coffee or tea packets to make your own favorite beverage. That way everyone in your family can have just the right drink for themselves. It’s just so modern and efficient and cool (almost snazzy) that I feel like breaking out into a break dance. That reminds me; a few years ago I gave my 80-year-old uncle some break-dancing lessons. He made it to the lesson where he spins on his head in the kitchen. His widow never forgave me for that one.

But that combo coffee-brewing baby was a hit. I just love going over there when they throw a little party and walking among the coffee- and tea-drinking guests. Everyone is getting the exact drink they want and love and need. A latte. A mint tea. A cappuccino imotatte. An English tea. A Chinese tea. A Chai tea. A Nestlé’s cocoa packet some little fart neighbor kid snuck in. It just makes my Christmas heart sing.

Speaking of Christmas singing, I bought our family a wonderful gift many years ago and it still is the most joyous gift we as a family have ever received, (although, technically, because I was the one who gave it, I don’t know if I can receive it, too. In the spirit of the season, let’s just say I can.)

Anyway, I gave the family a Christmas ornament that is painted a bright and shiny Tijuana gold, and if I say so myself, it is quite beautiful. It’s a gold metal ornament that looks like Elvis. Looks just like him. Right down to the drug injection marks on his arms. The detail is amazing. And not only does it look great, it plays two of his Christmas songs — “Blue Christmas” and something else we can’t make out. And get this. The batteries are still going. The same batteries it came with 10 years ago. It makes me want to cry.

My family feels the same way.

Driveways Driving Me Crazy (Cigar Smoke 12-3-09)

2009-12-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

I know I am a blessed person. I have a great family. I have both my health and my nine medications. I have a hovel up in Oregon I can escape to. And I have enough money to still be able to subscribe to newspapers. And I’m lanky. I’m living on house money, baby.

But I have to complain about one thing. For the past 38 years, yes 38 damn years, I have had really bad driveways. I bought my first house up in Altadena in 1972. It was such a great house and such a great deal that I just decided to hell with having a bad driveway. But indeed, it was a bad driveway.

The house was on funky little street called Northhaven Lane on a cul-de-sac. (That’s French for “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”) And you came down this very steep hill to get to the front of our house. And then the driveway was on another even steeper hill to get to the garage. Yes, the god of driveways had doubled down on me and had given me an essentially useless, probably criminal, driveway. You could not go down the driveway and have much hope of coming back up the driveway.

Occasionally somebody could do it if they had a Hemi-kind of V8 engine and floored it in reverse and screech-assed up the thing and scared the hell out of me and my insurance agent. But generally, you could go into the driveway, but you could not get out of the driveway. It was like the Roach Motel for Buicks.

I can’t tell you how many plumbers and pizza delivery guys would not even slow their macho butts down when they got to the driveway and ended up on the bottom and had to be towed back out. I should have bought a tow truck but, like now, I wasn’t that bright.

Anyway, it was an ugly driveway and I endured that car-swallowing sucker for 17 years. And then Marge and I moved into another house in Altadena over on Crest Drive. It was another great house, built back into the semi-woods, maybe 100 yards off the street. Well, Virginia, that 100 yards of blacktop was my new driveway nightmare.

No, it wasn’t steep, but it had a few other fun navigational challenges. First of all, the driveway was very narrow and it went over a flood control channel on a stone bridge built by Chinese slave labor in 1896. Then about 50 yards in, there was a huge tree stuck right in the middle of the driveway. And this tree further divided the driveway into our driveway and the driveway of our neighbor who hated our Airedale. He would call us up and say, “Would you please keep that beast of yours quiet?!” And I would tell him, “Marge isn’t that noisy, dammit!”

Speaking of Marge, she would always have her car parked in the garage and she would want to get out at night, and she would say Jimsie Whimsie could you pleasie-wheezie get my car out of the bad old driveway that scares me because I’m a woman and you’re a man and you like backing out backwards and driving in the darkness of death when you can’t see over Chinese slave-labor bridges into seven-foot tree trunks? Please? I’ll make you chocolate-chip cookies and hide them in my bra. (OK, she never said that part about the cookies, but everything else is damn close to being true.)

So I put up with 12 years of the second horrible driveway. And then we moved to our current driveway-challenged house on Braeburn. When we were thinking about buying it, I mentioned to Marge that the driveway wasn’t really that good, and she said that she knew that, but it was better than the last driveway. And I said yes, it was better — in kind of the same way Mussolini might have been better than Hitler.

Well, she looked at me, closed her eyes, opened them up again, and I was still there, and then she turned to the Realtor and said, “We’ll take it.” So we’ve been in this driveway hellhole for the last nine years. And, OK, I admit that it isn’t quite as bad as the other two nightmare driveways of my past, but it still is not good. You see, it is another long driveway that goes right from the street straight back into the backyard. But now we have a gate to the backyard, which I have to open and close all the time and it’s a hard-to-muffle-my-screams kind of gate.

And then once you get inside the gate you have to kind of split off a little to get both cars in there. And, of course, Marge has her car in the garage and I have to keep mine out in the coldness and dampness where squirrels can take their little dumps on it.

So now when Marge needs to go out and my squirrel-turded-up car is there, Marge will coyly say, “My car needs to get out.” She flicks her eyelashes a couple of times, and adds, “You’re so manly when you’re backing my car up.” And I say, “I’m in my robe! It’s midnight!” And she says, “The neighbors probably won’t call the sheriff again.”

God, what I would give for a circular driveway. Or a couple of chocolate-chip cookies with bra marks.

Spice Up Your Sex Life (Cigar Smoke 11-19-09)

2009-11-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

OK, admit it. Your marriage could use a little juice. A little tap on the accelerator of love. How do I know this? Because I have my ear to the ground and my nose to the wind and my mouth to the top of a Coors Light. Like the other night, a friend of mine told me that he had cuddled up to his wife, and said, “You wanna have some steamy sex tonight?” And she said, “Sure, who’s coming over?”

Now if you are a guy, that is not something you want to hear from your Spousy Wousy. So I would like to offer a little bit of marital advice to all the men out there. (You women can read along, too, if you promise not to use this information in your divorce hearing.)

OK, here we go. You’ve been married for a while. The last sexual conquest you had, other than your wife, was a female Sherpa on Mount Everest. Yes, it was exciting getting her out of that big, furry Eskimo outfit, and yes, you enjoyed her moaning your name in Urdu. But that was a long time ago. You are now married. You are not bored. You love your wife. You still find her romantically pursuable to engage in naughty stuff. But you need a little kick.

A while back I thought I’d jack things up a notch, so I suggested that my dearly beloved get flat-out jay-naked and wrap herself in Saran Wrap and meet me at the front door when I came home from work. I know this is kind of trite. It’s been done before. But it had never been done for me. So I was really jazzed. And I rushed home that evening and knocked on the front door, and my Wifey Poo answered the door, and she was stark naked! Of course, it might have been a little sexier if she hadn’t wrapped herself in aluminum foil. I remember it well. All she said was, “We were out of Saran Wrap.”

Another approach you might want to try is using sex toys and marital aids. You might want to try that. Not me. I’m too afraid. I know if I showed up some night in the bedroom with a whip and wearing German boots and running some battery-operated object that whirred, I would not get the desired affect. I just know my beloved would be laughing so damn hard she would spit up on her flannel nightgown and keep slapping her knee. Who needs that?

Here’s something that is not quite as extreme as whirring things. This is a killer. You should pay me for this one. Please don’t tell anybody you heard it here. (I could lose my poetic license.)

When you get in bed with your Loin Mate, just nuzzle her a little, and be playful, and put your finger on her cheek and let it run down her neck and then let your finger drift to the top of her shoulder and then on to that upper chest region where it is OK to touch without permission and then stop, and arch your eyebrows, twice, and say, “Darling, I would like to spice up our sex life a little.”

Hopefully, she is not laughing and says coyly or with slight alarm, “How?” And then you reach down and grab the little red and white tin container you have put on the nightstand and you sprinkle some cinnamon right there on her upper chest freedom zone. And as she is looking puzzled, you say, “Cinnamon. Spice. Cinnamon is a spice. Spice up our love life. Get it? Get it?” And if she tries to dial 9-1-1, say, “Columbus sailed over here for spice. Just do it for Columbus. Please.”

OK, OK, maybe you want something that is a tad more subtle than sprinkling cinnamon on your Matey Watey’s Chesty Westy. May I suggest a Mystery Evening of Love? Yes, I have done this many times. You just arrange the evening ahead of time but you don’t tell your wife where you are going. It’s that damn simple. Even you can do it.

No, you can’t go to a sports event. Geez. And don’t go to your gentleman’s club and say, “Uh, Destiny, this is my wife.” Don’t do that. That’s not mystery, that’s masochism. Other than that, most things are open. It doesn’t have to be expensive. A dinner at a restaurant in a different town and a movie. Maybe go see a play in some little playhouse where there are more actors than audience members.

There are a lot of mysterious things you can plan. Just announce it as a Mystery Evening of Love and you are set, baby. Just don’t tell her ahead of time what it is. You don’t want her to know she’ll be eating at Denny’s in Temple City and then seeing a movie with Adam Sandler in it.

My best Mystery Evening of Love was a few years ago. I told Marge ahead of time to expect a mystery night and she was maybe not all a-twitter, but pretty much semi-a-twitter. When the big night finally arrived, we got in the car and headed out the Ventura Freeway. For an hour and 15 minutes! Marge kept asking me where I was taking her. I kept pretending I remembered where it was.

We finally got to the venue and to reveal the mystery; we were there to see a Tom Jones concert in Thousand Oaks. And hey, Marge loved it. When old Tom was belting out “What’s New Pussycat?” Marge was answering him. And when he sang “She’s a Lady,” Marge whispered to me, “Since we aren’t staying in a motel, would you mind if I gave Tom our house key?”

I told her, “If you ever do that, I will never sprinkle cinnamon on your upper chest again.”

Eureka! I Have Lost It (Cigar Smoke 11-05-09)

2009-11-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

I would like to write about something young and vital, but I forgot what youth is. I think it was a time when most of your body parts still worked, and you wished they wouldn’t. I’m not sure what that means, either.

As you all well know by now, and are sick of hearing about, I am now 68 years old. But I am a vibrant, virile 68. Many times people will come up to me and say, “You look so vibrant and virile you could pass for a man of 67.” And I just nod my head and tip my imaginary hat with a young vigor of, maybe, a man of 66.

Anyway, the other day I had just gotten out of the shower, looked at myself in the mirror, flexed my arm muscles and scrunched my rippling abs, and said, “You look like a man of 65.” So I put on my slippers and went into the bedroom to get dressed. And I finish getting dressed, except for my shoes. I can’t find one of my shoes.

Now, I am usually kind of a neat-nik. Some might even say I am an anally retentive piece of human garbage who continually spoils things by trying to always be better than others. Well, what can I say? I am better than all you sloppy losers. I like being neat. I like being orderly. I like being not liked.

But I have to admit that in one area of life I am not neat and orderly. My dresser is always full of T-shirts and pants and sweat suits and jackets, and next to my dresser on the floor are at least five pairs of shoes. Regular shoes, tennis shoes, loafers, slippers. All turned over in a jumbled mess. If I saw this disaster at your house, I would look down on you and know I was better than you.

Hold it a second. I think I am having a senior moment. I can’t remember why I am writing this column. Oh yeah, I remember now. I couldn’t find one of my shoes. I am all dressed and I am looking for my black loafers. I can only find one of them. I go through the pile on the floor again. Not there. I then go into the closet thinking I may have actually put them where they are supposed to be. Thank God, they weren’t there. I go back to the pile and actually get down on all fours. I think I may have accidentally pushed one of the shoes under the dresser. Nope. No missing shoe there. Just dead spiders, rat droppings, toxic dust bunnies and M&M wrappers.

And then, while I am down on all fours, I had an epiphany. (When I was younger I used to know what that meant.) All of a sudden it came to me that I had seen only one of my slippers, too. Yes, on my crawling searches I had seen only one black loafer and only one tan slipper. And I thought to myself, “Self, that is damn peculiar. What are the odds of losing one shoe for two pairs, at the same time?” And I answered, “Self, for a 68-year-old piece of senile shit, you rock.”

So I get up off of all fours and I am standing there in my bedroom, all alone, and I say to my one rapt listener (me), I know where my other shoe is. And I exclaim, “Eureka, I have found it!” And I look down at my feet and tears come to my eyes. I have found both of my missing shoes. On my left foot is my black loafer and on my right foot is my tan slipper. And at this moment I realize that I have experienced an official senior moment. I really cannot believe I was actually wearing two different-colored shoes at the same time for at least a half a day. The night before I had gotten into my robe at around 7 o’clock and had gone back out to the den to watch television and pass on words of wisdom to Marge. I sat there on the couch for four hours and I had my feet up on the table and I never once saw that I had on two different-colored shoes! I never saw it.

And I went outside and had a cigar and put my damn feet up again on a damn end table and I smoked a whole damn cigar and I looked right down at my one tan slipper and my one black loafer for a half hour and I blew smoke rings up their little shoe nostrils and I never saw them!

So I go back inside to relate this Eureka moment to Marge, who has been known to have a few senior moments of her own, her being a much older individual than I am. She’s 69. Yeah, she’s a cradle robber. I say, “Margie Pargie, I have something to tell you.” And she says, “I know your first name is Poopsie, but what is your last name again?” I say, “Whoopsie. It’s Poopsie Whoopsie.” And before I can say anything else, she falls asleep on the couch and her Kindle falls to the floor.

At first I was kind of pissed off that I couldn’t tell her about my “Eureka!” senior moment, but it actually worked out pretty well — because by then I had forgotten what it was.

Not A Happy Ending (Cigar Smoke 10-25-09)

2009-10-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

This is a public service column. It is my semi-educated guess that most of you men out there have never had a pedicure. Am I right? Of course I’m right. (I voted for Bush. Twice.)

And until I was 68, I had never had a pedicure either. But, because of a couple of knee operations, bad back and a problem with uncontrolled lankiness, I have had a hard time cutting my toenails lately. So now I have had three pedicures — one at a private nail salon, one from my podiatrist and one by my wife. And I would like to share my experiences so you other men can reap the benefits of my sacrifice for my fellow man.

My first toenail experience occurred in a little nail salon on Colorado Boulevard. I tried to find one that I was pretty sure none of my friends would use or see me enter. So I walk in, without an appointment, and I’m standing in front — hoping to be ignored so I can leave — and then this cute little Filipino-Thai-Korean-Hong Kong woman says, “Can I help you?” And I whisper that I’d like a pedicure. And she says, “What?” And I whisper just a little louder, “I’d like a pedicure.” And she yells out in her little Filipino-Thai-Korean-Hong Kongian voice, “A pedicure!”

Four women and the four salon employees doing beauty stuff to them, and two other currently unattractive people waiting to be beautified look over at me. And then down at my feet. Let me tell you, it is embarrassing when ugly people look down at your toes.

So I get in the chair and I’m sitting there and the toenail woman comes over and looks at me, and says, “Well?” I say, “What?” She says, “It would be easier if you took your shoes off.” I always thought Asian women weren’t supposed to be funny.

Then I put my feet into this little pan of water she had. And then she took off my socks and got started. (Us American men can really be funny, too.) She starts washing my feet in water that looked like it had been recycled from Roman Polanski’s hot tub. Then she towels my toes off and picks one of seven toenail clipper/scissor things and then starts cutting my toenails. And with each toe she would take another cutter and cut like a professional, baby. I was impressed.

Then she filed them down and buffed them with an electric buffer. Then she put plain polish on them. Geez, my damn toenails looked better than my face. And then I looked at her and she looked at me. And I was getting the vibe that I was finished, and that I should leave. But I knew that couldn’t be true, because I hadn’t even asked her yet about the happy ending.

“That’ll be $12,” she said. And I said, “And how much for the pedicure?” She threw back her head and laughed that throaty Asian-woman laugh that only Asian women who are humorous can laugh.

Then, about eight weeks later, I went to my podiatrist to give him a shot at the toenails. He had told me that because I had diabetes, I should take good care of my feet, so to punish him, I made him do the dirty work.

I took off my shoes and he stepped back and said, “Whew. Those are some real sock-rippers there, boy.” And he put on his rubber gloves and said, “Eight years of medical school for this.” He then sprayed my feet with Raid and took one big-ass nail-cutter surgical instrument out of his bag and cut my toenails faster than UCLA can lose a football game. I couldn’t believe it was over so quick — I thought I was having sex.

Then I asked him, “What about the filing and buffing and polishing?” And I don’t think his response would have been approved by the American Medical Association, but he threw the surgical instrument at me while I was running down his hallway. Just as I got to the front door I looked back, and he reminded me of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” That sweating, glistening, fiendish face of my podiatrist will live with me forever.

OK, another eight weeks go by and more of my socks are getting ripped, so I have to find someone to cut my toenails before they run wild in the streets, like urchins in Rio. So I think to myself: Self, whom do I know that I can now turn to after burning my toenail bridges with non-happy-ending salon women and killer podiatrists? And I answer myself. Self, you can turn to your loving wife, who, although she wouldn’t agree to “obey” you at the altar, did agree to take you in good health and in a long-toenailed state of health.

So I walked up to my beloved, my little Margie Pargie Wargie, and I licked her left ear and breathed heavily on her neck with savagely hot breath, and asked her if she would like to cut my teeny-weeny toenails just this once because of her deep and semi-abiding love for me, her diabetical Muffin Mate with very few socks left. And she said, “If I won’t obey you, why the hell would I cut those suckers?” “Because you love me and you love hot savage breath, that’s why,”
I humbly replied.

So, incredibly, she really did cut my toenails, and all was going pretty well. Right up until I asked her if there would be a happy ending.

Bill Murray, Where Are You? (Cigar Smoke 10-8-09)

2009-10-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

You know it wasn’t until I was 29 that I learned that not all women in bars are named Security. I would go into a place and sit down next to a beautiful (or any breathing) young woman, and I would look at her, and raise my eyebrows alternately, right, then left, then right again, and I’d let her catch a glimpse of my money clip with the two twenties in it hiding the ones, and I would order a Chivas rocks with a splash of 7-Up, and I would say, “Hi, would you like to have the wildest night of clothes-ripping, sweat-dripping sex you’ve ever had, or would you like to go out with me?”

And then, when she paused and gaped at me, I would introduce myself, “My name is Jim. What’s yours?” And she’d always say, “Security.” And I would say, “Hi, Security. This is really uncanny. You’re the fifth woman I’ve met this week with that name. What are the odds?”

But I digress. But before I digress, I would like to inquire if I can officially digress before I have actually started doing something? How can I digress when I’m not doing anything? If I had started my column, and then I mentioned meeting all the lovely Securities I once knew, that would be OK. That would be true digression.

Anyway, I am not digressing now. I am just continuing on with my column and entering into a completely new subject. The digression is now over, or to be more accurate, the digression never really started.

Do you guys have problems with rats, gophers and squirrels? Well, your favorite digressing columnist does. We have rats in our garage. And it is not pretty. These little rotten rodents are everywhere. We find rat droppings on the floor and on the shelves and on our car. They’ve gnawed holes in boxes and are making nests in old clothes. I think I can hear them laughing, too.

At first, I tried to get rid of them myself. I bought some of those deadly rat spring-traps and hired a guy from Gold’s Gym to pull back the iron bar things, and I baited the traps with peanut butter, and yes, the traps all went off, but I didn’t catch any rats. Nope, I just hear them spitting out PB now. You ever hear a rat go pa-tui. And then laugh. It’s not a good sound.

Then I took out my old .22 rifle and staked out the garage. And when I finally saw one of those little brown-faced PB-suckers, I pulled off a round. I missed, but the ricocheting bullet was kind of entertaining. It bounced off an old cook pot and then glanced off a lamp and then off a sand wedge into one of my seven coolers. I felt like I was in a Road Runner cartoon. So, for safety’s sake, I put on a hockey helmet and fired off a few more shots. Didn’t get any rats, but at least all those storage boxes know who’s boss now.

And get this: we have squirrels that are bad-asses, too. About a month ago, we were having trouble with our TV reception, so we call Charter and the guy comes out and checks some stuff, then goes outside and looks at the wire coming into the house from the garage roof, and says, “You guys got squirrel problems.”

“You mean those cute little bushy-tailed, buck-toothed critters who sing Christmas songs?” I said.

“No,” he said, “Those are chipmunks, dumbass. You got squirrels eating your wires. See up there?” And sure enough, the little varmint vandals had eaten clean through the wires, preventing us from getting our daily allowance of reality programming. (I think Marge showed them where the wires were.)

By the way, and this is a legitimate digression, have you ever seen a squirrel go poo-poo?

I have not. I have seen rats leave rat pellets. I have seen every other kind of animal leave their calling cards. I have seen my dog, Hadley, leave mounds that should have been illegal. But I have never ever seen a squirrel even so much as hunch over, let alone leave evidence of television wire coating in their scat or whatever those little squirrel suckers call it.

And now — as if the rats and the squirrels weren’t enough — we have been invaded by gophers. They are in our backyard. Holes everywhere. So we had the gardener try to (don’t tell PETA) drown them with the hose. Didn’t work. Then we got Orkin out here and they put poison down in their little gopher tunnels. Didn’t do diddly. I called Bill Murray and asked him to bring his “Caddyshack” dynamite, but I haven’t heard back from him. Bastard.

So what could I do? I got out my .22 again, and I was lying prone on the grass like Gordon Liddy humping Mrs. Liddy, and I had the rifle pointed right at the gopher hole just waiting for one of the dirtbags to raise his little pest head, and then I heard something. It was very faint at first. I could barely hear it. Then it got a little louder and I leaned closer to the hole. And I swear on my mother’s tattoo, I heard a gopher say in his little gopher voice, “Got any peanut butter?”

The Fishing Trip (Cigar Smoke 9-17-09)

2009-09-24T13:32:00.001-07:00

Well, I haven’t had my morning cigar yet (I’ll pause for you to retch) so I am feeling a little too healthy. And that always makes me grumpy. But I have had my coffee, so I am not shouting, “You lie!” at anyone we know.

Anyway, at this exact time just two weeks ago, I was not stomping around being grumpy or yelling at weasels or anything. Why? Because I was up in Oregon, just mellowing out, enjoying clear water and trees and seagulls, and fishing for salmon. And you know what I discovered? I discovered another human being just as grumpy as I am. Sometimes the lord works in mysterious ways. (I think the lord is grumpy, too. I think he may be ticked off that I used a lower case “l” on his title.)

So who is this fellow grump? I don’t want to use his real name. Let’s just call him Mike Harrington who used to go to Humboldt State College and now lives in Beaverton, Ore. OK, Mike knew I was scouting around to buy a boat, so he suggested I come up to God’s country (note the uppercase “G”) for a fishing trip in his kick-ass jet-powered sled boat, if I had the guts — which he doubted I did, because he had known me earlier in my life, and was pretty sure I was the inspiration for the term “gutless wonder.”

I laughed my insincere laugh of repressed spit, and said, “Give those salmon suckers a head’s-up, because the Altadena Assassin is on his way.” Mike said, “Laris, it’s only a fishing trip — relax.” I said, wiping some non-repressed spit that escaped to my chin, “Assassins never relax. The SAA (Salmon Assassins of Altadena) won’t let us.”

Anyway, I get up to Portland, and Mike picks me up at the airport and says, “Couldn’t get a cab, huh?” And we drive to his house in the trees, and we get there and his delightful wife, Shirleen, asks me if the Salmon Assassin would like a BLT. I did one quick karate-slashing move and said, “Kwaa!” (meaning “yes” in Tai Quando. I’m hoping Tai Quando is a martial art and not a Chinese province.)

After a nice evening of watching TV, eating a Costco ice cream bar and listening to Mike grump about his Oregon Ducks getting their little duck clocks cleaned by Boise State, I asked him what he thought about the Duck uniforms. His face got red and his head started to expand and two of his pimples popped, and he said, “They have frigging feathers!” I suggested that they might use them to fly away. He suggested that I might do the same.

Eventually, I asked, “What time do we have to get up tomorrow morning?” Without even a pause, he said “Five.” “Five a.m.?” “Yes, 5 A.M.!” I mentioned that the mouth of the Columbia River, where we were headed, was only about an hour-and-a-half away, and maybe we could sleep in a little. He mentioned that I was the most sissy Salmon Assassin he had ever met.

We get to the river, we launch the boat and we start heading for the place Mike says the salmon will be. He says the tide will be coming in around 12:30 or 1 p.m., and that’s a perfect time to catch ’em. I calmly and affectionately say, “Mike, you dumbshit, do you know it is now only 6:30 in the morning? Mr. Dumbshit, it is 6:30 right now. The fish are showing up at 12:30. What are we going to do for SIX hours!” He says, “Troll.”

So we did troll for six hours. And we did a few other things, too. Between trolls, Mike would maneuver the boat at high speed so it would bounce up in the air and come down on the waves dramatically wrong and wrench my back in serious spinal-disc premeditated pain. I asked him why he would do this to a fellow Humboldt Lumberjack, and he said, “Feathers.”

Then he started to put on some sunscreen and I asked what number he used. And he said, “Number 2.” I said, “Were they out of number 1?” He smirked and tried to hit another wave wrong, and I said, “You know, that sun shit goes up to, maybe number 54, or something. Number 2 is about as effective as, say, water. Air is number 1, water number 2.”

Well, after trolling our asses off, we did catch a salmon. One 22-inch salmon. And we had to throw back a big 15-pounder because it didn’t have a tag on its dorsal fin. The Salmon Assassin was not happy.

The only other fun thing that happened, if you don’t count all the nature stuff, was that Mike took a leak into a half- full apple juice container and then said, “Better not drink the top half, fish face.”

Well, we kind of made up after a while and went out to dinner. And because we’d been using his boat, I offered to pay for the meal. That’s just the kind of assassin I am. And I told my inadequately sun-screened buddy he could have whatever he wanted on the menu as long as it wasn’t one thing: expensive.

Remote Possibilities (Cigar Smoke 9-10-09)

2009-09-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

You know, this may sound kind of unimportant. But then again, remember whom you are reading. (My grammar checker put that whom in, sorry.) Anyway, this is who speaking again. Yes, I’m on first, too.

Because I am a what? I am a man. Therefore, I am in charge of the remote control. It is my life and I would die for it. Do not try to take the remote out of my clutching fingers. Do not even think of trying to remove my remote. It will be a decision you and your next of kin will regret. It is my remote. Don’t touch it. Unless you just bought my TV from my craigslist ad. Then you can touch my remote, because it is actually your remote then. And I would never touch another man’s remote.

I know, most of you think of the remote problem as a guy thing. And I guess it is. Like not asking for directions or thinking about sex every four seconds. OK, every three seconds. But there is a hidden, huge responsibility of being in charge of the remote. If you are man enough to seize the remote, you must be man enough to use it for the benefit of your woman, your TV mate, your Vast Wasteland-watching partner. In other words, you have to choose some pretty good shows if you want to have the, excuse the expression, remotest chance of pleasing your Poopsie Pie.

And believe me, if your Poopsie Pie is anything like my Poopsie Pie, pleasing her is a challenge. It is tough. And I really work at it. And, of course, I have TiVo, too. And no, it’s not the old one-show recording TiVo. No, it is the new two-banger baby that let’s you record two shows at once or you can watch one show and record the other while you’re watching or you don’t have to watch the two shows you’re pretending to watch and it will still record stuff you don’t want to see. It is beautiful.

Every night after we eat dinner, we head for the family room to watch a little TV. Marge isn’t really a TV kind of person. Generally, she just likes to read her Kindle, and pretend she’s married to someone else who is also reading a Kindle. But sometimes she has very strong feelings on not being able to see anything good on TV. She’ll say something like, “Ah geez, I’m not watching that.

I just can’t watch that. Isn’t there anything else on? I just can’t watch it! That is awful. I cannot watch that! No, I can’t watch that!” And I’ll say, “Are you saying you can’t watch that?”

And then because I happen to have the remote in my hand and under my complete control, I hit the Now Playing button on the TiVo and I show Ms. Poopsie Pie a long list of previously recorded television favorites for her viewing enjoyment. And usually, because I am a wonderful TV mate, I suggest a preview of our television plans for the evening. I’ll say, “OK, first we’ll see a “Jeopardy!”, then we can either see a new “Monk” or an old “Law and Order.” She’ll jump in and say, “I don’t like ‘Monk’ anymore. It was OK at first, but I can’t watch it anymore. He makes me nervous. And how many times have I told you that I only like “Law and Order” with a colon after it, like “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” or “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.” Then I suggest that I could maybe put something like a remote control device in another colon if she doesn’t like the shows I pick, and she thinks that I am mean-spirited and gross and goes back to her Kindle and pouts.

Then I’ll start watching some show I like because she’s reading her Kindle and she’ll glance at it and say, “Is that all that’s on?!” Then I’ll gather my mean-spirited and gross self, and say, “Poopsie Pie, you wanna see a “Seinfeld?” She’ll say, “No.” “How about a replay of the Kings-Montreal Stanley Cup playoff from 1993?” “No!” “OK, how about a ‘Big Brother?’” And she closes her eyes, opens them, and says, “If you watch another one of those ‘Big Brother’ episodes, I will shoot your lame-ass stupid dead body and get the neighbors to help me stuff you into a suitcase and then I will mail you to myself and when you arrive I will stab you through the outside of the suitcase with a Japanese sword and then open the suitcase and pour kerosene on the pieces of your body and then light up a cigarette and drop the burning match into the kerosene and dance around the flames.”

“I guess you don’t care which houseguest is getting evicted huh?”

Hey, I really do try to find shows she will like. Poopsie Pie’s pleasure is my life. I want her to be happy. I want her to be fulfilled. I take my remote control obligations seriously. I just don’t TiVo for fun. No, I TiVo to be a serious remote control guy. I TiVo to save my marriage. I TiVo for my country. I TiVo to find shows with colons!

I think I may have found something. “Hey, Honey Poopsie, you wanna see this new reality show? It has a colon. ‘Octomom: The Formative Years’.”

One More Time (Cigar Smoke 8-13-09)

2009-08-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

OK, I know many of you are saying to yourselves, “This jerk-off is, as always, redundantly challenged and why the double hey hey does he have to tell us again of his redundancy.” Well, all I can say is, I would not be redundant if I didn’t try to explain.

Yes, I tend to over-explain things. Like just the other day I was coming home from a Scrabble tournament in Dayton, Ohio (not to be confused with Dayton, Sweden), a tournament in which I modestly must report to you that I kicked some serious old-lady butt. Of course, if any of the old ladies happen to read this and have their panties in a bunch at my using the term “old ladies” there is a good chance they will put bricks in their purses and Arte Johnson my old geezer ass. But, I digress. However, digression is a higher form of over-explaining, and if I had the time, I would over-explain why that is.

Anyway, a particularly noteworthy over-explaining incident occurred one morning when I went out to eat breakfast at the hotel restaurant. I had just taken a shower and, as is my wont (I always wanted to say that), I seemed to be perspiring quite a bit. Kind of like Lake Erie is quite a bit wet. Serial sweating is in my genetic code. This guy sweats after a shower. Yes, that noise you hear is God chuckling.

I don’t know what it is but I have always had this problem. Even when I was younger, before HDTV, I would take a shower and then dry off and get dressed and head off to work. And then, as regular as a damn soaked clock, I would start to sweat about 15 minutes later. Like clockwork, in 15 minutes I would be soaking wet. My shirt would be sticking to my body. My chest hair would be praying for a lifejacket.

I only bring this sweating problem up because you will need to know this information to follow my coming over-explaining.
OK, back to the restaurant. I go in and they seat me at a nice table. The waitress comes over and she hands me the menu and then she secretly glances down at my sopping shirt, and says hesitantly, “What can I get you?” I say, “A beach towel.” She does not laugh. I kind of thought it was funny. She’s just looking at me, not saying a word. So I tried again, “Maybe you could get me a blow dryer and a couple of sponges.” If she’s gonna laugh at that one, it will be in the future.

Now, here is where the over-explaining hits a higher gear. I know I should have just shut the hell up, ordered my eggs and hash browns and just let it go. But I have a problem. I’m me. So I tell her that I always sweat in the morning after taking a shower. I can’t help it. It’s just a Laris man trait. My dad always sweated like hell and my son, Mike, is carrying on the tradition of looking disgustingly drenched quite well, too.

She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. I don’t think I was actually scaring her, but she looked, shall we say, very alert. So I tried to reassure her, “Just because I am all wet with sopping sticky sweat doesn’t mean I’m an escaped murderer who chopped up nuns and ate them with Tabasco sauce, or just because my chest hair is matted down to my shirt like a pack of wet crippled spiders doesn’t mean I am a sex pervert who just drooled over a Britney Spears You Tube video eight times?” No, it just means I just had a shower and my pores are going postal. That’s all.

She didn’t answer me. She walked away silently and a rather big gentleman waiter guy came over and said, “Order something.”
Anyway, I finished my breakfast. The hash browns were a little damp and had one renegade chest hair in them, but I enjoyed the meal. Then I went out to the airport to fly home to Altadena. Did you know that you cannot tell someone you’re from Altadena without adding on, “Yeah, it’s just a little above Pasadena.”

I get on the plane. I sit down. I do not want to over-explain ever again. Then the lady sitting next to me happens to mention hair spray for some reason. And, incredibly, I had just been thinking about hair spray. (I had finished my quantum physics book.) So I said, “Could you please tell me which is stronger, Maximum Hold or Ultimate Hold?” She didn’t answer me. She just moved slightly farther away from me. I think she was the waitress’ sister.

But that didn’t stop me. “I kind of lean toward Ultimate Hold myself, but then again Maximum Hold has some things going for it, too. I mean, they do have maximum-security prisons, don’t they? I’ve never heard of an ultimate-security prison, have you? But then again, say you are looking for a mate and you find a guy and you go home to tell your friend about him, you wouldn’t say he’s the maximum. No, you wouldn’t say that — he would be the ultimate dreamboat, wouldn’t he?”

I noticed my seatmate had hit the attendant button, so I just ended the conversation quickly by saying, “The hairspray people could solve it really easily by just coming out with Infinity Hold, the bastards.”

Ten Damn Good Years (Cigar Smoke 7/30/09)

2009-07-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

Wow! I can’t believe the Pasadena Weekly is 25 years old. (That’s 475 years old in regular peoples’ ages, not counting the blood, sweat, cigarette ashes, grime, tears, ink stains, and pulled stress muscles and torn aortas.) I guess the paper had been around for four or five years before we bought it in 1988. Those guys did a nice job of getting it off the ground and then they sold it to my ex-wife, who owned another newspaper, and discovered that owning two papers at the same time was kind of like being one of Michael Vick’s dogs. So, after she stopped crying, she sold it to Marge and me and we had it for exactly 10 years. After a decade of forehead-vein popping, we sold it to the commie LA Times in 1998. Hey, I kid the commies. But, of course, I took the commie’s money. It’s just as green as environmental causes.

And then the Times sold it and it turned over a couple more times and the new publishers have put life and spirit back into it and the Pasadena Weekly lives. I am glad it has survived and I wish it many more years of good journalism and good times.

Anyway, the 10 years we owned it were 10 pretty damn good years. I think we took the paper in a new direction — a direction most people still haven’t quite figured out. I like to think the direction was up. But whatever, I think we definitely put our stamp on it. And I was proud to be associated with the professional people we had. We had such a great staff and we all worked our flabby buttocks so hard that eventually we had firm buttocks and we had so much fun doing it, it was like it was illegal. I’ll always remember it and always be grateful for the best 10 years of my life. OK, so it took off 10 years at the end of my life — who needs 80 to 90?

I’d like to go down memory lane a little ways. However, I’m not going to talk about what was actually in the paper for those 10 years because I’m semi-senile and I don’t quite remember a lot of it, and because, of course, I’m a shallow person who tended to get extra happy when we had big issues where we sold a lot of ads. And who wants to hear about ad sales? Except me.

I remember enjoying just going into the office every morning. I loved the routine. I would unlock the door, punch the code into the security alarm system (many times accurately), turn on all the lights, get a good feeling just looking out at all the empty desks, most of which I had literally assembled, and then going into the break room and starting a pot of coffee and checking the refrigerator for any uneaten leftover sandwiches or other goodies. I particularly liked to remove the little signs that said “Do Not Eat This!” on them. I would remove the signs, eat whatever was in the little white Styrofoam box, and then put the “Do Not Eat This!” sign on another Styrofoam box that contained something I didn’t want to eat. Oh, the memories.

One time some enraged Styrofoam box person stormed into my office and screamed, “Laris, did you eat the last half of my French dip sandwich? Please don’t tell me you ate it! Please don’t tell me you would stoop that low.” I had to fess up. I remember telling her that, no, it wasn’t me, but I did happen to see Fred Bankston (my ace ad rep) in the coffee room earlier and I couldn’t be sure but I thought I had heard the squeak of Styrofoam. Last I saw her she was heading for the ad department. I probably should have taken the stapler out of her hand.

Speaking of ad reps, one day I remember walking into the ad department and a new sales rep was, and I’m not making this up, standing on her desk, pounding a nail into the wall with the heel of her shoe. Another time I was eating lunch with an ad rep I had to let go, and as we were eating I noticed there was blood running down her lip into her food. She was so tense she was biting her lip and tongue and she wouldn’t open her mouth to talk to me. I didn’t know what to do. Check, please.

On the editorial side, I would pick up the phone and there would be a string of obscenities that even made me blush. No introduction, no hello, no nothing. Just obscenities. And finally after a while, he would stop for breath, and I would say, “Hi, Isaac. How you doing?” Yes, Councilman Isaac Richard was expressing his opinion. And then I’d hear someone standing at the front of our office singing the National Anthem at the top of his lungs. Some guy named Roy who had brought his bike up to our office was belting out a pretty good rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Oh, I miss it all. I especially miss all the great people who worked for me. Thank you everybody. Thanks for your hard work. Thanks for the fun. Thanks for the memories. It was truly a special time.

Here’s to another 25 years for the Pasadena Weekly!

A Good Use of Tarp Money (Cigar Smoke 07/16/09)

2009-07-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

OK, I am sitting on my deck in paradise. OK, it’s not paradise, it’s only Oregon. But I like to pretend it’s paradise because it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to paradise and I’m, as they say, getting on in years. In fact, in a lot of ways, I’ve pretty much gotten on and have almost arrived. And like wisdom and growing old gracefully, paradise has eluded me.

Anyway, I’m sitting on one of two pretty nifty recliners that I have given new life to. They are brand damn new recliners that were in the house, but I wanted a sleeper-sofa for my imposing houseguests, and these two beautiful recliners would
no longer fit in my hovel.

So, I thought about selling them on Craigslist, but I was afraid I would be killed by a sex murderer, so then I considered bartering them for a four-year supply of donuts, but then it hit me. I needed some comfortable places to sit on my deck. I needed to recline properly, like a man of leisure loafing in paradise, and feel the smooth, soft feel of expensive indoor fabric on my idle outdoor buttocks.

But, of course, my wife, Marge, the little woman, my better half, the yin to my yang, the chow to my mein and the toodle to my loo, tactfully mentioned that it rains in Oregon every 45 minutes and that maybe I could come up with another idea that wasn’t “totally whacked.” I said, “Does whack have an H or not?”

Well, I thought over the whole rain-ruining-nice-indoor-fabric issue for a while and concluded that I could somehow outsmart the rain, the fabric and the little woman. I just needed to think it through. Of course, that immediately presented another dilemma. I don’t think that well. And I’m impatient. Not the best of exactas, my friends.

So, I get on the Internet and Google outdoor furniture covers and re-upholstering and rainproof fabrics and Do Hooters Girls Like Owls (sorry, that was not a recliner-related search) and I come up with a number of solutions. And some of them would actually work well, except for a couple of things. They’re too damn costly. (And I’m too damn cheap.) And it would take too long to get them. (And I’m too damn impatient.) And redundant.

So then I say to myself, so what if it rains on the recliners. They’ll get wet, big deal. All I have to do is buy a raincoat and rain pants and I could sit on the wet recliner chair in my wet raincoat and rain pants and life would be good. Damp, but good.

But I do not do that. For some reason the word “whacked” seems more appropriate than it did earlier and I’m feeling like the little woman, the yin master, just might hose Mr. Yang down with a fire hose if I carried out this plan.

So, I rethink it. And as I’m rethinking, the little woman, the Jacko to my lantern, says, “You know, even if you sit on a wet recliner in your wet pants, the recliner will eventually rot from being wet and fall apart and be all shredded up and the springs will stick into your idle buttocks and the recliner will smell like an embalmer’s

T-shirt and our neighbors will laugh openly at you. And when they’re tired of laughing at you, they will mock you. You know that, don’t you?” I replied, “Of course I do, Little.” (It always pisses her off when I call her by her first name when we argue.)

So, I pop over to this big hardware/army surplus/espresso-latte place they have up here. And I buy a couple of nice-looking tarps (That’s a phrase you’ve never seen before, huh?). And I come back to my deck and I put a khaki-ass green, rainproof tarp over each little delicate flower of a recliner and violà, paradise has been rehabbed. It really turned out well. They’re featuring it next month in Better Homes and Hovels.

It’s perfect, baby. When it’s sunny, I just pull the flap back on the tarp and drape it over the back of the recliner. And me and my buttocks sit down on nice indoor-quality fabric that we enjoy and that we both deserve, and when it rains we just drop the flap back down and tell the rain to kiss our tarps.

So far it has worked great. I just sit there in paradise, smoking rum-flavored cigars, listening to my iPod and have Lyle Lovett tell me “if I had a pony and I had a boat, I would ride my pony on my boat,” and I’m snacking on a few cherries and, OK, maybe wiping my cherry-stained fingers on the nice inside fabric of my recliner every once in a while to keep myself neat and presentable. And, OK, there are a couple of cigar-ash holes on one of the arms on one of the recliners — but hey, you can’t worry about everything.

And it really doesn’t matter that much. When I’m through with a reclining session in paradise, I just stand up, brush off any recliner arm ashes, look for any renegade cherry pits hiding down between the cushions and then I do what? I tarp it, baby. I just flip the flap down. Tarp money well spent.

And then I leave paradise and I go inside the hovel and I say to the Goldie of my locks, the French of my dip, the three little words she loves to hear: “Where’s the remote?”

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

In the Fast Lane (Cigar Smoke 7-2-2009)

2009-07-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

’m a pretty law-abiding kind of guy. I usually follow the rules. I bring my library books back on time. I don’t litter. And I only give the finger to old Asian-American drivers. If I was a fruit, I guess I would have to be a peach.

However, I do have one semi-glaring criminal tendency. I get a lot of speeding tickets. I don’t think I’m an unsafe driver. I’m not reckless. I don’t drive under the influence of anything except backseat drivers. I don’t weave in and out of traffic at 90 miles an hour with my right arm around a “big, nasty redhead” and use the lover’s knob to change lanes. No, I don’t drive like that. But I admit I have been known to drive a little faster than the speed limit. I guess I just have a lead foot. Some would say a lead head.

As I have mentioned a while back, I used to even budget for speeding tickets when I went on vacation. Yup, we’d head out for Colorado, or New Mexico or Nevada or Montana, and I’d allocate a damn 150 bucks to pay off the speeding fines, and that was usually pretty accurate. And I remember once being with my kids, Mike and Casey, just before we drove into Arizona, and I said, “You watch, I’m going to get a damn ticket.” Two minutes later I see the red lights flashing from behind a billboard, and I said, “Daddy never lies.”

Another time I was with Casey up in Canada, and we’re cruising through Manitoba after seeing a minor league hockey game in Brandon, and I didn’t even know we went through some tiny-ass town. I hear a siren and the Mountie guy with the cool hat stops me and is kind of incredulous and all I remember is I couldn’t figure out the kilometers-per-hour to the miles-per-hour ratio thing. He just kept shaking his head and I think he mentioned something about Americans are a-holes, eh.

I can also recall a couple of other out-of-state ticketing adventures. One time I was in Wyoming, Red Rock or Green Rock, some Rock city place, and a Rock cop guy pulls me over and gives me a ticket for going 27 in a 25 MPH zone. Two miles over the limit! I don’t call that speeding. I call that a reason to cry.

And once my 39-year-old son, Mike, was driving with me in Utah, and I just let him take the wheel because I thought finally he was old enough to drive, and he got a ticket faster than Obama can change his mind. It was fast, baby. And although I was dizzy, I was able to tell him, “I’m proud of you, son, you’re the Lead-Foot Loin-Springer I had always hoped for.”

And I’ve had three, count ’em, 1-2-3, speeding tickets right here on Altadena Drive heading south just before New York Drive. It’s a 35 mph zone, and it seems harmless enough. But you’ve got momentum from going downhill and you’re just cruising at about 40 or so. You’d have to be a sissy or a commie to go slower. I knew I had a problem when, after the third ticket, the cop comes up to me and says all cheery-like, “Hi, Jim.” Yes, he called me by my friggoni first name. Jim. He called me Jim.

My latest brush with the law happened just last week. I was coming down Lake Avenue from Altadena. I wasn’t speeding speeding, but I was regular speeding just a bit. The speed limit was 35 and I was, maybe, doing 40 to 45. Just fast enough to make me feel slightly better than the other drivers, but not unsafe in my own Mensa mind.

Then I looked to the right and my eyes met the eyes of a motorcycle cop. And in that split second of eye contact I instinctively tried not to look guilty and the copper instantly noticed my guilty-ass fake-not-guilty look and kind of pulled his helmeted head back just a little and eyeballed me even harder. And then I, of course, to confirm my guilt, hit the brake like the dumb-ass lead-footed speeding nitwit that I am and will always be.

As soon as I touched the brake and the cop saw me slow down, he knew he had my worthless butt in his Protect and Serve hands. (Now, there’s an image!) So he guns his bike and whips out behind me, and I see him in my rearview mirror, and his red lights go on, and I cuss myself out, and eventually pull up to the curb right in front of the McDonalds near Orange Grove. “You want fries with that citation, loser?”

The copper comes up to my window and says, “Do you know why I stopped you?” I said, “Because I have a bad Facebook photo?” He said, “You look worse in person,” and informed me that I was going 50 in a 35 zone. I offered that I was going 40, tops. He then inquired if I had ever heard the expression “Going like a bat out of hell.” I said I had heard of that expression, but this here particular bat-mobile I was driving was barely going fast enough to get out of purgatory.

He had no sense of humor. He gave me the speeding ticket. And since I couldn’t see any excruciatingly bad old Asian drivers around I gave him a kind of proxy finger. I kept it below the window so as not to hurt his feelings.

Even though I’m a speeder, I’m always considerate of others.

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

Aging White Males Need Love Too (Cigar Smoke 6-18-09)

2009-06-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

You know that new Supreme Court nominee, the one with the broken ankle, and the broken compass. Yeah, that one. Well she has raised my ire, my hackles and my blood pressure. Too bad she couldn’t do anything about my ED.

Anyway, her whole whining, tiresome, racist Latina diatribe about her being better than an old white male has frosted this old white male’s frijoles, baby. Of course, she’s not the first one to have this learned opinion. You hear it constantly. It’s the new mantra. All the sensitive, understanding types want to have “people of color” for elected officials and judges, etc., etc. Now, you gotta be black, brown, yellow, or red to be one of the correctly colored guys. Well, white is a color, dammit.

And you know, us old white guys haven’t done all that badly for, say, the last 300 years. We’ve created the greatest country in history for starters. We have the best system of justice since time began. We have had an incredibly strong economic system, a free capitalistic system, which has given the world a wealth it never dreamed of. Our medical system is second to none. Our farmers, mostly white males, have fed more people in history than any other particular color of farmer that I know of.

We have the most powerful military in the history of mankind, a military which has not only kept us free for over 200 damn years, but has also freed millions and millions of oppressed “people of color” around the world. Most of the dead guys buried in foreign fields are our white males who gave up their white male lives so their white male children could be bashed by non-white revisionist short-memoried ingrates.

Hell, I could go on and on about what us disgusting old white guys have accomplished — from the computer industry to the car industry to the life-saving drug industry to almost any other industry you can think of.

Of course, I realize we, as old white guys, didn’t do all this alone. We had the help of wonderful and talented women, and equally deserving people of every race and color. I am thankful and grateful for how we all pulled together to achieve what we’ve achieved. I applaud us all. I applaud all the people of color. Including the white color.

A lot of women and minorities died in our wars, and they were all absolutely essential to helping create this great country. I am not trying to pit one group against the other. On the other hand, I would have to say that the old white guys were the dominant force in what happened for centuries. And most of that was pretty damn good in this old white cowboy’s opinion. Maybe with all the talk about tolerance and understanding and acceptance, Judge Broken Ankle might cut us a little slack. Or is cutting a little slack just for people of the correct color?

And you know, some of these great people of color who are idolized haven’t done all that well in most of the countries they came from. The old brown males from South America and Mexico have, for the most part, established dictatorships and caused misery for millions and millions of their own people. Their economic systems have generally been a disaster — considering all the resources they have. Hey, you don’t see Americans risking their lives to sneak across the southern border too much, do you? I wonder why.

And Africa is almost a total catastrophe. It’s painful to see the level of corruption and despair on that continent. The millions of black people slaughtered — by their own people of color. It’s heart-wrenching. And when us old white males (along with others) send billions of dollars of food and aid over to help them, most of it is wasted or stolen by the people of color in charge.

Hell, using a person’s color to determine your role models just doesn’t seem to cut it. Old black males and old brown males can be just as bad as us old white males. So, I guess in this case, white is as good as the other colors.

And hey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight David Eisenhower, Jonas Salk, Elvis Presley, FDR, George Washington, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Albert Schweitzer, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Red Grange, Jerry West, Bill Clinton, Alexander Graham Bell, Johnny Carson, Johnny Cash, Johnny Unitas, Willie Nelson, Audie Murphy, Alan Alda, Al Gore, Ross Perot, Tommy Lasorda, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mark Twain, Wayne Gretski, Clarence Darrow, Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert E. Lee, Ronald Reagan, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, John Irving, Carl Sagan, Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Edgar Allen Poe, Merle Haggard, Warren Buffett, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Rush Limbaugh all have one thing in common.

They’re all old white males.

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

Plunging In (Cigar Smoke 6-4-09)

2009-06-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

I know I have been accused of being anally retentive. Many of you astute readers, and even some of you stute readers, have mentioned over the years that I have a tendency to discuss certain things that, shall we say, are south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Well, I have tried to stop doing this, because I want to be accepted by all you non anally retentive people and live in a world where the opposite of being anally-retentive is really cool and maybe we could have some ice tea and play Canasta.

But something happened last week. Something so embarrassing and humiliating that I have decided to never go to the bathroom again. Oh, sure, I’ll go Number One, but I will hold in all Number Two urges until I either explode or shoot a few nuns.

I was at my sister’s house in Colorado last week, and I was enjoying talking to Carol and her housemate, Brent. Then I made the fateful decision to go to the bathroom. Excuse the expression, but I did my duty, and then when I tried to flush the results of doing my duty, let’s just say that the flushing was not exactly complete. I looked around for a plunger. No luck. God can be a kidder.

So I go back out to the living room and say to Carol and Brent, “Uh, excuse me, but would you happen to have a plunger?” Brent says, after moistening the twinkle in his eye, “What do you need a plunger for?” I ask my sister why she hangs out with these kinds of people. Finally, Brent brings me a plunger and says, “Be sure to put the round rubber side down, and hold the thin wooden handle in your hands.”

I go back into the emergency area wondering if they have the death penalty for homicide in Colorado. The disaster is still there. It’s a color now I have never seen before. And it has teeth. I plunge my little plunging heart out. Plunge. Plunge. Plunge. But nothing moves. So I go to my extensive plunging background and experience, and I do a really high suction suck with the plunger where I keep making the plunger progressively suction like mad in ever increasing suction sucks so eventually I will be able to suck the enamel off the damn toilet bowl.

I mean, I am really plunge sucking, baby. And that disgusting giant toxic glob of semi-solid and semi-liquid, grossly colored mess just looked back at me. And laughed. A little No. 2 semi-solid waste laugh that I will never forget.

Then I hear Brent’s soothing voice, “You been in there a long time. You need some help?” I think this over. Do I need help? Probably. Will I open the door so he can come in the bathroom in his own house and see what has come out of my body and is now coiled in swirls of wrongly-colored revenge and poised and ready to cause emotional damage to the next person who sees it? Probably not.

But, of course, after a while, I had to open the door. Brent came in. He looked right at where I thought he would look first. He staggered a little. And then said, “Jesus, this would make Richard Pryor faint.”

Then Brent plunged for a while. He’s younger than I am so maybe he plunged a bit better, but the results were the same. Nothing had moved, except our stomachs. If a director had asked for a disgusting bathroom, and walked in on this, he would have said, “Perfect!”

We worked on it for 10 more minutes and then he yelled, “Carol, come on in here.” Jeez. I had tried to protect my sister all my life, and now this. Carol came in. She looked you-know-where and she grabbed the towel rack and took a few breaths to get some oxygen. When she was able to speak, she said, “Did we have the same parents?”

So there we were. Me and Brent and Carol and The Thing in the toilet bowl. I asked if maybe Carol could call a few of her neighbors over to look at what had come out of her brother’s body. She said something quite un-ladylike into the handkerchief she was holding up to her nose. I further inquired if maybe she could get her church pastor over here. (We still had some space in the bathroom.) Or maybe some Girl Scouts could squeeze into the shower. Hell, we could call 911. Let’s just see if the Colorado Cops could Protect and Serve that.

Oh, I guess it’s kind of funny now that it’s over. Sure, Carol and Brent looked at me like I had an alien coming out of my chest. A coyote-ugly non-green alien. Yes, it was embarrassing. And yes, I was humiliated. But I think in some weird way it brought us all closer together.

We laughed about it for a couple of days. We all wondered if Hallmark made a card for this. And then when I was driving out of Carol’s driveway, I could faintly hear Brent saying, “I don’t care if he is your brother. He does that again, I kill the sucker.”

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

The Larry David Syndrome (Cigar Smoke 5-21-09)

2009-05-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

You guys like Larry David? To me, he’s one of the funniest guys around (even if he does have two first names). Obviously, the “Seinfeld” stuff was great, but I liked him even more in his own show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” That damn show used to make me weak. I’d be laughing so hard that I had to wear diapers — over my nose. I would be snot-snorting, baby.

In case some of you excuses-for-qualified-readers still can’t quite remember who Larry David is, he’s the lanky bald dude who is seemingly neurotic but who I think has his head on pretty straight. He notices things that most people miss, and not only does he notice them, he acts on them. Not only does he act on what he notices, but he can’t not act on what he notices. If Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” for Larry he would have had him say, “To be or to be, what is the question?”

Well, I’ve always had a little Larry in me. I do tend to notice weird stuff and find myself not quite able to let things go. The other day I go into a Starbucks to get a regular black coffee (which they had to send out for), and when I get my coffee and am about to sit down I notice that the little table I’m about to sit at has a checkerboard/chess game grid painted on the top of it. Yes, I was hesitant. My mind flashed to Larry and Hamlet arm wrestling.

Anyway, I’ve got my crusty cinnamon roll in one hand and my coffee in my other hand and I look around and notice that there are no free tables around. People are sitting at every table — except for the table with the checkerboard/chess layout painted on it. There is one table for four with one guy sitting there. I could have joined him, but I am not the social type. I can’t even come up with things to say to my friends. What the hell would I say to a latte stranger? Had any good mocha lately?

Well, I really wanted to have my coffee and cinnamon roll, so I asked myself, very quietly, “What would Larry do?” And, of course, I instantly knew what the answer was. I put my coffee and the roll on the checkerboard/chess grid on the table and said in a rather startlingly loud voice, “Excuse me, Starbucks coffee drinkers. May I have your attention? Please stop sipping your beverages for a few seconds.” The place went dead quiet.

I raised my hands up to try to reassure them that I wasn’t carrying an Uzi and that they shouldn’t be alarmed, and continued. “I am about to sit down at this table which has a checkerboard/chess layout on it and I just want to make sure that none of you are about to play a game of checkers or chess. I just don’t think it would be right if you were really wanting to play checkers, say, and some jerk-off such as myself just sat down at the official checkerboard table with no intention of playing checkers or chess. It just wouldn’t be fair. And I want you to know that I know it wouldn’t be fair, and if I sat there and didn’t say anything I would feel guilty and I would think you were looking at me with justifiable disdain.

“And because I am a person who does not handle public displays of disdain all that well, I thought I should just be upfront and see if any of you had plans to use the chess table before I just assumed you didn’t and sat there. Well, I am asking you now. Do any of you want to use the checkerboard/chess table?”

If possible, the room became even quieter than before. All you could hear were the thoughts of people wishing they hadn’t been born. I went on.

“Because of your silence I can only assume that none of you wish to play either checkers or chess at this time and that the table is free for me to use without even any glimmer of guilt. Is that correct? Have I made the correct assumption? I don’t see any little boxes of checkers. Anybody carrying a case of chessmen? I am going to sit down right now. Any problems with me sitting here?

I am pulling the chair back? I don’t hear anyone. I’m sitting down. Thank you for your time and attention. Please continue sipping your coffee or the other flavorful drink you have purchased. This checkerboard/chess announcement is now over. Thanks again. Appreciate your time. Take care.”

As I sat there at the checkerboard table enjoying my guiltless cup of coffee, I got to wondering. Why are checkerboards and chessboards the same? Same number of rows. Same number of columns. Even the squares are the same size. What kind of crap is that? Are Scrabble boards the same as Monopoly boards? Just what is going on here? I stood up again and said, “Excuse me, excuse me. One more thing, everybody …”

I think Larry would have been proud.

So Far, So Dumb (Cigar Smoke 5-7-09)

2009-05-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

First of all, before I try to be semi-funny, I want to thank all of you who sent me emails and cards about my having to put down my Airedale, Hadley. They meant a lot to me. Thank you very, very much.

Well, to kind of get my head out of what had been going on here, I decided to take another trip up to my new hovel in Oregon. I’m in the process of trying to make the place livable and I needed to take some special bunk beds up there.

So, after reading all the bed ads on craigslist for two weeks, I bought this kind of funky regular double bed with a twin bed on top. I got it at Couch Potatoes. I was going to haul it up to Oregon in my big old Dodge Durango. Finally, that polluting, gas-guzzling sumbitch was going to pay off.

The only little problem arose the day after I bought the beds. I sold the Durango. Pretty good planning, huh? (The White House has called me to help them screen their cabinet nominees. I kid Obama.) Just so you don’t think I’m completely nutso, I only sold the Durango because it wouldn’t start. I got stranded four times. It wouldn’t even start after I cursed at it and kicked it silly.

I got a neat used car that I really like, except it is not made to haul funky large bunk beds. It did, however, have a roof rack, and that’s where I made a really bad decision.

I was able to stuff all the wooden bed parts in the car. Yes, it was not completely safe. I had planks and springs and boxes going from the folded-down back-seat area up to the passenger side in the front. Just jammed in there. I could barely get in the driver’s seat, but I could see the right side rearview mirror, so I thought it would be relatively safe. My son, Casey, helped me get everything in there, but he made me sign a release form so he could show people at the funeral.

So far, so dumb. Then I decided to put the double-bed mattress on the roof and drive 830 miles. So far, so dumber. Being a conservative type, I wrapped the mattress in a special plastic tarp cover, and then I tied it down to the roof. And I knew the wind would be brutal, so I got six tie-down straps and cinched those suckers down tight. And I bought a bunch of bungee cords. And — I hate to say it — it looked pretty damn secure.

So I kissed Marge goodbye, and she said those 10 special words that I love, “Honey, you got the life insurance premiums paid, haven’t you?”

So off I went. I’m tooling along the 210 Freeway, everything is smoother than Nicole Kidman’s butt, and I merge onto Interstate 5, heading for hovelville. I am smoking a stogie I bought on the Internet so I didn’t have to pay California taxes; I am listening to Waylon say he is “too dumb for New York City and too ugly for L.A.,” and then I look out my left-hand window (the only window I can see out of) and I see a shadow. And the shadow is flapping around. Flapping shadows are not good. Then I hear the flapping shadow. Audible flapping shadows are even worse.

I pull off the freeway at Gorman. I stop at a gas station and I get out and look at the roof. It was like looking at Rosie O’Donell — it wasn’t pretty. The plastic was all ripped up; the straps were loose; the bungee cords were laughing.

So I go into this hokey AM-PM store and I look around for roof rack help and end up with some electrical tape, some duct tape and two coils of cheap rope. I spend 45 minutes in 60-mile an hour winds tying up that mattress, and I use up all the rope and the tape and the sanity I have left.

I go on down the road. It’s my life. I do not get far. I just make it over the Grapevine and the flapping is now so loud it’s making Big Bird horny. I get out and look up and I shudder. There is a loose, flapping, bleeding mattress, with ripped strands of tape and frayed rope everywhere.

Luckily, I have stopped at a Mobil station that has some pretty heavyweight tie-down materials. I buy four more cinch straps, wider ones. I get some better rope that doesn’t come apart as soon as you pay for it. And I get industrial-strength tape with fiberglass threads embedded in it. I spend another hour tying down that mess.

I head up the road again. I’m not having quite as much fun as earlier. I had to tell Waylon to put a lid on it. (You’re too ugly for Nashville!) Somehow I made it another couple hundred miles to a rest stop south of Stockton. I get out to go to the bathroom. Even bad roof-rack movers have to pee, dammit.

And, as I’m walking to the restroom, this guy next to me looks at the roof of my car, looks back at me, and then says, “Hey Tom, I loved you in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.”

I’m not going to tell you if I made it up to Oregon or not. However, if you’re driving northbound on Interstate 5 between Stockton and Sacramento, you might dial it down a few notches.

Rest in Peace, Big Guy (Cigar Smoke 4-23-09)

2009-04-23T12:52:00.001-07:00

Last month Marge and I had to put our Airedale, Hadley, down. It was very sad. I can’t quite believe he’s really gone. I can still hear his dog tags jingling.

He had been on a steady decline for over a year. His back legs had been failing him and he had lost control of his bowels. He was going blind and looked dazed and confused a lot of the time. We knew he was in pain, but he had always been a stoic dog. He would not complain. He would not whimper. He never cried.

We tried to help him as much as we could. We’d lift his back legs to help him up. We’d hold his collar and guide him through doorways so he wouldn’t hit his head. Somehow, though, we knew we were probably doing all this for ourselves as much as we were for Hadley. We couldn’t bear to lose him. I guess we were selfish.

At the end, he was not able to get up at all. He had fallen on the driveway and was stranded there. He could not lift himself up, even to his back legs. Because he was so heavy, we couldn’t lift him. So we got his bed and managed to put him in there, and then we gently pulled the bed from the driveway into our bedroom. We wanted one last night with our furry friend. And we hoped he might be better in the morning.

And, amazingly, he was — for a while. Then he got worse. So I decided to go down to talk to the vet. She had taken care of him for almost 13 years, so she knew him well. She told us that he had had a good life and she couldn’t do much for him now. She thought it was time for us to let him go.

We brought him in later that afternoon. It was the longest 15-minute ride I’ve ever had. We arrived at the clinic and one of the attendants was able to carry him into the vet’s office and put him on the table. He looked so fragile, and scared. I put my hand on his head. He was shaking.

I had never put a dog down before. I asked the vet how it would all work. She said she would give him a shot to relax him. And then she would give him the final shot. She said it would be fast and painless.

We said OK. She gave him the first shot, and the process had started. Marge and I both broke down. We were crying and trying to comfort Hadley. But he didn’t seem to be relaxing much. So the vet gave him a second shot and then he did become more relaxed. He became very calm and quiet and stopped shaking.

Before she gave him the final shot, she told us it would take about 15 seconds to reach his heart, and then that would be it. We nodded. She gave him the shot. We looked at our Good Boy through our tears and then we saw his big, fuzzy head gently drop and cover his right paw. Hadley was gone. Marge and I both cried and said our good-byes.

It was the saddest thing I have ever seen. It broke my heart.

The last two weeks have been hard. We miss our guy, and we both expect to see him every day. Marge will automatically look outside to see if Hadley wants to come in. I will start to get up to fix his dinner at 5:30 every night and then remember. I’ll come home and expect him to meet me at the door. I’ll get a cigar out of my cigar box, and I’ll look for Hadley to ask him, “You wanna go have a cigar with me, you long-headed weasel?”

And the other day I snuck a box of Cheez-Its into the living room. You know, that big red-and-orange box. I actually had the box on my right hip, trying to hide it from Hadley. Hadley used to love Cheez-Its, and when he’d see me with that box, he’d jump up and come over and, well, hound me, for some handouts. He loved those damn things. I mean, really loved ’em. I’d take a couple for myself, and then give him one, and he’d gobble it down, sometimes with a side order of my fingers, and then he’d want another Cheez-It. When I’d put the box down, he would sit in front of me and paw my knee until I caved in and gave him a few more. Now he’s not there. It’s just not the same eating all the Cheez-Its myself. They’re too dry.

I miss so many things about that crazy dog. I miss how he used to scatter-ass the ducks at the Santa Fe Dam; I miss how he did a double take the first time he drank some seawater at the beach; I miss having him sit upright in the passenger seat of my old Explorer; I miss him nose-poking my butt to suggest we go for a walk; I miss bringing him two pieces of a cinnamon roll or a donut every morning. Whenever I’d go to Starbucks or some donut shop, I’d always have to save two pieces for him. Once I brought back only one piece of donut to the car, and gave it to him. He was pissed. I never did that again.

And I miss lying down with him on the rug. I used to lie down with him on the bed for a nap, but lately he couldn’t jump up there, so we had our naptime on the rug. Usually, he’d be lying there, and I would interrupt his sleep, and get down next to him, and put my human head right near his long horse head, and he would thump his tail a few times on the rug and then he would lick my face. I think he got a little doggie high on my cologne. And sometimes that wouldn’t be enough and he would slobber-lick the hairspray off my hair, too. And finally, he would calm down, and I would sleep next to him with my arm resting on his shoulder.

Rest in peace, my friend.

Off at the Races (Cigar Smoke 4-9-09)

2009-04-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

I am not a big horse-racing fan. I’ve only been to maybe six or seven tracks in my lifetime. So I average about one race every decade. But I should go more often because, well, I am pretty damn good at betting the ponies.

And I’m going to share my system with you so you can take out what’s left of your 401(k) and finally make a little money. Here’s what I do. I get a copy of the Racing Form and look over the odds. Some horses will be 2 to 1, others will be 34 to 1. Whatever.

First of all, I never bet either the favorites or the long shots. If the favorite wins, I don’t make much money, and if the long shot wins, I just swear a lot. So I always pick a horse with medium odds, say, 8 to 1 up to 15 to 1. These horses usually will not be glue in the near future. And if they happen to win, you can make some nice money.

Armed with this fail-safe strategy, I went to Santa Anita Park last Sunday with the Altadena Soroptomist Club. My wife, Marge, is a member, and I like all the gals in the club. In fact, I’ve hung around with them for years now. One day I asked longtime member Shirley Manning why they let me, a man, run with their all-women club. And she said, “Because occasionally we need heavy objects lifted by someone not quite as smart as we are.” You can probably guess that I have warm feelings for them.

Anyway, they invited me to join them for A Day at the Races last Sunday, and I lifted a heavy object (myself) and accepted the invitation. We had great seats right near the center of the track. Had a super lunch of a corned beef on rye with crusty fries and a piece of cheesecake that took a couple years off your life. Oh, that’s another reason I like these people. They eat pretty well … for women.

For some reason (cheesecake withdrawal) I miss the first race. I bet 20 bucks to win on the No. 4 horse, High Note, in the second race. He goes off at 8 or 9 to 1. He starts off in last place. But I am screaming for him. I mean screaming. Soroptomist members are clutching their purses and their mint juleps to their bosoms like sick children.

But my screaming pays off. High Note wins the race. By a nose in a photo finish. I win $216. My system is a killer. My throat and nearby Soroptomist eardrums are broken.

So I kind of strut off to the window to collect my winnings and I come back waving two one-hundred dollar bills and I puff my chest out a little and ask if maybe any of the women are getting just a tad tired of their current husbands and might want a change. Marge supports me in this. She yells, “Take the bastard!”

In the third race, I find another horse that fits my system. I put another 20 bucks to win on the No. 3 horse, Patriotic Soldier. I think he went off at about 10 to 1. Well, this turns out to be an incredible race. It doesn’t get more exciting than this. My horse and the No. 5 horse were neck and neck. Coming down the stretch I was screaming, “Go 3! 3! 3! 3!” And the announcer says, “Down the stretch they come.” And me and my throat are raw. I’m yelling “3.” A guy next to me, a commie, is yelling “5.” I yell a louder “3!” He yells a pissy “5!”

It ends up in another photo finish. We have to wait over five minutes for them to figure out who won. I am weak. I would cry but there are too many Soroptomists around. Finally, the winning number flashes on the tote board. It’s No. 5. Not No. 3. I lost by a damn nose. No, by a damn nostril. No, by a damn booger. Yes, I lost another sure $220 by a booger.

I was devastated. My throat was wiped out. My chest was unpuffed. I felt weak and vulnerable. My wallet was lighter. Then another Soroptomist, JoAnn Formia, came up to me and said “You couldn’t carry my husband’s shoes, you loser.”

I lost another $20 on Bad Boy in the fourth. So then I gave up on that system and I went to my surefire backup system: picking horses by their funny names. I almost picked Cardinal Zin, but finally decided on Grylls because how could a horse without any vowels lose. I yelled Grylls as often as I could. I even yelled it with a German accent once and put an “a” on the end of it — Gryllsa.

Go Gryllsa! Go you vowel-less piece of dog food. Grylls did not win. Grylls did not finish. Grylls is still out on the track. Grylls is trying to buy a vowel from Vanna White.

So now that my system of medium odds wasn’t working, and my funny names system had mysteriously failed, I had to turn to my last great scientific strategy — always picking a gray horse. Somehow this had worked for me in the past. And I could always see my gray horse easily. It just stood out. And it made my screaming easier. “Go gray horse. Beat the brown and black horses.” Well, I yelled, “Go gray horse” in the final four races and lost all four. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe gray horses are hard of hearing.

But just send me your retirement money, anyway. I hear there’s a sure thing running at Hollywood Park next week — 12 to 1. A Hawaiian gray horse. No consonants in his name.

A Stimulating Column (Cigar Smoke 3-26-09)

2009-03-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

You know, I have been stimulating the economy for more than 50 years now. And how do I do this altruistic service to humanity? I buy cars, that’s how. No, I’m not Jay Leno. I don’t keep the cars and buy more cars. No, I just buy one car at a time, milk every last dying ounce of metallic life-juice out of it, then buy a new over-priced piece of potential junk, and repeat. I’m a serial car buyer. I live to stimulate the economy.

And while you have been crying and whining about the economy, I have been out there in the car-buying streets of hell for a half-century.

I bought my first car in 1957. I was 16 years old and the only thing leaner than my tough, stud body was my wallet. So, I bought a 1947 Mercury coupe for $50. The guy said he dropped a ’49 Ford engine in it and, sure enough, he did drop a V-8 into the engine compartment. However, he did not bolt it down to the actual car.

But you don’t care about my problems. All you care about is me stimulating the damn economy while you lie back and bitch about bailouts and moan about money. Go buy a car. Right now. They’re cheaper than houses.

When I was in my 20s and had a little more money, I remember, literally, using my last $900 to buy an MG roadster. It was a dumb decision. I did not have rent money. But, because my life was based on stimulating the economy, I did this for you and your ungrateful friends. I never even got a thank-you note.

A couple years later, I had my first kid and my wife thought we should sell the MG to help pay for the little interloper. She won that fight and I sold it for $500. I’ve made many bad decisions in my life, but that’s in the final four.

So, I took the $500 MG money and immediately bought an old lady Plymouth Valiant from my dad’s girlfriend. It was like a sedan with doilies. My biggest expense was buying paper towels to clean up my upchuck every time I got in that four-door loser. But I held my nose and my tongue and something else — I wanted to stimulate something. Yes, the economy. For you.

After owning the Valiant for a while, a friend of mine at work was selling this cool Pontiac convertible. I mean, it was really cool. It was really long and had more chrome and silver than Mexico and was shiny and had whitewall tires and air conditioning and the seats were this plush, dark blue leather. I bought it right on the spot, without telling the semi-little woman. I brought it home. I took the SLW (semi-little woman) out to see it. I told her to sit in the driver’s seat. I sat down in the passenger seat and I let the top down and I turned on the radio (which the Valiant didn’t even have) and turned the volume up to rumble and raised my eyebrows a couple of times and said, “What do you think, Interloper Mother?” And she said, “This will sure stimulate the economy.”

And I continued my personal stimulus plan over the years. When I left the job I had for about seven years, I had the option to take out my retirement money, so because I knew the economy needed to be stroked a little, I took the whole wad and went down to Felix Chevrolet in downtown LA and bought a brand new Monte Carlo. Drove that damn thing right off the showroom floor. I remember it to this day. My accountant was yelling at me as I drove off, “Don’t do this, you dumbass!”

And when that Monte Carlo turned into a worthless heap, I took that pile of junk over to a car dealer in Arcadia and I asked him what I could get for it, and he said, “Arrested.” OK, it didn’t have any brakes and the exhaust fumes were killing neighborhood pets. But the important thing was I had had the courage to drive it over there without any brakes to help stimulate the economy.

Yes, I ended up buying a pissy little Sentra because I was divorced and broke and lonely and the payments were only $127 a month. I hope you heard that. I was broke and lonely and I still had the humanity to stimulate the economy. I selflessly spent $127 a month for three years to help America defeat communism and be safe for me to get more credit cards with a 29 percent interest rate. And what were you doing? Don’t lie to me.

Oh, I could go on about other stimulating things I have done. But maybe there are kids reading this. Sure, I could tell you how I went out and bought an Eagle Talon sports car moving-ass machine so I could race home after my shrink sessions to regain my sanity. Yes, again I sacrificed and stimulated the economy. I was a good citizen in deep crushing debt, and you did nothing!

And, because the need is so great today, I went out and bought a new used car just yesterday. Yeah, I sold my big old gas-guzzling Durango SUV and I bought a pretty cool car. I can’t tell you what kind of car it is or you would know what size galoshes to buy Mr. Johnson.

The important thing is I stimulated the economy. I bought something I don’t need and I spent more money than I wanted to spend. You can do it too. S-T-I-M-U-L-A-T-E!

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

This Column is Depressing (Cigar Smoke 3-12-09)

2009-03-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had a problem with depression. It runs in my family. (Or walks, trudges actually, with its head down.) My dad was depressed. My grandmother was depressed. Her father was depressed. And I’m pretty sure my Greek forebears, Plato and Aristotle, were depressed.

I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years. It’s helped a little. Now I pretty much know why I’m depressed. But, when I think of how much money it cost me for that knowledge, I get depressed. I’ve got two friends who are depressed, too. But we’re too depressed to talk about it. We’d all shoot ourselves except we’re such poor shots.

So, how do I deal with depression? Basically, I try to ignore it, or blame it on other people. Especially dead people – it’s very difficult for dead people to defend themselves. But when that fails, I do something that has worked every damn time. I take a road trip.

I just get in the car, light up a semi-cheap cigar and take off. And something always happens that cheers me up. Like last week I was feeling really low, so I decided to drive up to Oregon to visit my empty hovel.

I was buzzing along Highway 5 in the rain, which is not the part that cheered me up, and I had to pee. I saw a sign that said there was a rest stop in 20 miles. I thought me and my bladder could make that, so I kept driving. When we get to the rest stop exit, it says: Closed. Next Rest Stop 52 miles. Mr. Bladder was, excuse the expression, pissed.

Anyway, I couldn’t wait that long, so I found a gas station in a few miles. Got some gas and went in to the Stop N’ Overpay store to get a bottle of water and a lighter. I gave the clerk five bucks and she said, “It’s $11.27, sir?” I said, “For a bottle of water and a $1.99 lighter?” She said, “The lighter is $9.99.”

I looked down and, sure enough, it was $9.99. I inquired as to why it was $9.99. She told me because it had a fingernail clipper hidden inside it.

Now that cheered me up. Finally someone had invented something I’ve needed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been lighting a cigar and I’ve said to myself, “God, I wish I could cut my fingernails right now, too.” It’s just a shame they didn’t come up with this lighter/fingernail clipper earlier. I could have saved a bundle in psychiatry bills. It’s depressing.

Oh, well. Got back on the road and drove along the California Aqueduct for a while, and remembered many years ago seeing a pilot fly his open-cockpit crop-duster right over my head and he had a Snoopy scarf blowing behind him in the wind and it made me smile. The road comes through. Again.

I got to the Kettleman City turnoff. I always stop at Mike’s Diner for lunch. It’s one of those cluttered Cracker Barrel kind of places with kids’ wagons and old Texaco signs and license plates on the walls. I ordered a chicken tostada. (Yes, I’m going to tell you what I ate for breakfast soon.) When I took my first bite of chicken, I thought something wasn’t right. It did not taste like chicken. It did not taste like anything I had ever eaten before. It tasted like an unlucky circus animal. But it did get me out of my own head. It’s hard to be depressed while eating a lion tostada.

That night I stayed at a Holiday Inn and my avalanche of cheerfulness continued. I turned on the TV and I saw a bunch of teenage guys chasing emus around in a field. Yes, emus. Big, clumsy, ostrich-like emus. Yee-haw! Take that, depression.

The next morning I had breakfast at IHOP. (I told you.) Every time I eat there, I get real serious and lower my voice and I ask the waitress, “Do you guys have pancakes?” And every time, her reaction cheers me up. But then I look at the seven kinds of syrup to choose from, and I go back down.

After breakfast I drove three hours out of my way to see a little mountain town called Hayfork. I’d always wanted to see it. I don’t want to see it again. Then I zigzagged and car-sicked my way through hours of switchbacks and slushy snow and I got to the Eureka Bay in Humboldt County. Now, I’m not saying the rainy, foggy, cold, sludge-filled bay is not attractive, but their slogan is “Our Harbor is Uglier than Your Butt.”

I ate lunch at a neat little place at the marina. And I swear to God, as I’m eating my tuna melt, the waitress comes up to me and says, “Would you run with the bulls?” Out of nowhere. “Would you run with the bulls?” So I said, “Would you share what you’re smoking?” She looked quizzical. I said, “Honey, I wouldn’t even walk with the cows.”

By the time you read this, I’ll be home again. Why don’t you come on over. I’ll light up a cigar for you. And clip your nails.

Spilling My Guts (Cigar Smoke 2-26-09)

2009-02-26T18:05:00.000-08:00

You probably think you’re a better person than I am. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. You probably think you’re smarter than I am. I doubt it, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. And you probably think you’re better looking than I am, don’t you? OK, I’ll give you that, too, Brad Pitt Face.

But I know one thing you’re not as good as I am on. Nope. You cannot now, or have ever in the past, or will ever in your fecund future, be able to spill stuff on yourself like I do. I can spill, baby. I am the Sultan of Spilling. I have been spilling stuff on myself for as long as I can remember — even as long as I can’t remember. I thought I would outgrow it, but now I have reached the doggone doddering age of 67 and I am still spilling stuff on myself. I have failed in this one aspect of life and I acknowledge it and I hereby pause to listen to your cruel mockery of a spill-stained senior citizen suck-face such as myself. Mock away.

I won’t go back to my childhood days and charmingly regale you with adorable childish spilling stories. But I do remember my mom just taking a bottle of milk and emptying it on my high chair and on my head and on my baby jammies outfit and on the floor, saying, “It’ll save time.” My mom was a kidder.

I will also skip through my teen and college years where I developed my spilling skills to near perfection. You don’t need to know the details, especially if you are eating right now. I will tell you though, that my friends applauded me one day with appreciative slow-clapping of hands that built into a genuine crescendo of pure admiration when they couldn’t determine just what gross liquid I had spilled on my shirt as they watched it eat away one of my pockets and start burning my chest hair. God, those were good days.

When I got married and became mature and bought insurance and sedans and got mad at younger people who spilled things, I had one particular spilling problem. I always spilled little drops of chocolate sauce on my white T-shirts. (For you younger readers, a white T-shirt is like your T-shirts only without all the rock star art and sports advertising bullshit and profanity.) By the way, when I was a kid we didn’t even have white T-shirts. We just had T-shirts. Period. No need to differentiate — colors were invented by the next generation.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s my first wife and I always had ice cream sundaes for dessert after dinner. Almost every night, just some, excuse the expression, healthy scoops of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. And every night I would be on the couch watching TV, and my wife would look over at me, and say, “Why in the name of holy bejabbers did I marry you?” No, that was something else she would say. She would say, “There’s chocolate on your shirt.” And she’d kind of head-point. And I’d look down and, sure as Shinola, there were two dark chocolate drops on my white T-shirt. This would happen most every night. (In later years, if I hadn’t spilled chocolate on my T-shirt, my kids would walk by and smear chocolate onto it. I don’t think the authorities ever found their bodies.)

I don’t know what to say. I still spill ashes on myself every time I drive. A bunch of my shirts have cigar-ash holes in them, and there are burn marks on most of the cushions in the backyard. And I swear I am not trying to be careless.

I really make an effort to not spill stuff. I just don’t succeed. Dammit, I try. Like when I get a barbecue-beef sandwich, I’ll be careful for the first half, but I always fail on the second half. I’ll end up with a wadded-up soppy-ass napkin that could kick Mike Tyson’s butt, and then I’ll accidentally wipe my face and I’ll get barbecue-sauce stains on my cheeks and on my collar and on my eyelids and on my dog. I’m worthless.

Just last night, after Marge went to bed, I stayed up and made myself a fried-egg sandwich. A couple of over-easy eggs on some white bread. I put it on a plate. I go sit down on the couch. I’m watching TV. I am very aware of the egg sandwich and my proneness to spillage. I lift the sandwich off the plate, carefully, and I extend my hands out over the plate like a Boy Scout asking for a nun’s hand in marriage, and I take a big, careful bite.

And I hear something. A whooshing sound. I look on the plate. It’s clean. For a split second I think I am not a spilling slob. Then I glance at my chest and my dark blue robe has a giant splotch of yellow yolk on it. Ugly, ugly splotch, a glob of guck. Looked like the Sea of Cortez with hepatitis. Just all yellow and yucky.

I told you I was The King.

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

The Eagle Has Landed (Cigar Smoke 2-12-09)

2009-02-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

Hello my friends, and hello my commie-loving, socialism-seeking, Democratic Party wastes-of-good-DNA, Obama-Kool-Aid-drinking cultists. (I’m just kidding. I love you people, too. Just not as much as the good people. I’m sure Bill Maher still likes you guys. Go over to his house. Eat his guacamole.)

A while back I confessed to you that my dream had died and I was not ever going to actually buy a little piece of land where Lenny and I could escape to and be men and play with mice. Well, dammit, I misspoke too soon.

I finally pulled the trigger. I was finally able to act. The anchor is off my ass. The dream is now a reality. The eagle has landed. My life is complete. I bought a mobile home up in Oregon, in a little town called Harbor, right below Brookings. It’s just a cow-chip-toss over the California border.

OK, I’ll say it before you do: I am now trailer trash. But I think I am trailer trash in a good way. I now consider myself one of the Jeffersons — moving on up, baby. This mobile home / trailer is actually properly referred to as a Park Model. Which basically means it’s a permanent mobile home in an RV park. That’s gotta be way better than a mobile home you can move somewhere, doesn’t it? And I’m pretty sure permanent trailer trash gets invited to better parties than itinerant trailer trash does. The way I see the trailer trash hierarchy is like this: dead people, homeless people, people who live in motels by the week, RV motor home drivers, mobile-homes-that-still-have-wheels-on-them dwellers, and then Park Model high-class residents, such as myself.

So, being such a model citizen (OK, a Park-Model citizen), I have decided to officially name my abode. Nothing says high-class like naming where you live. I call it “The Eagle’s Nest.” For some damn reason I have always related to eagles. I have user names with “eagle” in them for chat rooms and forums. I have paintings and artwork and art objects and T-shirts with eagles on them. I have a really nice plaster of Paris chalk eagle sculpture from Tijuana with one broken wing where it got caught in the window coming back through customs. I have a beautiful set of patriotic bookends in red, white and blue, where the two eagles’ heads are looking at each other with fierce eagleness. I just love eagles, dammit. Maybe because I yearn to be free and fly off to Alaska and mate with a cheap falcon — or maybe a foxy governor.

And not only was my love of eagles involved in the naming of my new hideaway, “The Eagle’s Nest,” but the hovel was also perched, yes perched, up on this cliff overlooking the harbor and the ocean. There’s a driftwood beach within 200 yards, and the Chetco River flows into the surf right there. The view is pretty damn cool. In fact, when I first walked out on the deck and saw the ocean and harbor and river on the horizon, I said to the real estate guy, “I’ll take it.” And Marge said, “Shouldn’t we look inside first?”

Well, being the shrewd investor I am, I did look inside. I took a two-minute lap around the place, and it had a toilet and a kitchen and no visible rodents, so I thought it would be fine. And I made the dream come true. I bought it. The eagle had landed.

So we came home to Altadena, and I was trying to figure out how to furnish it and I forgot what the hell the inside looked like. So, of course, I had to go back up there to check everything out. When I opened the front door I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked really nice! Yes, the interior of “The Eagle’s Nest” looked new and clean, and it was actually decorated by a designer and furnished beautifully. An attractive sofa, two specially made recliners, built-in appliances, freshly painted walls, tasteful oak trim, even skylights — I thought I walked into the wrong house.

It was way too nice for me. I felt like I was dating someone from Vassar, which I think is a college. I even went outside on the deck to fart. My Vassar date said, “What was that sound?” I told her it was an eagle landing.

So I come home again, and I’m feeling a little freaked out. Out of place. Unworthy. But I decide I should buy some dishes and silverware, and see if I can accept living in a nice hovel.

I go over to Macy’s (I’m changing already!). I go down to the housewares section and a saleswoman comes over and I say those six little words I never thought I would ever say: “Can you show me the Fiestaware?” She does. I buy a set of dishes in ivory.

To complete the metamorphosis, I then say, “Do you have the matching flatware in Evergreen?” She says, “Certainly, sir. We’re not savages.” She laughs and asks, “What kind of place mats would you like?”

I say, “You have any with refried bean stains?”

Enough Already (Cigar Smoke 1-25-09)

2009-02-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

I’m just sitting here at my desk, pretending to be happy and analyzing life and the horse it rode in on, and listening to my favorite song on the radio — the Kars for Kids Ad Jingle:

1-877 Kars for Kids
K-A-R-S, Kars for Kids
Donate Your Car Today

God, I love that song. The little tyke sings the first verse and then the gruff lovable guy with the deep voice repeats the verse. And then they both sing the verse a third time to just yank the aorta right out of your heart.

If I had a car to give them I would. Kind of feel bad that I sold my last one on eBay and stiffed the kids. And bought useless things I didn’t need with the money. What can I say?

Anyway, back to analyzing life. I went to the Santa Anita Mall the other day (no, not to eat lunch with mall cop Paul Blart but to buy a pair of shoes). And as I was walking around the mall, I started actually noticing all the stores. Yeah, noticing exactly what all the stores were.

Everybody is saying we are in an economic depression right now and everything is so damn bad. We have to dial that kind of scaredy-cat talk down a few notches. No, I was not around during the real Great Depression, back in the ’30s, but I’ve seen pictures of people in breadlines and soup lines and dust was blowing all over the place. It looked pretty bad to me.

But today, walking in a mall is incredible. There are so many specialty shops, it almost makes the free enterprise system seem, I hate to say it, frivolous. I used to be an entrepreneur myself, but jeez — I saw a store specializing in chocolate. All kinds of chocolate. Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate with nuts, chocolate with fruit, Asian chocolate, Obama chocolate.

Another shop was just selling soap. Scented soap, powdered soap, bubble bath soap, frilly soap, girly soap, soap tied in little bundles with bows, different colored soap nuggets, non-global-warming soap, soap for acne, soap for lumberjacks. I asked a very clean sales clerk if I could buy a regular old three-pack of white, anti-sweat Dial because my armpits were winning. She said I could go to OSH.

I continued walking around for a while. I walked past a pretzel store. Sold just pretzels. Past a popcorn store. Just popcorn. A candy-apple store. A nut store. A tea store. And a coffee store. If we are in such a horrible depression, will someone tell me why is there a Starbucks on every corner in America? Is there a new caffeine zoning law I missed? Did them commie environmentalists slip one by me?

The other day at a Starbucks I was drinking my wonderful beverage made with ergonomic coffee beans grown by vegetarian Ethiopians or Brazilian pacifists, I looked across the street and there was another Starbucks. Dueling Starbucks! I almost spilled $4.95 on three laptops. Not only that, there was another coffee place two doors down. No kidding.

Anyway, as you astute readers must be wondering, “Did you ever buy the shoes you went to the mall for?” Well, after walking past the food court and being torn between getting the two-pound baked potato filled with shrimp and bacon and olives and cashews and sour cream and guacamole and cheese, or the Korean sandwich that was still barking. I kept walking and looking.

I was looking for what I refer to as “sneakers.” I know that dates me. I just needed a damn pair of tennis shoes. So I look up and I see a Walking Shoes store. I’m about to go in when I notice a Running Shoes store. I think to myself, I probably should get the walking shoes because I walk 98 percent of the time, but I didn’t want to exclude the possibility of ever running again. So I kept walking, not running, to see what other options I had.

I went into a Sports Chalet, I think. And I walked to the shoe section, which was just a little smaller than the hangar they used to house the Spruce Goose in, and on the wall I saw the following signs: Walking Shoes, Running Shoes, Hiking Shoes, Court Shoes, Tennis Shoes, Racquetball Shoes, Basketball Shoes, Training Shoes, Men’s Shoes, Women’s Shoes, Boy’s Shoes, Girl’s Shoes, Youth’s Shoes, Toddler’s Shoes and Embryo’s Shoes.

As a sales guy was running/walking/or hiking towards me, I ran/walked/or hiked out of there, baby, and went directly to Nordstrom hoping the piano player would hug me. I bought the first pair of tennis shoes I could find in the discount bin. I asked the clerk if these sneakers would make me play like Michael Jordan. He said, “Yes. Yes, they will.” That was good enough for me.

And when the clerk was ringing up my shoes, he asked me if I would like to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD. I looked down on the counter. There were CDs for sale.

I said, “No, I don’t think I’ll buy a CD here in a shoe store. I think I’ll go get my CD at Starbucks. They have a much better selection.”

Getting off to a Complaining New Year (Cigar Smoke 1-15-09)

2009-01-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are in 2009. I thought I’d start the year off right by complaining my butt off. My butt could use a little off.

I had a terrific holiday season. We had a houseful of people I love over and one uncle who maybe I didn’t love quite as much as the others, and I accidentally put a few laxative tablets in his eggnog. I never knew that old sucker could dance like that.

As much as I enjoyed everything and everybody, I was ready for a little post-Christmas combat R&R. So when everybody left, I sighed and sat down on the end of the couch, and closed my eyes, and as my left-wing friends would say, my mind, too. But when I opened my eyes, I found something I usually don’t see. Clutter.

I pride myself on being anally retentive. It’s something I’ve worked hard at, and have annoyed people with for years. In fact, I’m not sure if “anally retentive” should only have one L in it or a hyphen. I feel uneasy right now just thinking about it, but I’m going with the damn spellchecker.

Anyway, the living room is full of guided rocket missiles that maybe could have been guided a little better, and video game cases, and the TV is turned sideways because the grandkids had to hook up their Play Stations, and there are a few orphan toy box lids around, and a some gnarly drink glasses were lying on their sides behind various pieces of furniture. And our neighbors’ cat was tied to the pool table by its tail. I told you we had a nice holiday.

So, the little lady asked me if I would mind helping her pick up some stuff because “isn’t it about time you got off your lazy, lanky, marshmallow-Santa-filled ass?” So, I helped her. And when I got through, I sank back down on the couch, and she appeared again like a genie, and said, “could you come into the kitchen and help me un-stick these plates.” Women can’t even pry a couple of plates apart. You’d think five-day-old gravy was epoxy.

So I do that, too. Cheerfully. Isn’t cheerfulness next to godliness? Oh no, that’s cleanliness —
I wasted a fake cheerful act for nothing.

Then I quietly, on little elf feet, tiptoe into another room and close the door and sit down where I think Marge will never find me. I hear a knock on the door. “Are you in there, honey?” I don’t answer. She says, “I know you are in there. I can smell your cigar reek.” So I said, “Yes, dear, me and my reek are in here. And I have a migraine. And maybe something worse if you don’t buy that. Could you come back in March?”

She laughs her Stalin laugh, and says “You know, we should take down the tree before Valentine’s Day.” The sarcasm peeled the paint off the door. “Sure, honey. I’ll hop right on it, as soon as this pounding in my head levels off.”

So, even though my left knee is feeling horrible from my recent arthroscopic surgery, and from the constant getting up and down from the couch, I say to Marge, “As the surgeon said to the amputee, you don’t have a leg to stand on.” She says, “What?” I said, “Never mind, just a little attempt at one-legged humor.”

I finished taking down the tree and I put away all the wrapping paper and name tags and bows and Christmas bags and I said, “I’m all finished, Dumpling Face.” And she said, “What?” I said, “Dumpling Face, Sir!”

I asked if there was anything else. She said there wasn’t. And paused for three seconds. And said, “Except.” (Except. Boy, that’s a killer word, isn’t it? Comes in second place, right after “you want me to do what?”) She finishes her “except” sentence, “for the guest room.” She requested nicely that “to save our marriage” it might be a good idea if I took off all the sheets and pillowcases from the beds in the guest room and put them in the washer. I sighed a really loud sigh, and said, “I don’t remember signing up for all these things when I said ‘I do’.” She said, “I do.”

I come out of the laundry room, and I pick up my car keys, and I’m walking towards the front door, and I yell to Marge, “See you in a bit. I gotta go help some charities do something.” She says, “You know, as long as you’re out, would you mind returning these shoes that Ryan didn’t want, and then stopping by the UPS store to send that espresso machine back to Amazon. It shouldn’t be too hard to wrap.”

Knowing that spousal abuse is not accepted in our culture, I said to Marge, in a soft unintelligible voice not much louder than a whisper — in a voice she could not hear — “You shouldn’t be too hard to rap, either.”

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

Sometimes I'm Almost Happy (Cigar Smoke 12-25-08)

2009-01-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

You know, it’s funny but I seem to have a reputation for not being a happy guy. I really don’t know why that is. I think of myself as a happy person. Yes, occasionally I might get a bit cynical, but not enough to put out the torch of my shining happiness. OK, maybe there’s a little pessimism thrown in there. And yes, a dash of fatalism and a few over-the-top sighs now and then. But dammit, does that make me an unhappy person?

No, it does not. What it does make me is a thinking person who – if he thought things through and saw things as they really were and acted like it was not like that – he would be lying to himself and his fake pretend happiness would be seen by his family and friends as false and ugly and downright dishonest and they would all yell at him, “Aha! You are not only unhappy but you are a lying sack of disgusting cowardly pretend happiness that none of us likes or even grudgingly would admire.”

Hey, re-read that last paragraph. There’s a lot of truth in there and I want you to be as happy as I think I am. And if you can’t figure it out, don’t tell me you can just to make me happy. Trust me, it won’t make me happy. It’ll make me think of you as everyone thinks of me. I’ll know you are just a miserable, unhappy glob of chromosomes walking around faking it.

Usually my well-disguised happiness shows up bright and bubbly at the breakfast table. I’ll just be stirring my coffee and asking Margie-Wargie how my little Muffie-Wuffie slept last night, and I’ll look down at the Los Angeles Times and I’ll read about how the drug lords down in Tijuana just killed 39 people and beheaded nine of them, and I’ll make some sort of exclamation like, “Holy crap, who does that? What kind of world do we live in?” And Marge will say “That’s a record. Took you only five seconds to get pissed off.”

Technically, of course, she may be right. Yes, I am yelling and I am loud and the skin on my forehead is tighter than Nancy Pelosi’s face. But does just getting mad make someone unhappy? I don’t think it does. It just makes me aware that I’m living in a semi-sick world and that horrible things will happen, and I will hate those horrible things and I will express my hatred of those horrible things with very audible anger. I can still pet puppies and eat hot fudge sundaes at hockey games after reading that stuff. I still have a shot at being happy. You know I’m right. Admit it — it might make me happy.

Another example of people thinking I’m not happy occurred the other night. I’m watching the tube and Deepak Chopra comes on and old Dipstick says in his freaky spiritual precious pseudo-intellectual subdued way that he thinks it’s our fault that the terrorists blew up the hotels and killed all those people in India. The learned man thinks we caused it. Chop Face doesn’t say one damn word about the actual 300 people who were slaughtered or about the fact that the murderers were Islamic terrorists. No, he just jumps right in on how bad we are here in the US and in the West. And how we need to work with these maggots.

I was so mad I threw a magazine and screamed some non-spiritual words at the TV and scared my poor old dog silly, and I was truly ticked off. Hell, I’m still mad at Sixpak and his bullshit. But, I do not think that makes me un-frigging-happy. I still think I’m a pretty happy guy trying to survive in a pretty messed-up world. Just because I get mega-pissed at the Dipstick Sixpaks of the world does not mean I am unhappy. Nope, I’m damn happy. Wanna fight?

Anyway, I finally calm down and I am happier than a lark dating a clam. That’s pretty happy. And then a few days later I’m watching “CSI: Las Vegas” and one story is about some homeowner getting harassed by some punk kids driving around with baseball bats and playing Mailbox Baseball. These punks had smashed four of his previous mailboxes, so Mr. Homeowner decides to give them a little surprise and fills the mailbox with cement.

The guy riding shotgun takes a swing at the mailbox, and indeed gets a surprise. He breaks his arm and shoulder, and the driver loses control of the car and they crash into a tree and are both killed. The mailbox and the gene pool high-five each other. But the CSI cops arrest the homeowner for negligent homicide.

There was no outrage at the four previous crimes, no being upset about trespassing and the car being on private property, and no concern that the bat swingers were driving drunk. Nope. I guess they just got on their cell phone and called DeepAss ChopSix and he told them it was the homeowner’s fault for buying his home in the first place.

OK, you finally got me. I was not happy about this one.

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

The Gift That Keeps on Taking (Cigar Smoke 12-18-08)

2008-12-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Well, as most of you who aren’t Islamic terrorists know, we’re right in the middle of the holiday season, and Marge and I are sitting on our dueling couches trying to get into the Christmas spirit. She’s reading her Kindle and I’m on my laptop looking around E-bay for something I don’t need. Nothing says Christmas like electronics.

So I casually mention that some guy in Minnesota is selling a Sirius satellite-ready radio. Not looking up from her Kindle, Marge said, “Yeah. So?” And I said, “Well, I was just wondering if he was serious about selling his Sirius.” Marge puts her Kindle down and is about to say something just south of profound and I say, “You know, I’d kind of like to have a Sirius radio for my car.” She said, “You would?” I said, “I’m serious about getting a Sirius. Seriously.” (Humor doesn’t take a vacation just because it’s joyous right now.)

Marge asked me how much it was. I said it cost $278. She said, “Why don’t I get it for you for Christmas?” I told her that would be great, and she said go ahead and buy it on E-bay, and she would reimburse me later. So I clicked the Buy It Now button and paid for it on PayPal, and life was good.

The radio came in a few days, and it was in good shape. No problems. So I went down to Al and Ed’s over by Circuit City and I spoke to Al (I don’t like Ed) and he told me that I needed a special receiver to make the radio work. I said I thought the radio was satellite-ready. He said that was kind of like thinking the girl in the massage ad is the one who’s actually going to come over to your hotel room.

I said, “Al, you are one happening dude, man. Way more happening than Ed.” Then I told him to go ahead and put the receiver in. He told me he’d like to, but he couldn’t, because you could only get this specific receiver through the dealer. So I hopped in my Durango and went over to the Dodge dealer in Glendale. I went into the parts department and I had the radio and I asked him if they had a Sirius satellite receiver he could sell me. He said he did. I said I want it. He said he’ll have it for me in a week. I said I thought you said you had it? He said I do have it. Just not here. I said, “Are you serious?”

So a week goes by and I’m smiling at Frosty the Snowman and grabbing Santa’s Sack (which I found out later was a felony) and the Dodge guy calls me to come and pick up my Sirius receiver. I drive back to Glendale, pay the nice parts gentleman $239 and think to myself that Marge must really love me for this much money and I take the radio and the receiver over to Al and Ed’s again.

I have the radio and the receiver in my arms and I try to open the door. It is locked. Nobody is there. It’s a Tuesday around 11 a.m. So I look at the hours posted on the door and it says 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I knock real loud. Nothing. Then I get a fantasy that the store employees are being held hostage by punks and that I will have to sneak around back and kill them and save the hostages and I’ll be featured in the Los Angeles Times — if it is still here.

Just as I’m about to start sneaking, Al pokes his head around the corner and says, “Can I help you?” I was pretty disappointed to not carry out my hostage freedom raid, but I told Al that I now had the receiver and could he install the radio? He looked at it. Cocked his head a couple of times, and said, “Where are the cables?” I, of course, said “What cables?” He said the cables that the dealer should have given you. I said, “Are you adjective Sirius?!”

So I drove back to the dealer’s and he apologized and said they forgot to include the installation kit. “How much is that?” I asked. He said, “$189.” I said “$189 plus the $239 I already spent on the receiver?” He said, “Yup.” I said “Is there anything else?” He said “No. No more parts.” I sighed. He went on, “Except the labor for the installation will run you about $400.” He was serious. Dead serious. I was just dead Sirius.

I said, with savage disbelief, “You mean it will cost me $278 for the radio + $239 for the receiver + $189 for the installation kit and then $400 to install it? That’s over eleven hundred bucks!” I paused to whimper. Then I said, “Hell, you could hire a homeless guy to sit in your front seat for a year and hum “Yankee Doodle” for that much.
My wife could buy a new husband for that.”

He laughed. I guess he wasn’t serious. Then I told him to refund me my $239 for the receiver and I would just have to get by without any satellite radio and just keep my damn ordinary, friends-in-low-places, cheap-ass, commercial-packed AM-FM.

I went home and thanked Marge for the gift that kept on taking. She said she was sorry about the radio, but I was right in assuming I wasn’t worth over 1,100 bucks for a gift, and by the way, could I help her assemble the new fake tree she got at Home Depot. Merry Christmas!

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

An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving (Cigar Smoke 12-4-08)

2008-12-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve always enjoyed Thanksgiving. I think it’s the best holiday of the year. You gather with your family and friends and the women do all the work and you just eat and watch football and rough up the kids a little and complain about getting fat. It’s perfect.

This year it was a little more perfect than usual. We all decided to chip in and bring various dishes so the little hostess woman of the house wouldn’t break down and cry at the end of the day. Somebody brought a great salad and this nifty bean dish with nuts and sliced almonds, and somebody else brought an incredible yam dish with three — count ’em, three — different color yams. I’m not kidding. Regular orange yams, and then white yams and purple yams. Three layers of colored yams topped off with a layer of oven-toasted marshmallows. And someone else brought an eggnog/pumpkin pie. You could hear the calories. And because I am what? I am a health addict. I brought the box of See’s Candy.

All in all, we had 12 people in the house. Plus three dogs. Our good dog, Hadley, and two rat-yappy dogs. They got along pretty well. The two yappers literally did vertical jumps right onto unsuspecting laps. They were like Air Force test planes taking off with no runway. Just straight up into the wild blue lap yonder. And Hadley, the good dog, was so tired from all the damn fun that he collapsed right in the pathway from the kitchen to the family room, and he just laid there like a canine corpse and we used him as an obstacle course all day.

Because we weren’t sure if we would get enough to eat, we started out with a few appetizers. Had some greasy salt-plastered garlic potato chips for the men, and had these Whole Foods chips made out of recycled whole-grain blue-flour tortillas from some adobe hut in some village in Guatemala for the women, and we dipped those gender- specific babies into some unisex humus. Some good eatin’ there.

Nobody got stomach cramps so we had some pistachio nuts in a giant bowl where we would just throw the empty shells back into the same bowl because some unnamed member of the family thought that the search for the next pistachio nut was “more challenging and thus more rewarding” than just picking out a pistachio from a non-shelled bowl. That person may be finding out soon what the singles scene is like.

Then somebody (probably a commie from my wife’s side of the family) brought out a platter of vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and cucumbers and celery sticks all arranged around some white loser glob of congealed crud that the humus just laughed at. All the guys tried to make the kids eat this stuff. Because we were good parents and good grandparents and because healthy children were our lives — and because some of the kids had come dangerously close to reaching into our garlic chip bag.

Then it was time to carve the turkey. And as you might expect, I am the official turkey carver for the Laris-Wood clan. I have been carving the turkey for approximately 47 years now. I think I do a pretty damn good job of it, especially now that I don’t use a live turkey. Some of those turkey screams in past years were heartbreaking.

We had a great meal! It would have made the Pilgrims proud that they had lied to the Indians and stolen their land. It was that good. Just a fantastic meal. All the regular stuff — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the three-layered yam-marshmallow deal, green beans, homemade cranberry sauce, flakey-ass rolls, salad and something I’m forgetting. Oh yeah, the gravy. It was almost liquid this year. That spread could have fed Haiti for maybe a week.

So, after feeling guilty for a minute or two, we went back into the family room to watch our third lousy football game of the day. Detroit got wiped out in the morning, Dallas made fun of whatever a Seahawk is in the afternoon and Texas pretty much horn-hooked Texas A&M until they agreed not to use abbreviations for their school name. It was ugly. Three really bad football games for the men of America. If Bush was still president, I know this wouldn’t have happened.

With no more football to watch, we helped each other up from the sofas and waddled out to the kitchen counter for some pie. Because of the bad economy, we only had four kinds of pie to choose from — apple, pumpkin, pecan and eggnog/pumpkin. And I think they would have been pretty good to eat, too. If the “incident” hadn’t occurred.

OK, maybe I had a little too much to drink. It’s hazy, but I think I recall somebody giving me one of those pissy little energy drinks and maybe I added a little Johnny Walker energy of my own to it. And yes, maybe this happened more than once.

Anyway, all I can remember is one of my sons having this panicked look on his face, and loudly saying, “Dad, put down the automatic knife. You don’t carve pie!” And then everything went dark.

Can’t wait until Christmas.

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

Land Hunting with Jim and Lennie (Cigar Smoke 11-27-08)

2008-11-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

For maybe the past 30 years I have had a dream of owning a little piece of land. Nothing spectacular or expensive — maybe a few acres in the country, or a spot next to a lake. Just a place of my own.

I feel like that big, thick-thinking guy Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” Lennie is always asking George, his conflicted buddy, to tell him about how they’ll find their own little piece of land someday. George always soothes Lennie with the story, but (spoiler alert) they never get there.

Oh, I have owned a regular house before, but that’s always felt more like owning a little piece of a mortgage. I want something special. Something unique. Even something funky. I’ll know it when I see it. Maybe a piece of pornography by a stream.
Everywhere I go, I’m always looking in newspapers to find just the right spot. Whenever I get to some town in Montana or Idaho or Oregon or Alaska, I immediately turn to the classifieds and start dreaming. But I never seem to find just the exact right spot — basically, because I’m cheap and don’t have the guts to act. If it weren’t for those two factors, Lennie and I would be sitting on the porch right now spitting sunflower seeds to the squirrels.

One time this real estate agent took me out to a cottage on a lake in Michigan. She asked me if I would like to make an offer. I said, “How does $40,000 sound?” She said, “It sounds like $240,000 less than the asking price.”

Another time I found this perfect, funky double-wide trailer up in some isolated town in Washington state. In the damn forest, right next to a river. And it was only $20,000. So what does your gutless land-dreaming columnist do? I’ll tell you what your favorite spineless excuse for a little-piece-of-land-dreaming, coward-ass dork does: He says he will “think it over” for a while. And he thinks it over for two weeks, and when he finally calls to buy it, the owner tells him he has sold it to a guy who didn’t think it over. For $15,000!

I would have killed myself, but luckily I had to think that over first.

I’ve been searching for something for three decades now. (Some might say I’m looking for something other than a little piece of land, like maybe a friggin’ clue.) I still search the classifieds for that idyllic place. But now, because I am what? Because I am modern, I now search the Web and have become addicted to Craigslist.

Every morning, every afternoon, every evening, I pop onto Craigslist and hunt for that perfect place. I’ve got keyboard bruises on the tips of my fingers. And I have now physically gone out on three searches that my Web-surfing fingers have pointed me to.

A couple of weeks ago, I’m on Craigslist and I hit the California button. It takes me to a screen with all the counties on it. I go to the Humboldt County button, and damned if right off the finger-searching bat I don’t find a funky place for sale out on the Samoa Peninsula, next to Arcata, where I went to school at Humboldt State.

And I mean funky. It’s a manufactured home right on the bay. The agent and I go out there, and it is so foggy we can barely read the tsunami warning area signs. I’m not making that up, dammit! My dream home was in a tsunami danger zone. Pretty cool, huh?

Because it looked so promising, we wanted to go inside, but something stopped us. The urine stench. We opened the door, and that smell rushed out like an escaped convict, baby. We took a whiff, and then we took a hike. The last thing that smelled that bad had police tape around it.

My damn dream has been jolted again. But I don’t give up. I go up the coast to Crescent City and I find this really cool house right next to the ocean at the mouth of a rushing river. It’s beautiful. Ocean waves pounding, otters and seals lounging on the sand spits and rugged rocks, and redwoods on the hills behind the house. And best of all was that my new address would be 12544 Mouth of the Smith River. Wow! Can you believe that for an address!

So did I buy my dream house? Well, the price is a little higher than I wanted, and I guess I’ll have to think it over for a while. So, I’m still getting my mail at some loser address in Altadena.

I guess you all know that in the end, George had to shoot poor Lennie. It was very sad. While he was telling Lennie the story about the little piece of land for one last time, George put a bullet in Lennie’s head.

And just before Lennie died, he turned to George and said, “Would you check Craigslist for me in the morning?”

Tuesdays With Hadley (Cigar Smoke 11-20-08)

2008-11-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

My dog, Hadley, is getting pretty old. He’s about 12 now, and the lifespan for Airedales is between 11 and 14 years. So, because he’s a very smart dog, and because he uses a really big calculator with extra large paw buttons, he knows he’s pretty much a fellow single-digit traveler, much like his single-digit (in expectancy and IQ) owner.

Old Airedale Face has a few medical problems. He was born blind in his right eye, but except for the occasional clunking of his head on an unseen fence post to his right, it’s never really bothered him much. And he did break a hip when he was younger and it never healed right. But up until about six months ago, all in all, he was hanging in there pretty well.

Then things took a more negative turn. He’s got severe arthritis in his back legs and he can barely get up now. He just struggles and struggles and it’s painful to watch. I still take him on hobbles every morning, but he can’t walk far. His legs are unstable and he stops a lot. Reminds me of someone I know.

For the past few months he has not been able to control his bowel movements. He leaves us little “Easter eggs” every day now. He has his doggie bed in our bedroom and every morning we get up and expect to find more Easter eggs. And in keeping with the holiday spirit, Hadley usually gives us something to find.

And it’s not just at bedtime. Marge and I will be watching “Mad Men” on TV and one of us will smell something, and then we’ll look around and see Hadley over in the corner whistling and cocking his long head to the side, and we know it’s time to get out the Easter Basket.

A lot of times he doesn’t even know he’s going. He can be lying down, and almost defy the laws of physics. One time I was sitting on the couch and petting him, and he was licking my face from the front end and depositing on my toes from the back end. I think there’s a message there.

And sometimes he’ll just be walking along without a care in his canine world, and he will be leaving a trail of non-omelet eggs. Marge or I will be running right behind him, yelling tender love yells, and suggesting that he wait for another five seconds and do it outside. But Hadley is his own Peter Rabbit, and he defecates to a different drummer.

Well, after about a half a year of this, and after a number of carpet cleaning bills, and after a general exhaustion of our obscenity options, and after Hadley had laughed at the doggie diapers we got him, we made the decision to at least control him overnight. So we made a little dog segregation area in one of our bathrooms, and we put his bed in there, and we put in a metal gate thing to block him from doing his fecal fun on the carpet. We figured it would be easier to just pick up the eggs from the bathroom tile floor.

We figured wrong. Because Hadley’s legs were so bad, he couldn’t get any traction on the slick tile and he couldn’t get up, and because there was no lack of eggs on the said tile, well, many of the eggs became accessories to Hadley’s fur, paws, side, back, butt, stomach, haunches, toes, tail, and teeth. And maybe even worse, Hadley hated it in there.

So I did something a Republican has never done before — I went to a Home Depot. I had two custom pieces of outdoor carpet cut into the exact sizes I needed. And I bought a carpet cutter tool just to be manly. And, yes, as long as I was there, I ate one of those healthy Home Depot hot dogs.

I bring all the stuff home and here’s what I do: I put Hadley’s bed back in our bedroom so he will love us. I put the two sections of outdoor carpet over our good carpet in an L-shaped area going from his bed around our bed. I close the bedroom door, and I put up the metal gate thing on the other end of the L-shaped carpet section. We now have an Easter egg acceptance area that rocks with both canine consideration and fecal utility. It was Easter-egg-proof. Not a square inch of good carpet to be even aimed at, let alone targeted successfully.

The perfect solution — Hadley loves it, Marge loves it. I love it because I thought of it.

So last night was the first night we used it. Everything went great. Hadley did not whimper. Marge was not fumbling around with the divorce papers. Me and my snore machine were sleeping. It was beautiful.

And then we noticed that the closet door was slightly nudged in. And we gently pushed back the door. And there, lying on the only exposed six-inch area of beautiful, formerly fecal-free carpet was, shall we say, an egg of a different color. The only six inches in the entire room, and Hadley had butt-nudged the closet door to expose it. It was incredible.

Yes, Virginia, there is an Easter Bunny.

Taking It In The Shorts (Cigar Smoke 11-13-08)

2008-11-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

Well, I hate to admit it, but I’m devastated by the election. I feel raw inside. And I’m sure many of you are pretty damn concerned for me. I know you feel my pain. So I’m devastated. So be it.

I congratulate Barack Obama. I salute the guy. I think he ran the greatest campaign in American history. He kicked Hillary’s butt and took the other shoe and kicked John’s tush, too. And for the record, I think Obama is head and damn shoulders above either John Kerry or Al Gore. I would take Obama over those two stiffs any day. And I am glad that a black person has been elected president. I just wish it wasn’t this one.

So I salute Obama for his win. And he won the thing fair and square. I’m not going to whine. Yes, I feel like whining. But I am not going to go there. The guy beat us like a damn drum.

I will quibble with a few things, however. I don’t think quibbling is as unseemly as out-and-out whining. First of all, this whole change thing is disturbing to me. Not just because my guy lost. Like on election night, in his acceptance speech, Obama did a rather poor imitation of Martin Luther King when he said something like even if he personally didn’t get there, we would get there as a people.

What the hell does that mean? I’m serious. What is he talking about? Literally. Where is the “there”? I’m sure a lot of you just think I am dense, but would someone tell me in real words —without using the word hope or idealism — where does he want us to go? I really don’t know. Do you? What is on the mountaintop? And why won’t he get there? Why will we get there and he won’t? Why the drama?

Probably the most disturbing thing to me in the campaign was how Obama kept saying he would “fundamentally transform America.” I, for one, do not want America fundamentally transformed. I think America is the greatest country ever conceived and has been and remains the greatest country in the world. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have built the best country ever.

America has created the greatest democratic system of government ever known. We have championed freedom (not equality) to build the best economic system ever known. Capitalism, with all its shortcomings, has proved incredibly better than socialism. Our standard of living and quality of health care for such a large population is unprecedented. Our military has saved the world from many, many scumbag dictators and tyrants. We’re the most generous people ever to inhabit the planet, dwarfing help given by any other country. You want to change all that?

The fact that we even elected a black man to be president is the most recent proof of this. Not that I personally give a shit about race. I could care less that Obama is black. Sure, there is the historical symbolism and all that, but I would never vote for a person because of his skin color. Although I didn’t vote for Obama, I would have voted for Colin Powell a while back, and I would have voted for Condoleezza Rice this year. You know, sometimes discrimination isn’t racism.

Democrats have been pounding us on how bad we are here. How racist we are. How backward we are. Yada friggin yada. Well, over 50 million people voted for a black guy for president. Without Republicans and independents joining the Democrats and voting for him, he would have lost. You wanna change that?

Maybe now we won’t have to listen to the usual Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton blather. There’s a nice change. Maybe we can now shelve all those outdated affirmative action quotas.

You know, this change thing is growing on me.

Obama has openly said that he wants to have the Supreme Court redefine how our school system should be funded to help minorities. Wow! There’s a damn change for you. Why do we even need an executive branch of government or Congress or a Constitution or local governments?

And he advocates redistribution of our wealth. What those big words mean is that if you make $80,000 a year, he would like to take $60,000 of it and give it to three guys who haven’t worked, so everyone will be equal and make $20,000. Yes, I was exaggerating a little there, but not that much. Obama wants to change from equality of opportunity to just plain old equality. That’s a change I don’t want.

One last quibble. Obama says he wants to unify all of us in one glorious united America. Democrats and Republicans holding hands and singing John Denver songs. Pro-life church members coming over to pro-abortion advocates’ houses for nice Sunday dinners. Anti-war demonstrators throwing back a few beers with Marines. Rush Limbaugh and Nancy Pelosi dating. It’s gonna be nifty.

And while Obama was giving his inspirational and unifying acceptance speech, a large throng of Georgetown and other DC college students were out in front of the White House, mocking and jeering President Bush.

I’m feeling warm and fuzzy already.

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

2008-11-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

Getting Clipped (Cigar Smoke 11-6-08)

2008-11-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

By the time you read this, the election will be over. Thank God. Or, as you Democrats say, thank my secular/spiritual essence.

Because I am into self-delusion, I figure I will be happy either way. If McCain wins, I’ll just be plain old slam-dunk happy. If Obama wins, maybe I won’t have to listen to all the Bush-bashing bullshit anymore.

So, to hell with politics for now. Let’s get back to the important things in life — like deciding if you should get a pedicure. I am really having a hard time with this one. As you know, I am now in my single-digit life-expectancy period and I have a semi-serious bad back and my eyesight ain’t that good and I am as rigid and inflexible in my physical being as I am in my political thinking and, OK, maybe I’m a little lankier than I should be, so it is very hard for me to bend down to cut my toenails.
For the past year I have gone through incredible gyrations just to reach my toes and when I finally reach my toes I have to re-gyrate to cut the damn nails off. It is really tough. For a while there, I would sit down on the toilet seat (with the cover down) and reach slowly towards my feet. However, with my back problem, I know I have to keep my head straight because if I bend my neck — even just a little — as I’m reaching down, it will throw my damn back out.

So I have to kind of guess where my toenails are. With my head straight, I just glance down with my eyes to try to see where to cut. This is not easy. I usually clip a few of ’em fine. But I almost always cut into the quick on a couple of others, and it hurts and it bleeds — I know you feel my pain. Even you Democrats are probably pretty upset right now.

And I’ve tried other solutions. I’ve lain down on my back and tried to bring my feet up to my hands. I’ve put my foot up on higher solid pieces of furniture to get a better angle. I’ve asked Marge if she would mind cutting the toenails of her beloved wonderful husband who still makes her heart sing and she mentioned something about something freezing over. Oh yeah, it was hell. Hell freezing over. That was it.

So then I saw this ad in Geezer Life magazine in the “You’re Not Quite Dead Yet” section. The ad was for a long-handled pair of toenail clippers. A long-handled pair of nail clippers. Oh my secular/spiritual essence, my prayers had been answered. I could not believe there was such a product. I would have had an orgasm if I could remember what that was.

I sent for this life-saving gadget immediately because my toenails were out of my socks and heading for my shoes. When the long-handled babies finally came in the mail, I ran to the bathroom and shut the door. It kind of reminded me of when I used to read the articles in Playboy and not look at the pictures a long time ago. Anyway, I rip open the package and take these long-handled suckers out, and am expecting to get some major-league toenail-cutting relief.

But, I did not. With the long handle, you can get down to your toes easy enough, but the damn things don’t have enough leverage to actually cut the toenails. Man, it was so disappointing. I was devastated. Really. I felt hopeless. And I know Obama won’t do anything about this if he gets in. The bastard.

So now I’m deciding if I should be a girly geezerman and get a pedicure. I have never had a pedicure in my life. Hell, I have never even had a manicure. I don’t know. Is it legal to get a pedicure before you’ve had a manicure? Or, in this economy, is it even moral to get a pedicure when poor people are getting by without high definition TVs? I just don’t know.

But most of all, it’s just scary. I’m filled with anxiety and insecurity about going in for a pedicure. What do you do? Do you just sit there like in a barber’s chair? Does someone come up to you, and you say, “Just a trim, please.” Or do you say, “I’ll have the Brad Pitt cut.” What if the pedicure person has a foot fetish and finds my feet irresistible? What if she says, “From the ankles down, you’re not bad looking, gramps.”

Do they take off your shoes and socks, or do you? Do they wash your feet first? Or do they just keel over backwards when they take your socks off? Do they buff your newly cut toenails? Do they tie you to the chair and put clear toenail polish on them? Do they laugh at you? Do they point at you? Do they make toenail jokes? “This toenail walked into a bar …”

And how much does it cost for a pedicure? I have no doubledamn idea how much it should cost. I could be ripped off by a fraudulent, unlicensed, unscrupulous pedicurist. And what about tipping? Do you tip by the toe? Is that how they came up with the expression tippy-toe?

This is all too much for me. I’m going back to politics.

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

Barack Bizaro Obama (Cigar Smoke 10-30-08)

2008-10-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like Barack Hussein Obama has a pretty good shot at winning this thing. And if he does, more power to him. He’s run a great campaign. He beat the pants suit off of Hillary. He played the Internet like Slick Willie played the sax. I have to give the guy credit.

However, I was just wondering if a Republican candidate, who had the same qualifications and had the same questionable associations that Obama had, would have done quite as well. Why don’t we just make up a candidate and let’s call him Tommy Adolf Obama.

Tommy just came on the political scene about three years ago at the Republican National Convention. He gave an inspirational nominating speech and he was damn good looking, too. Kind of looked like a young Harry Belafonte. More charismatic than JFK on steroids. Women swooned. So did gay men. Heterosexual men considered it.

And Tommy was, of course, half black and half white. His father was black and had abandoned him, and his mother was white and had raised him and sacrificed for him and encouraged him to reach for the sky. So, it was an easy choice. He decided to call himself white.

And what qualifications for the presidency did Tommy have? He was an attorney. He used to be a community organizer in Chicago. He was a senator from Illinois with a few years experience in the US Senate. He didn’t know much about foreign affairs or the economy or running a large entity like a state or a government department or even a company. He pretty much relied on his eloquence and his coolness.

So Tommy decided to go for it. He put his name in the hat and started running for president. And damned if he didn’t do pretty well at it. The press was behind him and he was never challenged too much and nobody ever asked him any tough questions and the press pretty much trashed his primary opponents. And damned if old Tommy didn’t get the Republican nomination to lead his party against the Democrats.

The Democrats were running an experienced man who had been in the Senate for about 30 years and had served his country well in the military and this guy was well versed in foreign affairs and had actual dealings with some of the bad guys of the world. So he was pretty formidable, but Tommy never faltered.

Tommy said, “I’m younger than he is. I’m better looking than he is. And I’m more eloquent than he is. I’m even taller than he is. I’ve organized way more communities than he has. And I don’t have jaw cancer, either. What’s the problem?”

So Tommy kept running his campaign. And all the young Republican girls swooned at his campaign appearances and all the movie stars thought Tommy was cool, too, and they fought the young girls to see who could get closer to him to swoon. Tommy laughed at the pushing and shoving, and he put his arm around the shoulders of the neutral press and kept that train on the track, baby. It was truly a beautiful thing to see. Kind of like a manger with neon lights. It made his Republican religious-right base quiver with a kind of spiritual delight. Hallelujah.

Everything was going great until the Democrats started to question some of Tommy’s old associations. He had been going to a church for the past 20 years and his minister had railed against blacks and Jews and those Muslim “bastards.” And his minister, Billy Graham, who by the way, had married Tommy and his wife (who said she never really liked the country all that much), screamed out “God damned America!” It was pretty ugly. But Tommy said he never heard any of that stuff. That’s good enough for us, huh?

And then some crazy fool had the nerve to ask old Tommy about someone else in his past. A guy named Tony something who had helped him buy his house in shall we say, a non-sunny deal. Tommy had bought an expensive house in a very nice area, and Tommy had only paid one-third the fair market price that his neighbors had paid. Tommy said he made a good deal and that people should just back off. Wouldn’t be right to challenge that.

And finally Tommy had to deal with another person in his past. This guy was a former Ku Klux Klan member and when the press asked this Klan jerk-off about what he’d done, he said, “I only wish I could have done more against those people. We didn’t do enough. If only we’d had more rope.”

When they brought this up to Tommy, he said, “I was only 8 when this happened.” When the press mentioned that Tommy was in his 30s when he launched his political career in Mr. KKK’s house, Tommy was speechless. He eloquently said nothing.

The press pushed and asked Tommy why he worked on the same board that Mr. KKK worked on when Tommy was in his 40s. And Tommy Adolf Obama said, “I think I was still eight, wasn’t I?”

Just sayin.

The Big Lug (Cigar Smoke 10-23-08)

2008-10-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

I rarely think about schlepping, unless I am the one doing the schlepping. For those of you who don’t know what schlepping is, come on over to my house. I have a few very meaningful tasks I need help with.

Like most of you, I have done a lot of schlepping in my life. I remember a long time ago when I was about 17 and my family and friends all went to the beach for a big old beach bash and weenie roast and sand in your butt-crack event.

We had three cars full of people and beach crap and we get to the beach and everyone piles out of the cars and runs to the beach to frolic. I’m a little late in getting out of the car and I am a little late in the intelligence department and I’m standing there and pitifully pleading to a bunch of deaf people, “What about the ice chest and all this stuff? I need help. Please!” They don’t even look back. They just frolic their guiltless asses down to the seashore.

So I take the ice chest out of the trunk. It’s full of, well, ice. And cans of soda. It is heavy. It is heavier than Rosie O’Donnell after eating her second KFC bucket. I wrestle the ice chest out of the trunk and then I start carrying it toward the shoreline of death, four miles away. This, of course, would be bad enough, but I am also trying to carry a handful of beach towels and two folding chairs and some swim fins and a bag of sandwiches, so I won’t have to make two trips.

I can’t finish this story. All I remember is that about a fifth of the way there, I started to sweat, and the sweat was getting on my hands and I couldn’t grip the ice chest and it kept slipping, and all the other beach crap was falling everywhere, and I felt unappreciated and ignored and I wanted to cry, but the sand in my eyes soaked up the tears so all I could do was attempt to make this pathetic little crying sound, but no sound would come out and I went blind from sweaty-sand-in-the-eye-syndrome and I hated life and hated my family and hated my frigging friends and I purposely stepped right into the middle of a little kid’s sand castle just to hear what the sound of crying was like. It was my introduction to schlepping. “Hello, schlepping.”

Schlepping replied, “Bite me, loser.”

Through the years, I have had many moments of schlepping. When my darling children were both toddlers, I schlepped all their playpens and cribs and strollers and jammies and teddy bears and toys and rockets and food jars full of squished peas and diapers full of squished pea results. I have done it all. I have schlepped where no man has ever schlepped before. If I had a nickname it would be “Schleppy.” And if I was a folk-singer and if I had a hammer I would kill Schleppy. Yes, I would keep hitting Schleppy over and over while a nice, lilting folksong melody lingered in the background.

I guess you can see I’m a little sensitive to schlepping. I thought most of my schlepping days were behind me. I was wrong. Marge, The Schlepping Master, asked me last fall if I would mind helping her Soroptimist Club at its annual auction. I said, “It’s not on a Sunday, is it?” She said, “Why, yes, it is? Why do you ask?” I started to say “NFL football” but I couldn’t get it out and just sobbed to myself and started looking for a hammer.

So I helped her at the auction. I schlepped some stuff into the house where they were holding the auction. It was pretty minor-league schlepping. Not too much crud. Nothing too heavy. And the auction went off smoothly and they made money to help out humanity and I was getting ready to go home and I noticed something strange. I was one of the only men left there. (The other men were what? They were smarter than me.)

I schlepped our stuff back to the car. And then I looked over at Marge and she had this pre-schlepping authorization expression on her face. I said, “What is it?” She said something about all the folding chairs had to be taken out to the back and there weren’t any men around except one guy who was faking a leg injury and would I be a wonderful husband and help them out. I said, “Can I be back to the house by 5:15 for the Sunday night game?”

Anyway, I schlepped for about an hour, back and forth, taking the folding chairs somewhere they weren’t, and the guy with the fake leg injury wouldn’t look directly at me, and I got all sweaty from my schlepping and on my final trip back to get my last folding chair. I was so sweaty that — and I am not making this up — my pants fell down. Just slipped right off my sweaty hips. (Calm down, ladies.)

Yup, I was standing there sweating my schlep sweat and my pants were draped around my ankles and I looked up and the fake leg guy was looking at my pants and he looked up at me and said, “What are you doing after the auction?”
I said, “I’m gonna get a hammer and kill a folk-singer. Wanna come along?”

Fist-Fighting Fun (Cigar Smoke 10-16-08)

2008-10-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

I was just sitting around the house the other day, just feeling better than other people because I owned an iPhone, and I got to thinking about fighting. Not gang fighting or road rage fighting or shooting- each-other-with-guns fighting, just regular old fist-fighting.

Fighting for me started pretty young. When I was 5 I would go around my neighborhood and I would ask my pint-sized friends to smell my knuckles. And when they did, I would pop ‘em. Gave out a lot of bloody noses and my parents had a lot of other parents coming over to the house to find out what kind of monster they had raised.

My favorite fight as a 5-year old was with a guy named Gary Skeen. Gary and I got into it for some reason, and we exchanged a few toddler blows, and then he started to run away. Well, I chased him and he ran into his house. He thought he was safe. He was wrong. I opened the front door and ran in after him and tracked him down in his bedroom and started whaling on him.

His old man was a cop, and he just kept looking at me. He didn't stop the fight - just let me beat up his kid. And when I was leaving, our eyes met and there was a look of admiration in his eyes. Some kid had busted into his house, the house of a cop, and beat up his kid, right in front of him. I'll always remember that look.

My next memorable fist-fight was with Dale Cooper at 98th Street Elementary School. We were in the sixth grade. Dale and I were each the leaders of our own little band of peewee tough guys. Kind of like a gang, but not really. You were either with Dale, or you were with me. We ruled the sixth grade!

Anyway, one fateful day, Dale and I were playing tetherball, and it got pretty heated and down and dirty. Both of our packs of buddies were watching, and then it turned from tetherball to fistball. I don't know how it escalated, but we just started banging on each other, and as I recall, it was a pretty cool fight. About 30 kids cheering us on on the asphalt. Just throwing punches and rolling around. Both of us got bloodied up pretty good, and when some teacher broke it up, everybody booed. It doesn't get much better than that. (Note: after the fight Dale and I became best of friends. There's a message there somewhere.)

The best fight I ever got into was on high school graduation night. At our school we had a Grad Night Party at some fancy hotel in Santa Monica and we stayed out all night. So we're at this party and everybody is dancing, and this guy, Kent Smith, cuts in on somebody who was dancing with a girl I had a crush on. Kent was pretty wasted and he kind of flicked this other guy away from her and started dancing with my crush-babe who didn't know who the hell I was.

Well, being the delusional male that I've always been, I thought I could come to her rescue and take Kent's roaming paws off her (hopefully) virginal shoulders and maybe someday put my own roaming paws on those grateful shoulders. Well, I went up behind Kent, and put my right hand on his left shoulder, and started to pull him off her. He did not take too kindly to this. How do I know? Well, as I was pulling his left shoulder, he was turning and throwing his right fist at my only nose.

He clocked me, baby. Just unloaded a big right hand. Bam! And the funny thing was he didn't even know who he was hitting. He just turned and threw. My damsel-saving face just happened to be right there to be hit. Hell, it could have been Mother Teresa - he wouldn't have cared. He just put my fist-fighting ass right on the floor, baby.

Well, I cleared my head a little and I went after him. It was a great fight. Like we were in a movie. We're in this ritzy hotel and we're fighting a good even fight, trading punch for punch, and I knock him over some couch in the lobby and then I leap over the couch to jump on him and get him again. (Errol Flynn, eat your heart out.) And damned if he doesn't knock me back over the couch and everybody is making a ring around us and lamps are breaking and we're falling onto coffee tables and there was blood on our white tuxedo shirts and our cummerbunds were not covering what cummerbunds were supposed to be covering and there were spilled drinks and scared girls shrieking and drunk guys yelling and damn it was fun.

And the girl I saved was so beholden to me that she got married a few months later to a guy named Trent - because he had gotten her pregnant in a 1957 Chevy at Grad Night while Kent and I were fighting.

I Hate Sports and the Horse it Rode in On (Cigar Smoke 10-9-08)

2008-10-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Nope, it is not easy being a sports fan. And I’m not just talking about being an LA Kings fan. (That’s being masochistic.) I’m talking about regular teams that are good and have legitimate chances of winning and they break your damn heart and you want to kill yourself and cry after you’re dead.

Like, let’s take Sept. 25. Just a couple of weeks ago. A regular Thursday. I was feeling pretty damn happy and was walking around with my head held high and my stomach held out and my arrogance was really working for me, and most of the people I know hated me even more than usual because the Dodgers had clinched their division and SC was ranked No. 1 in the country and I was more insufferable than succotash.

And then within a span of six hours SC got beat by a midget up at Oregon State and my sports joy was wiped out and I wanted to hurt panda bears and break things and cry and whine and blame and become a Beaver fan and burn the house and die. The sports gods had turned on me. In one day. In one-fourth of a day. They just couldn’t let me bask in my arrogance for a freaking full day.

I know you’re feeling my pain. Especially you UCLA fans. All I can say is thanks and, Brigham Young 59-0. I think I’m starting to recover.

The misery of being a sports fan can rear its ugly noggin in a lot of ways. Just before the Dodgers got into the playoffs I went to a game at Dodger Stadium, and I was watching Manny be Manny, and choking on a corned beef sandwich (me, not Manny) with no condiments on it, and it’s the seventh inning so we’re all standing up and stretching and singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” and this German guy behind me is talking real loud in a German accent and he’s saying, “You know, you Americans are kind of crazy. Just vat is Crackerjacks, anyway?” I am not making this up. He actually inquired as to what Crackerjacks is.

So I turned around to him and I said, “You don’t know what Crackerjacks is? You Third Reich goose-stepping swine maggot, how would you feel if I came over to one of your boot-stomping Nazi cities and saw some long stubby round brown things being grilled and I said “Just what is sausages, anyway? What would you say to that, Bratwurst Face?!”

He didn’t respond, so I said, “What if I went to one of your October gardens and watched a bunch of you suspender-sporting gazuntites all polka-ing your industrial-weight butts off and I inquired as to what you were drinking? Is zat beer?” Ah, sauerkraut this!

OK, I’m calming down.

I’m not sure how much longer I can keep being a sports fan. My blood pressure is now measured by how far blood spurts out my nose and hits the sidewalk. I’m up to being able to spurt over a hopscotch chalk outline now.

Another example of sports fan torture: I decide to go to an NFL game. It’s the first pro football game I’ve been to since the Rams left LA. So I buy three pretty pricy tickets for a Chargers game. The home opener. These tickets are not cheap. They’re on the 30-yard line, about 18 rows up. Damn good seats. So I invite my son Casey and his girlfriend Jessie to go with me.

We take the Metro down to Qualcom Stadium and go inside and sit down at our wonderful (expensive) seats, and I am smiling like I’m a pretty cool parent and Casey and Jessie should be grateful and always somehow owe me. So the game starts and we all stand up to cheer on the Chargers. Go Chargers! Kill those guys in different colored uniforms! We don’t care if they are other people’s husbands and sons. Kill them!

And then we sit down. But the fans in front of us do not sit down. I think, OK, maybe it’s some San Diego tradition to stand for the first series of plays. So we stand up and cheer. Go Chargers! Maim those brothers and uncles of other families! Make their sisters and aunts cry!

Well, those rat-bastard fans stood up for the whole game. Yes, the first 17 rows of fans all stood up for the entire game. We, being in the 18th row, had to stand up, too, and I, being a person who has been old enough to drink now for 46 years, had to stand too. I did not like this. My legs did not like this. My bones did not like this. My diabetes and hypertension were arguing. I did not like traveling for two hours and paying a lot of money to stand up for three-and-a-half hours in 90-degree heat. I did not like this. I was an angry sports fan. My cheers changed. Go Chargers! Kill the fans in front of us! After you kill them, Chargers, make their lifeless bodies be horizontal so we can see over them and see you kill Carolina Panther players like we paid for! Go Chargers!

I hate sports. I hate the horse that sports rode in on. I hate horses without riders. I hate riders without horses, who are sometimes referred to as pedestrians. I hate pedestrians. I hate pedestrians who like sports. I’m just giving up on sports and going back to what I do best.

Complaining.

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

180 Degrees from Somewhere (Cigar Smoke 10-2-08)

2008-10-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

You know what I like about life? You just never know what the hey-hey is going to happen. That’s what I like. Like the other day I get up and I go to my computer and I have this little reminder that pops up that I have to send a photo I took on my iPhone to my old friend, Jim Ludwig. He’s 20 days older than me, dammit!

I hadn’t been able to figure out how to do this until my son, Casey, showed me, and lovingly added on, “You dummy.” Anyway, I actually transferred the photo from my iPhone to my Mac and then I emailed it to Jim the Elder as an attachment. I’ll wait until the applause dies down.

Jim gets the photo and emails back to me, “Thanks, I didn’t think you’d be able to figure that out. You just learned how to use the on/off switch last year.” Jim and I have had a great friendship for about 60 years. The only other thing I have ever had for about 60 years is bowel movements.

Anyway, Jim asked me if I would like to have lunch, so I email back to him that I have a wild hair and I would like to go to an old favorite of mine from high school called Kelbo’s in Culver City. It’s a Hawaiian barbecue kind of place that had great appetizers and rum drinks and all that bullshit. I like that in a restaurant.

So Jim says he’ll check it out first and get back to me. Well, he does. And he breaks my heart and tells me that Kelbo’s is gone —it is now a gentlemen’s club. My heart comes back to life a little and I ask Jim if he thinks they offer barbecue sauce with the lap dances. Jim says, “Why don’t you let me pick out the lunch spot this time, dummy.” He and Casey must have talked.

So he finds some place in Azusa that he found on something called Yelp online. He said he tried to find a Hawaiian-type barbecue place and all he could come up with was a Thai place that specialized in barbequed country food. I told him he was the perfect guy to fix the sub-prime fiasco. So instead of going to Kelbo’s in Culver City we went to Thai Piglets in Azusa. Holy barbecue sauce. Now that’s pretty damn life, isn’t it? If that ain’t 180 degrees from somewhere, then I don’t know my compass, baby.

He comes over to pick me up in his new Prius hutmobile and I help him wind the rubber band and we start off to Azusa. Actually, I was impressed. The Prius is pretty cool. It’s part electric, part gasoline, and part sewing machine. It has this little indicator gizmo that shows you how many miles per gallon you’re getting while you’re driving. (Most of us just have our wives.) Like sometimes he’d be getting 50 miles per gallon and then he’d go down a hill and he’d literally be getting 100 miles per gallon. He averages over 40 miles per gallon. My Dodge Durango uses the Ross Perot method of fuel-use measurement. You just hear the sucking sound.

So we get to the Thai barbecue place and I ask him why he picked this fine eating establishment, and he said because somebody on Yelp said it had sticky tables. Now that’s why Jim and I have been friends for so long. Sticky tables! Yes! It’s a lot harder to knock over your iced tea.

Anyway, we’re eating our giant globs of health food and adding our own BBQ sauce to the stickiness build-up, and I look over behind Jim and there is this guy in the next booth and he has a giant plate of lettuce only. Nothing else. No tomatoes, no cucumbers, no salad dressing, just lettuce. A huge pile of lettuce on a plate. And then he just pinches up a bunch of lettuce with his fingers and starts munching. Doesn’t use a fork. Just gets his fingers full of lettuce and eats it. Ate the whole plate of lettuce. Peter Cottontail would have had an orgasm.

After we’ve eaten our giant globs of health food and added our own barbecue sauce to the stickiness build-up, we leave the restaurant and I secretly wipe my fingers on the Prius seat covers. Maybe that will knock that MPG average down a little. And then Jim suggests that we take a little ride up into the San Gabriel Mountains. I think maybe he’s going to whack me, but he’s not the Sopranos type, so I say, “Sure, nothing I’d rather do on a 95-degree day than see some dried-up parched mountains. I guess the Sahara was closed, huh?”

So we head up to the mountains behind Azusa and among other things we see a pistol range, a couple of dams, an off-road-vehicle park, an RV village and two suspicious looking guys in a Datsun. And those were the high points. Then we stop by the side of the road and Jim gets out his telescope and mounts it on a tripod and focuses it for 10 minutes and then says, “Hey look at this.” I put my eye to the scope, and I see a mound of trash in a riverbed. Jim says, “Pretty cool, huh?” I say, “Check, please.”

And then as we head back to the car, Jim finds a roll of bills on the ground. Really — 13 bucks. All ones. Just lying there in the dirt, in the middle of nowhere, wrapped in a rubber band. I thought maybe we should split it. I suggested that he give me the money and he could keep the rubber band in case his main Prius power-supply rubber band broke.

I was just about to tell him about life and philosophy and 180 degrees and not knowing what was going to happen when you got up in the morning, but he interrupted me, and I hate to say this, but he used a little stronger language than “dummy.” All I caught was something about a rubber-band-this related to my heritage and something with a mother-something in there with an anatomical reference. It would have made a rap group blush.

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

Not Falling Down Funny (Cigar Smoke 9-25-08)

2008-09-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

First of all, I want you to know that I don’t think falling down is falling-down funny. No, I’m not like “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” They wouldn’t have a show if people didn’t fall down. Kids fall down, brides fall down at the altar, people fall off stages, babies fall out of cribs, seeing-eye dogs fall down. Hey, it’s falling-down funny. You might even say it’s a trip. That may be funny.

And no, I definitely don’t think old people falling down is too damn funny. You always hear about the old guy who takes a tumble and breaks a hip — and then it’s memorial service time. I think Forest Lawn sponsors broken hips. You break a hip, baby, and it’s time to cancel the subscriptions.

But because I am a what? I am a journalist. I have to report the truth. I am getting semi-old and I am starting to fall down with something my bowels aren’t familiar with — regularity. I’ve probably fallen down seven or eight times in the last year or so. I’m just here to show you what you’re in store for when you start reading Modern Maturity.

There are many different types of falls. I would classify all of them for you, but sadly I fell and hit my head and I can’t remember diddly. I think his first name is Bo, but that’s all I can recall.

It seems to me that I fall basically because I can’t stop from falling. Now, I know that sounds simple. But here’s the thing. You step on a rock or you step in a small hole, and in your younger years you just compensate for it, and your upper body muscles help you hold yourself up. But now they don’t. They’re in a rest home in Florida.

I was walking across the damn street the other day at Allen and New York, and as I got to the middle of the street, I stumbled over a little uneven section of asphalt. Just a little rise. And damned if I didn’t go down like a sack of wet rice. My upper body compensation muscles were nowhere to be seen. Bastards. I never did like them, even when I was younger.

A while back I was just walking out to get my newspapers in the morning, and I walked out of the house and got to the top of my driveway and I took a step off the walkway and misjudged where the end of the step was and I stumbled. I immediately lost my balance and was starting down the driveway completely out of control. At first I didn’t fall down, I just staggered for about 20 feet and gained some momentum, and I was gathering some serious moss, baby. I was really moving.

Finally, as I got near the street, I decided I better just go ahead and fall or I might get nailed by a trash truck.

So I did my old football roll and ate the pavement.

Didn’t really get hurt, but I skinned my knees and had to spit out some pebbly gnarly stuff. But there is a bright side: While I was on the ground, I crawled over a few feet and picked up the papers. At least I didn’t have to bend over and throw my back out and fall down again. I felt very efficient. My hips applauded.

About six months ago I was in a casino in Reno and was walking down some stairs to get some lunch. When I got down to the last three steps or so, I tripped and took a nasty spill. I fell hard on some cement floor and I was kind of stunned. As I was looking around, dazed, I saw about 50 guys watching a football game on TV and not one of those bad Samaritans came to my aid. To be fair to mankind, I was wearing an SC shirt, and I did look into the eyes of one guy who was sipping a beer, and he just looked at me, and slowly mouthed the letters “U-C-L-A.” I thought that was pretty cold.

And I don’t only fall down. I fall up, too. I am an equal opportunity faller. I was walking out to my backyard deck — and it was at night and it was dark out (who would have thought) — and I had a cigar and a lighter in one hand and two fudgicles in the other hand and an iPod and earphones clutched to my chest, and Hadley was somewhere between my feet, and damned if I didn’t miss the first step. I fell pretty hard up into other steps and landed on some ornamental damn rock.

But I was lucky. I was OK, but everything was scattered all over hell, and as I struggled to get up, I noticed Hadley was eating my fudgicles, including the wrappers and the sticks. Man’s best friend, this!

I also slipped in the kitchen last month and did the splits and my thighs split open and my tendons and ligaments fell onto the tile. Felt like it. And it’s just a matter of time before I slip in the bathtub. I know it’s going to happen. Yup, I think I’m going to buy it in the shower. I can see it. I’m going to break a hip and probably a head. And I know the paramedics (who will still have their pissy compensatory holding upper body muscles) are going to come out and I know they will say to Marge, “We can’t get the rubber ducky out of his cold dead hand.”

Have a nice day, whippersnappers.

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

It Ain't Me Babe (Cigar Smoke 9-18-08)

2008-09-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

I went out to the Pechanga Indian Reservation on Sept. 4 to see what they were up to at the Pechanga Resort, and damned if Bob Dylan wasn’t there for a one-nighter. So, excuse the expression, I found a scalper and I got a ticket.

I go up to the entrance and I show my ticket to the usher and he looks me over and says, “There’s an age limit. Nobody over 80.”

I said, “I’m the same age as Bobby Boy Dylan, assface.”

Then he said, “You look like a Republican to me. Why should I let you in?”

I said, “Because would a Republican use obscenity and call you assface, assface?”

I walk into the theater and I am immediately hit with an overwhelming smell of marijuana. I thought I was at a Humboldt County pot-growers convention. I said to the guy next to me, “If I wasn’t a Republican, I’d probably take a hit of ole Mary Jane, of some of that wacky weed, a little grass, maybe toke a little smoke.” He traded seats with his wife.

I’ve got a pretty good seat. I’m in the third row in the center orchestra section on the aisle. I was almost as happy as if I had taken a few drags. Then Bob and the boys come out on stage. Bob is wearing this black gaucho outfit with a flat-brimmed gaucho cowboy hat and I am expecting him to say, “Hello Pechanga.” Something like that. He doesn’t. He just starts singing. And the beat goes on.

For two-plus hours. No intermission. No segues. No patter.

I know this doesn’t mean much in hard-rock circles, but he never said one damn word to the audience the whole night! He never acknowledged that we were even there. Oh, once he smiled, but I’m pretty sure that was just pulled-pork sandwich gas.

I didn’t want much. Just an insincere greeting. Tell us about his show in Santa Monica last night. Make a drug joke. Bash Bush. Something. Anything. But nope. Bob was just too damn cool for that. For a 67-year old guy, he’s pretty damn cool. I’ll give him that. I’m 67 too, and I would have offered an insincere greeting.

So he starts singing and, yes, it’s great to hear him live. That damn mumbly voice is something. And his band was incredible, too. That place was rocking. That steady Dylan kind of driving-rhythm thing. It made me want to get stoned and have sex with two younger women at the same time, maybe a 63- and a 65-year old.

But, as incredible as the music was, I have to say that I didn’t understand many of the words. I know it’s a cliché about how he mumbles and, hell, I have five or six of his albums, and I pretty much know a lot of the words, but, hey, outside of a “Highway 61” here and “Just Like a Woman” there, I didn’t understand jack. Maybe if a guy named Jack was singing I wouldn’t have understood dylan. I don’t know.

So as I watch other people in the audience, I think they do understand the words, and it’s probably because they are using the aforementioned medicinal-use products. So I decide to go get a Margarita. I go out to the lobby, go up to the bartender, and I notice that there is a little plate of olives, so I ask the guy if he would put an olive in my Margarita. He says “No. Can’t do that.” I say, “Why?” He says “I can only give you an olive in a Martini.” I say, “OK, I’d like a Martini, but use Margarita ingredients.” He says “No.” I say “OK, I would like to buy an olive.” He says “We don’t sell olives.” I say “I’m a diabetic.” He says “I don’t care if you’re Jewish.”

So I snatched an olive off the plate and just ate it. Just damn ate it. And then I went back into the theater knowing I was now a true Dylan fan because I was a rebel and I was going to get drunk and I would be able to understand the lyrics and I would have olive breath. Life was good.

But life didn’t turn out to be that good. Dylan just stood at the keyboard all night. His black gaucho boots may have been nailed to the gaucho floor. A couple of times he did bend over, but I think his back just gave out. He stayed in that same spot all night. Never moved. All I saw of him was the left side of his face. Maybe he was trying to hide a gaucho tattoo on his right cheek. I don’t know.

And people were yelling for him to play the guitar. Pleading with him to play the guitar. But he never did, and he never acknowledged our pleading either, because I guess that would have meant he would have had to say an actual word to us. Why couldn’t he have just answered, “No!” Would one “No!” have killed his cool ass? I say “No.”

As I was driving home, I picked a little chunk of my leftover olive out of my teeth and spit it out the window. That night it was the only thing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Or as Bob would have said, “Blohhhwhen nn thaa wwwiinn.”

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

No Time to Hate (Cigar Smoke 9-17-08)

2008-09-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

I don’t quite know what it is, but I relate to insects and inanimate objects pretty well. I wish I had that skill with people. But I guess people don’t have enough legs or they move around too much for me. Give me a bug or something made out of metal any day. All in all, they’re pretty good companions. And, I think I have a better vocabulary than most of them.

I know I’ve written about spiders and ants and ladybugs and crickets and those balling-up sow bugs before, but this is kind of different. Let me ’splain what I mean. Every morning just before I get into the shower, it seems I have to rescue some creepy crawly or lowly creature. And, to be honest, as wonderfully humane as I am, these acts of kindness are kind of driving me a little nutso.

This morning was a perfect example. I strip down naked, look at myself in the mirror, wink like Errol Flynn, and start to get into the shower. But my eye catches this little moving object. It’s so small I don’t even think you could classify it as a bug. It was just some little creature trying to get out of the tub. The walls were too steep and too slippery, and he just kept falling back.

So I got a piece of toilet paper, and bent down and made this escape ramp. I put one end of the toilet paper right in front of the place where he should have had eyes, and I nudged his mini-butt onto the paper and guided him up the toilet paper of life.

He scurried his little ass off and disappeared into my bathroom rug. And dammit, I did feel a little better. But I don’t know why. Hey, let’s face it; this guy probably had a life expectancy of, maybe, 16 hours. They say flies only live for 24 hours, so I’m just extrapolating a little. I saved something that was going to buy the farm by the end of the day anyway.

I save five or six of these itty-bitty characters every week. I have never been thanked once. They don’t even know they’ve been saved. They truly are dumber than doornails, which, by the way, I have a relationship with, too. I often wonder what it feels like to be hammered into something. Just waiting there for the, well, for the hammer to drop, and then it does.

Sorry, I got distracted from my bug friends. Why do I save something that doesn’t know it’s being saved and will die within hours even if I do save it? I do not know the answer. Please, will some philosopher help me out? Come on, Aristotle, enlighten me. Plato, ask me a probing question. Immanuel, help me, I Kant figure it out.

And it’s not just bathtubs. The other death venue for spiders and their buddies is the sink. I go to wash my hands, and damned if there isn’t some spider trying to walk up the side of the sink. He can’t do it. He just keeps slipping. Tries again. Slips again. I thought spiders were supposed to spin webs and walk out, proud and loud. But no. They’re even dumber than the scurriers in my shower, who as we’ve learned, are dumber than doornails. (By the way, are doornails dumber than posts? I’d pay to see that fight.)

So, does spider dumbness stop me. No, Mr. Insect Rescue Man jumps right in to help them. Yes, I get another piece of toilet paper, and lead the spider to his freedom. I put him gently down on the floor, lean down even closer to him, and listen closely, hoping for a sign of recognition. Just some kind of salute of gratitude. I know they don’t speak English. Just thank me in Spiderese. Just grunt. Or spit. Would it kill you to weave a little web thank you?

Oh, I kid the insect world. But my relationship with inanimate objects is also starting to worry me a bit. I now talk to objects almost every day. Like, I am now using my iPhone all the time, and my poor little Palm Pilot is just sitting there on the counter in its little metal case and leather jacket. It literally is gathering dust. Some no-good family member wrote “Wash Me” on it the other day.

I’m putting everything on my iPhone now. I have a calendar and an address book and a bunch of other utilities and applications that I used to use my Palm for. All of them are now on the iPhone. Hell, I even have my Scrabble dictionaries on there. And I can just tell my loyal Palm TX is hurt. I can feel it every time I walk by. Maybe, it’s just me, but I think I hear this little metallic cough sometimes, and I look down, and the Palm Pilot is just a fraction of an inch from where I left it, and I think I see a little teardrop there, too. And I don’t know if I can say this without choking up, the teardrop is, well, it’s rusty. Oh, God!

It’s starting to get to me. Now, before I go to bed, I apologize to my Palm Pilot. I say stuff like, “You know, Palm Face, it’s not really you. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. I’ve changed.”

And Palm Face just lies there on the kitchen counter, and I feel this pain, this guilt, and then she says, “You don’t even charge me anymore.”

Oh, God, it just hurts so much. Maybe I’ll reconsider having relationships with people again. No, I can’t do that. I think I’ll just dump inanimate objects, and stick with spiders. They don’t hold a grudge. They die before they remember to hate you.

I Would Procrastinate if I Had the Time (Cigar Smoke 9-11-08)

2008-09-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

I was going to write this column a long time ago, but, well, I put it off. And why did I do that? Because I am a procrastinator. And why am I a procrastinator? Because I am a no-good piece of useless human waste-material garbage. I think that’s pretty much what Sigmund would have said. And I think it has to do with sex and a cigar, too. Him, not me.

Oh, I kid us procrastinators. The reason this all came to the forefront of my consciousness (Let’s see Obama be more erudite than that) is because I had a slow leak in my left front tire. My tire kept getting lower and lower and I looked for a nail or something obvious, but I couldn’t find anything. So I just kept putting air in the damn thing every week.

Every day I would go out to my car and look at my left front tire and, sure enough, it would be slowly going down. I knew it would be, but I just wouldn’t get it fixed, because I am a lowly piece of procrastinating …you know what. Sometimes I would even sneak up on my tire and not look at it directly, and then turn real fast and look at it, and it was still going flat. I really did this. I think the liberals made me do it.

So every week I would have to take it to a gas station and put three damn quarters in the little air machine slot and the air machine would go on, and I would bend down and put the nozzle thing over the valve stem and I would pump air into that sucker. And it was not easy. I have a bad back (and my front ain’t that great either) and have trouble bending over. So I would have to get on my knee and get my pants all dirty and scraped and ripped. Took the chic quality right out of my polyester.
And I don’t know if you’ve put air in your tires lately, but it’s kind of a pain. You’re bent over, your pants are ruined, you’re trying to keep the nozzle on the valve stem, and it won’t quite fit right, and you’re cussing and spitting and scaring your dog. And you keep giving the air gun bursts of power and you can’t keep your fingers on the stem. And that little indicator comes up and it says you have 28 pounds in there. And somewhere deep in the back of your pre-historic mind you think there should be 32 pounds of pressure.

It is tough. I mean it. I hated it. But I did it. Every damn week. For four damn months. (I would have been the president of the Procrastinators of America Society, but they never got around to holding any meetings.) And every time I would do it, I would hate myself more. I would say to myself, “Jim, you useless piece of piss garbage, why don’t you have this tire fixed, you useless piece of crusted crud?” I would say that to myself, and my self would answer, “Because I am a useless piece of moron guts, that’s why.”

And some days when it was 100 degrees or hotter I would bend down and put air in that damn tire, and the little air machine would cut off before I could get my 32 pounds of pressure in there. So I would hang my useless sweaty head down in my hands and because my useless head was slippery with sweat my face would go through my hands and hit the pavement and I’d hit my nose on asphalt in July in Pasadena at a gas station. And then I’d go the cashier guy because I ran out of quarters to restart the air machine and he would say, “Uh, excuse me, but you have black tire smudges on your face and your nose is bleeding.”

I don’t know what kept me from getting the tire fixed. I guess I thought it would be too expensive. I didn’t want to spend more than $100 for a tire and I didn’t think they could put in an inner tube like in the old days and I could cheat the tire cost and be happy. And I didn’t want to take the time out of my busy retirement schedule. Would I have to cut back on my loafing or my idleness? Could I really afford to lose an hour of couch potato time? Would I have to answer the question, “Did you do anything today, Honey?” with a “Yes, I had my tire fixed, dear.” And then, of course, I would have wasted more time picking my wife up off the floor and taking her to the emergency room. That’s why I didn’t do it.

But last Saturday I was just driving by Just Tires over on Walnut Street and Sierra Madre Boulevard and decided to just drop in and just ask them if they could just fix it. I tell the guy I have a slow leak and he says, “Yeah, I know, but what’s wrong with your tire?” After we stop laughing, he comes out to my car, looks at my left front tire and immediately finds a nail in it. I couldn’t believe it. I had been looking for four months and couldn’t find it and he finds it instantly. He looks at me and I said, “Did you have one of your people put that nail in there?”

We go inside and I said, “I guess I need a new tire, huh?” He said, “No. We’ll just do a flat repair for $17.88 and you’ll be out of here in less than 30 minutes.”

And I was out of there in 30 minutes. It took me less than half an hour and it cost me only 17 bucks to fix a four-month-old killer problem that was destroying both my life and my pants. I never get actually happy, but I was damn close then.

So the moral of this tale is that I am no longer a useless piece of gut garbage. I am now a useful piece of gut garbage who is very, very smart and wears clean polyester pants, and if I ever have another problem I will say that I will fix it immediately — but will probably fall back on my old premise that if you ignore a problem for long enough, and if you go into full denial, the problem you are procrastinating about will probably work out somehow, and maybe the guy you owe money to will even die.

Rebel Without a Rap Sheet (Cigar Smoke 8-28-08)

2008-08-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

I bet you didn’t know your little old columnist here was a serial criminal. I can’t quite believe it either, but here is what happened. I committed six crimes. Yes, six. And the whole crime spree took less than a half an hour.

I took my dog, Hadley, over to the Santa Fe Dam recreational area and, because it was early in the morning, and because nobody was there yet, and because I am a what? I am a rebel, I let Hadley off the leash, and he raised his long head in freedom and appreciation and then he raised his left leg in urination. And he peed on objects, plants, and himself. That was Crime No. 1.

Then I lit a cigar and was walking along with my freedom-loving urinating dog, and I was smoking and throwing my non-long head back in freedom, and I thought to myself, I think smoking in a park is now illegal. Crime No. 2.

Then I look back and Hadley had progressed from urination to poopation, and yes, I didn’t pick it up. I really apologize for this one. I almost always pick up after my dog. But this time I didn’t because I had just had a really severe episode of my back going out and I couldn’t bend down. I know, that’s kind of a weenie excuse, but I had visions of falling down in this deserted park and not being able to get up and having Hadley licking my face and peeing on my stomach. OK, that was Crime No. 3.

So then, as I’m walking along feeling guilty about not picking up after Hadley the Wonder Pooper, I decided to call my son, Mike, in Washington DC to wish him a happy birthday. So I whipped out my iPhone and I called him. I am what? I am modern. We were having a great talk and maybe the highlight of it was that I couldn’t believe he held his cell phone in his right hand and he couldn’t believe I held my cell phone in my left hand. Anyway, the conversation got a little animated. Not nasty, but you could see it from there. So, as we’re arguing I’m finishing up my walk with Hadley, the Excrement Warrior, and I get back into the car, and I’m still talking to Mike on my cell phone. We’re just chattering along like magpies with iPhones. And all of a sudden, it hits me: I am driving with a cell phone in California and I don’t have the damn earplug thing plugged in and I am committing yet another crime. Crime No. 4.

Now I’m feeling like I may be close to being out of control. I have committed four crimes without even blinking a damn eye. I am a bad seed, and I know I will never be close to being a good seed, and I know if I am not stopped soon I will commit another crime. And it doesn’t take long for this to actually happen.

I look down at my speedometer and I am screaming along at 30 miles an hour. I am in a California state park and the speed limit is 15 miles per hour, and I am going twice the speed limit. What can I say? Crime No. 5.

I finally get out of the park and I look over my shoulder to see if the park ranger guy is trailing my butt, but he’s out helping coyotes or something and I am free — I have fought the sheriff and I have won. Change the lyrics. I’m feeling good. Bad seed good. But my crime spree has one more crime to go to make it a serial six-pack.

I’m still talking to Mike on the phone and my cigar has burned down to the nub and the cigar label is starting to burn and so I slip off the cigar band and I’m holding it in my fingers and Hadley is jerking around with me in the front seat and Mike is still on my ass about me holding the cell phone in my left hand, and I was frustrated, and the cigar was burning into my thumb, and I acted rashly and selfishly, and yes, I tossed the cigar band out of the window. I littered. No excuse for it. Crime No. 6.
Gary Gilmore, eat your heart out.

But you’re not going to believe what happened next. I knocked over a liquor store. I told you I was a bad seed. However, I didn’t rob the liquor store. I actually drove into the liquor store and, well, knocked it over.

Hey, I was on my cell phone and Mike said only dummies and losers and old people would use their left hands to hold their cell phones, and Hadley had jumped onto my lap and I was trying to keep his left leg from going into action and I could smell my thumb burning now and, well, the steering wheel just did its own thing. Liquor store went down like Monica, baby.

Stop me before I misdemean again!

Shut Up and Dig (Cigar Smoke 8-14-08)

2008-08-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

I’m just sitting here at my desk trying to get over being ridiculed by my son-in-law for putting my cell phone number on my cell phone. Yes, I made a little label from my little label-maker and I put the phone number right there on the damn cell phone. What can I tell you, I’m a bad seed. (At least I don’t have my computer password pasted onto my computer like a lot of you clueless bad seed readers out there. Admit it. You do it.)

OK, let’s talk about energy and oil. Hey, don’t you dare run away. We’ve got to talk about this. Let’s be different. Let’s be adults.

I just cannot believe that we are in the predicament we are in with gas prices and other energy issues. Though the Republicans have had their share of dopey energy policies, I just have to lay most of the blame on the Democrats. For the past 40 years or so, Democrats have stopped almost every plan to drill for new oil and build much-needed new refineries and take advantage of nuclear power.

Of course, they mask this foot-dragging strategy with environmental red herrings. Whenever they talk about not drilling in ANWAR up in Alaska, I just want to hurl. Have you ever been to ANWAR? No, I know you haven’t. Well, I have. Well, to be honest, I haven’t been actually on the ground there. I’m not that stupid. But I have flown over it. And let me tell you, there is nothing there.

Unless you count snow and frozen tundra and ice and a few very cold-ass caribou as something, there is basically nothing at ANWAR. Hell, if you made this a national park, you wouldn’t get 1,000 visitors in 100 years. I am telling you you can fly for hours (yes, hours) around ANWAR in any direction and you will see nothing but frozen stuff. Alaska is a big damn place. It’s half as big as the whole US. We can use a couple thousand acres to get oil. And the caribou will probably nestle up to a new ANWAR pipeline like they do near the Alaskan Pipeline now to get a little warmth. Come on, I’m not saying we should tear out Old Faithful and drill in Yellowstone. But ANWAR? It’s a no-brainer.

And dammit, let’s build some new oil refineries. We haven’t built a new refinery for something like 30 years now. That’s literally crazy. I guess the Democrats and environmentalists just think we’re going to get all our energy from solar panels and windmills and riding bicycles. Give me a break. I’m not against those things. But they shouldn’t be the only things we do for energy. The next time you pay $4.89 for a gallon of gas, say thanks to your friendly neighborhood Democrat, and pedal off on your bike to go home to your windmill. Oh, did you just hear that? Listen. It’s the Arabs laughing at us.

And nuclear power plants. It is unbelievable that we haven’t built any new nuclear power plants for decades. The environmentalists have us so scared that there will be another Three Mile Island meltdown that we’re just paralyzed. Of course, that was horrible, but technology has improved. Hell, countries like France get most of their energy from nuclear power. And you would think that Democrats would follow in France’s esteemed footsteps because Democrats shove France in our face every other second when it comes to foreign policy or Bush hating. Democrats love France except when it comes to nuclear power. I’m just the opposite. I don’t care much for France, but I think these commie pinkos are dead-on right about using nuclear power.

Aren’t you all just getting a tad bit tired of hearing the Democrats whining about big oil companies? It’s just so bizarre to me. Democrats just ignore obvious economic realities like that little old supply and demand problem. Do they even know that China and India and Russia and Korea etc. etc. are using incredible amounts of oil, which increases the demand for oil, and what do you know, the prices go up. Wow. Who would have thunk it?

And do they know that big oil companies are made up of little people in the stock market? Sure, a lot of oil execs are getting rich, but most of the oil money is being made by little old ladies who have mutual funds with oil stocks in their portfolios. And schools and universities and unions all have substantial amounts of their investments in oil. Something like 60 percent of Americans have an interest in oil. Doesn’t that matter?

And did you hear that mental giant from Nevada, Harry Reid, a few weeks ago? He said that oil is making us sick. How does that little roach (sorry, I don’t mean to give roaches a bad name) come up with stuff like that? If it wasn’t just so god-awful damn lame stupid I would laugh.

Has good ole Harry thought about this? Oil and coal have probably been the biggest contributors to health and well-being in our lifetime. OK, maybe electricity is first. I’ll give you that. But big bad oil and dirty old coal have been huge. Without gas for our trucks we would not have been able to carry lumber to the entire country to build homes. We would not have been able to get food to everyone. We couldn’t have gotten clothes to people. We would not have been able to get medical supplies to hospitals. There are thousands of things we are better off for because we have oil. Hell, even the environmentalists who go to their protest meetings to save the trees usually drive.

Well, I’m tired of ranting. I think I’ll go do what Democrats hate even more than oil. I think I’ll go have a smoke.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com

Stay-Cation Alternative (Cigar Smoke 8-7-08)

2008-08-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess you guys have all heard about this new thing they call the stay-cation. You know, like a vacation only you stay at home. With gas prices going through the roof and spending money getting hard to find, I have decided to provide a travel service to you, my columnar friends.

Here’ s what I think you should do to put a little zip back in your zipless life. And all the while keeping your wallet more zipped, too.

I suggest you take a 90-minute, 90-mile cation. No, it doesn’ t quite slip off the tongue like a vacation or even a stay-cation, but I can assure you it works because I just damn did it, baby. Me and my credit card had a ball. Yes, I went alone — you don’ t have to do what the other person wants and, of course, it costs roughly half as much.

I went to the Pechanga Indian Resort and Casino in Temecula. It’ s only 90 miles away and takes 90 minutes to get there. So, assuming gas costs, say, $4.75 a gallon and your miserable car gets 20 miles per gallon, that means you’ ll use four and half gallons of gas, which will run you about $21. So that will be a total of $42 for gas. Big deal. Even you can afford that.

So why did I go to Pechanga? Well, I like the words Pechanga and Temecula. They sound like places in a foreign country and look weird on a map. By the way, have you ever heard of the Pechanga Indians? Who the hell are those guys? Why couldn’ t we have major league Indians out here like the Apache or the Sioux or the Cherokee. The Pechangas? Can you imagine John Wayne being incensed by an Indian named Sitting Pechanga?

I kid the Pechangas. They have a pretty cool resort out there. I went there to see a boxing match and play blackjack and video poker and sit at a table where it said Moo Goo Gai Pan Poker or something. I asked the dealer what it meant and he said, “In Chinese it means an efficient way for us to take your money without you knowing what the rules are and not understanding the language enough to complain.”

I’ m getting ahead of myself again. Actually, the first thing I did when I got there was eat a late lunch/early dinner at their café. I ordered a pulled pork sandwich, this big pile of pulled pork sitting on a giant bun covered in barbecue sauce one inch high. That scared me a little. And then it had lettuce, onion and tomato on the other huge bun. Plus French fries and cole slaw that looked like it had died a slow, gasping mayonnaise death.

Well, I ate that whole damn meal. Let me just say, it did not taste all that great. The only thing I can remember in my life that tasted worse was something I had at a fraternity initiation. Something raw where two guys were holding me down. Hey, it was not good. I kid the pulled pork.

I only mention this culinary experience to help you save money. Yes, the sandwich cost me $9.95, but it stopped me from eating for the rest of the trip — and two more days after I got home. I’ m telling you, you eat that sucker and you and your stomach are taking separate flights, baby.

After the sandwich, I went to see some boxing. I love to go to these semi-hokey boxing matches where you can get ringside seats pretty cheap and have a chance of getting a little fighter blood splashed on you. But say you don’ t like boxing. On Wednesday nights they have a comedy club. Three unknown comics tell three people three bad jokes for the price of three drinks. So that’ s only another nine bucks. And knowing you guys, there’ s not too much leftover.

And maybe you play a little video poker or maybe you go to the lounge and listen to oldies but goodies sung by people who are younger but not so good. And you stay there until your pulled pork pulls off a rebellion in your colon or wherever the hell it has invaded. And the important point is all this enjoyment and all this fun is what? It is cheap.

So you have now had one full day of incredible 90-minute 90-mile Cation Fun. And it’ s only gonna cost you about 60 damn dollars! That’ s pretty dang cheap. Comes out to about five bucks an hour for 12 hours of Pechangian fun.

One disclaimer. You’ re probably tired after all that fun, and you’ ve had, maybe six drinks, and you’ re too damn cheap to stop at a Motel 6, so coming home you might rear-end a Chevy Blazer just north of Lake Elsinore on the 15, and OK, maybe when the cop comes over to see if you are alive you might hurl some pulled pork chunks onto his badge and say, “Sorry, officer. Code 7.” And yes, maybe the cost to fix your car and make bail and have stomach surgery could add up to more than the aforementioned $60.

But you did have fun didn’ t you? Cheap fun. You ingrate.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com

Unfair and Unbalanced (Cigar Smoke 7-24-08)

2008-07-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, my fellow ink-stained wretch Larry Wilson tweaked my tweaker when he wrote in his Star-News column that he would “never” watch FOX news. Wow. Even though I know most liberals don’t like Fox (OK, they hate Fox), Larry kind of ratcheted it up a notch when he used the N word — never.

To me that’s pretty strong. Over-the-top. Misguided. And wrong. I guess Larry and the libs don’t want to see any other point of view. They’ve already got all the national mainstream broadcast stations — NBC, ABC and CBS. And they’ve got the cable guys CNN and MSNBC. And they have 99 percent of the major market newspapers in the country — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, etc. etc. And, of course, they have Time and Newsweek to kind of put that finishing left-leaning flair on their non-assailable viewpoints.

Have you ever noticed that people of the liberal persuasion never (there’s that word again) say anything negative about any other TV station or newspaper or magazine. It’s always FOX. And not only is it FOX, it is only FOX. If, every once in a while, liberals would say, “Did you hear that crock on CNN?” I could maybe give them some deserved slack. But that never happens. Nope. Never happens.

Hell, I don’t think FOX is perfect. (I’m the only one I have ever found who is perfect.) FOX has their share of bias and bullshit. And yes, they lean to the right. And yes, sometimes Bill O’Reilly can be an arrogant jerk. And that Shepard Smith guy makes me puke. If he were any more insufferable he’d have to be speaking directly out of Ted Baxter’s butt.

However, in my humble opinion, they do not spout the Republican agenda, as is so often blindly claimed by the left. As we know, the libsters don’t even watch the damn station. I guess they don’t want pesky old reality to interfere with their opinions.

What about these pesky little non-agenda facts: Bill O’Reilly is a big tree-hugging environmentalist and he’s against the death penalty. And O’Reilly bashes Bush quite often about Iraq, and Sean Hannity and O’Reilly crucify Bush on immigration. There are many, many other points that FOX disagrees with the Republicans on.

But the thing that I really like most about the station is that they allow opinions from the other side all the time. Nightly, in fact. There’s a continual tension of opposing viewpoints on FOX. Really heated arguments between top Democratic people and FOX guys. You can say what you want about FOX, but “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity and Colmes” are on the cutting edge of opinion journalism. They have the guts to say things the mainstream media have ignored for decades. They broke news stories like the Jeremiah Wright story and the Jesse Jackson wanting to cut Obama’s nuts off story.

Liberals appear on FOX all the time. The only thing that is different is that finally some of their liberal opinions are being challenged. And that’s probably why they don’t like FOX. Hell, they’ve had a monopoly on ideas in this country for 30 years or more. Finally, one damn station comes along and has the guts to stand up to them and the libbies start pissing all over themselves.

What the liberals ought to be asking is how did FOX get to be so important? How did they come to dominate cable television news? They have something like four times the viewers of CNN and MSNBC — combined! It’s not even close.

I think the mainstream media missed one of the biggest stories of the last 40 years. And what is that story, Virginia? Basically, they didn’t recognize why Rush Limbaugh became so popular. They were too busy laughing at Al Franken “Big Fat Liar” book titles to see what was really happening.

What was really happening was that a huge part of America was getting fed up with the liberal media and their influence on the country. They just couldn’t take all the sexual craziness and anything-goes abortion policies and the nonsensical immigration ideas, and the downright hostile positions of the left on our military, and the constant tone-deaf roar of the left to eliminate any religious or moral standards. And the deterioration of our schools and the incessant whining of victims and the whole socialism trend. It was just too much.

And many Americans — generally half the country — had nowhere to turn for their information. So what happened? Rush Limbaugh happened. He, almost singlehandedly, turned AM radio into a right-wing medium where people on the right could be heard. Limbaugh saw that there was a big damn hole in information and he filled it.

And FOX saw what Rush had done and more importantly, saw that there was, and is, a huge audience out there for people who do not want to toe the damn party line.

So FOX had the guts to give people another viewpoint, another take on things. And they succeeded and now all the liberals are crying. As Don Henley would say, “Get over it.”

Oh, and also, FOX has all those cool blonde babes, too.

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

The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim (Cigar Smoke 7-16-08)

2008-07-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

You feel like a little nostalgia? You don’t look like a little nostalgia. You look meaner and older and nastier and, yes, uglier. You might consider having those warts removed, huh?

I was just sitting in my home office trying to figure out how to take a tax deduction for sitting here and writing — and I’m going to try it this year. Don’t rat me out, OK? I’ll come to your house. Kick a little ratting-out butt if I have to.

I was just thinking back to when I was six years old. Damn dinosaurs everywhere and saber-tooth tigers. It was rough. OK, I’m not quite that old. Yes, I feel that old. And yes I look that old. And yes, I have clothes that look like they’re made out of tyrannosaurus hides. But I am not that old, dammit.

OK, ready for some geezer talk? Well, Sonny and Sonnyette, I was 6 years old back in 1947. No, that’s not a typo. I guess you enjoy laughing at old people. I’d kick your butts if I could find my damn cane. Anyway, I lived out in San Pedro in this pretty cool place. There was a bunch of these three-unit Army barrack kind of places. They’d build two of these units and there would be a big dirt yard in between. Must have been 30 of these damn little complexes all over.

And there was a shitload of kids out there. There were kids everywhere. I mean, there must have been some serious after-war intercourse being enjoyed after kicking some Nazi butt, baby. Kids everywhere. We loved it, too. Back then parents were completely unevolved and tried (and succeeded) to ignore us, and we liked it like that. In the summertime, we would eat breakfast, get our Sky King rings out of the cereal boxes, and head out into life in Rolling Hills in Lomita, near San Pedro, next to heaven.

The first thing we would always do was meet near the top of this hill. We’d all have our wagons. Mine was the coolest, of course. It had a damn steering wheel! Really. My dad built the thing himself. I was the envy of the neighborhood. I used to fly down that damn hill, steering with my steering wheel, and then, just when I was at top speed, I’d jump off into the ice plant. Man, I can still smell that squished ice plant smell mixed with my bloody knees. Ah, it was so good.

And then after the wagon racing, maybe a bunch of us guys, no girls (we weren’t commies), would go down to our secret raft that we had built out of secret crap. It was like a damn Huck Finn raft, and I didn’t even know who Huck was back then. And we’d float around for hours in this muddy pond and steer with big poles and go around old tires and junk cars that were dumped there.

Couldn’t have been better.

And then maybe we’d go over to the cliffs and we’d have our club initiations. And you’d have to jump off, say, a 12-foot cliff, into some sand, and when you were in mid-air, you’d be pelted by dirt clods and apple cores and half-eaten sandwiches, and boogers, and life was good. One time a guy broke his arm jumping off the cliff, but we made him tell his parents he fell down on the playground, and the parents bought it. Parents were pretty dumb back then. Of course, not as dumb as they are now, but pretty dumb.

Then, after fending for ourselves for lunch, we’d maybe play some marbles in between the houses. God, we had some great marble games. Big-ass circles in the dirt, filled with aggies and steelies and puries and other marble names I’ve forgotten. I still remember nailing some shots and just seeing my shooter sting that sucker out of the circle. And then you’d get down on your knee in the middle of the circle and keep shooting until you missed or your shooter went out of the circle. And you’d turn to your buddy and say, “OK, Fuzz Nuts, it’s your turn.” And Fuzz Nuts would say, “Don’t mind if I do, Butt Brains.”

And then we’d have to go home to eat dinner. And we’d escape as soon as we could and meet up by Sandra Holt’s house. I always liked Sandra Holt. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know what sex was back then. And now that I do know what it is, I’m sure Sandra would never have been involved in something so dirty and icky. I think I liked Sandra because she was a good wagon driver and she didn’t have any teeth. I still find these traits attractive in a woman.

And all of us would just be lying down on the grass in the evening waiting for the trucks to come by. We’d just be eating cherries or something and spitting the pits at each other’s crotches, and then the pickle truck would come by. I’m not making this up. We’d all buy a pickle for a nickel. Big juicy dill suckers. Came in a sheet of wax paper. And man, those were sour. Just made you pucker like you meant it, baby. I’m sure that’s why I grew hair on my chest. Hell, I had hair on my teeth.

And then a bit later a tamale truck would come by. (Even then there were illegal aliens.) I usually wouldn’t buy the tamales but I loved the smell. Just didn’t have the money. I would always save my money for the ice cream truck, which came by right after the tamale truck. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I would sneak a ride on the running boards of the tamale truck. I still remember the smell.

And then the ice cream truck would come by. Had this funky little horn thing going for it. And the driver would open up the back door/hatch of the truck and the dry-ice steam would waft out and he’d fan it out a little more so he could see the ice cream bars inside. And we’d all buy our ice cream bars and Eskimo Pies and go flop on the cool grass on a summer evening and life was good.

Very very good.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com.

Tooth Hurty (Cigar Smoke 7-10-08)

2008-07-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the dentist. And, you know me, I don’t like to complain. Bitch and moan? Maybe. But complain? Never. Let’s just say I would like to share some things with you.

First, I have had a long and painful history with my teeth. When I was a kid, I had to have all my baby teeth pulled. They just would not fall out on their own. Oh, one time one of my teeth was loose and an uncle came up to me and, after asking me to point out the loose tooth, yanked it right out of my damn youthful head and held it in front of me and said, “Is this the one?” Uncles are kidders.

Then when my permanent teeth came in, there was good news and bad news. The good news: my teeth were incredibly strong. The bad news: they were all over my mouth, running up against each other at right angles, pushing into each other. Kind of looked like a used car lot after a tornado.

So I had to have braces for eight years. Yes, eight years of the orthodontist tightening those damn things so I couldn’t eat for three days, and eight years of those little sucky rubber bands stretching from the top of my mouth to the bottom of my mouth.

And they looked so good, too. I remember in high school going up to a girl with my braces on my teeth and zits on my face and unshaven tufts of hair next to the zits on my face and a few bloody sheared-off ex zit spots and I asked her out and I remember her saying, “Uh, maybe. I didn’t see the weather report this morning. Has hell frozen over yet?”

And when I finally got my braces off, things didn’t get much better. I always had problems with my teeth. A mouthful of cavities and extractions. I’ve had root canals and impacted molars and I’ve had bridges put in and crowns put on and wisdom teeth pulled out and gold fillings put everywhere. So many gold fillings that I count my head as my biggest long-term investment.

Now remember, I’m not complaining. I’m sharing. I remember about 15 years ago I had a memorable dental experience. I had a wisdom tooth taken out. Man, that was an experience. I went to a dentist over in Arcadia and before he started to go to work, I told him I needed extra Novocain. And, like all dentists, he ignored me and started to pull the tooth.

This was a big tooth. And after about a half-hour of trying to yank this sucker, my Novocain started to wear off and then the pain took my breath away, along with 10 years of my life. The dentist said, “I guess you were right about the Novocain.” I said, “I guess I’ll be right when I pull one of your teeth out with a plumber’s wrench.”

OK, that’s all in the past. So about a month ago I notice something outside one of my lower teeth on the right side of my mouth. It’s bulging up, but the tooth isn’t really hurting. So my dentist suggests that I go see a microscopic endontics guy.

So I go to see the guy. And he tells me I need to have the tooth pulled and then I need to have an implant. I inquire as to the approximate cost of this procedure. He tells me the approximate cost. I tell him that’s approximately what I used to pay for a car.

After a fairly long pause, he says, “Well do you want to go ahead with this?” I say, “You know, the tooth doesn’t really hurt me. What would happen if I just didn’t do anything?” He looked at me for a few seconds and said, “My kid couldn’t get into a good college, that’s what would happen.” Those microscopic endontics guys are kidders. No, what he really said was that the tooth was infected and if I ignored it I would lose that tooth and all the other teeth around it would become infected and I would have to gum my words when I ordered in restaurants and if I ordered mashed potatoes I would end up with mathed pimentos.

So I decided to have him pull the tooth. Well, I was in there for over an hour. He tried to pull it. He couldn’t. The tooth was too damn big. So he had to drill and cut the killer tooth into four quarters. Divide and conquer, baby.

So after the tooth was out, he told me I couldn’t have anything hot or hard. And I couldn’t have any coffee and I couldn’t even smoke. I asked him if I could eat meat. He said no. I asked him if I could eat donuts with the left side of my mouth only. He said no. I asked him if I could have sex. He said no.

Finally, I said, “Well, could I at least play the piano?” He said, “OK, you can do that.”
I said, “Great! I never could play it before I had the tooth out.”

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com.

Glad to Be Home (Cigar Smoke 7-3-08)

2008-07-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

As you know, my dog, Hadley, has some pretty bad back legs. He has real difficulty getting up and cannot climb stairs any more. So while we were at my friend’s ranch in Colorado recently, we’d always be sitting on his deck, which was on the second floor. Vic and I and his two dogs and various cats and critters, would all be up there having some damn fun, and Hadley would be on the ground floor envious of all the noise and action.

So, because he’s a smart dog, he went to the bottom of the stairs, and started to bark. So Vic and I, being not quite as smart, said, “Shut the hell up, you mutt!” Finally, we figured out he wanted us to carry him up the stairs. Pretty cool, huh?

So Vic would grab him under the front legs and chest and I would grab his rear end, and we’d carry him up the stairs. At first, his heart would beat really fast, and he’d be very unsure of the whole thing, and then he gradually got used to it, and relaxed, and told us in doggie yelps to carry him faster. And we did, and he got up there and ran around and smelled a few butts, and life was good. (I don’t get any more heartwarming than that.)

But before you come to the conclusion that Vic is a nice guy, I have to say that I stood at the bottom of the stairs a number of times and barked and he didn’t do shit. He never carried me up. Not once. The bastard.

By the way, remember in my last column when I used the word “dickhead,” as in “Did you bring the steaks, dickhead?” Well, I asked Vic if he used that term with love as kind of a guy insult thing, and he said, “No. I always thought your head looked like a penis.”

Anyway, on the way home, Marge and I were driving through Arizona and we were on Highway 10, pretty much flying, and we saw an Arizona Highway Patrol car stopped by the side of the road, and we went by him, and then a few minutes later he comes up behind us with his lights flashing. I told Marge, “I guess he thinks going 90 in a 75 is speeding.”

We stop. He comes to the window. I roll it down. And he says, “Do you know why I stopped you?” And I said, “Because my head looks like a penis?” He said, “What?” I said, “I don’t know. Why?” He said, “Because you failed to move over to the next lane when you saw a Highway Patrol stopped car at the side of the road.”

I told him I had never heard of that law and that we didn’t have it in California and that I was sorry. I really, truly hadn’t heard of the law, and I was sincerely sorry. He kind of looked at me over his sunglasses and asked to see my driver’s license, registration and my insurance card. Well, I had my license and registration, but my insurance card was outdated — by a month.

He told me my insurance card was not good, and as I was looking for the right one in my special car envelope I pulled out a 50 dollar bill (that I keep for emergencies) and he saw it and said — and if I’m lying I’m buying — “Is that for the nice Arizona Highway Patrolman?”

Marge’s jaw dropped and she looked at me like she would be visiting me in jail, and she said, “Officer, I don’t know this gentleman. I was hitchhiking and he picked me up.” True love.

The nice patrolman only gave me a warning and we made it back to good old Altadena. Glad to be home. Until I opened the accumulated pile of mail. I had a notice from the IRS saying that I owed them $2,300. I called my accountant, Steve Boyer, and asked him if I had any other alternative than paying and he said, “Prison.”

So, the next day, after sleeping in my own bed, the bed with the dried bloodstain on my pillow, the bed where I use my CPAP machine to blast off into dreamland, the bed that is even softer than the Lakers, I get up and go out to the kitchen. Marge is there at the table with her oatmeal and coffee. We read the papers. And then we each take a crossword puzzle, one from the Star-News and one from the LA Times, and we start working them, and then, as always, we switch about halfway through, and we slide the puzzles over to each other.

As we slid the puzzles to each other, we both, at exactly the same time, also slid our pencils over. Did you catch that? We slid our pencils over to each other. Do you see what I’m saying? We were both incredibly moronic at the same exact point in time. I guess we figured the puzzles could only be completed by pencils they already knew. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a new law in Arizona.

Then I went to Brookside Park to get back into my routine, and within three minutes and 100 yards, these things occurred. I swear. On a stack of pancakes. A kid in a school bus said, “Is that your nose or your trunk?” and then ducked down under the window; a guy in a captain’s hat told me his dog more than liked my dog, his dog loved my dog; I overheard a tennis instructor tell his young 8- to 10-year-old students, “Quiet! I want to be able to hear a cricket fart.” I walked by the swimming pool where elderly lanky-ladies in one-piece bathing suits were doing water nymph exercises to the recorded scratchy blaring of “Mellow Yellow.”

Glad to be home.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com.