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

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)

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.

Getting Clipped (Cigar Smoke 11-6-08)

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)

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)

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)

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.