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

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!

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all put down our wine and clapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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