Remote Possibilities (Cigar Smoke 9-10-09)

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)

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)

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)

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)

’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)

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)

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.