The War Against Tibi

...is over. I lost.

Very bad things are happening in my head right now. I'm between jobs, and clinical depression is hitting hard. It's been seven years since I made a move, and I forgot how I take to my bed for days in between careers, etc.

More on that later. There's another freaking Rocky movie coming out? Has Hollywood totally thrown in the towel, or what? Seems like every other movie coming out is a remake of something done thirty or forty years ago.

Except for the Passion of the Christ. That was one of the best comic remakes of a two millenium old story I've seen in a long, long time.

The Hills Have Eyes

Life in our country village is quaint, remote, charming, and sometimes outright terrifying. Like when you're running down the road at five in the morning, wearing only your tighty whities, waving a heavy caliber semi-automatic handgun at a fox that just tried to raid your chicken house and your neighbor drives by on his way to work.

“There was a fox, see?” Pointing to the woods where the only thing visible is tendrils of mist rising from amidst the trees.

“Ayuh.” He replies, and drives off.

And you pinch yourself to wake up, and don’t wake up. You’re already awake. And standing in the middle of the road in your underwear with a pistol and all you got from your neighbor was an "Ayuh."

That’s the terrifying part.

But even scarier than that is how closely the other villagers are watching you. They don’t stress enough in anthropologist school the scrutiny you’ll face when you move into tribal lands and adopt native customs.

Every village has a busybody, too. Ours is named Kathleen, but we call her the Town Crier. She spends each Saturday and Sunday visiting everyone’s teepee, peering into their homes from the threshold, and then gossiping about what she's found out with the neighbors in the next teepee.

She just called me on Sunday to find out what she could do to help us. Why she was calling is beyond me. The last time I actually spoke to her I was chasing her off my porch, gesticulating wildly, and making exaggerated claims about how much money I made. Evidently, it is customary in this village to dump large black garbage bags full of discarded clothing on the doorstep of any family that has three or more children. Obviously these breeders must be unfit parents who cannot afford to keep said offspring in clothing, let alone feed them.

So she calls because it is quite evident to the rest of the village that I have taken to my death bed. They hadn't heard any power tools running or seen me on the roof working on the addition we’re building, so something tragic must've happened.

I politely let her know that Theresa was out of town, and that I’d been riding herd on this gaggle of children of ours. Hence, -no work. Just Barney, puzzles, getting my can kicked at chess by a six year old, lots of Tibi and Kom Putii worship, and endless treks in the minivan of wonders back and forth to Girl Scouts, basketball games, church, etc.

Allegedly she and her husband are moving up north, and there is in fact a for sale sign in front of their mud hut. I'll miss Steve. We've spent many an hour commiserating over a bottle of fermented goat beer. But I don't believe she's leaving. I can't imagine any man patient enough to spend the remainder of his natural years stuck on a mountainside in Bethlehem alone with that woman.

She vexes me.

Oh I am terribly vexed.

Unrest in the Mud Hut

There is much unrest in my tribe right now. A rift has developed between the worshippers of Tibi (pronounced Tee Bee) and the worshippers of Kom Putii. The majority of the tribe are loyal practitioners of Tibiism. And though all pay varying degrees of tribute to Kom Putii, Tibi is hands down the greater of the two deities.

I am a high priest of Kom Putii. I spend each day prostrate at the altar of Kom Putii, and each evening pouring Wiki libations before the small Kom Putii shrine in our hut. Kom Putii is a demanding, yet benevolent god, who allows his adherents the illusion of communing with the divine on an almost equal footing. I pour Wiki libations deep into the night, and eventually have a vision and go to sleep, or post something supremely embarrassing that must be deleted before dawn in the hope that none of the other followers of Kom Putii who are channeling into me have read it.

It’s usually too late.

Tibi on the other hand is a puerile, authoritarian, selfish, self-centered, exacting, unsatisfiable bitch of a goddess, and favors her adherents in Asia above all others. Tibi tells you what to think. If you do not agree with something Tibi tells you, she punishes you with reruns of Desperate Housewives or by interrupting Grey’s Anatomy with news conferences from the Great Stammering Banana Slinging High Chief Chimp in the Whitehut. Every three and a half minutes Tibi demands that you buy more useless crap from her beloved Chinese.

My woman is a high priestess of Tibi.

It is going to bankrupt me.

Tibi is clever, and conjures many different lesser deities to control the minds of her followers. Each morning starts the same for us. The infant awakes screaming and demands “Momma food now. Tibi now. Tubbies. Tibi Tubbies. Now!”

And then goes into a trance and hisses and hits and bites you if you do not immediately place her before the altar of Tibi with whole grain offerings.

The Tubbies are seditious, wicked, androgynous, brightly-colored demons who wiggle and jiggle and feed off of the minds of the youngest members of the tribe. In the Western religious writings of the middle ages, they were known as Incubus and Succubus. In the dead of night, they were sent by Satan to anally probe and otherwise sexually torment devout Christians. To this day, —when not feeding on the minds of children at the behest of Tibi—, they creep and probe in the middle of the night.

The post-Christian era has a new term for it though: alien abduction. A full 25% of the American population reports some form of Teletubbie probing, yet no one has ever seen a space ship. Demonic possession, or course, is just to antiquated a notion to explain why, Po has you ball gagged with that circly thing on its head and is blinding you with a flashlight, while Dipsy is mining your rectum with its cranial probe. Aliens.

Now in the universe of my tribe there is a binding, metaphysical, and ubiquitous force from which both Tibi and Kom Putii draw their power. The vernacular term is electricity, but in reality it is a form of black magic created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together. Without it we are reduced to groveling, filthy, savages who wail and gnash our teeth in the outer darkness.

You must never disturb this force, or the gods become angry and punish you. I recall a time many moons ago when I was committing the ultimate sacrilege by attempting to channel “electricity” into a new section of our hut during the high holy hour of Desperate Housewives.

Tibi was angered by my transgressions and the force became unbalanced.

It was suddenly dark. Tibi and Kom Putii abandoned us. We were left to wail and gnash our teeth in the inky blackness. Then Tibi took possession of my woman, and she chased me around shrieking that I had blasphemed against the gods, and struck at me with a broom and any other blunt object that was readily at hand until I made proper amends by clicking fuse switches, and worship services at the altar of Tibi were restored.

So the unrest in the tribe grows from the fact that Tibi has grown too powerful, and other mindless rituals such as homework are not being completed. I am preparing to strike at the followers of Tibi in much the same manner Conan struck at the Snake People. But I am a follower of Kom PutIi, not Conan’s great god Krom. I fear it will be a desperate, grueling battle. Much blood will be shed. And I am fairly certain that instead of crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women, I will most likely retreat to the temple of Kom Putii with a bottle of Wiki and post supremely embarrassing drivel in the middle of the night.

I’ll keep you posted.

Gastrointestinal Delight

So I had this epiphany the other night.

Take a man and woman. Feed them say a pulled pork sandwich and a big glass of milk. What happens? Within minutes the man is gloriously blasting noxious fumes out like one of those giant rail canons the Krauts had in WWI.

Thump beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooorp booooooooooom!

For hours, too.

His ass is now a weapon of mass destruction. Birds fall from the sky. Small children mutate, and are hidden away in hospitals for the criminally insane. The Benedictine Sisters of Mercy at Mt Subiaco in Italy begin ascending the mountain on their knees, praying decade upon decade of the rosary in a futile attempt to keep the Baby Jesus from crying...and the UN passes a resolution threatening to do absolutely nothing should he fart again.

And what do you get from the woman?

Nothing.

Not a damn thing.

Where's all that poison go? It's obviously not good for a person if the body works so hard to expel it right?

I think it goes into their brains.

That's why we have feminists.

Of Mice and Flashlights

So this morning I'm in the shower contemplating field mice. It's winter now, and living in a relic of a house in New England we have our fair share coming in through the cellar hole and scurrying around in our cabinets in the middle of the night. Honestly, they're pretty unobtrusive. A few tiny droppings in the far corners, the occasional tiny hole in a garbage bag, the pitter patter of little feet across the ceilings every now and then.

But the woman of the house is terrified of them.

There is nothing intrinsically terrifying about field mice. In fact, they're cute little brown balls of fluff. They're not at all like those insidious man-made white mice with the beady wicked little red eyes. You know the ones. The pet stores keep hundreds off them in those Plexiglas boxes where you can pick them up. I completely understand being freaked out by those. They're saboteurs whose only mission is to get you lift them up in your hand so that they can leap to the floor. Then they scurry up your pant leg and attack your naughty bits causing you to hop around on one leg, shrieking and flailing your arms about, thereby liberating all of their enslaved animal pet shop friends. Field mice on the other hand are actually quite charming. They have delicate little noses sprinkled with dainty whiskers, and beautiful black eyes. Eyes like reflecting pools so deep you want to swim in them. Eyes filled with wonder and delight. Eyes that look as if they have just seen the face of God himself.

Which they have.

For if you're close enough to a field mouse to look that carefully at its eyes, its because it's in a snap trap. And not only has it just seen the Great Fisher of Field Mice in the Sky, but the reason its eyes are that widely open is that a few minutes earlier it was thinking "Peanut butter, peanut butter, I love peanut butter... SNAP! HOLY FUCK I'M DEAD!

***

Thwack across my head in the middle of the night.

"DO YOU HEAR THAT?!?"

Now when you whack a man across the head in the middle of the night because of a strange noise in his castle, you must understand that the otherwise out of shape, middle aged, pasty bald guy who is normally winded after the second flight of stairs transforms instantly into a crouching steely-eyed Silent Ninja of Death. I am a coiled spring. Two double back flips across the bed room and I'll have the pistols out of the super-secret biometric gun safe, and roundhouse my way through the kitchen, blazing away guns akimbo. The army of assassins who have entered my home will perish in a well choreographed slow motion melee of karate chops and hot lead.

"THAT!!!" She cries.

"whaaaat???" I hiss.

"THAT SCRATCHING IN THE CUPBOARD! THERE'S A MOUSE IN THERE!"

I deflate like a released balloon, and fart fart fart my way back into the comfortable milieu of out of shape, middle aged, pasty baldguydom.

"Jesus woman... it's just a mouse." I mutter in exasperation whilst pulling a pillow over my head. I am secretly happy to shed the Silent Ninja of Death cloak. Probably would've had a coronary anyway. But the adrenaline dump has done awful things to my bladder, and now I must relieve myself as well.

"I'll set a couple of traps under the sink." I grumble while getting out from under the blankets, though a delightful thought has just occurred to me, and secretly I am pleased to be leaving the bedroom. I'll be able to use my new flash light while setting the traps.

Flashlights are entertaining no matter how old you are. Here's this shiny tube. You click a button. It makes light. You click the button again. The light goes away. Sure, sure there's science that explains how putting a couple of small cylindrical objects into a slightly larger cylindrical object suddenly gives you power over light and dark, day and night, but deep down inside we all know it's magic. And not just ordinary darkest Africa type black magic. This is akin to Stargate black magic. You could tell me that aliens gave the ancient Egyptians flashlights and that's how the pyramids were built, and though I might shrug it off, secretly I would BELIEVE.

Anyway, the biggest problem with flashlights is children. They always find them. And after 37 seconds of play play play click click click with the flash light and they're bored again. Clonk. The light hits the floor, rolls under the couch while still on, and it isn't discovered again for at least three days by your wife. And she doesn't bother to check the batteries, just returns it to it's proper place. So naturally, when you actually need it, like say...I dunno... when your arch nemesis' Secret Assassins of Doom are invading your house, or perhaps a mouse is scratching in the cabinet, or the power goes out, — or you're all in imminent danger of dying because the house is filled with smoke that the alarm didn't warn you about because no one bothered to check the batteries in that after the last time it went off when you were at work either, — the flash light, or course, is stone dead

Not this time.

I have the Mother Of All Flashlights. MOAF for short. It's so big no child can heft it. It's so powerful it must be plugged into a wall socket for at least a day before you can use it. 37 gazillion candle watts of raw, unmitigated, intruder blinding, finding things under the couch empowerment packaged like a pistol. You actually have to hold it like a firearm and pull a trigger to engage the lighting elements. I bought it on a whim on my last trip to Home Depot. It was there at the check out counter and I couldn't resist. The heavens opened and the angels wept with envy as I made my way through the parking lot to my truck.

Anyone who's ever purchased a flashlight,— be it one of those gimmick Mag Lites no bigger than a cigarette lighter, or the MOAF I know held in my hand —, knows there's only one thing you can do when you get a new flashlight. You have to point at your own face and turn it on. I had to wait 24 hours, but come on, 37 gazillion candle watts of brightness? I could wait.

When the moment finally arrived, I stood in the kitchen and slowly pointed the saucer sized lens directly at my noggin. A wry smile of gleeful anticipation crept across my face. There was a barely perceptible clicking followed by an audible hum as my thumb depressed the trigger. The cameramen in the movie in my head starring me panned out and the room circled round. Slowly... slowly... thumb depresessing.... humming growing louder...


....wooooOOOOOOOOOOSH!

I also saw the face of God.

And then nothing else for a long, long time. Though I did slip in a pile of Magnetix and slam my head off the counter while Theresa yelled: "Did you just point that thing in your eyes?!? What the hell is wrong with you? No wonder our kids are so screwed up!" And other lovely things of that nature.

"Ummm... no. It just sort of went off..." I managed to stammer as I groped my way towards the couch. I sat down. Brain cells were popping. I could see, or rather feel their iridescent sparkle flare across a field brightest green. Time slowed down and I was dancing in a pasture of painted flowers that dripped away when I touched them like in that apoplectically horrible Robin Williams movie where he goes to heaven and has to go save his wife from hell.

"Have you seen my keys?" Theresa interrupts my wide-eyed religious reverie.

"Are they bright green? 'Cause that's all I've seen for the last four and a half minutes or so."

"Oh you're are such a horrible, useless man."

She's hitting me. I think. Or maybe it's one of the kids. Could be anyone for that matter. Who cares? I'd just seen God.

She storms out, and I call after her:

"Don't worry dear, I'm not Robin Williams. I think you'll enjoy it down there. Probably let you run the PTA or something, too."

Ruminations in the Shower, episode I

I had one of those wife revelations in the shower the other morning while pouring St Ives vanilla body wash onto a well moistened pouf. As I stood there in the steam unlocking the swiss secrets to visibly healthy skin, - skin that is nourished and restored by the soothing scent of vanilla-, my mind was slowly putting together the pieces of a puzzle that has been nagging at me for some time.

Reaching for the Ultra Botanicals Coconut Mango shampoo, I think of her: dark, smooth, demur, feisty. Bold, well bodied, yet mellowing with age.

My mind wanders a bit, — pondering how routines change. How a decade ago it was a thirty second scrub down with Irish Springs, a squirt of Pert Plus, and done for two or three days

Scrubbing the Suave Tropical Coconut conditioner out of what's left of my hair, i squirt Island Bliss Shower Gel onto my bath net for a zestful full body scrubbing that visibly reduces wrinkles in only four to six weeks, and leaves me with that pleasant sensual glow for the entire day. And then, when the transformation is complete, — and I smell exactly the way my wife smells every day—, it hits me.

I am married to an umbrella drink. Dark smooth well bodied vanilla coconut mango goodness. Exquisite when the time is right, but no wonder overexposure gives me a headache.

Ruminations in the Shower, episode II

I'm in the shower this morning performing my normal louf poof ablutions. It's later than normal as I stayed home to watch the kids until Theresa returned from a 7:20 am parent teacher conference with Jack's teacher. Ms. Kimble is a lesbian. I only know that because I ran into her and her shemale husband friend in Target one evening. They were holding hands. It was sort of cute in that you run into two bull dykes in their late fifties holding hands in Target kind of way.

I'm mildly irritated because I had to keep an eye on Tyler and Jocelyn, too, and I'm not particularly fond of them. Or anyone else's kids for that matter. They've interrupted my morning meditation, and I just can't seem to get the thread back. Something about how no matter what people have, they always want something else. Which is probably a good thing, or we'd all still be living in mud huts in darkest Gandwana, - or whatever that mythical continent the National Geographic people made up and claim is the place where man first evolved from fish.

Tyler and Jocelyn are this guy Matt's kids. They strike me as mildly retarded. Tyler is six years old and doesn't speak English yet. Or anything for that matter. He just sort of grunts and gestures.

Monica, — who is all of 17 months old—, ambles up to him and says: "Hi Tywer".

"Eeeeorp patootie woop", he replies.

Jocelyn is a gigantic, plodding, nine year old, and has the dull expression of a jersey cow. She has this unusually deep and unsettling huh huh huh laugh. She weirds me out. I try not to make eye contact as I'm concerned there's some sinister ax murdering plot festering behind those dull, listless orbs seated deeply in her jowly face. I hide sharp objects when she's around, and continually find myself squealing and jumping every time some child bumps into me from behind.

Matt's a single dad trying to raise his kids as best he can. Evidently something happened to his day care lady, so he asked my wife if she could watch the kids from 6:45 in the morning until the bus picks them up at 8:30. My wife can't say no to anyone but me, so we've had these kids as part of our routine for the last few weeks. It was supposed to end a few days after they started showing up, but I get the impression that Matt isn't even looking for someone else to watch them.

I don't like Matt. I think he's a kid-toucher. He's about four and a half feet tall with a shock of red hair that's been ravaged by premature male pattern baldness. Bandy legs, rotund mid section, and gawky arms that he's always gesticulating wildly with like some adolescent goony bird careening towards first flight. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if he got picked up by Webster's finest wearing only a thong and a giant pumpkin mask, dancing a jig in a circle of frolicking preschoolers singing " will you touch the Pumpkin Man, the Pumpkin Man, the Pumpkin Man..." Which probably explains what happened to his last babysitter. She found the Pumpkin costume, and he chopped her up, stuffed in back of a Ford Pinto, lit it on fire, and rolled it off the side of the highway. Which really isn't too much of a shame. The Pinto was such a waste of metal.

However, there have been a few times he's dropped the kids off in the past while I was still home and he didn't know it. The way he so vigorously flirts with my wife gives me hope that maybe he's not a kid-toucher after all. Perhaps he really is just a normal, bandy-legged, little pumpkin man who'd prefer dancing a jig in a circle of frolicking above the age of consent females. And who wouldn't want that?

I'm interrupted by a shriek of "DAAAAAADDDDY!"

"WHAAAT?" I yell over the noise of the shower.

"I HAVE TO GO POOOOTTTTTYYYY!"

"CAN'T YOU WAIT UNTIL I'M DONE, SUSANNA?!?"

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

"ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT"

I mutter to myself while pulling the shower curtain as tight to the sides of the tub as it will go. I cower in the corner in all my frail pale nakedness. Freaking kids always wait until you're finally in the middle of something... had all morning to take care of this, but nooooo, I gotta go potty now. NOW! The bathroom door crashes open, and I cower even further into the corner knowing full well what happens to daughters who peak on their naked fathers. The become psychologically unhinged and grow up to be Sylvia Plathe. They write crazy male hating free verse that unfortunate undergraduates are forced to parse by their male hating lesbian literature professors. Then they stick their heads in gas ovens.

"DAAAAAAAAADDDDY!!!"

"WHAT!?!"

"THE TOILETS CLOGGED!"

"GET OUT! I'LL TAKE CARE OF IT! JUST GET OUT!...AND STAY AWAY FROM THE STOVE!"

Black clouds fill my head as I towel off, dress, and head toward the toilet. I expect to find nothing less than an in tact roll of toilet paper stuffed perpendicularly into the pipe at the bottom of the toilet. Daughters, I mutter to myself like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Dear God, I know they are a blessing, but why have You chosen to bless me three times with daughters. Another son, God, You know a male child, - one that does not see fit to stuff half a friggin roll of toilet paper down the shoot every time it needs to pee. I know you only test the ones You love, but perhaps You could love me just a little less...

I plunge the toilet and make my way into the dining room and begin my tirade against the girl cowering in the corner.

"You know what's going to happen? Do you? One day you'll grow up and get married and have a daughter. And that daughter will stuff half a damn roll of toilet paper down the toilet every time she needs to use the bathroom. And you'll have married some guy who isn't nearly as cursed, committed, hard headed, call it what you will as I am. The first time he's up to his armpits cleaning out some shit pipe in the basement, he's going to leave you. And you'll end up on the streets turning tricks on the corner for meth money until you've finally swallowed your pride, and come crawling back to me to raise my own grand kid, and I'll just sit on the porch in my rocking chair and grin and say "I told you so. Ha!"

She looks up at me with dull, listless bovine eyes, and I realize it's Jocelyn. She's chewing paint chips off the wall, or maybe card board. I'm taken aback at first for venting on someone else's spawn, but then realize she'll have no idea what I just said.

I grab a cup of coffee and my hat in one hand and head for the door. Crash. Tyler has hidden himself in a cardboard box in the doorway and I trip over him. " Ooompa doopy yawp!" He cries. Apoplectic, I slam the door behind me, put on my hat, and warm brown liquid seeps slowly down my face and into my collar. The coffee has spilled into my hat.

On the way down 89 I see a car with its blinkers on. I'm feeling rather bad about my little tirade, so I pull to the side of the road intent upon doing my good turn for the day. Perhaps it offset the karmic deficit I've fallen into.

A very attractive, well rounded female thing is seated in her Subaru. She's in tears. She has a flat tire, has forgotten her cell phone, and no one has stopped to help her on this chilly morning. No worries, I tell her. It's just a flat. I'll have it changed in no time.

I change the tire. She does this little yip yip jump into the air happy dance thing and hugs me. I stand there, arms hanging limp at my side, one eyebrow raised, wondering if she makes it a habit of hugging angry weirdos in beat up old trucks on the side of the highway.

She blurts out "I'm Missy," and gives me her card. My eyebrow rises even higher.

"Are you married?" I ask.

"Divorced." Her expression sinks.

"You have a daughter, don't you? About say... six or seven years old?"

"Why yes!" Her eyes wide with astonishment and delight. " How'd you know?"

"You daughter used to stuff massive amounts of toilet paper down the toilet every time she went to the bathroom, didn't she? And your husband... he just couldn't take being arm pit deep in the shit pipe anymore and finally walked out, didn't he?"

Her look of astonished delight is rapidly changing into one of abject horror.

"... and you've been out on the streets turning tricks for meth money because you're just not ready to go crawling back to your dad yet, aren't you? And you think by hugging me and giving me your card that I'll give you money for sexual favors so you can buy more meth? Don't you, you sneaky toilet paper stuffing female thing!"

"You sicko!" She shrieks.

"I knew it! " I cry, as she snatches her card and speeds off.

And as the sun pierced the sky and blazed down on Bow Junction, I leaned against my old Dodge, lit a Marlboro, and basked in the glorious vindication of mental acuity that was mine, and mine alone, at 8:39 this morning.

Ruminations in the Shower, episode III

So I'm out of the shower a bit early this morning. It's chilly, so I step out on the back porch to grab an arm load of wood for the stove. It's a little difficult with only one hand, as I must keep my left hand elevated with my middle finger totally distended to keep the pressure off the spot where I shot a nail through it two nights ago. Careless mistake, but Theresa is convinced I got loaded and thought it would be a good idea to place my middle finger directly beneath a Bostich framing canon and pull the trigger. Can't really blame her. Stranger things have struck me as good ideas at times like that. And I was pretty loaded.

I stand up and ram my head into the silly decorative wrought iron wrack my loving wife has screwed to the wall at exactly head height with a resounding WAAAAAANG.

SON OF A... Grrrr.

Seeing stars and red clouds of rage, I make my way back into the house and load the woodstove just as Matt, Jocelyn, and Tyler are making their way onto the front porch. I flee into the computer room and duck down at the desk so they won't see me through the window above the stairs.

"How yeah doooin?" I hear Matt ask my wife, in that rural yankee twang. It's that half Cockney half... half something else... dialect that's delightful when spoken by the old timers, but pegs a person for a rube if they talk that way in their thirties. Words like "here" are pronounce "heeeeah." As in "whacha dooooin heeah, Pumkin Man?"

I grimmace and clutch my throbbing head.

"Jocelyn got the olive oil treatment this mornin," He continues.

What the hell? I think to myself, completely forgetting the head lice that filthy, listless, bovine urchin nearly afflicted my ramshackle, yet uninfested home with.

"It was eeetha that or Mayonaisse." He chuckles the pumpkin hee hee hee. Mayonaisse. Sweet Jesus, I know all about what rural country freaks do with Mayonaisse. Especially the ones that keep it in their garages.

"Or Vaseline." My wife chimes in.

"Holy God!" I nearly cry out. " They're in cahoots."

Visions of my wife in her own Pumpkin costume burst upon my brain, and I suddenly know it is time.

The Pumpkin Man is going down.

The guns are all on the other side of the house, and I can't get to them without revealing my hiding spot. And of course, I'll need proof before turning them into purée of pernicious perverted Pumkin people. I sneak out the door into the unfinished addition, grab a chisel, and make my way to Matt's car.

For various reasons that are all well sealed in juvenille court records, I am rather adept at jimmying a trunk with a screw driver or chisel. Two seconds and I am in. I begin rummaging for the Pumpkin costume. Nothing. Loads of crap, and then I find it.

It's not a Pumkin costume. It's one of those inflatable Frankenstein Halloween costumes with the battery powered fan that makes the whole outfit bobble about when the unfortunate kid wearing it gets the crap beat of him or her for being such a freaking dork.

Horrors, I think. I've entirely underestimated this perverted freak. He's no Pumkin Man. He's freaking Frakenstein! My wife must be the Pumkin. Pumkin woman!

Now for the guns. I quickly replace the contents of the trunk, make my way to the back of the house, and lean a ladder up to the roof line. If I sneak across the roof, and swing myself James freaking Bond style down off the pergola and through the bedroom window, I can have them cornered before the glass has even finished settling. I grab hold of the pergola and swing down.

Crack. The 1x3 lets go.

Thud. I slam into the wall completely missing the window.

Crunch. I land on my back in the gravel path.

Stunned, I lay there for a moment seeing more stars, and then I remember the head lice. Olive oil treatment. It makes sense now. And the Halloween party at the town hall. I caught a glimpse of Matt there with Tyler and a giant inflatable Frankenstein. Must've been Jocelyn in there. Damn it.

I hobble back around the house and sneak in the back door to the computer room.

"Eeeeooorp eeee poooty woooty dog dog?" Blurts out Tyler?

"Where's the dog? Oh he's sleeping in the computer room where John's hiding." Theresa replies.

"I'M NOT HIDING!"

I stand up and inadvertantly give everyone in the room the bird. Matt's eyes get a little wide. Jocelyn laughs that low gutteral heh heh heh laugh and says " he made the bad finger dad."

I look at my protruding middle finger and start to explain, but then think better of it and just sit down in my static, yet impotent rage.

"I'M DOING IMPORTANT SECRET THINGS ON THE COMPUTER FOR WORK!" I yell.

"Oh yeah... he's talking to his Jeep buddies." I hear my wife explain to Matt. I can almost see her rolling her eyes. She goes on to explain that I broke my finger being stupid.

"Hee hee hee", Matt laughs, "yeah shouldn't drink and use powa tools. Hee hee hee. That's how ahccidents hahppen. Well seeeyah laytah."

I crouch lower in front of the monitor and and shaking clenched middle finger swinging fist swear my secret and solemn oath. Curse you Pumpkin Man. You may have gotten away this time, but mark my words... I will get you. I'LL GET YOU, YOOOOUUUUU BAAAASTAAARD!

Grandpa

The following is the result of a short lived, yet highly entertaining creative writing contest held several months ago on a bulletin board I frequent. It burbled out of the dank recesses of my subconscious in a matter of minutes, and is quite rough in places. Though the events themselves are real, all names and locations have been changed to preserve whatever shreds of dignity the participants might still possess.

Ok. I'm lying. The contest was real. I made everything else up.

Act I was inspired by a Drudgereport headline about a 65 year old male grade school teacher who got a sex change and tried to go back to work. Parts of Act II are inspired by a girl my little brother was infatuated with in high school. You'll understand when you get to the fire pole. Act III ...well... I'd recently discovered the film Little Big Man and become obsessed with it. I have a tendency to watch movies over and over and over again until I understand what it was about that particular film that caught my attention in the first place. Then I never watch them again. If you've seen the film, you'll understand. If you haven't, go see it.

Act IV is percolating. Involves a road trip to Las Vegas ala Fear & Loathing. I'll get drunk some night and actually write it. Or maybe I won't. I'll certainly get drunk though.

Act I
"Grandpa"
(Read by Gilbert Gottfried)

Grandpa taught me how to whittle and spit and fish and drive a car.

That was before he became a woman.

Turns out he wasn’t all that happy being a he, so one day after his seventy first birthday he plonked his amex gold card on the counter of the local gender reassignment chop shop, and a few hours later he was a she.

Only he didn’t really look like a she. He still had that firm masculine grandpa jaw I used to admire in the wartime photo mom kept on the mantle. And even the nail polish couldn’t disguise his big man hands. The died blonde hair and old lady glasses did help a little. But he still had old man smell. I guess old woman smell wasn’t included in the extra value gender reassignment package he bought.

Grandma went to pieces of course.

I guess that’s what you’re expected to do when the man you’ve been married to for fifty years leaves for a round of golf on a Tuesday and comes home a woman. It’s just not what respectable mid-western senior citizens who’ve spent their entire lives in the suburbs of St. Paul do.

You don’t do it.

Don’t do things like that Bill.

Bill! How could you do something like this Bill?!?

So she packed her bags and ran away with a Jewish rodeo clown. Last I heard she was turning tricks in Vegas and running an online porn site catering to folks with old lady fetishes.

Schultz checked it.

Fucking Schultz.


“Dude your grandma can shove a bull whip three feet up her ass and still dance the Macarena.”

Shut up, Schultz.

But it was too late, the other kids sitting at our table in the cafeteria heard him. It was bad enough being the kid who’s grandpa was a woman, but now all of myspace would be alive with stories about the kid who’s grandma did internet porn.

For years people would tell the stories. They’d all start with “I knew this kid back in high school…well I didn’t hang out with him or anything, but his grandma…” And they’d all end with the same “Get out. No fucking way.”

But then they’d google it, and something would turn up in the archives about a seventy one year old man who became a woman, and they’d believe it.

You see, Grandpa wasn’t happy just being a woman. Now that he had all the proper female naughty bits, he had to become a professional woman. He went back to the accounting firm he’d been working at for the last forty five years. He’d only been part time for the last few years. Just went in during tax season, but he hadn’t told them about his change.

Needless to say, when Billy showed up as Lilly, the whole place was thrown into an uproar.

The owner told his slack jawed moron of a son to get rid of grandpa, but he was chicken and instead just walked really quickly past grandpas desk on his way to the bathroom fifteen or twenty times a day. And grandpa wasn’t going down without a fight.
When John finally told his son he’d fire Grandpa himself, Grandpa called CNN, and it was the talk of all the internet forums for twenty four hours and grandpa got to stay in his job and everyone forgot it the next day.

Except Schultz. Fucking Schultz.

Schultz decided to write a short story about it for lit., and the teacher loved it. She thought we could all use a lesson in celebrating diversity. She called grandpa and asked him to talk to the class about his life journey. And of course he agreed.

Act II
"Coconuts"
(Read by Garrison Keillor)

It was one of those frost-laden November mornings upon which normal people breathe in the chilled air and express gratitude to their creator. In their own constitutionally guaranteed, -albeit private-, way, of course. Even the most ardent god hating, baby killing, tax and spend Democrat finds it impossible to keep his inner Republican caged on such mornings, and he too breathes a silent prayer to Baal or Mammon or whoever it was that created him.

I felt anything but normal, and was far from grateful to God. In fact, I wanted to kill Him. Still stewing over Schultz’s upcoming presentation on my hemale shemale grandpa, I stopped outside his door and waited for him to join me.

“Hey Brian.” Schultz mumbled as he staggered out with his books. He grabbed a handful of unkempt hair, yawned, then slowly grinned.

“Only a week to go, man.”

“Shut up.”

I would’ve broken into the supplications and pitiful pleas for mercy that had become our ritual each morning on the walk to school, but today was different. Today I would exact one miniscule sliver of revenge. Today it would be Schultz who would suffer, and I – glorious I – the tormentor for once.

“You see the paper this morning Schultz?”

“No.”

“Girls soccer team won the tournament. Allison Fournier’s on the front page.”

I watched as the grin faded. His face sank beneath a sea of grief like some passenger liner torpedoed by a maniacal mustachioed Sieg Heil screaming Nazi submarine commandant. With an eye patch. All proper villain submarine captains need an eye patch. I’m not sure why. Perhaps from running into a rock or something while looking through the periscope.

“That bitch,” muttered Schultz.

“Bitch? I thought you were infatuated with her?” I could barely contain my sadistic glee.

“She broke my heart man.”

“How’d she break your heart if you’ve never even spoken to her?”

“Dude I’ve told you this a thousand freaking times. We were in the library. She looked up from across the table and our eyes met. Our souls mingled man. We are one now.

“She just doesn’t know it yet.” I laughed.

“Shut up, Brian. What do you know about love anyway?”

“I know enough not to get infatuated with a girl who’s railing Eric Krauss.”

That was it. I’d gone too far. I’d played the Krauss card.

Eric Kraus: that glorious blonde haired captain of the boy’s soccer team. He was so good looking even the most secure, red blooded, apple pie and I love my mama homophobe in school went a little weak in the knees around him wishing he’d been born a woman. The freshie hotties would fall down in front of him in a slippery little puddle,— their legs sticking straight up in the air—, whenever he strode confidently down the high school halls.

I giggled a little as the expression on his face changed from all hands abandon ship to battle stations! The Lusitania was pissed, and she wasn’t going to take it anymore. The one eyed Nazi sub captain shrieked in unbridled yet impotent rage. Dive! Dive! Dive!

“I fucking hate that guy.” Schultz growled. “What does she see in him anyway? Ooh I’m a pretty soccer boy. I kick balls. Probably doesn’t even have any.”

“Schultz, I’m in gym with that guy. I have to shower with that guy. You ever seen his dick?”

“I’ve got a policy about seeing as few dicks as possible, you fag.” Schultz growled.

“Dude… It’s like a freaking fire hose. I swear it’s three feet long. Friggin’ guy swings around in the showers slapping people with it just ‘cause he can. Down to his knees man.” I said raising one eyebrow and winking knowingly.

“Shut the fuck up, Brian.”

We stopped at Dunkins and grabbed a coffee. I mused over the warning printed on the Styrofoam of my large, steaming coffee. WARNING:CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT. Some old woman had won millions in a lawsuit years ago because she’d burned her mouth on a cup of hot coffee. Go figure.

Schultz exited with his coffee. He’d gone from rage back to despair, but I just couldn’t let up.

“I was talking to Mike. He told me that Eric told him he always has Allison do him on top. Said he has to pile up pillows on either side of him, and she has to brace her hands on the pillows and slide down him like a fireman sliding down a pole.”

“Shut the fuck up man. I’m fucking serious. Not another word.”

We stood there in silence for a minute, and then it happened.

There before us, just outside of Dunkin Donuts was a newspaper dispenser. Behind the frost covered glass you just make out the jubilant face of Allison Fournier hugging her teammates after the previous nights victory.

Schultz stopped in front of it, set his coffee on the box, and started pulling down his pants.

“What the fuck are you doing man.”

“Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“Seriously, Schultz what the fuck are you doing?!?”

“I’m tea bagging the bitch. It’s gotta be done if I’m going to make it through this.”

Panic, horror! We’d be arrested. I turned in circles looking over my shoulder, and seriously considered running. Schultz sidled up to the newspaper box, his scrawny white buttocks winking at me in the rosy fingered dawn.

“Schultz! Come on man! Let’s get out of here!” I cried.

But there he stayed, straddling the box.

The silence was deafening.

“Shit,” Exclaimed Schultz.

“Shit?”

“SHIT!” He yelled.

“What?!?”

“I’m stuck Brian.”

“Shut the fuck up Schultz. Let’s go.”

“Brian, I am seriously fucking stuck! My nuts are frozen to the glass!” He wailed.

It’s a known scientific fact that when you apply ice to the scrotum it retracts. Now if you’re twins are frozen to a pane of glass, and suddenly retract, it pulls you closer. This makes them colder and you pull away, and yet they retract again pulling you closer to the glass. Schultz was gyrating wildly as he thrashed back and forth, back and forth becoming one with the box. His pathetic yelps sounding more and more like the unbridled cries of passion.

Time stopped. I went into a trance. A blinding light pierced my inner eye, and I saw the future.

Schultz would be apprehended with his little hairy coconuts frozen to a newspaper dispenser. We’d be on Drudge. Within hours there’d be 50,000 posts on bulletin boards where balding, middle aged men allegedly discussed offroading, but really just grew huge epenis by ridiculing the misfortunes of others.

He’d have to register. He’d grow old alone and despised, on the outskirts of some rural town. Until one day in the distant miserable future a flat rater would check the online registry and go to his house and punch him through a screen door and stomp him to death while angry pit bulls slathered in peanut butter ravaged his remains and cops tazed him until his eyes popped out.

Unless, unless…

And then it came to me.

I did the only thing a friend could do. I took out my camera phone and snapped a picture of Schultz fucking a newspaper dispenser. Then I poured my steaming hot coffee directly onto his twins.

They heard the shriek three blocks away.


As we arrived late to school, Schultz wallowing in humiliation and despair, I cleared my throat and said:

“So… um… Schultz… What’s your new creative writing project going to be about?”

“Your grandpa…” He trailed off in mid sentence. He looked down at the brown coffee stain on the front of his pants, then up to the cell phone I was tapping, then back down at his pants.

“Myspace, man. You breathe one more word about my grandpa, and this is going on myspace.”

And though the black eye lasted for more than a week, and Schultz got three days internal suspension for fighting, I was again the happy master of my fate.

Act III
"Moobs"
(Read by Alec Baldwin)


I stopped by my grandfather’s new apartment on the way home from school to inform him of Schultz’s sudden change of plans. I knocked several times, but there was no answer. I tried the knob, found the door to unlocked, and let myself in. The air inside was heavy with a thick, sweet smoke that I instantly recognized and knew was not tobacco.

He was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, clad only in a knock-off Indian head dress and leather loin cloth. His face was smeared in what appeared to be peppermint scented lip balm, and in place of mocasins, he sported red Chuck Taylors.

“Jesus Christ, Grandpa, put a shirt on!”

“ Hello my son. I had a dream you would return.”

I failed to notice the slow sonorous way in which he spoke, so horrified was I by that vision of my bare breasted grandfather. Had there been a toilet brush and a bottle of bleach handy, I’d have given my eyeballs such a scrubbing that the creators of Mr Clean and Tidy Bowl would have fallen to their knees in front of me and begged me to become their new household god.

“Schultz isn’t going to need you for his presentation next week.” I croaked. Averting my eyes, I tried not to gag at the vision of my grandfather's breasts now indelibly burned into my fragile young psyche.

“That is ok. I have grown weary of being a woman.” The slow deliberate words resonated through the room, carrying with them all the windswept wisdom of the open plains. I had visions of buffalo, and a solitary mournful dove calling out about the endless prairie grass.

“ Do you know what it is?” He continued. He’d wrapped himself in one of those abrassively gaudy Elvis Presley blankets that people buy in Reno and hang on their walls.

I looked him straight in the face and said no, Grandpa.

“ You are to address me as Grandfather now. It is the Indian way.”

“No, Grandfather. Why have you grow weary of being a woman?”

“It’s these god damned tits.”

He jiggled one of them beneath the blanket, and I screwed up my face in disgust again.

“They keep getting in the god damned way. Bump into things. I’ve spent my entire life thinking about squeezing boobies, and then I finally got some. And you know what? It hurts. Not really pleasant at all.

“You know those white women in the movies? The ones with the enormous boobs who show pleasant enthusiasm while the white man with the cock of a raging stallion fills them full of man meat and kneeds their enormous boobs as if he would soon bake bread? Those women are faking. The do not enjoy having their boobs groped like that.

“You watch porn Grandpa?! I mean Grandfather?!?”

There was a long pause.

“No. But if I did, then I would know such things. And another thing. I found myself becoming offended by the word ‘boob.’ It really is not something that we who have them like to hear. It is strange, my son, and I cannot fully explain it. And I found myself remembering. I remembered everything. Every unkind word ever spoken to me. And every little thing anyone ever did that was not done the way I wished it to be done. Even if I had not told them how to do it in the first place. And all I wanted to do was cry. And eat ice cream.

I stared in disbelief and absolute befuddlement.

“You see, my son, it was then that it came to me. I had indeed become a true woman. And now that I understand them, I wish to be a man again. Simple. Free. Reasonable. And able to go without showering for three or four days and leave my dirty socks on the kitchen table during meal times.”

“But...but Grandfather, “ I stammered, “um... what about the...um... rest of your...um...?”

He reached beneath the couch and retrieved the most elaborate and ornate pipe I had ever seen. And stuffed it full of weed.

“My heart soars at your return my son, and now we must smoke.”

He struck a match, held it to the pipe, inhaled deeply, and held it in for what seemed ages. Then coughed. He passed the pipe to me.

“This is some preeemo shit, my son.”

He was right. It was some primo shit. I burned my fingers as the match burned down between them after the third or fourth pass of the pipe, and we both giggled as I continued to hold it, and the match continued to burn. I leaned back against the couch and stared at the little flashing luminescent clock on his antiquated VCR. 4:24 it blinked.

Hours passed. The wisdom of the Indians was being imparted to me in deep, melodious tones. I became one with the people of the plains. I lived in a teepee with three buffalo hunting women, and we made glorious whoopee each and every night.

I looked back to the clock.

4:24 it blinked.

“Nooooooooo!” I cried. Time had stopped. I was truly, properly, unexplainably, and forever fucked. Trapped for eternity as a pimply 17 year old kid. In an apartment. With my be-breasted, pot smoking, freak of a grandfather. My legs thrashed, and I banged my head against the couch. I flailed my arms about, and accidently smacked one of Grandfather’s withered shemale dugs, which I admit, undulated gloriously beneath the King’s neon visage. The King’s mouth expanded and contracted and you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog echoed through my empty head.

“Ouch, ... my son.”

“Grandfather?”

“It’s pot panic. It will pass in a moment.”

He was right. It did. And then I was sitting across from him. My legs crossed, my shirt off, with war stripes of Burt’s Bees peppermint scented lip balm streaked across my face.

“Grandfather?”

“Yes, my son?”

“Grandfather... if you are tired of being a woman, and um, are going to be a man again, um... what about...well...your other naughty bits?” I giggled.

“Do you think I would cut my junk off just because I wanted to be a heemenah, for which their ain’t no English word?

“Heemenah, my son, like Little Horse.” He replied.

“Little horse, Grandfather?”

“Yes, my son. Little Horse - the extraordinarily well adjusted homosexual Indian brave in the movie Little Big Man. He was a good one, too. We Human Beings thought a lot of him.”

“Human Beings, Grandfather?”

“Yes, my son. We Cheyenne call ourselves the Human Beings because we are the only people who know where the center of the world is. Everyone else is crazy. Especially those whites. Even the black white men. They are not as ugly as the whites, but they are just as crazy.”

“Grandfather... we’re Jewish.”

“And so is Dustin Hoffman,” he replied.

His logic was irrefutable, and I sat there stuffing fistfuls of Cheetos from the bag he’d retrieved from the kitchen into my mouth, turning the entire lower half of my face orange in the process.

“And now, my son,” he said, rising with infinite Indian chief wisdom and dignity, “ I must go and get rid of these tits. Then find your grandmother and bring her home. So that I can squeeze hers.”