by JRM

February 12, 2008

I have this acquaintance that can’t talk all that well.  In fact, she mercilessly slaughters the English language.  When she’s preparing to enjoy a salad, she asks me to pass her the eye-talian dressing.  When she has run out of clean clothes, she takes them to the laundry and warshes them.  Sometimes people’s names get pluralized for no reason…Jeff Mason suddenly becomes Jeff Masons.  When she forgets someone’s name, she’ll use whatever letters she remembers, makes up the rest and convinces herself that whatever she has conjured has been that person’s name since birth.  I’ve actually seen her argue with people about their own name.  She has no idea that she’s doing it.  There’s no explanation for it.

I have tried to fix the problem through all of the usual channels.  At first I assumed that it was a slip of the tongue and ignored it.  As the problem continued and grew in terms of frequency and heinousness, I would make a habit of using the correct pronunciation of mispronounced word back to her as soon as possible.  This never works.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that she thinks that she is pronouncing everything right and I am the one with the problem.  I just don’t understand it.  Does she not hear other people talk?  Does she not know?  Maybe I’m the one with the problem.  If you know me, please tell me…have I been mispronouncing shit for years?

Speaking of names – I know that the names of the people that send you spam are computer generated by a name-assembling piece of software…but there has to be a point where even the little douche hacker at the wi-fi coffee shop in Russia knows that the name is too ridiculous for anyone to mistake it for an actual email.  For example, some of the sender fields that are currently in my spam folder contain the following names (listed in order from normal to bat shit crazy):  Ashley Staton, Andy Ortega, Owen Cohen, Genevieve Battle, Carld Abdelmuti,   Defected H. Superintendent.  I mean, you’re all smart people…would you open an email from your old buddy Defected H. Superintendent?  Is there honestly somebody in the world who has always wanted to try counterfeit Viagra but was just waiting for someone with a sufficiently ridiculous name to suggest it?

Also, does anyone know what their boogers smell like? Just curious. Now that I’ve got the booger question out of the way, I want to talk about my dad.  He’s working on dying and it makes me exceedingly sad, so I thought I’d force you to read something I wrote a long time ago.  I think it sums the guy up pretty nicely:

The phone call to my parents was a little bit weird this week.  We covered the usual crap…The kids are fine, work sucks, a funny thing happened while I was at the gas station; that sort of thing.  All of the sudden, my dad breaks out with the most peculiar announcement (this isn’t an exact quote, but it’s close):

“I was standing in the kitchen the other day and in the corner of my eye I caught a ladybug – Do you guys have a lot of those down there?  We have a ton of them up here. – I caught a ladybug crawling up the spout of one of your mother’s antique pitchers.  I watched it climb all the way to the spout’s opening.  Then I watched it crawl back down again.  Then up again, and so forth.  After a while, I decided that there was no other explanation for the ladybug’s actions except that it was making these trips for its own enjoyment.  It was really great.”

My only response was, “Um…Okay.  What else are you guys up to?”

I would never have seen the ladybug in the first place.  If I had seen it, I never would have wondered where it was going.  It’s a fucking ladybug – who gives a crap?  I most certainly never would have watched it for 20 minutes or however long Dad looked at it.  Finally, if by some miracle I had managed to get that far I would have concluded that the ladybug was a moron and sure to die of starvation.

“Stupid ladybug.” And that would have been it.

Even at 58, old Dad is wise beyond his years.  He has been an electrician for close to 40 of those years.  His mantra for the majority of his life was “bend pipe, pull wire, drink beer, go pee”.  And it served him well.  He has anything he could ever want.   He once told me that he would have gone to college if he thought he would have learned anything.  I’ve been to and graduated from a couple of colleges.  Dad’s a pretty smart guy.  For the most part, I respect him for it.

On this Father’s Day (or the real one several months from now) I not only encourage you to thank your father for all that he may have done to make you who you are today, but also to stop and notice the ladybug (or whatever) and be thankful for the opportunity to be alive.  Either that or go make some Jello shots.  I’m a fan of those too.

So anyway, there’s that.  Give me a call if you’ve got a couple of spare lungs laying around…you sick, sick lung-collecting fucker…

See you next week.

Love,

JRM

      
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