Something to offend everyone, archives from 2011 in Normal entries

Whereas I’ve never been the sanest person I know, part by design, part by fucking providence, I have had a firmer grasp on accepted standards and practices of this model of homo sapiens than a number of peers in various positions of authority and or marriage, and or not so high up the tree the fire department needs to get them down. I think I’m becoming a bit obsessive compulsive though if I just wrote OCD you’d be thinking I count how many times I wash my hands or circle the chair before I sit. I mean obsessive compulsive in the two most common meanings of each word. A fine for instance is I was sitting around smoking this cigar from deep in my humidor, one I’m not sure I had heard of or tried before and I’m thinking to myself “I’m never going to remember this”.

So I started thinking about Cigar Journals, did a quick online check. Yeah, they want to call themselves Cigar Dossiers, and like a lot of cigar accessories, figures the modern cigar smoker is extravagant and the opposite of penny-wise, which is something like Dollar stupid. Now granted, the cigar dossiers are leather bound and have rooms for notes and shit, but even in that price range so do fancy day planners at a Mall stationary store where you’re paying four times as much for a day planner and still a lot less than a Cigar Dossier. Part of my point about obsessing is that I went through this thought process instead of just snorting a derisive snort, and being back on my merry way of doing nothing except telling the dogs to try to be good if they can possibly manage it.

And it didn’t stop there. I started thinking about alternatives, like little photo albums and shit with the sticky backs, but how cheap ones lose their sticky over time, yellow, and the pictures fall out. I was even about to prove it to myself when I realized how much shit I’d have to dig through just for a guess at where a photo album might be up in this motherfucker. I’m not really scared of photos any more than Herschel, my dearly departed 100 pounds of muscly pit-bull, was genuinely scared of corn chips, but both of us have been known to run the other way when corn chips or photographs are either emergent or displayed. Which of course had me dismiss the photo album as “Dude you will lose your cigar journal long before it yellows and falls apart.” This happens to my paper journals too. One of the incredible things about OD is it’s the only Journal I’ve ever kept where I know where it still is.

So an hour into thinking about this I say to myself, or maybe out loud to the dogs, “Fuck it, I’m just going to the dollar store.” There is a bit of a problem with saying things to the dogs. If I’m only looking at the one the one dog, I have to repeat something similar to the other the one. It’s not that they understand what I’m saying; it’s that they don’t want the other getting something without they should get some too. It leads to really stupid shit in a house where I’m the only one who understands English like “Oh, Otis, you’re a fat gay bad dog too, yes you are, and I know you would have eaten a chair to get to the stuffing if you had wanted to, c’mon buddy, who’s my weasel beaked fat gay bad boy?”

There is nothing homophobic or even sexual in calling Levi a fag or a gay homosexual or woefully queer fat. There is something funny about a quizzical look from a broad pit-bull face when you call him something no one else is ever likely to say, like if for instance, if it made him mad, nobody ever, in my experience as a pit-bull compadre and observer, ever calls a blue nose, the most pit bull looking of any derivation of pit bull, a fag. Nor do they hug and kiss him afterwards. Adding to the vicarious pleasure of the non PC response to a nutless and asexual great daft beast is having to soothe my other beast by saying, “Oh Otis, you know you’re my number one weasel beaked rump rustling gay boy. Yes, whose my gay dog? Scrotis is!”

So I roll up the dollar tree rocking weird ass shit at deaf guy volumes (Either Alabama Three or Soul Coughing, one of those things that even if the morbidly obese and crippled in their surprisingly late model German engineered vehicles in the dollar tree parking lot knew, they would not be whistling on their way home, the equivalent of parking in a Brahms concert parking lot and blasting Wagner). Oh. Wait. Maybe I need to clarify my parenthetical statements above. Crippled and morbidly obese is as untrue and almost funny to me as calling my dogs gay. That there are more Mercedes than mighty mighty Hoopdees in the parking lot of the dollar tree store is true in every sense of the word, even if you’re in a high school level philosophy or physics argument about the nature of reality and truth being more proscribed than prescribed. I have been to much fancier stores where the mighty mighty jeep was a prince among rigs. The dollar tree, however, is not one of them. The mighty mighty Jeep looks like the helps poor relative in that parking lot. And on an aside, it’s in the building that, at one time, mid-eighties to about 2004, was a circuit city adjunct. Circuit city owned the building and was attached to what had been a circuit city and is now an auto parts store. The dollar tree used to be a pet store. I spent many an evening smoking between the two buildings and watching the various promotional things like obedience class where twelve unruly dogs would be circled around the trainer and twelve haggard owners holding on for dear life. The parking lot to the auto parts store is full of hoopdees and tricked out Jettas (a look I’ll never understand).

So, I’m fighting middle aged housewives with their grubby children, fat chocolate smeared Hansel and Gretel cheeks or Jesus y Maria cheeks, for a position in the Stationary aisle where I can look at things. All the small photo albums have little old lady or precocious little girl prints on the covers; Big daffodils or pink unicorns or springs of bougainvillea and shit, and they are put together like they should be sold in a dollar store. Another aside, for some unknown reason, this area, has this sort of chaos vortex, an anomaly of pisspoor merchandizing. Even the strictest of corporate national stores cannot maintain attractive merchandizing here and even the newer stores look like garage sales. One actually sort of expects this from a dollar tree but not, say, a home depot or best buys, but in this neighborhood, not the whole city mind you, just around here, home depot and dollar tree both have things out of place, on the floor, in disarray.

Oh, another aside, I used to get recruited often as a salesman for Circuit City, the most flattering and interesting and almost tempting one was when one of our old warehouse managers who had become store manager of the downtown future shop, took me to lunch and offered me the position of lead in the computer department, a sort of first among equals kind of gig. The store was beautiful, multi-level with a credenza and a promenade, the sort of store that would have looked at home in a fancy casino on the Strip in Vegas, a showcase. I liked the guy, I loved the store, he hit on the right motivation for hiring me “Because you’ll talk to anyone, my guys are both gun shy and prejudiced, like blind cherry pickers”. Usually I ended those conversations with “Thanks for lunch. You come into my employer’s house and make an end run to sneak behind their backs. Why would I want to work for a prick like that?” But to this guy I said “Give me a few to think about it?” and we shook hands. Within a month Future shop had shut down all locations in Oregon, and, I think, the United States.

So I’m standing in the aisle accepting the excuse me’s from folks trying to get by. And I find, among a pile of shit, a little faux leather day planner that looks perfect for my needs. I don’t have to wander far to find a four pack of glue sticks, including a purple one with glitter, glue sticks being the sort of thing that don’t feel like a bargain at a buck a stick. I grab a couple of rawhide chews and a box of cheese crackers with peanut butter filling and check out, have a few non sequitor sort of conversations in line, take my booty to the mighty mighty jeep, spark her as whatever weird ass tunes come roaring back to life along with six cylinders of raging fury pumping their stiff green gallop and parking lot surf back to hearth and home where I have to tell each dog to keep his furry pants on, yes I got them treats. Neither one of them actually neither has pants nor speaks English, yet, it’s expected I say something, it’d be weird to just come in and hand them raw hide chews. With Herschel I always had to touch his soft muzzle when giving him a treat, because he wouldn’t allow me to otherwise, twisting and turning his head away from the muzzle rub. Sometimes I find myself doing that to Levi, though Levi will put his fat muzzle in your hand and expect you to hold it for him. Otis, trained how to be a dog by Herschel, will avoid the muzzle touch though I’m not sure he knows why he’s doing it.

So, I got out my glue stick and started gluing in the cigar wrappers I’d been saving, the paper ones, not the actual tobacco wrapper. I went through all that in the manner I find myself doing a lot of things of late; “Dude, just go do it or you’ll just drive yourself nuts thinking about it, you fat gay bastard”. Obsessive compulsive but not OCD. I only wash my hand when they are dirty. Just as another aside, more often than not it seems washing your hands before you pee makes more sense than after. My penis has few adventures, spends most of it’s time in a safe and secure cage away from light and dust and things other people have touched. My hands, however, touch all sorts of awful things all the time; they lead a life of danger. My pristine penis should be protected from my grubby paws, not the other way around. I know, washing your hands after peeing is based on pee splatter. 1) I do not pee on my hands nor do I often pee in receptacles shallow and high enough to splatter back to my hands 2) I always think about that old joke; An army man and a Navy man are peeing side by side. The navy man goes to comb his hair afterwards the army man to wash his hands “In the army we wash our hands after peeing” he says, the navy man answers “In the navy we avoid peeing on our hands.”

Immediately I discovered after gluing a bunch of labels into a day planner that I rate cigars, when push comes to shove, much like I label mix tapes (e.g. Tunes for ass, Songs your mother warned you about, things for white boys in cars going real fast). I think my first review was something like, “This short fat bastard was yummy, four stars, hints of leather and horsehide like center field at Fenway”. The second something like “Boy, Freud would have had a field day with this one, three and half stars, half off for humiliating me” There might be some redeeming value in these reviews if I knew what a star meant and was sure my rating system was like one to five stars, one being shitty five being fantastic. Of course, to be fair, some of the labels are so recognizable a review isn’t really needed. Maybe I should think about it a bit more and maybe not use a sharpie on the thin paper as it’s got a fat nib and bleeds through. It’s entirely possible the day planner with the cigar labels will shortly wind up in the fat little dogs gaping maw and I’ll find myself saying “Oh, Otis, you’re a dossier eating son of whore too, come here and kiss me you gay drooly bastard.”