ABSURDITIES

Absurd (ab-surd) adj. contrary to all reason or common sense; illogical, ridiculous.

What is it that makes a bank robber not only hand the teller a note demanding all of her money but at the same time give her his paycheck and deposit slip with his name on it? What makes a visitor to the local fast food joint get out of the car to go inside to use the bathroom but then get back in the car and wait to go through to the drive thru window? Just what does make a 65 year old balding man go to the barber to get a hair cut? These are fascinating studies in human behavioral oddity and absolutely true cases. We have all probably heard of cases such as these but how many of us are willing to admit to out own similar stupidity? Not me brother! I meant to walk into that solid wooden door because I am conducting an acoustical study into how many different sounds can be categorized as a “thud.” That sound you heard when I was under the table trying to stand up was also part of the same project. I am secretly trying to find out how many lumps on one person can have on their head before they can no longer see strait. I am slowly approaching the state where I can no longer comfortably wear a baseball cap.

My child is in on the act too. She is trying to climb and fall from enough monkey bars, trip over as many curbs, and run into as many objects as she can to accumulate bruises. She’s trying to look like an over ripe banana.

The other woman in my life has always had as an ultimate goal having every part of her body hurt, broken, lumpy, oozing, or wiggling at one time or another during her lifespan. She’s been at it for as long as I’ve known her. Don’t stand next to her or she’ll take you down too. She loves to grab and fall! Her favorite phrase is “aawwwww shhhhhhh…..” I don’t want to say she has a balance problem but she does do a startlingly amusing slick stairway tap dance as anyone I have ever seen! Every time I think she has completed her task of hurting body parts she comes up with another one I’d almost forgot existed on a human being. You haven’t lived until you hear improbable words like “my eye lashes hurt.” “Stop letting the gopher pull them out” I tell her. She doesn’t listen. I’m sure that’s because she has earaches or something.

Human stupidity is never more evident then when watching Jerry Lewis, Jim Carey, or John Belushi in action. Theirs are case studies in the ability to harness observation of stupidity, exaggerate it, and play it back in a manner that has the average shmoe busting a gut. Once hooked we don’t mind shelling out hundreds of dollars to see these genius’ perform the material that we provide them! Who’s yankin’ who?

What passes for wisdom in the modern era is kind of like clutching the wind. You know its there somewhere but the forces of nature won’t let you see it. We all do things that seem out of character from time to time. However a woman’s salon that applies peanut butter instead of toenail polish would be a bit out there! Selling entrance through the pearly gates that guarantees you a spot in heaven is just such an idea whose time has come. There is actually a company who is making this claim. Looking back on my illustrious life I realize its time to belly up and pay!

Just think of all of the things you have done in your lifetime that are contrary to “normal conventions. I don’t mean just the boo-boos that everyone has seen. I mean the truly nonsensical behavior that only your lover and an ER doctor with exceptionally cold hands has ever seen. Who would have thought that would get stuck in there?

For the amount of people on this planet it is rather remarkable that we are not hearing such absurdities excessively and laughing ourselves silly.

Look around you! Why do us overweight types always spend a mere 35 seconds choosing a restaurant? We have the innate ability to pass a local establishment, put our piggish noses in the air, and get a whiff of whether they serve enough calories per square inch in their slap happy deal! We require, by the way, enough caloric intake to make a pachyderm happy. We always select the restaurant with the absolutely worst, greasy, cholesterol raising, artery clogging, heart thickening version of food. Then to counter balance the bad karma we’ve created we all do the same thing. We order a diet soda to go with it!

Just listen to our conversations to see the kind of communication that typifies such farce? “I lost my keys and looked everywhere for them. I finally found them. It’s always in the last place ya look ya know!” That last part has become quite a catch phrase. Well who finds something and keeps looking for it? Of course it’s in the last place you looked you dunce!

This is the kind of stellar logic that we have been instilling in kids for years. They learn more of it in school too. They can’t add, read, or write, but they sure can choose the correct eye popping ensemble to impress the recess crowd! They can’t play dodge ball anymore because someone might get hit by the ball and their face could fall off. You can’t let 'em swing from the swing set too high or they might go too far, fall off, and bruise their tush. Apparently all of those teacher in service day holidays that leave your kids a day off every month is in place so the teachers try to recover. Just try dealing with the least logical of us and you’d end up looking like a teacher too. Their eyes aren’t that wide open because their attentive. It’s because they spend so much time with illogical kids that the stress is forcing their eyes to bulge! There is little wonder why periodically you hear from your kid “I don’t like that teacher! Well guess what kid you’ve driven them to have to have a day away from you ever month just as a reality check! They don’t like you either!

At school ya can’t even let the children walk the hallways during classes any more unless they’re in pairs. This is how all of the adult ladies learned that they can’t go to the bathroom tinkle without a partner in the next stall. That’s why they go to the bathroom in pairs. Guys are not taught this in school. Contrarily boys learn individualism and competition usually in the form of some long distance whizzing competition when the teachers aren’t looking. That is equally remarkable because guys who as children use to wave that thing over the bathroom shelter themselves in the stall so no one will see what they’re hiding! Whatta ya got in there?

In any event all of these amusing behaviors are perpetrated upon ourselves! Whenever self inflicted stupidity rears its head you can bet that there is a partner there laughing with you and a cold handed ER doctor to laugh at you!

PETS!

What is the fascination of children toward pets? GI Joe and Barbie are good enough to hold the average scurrying rug-rat but only for a few years. Invariably the subject of having a pet arises. You can run but you can’t hide! Having a pet is a prerequisite to becoming an adolescent! It is accompanied by that whiney, grating, noisy, flopping up and down, thrashing on the ground, holding ones breath until you get what you want scene, and that’s just me protesting! Oh, yeah, this is the same behavior youngsters have in the pet store in an effort to persuade you that having a pet is a good idea.

Pets come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s usually the big ones they want first. My daughter’s first request was for a pet elephant. If I remember correctly, I think “peanut” was her first spoken word. It didn’t help that my wife is a fancier of such humongous, largely overweight animals. That’s why I’m the apple of her eye! She likes elephants, too. This elephant desire was not easily squelched in our house because of the often-watched episode of The Simpsons where Bart wins a pachyderm in a radio station contest. “No honey,” we’d tell the youngster, “that’s just a cartoon! Elephants belong in the circus or the Republican party”. Come to think of it, isn’t that the same thing?

When I was a kid I wanted a dolphin. I figured all you needed in the back yard was a pool and some kind of watertight truck to carry it up the highway from Sea World. Can you imagine the rear end of such a vehicle swaying as it drove up the highway? As a kid I could actually visualize it.

Another clarion call was for my very own horse. Not such a big deal if you live on a farm or a place with a lot of land. We, however, lived on a postage stamp sized lot barely big enough for the house that sat upon it. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop the yearlong nagging I put upon my parents. It wasn’t until I realized that they had invested heavily in the earplug market that I gave up the ghost on that idea.

Kids are funny, but they grow up and then the real pressure for a less wacky domesticated animal comes into focus. A dog is a prime example. How many times can one parent say no to such a normal household pet? The older members of the family try the logical approach. “It’ll be good as a watchdog and make mom feel safe.” However, when you end up with a dog that has a high-pitched yap instead of a deep-throated baritone growling bark, that benefit flies out window. As I think back on my childhood I’m hearing the same arguments I heaped on my poor parents. My daughter is trying them out on me.

“I’ll take care of it! I’ll feed it! I’ll walk it. I’ll clean up after it!”

To this day when I review the family scrapbook I always come across that picture of my father with a pooper scooper in his hand, and he is not smiling! Children take as much care of the animal on the lowest rung of the family ladder as they would a brother or sister. Good heavens, that would be considered animal cruelty!

Having a pet is like perpetually having an infant in your care. They can’t feed themselves. There are particular needs when cleaning up after them. They tend to chew on everything, and create quite a mess of your shoes when they are growing (and that’s just the kids). You can’t leave the house or leave town without “special arrangements” or taking Fifi on vacation with you! The idea of spending 2,500 miles of highway time with a lap sitting Pekingese, their tongue flapping in my face from the necessity to stick its neck out the driver’s side window, isn’t overly appealing!

Man’s best friend? My family lineage consists of a long line of postal workers, utility company employees and various assorted other entities which required a work uniform. There’s nothing a watchdog likes more than to sink his teeth into the soft part of your tush when you wear one of those coordinated ensembles. It’s like waving a red flag at a bull. I never knew that postcards could fly until I saw them do just that out of a postman’s mail pouch. He was doing the 25-yard dash and high jump out of a neighbor’s yard. Postmen have to be very athletic or get used to spending time lying on their stomach as the family physician sews their wound that's the shape of the Liberty Bell. If you know a postal delivery worker, you can bet there is a bell on their butt!

Much has been made of being a “cat person,” versus being a “dog person.” These pet owners fancy their animals as extensions of their own personalities. I know more people that are dogs than are cats, and usually they are men! Some pet owners are merely confused folks because they treat “Fido” or “Twinkie” like they are the people of the house. There are complete pet wardrobes including sweaters, pants, and accessories (diamond studded jewelry). My favorites are pet eyeglasses and dental braces.

Not to be outdone, there are equally delusional individuals practicing pet psychiatry! I can hear the conversation now:

"Doctor": I know you were the seventh in a litter that had a mother who could only service six at a time, but that doesn’t mean you should be pooping in your neighbors front yard!

Rex: I know it, Doc, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I think I’m addicted to a swat on the nose from a rolled up newspaper!

Doggie psychiatrists are sure to confuse a pup. “How will I ever get him to stay off of the couch at home if the doctor requires him on it in his office?” Exactly what university in this country educates veterinarians and qualifies them as shrinks? There are professors out there who need to have their heads examined!

Alas, no matter how much I object the tide eventually will turn against me. Since I want to be remembered as a kind, softhearted, loving, gracious, father, instead of my true identity, eventually I know I will lose this battle. Mind you, I could go a whole lifetime without knocking the pet bowl of water all over the kitchen floor and still live a fulfilled satisfying life. I’ll be the one that has to clean that up, too, I’m sure. However, I’ll be overrun in the family’s zeal to add another mouth to feed to our household one way or the other. I can see how this will all end.

Our beautiful little home will forever have a keepsake on the mantle over the fireplace in the living room. The family portrait will display us all together, including me, with a special look on my face, and a pooper scooper in my hand!

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Is it just me or has group-think reached epidemic proportions? If you are not firmly planted in the left, right or independent center of political thought there is no place for you to go! How’s that for covering your bases? My point is not about being among the group. It is about being an individual away from it. What political party would Einstein belong to today? Why the Whig party of course! Yeah I know it’s a stretch as a hair joke but where is that individual with the observant mind to go to satisfy his wit today?

From Global Warming to the potential pandemic of bird flu, the unity of supposed experts displayed on news programs is as deafening as the guys who use to tell us that the world was flat. Remember them? Falling off the edge of the world was a big thing back then! We haven’t heard from too many of them in a while. They sailed off to prove their theory and never returned.

These types are the same as the gang that runs from a black cat and never under a ladder! They throw salt over their shoulder, avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks, fear a bird in the house and won’t label the 13th floor of a high-rise building properly. You probably remember them from high school. They were the large rimmed glasses wearing, high water panted, pencil box carrying, protractor consulting, geeks that were wallflowers at the monthly teen club dance! Today they are Bill Gates; rich and still just as goofy!

These are the same folks who tell you that you came from monkeys! That is an insult to your parents perhaps but probably more so to your great grandfather, Dr. Zaius. What they never told you was that Charles Darwin had ape hair growing out of his own knuckles! This type of individual lives in a world of academia. For most people that’s a world of abstract thought where the universe can be answered by atoms, quarks, and theorems joining forces so as to resemble Phyllis Diller. It’s a mathematics survival of the fittest and is delivered courtesy of Texas Instruments.

Individuals with a vested interest in a particular outcome of a given subject now control many of the levers of societal communication. No longer just two cups on a string the arbiters of what we hear and see are a lot like the cable TV guy. Here’s a chap to whom you are at the mercy of that shows you so every afternoon that you’re still waiting for him to show up for his 9am appointment.

This person appeals to our gullible side! They can make you believe that purple elephants with pink polka dots can really fly if their ears are big enough. That’s silly because they usually are not drinkers. Everyone knows that you only see such things after being picked up off the bar room floor. Usually you are stepped on down there until your tongue flops to the ground and is used as a mop for the ashtray like tiles. Mmmm Mmmm tasty! Afterward one of the large bouncer fellows tosses you right onto one of those pachyderms for the flight home.

Some see the ridiculous things they espouse as the be-all and end-all of both time and space. Does anybody really believe that U.F.O’s have Jimmy Hoffa running their Intergalactic longshoreman’s association rather than the conventional wisdom? Thinking outside the box helps but that doesn’t justify their reason for existence. Insecure little nits aren’t they? Professor Frink can answer any question but is incapable of comprehending the impact of emotions and philosophy. If a tree fall s in the woods and lands on someone out of sight does it still hurt? Not until you witness them in a body cast!

Now we come to find out that Jesus Christ has great grand children to the fifth power who probably live in France courtesy of Leonardo DaVinci. I thought Leo just was a flying artist that wanted to create unperceivable paintings to hang on Riviera museum walls while waiting to become rich and famous posthumously. Sure he painted The Last Supper, but that feminine looking apostle John in the diner scene is really a woman and the Star’s wife! Therefore, in his other effort the Mona Lisa is a painting of Mary Magdalene during her pregnancy. She could be smiling because just out view Jesus is tickling her fancy! If enough experts would say it a large segment of the population would agree upon it.

Why you could write any story about history you want. Dinosaurs didn’t disappear from the face of the earth they just shrank and are sleeping! Ben Franklin was really wearing metal underwear when his kite was struck by lightening. After all what else could explain his proclivity to produce children at such an advanced age? His lady companions use to comment of Ben’s prowess in bed simply shuttering the phrase “shocking!” The Roman Coliseum really only held football games for the oldest football team in history, (The Saint’s of course).

The latest travesty with bird flu, a family infecting each other without exposure to birds almost brings a gleeful tone to the newscaster’s voice. They’ve been waiting for this since 1919 after all. Since they’ve said a flu pandemic was possible every year since then they were likely to hit upon being correct eventually. Now that is being ahead of the curve! Maybe it’s just mathematical. Perhaps it’s just the masses in a concert of thought out of control on a one way street!

Perhaps Albert Einstein’s hair looked like that because he was dressing up as Bozo the Clown for weekend children’s parties! That's probably not so though because that would make him more like the rest of us and susceptible to peer pressure. It is generally accepted that he had no equal. We all know he was using more intellect in one thought than most of us clowns use in a lifetime. He wasn’t a bird brain at all. He was a different sort of a bird all together; an individual apart from the group-thinking flock.