What's up, Docs?

 Sorry about disappearing again, but it is difficult to satirize 2020 when the year is doing its best to satirize itself. Events have, very frankly, outpaced my powers of imagination. I will try to think of something and let you know how it goes. Enjoy your Halloween!

Upcoming

Something is coming, folks, I have it written out, but I must type it out first. My apologies for the absence; I had a nasty and persistent case of pneumonia. I'm fine now, but it has been something of a pain trying to catch up with the rest of my life. See you soon!

Hugo Chavez

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dead, and on the sixtieth anniversary of Josef Stalin's death to boot, which only goes to show you that while some people would rather be dead than Red and others would rather be Red than dead, there are those who can only be happy when they are both dead and Red.  I wish it were possible to convince more people to join the latter category; it would greatly limit the damage these clowns can cause while they are still living. Hugo Chavez, rest in...well, just rest.

UPDATE: Today I bought nine gallons of Citgo gas for the first time in many a year. Having wished that Chavez would just drop dead for so long, I think it's only right that I help pay for the funeral.

BEARDING, A LESSON IN NO PARTS: To begin, we must first point out that the existence of the beard is, before it is anything else, a philosophical question, at least in the West, whereas in other cultures the beard is not merely simply a matter of philosophy, but one of theology. Orthodox Jews, for example, refrain from shaving, obeying Leviticus’ command that the Children of Israel, or at least the male portion thereof, shall not mar the corners of their beards; whether the bearded ladies at the circus must comply with this commandment is a subject of debate. Devout Muslims do not shave either, but, following the example of the Prophet (peas be upon him), they will clip their mustaches away from their upper lip. Sikhs are the champions of theological hirsuteness here, however, as the tenets of that faith not only forbid the devout to cut their beards, but any other bodily hair as well, which taboo goes a long way towards explaining why there are so few photographs of devout Sikh girls in bikinis. In contrast, Christians, at least here in this our Great Republic, represent a clear-cut victory for Saint Jerome.

In the fourth century, a group of Christian theology students in Alexandria came to blows, a common enough event for Christian theology students then and for centuries afterwards, over the question of how long a beard should be in order to demonstrate the wearer’s personal sanctity. After a night of exhaustive theological and pugilistic investigation of this admittedly arcane bit of dogma, someone hit upon the bright idea of asking the great scholar and Biblical translator Jerome for a ruling on the matter. So the collected students hied themselves and their black eyes down to the great library of Alexandria to pose the question to the saint.

Our seekers after knowledge found Jerome (or Hieronymous, if you people prefer the original with all this Bosch) standing at the circulation desk arguing with one of the clerks about his overdue copy of Valley of the Dolls. The students, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm, which is always the most annoying kind, breathlessly asked their tonsorial question of Jerome, an irascible man in the best of times—he once called someone who disagreed with him an ignorant calumniator, stuffed with Irish porridge (clearly, a man who knew how to vent and to vent well)—and now a man driven to new heights of irascibility because of the clerk’s obstinate refusal to let him keep the book out a little longer so he could translate the good bits into Latin. Jerome told the students, with perhaps more heat than charity, that if sanctity depended on the length of one’s beard, nothing in the Lord’s creation would be holier than a goat. Then, driven to distraction and left there without a return ticket, the great saint hurled anathemas at the students, as well as volume I of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Aardvarkus to Aggravatedus), and the chastened students fled for their lives from the saint’s onslaught, returning to their usual haunts to discuss the theological significance of the goat. As per usual, the conversation grew heated and the neighbors then called the police to suppress the rioting. In the end, only three people were killed and 27 goats reported missing, although the police later found five of them tied up behind Jamaican restaurants on Alexandria’s west side. The owners declared that they had no idea how the goats got there.

I bring up all this aggressive hirsute shilly-shallying because I now have a beard and I am under some very substantial pressure from a number of people to get rid of the thing. My mother, for one, has never liked beards and finds the prospect of looking at mine for any prolonged length of time a prospect to horrifying to contemplate. Mom does not like anything that reminds her that she is, as she puts it, getting on a bit, although I should point out here that at 82 she is not getting on, she’s got on, and no, that is not something I would say to her face, thank you very much, and therefore having to look at her eldest son’s impression of Robert E. Lee is as grim a memento mori as you can find here in our happy little burg. The kid next door, an obnoxious munchkin as viciously noxious as she is relentlessly ob, takes my mother’s side of the argument and does so with no end of sonic gusto, usually in as close a proximity to my ears as she can manage. Scarcely a day goes by hereabouts that I do not hear that annoying little cockroach bellowing her incessant demand that I shave the ugly gray ferret off my face, and scarcely a day goes by that I do not wonder why I didn’t smother the rotten brat with a pillow when I had the chance. Ah well, it’s too late for regrets now, I suppose.

On the other hand, a good many people like the new look, something that I find very heartening. I look, depending on whom you talk to, like a professor, which is what I started out to be all those years ago, or Ernest Hemingway, a comparison I simultaneously love and loathe—I admire Hemingway the writer a great deal and I dislike Hemingway the man about as much; the type of person who could write the kind of nasty hatchet jobs that appear in A Moveable Feast is not the sort of person I would want to know personally. And, apparently, I look like Santa Claus, a resemblance that has led more than one youngster to sidle up to me and mutter, “I wanna Playstation.” I must admit that since growing the beard I am taking a good deal of pleasure in playing the Anti-Claus and telling them that they can’t have one unless they beat up their little sisters two days before Christmas, and that they may get nothing at all this year because the cookies they left out for me last year were so stale that the reindeer wouldn’t eat the damn things, and let’s face it, reindeer are neither the pickiest of eaters nor are they the brightest bulbs in the box; if the reindeer won’t eat the cookies, no one else will. I may not stop Christmas from coming this year, but I managed to take some of the shine off of the holiday, especially if you happen to be a little sister hereabouts just a couple days before Christmas, and before you start calling me names, let me reiterate my long held position that Ebenezer Scrooge was a deeply misunderstood man and that the Grinch was a equally unappreciated…well, whatever grinches are, with or without the tight shoes, they are unappreciated.

But the best opinion of all came from my brother, who agrees with my mother, thinks that the beard should go sooner rather than later, and says that the damn beard makes me look like a refugee from the ZZ Top Fan Club. This is fine by me; I’ve been a fan of the Texas rockers for years now, so if I’m going to look like I’m with the band, I might as well keep the beard. Like the boys say, every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man. Of course, ZZ Top is not the sharpest looking band around—I think they look like the miner ‘49 and his daughter, Clementine, especially the latter—but then again, they don’t have to look sharp. Unlike me, they’re actually with the band.

There will be a new post up before the end of the week, folks. My apologies, and yes, I know you're tired of my apologizing for this sort of thing, but it isn't lack of ideas or even sloth this time around; the piece is fighting me every inch of the way. I know I should just drop the thing now and move on to other things; I have a couple of good ideas in line waiting for me to write them up; but at this point it's become one of those guy things: I'm going to finish this if it kills me first. I will be back at the grindstone tonight in an effort to move this thing along. Until then, watch some television and contemplate how much better your life is going to be once the same government that cannot deliver the mail properly is delivering medical care for all and sundry.

GOVERNMENT CARS: I haven’t been keeping up with the news recently; some things are just too depressing for words and I’ve been trying to shift from my usual diet of negativity to something with fewer carbohydrates and more good cholesterol; so I’ve been missing things as they go zipping by, and one of the things that I’ve apparently missed is the United States government guaranteeing the warranties of the Big Three automakers. This was news to me, and apparently it was news to me about three weeks after it was news to everyone else here in this our Great Republic. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that my car is nine years old and that I finished making payments on it four or five years ago, so I am pretty sure that the warranty on my car ran out a while ago and that President Obama’s guarantee does not effect me in any way, which means that I am now officially easy meat for Lennie, my trusty and extremely expensive auto mechanic and a man whose kids my car has put through college at least twice. Having said that, I would think that people whose cars are still under warranty would start to worry right about now. At first glance, the idea that the full faith and credit of the United States government backs your car warranty should ease the fears of anyone with a warrantied car, but should reflection set in, and reflection almost always sets in like your brother in law from New Jersey parking his fat ass in your favorite chair after Thanksgiving dinner, troubles innumerable begin to spring up. I hesitate to point this out, a grammatical construction I’ve never really understood, since what usually follows after you say that you hesitate to point this out is the very thing you say you are hesitating to point out, but the same government that says it will guarantee your warranty is the same government that cannot successfully run a railroad, deliver your mail, or patrol its own borders. This, you’ll pardon me for saying so, does not inspire confidence in the long-term security of your warranty. So if you do have a government-backed auto warranty, you might want to start thinking about trading your car in for a Japanese or German car. If you are ecologically minded and concerned that getting a new foreign car may add to your carbon imprint, then now is a good time to think about buying a bicycle, or maybe a horse, although parking for the latter may be a bit hard to come by these days. And remember, if the government wants to guarantee the warranty on your horse, you might as well shoot it right now; five will get you ten the horse will be lame by the end of the year. And don’t forget to recycle the shoes.

SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING: I should smile more. I hadn’t realized that smiling, or the lack thereof, was in any way a problem for me until a few days ago, when a small child came up to my desk and solemnly asked why I didn’t ever smile. My response to the little tatterdemalion, that I smiled all the time, brought forth a huge collective guffaw from my fellow inmates here at the egregious mold pit. When I asked what so funny, my co-workers, none of whom is ever going to get a Christmas card from me ever again, told me that the little urchin was right: I never smiled.

In fact, I am apparently famous from one end of this our happy little burg to the other, a span that admittedly does not cover much ground when looked at in the overall topographic scheme of things, for being the sort of grim, unsmiling, humorless ogre who could ruin a rich relative’s funeral just by showing up. This, I said, was nothing more or less than a low and contemptible slander—I am a cheerful sort of fellow, always happy and smiling and up for a good laugh. This statement brought forth a further burst of merriment from many of the co-workers and no few stares of wonder from others, especially those interested in seeing just how personally clueless one human being can be if given half a chance.

I must say that I found the discrepancy between the public’s apparent view of me and my own self-image more than a little disconcerting. I could not, I thought, be the dull, dour, humorless prig that my co-workers think me, and so I resolved to settle the matter by asking the people who know me best, my family, what they thought of the little munchkin’s libelous accusation.

Asking my family anything about anything is, I now find, a bad idea. Clearly, a virulent strain of idiocy runs through the family tree like Montezuma’s revenge. To a man, to a woman, to a child, the general consensus of amongst this vile assemblage of congenital dolts was that the runt was right: I am as grim, dour, and unsmiling a wretch as you would ever care to meet. Somehow or other, I have managed to go for fifty years without ever learning that I have all the personal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge before he met the spirits, with this small fillip of difference: everyone agrees that I would have told the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to go kiss my ass. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was mortified to the nth degree. Surely, I thought, there must be someone who sees the happy, smiling me. So I went then to the source of all wisdom and comfort in the Bashmachkin clan: my mom. Surely, my own dear, sweet, beloved mother would protect me from the scummy tide of calumny sweeping about me.

The interview did not go well, although I must admit that my threatening to have the immigration department deport her if she didn’t see things my way may have contributed to the generally negative tone of the meeting. Mom provoked me, though, what with her agreeing with the rest of the family on the smiling slander. She did do her best to put a positive spin on the bad news—moms are like that—telling me that while I was not the most cheerful person in the world, there were ten of thousands of people even worse than I am, no two ways about it, and there are my many positive qualities: I am kind to children and small animals when I am not actually kicking them, that I am good to the poor when I am not ignoring them, and that I respect the sanctity of other people’s families right up to the point where they want some of my money. Upon hearing my positive qualities stated in what I can only describe as a slightly equivocal manner, almost as if Mom had to rummage through her memory in order to find something nice to say about me, I then threatened the aforementioned deportation proceedings, whereupon my mother told me to go pound salt, an expression most New Yorkers use at least once a day and sometimes twice just for the fun of it.

So it must be true, after all: I don’t smile. I am a grim and glowering presence who thoroughly frightens small children and depresses anyone who comes in contact with me. I am that little guy in the L’il Abner cartoons, Joe Something or other, who stalked the earth with a perpetually raining storm cloud permanently ensconced over my head. It is official: I am not a happy camper. And then I saw it, I saw opportunity knocking like no one’s business. Yes, I frown more than I smile—from what the family tells me, I last smiled in 1966, but everyone thought I was trying to sneeze and so said, God bless you; I’d always wondered why they did that—but this is not altogether a bad thing, despite the best efforts of modern medical science to convince us otherwise. Modern medical science also tells us that it takes 76 muscles to frown and 14 to smile, and there’s gold in that there difference, folks, gold.

Yes, my friends, 76 muscles control the human frown, and to this day, no one has come up with a way to frown aerobically. Obviously, it is easier to smile aerobically than it is to frown, but if you spent your day smiling aerobically people would think that you were more than a little strange, and possibly on drugs, whereas aerobic frowning not only works more muscles than smiling, it convinces people that you are a deeply serious and thoughtful person whose opinion about the great issues of the world really matters. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but I’m pretty sure that this one is a moneymaker, even in tough economic times like these. The times may even help me strike it rich; if everyone’s going to be frowning anyway, and they will, they might as well frown and lose weight and feel better about themselves as they stand in the unemployment line. You know, I think I’ve got something there.