Football is fun

If you're like me, and thank the good lord Sweet jesus you are not, but even if you are just kind of like me, you are completely overdosed on turkey  sandwiches and prescription pain medications, laid out on an uncomfortable couch and barely able to make out the blurs on the big screen which is apparently about a half mile away on a far off wall, with the best college football game in the nation playing this very second. If that is the case and you are slowly fading in and out of consciousness you may be awakened by the supreme play of Alabama super player HaHa Clinton-Dix.
I was just laying there on the couch and every so often the languid vocals of the drunken announcer would say, "that's Haha Clinton-Dix again," or something like that and I would all of a sudden wake up, sort of.
It's not every single day of your life that you hear the words Haha Clinton-Dix all strung together like that.
Then again, if you think about it, a college football player is probably somewhere between the age of eighteen to twenty one. So, if my math is even close to accurate, Mr. Clinton-Dix was born somewhere in the early 90's. So even I, a person with only decent Google abilities could figure out which famous president was in the Oval office at the time of Haha's birth.
I'm just going to go out of my way here and thank the parents of this spectacular football player for thinking so far into the future during the early days of the turbulent presidency of one William Jefferson Clinton. How could they have ever known how ironic and fun their superstar sons name would be just a few years later.
"Haha Clinton-Dix slams another Auburn player to the ground."

Shop small on Saturday

So, you avoided WalMart and all those other monster type shopping prisons and now you want to help out smaller stores and businesses that survive selling interesting and eclectic goods to normal and healthy people.
American Express is offering a 10 dollar rebate for every 10 dollars spent using an American Express card when purchasing goods from approved stores on Saturday, December 30th.
Lucky for you, Mergatroid Books collection of fun and funny books is part of this deal. So click on over to Amazon and maybe buy yourself the latest Branson novel and sit back and enjoy for a variety of reasons, no lines, no crazy tantrums and most of all, you get your money back from AmEx when you buy the book tomorrow. Here is the link to Branson, but there are others in the Mergatroid orbit and feel free to buy one or two of those too.

The Friday of blackness

I have never done a "Black Friday" zombie sort of experience thing. I don't like lines, I don't like dumb people and I don't really get the entire concept of lemming behavior, but since I am always on the prowl of a new experience, I put on some blackface make-up and woke up early this morning and drove to our local WalMart super shopping big box crapfest shopping experience.
Imagine my surprise to be the only person to be wearing blackface makeup for Black Friday. Did no one else get the memo? How could I be the only one who thought about dressing up for this major American event?
Lucky for me, I happen to be in Mississippi and most of the people in line at WalMart just sort of laughed uncomfortably and a few took my picture.
So what did I learn from the masses of people massing at a store filled with junk made by slave labor children in a far off country? I learned nothing. People are strange, strange for waking up very early for deals on stuff they probably don't need.
When I was a kid we were so poor that I used to get a pair of socks as a holiday gift. A single sock if things were not going well. The concept of running off to a store at some ungodly hour to buy terribly made stuff just to wrap in ugly paper to give to people I may not even respect is just insane to me.
That said, I did buy 4 large flat screen TV's and 14 video game control systems, because I just got caught up in the whole shopping experience. That and I knew that once I left the safe confines of WalMart, those angry people in the parking lot were going to beat the living daylights out of me for my awful choice of makeup techniques.

Unsure of brilliance

Artist life

Thanksgiving gypsy circus

When I was growing up my family never celebrated thanksgiving in the traditional way people celebrate thanksgiving. For us, it was just another day to set up our Gypsy Circus road show. 

Early on every Thanksgiving morning my father would unpack an old Underwood typewriter with a well worn handwritten sign on a terribly broken down poker table that read “will write a short story for 3 dollars” and people would come up, give him 3 dollars and tell him the names of their children and off he would go, creating these vivid and fantastic tales of danger and woe all based about some crazy concept he would drunkenly throw together inside his mind. Oh, did I mention he was shit faced drunk when he did this? He was.

The problem with my fathers Thanksgiving Day gypsy writing scam was obvious, it would take him hours to write a 2-3 page story and after a paragraph or two, it was completely incoherent. Sure, it might start with, “Johnny and Jimmy had the day off, so they left the castle atop their favorite dragon, flying over the lush green forest that they considered the prime playground.” But within just the span of another paragraph or two, the alcohol and bitterness had taken over and the kid story had turned into, “sure, the castle was a cold place, who can afford to heat such a large and uncomfortable home? It’s not as if the witch of a queen bothered, she was busy with her social life, performing lurid dances for the knights and trolls who would wander in from living under the various bridges that made up the unfortunate kingdom.”

At some point, parents would throw a few dollars at my fathers typewriter and walk away, holding maybe a page and a half of blathering silliness from his beautiful antique typewriter.

At the same time that my father was barely entertaining patsies with his writing scam, my mother, high as a kite on prescription pain medication and something she called “happy juice’ would also set up a shanty town table and a small tent, with a crayon sign that read “fortunes reader hear” (sic) and she would sit, zombie like, until some idiot would sit across from her on a chair barely designed to hold the weight of an infant. She would awaken to find someone in the chair opposite her and she would shuffle her cards. Now, get this, these were not tarot cards, or even Pokemon cards, no these were playing cards that she had stolen from Caesars Palace in Lake Tahoe on one of her gambling binges. She would shuffle them in her Oxy-drugged haze and thrown down a couple of disrupted random cards, look at them, “oh a seven of diamonds and a two of spades. Are you a prostitute? Do you work in construction?” she would ask, and often times, the woman sitting in the guest seat would look at her in disbelief and just stand up, sometimes asking for her money back, sometimes just violently walking out, my mother palming the cash and putting it in her over filled bra.

We had a large family. My oldest brother, who shall remain nameless, mostly because my parents were too lazy to name him, did his own gypsy circus tricks to make the family money. As a young and handsome boy, he was able to cobble together enough of a story to entrance other kids to gather around, and before long, all the kids would dig deep into their “britches” and pull out any coins or cash they had on them. They would willingly hand them to my charismatic brother, who would then tell them to follow my incredibly sleek and fast other brother, dressed for this part in a silk-like fabric racing outfit. My oldest brother would offer the cash prize to the “strongest and fastest amongst you who can take down this scamp here (pointing to my ostensibly pajama clad brother) and bring him back to me” Off my middle brother would sprint, followed by a herd of young and uncoordinated children. Not once in the many years of scamming did anyone catch my super fast brother, actually I stand corrected. One Thanksgiving, a young girl rom Tupelo corralled him, took him down like a young steer and held him to the ground and yelled for my older brother to pay up. “I can’t hear you,” he screamed at her, “you must bring him to me to collect your winnings.” That was the screw right there, because my middle brother had spent a lifetime being tormented by his older brother, being held down on a variety of surfaces and tickled or worse by a much stronger older brother and had learned how to escape. So when this young Tupelo girl looked at my older brother in disgust, my middle brother turned a hip, slipped a foot forward, got a knee under himself and was up and running again, the young girl laying on her back screaming in pain. I believe they made five dollars that day.

I was old enough to actually be preparing to leave for Circus College when I finally had the nerve to ask my parents why we never took the day off and celebrated Thanksgiving like so many other Americans. They both looked at me dumbfounded, like I had crossed a logic line that I never knew existed. “Why would you even ask such a stupid question?” My out of her mind mother asked, followed by my father giving me such a serious glare I was sure part of my scalp would soon catch fire and then a slap on the back of my head that was designed to knock some sense into my already empty head. 

“I was just wondering,” I said, as explanation.

“Well, wonder how you are going to catch a rabbit for your sisters magic trick this afternoon,” my dad said, as he set up his story table on a nondescript street corner, across from my mothers Fortune Reader tent.

Years later I would have my own family and as much as I wanted to incorporate new traditions, like celebrating thanksgiving in all the traditional ways, all I really knew how to celebrate this unique  American holiday was to set up flimsy tables and find a way to remove the cash from gullible peoples wallets. Which is how, about a decade ago, my children and I developed the entire concept of “black Friday” an evil plan that involves not just me and my small and unsuspecting children, but employees and terribly run globally owned slave labor stores, that would buy into my evil plan, by forcing their low paid employees to actually do what my parents made their lonely children do so many years before, engage in embarrassing and circus like work on Thanksgiving for pennies, doing something loathsome meaningless and obligatory for low wages, just because they could and in the end, ruining both the holiday and the meaning of the holiday, all in one swift move. 

This year, I am without any of my own children for the first time in decades and the love of my life and I are onto some new and better ideas for Thanksgiving. Instead of Gypsy Circus’s or Black Friday scams, we are planning to saunter over to one of the many local casinos and eat life wild forest pigs at an all-you-can salvage buffet. Nothing says Traditional American Thanksgiving like stuffing your mouth with food made by people who should be home spending quality time with their family.

Buy the new Branson 3 Here.

Travel days

E-book reminder

The vast majority of everyone in the entire universe will be traveling soon. I am making that up, but if you listen to a radio or happen to own one of those TV things, you will hear a story in the next few minutes about the nightmare of holiday travel.
I am at the airport as I write this. There was NO ONE in line for security. No one. Not a single person. I was alone.
That said, I have been sitting here posting little boring posts about why people should be reading Branson 3, and it did dawn on me, it’s a good book for plane travel. It is, that part is true. So is the part about not a single person being in line for security.
Branson three is a fast and furious read. It’s digital, it’s linked right here and I am about to download it myself and read it on my way to Atlanta. You should too.

Bible says:

Hosea 3:1-3
Once again the Lord spoke to me. And this time he said, “Hosea, fall in love with an unfaithful woman who has a lover. Do this to show that I love the people of Israel, even though they worship idols and enjoy the offering cakes made with fruit.”

So I paid fifteen pieces of silver and about ten bushels of grain for such a woman. Then I said, “Now you are mine! You will have to remain faithful to me, though it will be a long time before we sleep together.”

Why now

The clouds have spoken

with the slightest movement 

they just danced a little bit

and then it began to rain

Stupid people that fly

Until about a decade ago you never really knew if the person standing next to you on a public street was nice, naughty, smart, friendly, mean, intelligent or even spoke english. You just sort of smiled, waited for the light to change and walked on as if the bird in the far off tree was the most important thing you would ever see, thus was the sort of communication people engaged in before cellphones.

Then dumb people got smartphones.

Until the advent of portable phones no one knew I was a babbling idiot. I kept it a secret. I could hide all my personal drama, all to myself. Sure, when I got home I would call my friend LoShonda and I would just rant and rave about my latest craziness and we would scream and yell about this or that in almost obscene amounts of details, but since it was just me and LaShonda sharing, no one knew about me and my shallow existence, except LaShonda, she seemed more than willing to keep my secrets.

Then I bought me one of those cellphones and so did every other imbecile this side of a Chinese slave labor camp and now you can not stand on any street corner in any street in this world anymore without hearing the dirtiest of very dirty laundry from some of the stupidest of the most incredibly stupid people who inhabit this world. For decades we walked the highways and byways of this country without questioning that our fellow travelers were at least bright eyed and somewhat intelligent, until they started to share their most intimate details of their dates, their hookups and their most private lives, everywhere, from subways to fast food lines. 

I was at a doctors waiting room this last week and the diabetic extra large woman sitting across from me was wheezing into her phone about her rotten children in a voice loud enough to guide ships into a fog shrouded coastal community. I heard everything from her pot smoking teenage daughter to her bully prone son who hates autistic children with a neanderthal passion. Of course there was not much this out of touch mom could do but shovel in another donut and wonder where the no longer interested father went wrong. 

I should not know anything about her life, but I know way to much, because she has a cellphone and no sense of pride. I am only bringing this up because my last vestige of privacy from these  monsters of over-sharing may have finally found me. Apparently airlines are about to allow these loud and proud idiots to use their phones on airplanes. The one place left on the planet where I could sit quietly and read, an airplane in flight, will probably no longer exist. Within months, airlines will allow people to make phone calls while in flight. 

I’ll be honest with you, lately I fly solely for the quiet privacy. I fly from here to there and back again just to be around people not talking on cellphones. I like to be around adults who read or talk or even play games on electronic devices without babbling incoherently into electronic devices about nothing at all in a language so unintelligent it has to make Shakespeare spin wildly in his grave.

So, soon enough anyone on a plane will be met with the same super sized people I recently sat near in that doctors waiting room, over sharing personal information with the world at large, except on a plane, they will be yelling to be heard. When you add in the ambient noise that planes make, you only have to imagine those banal morons yelling into their phones, “no honey, I’m on a plane, so anyway, last night was amazing, a foursome, I swear…”

Breaking stupid

Wake an break

Dance music

Without saying

Should go without saying, but some people never know somethings (Toronto Mayor Rob Ford joke goes here).
New Branson book remains selling on Amazon and this is the first weekend it is super available. Click here. 

Ikea is boring

Little of this

A fathers lament

As most everyone knows I grew up in a slum in Brooklyn, which is now a very hip and prosperous area, but when I grew up there, it was a slum, a terrible slum. My family was poor, but not as poor as the unorthodox Jews who lived above us in Apartment 7. They were so poor they had a sheep that lived with them, that sheep was named Max and he gave them his fur so they could make clothes with it. That’s how poor they were. “Poor unorthodox Jews” my brother Shlomo and I would say to each other, and then smirk with a sense of superiority.

Then I would eat some of the warm raisins Shlomo would hand me almost daily that he would get from the doorway of Apartment 7. He did not like raisins, but he would get me a handful and smile as he gave them to me, my brother Shlomo was a jokester his whole life. 

My older brother, the handsome one, his name is Marcus, although he is now Marlene and as a woman, he is not so handsome, in fact, Marlene is kind of an acquired taste for a woman. As a man, Marcus was handsome, Marlene, not so much.

My family no longer lives in Brooklyn, but I returned there this weekend for my fathers funeral. I walked past the old apartment building where my father used to sit on the stoop and smoke these terrible cigars just to upset the unorthodox Jews, who could have cloven farm animals pooping on their door step, but could not allow neighbors a peaceful evening smoke, even if the neighbor did not even like smoking, such was the dysfunctional nuance of that particular neighborhood dynamic. 

I read the New York Times online edition sometimes, just to see if I recognize names or faces, I usually don’t, but for whatever reason, it felt good to be back in the old neighborhood. Apparently it was my fathers last wish to have his services in the Temple Berle, no relation to Milton, although the neighborhood shunned the place because of the suspected affiliation. So an unadorned urn was sitting on a simple and small table when I opened the frail and weathered doors of the old temple and I could see my tall and statuesque brothers feminine figure in the distance, he turned, or she turned as it was, I still get confused. A wave and a smile and we walked toward one another and embraced. It was an embrace of brothers who come together to mourn, the oldest brother/sister holding the youngest brother. This is what families do, we hold one another when we lose our father. My brother/sister Marcus/Merlene held me and I enjoyed the moment of being held by one of the people in this world who just loves me because we are both genetically linked. 

He was old, we both said, sort of quietly, as if to excuse his passing, as if age is somehow a justification for his disappearance from this ceremony. The ashes did not do him justice. My father was about five foot four inches without any sort heals on his work boots, but he was never without those boots, although when necessary, a boot was thrown in battle and with three teen aged boys in a small slum of an apartment, my father was in daily battle. For a long time he may have just as well had a peg leg, such was his use of a boot as a means of controlling his unruly sons. 

Later in life, upon reflection of his parenting skills, my father took great pride in telling the world that he was superior in his parenting because not once did he ever stoop to the unorthodox Jews savage use of spanking or other techniques of terrible parenting to control or discipline their children. We all would sort of sideways smile, remembering the flinging work boots coming from any number of directions, at astronomical speeds, dangerously close to causing severe bodily damage, at a time when parents were never charged with anything short of murder. Of course, in his memory, my father could claim that since no hand of his ever touched the skin of his beloved sons flesh, he therefore was the superior parent. In someways, I guess he was, but to this day, two of his sons can still not bring themselves to wear work boots for any occasion and one wears strictly high heals for all occasions, so maybe his long lasting legacy was sparing the rod, but spoiling his children's choices in comfortable shoes. 

Shlomo stumbled in a few minutes after Marlene and I had started to feel awkward, he wearing his traditional stinky t-shirt, his jeans rolled up past his thin ankles, dirty Converse high tops and a smug look of self satisfaction on his ruggedly handsome face. He hugged Marlene first, a long and warm embrace, a soft kiss on the cheek and then me, an intense and loving hug that felt genuine and left me both energized and languid. We all sat, silently, looking at our father in his simple wooden urn. Brothers not far removed from ashes. 

The magic is in the Keggo

These are the Keggo Boxes for sale on Etsy. They are the sort of thing every family needs for saving for some sort of special day, at least that's what worked for our family. Some are below, here is the link for the Etsy available Keggo and some of the history.

Vines are kind of stupid, right?

Election results

Last week, like what I presume is the experience of the vast majority of Americans, I went to my local polling place and voted. Today I checked on the local results and was shocked to see that once again my dog was not elected as city treasurer.
So, you snobs from around the country who think that a dog should not be a city treasurer, I assure you, my dog is more than qualified to be city treasurer of our ghetto than the majority of walking, talking, math knowing humans. First, she is wildly incompetent and second, she is completely corrupt and finally, she is usually way too busy grooming herself to care at all about anyone else’s business. Perfect for the job.
So, you must be asking yourself, how could my dog NOT get elected? I asked the same question, but first a sentence of history. Last week, no one was running for city treasurer, so I wrote her name in. How could she fail? That was my thinking. I actually lobbied for her. When my long term lover went to vote I offered up some top quality hot loving if a little ballot write in could be traded in for the city treasurer position. That apparently was not worth it.
I asked my neighbor if he would vote for my dog and he looked at me like I might be insane, which is a look he has given me more than I care to recall.
That’s when I realized that a campaign for ghetto city treasurer should not be started the afternoon of actual voting.
I did call the county registrar office this morning and found that they did have a tabulation of votes and was just a little surprised that my dog received four votes for city treasurer. So, while not that not enough to actually win the race, it was far more than I ever expected and a little shocking, which has left me wondering, who the hell actually took the time and wrote my dogs name in on the ballot and voted for my dog?

Without Malice

My native American friend Bobby Without Malice has been spending the last month with us, which is kind of nice, because since he moved in, he has been sleeping in a tee-pee in the back yard, kind of quaint. Except of course, in the traditional Native American way, or at least according to Bobby Without Malice, he also has to poop outside too, or “make in nature” as Bobby Without Malice calls it. While I am all for tradition, Bobby Without Malice is kind of competing with my dog, Beth Libitard and between the two of them, it’s no longer safe to walk in the backyard without some sort of knee high boot.

That’s not the sole problem though. Bobby Without Malice likes to get all philosophical at mealtime. Just yesterday we were having breakfast, hot coffee and luke warm blueberry pancakes and as I was chewing a glorious bike and pankcake, Bobby asked me if I had my affairs in order and I smiled and said, “as long as all my affairs don’t know about one another, then they are in order,” and smiled one of those knowing smiles and Bobby Without Malice looked at me quizzically. He picked up my cellphone and started dialing. “Who you calling?” I asked. “My brother in law, Sidney Who Answers Quizzically,” he said.

“Sid, it’s Bobby.”

The conversation continued for a few minutes, but I continued finishing my pancakes and wondering how my house is always the one that people feel it’s OK to come visit, set up temporary housing in the backyard and make wherever they want. How can that always be the case? I was going to confront Bobby Without Malice, but he is one of those guys who is so grounded and happy and just so peaceful that you find yourself ready to confront and he sits across from you and looks right into your soul with those puppy dog brown eyes and says something like, “bro” and you lose your train of thought and just want to go see a movie and buy him some chocolate Zeffers and have a great afternoon.

I guess what really has me more upset with Bobby Without Malice than the last few house guess s is this whole movement, this “make it nature” thing that really has run its course. I don’t get it, but then again, there is much I don’t really understand. In our house we have three full bathrooms and we actually only use one. The downstairs bathroom has a tub filled with herbs for the winter, so when you are in there it smells kind of glorious. Why anyone would not want to make in that bathroom is beyond me. It’s almost like “making” in the wild, only without the possibility of having an angry neighbor watching from their back porch.

A couple of days ago Bobby Without Malice and I were having tuna sandwiches for lunch and he asked me if I had ever been arrested or served time in jail, out of the blue he asked me such a personal question. I told him the truth and he leaned in close, so he and I were the only ones who could possibly hear one another, which was a silly move, since he and I were the only ones left in the house at the time, except for my lesbian dog, who is a known gossip, so maybe is was a smart move on his part. He began to ask if I had ever robbed a bank. I told him no, I had not. He asked if I had thought about it, I said yes, but only online banks. He sat back and smiled and said, “thank makes no sense, brah.”

“I ain’t your brah, bro.”

“I ain’t your bro, brah.”
“You planning to rob a bank Bobby?”

“I am and I need a driver, you up for that?”

“I don’t have a drivers license.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I don’t.”

“So you saying you could not drive our getaway car cause it would be breaking the law?”

“Yeah, cause what if we got away and were like 10 miles away and got pulled over, and the cop asked for my license and registration? Giant red flag, bro.”

“Not your bro, dip stick.”

“Still.”

And so it was. I could have been Bobby Without Malice’s get away driver.

Now, skip ahead about a week later. I had spent the day before, wearing gloves and boots up to my knee, picking up poo the size of my fist, throwing them over the fence, into the yard of the neighbor that I don’t like so much and listening to Pussy Riot on my ear buds. It took about 3 hours, between what my lesion dog had been leaving behind and what Bobby Without Malice has been creating over a 2 month stay. He had been gone for a week or so and I was prepping our backyard for winter.

Then, this morning, I was siting in our nook, reading the morning news on my iPad Air (that plug right there was paid for my the Apple Corporation) and I clicked on a link for a failed bank robbery attempt at a nearby bank. As I was forking some of the best blue berries cooked lovingly into gluten free pancakes. of course, I read how a small band of incompetent robbers had made it in and out of a local bank with over 100 thousand dollars, drove 7 miles in a small Fiat 500 car and were arrested when police pulled them over because the car did not have up to date state registration tags on the license plate. I took a sip of hot coffee and sort of smiled,  without malice.

Magic for sale

When I was but a wee little boy, I would often ask my eccentric keeper, I would say, "Sir Parker Kay Smith, would it be alright if I were to take the motor car into the city and purchase a human to ride around the garden today?"
Almost always I was told to check the Keggo Box and see if there was any money for such an expense and almost all the time there was none. The concept behind the Keggo was that every time Sir Parker, or a parent for that matter, entered the room, they would drop whatever excess cash they had into the Keggo and forget about it. That way, in time, the Keggo would grow a sum of savings that could be used to pay for all sorts of fun stuff.
The Keggo Box was our sole source of income, at least as far as I was concerned and so it was until I would leave for college. I thought all families had a Keggo Box and I was sure that was how they paid for everything from clothing to hookers.
Imagine my surprise when I joined a fraternity in college and when it came time to pony up for some beer and my frat brother, and Native American Rodney Who Shows No Malice, asked me if I had 20 bucks and I told him I didn't even bring a Keggo with me to college and he looked at me like I might be crazy. It was that night that Rodney Who Shows No Malice explained to me that not every tribe has a Keggo Box.
So, for a while I would live without a Keggo Box holding money I would save and use when needed. Then at some point, I have some children of my own and I found it necessary to have savings for unplanned events, so I had to start my own Keggo Box. In time, our Keggo Box has paid for trips, cars and flights to China. In one instance, funds from our Keggo Box paid to repair a broken leg of a damaged deer that had been hit by a Fiat 500.
By happenstance, almost everyone can now have their own Magic Keggo.
See, you and almost everyone in the world could buy a Keggo Box of your own, put it somewhere obvious and begin pouring money into it and then when a time comes, somewhere down the road, sometime in the far off future, maybe somewhere in a time far far off, that Keggo money will be needed and you can pull the top off and be astounded by the cash you have accumulated.
So click here, check out the sort of amazing Keggo opportunities and then realize, a Keggo in your house is better than two Keggos in some fancy museum in Istanbul.