YO MAMA, DADA, AND ME

Life is like a parking meter. How many times I’ve heard that said and laughed. And even though it’s never much, only what’s left over when I break a dollar bill, imagine how ridiculous I felt after sixty years and a stroke convinced me to buy the insurance. But as I recovered from the stroke and continued to live, I made a moral decision that those few pennies a day could be put to better use elsewhere. I let it lapse after only a few months. I guess I didn’t really need it, although for the time that I had it, it made me feel better. We flatter ourselves to think what we do has importance. That series of half hearted attempts and missed opportunities is not what life is all about. What is important is not what we do, but why we do it. Not who we are but who we think ourselves to be. The internal dialog. The inner reality. The interior landscape. The imaginary city. The curious territory between wakefulness and dreams.

NO STUFFED ANIMALS PLEASE, I was molested by stuffed animals when I was three and I never have trusted those sleazy two faced bastards since. It was probably a case of too much of a good thing. I mean twelve is too many stuffed animals for any child. When my adult friends hear of my antipathy, there’s always one among them who decides to melt my heart with a little stuffed puppy dog or it’s equivalent. Left untended, soon all my friends would be sending me stuffed animals and I would have to move.

HERE’S WHAT I DO WHEN SOMEONE GIVES ME A STUFFED ANIMAL. I harvest the eyes first. That’s the only part that I keep. I have a big jar of stuffed animal’s eyes and there’s nothing more beautiful to me. Then I take a carpet knife or a good pair of sewing scissors and gut it from end to end along the seam that runs across the stomach, pull out as much of the stuffing as possible, strew it around the house and discard the carcass where the good intentioned sender is sure to find it.

DON’T HATE. I don’t hate serial killers, gang violence, child molesters, rapists. I don’t hate war or crime. I don’t hate Republicans. I don’t hate Ku Klux Klan, Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Hating them is not worth the energy, because hating them will not do anything about them.

I DO HATE stuffed animals, greeting cards, children’s books, fluffy bedroom slippers, and watercolor paintings of lighthouses, sailboats, or clowns. THESE ARE WORTH HATING BECAUSE HATING THEM CAN KEEP YOU FROM OWNING THEM.

YO MAMA! DADA! And yours truly.