Month: December 2002

I have to pee. Not all the time, and not right now, but often enough that my house has a special room built just for that purpose. I used to hold it in all day and let loose in my neighbor’s bushes when everyone else had gone to sleep, but my doctor says that I can get arrested for that sort of thing and, even worse, that it might lead to something like kidney infection, discomfort, occasional swelling, or smelling bad if my clothes get wet. None of which, quite frankly, is at the top of my to do list. So now I pee whenever I have to. Provided, of course, that I’m in the special room. It’s a relatively simple process, and I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but I’d like to think I’ve mastered it and could easily compete in the unlikely event it should ever became an Olympic sport. Most people, I think, take urination for granted, which is fine, but I don’t trust anybody who tries to tell me that it isn’t important.

Do you know what else I don’t trust? Magnets. It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s just how it is. I can’t exactly pin it down, but there’s something about them that I just don’t like. It sometimes seems like they’re everywhere, running up and down my refrigerator door like barnacles stuck on the underbelly of a ship, crawling like little metal rats into every dark magnetic corner they can find, lying in wait at the bottom of the cellar stairs with a knife already bloodied from that morning’s kill, a sacrificial offering to some all-consuming totemic god who, even now, cries out for blood! blood! blood!

Well okay, no. Actually they are just on the refrigerator door. But you have to understand, there are so many of them, and they’re so varied in color and shape and size, that I’ve begun to suspect that maybe my wife is sleeping with a traveling magnet salesman. The only thing that prevents me from confronting her with this accusation is my other suspicion that there is no such thing as a traveling magnet salesman. I suspect that she would probably just laugh at me and say that I’m being silly. She might even suggest that I see a doctor again about my so-called “emotional problems”. It’s a difficult situation in which I now find myself, made only more difficult by the fact that I can’t reach the potato salad in the refrigerator without having to read ten or twenty different magnets every day.

Honestly, it’s enough to drive a man to his breaking point. It’s possible that magnets now outnumber people in my house — which is no small feat with the family of seven currently hiding out from the law in our upstairs linen closet. My wife says I should probably ask them to leave, but with the holidays coming up, that just seems kind of cold, you know?

I just wish they’d quit hogging my special room. I really do have to pee.

Call me Ishmael. It’s not my name, and I won’t answer, but I want to make sure I’m pronouncing it correctly. I am always pronouncing words incorrectly. My doctor, whose clinical skill I admire almost as much as his milky white thighs, says this is because I am stupid and ought to be shot. I think maybe he just needs to relax, and possibly take a vacation, and I would tell him so myself only I’m afraid I might mispronounce it and he’d just think I was asking to take a bubble bath with him again. I don’t need a repeat of that mistake, thank you very much.

But the truth is, words are funny things, and they can mean different things to different people. Take, for instance, the seemingly innocent phrase “vibrating panty snatcher”. It has a variety of uses, and, given the proper context, I’m sure it can seem perfectly acceptable. But its use is probably inappropriate at, let’s say, your wife’s mother’s funeral, especially when what you’re supposed to be reading from is a passage in the book of psalms. Say what you will about the Bible, it almost never mentions the word panties. It also almost never mentions the sort of bizarre obscenities my wife spat out at me in the car after the funeral, but that’s another story and there’s little cause to go reliving it now.

Because that isn’t the point. The point, as I think I mentioned before, is that words are funny things. Take, as another example, the phrase “machine tool components”. Now, maybe it’s just me (because, I’ll admit, it usually is), but there has always seemed to be something vaguely sexual about that. Not that I want to start rubbing myself in strange places with machine tools or their components — I’m pretty sure that would hurt, and it would probably stain the carpet — but the words themselves have a curious rhythm that has always seemed somewhat sensual to me, evocative of dark street corners and unknown fluids exchanged. The words themselves roll off the lips, and it isn’t their meaning so much as their sound that gets to me. There is a certain mellifluous music to them, much in the same way that there is music, for instance, in the French language, which one can appreciate even if one doesn’t understand a damn thing those weird freaks are saying.

In fact, for the longest time, I thought it might be nice to write a column entirely in French. I realized, of course, that since I don’t know any French, you would probably just get annoyed and walk out on me. People are always walking out on me for things like that. My first wife, Enid, walked out on me after only five weeks of marriage, which I think upset our minister, since he had picked three and a half weeks in the betting pool and lost fifty bucks. Enid was a good woman, and I don’t blame her for leaving, but I don’t need to start alienating all of you as well by merci beaucoup-ing all over the place, now do I?

The bottom line is, words are weird, and that’s really all I’ve got to say about that. You can stop calling me Ishmael now if you want.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been thinking a lot about monkeys lately.

Among other things, I sometimes wonder why we still haven’t trained monkeys to sell encyclopedias. I refuse to accept the conventional wisdom that says it’s just too difficult or time-consuming. I’ve seen what monkeys can do. They’re hard workers. Give a monkey a banana and he’s your friend for life. Give him two bananas, and he might even kill a man for you. Surely we can work out the ratio of bananas it would take to get a monkey to go door-to-door with encyclopedias. We’re smart enough for that.

I remember the first time I saw a monkey kill a man for a banana. It was July of 1972, I was somewhere in Reno, and I might very well have been hallucinating, but I swear I saw a chimpanzee beat a man to death with one of the casino’s complimentary bottles of champagne just to get the banana the blackjack dealer was about to hand to him. It was a disturbing sight. With those long hairy arms and that cheap bottle of Brut at its disposal, the poor bastard never stood a chance. But, frankly, I can’t really say I was surprised.

Because, really, just what are chimpanzees anyway? What’s with that word, with that “zee” at the end? That’s not normal. That’s not natural. And where do chimpanzees come from? What do they want from us? When your government tells you that chimpanzees are gregarious anthropoid primates of equatorial Africa, having long dark hair and somewhat arboreal habits, just what the crap are they trying to get at?

Sure, some people will tell you that chimpanzees are actually apes and not monkeys, because that’s what it says in their fancy science books and because chimpanzees don’t have a tail. Monkeys have tails, they’ll tell you. But, really, whose fault is that anyway? Do you need a tail to sell encyclopedias? I don’t remember seeing that anywhere on the job application, no sir. I think it’s high time these zoology nuts stop protecting Bonzo and the other chimps from doing an honest day’s work. I mean, really. Encyclopedias are not going to sell themselves.

But you know, hey, there’s an idea…

And here’s #10:

Sometimes, when I’m feeling low and like the whole world is against me, I like to amuse myself by making my calculator spell out funny words. The number 0.7734, for instance, spells out the word “hello” if you flip it upside-down and then read it backwards. “Booze”, which usually leaves me feeling upside-down and backwards, is really just 32008 — ironically enough my locker combination in junior high school, which is where I did most of my heavy drinking in the first place.

Numbers are funny things, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha, although any joke that involves the number sixty-nine will have me giggling like a schoolgirl for hours. I mean funny weird, as in bizarre, otherworldly, as if numbers fell to Earth many years ago on a dark night in a fiery storm that probably killed the dinosaurs and did some other things they don’t teach you about in no fancy history book. Not that there’s anything wrong with history — don’t do drugs and stay in school, kids — but it’s definitely a page out of a different book than numbers.

The truth is, numbers are such an integral part of our lives, and yet how many of us can truly claim to understand them? How many of us really know what mathematicians are talking about when they use words like theorem, cosine, differential equation, and dear god in heaven why won’t you stop hitting me with that hammer? Math is confusing stuff, and just because I get my kicks by using a calculator to spell out words like “goose egg” (66335006) and “boobies” (5318008), that doesn’t mean I’ve got any of it figured out.

To be perfectly honest, numbers scare me a little. My wife says that this is no excuse for refusing to balance a checkbook, or for spending our retirement money on that mail-order kangaroo I bought last month. I think she’s just a little jealous of all the time I’ve been spending with Joey lately, and so she doesn’t recognize just how freaky numbers can actually be. Though, come to think of it, kangaroos can be pretty freaky sometimes, too.

I wonder if maybe I can ask for a refund.

Damn, I hope that won’t involve any sort of math.

1. What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year? Christmas and New Years, although Christmas is definitely the bigger deal. More likely than not, I’ll be spending New Year’s Eve by myself.

2. What was the best gift you have ever received? The car my parents bought me last year definitely ranks right up there, if only because it’s changed so many things and made so many of them easier. But, above all, I like to be surprised by gifts. I like to be given things I didn’t know I wanted. I don’t like coming up with a list and saying, “this, this, and this.” I mean, I have a wishlist, and my parents did insist I share it with them, but it’s there mostly so I can remember, “hey, these things are cool.”

3. What was the worst gift you’ve ever given? That’s difficult to answer. I know there have been gifts that I’ve returned that I wish I had kept. And while I understand that some relatives don’t know what to get me besides money, there’s just not as much fun to cash in an envelope. But really, the only way to disappoint me with a gift is to put no thought into it whatsoever. I appreciate simple, heartfelt cards just as much as silly gizmos and toys.

Oh wait. The worst gift I’ve ever given someone else? Nah, they’re all good. Or I have very polite friends. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t buy a lot of gifts for other people.

4. Where will you be celebrating the holidays? Are you hosting? Going away? I am headed back to New York, probably on Sunday, for about a week. We’ll go to my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve like we’ve done all my life, and then I think my parents are hosting Christmas for the rest of the family.