I have a profound respect for all living things, an abiding reverence for all God's creatures, great and small, a deep sense of kinship with everything that moves upon the Earth.
But spiders must die.
Because four legs is my limit. Wild boars don't bother me. Warthogs are fine. Grizzly bears could drop over and I'd usher them in gladly. But eight legs? Give me a break. That's just pure feet greed.
They're hideous. That's obvious. Nothing is more revolting than a spider, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, and when I run shrieking and waving my arms above my head (in a manly fashion, mind you), I want to make it clear it's not because I'm scared, I'm just grossed out. (I also flee spiders.)
But what really bothers me is their superpowers. Anti-gravity, for instance. You see a spider on the ceiling. You nail a couple of spongemops together so as not to have to stand right under it when it falls, and wham it at an angle from way off to the side, and what does it do? It falls onto you anyway, at a forty-five-degree angle, clings to your jugular vein and sucks all the life from your body. Nothing defies the laws of physics like a spider.
And you can hit it a hundred and thirty times with enough force to atomize a rock and it's still capable of running around at mach speed, unphased, and it would be just as lively if you used a phaser. Spiders have invulnerability.
Invisibility, too. If you whack one and it falls onto the floor, right at your feet, you frequently can't find it. You know it's right there. You didn't see it run. But it can't be seen. They say it's because, no matter how big it is, it can curl up into a little ball so tiny the human eye can't detect it. This is nonsense. I used to try that trick when the school bully was after me, but I could still be seen. And she wore thick glasses.
And web-making ability? What the hell is that? A thread comes out of its ass with a tensile strength the equivalent of titanium for its thinness, with alternating sticky and treadable strands so it can retrieve trapped prey without getting stuck itself, and we're supposed to believe it's from this solar system? I don't think so. (But then again, neither is Trump.)
(Have you ever walked through a spiderweb when you're passing under a tree and you set frantically to clawing at your face to get it off, spazzing out, panicking, and you look across the street and people are staring at you in alarm? They don't know you walked through a web. They just think you snapped.)
Spider advocates (a term akin to Nazi sympathisers) say the little arachno-demons are good to have around because they eat flies. Relatively speaking, this is like saying that pythons are great to keep near because they scare away mice. Personally, I would rather be submerged in a vat of thousands of flies than live in the same hemisphere as one spider.
So sorry, nature lovers. I believe in live-and-let-live as much as the next guy, but there's not room enough in my home for spiders and me. If I see one in my bedroom before I go to bed, there can be no sleeping until I find it. If I have to stay up for a month or two, so be it. That's why I bought the flamethrower. I sleep better with it under my pillow.
God made spiders, you say? And therefore they have just as much right to live as me? Tell that to The Donald when I've reduced him to ash.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
My Omelets Are Too Good
My omelets are too good to eat, I've decided. They're just too fantastic. Nobody can eat them anymore. It was getting dangerous.
People who have had my deluxe homemade cheese omelets are at risk. They can hurt themselves, for one thing. They snap vertebrae in their necks flinging their heads back in rapture at how utterly delicious they are. They say MMMMMM so loud that they rupture their eardrums and the vibrations cause aortic palpitations. (If I ever have a band, it's going to be called the Aortic Palpitations.) They close their eyes so tightly in their ecstasy that sometimes they can never open them again and they have to get a seeing-eye dog. (Why can't deaf people have a hearing-ear dog?) Their taste buds freak out and leap off their tongues onto the table and run for their lives, never to be seen again. My omelets are downright hazardous to people's health.
Also, they ruin other food for life. Once you've had my omelets, nothing else is palatable again. Filet mignon tastes like a stale Big Mac. Smoked chinook salmon tastes like guppy. Escargot tastes like...well, escargot. My omelets raise the succulence bar so toweringly high that, for the rest of your born days, everything else is about as delicous as the inside of a Soviet weightlifter's jockstrap. Um...I've heard.
I used to make omelets in the morning for overnight lady guests. But I had to quit doing that. I never saw them again. Pleasure overload, I guess.
So people can't actually have my omelets anymore. They can gather 'round to look at them. They can take pictures of them. They can paint them, often in their own blood, in touching tribute to their magnificence. When people make arduous pilgrimages from distant lands, trudging over rough terrain on their lips for a single fleeting glimpse of my omelets, I sometimes take pity on them as they throng piteously in the hall outside my locked door and let them sniff them through the mail slot. But that's as far as it goes. I had to set limits. People were dying.
I put things in my omelets that don't normally go in one. Cheddar, feta, mozzarella and parmesan cheese. Bacon bits (real, not artificial). Garlic powder. Bits of turkey breast. A hint of barbecue sauce. Wine. Hot dogs. Whatever occurs to me. It all adds up to one truly transcendent experience. The English language has no words to describe it, although the Farsi word 'fnork' comes close. I don't recommend that you even think about my omelets, lest you be rendered inert by the overwhelming wonderfulness of the very notion.
No, your best bet is to put them out of your mind. Just forget it. In fact, eliminate from your recall the memory of reading this blog. Move on with your lives. You'll be better off. People who have tasted my omelets are like those who have had near-death experiences, getting a glimpse of the pure Valhallan bliss of perfect joy and then being brought back to 'life' by doctors who ruined everything by 'saving' them. Trust me on this. You're better not to know what you're missing.
But it's different for me. In fact, I'm going to go have one right now. My boys get to have one, too. All day long, they beg me for another one. They can't get used to it. The thrill never wears off. There's no immunity to heaven. But I figure they and they alone deserve it.
The rest of you? Not so much.
People who have had my deluxe homemade cheese omelets are at risk. They can hurt themselves, for one thing. They snap vertebrae in their necks flinging their heads back in rapture at how utterly delicious they are. They say MMMMMM so loud that they rupture their eardrums and the vibrations cause aortic palpitations. (If I ever have a band, it's going to be called the Aortic Palpitations.) They close their eyes so tightly in their ecstasy that sometimes they can never open them again and they have to get a seeing-eye dog. (Why can't deaf people have a hearing-ear dog?) Their taste buds freak out and leap off their tongues onto the table and run for their lives, never to be seen again. My omelets are downright hazardous to people's health.
Also, they ruin other food for life. Once you've had my omelets, nothing else is palatable again. Filet mignon tastes like a stale Big Mac. Smoked chinook salmon tastes like guppy. Escargot tastes like...well, escargot. My omelets raise the succulence bar so toweringly high that, for the rest of your born days, everything else is about as delicous as the inside of a Soviet weightlifter's jockstrap. Um...I've heard.
I used to make omelets in the morning for overnight lady guests. But I had to quit doing that. I never saw them again. Pleasure overload, I guess.
So people can't actually have my omelets anymore. They can gather 'round to look at them. They can take pictures of them. They can paint them, often in their own blood, in touching tribute to their magnificence. When people make arduous pilgrimages from distant lands, trudging over rough terrain on their lips for a single fleeting glimpse of my omelets, I sometimes take pity on them as they throng piteously in the hall outside my locked door and let them sniff them through the mail slot. But that's as far as it goes. I had to set limits. People were dying.
I put things in my omelets that don't normally go in one. Cheddar, feta, mozzarella and parmesan cheese. Bacon bits (real, not artificial). Garlic powder. Bits of turkey breast. A hint of barbecue sauce. Wine. Hot dogs. Whatever occurs to me. It all adds up to one truly transcendent experience. The English language has no words to describe it, although the Farsi word 'fnork' comes close. I don't recommend that you even think about my omelets, lest you be rendered inert by the overwhelming wonderfulness of the very notion.
No, your best bet is to put them out of your mind. Just forget it. In fact, eliminate from your recall the memory of reading this blog. Move on with your lives. You'll be better off. People who have tasted my omelets are like those who have had near-death experiences, getting a glimpse of the pure Valhallan bliss of perfect joy and then being brought back to 'life' by doctors who ruined everything by 'saving' them. Trust me on this. You're better not to know what you're missing.
But it's different for me. In fact, I'm going to go have one right now. My boys get to have one, too. All day long, they beg me for another one. They can't get used to it. The thrill never wears off. There's no immunity to heaven. But I figure they and they alone deserve it.
The rest of you? Not so much.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Strawberry Genocide
I love strawberries. Everything about strawberries is delightful. When I enter the grocery store, I sprint directly to the strawberry section. I would go so far as to say that strawberries are my life. This is why I don't understand my need to destroy them.
Because that is what I always do. I am a serial strawberry killer. (They never even make it to my cereal.) I have this deep-seated (seeded?)compulsion to murder every strawberry I see. I never get around to eating them, and their juicy red corpses sit decomposing in my fridge until they morph into something else entirely and their remains cast a pall over the rest of the food and I carry them, like a pall-bearer, to the garbage. I am a strawbicidal maniac on the loose.
It's not like I have anything against strawberries. Strawberries have never done anything to me. (Unlike rhubarb, which singlehandedly ruined my life.) In fact, as I say, I love them very deeply with an abiding, all-consuming passion. ( I have, in fact, gone so far as to use them amorously to add flavour to my after-dark activities, sometimes even with a woman present.) So why I have embarked on a one-man crusade to wipe them out is a horrifying mystery to me.
Because I'm slaughtering them in ever-increasing numbers. As I type these words, in my fridge, in their fungal death throes, are four, count-'em four containers of strawberries which I purchased in a joyful frenzy at Longo's two weeks ago and whisked home lovingly as though they were succulent little valentine hearts. I had the best of intentions. It was going to be great. I would get up each morning and start my day with a delicious repast of sliced strawberries in milk with brown sugar. But yet again, that never happened. My apartment is strawberry Auschwitz. There's a sign above the entrance that says 'Mould Shall Set You Free'.
I feel terribly guilty about this. I'm wracked with remorse when there's fiendish, fruity foul play afoot. It's getting embarrassing when I buy strawberries. They plead for mercy in the store. "Nooooo!" they scream as I put them in the cart. "Spare us! We don't want to go white! Quick! Raspberries! HELLLLP! He's taking us to strawberry HELLLL!" But I run them outside and put them in the trunk of my car like doomed mob victims, hoping other motorists won't hear their desperate, muffled, thumping pleas.
I used to be a banana killer, too. Within a week, the cheery yellow bananas I brought home would ripen to festering brown tubes of slop until my countertop was a fruit-fly nightclub. Eventually, moved by their plight, I simply stopped buying them. But I can't stop purchasing strawberries. I'm bent grimly on their merciless destruction.
Eventually the authorities will catch me. And, fittingly, I'll rot in jail with a fruity cellmate. In the meantime, don't try to stop me. I'm on a rampage.
Because that is what I always do. I am a serial strawberry killer. (They never even make it to my cereal.) I have this deep-seated (seeded?)compulsion to murder every strawberry I see. I never get around to eating them, and their juicy red corpses sit decomposing in my fridge until they morph into something else entirely and their remains cast a pall over the rest of the food and I carry them, like a pall-bearer, to the garbage. I am a strawbicidal maniac on the loose.
It's not like I have anything against strawberries. Strawberries have never done anything to me. (Unlike rhubarb, which singlehandedly ruined my life.) In fact, as I say, I love them very deeply with an abiding, all-consuming passion. ( I have, in fact, gone so far as to use them amorously to add flavour to my after-dark activities, sometimes even with a woman present.) So why I have embarked on a one-man crusade to wipe them out is a horrifying mystery to me.
Because I'm slaughtering them in ever-increasing numbers. As I type these words, in my fridge, in their fungal death throes, are four, count-'em four containers of strawberries which I purchased in a joyful frenzy at Longo's two weeks ago and whisked home lovingly as though they were succulent little valentine hearts. I had the best of intentions. It was going to be great. I would get up each morning and start my day with a delicious repast of sliced strawberries in milk with brown sugar. But yet again, that never happened. My apartment is strawberry Auschwitz. There's a sign above the entrance that says 'Mould Shall Set You Free'.
I feel terribly guilty about this. I'm wracked with remorse when there's fiendish, fruity foul play afoot. It's getting embarrassing when I buy strawberries. They plead for mercy in the store. "Nooooo!" they scream as I put them in the cart. "Spare us! We don't want to go white! Quick! Raspberries! HELLLLP! He's taking us to strawberry HELLLL!" But I run them outside and put them in the trunk of my car like doomed mob victims, hoping other motorists won't hear their desperate, muffled, thumping pleas.
I used to be a banana killer, too. Within a week, the cheery yellow bananas I brought home would ripen to festering brown tubes of slop until my countertop was a fruit-fly nightclub. Eventually, moved by their plight, I simply stopped buying them. But I can't stop purchasing strawberries. I'm bent grimly on their merciless destruction.
Eventually the authorities will catch me. And, fittingly, I'll rot in jail with a fruity cellmate. In the meantime, don't try to stop me. I'm on a rampage.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
A Nice Game Of 'Flop & Drop'
The XBox is back. It was gone for a really long time. It got the dreaded 'ring of fire', a red light around the 'On' button that means Screw 'Off'. And, like an abusive parent, I took the lifetime of a sea tortoise to get around to sending for a new one while my children suffered. If it had been a choice between shelter and the xBox, it would've been no contest in their minds. Needless to say, they were profoundly disgruntled with my failure as a father to provide them with the necessities of life. They came within a whisker of turning me in for child neglect.
It finally came, though. You have to send the old broken one away and the Microsoft people send you a new one. It was delivered by Purolator, however, and so therefore it was ages before it got here. (PoorLater, I call them. Motto: Owing To Our Poor Service, You'll Get It Later.) It would've been here quicker if it had been delivered by the Pony Freakin' Express. I told them this, in one of my many 'discussions' with the so-called 'solution specialist', a quaint euphemism for 'problem maker', in which I endeavoured mightily to communicate the concept that they needed to bring the item to where I actually was, rather than to where I wasn't, a remarkable five consecutive times. "After all," I said at one point, "I don't live in Zimbabwe. And if there were a carrier pigeon large enough to carry an xBox, it would've brought it to Zimbabwe by now." So they marked the box 'Boot Hard And Submerge In Water'. (I actually wrote this on the box when it arrived and then showed it to my children. They were appropriately amused. They're the best audience ever.)
So now they can play Call Of Duty again, a war game in which the object is to kill and not be killed. Basic though that sounds, I cannot manage either of these goals. When I play with my boys, who are ten and eleven, I can neither shoot their screen characters nor prevent them from filling me with lead the instant I reincarnate from the fusillade that just felled me. It's so discouraging. That's why the game, when I play it, has come to be known in our household as Flop & Drop. (I don't think children should be allowed to be so sarcastic.) "Wanna play Flop & Drop, Dad?" they gleefully ask. They love it. I may have had them, but they own me.
The game looks like fun. It's photo-realistic, like operating a movie, except that in the movies, the hero doesn't croak the nano-second the film begins. That's all I do is die. There are many skills to master, like running and jumping and ducking and aiming and shooting and reloading and calling in air strikes, but all I've been able to master so far is the ability to expire with ever-greater speed. No matter where I hide, there they are, shooting me. If I run, they shoot me on the move. If I hide in the long grass, they come creeping up and shoot me. If I get on a bus and go to an entire different city, the second I get off, I'm shot. And then they cackle sadistically and say things like, "Nice try, Dad," which, of course, means, "You suck, Dad," but I always say thanks.
My guy automatically is reborn. And is automatically shot again. That's why they're called automatic weapons.
It's gotten so bad that the children have taken to making up new rules to make the game more competitive. "How about this time, Cole, you defend Dad while I try to kill him?" suggests Keith. Or, "Dad, why don't you have a rocket launcher and we'll have a kleenex?" Or, "Okay, new rule, Dad. We can't move or shoot and you can have a tank, okay?" But it's no use. Even if we amended the game so that the object were to stroll around the battlefield sight-seeing, I would immediately step on a landmine and be blown to smithereens. (Sometimes the kids shoot me up so thoroughly that it isn't even plural. I'm blown to a single smithereen.)
So technological entertainment marvel that video games in our modern age clearly are, they're also a sinister means by which children confirm that they are, in fact, toweringly superior to adults. When they were little, I was an all-knowing, heroically cool guy to them. Now, in their eyes, I'm a profoundly retarded, big, sad sack of uselessness.
When I was young, I played with a stick. And I was happier, let me tell you.
It finally came, though. You have to send the old broken one away and the Microsoft people send you a new one. It was delivered by Purolator, however, and so therefore it was ages before it got here. (PoorLater, I call them. Motto: Owing To Our Poor Service, You'll Get It Later.) It would've been here quicker if it had been delivered by the Pony Freakin' Express. I told them this, in one of my many 'discussions' with the so-called 'solution specialist', a quaint euphemism for 'problem maker', in which I endeavoured mightily to communicate the concept that they needed to bring the item to where I actually was, rather than to where I wasn't, a remarkable five consecutive times. "After all," I said at one point, "I don't live in Zimbabwe. And if there were a carrier pigeon large enough to carry an xBox, it would've brought it to Zimbabwe by now." So they marked the box 'Boot Hard And Submerge In Water'. (I actually wrote this on the box when it arrived and then showed it to my children. They were appropriately amused. They're the best audience ever.)
So now they can play Call Of Duty again, a war game in which the object is to kill and not be killed. Basic though that sounds, I cannot manage either of these goals. When I play with my boys, who are ten and eleven, I can neither shoot their screen characters nor prevent them from filling me with lead the instant I reincarnate from the fusillade that just felled me. It's so discouraging. That's why the game, when I play it, has come to be known in our household as Flop & Drop. (I don't think children should be allowed to be so sarcastic.) "Wanna play Flop & Drop, Dad?" they gleefully ask. They love it. I may have had them, but they own me.
The game looks like fun. It's photo-realistic, like operating a movie, except that in the movies, the hero doesn't croak the nano-second the film begins. That's all I do is die. There are many skills to master, like running and jumping and ducking and aiming and shooting and reloading and calling in air strikes, but all I've been able to master so far is the ability to expire with ever-greater speed. No matter where I hide, there they are, shooting me. If I run, they shoot me on the move. If I hide in the long grass, they come creeping up and shoot me. If I get on a bus and go to an entire different city, the second I get off, I'm shot. And then they cackle sadistically and say things like, "Nice try, Dad," which, of course, means, "You suck, Dad," but I always say thanks.
My guy automatically is reborn. And is automatically shot again. That's why they're called automatic weapons.
It's gotten so bad that the children have taken to making up new rules to make the game more competitive. "How about this time, Cole, you defend Dad while I try to kill him?" suggests Keith. Or, "Dad, why don't you have a rocket launcher and we'll have a kleenex?" Or, "Okay, new rule, Dad. We can't move or shoot and you can have a tank, okay?" But it's no use. Even if we amended the game so that the object were to stroll around the battlefield sight-seeing, I would immediately step on a landmine and be blown to smithereens. (Sometimes the kids shoot me up so thoroughly that it isn't even plural. I'm blown to a single smithereen.)
So technological entertainment marvel that video games in our modern age clearly are, they're also a sinister means by which children confirm that they are, in fact, toweringly superior to adults. When they were little, I was an all-knowing, heroically cool guy to them. Now, in their eyes, I'm a profoundly retarded, big, sad sack of uselessness.
When I was young, I played with a stick. And I was happier, let me tell you.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Horror, The Horror
Dear Beloved Readers That Don't Exist Yet:
Welcome to the unutterable horror that is to be my blog. I have decided, in my Amishness, to get with the twenty-first century and assail the world with my views in the demented, lunatic belief that they might entertain someone, no doubt shut-ins and narcophiliacs and the criminally insane. We alleged writers have a need to write; that's what we do, as orators orate and pontificators pontificate and couch potatoes potate. Run. Scurry. Flee. Save yourselves. I cannot emphasize enough the degree to which I'm not kidding.
Welcome to the unutterable horror that is to be my blog. I have decided, in my Amishness, to get with the twenty-first century and assail the world with my views in the demented, lunatic belief that they might entertain someone, no doubt shut-ins and narcophiliacs and the criminally insane. We alleged writers have a need to write; that's what we do, as orators orate and pontificators pontificate and couch potatoes potate. Run. Scurry. Flee. Save yourselves. I cannot emphasize enough the degree to which I'm not kidding.
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