When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (28 page)

Release the handle by pulling down the strap and tightening the fasteners. Press the button and remove the safety cap, then turn the knob to unleash the spring and wind the excess slack onto the spool. Loosen the screws on the plate lid and insert the tabs into the slots. Rotate the control switch a quarter of a turn before lowering the two levers. Then drop the main crank into a neutral position. Be careful not to unscrew the housing before engaging the catch. Plug in and you’re set to go. If smoke fills the room, read the troubleshooting guide at the rear of this manual.

ACTORS, NOT ACTIVISTS

I like the good actors. The real actors. The ones who keep their lives private. Sean Penn, Harvey Keitel, Alan Arkin, Robert Duvall, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Gary Sinise, Christopher Walken, Gary Busey. They keep to themselves. You don’t see them appearing all the time on TV. They don’t cooperate with Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. They’re actors. Not celebrities. They keep to themselves. That’s why their work is so good. Good for them.

DEAR MA

Dear Ma,

Even though you ‘re dead, I wanted you to know I’m doing real well. No thanks to you, I might add. I now have my own TV show and it’s getting very high ratings. 1 play the part of a guy whose mother dies but it doesn ‘t really bother him. I know they don’t have good reception where you are, so I’m going to send you a tape. Do you think a tape will be okay in the intense heat? Love, Dirk

TEAMS SUCK!

I don’t like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn kids: “Somewhere along the way, someone

is going to tell you, ‘There is no “I” in team.1 What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality and integrity.’ ” Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, ”We’re the So-and-Sos,” take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it’s unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don’t participate; it will be your death. And if they tell you you’re not a team player, just congratulate them on being so observant.

IN THE GROOVE

You ever run over a guy with your car? And you kind of panic? So you back up? And run over him a second time? And then you realize you have to get the fuck outta there before the police show up? So you put it in drive again and run over him a third time? What the fuckmight as well. What else you gonna do at that point, drive around him? Anyway, as you drive away, did you ever reflect on the fact that each time you ran over him the crunching sound got fainter and fainter? That’s because he already had two good, deep grooves pressed into him that you kept driving through.

PRIDE GOETH . . .

Parents are such fuckin’ doofuses. I saw a bumper sticker that said “Proud parents of a sailor.” What the fuck is so special about being a sailor? How about “Proud parents of a tailor”? Isn’t a tailor worthy, too? The whole “proud parent” thing is bullshit. Pretty soon I’m expecting to see “Proud parents of a child.” Have a little self-respect, will ya? You never see the children with

bumper stickers that say “Proud son of Mr. & Mrs. Klayman.” That’s because Mr. & Mrs. Klayman are such fuckin’ doofuses.

I’M IN THE MORAL MINORITY

I don’t think there’s really such a thing as morality. I think it’s a human construct designed to facilitate the control of people. Values, ethics, legal standards all of these things are human-generated, and they’re lumped under some vague idea called morality. But suppose humans got it wrong? Suppose there’s no actual, objective morality? Suppose there’s just a natural, worldly, secular, common-sense standard of behavior whose purpose is what’s best for getting along and what’s best for survival? That would be a good system. Why should a system like that be overlaid with a sense of spooky, mystical, judgmental oversight?

JUST DIE, MOTHERFUCKER

When this Catholic guy, Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, died, they praised him for accepting death gracefully. Excuse me, but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Accept death gracefully? What’s that? You say many people don’t accept death gracefully? I see. So now we’re evaluating people’s behavior and praising them based on what other people don’tdo? Wonderful..

I don’t think people should ever get credit for doing something they’re supposed to do, even if it’s rarely done by others. Condemn the ones who don’t do it if you like, but don’t praise the ones who do it. Only one of the two behaviors is worth commenting on, not both.

TRUE STUFF

You know those broken white lines that separate the lanes on a highway? Have you ever counted them? If you do, you’ll find that there are a hundred of them every mile. It’s true. Each line is a hundredth of a mile from the next one. Count them for yourself as you track your distance on the odometer. Just count how many there are each tenth of a mile; there should be ten. But while you’re counting, don’t forget to keep an eye out for that big eighteen-wheeler up ahead, parked sideways in the middle of the road.

CHOW TIME

“Hi, I’m Ferris Banderhead, another bothersome movie star who tells people to support some charity or other in order to make myself appear concerned and to increase my popularity. Not to mention easing the guilt I feel for having much more than I deserve. But enough about me. April is National Hunger Month. In Beverly Hills, we’re having our annual Hunger Banquet and Gala called ‘Hors d’oeuvres for Ethiopia.’ Send in your dollars today and help us feed people around the world who could certainly use a nice hors d’oeuvre. And remember, the sooner we conquer hunger, the sooner we can start working on upset stomach. Thank you. This is Ferris Banderhead, reminding you to see my new spy movie, The Snotlocker Papers.”

Mannheim Rehab: Call Today

“I’m Dr. Mannheim of the Mannheim Rehab and Recovery Center. People ask me, ‘How can I tell when one of my loved ones needs help with a substance abuse problem?’ And I say, ‘If you see them lying in a corner, naked, in a puddle of their own filth, it may be time to think about counseling.’ Call Mannheim today, and we’ll come over and pick them up. But before we get there . . . please clean up the filth.”

UNCLE BLITZEN

Uncle Blitzen was a troubled man. As a child, visiting backstage at a concert, he was fondled by a viola player and lived the rest of his days with an unnatural fear of stringed instruments. He was one of the nine hundred people present at the Jonestown Massacre, but he threw away the Kool-Aid and only pretended to be dead. When everyone stopped moving he looted the corpses. Subsequently, he moved to Stockholm, where he became the town scumbag. Years later, he reemerged in England as a self-proclaimed bishop, roaming the Midlands with a band of rogue altar boys, administering forced communion to lapsed Catholics. He died during Hurricane Shlomo in front of an adult sex shop when the store’s sign blew down and he was crushed to death by a giant neon dildo.

UNCLE PINOCCHIO

Uncle Pinocchio had twenty-three separate and distinct personalities; unfortunately, all of them were unpleasant. He believed that Porky Pig cartoons rep

resented actual events, and he once stabbed his dog with a ceremonial Japanese saber in a dispute over a lamb bone. He always wore a three-piece suit. It didn’t have a vest, the jacket was just torn in half. He drifted from job to job: balloon vendor, freelance daredevil and stoop laborer among them. He finally settled in his basement, where he lost his mind trying to invent a rectal harmonica. After that, the family kept him tied to a linden tree in the backyard, where they fed him with a slingshot. After six years, they released him on Mussolini’s birthday, whereupon he married a passive-aggressive librarian who later beat him to death with a dictionary stand.

UNCLE SHADRACK

Uncle Shadrack felt he was special because one of his testicles was shaped like a Brazil nut and the other like a cashew. He loved to run up to women, screaming, “You want some mixed nuts?” He told me that in his younger days he was quite a lover and once fucked a girl so hard her freckles fell off. Alas, he didn’t marry well. His wife, Chlorine, looked like something that might be found in the Dumpster behind a cloning center. Her PMS was so bad she had a mood swing installed in her backyard. As a child, while watching a gay pride parade, she was run over by a float full of lesbians, and was eventually found dead in a military barracks, having ingested a load of bad sperm. Shadrack was electrocuted by a RadioShack pacemaker he purchased at a thrift shop.

UNCLE SHEMP

Uncle Shemp was alarmingly unexceptional. He had no detectable lifestyle, and his only accomplishment was the fact that he was a lifelong member of the general public. He started slowly, struggled hard and eventually clawed his way to the back of the pack. Occasionally, he would show a sudden flash of mediocrity, but quickly return to his usual pattern of complete insignificance. He was a man without memories. He didn’t have amnesia, he simply had no memories. As he put it, “Nothing big ever really happened.” As a result, he wore a Medic-Alert bracelet saying PLEASE LET ME DIE. His only pleasure was his hobby: picking through airline wreckage, looking for children’s toys. He died at seventy-five from a head injury suffered as the result of undue glee following a bowel movement.

MAE: Listen, girls, this wasn’t no small Indian River-size tumor. The doctor said this thing was almost the size of a cantaloupe. He claimed if he’d-a left it alone any longer, it probably woulda wound up as big as a casaba melon.

AGNES: Earlene Miller had a tumor the size of a casaba melon. Actually, her sister claimed it was approaching honeydew proportions.

PAULA: Well, I don’t know nothing’ about no tumors, but when my aunt Ruby died, her liver was the size of a champion watermelon. I got a picture of it somewhere.

KATE: Really? You know, they say that after you die, your liver keeps right on growing.

PAULA: Well, I’m thinkin Ruby’s liver had probably reached its limit. I mean, where do you go from watermelon?

KATE: You want food? I’ll give you food. Wait’ll you hear this. Ten years ago, when my sister Myra had her gallbladder out, they found

twenty gallstones in it. Each one of them was the sizeand the shapeof a different type of food: a raisin, a pea, a caper, a grape, a radish, an olive, a pearl onion, a melon ball, a hazelnut, a marshmallow, a Brussels sprout, a bing cherry, a kumquat, a gherkin, a filbert, a small whole boiled potato, a cocktail sausage, a meatball, a lima bean and a dwarf pumpkin.

PAULA: They took all of that out of your aunt? KATE: They sure did. PAULA: Jesus! Did she feel any better? KATE: She said she was hungry.

JIM: It sure did. I can remember the day I first saw it; it was small, like a marble. Then almost overnight it looked like a golf ball. I couldn’t believe it!

TOM: That was the day he showed it to me. By the time I saw it, it looked more like a slightly enlarged handball, maybe just approaching racquetball size. I spent about an hour with him, and as I was leavin’, I glanced at it. The damn thing looked like a tennis ball. I don’t

mean it had fuzz on it or anything. I just mean it was the size of a tennis ball.

JIM: Yeah. That’s when he went to the hospital. He said on the way over in the taxi it went from a baseball to a softball, and then, in the waiting room, it reached the size of a small, regulation volleyball. Finally, when he got into the examining room, the doctors were so alarmed at its growth they smashed it with a big fryin’ pan, and it temporarily flattened out into an oval shape.

TOM: Yeah. Then it slowly became round again, but it kept on gettin’ bigger. Suddenly, it developed big black spots all over it.

TOM: Yeah. Of course, by that time the situation was hopeless. Pretty soon the thing was up to the size of a basketball, and before you knew it, it had gone right past medicine ball and was headin’ for beach-ball status. They finally had to move him out of his room and put him in the gymnasium.

JIM: They tried to operate on him, but as soon as they made an incision all the air rushed out of him. Death by deflation.

TOM: Poor guy. ED: Yeah. TOM: Hey, you know what we forgot? Lacrosse and polo.

SOARING AND PLUNGING IN THE MEDIA

One of my pet pursuits is keeping track of how the news media describe those things in the news that increase or decrease. I can generally rely on the fact that the same verbs will be used repeatedly in the same situations.

One of the first things I noticed is that while certain things skyrocket, others tend to mushroom. Medical costs skyrocket. The national debt doesn’t do that; it mushrooms. And, experts warn, if present trends continue, both of these things will eventually #0 through the roof.

But mushrooming is not the only thing the national debt does; it also balloons. There aren’t too many things that balloon. The annual budget deficit used to balloon, then for a while it didn’t balloon, now it balloons again. And, by the way, people can balloon, as well. I remember reading in the tabloids once that the actress Delta Burke had ballooned to some weight that, apparently, the publication found unacceptable.

So, thus far we’ve skyrocketed, mushroomed and ballooned. But let’s not forget snowballing. You know what snowballs? An investigation. What happens is, an inquiry becomes an investigation, and the investigation begins to snowball. And what does it snowball into? Right! A full-blown probe. And if the probe uncovers enough dirt, it could possibly mushroom into a full-blown scandal.

Then we have the case of swelled. During the 1990s, job rolls swelled. By the way, I’ve often wondered if those job rolls are at all similar to the welfare rolls we used to hear so much about. Just between you and me, I’ve never actually seen welfare rolls, but I’m sure that with a little margarine or jelly they re quite delicious. And it’s certainly heartening to see the food stamp program working so effectively.

Getting back to our subject here, I’ve found that one of the best places to keep an eye on these “up and down” words is Wall Street. Financial reporting. For purposes of this activity, I’ll use hypothetical examples of economic activity that don’t actually reflect recent conditions. I can’t keep adjusting this material according to the whims of the economy. And besides, this is about language, not finance.

Just to review: We’ve already skyrocketed, mushroomed, ballooned, snowballed and swelled. Now, as we enter the world of Wall Street, we add a few simpler verbs: climb, surge and jump. “The stock market climbed today as prices surged on news that housing starts had. jumped ten. percent.” Lots of action.

Another big thing on Wall Street is soaring. “Stock prices soared today, as reports showed earnings were up sharply.” Or they may have shot upward. At any rate, upward is good. I remember one time hearing Lou Dobbs himself telling me that the Dow Jones Industrials had vaulted upward two hundred points. And, on the same day, not to be left too far behind, the long bond inched higher.

Then we have the very special case of spiraling. The nice thing about spiraling is that it can go in either direction. “As medical costs have spiraled upward, the quality of medical care has spiraled downward.” And not only do these two medical numbers spiral upward and downward, both of them are actually capable of spiraling out of control.

Spiraling downward brings us to the verbs for things that are falling. For some reason, downward verbs are more colorful than upward verbs. Down

ward is where we discover plunge, plummet and nosedive. You can always tell when a bull market is over, because bousing starts plunge, new-car sales plummet and orders for durable goods take a nosedive. At a time like that, stock prices are usually on the verge of collapse.

Or, instead of collapsing, they may simply tumble, drop sharply or go into a tailspin. And if stock prices are in a tailspin, you can be sure it won’t be long before they find themselves in a dizzying free fall.

Continuing with bear markets, not all days are so dramatic. Occasionally, prices only dip slightly. Dip slightly is the opposite of edge higher.

And before we leave these words for increasing and decreasing, I would like to make special mention of beefed up. I remember reading once that, in anticipation of a visit by Yassir Arafat, security at the United Nations had been beefed up.

Arafat being a Muslim, of course, beef would be the preferred meat. You certainly wouldn t want security to htporked up. I can think of any number of reasons why we wouldn’t want that. And by the way, if you’ve ever seen some of these security people, you know that the last thing they need is more pork. Or beef. Or food of any kind, for that matter.

Beefed up is one of those terms that has no exact opposite. Nothing ever gets beefed down. They never say, “Now that Arafat’s visit has concluded, security at the United Nations has been beefed down.” Doesn’t sound right. Instead, they say scaled back. Always remember, anything that’s been beefed up can be scaled back. Although occasionally, for variety’s sake, rather than scaled back the item may be pared down.

Hiked and mmmed are two more good uup and down” examples. Quite often, during the same session of Congress, defense spending will be hiked while education spending is trimmed. And sometimes, if Congress is in a really bad mood, education spending is slashed, and defense spending skyrockets.

Well, we’ve gone from sky-high to rock bottom and we seem to be winding

down now, so let me add one last item: I think I may have figured out the difference between ramping up and ratcheting up. I’m pretty sure that while ramping up takes place on a continuum, ratcheting up is more a series of increments. But I do find it interesting that, as with the beef situation, I rarely hear of ramping or ratcheting down. As for me, I’m at wit’s end.

PROBLEMS AND ISSUES

As you know, people no longer have, problems in this country, they have issues. This shift grows out of our increasingly desperate need to shade the truth and see things as more positive than they really are. Problems sound negative and ordinary; issues sound important, worthy of attention. People are proud to announce them: “I have issues.” They feel superior to others who haven’t made the switch: “Poor fuck. He has problems. I have . . . issues!” To feel extra superior they may even pair it with some other trendy upgrade: “He has a drug problem, I have chemical dependency issues!’

As with everything in American culture, the use of the word spread indiscriminately to the point where it, of course, lost all its usefulness: During the murder case in San Francisco in 2001 in which two dogs mauled a woman to death, one of the neighbors said, “Everyone knew those dogs had issues with females.” Commercials picked it up: L’Oreal says, “Mature skin has issues all its own.” An adult diaper commercial informs me that “Many women have bladder-control issues.”

So now people have all these issues: trust issues, boundary issues, abandonment issues, personal-space issues. Clearly, I have a problem with this word, but problem has lost its power, cheapened by the careless use of expres-

sions like, ”What’s your problem?” “You got a problem with that,” “No problem,” and, for those truly in a hurry, “No prob.”

I needed a new word, and I refuse to say “issues.” So, instead, I turned to that ultimate source of creative language-bending, our nation’s capital. I heard a prominent senator, when asked if some issue presented a problem for him, say, “Well, it’s not a problem, but it is a concern. “And I thought, Wow, another choice for people who refuse to acknowledge problems. I adopted it immediately. But I hope concern doesn’t catch on to the point where it becomes a problem. After all this trouble, I’d hate to have to deal with concern issues.

THE SECRET NEWS (News ticker sound effect)

ANNOUNCER: (whispering)

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the Secret News.

(News ticker gets louder.) ANNOUNCER: Shhhhh! (Ticker lowers.)

ANNOUNCER:

Here is the Secret News:

All people are afraid.

No one knows what they’re doing.

Everything is getting worse.

Some people deserve to die.

Your money is worthless.

No one is properly dressed.

At least one of your children will disappoint you.

The system is rigged.

Your house will never be completely clean.

All teachers are incompetent.

There are people who really dislike you.

Nothing is as good as it seems.

Things don’t last.

No one is paying attention.

The country is dying.

God doesn’t care.

Shhhhh.?