This is my SCRATCHING post

I notice as I get older I find there are a lot of parts on my body that need routine scratching. I am not sure what has changed other than living in Missouri over the last ten years. When you live here during Springtime, it rains a little bit daily so for tax purposes, our mosquitoes are treated as dependents. Overall we enjoy the wildlife and I generally don’t spray for bugs - unless they occupy the immediate area around a fire hydrant.

I think my scratching issue these days is that I am more creaky, less flexible, and live only to torture my kid into facing her damaged gene pool and a destiny of perpetual discomfort. So naturally, when the urge strikes, I channel my inner Kodiak bear and back into any wall, cabinet, or furniture protrusion which can ease my notion for some scratchin’ motion.

It has gotten so bad now whenever my family or friends see me coming they routinely greet me with my favorite cocktail of pepper spray, Benadryl, and a celery stick. My wife has even threatened to get me a troop of service monkeys to keep me groomed and lice free if I keep it up. That makes me curious, whatever happened to those long, bamboo monkey-hand back scratchers everyone used to have in their house? Maybe all the wood monkeys have become extinct? Since hardware stores don’t give away yard sticks anymore, my scratching utensils have been reduced to an occasional paint department stir-stick or a greasy, foot-long hot dog.

So hopefully when I get those nit-pickin’ monkeys, after they give me the once over, maybe I can turn them loose on my daughter’s resident raccoon brood. No doubt like me, they have a few ‘tiny and Mite-y’ itchy, hitch-hiking parasitic friends that need to find new hosts. Yeah, I think everyone around here could probably benefit from a fun-filled, periodic prehensile primate preening . . . or better known in layman’s terms, as “Monkey Business”!