Toss Your Cookies Carefully

Like my underwear, I too am slightly imperfect and inelastic, so it is not for me to judge why hurried thoughtless people do what they do. I know folks are busy, routine driven, and rarely care anymore about time tested and TRUE philosophies like ‘Don’t speak until you’re spoken FOR’ or ‘Mind over PLATTER’. Still, when it comes to the really important choices in life like ‘paper or plastic’, ‘regular or decaf’ or where is the best place to ‘TOSS your cookies’, I expect a tad more care and respect from my fellow man. 

Around my ape cage for example, cookies are a celebrated semi-sweet staple and major food group which cannot be eclipsed. It really doesn’t matter if my ‘flour-y friends’ are frosted, sandwiched, soft, waffled, or bagged. All races and creeds of cookies are revered and treated to a place of prominence in my air sealed, compacted, and vessel-lined junk-food vault. Whatever leftovers I haven’t EATEN, end up perfectly organized in a crumb and saliva-free cabinet that my wife swabs down and secures shut like a greedy Keebler elf in a hollow tree.

Many thoughtless cretins on the other hand simply throw their Nabisco’s au naturel’ into some kind of ugly bust of a ceramic cookie crypt. Not only are those poor mistreated sweet choco treats chipped, abused, and subjected to ‘crumb-y’ accommodations; but who wants the harried and unwashed hanging over and handling my favorite discus desserts with disrespectful disregard? Further who decided it was an appetizing adventure to yank ol’ Santa’s or Mother Hubbard’s noggin off willy nilly to extract their internals for a random after school snack.

How can this obvious kookie cookie abuse continue to go on unchallenged, unchecked and unchanged from generation to generation? I don’t pull your pets from their filthy cages and immediately subject them to extreme temperature ‘waterboarding’ in a hot carafe of coffee or mug of chilled milk do I? Today’s society needs to think more and dunk a little less when it comes to drowning  our lowest of the lowly cookie’s sorrows merely as a dalliance of dairy delight or ‘cream-between’ guilty pleasure. 

My taxing Uncle

Every January my mind turns from joyful gift strapping and family evergreen burning rituals to genuine terror. Oh sure those holiday bills now due add a few buckets of blood to the night sweats, but the real fear is that my tax-happy Uncle is lurking in April with his freshly sharpened fangs and an insatiable hunger in his wallet. Yeah Valentines Day and Easter might provide a little milk chocolate relief from the heartburn as long as you don’t mind getting shot by arrows from a little nekkid peanut butter bunny – uh … or something like that?

What makes ‘Unkey’ Sam so taxing this year is H&R Block is running this overly happy advert with a glowing and smiling tax preparer lady telling me how she loves to sift through my complicated steamy bedpan mess of a tax headache. Where did they drum this girl up from –  Chucky Cheese, a prison, or mental institution? Only if this tax preppie is a Morlock, Vampire, or a rat would she have an excuse to be so far away from enLIGHTenment.  Nobody; not even stupid people who get back big refunds, can actually be THAT happy about worming their way into piles of tax road apples.

Yeah I get the fact that the tax addict on TV has a fun job of telling me anything she wants to and I have to believe it no matter how little sense the lies make. The last time I was lucky enough to have that much fun my daughter was only five years old. Yep, I proved to her, until she started driving in high school, that she could operate the car’s wipers, windows and lights by simply barking at them in morse code.

So that dark shadow hanging over me and my 8 foot wide interstate estate is not just another eighteen wheeler parked on the overpass. No it’s time for me to accept that my Uncle Sam is a morbidly obese hungry HUNGRY hippo and I’m just one more fleeting mid-day treat to eat and bleat about paying my ‘fair share’. Well I have news for you dear Uncle, your excessive appetite is rapidly making you an unwelcomed guest at my park bench covered with the Slim Jim pickings and Spam scraps of celebrations past. We’ve all read this book before in high school and I remember the ending  well – when it comes to fat succulent pigs like the ‘Sam-man’,2 legs are JUST AS GOOD as 4 legs when they are covered in goo on the BBQ … or something like that.

Dumb Drum Fun

Don’t you miss the good ol’ days, when something didn’t work all you had to do was bang on it or slap it against a hard surface and it was usually good to go. Unreliability was a blood sport where the fights were good for at least few rounds before the Band-Aids ran out or the final knockout came. Now our stuff either works for mere minutes or for years but either way, once it goes - it goes.

I miss the satisfaction of pounding my TV and it’s static-filled signal into submission with my fist. These fancy digital televisions and gadgets just go dark and stare back at you in silence when they don’t work. If I wanted that kind of treatment I could just try to talk to any tattooed dude who works in a gas station or convenience store after midnight.

Since I’m not a fast learner, I still wander around my house at night drumming on inanimate things just to show ‘em who’s boss. The tables seem to get the message because most of them that still have feet  hold up my  magazines and placemats perfectly without complaint. The windows on the other hand don’t appreciate my fingerprints and their disgust is Transparent, especially when I ask them nicely to wash themselves.

Since my car has reached the ripe ol’ age of 13, at least it is understandable when it becomes cranky, ignores my input, and behaves badly like most teens. It is probably no surprise that I like to take the car to the woodshed repeatedly when it doesn’t do as I ask, but that’s ok because I park it there.  Rest assured I never re-BUFF my car’s advances nor do I beat the beast relentlessly – though at times when I get close to car lots, I have been tempted to KICK the tires of OTHER cars! 

Solo Resolution

At the end of every year my mind shifts from all the things I don’t do to all the things I should have done. Yes, though I hate to admit it, I have a few things yet to resolve from the last twenty or so New Years that have already passed? Since ‘resolve’ sounds more like a dishwashing soap than an achievement, more than once I’ve been guilty of putting off minor milestones like brushing my teeth or combing my back hair into a neat row of dragon spikes.

Still even cave cretins have to grow up someday to prove their worth and watch the ball drop with  my pants-less tribe on New Years Eve. Clearly it’s time that I REALLY heed the need and evolve to resolve something truly important. I’m not exactly  sure what resolutions I should actually follow through with but since my wife says my face is always locked between a computer and a TV, I had better make ‘em all HIGH DEF.  

Like most folks I know I should lose a little weight but the only thing that’s THAT ‘little’ on my beastie boy body is my pin head. Unfortunately I can’t afford to lose any more gray matter - both the hairy stuff on top and the normal goo inside my brain. In truth I need something to hold up my ears so I can hear my fat fingers do the walking on a keyboard even when the rest of me is too tired for a healthy troll stroll in the park.

Anyway calorie commitments are too common and specific for great goals of epic proportions like I desire. This new year I aim to tackle the big stuff with a lofty resolution that helps me achieve higher success in everything I do, like avoiding procrastination, being more punctual, or simply using deodorant on a regular basis. Then again I’m in no hurry because whatever I’ve been doing for the last half century seems to make me pretty happy. You see, people inexplicably LEAVE ME ALONE regardless of what I say or do, so maybe the best plan in choosing another resolution is to simply ‘STINK’ on it until tomorrow?

Red Letter Days

Out of all the holidays, July 4^th used to be my favorite because I could blow stuff up (other than pool toys) without going to jail. My second favorite holiday is Halloween since I’m free to walk among the living and scare kids on one night as much as they scare me daily over the rest of the year. If I do a good job of tricking treatsters, I can score even MORE sugar than I normally get when dressed as a weird geezer slogging to my neighbors with a sweet recipe in hand. 

Next on that list is Thanksgiving because it truly is a day of simple pleasures like stuffing bread into the dark headless cavity of poultry and buttering up loose pink skin (sometimes on the turkey too). St. Patrick’s isn’t bad when you’re as partial to pinching as I am and VETerans day is really special because like most folks, I love patriotic pets.   So what about the status of big ‘gifty’ days like Christmas, the day when I was hatched, and of course everybody’s fav holiday - tax day on April 15th. 

Christmas-time feels more like a noisy reindeer race starting with Kwanzaa (which I assume is on black Friday), seven days of candles pitchfork-perched in the middle, and ends  by cleaning up annoying tinsel, enormous credit card and travel bills. Beyond Santa’s blinding BLURR on my saddle so many taxes are due by New Years, which means by mid April I’m sick of giving the government or anyone ANYTHING, except maybe an oversized foam finger.

My birthday dropped a few notches at a young age when my parents FORGOT what date I was actually born on and made me wait sleeplessly in anticipation until the day AFTER to celebrate. Now my b-day is more of a celebration of still having thick wild hair, though I’m not sure if it counts as much when it knots endlessly from my ears, eyebrows, nose and toes? Don’t worry though I intend to seek revenge when my folk’s old-fogey faculties become completely compromised by the ravages of time. Yes, I will simply write only ONE loving letter to my parent’s filled with praise and prose. I intend to thoughtlessly enthrall them with my attention and affections revealed in that same letter OVER and OVER again for every holiday. Now that’s what I call a real ‘READ letter day’ – of course, as long as I can remember what I wrote in that letter the last time so I can write it AGAIN!