Tireless Street Sweepers

When the car passes its last gasps where even bacon grease and a leash won’t motivate my wagon’s wheels to move I sometimes have to venture TIRElessly out on foot for repairs. Since small smart-phones are not yet Yeti-friendly and overt stimulation from music or talk-radio overloads my beanie baby brain, I slog silently with little but the fat on my pratt to keep me company. So it’s no surprise that whenever I travel trike-less, I choose random roadside refuse to ‘count’ and keep my gnat-sized noodle from focusing on both the corns on my feet and the ones stuck in my teeth. 

Since counting over ten is not my strong suit I avoid all common twigs, rocks, and gutted gutter road-kill along my chosen boot route. Instead I have a knack for tracking trash or other stand-out street-leavings which are easy to spy with my bloodshot eyes and can dutifully tally fast with or without an abacus. If I can snag a bag or un-holey rag I will collect the parkway prizes to shuttle back to our hovel but usually the neighbors complain that our dump already has enough yard art at our disposal.

In many places that I have lived, soda cans and rum bottles are ordinarily good ‘objet d’ cART’ for my way of highway ciphering and, if I am REALLY lucky, an occasional drop of hobo-hydration. However, local recycling rules near me now put bounties on such items making them slim-lickins during my current treks and frequent sole searching. Too bad I can’t earn some clean cold cash for dirty hot butts since lip-flicked cigarettes along with their flat-mashed cello packs are probably the most rampant refuse to cross my tracks and fill my sacks.  

My record trash total for a 3 mile hike to retrieve my wheels is forty-five little mini-bar sized liquor bottles left curbside full of air and an occasional inquisitive ant. Clearly the walking dead near here must have a lot of frequent flyer miles to choose those tiny liquor hits over the better valued quarts of Thunderbird offered up at our local 7-11. In fact our bums are so well off you’d think they’d have the decency to leave a bottle drop for posterity or at least thirsty street sweepers like myself.  I have troubles to drown too you know since I’m disheartened by frequent car repairs and past lapses in my synapses from a lifetime of nutrition-less Wonder bread and un-recycled abuse of addictive Diet Coke. 

Oldster Fashion NO NO's

Most post mid-life mugs like myself would like to stay as healthy, young, and contemporarily relevant for as long as possible despite our advancing age. The problem is of course that the wrinkles, graying follicles, and the fact that we think younger people do everything WRONG exposes our true chronological age. Sure we’re never gonna’ be young again so it’s probably time to find a hobby like grave digging or worm farming which can be constructively applied before we put our lame ‘HurryCanes’ down for the final time.

So I’m tolerant of all kinds of old folks and their weirdo habits to hang on to youth (no judgment, just an honest observation) because how fun would it be to stand in line at the DMV if every dried prune dressed and behaved just like me? Hey just because my hair has DePARTED faster than Moses did to the Red Sea doesn’t mean I have become a card-carrying AARP geezer-believer yet. I understand the primal urge to feel like your soft tail still belongs on a 6 speed Harley even though these days as a REAL fat boy you’ve never piloted anything more powerful than a 2 speed massage recliner. 

That’s why I might give the geezers a pass with the haughty Van Dyke beards encircling their ‘Pepto-portals’  as a reminder of where to target food instead of their feet. I try too to ignore ripe-type seniors wearing ridiculous designer slim-fit jeans over cowboy boots scootin’ boogies, or whatever else is trapped in their  brightly-colored bandanas. Occasionally, despite an involuntary cringe, I’ll even choke down that tan-in-a-can golden oldie who sports a spread eagled collared shirt, flaunting his flossy fur and an oversized pierced cauliflower ear. 

Despite all that tolerance and my considerable effort to turn a varicose-veined pink-cheek to oldsters trying to delay the inevitable, society must help me put an absolute stop to the ultimate dried-up dude fashion faux pas. No more ignoring this festering and flagrant abuse by the creaky who refuse to act their own age and face the final swan song stage of yawing youth and meet their musty destiny with gusto and dignity . We must stand together to clip, cut, and blow - don’t pass GO, until the aged and gray cleave off that HATED, greasy-weaved foot-long pony today and donate it to balding and less fortunate hairless RATS!

One BAD egg

Being a free range chicken at heart especially whenever I see scary movies has made me an EGG-spert of sorts on all things egg. Except for my enduring essence of sulfur I think I have inherited most of my ‘egg-centric’ traits from my parents who meet, greet, and eat the ovoids nearly every day. Yes, you can boil ‘em, fry ‘em, or tie dye ‘em because unless they’re still warm from a fresh squeezing, you can bet I will try ‘em.

Like my city-bred attention span, I like eggs best when scrambled except I prefer the farm-raised versions extra large and on buttered toast points any time of day. Surprisingly though my wife is not a ‘egg-ok’ with chicken droppings sold by the carton and parked in ROES in the fridge.  The egg-hater knows we need ‘em for baking cakes and practical yolks on neighbors with high cholesterol but otherwise never makes ‘vittle’ dinner plans with chicken littles in pans. 

Yes, in my wife’s hard-boiled world, colorless n’ boring un-hatched eggs should be for breakfast exclusively and their bald tops need never see our fingerprinty glass table top after daybreak. Even then, the white-headed plain jane under-studies might only get their big break after all the cold limp cereal, pasty oatmeal, and stale bread ends have been exhausted as superior forms of sunrise sustenance. On rare occasions I can spur the spouse to sup up some embryos sunny side up, only if they go under cover as an abstract Picasso palette, with a gaudy free-flowing mix of yellow, gory splotches of red catsup, and a liberal dusting of black cracked pepper.

Ironically on a recent grocery run to restock a dozen of the hard-shelled and edible white cargo, the Crayola egg-eater paused a wee longer than normal to check for ‘cracks’ on the backs of our styro-packed inhabitants. As she deposited the EXACT same questionable carton-coop gingerly into our basket, it was clear that she had witnessed something that had caused pause for considerable thought. When queried as to her concern my wife replied, ‘ Oh it’s nothing,  just ONE egg is a bit ‘browner’ than the rest so I thought it might be BAD!”

Animal HABITS

While every Target or WalMart has seemingly endless bins and boxes of stuffed animals to ‘hawk’, I wondered if REAL animals ever get jealous of all the attention stores pay to the fake brightly colored fur they wear?  The only real respect animals get in most stores is in the pet food aisles and even there the dirty little secret is that the protein derived from kibble and bits is made up of their ACTUAL brethren’s kibbles and bits. How would you like to wander down the canned food section of the grocery and have to choose between packed human varietals like ‘prisoner’ (a little tough but plentiful), ‘gardener’ (for you Vegans), or ‘politician’ (pickled in lard but still often spoiled).

Bovine leather is fairly well represented in stores especially in the shoe aisle, but except for boots few items reference ‘cow hide’ as the source – which makes sense because who really wants to know they are walking around in cow stuff all day. Oh sure gators and snakes have their trademark luxury bags and boots to show off in country western bars and Florida souvenir shops. However the only real ‘rattlers’ and commonly available slime-covered consumer goods are in the ‘baby’ and toy sections of stores where I shop.

With portable storage enthusiasts and survivalists in mind (since they have biologically cornered the market) you would think marsupials might have challenged ‘cargo’ pocket pants for major retailer placements. Instead, those dumb waltzing Matilda’s end up focusing their efforts WAY too far down under on lowly Underoos to pack in who knows what for who knows how long. Nobody should strive to store stuff in their skivvies so let’s just leave the undergarment biz to the silk worms since they don’t crave exposure to the light and everything slides off of them anyway.  

I guess it’s no wonder rabbit’s don’t make great garments since Angora sounds like a war-torn country and nobody buy’s brand new ripped up clothing  - except oh yeah,  denim teens hopped up on Trix and designer envy. Clearly too geese are still surly about being in the closet, since their feathers are always crammed into pillows and whenever I try to grab one to take a nap, they just duck down and try to bite me. At least the turtles have made it to the mainstream stores and clothing sections because my wife often enjoys their sweaters - but it’s too bad that they can’t make proper fitting clothes for anything below the NECK.

Charity’s Net Worth

Even though I have a reputation as a hard hearted miser, deep down I have soft side too, but that is mostly due to consuming so much doughy Wonder bread and starchy white rice. As I have gotten older I certainly have become more generous, though nobody seems to appreciate a free sneeze from a geeze or moldy whiff from an old stiff’s scent. Too bad though because I know if given the chance I have a lot more charity to give the world beyond communicable diseases, dandruff, death and taxes.

For example, just like ‘nice people’ I unload a bag of canned goods on my porch for the needy a couple of times a year, though the racoons have never mastered using a church key very well to open them. Don’t hate me just because my food supply tends toward dents and often consists of everyone’s cupboard staples - expired sardines and Vienna sausages. Yes sometimes I feel bad holding back all of the delightfully aged, bloated and ‘botulistic’ tins of Beluga for myself; but I know everyone has guilty pleasures of their own and I’ve particularly had a ‘tough ROE to hoe’.

Next to sleeping, I actually have become somewhat of an expert at sitting most of my life which makes me one of the most ‘CHAIR-itable’ people you’ll ever meet off your feet. Like many others I’m sure, I would work harder at volunteering a bit more if the government would just raise the minimum wage to motivate me to do so. Obviously given my mental faculties it’s a no-brainer to pass-on a little wisdom to those in need but if they want the most value for their EBT cards they’d be better off to buy somebody else’s Swiffer instead of my vacuum.

Out of sheer good will (and having nothing at all to do with taxes) by early April I try to give the shirt off my back to thrift stores but it’s too stained and holey so they only accept my barely abused and under-used household goods instead. Since I truly can’t live without all my Cabbage Patch collectibles I just donated, I urge my cockeye-wheeled shopping cart back to the thrift outlet after my stuff is tagged and bagged to buy it all over again. Not only does this do a lot of good for those billion dollar charities with 80% overhead who need my cash more than I, but I finally get to find out what my True net worth is too.