You, gentle reader, get a post!  You can thank my sciatic nerve.  Fool nerve can go back anytime now.  I'm not a pregnant woman, so I don't know what business it has acting all stupid on me.  Oh, and my stomach is a little funny too.  But that's my fault.  Mrs. talked me into going to the Chinese buffet for dinner.  When is that ever a good idea??  300 items!  All of them bad!  Funny thing about that buffet, there were Mexican families at the restaurant.  It got me feeling fantastico.  I miss my hermanos.  There are only like 20 Mexicans living in Pittsburgh.  I don't know what Juan, Carlos, Jose, and Fernando have against my adopted city, but they seem to stay clear.  Or they're all getting poisoned at the Chinese buffet.  The landscapers here are white.  Madness!  Oh what I would give for an El Milagro taco from Blue Island Road in Chicago.

As a teacher, I made liberal use of my sick days.  Upon my (triumphant) return, I'd look over the sub's attendance sheet sign-in.  Inevitably some clown would sign in as Hugh Jass, or Anita Amanda Hugandkiss.  Isn't that supposed to make the teacher mad?  Not me.  Those names made my day.  Ooooooooo I loved me some goofy names.  Of course I've matured since then, right?  *Ahem*  We're friends here, right?  I have a terrible confession:  I can no longer deny that my favorite TV show is iCarley.  You don't know what iCarley is?  Of course you don't!  Its targeted audience is 11-year-olds.  How I got mixed up with that crackhead show, well, I'll never know.  The over-acting is so over-the-top, it's ridiculous.  Even Zach shakes his head in disgust.  It makes Mad TV look like subtle sophisticated comedy.  So I've got that going for me.

At my first teaching position, I yelled all year long.  Kids learned to tune me out.  In my last years of teaching, I rarely raised my voice.  The usage of something scarce has impact.  Remember the post-Kramer hysteria of black comedians wanting to ban the "N-word"?  As a casual Def Comedy Jam viewer, I would conjecture that the health and usage of the "N-word" has been nursed back to pre-Kramer levels.  A successful ban would have sharpened the impact of the word to absolute volatile levels.  But none of that has much to do with this old cracker.  Here's what has me down:  It's all these little kids running around with mohawks.  The sanctity of the mohawk has been defiled.  Or is this just a suburban Pittsburgh phenomenon?  It's upsetting.  About the only thing more upsetting is Zach's "faux-hawk".  I need to sit down and give that boy a good talkin-to.

R.I.P. mohawk.  Your shock value is near zero.  In a bygone era, children would cry and hold on to their mommies when they would see me and my hairdo.  These days those same impressionable kids would squeal, "Mom, look at that awesome haircut".

 

Confederates?

I don't think I could be feeling much worse.  Thanks for asking!  My sciatic nerve seems hell-bent on overpowering the Oxycodone my new doc has me consuming.  The new doc wears a turtleneck straight outta 1994.  I let it slide, because turtledoc looked at me intently as I spoke, giving the appearance of listening to what I had to say.  It reminded me of the rapt look I gave my Math professors when I wanted them to think I was absorbing their gibberish.  A long lost friend of mine (see "Gay is the New Black" comment from the previous post) has the ability to project that same focused gaze.

I'm a broken man with a broken back.  The brokenness has spread all the way down to my legs.  It's all so broken, that last night I had to pee sitting down.  The indignity has forced me to take drastic action - a visit to the doctor.  I've been doctor free for some months now.  I hate doctors.  Their questions annoy me, and it never seems like they're REALLY listening.  I fired my last doctor, mostly because he wore a fanny pack.  How am I supposed to take a man seriously who wears a fanny pack?  Fanny packs are so gay that even gay men won't wear them.  (Back me up on this Scottie.)  Oh, and my ex-doctor is 40 years old, and claims to be a baby boomer rather than a gen-x.  WTF?  I've half a mind to gather up a posse of fellow slackers and give the man a good drubbing.

As luck would have it, last week a different brand of quackery opened up across the street from my house - a chiropractic office.  One of my old college roommates was a back cracker, so I'm familiar with this sort of operation.  He was always trying to get me to ingest pig pancreas pills, and whatnot.  Let me tell you, those pills weren't too cheap either.  In a state of desperation, this morning I let those chiro's have their way with me.  They seem to think I'll be peeing on my feet by weeks end.  So I've got that going for me.

Today probably wasn't the best day to go shopping in an African-American neighborhood.  But when you're out of 2X4's, and the closest Home Depot is in East Liberty, well, whacha gonna do?  Fortunately my brothers and sisters were amused rather than offended at my altered skin tone.

Did you know laziness and ignorance can kill you?  Well it almost killed me.  I got electrocuted the other day, due to a lethal combination of laziness and ignorance.  Seriously, I don't know how I'm still alive.  I got jolted through both hands simultaneously.  I know Jesus loves me, and that I live a ridiculously charmed life, but wow... I hope the new owner of my flip-house appreciates those stupid recessed lights.

This kind of crap puts life in perspective.  Here I've shipped my family off to Texas for 10 days so that I can work 12-hour days at my stupid flip house.  How dumb is that?  Never again.  

When I was four years old my dad would let me play with his oscilloscope.  Turning various knobs would produce sine waves and other funky shapes.  Each session would end with a mind altering electric shock.  I learned two things at an early age:  1.  Following in my dad's footsteps as an engineer might not be so wise.  2.  Getting a finger jolted, albeit painful, is OK, but electricity flowing into one hand, traveling across the chest, and out the other hand is not OK, but deadly.

Funny, this song started playing as I write...

I'm a little late posting pics of that Santarchy business, but you can check them out here.  (Thanks Noise...good times as always)  Highlights included SILENTLY (our mere presence) terrorizing a public library, and LOUDLY (lewd carols) terrorizing a "Church of Scientology" meeting.