This Is Gonna Be a Busy Year! Poopenheimen!

January 1, 2004

This Is Gonna Be a Busy Year! Poopenheimen!

I didn’t make an ‘official‘ New Year’s resolution last night.

Not that I couldn’t have, of course. I could always stand to exercise more, or eat healthier, or watch more TV, or curse more often, or practice drinking at work, or start giving wedgies to nuns… really, who among us wouldn’t benefit from trying harder in those areas?

But this year I decided not to make a grand gesture, or try to ‘better myself’ over a whole twelve months. Who sticks to that crap? Making resolutions on New Year’s Eve is a damned fool idea, anyway — I mean, really, what do people always say they’re gonna do? Stop drinking, lose weight, be nicer, and stop smacking their kids, right? And then bam! — less than a month after New Year’s, there’s Super Bowl weekend, and every one of those notions goes right down the shitter when you’ve got two bills on the NFC team and they can’t cover the damned spread. Again. Personally, I think ‘after-football resolutions’ make more sense. But that’s just me.

Anyway, I didn’t want to break in a new calendar (the ‘Trivial Simpsons 2004’, courtesy of my wonderful, beautiful, and tuned-in wife, in case you’re interested) without some sort of nod to the occasion, so I gave it some thought while I was soaking my ass in the tub this afternoon, and I came up with a few things. ‘Promote world peace‘ or ‘Give back to the community‘, they ain’t, I’m afraid. They’re not even ‘Plant a tree‘ or ‘Remember to floss‘. But it’s something. And until the Super Bowl, this is about as high as I intend to aim. Happy new year, and enjoy.

1. I’m going to use new exclamations.

As much as I like putting hands to cheeks and crying out, ‘Ay, chihuahua!‘ or ‘Good lord ‘n’ butter!‘ every chance I get, they do get a tad old after a while. Plus, neither is terribly original — the latter is lifted verbatim out of Bloom County, fer chrissakes. I think if I’m going to try and call myself a comedian — or a comedy writer, or standupper, or even creepy old guy who hangs out behind the high school — I need to try out something more creative, more signature, more… me.

So all the old stuff is out the door. I’m not sure what to replace it with, but I’m working on it. Maybe I can keep ‘Poopenheimen!‘, I suppose, as a starting point — I don’t recall hearing that anywhere else. On the other hand, with my luck, it probably means ‘beaver cheese’ or ‘crab sandwich’ in German. On the other hand, those would be okay phrases to use, too — how cool would it be to spin the big wheel on The Price is Right and yell, ‘Daddy need some beaver cheese!‘ or ‘Lemme see some crab sammich, Bob Barker!‘ Oh, yeah. Those are goin’ on the list.

2. I’ll make a concerted effort to get ‘boobered’ into general usage.

A few weeks ago, I came up with ‘boobered’, or at least a new, precise meaning for the word. You can read the original post for the details, but the idea is really pretty simple. It struck me that ‘funny’ has no opposite besides ‘unfunny’. ‘Happy’ has ‘sad’, ‘cold’ has ‘hot’, and ‘hot’ has ‘ugly’… but ‘funny’ was left out somehow, and I don’t think it’s fair. Thus, ‘boobered‘ — that is, ‘unfunny when funny was intended’ — was born.

And in the first few days, use of my word spread, a little bit, through the blogosphere. Or at least my part of the bloggerhood, anyway. Okay, so maybe just halfway down the bloggoblock or so. Fine. A few people got the message. But now it’s time to take boobered to the masses. I’m not sure yet how I’ll get it done — flyers, billboards, maybe a TV ad campaign — but 2004 will be the Year of the Boobered. Oh, it’s gonna happen. Mark my words. Or, well, one of my words, anyway. Just keep your eye on ‘boobered‘. You’ll see.

3. I will use as many vague sexual euphemisms as humanly possible.

Okay, so I’m pretty close to this goal already, I suspect. Still, I’ve never made a formal effort in this area.

(See, shit like ‘unrolling my Ho-Hos‘ and ‘froggy went a-crotchin’‘ just happens by accident. Imagine what I can do if I really make an effort!)

So this year, I’m going to put some thought into it, and say all sorts of things that might — or might not — be ass-drippin’ filthy. Like, oh, I don’t know…

‘dipping the old pig knuckles in the barbecue pit‘

or how ’bout:

‘getting my Sinbad all up in yo’ Carrot Top‘

No? No good? Eh, that’s all right. All I need is a little more practice.

Man, it’s a good thing I’ve got all year to sort this out. Damn.