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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Those wacky Catholics seem to have a patron saint for everything. There are saints assigned to protect racquet makers, outbuildings, and pastry chefs. On the flip side, you can invoke the appropriate holy crusader to protect against eczema, fainting, and scurf. I’m not entirely sure what ‘scurf’ is, but I imagine it probably wears a trenchcoat and giggles evilly to itself a lot.
“I’m no Catholic, nor do I play one on TV, but if I’m in a jam, I’ll pray to anyone who’s supposed to be listening. I’m not picky about my personal saviors; I can decide who to worship after I’m dead.”
There are even two patron saints for unborn children. Though it’s not clear whether those saints are meant as protection for unborn children, or against them, so I’m staying away from that one. Maybe it’s one on either side, and they duke it out in a saint-on-saint fetal deathmatch when there’s a conception in question. That’s got ‘pay per view’ written all over it.
With all of these saintly souls keeping watch over the world, you’d think all our bases would be covered. For any event or person or issue that needs a saving, a preventing, a blessing, or just an ectoplasmic pat on the pious shoulder, you’d think there’d be a saint or two waiting around in the wings to help out.
Not so.
In fact, there are countless precarious and prickly situations out there in the world that are fully uncovered by the hovering horde of holy Catholics supposedly keeping an eye on the joint. Worse yet, some of these situations directly and adversely affect me. I’m no Catholic, nor do I play one on TV, but if I’m in a jam, I’ll pray to anyone who’s supposed to be listening. I’m not picky about my personal saviors; I can decide who to worship after I’m dead.
So, I’ve decided to help the Catholics out. Below are a few things that as far as I can tell, don’t have some sort of patron saint, but in today’s modern world could really use one. In some cases, two or three. And would it excommunicate you to throw a guardian angel at a couple of these? There’ve got to be a few thousand of those things lying around up there somewhere. Throw us a fricking bone, already.
Where’s a Patron Saint When You Need One?
Phone sex operators — These gals are doing their job, just like everybody else, right? I say they’ve earned a little help from above. Think about it — if you had to answer the questions ‘Whatcha wearin’?‘ and ‘How big’re yer boobs?‘ three hundred times a day, you’d want someone to answer your prayers, too.
Food stuck in your teeth — Surely there’s a patron saint of dentistry or personal grooming we could borrow for this one. Also, given recent events and the food most likely to show up on those choppers, maybe we need a patron saint to ward off spinach altogether. And a world full of churchy children rejoice.
Avoiding a parking ticket — Personally, I can’t ‘just run in for a minute’ anywhere without getting an envelope slapped on my windshield. I think the cops hide behind trees and mailboxes and wait for me to show up. Maybe with the power of saintly voodoo magic, I could buy a hot dog and a Juggs at the 7-11 without owing the fuzz forty bucks when I’m done.
Protection from spyware — I’m no malware expert, but I have to believe that the spirit of some obscure monk who’s been dead for six hundred years and once drove the fruit flies out of Belguim would be at least as effective against spyware as those Microsoft Windows ‘security’ patches. Maybe that’s just me.
Walk-off home runs — This is another subject that needs a ‘for’ and an ‘against’ saint. I need somebody to counteract the mojo when Joe McCatholic from Brooklyn prays for Jason Giambi to take one deep in the ninth. Or maybe we could make do with a patron saint of candy-armed head case closers. Either way.
Channel surfing — All I know is, when I get close to my favorite networks during a circuit through the channels, I’m usually muttering, ‘Please don’t be a Friends rerun; please don’t be a Friends rerun…‘. And then it’s a Friends rerun. Can I just get some pious prat to pray to, to give me a fighting chance?
Sneaking in unseen — We’d use this guy all the time. Slipping into the office late, tiptoeing into a sleeping spouse’s bed after a night out, slithering back to your dorm after curfew — is there anybody who wouldn’t use this dude? He’ll need a saintly secretary and a whole sneaking entourage to handle the load.
Drive-through accuracy — Asking the greasy kid at the window to repeat the order doesn’t help. Ordering by the meal number with no substitutions doesn’t help. Asking again at the pickup window doesn’t help. So why not enlist some dead guy with a hotline to god to slap those bitches at McDonald’s into putting the right sandwich in the right goddamned bag?! Even if it doesn’t work for the food, it’d be fun to see a good smiting. I’ll take my fry cook extra crispy, please.
(All links to actual Catholic saints are from the Patron Saints index at catholic-forum.com. Amen.)
Permalink | 3 CommentsAround the time I started this site, my high school contacted me about attending my fifteenth class reunion.
(Yes, I’m that old. No, don’t do the math. Yes, I know it’s not pretty. And no, I’m not writing this from under a shawl in my rocking chair.
Lick my liver spots, smartass. Now move it along.)
“You might think that I’d be disappointed in not keeping up with my high school mates, and finding out how their lives and dreams and cosmetic enhancement surgeries have turned out. Not so much.”
I didn’t attend that fifteenth reunion. Nor did I make it for the tenth. Nor the fifth, nor the first, nor do I have any plans to reune with fellow classmates at any time in the future. I keep in touch with a couple of old high school chums on my own, thank you, and that’s usually quite enough for me. When it isn’t, I can always spend an afternoon Googling old pals’ names, out of curiosity.
(In doing so, I’ve come to three conclusions:
1. Googling someone’s name fifteen years after you’ve last spoken to them is a spectacularly inefficient way to ‘reconnect’.
2. Most people from my high school have names far too common to be of any use in searching, with the exception of several women whose names are apparently very similar to the stage names used by various internet porn chicks.
3. There are some frighteningly skanky internet porn chicks out there. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying.)
You might think that I’d be disappointed in not keeping up with my high school mates, and finding out how their lives and dreams and cosmetic enhancement surgeries have turned out. Not so much. You see, I subscribe to the notion that ‘reality is always more mundane than fantasy’. And so, rather than actually getting into contact with old pals, and learning about their mortgages and divorces and therapy sessions, I’ve done the next-even-better thing. I’ve made up lives for them. Here are a few of my favorites:
The wild-eyed Jesus-freak girl that sat in front of me in homeroom, and carried a Bible to all of her classes:
She followed her faith and entered a convent right out of high school. Three years later, after a spirited debate over the ecumenical significance of using Captain’s Wafers in communion rites to save money, she left in a huff and denounced her religion for good. Several years of ‘making up for lost time’ later, she settled down with three-quarters of a Harley crew in Ohio and lived kick-assedly ever after. She still keeps the Bible and habit around as a costume for Halloween. And sexy parties.
The rich kid who was really smart, but stayed so stoned he nearly had to repeat a year:
Rich kid’s dad bought junior’s way into Georgetown — it would’ve been Yale, but they weren’t that rich — where he fell in with a local band of neo-beatniks. Finally energized by belonging to a community where he could fire up and be appreciated for poetry too clever to rhyme, he raced through a ‘General Studies’ degree in only nine years. Nine and a half, if you count the ‘sabbatical’ he took ‘sightseeing’ in Amsterdam for a summer on daddy’s tab. He’s currently a senior vice president in his father’s corporation, pulling in six figures a month and blowing most of it on European hash and Filipina hookers. In his spare time, he writes sonnets with the wrong number of syllables per line, and calls them ‘ironic’.
The hot cheerleader girl who wouldn’t give me the time of day until she wanted to cheat off my tests in Economics class:
After high school, cheerleader girl attended a local state school and leveraged her womanly wiles to finagle a ‘B’ grade point average out of college. Sadly for her, she never did learn anything about economics, and when the free beers and generous boyfriends of her college days dried up, she found herself under a crippling load of credit card debt. Using her time-tested techniques, she seduced a loan officer at her bank and borrowed enough money to get out of the red.
Unfortunately he knocked her up, they got married, and her looks faded with motherhood. She now leads a bitter and desperate life as a housewife and mother of four, living in his two-bedroom loft on his meager salary and bottles of Kahlua stashed in her dresser. The worst part is, we both got a ‘D’ in that econ class. I didn’t know any more about that shit than she did.
The tall dumb jock who unfairly skated through classes because he was the star center on the basketball team:
This guy got an athletic scholarship, and proceeded to dribble and shoot his way onto the bench at a big-conference college. He never played much, but parlayed his team sweats and official practice jersey into the dorm rooms of most of the sorority chapters on campus. Until he blew a ligament in his knee during his junior year, that is. Chicks don’t dig a scrub on crutches, and he dropped out of the honeys’ hearts, off the team, and flunked out of school when he failed his ‘Remedial Shoe-Tying’ class for the third time. Currenly, he’s the tallest, lankiest counter jockey that most people visiting the Erie, PA 7-11 have ever seen. And he hates it when they tell him so.
The guy who was a really good artist, but mostly drew portraits to pick up chicks:
Artist dude knew a good gig when he saw it, and completely abandoned his ‘serious’ artistic training to focus on the subtle art of making hot women look just a little bit hotter on paper. He scraped up enough money after high school to move to New Jersey, and has spent the past fifteen years living in the same one-bedroom apartment and drawing caricatures for tourists in Atlantic City. He’s not a rich man, nor is he making a significant and lasting contribution to society. But boy, does he get laid. A lot.
The quiet brainy girl who tried to seem very proper and stoic, but still occasionally laughed my at stupid jokes:
Miss Prim ‘n’ Proper continued her studies at Brown, and went on to earn advanced degrees in Classical Literature, Applied Linguistics, and Using Big Words to Obfuscate Your Speech When Conversing with Commoners. With her impeccable manners, impressive education, and understated good looks, she quickly rose to high standing in a local pocket of New England intelligentsia.
Unfortunately, her reputation was tarnished when she couldn’t manage to repress a giggle at a brash poem read by an outsider and featuring several inappropriate double entendres for the word ‘punting’. Shunned by her former colleagues, she moved and took a position as an ‘honors’ English instructor for a private school in Maine. For fun, she highlights rude passages from Chaucer, translates limericks from Gaelic, and beats the living bejesus out of the other teachers at Scrabble.
The bratty little punk who was always mouthing off to people, and who I now realize was only seeking attention to compensate for a tumultuous home life:
This kid’s sass finally caught up with him, when his father cuffed him around and kicked him out of the house soon after graduation. He caught on as an errand boy for a local gang of toughs, but couldn’t keep his big yap shut long enough to do that job either, and spent more time picking his teeth off the floor than earning money running drugs. Finding no one else to tolerate his insolence, he took to bullying elementary school kids at the playground of his old school. That lasted until a precocious fourth-grader took offense, and unleashed his much older and much larger brothers on the punk. They landed the shrimp in the hospital, and these days he uses his disability checks to occasionally pay the rent on his squalid studio apartment, and to buy scratch tickets for the state lottery. Fifteen years and thousands of tickets later, he hasn’t won. One. Single. Dime.
Also, his penis fell off.
(Hey, I said I understood why he was such a little shit in school. I never said I forgave him.)
The cute funny girl that turned me down for the senior prom, and ended up going at the last minute with some pimply-faced scrawny jackass from the class below ours:
She and Pizzacheeks went on to have a torrid whirlwind romance, and were married before the summer was over. She waited tables until he finished school, then they scraped together enough cash to move south to the outskirts of Houston. They took out a few loans, bought a starter home, squeezed out some kids, and settled into a simple but comfortable life of domestic routine, frugal spending, and weekend Texas barbecue.
See? I’m not bitter about everyone I went to high school with. At least somebody ends up with a genuinely happy ending.
No, really. I hope Miss Thang and her pimply little clan are very happy. Really. I do. Stop looking at me like that. What?
Permalink | 2 CommentsMy wife and I have worked out a system.
During the week, we’re both pretty busy. She keeps herself occupied with work and attending law school at night and waking up at the asscrack of four AM every morning. Meanwhile, I wake up later and stay late at the office most evenings, and play ‘fat old man sports’ like softball and billiards when I have the chance. Also, I watch a lot of football on TV. And eat Cheetos.
Clearly, I’m getting the better end of the deal so far.
With all of this running around higgledy-piggledy, we sometimes don’t see much of each other during the week. And while we do our best to catch up on the weekends — one recent Saturday conversation started with, ‘So how was your summer?‘ — we don’t want to chalk up the work week as a total loss, relationship-wise.
So we’ve worked out a system.
Just before my wife leaves for work each morning, she comes back into the bedroom, gently wakes me, and gives me a kiss goodbye. That’s her job in this system. My job is to wake up, kiss my wife — without drooling on her clothes, apparently — and chirp, as cheerily as possible, ‘Have a good day!‘ Then she heads off to work, and I go back to sleep for three more hours.
Again, I would seem to be getting the long end of this particular stick.
“According to my wife, a shadowy figure looming and making puckery kissy noises at her at two in the morning can be ‘startling’.”
And mostly, it is a pretty sweet deal for me. First, it’s my wife who’s responsible for initiating the process. We tried doing it the other way once, where I’d wake her for a sweet kiss goodnight before slipping into bed in the wee hours of the morning. That proved to be problematic. According to my wife, a shadowy figure looming and making puckery kissy noises at her at two in the morning can be ‘startling’. At least, that’s what I gleaned from her shouting, ‘Whoooohaaaaaah!!‘ and beating me over the head with her nightstand lamp. So in the end, I’d say we were both startled. But only one of us was bleeding. This is why we don’t have goodnight kisses at two AM any more.
All is not sunbeams and fuzzy bunnies in the morning version, either. Yes, I appreciate that we steal a moment together, however brief, in the middle of our hectic schedules. And getting back to sleep is no issue — no sane human should be awake before eight in the morning, anyway. When my wife leaves, I glance at the ridiculously early time on my clock, and laugh my way right back to dreamland.
There is one problem with our arrangement, though — the method my wife has chosen to wake me. I call it the ‘Chinese Poking Torture‘. She picks a spot, ostensibly depending on which awkward position I happen to be dozing in. It might be my shoulder, or my back, or the top of my head. Once the target is selected, she gently, with one finger, pokes it.
Then she pokes it again.
And again. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Now usually, I’m dreaming when this poking starts. So my slumber takes an odd twist as my feeble brain attempts to reconcile this repeated prodding with whatever’s happening in my dream. I’ve interpreted it as being bumped, pushed, tapped, punched, landed on, tugged, and, in one rather ‘startling’ case, shot in the chest. Luckily for us both, my nightstand lamp was out of reach.
I suppose I can’t complain about being awoken with a poke — even if it’s not that kind of ‘poke’. At six or so in the morning, I’m lucky she doesn’t use a backhand across the chops to stir me. At least, that’s what I feel like doing to people when I’m up at that hour. If our roles were reversed, she might wake up with permanent marker drawn on her face, an atomic wedgie, and her hand in a bowl of warm water. It’s not that I’d want to do those things to her; it’s just that I’m cranky before nine o’clock or so in the morning. And before seven, I’m downright evil.
Consider, as an example, the day last week when I was actually awake before my wife came in to poke me. I decided to gently, lovingly suggest that perhaps finding another way of waking me would be preferable. As I lay there, facing away from her, I could sense her approaching my backside with her pointy finger poised to poke. Just as her digit descended towards my derriere, I flung myself around, jumped to my knees, and grabbed at her hand, shouting:
‘IF ANYONE’S GONNA TAP AN ASS AROUND HERE, IT’S GONNA BE ME!‘
I’d like to reiterate at this point that a nightstand lamp upside the head really hurts. You’d think I’d learn these things the first time.
To add insult to the ensuing injuries, my little stunt didn’t have quite the effect I was hoping for. True, my wife doesn’t wake me by standing over me and jabbing me with a finger any more. No, now she stands across the room, and pokes at me with one of my golf clubs. Not only am I awakened just as rudely, but if I try surprising her again, I’ll get a nine iron to the noggin, too.
So in the end, as always, she’s got the better deal. Maybe there’s something to this ‘early bird’ crap, after all.
Permalink | 2 CommentsBest Buy has introduced a new series of television ads, where their troupe of not-an-employee-but-I-play-one-on-TV makes a series of pledges designed to pull customers into the stores. They make promises like:
‘I pledge to set up your HD right.‘
‘I pledge to beat anyone’s price.‘
‘I pledge to show this off to my girlfriends.‘
“That new ad campaign isn’t all it’s pledged up to be.”
Now, apart from the obvious perverted possibilities of that last one, these are just the sort of pledges that you might want your local electronics store employee to make. I’ve got a Best Buy close to my house, and they’re the sort of promises I’d want them to make.
So I visited my local Best Buy, to check things out. I discovered that the employees there had apparently also made some pledges — but they were different pledges. Pledges like:
‘I pledge to keep tapping on my keypad for no apparent reason and ignoring all of your attempts to get my attention.‘
‘I pledge to ‘check the stockroom’ for the MP3 player you asked about, only to return slackjawed, empty-handed and reeking of cigarette smoke twenty minutes later.‘
‘I pledge to treat you like a respectable and reasonable human being — until you decline the warranty option on your new washing machine, at which point I shall behave as though you were a two-headed mongoloid leper for the rest of the transaction.‘
‘I pledge to ring up your camcorder without adjusting the price to include the discount, hoping that you won’t notice.‘
‘I pledge to spend half my shift convincing you that you need the latest pimped-out laptop with the integrated camera, DVD recorder, and plush heated keyboard, though you’ve insisted repeatedly that you only want to play solitaire and email your grandchildren.‘
‘I pledge to jibber-jabber for forty-five minutes about home networking with the hot chick in the belly shirt instead of answering your simple question, even though we both know the girl couldn’t spell ‘DSL’ if you gave her the ‘D’ and the ‘S’ and three free guesses.‘
Luckily, all I needed was a computer cable and a new CD. But for anything more than that, I’m not sure I’d go back to Best Buy. That new ad campaign isn’t all it’s pledged up to be.
Permalink | 2 CommentsEarlier this week, I ran out of deodorant. I found myself standing in the bathroom, with one underarm appropriately anti-perspirated and smelling of fresh mountain air, and the other… not. My trusty stick of Mennen was rubbed down to the plastic nub, no longer able to protect me from the tense and sweaty rigors of daily life.
So, I set off to the hall closet — gingerly, so as not to break an asymmetric sweat — to find another stick of deodorant. Which I found, sort of. Specifically, what I located was:
“I can’t personally vouch for all of my wife’s activities over the past few weeks, but I assure you I would notice a round of sudden and excessive panting.”
Now, my wife does most of the grocery shopping, which includes keeping our antiperspirant arsenal stocked. It’s certainly her prerogative to buy herself something nice and delicately scented for her pits. That’s my lady there. Nothing’s too good or too pH-balanced for her.
But I’ve never seen this sort of glaring disparity before. It’s remarkable enough that I have to believe one of two things have happened:
Possibly, my wife has recently stopped perspiring — not sweating, as ladies don’t sweat, she tells me — and I haven’t noticed. Maybe at some point, we each had seven sticks of deodorant, and I’ve simply used mine up while hers are collecting dust. As opposed to mine, which mostly collect sweat and odor and little curly hairs.
Hopefully, she doesn’t have some sort of medical condition or ‘perspire gland’ blockage. It seems fairly unlikely, though. I mean, my dog can’t sweat, and she sits around the house all day with her tongue hanging out. I can’t personally vouch for all of my wife’s activities over the past few weeks, but I assure you I would notice a round of sudden and excessive panting.
)Notice it, and be oddly excited about it. Especially if she also could scratch her ears with her feet or sniff my crotch at inappropriate times. Perhaps that’s asking too much.)
The other explanation is that she’s suddenly started sweating perspiring a lot, and now needs all seven of those deodorant sticks. Certainly, her job can be stressful — and she’s been pretty busy at the office lately — but if she’s going through three sticks of Secret a week, it might be time to think about a vacation. Or at least taking a towel to work. And maybe a mop.
In any case, I did the only thing I could do at that point. I found the stick of deodorant she was currently using, and glommed it all over my previously unprotected underarm. Then I wiped away any evidence from the top of her Secret, and nonchalantly walked away from the bathroom. It’s ‘strong enough for a man’, right? So why does it have to smell like lilacs and roses? Give me a fighting chance, already.
On the way to work, I bought myself some deodorant. Lots of deodorant. And when the drug store clerk commented on my ‘summery scent’, I went back to my car and rubbed on roll-on like a smelly, sweaty son of a bitch. Which I was, at that point. Yet still, I smelled like flowers and fluffy pillows.
You know, sometimes I wonder whether it’s just easier to let them see me sweat. Jeez.
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