About ThisAbout Me
Email Me
Bookmark
Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Ah, the joys of owning a home. Or in this case, a yard.
I don’t remember buying a house in the middle of a fricking forest, but that must be what happened. How else could we end up with dead leaves a foot deep in the back yard? I went back there yesterday to rake them up, and could barely wade through the damned things. We lost the dog for a while — we had to strap a snorkel to her ass, so we could see the breathing tube sticking up out of the leaf piles.
(Which worked out okay until she started farting. Not only did it tootle out the top like a train whistle, but it seems to have permanently fogged up the mask.
Yeah, I think I’m done with scuba for a while. Ick.)
Anyway, I raked myself a path out to the middle of the yard, and went to work. And work, and work, and more work. Honestly, I think the bastards around us must have raked their yards, and dumped all their shit into ours. While we were sleeping, maybe, or… um, at work. It could happen. And then they… uh, smoothed them all out, to make an even layer, so no one would suspect. Yes, I’m sure that’s what they did. Now all I’ve got to do is prove it, or at least keep them from coming back. Bear traps and land mines ought to do the trick.
(Hey, it worked so well for the gopher problem we used to have, that’s how I solve all our yard-related problems now. Bear traps and land mines have gotten rid of skunks, and ants, and most of the weeds in the yard. Well, okay, to be fair, they took out a lot of the flowers, too… not to mention the left side of the porch. Still, I think it’s been worth the effort.
Of course, we do go through an awful lot of mailmen. I guess we should probably put up warning signs or something. Or at least stop leaving traps in the mailbox. But you never know where those pesky ants are going to crawl. You can never be too careful.)
But all of that didn’t help me with the leaves I already had. And believe me, I tried. I set up a chain of firecrackers, hoping to burn the leaves away. In hindsight, I suppose I should have realized that was a bad idea. All I got was a bunch of ‘leafetti’ raining down on my head. Oh, and I managed to catch the grill on fire. And while fire in a grill is good, bright yellow flames burning the hell out of the outside of the grill are generally not what you want.
So, I put the fire out. But our grill is now a nice golden brown. In a pinch, I might throw it on a roll and try to eat it. Bitches.
Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and got to work on the leaves. Now, don’t get the wrong idea, either. I didn’t use any of those newfangled, fancy-shmancy modern lawn tools. I’m a traditionalist, folks. I’m a throwback. ‘Old-school‘, I think the kids call it.
In other words, I’m poor. You see, actually owning some green space within twenty miles of Boston doesn’t leave you with much ‘green space’ in the old wallet to put towards lawn maintenance. So we make do with the tools our parents, and grandparents, and Neanderthal ancestors, used. We’ve got a rake, and a shovel, and a pack of leaf bags. That’s pretty much it.
(Well, to be honest, we did save up our money and buy a lawnmower this summer, too. Which was a relief — clipping the lawn with a pair of scissors was getting pretty damned old. I was considering just dumping peanut butter all over the yard and letting the dog do the work for us. That’s when my wife suggested the lawnmower. She always has such good ideas.)
So I went at it with the rake, and after a couple of hours, I had two chest-high piles of leaves. But that wasn’t the truly onerous part. Oh, no — not by a longshot. The bagging is ten times harder than the raking.
(Bagging’s always the hardest part of anything. Ask a hunter, or maybe a coroner. Or even a horny teenager; they know. They wish they did, anyway.)
Luckily, though, I had some help. My wife came out for a little bagging party. (Yeah, I’m gonna leave that one alone. Think what you want.) And soon enough, we had several big-ass bags full of leaves and stored under the porch. That’s when I took a good look around the yard, and recoiled in horror at what I saw.
It wasn’t the ground that concerned me — oh, there were still a few leaves here and there, littered on the lawn like drunken frat boys after a kegger. (Sorry, we’re in New England. That’s keggah. A wicked pissah keggah!) And the grill was still smoldering. But I was over that already. No, what really got my knickers in a twist was what I saw on the trees — all the damned trees lining the properties around us still had loads of leaves! Thousands of the little bastards, just waiting to die and drop onto my property. How fucking rude!
(Look, you don’t see me dying and dragging myself into their tree trunks, or draping myself on their branches, now, do you? No. It’s just common courtesy. You’d think these damned leaves would get with the program already.)
That’s when I realized that the circle of back-breaking yard work is never-ending. As soon as you’re done with one batch of Nature’s little tree turds, another round starts plopping down onto your shit. And then you’ve got to rake those. And over, and over, until the snow falls, and then you’ve got to shovel that shit up. In the spring, there’s apparently something called ‘planting’, or ‘seeding’. Sounds hard. And then you mow the grass all summer, until before you know it, you’re back to the damned leaves! Shit! Who’s idea was this ‘yard’ thing, anyway? Can I just pave over the thing and be done with it? It’s not like I’m gonna grow frigging wheat out there — so why the hell do I have to bother with it?
Eh, this sucks. But maybe I’ll get lucky this year. Hell, it’s already mid-November, and this is New England — the blizzards should be starting any day now. Maybe those leaves that are left will get caught by surprise, and get flash-frozen right on their nasty little stalks. They can sit there freezing on the trees for all I give a damn. Just so long as I don’t have to deal with them.
But what if they do fall? What then? Well, I’m not bagging the little fuckers, I’ll tell you that. Once a year is enough. I’ll rake ’em if I have to, but that’s it. I’ll just leave the pile there for the winter, like some sort of leafery burial ground. That’ll teach the bastards to keel over on my lawn. I have a policy on my property — if you die there, then you’d damned well better be sure to drag your carcass away before I find it. Or have it dragged for you, ’cause I’m not likely to do it. And we’ve got the remains of our gopher friends out there to prove it.
(The mailmen, we cleaned up — all those letters and catalogs were clogging up the drainpipes.)
Anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’m done with leaves this year, but it doesn’t look good. Another couple of weeks without snow, and I’ll be up to my ass again in dead tree parts. The neighbors better hope that doesn’t happen. ‘Cause next time, my leaves are getting dumped in their yards. Yeah, baby — payback is a bitch. I’m onto you people, do you hear me? I’m onto you!
Permalink | 5 Comments(Note: Yes, I’m backdating this post by a few hours. Again. At least this time, I have a good excuse.
(Assuming that laziness, exhaustion, procrastination, and distractedness — the ones I’ve used in the past — aren’t good excuses. Even though I think they are. Nyah.)
Anyway, this time my tardiness has a technical explanation — apparently my wireless router hiccuped yesterday and stopped talking to my ISP’s DNS server. Maybe they had a spat of some kind. Maybe the router was upset that the DNS server never calls any more. (Just like a man.) Or maybe they’ve both got their eye on some hot mailserver out there. Something. Anyway, they got snarky with each other, and I lost all access to the web at large.
(Well, that’s not entirely true, I suppose. If I’d known the IP addresses for Blogger, and Yahoo, and the rest of the places I wanted to go, I guess I wouldn’t really have needed the DNS server. But I didn’t. Maybe I should start memorizing those for future reference. Yeah, that should be fun.)
So, to make a long story… um, marginally less long, I finally called my ISP this morning (because I didn’t know the problem was on my end), and — after some initial diagnostics — the tech support guy gave me the universal, highly technical, time-tested, expert advice that I give people when they come to me with computer problems:
‘Uh… did you try turning it off and back on?’
Shit. Why the hell didn’t I think of that? If the printer’s screwed, what do I do? Off and back on. When my computer locks up? Reboot. So what happens when the network suddenly goes belly up? Well, um, I wait sixteen hours or so, then call my ISP. And what do they tell me? ‘Restart your router, stupid.’
(In a very nice, friendly, customer-friendly sort of way, of course. They know who pays the checks.)
*sigh* I’m such a tool sometimes.)
So. I thought about bitching about last night’s horrendously unfunny Saturday Night Live / Mad TV episodes. But I just can’t find the energy. I’m depressed that there’s no good sketch comedy on TV any more. Sure, SNL has hit lulls before — the post-Eddie Murphy era, the dark times right after guys like Mike Myers jumped ship — but I’ve seen very little in the past couple of years that suggests they’re close to coming out of their current flat funk.
(Seriously — Hall and Oates custom-singing at a business conference? Why would that be funny? And why Hall and Oates? Who the hell cares?)
Ugh. It just makes my funny bone hurt.
(Andy Roddick as host? *sniff sniff* Is it just me, or am I catching the faint whiff of ‘desperation’? Maybe SNL’s not bringing in the cool kiddies any more.)
Where are the Dana Carveys, the Eddie Murphys, the Chris Farleys?
(Well, okay, I suppose we have a pretty good idea of where Chris Farley is right now. Bad example. Sorry.)
That’s to say nothing of the show’s heyday — Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Jim Belushi… shit, I’d settle for John Belushi right now. Or Rob Schneider, for chrissakes. David Spade, Kevin Nealon — give me something! Placate me, dammit! Even Victoria freakin’ Jackson would be… um, no, never mind. She was the worst. Forget I mentioned her. Sheesh.
And it used to be that I could turn to Mad TV for relief. Miss Swan (‘Rooka rike a man.‘) would help, and Stuart (‘No…. noooooo… look what I can do!’) pitched in; even Lorraine (‘God, that’s cute! Hurmph!’) lent an occasional hand. But that show’s gone down the craptube, too — last night, with plenty of old regulars back, they chose to go with Will Sasso’s Kenny Rogers (damn, what brain-deficient bumbleass decided that character should get more than one sketch? Mumbling, bumbling semi-famous has-been Southern nonsense was funny for the first couple of minutes, but skit after skit after skit?), Nicole Sullivan and Michael McDonald as the ‘literally‘ twins (ugh!), and Aries Spears’ ‘Real M************ News‘ nightmare. From what I gather, I missed a few of the better sketches, but still — for a big ‘special show’, shouldn’t most of the material be good? Not half, or some, or a little, but most? Is that asking too much?
Well, apparently. Mad TV is still the better option, but last night was just damned depressing. I watched for over an hour, and the most entertaining thing I saw was Tina Fey shaking her stuff along with the other SNL chickies during Andy Roddick’s monologue-that-wasn’t. I don’t know what the hell they fed ‘Tangy Tina’ before that little bit, but she was the rump-shakin’est of anyone out there. She always seems so straight-laced and calm in most of her sketches — I didn’t even know she had a jiggy to get with. Color me impressed.
Okay, that’s enough. I said I wasn’t gonna bitch, right? Oh, well. So much for ‘best-laid plans’. Eh. I can’t help it if I have high humor expectations. It’s not my fault. It’s those people who wrote the good shit back in the day — the Conehead family, and the wild and crrrrazy guys, and ‘Jane, you ignorant slut.’ If they’d never shown me Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, or Wayne’s World, or even the Church Lady, then I wouldn’t be demanding something just as good now. Seriously, my tastes haven’t changed much.
(Since I was eight or so, come to think of it. Obvious, isn’t it?)
So it’s not my fault. It must be the writers, and the actors, and whoever’s running the crappified versions of these once-funny shows.
Heh. Finally I’ve found a scapegoat. Cool. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Or at least while I have someone else to blame. I don’t get to do it often, you know.
Permalink | No CommentsWell, today’s the day. Today I enter the infancy of my standup comedy career.
All right, so technically, it’s not quite the ‘infancy’ yet. My first show’s not tonight, or anything official like that. So I guess I’m still in my… um, fetusry.
(Or something. Ew.)
But the point is that I’m about to get serious. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come up with material. I refined some stuff, I reworked other bits, and a lot of it I crumpled into tight little balls and buried in the yard. And then peed on the spot, and covered it up with leaves. Believe me, I am capable of dreaming up some horrible, unfunny shit.
(Yeah, I know — I’m preaching to the choir. Suck me.)
Anyway, there was some crap that made the cut. About twenty minutes’ worth, in fact. So today I have to make some tough choices. I have to edit, to winnow. To separate the chaff from… well, from the other chaff, pretty much. None of this is friggin’ Shakespeare, after all. But again, that’s not the point.
All I’m saying is, it’s gonna be tough. These little skits and bits are my babies now.
(Well, except that they don’t produce any green poop or early-morning screaming fits. There’s still a bit of projectile vomiting from time to time, of course, but that’s okay. It’s usually not mine, and that’s all that’s important.)
But how to choose? How to choose?! Do I cut the ‘assbag’ bit, or leave out the ‘wet spots’ routine? Do I do the thing that ends with ‘licking herpes’? Then I might have to leave out the part about being ‘in my bedroom with a cucumber for an hour and a half’. Oh, they’re all so priceless — how on earth can I be expected to choose?
(And yes, if you’ve been paying close attention, versions of most of this crap have appeared here on this very site. That’s right — you saw it here first, whether you wanted to or not. Hopefully, you still manage to sleep at night.)
Anyway, by the end of the day, I’ll have a five minute set all ready. There’s a ‘dry run’ on Tuesday — on stage, but with an empty house — and then next Sunday’s the big show. I guess that counts as the ‘wet run’.
(Which could be taken several different ways, very few of them good. Unless this was a porn movie shoot. Which it isn’t. Damn.)
And we’ll see what happens after that.
So hopefully it’ll go well, and I won’t leave anything good on the cutting-room floor. Assuming there’s anything good in the first place. And assuming that I actually had a ‘cutting room’, which I don’t. I’ll probably end up doing the deed in the basement, or the spare bedroom. Somewhere out of the way, where I won’t be disturbed — or embarrassed, by getting caught in the act of miming how I ‘raise the roof’ or ‘eat like a bird’.
(Jeez. How the hell did I fall into this crappile, anyway?)
But getting the set together’s not the end of the process. Oh, no. Once I have something ready, then I’ll have to practice. And record it, and time it, and play it back while I cringe in horror and make the ‘I sound like that?!?’ face. Yeah, that’ll be fun. I’ll probably have to do that a few times, too, to get the timing down. It’ll be a little repeating loop of me being a moron over and over, with slight variations each time. Like when I went around to every girl in my class in high school, trying to score a prom date. Or that time I ended up on the wrong side of a plate-glass door from the keg at a party a few weeks ago.
(As in:
‘Hey, beer!‘
‘Ow! Shit!‘
‘Hey, beer!‘
‘Damn! That hurts!‘
‘‘Hey, look. A keg!‘
‘Ouch! Ow-ow-ow! Oh, hoppy goodness, why hast thou forsaken me?!‘)
Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes. And, of course, I’ll keep writing this drivel down, and maybe I’ll find something else I can use. (Like ‘fetusry’. Hey, shut up! You never know.) In the meantime, I’m off to talk to myself in the mirror. At least this time, I’ll have a good reason.
Permalink | 4 CommentsYou know what really bakes my muffins?
(Hmmm. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, muffins are nice, right? They’re usually pretty tasty.
Ooh, and they smell nice, too. In a pinch — like when you’re out of deodorant — you can rub ’em under your arms to ‘freshen up’. Of course, you wouldn’t eat them then. Unless you’ve got some sort of fetish thing going on that involves sweaty, musky, damp muffins. Or the armpits they rubbed up against. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ‘Weird’ with that, yes. ‘Disturbing‘ with that, certainly. But ‘wrong’? Um, yeah — come to think of it, maybe so.
Look, all this talk about sweaty pit muffins is getting us nowhere.
(And yes, I do say that to all the girls. However did you know?)
Maybe I should just start over.)
So. You know what really tweaks my nipples?
(Okay, wait, hold on right there. Stop. Time out.
To be honest, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing, either. Gimme a second; I’ll check.
Yee-ouch! Ow ow ow ow ow! Holy shit, OUCH!
Um… yeah, that was actually pretty good. I’m strangely excited now. Shit. I guess I can’t use that one, either.
Okay, let’s try this again. Take three.)
Ahem. Hi there. You know what really burns my ass?
(Well, that sounds like what I’m looking for. Just to be safe, though, I’d better make sure. Hold on — the stove’s in the other room. I’ll be right back.
<…time passes…>
Um. Yeah. That really pissed me off. That’s the one I’m looking for, all right. Anybody out there got any Bactine? Aloe, maybe? Some sort of ass Band-Aid? Anyone?
Hey, don’t give me that look. I had to make sure I picked the right saying for the occasion. I’m willing to suffer for my art, even if it means roasting my assflesh to a nice golden brown.
Ooh, ooh — it’s ‘Choose Your Own Punchline‘ time — pick the one you like best to end this train wreck of an aside. Which of these goes best after the ‘assflesh’ line above?:
Don’t go saying I never gave you options, folks. Get in there and participate! Woo!)
Okay, I think we’re (finally) ready to get this damned entry started. Once more, from the top! And… action!
You know what really burns my ass?
(Um, besides the stove, that is.)
Lucky bastards, that’s what.
And I’m not talking about all lucky people here — I really mean the bastards out there, who happen to get lucky through no merit or effort of their own.
I’m sure this shit happens all over the place — in business, and love, and even in Vegas — but the place where I notice it the most is on the road. And boy, it burns my ass.
Now, I’ve talked a couple of times (here, for instance, and also here) about the lobotomized hyperactive boobs that are Masshole drivers. I’m truly beginning to think that part of the driving exam in the Boston area involves jamming the business end of an electric mixer as far as it’ll go up your nose, and setting it on puree for thirty seconds. And then developing a crack addiction.
(No, I don’t know how you’d document a crack addiction to the DMV’s satisfaction. Maybe a form from your dealer, signed in triplicate? Dunno. I’m just saying. Don’t be a smartass, man.)
But I’m past that. Mostly. Maybe ‘accustomed to it’ would be more accurate. I’ve sufficiently lowered my expectations, such that I now expect — even anticipate — asinine, oblivious, idiotic assholery out on the roads. Oh, occasionally, a drooling dumbass will manage to surprise and enrage me, but it’s happening less and less often. Generally, things are Zen. Very Zen.
So, when some sport utility bitch cuts across three lanes of traffic — two of them oncoming — to make a left turn, or a plodding peckernose just has to pull in front of me from a side street, and is then compelled to drive at six miles an hour… I can deal with it. I don’t like it. I’m not happy. But I can control the urge to pull the cluetards out of their vehicles and shove their tires up their tailpipes. If you know what I’m saying.
However. All of that changes if one of these vehiculosers actually manages to win.
You see, once I’m wronged by Tom Toyota or Vicky Volkswagen, then I have to win. I’m past the point of wishing them bodily harm in response to a dumbass swerve or a dickhead move, but I still have to win. I’ve got to get where I’m going before they do. As long as we’re taking the same path, I’ve got to get ahead of them, to teach them a lesson. Cheaters — and careeners, and cutoffers, and no-signal-using sudden-turning jackhole cocksuckers — never win. Me win. You no win. Arrr.
That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, anyway, in my little world. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the assholes get lucky, and often at my expense. They piddle and crawl toward a green light, until it turns yellow, then race through it as it blinks red, leaving me green-eyed and red-faced myself.
(And, I suppose you could say, yellow with piss and vinegar. But that’s nasty.)
Or the numbnuts continues to pull his or her death-defying, anger-inducing stunts on drivers in front of me, and manages to scoot on down the road before I do. And that’s just wrong. What kind of a world are we living in, anyway, where I don’t get the chance to cut them off? Where I can’t center my car in the two lanes directly in front of their car, and then drive like a turtle on Valium? Where my ass gets boxed in behind a semi after they pass it on the right… on the shoulder… at sixty miles an hour… in a school zone? How the hell is that fair?
This shit happens on a regular basis. I get cut off, hemmed in, blocked out, and nearly run into just about every day, often repeatedly. Now, most of the time, I’m able to hustle past most of the goons, and go on about my day confident in the knowledge that I’ve taught them, in a subtle and non-violent way, that their particular brand of vehicular pilotry isn’t the solution. Smart driving’s where it’s at.
But once a week or so, one of the boobjobs gets away, and that’s damned frustrating. It’s another reckless yahoo out there who thinks they’ve got a leg on the rest of us, traffic laws and common courtesy and crosswalkers with the right of way be damned. And that’s not cool. Not to mention very messy. And we’re the ones left cleaning pedestrian parts off our tires, because some jackass was late for his monster truck rally, and couldn’t be bothered to avoid the people trying to leap out of his way. Inconsiderate bastard.
Anyway, that’s my peeve.
(Brought on by a particularly aggressive dimbulb-that-got-away on my way to work this morning. Damn you, slow-witted Chevy Suburban douchebag!)
Sorry to be so negative — and to go on (at length, again) about the drivers around here. My commute pretty much doubled with this new job, so driving among the clueless cartards out there is a bit higher on my list of complaints. I promise to cool it with the commuting rants for a while, though. I think we’ve all had enough.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for some more nipple tweaking. My ass may be burnt, but I can still have a good time. Hey, speaking of which, I wonder if we have any muffins around this place…
Permalink | 2 CommentsHey, all — just a quick note with the skinny on some changes around here. The scoop. The striaght dope. The scuttlebutt, if you will.
(And you will, because that’s a damned easy way to get the Word of the Day out of the way. Don’t hate me because I’m lazy.)
Anyway, here are just a few of the many delectable changes I’ve made for you, my adoring fans.
(You not-so-adoring fans are out of luck. Don’t even think about trying out the new shit if you don’t adore me, dammit. Adore me!)
Ahem. Sorry. Here’s the list:
So, that’s about it. Sorry to interrupt the zanery around here, but I thought you ought to know what you’re dealing with. This shit is high-falutin’-tech, folks. And leaning further and further that way, too. I’ll be working on building a better RSS feed next, and re-templatizing my non-main blog pages, like the ‘about’ pages, and the 100 Things. And if none of that last bit meant anything to you — don’t worry! It’s all behind-the-scenes crap.
(You might notice the RSS thing if you subscribe to my Klip, or some other service that picks up the RSS feed — right now, it’s pretty crappy and generic. It’s the Yugo of RSS feeds, or maybe one of the Olsen twins. I’m not going to go overboard futzing with it — I just want to bring it into the twenty-first century. You know, make it a Nissan, or an Alicia Silverstone. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should at least have some ‘oomph‘. And be nice to look at.)
So that’s it — check out the Klip thingamadoodad, and search away, folks. Hey, and I get reports on which searches are being done, and how many get entered. So hop to it, dammit. I wanna see lots and lots of crazy queries, all right? This shit didn’t read itself the first time around, and it ain’t getting any funnier just sitting around in the archives. Go get it.
Permalink | No Comments
![[Subscribe]](/blog/images/subscribe.png)
