THE NAIL, THE SETTER, AND THE STAIRCASE: CONCLUSION
Previously on The RyduffalO Pinyon:
"You know, I bet we could fix this old treehouse up better than new."
"Ahhhhhhhhh! Help me Julie, there's a nail in my foot!"
"Let's play a new game, I know, we'll run around the neighborhood looking for dogs to jump over!"
"Ahhhhhhhhh! Help me Julie, there a giant piece of glass in my hand!"
....
In the interest of being historically accurate, let me point out that the shard of glass in question was, in fact, giant. Some of you might assume that an ordinary sized piece of glass stuck into the left hand of an 11 year old boy might seem large to him, but actually be relatively small.
You'd be wrong. It was fucking huge, and damn you for assuming.
However, just to be clear, it was about 5 inches long and 3 inches across at it's widest point. The widest point didn't really concern me however, it was the pointiest point that was currently on my mind.
And in my hand.
As far as it would go.
And also on my mind, apart from the blood and pain of this traumatic injury, was the fact that no matter how much my hand hurt, there was still a dog to be dealt with.
The Setter.
It was snarling at me as if to say,
"Ha ha you fool, you fell right into my trap! I saw you degrading the other dogs around here and I put that glass there for you to fall on. Now you're mine!"
So I did what any real man would do in that situation, I screamed for my little sisters to help me.
They came running, but it was too late.
The Setter grew tired of taunting me, and attacked.
And what happened next is something that I won't ever forget or forgive myself for.
In a desperate attempt at self defense I kicked out with all of my might to keep the dog from biting me, and it worked.
My foot landed squarely in the throat of this hellacious beast named Lucy, and she fell back with a strange muffled yelp, coughed a few times, and died.
I killed her. I went into her yard, and I killed the Irish Setter that belonged to my neighbors down the street. And I was bleeding pretty badly now.
Not knowing that Death had just come for Lucy in the shape of my Converse, and thinking she was just stunned or something, I turned my attention back to my hand and the protruding foreign object I had unwittingly collected.
I pulled the glass out, and that was apparently the cue for the real bloodflow to start.
Within seconds, my hand wore a bright red glove that dripped and I began to seriously consider panicking. My sisters arrived at that moment and immediately got into a fight concerning what they should do to help me. It wasn't their fault though, they were kids and this was adult business.
But there were no adults around. It was the middle of the day and the only things populating our neighborhood were kids and dogs, and the dogs weren't in much of a mood to help us out right now. You understand.
So we went from house to house knocking on doors in the vain hope that maybe someone would answer one of them and fix my hand. This plan hadn't been thought through too well, and I was beginning to feel a bit faint. I'm unsure if it was loss of blood that made me feel this way, or the terror that comes with watching your hand spew red liquid everywhere you walk, leaving a blood trail going from house to house that would remain on the sidewalk until the next rains came.
Yes, I used the sidewalk. I was a dumb ass.
Finally, we knocked on the right door.
It opened and a kindly lady stood there, she looked down at my sisters and I and instantly sprang into action. She rushed me to the sink and went to work on my hand. She seemed to know exactly what to do, I mentioned this to her and she told me why.
She was a nurse.
That was the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me, and it kept my faith in God rock-solid for the next five years.
A few days passed, and my neighbors buried their dog Lucy who had died mysteriously in their front yard while they were at work. My sisters, to their credit, never told anyone about the murder and for that I thank them. Nice work, ladies.
After the whole excitement of my near-death experience faded, later that day, we went to work on a new idea. One that was fun, but didn't involve nails, or glass, or dogs.
We sat in the living room and brainstormed for a while with no little to no results, when my eyes came to rest on the staircase.
I thought to myself, that's a pretty steep staircase, I bet you could get up some speed going down that sucker, if there were only something to ride.
And then it occurred to me that if we took the mattress off of Claire's bed, it might prove to be just the vehicle we needed.
So we went and got the mattress.
Now it was time to try it out, and also the time for my big brother authority to kick in. We needed a guinea pig, and since I was the brains of the operation, I was ineligible. So I chose Julie, because she was the middle child and no one really loves them anyway.
She climbed aboard the vessel and peered down the steep flight of stairs to the bottom where we had collected all the pillows and couch cushions in the house and formed a rudimentary landing pad. I noticed her getting scared, and just to take her mind off of things for a moment, I said
"Don't worry Julie, you don't have to go if you don't want to."
And then I pushed her.
She and the mattress left the launching pad at the same time, but regrettably, she arrived at the landing zone much earlier than her chariot, after bouncing down the last half of the stairs. I made sure to laugh very loudly, so that Julie would think that all of this was funny, and not painful. It worked.
We discovered that you had to hold on to the front of the mattress while going down to avoid any unfortunate mishaps, and once that policy went into effect, it was smooth sailing.
We had finally found the perfect form of entertainment, with just the right amount of danger to keep us interested until cartoons came on. We spent the rest of that summer riding our staircase to glory, and as for me,
I haven't been impaled by anything since.
THE END
Friday, February 27, 2004
Friday, February 20, 2004
STORY TIME
When I was younger, so much younger than today, I lived in a big, shiny, beautiful metropolis known to it's many inhabitants as simply Atlanta.
Has a more perfect name for a city ever been concocted?
And no, Tomorrowland doesn't count, as it is a not a real city, but a false moniker invented by a warped, demented mind, just like SeaTac.
It was between the time of my 10th and 11th birthdays and my family lived in a very spacious two story duplex. Connecting the two different floors was a very steep and extremely wide staircase, which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the upcoming tale, because it has been bolded.
A quick background into my familial unit. At the time, I had two little sisters, a Mom, and a Dad.
My sister's names were Julie, who has since dropped the "e" in favor of the more extreme "Juli", and Claire, who has more tattoos than all of The Habit combined (3), and is currently seeing a young man named Pal. Wait, let me just check the spelling on that...yep, Pal.
My father's name is Lawrence, and my mother's name was Joanne. Interestingly enough, she also has since dropped her "e" , but she decided to replace it with an "a", I guess to sound more professional, or maybe she was just trying to show up Juli. You know how women can get.
This story takes place in the summer of what must have been '87 or '88, I could figure out which one it was, but who has that kind of time? We'll just pick one at random and say '87.
So it was the summer of '88 (changed my mind) and my sisters and I were mired in the listless middle days of the golden season, when you had been out of school for just long enough to not be excited about being out of school. Both my parents worked during the day and all I had to look forward to was afternoon cartoons. So that left my sisters and I the whole day until three o'clock to fill with some sort of diversionary activity designed to alleviate the crushing boredom, and I'll be damned if we didn't come up with some doozies.
Doozy: informal something outstanding or unique of it's kind. (The Oxford American College Dictionary)
One day we went into the woods and found an old tree house that we decided, in our infinite wisdom, to fix up. We made plans, designed a rudimentary set of blueprints for reference, and made our way to a construction site down the road, to liberate some wood from the carpenter's oppressive regime. We were successful in our campaign, and we took our haul back into the woods to begin work on
The Reconstruction Project.
Only we never did it.
We never even started.
That wood's probably still laying there.
In the exact same place that it was when Julie was chasing fireflies in the darkening afternoon, and Claire was busy dabbling her feet in the creek, and probably in the same place it was in when I was stepping from board to board on the ground to avoid The Lava.
I was rather enjoying my little game, (as I always do when I'm winning) and then I noticed that one particular board was having trouble being persuaded to come off the bottom of my shoe. It was a very peculiar feeling, and naturally I looked down to see if I could find the problem.
I found the problem.
It was about six inches long.
It was made of metal.
And it was protruding from the top of my right foot.
The pain didn't really kick in until I saw the blood start to bubble up like the stigmata from around the thick black nail that was sticking out of the board, and that's when I began to feel a certain degree of panic start to settle in. I put my other foot on the board and started to pull up with my right leg in an attempt to extricate myself from this unholy union of flesh and steel.
That's when I discovered that the nail was going to hurt a lot more on the way out than it did on the way in.
And so ended The Reconstruction Project.
But never fear, The Nail Incident did not slow us down for long, and it was only about a week later that we invented a game that I knew would be the next big sports craze to sweep the nation, bigger even, than our beloved four-square.
The name of this game was Dog-Jumping.
It involved three players, (naturally) and a dog, (more naturally) and the act of jumping (duh).
It was all going swimmingly, and I was up by like seventy-five points, depending on whom you talk to, when I went for the big one.
The Irish Setter.
There were many dogs in our neighborhood, but none as feared and mean spirited as The Setter.
I think it's actual name was Lucy, but for the purpose of this narrative, we will use The Setter, because in our opinion The Setter sounds scarier.
It was lying in it's yard, facing away from me, when I began my approach. I ran swiftly, and stayed low to the ground, As I grew nearer, I knew that it was going to take all the strength my legs possessed to clear this bohemoth. I gathered myself, and lept!
And I cleared it.
But as it turned out, I jumped too far.
I landed awkwardly and stumbled forward and fell to the ground using my hands to slow my fall.
And that's when it happened. The second time in ten days that I was impaled by something.
Only this time, the material in question was not steel, it was glass.
And in the meantime, there was a very large, very red, very angry dog, who had just been punked in it's own front yard, baring it's teeth and barking, five feet away from me.
TO BE CONTINUED
(We haven't even gotten to the staircase yet)
When I was younger, so much younger than today, I lived in a big, shiny, beautiful metropolis known to it's many inhabitants as simply Atlanta.
Has a more perfect name for a city ever been concocted?
And no, Tomorrowland doesn't count, as it is a not a real city, but a false moniker invented by a warped, demented mind, just like SeaTac.
It was between the time of my 10th and 11th birthdays and my family lived in a very spacious two story duplex. Connecting the two different floors was a very steep and extremely wide staircase, which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the upcoming tale, because it has been bolded.
A quick background into my familial unit. At the time, I had two little sisters, a Mom, and a Dad.
My sister's names were Julie, who has since dropped the "e" in favor of the more extreme "Juli", and Claire, who has more tattoos than all of The Habit combined (3), and is currently seeing a young man named Pal. Wait, let me just check the spelling on that...yep, Pal.
My father's name is Lawrence, and my mother's name was Joanne. Interestingly enough, she also has since dropped her "e" , but she decided to replace it with an "a", I guess to sound more professional, or maybe she was just trying to show up Juli. You know how women can get.
This story takes place in the summer of what must have been '87 or '88, I could figure out which one it was, but who has that kind of time? We'll just pick one at random and say '87.
So it was the summer of '88 (changed my mind) and my sisters and I were mired in the listless middle days of the golden season, when you had been out of school for just long enough to not be excited about being out of school. Both my parents worked during the day and all I had to look forward to was afternoon cartoons. So that left my sisters and I the whole day until three o'clock to fill with some sort of diversionary activity designed to alleviate the crushing boredom, and I'll be damned if we didn't come up with some doozies.
Doozy: informal something outstanding or unique of it's kind. (The Oxford American College Dictionary)
One day we went into the woods and found an old tree house that we decided, in our infinite wisdom, to fix up. We made plans, designed a rudimentary set of blueprints for reference, and made our way to a construction site down the road, to liberate some wood from the carpenter's oppressive regime. We were successful in our campaign, and we took our haul back into the woods to begin work on
The Reconstruction Project.
Only we never did it.
We never even started.
That wood's probably still laying there.
In the exact same place that it was when Julie was chasing fireflies in the darkening afternoon, and Claire was busy dabbling her feet in the creek, and probably in the same place it was in when I was stepping from board to board on the ground to avoid The Lava.
I was rather enjoying my little game, (as I always do when I'm winning) and then I noticed that one particular board was having trouble being persuaded to come off the bottom of my shoe. It was a very peculiar feeling, and naturally I looked down to see if I could find the problem.
I found the problem.
It was about six inches long.
It was made of metal.
And it was protruding from the top of my right foot.
The pain didn't really kick in until I saw the blood start to bubble up like the stigmata from around the thick black nail that was sticking out of the board, and that's when I began to feel a certain degree of panic start to settle in. I put my other foot on the board and started to pull up with my right leg in an attempt to extricate myself from this unholy union of flesh and steel.
That's when I discovered that the nail was going to hurt a lot more on the way out than it did on the way in.
And so ended The Reconstruction Project.
But never fear, The Nail Incident did not slow us down for long, and it was only about a week later that we invented a game that I knew would be the next big sports craze to sweep the nation, bigger even, than our beloved four-square.
The name of this game was Dog-Jumping.
It involved three players, (naturally) and a dog, (more naturally) and the act of jumping (duh).
It was all going swimmingly, and I was up by like seventy-five points, depending on whom you talk to, when I went for the big one.
The Irish Setter.
There were many dogs in our neighborhood, but none as feared and mean spirited as The Setter.
I think it's actual name was Lucy, but for the purpose of this narrative, we will use The Setter, because in our opinion The Setter sounds scarier.
It was lying in it's yard, facing away from me, when I began my approach. I ran swiftly, and stayed low to the ground, As I grew nearer, I knew that it was going to take all the strength my legs possessed to clear this bohemoth. I gathered myself, and lept!
And I cleared it.
But as it turned out, I jumped too far.
I landed awkwardly and stumbled forward and fell to the ground using my hands to slow my fall.
And that's when it happened. The second time in ten days that I was impaled by something.
Only this time, the material in question was not steel, it was glass.
And in the meantime, there was a very large, very red, very angry dog, who had just been punked in it's own front yard, baring it's teeth and barking, five feet away from me.
TO BE CONTINUED
(We haven't even gotten to the staircase yet)
Thursday, February 12, 2004
CAN I GET A WITNESS FROM THE CONGREGATION?
Aww yes, welcome back, my brothers and sisters.
Welcome back to the home of the truth.
To the place where everyone is welcome and no soul is ever turned away.
To the center of all that is right, all that is real, all that is fundamentally correct.
My brothers, my sisters, the time has come.
A time I knew would come, but prayed would not.
It is time that we discuss something.
And before I say this, know that I am not one of those kind of people.
But still, as strange as this may sound coming from me, I am forced to admit this unfortunate fact to the entire world;
That fucking Oven Mitt from Arby's is one funny motherfucker.
Can I get an "Amen"?
Anyone?
No?
Fine, church is over, go eat.
In related news, my boy Spirit is fixing to rip that bitch-ass Opportunity a new data port.
I don't know if you've heard, but that nilla is back in action, and he's not going to take it anymore! All of you suckas that jumped on the O-P-P's bandwagon better recognize!
We got Spirit, yes we do!
We got Spirit, how bout you?
What's wrong bitches? Is it possibly the fact you can't respond with a clever chant because nothing rhymes with opportunity? Boy, did you pick the wrong horse. You bet your money on a bob-tail nag, and this somebody bet on The Bay.
In still other news, the votes are in, and the M.V.P. for the month of January is one Lucas Samuel Thayer.
He came.
He saw.
He learned choreography.
And as if that wasn't enough, even though he just arrived in sunny SoCal, he has decided to forgo the requisite year of inactivity to "adjust to life in L.A.".
He looked this diabolical city straight in the eye and pretty much just said,
"No, I'll just kick ass now, thanks."
Nice work, Luke. Keep it up.
In other news, I would like to announce that we are mired in a movie slump right now, and it's kinda getting me down. I can remember vividly the excitement I felt waiting for Return Of The King and before that (gulp) Matrix Revolutions and I don't feel any of that now. What do we have to look forward to?
The Jesus movie with the Lethal Weapon guy? No thanks.
The Meg Ryan/Omar Epps boxing epic? Please.
Win a date with Crap McCraperson? Pass.
At this point, I'm supremely uninterested in anything showing at our huge, overpriced, commercial-showing movie houses.
Tell you what, just wake me up when "Radio" hits DVD.
Better yet, don't.
Tonight my comedy group has the meeting to decide which sketches go to The Show, and which sketches are stuck in Everett playing for the Aquasox.
By the way, that is how they spell it. But I don't know why.
Try as I might, I can't support the practice of replacing the conventional and fully functional "cks" with the more extreme and faintly 90's smelling "x". It's something fifth grade boys do when they're being lazy, as in;
"Dude, this class sux!"
Yes, son. This class does suck. But maybe if you spent a little more time looking at your books than at the Hustler your friends found in the woods, you'd actually make something of your pathetic life.
Kids, you just gotta know how to talk to 'em.
Aww yes, welcome back, my brothers and sisters.
Welcome back to the home of the truth.
To the place where everyone is welcome and no soul is ever turned away.
To the center of all that is right, all that is real, all that is fundamentally correct.
My brothers, my sisters, the time has come.
A time I knew would come, but prayed would not.
It is time that we discuss something.
And before I say this, know that I am not one of those kind of people.
But still, as strange as this may sound coming from me, I am forced to admit this unfortunate fact to the entire world;
That fucking Oven Mitt from Arby's is one funny motherfucker.
Can I get an "Amen"?
Anyone?
No?
Fine, church is over, go eat.
In related news, my boy Spirit is fixing to rip that bitch-ass Opportunity a new data port.
I don't know if you've heard, but that nilla is back in action, and he's not going to take it anymore! All of you suckas that jumped on the O-P-P's bandwagon better recognize!
We got Spirit, yes we do!
We got Spirit, how bout you?
What's wrong bitches? Is it possibly the fact you can't respond with a clever chant because nothing rhymes with opportunity? Boy, did you pick the wrong horse. You bet your money on a bob-tail nag, and this somebody bet on The Bay.
In still other news, the votes are in, and the M.V.P. for the month of January is one Lucas Samuel Thayer.
He came.
He saw.
He learned choreography.
And as if that wasn't enough, even though he just arrived in sunny SoCal, he has decided to forgo the requisite year of inactivity to "adjust to life in L.A.".
He looked this diabolical city straight in the eye and pretty much just said,
"No, I'll just kick ass now, thanks."
Nice work, Luke. Keep it up.
In other news, I would like to announce that we are mired in a movie slump right now, and it's kinda getting me down. I can remember vividly the excitement I felt waiting for Return Of The King and before that (gulp) Matrix Revolutions and I don't feel any of that now. What do we have to look forward to?
The Jesus movie with the Lethal Weapon guy? No thanks.
The Meg Ryan/Omar Epps boxing epic? Please.
Win a date with Crap McCraperson? Pass.
At this point, I'm supremely uninterested in anything showing at our huge, overpriced, commercial-showing movie houses.
Tell you what, just wake me up when "Radio" hits DVD.
Better yet, don't.
Tonight my comedy group has the meeting to decide which sketches go to The Show, and which sketches are stuck in Everett playing for the Aquasox.
By the way, that is how they spell it. But I don't know why.
Try as I might, I can't support the practice of replacing the conventional and fully functional "cks" with the more extreme and faintly 90's smelling "x". It's something fifth grade boys do when they're being lazy, as in;
"Dude, this class sux!"
Yes, son. This class does suck. But maybe if you spent a little more time looking at your books than at the Hustler your friends found in the woods, you'd actually make something of your pathetic life.
Kids, you just gotta know how to talk to 'em.
Monday, February 09, 2004
HI, THANKS FOR WAITING. HAVE YOU HAD TIME TO DECIDE?
First off, my apologies for the time off between blog entries. I'd like to say that it will never happen again, but I won't. Because it will.
But at least this time I have a good excuse. I was writing sketches.
OK, it's not a good excuse, but it is an excuse, and I'm using it.
You see, my sketch group The Habit is doing a new show next month, and we all decided to come to our meeting on Sunday with at least 3 new sketches each.
You may find this difficult to believe, but I haven't always been the bastion of literary excellence that you all know and tolerate.
No, there was a time when I would write one sketch a year and consider it a job well done. That time has passed.
I can say that with some confidence, because yesterday morning, when I was 3 sketches short of where I needed to be for our six o'clock meeting, I figured it out.
That is to say, I have a rough idea of what it's like to actually do the work that I've been telling people that I do for the last seven years. Quite fulfilling. Now I know why Jeff is so pompous and cocksure all the time. To be fair, he has every right to love himself and treat everyone around him like filth, because hey, he signs the checks.
Not to infer that we are actually getting paid for all of this, but if we did, I think it's safe to say, that Jeff, whether he needed to or not, would write his name on my check.
He's that good.
Anyway, back to me. I wrote my 3 sketches, using my time-tested "just throw some shit together so I don't get in trouble" method and I came upon a startling realization.
They were awesome.
They were pretty good.
They were fair.
And Jeff wrote half of the good one.
But still, I worked in my Mars Rover joke, and it went over quite well at the meeting.
Ah, the meeting. We concluded that we would take a few days to ruminate on the various undertakings, before meeting again on Thursday, which incidentally was named for the Norse God of Thunder, to decide which of all of these opi (opuses?) would be deemed good enough to use in our production.
Here comes the tricky part. The actual picking of the sketches. We have foolishly chosen democracy as our model for solving problems like these, unless of course if there is a tie, in which case it becomes a sketch-tatorship.
But here's my problem. When we reassemble three days from now, there is only one rule we must adhere to in regard to the pieces we have submitted.
We cannot vote for our own sketches.
Now what do I do? Trust these simpletons to recognize the genius inherent in my collective works? Half of them don't even realize they've just been insulted.
What sick, twisted mind conceived of this ghastly unethical system? More importantly, what reality TV show did he steal it from?
I guess we'll never know.
Unless I call and ask him.
Which I won't.
Because I don't want to play his little games.
In other news, I apologized to my mother and she assured me that if I kept my nose clean and played my cards right, then she would strongly consider the option to not stop loving me. Whew.
Thanks America, you've been great.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Just to clear up any confusion, the plural form of opus is, in fact, opuses. And also, America has been great, just not recently.
(Zing! Take that, land of my birth!)
First off, my apologies for the time off between blog entries. I'd like to say that it will never happen again, but I won't. Because it will.
But at least this time I have a good excuse. I was writing sketches.
OK, it's not a good excuse, but it is an excuse, and I'm using it.
You see, my sketch group The Habit is doing a new show next month, and we all decided to come to our meeting on Sunday with at least 3 new sketches each.
You may find this difficult to believe, but I haven't always been the bastion of literary excellence that you all know and tolerate.
No, there was a time when I would write one sketch a year and consider it a job well done. That time has passed.
I can say that with some confidence, because yesterday morning, when I was 3 sketches short of where I needed to be for our six o'clock meeting, I figured it out.
That is to say, I have a rough idea of what it's like to actually do the work that I've been telling people that I do for the last seven years. Quite fulfilling. Now I know why Jeff is so pompous and cocksure all the time. To be fair, he has every right to love himself and treat everyone around him like filth, because hey, he signs the checks.
Not to infer that we are actually getting paid for all of this, but if we did, I think it's safe to say, that Jeff, whether he needed to or not, would write his name on my check.
He's that good.
Anyway, back to me. I wrote my 3 sketches, using my time-tested "just throw some shit together so I don't get in trouble" method and I came upon a startling realization.
They were awesome.
They were pretty good.
They were fair.
And Jeff wrote half of the good one.
But still, I worked in my Mars Rover joke, and it went over quite well at the meeting.
Ah, the meeting. We concluded that we would take a few days to ruminate on the various undertakings, before meeting again on Thursday, which incidentally was named for the Norse God of Thunder, to decide which of all of these opi (opuses?) would be deemed good enough to use in our production.
Here comes the tricky part. The actual picking of the sketches. We have foolishly chosen democracy as our model for solving problems like these, unless of course if there is a tie, in which case it becomes a sketch-tatorship.
But here's my problem. When we reassemble three days from now, there is only one rule we must adhere to in regard to the pieces we have submitted.
We cannot vote for our own sketches.
Now what do I do? Trust these simpletons to recognize the genius inherent in my collective works? Half of them don't even realize they've just been insulted.
What sick, twisted mind conceived of this ghastly unethical system? More importantly, what reality TV show did he steal it from?
I guess we'll never know.
Unless I call and ask him.
Which I won't.
Because I don't want to play his little games.
In other news, I apologized to my mother and she assured me that if I kept my nose clean and played my cards right, then she would strongly consider the option to not stop loving me. Whew.
Thanks America, you've been great.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Just to clear up any confusion, the plural form of opus is, in fact, opuses. And also, America has been great, just not recently.
(Zing! Take that, land of my birth!)
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
AND WE'RE BACK.
I just got through reading all of the blogs and I gotta say it again.
Mark is hilarious.
Completely unrelatedly, this morning I got into a fight.
With, of all people, my mom.
And the worst part about it is, I won.
It all started when I received an email from Moveon.org (via my good friend Jeff Schell) asking me to put my name on a list of people who think that President Bush should be censured by congress. This seemed like a great thing to do, and not only did I sign up, but I crafted a rare mass email and asked most of my family and friends to do the same.
Included on this mass email list was my mother, who I'm told, brought me into this world, and is apparently allowed to take me out of it at any time. I was not aware of this loophole in the law, but she seemed quite sure of herself, so I guess I'll believe her.
She didn't think Bush should be censured.
In fact, what she said was,
"Not all of us think he's a bad guy, Ryan."
That's it. That was the full text of her message. No, hi son, are you married yet, when are you coming to visit. That meant she was serious. So I sent her this.
"I never said he was a bad guy, Mom. I said he was a LIAR."
And I capitalized "liar" like that too, very cool. Or so I thought.
She sent back a message that talked about how Iraq was better off now. Then she asked me to imagine if she was living under a brutal dictator, wouldn't I want someone to help her?
And what can you say to that?
I'll tell you what you say. You say, "Of course I'd want someone to help you, Mom. I love you, and I'm sorry for upsetting you."
At least, that's what you say if you're not a dick.
I went on an e-rampage and pulled out all the sarcastic comments I could find. I wrote very lucidly about the lying, the agenda, and all the troops that are dying. I was mean and condescending to her. I talked to her like she was in The Habit.
Basically, I tore my mom a new one.
And I feel really bad about it.
I don't regret what I said, because it was the truth as I see it, but I shouldn't have gone as far as I did. On the bright side, at least I never once used the phrase
"Son of a Cock."
I sent the email with a vicious stab at the left side of my mouse, and sat back, thinking to myself, "Go ahead Mom, respond to THAT."
But she didn't.
I waited around for an hour and still nothing.
And then I read David Swidler's Way Cool Dude Blog to cheer me up.
Bad idea. He's what's known as "a good boy".
I'm an ass.
No, I'm worse, I'm a Mom-abuser.
A Mother Puncher, if you will.
May God have mercy on my soul, even Tupac loved his Mama. I just hope she's not on her way down here right now to grab me by the ear, use my middle name, and tell me to clean up this pigsty.
Mommy?
EDITOR'S NOTE: To follow up on this story, this morning I received a package from my mother and in it were two awesome gifts which she had sent me before our little chat yesterday. I really suck.
I just got through reading all of the blogs and I gotta say it again.
Mark is hilarious.
Completely unrelatedly, this morning I got into a fight.
With, of all people, my mom.
And the worst part about it is, I won.
It all started when I received an email from Moveon.org (via my good friend Jeff Schell) asking me to put my name on a list of people who think that President Bush should be censured by congress. This seemed like a great thing to do, and not only did I sign up, but I crafted a rare mass email and asked most of my family and friends to do the same.
Included on this mass email list was my mother, who I'm told, brought me into this world, and is apparently allowed to take me out of it at any time. I was not aware of this loophole in the law, but she seemed quite sure of herself, so I guess I'll believe her.
She didn't think Bush should be censured.
In fact, what she said was,
"Not all of us think he's a bad guy, Ryan."
That's it. That was the full text of her message. No, hi son, are you married yet, when are you coming to visit. That meant she was serious. So I sent her this.
"I never said he was a bad guy, Mom. I said he was a LIAR."
And I capitalized "liar" like that too, very cool. Or so I thought.
She sent back a message that talked about how Iraq was better off now. Then she asked me to imagine if she was living under a brutal dictator, wouldn't I want someone to help her?
And what can you say to that?
I'll tell you what you say. You say, "Of course I'd want someone to help you, Mom. I love you, and I'm sorry for upsetting you."
At least, that's what you say if you're not a dick.
I went on an e-rampage and pulled out all the sarcastic comments I could find. I wrote very lucidly about the lying, the agenda, and all the troops that are dying. I was mean and condescending to her. I talked to her like she was in The Habit.
Basically, I tore my mom a new one.
And I feel really bad about it.
I don't regret what I said, because it was the truth as I see it, but I shouldn't have gone as far as I did. On the bright side, at least I never once used the phrase
"Son of a Cock."
I sent the email with a vicious stab at the left side of my mouse, and sat back, thinking to myself, "Go ahead Mom, respond to THAT."
But she didn't.
I waited around for an hour and still nothing.
And then I read David Swidler's Way Cool Dude Blog to cheer me up.
Bad idea. He's what's known as "a good boy".
I'm an ass.
No, I'm worse, I'm a Mom-abuser.
A Mother Puncher, if you will.
May God have mercy on my soul, even Tupac loved his Mama. I just hope she's not on her way down here right now to grab me by the ear, use my middle name, and tell me to clean up this pigsty.
Mommy?
EDITOR'S NOTE: To follow up on this story, this morning I received a package from my mother and in it were two awesome gifts which she had sent me before our little chat yesterday. I really suck.
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