Have You Suffered Dizziness, Coughing, or Death Recently? If So…

by Roger White

So I’m curled up in bed on a drizzly, dreary Wednesday, nursing a bit of a cold (and when I say nursing, I mean I’m milking the most out of this sniffle so I can stay home—don’t try to deny that you know what I mean). I’m all set. Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke, The Big Valley—the whole lineup waits for me. I’ve got my rainbow-colored goldfish crackers, ice-cold Dr. Pepper in a glass with the bendy straw so I can drink it in bed, and—my favorite—Girl Scout lemonade cookies. Man, I got it made.

But about midway through the second or third TV show, I start feeling bad—not sick bad, like I’m pretending to be. No, I start feeling like some sort of no-account loser. A vague and nebulous guilt nags at me, as if I should be creating something or fixing something or learning to sell real estate or toning my abs. And I realize the culprit is my very own pal—the television. No!

Unfortunately, yes. TV advertisers assume, and maybe rightfully so, that the vast majority of folks who stay home during the daytime are unemployed, uninspired, unhappy underachievers. Have you watched the ads on daytime television lately? Talk about a real buzzkill. Shee.

From the time I watched Barney Fife try to arrest the governor of North Carolina for parking next to a fire hydrant to the time Lee Majors rescued his ma Barbara Stanwyck from evil rustlers, I’ll bet you I saw 37 commercials, all of them for one of the following:

• How to be a culinary arts professional by attending Chicken Cordon Bleu Academy
• How to be a medical assistant professional in just six weeks by taking online classes from OuibedoxUniversity
• How to sue your employer for asbestos exposure if you suffer from: a. difficulty breathing; b. dizziness; c. chronic coughing; or d. death
• How to make $100,000 in six months by convincing people who stay home during the daytime to send you $39.99 for your program—a program that basically says to tell people they can make $100,000 in six months by sending you $39.99 for your program—are you following this?
• How to lift your butt as only the Brazilians can
• How to: lose your muffin top, achieve six-pack abs, boost your testosterone, add inches to your man parts, add inches to your woman parts, take inches off your woman parts, buy the correct bra, perform better in the bedroom (what, standup comedy?), or remove unsightly skin tags (ew)
• How to remain in your home, travel the world, have money in the bank, finance your kids’ college, and retire in splendor—all with a reverse mortgage

I still don’t quite get the whole reverse mortgage thing. There must be something to it because they have former congressmen—heck, even Henry Winkler—hawking them. I reckon if a reverse mortgage is good enough for the Fonz, then maybe I should look into it. If it’s what it sounds like, I presume that in a reverse mortgage, the bank pays me a monthly mortgage payment, and then all the upper management people at Citibank Mortgage come and live in my house. Does this mean we have to move out, or can we just let all these guys sleep on the sofa bed until they get tired of the whole reverse mortgage deal?

And why a Brazilian butt lift? I’d like to see a good Norwegian butt lift now and then.

Man. I was going to stay home again on Thursday, but this is all too depressing. But ya know, I have been coughing and suffering some dizziness today. I might just call that law firm. I thought I caught a whiff of asbestos in the old cubie lately. Worth a shot, no?

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat dachshund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.

Lenticular Haiku, by Sir Archie Ferndoodle

by Roger White

Fellow time/space voyagers and other occasional devotees of “This Old Blouse,” I am more tickled than a duffel bag full of marsupials to announce the return of my dear friend, front porch sartorial mentor, and fellow breakfast-nook philologist, Sir Archie Ferndoodle (applause, applause, applause).

Yes, the former poet laureate of the Greater Southwestern Scribes Society, which meets every third Thursday in the back of Sue’s Salon in Cement, Texas, has been gently coaxed out of quasi-retirement to once again bless us with phrasings, words, syllables, parts of syllables, and renderings of nocturnal animal sounds from the Ulan Bator region as only Sir Archie can. (And remember, if you mention this column at Sue’s Salon, you get 10 percent off a five-ounce jar of Sue’s Coconut Heel Scrub with the purchase of at least $20, not including her patented Tomato-Lye Jamboree Hair Tonic.)     

As I’m sure you remember, the esteemed Fernie holds an associate’s degree in postmodern comparative limerick studies from the University of Southern Panama’s Correspondence College and has been featured five times in the American Anthology of Poetry. Just a few of his classics include “Oh, Staff Sergeant, My Staff Sergeant!,” “Why Is the Man Always from Nantucket?,” “The Squirrels Stopped Talking to Me Today,” and his latest, “A Stitch, a Horse, and a Can of Pearl,” which was the inside-cover poem in the most recent edition of the Cement Area Greensheet.

The more astute of you may have seen Fernie’s hand in the Christmas edition of “This Old Mouse.” Raise your hand if you had the notion that Sir Archie was the ghostpen behind“The Nitrous Before Christmas.” Well, you’re dead wrong; I wrote that while flying low in my dentist’s office, but I did have ol’ Fernie in mind. In fact, he may have actually inhabited my body during that whole experience, but we digress again.

So anyway, without further magoo, I give you Sir Archie Ferndoodle, who has just returned from a five-month sojourn at the Tao Sendaha Haiku Sweat Lodge, just north of Pittsburgh.

 

Lenticular Haiku

by Archie Ferndoodle

 

Hand old, withered

Extended to young happy boy who

Smiles and

Coughs up a small border town near

Flagstaff.

 

Deposit slip with no meaning flutters

In brown surge of empty day. I find Julia at

Home making love to the Buick

Again.

Better judgment whispered

Toyota, Toyota.

Toyota. Smash hindsight with

Bitter hammer of stoli rocks. Ah.

 

Three grateful invertebrates argue

On who passed

Wind while each ascends

The assistant professor’s

Mortgage.

 

 

 

Trees and earth know much more

Than they sing

To man accused of listening of listening

Of listening to Alex

Trebek and his minions. Only refuse

And then hear again, the daily

Double. Oh! Bodies of

Water for Four

Hundred.

 

Heat. No heat. Heat. No heat.

Damn toaster. Fling the

Shiny monster down the hillock to

CRASH waves of filament element

Parchment and wire. No heat toast is mere

bread and

Sorrow.

Dear Julia. I’m trading it

In.

 

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat dachshund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.

The Jury’s Still Out on This Column. Way, Way Out.

by Roger White

You’ll pardon me if I flex my whack-a-lawyer muscles again, but it’s not my fault this time. It’s true that I swore to my friends of the barrister bent that I would lay off for a while since my last acerbic attorney attack, in which I believe I opined something to the effect of the following:

“Q: So you’re stuck on a desert island with Hitler, a 100-pound rabid wolf, and a lawyer, and you have a gun with only two bullets in it. What do you do?

A: Shoot the lawyer twice.”

And, indeed, I had no intention of even intimating in this column the notion that fifteen minutes in a steamroom full of lawyers is guaranteed to produce results as mucilaginous as a great pot of stewed okra. Ick.

No, I was going to pen a nice, droll little piece about the agonies of Christmas shopping, mainly pointing out all the unfathomably extraneous must-purchase gift doodads at places like Brookstone—such as those internet-linked patty thermometers that you can insert into your burgers as you grill them to determine not only the very millisecond that the epicenter of your ground beef mound hits optimum ingesting temperature but also to pinpoint and track the temperature of each patty morsel as it works its way through your backyard barbecue guests’ digestive systems, just for fun.  This is what I was going to write about. How thoughtless gifts have come a long, mysterious way since the era of maritime-themed tie tacks and microphone-shaped soap on a rope.

Alas, that column was not to be, for again I have been sidetracked, this time by that little letter we all receive from the county clerk now and again that makes us all earnestly yearn for a hefty dose of the chicken pox: the dreaded jury summons.

Yes. So the very day I had set aside to congeal all of my yuletide shopping horror stories into a bouncy little missive for your wonder and amusement was spent instead deep in the bowels of the Travis County Courthouse listening to defense and plaintiff legal beagles grill me and approximately 50 other total strangers on whether or not we could be fair and impartial in this really twisted case of . . . ooh, sorry, I can’t divulge that information. Judge’s orders, ya know. All I can say about the case is ew, yuck, OMG, and I didn’t know such a thing was anatomically possible with a regulation-size bowling pin.

As prospective jurors, we all had to sit through five grueling hours of voir dire, which is Latin for “your embarrassing past is now on display to determine if your biased, bigoted, and emotionally disturbed personality precludes you from jury service.” The lengths some folks go to avoid their civic duty, I must say, never ceases to amaze. One lady, I kid you not, interrupted the judge no fewer than nine times with such questions as “Is the prosecutor the same thing as the attorney?” By the time this old gal was hustled away, the rest of us weren’t sure if it was an act or not, but she was unceremoniously handed a “get out of jury service free” card and awarded six free DVDs of Judge Judy Season One. One large man in front of me claimed post-traumatic stress disorder from grievous wounds received during his military service as a means of skipping out, but when pressed by one of the attorneys on the specifics of his war injuries he ’fessed up that he was beaned in the back of the head by a car part in his motorpool job. Yeah, right. Keep your seat, Mr. Purple Heart. I was Prospective Juror #18, and by the time the lawyers took turns whittling away all their undesirables, it appeared that I was seriously headed for ye olde jury box. However, a late question by the defense team saved the day. They asked me what my wife did for a living, and I proudly proclaimed that dear Sue works for, you guessed it, a downtown law firm. “You mean she works with lawyers? Like us?” “Yup.” “Do you believe this fact might hinder your ability to render a fair and impartial verdict in this case?” “Uh, probably not. Giggle. Fry ’em.” “What did you say?” “Nothing.” Then both legal teams hustled to the bench to whisper things back and forth to the judge, and the next thing I knew I was on the street.

Hoohah! I mean, darn. Oh, well. I had fully intended to serve if called upon. Heck, Twelve Angry Men is one of my favorite movies. It may have been a real kick to be Henry Fonda, or Lee J. Cobb, or Jack Klugman even. “Of course, the kid did it! They’re all alike! Hang ’em all! AHAHHA!!!” Whew. Sorry. Got carried away there. 

However, I did not emerge unscathed from my brush with our cantankerous court system. When I finally got to my car, I found my windshield papered with a nice collection of parking tickets, courtesy of Austin’s finest. Now, that’s a good scam. Where’s my lawyer?

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat dachshund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.