A Mighty Wind Cometh (from an Empty Caveth)

by Roger White

Never let it be said that the Spouseman ignores his readers. I recently checked my inbox and found myself inundated with an e-mail, which lamented the fact that I haven’t tested you guys with a Quizzical Quotes contest in ages. I figured we’d seen the end of QQ, seeing as how the last time we did this, three of you wrote in threatening physical violence (I won’t name full names, Ronnie, Margene, and Achmed) and I ended up in protracted litigation with the estate of Aesop’s Fables claiming copyright infringement.

But.

Ye have spoken, and thee has listened. Besides, the nifty column I had drafted about the quirky personalities in my neighborhood didn’t make it past my copy editor (that being my lovely wife)—so you’re safe for now, Ronnie, Margene, and Achmed.

The object of QQ is simple: give me the more popular version of the quotes, sayings, poems, tidbits, cereal boxtops, song titles, book titles, phrases, expressions, adages, aphorisms, platitudes and proverbs you see below. For example, the more well-known version of “I’ll take freedom or croaking” is … anyone? Bueller? Come on, it’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” Dig? Dug.

First 10 of you who e-mail me at rogdude@mail.com with anything close to the correct answers win a nifty “Jesus Is Coming, Hide the Bong” bumper sticker. First 10 of you who e-mail me your PayPal account information and anything close to the correct answers win two bumper stickers and a VIP seat at my book-signing party (to be announced as soon as I hear back from my guy Larry at Self-Publish America).

So here goes. I was going to go with 50 of them, but I got tired. Sue me.

1. “You are not just puckering your lips and melodiously blowing a tune popular in the Old South.”
2. “Rap on oak.”
3. “Treading on chicken-embryo casings.”
4. “Don’t inspect a free large, solid-hoofed herbivorous quadruped in its oral cavity.”
5. “Each canine possesses its 24-hour period.”
6. “Existence in the Driving Corridor Designated for Speedier Vehicles.”
7. “What’s the latest information, feline?”
8. “Don’t mooch things off other people and don’t loan out your stuff, either.”
9. “The clock doesn’t hang around for anybody.”
10. “In what manners do I really, really like you? Where’s the calculator?”
11. “The puny, soft-spoken guys will get the third planet from the sun.”
12. “A threaded knot at the appropriate interval precludes the necessity for three squared.”
13. “Amalgamated, our posture is upright; split apart, we hit the floor.”
14. “The precipitation in the northern Iberian peninsula comes down principally on the flatlands.”
15. “A snapshot equals a lot of talking.”
16. “Devotion has no eyesight.”
17. “Consume, imbibe, and laugh it up, because two days after yesterday we could kick the bucket.”
18. “An egg-laying winged vertebrate within the extremity has the same value as five minus three in the shrubbery.”
19. “As a pair of ocean-going vessels that came within close proximity of the other after the sun went down.”
20. “Only a couple of items are sure things: pushing up daisies and governmental levies on personal income.”
21. “Confection is nice; however, alcohol has a more rapid effect.”
22. “Being really smug and happy with yourself precedes a sudden drop.”
23. “The neatest items of existence don’t necessitate a trip to the bank.”
24. “My mind processes information, so I gotta be here.”
25. “Grasp this career occupation and push it.”
26. “This is a canine-consume-canine planetary sphere.”
27. “Twelve divided by four bed linens facing the breeze.”
28. “As comfortable as an insect within a floor covering.”
29. “Getting even is sugary.”
30. “Glimmer, Glimmer, Diminutive Gaseous Orb.”
31. “The guy who is the final guy to snicker has the highest-quality snicker.”
32. “Need is the mom of contraption.”
33. “The only item we should be scared of is being scared.”
34. “OK, let’s have the guy who’s done nothing wrong hurl the initial rock.”
35. “To Assassinate the State Bird of Texas.”
36. “Clear liquid’s all around, but we can’t imbibe any of it.”
37. “Every one of the monarch’s large, solid-hoofed herbivorous quadrupeds and every one of the monarch’s male homosapiens failed in their efforts to reconstruct the egg man.”
38. “Bluntly, Red, I do not care.”
39. “I detect spoilage in the Copenhagen area.”
40. “See ya, mean globe.”
41. “Inactive appendages equal Satan’s studio.”

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.

‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

by Roger White

For this installment to make any sense to you, my fellow life travelers, it will behoove you to be of a certain age range—namely, somewhat old to pretty darn old. It will also be of great benefit to your reading comprehension and pleasure if you are listeners of a particular genre of music—i.e., rock and roll that also ranges from somewhat old to pretty darn old.

Let’s put the bandwidth at somewhere grayer than The Cars but not so geriatric as Jerry Lee Lewis. Give or take. So if you don’t currently fit these parameters, I will wait to write the rest of this column until you comply. You have 20 minutes.

Oh, forget it. I got stuff to do. Please continue.

You see, it occurred to me the other day, as I tried with scant success to decipher the words to one of the endless string of hippity-hop rapster tunes my daughters devote their entire afternoons to (see previous column entitled…well, heck, see all previous columns), what wondrous adaptive mechanisms our brains are. If we can’t make out the lyrics to a song we listen to over and over (sometimes under duress), our minds create lyrics for us—and even a backstory to go with those faux lyrics—so we can make sense of what we’re hearing and thus not go entirely insane.

Specifically, I was driving home from a genuinely miserable day at the cube. The radio was still in daughter mode, so when I turned it on, Katy Perry was asking plaintively, “Baby, are you tired of work?” You know it, sister, I replied. Understand that I recognized the singer only because I have been taken to task several times for not knowing who Katy Perry is or realizing her great significance to Western civilization. My daughters truly believe it is my life’s goal to embarrass the bejeezus out of both of them.

So anyway, I got home and relayed with a smidgen of pride to my girls how I related to Ms. Perry’s song. I got the exaggerated eye roll and the pitiful head shake, in unison. “Dad, you are such a goober. She’s saying, ‘Baby, you’re a firework.’”

Oh. Well. It was then I hopped into my lemon-yellow time machine and found myself back in my senior year in high school, working at that tiny self-serve gas station, stacking cans of Havoline in the back. It was 1976, and the cheap box of a radio in the next room was playing the new song by The Eagles, hot off the presses. What follows I must say in my defense transpired mainly because I couldn’t hear that darn radio very well. Did I mention the radio was cheap, and small? Anyway:

Catchy tune, I thought as I strained to listen, and what a unique way to give vent to how things can get so messed up at times:

“Flies in the Vaseline,

Surely make you lose your mind,

Flies in the Vaseline, uh huh…”

I could identify with that. I asked my friend the next day if he’d heard the song. “Neat,” I said, “because it’s true, ya know. Sometimes it feels like there’s just a bunch of flies in your Vaseline. Everything going all wrong.”

My buddy’s face morphed from utter confusion to complete hysterics when it dawned on him that I was talking about “Life in the Fast Lane.”

Just so you’ll know I’m not the only goober in the family (and so I can shine the warm lights of shame on my wife, as well), when I divulged my dark secret some years ago to my lovely spouse, Sue, she laid on me a beauty of a “lyric lapse” of her own. Now, here’s where you may look at me like a medicated cow if you haven’t heard the song.

My dear Sue actually thought that in the song “Peace of Mind” by Boston, where the chorus goes thusly:

            “I understand about indecision,

            But I don’t care if I get behind…”

…that it went like this:

            “I understand about indecision,

            But I’m not scared of the FBI…”

I thought for a while there that she was just saying this to ease my discomfort, but no, you can’t make this stuff up. We surely all have our own versions of tunes, the most classic being, of course, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy…” I bet Jimi never knew how many people through the years would be pondering his lifestyle choices because of that one line. And, yes, CCR will always and forever be accused of some sort of scatological preoccupation for directing us to the “bathroom on the right.”

There are dozens, probably hundreds of others. There are even books and web sites devoted to this phenomenon. But you can’t really worry about it. It happens to everyone, I guess. You have to just let the water run off your back, like Van Morrison says:

            “Hey, wet amigo!

            Dazed when the rains came…”

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