Balls and Walnuts
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Here be yer pirate romance. Arrr.
A Pirates Dilemma, Part the First
Taint easy being grizzled as a cockswain’s dungbie, I tell ye, and me with a leg o’ teak from the knee down. The eye patch don’t help at all, neither. Of late, it seems I can only wet me beak in the back end of a cackle, or in the bunghole of a portside beauty with fewer eyes than me. Imagine me surprise, mates, when I stirred meself one morning and found not one but two beauties casting hopeful eyes on me sorely underused mizzenmast.
But I be gettin’ ahead of meself. Name is Wood, me friends. They calls me Morning Wood, on account o’ I rise before the cock crows and I be barking orders before the sun peeps out her shiny eye. We’d just taken a fine haul, having scuttled Her Majesty’s ship The Drake off the Ivory Coast, and I was of a mind to give me men some much needed shore leave. And, truth be told, I longed for a fine young maiden of indiscriminate tastes to shiver me timbers right well.
We put anchor at the Port of Sassandra. So many bronze beauties lined up at the docks, I figured I had to be in Davy’s grip to be this close to Paradise. Old Stella herself met me at The Blinkered Eye — that be right, Stella of the Ivory Coast’s most famous house o’ ill repute, The Jolliest Roger. Stella had so many rolls of flesh, twas said she could satisfy the whole Spanish Armada with nary a risk to her honor.
“Ahoy, Wood!” she cried. It tickles her fancy to talk like a pirate, it did. “Is that a hornpipe in your pocket, or do you be glad to see me?” Sadly, she ain’t too good at it.
“Darlin’, how would you like a ride on the Cap’n’s Fo’c’s’le?”
“That be a fine proposal, Wood, but I’ll do you one better. I have me some new blood, I do, and I’d be honored if you’d inspect the merchandise.”
“Inspect the merchandise? What do you take me for, woman, a common water-clerk? I be here to find meself a good time –“
Old Stella sighed. “I meant, how would you like to get laid? Really laid? Not just a roll in the hay with my pet sheep.”
I was as stunned as if I’d been clogged on the head by sodden oar.
“You mean it, woman? A real dame, one of the human persuasion?”
“Two X chromosomes and all, Cap’n.”
That one went over me head, but I liked the sound of it all the same.
Your morning blast from the past
This is my favorite photo of me and Jake. We took it at my parents’ fiftieth anniversary celebration in Las Vegas — about six years ago, I think.
Cute kid, eh?
D.
Passing notes
Before I get rolling, Karen has written about the Gretna, Louisiana atrocity-in-progress over at her blog. Now, on with our regularly scheduled blathering.
We had a saying in residency: “You’re either in this hospital working, or you’re in here as a patient. Either way, you’re here.” Point being, no time off for illness.
In five years of training, I only missed one day, and that only because I had food poisoning and couldn’t bring a barf bag with me on rounds. Well, I suppose I could have, but the other residents frowned upon that degree of obsessive dedication. In any case, at L.A. County Hospital we functioned in a perennial state of “swamped”. If you stayed home, someone else had to do your work, someone who already had too much work of his own.
Now that I’m out of that zoo, I have no excuse for not taking better care of myself. Office patients can be rescheduled, ya know? But, no. I had to go into work, because . . . ah, who knows.
I still eat fast, too, which made sense during residency (you never knew when the ER might call) but makes absolutely no adaptive sense nowadays.
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts & best wishes. I’m a little better today, but not much.
I tend to get political on the weekend, which means I get depressed, too. For you non-Americans in my crowd: we’re indoctrinated from kindergarten with a slew of nationalistic ideas. America is the greatest nation, and we’re great because of the freedoms we enjoy, the freedoms our country symbolizes, the freedoms our military defends. You have to find out about the atrocities on your own: the genocide of Native Americans; My Lai; Andersonville (a Confederate POW camp); the LONG history of black oppression, from Day 1 to the present; the firebombing of Dresden. Robber barons of every generation raping the underclass. Iraq. New Orleans.
There’s so much evil out there now, I don’t know where to start. If I were Christian, I could only conclude that Dubya is the Antichrist. Tell me I’m wrong.*
But, hey. This is a humor blog (sometimes). So, for your pleasure, consider the following:
I have it on good authority that this image is a fake, a clever bit of photoshopping. However, there’s a good deal of confusion as to what Dubya really wrote in that note. Thanks to close questioning of eyewitnesses, I have narrowed down the list of possibilities to the following.
1. I’m bored. Can I go home now? Wah!
2. Condi: there’s the Colombian ambassador. Think you can score me some blow?
3. I never been in a room with so many nigras. Nothing personal, Condi.
4. How many of these here ambassadors are Republicans, anyway?
5. The Iranian ambassador keeps staring at me. He is so dead.
So . . . have you folks heard of any other possibilities?
We’re watching one of my all time favorite movies right now: Men in Black. Awesome script, great special effects, and every actor was on his/her game. Nothing sucks in this movie, not a single damned thing.
Watching Vincent D’Onofrio’s alien bug reminds me of something Karen showed me on Arachnopets yesterday: a series of photos and messages from a guy who lets centipedes crawl on his hands. Now, I know a lot of you are terrified of spiders, but I’m here to tell you that spiders ain’t got nothing on centipedes. Centipedes are far more aggressive than most spiders, and their venom is WAY more painful.
If you don’t like creepy-crawlies, do not, repeat DO NOT view this link. I’m telling you, we’re talking Major League Formication, got it? But those of you with creepy-crawly loving kids, you’ll score points for coolness if you let them look at these photos.
Have a great weekend, y’all, and thanks again for your kind thoughts.
D.
*Yeah, when I get published, I am definitely going to have to get me an apolitical blog.
Addendum: I’m not the only one who thinks Bush is Eeeevil. This guy has written the book on the subject. For example: by several separate numerological systems, Bush’s name adds up to 666. So there!
No Blogging Today
Karen’s version: Doug has a note from his doctor excusing him from blogging today. He injured his index finger picking his nose and cannot type. (That’s an ENT doctor joke, they’re snot doctors.)
Jake’s version: He injured his pointing finger while sticking it up his butt.
Doug’s version: I pulled a muscle in my back while coughing.
How the hell do you pull a muscle coughing? Well, he did it this morning. Jake claims he screamed like a girl. I unfortunately had to help him put his underwear on. Ewwww!
Okay, that last bit was Jake again.
Doug will never let us post again after this. WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Karen and Jake
Your morning linkage
Check out Rae Alexander’s blog for a particularly creepy bird story. Yeesh. And I thought I had exaggerated their cruelty in my NiP. She also has some fine frog pix up, for you frog lovers.
More later.
D.
Dorm life
One of the things that sucks about my profession: I catch every cold that comes into the office. If I were a podiatrist, I’d do just fine, since no one ever became ill from close exposure to little kids’ feet*. But, no. I have to look up their goopy little noses, which brings me within firing range of their snot rockets.
Yesterday evening, I developed that vague ache in my soft palate which heralds a cold. Now my neck is stiff, my nose is twitchy, and my brain is all marshmallowy. This makes blogging difficult.
You may lower your expectations . . . now.
What should I write about? I came up with a not-t00-bad idea: “All I really need to know I learned watching Rocky Horror Picture Show.” With that idea came a single joke: “Eat your Meat Loaf.” Not bad, but not great, since it presupposes a knowledge of the movie. Even if I pony up an image of Meat Loaf, some folks are gonna say, “Huh?” Cuz if you haven’t seen the movie, it just ain’t funny.
So: that line of blog reasoning came to a dead end. I decided to free associate.
I saw RHPS in 1980, my second year in college and my first year in the dorms. Dorm life makes me think of:
- Dale getting drunk and pissing in the hallway
- Dale getting drunk and pissing off the balcony
- Dale getting drunk and pissing everyone off
I’m sure you’re wondering, “Who’s Dale?” But, really, don’t you know everything you need to know about him?
Maybe I should do a piece entitled, “All I really need to know I learned in the dorms.” I’m still making the assumption that you guys know that bit, “All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten,” which includes such pearls as:
- Play fair.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t hit people.
- Share everything.
Okay, let’s see where this leads. What did I learn in the dorms?
- Play fair. If you fill your roommates’ room with crumpled newspaper, Eric, don’t whine when you find out your prank lost them some important shit and you’re responsible for the damages.
- Clean up your own mess. Oh, how I would love to say we ganged up on Dale and used his head as a mop to take care of that pissing-in-the-hallway stunt. Alas, we had to content ourselves with the fact that he flunked out after the first quarter.
- Don’t hit people. Hit on them. And, oh, by the way, you know that bit about, “If you listen to a woman’s bullshit until 2AM she’ll have sex with you”? Ain’t true. Jennifer, I think listening to you tell me at cracked-tooth-painful length how Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changed your father’s life was at least worth some tongue.
- Share everything, but please be aware that if your roommate is busy humping the gal from next door** — five feet away from you — he may take exception to this rule. Oh, and by the way, Joe. If she whimpers after you’ve finished, it is not a good sign. Let a Real Man satisfy her next time***.
Not bad, but that’s all I got. My brain has maxed out, folks. Ever see Scanners?
Off topic: Have you folks been watching The Daily Show this week? Jon Stewart rocks.
D.
*I may be wrong about that.
**Co-ed dorms, including the bathrooms. Some chicks are nasty in the morning, I tell ya.
***Yeah, that would be me.
The things we do for love
How far will we go for love?
I think some guys are willing to work a lot harder for it than others. In particular, if you look like this
(that was for you, bam) you’re likely to expend far less time and effort snagging this
than if you look like this
.Before you howl, “But Rick Moranis is cuuuute!” let me say: I’m one hell of a lot cuter than Rick Moranis, and I’ve had two, count ’em two women in my life (no, I’m not counting my mom), and it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
Matter of fact, I got pretty good at trying.
I’ve already written ad nauseum about my courtship with Karen. Nuff said already. Thinking about today’s theme, it occurred to me that I haven’t told you much about my first girlfriend, GFv1.0*.
GFv1.0 never put me through much grief, not in our courtship phase. No, she let her parents do it for her. They liked having me over for dinner for a game I liked to call, “Torment the Howlie.” Or was it, Torment the Gwailo? Can’t remember what slang we used for whitey in those days. Anyway, GF’s mom would feed me yummy stuff like fish stomach. Grinning madly, she’d say, “SO? How do you like?” Then GF’s dad would make me drink Chinese tea that smelled like tobacco and kept me up for days.
I realize now they were being nice, accepting me into the fold. GFv1.0 has since told me that they actually really liked me. But at the time, I saw it all as an awful test.
Black mushroom: that’s the one I failed.
GFv1.0 couldn’t understand why I didn’t like black mushroom. It upset her. It was worse than, say, hating chocolate. Oh, how we fought over black mushroom. Nowadays, of course, I crave the stuff.
Would you believe that for love of GFv1.0, I once watched a chick flick from the first row of the movie theater and then raved about it afterwards? Well, of course I did. I’ll bet lots of high school guys do that, especially those of us who hung out at the Rick Moranis end of the gene pool.
We saw The Turning Point, with Shirley MacLaine (*shiver*), Anne Bancroft, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. But I didn’t care that I was watching a chick flick and getting a whopping case of neck strain. Why? I’ll tell you why.
We’d had dinner at a nearby pizza parlor, and then we decided to fit in some necking time before the movie. This was mighty early in the relationship; open-mouth kissing resembled Mr. and Ms. Pac Man trying to eat each other’s faces. It was a messy affair, with much gnashing of teeth and bruising of lips, because, you know, they just don’t teach this stuff in school.
At one point, she reached over and patted the lump in my crotch and said, “What is that thing?”
That’s how I managed to get through The Turning Point with a grin plastered all over my face. Granted, there were Levis in the way, but she’d actually touched it.
Something just occurred to me. Given the fact that Mikhail Baryshnikov spends most of that movie in tights, I don’t think GFv1.0 would have asked me that question after the movie.
D.
*Who shall remain nameless. There’s a distant chance she may visit the blog one day. If so, my only chance of survival will be the fact that I haven’t spread her name to hell and back.
Mysterious Island
Mysterious Island, 1961
I grew up with Mysterious Island. In those pre-Betamax dark ages, you had to keep a keen eye on the TV Guide if you wanted to watch your favorite movie again and again. Then, inevitably, you’d have to run out of the room to go pee just as your favorite giant-animal-monster was about to terrorize the buxom heroine. Oh, DAMN! I missed the first thirty seconds of the giant bees!
Watching it nowadays, my finger is never too far from the fast forward button. Ray Harryhausen’s good stuff (note giant crab, bee, and chickenish thing in the poster above — and that’s not all!) is intercut with long, boring bits of dialog as our castaways struggle to survive on (badummm!) the Mysterious Island. I have no patience for this as an adult. As a kid, the talkie stuff functioned as foreplay, raising tension in anticipation of the orgiastic monster scenes.
When I set about the process of world-building for my novel, I think Mysterious Island must have been lurking through my unconscious mind, diddling my muse. My aliens are little more than giant Harryhausen-style critters. Big birds, dogs, pigs, spiders, and so forth. Sure, they have their little quirks that make them alien, but I wanted my creatures to be immediately imaginable by the reader. I dislike extraterrestrials which demand much from me in the ‘inner eye’ department. Moties? Feh. Niven’s puppeteer? Uh. I’ll take Niven’s Kzin (giant cats), thank you very much.
I suppose many readers are just the opposite. They crave the strange. Show me something I’ve never seen before. Yeah, I know there are SF fans out there who think that way. I cracked the problem in a different (and, I hope, equally satisfactory) way, by giving my readers situations they might never have imagined possible. Like, say, a giant fly going down on a giant spider. When was the last time Niven gave you that, huh?
D.