Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The Quest for Smithereens of Truth

"It’s in the busted minds of troubled offspring, or among bones not quite picked clean, or poking out of the smithereens of collapse that I think the true truths are found."

Now you tell me. I’ve been seeking truth in all the wrong places.

Handymen have been repairing years of neglect on my house and in the process have made big piles of rotten wood, stripped wiring, broken flower pots, abandoned lawn ornaments decomposing cardboard boxes filled with sprinkler parts to systems no longer extant, and paint cans with 4 ounces of dried orange paint in the bottom but which have to be separated and dumped as hazardous waste.

Before they finish loading the piles into the truck to take to the dump, I should sift through these smithereens of collapse. 

I will not be deterred in my quest for truth. If I don’t find anything, I’ll sing the Lionel Richie song "Sunday Morning" into a fan. Perhaps I should get a tetanus shot first.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Choose Your Own Superhero or Saint

"I find it is a great strain for me to believe what I see, and I am becoming afraid occasionally to look at some things in case they would have to be believed."
 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Dubious Superpowers 
  • Bulletproof underpants
  • Unerring ability to correctly use “literally” and “figuratively”
  • Lasso of shame
  • Always finding what one is looking for
  • Motivational skills workshop leadership expertise
  • Ability to shoot dental floss from fingertips, or silly string, depending on circumstances
  • Invisibility socks
  • Nonfatal curiosity
  • Selective hearing loss
  • Human kindness
  • Infallibility in matters involving faith, morals, and tech support
  • Poop that smells like peppermint
  • Never applying the front brake first
  • A superhero suit made out of memory foam that guarantees comfortable naps in otherwise uncomfortable spots, and which incidentally doesn’t make the wearer look fat
  • Ability to apply inexorable logic to accept what cannot be changed without bursting into tears
  • Secret power to initiate onset of hot flashes in others regardless of their age or gender
  • Ability to open new CDs using only fingernails and patience (and not teeth)

 Elements of Mysterious Heroic Backstory
  • Being tragically orphaned at a young age and left with a tremendously positive cash flow generated by Papa’s extensive interests in South American strawberry jam plantations.
  • Event causing parents heartbreaking deaths never conclusively determined to be an unfortunate Act of God, a malicious act of Caltrans, or a particularly creative form of murder/suicide; all three theories coincidentally agreeing however that beyond any doubt, substance abuse was involved.
  • Credible rumors that unexplained three-year hiatus from crime-fighting and damsel rescuing were connected with an almost fatal addiction to cat dander; which by the way, was only licked by chamomile shampoo and positive affirmations
  • Founder and First Customer of the Witless Protection Program to avoid conspiracy theorists, despicable in-laws, and door-to-door preachers/storm window salespersons.
  • Empathy for the downtrodden inexorably combined with unlimited power to hold downtrodders responsible.  
  • Scientific discovery that the degree of a person’s verbal genius in mixing metaphors in hilarious ways is inversely proportional to their bodily hirsuteness; for which a single-use Nobel Price Category was invented to award the Nobel Prize in Mind-Bending Uselessness That Just Might Lift Homo Sapiens Up Next Rung of the Evolutionary Ladder, if Only We Could Answer the Question: “What?”
  • Inventing a wearable monitor that measures how many rocks have been taken in one’s rocking chair and how fast each rock is. The device is programmable to establish a goal of rocks/day and speed/rocks, and to provide motivational reminders throughout the day, and can be uploaded via Bluetooth to one’s social media of choice.
  • Being born without double-jointed thumbs but at the age of 11 learning through self-guided meditation how to make thumbs double-jointed.
  • Posthumous speculations about whether or not you really existed or were a postmodern take on the myth of Sisyphus’ ultimate happiness written by Pat Nixon using the pseudonym Idiot Nonsavant.

 Miracles I Might Perform If Nominated for Canonization 
  • I will create a polar vortex limited in time and space to people in the green room waiting to speak at a climate change denier convention. They will however be suddenly, mercifully painlessly, and permanently frozen into embarrassing positions.
  • The next time my kitty has an allergic reaction to the food she can’t digest and loses her hair in patches, I will shape one hairless patch like the face of the BVM with bleeding scabs for eyes.
  • I will assure that the doctors who cure a photogenic poverty-stricken young brother and sister of a fatal disease will be credited with miraculously saving the childrens’ lives, instead of giving credit to that old hypocrite Mother Theresa who caused untold suffering and premature deaths of poor women who she forced to have too many children to feed, and who generally died in childbirth before they were 30.
  • I will give everybody who drives a car the power to find a perfect parking place three times in his or her life.
  • I will create lasting peace on earth by genetically modifying human DNA to eliminate chromosome combinations that cause people to be mean. (Kidding. God created Man in his Image, so god only knows how to fix that mess.)
  • I will give everybody who regrets having a tattoo the power to wish the tattoo away, but only once in their life; so wise up people contemplating that heart-shaped dolphin tattoo.
  • Publicly eliminating an infestation of scary bugs and spiders from the vicinity some people who are deathly afraid of bugs and spiders.


  What I’d want to be Patron Saint of
  • Cats with food allergies causing their fur to fall out in patches
  • Finding movie parking spaces
  • Persons with cat dander addiction
  • Strawberry Jam Plantations
  • Impatient people whose impatience is mostly justified
  • People who begin three sentences in the middle of each sentence they attempt -  that they may resolve each sentence chronologically and intelligibly to the amazement of friends and relatives who had begun to despair at their increasing incoherence.
  • Skate boarders who defy convention and don’t cut their hair like skateboarders and/or who refuse to wear baseball hats backwards.
  • People who just want to make a perfect light flaky piecrust