Blunt Wit

Another silly blog where I muse ponderifically on the art and science of wording thoughts.

So what is blogging to you?

To me blogging is all about all about lending cogency to a thought, breathing life into a whim.

Some days the swirling ideas, the tornado of life, whips up the mundane and transforms it into the sublime. At other times, it morphs the exquisitely divine into the muck of everyday existence.

We gather here in this space to share our observations. We laugh, we cry, we titillate, we entertain one another mightily. We commune, we share, we sympathize, we blog each other our humanity. We take the high road, the low sexy road and all the paths that criss-cross like silk-laced panties in-between.

In the final analysis, we are but scribes, bloggers bearing witness to the grace and glory of our own life stories. But always there is a thought, an idea, bursting to be expressed. An intention itching to leak out onto the blog and into our, sweet reader’s, consciousness.

So what is blogging to you?
Can you link an especially nice blog here today and share the love. I, for one, have been absent much lately and would love to meet some new blogging talent.

There probably exist other folks more qualified than me to write about traditions of the great American South. Local yokels. Jim dandy’s. You see me, I’ve been a carpet-bagger all my life.

Alas, I was born in Saratoga Springs, NY. Hell that’s almost northerner than Toronto, the capital of the biggest northern state, Canada. However, my entire family all hails from the South: Georgia mostly, but also Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee. In fact, as I was growing up my extended family chided me for being a Yankee due to my birthplace.

I believe this was the primary reason I developed a deep seated sense of displacement, a sense of never really belonging, the genesis, if you will, of my wanderlust. I left the South like a shot from a cannon. I traveled to and settled down in far flung reaches of the planet. I learned Chinese and Japanese and fully embraced these cultures: reading their newspapers, watching their TV, eating their food and surviving numerous encounters with their law enforcement which we won’t go into here.

But the traditions of my upbringing still exerted a mighty pull over me and I thought to expound on them here for those of you not lucky enough to have been born and raised in the South. There are literally thousands of idiotsyncrasies that set us apart but for the purposes of briefing down I will limit myself to the following: caning, black eyed peas, sweet iced tea and wet T-shirt contests.

So I remember oh so well pulling out the mason jars and boiling them with those funky holy vacuum seal lids. We then fixed up huge boiling pots of veggies and overly sugared fruit. Wait, that’s canning. Caning, on the other hand, occurred on the numerous occasions we were bad. Parents would pull out that rattan cane and beat us to within an inch of our lives. Dammit, memories as fine as these are nearly forgotten or possibly blocked out by deep psychological trauma. Makes one feel Singaporean, or possibly Catholic, although every southerner has a bit of Baptist blood running in their veins.

Next, every New Year’s we would all gather round the boombox and sing the Pea’s “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps” together. Kidding. Not those peas silly, the other black eyed peas, the ones you eat.

This tradition dates back to the U.S. Civil War when Union troops, especially those in areas targeted by “Scorched Earth” General Sherman would typically strip the countryside of all food, crops, and livestock and destroy whatever they could not carry away. At that time, Northerners considered black eyed peas suitable only as animal fodder, and as a result they didn’t steal or destroy this infernal food. Many Southerners – my ancestors in fact – survived as a result of this mistake. And thus, to celebrate this fact, we’re forced to eat peas that have the consistency and general taste of dirt at least once each and every year.

But at least we can wash it down with sweet iced tea. We never had air conditioning growing up – or at least that’s the myth my parents had us believing to conserve electricity – so the only way to keep cool in the hot, humid summers was to drink iced tea. And since sweet desserts are a decidedly southern trait, any self respecting tea comes laced with cup upon cup of heaping sugar. I think you can actually hear the sound of teeth rotting in their gums on those warm southern breezes of summer.

And of course there is that hoary tradition of the wet T-shirt contests. Every spring the entire school population of the South spills into Dayton Beach, Florida for their Spring break. And all up and down those shapely beaches, young women enter wet T-shirts contests by the million pairs. Lithe, nubile bodies made wet by testosterone induced spillage. The vibe makes one nostalgic for coliseums and lions. I’d have to say that of all the southern traditions THIS is the one that captures my attention and interest the most, even to this day.

Have you ever participated in a wet t-shirt contest?

Can you share any funky traditions (sordid or not) from your part of the world?

So in the foggy past my son and I were playing golf at the local 9-hole short course and happened to get paired with a Frenchman and his 14 year old son. On the seventh hole young Benjie fired his approach shot into the butt of one of the many geese who were rutting and strutting on the course, it being the mating season and all.

Gerrard, his loquacious father, said in a toasty French accent, “Nice birdie!”

I winced (while chuckling inside). Jokes that bad should come with a money back guarantee. I missed my subsequent real birdie putt. Damn lame joke!

But this is all digression.

My story begins a few minutes later on the tee box of the 9th hole as I sized up my many options. A sneaky little hole.

Meandering stream to the left where vagabonds straight out of a Mad Max movie hung out on the banks and prayed for you pull your tee shot so they could collect your ball out of the creek and sell it to the Pro shop (for you to buy it back the following week).

Fairway for Hole One on your right where you risk bodily harm and a lawsuit if you slam your tee shot into any one of the approaching unsuspecting golfers. No, the only play on this hole was right up the middle. The arguably weakest point of my game!

Thus lost in my Tiger Woods moment, without warning, I felt something hit me on my back, just under my right shoulder, hard. I spun around half expecting to see that I had been hit by a ball but to just catch out of the corner of my eye three geese flying overhead.

My back/shoulder suddenly felt … warm. So I pulled my shirt around and lo and behold I had been pelted with goose shit! Dive bombed! Seriously, I didn’t know geese could do that. Be that resourceful. Be that vengeful (as I think his or her load was meant for Benjie’s head and I, an innocent bystander, was caught in the goose shit crossfire). Most of it, greenish in color, still clung to my yellow shirt.

My son laughed up a storm as he helped me scrape it off. Needless to say that night at the dinner table my son reported the entire incident to the rest of the family who laughed uproariously.

I was still pissed I missed that birdie putt.

Have you ever been shit upon – either literally (like me in this case) or figuratively?

So I’ve driven up to San Fran from waaaay down on the Peninsula like a million times. Some days you zip up there in the veritable blink of an eye. Other times it seems to take days. Predicting the traffic patterns is akin to anticipating a woman’s (or read here significant other’s) behavior: erratic (note: I did not say erotic) on a good day.

So the other day I headed up to one of those high power VC soirees on the Pier by invitation of a friend, the Philmeister. Wouldn’t you know that on this day like some latter day Moses parting the red sea of traffic, I somewhat miraculously sailed through and arrived a full twenty minutes early.

So I parked my car on a side street near some restaurants and apartments and….shhhhhh…tried to ‘borrow’ a loose wifi signal to hook in to the net. Alas, nothing. So I wandered into a super market just as a tall, well-dressed African American male (model type) was completing his purchase. I thought his shoes might crawl off his feet, the alligator skin looked that fresh.

I asked the gruff looking Pakistani cashier if there was a nearby café with wifi –in my best Pashtun. Ok, in truth, maybe I just imagined I was speaking Pashtun. The attractive customer (ok, yes I admit he was handsome) chimed in to suggest a café a few blocks down. I thanked him and hit the road.

I found the café, went in, ordered an iced tea, fired up my connection and hunkered down to get some work done. I had just gotten comfy when out of the corner of my eye I spotted, Mr. GQ walking in. He ordered his half-calf/half-decaf skinny mochachino and then sashayed over to make sure I was “OK” and began to chat me up.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t gay since he was so damn hospitable. And truth be known, I was trying to get up the nerve to ask where he got his shoes.

So after some polite conversation, I begged out to go to my event which was just across the street at a nautical-themed home décor wharf. A place where you normally buy scented biodegradable soaps, Alpaca handtowels, kayaks and I’m pretty sure, whale blubber. The VC, who has an office one wharf over had rented it for the evening.

You see these days the Web 2.0 conference was lighting up the San Francisco conference center. Eight thousand people applied and a lucky 1000 were actually invited. This was one of those fabled “after parties” for all the technogliterati. I figure Norad must have picked it up on their radar due to the concentration of high power electronic devices.

I got a florescent blue nautically- themed drink with rum in it (the drink was a manly skipper’s drink since it came sans umbrella) and started to mingle. There were hundreds of professor types triangulating on moneyed Mr. Howell VC types. I met the guy who writes a top 50 blog (worldwide and yes it’s techy), a hulking 6′7″ guy who used to write for Forbes and now drives mini’s cause they’re easy to park in SF (I know I had a hard time imagining it myself), and a famous VC in a wolf’s costume. Or again maybe that was my imagination getting the best of me.

Just then two booth babes, kind of hot Ginger types distinguished by their stunning looks and vacuous demeanor, sauntered up and diverted his attention away from moi.

Anyway, I digress. Sorry, it’s the rum. I swear. Gin might make you sin but rum makes you dum.

Eventually I struck up a conversation with the event organizer. She had a quaint Mary-Ann quality about her until I asked her if I might not be able to get some whale blubber to go. She screamed, “You’re such a Gilligan!” and chased me out.

And I spent the next two hours in a traffic jam driving home.

What goes around comes around, funny how life has a way of balancing everything out.

Several years ago when we were visiting my brother in California his young panicky cat slipped under his car and refused to come out. After a watching the entire family try to coax the timid kitten out, I sauntered up and with no uncertain amount of bravado blustered, “Let me get him out, I speak Cat.” So I squatted down and let loose an authoritative “Meow.” “Darn if I don’t sound like a cat,” I thought to myself. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Boots came tumbling right out. My young kids looked at me in awe. Being totally within character, I took full credit for this feline rescue.

So from that point on M and S actually believed that I spoke Cat. I’m not kidding. At the zoo they exhorted me to translate for the Tigers. To laugh at the Lions. I told them, “Lions are proud creatures that wouldn’t admit to speaking lowly House Cat,” while suppressing a big chuckle. They implored me to yell at the Jaguars to come over and bare their fangs. This myth not only perpetuated for years, but in fact, grew in stature. One day not long after the original “Boots incident” while at the park M, knowing that I already spoke Cat, on a lark asked me if I also barked Dog. “Well, heck, once you purr a little Cat, what’s a little Dog,” I thought to myself. So I said “Yes,” barked at a dog to come over and wouldn’t you know it – he did! This marvelous myth persisted for years. I teased them mercilessly and laughed and laughed (on the inside). I became so full of myself.

But then life has a way of slipping away as air slowly hisses out of a holey bike tire. I don’t know exactly when or how, but sort of like the invisible deflating of the Santa Claus or Tooth fairy myths, one day I woke up to find that my kids didn’t believe I spoke Cat or Dog anymore. In fact, in a rude turnabout, they had taken to piteouslessly teasing me about it when I continued to “meow” and “bark” away at rogue pets. Which stung mightily because, truth be told, after so many years of them believing, I had come to the inexorable conclusion that I actually could speak to animals.

To this day, I still believe with all my heart that my perfect pitched purr will get through to those cats without the odd hearing impairment or personality disorder.

“Meow.” “Meow.” “Prrrrrrrr.”

Reacting quickly to the news that Bob Barr, once firebrand Georgian Republican, is running for President as the Libertarian candidate, the GOP has taken drastic measures and contracted Karl Rove to put together an exploratory committee for a Barak Obama run for President. The GOP brain trust has begun to worry that the Barr candidacy will split the vote for John McCain thus possibly costing him the upcoming Presidential election. So under the leadership of Rove, they are working to put Barak Obama on the ticket as the Freedom Party candidate. Note, Barak Obama bears no relation to presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

The freedom party is indirectly related to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and on paper is a legitimate political party with the right to run a candidate in the upcoming Presidential election. Barak Obama is the new name that actor Ezekiel Frankel, who played the erstwhile Obama on last week’s Saturday Night Live political sketch, has recently adopted legally. Apparently his fiery rhetorical message of hope and change had a powerful effect on political consultant Karl Rove, who incidentally was responsible for the whisper campaign started during the 2000 Presidential primary in South Carolina that Bridget, the young girl that John McCain and his wife Cindy had adopted from Mother Theresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh, was, in fact, an illegitimate African American ‘love-child’ that subsequently derailed the McCain candidacy.

It is widely believed that Rove intends to dupe a gullible United States populace into splitting the vote between the two Obama’s as it has been proven that the average American can’t spell. Unofficial word from the Obama campaign suggests that there may yet be another candidate, Jon McCain, gumming up the field of the upcoming Presidential election.

So they say a Libertarian is a Republican with a bong. Would you consider yourself a donkey, an elephant or a bong?
I’m so not looking forward the shrill negativity that precedes any US Presidential election. Can someone wake me on November 5th. Is there anything redeemable about presidential elections?