Thursday, July 27, 2006

Poopslinger

I have terrible aim. This is something that you might as well know about me. Terrible, horrible aim.

It's true when I'm throwing a wad of paper at a trash can, It's true when I'm throwing my skidmarked undies at the hamper, and as Sally will gladly tell you (while kneeling on the bathroom floor and employing a large variety of cleaning products), It's true when I'm aiming my wizzle-stick at the toilet. Lousy, lousy aim. Don't even get me started on my inability to play darts. If I'm holding a dart, the safest place in the world to stand is directly in front of me, because that's the one place that dart ain't ever going.

So fact "a" that you should be keeping in your head, for it is germane to the story I am about to tell you, is that I have lousy aim. Fact "b" for you to hold onto is that I live in a row house, which is an end unit on a corner, and that I have, sticking off the side of the rear of my house, a little tiny useless garage.

"Useless" is probably a bit of an overstatement. It has plenty of uses. It's just that none of those uses includes parking (or for that matter fitting) an actual automobile inside of it. Given that the definition of "garage" is "an outbuilding (or part of a building) for housing automobiles," I'd say that the little room on the back of my house with the cool roll-up door fails utterly to be a garage. Maybe it was built years ago, in a bygone age when cars were, oh... 5 feet wide. If you drove a Mini you could probably get it into my garage, but you certainly couldn't open the doors. You'd have to climb out the windows, "Duke-boy" style, if you ever wanted to actually come inside for an iced tea or something.

We have no idea what possessed one of the previous owners to build a tiny garage. We have no idea if it was at one time functional or if it is some sort of elaborate practical joke. We use it mostly as a junk room, and a place to keep the garbage until garbage day, at which time, I roll up the door and plop the trash cans out on the sidewalk.

Anyway, to recap, the things you should now know are:

a) Lousy aim
b) Tiny, stupid "garbage room" garage

Okay. On with the (by now completely un-thrilling and anticlimactic) story.

This morning around 11, I arrive home from running a few errands. You may imagine that by "errands" I mean eating scones off the naked back of an armless asian woman with some of Baltimore's intelectual elite or possibly arranging a series of diabolical prison breaks that will soon have this city on its knees, begging for mercy. I don't actually mean either of those things, but you may imagine that I do. I pull in behind a very shiny and obviously brand new blue Mustang. It's quite a pretty car, somewhat out of place in my neighborhood, and someone has gone to great lengths to really make it sparkle. It's one of these here:


(Common Wombat in no way is affiliated with, nor does he endorse, the Ford Motor Company. Unless they'd like to send him a free car. Then he'll endorse whatever they want him to, because Common Wombat is a big fat whore.)

I am distracted from my admiration for the pretty, pretty car, by the sight of something lying on the lid of one of my trash cans. I know what it is the second I see it. It's a little plastic sandwich bag filled with shit.

(Common Wombat is also in no way affiliated with, nor does he endorse, little plastic sandwich bags filled with shit.)

I keep my trash cans inside of my little tiny garage. They only sit outside for a few hours twice a week on garbage day, but in that short window of time between when the garbage men empty them, and when I take them back inside, they always manage to acquire a few bags of dog shit. It's irritating to have to house someone else's crap for a few days, but honestly I'm just glad they are actually picking up their turds instead of leaving them scattered around my kitchen door like a fly-encrusted mine-field. That's assuming that the pooch-poo comes in the standard approved package of an intact plastic shopping bag, tied off securely and placed inside my trash can. Double-bagged is even better. If I see you double-bagging, I'll come outside and kiss you.

This wasn't a trash bag, it wasn't tied off, and it wasn't actually in the can. This was a pile of fresh soft steamers in an open sandwich bag, lying on the lid of the can. That's just bad neighborship in my book, and it caused me to make the following face:



I'm a generally loving and kind guy. But there's only so much of dealing with someone else's smelly turd bombs that I can take before I snap a little. Besides, it's been a hard few weeks, you know?

So, full of righteous anger, I went over to the trash can (still making the face) and picked up the bag of shit by one corner. I summoned up all of my intense hatred for the dog walkers of America who don't practice neighborly shit-scooping practices, and with a mighty swipe of my bear-like paw, I flung the offending poo-pouch across the street.

Or at least, that's how it happened in my head. In reality the mighty swipe of my paw was more of a feeble flap of my flipper, and the little turd-sack wound up sailing sort of diagonally about 15 feet away...

...And right smack onto the trunk of the shiny new Mustang, where it promptly unloaded all of its little brown passengers to play all over the back of the car. Immediately my face of righteous rage morphed into my face of "holy shit I'm a gigantic asshole."



What does a good neighbor do after he has plastered the back of your expensive and spit-shined new car with fresh dog shit?

I wouldn't know. I hid in my kitchen.

Friday, July 21, 2006

I'm Back And I'm Black!

Some of you are thinking, "He's not black... what is he talking about?" This is the internet, people. I'm blogging from behind an iron veil of secrecy and anonymity... You don't know who I really am or what I look like. I could very well be a black man. Hell, I could be a black woman! I could be a female black midget!

Some others of you are thinking, "No... I've met you face to face, and you're a tubby white dude. You sir, are not black. Or a midget, for that matter." Um... crap. So much for my veil of secrecy.

At any rate, the question of my blackness aside, I am, in fact, back. I'm back and I'm white.

Thanks to all of you who commented or sent me emails expressing concern. It's good to know so many of you are caring, loving individuals, in addition to being depraved little fuckers who scour the internet for poop stories. I admit that some life issues had me on the ropes and reeling for a few days there, and at the time, I really wasn't seeing the funny come back in the near future. Hanging there on the ropes does that kind of shit to your perspective. On the ropes, all you see is the mat and the gloves of the guy slugging you.

But then, if you're me, you remember that you're a hell of a lot stronger than the guy hitting you, and you get the fuck off the ropes and start throwing punches again. So that's what I did. And lo and behold the funny came back. Along with the funny also came the need to drive stupid boxing metaphors into the ground, so it seems.

Anyway, things here at Wombat HQ are okay... Nobody died. Well, my grandmother actually did die, (peacefully and surrounded by family, which seems to me to be the best possible way to go...) but that wasn't what had me on the ropes. Sally did not die, (I know some of you were thinking it!) or even lose a limb. Look, here she is with me in Shenandoah National Park this weekend, hale and healthy.



I just realized that you can see none of her limbs in that picture. You'll just have to take my word for it - they're all there and functional. Ain't my wife a cutie though? That, by the way, is the face she makes when I pinch her butt. Or when I drop a KFC-scented trouser bomb. It's the same face for both things.

Hmm... I just noticed that we both have trees growing out of our heads in that picture. In the "cool head trees" battle, sally wins, because hers looks like a badass Ronald McDonald wig. Mine looks like I have an elephant knee jutting out of my skull. Next time I'm paying more attention to where I stand and getting the cool head-tree.

Shenandoah was terribly cool. It may be because my job frequenly requires me to spend a lot of time in the shopping malls of the world, but I had completely forgotten that there were great sections of our country that have yet to be paved over. This is a bad thing if you're looking to park your car or get a pickup basketball game going, but if you're looking to relax and explore, I highly recommend spending some time in the non-paved areas. Sal and I hiked down into the woods to see a 70-foot waterfall hidden back there, and once I was done frantically looking for the jumbotron monitors and trying to order peanuts from every deer in the area, I was really awestruck by the beauty of nature. I don't spend enough time outdoors. Something I shall rectify.

Anyway, as I said before, I'm back. And yes, officially, white. Just in case you were wondering. You can't keep a good wombat down. And I am a very good wombat.

Thanks again for all the support guys.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Nothing is funny anymore...

...and probably won't be for a long time. No more blogging. Maybe someday. Sorry.