Once again, more about my shitting habits than you ever wanted to know.

Sometimes the prose flows as if from a hose, or falls like snows on Himalayan floes. Other times I have the no-prose woes. The muse just goes, my frustration grows, my synapses close as I pick my nose and consider leaving the writing to the pros.

All of which is my way of saying "this is my third blog entry in a month??? I suck."

And so, in the interest of not sucking quite so much, I now present you with what passes for a blog entry when the muse departs: A couple of unrelated things from my brain.

Unrelated thing from my brain #1:

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator will always be a very special book in my life. For those of you who don't know, it is the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's a pretty good book if you are in that "smart middle-school kid with no friends and no prospects of dating in the next 7 years" demographic. In fact I'll go as far as to say it's a better book than the one that precedes it. But that's not why it's special to me. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator will forever be enshrined in the Wombat Hall of Fame because it is (so far) the only book I have ever read cover to cover in one sitting on the toilet.

Ever since I was a wee lad I understood that rule #3 of being a guy is "No shitting shall occur without the presence of reading materials." (For those of you who are curious, Rule #1 is "If you shake it more than twice, you're playing with it," and Rule #2 is "By all means, shake it more than twice. As often as possible.") I know that a few of you out there are speed-shitters. You crap like it's some sort of timed Olympic event. If you take an extra half a second on the wipe or the dismount, it's like you've let your whole country down. You probably spend hours sitting at your desks, obsessing over how sphincter control training could shave seconds off your TEBV (Total Elapsed Bathroom Visit).

I'm exactly the opposite. I approach the bathroom like it's a sunlit clearing in a peaceful forest. I look around, admire the view, find the most ideal spot and set up my tent. Barring a few exceptions (like a last minute grump on a crashing airplane), when I sit on the toilet, I plan on camping out a while. And yes, I always bring a book. I don't mean to imply that it takes me a long time to shit. I imagine that my actual "pushin' one out" time is about as long as anyone's. A couple of minutes (sometimes less) and the actual bathroom work is pretty much over. But the beauty of the bathroom (once you get over the smell) is that by and large you get left alone in there. I grew up with my mother and my sister in a pretty small house, and if one of them wasn't yapping at me about chewing the knees off her Barbies, the other was asking how my day was, or trying to get me to clean my room. (I'll leave it to you to guess which was which.) My room was no escape from them. The walls were thin, and a closed door was no hindrance to either of them. But I learned pretty quickly that if I went to the bathroom and commenced with the grumpitude, suddenly I was left to myself. Nobody wanted any part of that action. The bathroom became my sanctuary, my place unto myself, and (as I got the book bug from my Mom) my reading room.

The amount of time I spent in there as a kid was legendary. It actually was a running joke with my friends and family. One Saturday my buddy Dave called up to see if I wanted to hang out. My Mom answered the phone: (By the way, I swear to the Great Chocolate Monkey that this story is 100% true.)

Dave: Hey Mrs. Baker, is John there?
Mom: Hi Dave. Well, he's here, but he's in the bathroom, and we know what that means.
Dave: Ha ha ha! Okay, I'd better call back in a few hours then. Ha ha ha!
Mom: Ha ha ha! Yeah you'd better do that. Ha ha ha!

Three hours pass. The phone rings again.

Dave: Hey Mrs. Baker, is he out yet? Ha ha ha!
Mom: You know... Um... I don't know if... Um... I haven't seen him in a while. I think he's still in there. Good lord...
Dave: You gotta be kidding me.

What can I say? If the book was a good one, I could really camp out. My legs would actually go numb, and I'd just keep reading. I'd have ring-around the butt that would last for days. I like to think that this is all proof of my intense love of reading, but you all probably just see this as yet another reason I'm utterly unfit for integration into human society. You may be right.

I'm much better now. I don't spend hours in there anymore, but I do still take a book every time, and I will admit that 45 minutes on the grumper isn't unheard of around here. At least I'm well read.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, though, is still a feat which has not been duplicated. It's not a huge book though. 176 pages. Also, I was like, 12. I could do better. And if I do, you know you'll hear about it here.

Unrelated thing from my brain #2:

You know how some people (and by "some people" I mean fundamentalists and Mormons... And fundamentalist Mormons. Fundamormons.) like to say "The Lord moves in mysterious ways?" It just now occurred to me that maybe they mean he actually moves weird. Like all the angels and saints just float around Heaven in the normal way, but God sort of hop-shuffles sideways, like an epileptic crab.

No, come to think of it, God lurching about Heaven in a strange manner doesn't really cut it. They don't say he moves in odd ways, they say mysterious. However it is that God is humping all over Paradise, it has to be so weird as to actually qualify as mysterious. New entrants into the kingdom must see God go by, half rolling, half doing jumping jacks, With a fresh donut stuck on each finger and a live lion on his head, all the while making horrible noises through his nostrils like a broken threshing machine. They must see this, and turn to the nearest Seraphim and say "Was that God? Why the fuck does he do that???" And the Seraphim must reply, "No one knows. It is the great holy mystery."

Heaven must be a truly weird place.

Unrelated thing from my brain #3:

Do you think blind people go crazy if they try to read a sheet of bubble wrap? I'm just wondering.

Unrelated thing from my brain #4:

There are several reasons why the woman that I married is absolutely batshit crazy. Here's the latest:

Just now, after writing Thing #3 above, I wandered downstairs to see what my beloved was up to. I found her in the kitchen, cleaning things. And when I say "things" in this case, I mean pennies.

Yes, for some reason, my wonderful wife looked in her wallet and decided that her pennies were just too grungy for everyday use. So she got out the Barkeepers Friend (which, for those of you who don't stay obsessively up-to-date on cleaning supplies, is some crazy powerful shit) and scrubbed all of her pennies to a glowing sheen. I kid you not. Look:



Now you tell me, Blog-Buddies, am I wrong in thinking that cleaning your pennies is a free pass into the nearest padded cell? Do all of you occasionally dip into your pockets, pull out a handful of shoddy loose change, and think "These can be a lot cleaner?"

It's not like they de-value if you let them get dull. That pile in the photo above was worth exactly 17 cents when Sal started scrubbing, and they're worth exactly 17 cents now that she's finished. It boggles the mind.

Look at how happy she is!



What's crazier? That my wife obsessively cleans her coins, or that I probably love her more for doing it? I mean, she's a crazy lady, but she's my crazy lady, ya know?

Okay, that's all I got for tonight. Don't bother writing to ask if she'll clean your money. We ain't running a laundromat here.

Lazy Fucker / Spidey-Sodomy / Bear Cock

If I had to list four things about myself, three of them would be the fact that I am incredibly lazy. I wouldn't even list the fourth thing. That's how lazy I am.

I am so lazy, in fact, that I can't even be arsed to muster a good excuse as to why I haven't blogged in two whole weeks. I'm sure I could lay out some twisted tale for you about how a sudden and previously unknown rectal malady had me laid up in the New Irving J. Rosenthal Anal-horror Wing of Johns Hopkins Hospital. (I'm sure you'd believe it too, because let's face it, at this point you're probably willing to believe just about anything I say about my butt. If I said my butt was issuing valid Macy's gift cards, you'd all line up to get one.)

Anyway, for those of you keeping score, I wasn't laid up in the hospital, nor was I overseas on some humanitarian mission to sew prosthetic bungholes on the poor assless children of Serbia. I was also not (as some rumors would have you believe) touring Europe with Night Ranger, Hiding out in the witness protection program prior to testifying in a high-stakes rubber-nipple racket trial, or fingering the Pope.

Okay, I fingered the Pope once.

Tell no one.

At any rate, I've heaved myself keyboard-ward this evening because I want you to know, as I stated above, That I am incredibly fucking lazy. Thank god typing in this blog only requires movement from the wrists down. All the parts of me located behind the wrists are actually sleeping right now. Sleeping, snoring and drooling.

...

Those three dots right there? I took a nap. Lazy!

I could continue describing my incredible laziness to you, but it would take too much effort. Instead I think I'll show you my all time favorite picture of Spiderman being anally sodomized. This comes from back when Paul and I both worked at Santa, Inc. together. Often, instead of helping to create wonderful holiday displays to delight the children of the world, we would do this instead:

No, I don't mean we would do the act depicted above... We'd never do that on company time... I mean that we'd spend hours (and I do mean hours) posing our action figures in obscene positions and taking pictures of them.

Man, if there ever was a sentence to get me into the Horrible Nerd Loser Hall Of Fame, it's that last one above. Jesus. Even I want to beat me up and steal my lunch money...

Anyway, I posted that picture partly because I think it's funny (Spidey looks so ashamed!!!), and party because I'm dying to know how many Google searches are going to end up at this blog now that I've typed the phrase "Anal-Rape Spidey" a few times. You just know ACW Google searches that exact phrase on a nightly basis...

Hmmm... Looking at that pic, it seems to me now that it's missing something... Here we go:

Feel free to spread that around the internet.

While I'm waxing nostalgic about my time at Santa, Inc., I'll relate one more brief story. We had a creative director there who I'll call "Mort." Mort was a nice dude, a born-again Christian who (while outspoken) was never ever pushy or preachy with his faith. He was usually upbeat and energetic, and he had a very positive outlook about his job. I liked Mort. He had the tendency that many high-enthusiasm people have to be a little irritating, but I always felt that he was well-intentioned.

One day we were doing a holiday presentation for the Celestial Seasonings Tea Company, and we were brainstorming different concepts for decorating their corporate headquarters. Mort's idea involved large teddy bears in PJs (the Celestial Seasonings packages always have art of teddy bears) hanging from the overhead with giant "tea-related" props. It was an okay idea, I guess, and things were going great until he brought out the drawing of the Honey-dripper bear.

To this day, he refuses to understand why we all fell on the floor laughing.

(waaaaait for it...)

Mort was so insistent that the display was not (let's just call it like we see it) a giant flying bear with a huge dripping dong, that he refused to change it and it went up at Celestial Seasonings just as you see it here. I can only imagine what people thought when they entered that huge atrium and looked around at the display we hung for them. Oh, the joy!!! Oh, the wonder!!!

Because nothing, my friends, nothing says "Merry Christmas" like a giant bear waving his cock at you.

Son of a tassel-humper!

I love how lately this blog has been bouncing back and forth between tales of disgusting horror and little glimpses into what a huge softie I am. Since the last entry involved a detailed journey into the inner workings of my rectum, it's a safe bet that today I'm going to go all mushy on you again.

Early in the morning on March 1, my good friends Ray and Maria welcomed their first child, Nicolas, into the world. (When I say "first," I don't mean to imply "first of many." I mean, they're my friends and all, but I really have no insider info as to their future procreative plans. Nicolas may be the first of 18, or he could be the first of... um... one. I'm betting against 18 though. That seems like excessive baby-making to me.)

I'm lucky in my life to know many truly good people who are wonderful parents to their kids, (and one or two total whack-jobs who should probably have their wombs confiscated) and Ray and Maria are no exception. I know they're going to be great parents and I just wanted to take a moment to come down firmly on the side of "I wholeheartedly approve of their successful procreation."

Here's an adorable photo of the new mom and her son:

And, since the proud father couldn't be in that picture, here's a nice shot of him humping a giant tassel:

Hmmmm. Well, I'm sure Maria will be a great parent, anyway.

Now, if I'm staying true to form, my next post will be so gross as to actually shrivel you to midget-size. After that... probably pictures of kittens.