Annual Labor Day Road Trip

When I went to work yesterday I saw the guy sitting on the curb.  He was whipping a weed into the asphalt and I kind of felt bad for him.  He was clearly disappointed, and part of me wanted to tell him to cheer up, I was right here, and he could pummel me right now if he liked.  When he looked up at me he said, "Cyrus?"  I responded with a no, but then made him promise to let me hold Cyrus when he finally beats him up.

My whole shift I tried to think of who this man was.  To this point I still have no idea.  I'm pretty sure that means it's someone else I've done something horrible to, and he is just the executioner.  I wanted to ask him what Cyrus did, but was afraid I'd give something away.  Marcel was still working when I got inside, so I asked him to do it for me when he left.  He called me from his car to say that the man was walking away from the Sleep Center when he went off-shift, and he looked like a little boy who had lost his dog.  The man's rage has obviously tapped into a deeper feeling of insecurity due to chronic failure.  I must remember to use that when he fights me, in lieu of strong punches or coherent attempts at self-defense.

I will manage to avoid him since it's Labor Day weekend, and that means my annual pilgrimage of graves.  I go to see my father's grave, my mother's grave, and my uncle's grave.  I also visit a couple other graves that I don't like to talk about.  Since New York City, where John James Audubon is buried, is too far away, I also make a trip to Audubon County in Iowa to put flowers at the feet of his statue.

My father is buried in a different state than my mother, so I have to rent a car to make the whole trip.  It ends up being a big part of my budget, but I figure it's worth it.  Ever since Mom died it's been a lot easier to make the trip to see Dad since no one's making fun of me for doing it.  Once Mom died too I put her into the trip.  My uncle died just a couple years ago from a long life of drinking and pill popping.  When he was dying, he asked if I would stop at his grave too on my Labor Day trip.  It never occurred to me to do that, but I said okay.  Then at his funeral, which was a whole bunch of drunk guys in a steak house, all his friends were real nice to me.  Later that afternoon they let me do a couple donuts in the mud pit with an old Dodge Charger.  Some of them even knew my dad, and they patted me real hard on the shoulder.

Who Wants to Hurt Cyrus?

Usually, when Rex Tugwell tells me that I'm going to be gutted like a deer, he's just telling one of his "jokes" while he's "playing" with one of his sharp "knives."  Therefore, when Rex came up to me the other day and said, "Someone wants to cut all your fingers off," I assumed that someone was him.  No harm, no foul.  It was after all, a Monday.  When Marcel LeFarge told me a little later in the afternoon that, "Someone wants to bite your throat off and chew it on the grave of your ancestors," I was more concerned.  I asked Marcel why he would want to do that to me.  He said, "I don't want to, friend, but someone does."  He then described the large man that had been pacing in the parking lot during the day shift muttering all kinds of horrifying things, and then stopping every man, woman, and child to see if they knew Cyrus Wetherbee.

Marcel asked me if I'd made any enemies lately, and I told him it was my unfortunate habit to make enemies all the time.  It's generally not my fault.  An involuntary, ill-timed laugh--"Oh my, I thought you were joking about your brother's suicide"--or an impetuous remark--"Sorry to interrupt, but please don't tell your kids the birds are playing.  They're fighting to the death to see who gets to mate"--always lands me into trouble.  Even when I'm with Sammy and Boyce, I'm the one that the drifter we pick up in Boyce's van always has a problem with.

I asked Marcel to describe the man to me, and he just said "unpleasant."  I called Rex and his best description of the man was to laugh really hard into the telephone.  I called Sammy and Boyce and told them someone's hanging around the Sleep Center that wants to hurt me very, very badly.  Needless to say, they were both excited and promised their full support.  Sammy said if I could beat a chimpanzee I could certainly beat a human being.

I always wanted to get into a fight when I was around Rachel.  For months I had fantasized about defending her honor that I got so hungry for it, I kind of began instigating it.  When a man bumped her at Pizza Hut, I asked him if he wanted to take this outside.  Rachel told me to shut up, as the man was not only clearly elderly, but blind, too.  It was in fact, not the man who had even brushed up against her, but his seeing eye-dog.  When I asked the art museum's cashier if he wanted to fight, Rachel told me she would stop hanging around me if I didn't stop.  To be fair, that cashier kept his hand in her palm for way too long when he gave her change.  Turns out, no one ever really compromised Rachel's dignity.  Sammy said he could hire one of his teenage workers from Arby's to say something horrible, but I said no since none of them were white.

I have tried to think of who I have offended so badly they would wait for me in the Sleep Center's parking lot.  I have amassed the following list:

1. Someone hired by the ghost of my mother.
2. Rachel's priest.
3. The Saturday morning city bus driver who refused to take the nearly 10,000 coupons (valued 1/100 cent) that Sammy had spent four years collecting.  To be fair, Sammy is more his target, but I did shout over his shoulder, "Can't you read?"
4. Mrs. Marley, my sixth grade teacher, who didn't appreciate that I couldn't stop laughing at the words "upcoming hysterectomy."  They just sounded funny to me.
5. One of the guides at the Columbus Zoo's Habitat Hollow, when I demanded him to tell the children in the tour that some birds actually seemed to choose litter to make their nests with.
6. Drifters.
7. Most Brazilians.
8. My aunt's wedding DJ.
9. Whatever corporation owns the brand name Hot-Pockets.
10. The lady at the DMV who provided no real evidence that paramedics wouldn't choose to let me die so they could harvest my organs for oil tycoons and retired athletes. 

Reading Comes Alive!

Because I work nights, it's really hard to stay awake the nights I don't work.  Last night was one of those, so I thought I would do some reading.  I had already spent a few hours going through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology, so I went back to one of my favorite books, Vernon Birkhead's Victimless Crimes and Hard Plots to Follow.  It's not Amazon.com, but you can suggest to Amazon here that you'd like them to carry it.

Last night I was reading the part where Pervis Sutpen has just escaped from prison and is trying to find his pet timber wolf, Jibjab.  Pervis knows that if he doesn't get to Jibjab who has the antidote around his collar he'll never get back to the fishing ship where Captain Bulkington is about to unknowingly steer the crew right toward the Straits of Pound.  Pervis, of course, is weighed down by the one-act plays that the prison guard who helped him escape had written and Pervis had promised to deliver to Timor, the traveling bard from the prison guard's home village, which Pervis doesn't yet know is also the home village of Rodney the blind arachnologist who prophecied that Pervis would never find love until he sees a hearse being dragged by a team of fainting goats.  And the whole time Pervis is complaining that the prison guard didn't write on both sides of the paper. 

As you can imagine, it's a pretty magical moment.

Saint Rick the Baptist

Sammy has been pretty excited because Saint Rick the Baptist is back at Arby’s.  A couple years ago Sammy was just an assistant manager at Arby’s, and the regular manager started sweating it because there was a man wearing a sandwich board at the street entrance of Arby’s, shouting about people going to hell.  The manager didn’t want to do anything about it besides pace.  Sammy volunteered to go tell the man to get off Arby’s property, so the manager told him to do it.  Sammy walked out there like he’d just won a prize.  The man asked Sammy if he knew about his soul, and he said, “Sir, please, I can't talk about what's in the secret sauce,” which kept the man quiet for a few seconds because he just didn’t know how to respond.

Sammy told him he’d have to stand in the middle of the street if he wanted to talk about people who were going to die.  Then Saint Rick the Baptist said Sammy didn't own the ground he walked on. Sammy said no, but Arby's did. Saint Rick the Baptist then pointed his finger in the air and said, "And Arby shall be the Lord’s!" Sammy thought that was the greatest thing he’d ever heard, and sometimes when he’s gambling with me and he gets a good roll of the dice, he’ll shout that.

Well, that day Sammy got Saint Rick the Baptist off the property but he came back the next day.  Sammy volunteered again, and walked out just as happy as the first day.  Saint Rick the Baptist asked Sammy if he was going to hell.  Sammy said, “Online I am,” which kept the man quiet for a few seconds because he just didn’t know how to respond.

Rachel always loved Saint Rick the Baptist, too.  She’d make Sammy call her whenever he showed up to Arby’s.  Sammy would have to promise to give Rachel time to get there before Sammy kicked him off the property.  Boyce and I couldn’t understand how you could sit and listen to someone like that.  Every time someone mentioned Saint Rick the Baptist Boyce would get this look in his eye and start imagining funny things he could throw at him from his van.  Sammy really wanted to throw pickle juice on him, that way when he told people they were going to hell, people would think, "Why is there so much dill in heaven?"  Rachel and Sammy liked talking to him.  Rachel wondered sometimes if he had a homosexual son somewhere, or if he was scared about how the world was different than he needed it to be, or if he was a performance artist who lived in a studio apartment that had furniture converted from urinals and toilets and upside down park benches, and whenever his cats would get hungry he'd print out the word IRONY and then cut it up into their bowls.

Well, yesterday, for the first time in a long time, Saint Rick the Baptist came back to Arby's and Sammy of course couldn’t call Rachel.  So he called me instead, and I went down there.  When I got there I asked him if he remembered Rachel, and he said, “Oh my...,” and then, like he was eating a pork chop, he said, "Yes.  She's going to hell."  I had to concentrate really hard on how bald eagles build nests so strong a human adult could sit in them, otherwise I would have gotten really upset.  He asked if I knew what hell was, and I repeated what Rachel told me was the only thing I ever needed to know about hell: “Yeah, it's both the name and dwelling place of the daughter of Loki, the Norse trickster god,” which kept the man quiet for a few seconds because he just didn't know how to respond.  Then Sammy kicked Saint Rick the Baptist off Arby's property, which felt great.  Later Boyce said he's not just talking anymore--he was going to stop throwing away pickle juice.  But I told Sammy he didn't need to call me anymore when Saint Rick the Baptist showed up.

Bart, No!

You may remember that in my first post on this blog I mentioned what a huge Packer fan I am.  Now, I'll be the first to admit I haven't been a lifelong Packer fan.  As you may expect, Rachel's influence had something to do with it.  She liked the Packers because she said the town owns the team rather than some rich family.  Also, she liked the fact that the team name was from a company in the canned meat field.  Whenever someone argues that the Packers are inferior to another sporting team, I always explain these two points of Rachel's.  Maybe if there were some teams named after birds I would be more willing to root for them, but until that happens, call me Vince Lombardozzi!

Well, I've just been informed that the Packers' beloved quarterback, Bart Farv (picture at right), has been traded to our archrivals, The Minnesota.  If I were still speaking with Rachel, she would see me spitting nails over this.  Of course, the question will be whether I root for Bart Farv when he plays against the Packers.  Rachel--if you could only hear me!--I'll always be a Packers fan.  Even though Green Bay has really done nothing to me and is marginally betraying me through its negligence, I will always have loyalty even at the expense of my own well-being.  If I had a football and a son I'd go out in the yard and tell him, "Go deep!"  Instead, I'm just throwing aluminum cans at my basement wall.  But you better believe I hit that wall every time!

I've asked Sammy and Boyce if maybe they'd like to make a road trip to Green Bay to see a game.  Boyce said he'd love to, and is going to do everything he can to get us tickets for when Minnesota and Favr come to Green Bay.  He said it would cost a lot of money, money that he certainly doesn't have, but he said it would be worth hearing me ask other Packer fans what they felt about Bart getting traded.

My dad and I never got a chance to go to football games.  My dad was best at staring and talking to things that can't talk back to him, like cars parked in two spaces or the rain or a dead bird on the side of the road that he always joked was "his only friend in the world."  Dad was a dreamer, all right.  At dad's funeral mom told me he finally got the only dream he ever had.  She let me come live with her since she was going blind anyway.  Besides, she said, my uncle would need someone to get high with.

Go Packers!

Cyrus Weighs In: Health Care

Since I hurt my rib I've been thinking a lot about dying, and therefore doctors, and therefore paying for them--and lo and behold Sammy says there's a bit of debate going on about how to pay for doctors. I tried to inform myself as best I could on the different aspects of the debate, and this is what I've found out so far through my internet research.

1. Under our current health care system, if you go to an emergency room and tell them you have no insurance but need to be treated, you will be shot. (Note: Some have noted that the hospital will pretend to treat you, but while you're anesthetized your organs will be harvested for illegal immigrants.)

Cyrus weighs in: No way, Jose!

2. Government management of Medicare and Medicaid is so bad, that when a pregnant woman delivers a child in a hospital without insurance, 50% of the time that child is fed to hungry Jews who live under insurance buildings in New York.

Cyrus weighs in: No one should eat babies, no matter what your religious beliefs are!

3. In Switzerland where the government runs health care, old people are fed to cats.

Cyrus weighs in: Cats have been known to eat their elderly owners when they die!

4. rifleman6847 reports on a YouTube comment board that his friend was traveling in Canada when he sprained his ankle. Since Canada's health system is so overcrowded, and since he had applied ice and compression immediately, his friend didn't even bother going to the hospital.

Cyrus weighs in: Ice and compression help reduce swelling!

5. If the government runs health care they will put caps on how much our lives are worth, negotiate how much to pay doctors for procedures, and ration health care, all while foreign investors indirectly control the money available.

Cyrus weighs in: Madness!

6. The Sleep Center has Blue Cross Blue Shield, and although I am part time and am not allowed to have it, I do know that Blue Cross currently puts caps on how much our lives are worth, negotiates how much to pay doctors for procedures, and rations health care, all while foreign investors indirectly control the money available.

Cyrus weighs in: Lunacy!

7. Comrade Obama didn't even want to come up with government health care until he got invited to Hugo Chavez's surprise birthday party where, when things were getting dull, they got out a Ouija board and contacted Stalin's ghost about what's the best way to bring back the Soviet Union.

Cyrus weighs in: I don't know who any of those people are, but Ouija boards are for entertainment purposes only!

8. If government runs health care poor people will have less retarded kids but more abortions!

Cyrus weighs in: When I get scared I pretend I'm a bird. Right now I'm a Ring-Billed Gull!

Marcel LeFarge and the Hockey Helmet

Two days ago I was going off-shift at the Sleep Center, and Rex Tugwell was just coming in. He told me that later in the day he and Marcel LeFarge were going to the widow Smolinsky's house to clear out some of her husband's stuff. The widow Smolinksy's husband had been dead for almost twenty years, so I asked Rex why she was just now giving away her husband's things, and Rex told me she had, for the first time, sat down with Marcel LeFarge.

Marcel LeFarge, despite the fact that he sounds like a top-hotted villain, is one of the doctors at the Sleep Center. Every single human being loves Marcel once they are convinced Marcel LeFarge is actually his real name. Marcel is originally from New Brunswick, Canada. He was a real smart kid in school, but didn't want to do anything with his brain until his other parts started to slow down. So for about eight years he was a sailor in different parts of the world. He was in Alaska, in the Middle East, and India, among other places. When he came home he went to medical school. The women at the Sleep Center say he was a horrible doctor, but he cured all his patients by charming them into living longer. He's like a seeing-eye dog: when you see him in person you just think everything in the world is great.

So the widow Smolinsky had spoken with Marcel LeFarge for a little bit and offered him everything. He said he'd be happy to go check things out, and Rex Tugwell said he'd go too because he's kind of a scavenger. I told Rex I'd go too because maybe there would be old records for Boyce, and he said, "Yeah, and naked bird calendars for you." This is stupid. Birds are always naked, in and out of calendars. Besides, what good is an old calendar? I hate Rex.

We went out there in Rex's car and Marcel asked me if I'd seen any owls out back of the Sleep Center. He asked me to tell him something he didn't know about owls, and I told him that the Latin word for owl was "bubo." The Great-Horned Owl, Rachel's favorite bird, was therefore bubo virginianus. Rex made me say it again. Bubo virginianus. Bubo virginianus. He made me slow down. Bubo. Virgin. I. Anus. He couldn't stop laughing. He would have laughed even harder if I had told him that in Greek bubo means groin. He asked me if the Great Horned-Owl was on the Virus Buttertree family crest, sitting on the shoulder of a man selling his daughters for some magic beans while his wife poisoned a well. I told him that if he cared to know it was Rachel's favorite bird. Things got quiet and I could tell Rex was thinking about cracking a joke. He didn't though, so the house key I was holding between my knuckles got put back in my pocket.

We spent a long time at the widow Smolinksy's. I found two great old jazz albums for Boyce, but that was about all. Rex got a bowling ball and a couple chairs, along with some old hockey gear. Marcel didn't get anything until he saw the widow Smolinsky wanted him to have something, so he asked if he could have an old picture of her and her husband, and I thought the widow Smolinsky was going to tear her dress right off.



On the way home Rex Tugwell put on the hockey helmet from the gear he got, and every time we'd stop at a red light he'd look to the car next to us and start licking the window. I don't know what people thought when they saw him do that. The last time he licked a window he saw he'd gotten the attention of an entire family in the car next to us. So to crank it up a notch he banged the helmet against the steering wheel. When he did that though, all the sudden earwigs started coming out of the helmet. Rex started to panic and just floored it right through the red light. Luckily there was no car in front of us or in the intersection. Marcel tried to reach over for the wheel but Rex was flailing around and screaming. I don't know how many earwigs can fit in a hockey helmet (note to self: could be the start of a great joke), but a whole bunch poured out of it. Rex, still flooring it, took both hands and tore the helmet off. The car veered to the right, jumped a curb, ran over a couple mailboxes, and then went right down into a ditch.

You'd think everything would get quiet in the ditch, but Rex was still screaming. He scrambled out of the car and then fell over. Marcel calmly got out and inspected the car, and then watched Rex roll around in the dirt. After you've been in a shipwreck in Alaska being in a ditch with a bunch of earwigs isn't a big deal.

As for me, I was holding Rex's bowling ball the whole time, and when we went into the ditch it hit against my side. I climbed out and Marcel asked if I was okay. I said I wasn't sure and pulled up my shirt to see if a rib was sticking out of my chest. None were, but when I tried to throw Rex's bowling ball into the weeds it hurt pretty bad. Rex was still rolling around and screaming. The family from the last car he licked the window for were at the top of the ditch staring. I don't really know what they were thinking, because they were clearly more frightened by us than what had happened to us. Marcel shouted up at them if they knew what the Latin name for a Great-Horned Owl was. "Tell 'em, Cyrus," he said, but the family had already got back in their car.

"The Widow Smolinsky's Electra Complex"

One of my favorite chronic patients, the widow Sara Smolinksy, came in this past week at the Sleep Center. She’s not one of my favorites because she’s particularly pleasant. In fact, I made the mistake of telling her how I feel about birds, and now every time I see her she tells me she’s twisted the heads off X number of pigeons since she’s last seen me. I have found that many people, once they find out how I feel about birds, immediately find great satisfaction in telling me bird-related horrible things they heard, they saw as kids, or they wished they could do to make me “break.” No one has ever made fun of my ears because they’re too busy talking about birds. If I ever have a child I will tell him to invent a hologram passion to divert all the barbs and arrows of this world.

From what I hear, the widow Smolinksy used to be a decent person, but living much of her adult life with her ageless father and his Torah-spouting dragonmouth sucked the goodness right out of her. She does, however, have some spectacular dreams because of her Father. Her dreams are like mythical giants. Some people dream dogs or robbers are chasing them, but Sarah dreams that God is chasing her. Jewish people believe God is a shapeshifter, therefore in the widow Smolinsky’s dreams God chases her in the form of an elephant, a walking house, or a clay statue that eats paper. Whenever God chases her he’s always carrying too much in his hands, and he has to keep stopping to rearrange his load. That’s the only reason she ever gets away. What he carries changes in each dream. Sometimes they’re skeletons, greeting cards, or baby dolls. Last week when the widow Smolinsky came she told me God, in the form of Gary Busey, was carrying hundreds of silver, Liberian 9/11 commemorative dollars.

The only person whose dreams were near as mythical as the widow Smolinsky’s were Rachel’s. In fact, it was because of the widow Smolinsky that Rachel first told me one of her dreams. I was at the Sleep Center having just finished a sketch I did of the widow Smolinsky’s best dream (God in the form of a horse made of bees who carried bees made of horses), and Rachel saw it. She didn’t say anything, but turned her head to try to see the sketch. She pointed at the sketch and raised her thumb, and I told her “It’s the widow Smolinksi’s Electra Complex.” Rachel thought that was the title of the sketch and said, “I love your drawing, but I love the title more.” That’s the first thing she ever said to me, which was awesome. The second thing she said was, “Are you Rex Tugwell?” which was just terrible. The third thing was, “Cause someone threw up in the lobby,” which was kind of awesome since that meant Rex would have to clean it up. But since Rex wasn’t working (he was dove-hunting), it was terrible. I stared at her and said, “Oh, I’ll have to clean it up. Um, I draw dreams.” Then she said in this beautiful, kind, wise way, “Really. Huh. I have some dreams you could draw,” which was awesome. And then, “It wasn’t me that threw up,” which was also awesome.

While I cleaned up the worst of the vomit, Rachel was good enough to ignore me. As I was finishing though, she asked if I had a second to talk, and I said “Ptttttttttttt…..cha…rrrrrrr.” She moved to a closer chair and told me she had a dream she'd love to see drawn: it was the end of the world, and Jesus came back and he was about two hundred feet tall. He had all these birds flying around his head, and she couldn’t tell if they were buzzards or a bunch of mini-Holy Spirits. There was lightning all over and a really strong wind. Noah was in the background, driving a speedboat with deer throwing coolers off the side because Noah shouted, “Faster! Faster!” She asked if I could draw it. I told her she could pick it up tomorrow.

When she saw my drawing she burst into laughter. She said she loved it, that she wanted it, that she was going to show it to her girlfriends “immediately,” but when she saw my concern about her laughing, she explained all the things that were “special” about the drawing. She asked if I had never even been inside a church before. I said, “I was raised Jesus. I’m very heavenly.” Again, hysterical laughter. She tried to explain what I messed up, saying Jesus probably never wore gladiator armor, didn’t file his teeth—and when she said there was lightning she meant from the sky not his fingertips. As for the Holy Spirit, it's a good guy, and in no way resembles the library ghost from Ghostbusters. Also, Noah apparently was a man.

I knew then if I was going to win this woman, I would have to find Jesus, and the kind who has a beard, not a moustache.

Who Would Have Thought?: More Horrible People at the Casino

This past weekend we went to the local Indian reservation with 750 dollars as seed money. Neither Boyce nor Sammy are particularly interested in gambling, but they’re always willing to do something different. Sammy is half-convinced that the passage into heaven will be based on this question from God: “You have five minutes to entertain me with your stories……Go!” Boyce just wants to lose his breath laughing, which Sammy says God will find acceptable in place of entertaining stories. I keep hope that if there is a God, the test for heaven will be how fast someone can dis-assemble an owl pellet.

I have no gambling secrets. Only rules:

1. Rachel never liked to gamble not because she had a moral aversion to games of chance, but because she didn’t like the idea of competing against other people. Therefore I too swore off forever games in which I competed with other people. Therefore I will not play poker, nor will I play blackjack as I do not even want to be against the dealer (the casino as an abstract entity, like aliens or the archaeopteryx, is different). I am only against that sweet-tongued succubus, Chance. Games of choice then are roulette and craps.
2. Slot machines are for non-people, or at least once-people, who have simply exhausted their will to engage with other people. Sammy says slots are for William Loman. I am unaware of this man, but if he likes slots he’s probably ten seconds from driving his car off a cliff.
3. Only low-yield bets. This is for several reasons. First, it stretches the amount of time you get to play. Second, the house always has the odds. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Therefore, your best plan is to spread your chances and go with low-yield wins and low-yield losses. This means sometimes after five hours you’ve only won ten dollars. Or lost ten dollars. This is what keeps Boyce from gambling. After three low-yield bets he gets irritated and says, “Snake-eyes, baby,” and puts it on something that is not even snake-eyes. In fact, it’s not even a craps table.
4. There are no patterns in luck. Each roll of the dice or spin of the wheel is exclusive from all previous and subsequent turns. If double-zero has come up 20 straight times, it’s just as likely to come up a 21st time as any other number. The wheel is not tilted and the dice are not loaded. The spirits of the great gamblers, Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, would not allow such a thing.

We went to the Indian reservation casino and camped around a roulette table. Boyce and Sammy bet only as much as it takes to keep the dealer off their backs. They generally benefit from my relationship with the dealer, which is usually positive. Dealers respect the scientist, not the snake oil salesman nor the suicide. Sammy often overacts his role of nervous bettor, making grand gestures of wiping his brow and shaking his head, sometimes mumbling, “I just don’t…um…yeah, I’m out this one.” It’s unnecessary, and the other end of the spectrum from Boyce who sits there in silence until the dealer tells him to leave or bet, and then Boyce bets the minimum.

On Saturday we were doing fairly well at the table when we were joined by a man to Boyce’s left. He immediately caught my attention as he began making perfectly absurd bets. He would put ten dollars on a single number rather than one dollar on ten different numbers, and of course every single time he lost. He would simply get more chips from the dealer and continue, once putting thirty dollars on double-zero. He paid no attention, as the degenerates never do, to the fact that I was slowly succeeding while he was quickly nosediving.

Sammy, of course, began speaking with the man as he slowly revealed his life. Everyone around the table found it difficult to look other people in the eye. Why are all these horrible people in casinos?! Apparently the man has fathered many children, admitted he doesn’t pay child support, and gets most of his money from stealing catalytic converters from the parking lots of retirement homes.

Finally, he watched me win two spins in a row and asked me to make the next bet for him. He was laughing when he asked me, holding up an ashtray so that he could not so much spit as dribble his slobber out of his mouth. I showed him what to bet and he did it, but ended up even on the spin. He immediately went back to wild bets on single, random numbers. Sammy asked him if he had any kind of reason for picking those numbers. He laughed and said this next bet was for his girlfriend’s age, and put about forty dollars on 16. He lost and laughed hard, the way I thought some villain might laugh when you cut his arm off only to learn that he had a secret power to let his arm grow right back.

He asked me again to help him with a bet, and I showed him, and again he came up even on it. Sammy asked him why he doesn’t keep betting on 16. That’s when the man said, “I don't care about her. I’m getting rid of her.” It’s as though the man had no sense of continuity, completely unaware of what he had said, felt, and done, and what he was going to say, feel, and do. Boyce couldn’t take it and said, “But you just bet on 16 because of her.” “Yeah,” the man said, “but she may have given me janitorial warts so whatever, she’s gone.”

Boyce and I took different tacks on this. Boyce said, “Yeah, but you knew that when you bet on 16. It’s not like you just learned that in the last ten seconds.” I went this way: “What did you just say? Did you just say…what did you just say?”

The man repeated himself: “janitorial warts.” I didn’t know what to think. Did this man just not know how to pronounce the word, and was changing it to something he incredibly thought similar? Or was this slang for something else entirely? I demanded he tell me again what his girlfriend did. And again he said it. It was just too much. I have already been forced to accept that there are men out there who play video games with some guy who the previous night tried to knife them while a baby sits in a car seat next to them not getting fed, but I have never before been forced to accept something as genuinely baffling as this. When he asked me to help him bet a third time, I refused, and walked off.

If Rachel were there she probably would have asked to see a picture of his girlfriend and kept talking to him until he said something sincerely kind about her. Rachel wasn’t there, though, so instead we spent half an hour trying to figure out which car was his in the parking lot. We’re pretty sure we found it when we found a Mercedes with a bumper sticker that called attention to three different body parts. We let the air out of the tires and went home.

A Low Point for Cyrus

Sammy and I ate dinner with the Lancasters yesterday. We talked about heading out to the local Indian reservation to make more money off my monkey wrestling winnings. I used to not like to gamble with Boyce and Sammy because they distracted me. Once I was sitting at the roulette table in Vegas with Sammy. He started talking to this other guy at the table which I generally don’t mind. But the story the other guy told was so disturbing that I simply couldn’t continue. Sammy somehow got him talking about his hometown. This is a favorite subject of Sammy’s and it produces some wonderful stories, and in this case, some horrifying ones.

In this instance I overheard the man tell the story of a guy from his high school (most hometown stories begin this way) who was the quarterback of the football team. He was a “straight-shooter,” the man said. The kind of guy, “who wouldn’t stab you with a screwdriver.” There is just no way to concentrate on anything when someone describes an admirable person by explaining how they would be unwilling to jam a sharp tool into you. This un-stabbish quarterback went to a party where he got very drunk, unusual for him. Out of his mind on whiskey, one of his linemen took him up to where the teenagers neck and canoodle. Approaching a car the lineman said he’d take the driver, and the quarterback can take the girl. They each opened the door and the lineman pummeled the driver, while the quarterback pulled out the girl and had his way with her. Only to realize that the girl was the quarterback’s sister. The quarterback ran away and was later found drowned in a local pond.

At this point in time the roulette ball was spinning. I’d made my bets which were all foolish, no doubt compromised by some lunatic telling me an outrageous story that was as ghastly as it was undoubtedly untrue. As Sammy says, I blew a gasket. I reached into the roulette wheel and grabbed the ball, screaming how I was distracted when I made my bets. The dealer was a small Asian woman who reached for my arm as I grabbed the ball. Too late Tokyo Rose, because I already swallowed it.

In retrospect that was the wrong thing to do. I was quickly grabbed by some large men and told that while every one else’s bets were safe, my money was gone, and if I didn’t get off the grounds immediately I would offer a small but important part of myself to be the new roulette ball. Since I was actually using my fake id of Boyce while I was there, he was the one who received a letter explaining his permanent banishment from Excalibur Casino.

Sammy later told me that I shouldn't have been so disturbed by the man, that in fact I should have liked him based on my hatred for most things people say. Here's the thing: I do not like it when most people speak their opinions because those opinions are generally based on: 1) a lie, 2) a rumor, 3) someone else's opinion. Since #3 generally comes from other #'s 1 and 2, you can understand how endless this is.

For instance, I understand Barack Obama is our "president." I do not care what anyone has to say about this man. I simply don't care because why on earth should I? I certainly never said I was interested in what you thought because I am not a liar. Sammy is the only person I know who says, "What do you think?" instead of, "You know what I think..." To be fair though, Sammy doesn't care what the person actually says--he's just interested in how people say it. Rachel was like that: she didn't care what you thought, just what your thoughts meant about you. As for Boyce, he just doesn't care about most things, and I am generally looking up at the sky because anything falling from a bird's butt is more genuine and enlightening than what rises out of a person's mouth.

This is why Sammy thought I should have liked this man. After all, he told a wildly inappropriate story (even for a roulette table) instead of saying some simplified opinion he got from someone else about politics, religion, or someone he doesn't like. This man, Sammy said, was shockingly original, which next to no one is (certainly not people who want to be shocking or original). Next to talking about who he thinks would win in a fight between a red-tailed hawk and a german shepherd, his story should have been one of the best things he could have told us, even if we didn't like what we heard.

Therefore I changed my mind. I also changed my mind about Sammy and Boyce being around me when I gamble. I pride myself on being somewhere between degenerate and professional on the gambling spectrum, and I was never sure where eating the roulette ball falls in that. With Sammy and Boyce as my wingmen, however, I can not only learn to appreciate the fresh jabber of alcoholics, prostitutes, and lunatics who often sit by me, I can also learn to love myself a little more.

By the way, when word somehow got around at the Sleep Center about how I ate the roulette ball, I had one religious lady tell me that it was the demon of gambling working in me. When Rachel heard that she said maybe it wasn’t the demon of gambling but the angel of investment capital, since those two little devils are never in two places at the same time so you'd almost think they were the same thing. I didn't get what she was talking about, but she touched my arm when she said it so I just kind of mumbled, "Seriously...Jesus is awesome...no way devil..." and then pretended she was a blackjack dealer with a pet falcon who asked me to marry her.

P.S. The red-tailed hawk would destroy the german shepherd. The dog just couldn't overcome the advantage of position.

Misrepresentation of Class Aves

Ever since I mentioned the magpie in the picture of the golden eagle whipping the fox I’ve been thinking about Rachel. She loved magpies, which at first is an odd choice for a beloved bird. Like many members of the noble and misunderstood Corvid family of birds (crows, ravens, jays), it’s associated with a lot of mythology, but none more famous than the rhyme about what number of magpies you see:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
And seven for a secret never to be told.

When I told her about that rhyme she’d never heard it before, and she thought the phrase, “One for sorrow, two for joy” was just great. She would just say, “One for sorrow, two for joy” for no reason. She also loved the magpie once she realized that Heckle and Jeckle were not actually crows but magpies. I consistently balked at them being called magpies since little in their appearance reminds one of an actual magpie. Their behavior was also puzzling. In this video they are attempting to sell hair tonic to park animals. An apparently mentally disabled custodian dog, probably a Goodwill hire, attempts to do his job and keep them out of the park. Heckle and Jeckle do frightening things to him.




Rachel also loved Woody Woodpecker, again for aesthetic reasons, despite the fact that he is clearly a deranged bird that doesn’t look like a woodpecker. In this video, he attempts to sneak into a baseball game, neglecting his ability to fly. At about 1:18 he apparently has a brain aneurysm based on the look on his face.

When I showed Sammy both videos he thought they were both clearly influenced by John Steinbork, since the law is represented as an arbitrary power that keeps the working poor out of open places. I looked up John Steinbork but was unable to find what kind of cartoon bird he was.

I fear that bird representation in the media, especially when shown to the children, leads to unrealized expectations and therefore disappointment, and possibly resentment. Does your aunt keep parrots because she was born a horrible person, or because when she realized that her exotic birds would never deliver her colorful cereal in loop-form, she became a horrible person? Does Rex Tugwell shoot doves from his back porch because his mother's uterus was formed from the tears of fallen angels, or because he can't endure the bitterness caused by visiting a farm as a small boy where he hoped to see a former plantation-owning, gigantic rooster attempt to philander with homely hens?

Keep it real, America. Not just for the birds' sake, but ours, too.

Birds in the News!

Outrage in Shelton, Connecticut! I realize I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but the following was just reported: "Nineteen people were arrested Sunday after police raided a home and seized 150 canaries and finches in a suspected bird fighting ring." See the entire story and video here.

This is outrageous for several reasons:

First, and obviously, bird fighting is wrong. In fact, so is most bird ownership. Other than farm birds that are allowed to roam, anyone who keeps a bird in a cage is a filthy piece of trash. And I don't mean the kind of trash where there are some papers and maybe you could recycle them, but oh, someone spilled a little bit of mustard on it so, yeah okay, I'll just leave it in the trash. No, I mean the kind of trash where someone didn't finish their Red Lobster crab cakes.

Why would you keep a bird in a cage? Do you think he likes it? Do you think it's a reflection of your smarmy good taste? I'll tell you what it is: it's a reflection of your soul: lock up something originally free and beautiful and turn it into an isolated madman that fills its food dish with its own feces. That's you! Congratulations, Satan, on putting a gorgeous creature into what is the exact opposite of its intended environment.

And P.S.: your bird doesn't love you. No one does. We all wish you would die so we can finally have a party you don't show up at and ruin.

Second, if you are going to fight birds, go big or go home. This is a picture of a saffron finch. It is, well, a finch. It would be like getting a bunch of your friends and instead of having a fight club, having some kind of non-fight club. The news video reported that some birds were missing wings and eyes, and this is probably due to finch-fighting. Eventually everything will fight. That's pretty much a rule of nature. But the print story pointed out (right after the names of the criminals, as though to insult them) that none of the birds were injured.

I don't consider cockfighting especially "big" either, though it is certainly ruthless. I might come to respect both your gambling as well as your bird fighting if you fought with golden eagles. Here is a golden eagle lifting a fox off a carcass (check snopes.com for validity of photo. I would not lie about golden eagles.). If you're going to be a tough guy and keep birds in cages and fight with them, do it with these guys.

Perhaps the best part of this picture is the magpie in the right hand side of the picture deciding that it needs to get the hell out of there.

I will keep you updated about the canary/finch fighting ring, and do the same if any of you out there decide you'd like to round up some golden eagles.

You're the Best: Back after Monkey Wrestling

Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve written. I know you’re wondering why, thinking, “Cyrus must have been doing something great. Maybe he helped deliver a baby or something.” Actually, I’m recovering from getting beat up by a chimpanzee.

If you remember, two weeks ago Rex Tugwell invited us to monkey wrestling “down at the airport.” I didn’t want to go, figuring that monkey wrestling was really code for some kind of metaphorical but nevertheless public de-pantsing at the hands of Rex. Both Sammy and Boyce, however, were excited to go.

I was none too excited that we had to go with Rex Tugwell, nor could I understand why he was inviting us in the first place. But when he told us to pick him up about a mile away from the airport, I figured why: if the police showed up he wouldn’t have to worry about his car being identified. Boyce said he’d bring his van since he was angry about the threat of going to part-time work, so we all sat in the back as he drove us to the airport.

Our city has a small municipal airport, and just to the west of it are a series of hangars for little prop planes. Rex pointed us to the last one where some cars were parked out back. We went into the hangar to find about three dozen men standing around a boxing ring. They were just drinking, but I got the feeling that something incredibly disturbing was happening. Like when I was a kid and woke up in the middle of the night to see my uncle’s car entirely on its side in our front yard, and he there digging a hole and laughing.

We walked with Rex who would high-five random people or call them horrible names and laugh with his mouth way too open to trust him as anything but ready to eat his own arm. In one corner of the ring was a small metal cage, and Rex told us there’s the monkey. It had just enough room in the cage to turn around. Sammy said it was actually a chimpanzee, and Rex said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Rex told us that you paid twenty-five dollars to enter the ring. The monkey would be released and if you could stay in the ring with it for one minute then you won a thousand dollars. The only thing was, you had to put your money down before the first guy ever gets in the ring.

Rex begged us to put our money down, and Sammy, who was really trying to get a good look at the chimp, as though it’s height might change whether he entered or not, decided first. He told Boyce he had to do it, and Boyce said fine. Rex told me that he was willing to pay my money if I entered. It didn’t take much to convince me. Even though most things make me nervous and scared, I do them anyway. We went to the ring and got a good view to watch the first guy with the chimp.

The first guy was bigger than Boyce. He was really serious, spitting into his hands and trying to get a good footing on the mat. I watched the owner of the chimp shouting at it until suddenly a bell rang and the front of the cage slid straight up. I don’t know how fast normal chimpanzees are, but I had to assume that this one had eaten the four other fastest chimps. In two strides it was across the ring and latched to the man’s face and neck like the way a starfish sucks onto a rock. The man immediately fell on his back, and the chimp began pummeling him on the sides of the head. The bell rang again and immediately the chimp jumped off the man and ran back into his cage where the gate slid back down. The man lying on the mat looked hurt, but more than anything he looked scared—like he’d reached down to pick a flower and came back without an arm. They dragged him off the mat and when he stumbled by us Sammy asked him if he had any advice. I don’t think he heard us since he just kept waving his hands in the air. Rex couldn’t stop laughing, but Boyce, Sammy, and I were scared. Sammy guessed that this wasn’t animal cruelly since clearly nothing was ever going to happen to the chimp.

(For an example of a chimp fight)

Seven more men were pummeled in like fashion, though to the chimp’s credit he always jumped off them when the bell rang. No one got too hurt, though one guy did lose two teeth which really freaked out Boyce. Rex asked if I was going to chicken out and I told him I most certainly would. Surprisingly, when Sammy was informed he was next he didn’t hesitate to jump into the ring. He walked up to the chimp’s owner and spoke to him for a second, then leaned down to talk to the chimp. Before he left Sammy told us his strategy was to befriend the chimp. He had a candy bar in his pocket that he had unwrapped, and when he spoke with the owner, he snuck the chimp a piece. As he walked away to his corner of the ring he winked at us. When the bell rang he was going to offer the chimp the rest of the candy bar, thus winning without either fighting or defending himself.

Waiting for the bell he took the candy bar out of his pocket and waved it at the chimp. The bell rang and the chimp burst out of his cage. Sammy didn’t even have time to extend his arm with the candy bar. In pure defense he simply chucked the candy bar at the chimp and then heaved himself over the top rope. He landed hard on a foldout table and knocked over quite a few drinks, but no matter because everyone thought it was hilarious. Everyone was cheering him and patting him on the back for such an absurd, doomed strategy. Sammy held his arms up to the roar of the crowd.

There was another guy to go before Boyce, so we thought to talk strategy. Boyce thought the best thing to do was just try to give an enormous kick to the chimp on its way over to him. We told him if he did that he’d never be able to get over the ropes before the chimp began punishing him with those meathooks. Boyce just shrugged though. When the guy before him got slaughtered, Boyce put a huge wad of gum between his front teeth and gums, then climbed into the ring.

Just before the bell rang Boyce put his right leg back to get ready to kick. He looked like someone who really wanted to kick a long field goal. As soon as the bell rang he started to kick. I don’t even think the chimp was out of his cage before the kick was half-over. That chimp though was so fast that Boyce actually timed it perfectly and kicked that chimp square in the face. It fell over to his side and Boyce just stood there, kind of stunned. Then the chimp got up, stared at Boyce for a few seconds, and rushed him. Boyce didn’t waste any time and dove out of the ring. The crowd cheered for him because he’d made it the longest: 14 seconds, and half of that was just the chimp staring at him in a you-know-I’m-going-to-eat-your-eyes-out-for-that-right? kind of way.

Rex informed me that I was next and both Boyce and Sammy, sensing my lack of resolve, told me to stand right at the ropes, and as soon as the bell rang to just get out of there. That way when we told the story to people I could always say I did it too. I thought it was better than my plan of simply screaming at the chimp until I blacked out. I climbed in the ring.

Whenever I have to do something I don’t want to do, I always imagine I’m doing it for Rachel. Even if it’s washing a ton of dishes, I think, “No Cyrus, you do this for her.” And even though I knew Rachel would be horrified to know I was attempting to wrestle a caged, undoubtedly ’roid-raging chimp, I still thought to myself in the ring, “No Cyrus, you do this for her.” Even when I looked back and saw Rex Tugwell talking with other people and laughing, knowing full well he just wanted to see me hurt in a way that 24 hours earlier I didn’t even know existed, I still said, “No Cyrus, you do this for her.”

I wished for just a second that ornithology had some kind of crossover to primates. If I were forced to fight an osprey I could at least know where to try for a lucky hit. The chimp seemed impenetrable. I thought the eyes and groin were the universal weak points, but going after the chimp’s eyes seemed ungentlemanly. Besides, I’m sure others thought the same thing only to be faced with a brute force that makes the mind go blank and the bladder go empty. Nothing three feet tall should be able to pile drive a three hundred pound man. Even the largest guy of the night, some 400 pound man who thought he’d just fall on his foe, learned that a chimp can punch through several layers of fat to make a man scream, “My liver! He burst my liver!”

Sometimes it seemed like the chimp was just messing with the contestants, and I expected him to do the same thing. It spun one guy around twice before it finally just grabbed him by the foot and dragged him to the ground where it leaped on top of him. Another guy tried to run away and the chimp jumped on his back. For a good five seconds it just rode him as though to say, “Where are we going, friend?” Then, suddenly, it punched him several times in the back of the head.

I wondered what undignified move the chimp would do to me. The whole night it had never gone for a man’s groin. It was either a noble, principled fighter or simply saving its crotch attack for the final fight of the night, which was of course me. I whispered one last time that this was all for Rachel, and then the bell rang.

I just kind of screamed “Oh dear God!” at the top of my lungs and turned to climb the turnstile. I didn’t think anything, even when I felt the chimp jump on my back. I just kept screaming uncontrollably. Everything went white and I was later told the chimp had rammed its forehead into the back of my skull. I have no idea why it would do this instead of punching or biting—what analysis did it do while riding my back to think that trying to break my skull with its skull was the best maneuver? Whatever the case was I saw white for a second and fell over to my side. I was not aware of this at the time but I twisted as I fell, and actually landed on the chimp. It’s head must have hit funny because it was dazed for a second.

Feeling no primate on my back, I stood up and realized I was in the middle of the ring. The chimp was getting up and I panicked. I don’t know why I did what I did. I had watched Boyce, Sammy, and many others leap out of the ring at the very first opportunity. Why didn’t I leap? My God, why? I don’t know. But with reeling tunnel vision, all I saw was that chimp dazed for a second and, inside my skull, on the opposite side where the chimp headbutted me, were the letters R-A-C-H-E-L. I didn’t even see her, just the letters. And suddenly, without thinking, I just kicked the chimp as hard as I could right in the chin.

The crowd cheered and I realized that maybe I could do it. Maybe I could beat this chimp. But as it was getting back up someone shouted “45 more seconds!” 45?! That had only been 15 seconds? Again, I’m not sure with a second opportunity why I did not simply leap out of the ring. Instead, I ran. And for whatever reason, I ran straight for the chimp’s cage and dove into it. The chimp saw me and started bounding over to me. I reached up and from pure adrenaline broke the latches on the gate and pulled it down and shut. Since I’d broken the latch I had to hold the gate down because the chimp—well, he really wanted in that cage. I think I broke some cardinal rule in monkey fighting because that chimp was seriously pissed. He was pummeling my fingers that were holding on to the bars to keep the gate down, but I had to hold on. At one point he jumped on top of the cage and reached down to tear my ears off. I had to lean way down. Even at the time I was able to think that very few people have had a seriously pissed chimp screaming at them from above their head. You know what, though? I have.

For 45 seconds that chimp punched my hands and swiped at me. When the bell rang he suddenly went docile but damned if I was going to open that cage gate. I didn’t let go and let it up until the chimp owner got into the ring, screaming at me that I cheated. Others though were screaming that the cage was in the ring, and nothing said I couldn’t hide in there. Sammy, Boyce, and even Rex helped me out and were checking me over since I was bleeding in a few places. They were all so happy they couldn’t stop giggling. After a while some guy came over and asked if I would accept $750 dollars, and I said that was fine. They gave it to me in cash, and everyone there came by to congratulate me. Not since my uncle’s funeral have drunk strangers been so kind to me. People patted me lightly saying how great it was to see the chimp not be able to get me crying in that cage.

Boyce and Sammy agreed it was just about the single most greatest thing they’d ever seen. Rex told me he would cover for me for a few days to give me a chance to heal, and then he gave me a big, but soft hug. Someone in the background was singing the “You’re the best” song from The Karate Kid, and we kept up with that for much of the night.

That was a couple weeks ago, and things have gotten back to normal. None of my injuries were so severe I needed to see a doctor, so I just spent a lot of time watching birds and thinking. My hands have been pretty beat up so I haven’t been able to type. Now things are getting back to normal though. Even Rex is starting to treat me mean again, though some times when he finishes a three-minute speech about my masculinity, he finishes with, “Dang, that chimp was pissed, Virus.”

Rex Tugwell, the Brown-Headed Cowbird

Sammy reports that while working his shift at Arby's yesterday he found in his register a crude stick drawing of what he assumes is himself with the word "RACIST" underneath it. Clearly, Trisha has not forgotten his lack of concern about Michael Jackson. Generally, Sammy wants every person to like him. It bothers him if people look at him funny. So it was uncharacteristic when Sammy held up the drawing to Trisha and said, "Did you see what a seven-year-old retarded customer made me?" He says it was the easily the cruelest thing he's ever said, though he's more concerned about the insult to a mentally retarded seven-year-old girl than to Trisha. Sammy knows himself though, and he's already tried to make it up to Trisha (in the absence of a mentally retarded seven-year-old girl). On break he listened to his ipod with one earphone hanging out so Trisha could hear he was listening to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" (he has no Michael Jackson and refuses to buy any now) which Boyce gave to him from his favorite Stevie Wonder album/cover, "Talking Book." (Boyce says: "I don't think anyone ever told Stevie Wonder that they made the cover from a picture of him trying to find something he dropped in the dirt. I bet they took a hundred pictures of him in some funky, artistic poses, and then they thought, 'Let's just use the one where he's trying to find the pen he dropped.'") Trisha didn't seem to notice, so now Sammy is going to have to give her great hours next week to try to smooth things over.

I wish I had a boss like Boyce. My boss who makes the schedule is Rex Tugwell, the head janitor at the Sleep Center. He calls me Virus Buttertree. I told him he should be one to make fun of names. He said, "Oh yeah, is there something wrong with my name?" Apparently he's like the fifth Rexford Tugwell in his family. When I don't have anything to sketch, sometimes I sketch Rex with the head of a brown-headed cowbird, which is the biggest douchebag in the bird class.

Birds of prey are a necessary part of nature, and I don't resent them for killing other birds. There is a certain dignity in being hunted by a Peregrine Falcon. I only wish I could go in such a worthy way, rather than forgetting to look when I cross the street which I have so often predicted. The brown-headed cowbird though is an undignified, shameless monster.

Brown-headed cowbirds do not make nests. The females lay their eggs in another species' nest so that the victim species raises the cowbird young instead of its own, sometimes letting its own baby birds die from neglect. There is also something called "mafia behavior." Occasionally a victim species will recognize the cowbird egg and refuse to care for it. Other brown-headed cowbirds, however, will literally come to intimidate the victim species by ransacking the nest until the victim gives in and cares for the cowbird young (for the unbelievers). The cuckoo bird actually does the same thing, and can actually make its egg look like the victim's eggs. But since the cuckoo is mainly in Europe my disdain is more abstract. Still, I find the choice to domesticate the cuckoo's form through the hour chime of novelty clocks to be a dubious decision, at best.

5 reasons why Rex Tugwell is akin to the brood-parasite brown-headed cowbird:
1. He calls me Virus Butterbee. Other versions are Typhus Wondergeek, Spineless Feathertree, and Idiot.
2. He shoots mourning doves in his spare time. I confirmed this when I asked him.
3. He doesn't give me extra hours except when he goes camping.
4. He says "I understand that" even when you are clearly informing him of something new.
5. He is actually a pretty terrible janitor.

Since we don't work at the same time, I generally don't see Rex too much. I saw him yesterday evening on his way out, and he told me he just got down shooting some owls out back. That's how he says hello to me. I said I highly doubted that due to the laws about discharging guns, and he said, "Yeah, well, you think you're so tough, you think you could wrestle a monkey?"

I was not expecting this. It turns out Rex was in a good mood because what he called "monkey wrestling" was back in town down at the airport. He told me to get on the phone and let my two gay friends know about it. I told him I would do nothing of the sort, but when I did tell Boyce about it later he told me we have to go. So for the first time in my life I called Rex and asked him about the monkey wrestling.

We're going Saturday night.

Sammy Loses It About Michael Jackson and Boyce Dreams

Sammy said that when he told a fellow Arby’s co-worker that one of his friends was having trouble with dreams, the co-worker asked if it was because of Michael Jackson’s death and “what his kids must be going through.” Sammy tries to like everyone, and up to that point he had been fine with Trisha. He couldn’t manage it, though. He told her he didn’t know Michael Jackson, that nobody he knew had ever met Michael Jackson, and that if he later found out that Michael Jackson was really a cyborg created by the CIA using a new type of synthetic skin, then it wouldn’t affect either his or Trisha’s life one single bit. That under no circumstances should she be talking about Michael Jackson until she first spoke about the fact that yesterday was the anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, which did a whole lot more to define both her existence and consciousness than anything Michael Jackson ever sang, no matter how many times she watches Access Hollywood. Then Trisha called Sammy gay, and finished getting some curly fries for a drive-thru order.

At Boyce's Charlotte made us chocolate chip cookies which was her way of saying she didn’t mind we were over. While we ate I showed Boyce a mouthguard to wear while he slept to help in the short term with chipping more teeth. We played Risk for a while like we always do. We never finish the games because Boyce comes to peace arrangements and says he’s content to rule the land he has. I always say he needs to keep fighting because that’s the game, and so he swept all the men off the board and said, “There, swine flu wins.” Every time Boyce ends the game this way by sweeping his arm across the board, he says a different disease: ebola, tuberculosis, yellow fever, AIDS, the plague, rubella, smallpox, syphilis.

After Risk Sammy said he was worried he didn't act weird enough and might get chosen for the jury. Boyce said he was afraid there wasn’t enough work for him to keep getting full-time hours as a locksmith. I told them I miss Rachel. Then we figured out which were the five most sensual fruits. Answer: strawberries, cherries, grapes, mangoes, and pomegranates. Sammy wanted it noted that he disagreed about pomegranates, and instead would like to have seen olives on the list.

Boyce slept on the couch, I slept on the floor, and Sammy slept on a recliner. We asked Boyce what would be signs that he was dreaming he was Jud. Boyce wasn’t sure, but singing, hoeing, bidding at a pie auction, and dying were all possibilities.

In the morning Boyce told us he didn’t dream about being Jud, but he did dream about Rachel. I never dream about Rachel. Just like I don’t dream about birds or doubling down on a good hand. I asked Boyce what she was doing, and he said practicing on one of my boomerangs. I said that was stupid. She wasn’t coming back. Boyce said I was stupid, but then he got what I meant.

Boyce as Jud and How to Fix It

A few years ago Boyce finally stopped making fun of me for interpreting dreams when he told me he’d been having a recurring one. He kept dreaming that he was called on at the last second to play Jud from Oklahoma! Boyce owns the album because he thinks the cover is “classy.” It’s actually a rather boring album cover so both Sammy and I think that Boyce actually loves Oklahoma!, testified by the fact that Boyce Jr. will always play “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” whenever you asked him to grind his axe.

In Boyce’s recurring dream, he was rushed into the part of Jud and at first, could never remember the words. A classic dream, I told him, about anxieties of failure, especially in front of others. I told him not to be surprised if future versions of his dream included being naked, forgetting to go to class, or being forced to eat muppets out of jack-o-lanterns at the request of Paul Bunyan and the Buddha, all classic symbols in anxiety dreams. But Boyce told me his dream evolved and he started getting better as Jud. Once he did so well that a talent agent asked him to join Seinfeld, but then she made advances on him and Boyce felt uncomfortable and declined.

The problem was every time Boyce woke up from one of his Oklahoma! dreams, he’d chipped his teeth a bit. He didn’t know if he was punching himself in order to recreate his death at the hands of that unfairly smug Curly, or if he was grinding his teeth due to the pressure of being a Broadway star. I told him it might even be the opposite: his teeth cause the dream to happen, not the other way around. When his mind attempts to represent shattered enamel it chooses a potentially sexually violent ranchhand who sings at his own funeral.

Boyce loves his teeth, and any damage to them is like the poisoning of his soul. He doesn’t have dental insurance working as a locksmith, but he doesn’t worry about the money. He just adores his teeth like a baby rock pigeon adores its regurgitated crop-milk. Sammy told him teeth were a sign of mortality, and pointed him to Edgar Andy Poe’s short story "Berenice." Boyce told him he’d like to tear Sammy’s teeth out if he offers him one more book, and Sammy told me it seems that Boyce had already read the story.

This morning Boyce called me to say he’d dreamed he was Jud again, and this time he was so good he finally got invited to the cast party afterward. When he checked his teeth he had a new chip running up one of his front teeth. He was panicking because there’s nothing he can do about it. As soon as he goes to sleep he can’t control what he dreams anymore than I could control how a Common Merganser flaps its wings (my words, not his). I told him there might be something we can do. Sammy and I are going to spend the night at Boyce’s to try and keep him from dreaming about Oklahoma!, but still making sure he gets some sleep. I’ll report on how things go tomorrow.

Boyce's Favorite Album Cover and My Dad

Boyce asked if I would post an image of his favorite album cover of all time. This means that Boyce listens to this album a lot, though he's not particularly fond of the album. If you ask him
about it he won't even mention the album, but instead just tell you how much Led Zeppelin could destroy the earth if they wanted to. However, Boyce cares more about the art of albums than the music inside, so Glen Phillips' "Winter Pays for the Summer" still gets more attention in his home. It's a painting of two ravens (not crows. Notice the larger bills, stouter necks, and longer tail feathers.) eating from pomegranates. One of the ravens is holding up a pomegranate seed while the other raven looks at him. Sammy said that since pomegranates get used by a whole bunch of religions to represent heaven and ravens are picking at them, the sky is bleak, and the tree's leaves are dying it's a terribly pessimistic painting. He thinks maybe the ravens aren't so much feeding themselves as they are casting lots to see who gets what of the pomegranates. He also thought the first raven stole the seed from the second, and the way the two birds are placed on opposite sides of the pomegranates suggests conflict. Boyce said birds are stupid because there are about five thousand seeds in a pomegranate and all they need to do is just pick one and eat all they want. Either way, we all agree it's a great album cover. And that Zeppelin is like a meteor that could blow up Russia any time it felt like.

One reason I really like the album cover is because it reminds me of the ranches my father would take me to when I was a kid. We would take long drives out to different cattle ranches and we'd get out of the car and just stare at the land. I'd look at the birds while my dad said things like "It's not coming back." There were bunches of crows out there in the trees, and when I asked my dad if he saw the blackbirds, he said those were crows. Not blackbirds, not ravens, he said, crows. He said some crows don't mate so they can help other crows raise their young. Then he'd say he was tired. We'd get in the car and I'd cry about getting fast food and then he'd take me, and I'd spill my pop or throw french fries in his face.

He was a lot older than my mom, and he died when I was just a kid. One of the first times I ever spoke to Rachel I told her about my dad taking me to the ranches, and she said he must have been a really gentle person. Then I said, "I think it's creepy when kids sing religious songs in perfect unison," because I had thought about that earlier in the day and I was so nervous I just blurted out the first thing I could think of.

Sammy Gets Interviewed

Well, Sammy went to his interview at the courthouse posing as Boyce. If you remember correctly, he had challenged himself to use the words "bodacious" and "fetal development" five separate times, and then Boyce (the real one) challenged him to use "bodacious fetal development."

Sammy said when he got to the courthouse he realized he did not want to be selected for the jury. The rest of the people there for the interviews were so magnificently awkward and disturbing that Sammy felt, even with just eight fingers I guess, like "a god." Sammy didn't mind though because he loves people. Even shy strangers end up enjoying his company because he always asks questions that make people want to keep talking. If he has any talent other than reading books and putting the most massive pile of Arby's Horsey sauce on a roast beef sandwich without having any of it drip off, it's knowing what questions people want to hear to get them to keep talking.

He said he was interviewed by a few lawyers that he assumes were from both sides of the case. He thought it would be best to try for a homerun on the first pitch, so when the first lawyer asked if he was enjoying the beautiful day thus far, Sammy said, "If the sun were a baby I bet it enjoyed bodacious fetal development." Nobody knew what to say to him, so he chewed on the corner of his thumbnail to show he was missing fingers.

Every time one of the lawyers explained something to him, he would nod thoughtfully and say, "Bodacious." He said getting five of those was easy. "Fetal development" though was much more difficult. One was already used up on his opening comment, and though he didn't remember every use, he did recall that when one of the lawyers asked him how he felt about slander laws, he said, "It depends a lot on one's fetal development." Another time he switched it to "the developing of a fetus" and hoped that wasn't cheating.

Sammy is pretty sure he's not going to get selected for the jury, but there's always a chance that one side wants a complete basketcase on the jury, especially if the case is particularly hopeless. Who knows, you might get a mis-trial or something if one of the jurors tries to eat the hair of a witness or something.

I Interpret a Dream and Boyce's Family

Worked at the Sleep Center last night. From the utility closet I listened to a woman named O----- F----- (name withheld: she seemed like she had social problems but was unaware of said social problems, and is therefore the kind of person who googles herself every day) tell her dream to Marcie, the attendant who was working last night.

O------- was in a mall where she saw a man with a machine gun sneak in. She rushed into a store where she and a small Asian woman hid among ceramics. As the man walked by with his gun, she realized she couldn't just sit there and do nothing. She grabbed a bat that was apparently available among the ceramics of angels and small boys in overalls "goin' fishin.'" She hit the man with the gun and celebrated that she stopped any crime from happening. A cop though, in what might be described as the ultimate buzzkill, told her that all she managed to do was stop the murder of a woman who was pregnant with a child who would grow up to murder Batman.

It is much more difficult to interpret dreams without reading the people's files, but a promise is a promise. Just hearing the way the woman talked though, she seems to think a lot of herself, as is evidenced by the fact that she a) stopped the mall shooting, and b) felt she was good enough to hide out with Asians. However, there is a fly in the ointment. The women was in a shop of what can only be described as sentimentalized dreck. She wasn't able in her dream to even hide out in a "cool" shop, or even one that pretends to be a "cool" shop like where kids buy shirts with distressed clowns and aliens on them. She also found her most heroic act to be an anti-heroic act by literally allowing the eventual murder of a hero. Clearly, this woman hides a debilitating lack of self-worth behind a thin veil of middle-class sentimentality and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, by telling the dream she has a vague impression that sharing with another (even if it is a stranger) could lead to some realized sense of community. She will either come back for more treatments at the Sleep Center or be dead by her own hand within the week.

Today is the first day that Sammy can go in for an interview at the courthouse, so I'll let you know tomorrow how it went. Sammy called Boyce before he left for the courthouse to make sure he was willing to risk a fine/jail time just to stay out of jury duty, and Boyce told him he couldn't be away from his wife and kid for that long.

Boyce's wife is different. Sammy and I don't mind, though, but other people get in a fit about it. Charlotte doesn't really like to be around other people, though she doesn't mind being around us because we don't ask questions we know she doesn't want to answer. We just let her do her thing, and her favorite thing is getting out blank sheet music and writing the musical notation for everything she hears. Commercials, songs, people humming--she writes it all out on sheet music, and it's always right. I once gave her a cd of bird songs and she loved it because it was so hard for her to do, but she eventually got most of them right, I think. Charlotte would then give all the sheet music to Boyce who would then try to play it on his guitar. Boyce isn't very good on the guitar though, but now their son Boyce Jr. is eight and he's already better than his dad is. So now Charlotte gives the music to Boyce Jr. and he plays it for her.

The first time Rachel met Charlotte she used the s-word around Boyce. She called Charlotte a "savant." I didn't even know what the word meant--I thought it meant a kind of medieval sword, so I made this "swushing" sound and tried to cut everyone's head off with an air sword, which was obviously really inappropriate--but Boyce knew what it meant. He yelled at Rachel that just because Charlotte is good at one thing doesn't mean she's good at other things. Then Boyce shouted at Charlotte to add 150 and 146 and she couldn't do it, and both Charlotte and Rachel started to cry. It got really weird there, and Boyce apologized, and to lighten the mood I went to air-chop everybody's head off again with my savant-sword but Sammy told me to quit before I got revved up.

Chronics at the Sleep Center

We don't get too many regulars at the Sleep Center. Some sleep problems are acute, so people get the problem fixed and don't come back. Other people have chronic problems but after they come here a couple times they realize nothing at the Sleep Center can help them find the merciful joy of oblivion until they confess they slept with their brother's wife, ran over a construction worker in Mexico, or admit that's probably too much pork for one person to consistently ingest.

Like all medical settings though, we do have a few chronic patients who come even though we can't help them. They don't care insurance isn't paying or that Mark and some of the other attendants are making fun of them barely-behind their backs. They just don't want to be alone. One guy told me he was doing research for an article he's writing for the New Yorker, but then he messed his pants in his sleep, so I'm pretty sure he was a crippled alcoholic who needed a friend.

I first started reading people's files at the Sleep Center because of one of these chronic patients. Once, I was mopping the floor and a chronic patient leaned forward on his chair and said, "I bet I could kill you and no one would even care. I've killed people, you know." I didn't know what to say and he just kept staring at me. I thought I better check his file so when I was cleaning I just pulled open the cabinet and looked him up. Turns out he never really killed anyone. He was just a lucid dreamer, so he was having trouble keeping reality straight sometimes. The next time I saw him I touched him on the shoulder and told him not to worry, that he never really killed anyone. He told me to leave him alone and that, instead of bothering him, I should go do horrible, horrible things to my sister. That guy was eventually banned from the Sleep Center because he told Marcie, another attendant at the Sleep Center, that he was going to wear her one day.

From then on I really started to enjoy reading people's files. Sometimes people were messed up so you felt good your life wasn't as bad as theirs, and other times people seemed so hurt, and when you talked to them they were so kind, that you never thought you could feel so strongly for a stranger. I never read Rachel's file, though. Even when she told me I could. She told me I couldn't read any more files, that it wasn't right, and that I could only read one more, and that it would be hers. I said I didn't want to, though.

So I read another person's file instead, and sweet grackle!, that guy was just completely insane.

Behind the Sleep Center

It's been a few days since I've written because the Sleep Center gave me more hours. They know I'm willing to work day and night because I'd just as soon be there as any place else, so sometimes I work days, sometimes nights, and sometimes like last night I finish my shift and just hang out behind the building.

There are some woods behind the Sleep Center, and I built a couple nesting boxes to see if I could get lucky and attract a Great Horned Owl, Rachel's favorite bird. The Great Horned never came, but an Eastern Screech Owl did come, so sometimes after my shift at night, especially when I know Sammy is working the late shift at Arby's (which is just a few blocks away), I'll sit in a chair against the outside of the building and listen until Sammy shows up.

When Sammy does show up during his break, he generally tries to imitate a bird call or scare me by pretending he's two people speaking about how to murder me. Last night he had Boyce with him, and they must not have got their stories straight, because I heard Sammy whisper, "How should we kill him?" and Boyce responded with "Buuuuuurd....I'm a buuuuuurd...Buuuuuurd...," as though birds sing and call by announcing their species in English. And they certainly don't do it to pelvic grinding which Boyce added for no reason.

I pulled out the two extra folding chairs I keep for them behind the dumpster and they sat down with me. A few weeks ago Boyce had got a letter that he was a potential juror, and yesterday afternoon he got a letter saying he needed to go to the courthouse for an interview. Boyce and Sammy decided to switch places, so Sammy is going to the courthouse instead.

This isn't entirely unusual. All three of us have fake drivers' licenses with each others' names. We know each other's social security numbers and mothers' maiden names, so we can impersonate one another in almost any situation. We started doing it in our early twenties when we learned that Sammy had already been impersonating us with fake id's for almost seven years. Sammy told us he started doing it when he was seventeen and would buy beer with an id that said Boyce Lancaster. He wouldn't even drink the beer. He'd sell it to some middle schoolers or, all by himself in the parking lot, he'd throw it at the ground as hard as he could and then jump rope the spinning, spraying can. Once he gave a 24-pack he bought to a crazy homeless man. The homeless guy looked at him weird, and Sammy said he was the devil's messenger, and that although these looked like beers they were actually liquid damnation made of hot sand and splinters, just to see if the guy would still open one. He did, but what really thrilled Sammy, was the homeless guy offered Sammy one, too. Sammy loved that he never could tell how the homeless guy meant it.

Sammy used fake id's with any clerk who previously looked at him wrong because of his missing fingers. He'd never tell the clerk later that on three successive nights he, a seventeen year old kid, was Cyrus Wetherbee, Samuel Clifton, and Boyce Lancaster. He just wanted to prove to himself that the clerk was a fool.

Boyce doesn't want to do jury duty because he's got his wife and kid, and he needs to spend a lot of his time with them. Boyce is married to Charlotte, and his son's name is Boyce Jr. Sammy is happy to get away from Arby's for a while, and he likes to self-dare about how often he can use unusual words in social situations. He's already promised to use the words "bodacious" and "fetal development" five separate times each during his interview at the courthouse. Boyce told him he'd buy him a round if he can find a way to say, "bodacious fetal development" in a sentence. Sammy is very excited to try.

We stayed behind the Sleep Center a little longer to wait for the Eastern Screech Owl to come but it never did.

In Memoriam: American Music

It's not an easy day to blog after yesterday's death. It's unfortunate that only once people have passed do we think about how they've affected all our lives. Whenever I hear about a passing, whether it's of a good person or bad, I always think about what Rachel would say: "To the dead all is forgiven."

June 25, 2009 is going to be remembered in the history of American music. When a person this important passes, you don't forget it. When someone brought so much joy to people's lives on such an intimate level it shouldn't be shrugged off like some old feather. When a person like this spent so much time giving music to people, providing comfort for others' most important and difficult moments, it deserves to have the attention all the media is giving it.

You might ask yourself if all the national attention this is getting might be a bit ridiculous. After all, we didn't all have a personal relationship with such a person, did we? No, but we're celebrating an important person. Let's raise a glass then to Erma Louise Pittman Ellis of Cranberry, West Virginia. To quote her obituary, "She was known in Raleigh and surrounding counties for her music ministry on WOAY TV and Radio and was part of the Skelton Trio. Louise sang with the trio and individually at more than 2,000 funerals over a span of 50 years. She lovingly shared her music to comfort families during their time of sorrow." Certainly someone worth the whole country thinking about.

http://www.register-herald.com/obituaries/local_story_175223217.html

Sammy and Boyce

Ate lunch yesterday with Sammy and Boyce on the curb of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sammy, who works at Arby's and always gets us free food, asked us if we couldn't eat on the curb of the KFC next door so he could say that he went some place different for lunch. It was a nice day. Boyce gave some house sparrows bits of curly fries, even though he knows I don't like that.

At one point Sammy pulled apart a piece of roast beef that hung over his bun, and he held it up in the air. He said he thought it looked like one of those ultrasounds of a baby. He asked Boyce if it was a boy or girl, and Boyce told him it was meat. Sammy asked me if birds eat roast beef. I didn't even respond because I knew Sammy was going to give the roast beef to the sparrows no matter what I said. A few of the sparrows fought over the piece of ultrasound baby roast beef, and one of them flew away with it to the other side of the parking lot. Look at that, Sammy shouted, Baby Alice can fly!

Sammy Clifton is the only person I know who both reads constantly and has lost fingers to a hatchet on two separate occasions (one involved attempting to split a walnut in half, the other was from his brother). He's distantly related to Charles Brockden Brown, who's an old writer. He's tried to make me read a lot, the same way Rachel tried to make me religious a lot. Neither have really stuck, and all I do is make up the details that I can't properly remember. Once I thought Sammy was going to have an aneurysm when I said, "Captain Eh-rab." If you saw all the books he's read you wouldn't think he works at Arby's. But then when you saw he only has eight fingers you might think it all balances out.

I met Boyce when he punched me on the school bus. He climbed on the bus, asked who Cyrus Wetherbee was, and then walked up and slugged me in the side of the neck. Someone told him Cyrus Wetherbee was making fun of his mother. It wasn't true, though. I never even heard the name Boyce Lancaster before. He apologized and asked if I wanted to borrow some of his old Christmas records. That seemed just as weird as punching me in the side of the neck. When I asked him why he punched me there, he told me that it's not right to do wrong to someone's teeth. I think he'd cut a man's heart out before he hurt his teeth. Boyce has an enormous music collection, mostly old records. He listens to the music because he likes the album covers. He says that means he's got some pretty terrible music, but it always looks nice.

When I told Sammy and Boyce I was going to write this blog they thought it was a good idea. I told Boyce I'd link to some of his favorite record covers.

After lunch Sammy went back to work and Boyce gave me a ride home in his locksmith van. Sammy called me later that night to apologize about giving roast beef to the house sparrows. I told him Alice was passing through some sparrow's cloaca as we spoke, and he wouldn't stop laughing. He made me call Boyce and tell him that. Boyce didn't laugh until Sammy said a cloaca was another word for the bird's crapper. It's also the canal the egg passes through, but I didn't want to ruin their fun.