So what I’m really saying is that this post is leftover leftovers –
kind of like stale reheated hash.
Sound appetizing?
I’m guessing that some of you who stumble onto this post have not
dedicated your lives to reading the hundreds of posts that preceded
it, so maybe some of these pics might look fresh and new to you.
At least they won’t be cute. Cute was last week. These are the
un-cute reusals from the reuse folder.
Un-cute includes scary.
This carved pumpkin is disturbing, but how about...
A Rambo Queen Elizabeth? Or...
A new visitor at your doggie door.
Even tree can spook you.
This one doesn't surprise me. I've always been wary of Ronald McDonald
For those who
feared chapter eleven ended last Friday, fear not! Chapter 11 ended,
but eleven lives on. And with such semantic garbage comes a flicker
of hope for our protagonist, Elmer who pretty much blew his chance
for happiness with the lovely Ono.
Chapter Eleven
Desperate Male Insecurity
Over the millennia I have observed odd things about how the genders
interact. I will not attempt to define what women think or want as
that would require far more millennium than I have lived for me to
understand, but I have come to a basic understanding about us men.
Men want to eat what they want when they want it; they want to have
sex with who they want when they want it, and otherwise they want to
be left in peace to watch mindless entertainment – jousting, the
dog and cat fighting, or the neighbor’s wife undressing in front of
an open window.
In short, the male mechanism is simple and gratification oriented –
a very efficient mental machine – most of the time.
One might think that due to male simplicity that all of the great
innovations and advances in society would have been developed by
women who are, at the very least, more complicated.
But it’s not true. Many, if not the majority of innovations and
advances were developed by men. The reason for this is the most
powerful, least understood, and clearly least respected dynamism of
human history: Desperate Male inSecurity.
Desperate Male inSecurity, or DMS™
is responsible for the lion’s share of changes in human living –
both good and bad. The scratchwing, for instance was created by
Horace N. Scratch on the coast of Pogo.
Horace was a trader in coal dust. Coal dust gathering,
consolidation, and merchandising is usually a painstaking and
solitary profession. It also tends to clog the nose. For this
reason, coal dust traders were, as a group, inveterate nose pickers –
or at least they were if inveterate means what I think it means. If
it doesn’t, then coal dust traders were not inveterate nose
pickers, but they sure picked their noses a lot, because every spec
of coal dust dreams, from it’s early days as a little spec, to
someday settle down in a spacious human nostril, and maybe raise a
couple of…”
I’ll spare you.
Horace’s problem was that he wasn’t nearly as solitary as was the
rule for coal dust traders – or at least he didn’t want to be.
Horace was cursed, (by coal dust trader standards,) with
non-repulsive features, and a personality that bordered on
companionable.
“That boy will never make it big in coal dust,” said his Uncle
Scrofulous, and Uncle Scrofulous needed only point to
Karen-Judy-Joan-Dusty Carpenter-Collins-Baez-Springfield-Blondie as
the reason why. You see, in spite of the fact that Horace was a less
than successful coal dust trader, Karen------ didn’t find him
immediately repugnant. As a matter of fact, she might have had
serious interest in the guy except for one thing – you know - the
nose thing.
“I’d never give up a healthy nose picking for any dolly,” said
Uncle Scrofulous, who like most coal dust traders, had done his
procreation through Speedies Mail Order procreation service, which
may have explained why Horace’s cousin, Sniff looked a bit like an
anteater.
But Horace had heart-fire for Karen-Judy-Joan-Dusty, which is a
dangerous thing to have around so much coal dust, and as a result, he
developed that most powerful and dangerous of all creative forces –
Desperate Male inSecurity – DMS™.
The problem was to keep his gnarly fingers out of his nostrils, and
so Horace began wearing wool gloves. He knew that wasn’t working
when the tiny dust families started dressing their specks in tiny
wool sweaters. He tried keeping his hands in his pockets, and ended
up having surgery to remove a blue jean rivet from his septum, (which
became a short-term fashion statement in art schools and
snake-handling religious sects.)
Finally, in desperation, Horace attached a wood frame around his neck
to keep his hands away. This simple device made a rich man out of
Uncle Scrofulous, who sold the idea to the Shackles weight-loss
company.
It also began Horace’s journey to a pick-free life. In the early
days, he bruised his knuckles against the wood frame, and grunted
with frustration at the population explosion of dust and specks
populating his nostrils. The knocks and grunts reverberated through
the frame creating interesting and not unpleasing sounds.
Then one day, while coal dust buying and needing his hands free,
Uncle Scrofulous carelessly placed his horickvock on top of Horace’s
neck frame. I don’t need to tell you how a horickvock responds to
knocks and grunts, but within the confines of Horace’s ingenious
frame, the horickvock mutated Horace’s knocks and grunts into…
Music.
This was a foreign concept to the coal dust trading community, and
rich Uncle Scrofulous feared it might be some religious thing, but
Karen-Judy-Joan-Dusty knew music when she heard it, and knew Horace
for the musical savant that he was.
They lived happily for three months until Horace was swept away by a
moose of unknown gender and never heard from again.
But the music that Horace and KJJD created was a sensation that
lasted three or four times the usual end-by date that traditionally
limit sensations. More importantly, they accidentally created a
musical genre known for its excessive use of the scratchwing, and a
coal-filled nasal quality to the vocals.
Was I any different than Horace? Well, I hoped I was, but one thing
we had in common – Desperate Male inSecurity, DMS™.
And I knew only one place where desperate male insecurity could
create the kind of help I needed.
The school of amazing stuff.
Will Elmer be
able to return to the school of amazing stuff? Will he find
something he needs to save his budding relationship with Ono? Will
he even understand what he finds without Dirk to guide him?
Why am I asking
you these questions? I wrote this silly parody; you’d think I’d
have a clue what’s ahead.
One thing’s
for sure. We’ve had chapter 11 and chapter Eleven. There can’t
be any more 11/Eleven left, can there?
Again, I’m
asking you? We’ll just have to discover what there is to see next
Friday.
Sometimes villains just have to sell it - from Phineas and Ferb.
Since I started this blog in 2013, I’ve maintained a file of
pictures I’ve used in the blog. One of the folders in that file is
labeled “Re-use.” A few of the graphics in re-use have been
re-used, such as the excerpt banner and the shrugging question mark
that I frame the Dirk Destroyer passages in each Friday.
But most of the re-use stuff just sits there. So today and next
Tuesday I will re-use the re-usals, or whatever the occupants of the
said folder should be called. So how do I split the pictures? Let's do it cute
and less cute.
Okay, that's actually me. I might have been wearing a mask - hard to tell, but the Pop Tarts are very cute.
You think Pop Tarts aren't cute?
Changing your tune, now? Baby animals do that.
When they're on parade.
When they're afraid.
When they're asleep.
Even when they get pushy.
And some animals never grow up.
Just like humans. All babies are cute.
Though some act strange.
And maybe a little creepy.
Alright, enough of this guy.
But cuteness comes in all ages.
Some times it's a mind set.
Even a great mind set.
And non-traditional fashionistas.
Like these two friends of mine from up north.
And the head of their secret police. Too much cuteness. One more picture.
To drive this post home.
And now, in honor of Super Tuesday, A little Democrat Bad Lip Reading.
Last week we
began the endless Chapter 11 of Dirk Destroyer’s Less Destructive
Brother. This week we reach the end… or do we?
The answer is –
kinda.
Last week
Elmer, the bland and helpless hero of this saga was chatting
semi-romantically with Ono, who clearly wanted something from him in
spite of an age difference of several thousand years.
“So,” she asked, “the school is full of these great teachers
who will teach you anything you want to learn?”
“That would make sense, but I didn’t run into any teachers
there.”
“Other students?”
“No other students,” I said, “unless you count Dirk.”
“So how do you learn?”
“From the building. There are switches and dials, and other such
devices all over the school. You shouldn’t move any of them unless
you know what it will do – most of them won’t budge for me
anyway.”
“So you can fly?” she asked, and I knew what she was thinking,
why didn’t I fly up and grab Jonma Claim when he was thrashing
around.
“I can’t fly,” I said. “I haven’t learned how. I can’t
control animals, or stop time, or any of hundreds of other things
that must be in that building. I can make dirt jump off my clothes;
I can get nutrients from the soil, or gather them into algae bars. I
can do a few other, simpler things, but nothing flashy.”
“Can you stop Lustavious from banishing you to oblivion?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea how Light Bringers do that.
Every time the Light Bringer banishes Dirk, I’ve been there to
watch. It’s different every time. They say something, or do
something, and suddenly, he’s gone.”
“So if you don’t know how…” she didn’t finish her sentence.
“It’s a bit like the school, I guess.”
“I see,” she said.
Neither of us said anything for a while. Our cigars got shorter, and
as they shortened, I realized that my moment alone with her was
coming to an end.
“So All Bore made me an offer,” she said.
“An offer?”
“He saw that Lustavious was…”
“After you?”
She blushed. “I guess that’s right. He said I could go with him
and that with all of his wealth and international prestige, he could
protect me from Lustavious.”
“Oh,” I said brilliantly.
“Things didn’t work out with his first wife. He was a bit fuzzy
about why.”
“Wait,” I said. “He made you that offer in front of
Lustavious, and everyone else?”
“They’re all asleep,” she said. “Well, it’s kind of hard
to tell about Jon.”
“The Jonma Carry?”
“He prefers Jon. Anyway, All Bore made me the offer, and I thought
that maybe…”
“Maybe what?” I asked.
“Well maybe if you could shush Lustavious or maybe whollop him with
tinkle whizz pop ping…”
Ono looked like she was about to hyperventilate. I took her hand and
her breathing slowed. “You thought I could save you?” I asked
“We could save each other,” she said tentatively, hopefully, and
at that moment I realized that she was right. I needed saving as
much as she did.
“I…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You could go to that school and figure out how!” she said. “We
could be together.”
Silence. It wasn’t complete silence. All Bore was still talking,
though I have no idea why. Maybe it was one of those dream talking
things practiced by the Sublimin people.
My throat was dry, and it wasn’t because of the cigars. She was
asking me to be the hero, the guy who comes through and makes things
happen. I’d never been that guy. Dirk was that kind of guy, if
you count upsetting everyone in power as coming through and making
things happen.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Oh.” She didn’t say anything else until our cigars burned
down near our fingertips. “What do I do now?” she asked.
“You push the lit end into the earth and grind it out.”
I watched as she ground out her cigar, and watched my hopes die at
the same time. I finally knew how incomplete my life was and now I
would be going into oblivion to contemplate that forever.
I watched her walk away. Swampy’s head swiveled all the way so he
looked me in the eye.
“Idiot!” he squawked.
And he was right. I got angry – not at Swampy, but at me.
And so
(seemingly) Chapter 11 ends with our protagonist giving up on the
love of his incredibly long life. His chance has past, the chapter
is written. What can save his sorry heart now?
DMI
What is DMI?
Come back next Friday and find out.
Poor Elmer, He never had an older adviser like Luke did.
