The Screaming Room

Family gatherings have got to be one of the most stressful events a person can go through. First off, I don’t know half the people at these damn gatherings. I didn’t as a kid, and it’s only gotten worse since, as the children have grown up and have children of their own.

We all have relatives like these: the pretentious ones who think their poop shall not eminate odiferous gases, the lecherous uncle who always made you feel violated whether he touched you or not, the aunt who was gaudily dressed and heavily perfumed who just had to pinch your cheeks, the ‘cool’ cousins who were hanging out at the back of the barn, smoking something and looking glassy eyed and laughing when you ran away terrified after being offered a hit. There were also the cousins who had long hair, dirty clothes and looked like they needed to see a dermatologist for the acne on their faces.

I didn’t understand the rules of those gatherings but I do know I suffered mightily for breaking them. “My dad says you’re nothing but a stinky old fat drunk and it’s a wonder you’re not passed out under the table since it’s an open bar” are not words the fat, cheek pinching aunt needs to hear. Hell, it’s not like we were on her Christmas card list to begin with. And to be perfectly honest, I think the rules of these gatherings suck, anyways.

People start sniping at each other the instant they get there and the cliques start to form. “My God, she’s half his age! Do you think he can still get it up?” or “Why wear anything?” better yet, “You’d better keep her away from so and so or the cops will be here to arrest them for screwing on the lawn.” How about, “The nerve of that woman, she stole that dish from me last time we did this, now she’s written her name on it so she can take the damn thing home.”

Then you’d go out and make nice-nice with these people and act like they were the Lost Tribe of Isreal Come A-Calling. I asked my father once the meaning of hypocrisy and he said, “The way we act at reunions. Now shut up and don’t say anything the rest of the Goddamn day!”

Extended families are a strange beast, that’s for sure. You have unknown people tromping through your house and using your bathroom, little kids running around with stuff from the drawer you thought only you and your wife had keys to. And you know there are people that came armed with large trash bags to take away the left over food and get snappy when someone takes one elbow too many of macaroni because that one piece is the difference between life and death for a member of the family.

Yup, there’s definitely a comparison between weddings, funerals, and reunions. I welcome your horror stories.

After a non-stop week of boobs, boobs, and more boobs, it’s high time we switched gears. And switched sexes. Let’s talk dick.

Oh wait, that’s not the dick you were all thinking, is it? Actually, Bobbie, God bless her little heart, sent me great pictures on the subject of dick. Now that girl knows her dick, or at least where to find great pictures. She had short dick, long dick, hard dick, soft dick. You name it, it was there. Apparently, dick is king in Asian countries. (Notice I didn’t say Orientals, Weasel, I know they are rugs)

I want to talk about all of the myths that surround the dick. Could it be true that men with big hands, big feet or big ears be better endowed that those with small feet, hands and ears? And what about the myth size doesn’t matter? Check out www.sexinfo101.com/kb_penissize_2.shtml and come back and tell me what you learned.

My buddy and I saved up for weeks to pay for the magical, elusive drug known as Spanish Fly. The older kid we got it from assured us it would drive our girlfriends wild. We forked over the dough and scurried away with a packet of this mystical stuff. Soon, we reasoned. Soon our playful but hesitant girlfriends would be all over us like big hair on a porn star. Turns out we were right, too. But it had nothing to do with the mysterious powder. The very night we intended to spring it on the damsels, they got into the Khalua and worked themselves into a pubescent frenzy without any additional help.

All’s well that ends well was the overall theme of the evening.

Sooner or later, we gave up on the idea of Spanish Fly altogether. We worked on things like smooth pickup lines and bathing in order to entice the girls. That powder, we figured, was probably another urban hoax designed to lure money out of horny teens. Who wanted to be a part of that?

Turns out the stuff is legit. I just stumbled upon a Wikipedia entry in which it is explained that Spanish Fly is actually derived from an emerald green beetle that features a chemical that irritates the skin of animals. But before you go scurrying to get some for the frigid object of your desire, take a gander at the last line of the write-up. And good luck hooking up, you horny bastard.

The crushed powder of Spanish fly is of yellowish brown to brown-olive color with iridescent reflections, of disagreeable scent and bitter flavor. Spanish fly, or cantharides as it is sometimes called, is often given to farm animals to incite them to mating. The cantharides excreted in the urine irritate the urethral passages, causing inflammation in the genitals. For this reason, Spanish fly has been given to humans for purposes of seduction. It is dangerous since the amount required is minuscule and the difference between the effective dose and the harmful dose is quite narrow. Cantharides cause painful urination, fever, and sometimes bloody discharge. They can cause permanent damage to the kidneys and genitals.

“I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see,” said the horrified woman, appalled at seeing a round, firm breast on the cover of a magazine.

Trust me, woman. There is no breast in the world your husband and son don’t want to see. Men and boys spend 95 percent of their time trying to get a glimpse of boob. If it weren’t for the possibility of glimpsing strange breasts, most males could not make it through the day. The chance of mammarian serendipity is one of the primary motivations for male survival.

Frankly, I don’t know how I feel about this storm of outrage. While I am among those males who enjoy an unexpected glimpse of boobage, there is something shocking when the boob in question happens to be feeding a small child. It is the epitome of conflict. The male thought pattern goes like this: “Hey! A naked boob! I’m going to call my friends! But wait! There’s a small child attached to it! I’m not calling anybody! But I’m still looking!”

But enough out of me. Behold the controversial C cup.

NEW YORK - “I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third.

These readers weren’t complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine — yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains greater support from the government and medical community.

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.

Mark Twain once said: “There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It’s dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.”

The issue has come up a lot lately in the newsroom. But there is no moral debate on the streets about the proper use of profanity. You are either in favor of cussing or you are not.

Witness a confrontation between an older woman and a teen outside a downtown store. A string of profanity crackles through the calm summer air like the tip of a whip. This nasty oration was uttered by one who clearly has been trained in the mystical art of Obscenity Fu.

“Do you have to talk that way?” said the other, more puritan party. “It’s not appropriate.”

Now, if you’re assuming that it was the older woman who chastised the teen about his potty mouth, guess again. It was the gray-haired lady who sung a song of swearwords and the wholesome lad who asked her to stop.

You just never know. Gutter talk is learned behavior and it stretches back to the time of cavemen, when a primitive man whacked his thumb with a club and shouted a nasty oath. Primitive birds took wing. Primitive women blushed and pressed hairy hands to their lips. Nasty Neanderthal knew that he was onto something.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s a right way and a wrong way to swear. At a poker game, working on the car, in a street fight, watching the Kansas City Royals beat up on the Red Sox … all perfectly acceptable conditions for letting loose. At your daughter’s wedding, a funeral or a job interview, not so acceptable. And you learn that the hard way.

Me, I’m a profanity moderate. I have argued in the past that mild swearing is an integral part of communication. In the proper context, a lukewarm turn of phrase can add emphasis to a point, illustrate your state of mind or add texture to an otherwise bland sentiment.

Swearing can make you feel better. Twain wisely observed that the use of profanity can provide a level of relief not attained even through prayer.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide examples of good swearing and bad swearing in this forum. The Sun Journal takes a fairly rigid approach to keeping possibly potential could-be-taken-wrong words and phrases out of their pages. Just try infusing a “darn” or a “friggin’” into your copy and you could be banished to the weather beat, which will make you swear more than ever.

Recently, I was castigated for using the word “poop” in a piece of writing that required a description of the foul stuff that comes out of dogs. Call me crazy, but poop is a mild, almost playful word. More scientific terms, like defecation or excrement, look and sound much more descriptive when discussing that kind of substance.

More recently, a brood of Sun Journal editors hung upside down in their cave to discuss a quote I had included in a piece about my recent travels with goofy shoes. In that piece, a woman commented that I was apparently gifted with a great deal of courage to have embarked while shod in such embarrassing fashion.

Only, the woman expressed herself far more colorfully. And while discussing the matter, one of the editors began chirping and batting his wings to alert the others that he was not pleased with that quote. Oh, no. Not pleased at all. And so, I had to paraphrase that quote in a manner that would imply exactly what the woman on the street said without actually using her words.

Would it surprise you to learn that I don’t always agree with editors?

I also was taken to task for attempting to use a two-part word that implies a person is of limited intelligence and also resembling somebody’s backside. It’s a word you hear all the time on “That 70’s Show” and various other places. And I think the word was eventually allowed. So, why am I being a dumbass and skirting it now?

I never had my mouth washed out with soap when I was a kid. I hung out in pool halls where masters of cussing demonstrated the most mouth-dropping feats of profanity gymnastics I’ve seen, before or since. I learned the value of vulgarity from the best.
Even so, I don’t descend into gutter talk all that often. Driving through Auburn will tease obscenities from me because driving through Auburn is inch-by-inch locomotion from H-E-double-pogo-sticks. Insomnia will cause me to unleash, because I believe swearing coaxes sleep-inducing melatonin from the pineal glands. It’s all very scientific.

I’m not foul-mouthed by nature. And I know that someone needs to man the gate and make sure true filth does not find its way to the eyes of those who would be offended.
But I also bristle at the suggestion that all forms of off-color speech are bad and the people who speak it are derelicts.

As the brilliant Mark Twain once said: “When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.”

That Twain was one smart son-of-a-bitch.

Isn’t there a joke about a hooker and a cockatoo? If there isn’t, there should be. Unfortunately, I’m too distraught to come up with one. I mean, I never had a pet bird, myself. But if I did have one, I probably wouldn’t bring it in the car with me. Unless I had a yen for baked exotic bird. But you know me. I prefer the roast duck, with Mango salsa.

It’s not clear whether a 25-year-old bird owner enjoyed the movie she watched Saturday in Fredericksburg. But it is clear, police said, that her pet cockatoo didn’t enjoy waiting for her to watch it. The bird died after being left in a hot car outside Regal Cinemas in Central Park. The owner, Donia Monique Brooks of Stafford, was charged with cruelty to animals, a misdemeanor that carries a potential 12-month jail sentence.

According to police, moviegoers spotted the bird in distress as they were going into the theater. They told an employee, who came outside, saw the bird and called police about 5:20 p.m. When an officer arrived, the cockatoo was lying in a cage in the back seat. The officer quickly got the car door open, but the bird was already dead. Police said the temperature at the time was 90 degrees and the heat index was 97. The windows in the car were all rolled up except for the driver’s window, which was open about an inch.

An anonymous writer sent this picture and insisted I post it. He or she has a point. There’s something strange going on in this couple’s version of summertime fun. I’ll leave it to you whackos to sort it all out. Feel free to write hilarious and wildly inappropriate captions for each of the players.

Okay, there you have it. My worst bee encounter of the season. I was sitting on the hammock in the backyard, reading a riveting story about changes to the sex offender registry. A bee flew around my head and I swatted it very manly like. You should take note of the manly gesture because you shan’t see it again in this narrative.

A moment later, the bastard appeared right in front of my head and all manliness disappeared. I tried to blow it away and swatted at it again, but this time with outright desperation. I leaned back in the hammock, spilled coffee on my chest, and then fell over backwards.

I was recovering nicely, coffee still in one hand, when the metal frame of the hammock collapsed down on top of me. For a good ten seconds, I scrambled to free myself from the framework like a fly struggling in a spider web. Meanwhile, the fuzzy little terrorist was still circling. I swear, I heard the winged prick giggling at me. I ran, not manly at all, into the house and the little peckerhead followed me the whole way. Once inside, I got in front of the mirror and did a little pirouette in an attempt to examine my back. In doing so, I spilled more coffee, down my leg this time. Very embarassing, all of it. But hey! I didn’t get stung.

I don’t know what it is about those furry bastards. I’ve been stung a few times and I wasn’t impressed with the pain. A standard bee inflicts about as much agony as blown out match. Nothing to it. And yet I’ll still subject myself to this kind of trauma and humiliation in order to distance myself from one of them.

What thinks you? Am I a victim of evolution? A sufferer of some deep, pschological disorder? A simple self-perservationist? A big fat sissy?

Ah, I got your stinger right here.

So I’m starting my seasonal panic. July is on its way out and all we have left is August. September is right on the heels of that and beyond it, cold dark death. The death of snow banks, penis shrinking cold, and night that falls at 3 p.m.

Few people are more irritating than me when late summer desperation begins. Every day must involve some form of recreation involving the sun. Every meal must be cooked on the grill, even if it’s cold cereal. I refuse to go to bed because summer nights are the best, and I won’t wear long pants even at a funeral.

Tick-friggin-tock, people. In six weeks, we could have a frost. It will be time to put away window fans and turn on the heat. Days will get woefully shorter and the beaches will be too cold to swim in. Instead of the sweet smell of mown grass, you’ll get the scrotum crawling sound of shovels scraping down to pavement. Instead of drives with the windows down, you’ll have white knuckle excursions on tires that slip on snow slicked roads.

As the terminall morose Jim Morrison said: “Morning found us calmly unaware/noon burned gold into our hair/at night we swam the laughing sea/when summer’s gone… Where will we be?”

I need more time. I need to embrace summer as if we were drunken lovers. I need a goddamn vacation.

Which I will get starting next weekend. Heading north, my friends. Gonna swim naked, sleep in a tent and drink a mile of Pabst Blue Ribbon. For that week, the blog will be taken over by a mystery administrator who will probably cause barfights and bodily mishaps. Prepare yourselves. And if you have any burning thoughts you want to share, send them to me and I’ll pass them along to be posted in my absence. Deviant sexual confessions are welcomed.

A buddy sent this to me today because he wasn’t around to flash these obscene gesture in person. Now that’s committment.

So, I’m sitting in my car at a traffic light at dusk. My hands are placed neatly at ten and two on the steering wheel and I’m preparing to proceed in a safe and responsible fashion once the light turns green again.

A car pulls up to my left. It’s one of those decked-out cars, with the tinted windows, dazzling stickers and dual whatever on the back. The stereo is cranked and the car bounces up and down like an inner city carnival ride.

Several young men are staring at me from inside the car. They have bandannas all over the place, oversized basketball jerseys and baseball caps tilted at every angle allowed by physics. Just as the light turns green, the badass dude in the passenger seat speaks to me.

“You know,” he said, all low and menacing. “Smoking is bad for you.”

My friends, I was rattled. Not because of this new revelation that cigarettes may contain carcinogens and presents other health hazards. But because the badass in the car had said something I was completely unprepared for.

I hate to say it, people. But when it comes to the ugly exchanges that occasionally pass between people, predictability is the rule of the road. When you cut off someone in traffic, you can pretty much count on what he will say to you. He will say: “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, moron?” Because that’s what his daddy taught him to say. And his granddaddy before him.

There is a very sensitive gauge standing somewhere in Denver, Colo. Its only function is to measure the number of times a certain insult is flung across America. Just recently, the line: “Why don’t you learn how to drive!” was screamed for the one billionth time. They had fireworks to mark the occasion.

I’m not saying we are predictable by nature. If that were so, I would have nothing to do on those long, lonely jaunts around pristine Lewiston. People do unpredictable things all the time. No gauge anywhere, no matter how sensitive, can possibly predict the number of stupid things somebody will do downtown.

But when the heat is on, and an angry person is forced to express himself, the old chestnuts are always just too close to resist. It’s the same on the bathroom walls, or on the scarred bricks in the back alleys. What’s the first thing you see written in those places? That’s right. It’s my name and telephone number.

But the very next thing you can count on finding is that one word: the one nasty word that has been dirty since it was invented by primitives who scrawled it in caves. The mother of the four-letter-word can be found scratched onto library tables, spray painted on the sides of buildings, written in pencil on telephone poles.

Millions of people every day, given one chance to deliver their views to the word, choose that one word over and over. The world is their canvas, yet all they can muster with the pencil, the magic marker or the chalk is that one word. The word is so ubiquitous and widespread now, it may be the first thing extraterrestrial see when they first visit the planet in 2017. The E.T.’s will look at each other, scratch their tentacles and say: “Fuck?”

Behold the middle finger. Such a commonplace gesture, it is believed to date back to the year 1415 when one Viking ship rammed another. Yet billions use it every day, and you don’t need the Denver gauge thingy to verify that.

The middle finger really means nothing anymore. The idea of any such gesture made in anger is to set a person back and make him feel your rage. But the average kid has seen the one-finger salute a hundred times by the time he is 9 years old. It has lost its effectiveness through sheer overuse.

The next time some yahoo steals your parking space, try jamming your thumbs up your nostrils and wiggling your ears. You will look ridiculous. Your wife will crawl back in the car and hide behind the seat. But that gesture will cause the focus of your ire more genuine unease and confusion than any cliché finger ever could. It could possibly keep him awake that night.

And so the kid with the public health warning at the stop light somewhat pleased me because he said something I didn’t see coming. And none of it really matters much, because exchanges like these are small disruptions to your day.

The sad part is that we have locks on our doors, court systems and armies because, when it comes down to the serious stuff, the deadly stuff, that’s when people start to get inventive.