The Screaming Room

We’ve all been hooked while waiting in line at the grocery store. The headlines are in huge point type and there is often an accompanying photo. The concept is outlandish. It’s too bizarre to be believed. The screaming headline is more Barnum and Bailey than news. Yet the eyes wander there and a few of us are even bold enough to pick up the rag and flip it open.

FAT WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO FULLY GROWN MAN!

HUMAN HEAD GROWS IN PUMPKIN PATCH!

U.S. PRESIDENT IS AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL: HERE’S PROOF!

WORLD’S OLDEST WOMAN IS 543 YEARS OLD!  HAD SEX FLING WITH WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE!

GEOLOGIST’S FIND: CENTER OF THE EARTH IS INHABITED BY EIGHT FOOT TALL LESBIANS!

And so on. I love those headlines. As inane as the purported stories may be, you just know that some group of psuedo journalists spent hours rolling on the floor and clutching their sides while coming up with them. Now that’s good work, if you can get it.

I bring it up because in the past two weeks, I’ve been called a yellow journalist, a sensationalist and a tabloid hack, all due to the series of stories on MAINE’S MYSTERY CREATURE! And while I admit the story bloated into something absurd and unmanageable, I’ll defend to the death my judgement in presenting it to the reader for assessment.

Okay, maybe not to the death. I mean, we ARE talking about a dog here. And what’s with throwing around terms like “tabloid hack” as though it’s a bad thing? I’d love to get paid to invent shit like that. I’d never have to worry about correct name spellings or silly things like attribution. Beauty. But my problem is, while I’d love to tackle the stories, I suck at writing headlines. Best if someone with a flair for the concise and dramatic pounded out a flashy headline and then let me create a story about it.

My favorite, as I’ve repeated ad nauseum, has always been BOY TRAPPED IN FREEZER EATS OWN FOOT. I’m kind of a one-hit-wonder. I suspect you clever people are far more gifted at this stuff than I am. I welcome all tabloid headlines, new or recycled. Just for entertainment purposes. Not, by God, because I plan to write a column about this stuff.

From now on, can we refer to the washed out suspect from the Ramsey case as Mark-Friggin-Karr? Or maybe, “that douche bag?” There is just something about that spooky-eyed, loud-mouthed geek that I find loathsome. And I know we’ve batted the Ramsey case around in here a time or two, but now a new conundrum is at hand. What do you do with an obvious pedophile who has confessed to an old child murder but who is not linked to it in any physical way? Do you just drag him out of the jail cell against his protests and throw him back on the street, like an undersized fish tossed back into a pedophile pond? No obstructing justice, creating false alarm, or illegal possession of douche bag characteristics?

Pedophiles are everywhere and they are all despicable. But they come in different forms. You have the slobbering wolf-like rippers who prey on kids because they want to and they maintain secrecy by threatening the victims of their nasty impulses. Then you have the Mark Karrs and Michael Jacksons of the world, men (in a loose sense of the word) who insist they only have a special affinity for tots and they would never harm them in any way.

The Peter Pans of the pedophile world are particularly troubling. They might be camp counselors, little league coaches or teachers. And that’s a real bitch, because there are counselors, coaches and teachers who have a genuine affinity for children that does not involve touching private parts or being touched. These good men and women will always be under at least partial clouds of suspicion because, really. Who among us really trusts anyone around kids these days?

Mark-Friggin-Karr did the world a disservice in many ways. He clouded an already hopelessly murky investigation. He provided false hope for the people who are desperate to see Jon Benet’s killer strung up sooner rather than later. And he further illustrated that child molesters are monsters with human masks, and that monsters prowl every segment of society. When the Halloween movie hosts say “lock your doors, hide your children,” it doesn’t just apply to 90 minutes of Creature Feature any more. That’s real world advice because people like Mark-Friggin- Karr and other mincing, child-hungry lechers undermine the trust, not only of children, but the people who protect them.

Confessing falsely to the rape and murder of a six-year-old doesn’t qualify as free speech, but it doesn’t qualify as a crime, either. Mark-Friggin-Karr will probably take his child desiring ass off to another foreign country and get his teaching career back off the ground. Because he loves the little ones so. Because he understands and identifies with them.

Because he’s a complete and utter douche bag.

TEN THINGS I HATED ABOUT SCHOOL

1. Waking up early. This will always be number one on my list of things I hate. If you’re a naturally late sleeper, few things compare to the hellish sound of an alarm clock reminding you that you have to get out of bed to go some place you detest. Entire childhoods are spent obeying that demonic alarm clock so you can go to school and obey a legion of demonic adults.

2. Fuggin cold. For the most part, I walked to school. But whether your hiking through the snow or waiting for a bus, it’s all part of the same purgatory. You’re subjected to extreme weather in order to get to a place you’d rather not get to.

3. Back to school shopping. You had to study in the middle of vacation to get up to speed with the year’s fashion. Who the hell every decided chamois shirts and those massive, metal belt buckles with the sliding fasteners were cool, anyway?

4. Book covers. I know most of you out there were probably Bob Villa’s of the paper bag book cover. Good for you, Bob. Where the hell were you when I was going through six bottles of glue and 40 bags just to get one half of one book covered. If asked today, I could not cover a book with brown paper if it meant the firing squad.

5. Cafeteria food. I don’t care if you bring a cold lunch or not. You still have to smell cafeteria food. And if you’ve ever been in a jail or prison, you will have noted that the smell there is the same as it was at your elementary school. I’m guessing this is no conicidents.

6. Indoor recess. Oh, sure. You’re going to succesfully cop a feel from that sexy, brainy chick from the third row during indoor recess. There is nothing quite like the smell of 30 or so wet kids trapped inside a classroom that already reeks of chalk dust and construction paper.

7. Gigantic classroom clocks that stretch spacetime. Seriously, those bastards seemed to run backwards some days. Einstein clearly should have created a third theory of relativity to explain the excrutiating pace of classroom time.

8. Valentine’s Day. Remember how you always made a super huge card for the first girl to develop breasts? But gave one of those cheesy, store bought junks to Valerie, the chick who smelled like mustard and who always answered the teacher’s questions and made you look like a tard? But then, when it was go time, you found that the breasts girl gave you one of the store bought junk cards, and so you understood that pain and started to realize how horribly you’d treated mustard reeking Valerie? Hated that.

9. Fitness tests. These things were always interrupting perfectly good gym class activities like dodge ball, floor hockey and kickball. Quick, boy! Climb that rope so we can prove to other countries how physically fit we Americans are? I wanted to smash that guy in the face with one of those red rubber balls.

10. Cursive. Why do we need it? My cursive still sucks, because Becky, the first girl to develop breasts, was always stretching when we were learning how to write it. If anyone has seen my signature, you will note that the two M’s at the end of my name appear as breasts. You can thank Becky for that.

TEN THINGS THAT WEREN’T SO BAD

A. Girls. There was simply no better place to be than school if you were a young man with blossoming curiosities.

B. Putting your head down on your desk as punishment. Golly, what a mean thing to do to a kid. I used to love putting my head down. I’d alternate between sneaking glances at Becky and dozing.

C. Four square. Great game. You could totally favor the girl you had a crush on and smash the ball into the square of guys you didn’t like.

D. Fire drills. Ah, sweet glimpse at freedom. Kind of a tease, though.

E. Hot teachers. I think I had maybe two in my whole school career. Still, the early construction of fantasies made that year very special.

F. Halloween. Strangely, I enjoyed Halloween around the Night of all Nights of the Year. Perhaps it’s because schools are inherently creepy.

G. Spelling Bees. For one reeson or anuther, I was a great spellur. And oddly enuf, this inpressed the gurlz.

H. Bike racks. Man, was anything cooler than riding your bike to school and then locking it up with one of those cheesy chain locks that would open up in a stiff breeze?

I. Snow days. Man! A reason to wish for snow. I haven’t experienced that since.

J. The last day of school. There is absolutely no joy that can equal that of the day of liberation, and just as the weather is turning nice. Cleaning out the desks, turning in books, putting chairs upside down on desks for the last time. Remember that final bell in early June that marked your freedom? It was a precursor to the euphoria you later sought in sex and substance abuse. Sweet. Very sweet.

Decades! I’ve been listening to the Rolling Stones for decades. And though I’m not a rabid fan, I’m fairly familiar with their work. And all my life, I thought Mick was singing “Hey! Hee! Get offa my cloud!” I’ve been singing it that way myself all these years, often loudly and in public. Is it any wonder I am thought a fool? Just today, the error of my ways was pointed out by my wife, who was born maybe a decade after that song hit the charts.

I suck with song lyrics. I have a deep appreciation for words, yet I tend to listen to them phonetically. There is a great LIVE song called “All Over You” which features the line: “Our love is like water…” Only, I sing it the way I hear it. Specifically: “Our love is, like Walter…”

Damn, I’m dumb. When I was a kid (of 25), I thought the line from Dust in the Wind went: “nothing lasts forever but the Windex shine…” Which makes for a great ad campaign but really raunchy song lyrics. And in one of my all-time favorites, Don’t Fear the Reaper, I still sing: “Cesars don’t fear the reaper…” instead of “seasons don’t fear the reaper,” which makes infinitely more sense.

I won’t even get into the way I mangle the lyrics to “Go Ask Alice” or how I still believe the words to Dream On sound like: “sing windmills, sing for the year…” Not to mention how I sing the opening line to Smoke on the Water: “we all came out to mount her…”

Damn, I’m dumb.

It’s become almost taboo these days to express negativity about anything pertaining to 911. But that’s what I’m doing. Specifically, I’m deriding “World Trade Center” as one of the most misdirected, sappy ass pieces of crap to come along this season. No, seriously. Oliver Stone must be taking heaping helpings of estrogen these days. Slap an extreme reality title on this sucker (”Not Without My Husband!) and you’ve got a Lifetime movie. That Valerie Harper and Gerald McCraney never appeared on screen is a damn miracle.

How any one can fail to move the audience with such a horrific subject is beyond me. The film focuses on two men trapped beneath the rubble and their anguished loved ones back at home. The script jumps back and forth between the subterranean crisis and some really mundane scenes involving wives and children of the trapped men. I mean, it really jumps back and forth. It’s like those funny cartoons you draw in a notebook so that action seems to be taking place as you flip the pages. Only, the action in those notebook sketches are a lot more entertaining.

The film provides no sense at all of the larger scale horror of 911. There is no hint that thousands of others died and suffered as well. Just these two men you can’t see down in the dark, and their wives at home fretting about baby names and unfinished kitchen cabinets. Halfway through the movie, horrible as it sounds, you actually start to dislike those wives a little.

I was braced for the unpleasant but important reminder of the terrorists attacks of 2001. But the movie entirely failes to provoke any genuine recollections of the fear and rage. I spent most of the movie inspecting kernels of corn and hearkening back to the day it happened. Me, I was in bed asleep when it happened. I woke up to that mess and spent part of the day half believing I was dreaming.

So, go ahead and tell me where you were when you learned that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit. Tell me eerie stories about how you were supposed to be in New York that day but cancelled because you developed a really nasty corn on your foot. Give me a proper Lifetime title for this movie. Anything. Just don’t tell me you liked it unless you happen to be Oliver Stone. And if you are Oliver Stone: Dude. What happened?

Lately, I find myself longing for my old cabin. I’m not talking about some modern house on a lake somewhere. I’m talking about an honest-to-God cabin, built of old boards stolen from a moving company and nails swiped from somebody’s workshop. A cabin built deep in the woods and constructed in pursuit of all a young man’s ambitions as he toddles into adolsescence. Specifically, girls and beer.
I had several cabins when I was a kid, but the one that stands out is the one we built in a tree behind the armory. It was a prize winner, that one. The boards came from old crates stolen from United Van Lines (the statute of limitations has run out on the theft charge). We had to drag massive crates across a budy road and into the woods behind the armory. We had to brave bees and older kids as we blazed a trail to the building site.
Totally worth it. We set up a retractable ladder, filled the cabin with hay, and built a hidden compartment where beer or magazines could be stashed. We lured girls there at night and generally partied like emporers. Good times, man. Good times. I broke my figurative cherry in that cabin, I’ll have you know.
Some asshat tore the cabin down one weekend when I was away. A lot of good memories got ripped apart and strewn across the forest floor. A lot of good magazines and a few bottles of warm Miller disappeared. The culprits were never discovered. In fact, until the crime is solved, you’re all suspects.

Holy shit, I am looking forty years of age right in the eyeballs. Yup, October will do it; I will be at least at the base of the hill. There are days I already feel over it, and some days I feel under it.

Has it really been twenty-two years since I was eighteen and chomping at the bit to be older? I can remember thinking that twenty was old when I was ten and the same for thirty when I was fifteen. Forty was a milestone where I would have to eat oatmeal every day in order to keep my colon regular. It’s when I would have to bend over and have my prostate poked and hope that my comedian of a doctor didn’t have a fake hand so I wouldn’t feel two hands on my shoulders while his finger was up my butt.

The passage of time has gotten worse since my kids were born. Ten years has passed in the space of a day or so as far as how fast my kids have grown up. Diapers and midnight feedings yesterday, puberty tomorrow.

I can recall fighting bedtime when I was my son’s age and didn’t think a damn thing of staying up for three days straight when I was in the military, on liberty. What the hell, I got paid every two weeks, I was floating through the world at the expense of the taxpayers, and I knew I might never get to do it again. Now I have to get my beauty rest: my normally ebullient demeanor is far from beautiful if I don’t.

A lot of the old farts I scoffed at when I was eighteen have turned out to be pretty fucking smart about a lot of things. My kid’s ears don’t work any better than mine did when I was their age.

Gravity and time are vicious allies, too: Anything that was up high at eighteen probably ain’t at forty!

But what really scares me is turning fifty, because that’s the age when you’re supposed to get your first colonoscopy. It’s not the thought of the camera in the ass, as you’re given sedation for that, but the bowel prep.

See, you’re given this stuff that literally takes all the shit out of you. I am full of shit, I like my shit, and I am scared to death that I will simply vanish down the toilet.

A FRANK AND EARNEST LIST OF FOOD I HATE.

Onions: they sneak up on you. You’re happily chewing a mouthful of spaghetti when you bite into something that feels like it might be a human fingernail.

Peppers: same as onions, texture-wise, except they also taste like something poisonous from somebody’s ass.

Peas: gushy little bastards. I think peas are really just extremely orbical boogers.

Green beans: I have a motto: if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a bean. Seriously. Baked beans, lima beans, jelly beans, Mexican jumping beans, the Beans of Egypt. Hate them all.

Carrots: gushy and they taste like rabbit poop. I assume.

Pastrami: it’s a mystery. I love almost all forms of meat (place homosexual joke here). Pastrami, though, tastes to me like the bottom of a dead man’s foot.

Raisins: bat testicles!

Creamed corn: who the hell thought of creaming perfectly good corn? It’s like getting the goods after it’s been digested and passed through one orifice or another.

Mushrooms: it’s like eating something that grew on a sock.

Moxie: Not really food, but still. It’s like your grandpa spit in his medicine and then asked you to drink it.

Black olives: love the green ones, hate the black ones. Has nothing to do with race.

Venison: Deer meat tastes like Bambi’s rectum.

Pea soup: God awful! Chalky, foul tasting and outright vile. If given a choice, I would rather eat that shit the Exorcist chick spewed across the room.

Calamari: what is that shit, anyway? Squid? Octopus? Tastes like afterbirth.

Sweet potato: looks and tastes like Carrot Top, the comedian.

Rye bread: any bread that’s not white cannot be trusted. Possibly made of dog.

Oranges: all the work of peeling those stupid things and they bland and joyless. Probably similar to biting into the back of somebody’s eyeball.

Hot Pockets: nasty! I think they mush all of the above ingredients into some grotesque pocket and sprinkle the whole thing with belly button lint from a fat guy.

FOOD I LIKE BUT REALLY SHOULDN’T

Vienna sausage: sure it looks like a truncated penis and has the consistency of same. But I’m good for four or five of these suckers before I start hurling.

Baloney: there are times when I’d rather have baloney than filet mignon. Which is funny because I have absolutely no idea what or who baloney is made of.

Spinich: with butter and vinegar. Plus, I get to bang Olive Oyle.

Fiddleheads: they grown in swamps and I think moose pee on them. Absolutely delicious.

Onion rings: very strange, I know. I hate onions, but totally dig onion rings. I’m very enigmatic.

Steamed clams: one word: scrotum.

Ramen noodles: I still call them Oodles of Noodles. Poor man’s linguini.

Lobster: it’s basically an overgrown crab louse.

Sliced lime: with salt. So good, I once at half my finger while devouring a slice. The finger tasted like Vienna sausage.

I love beer. Not the fancy imported stuff that comes in corked bottles. Not the spiced crap, like cinnamon or pumpkin flavored beer. I like an unpretensious brew, something that looks like piss with a fat head of spit. Even the scorned brews work for me. Hand me a Schlitz and I’ll drink it. Nasty Ganset? No problem. Schaeffer? Gladly. It’s the one to have when you’re having more than one.

I’ll drink your Stroh’s, your Old Milwuakee and even it’s bastard brother, Milwuakee’s Best. I’ll drink your Busch, your Miller, your Heffen-freakin-Reffer. The only mainstream beer that ever made me cringe was Meister Brau. But you know what? I’ll choke it down. Five or ten, even. After you get the first one, it tastes like ambrosia.

I come from a long line of hard beer drinkers on my paternal side. And I have a strange childhood memory of the lot of them sitting around a table, drinking beer out of pilsners and singing a goofy song. It went a little something like this. Someone give me a C minor?

In heaven there is no beer

That’s why we drink it here

Cus when we’re gone from here

All our friends will be drinking all the beer.

Then they went out to the backyard to fight and moon strangers. Man, I love beer.

No matter what power tool you bring into the bedroom, you just can’t seem to satisfy your wife. Your boyfriend keeps requesting that you come home dressed as his third grade teacher and you don’t know how to feel about it. Your son appears to have an unhealthy obsession with barnyard animals and you need professional help.

You could turn to the Advice Diva or that insipid couple at Sexcetera, but what are they going to do for you? Wise-cracking know nothings, is what they are. It’s time to call in a pro. It’s time to unleash the dogs of naughty.

For those who don’t know Bulldog, here are the quick facts. She’s a feisty redhead, appears to enjoy matters of carnal quandary, and she can drink most of us under the table. To my knowledge, there is no subject that can make the lady blush. There is talk that Bulldog has designed a vibrator with such magnificent pleasure nodes, penises may be obsolete altogether in the very near future. Bulldog is a sexual intellectual of the highest order.

So, I urge you to unburden yourself. No, not that way, fiend. Zip your damn pants up. What I mean is, you should feel comfortable opening up to Lady Bulldog and seeking her guidance in all things sexual. Need a fancy new position to wow that stewardess? Ask Bulldog. Need a home cure for an itchy affliction? Ask Bulldog. Need to know the laws on sodomy and animal abuse from state to state? Ask Bulldog and strengthen your sexual muscle.

DISCLAIMER: Bulldog is not a medical expert. If you have items or animals lodged in a hard to reach orifice, contact your local hospital for emergency help. Pervert.