I got home and dumped a can of tuna into a tupperware, put pesto sauce on it, chopped a cucumber in it and then added a scoop of buffalo wing sauce to give it some punch.  That’s when it struck me I’d stumbled upon a new TGI Friday’s appetizer: Zesty Pesto Buffalo Wings.  When they start making them, I might start eating there but probably not.

Because what I created was so marketably nasty, I wasted a few minutes of my life dreaming up more:

Tuna stuffed cherry peppers smothered in cheesy chipotle dipping sauce

Zesty garlic fried Velveeta balls smothered in house made ranch dressing

Halibut logs with cheesy chipotle dipping sauce

Beer nuts, beer battered and fried to golden perfection with three kinds of dipping sauce: Thai peanut, golden artichoke, or creamy shrimp and pepper.

“Captains sliders”, three mini beef patties topped with coconut popcorn shrimp, smothered in thousand island dressing cradled in a cheddar biscuit.

Zesty pesto buffalo wings with Alfredo dipping sauce

Sizzling oil skillet and bread sticks

Big Western roundup: three thick fingers of chuck steak flame broiled, smothered in nacho sauce, and served up on a pile of onion blossoms with a side of cheesy chipotle dipping sauce.

Clucky fries: curled chicken skin fried to crispy perfection swimming in a plate of home made sausage gravy: add cheesy chipotle dip for no extra charge!

Beer battered cheesy chipotle sauce.

Their relationship, so delightfully dysfunctional, so delectably fraught with ignorance as to their own misdoings, was a unique one in that it was never mired in the memory of a once blissful harmony.  No, they were misery formed of original misery that divided and doubled itself like cancer cells.

He was May and she was December, an unusual switch but identical in most other such unities in that they were both trying to escape something and in finding each other they did to some degree.  They’d defeated their personal monsters by joining and giving birth to a larger one.

That monster, a beast of profound comical quality, reared its head every time a decision had to be made or a problem had to be dealt with.  It came out in his words “fucking whore” and in her actions “what did I do?” She would call it to the table and he would give it meat so that it grew; the love child of their mismatched marriage became the dictator of their mismanaged lives and ruled over them like a ringmaster commands the clowns and poodles to dance.

“Whore!”  “What’s the big deal?”  “Fucking moron!”  “What did I do?” But she always knew what she did like he always knew what she would do and still they played their parts like they were leading actors in a hot new Broadway show rather than the tired relics of a ten-year-old sitcom playing in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.  They never missed an opportunity to make friction, for years and years and years and years.

Dear reader, now is the point where you should be cautioned that I am far from neutral.  I sat front row in the audience for the last of their days together; I watched them bait and taunt each other and I listened to their complaining like a friend- I suppose I was a friend.  I mostly remained neutral through it all though- it wasn’t hard- I gave my opinion occasionally and lightly put one foot or the other over the fence at times but for the most part I straddled the pickets.  They were both wrong; they were both right.  Certainly they never should have been a couple but, who’s to say what works and what doesn’t when there is so much wrong that passes for right.

In the morning we had a fight that carried into the evening, the two of us lying in bed facing opposite walls and expressing our feelings destructively.  He said, “My love for you is like a marble that wears down over time; every time you cry and every time we argue it gets smaller.”  I asked how big is the marble now?  The size of a pea?  A peppercorn?  Fighting the urge to weep pathetically, I lay there silently and whittled his simile down into its most basic message: someday I won’t love you.

That could be the vow of every monogamous unmarried couple: “someday I won’t love you”, along with “I love you for now” and “at this juncture in my life you are a satisfactory partner”.  Although marriages often fail, at least they had noble intentions, most of them.

“Someday I won’t love you,” an anvil dangling from a fishing line above my side of the bed.  Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry and for god sakes don’t argue or else! It could be tomorrow or a week or another three years but regardless, someday his marble would wear down to a grain of sand and then a fleck of dust and then a particle too small to be seen with the naked eye and then: WHAM!  The anvil drops and I am no longer loved.

“You’ll get the idea when the new one comes along and you’ll say ‘how could you do this to me,’” he continued, “so I’m warning you now.”

I wretchedly rolled over, wrapped my arms around him and told him I loved him regardless, which is true but wretched.  I ought to have told him to go fuck himself but really, I’m not in any hurry to get where I’m headed.  I ride all my doomed relationships to the bitter end, clocking as many years as I can in the normal world before I become the inevitable crazy cat lady.

Most people wonder how they end up that way- wild eyed, frizzy haired and lap heavy, but I know the forces that drive a cat lady, they’ve been there inside of me since birth.  Cats may seem like a sorry replacement for human companionship until you realize that they are less fickle and easier to love.  People say cats only love you as long as you feed them, which is to imply human love is so much more genuine.  Not really.  Food in exchange for unconditional love is pennies for the world; people demand much more and when you don’t meet their demands they won’t just make noise and circle your feet, no, they’ll belittle you and break your stuff.

One of my biggest regrets is leaving my old cat Benny in the hands of an ex- a stuff breaker; it felt like leaving an injured Marine behind enemy lines and yet I had convinced myself he would be better off with the house, the yard and all of his prey that lived in the brambles out back.  City life would cramp his style.  I regret abandoning him, though, and I imagine that one day when I have a trailer in the woods I will steel him back and make up for my mistake by feeding him expensive wet food.

A trailer in the woods or on a vacant lot with Beatrice Potter animals burrowing holes beneath waist-deep weeds is what I picture for myself.  Isolated in a fortress of fiberglass and aluminum, I’ll spend my days writing, reading, and praising the cats for every Beatrice Potter carcass they deposit on my astro-turf.  Every so often I’ll add to our family, a new kitten, a stray maybe, or I’ll head down to the Humane Society and rescue an old warrior with a bent tail and a mottled eye, the kind of cat only a crazy cat lady could love.

Neighborhood kids will come by to play with the cats and to giggle at me as I spill a 20lb bag of kibble out into a large shallow trough and sing, “kitty-kitty-kitty!” in a shrill falsetto three times a day, my wild gray hair un-brushed and smelling of flea medication.  I’ll point to each cat and recite their names for the kids- people names like Arnold, Bobby, Carlotta and Rockford, “Would you like to see the pictures?  Gilbert was so cute when he was younger!”

People will talk about me, drawing circles in the air next to their heads as they do to indicate my certain insanity.  But come springtime- kitten season- when so many family pet pregnancies reach full term, they’ll come to my door with a mewing basket of unconditional love and I’ll gladly accept it.  Crazy cat lady, retreating from all the people who love her, all the people who don’t, and those that do but someday won’t.

A book of tags,
stickers with bar codes and numbers that all end in nine,
To put on the backs of bottles
A hair above the surgeon generals warning
A hair bellow the adjectives big, fruity, delicate,
hints of tar and black pepper

Chariots of Fire, the synthesizer rendition,
falls down from the ceiling
A man reluctantly interrupts the famous tune
“shoppers, looking for a way to beat the heat?
Try cooling off with an iced mocha or a delicious iced latte.”
Chariots of fire resumes.

From shelf to shelf,
Head floating above a body that lumbers obediently
I put the bottles where they belong
In stacks at the ends of the isles
In rows and lying in wooden boxes attractively
A new song begins

“Your loving arms,
Your loving arms, your loving arms
Your sweet, sweet loving arms,”
I carry three pieces of paper to the customer service counter
Wait in line behind a man with dreadlocks
And a fat woman

On the back of her knees
Big blue veins pop from the skin like parasitic lesions
Smaller, purple veins fan out from them
The man with dreadlocks buys cigarettes and a bus pass
The fat woman has a child clinging to one leg
And cat food to return

I collect my checks
Flee from the service counter past colorful bottles of bleach
Advertising the whitest whites
Past pallets in storage and a garbage compactor full of rotting meat
I escape to the van where public radio is playing

Big, sloppy tears
Long, low howl rising up from my rib cage
The van is burbling diesel and rattling impatiently
Heat from the windshield boiling my bottled water
I let my foot of the break and glide backwards
A seventeen year old has sailed around the world

By Val Nugget

“They’re just stupid,” Dr. Melford says when I ask him to sum up his findings, “Most of them at least.” I’d caught up with Dr. Garrison Melford, Professor of geriatric medicine at University of Chiliwack in British Columbia and author of the recent medical publication Stupidity Disguised as Senility: Dumbness at Every Age, at a café across from a day-care center where he agreed to let me interview him. Melford was already onto his next project but he let me snag a moment of his day to talk about the work that has garnered him so much attention and praise.

When asked how he got the idea for the project his eyes light up “I’d stopped at convenience store to get some jerky on my way home from work,” he says, “An old woman was arguing with a cop about getting pulled over for running a red light, claiming she forgot that red meant stop.”

That old woman, Ester Fields, 93, ended up talking her way out of the ticket, receiving instead a tender reminder from the young trouper that red was stop. But Dr. Melford, an expert at recognizing the tell-tale signs of senility, wasn’t convinced. “There was a vacancy behind her bifocals and a seeming lack of embarrassment that was inconsistent with standard age-induced mental decline,” he relates. So he jotted down the plate number on her ’83 Buick and gave it to his friend in the department; what her record revealed was astounding. “She had tickets for running red lights that dated back to 1959,” Melford says, “and those were just a few of the many infractions she’d committed in her near century of life.”

This lead Dr. Melford to question how many seemingly senile old people were actually just stupid and embark on the research that would eventually shed light on a sector of the population that has long been over-looked and unjustly catered to. In Stupidity, Dr. Melford address the ethics in forgiving stupid behavior in old people because, “we often discriminate against young adults and the middle-aged for the same kinds of actions.” For Melford, this type of discrimination is very personal, “I don’t want someone like my brother Phil, who is very stupid,” Melford says, “to be discriminated against when someone like my grandpa Willy, who is also very dumb, gets a free ride just because he’s over a hundred.”

When asked how he felt about two close members of his family being stupid Melford presses his finger to his chin thoughtfully, “You know, I think now that that kind of connection probably helped me better tune myself to recognizing stupidity in strangers, especially old people since my grandfather has one foot in the grave.” “Of course,” Dr. Melford adds, “It takes training to separate the symptoms of stupidity with the symptoms of senility, training that the average person doesn’t possess.”

When asked how the general public might use the results of his study Melford responds enthusiastically, “I don’t expect everyone to start picking out who is dumb and who is incapacitated; It’s my hope to get people to stop and think about it, to say, ‘you know, maybe that guy tripped over the sidewalk because he was too stupid to pick his feet up,’ and not just assume he didn’t see the curb because he’s 80.”

That raised the question in my mind as to how many physical ailments are actually the result of idiocy, so I asked the doctor if he’d addressed this in his study. “No,” he said, “I imagine many (injuries are due to idiocy) but I couldn’t get a grant to research it; too much red tape.” Dr Melford explains that he was most interested in nailing down the percentage of old people who were misdiagnosed as senile and he did this by soliciting volunteers from every walk of life with the only stipulation that they were over the age of 70 and considered to be senile.

The research took about seven years with a test group of five-hundred seniors and a team of fifty assistants, mostly students at the university where Melford teaches. “We had the old people recount their life experiences on tape,” Melford says, “and it took a lot of time sifting through those tapes to look for relevant information.” The kind of information Melford was looking for were instances in a subject’s life that clearly demonstrated stupidity, such as immigrating to California in January via wagon train through the Donner Pass or selling tech stock to invest in a nuclear fallout shelter.

“Sure a lot of the (stupid) things these people did seamed smart at the time,” Melford says, “but the fact it that a lot of (smart) people from their generation made the right choice when faced with those same decisions, which leads us to believe that even in their youth, these old people were idiots.”

Dr. Melford’s research didn’t stop with interviewing the case subjects; he spent considerable time interviewing their friends, family and associates to determine if there had been a pattern of stupid behavior throughout the subject’s life, but it wasn’t always easy to find people who knew the person when they were younger. “The grandkids just remember them as nice of course,” Melford explains, “And the kids weren’t always privy to all the decisions their parents made.” That left him to rely on former associates of the case subjects who “were often dead or hard to track down.”

Despite the immense challenges Dr. Melford faced, he emerged from the study with a figure that he believes is fairly accurate to the actual amount of people who are considered to be senile but are really stupid. “It’s about 88%,” he says candidly. When I asked if he was startled by such a large figure Dr. Melford explains, “Not really, it’s close to the same percentage of stupid people we find in all sectors of the population. It’s a myth that wisdom automatically comes with age; the truth is, those with the capacity to be wise may get wiser and those who were born stupid will pretty much maintain that same level throughout their entire life.”

Melford also reminds us that stupid is not to be confused with ignorance, “(ignorance) is a temporary condition that is easily fixed with information,” he says, “Unless you’re stupid and then the chances are that you will also remain ignorant.” As we finished our lunch I asked Dr. Meford what was next for him and he gestured toward the near-by daycare with an impish grin, “Well, it’s about time now that we debunk a myth that’s been the bane of both parents and teachers since the existence of mankind: some kids can’t be taught; they’re just stupid.”

Let there be dust balls, dirt balls, hair balls
Grime and grit
Bring in the leaves, the fleas, the pine needles
Everything outside,
Welcome it in!

Leave the spaghetti sauce on the cabinets, the noodle water
In the pot for ever
Keep the trash can sated with refuse
Pile the dishes
Anywhere

Give me a soft place to sit, to tread upon- a carpet
Covered in cloths
Give me a warm place to sleep, lay my head upon- a futon
Also covered in cloths
And cat hair

Bring on the mildew, dust mites, water lines
Bacterial, fungal growth
Let the soap scum stick to the shower curtain
Nail slivers
Peeled from toes

Find me some stale bread, stinky cheese, questionable leftovers
Long as I have hot sauce
Give me a cold can of wieners or mustard greens
I’ll eat if I like it
Or not

Allow me a hovel, a shack a shed for my things
Hot water and heat
A quiet place to relax and unwind and to dream
To stare at the wall
And be unclean

When I set something down, there is a 50% chance that I have considered all my options before choosing where to place it and the other 50% chance is that I don’t care where I put it.  There is a 100% probability, though, that I want it to remain where I placed it and not get put “away” wherever that may be.

This is what I will do after a long work day: eat, read, write, watch a movie, drink wine, cook dinner, shower, soak in the tub, pluck my eyebrows, and play with the cats.  Anything that isn’t on this list will likely not get done until the weekend and that includes vacuuming.

When I do laundry, I do not set aside or plan my entire day for it or around it.  I do laundry in between more important things and over a period of days.  I will start the wash in the evening, throw the cloths in the dryer the next evening, and fold them the following evening.

If I haven’t bought something already, chances are I don’t want it unless it is a lotto ticket, food, or something that I can easily sell for a lot of dough.  This excludes hand made gifts.

My priorities are not the same as yours and I do not place importance on many of the things you do.

Very few things offend or disturb me so, if I say something that offends you, please note that I probably won’t understand why you are fuming or screaming at me.

Most often the first thing I say to you is what I really think and the second thing I say to you is what I think will make you stop being so mad at me for the first thing I said.

I have little trouble admitting when I make a mistake but it usually takes me making the same mistake half a dozen times before I learn from it.  It’s not because I’m stubborn- I just have a very poor memory.

I can find a redeeming quality in just about any edible substance; if nothing more than that it is a vehicle for hot sauce.

I am a reader of novels, not instruction manuals, street signs, recipes, or blogs.

I try to put the needs of others ahead of my own but, quite often, I am unaware of others needs.  If you want me to do something you have to ask me clearly and when I am not otherwise occupied.

I like physical stimulation and I get cranky if I don’t get enough of it.  I can’t understand what’s not to love about a 5 mile walk as much as some people can’t understand what’s not to love about a 3 hour movie.

I love to talk politics and current events and I enjoy a good debate.  It’s the one sport I most often win out of sheer doggedness.

I am aware that there are many aspects of my personality that anger, offend, frustrate, confuse and annoy my loved ones and I can ensure that I am working to enhance them.

With the constant rise in divorce cases I think it is high time we have some sort of vows that married couples can say to officiate their separation in front of their family and friends.  I mean, who could argue against more reasons to have a ceremony and throw a party?  People are always talking about “closure” and their need for it and so, wouldn’t an official divorce ceremony serve to provide that?  Why, I think this is a yet un-tapped market for magazines, florists and dress makers!  The wife could wear red or black and the husband could wear . . . whatever (people only look at the woman anyway and he might want to save his money for child support).

These are some prospective vows for a formal Christian divorce:

Shame on you,
To have and to hold
You didn’t know what you had
So you didn’t hold it

Shame on you
For better or for worse
You got so bored with better
You made it worse

Shame on you
For richer or poorer
You sought me out when times were good
And in poverty I was ignored

Shame on you,
In sickness and in health
You didn’t know what was well
And so you caused sickness

Shame on you
To love and to cherish
You loved yourself and cherished my adoration
But didn’t give a damn about the rest

Shame on you
‘Til death do we part
You must have thought you would die in a week
Or you wouldn’t have said that

Buddhist divorce vows:

In the future, miserable occasions will come as surely as the morning.
Your next one will be fugly as surly as the night.
When things go joyously, don’t bother meditating because it will go bad soon.
When things go badly, don’t bother meditating because it won’t help.
Meditation in the manner of the Compassionate Buddha but it won’t help our miserable marriage.
To say the words ‘detest and abhor’ is easy.
But to accept that detestation and abhorrence is built upon long suffering
then animosity is easy.”

Vows for a Muslim divorce:

Husband: “I offer you shame and possibly death and definitely financial ruin in divorce in accordance with the instructions of the Holy Quar‘an and the Holy Prophet, peace and blessing be upon Him.  I pledge, in honesty and with sincerity, to take the kids because you have not been an obedient and faithful wife.”

Wife: “I pledge, in honesty and sincerity, to escape with my life and get my children back and to find a subservient Western husband to support them so I can be the dominant one for once in my life.”

And for a Bohemian divorce:

H: Fuck you Jean
W: Fuck you Larry

H: I hate your fat ass
W: I hate your fat gut

H: Our kids turned out retarded
W: Because their father is retarded

H: You never cook
W: You never wash your butt

H: You look like your mother
W: You look like a cross between Lucy the Ape and The Elephant Man

H: I hope you die
W: I hope you die first

In unison: Amen.

Hello there PDX,

We have a space manifested we have space and we say manifested because we’ve heard the word before and it sounds groovy for one lucky new housemate renting with us is like winning the hippie lottery in the beautiful Alberta arts district, hippieville 1922 NE Emerson. Asking $300, plus one month deposit($600 total) we added that for you because we’ve got a calculator handy so you don’t have to worry about figuring out all the fine print dude a Sirius you know, like Sirius radio except we’re not alluding to that.  We don’t know the true spelling of the word. deal… Preferably looking for another female for gender balance one of the roomies is shagging another roomie but I’ve got nobody to shag and it’s not fair but the right guy could also work I’m bi curious, yeah some of you dudes are pretty slinky too…Anyway, a little about us…. We are an eclectic group of three artists and entrepreneurs we are hippies. Maxwell 20, likes to play music Maxwell is unemployed and spends all day playing guitar hero .Jeremiah 27, is working on creating a biodegradable company Jeremiahs biodegradable company is the cardboard box he will soon live in if he doesn’t get a real job. Jeremiah and Maxwell work together in there biodegradable business endeavors the are both hippie bums with expensive college degrees that didn’t do a damn thing to teach them common sense… Kat 21, is an artist, holistic healer, vegan/raw food consumer Kat is a true fruitcake, the kind with green maraschino cherries and bits of nuts you’ve never even heard of.  Her ancestors did nothing to help further our evolution and her descendants likely won’t either. Another person with a vegan lifestyle would be a good match Kat freaks out when she sees meat because it is sooo dead and that’s cruel. We are looking to find someone to move in by the end of this month neither of us make any money and so we need income like, mega pronto dude. This house is just now coming together so it has plenty of room to grow… Circus tricks are a plus :)! If you could be a worthless hippie bum like us but also make enough money to pay our rent that would be rad. To set an appointment, please call 805-816-8857… We are looking forward to meeting you.

Best,
Renaissance House Dark Ages Hovel