Ain't Got No

I was listening to an old song the other day that I've heard a hundred times in my life, "Ain't Got No Home," by Clarence "Frogman" Henry.

Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. Usually I do. It seems very off the cuff as songs go. The fact that Frogman can sing like a frog and can sing like a girl always amazed me as lyrics, since anyone with a normal throat and the ability to utter sounds can sing like a frog and a girl, assuming you're not already a frog or a girl.

The first part is straightforward enough. He seems like a normal guy, but he "ain't got no home." He's a lonely boy, he ain't go no home. Then he goes on to sing like a girl, that he ain't got a man or other familial relationships that would be good from girl's point of view. Then my favorite, he drops it a few registers, way down deep in the swamp, to lament from a frog's point of view that he ain't got a mudder, fahder, sister, or brudder.

He's lonely, he ain't got no home. Whether man, woman, or amphibian.

Concerning his great ability to sing like a girl and a frog, like I said, that's not that tough. If you start singing as a tadpole, you don't lose it after the transition. I remember us kids singing, or especially talking, like a frog a lot. It's just a matter of burrowing down a little deeper in your throat and letting the sounds grind through your gears a little differently than usual. The unusual thing about it is that a guy could put it on a record and not only get a hit out of it but also an enduring nickname!

Personally, I got a home. I've lived in one all my life. It's the place I sit everyday watching the world turn round. But there is something I woke up to that I ain't got none of, and that's my morning milk. I'm used to having a big tall glass of milk everyday, but we ran out yesterday and I didn't make it to the store. O for the days when the milkman came! I ain't got no milk!

Plus I ain't got no cow, so I can't go out and get it straight from the spiggot. Loosening up my hands a bit, pushing the arthritis over to the side, just in case a cow shows up at my front door. But I ain't got no milk pail. And I ain't got no stool. Ain't got no hay. Ain't got no rope. Ain't got no pasteurizer. Just a glass. I got a glass, a big fat empty glass.

Local Man Writes For Highlights Magazine

I was at the doctor's office yesterday, and I think there was a slip up. I was left in one of the little holding cells they have and apparently forgotten.

I was sitting there, 40-45 minutes or something, thinking, How come no one ever comes into this room for a normal errand, let alone to check on me?

After that whole time, I heard the doctor in the hallway saying he was done with me, they came in and directed me out, and the doctor said he was sorry about that. As angry as I could've been, I was actually relieved, because it answered a question I'd always had, which is whether you're under video surveillance in there. It turns out you're not.

But while there, I had plenty of time to look at the magazines. I looked through the "Entertainment" magazine, then the "National Geographic." Finally I was down to the "Highlights" magazine for kids. Which turned out to be more fascinating than the others.

It's been a long time since I've looked at this magazine! I'm so old the doc used to bring it with him when he made house calls. And even back then they had hidden pictures where you had to find things, like the crank to Grandpa's car and Grandma's war bonds.

Looking through it, the Feb. 2010 issue (so we're right up to date!), I was very pleased with the fun activities and cute stuff. I was trying one of the Hidden Pictures, and the stuff was very hard to find. Let's say you have to find a ring. It's not just a normal ring laying on the table. It's a ring that is big and doubles as a cup or a planter. And so forth. I'd go insane without the key to the things hidden off to the side.

The page of jokes ... I can't say too many good things about it. The jokes are corny, bad, and stale. Some weren't even jokes, just witty plays on words, like the word "herd" and "heard" as they relate to a herd of cows or hearing cows. They had that old moldy chestnut that 'my teacher yelled at me for something I didn't do ... my homework.' I'm thinking, I could write better stuff than this, maybe I ought to get a job there. But this page of jokes was written by kids (so they claim ... and it's probably true ... although I can see them sneaking in a guy like me, worldly wise and who knows all the moldy chestnuts to write it and just sign it "Billy, age 6.") Anyway, kids aren't psychologically devious enough yet to do humor well.

There was a picture search for homophones. That was wild. Words that are different but sound alike, like "flower" and "flour." Another activity that would take all day to do.

My favorite thing in the magazine was the two page spread of artwork. Some of the kids did some terrific artwork. One of them was a mournful sun over a lonesome beach with a broken down fence stuck in the sand. It was beautiful, and perhaps copied from something in the child's home. I shouldn't say that, because children are geniuses, like Mozart, or myself when I was five. Mozart could write symphonies and I could hum really well.

But the fence was a little too perfect, too evocative of the emotions of forlornness. But the only rule the magazine gave for artwork was that it had to be on unlined paper. It didn't say you couldn't take your inspiration from the picture over the couch. And I don't think they gave an age restriction, so I might submit something. Like a knockoff of this beach scene, if only I could do it half as well.

Also there was a page of poems. Some really good ones, too! The only restriction on this was that it had to come "out of your own head." I can't think of any particular examples but I was impressed.

The kids got to do a creative thing about what creature would come forth from a big egg. The publishers had a big yellow foot sticking out, so naturally most of the creatures the kids pictured, however different in other ways, had one or more big yellow feet on their creatures. I believe there was just one, maybe two, that didn't go with the yellow feet, which had to be wrong in the context, of course, but those are the kind of people I like.

All in all, it was a joy to look through this and know the kids of the world have this magazine. It's just too bad you have to be at the doctor's office to see it. Or you could get a subscription. But since we only associate it with doctor visits, that might cause a lot of false symptoms.

It'd be great as a kid to get a call from someone saying your picture will be in next month's issue. Or your joke. That'd be something I'd keep forever.

In God We Trust

Do you ever get emails from distant relatives and older friends who worry that they might take "In God We Trust" off our money? I do too. They're feeble and don't know where their next breath is coming from, but this is what they care about.

They care enough to forward it to me, like I'm going to be outraged and march on Washington. LOL.

If they really mean what they say, they ought to just pray about it and then trust God to work it out. If indeed "In God We Trust," don't we think He can keep His name on our money if He wants?

It'd be cool, really, to be at the mint. They're feverishly trying to get rid of the phrase, scratching, burning, pounding, but through a great miracle it keeps reappearing on all the coin stamps!

Suddenly a cloud descends and a voice booms out a majestic, "Try to take my name off the money one more time -- just one more time -- and I'm pulling out the big guns!"

Medical Brochure Mash-up

Here's one that caught my eye, a mash-up of old and young. Photo today by me, your humble correspondent at Grandma Slump.

Taking The Census Was Very Easy

I guess I forgot in the last 10 years how easy it was.

The big census form came in the mail and I thought it'd be like doing taxes, so I set aside a good chunk of time to get it done. Got my pen, a hard surface to put it on, and sat on the couch -- grinning and bearing it -- dedicated to getting it done whatever it took.

Then I started and I finished. It was just that easy. Five minutes tops!

Basically, they don't want any information, just your name, address, date of birth, race, and it seems like that was it. Person number 1, that's me. Person number 2, that's Grandma. And that's it. Nothing about your occupation, how big your house is, how many rooms you have, what you collect, your income, your opinions, your politics, clubs you belong to, religion, how often you go out to eat, whether you like Windows or Macs, and no essay questions on your hopes for the future or your regrets about yesterday.

So this is the big information that genealogists are longing for, clamoring for all the time? This is the big information that we have to keep confidential for 72 years? My name and address are in the phone book. What if they said they couldn't print the phone book for 72 years? Nobody would be clamoring for that.

Anyway, I got Person number 1 and Person number 2 done. And I was thinking, some of the questions following are going to have to pertain to other Persons, since of course some households still have their Grandpa. Ours died. So I started leafing through those pages, taking us from Person number 3 all the way through Person number 12! And that was the end of the book!

I leafed through it again. I felt like the other questions had to be in there somewhere, but that was all they wanted to know! Our government isn't very nosy, it seems.

No One Likes A Grump -- It's A Great Day

I could just sit here and complain, thinking over some of the more complicated things of my life. But no one likes a grump or a complainer, so I may as well just claim something different for myself, joy. And say it's a great day regardless of what else may be going on.

I was reminding myself of this yesterday in the middle of a crisis, Enjoy yourself, enjoy it. It's a thought that comes to me when things are going wrong. Like stuff no one can help, like if we have an enormous blizzard. Of course it's going to complicate everyone's life, but enjoy it. There's plenty of interesting things about it.

The same thing is true about having a busy schedule and hoping you can do justice to all of it. Or even make it, the basic accomplishments plus actual survival from the strain. If I'm looking at a schedule like that, I'm thinking many things. Like, What can I get done in advance? How can I make it work out? Should I go through it simply dreading it? Or should I put myself into it with a different attitude, one of happiness?

Today is a day for me where there's a few things to be done. But I know the next few weeks are going to be crazy. I could sketch it out, make a chart even, even though there's unforeseeable things. The things I can foresee I can chart, then knock a few of those things off with some quick effort. And everything else will be that much easier.

My first thought on the unforeseeable is Oh No! But it's always going to be that way, so there's no use wishing your life away, wishing yourself through it. Instead, step through it, and do your best, and have a sense of joy along the way.

Life is fun ... even when it's not.

My Russian Ad

I said something about the Russians the other day and now I've got a Russian ad on the blog!

I have no idea what it's selling, but it's only $39.99 per mec, so you probably can't go wrong.

But this could be bad, to have my blog associated with the wrong crowd. Joseph McCarthy is dead, right?

It'll Take Lots Of Sugar To Keep My Big Mouth Shut

This is a panel from a cartoon strip called "Jeff Cobb." By Pete Hoffman. Printed in the Bakersfield Californian, Bakersfield, CA, Sept. 24, 1958, p. 50. The character's name is Rona.

I touched up a big white spot on the lips. I hope it wasn't supposed to be a big reflection.

UPDATE: It was supposed to be there. The big white spot on the lips is supposed to be there.

My Town Needs To Be More Poetic

One of the truths of life is that everything changes. If it didn't, it wouldn't be life as we know it. But it'd be like something in a wax museum, just standing there motionless.

But even in a wax museum, things are still changing. The wax will droop, slowly melt, and fall away.  It's decomposing, so that if you looked way ahead you'd eventually see clumps and hardened puddles of melted wax all over the floor and a humanoid scaffolding left behind of nothing but clothes pins and twisted pipe cleaners.

There is after all a network under girding everything, like the frame of your house or the skeleton in your body. Once you peek behind the curtain, or see behind the facade, that there's workers back there peeing on the backside, you're more content, like me, to live with the illusion. Except I know it's there.

My town is just like everyone else's town. There's the good side of town, and of course the bad side, where the filth goes to prosper. In the part of town where the dives flourish, the houses of ill repute do a good trade, and fly by night carpet dealers scam their victims.


I was thinking that if it were more poetic -- the town -- that at least we'd have the heroic image of something that doesn't change. We could hear the songs and read the words. Like "In a little Spanish town, on a night like this" or "Out in the west Texas town of El Paso." It freezes it, the imagery, to a particular place and time. Even the cactus at the edge of town stands eternal.

I need to read more poetry, so I'd know how it goes.

We Know You Took Our Dog

Of course I'll never know how this turned out.

But it raises the question, Were they bluffing? Did they really know who picked up their dog?

The ad is from The Coshocton Tribune, Coshocton, Ohio, July 20, 1954, p. 10.

And this was before TV cameras on every corner. Somehow they figured it out the old fashioned way!

My Secret Late Night Job

I'm able to write about my secret late night job and still keep it a secret, I think, because I've sufficiently kept my true identity under wraps. Even the government, with their agents and feelers, haven't been able to crack the code.

There are certain things I can say with impunity, such as how I'm able to circumvent the explicit laws of the United States and supplement my income. I'm like the guy I saw on TV the other day in a poor neighborhood of Chicago advocating for more guns there. They blurred out the house numbers, therefore no one would be able to figure out who he was.

Now, we all know that when you're on full disability, you're not allowed to make money. Their reasoning is simple, of course. If you're disabled, that literally means you have no abilities. That's simple enough. If you had abilities and could make money on your own you wouldn't need the government to supply it. But I have tested the limits and have found that I actually do have abilities even though I'm disabled.

How I got on full disability is another story -- I have a game toe -- that I won't take the time or risk of telling here. The fact is, I get a big fat check every month and the government's largesse definitely soothes away some of the pain.

But I find that I have greater expenses to cover, such as DVDs, CDs, and now my latest guilty pleasures, MP3 downloads, expensive Belgian chocolate, and lattes at the college coffee shop. Meaning I needed some way to supplement what I get on the public dole.

Enter my secret late night job! I've been vacuuming and cleaning up at a local church. They said I could set my own hours, so I picked late at night. One, this frees up the rest of my day for other activities. And, more important, my government minder -- the parole-type officer that every disabled American has trailing him around -- is asleep then and thinks I'm sleeping too. The electronic monitor they put on my toe all those years ago, I wriggled out of it shortly after, and they only think they know my comings and goings!

(I can say all this with impunity, because there's a lot more disabled people with game toes than you might guess.)

So the short story of it is, now I'm up practically all night a couple nights a week, doing janitor work, sweeping around the pews, etc., with an Oreck vacuum (seriously, Nothing Gets By An Oreck, as long as you're willing to go over the same spot an infinite number of times.)

The money's good, the government doesn't know what's going on, and my life couldn't be happier!

The Emotional Catharsis Of Putting A Pet Down

It's been a week and half or so since we had to put one of our cats down. In case you don't know the terminology there, putting them down means putting them to sleep, or having the vet give them a sedative, then ending their life in a peaceful way.

Of course it's much more costly and sanitary than the way Grandpa used to put them down, which involved a gunny sack and a body of water. But that's OK, because we love our cats and other animals a lot more these days than the unsentimental (and more detached) people of the past loved theirs.

That'd be a good sociological study right there, what some of the reasons are for our increased sentimentality and attachment to pets, when back in the old days, if you had a wild animal carrying off one of your pets, that was their problem. Or if they got run over it wasn't any big deal. I knew people with barns who didn't know how many cats they had, and also didn't know how many were carried off by coyotes on any given day.

But it's definitely a big deal to me. We had the cat around 15 years, then suddenly we had to put her down. I was crying, it was a real sad day. In fact, it was so sad that the emotional catharsis really was something. I hadn't had anything to cry over like that in quite a while. But that day it was really something. Like the dark night of the soul -- bitter tears that led to ascent.

Which makes me think, I hope I don't start longing for it. You know, finding myself wanting to have a pet put down just to give me something to cry over, since it really was an emotional experience. When it all wears off, what if I think, The other cat would be good for that too. He does seem a little sick, doesn't he? And it was only 40 bucks.

So I could be out there with the other cat, getting him put down too. Then in a few weeks, my beloved dog, since by then my addiction to an ever deepening emotional catharsis would be real. Then I'd be hitting rescue leagues, adopting every animal I see, especially the sick ones, just to be with them in their hour of crisis. Because crying like that is such a powerful experience. You're suddenly helpless as a child to the emotions of the moment.

I remember carrying a dog one time that had died from worms. I must have been a pathetic figure -- like someone from the movies -- carrying that dog to his grave. I was crying ear to ear.*

Then let's say I'd run out of big animals, I'd be checking out my 10 gallon jobbie -- my aquarium -- for sick and dragging fish. I'd have to really work at that one, though, because it's tough to get emotional over a fish. Maybe the vet could take three or four fish at a time. That'd bring up a tear or two, maybe.

*I heard someone say this the other day. I'm not giving a specific attribution, I just want to acknowledge that someone else said it.

The Russians Are Coming!

Guess what, this blog (Grandma Slump) has had two visitors from Russia in the last week!

That's mind-blowing to me. Someone from St. Petersburg and someone from Moscow. This is something I didn't imagine happening.

It does a couple things for me. 1) It widens my perspective. Now I know that a great blog is indeed a universal thing. 2) It qualifies me to be president, like Sarah Palin. Because the Russians can see me from there.

I could go on and on about Number 1. Do I think this blog is great? Yes, of course I do. I brag about it all the time in my own personal time. I'll be walking anonymously outside, taking Underbrush out to poop. And I'll be thinking about the people driving by in their cars, glancing over to see if I'm going to pick it up in a bag, "If they only knew who I was! I'm the brains behind the whole thing!"

Or I'll be out at Walmart standing in the checkout line, thinking, "If they only knew who I was! I'm sure they'd let me go to the front of the line, 1) Out of respect; and, 2) So I can get home quicker to write more blog posts." They're that good!

Or I'll be in church, listening to the preacher pray for everything else under the sun, and I'm thinking, "If he only knew who I was! He's certainly be thanking God for everything I provide the world (that God so loveth) via my blog."

And now I have Number 2 to think about, the fact that even the Russians are checking me out! So who says detente, the SALT talks, perestroika, and the arms race weren't good things? They kept us alive long enough, despite our fear at the time of mutual assured destruction, to now have this new age of mutual assured something else -- blog reading.

I might become the dictator (benevolent) of the world if this keeps up. Because there's millions of them and only one of me. They'll want me for the Beloved Leader as sure as anything. Then I (or one of my security doubles) can ride in a big car, with motorcycles riding along side, and they'll be tossing me flowers and big wet hand kisses. It'll be great.

No one knows the fear I had of Russians when I was a kid. In the '60s I literally slept under my bed because we thought they were coming. I was one of the kids you heard about who peed the floor.

But then everything thawed out when Nixon stole Khrushchev's shoe during the kitchen debate and buried it, and now we can live in peace, harmony, and camaraderie.

More On My Hypothetical Debtor And Getting Paid Back

It's hard to believe I was writing about this way back in January. That is, the hypothetical case of someone who would want to borrow some money, of course with the promise of paying you back. On a particular date in February, let's say.

In January I was thinking about the psychology of possibly getting them indeed to pay you back. Because these things obviously have to be finessed, or you'll be high and dry, in a conflict and out. But let's say the particular date in February has come and gone and that I am still sitting here on March 1, wondering what happened.

What if I was thinking about calling the guy? Then what if I decided against it? Then what if within five minutes of thinking that the guy called me? Isn't that wild? I think that's an amazing coincidence, and a very helpful one at that. Because, in this scenario, that tells me that he still has the best of intentions, even if the original date came and went.

Someone who wasn't going to pay you back, yet had promised that it'd be on a particular date in February, wouldn't be calling you on March 1 with more assurances. It just wouldn't happen. I would definitely see it as a positive sign. Let's say he promised to pay it back on March 18, then amends that to "or March 25 at the latest." That would still be very positive.

You never know about human nature. I could easily picture him running for the hills. Maybe I would've thought that if the February date had slipped by without any notice. But sometimes people do surprise you. Rarely, but sometimes.

One of the things I remember reading about James Joyce was how much money he owed people. I don't remember the particulars, but I can imagine him hitting up someone for a few bucks here and there, then avoiding them so he wouldn't be called on it. Maybe that's why he knew Dublin so well, because of all the places he ducked in to keep from meeting his creditors.

I hope my hypothetical guy is more honest than James Joyce.