Maelstrom: Uncle Dingy's Regrets

Part 9 of 31

They Found Another Body

This was a relative of mine, Uncle Clarence aka Uncle Dingy, who actually died before I was born. Once upon a time something happened and Dingy went a little rancid, wormy in the head. These days it might’ve been called a mental breakdown, because he was definitely under the weather where it counted. He had several close calls with death. He saw more than a man of his limited mental capabilities should see. Involving someone else's wife, likely from the neck down in full display. And he ended up dying of natural causes, some say murder. There was a prolonged vigil, rattling the cages and storming heaven's gate but it didn’t do any good.

I’m kind of glad it all went down before I was born. I have the space to stand back semi-detached and judge from a distance: “What happened to you, Dingy, that you couldn’t make it to old age like the rest of the brood? Did you forget every teaching they taught you, not to get involved in the affairs of people of such low character, with more on their mind than citizenship, patriotism, and doing good? You know the family, right, Dingy? We wisely stand back when the world’s going to hell in a hand-basket. Where others wilt in the face of temptation, we stand tall. So what happened to you? Was she that hot?

Ouch, that might burn, I got a little too close to the truth, which I wasn’t going to touch. But there was a jealous husband, jealous to the point of taking it out on Dingy, it being a firearm, a pistol to be precise, waving it about, about to fire it in that room of sin, with red wallpaper and nude paintings, the works, after backing Dingy to the headboard, who strained his neck something fierce when there was nowhere else to crawl. Bang!

His last word was “Maelstrom! Maelstrom!” I’ve heard of that, but I had to look it up to get a fuller understanding. The dictionary says, “A powerful whirlpool in the sea or a river.” And “a situation or state of confused movement or violent turmoil.” My first thought is that Dingy was out of his mind and randomly remembering something maelstromesque. But I ran it by a friend and he said Dingy likely was likening his experience with the woman and her jilted lover/murderer to a maelstrom, something he wished would’ve never happened, and if he had it to do over, he wouldn’t have. Or would've taken her to a different town.

That’s pretty smart reflection. ‘I did something, I’m sorry I did, and if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have, or would've gone farther.’ But then he was in a maelstrom, a whirlpool of consequences, sucked down, dragged inexorably toward a fitful though regrettable conclusion, death.

What could he have said to call off the dogs? If a word like maelstrom didn’t call them off, probably nothing would have. “I’m sorry, it was a one-time thing, nothing we’ll repeat, I’ll make it up to you somehow…” “Make it up to me, huh? There’s no unsullying her good name and honor!” Bang, bang!

The Stupid Stars of YouTube Police Chase Videos

The police chasing you, how satisfying that must be!

It turns out there’s not much to do in my golden years. Yes, life's always complicated and a mess in certain ways. Grandma’s house was completely dismantled and carted off to the dump. The insurance is supposed to cover the damages, as long as I'm not found responsible for the bacteria getting a foothold, which later multiplied and consumed the place. In the meantime, I’m holed up in the Big City, trying my best to survive until the verdict. It’s a good life.

One of the things that makes my golden years more satisfying is my daily rendezvous with the seamier side of YouTube. Yes, I’m talking about police chase videos. I used to watch them occasionally on TV when they were live. But those were the local channels and local chases, only a few. Now I've got the world and many chases at my fingertips. So I'm glued to YouTube, rooting not only for the police but to a certain extent the bad guys. If he or she could only prolong the madness, so much nicer for me...

Of course I myself would never be involved in a police chase. All such crazy mistakes are totally beyond anything I'd do. Those people snapped. I don’t snap, I barely stretch. Really, I maintain something like a 3D omniscient perspective on what I could ever do, and knowing those limits, I don’t snap. If you ever hear of me doing something like that, read it again, it's someone else. One of these days I’m going to my grave, of course, but it won’t be from a chase on the freeway or the cops gunning me down when I'm trapped at a dead end.

That said, it's so extremely interesting that others aren’t as reserved. And that they have no restraint whatsoever when it comes to their personal safety, reputation, future, the law, and concern for others. How I was ever lucky enough in the wide time-frame of existence to be born into a world that would invent the internet and allow for YouTube and endless videos, I’ll never know. Big praise for whatever is Good, Eternal, and Ultimate out there, because I’m daily entertained by a never ending parade of total losers and schmucks.

In the last few days I’ve seen a man eluding the police for probably 20 minutes, a journey that eventually took him off the road and across various fields. Finally, he abandoned his vehicle and made his way into a river, in which he waded as best as he could. Then he was climbing on the bank, slipping in the mud. He was surrounded, but instead of wisely surrendering — all hope was lost — he optimistically persevered, stripping off the waterlogged rags that bound him. Until, if memory serves, he was mostly nude and still striving to slip and slide his escape, though he was only about five feet in front of the law. They captured him, duh. How do you spell D-U-M-B?

As alluded to above, there was another guy who starred in his own police chase, but lacked the foresight to not get trapped in a dead end cul-de-sac parking lot affair. But did he give up peacefully when every shred of hope was lost? Hell no! He had a truck eight feet wide and thought he might barrel it through a five foot gap between the police and a fence. Which meant it was his day to die, a very stupid death, no tears, no last rites. I did make a mental reminder, If I’m ever that stupid (and I won’t be), dear officers, aim for the heart!

The last chase I saw yesterday was mostly dismal, just another arguably mad woman on the interstate. It wasn’t memorable enough in and of itself to remember everything clearly, just more sheer stupidity run amok. I do remember when watching it that I was actually critical of the police, not understanding the method to their apparent madness. They kept surrounding the alleged perp, then pulling back. Which later looked like it was meant to give her the confidence of escape every time she had one apparent path of survival. So when she approached six lanes of the road with backed up traffic and one lane with a police car and the next lane open with a spike strip in it, the only close thing between her and precious freedom, she took it. (There were open lanes farther to the right, but she ignored those.)

Damn that mistake! Part of me wanted her to keep going, but most of me wanted it to end. Because these people are monumentally stupid and dangerous to others, they may as well be stopped. But she hit the spike strip, then was riding on the rims the rest of the way. She was quickly nabbed in a parking lot, unceremoniously captured, never to be heard from again.

It’d be a better world if people wouldn’t take their lives into their own hands like that, and of course if they weren’t endangering the rest of society. But I have no say on whether they do or not. Guys and gals, if they’ve been doing it till now, are likely to keep going ballistic, then ending up in complete and total trouble. I don’t know how they ever live it down. Any theories? I don’t know how they’re able to cope socially from that point on. They surely lose their license, but maybe it doesn’t matter. They didn’t follow the law before, why would they now?

As long as people go ballistic, I’ll be sitting here watching them, shaking my head, and saying to myself, “How can they be so stupid?” I’m also a little critical of the police, since with my superior brain I naturally always know better and can't believe it takes them so long to catch these perps. Do we not have the atomic bomb? Why should they live another stinking day?

February Survives -- I Blame Hugh Hefner

WE CAME THAT CLOSE TO WINNING,
BUT FINISHED THE BATTLE WITH
NEXT TO NO SURVIVORS, ONLY
ME. AND I'M GOING INTO HIDING.

I was up early this morning, looking for signs of success against February. My heroic attempt to destroy February as a month on the calendar, then divvy up most of its days with other months and preserve a "stump month" of 10 February days, hung in the balance. Alone in my prayer citadel -- other than the courthouse the highest point in the county -- I tried to have faith, but reports coming in from around the world painted a dismal picture. There was no popular groundswell, none whatsoever, to do away with February.

I held out hope, biting my fingernails to the quick. Various lieutenants and family members climbed up to check on me. The braver ones warned me to be prepared for bad news. They said reports arriving from other states and countries showed the chances of destroying February as bleak. Legislators were not meeting, Congress pitched pennies instead of working, and the United Nations was closed, ambassadors laid off without pay.

Finally, I realized I had to put on a brave face. And show that everything was fine with me, in spite of my disappointment. I stripped off my outer layers of clothing. (It's a cold day.) Then my thermals. Last, I shed the rest of my clothes and stepped out on my citadel balcony, totally naked, me against the world! In one last expression of defiance, albeit vain, I peed. Reasoning, if I can't destroy February, I can go for the Guinness world record for the longest adhering urine stream. I was stoved up with two pots of freshly ground coffee -- jet black! My stream might still be flowing -- somewhere, somehow -- even as I write this two hours later.

So what happened? It's too early for a complete post mortem. I won't get into the details of my agitating government and the media. I put my heart into it, but it wasn't enough. I would like to mention, as an incriminating aside, that there seems to be a lot of old-time XXX movie houses very close to the Capitol. Could it be our "faithful representatives" are more "hung" up on some "pressing" matters of the flesh than they are "coming" to the aid of their people? 

OK, I did the government thing, but the heart of the campaign had to be this very blog. I put the word out there everyday -- with a worldwide outreach -- and what did people do with it? That's what I'd like to know! I know you'll say this is in bad taste, but frankly I'm shifting much of the blame to my readers, whose personal pleasure was their only real concern. Pretending to be on my side, pretending to do the heavy lifting, but then ... not really. I'd guess most of them are also into XXX entertainment, whether in some rundown smelly/sticky theater, or right there with their iPhones "in hand."

I've suspected all along that I've been dealing with mental cream puffs, halfwits, and the usual run of dim bulbs you meet on the internet. They're spoiled, there's no commitment. You know what, I remember the internet back in the '90s, man. Back in the '90s, man, you'd run a campaign -- destroy February, replace Christmas with Worship a Pine 2 x 4 Day -- and you'd get it done. Then the 2000s came -- 9/11 and people became pansified -- and now we're so soft we've essentially melted. It's 2015 and you couldn't raise an internet volunteer to YAWN on cue; they'd be asleep already before you flashed the sign!

OK, you had your chance. So don't come looking to me next year when February rolls around again. Just suffer. Because I'll still be nursing a grudge -- an eternal grudge -- stewing over how you deserted me, then even went so far as to callously stab me in the back right when I was on the brink of victory. The very worst time for betrayal, because the hurt never leaves. I'll always remember ... this time back in 2015 when I took on this literally thankless task. When my readers were so "into pleasure" they couldn't be bothered to support a brother in his hour of need.

It's a lot different from what I grew up with. I grew up hearing about the Depression, with my relatives' memories being how they stuck together, through thick and thicker. So where did things go so wrong with society? You know what I blame it on? There was strength in World War II, then a huge letdown, and people relaxed. When, guess who, Hugh Hefner comes along and fills the vacuum with Playboy magazine, setting the old mores aside as well as the old values. Look it up in any sociology text. Hugh Hefner gave us the dawn of a hedonism that would've made Caligula blush. And therein is the reason we couldn't destroy February.

So it's a problem with our government, and a problem with my readers, existing as they do in this reckless XXX world. And apparently there's nowhere to find better ones. Even the most prominent think tanks can't find people. They're all so hopelessly wasted, there's probably no one but me who'd even be smart enough to apply.

Keep It Simple, Stupid, Because If You Don't...

 
Sometimes I'm sorry about the things I post here. Of course, I always know who I am and what I'm up to, but then I forget that everyone else might be confused. So I hit my head and say: "Duh, you should've thought of that!"

In other words, all those times I am guilty of forgetting the very first rule, which is KISS, "Keep it simple, stupid!" Making me the stupid one there, in case you didn't get that. I've actually expanded the first rule, making it more helpful, which might be useful to share here: KISSBIYDTSWBICATYO. Get that? Obviously, it stands for, "Keep it simple, stupid, because if you don't, then someone will become instantly confused and turn you off!"

I've had a number of people "turn me off," probably because they were "instantly confused." Again, I know what I'm up to, but it's not perhaps immediately clear to everyone else. So it's very, very, extremely important -- Note to Self -- that I remember this rule. It's important, so important that I'm going to memorize it: KISSBIYDE. No, KISSBIYDS, damn, missed it again. Let me look: KISSBIYDTS (the S is for someone, not E for everyone) Then the end, WBICATYO. I think I can remember that as a W followed by BIC AT YO, a BIC pen @ YO[u]. OK, got it!

So why are people so instantly confused? I hate to be potentially insulting, but clearly they're not entirely focused in. Teachers tell me these days it's all video games and graphic novels, dumbing down everyone. To which I shout a hale and hearty, "Amen!" I'm sick of video games and graphic novels dumbing things down! I asked at the library why they even stocked video games and graphic novels, and they said they didn't really want to. But, it seems, when you've got morons as your audience, they can be very demanding. They throw fits and pee in the book deposit!

But to be magnanimous and not alienate these easily alienated people -- wilting violets -- naturally I will take the blame. That's only right, keeping with the first rule of customer service: TTBBIYPIWIBTWBIOJON. You probably remember the old rule: "Take the blame, because if you put it where it belongs, they will be instantly offended, justified or not."

I've known a few people in business. And believe me, they're rolling their eyes something fierce at this stuff. Always having to cater to the customers, it's an understandable drag! But the businessman gets 'em back in private, tossing around these acronyms. Like, TCAREWTNWIAATT, "The customer's always right, except when they're not, which is actually all the time!"

I'll Never Be Ignorant Again

It's been a while now, back in January, that I wrote what I thought was a scientific post on clouds, "The Mystery of Clouds." You'd really think that'd be so long ago no one would care. But I get more mail on that post than all the others combined. As it turns out, science people are very protective of their domain, and apparently I don't measure up to their lofty standards.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting any backlash whatsoever. Because I figured my opinions are as good as anyone else's. Which, OK, looking back on it, I can agree that there can be a stark difference between scientific fact and personal opinion. Just like there's a difference between intelligence and stupidity.

All that said, the backlash looks to be way out of proportion to the offense. Wasn't what I said half in jest anyway? I don't have a clear memory of it, but it seems like it. I said I wasn't sure what held clouds up or how they operated. So I gave my opinion that it had to do with being lighter than air. But heavier than the air above them. As they gain weight they become fog. As they lose weight they leave the atmosphere. I wrote something about wires holding them up too. Which isn't true, but that's the part I was joking about.

To those who wrote in and left comments: It might interest you to know that I deleted all your comments. If you can't keep it clean, then I'm sorry, you're outta here! It turns out those who believe in science are the world's biggest pottymouths. Probably because they believe in science, they're able to harness technology faster than everyone else, thereby allowing them to accomplish so much more, fitting in more activities, etc., like looking at porn, and so they pick up a more extensive vocabulary. Of the four-letter variety!

It was hurtful to be called ignorant, along with all the more colorful ways of saying it. But just to clarify one particular comment, assuming I'm supposed to take your insult literally, no, my head is not so far up my ass that I have to see the sun shine through my mouth. Would that even be scientifically possible? Come on, we must be scientifically reasonable and consistent, don't we, huh? Excuse me?

Still, my Grandma always told me I needed to pick my battles. She also gave me a bunch of good information on psychologically minimizing the various situations of life, such as looking for one fatuous argument against me, then being able to dismiss the whole thing, like the guy above saying my head was up my ass. It's impossible. Something I like to do, heh heh, giving away my most intimate secrets, is when I get in a fight I know I can't handle I just walk away. My way of picking battles is never to actually pick one! You see, Grandma lived in a world that didn't have the internet. She never knew an anonymous battle.Or the scurrilous creatures we now have to communicate with on a daily basis.

But I have my self respect to deal with. And if I made certain claims, ignorantly as it turns out, about clouds, then I want to do better next time. So that's my resolution! I'll never be ignorant again! From now on, before I ever say anything even remotely scientific, I will look it up online or in a book. You'll never catch me saying anything stupid ... ever again!

Is Christmas Always On Sunday?

I'm glad the paper answered this important question today, because there's probably lots of us who've been wondering the same thing, without having the courage or drive to write in.

I can truthfully confess, I've celebrated many Christmases, all of them in the past, without now remembering the day of the week they were on. But if I'm to be completely honest, I have to say I don't think they were always on Sunday.

Unlike the questioner, I was already more or less aware that Christmas is always on Dec. 25. More or less? I can actually be more definitive than that: I am very sure Dec. 25 is always Christmas Day! But, still, it's nice to see it in print, and to know it wasn't just a figment of my imagination.

So, thank you, newspaper! You've done us all a great service. If it weren't for the help, who knows, the questioner might have had to look at a calendar! Or googled multiple calendars for multiple years, which would make it a lot more complicated. And obviously not every calendar says when Christmas is, like little calendars. Plus, sometimes it's tough to know if the calendar is showing Sunday or Saturday, since sometimes they just say S M T W T F S (my emphasis).

I hate to gripe about the "Sound Off" column today. But if I could complain just a little, what's the big gap of white space for? If they had that much room, they could have elucidated with a few more details. Like how to reconcile the odd fact that Easter is always on Sunday.

Here's why I think that is: The church gives payoffs to calendar publishers to make it happen. Why the publishers aren't open to payoffs at Christmas is anyone's guess. You'd think they'd be more open, so they could afford more Christmas gifts. But you'll have to ask them.

Maybe "Sound Off" can get to the bottom of it! I'll write in! Why do calendar publishers accept crooked payoffs from the church to reserve Sunday for Easter, but when it comes to Christmas they turn and say "Bug off!"?

I'm With Stupid

I like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy. All depends on what you mean by reasonably. It's definitely a qualifier, in my opinion meaning, "By ordinary standards, nothing fancy, such as putting me up against Einstein or Hawking, I'm smart enough to get by in typical human settings without sticking out like a sore thumb for being stupid."

It's all relative. Although I suppose you could make the case that since everything's relative that nothing's relative. But if we have have even one guy who's smarter than another guy, which is easily demonstrable, then obviously there is relativity in this important matter. So the other guy has to be stupider. He's stupid, just maybe not the stupidest guy there is.

What's the chances of the first stupid guy you meet being the stupidest guy ever? The chances of meeting the stupidest guy ever are slim. Of course if you eat a lot of fast food, you have a better chance. If he messes up your order, even a simple order, maybe you've found him. I tend to be more lenient, more merciful in these cases, especially if I'm thinking. Because maybe he had a fight with his girlfriend before coming to work, or his car's getting fixed and he knows he can't afford to pay for it, or his child support is due, or his kid is sick or something. That would explain why doesn't realize a Number 7 comes with coffee without being told. Still, if he's able to function at a job at all, he can't be the stupidest guy in the world.

Anyway, let's say you find a really stupid guy -- and he's not only apparently stupid because of troubles with his girlfriend, his car, his kid. Chances are you could find someone stupider, given enough time and the freedom to travel. So this guy is stupid, but he can tell you someone stupider. And that guy can tell you someone stupider yet. And that guy knows someone even stupider. We keep tracing the line of stupid people from this one particular branch till we find their stupidest guy. Then even he knows of another branch where the smartest guy is stupider than him.

I'm reasonably sure that you're never going to find the absolute stupidest guy, because at some level it's going to just be a pool of brain dead people who are identically stupid. If you got there there would be nothing really to cling to to quantify their intelligence or lack thereof.