The death notice in a local Ohio newspaper included a simple last request by the deceased, Scott Entsminger. The avid Cleveland Browns fan, sought that his beloved NFL team provide six pall bearers to carry him to his grave — that’s so the perennial football also-rans “can let him down one last time.”
Hmm… I needed that. That death need not be proud – just funny. Humorous. On wry. The wonderful last retort of dying with a joke on your lips. As we all should. Since everything is a bloody joke. Including all of us. My epithet under consideration stipulates: Tell the IRS to kiss my exes.
Also in the Entsminger obit the family recommended – besides wearing Cleveland Browns clothing to the funeral — that in lieu of flowers to plant something in Scott’s memory.
Hmm…I’d like to plant my last ex-wife, Stephanie Blatt, who lies through rehearsed, theatrical tears – especially on TV. But since that daughter of Baptist missionaries is absolutely devoid of any sense – of humor, also — that would ruin the sacred ground of the musical Scott Entsminger’s final mirth.
Hmm…
What a coincidence: Stephanie’s second of five serious, but discomfiting relationships – to date — was also named Scott. And rather than continue with grim Stephanie her Scott preferred to kill himself before he died of natural causes. Which my romantic mother contends every one dies from – even the heartbroken guy who rams his car into a tree. “It’s only natural he should die,” she intones.
But Stephanie’s Scott’s abrupt autocide death was a far less punishment than the slow death preferred by the Palestinian father of her first son. Sharif apparently chose to escape far away and hide in a cave in the Gaza Strip. That is rather than endure dour Stephanie’s acrid humor that always fell flatter than her chest.
So planting my grim Stephanie anywhere near the good-to-the-last-laugh Scott of the death notice, would seem sacrilegious. For if you can’t laugh at just about everything at most anytime, then you just don’t get duh joke – that it is you and me and everybody else planted on this penal colony to serve out life sentences. And to do it stoopidly. Afterall the only two infinite things are the universe and stoopidity. And, as even Einstein pointed out: I ain’t that sure about the first.
But of course! There’s always more than a hard bitten bullet of truth in all hilarity. That’s why we guffaw, isn’t it? Sometimes our laughter may dither between glee and gallows humor. But so what? Doesn’t all humor linger between our aspirations and limitations. Our optimism and desperation? Truth and consequences? Even though mendacious Stephanie seems to get off ‘scot-free’.
Hmm… There’s Scott again.
Anyway, today (I mean this very day) I am laughing so much because I simply can’t stand it anymore! Unlike Mr. Entsminger it’s not just the Browns, but the world has let me down one last time too many.
As I’ve oft repeated most people don’t die from old age, or illness… or even stoopidity. Most people die because they are bloody fed up. Naturally. That is, just before the laughter turns insidious to a disquieting, insane cackle.
What I can’t stand are all the lies. By everyone. Everywhere. I know the truth is irrelevant. All that matters is what the masses, us hoi polloi, are willing to believe. But I don’t believe nobody, nowhere no more.
My home town Philadelphia is lyin’ about what it did with years and years of tax dollars so that now it ain’t got no money—especially for its already poor and shoddy public schools. And City Council is just too stoopid to recognize the truth. That it is incapable of doing anything but levy more taxes on those who are already overtaxed.
And Pennsylvania is lying. The state ain’t got no money to fund most anything except its underworked and far overpaid legislators who have absolutely no idea how to perform its major function — that is managing the state budget. And that includes recovering the $40 billion shortfall in underfunded pensions.
Our government is lying more than pedophile priests and homophobic Boy Scouts. It lies about wars. It lies about the carnage. Now it is lying about spying on us – the taxpaying citizenry. And so is the rest of the Western World too. Even Germany and France, which both expressed disingenuous shock and dismay about the USA world-wide surveillance shenanigans, were long participants in this voyeurism on more than the neighbor’s wife.
The whole world lies. Pakistan didn’t know that Osama bin Laden was living in country for nine years? Even a half-mile down the road from its equivalent of West Point?
Oy-vey-iz-mir!
In Egypt and Syria and Iran and Afghanistan and Iraq you tell me which liars are the good guys and who deserves a good cross-the-knee spanking.
Of course with a million criminal trials going on in this country the media has us totally focused on the lies on all sides during testimony of the ‘White Hispanic’ who ended up shooting a black teenager who putatively attacked the White Hispanic for trailing him. Which the Florida police told the White Hispanic not to do. But George couldn’t resist being an eager-beaver neighborhood watch rent-a-cop. And Trayvon couldn’t resist George. And now we can’t resist all the juicy Schadenfraude, aka lies, to convict the stoopid White Hispanic’s hide.
In Canada it’s been decided, to date, that the great combustible train crash which upon final tally may result in perhaps more than 50 deaths, was caused by the train engineer. He apparently did not set all the hand brakes, even though he said he did, but the RR CEO said “we think that’s not true.”
Hmm….Is somebody lying?
In Brazil they are lying about protecting the country and keeping it safe for the upcoming World Cup soccer matches. I mean they couldn’t even protect a referee from being stabbed, quartered and beheaded in the middle of a soccer field melee the other day!
And we, back in Philadelphia, have nothing to scoff about. A champion high school girls’ basketball team had to return its back-to-back Public League championships. That is after a third girls’ basketball player (a third!!!) was found to be lying. That is she lives outside the city. Not one. Not two. But three players had completely bogus addresses. And the coach, who has accepted a bigger, better and richer job at another school was caught in his unawares?
Please, someone throw me in a vat of bourbon. These lies are so badly scripted they couldn’t hit water if they fell off a boat.
Doesn’t anyone tell the truth anymore – I mean except when the truth is more profitable? The trouble with liars is that you can’t depend on them. I mean every once in a while even a pathological liar like my ex-misses, Stephanie, tells the truth. But how would you know?
Perhaps it’s everywhere because there are no real consequences these days, except in China where all those corrupt politicians are dying mysteriously from ‘respiratory failure.’
Hmm…
And meanwhile, not one of the patronizing tsk-tsking commentators on the Golf Channel sought to call me up and consider another side of Stephanie’s abominations. Not that I would explain myself. Those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind her mendacious perfidy. And I would just reply: Here’s the phone numbers of the Judge, DA, psychiatrists, social workers, lawyers, acquaintances and such. Even her reticent mother and father. Here’s the so-called proof she has a history. And I have a history of women with a past. And Stephanie’s past is just like that Asiana plane crash in San Francisco.
I am sitting outside a coffee shop writing this requiem. And the rather alluring shop manager is sweeping the sidewalk while kvetching about all the litter. And she noted that she had just returned from a visit the Holy Land where it was much worse.
At first I told her the old saw: That if everyone cleaned in front of his or her home then the whole world would be clean.
Then I fell into relating the slightly embellished tale of when I moved to Philadelphia from North Carolina. One early morning I was jogging around the luxurious Center City Rittenhouse Square, where all the old money is squired.
There was this squat, little, old, bad-hair-day matron with two petite dogs about the size of hors d’oeuvres. The little yappers had planted elephant-sized dumps on the sidewalk. I asked her to clean it up. She merely harrumphed and waddled off in her ersatz leopard skin coat. So I scooped it up and tossed duh stuff into one of the many nearby trash bins.
A couple of weeks later while jogging around the same park I was daydreaming with the glorious blue-as-Carolina sky. And suddenly I slid and badly wrenched my bad knee. The dog dump smell was acrid. And up ahead I saw the same lady with the same two Pekinese mutts. So I scooped up the crap in my hands and hobbled up to her. At that I wiped my mitts across her fake leopard hide. Back and forth like an old barber on his razor strop.
She screeched and howled for help! And a policeman the size of Wilt Chamberlain slowly strolled up.
As the woman continued to caterwaul I simply reported: “I warned her last week.”
The officer twinkled one of those devilish grins and exhaled deliberately: “Well, I guess she won’t do that again.”
Consequences, I chirped. Even Mother Nature has no rewards or punishments; she only has consequences.
And so it was done, as Scott Entswinger sought with his own written elegy: One last time.
And dats yDrewIS on dis penal colony…
ydrewis.wordpress.com 