Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

from June 13, 2008

October 23^rd, 1986- Just over one week before Halloween, Mr. Blog, eager to carve a jack-o-lantern, buys the last pumpkin at Waldbaum’s.

June 10^th, 2008- Mr. Blog is excessed from his school.

Coincidence?

I think not.

There are no coincidences. There can’t be. Because if there are such things as coincidence and happenstance, then this must be a truly chaotic and unpredictable world in which we live. Imagine if what we call “luck” was actually the careful mathematical, algorithmical output of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. Who would believe in the opening years of the twenty-first century that this world is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as our own?

No one would. That’s bullshit I paraphrased from the opening of War of the Worlds.

There is one universal truth and that is what the French call la merde se produit.

We say “shit happens.” It just sounds better in French. (And what doesn’t? Even je me rends sounds romantic until you realize that it means “I surrender” and the French waiter you just tipped is about to take off his apron and put on a pair of German jackboots.)

So this is some of the HA! HA! funny stuff that happened to me this week, in no particular order, ’cause that would be work and I’m tired- blame my Epstein Bar, or maybe I’m just lazy. Nah, blame global warming instead. (“I’m sorry, Mr. VP, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore- I’ll buy some more of your carbon credits, just stop hitting me!”)

When was Chinese New Year? (Kathy?) Anyway it was awhile ago. So I put up some decorations in my room- some fragile paper dragons that broke when I looked at them sternly and two plastic “Year of the Rat” posters. One went on my door and one went on my wall.

We’ve got a brick-faced secretary at work named Doreen. Or should I say they have, ’cause as you may know I’m bound for a new career in air conditioner repair. (Apex Tech all the way!) Imagine Olive Oyl’s overbite, Roseanne Barr’s whiny voice, and the body of your second cousin. Now give her all the personality and intelligence, and, yes, raw simmering sex appeal of a log or a wedge of cheese. That’s her. (BTW- Mr. Leal hit that??? Ohh, belay that- I’ll show off my street cred- Mr. Leal tapped that ass???)

Anyway, she blah blahs her way over to me and tells me that she’s a rat. With those teeth I could believe it, but she explains that (Here I go all in present tense again- won’t anyone edit me?) she was born in the year of the rat and when I’m done with the decorations she wants one. OK, sure, thumbs up! Long story not quite short yet, I kept them up way past Chinese New Year just to bother her.

And it did. Every few weeks she’d rat on by and remind me that she wanted one.  Or she’d tell me about her back problems, or she’d tell me about her back problems. Or she’d tell me about her back problems. (Yeah, I typed that 3 times.) That must have disappointed Mr. Leal to no end.

Today I took down the decorations and, just on the off chance that she might, you know, slither on by and ask, I put one in her mailbox.

She came into my room and asked if I remembered her. I said “sure, you’re a rat.” She pointed at me and said “a-ha.” I told her it was in her mailbox (just like Leal was in her box) and she stayed and made some small talk that made the small talk I made at the LHS party seem epic and she left. When she came back she was holding, no, sorry, hugging the poster and stood in my doorway where the kids couldn’t see her and pointed to the poster, pointed to herself, pointed to me, and made the same complicated hand gesture that Fortunado made in The Cask of Amontillado  and walked off.

If it was a gang sign I may now be in good with the Horse-Faced Crips.

I also started cleaning out my closets and files and came across things that I haven’t seen in almost nine years, like the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was in the LHS library and was pulled after a kid was disappointed that it was written in good, grammatical prose and was therefore unerotic and not able to help him jack off and complained that it had no pictures.

I found a letter from my first mentor, when I first taught in a middle school. This mentor would always tell me about the jobs for a teacher with the Board of Education that would keep me out of the classroom. I could work in an office, she said.

I found a small plastic dinosaur from when Michelle cleaned out her room. Kept that.

Under an old notepad was a brand new notepad. This is not funny, just ironic, as I spent the last week looking for a new notepad.

I am also reluctantly about to throw out the beat-up Superman poster that has graced my front door for the last couple of years. But don’t worry- in my new office at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge (or somewhere) I’ll hang up a new geeky poster.

Change, transition, evolution, metamorphosis, yada yada yada. Call it what you will (“we call it maize”) but it all comes down to the luck of the draw. Sometimes you draw the jack on the river and pull the inside straight, and sometimes you pull the little card with the rules of poker and the other players want to kill you because you shuffled and forgot to take it out of the deck.

One thing is constant. MY BLOG.

Literary references in this blog: 2 (War of the Worlds and The Cask of Amontillado.)
Old-fashioned erotic boring porn references: 1
Parenthetical asides: Too many to count, and really, why bother?
Stuff that’s true: All of it.
Stuff I made up: Believe it or not, not a word.

Tags: bmj2k, decorations, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride