Took a look at the flash Friday prompts. I snorted. I do that sometimes, I snort. This is 2014, sexism, racism, cataclysm (you caught me, that was a sesame street thing) aren’t gone we just have a new coat of shellack over them; truth is I’m a grown ass man and not only can I snort, I snort in mirth, derision, I can even pull off the inscrutable snort (don’t try this at home kids, I’m a trained professional). Grown ass women? They can’t snort. Sure we’re all enlightened here (at least in the public note section) and I’ll be the last fellow on earth to say a chick can’t snort, I even find it charming. One of my great joys in life is get a woman to snort milk or beer or chicken noodle soup --- it’s really the only true measure of comic timing. But you know that’s not the snort I’m talking about. That snort gets you a punch in the arm and later, perhaps, if the snorter is a second cousin or less related, snort sex; it’s like make up sex only with snorting.
It’s chicks themselves who judge themselves and other chicks so harshly for snorting where there should be a titter, a giggle, maybe, at most a guffaw. And not just chicks but dames and broads and skirts, all of them.
I could be mistaken. I just came up with that theory because I’m going to try really hard not be the first to do a flash this week and then perhaps I won’t be the only one. I did them last week to get out of my head and perhaps the opposite happened. I don’t have the right POV to know for sure. I’m more a brownie than an SLR (ahem, for you youngster a brownie was a square box, maybew two steps above the archaic camera obscura, the lens/mirrors showed the image upside down and the film had enough silver nitrate to kill a nest of vampire. A brownie is not a scabby kneed girl working her way up to scout. An SLR is a single lens reflex, you’re pretty much seeing things exactly as the lens would if it were your eye; it’d be like if your finger and thumb really were a gun).
Oh, sexism and racism. I’m going to meet an old friend next month sometime. As culturally diverse as this sleepy little big ten Hamlet was when I was growing up there were only a handful of black kids; seven belonged to one family, two were African Africans a couple who worked as an thropology team adopted them, the boy pulled a boo Radley when he was sixteen and tripping his balls off and stabbed his dad in the leg with a pair of scissors.
The guy I’m meeting is not boo radly. More importantly he is not Jordie Ascher. Two families next door to one another , seven kids each, eternal and vicious blood feud, the reasons why were never made clear to me. I was friends with both of them, though I remained friends with Chris, Jordie I lost track of. I lost track of most people in this town on my second to last and longer lasting attempt to leave this town, what, I had considered a successful and final attempt.
Oh, chris was and probably still is a black kid. Well, probably not still a kid. Though he’s about as black as I am polish, which is to say entirely but pretty far down the list of what would define either one of us.
Anyhow he somehow heard about the tribute website for my dad and left a tribute and unlike a few of the other tributes (significant enough a few to warrant mentioning) he actually knew my dad, sat at our breakfast and spilled orange juice (not exclusively, sometimes he did other things. I just mean there’s tributes up that start off sort of like some preachers at funerals “I did know the deceased …”). I say somehow because as far as I know he doesn’t have family here and he left town for good sort of around the second to last time I left town for good. So I’m not sure how he knew there was a tribute. But I wrote him back, he says he stops in town every few years and was coming up in July or August and I suggested we try to catch up. He lives in LA (no, the other LA, not L dot A dot, Louisiana). If I lived in LA I would go visiting places in August as well, not this place, but shit, I’d rather be in Phoenix in August than New Orleans, and I like New Orleans and dislike the living shit out of Phoenix (that’s like hate only without using the word hate which is very close to the word love and I don’t have a love/hate relationship with Phoenix Arizona, I have a rather-be-in-flagstaff/dislike the living shit out of relationship with Phoenix).
I had also connected with a cousin who I always sort of meant to talk to just have managed to in fifty years. I saw him once when I was a kid, his family had drove from upstate New York to Disneyland (Disney world wasn’t invented yet) and they stopped by for an afternoon.). The cool thing about the tribute site is that though it obscures email addresses you can send an email through the site itself and, if you get a reply, then you have email addresses. I wonder what sort of dick wouldn’t reply to the son of the deceased? Just saying. My short test would suggest no kind of dick would. But, you know, it was my cousin and an friend, what the fuck were they going to say “Fuck you, your dad is dead.”
My buddy sent me a brief bio, almost looked like the sort of thing you’d put up on a very formal social networking site, except the bit about wife, five kids and grandkids. I snorted again. Except for resumes the closest thing I’ve written to a straight bio (as in not trying to be funny, not trying to be hetro-sexual, though, for all practical purposes I’ve succeeded at being hetrosexual, I mean as much as anyone; I’ve had intercourse with women which, for a guy, is pretty dang hetrosexual and I have not had intercourse with men, to the best of my knowledge, which is equally pretty dang hetrosexual). Shit. Let’s try it without the parenthesis; the closest thing I’ve written to straight bio was three hundred pages long.
So I took him that I’d like to get together when he’s in town and how many kids and grandkids I had and have done a fine job of eating and shitting and laughing and crying and falling in and out of love made mistakes had an epiphany and pretty much did most of the things people and reasonable facsmilies of people manage to do or look like they are doing most places most of the time.
Somebody write a damn flash will you?
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