Stump: The Sequel

Those of you who have the misfortune to call yourselves "Diehard My Masonic Apron Freaks" might remember a silly little post from July 19th, 2009 where I went... oh... a little funny in the head. And I impetuously tore out a bunch of yew stumps from the flower-beds in front of our house, in 90 degree heat, using nothing but a shovel, my bare hands, and caged-up half-Israeli inner turmoil that could be caged no longer. There was copious, rather untoward amounts of sweating, profanities, and, yes, blood. It was, quite frankly, a time where my mental health was clearly in a rather dubious, tenuous, and fragile state.

My wife, immediate family, clergymen, and my healthcare providers were all relieved when 2010 passed by without similarly unsettling incidents arising.

Enter: April 30th, 2011.


The day started out innocently enough. We went out for a delightful breakfast. We fought with two Asian check-out ladies (one of whom was inexplicably named "Ophelia") at the Rite-Aid over our right to use a faded coupon that had NOT expired, and then we went home.

To garden.

It was supposed to be a quaint, lovely little time in the garden for this young couple. We'd started some snapdragons in the house, as well as some coxcomb, and a sweetpea or four, and they'd finally outgrown their little starter pots, and it was time to place them in the earth to, hopefully, flower and/or grow brilliantly.

Of course, we had to weed first. My wife weeded in the back to make room for the snapdragons, and I was charged with weeding in the front flower beds where, nearly two years ago, I went a little... you know... funny.

Well, I got on my hands and knees and I started pulling shit out of the ground-- which I L-O-V-E. As I weeded, crouched in a squating position, I teetered a bit and I leaned up against one of the five remaining yew stumps that, two years ago, we had deemed far too large to attack ourselves. We still have the estimate from the tree surgeon who came to our house to evaluate what it would cost to professionally remove the remaining stumps.

($250-- and we agreed to have him do it, and we called him and told him to come do it. In July of 2009. He never showed.)

Anyway, when I leaned against this yew stump to brace myself and catch my balance, it gave a little bit, and a root became exposed from underneath the dirt. I stared at the root.

Well, I thought, I can break that.

And so it began again. I stood up, grabbed hold of the $30.00 fiberglass shovel, and I attacked that root with the pointed end of the shovel, as if I were trying to decapitate some royal usurper with a blunted sword. When I had broken through the root that was probably as thick as the Jolly Green Giant's whang, I grabbed ahold of the yew stump with both hands and I rocked it back and forth, pulling as hard as I could, sweat pouring into my eyes and stinging like a bitch, and-- whaddya know-- the stump broke free.

Immediately, I set my sights on an enormous one, right in front of the house-- a real eyesore.

My wife, who had been weeding in the back of the house, came over to me.

"Oh, my God. Again?"

I looked up at her with dirt on my forehead.

"Again."

It took approximately one hour to get the other stump out of the ground. It was horrible. I thought my heart was going to explode at one point. I felt like giving up at least four times. But I couldn't. I needed to finish. Call it compulsion. Call it insanity. Call it yew-buggery if you're English, but there was no way that, once I'd started, that fucking stump was going to survive. I just wasn't going to allow it.

NIMFY.

NOT.

IN.

MY.

FRONT.

YARD.


And then, we planted the snapdragons and coxcomb together. Which was very nice.

Knowing, too, that I am still as crazy at nearly 31 as I was at newly-minted 29 is very nice, as well, I think. I suppose I will mellow out at some point. But the compulsive, driven, irrational and impulsive side of me has yet to be quelled, not even after nearly three years of living a placid-seeming, suburban existence. And I suppose that's a good thing.

"I'm always going to be crazy," I said to Mrs. Apron as we washed the morning's adventure off our hands in the sink.

"I know," she said, and then she kissed me.

Goodbye, April. Hello, May. Don't fuck with this green thumb.

Oh, Bits.

For a while, when I was younger, I would read the obituary page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. When I remarked to a camp counselor that I did this, he asked me why. "To make sure I'm not in there," I quipped.

Precocious, indeed.

Really, the reason I read the obituaries was to see if anybody I knew was in there. I'm not quite sure who exactly I thought I might know, as a fourth grader in suburban southeast Pennsylvania, who might be recently deceased and, therefore, would be in the obituaries. But, for a good few years, I read the obituaries-- just to make sure. I read them pretty regularly. Like other developmentally dubious, potentially unhealthy habits in which I engaged as a child, my parents did little to curb this particular... interest.

"Why don't you read the comics?" my mother helpfully suggested one morning as I sat in my father's chair at the dining room table, hunched over the obits page. I thought about that idea for a moment or two, and it seemed reasonable.

"Okay," I responded. And I began to read the comics, after finishing up reading the obituaries. My favorite comics as a child were "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury."

There is no denying that death is fascinating, especially to a child, who is just beginning to fit death into his whole schema of how the world operates. The utter finality of it, the universality of it, the why and wherefore-- it was pretty arresting for little bowl-cut ol' me. I enjoyed very much reading all the different names and professions people had, how long they lived, where they were being buried. Goldsteins was a very popular funeral home in my neck of the woods, and, as the years went on, several members of my mother's family passed through that way. Those who worshipped in a different way frequently were tended to by the Donahue folks. They had multiple locations. Death is a big business.

The one thing that really irked the piss out of me as a kid reading obituaries was the distinct lack of gory details-- especially when the decedent was a young buck. Like-- I really wanted to know what happened and I thought, if they were going to bother putting this shit in the newspaper, which is supposed to provide information, that I had kind of a right to know how these people died. I wasn't particularly interested in, "passed suddenly." Well, if you're not wasting away in some Stryker bed in your living room with bedsores all over your ass or hooked up to a ventilator in some ICU, isn't it pretty much always "sudden"? Come on, bitches-- I wanted the details.

What? Was she shot? Stabbed? Hammered or what? Did he eat poorly washed baby lettuce with E-coli in it? Was it an aneurysm or an embolism or a tension pneumothorax or a cerebrovascular hemorrhage? Did some crazy fuck put a pillow over this creep's face because he owed him $30 and a Sega Genesis game? I realized, of course, that it was just a tiny obituary and not a coroner's report, but I was reasonably sure that maybe seven or eight words about the cause of death wouldn't kill anybody.

See what I did there?

I routinely scanned the obituary pages to see if people were around the same age my parents were back then. If I read the entire day's worth of death notices, and there were no people who had died at roughly the age my parents were at this time, I could go to school relatively comforted that one or both of them weren't going to drop dead while I was not learning math. This was the kind of reassurance I craved, amongst lots of other kinds. If I read the obituaries and there were a couple of people who kicked it in their late thirties to early forties, it would be a challenging day at school. I wouldn't be able to focus. It's not that I'd be thinking about my parents dying all day, but, at inopportune moments, my mind would admittedly drift back to that unfortunate subject. Well, I'd reason, if it could happen to Stella V. D'Orisio (née Kaplan), then it could just as easily happen to my mommy. I'd like to entirely blame my mediocre grades on this preoccupation of mine, but I don't think that would be entirely fair. I also watched a lot of Monty Python.

Of course, as a child, I never found anybody I knew in the newspaper's obituary section. It was only after I actually started knowing people who had died that I stopped reading the obituaries. Maybe it became too real at that point. My great-uncle. My neighbor. My allergist. The girl I knew from school who died of a heart attack while getting her wisdom teeth out.

Suddenly.

And it was perhaps then that I realized why, when someone so young passes, the family doesn't particularly feel compelled to reveal the reason behind the premature exit from the stage of life. Because it's just too painful. And, really, in the end-- what does it matter? When you're dead, you're dead. And to you and your loved ones, it's a calamity of unequaled proportions. And to some kid with a funny haircut sitting in a turquoise sweatsuit with his legs folded underneath him in his father's chair poring over the newspaper-- it's merely a curious obsession.

To put it mildly.

You'll Thank Me (In Advance)

When this blog goes live (7:18am on Sunday), I'll already be eighteen minutes into the official start of my shift. Of course, because I'm insane, I'll have entered the psych hospital (good place for me) at 6:30am, to get a jump on the morning's paperwork.

When I work the weekends, I like to have my weekend blogs (which nobody reads, except for you. Loser.) attended to, scheduled, in the can, loaded up and ready to fire before the weekend rolls around so that, when I get home from work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I can spend time with my wife, like God intended us to do together when he, like, knew us before he formed us in the womb or whatever.

As I write this post, it's 8:24pm on Thursday night. Mrs. Apron's out tutoring, so it seemed like the perfect time to get through the weekend's posts. I don't think I have the energy to do Monday's tonight. I'll do that Sunday night. I mean... tonight. I mean-- you know what I mean. Shut up.

You know how this blog goes by now. It's unpredictable in its predictability. Sometimes there's a post about what a Dee-presso I am, the next day there might be something that makes the pee come out, just a little, then there could be something about a dead cop, or an earthquake, or a politician, or some sort of other current event or other. Obviously, it's tricky to be timely and write about current events that might be current on Sunday when it's Thursday, unless you're a soothsayer or something.

I'm not. I just have a big nose and funny looking elbows.

That said, I can make predictions about where this world of ours will be on Sunday, March 13.

I can say funny things about Libya and Justin Bieber and the future Mrs. United Kingdom. I can make all kinds of pop-culture references that make me sound wry and irreverant, well-informed yet casually aloof.

"Hey, you know that Governor Chris Christie? By Sunday, he will throw up a skinny version of himself who will hire back all those Camden cops and make some of New Jersey's roads not flat."

Ha.

Awesome.

But I'm not going to do that because, as you can already tell: that's annoying.

I could also write some whining bastard post about how awful it is to have to work every other weekend, but then I think of my coworker who's been doing the same thing for eight years. I've been doing it for six months. And that motherfucker recently took three weeks off in a row, and he's got over two more saved up. So, you know, life's not so bad. Don't cry for me, Uruguay.

Then I was thinking about making up some kind of fictional scenario where people are faced with the dilemma of whether they ought to eat their counterparts or die. You know-- people love to read about that shit. The Donner Party. Alive. Just think about how much more compelling 127 Hours would have been if the dude had not only cut off his own arm, but ate it, too. I was thinking, like, you know... I don't know, there's this orgy going on in a hotel in Mexico City, and there's, like, four Asian businessmen, two Mexican prostitutes and a burro all rompin' around and shit and all of a sudden, there's an earthquake and the room caves in on everybody, and the businessmen and the prostitutes have to survive any way they can.

Obviously, the first choice is: eat the donkey.

BUT: the lynchpin of this whole thing is that the donkey... um... it's magic. YEAH! A fucking magic fucking donkey! His big ass buck-teeth are made of gold and whenever you lick them, uh, you get three wishes. So, right. So, the businessmen are all like, "Damn, we can't eat this fucking thing-- it's magic. So, they wish, obviously, for more Mexican prostitutes. So, more Mexican prostitutes show up. And then they wish for a big bucket of frozen Halibut, you know, so they can do fucked up things to the Mexican prostitutes with the Halibut. And then they're all like, "Oh, no! This Halibut smells like hell, especially when combined with Mexican prostitute schnazz, so they wish for the Halibut to disappear, which it does, but then they're still in the busted up motel room with even more Mexican prostitutes than before, and the magic donkey, having exhausted all of its wishes and its earthly purposes, turns into a Halibut. Non-magical, and unfrozen.

And it smells.

And that, friends, is what happens when I blog on a Thursday, for a Sunday.