That's Some Funny, Sir

I often fall into the trap that lots of people my age find themselves in, or never realize that they're in to begin with, and that's the trap of fooling myself into thinking -- no, knowing -- that I'm experienced: broad-minded and worldly.

And then, every so often, I realize that I'm just another sheltered, Jewish mama's boy from the suburbs. With post-nasal drip, of course.

Yesterday at the psychiatric hospital that, for eight hours a day is my home, I had the opportunity to experience a first. I have experienced many firsts at my current job-- and I've only been there exactly one month. I have seen male masturbation, and I would say that I've seen more than my fair share of said activity. I have also seen people wander around hallways naked; I have seen patients and staff members get attacked and have intervened physically to restrain patients. I have held patients down while they have received medicine to calm them down, and I have applied full leather restraints to patients to tie them to beds after they have been assaultive.

I've seen some cray-cray shit, and it's really just the beginning-- the very humble beginning. And that's just the shit that I've seen. The shit that I've heard? Forget about it.

But yesterday I had the unusual experience of sitting in a chair, beside an elderly, black, female patient. She was in a wheelchair, covered up to her chin with a blanket, with a Phillies hat on her head, at a jaunty, 1940's angle. She's missing around seven teeth on the bottom row-- she lost two just a couple weeks ago at the hospital. I saw one of them in a Zip-Loc baggie in the nurse's station. It looked archeological.

"I don't know why they didn't just nail that shit back in there, sir," said Gladys (not her real name-- fuckin' duh) "the roots was good. The top was good."

"I don't know, Gladys," I replied, "that tooth of yours that I saw looked like a twenty year old Rice Krispie."

Gladys cracked up. She loves messing around, and I love it, too. She'll look at you out of the corner of her eye after a jest, to check you out-- to make sure you're on the level, and then the corners of her mouth will turn up and she'll start laughing. And it's good medicine.

"You're a funny motherfucker, sir," she said to me, giggling. I said thank you. Gladys has known me for a month now, and she knows my name, but she insists on calling me "Sir." I've stopped asking her to stop. "I got some jokes for you, sir," Gladys said, scratching one of the cornrows under her Phillies hat. "You wanna hear some of my jokes?"

"Definitely," I said, putting my clipboard down on the floor. "Wait-- are they clean?"

She looked at me.

"Fuck, no."

"Excellent," I said, folding my arms and adjusting in my chair, "let's hear it."

"Okay," Gladys said, "first one goes like this: See, there's this black man and he's on the train, you know? And he's sittin' there, just sittin' there on the train, sir, and he's got this big ol' roach on his shoulder, sir-- just sittin' there on his shoulder, on the train, see? And the steward, he comes walkin' down the aisle checkin' all the tickets, and he sees this roach, and he brushes it off the black man's shoulder, and the black man says, 'Shit, mothafucka, leave that roach alone. Man! Everythin' a black man has, people be tryin' to take away from him.'" I let out a laugh and Gladys checked me out, cracked a grin, and she started laughing, too.

"You like that, sir?" she asked.

"I do," I said, nodding.

"That's some funny shit, sir."

"Yeah-- it is."

"I got another one, sir."

"Proceed," I said.

"So, there's a Chinese man, a white man, and a black man, and they's all sittin' down at a bar gettin' drunk-- they havin' a good time, sir. And in walks Jesus Christ. He comin' on down to the bar to have a few, you know. And the Chinese guy, he says, 'Oh, shit! That Jesus,' and he walk up to Jesus and he say, 'Jesus, I got leprosy, I'll buy you a drink if you pray for me and take away my leprosy,' you know. And Jesus touch him and you know his leprosy got cured.

And the white man, he say, 'Jesus, I got these migraine headaches-- bad. Can you touch me and take away my migraine headaches?' (I guess the white guy didn't offer to buy J. C. a drink.) And Jesus said, 'Fuck, yeah,' and he touches this white dude and take away his headaches.

And then Jesus walks up to the black dude, he on crutches, see-- and Jesus start to reach out to the black dude, and the black dude he say, "Motherfucker, I'll buy you a drink, but don't be fuckin' touchin' me-- I'll lose my disability check."

And, as I laughed, and as Gladys laughed, after checking me out first, of course, I laughed with the selfconscious uneasiness of a suburban, Jewish mama's boy (with post-nasal drip, of course) who had never before heard, live and in person, a black person tell a "black people" joke.

While calling me "sir."

My Masonic Apron's AWESOME GIVEAWAY!

Hahaha! You clicked to read this post thinking I had some cool promotional item to give away to a randomly-selected reader in order to drive up my readership statistics.

That's funny!

Yeah, I don't have shit for you.

What I do have, though, is a blog post-- because that's what a blog is supposed to contain, right?

Right.

Have you ever stopped for a moment to consider what is on your desk, and what those objects might say about you and your own personal little world? Personally, I'm a little afraid of revealing to you, gentle reader, all of the items that are sitting here in front of me, but I think I'm going to, because I think you deserve to know. Not only that but, I think, most of you know me well enough by now to know that I believe in an overabundance of disclosure.

I think it brings us closer together.

Ready? Here we go:

I'll start with the obvious-- the computer monitor. It's a 19-inch Westinghouse flatscreen that we purchased as an "Open Item" from Worst Buy a few months ago when my wife's butt-monitor of the Bush, Sr. era finally blitzed out. I had been advocating for a flatscreen monitor for months and months prior to that event, ironically, to conserve desk space. You'll see why that's ironic soon.

On our desk also sit two boxes of checks. I'm always petrified of running out of checks. We don't usually run out, we usually just lose them. Even though most of our bills are paid in cyber-space, we still use checks to pay the mortgage and the car payment. There are three hundred checks in the two boxes on the computer desk.

A huge Mag-Lite flashlight. I bought this flashlight many years ago, for one reason: because it's a cool cop-like toy. It's the kind the police used in the 1970s to beat the shit out of suspects when they couldn't reach for their nightsticks in time.

There's a pedometer, too. When my wife and I go out walking or hiking, she likes to know how far we've gone, for reasons of personal gratification. We always forget to attach it to her waistband whenever we go walking or hiking.

My "Pirates of Penzance" score and libretto. Hopefully I will remember to take this to work with me today so I can use 15 minutes of my 1/2-hour lunch break to practice my recitatives, and the Act II finale so I won't look like a complete asshole at rehearsal tonight.

Lots of Post-It-type notes. Some contain online ed. class log-in information, things we want to remember, some are discolored. It's obviously not a very efficient system for remembering things, because I look at some of them and don't even know what they refer to. And they're in my handwriting.

The Boob-Frog. The Boob-Frog is a very long, sock-monkey-looking creation that my wife made, though it definitely more resembles a frog. It has two extremely large, bulging eyes that easily conjure up images of two honkin' titties, thus rendering it "The Boob Frog." It lies inert and prone on our desk, looking rather like a worn-out, empurpled prostitute on her lunch break. I mean, come on-- it's not like she'd be practicing "Pirates" on her lunch break.

A stuffed gingham turtle. I don't remember the story behind this one, but he's cute. He has two purple beads for eyes and a brown patterend shell. I like him, but I don't really know what he's doing here. I hope he doesn't get corrupted by the Boob Frog while I'm at work.

The digital cameras. Yes, there are two, because we're card-carrying members of the Bourgeoisie, and we like it. My wife's is huge and contains pictures from the infamous barn dance and less infamous wedding we attended this past weekend. The smaller camera is mine and it contains dozens and dozens of pictures from our vacation to Maine, including but not limited to pictures of us taking a spin in a real Model-T, me drooling over a 1950 split-window VW Beetle at an antique car museum, some old guy in a blue Speedo doing stomach crunches on the beach, a guy in a kilt, and my wife clutching onto the side of a sailboat for dear life on the Atlantic Ocean. All pictures have yet to be uploaded.

My Norton Anthology of American Literature "Shorter Seventh Edition." It's 2,874 pages.

A 1/64th scale replica of a VW Beetle with a picture holder attached to it. The picture that used to be in it was of me and my wife after I had just proposed to her on the porch of Mark Twain's house in Hartford, CT. The Mexican painters moved it and the picture fell off-- but I just spotted it on the dresser across the room. There, I've put it back. CUTE!

A container holding approximately 8,436 pens, most of which are probably non-functional. There's also a pair of chopsticks in there, I guess for the as-yet unmaterialized instance where we consume Chinese food while watching a TV program on Hulu. Maybe the season premier of SouthLAnd? (October 23)

A couple of random, overflow pens managed to escape from the holder and are on the desk, scattered, including my personal favorite from the Pennsylvania Resource Organization for Lactation Consultants. A nutjob who used to work in my office was also a lactation consultant and she left sixty of those pens at work when she quit. Wanna prank 'em? 610-873-9828. Tell them you're uncontrollably geysering and it's coming out chocolate.

Two free tickets to the Antique Auto Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania. My wife makes her monthly car payments to a credit union in Mechanicsburg, PA and they just sent her these tickets, out of the blue. Finally, something free that we can actually use, and that we will enjoy. If they don't get lost in the vastness of the desk clutter.

Two bottles of nail polish-- Black Peal and Bogota Blackberry.

There's a scrap of pink fabric with little back dresses on manequins sticking out of the top desk drawer. It's mostly on the desk top, so I guess it counts as something on our desk, even though it just looks like the desk drawer threw up.

And, finally, under a chenille lampshade made by my wife which sits on top of one of our auxillary speakers, all of our mortage and closing papers from our homebuying extravaganza. The folder's too big to fit into our filing cabinet, so, um it's on our speaker.

Once, in a graduate level education class, my professor said that you can tell a lot about a person by opening up the trunk of their car. I looked down, carefully averting my gaze as I had learned in years and years of math classes.

"What about you, son?" he said to me. I looked up at him.

"Um," I stammered, "I'll pass."

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P.S.-- Still want that giveaway? Come here and take all this fucking shit off my desk. Except the "Pirates" score. You can have that once I'm off-book.