Educational Wednesday, Part Ketto (That’s Hungarian For Two)—The Soothsaying Winnebago Man

I remember back in 6th or 7th grade, some guy in a camper came to our school and talked to us about what we wanted to be when we grew up. After his spiel in front of the class, he took each of us out to that camper for a ‘one-on-one,’ without any later reports of molestation, which is pretty amazing. That is not the lesson here, though.

Inside, he had some sort of weird, primitive camper internet that gave printouts of information on the careers that we said we were interested in. I thought the whole thing was stupid, so I told him I wanted to be a garbageman, which I ironically sort of was a few years ago.

So, was this some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, or did that camperman overlook my lack of enthusiasm for choosing a career at age thirteen because he saw something in me, some raw, unshaped gunk that he truly believed would make a good garbageman?

I think the true lesson here is this: career counselors that live in campers know more about you than you think.

I Was Gone For A Little Bit. I’m Back Now.

I’ve been out of the blogosphere for a few weeks, but I’ve been doing stuff:

—I gave three cans of beans to a food shelter. I am now part of the solution.

—I travelled.

—I came back.

—I was undercharged at a Subway in Lusk, Wyoming, and didn’t tell them because the service sucked.

—I was overcharged at a liquor store in Mounds View, Minnesota, and I did tell them because the total came to over $8,000 for a six pack.

—I met a woman at an Arby’s in Kearney, Nebraska, who believed South Dakota was an exciting state to visit.

—I went through South Dakota, and wanted to drive off a cliff after passing the 257th sign for Wall Drug. BUT THERE WERE NO CLIFFS.

—Then there were cliffs, in the western part. I decided to boycott Wall Drug instead.

—In the mountains of Colorado, I urinated in a tributary of Clear Creek, the water source of the Coors Brewery.

—I drank a beer infused with bull testicles. This beer: Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout.

From beerpulse.com

—I drank a beer named after Kurt Vonnegut, using a recipe from his maternal grandfather. This beer: Kurt’s Mile High Malt.

From wynkoop.com

That’s it.

 

 

This Is How I Found Out Where Babies Come From

A baby, just lying there, contributing absolutely nothing to society

It’s my little sister’s birthday today. Around the time she was born, or sometime in the months or years after, I found myself wondering, “Who is this other kid, and where did it come from?” I asked Google of the late ’80’s, my Mom, why there was another, smaller member of the family. In response to whatever form of the “Where do babies come from” question I dropped on her, I got this: “You pray for it, then you get pregnant, and then you have a baby.”

Even at the age of three, or four, or five—however young I was at the time, I remember thinking to myself, “Something about that doesn’t sound right.”

I took this info to my older sisters, and was told “You don’t have to pray for a baby, the man just sticks his penis in the woman’s vagina.”

This was confirmed much later in school when we watched animated sex-ed videos with wacky talking sperm and kids wondering why they have hair growing in places where it seems like hair isn’t necessary.

A Late Halloween Story

I remember a few years back when I was at a costume store before Halloween. Some old guy started talking to me for some reason. He told me that he was going to stick a potato on his genitalia, and go to a Halloween party as a dictator. Then I left because he was weird.

The Snake Feeding

Ever since seeing the movie Road Trip it has been one of my lifelong goals to witness a snake feeding. The events in the following anecdote occured in mid-February of this year.

During a birthday party, I was informed that meal time for the resident pet snake was imminent. This only happens like once a month. The electricity in the air was palpable. Tensions rose as the frozen corpse of a small rabbit thawed in the bathtub. Not able to take the suspense any more, I walked into the kitchen, positioned myself in the middle of a crowd, and started chanting “Feed the snake, FEED THE SNAKE!” The chant caught on, and a small crowd congregated around the cage. But much to my chagrin, the serpent did not seem to be hungry just then. She did not ravage the deceased hare, and the body was refrozen for later consumption. I was so close to seeing it happen. It was right there! C’mon man!

This is actually pretty similar to what happened:

I Owned a Phat Farm Polo Shirt For One Day

Remember back in June when I started writing my memoirs? I kind of do, and you can too if you click here. Here is another anecdote I thought I should share. It’s the tale of how a Honolulu-blue Phat Farm brand polo shirt came into my possession in the summer of ’05.

I was standing outside a party at my neighbor’s house one night, and some guy came rushing out the back door, vomiting as he ran. It was mostly whiskey. I know that because some of it landed on my left shoulder and arm, and it’s easy to smell what something is when it’s soaked into your clothes. He felt so bad that he literally gave me the shirt off his back. I kept telling him that I had no use for his Phat Farm apparel, but he really wanted me to have it. So I took it, went home, threw it on the floor, and changed into one of my own non-Phat Farm shirts. I tried to think of something cool to do with that polo, and the best thing I came up with was to throw it in the trash.

Memoirs

In my ongoing quest to become rich, I recently began preparing my memoirs. Only the richest, most influential people write memoirs – or get them published, I should say. Otherwise every two-bit Jimmy and Jane on the block would be pumping the market full of balloon juice. Beginning this project now will leave me more time to enjoy being rich later. I would assume the full volume will hit the shelves anywhere within the next three to seven years, or whenever it is that I accomplish the remarkable feat that, still unbeknownst to me at this time, will make me an extremely rich person. Let’s just poke our nose in on a random chapter and see what’s cookin’.

Memoirs

….”And so I said to her, that wasn’t a ferret!” Oh, hello. Didn’t see you there. I was just telling a hilarious anecdote to some friends. Anyways, this seems like a good part of the memoir to reveal a major character-shaping event in my life that led me to become who I am today. As we all know, I spent the summer of ’03 working as a “butter melter” under the employ of my uncle Bruce at a dairy plant in a small agrarian town in Minnesota. I spent all day sliding 50 pound blocks of butter into a 250 degree vat where it eventually melted. Not so long after beginning there, the time came for my forklift training. This consisted of me sitting on a forklift in a room full of wooden pallets, and a guy named Fuzzy telling me to “move them around until you’ve got the hang of it.” And so I did. Not soon after, disaster struck. While lifting a stack of pallets, I inadvertently caught the edge of an electrical box on the wall and ripped it out of its moorings. Luckily the training that I had just given myself allowed me to deftly maneuver a bunch of pallets in front of the box to hide it. I just assumed that time would pass and it would go unnoticed. How right I was, for a little bit.

Weeks later, while walking the grounds with uncle Bruce and some guy with a moustache, I don’t recall his name because everyone there but me had a moustache, we came across the box, just hanging there. Someone had exposed it, not knowing that I was hiding a terrible secret in the rotten jungle of pallets. Anyways, Bruce was all like “Who did this?” And the guy with the moustache was all like, “It was probably that idiot Stanley.” Stanley, by the way, was some guy with one eye who never showered. Now, keep in mind that in the butter melting profession, you are covered in butter and sweat for eight to twelve hours a day. So if you don’t shower, things get sour. I thought to myself, “Nice, they’ll just pin the blame on this stinky one-eyed guy.” And it turns out I was right.

Therein lies the lesson for this portion of the memoir: always have a weird looking person that you can project blame onto. And in this case, I didn’t even have to do the blaming, other people did it for me. So there’s another lesson. Just kind of hang out in the background and let other people battle it out. That’s what the Swiss do. And Switzerland also happens to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Thus concludes this portion of the memoir.

By the way, I don’t think that electrical box was actually hooked up to anything, so no one got in any real trouble anyways.

Here’s the Blong (Blog Song) of the day. Junior Kimbrough – Done Got Old. Dirty, filthy, nasty blues.