Tag: humor

REPOST: MOAR BUTTZ, a tale told with pictorial accompaniment.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting3 Comments

Context: my day has been long and tiring, and yesterday was largely consumed by dealing with my now-six-year-old son’s ass and the various horrifying products it was creating and dispensing.  I am not in the mood to write a post, but I have always felt like this one didn’t get enough credit.  And most of you haven’t seen it.  So therefore: enjoy.

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So for the last couple of days the boy has been all

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and, frankly, it’s starting to look really unpleasant.  He’s clearly not terribly happy with the situation either.

My wife gets home from work today and tells me she has a mission for me.  I’ll be honest: I was tired (again) and hungry (again) and more than a little aggravated already for reasons that I don’t plan to go into and the thought of a mission was not entirely pleasing to me.

“Describe the nature of this mission,” I requested.

“I need you to get butt paste,” she said.

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“Butt paste.” I replied.  I made sure to phrase it in such a way that she heard the period at the end of the sentence.

“Butt paste,” she says.  “I’m hoping you can get it at Martin’s.”

(Context: Martin’s is our local grocery store; it’s a chain but I’m pretty sure it’s limited to north-central Indiana and maybe lower Michigan.)

I look up Butt Paste on the Internet, which sadly is probably not the oddest search I’m going to perform on the Internet this week.  It turns out that there is a product specifically called Butt Paste.  Check the URL:  you find it at buttpaste.com, which should not be a website for medical supplies.  However, frighteningly, that is not the Butt Paste that I’m looking for.

UnknownWhat I’m looking for– what the pediatrician apparently explicitly suggested my wife try to locate– is actually called Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment, which still sounds inappropriate.  Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment is, near as I can tell, only sold in one place on Earth, but more on them later.  Needless to say, that place isn’t Martin’s.  My wife calls Martin’s anyway, just to be sure, and asks the pharmacist who answers the phone if they carry, no shit, this is a direct quote: “Dr. Sirlin’s butt paste.  For butts.  Baby butts.”

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I consider protesting the use of the phrase butt paste for this query, because we aren’t looking for butt paste, we’re looking for bottom ointment, which is clearly very different.  I do not actually voice the query.  The person on the other line comes back quickly with an affirmative.  We have butt paste!  Go for butt paste!

Unknown-1And I’m off to Martin’s.  It’s not far away from home, which is the reason we’d rather go there.  Once I get there I arrive timed perfectly with a car leaving a very choice parking spot, which I wait for.  The driver of the other car, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to get that I want her parking spot, and keeps trying to wave me on past her, thinking she’s being polite, and no amount of flailing and pointing at the empty goddamn parking spot on my part convinces her otherwise.  So instead I park here:

Unknown-2And into Martin’s I go.  To be greeted with a conundrum!  Cute Cashier Girl is for some reason working at the pharmacy counter.  Cute Cashier Girl, I hope to God, is in her early twenties.  She’s a cashier, though!  She’s not supposed to be at the pharmacy!

I cannot ask Cute Cashier Girl for butt paste.  I’m gonna try and be all suave, like

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but I know me.  It’s gonna come off all

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I cannot do this.

I spend a moment considering other options and can’t think of any.  I approach the counter.  She smiles cheerily and asks if she can help me, with no idea of the horror of the request I’m about to make of her.

“I’m looking for something called Dr. Sirlin’s Ointment?”  I omit the word bottom, because I cannot say bottom to this lovely young lady.  “I understand it’s supposed to be behind the counter for some reason.”

She looks quizzically at me, then looks around for a minute.

“I don’t see it.  What’s it for?”

Don’t say butts.

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“Diaper rash.”  Ha!  I win!

She lights up, smiling again.  “Oh!  You’re the butt paste guy!”

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Oh hell no.  I am a lot of things, Cute Cashier Girl, but I am sure as hell not butt paste guy.  No.  Uh-uh.  No goddamn way.

The butt paste, apparently, is not behind the counter.  It is actually in the baby aisle.  I swallow what is left of my dignity and head for the baby aisle, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt what is about to happen.  And my worst fears come true:

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God dammit.  That, you will notice, is not Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment.  That’s fucking butt paste.  I don’t want butt paste.  I want bottom ointment.

I pick up the box, cursing God and all creation, and return to the pharmacy counter.  She’s still there, of course, it’s not like the goddamn baby aisle is that far away.

“I have a, uh, follow-up question?”

“Oh, okay!”  oh god she hates me so much she’s actually got her bright cheery smile on her face, and a bit of a twinkle in her eye that suggests to me that she’s enjoying my pain.

“I assume you are the one my wife talked to.”

“Yep!”

“She asked for Dr. Sirlin’s… (makes a face) Butt Paste.  The stuff we want is actually called

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Bottom ointment.  I thought this might happen.  Do you have the ointment?  This isn’t actually what I’m looking for.”

She looks around again and then signals the actual pharmacist, who has been hiding behind a rack of drugs and trying her damnedest to keep a fucking straight face.  The pharmacist confirms that, no, they don’t have Bottom Ointment.  Just Butt Paste.  So I have to go to the other place.

I thank her for her time and apologize for my own nonsense.  Off to the car!

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There are two reasons I don’t want to go to this other establishment.  One I’ll get to later.  The other is that they are a million miles away.  They are literally not in the same town I’m in.  I don’t want to go to another town for butt paste or bottom ointment.  I want to be home, eating dinner.  In my town.

But I love my wife, and I love my son, at least the non-butt parts of him.  So off I go.  I drive past this place on my way home from OtherJob all the time, so I know where it is, and I head there– to OtherJob, not quite realizing until it’s slightly too late that I drive past it on the way home from OtherJob, and for reasons that are not interesting I generally drive home from OtherJob via a different route than I take to get to OtherJob.  So I’m going the wrong way.

Once I realize this and correct my course, I still manage to make two fucking wrong turns before successfully arriving at Pharmacy Two.  On the way over to the pharmacy, it occurs to me that I am so fucking blogging this shit when I get home.  I take a moment in their parking lot and compose an entertaining Tweet to that effect.  Then I get out and go inside.

Well, I try to.  As I’m reaching for the fucking door, an employee locks the fucking thing from the inside and points at a sign next to the door.  The sign cheerfully informs me that this fucking place closes at six, as pharmacies do oh wait no they fucking don’t, ever.

I look at my watch.

It’s five fucking fifty-eight.

At this point my mood somewhat transitions.

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I was entertained with this bullshit up until this exact fucking second.

You did not just LOCK A FUCKING DOOR IN MY FUCKING FACE TWO FUCKING MINUTES BEFORE FUCKING CLOSING AT A FUCKING ***PHARMACY***.  It ain’t goddamn 1983 anymore.  My fucking watch ties into a goddamn satellite that tells it what time it is.  I can’t even adjust the motherfucker.  It ain’t goddamn 6:00 yet, which means your ass isn’t fucking closed yet.

Listen, bitch, this ain’t fucking Barnes and Noble and it isn’t fucking Applebee’s.  I am not fucking here to browse.  You’re a pharmacy, motherfucker, and no fucker anywhere goes to a fucking pharmacy unless they motherfucking need to. I am there to get my shit and get the fuck out, and don’t you dare fucking thing for one fucking second that I can’t see that there is at least one motherfucker in there who isn’t dressed like he’s at fucking work.

I have two fuckin’ choices here.  One is to go home.   The other is to go to jail.  Jail will no doubt feel better but either way there will be no fucking Bottom Ointment.

Not.  Happy.

I went home and had dinner.  A bit more research after dinner indicated that Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment is apparently produced by this pharmacy.  It’s literally the only place you can get it other than the Internet.  Well, fuck them.

Butt Paste it is.  I return to Martin’s.

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I collect my Butt Paste.  I go back to the pharmacy counter, because I’m buying this with a damn flex account and it’s easier if we just use the pharmacy counter to buy anything medical-related.  She’s still there, naturally.  And she, I swear to God, says:

“There’s a story here, isn’t there.”

Oh sweetie.  You have no idea.

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(ADDENDUM:  I didn’t include this in context because it kinda kills the tone of the piece, but the other reason I don’t like this pharmacy?  They tried to kill my dog.  My dog in high school/early college developed epilepsy, and rather than try to get a canine version of the drug they needed the vet just contracted through them to produce his medicine– which happened to be in liquid form.  He was on the stuff for quite a while, and at some point we went in and got a bottle that was a radically different color and consistency than every other version of the medicine we’d gotten.  The pharmacist not only argued with my mother about whether the medicine was different, at one point he actually said the words “Look, it’s just for a dog.”  So this is the second time this place has nearly resulted in a member of my family going to jail.  Merrill Pharmacy in Mishawaka, Indiana?  Go fuck yourselves.)

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(FINAL NOTE:  As I was finishing this post up, my wife, who has been bathing our son, sticks her head into the office.  “Hey, babe?  There’s poop in the tub.”  Because of course there is.)

The End.

RIP, Mrs. Gates

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching2 Comments

image-29403_20180310.jpgxI got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92.  Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.

I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years.  My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right?  As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time.  I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.

The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it.   Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean.  She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.

I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away.  And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone.  Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation.  I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class.  And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates.  Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances.  I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story.  I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates.  I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.

Eew gross

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life2 Comments

Here is a thing that one ought not to do:  Sneeze, abruptly, profusely and wetly, while driving to work in the morning.  Because the horrifying glob of gross that fires from your  mouthparts will hit your windshield at the farthest possible location from your face, and you won’t even find it for a few minutes, and then you’ll notice, and by the time you get to work it will have frozen to the windshield as well as to the dash underneath, and you will discover that cleaning it off with what you have on hand is impossible, and then your car will spend twelve hours outside and you will realize that you are stuck with a smeary blob of gross on your windshield until your car has time to warm up in your garage for a bit before you try to clean again.

The end.

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On delayed gratification

On By Luther M. SilerIn life7 Comments

My college hair was glorious.

My girlfriend in high school thought I would look better with longer hair, so I started growing it out during my senior year and basically never stopped.  By my senior year of college my hair was mid-back length and, amazingly, wavy as fuck— I was a Jewish Studies major among a couple other things and there was a running joke that I could easily pass for an orthodox Jew if I just tucked a couple of ringlets in front of my ears and put on a properly conservative hat.

I spent a good chunk of the summer after graduation on an archaeological dig in Israel, and decided just before leaving for the trip that heading out to dig in the desert with an extra fifteen pounds of hair on my head was not what I wanted to do.  So I went to a barber and had him trim me down to a “normal” haircut, which lasted about another year until I shaved my head for the first time and I’ve basically been doing that ever since.

But yeah.  That first haircut.  The first thing I had him do was pull my hair into a ponytail and then cut the ponytail off in one fell swoop.  I then, for no good reason other than that I thought it would be funny, mailed the ponytail to my mother, who had spent years occasionally politely hinting that perhaps my hair was a bit too long.

This backfired when my mother received a bundle of my hair in the mail and, despite the handwriting on the envelope being mine, immediately concluded that I had been kidnapped, and, this being pre-cellphone by a few years, wasn’t able to quickly get ahold of me to confirm that I was actually still alive and putting up with Samson joke after Samson joke after Samson joke from all of my fucking Religious Studies-ass friends.

She still has the ponytail.  This happened in 1998.

When I got home from work last night, there was a large envelope in the mail addressed to me.  I thought the handwriting on the envelope was my mom’s, but it was dark outside– we are well into the part of the year where I’m working from cain’t see in the morning to cain’t see at night– and the envelope didn’t appear to have anything in it, and I had just seen my mother the night before and she hadn’t mentioned mailing me anything, so what the fuck is going on here?

I generally open my mail in the garage going into the house, since the recycling bin is right there and I can trash all the junk mail before going inside.  Ten seconds later I was laughing so loud that my wife heard me from inside the house.

This may be a good time to point out that Mom’s going through a course of chemotherapy at the moment.  Don’t panic; she’s gonna be fine.  But this is what was in the envelope:

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That, my friends, is the final punchline to a twenty-year-old joke.

Nicely played, Mom.

In which this shit is not normal

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

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So this is a thing that I just did.  And I’d like to pretend that it’s a thing that I just did for the first time, but the fact is it’s a thing that I do all the time, and it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with me in my brain-parts and I probably ought to be put somewhere where either I can’t get at society or society can’t get at me.  Your choice which.

It was a long day at work today.  Not a bad day, necessarily, but a long one, and I’ll trust you know the difference.  For two days in a row now the pattern has been thus: a morning full of self-directed cleaning/organizing/repricing sorts of tasks, with few customers, then my lunch arrives, then three hours of screaming madness, during which I am unable to find even the couple of minutes necessary to eat my lunch– and as someone who doesn’t take lunch breaks and before being at this job was a teacher I can assure you I eat my lunch at lightning speed, and then several hours of wondering where the fuck everyone went.  Today had the added bonus of there only being two of us in a store that has, oh, I dunno, sixty thousand square feet of floor space.

On the way home from work, listening to music, the chewing gum analogy frequently used by abstinence advocates just happened to float through my head for some reason.  I’m not a teacher anymore, I never once taught sex ed when I was teaching, and I’ve never actually had anyone attempt to instruct kids in this way when I was in a classroom.  And yet one minute after this idea floated in my head I found myself, still alone in the car, in a very loud argument with no one at all as if there was someone in my car who was attempting to convince schoolchildren that fucking before marriage was the same thing as chewing used gum.

Very very loud.

And there was no one there with me at all.

I mean, I won the argument, but at one point I let loose a primal howl of suppressed rage and stress that was at sufficient volume that the people in the car next to me at the stoplight heard it.

This happens more often than I’d care to admit.  I mean, it’s not always about abstinence education, right?  But I get into arguments with imaginary assholes in the car on the way home from work.  Loud.  Arguments.

Send help, please.

 

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: POKEMON

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television2 Comments

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You may have heard of this show.

My son has, in the last few months, become entirely obsessed with… whatever the fuck these things are.  They come in types, apparently, Water and Fighting and Nonsense and Flatulent and Clown and probably a few others I’m unaware of.  And they live in little plastic balls, except for the little yellow one, who won’t go in the ball.  And they only come out of the ball when it’s time to fight each other, which they are willing to do at any time and for any reason.

Except, see, they don’t know how to fight.  They have no fucking idea how to fight even though fighting is literally the only thing they’re for, or at least it’s the only thing they’re for once they go in the ball.  The ones out of the balls seem to live perfectly normal wildlifey sort of lives.  So they need people to tell them how to fight.  All of their moves have names and they have “trainers” who tell them, step-by-step, how to fight each other. Picture somebody outside a boxing ring hollering at a boxer to “Use Jab!” and “Duck!” and “Use Roundhouse!” or “Use Spousal Abuse!” and you have the basic idea.

The main character is a homeless orphan named Ash.  His last name is Ketchum, because his job is to catch all of the Pokémon– to catch ’em— and this show is nothing if not fucking subtle.  He only has one set of clothes and his electric rat lives on his shoulder.  He literally wanders around in the woods with his friends and looks for other electro-rats and fire-bears and flatulence-sloths and such and he finds them and he makes them fight his electro-rat or whatever and then if he beats them he gets to stuff them into a ball and keep them.

I think.  It’s hard to pay attention to if you’re grown.

Then there’s these assholes:

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These are… the bad guys, I think?  They seem to really want the electro-rat.  So maybe they want to steal him, or something, or maybe they just want a different electro-rat to go with their weird horn-cat thing they have, I don’t know.  But here’s the thing: there are eleventy fifteen thousand different versions of Pokémon.  There’s Pokemon XY and Pokemon Black and Pokemon Silver and a bunch of movies named after individual Pokébeasts and all sorts of shit.  And I’m pretty sure these three are in every one?

And every time they show up on screen they introduce themselves with the same rhyme.  

I’m pretty sure that this is actually supposed to be happening in the real world.  Not, like, in their heads or some shit like that.

Try and imagine knowing these people, and every time you see them they have to introduce themselves with this stupid fucking rhyme.  Each and every single time.

These may be the most annoying people in the history of television, and we live in a world with Super Why.

Thursday night dance party

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

And because you probably need a palate cleanser:

A brief work anecdote I forgot to tell yesterday

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

seriously-how-many-paint-chips-did-you-eat-as-a-childThis one’s new.

We all have emails at our jobs, like I’m sure a lot of you do, and also like I suspect a lot of work email accounts, they’re really locked down in terms of what we can send and/or receive.  Chief among these things: images, which is a serious pain in the ass because “send me a picture” is one of the first things you want to tell people when they call you and tell you something is damaged, and that means we have all had to create alternate work email addresses that can receive images.

Not the point.  Point is I have a work email.  It’s on my business cards.  I hand out lots of business cards, as you can probably imagine.

I checked said work email late yesterday evening for the first time in a couple of days (Saturday is my Monday, for the record) and had two emails from PayPal.  One of them was letting me know that I had money in my account, and the other was reminding me that I had money in my account.

My work email doesn’t have a PayPal account.  Why the fuck would I have a PayPal account under my work email?

It turns out that a customer who had come in and gotten a quote on some side chairs had decided to pay for them by sending me the money via PayPal.  Me, personally, at my work account.  There’s a note attached to the payment: “4 blahblah side chairs.”

How the fuck is anyone stupid enough to think this is how anything works?

How the fuck do I get through a conversation with this idiot without using the word “idiot”?  Because this person is an idiot and deserves to be called one.

Christ.