When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
It also doesn’t hurt to pretend that the lemon you’re squeezing the life’s juices out of is the head of your mortal enemy.
Archive for December, 2001
Holiday Redneck Police, or More about My Pumpkin-Keeping-Brother
Me: Sir, we’ve had reports of December Halloween-Pumpkin-Keeping at this address.
Brother Keith: Scott, what are you talking about? Sir? You already wrote about that stupid pumpkin yesterday.
Me: Just doing my job.
BK: A little sleep would do you wonders. Some of us actually do read the timestamps on those web log entries. Plus, I’ve seen the hard cider bottles on your desk!
Me: You can answer the questions here, or down at the station. Your choice, sir. Now, about the pumpkin…
BK: Pumpkin is in the can… on the curb… should be in the landfill by mid morning. Gone. Forever.
Me: Gone?
BK: Yeah, at least I won’t have a pumpkin and a Christmas tree on the curb. That is reserved only for the true professionals.
Me: Very funny. This is serious business.
BK: It’s a pumpkin.
Me: In December. Very very wrong.
BK: I should have draped Christmas lights over the pumpkin…
Me: Sir, stop.
BK: Then I could have painted it and hid it on easter!
Me: That’s enough!
BK: Then, on July 4th… KABOOM!
Me: I’m going to have to give you a ticket now, sir.
BK: C’mon! You were just short on material for your web log tonight! We’re brothers!
Me: Here’s your ticket, Bro.
BK: Nothing is sacred methinks.
Me: I’ll be checking back to see about those Christmas lights this January…
So I go over to my brother’s house. I can see his Christmas tree lights through the window as I pull up. I get out of the car and as I walk up to the porch, with the “Bring on the Blizzard” happy snowman sign, there it was. I was totally shocked. My own brother?! It was undeniable. The proof was sitting there, right in front of me on the top step, an eerie Christmas-light glow reflecting off the slick orange surface. My kin. My blood. A Halloween-Pumpkin-Keeper.
Surely, I thought, there must be some explanation. This is where he had installed his hidden home video surveillence camera? Santa’s reindeers secretly like to eat rotted two-month-old pumpkin? No, what was I doing. You can’t cover up the problem. He didn’t even try - not even a Santa hat thrown casually on top of it. Nothing.
I just prayed that once I got inside I wouldn’t find the tree decked out in ghosts and goblins. Aside from the obvious Halloween candy dumped into a festive Baby Jesus bowl, everything else was okay.
Still, it’s a shame I can never talk to him again.
You can’t be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER. - Frank Zappa
While everyone else in the neighborhood is out hanging Christmas lights I’m doing yardwork. They’re all hoping for snow and I’m praying for a few more days of sunshine to dry out the lawn so I can mow one more time. Now mind you, I’m not the guy down the street with jack-o-lanterns wilting on his porch or those dreadful pumpkin garbage bags sitting in the front lawn - but I was starting to feel like that was all I was missing. Nothing shatters the picture-perfect holiday-looking house like two-foot tendrils of uncut bushes poking out from under a picturesque blanket of snow. Or a freshly shoveled walk with all the half-rotted frozen leaves upturned by the snow shovel now sitting on top of the otherwise white Christmas-postcard landscape. Not this year! December 3rd in normally frozen Indiana, God willing, the noise polluting growl of a lawn-mower will ring out in my neighborhood once more. While other mowers sit snugly in their winter garage-beds, dreams of spring dandelions floating in their cylinders, my lawn-boy will be chewing into six-inch semi-wet bent-over leaf-ridden blades of grass. Yeah, baby! Those who cut last have the neatest trimmed yards when the snow melts next spring. Pumpkin-dude, eat your heart out!