Odd Observations from a Skewed Perspective
Follow suit. Especially bathing suits.Archive for humor
Deathbed confessions
“Who the hell is this woman?” Said my thoroughly strung out brain, even as I was hovering over my mother in her hospital bed. The story that had just bled into my ears painted images of her in ways that could not be unseen by my bloodshot mind’s eye.
I will neither confirm or deny the use of substances at this time, but my mother lay dying and I will apologize for nothing.
My mother had seen the finer end of remission for several years before the cancer reared its ugly head again. She had been active with survivor groups and charities and awareness walks throughout. Vengeance cliche notwithstanding, from resurgence to remembrance, it was a very brief year.
Despite the warning, the end came suddenly with all of the dizzying decision making that comes with it. Once the final decision came to cease life support, we were left there in quiet contemplation.
Beeps, chimes, wheezing machines and my father besides me begins with, “This one time, me and your mom were fooling around in the back of my car.”
My head lifted from where it hung in my hands. I can only imagine the horrified expression I wore. I am coming to the painful realization of the finality of this situation and now, this? My mother, Catholic school girl (the good kind!), quintessential Latin mother: tough, fair, full of life and laughter. The worst thing she’d ever done was put a tack on someone’s chair in school.
Some days it truly is a curse to have a vivid imagination.
My brother and I exchanged looks. We could say nothing as the memory granted us a glimpse into a woman I knew all my life and knew not at all.
Canoodling (it’s a word, my spell check says so) in the back of a Lincoln towne car in 70s Brooklyn, my parents steamed the Windows a la Titanic. Unbeknownst to them, in their frolicking, the local law enforcement had had just about enough of their shenanigans.
Flashy blue and whites colored their various clothed and unclothed bits a lovely shade of patriotic when Brooklyn’s finest came over the trusty bullhorn. “You got your twenty buck’s worth, now let her out.”
I was aghast for my mother’s sake, ready to rail at some long since retired flatfoot for besmirching my mother’s thirtysome year old honor.
That Catholic school girl turned to my father and said, “Let me out and hand me twenty bucks.”
Applied Brains
Not that I have any problem with the pursuit of philosophy, nor am I disparaging philosophers, but it is in my opinion that there is a valuable amount of grey matter energy that is directed in this endeavor that could be .. I don’t know, curing cancer?
I know that someone has to figure out exactly why “snow is white” if and only if the snow really is white. There has to be the scholarly pursuit of the eternal “why” of names and definite descriptors and articles of expression within the American English language. There really is an intellectual necessity for those who devote their lives to the love of wisdom and knowledge.
I am personally pleased that it is not my passion.
I. Am. Choking. On. The. Academese.
I thought anthropologists were bad about using extraneous modifiers, honorifics and excessive quantifiers and qualifiers all throughout their scholarly interpretation of humanity. Humanity, being of fluid nature and difficult definition, seems to imply the necessity of complex correlative contemplation (Points for academic alliteration).
Never have I had to forcibly cram such superfluous vocabulary down my gullet with the vague hopes of academically regurgitating some semblance of an understanding for a proper participation grade. I look toward the end and the term writing with some trepidation as I will be required to do the same. I already lose enough sleep on statements like “Present King of France” and the dogmas of empiricism that’s rolling around in my skull lacking any real tether and so lost to the rest of the fluff that is compacted between my ears.
I have a passion for the scholarly arts. I do. It is simply in my opinion that the energy required to analyze the predicates of analytic and synthetic truths of language could be applied towards applicable human necessity. Perhaps I am not seeing the forest for the trees, and sitting in the ground zero of classroom dynamic, I’m suffering an indistinguishable skewed perspective. I may pull this knowledge out of the annals of my mind, blow off the dust, and crack the lid and find treasure. For now, I devote my time and energy into my personally preferable venues.
However, those usually end in blurred vision and equally blurred memories.
Odd Observations from a Skewed Perspective 