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  • Squirlz…

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    This is probably going to sound a bit weird, but I think maybe Jerry Garcia came back as a squirrel and he’s living in my back yard with a whole raft of furry dead-heads.

    081129-squirrel-hmed-5p.hmedium Yeah, I’m sure you are probably wondering what I’ve been smoking that would make me think such a thing, but interestingly enough, that’s kind of the point behind this whole blog entry. Not the smoking per se, but the ingestion of psychedelic substances, and no, I’m not talking about a rainbow bomb pop from the ice cream dude.

    Now, as a rule, I think squirrels are pretty cool. After all, I am a devout follower of Foamy, and I regularly exchange Tweets on Twitter with Butters The Squirrel. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these two tree dwelling rodents, Foamy is the activist with a foul mouth, and Butters is quite a bit more of a pacifist. Basically, I suppose I am covering all of the bases in the event of an unexpected “Squirrel Uprising.”

    funny-pictures-say-anything-squirrel Now, lest you think I am merely playing both sides against the middle, I am also a great supporter of the squirrel kingdom across the board. I have a pinwheel feeder which I keep stocked with feed corn (incidentally, my father-in-law calls it a squirrel gymnasium), and when winter rolls around and the temperature drops off, a big part of my morning routine is preparing breakfast for the tree rats. I do this by breaking a couple of slabs of Ramen noodles into squirrel friendly sized pieces, then coating them with chunky peanut butter and rolling them in sunflower seeds & feed corn. Not exactly gourmet, but I haven’t had any complaints yet. In fact, Clem and Cletus, a couple of my regulars, can often be found peering into our dining room from the picture window while they wait for the restaurant to open.

    But, let’s get back to Jerry and the Dead Heads living in my back yard. You see, I’m actually old enough to remember Jerry. I’m also old – and experimentally curious – enough to have experienced the Dead Head culture. Now, I never actually followed The Grateful Dead across the US in a beat up microbus. Truth is, I never even attended a Dead concert in person (I could only afford just so many concert tickets). However, this is not to say that in my younger, wilder, less inhibited, and somewhat stupider years I didn’t maybe partake of a few controlled substances.

    Yeah, I inhaled.

    And guess what, I don’t intend to run for public office, but if for some reason I do lose my mind and put my name on a ballot, here you go. No digging required. Get over it, odds are you inhaled too.

    But, moving right along… There was another substance that made the rounds with the Dead Heads, that being The Magic Mushroom. Yep… Psylocibin containing psychedelic fungus. Happy toadstools from the cow pasture. Your ticket to the magic kingdom.

    Did I ever partake of them? Well, I probably shouldn’t say… But in case you are wondering, for the record those things taste like crap. (whoops… oh well… didn’t say I was proud of it, but hey, I’m being honest here…)

    And so, anyway, Funny Fungus is exactly why I think Jerry and the Furry Dead have pitched a tent city in my back yard. You see, the other day I pulled into the driveway, parked and all that jazz. However, unlike any other day I heard this loud thump as I climbed out of my truck. Darting my eyes in the direction of the noise I saw a wild eyed tree rat perched on the railing of my trailer. He began chittering at me, as squirrels tend to do, then darted off down the length of the flatbed following an erratic serpentine pattern. Against my better judgment, I followed the little furbag.

    Before I even reached the back gate I saw a half dozen more squirrels running around the yard like their tails were on fire and their nuts were catchin’… Aww, come on… I mean like peanuts, walnuts, hickory nuts… sheesh, you dirty minded folks… Anywho, I watched as they darted about, jumped up onto the deck railing, beat their tiny little paws against their chests while doing these squeaky little, high-pitched Tarzan yells, somersaulted onto my BBQ pit, ran up a tree, jumped 72 feet to the roof, double back flipped into the wading pool, and then started all over again.

    Let me tell you, it was a sight to behold.

    magic mushrooms I stood there wondering what had gotten into them when something caught my eye. A couple of the tree rats who weren’t engaged in happy jungle gym time were sitting back on their haunches atop a stump. In their paws they held huge chunks of brownish-orange fungi. Before long, one of the crazed rodents who had been doing the backstroke in the offspring’s pool ran up to the stump, tore a hunk of the fungus from the side, then sat back and began gnawing on it. My guess is that his Psylocibin levels were getting a bit low and he needed a booster.

    This continued daily until the fungus was all gone. No big surprise there. I almost offered them a boom box and a stack of Dead CD’s, but they seemed to be getting along fine without tunes.

    And, you know, I can’t say as that I blame them for the rampant, repeated frolicking and going back to the trough for more, so to speak. As I recall, the magic kingdom was a nice place to visit. Not a place where I’d want to live, but hey, it had it’s moments.

    Still, with that said, if I ever catch the little bastards cooking up meth in the tool shed, I’m having squirrel and dumplings for dinner that night.

    More to come…

    Murv

  • Karen And Mindy: Unplugged

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    Well, it seems I screwed up.  Nothing so bad as to warrant a beating from E K… Well, scratch that, actually. E K never really seems to need a reason to hand out beatings… But, be that as it may, I think I escaped the wrath of the Evil Redhead for this particular infraction.

    Maybe…

    You see, I entered the wrong date into the post scheduler for my most recent blog (Mindy, Hold The Mork…) and therefore it deployed a day early. Now, normally folks would think of this as a Christmas in August sort of thing. You know, early present and all, but that just isn’t how my luck runs. Nope. Not in the least. It seems Anastasia, (yes, that Anastasia) who is apparently taking EVIL lessons from E K, informed me that if this premature post-aculation meant she was going to have to wait an extra day in between blog entries that I had better write a “bonus blog” or she would complain to E K and then help her do bad things to me. Of course, we all know where that will lead, and my insurance carrier is ready to drop me as it is…

    So, as an act of self-preservation, after spending much of the day cowering in the corner with Satan, who still can’t seem to shake this morning’s Redhead Rampage, I figured I’d better make something… errr… ummm… write something up. So, since I already had notes on hand for the continuing adventures of Karen and Mindy, I figured what the hell…

    It was a Thursday. A Thursday like any other Thursday, except that Mindy had dressed down for the day and Karen was in a mood. Now, granted, Karen was always in a bit of a mood, what with wanting to shoot everyone, but she was actually a bit more surly than usual. She might have even been carrying explosives in her purse, but I wasn’t about to ask.

    The conversation had been raging on about blog entries and humorless folks for several minutes, and was now starting to wind down. I had no more finished jotting a few notes about the West county water issues than Mindy pointed at me and exclaimed, “Murv! You aren’t going to blog about that are you?”

    I shrugged. “Why not? It’s funny.”

    “You want funny?” Big K asked.

    “Sure, but I think we’ve pretty much worn out the whole gun thing,” I told her.

    She huffed then cocked her head to the side and said, “Oh yeah, well what about underwear?”

    Now I was intrigued, but by the same token I was unable to hold back my compulsion to pun.

    “Depends,”  I quipped.

    “Yeah, real funny, Murv. Don’t make me shoot you.”

    “Yeah, okay, so what about underwear? I’m wearing tighty whities.”

    “Murv!” Mindy yelped.

    “Hey, I actually used to get that question and booksigning Q&A’s.” I shrugged. “Now I just get it out of the way from the start.”

    “People really asked you that?”

    I nodded. “Yep.”

    “Shoulda shot ’em,” Karen added on cue, just as I’d expected she would.

    Mindy spoke up again, directing herself to Karen. “So, is this about that guy? You know, the one you yelled at?”

    “I yell at everyone,” Karen replied.

    “I know, I know,” Mindy agreed. “But isn’t this the story about that guy with the pink pants?”

    “Yeah,” Karen answered with a nod. “Pink pants and bright green little boy underwear.”

    I was no longer intrigued. Now I was just mildly disturbed, however I simply couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth. “I know I’m going to regret asking this, but how did you know what color his underwear was?”

    pants

    Karen’s voice was as deadpan matter-of-fact as I had ever heard. “Because he had his damn pink pants pulled down below his cheeks.”

    “Ass cheeks?”

    “Well yeah…” she answered, sarcasm heavy in her voice. “They’d look pretty damn weird up around his face cheeks, don’tcha think?”

    I held up my hands in surrender. “I was just asking.”

    Karen shook her head. “And you write books for a living? Sheesh. You been drinking West county water too?”

    I ignored the jibe and asked, “Okay, so I have to know… How did you see this? Did you follow him into the men’s room or something?”

    “No. This was in the meat department.”

    Now, there’s something I forgot to mention folks – Karen works in the meat department at a local market.

    “Rump roast then,” I said.

    “Wasn’t on sale that day.”

    “I was joking. Who’s been drinking the water now?”

    “My gun is in my purse you know.”

    “Yeah, okay.”

    “Tell Murv what you did,” Mindy interjected, trying to avoid bloodshed. She seemed far more excited about the story than Karen. But then, Mindy was definitely the excitable one. Karen just approached everything with calm detachment before pulling out a gun and killing it.

    “I went and got my knife,” she said.

    “No gun?” I asked.

    “I was at work. Can’t bring guns into work, dammit.”

    “Oh, I see.”

    “So, I got my big knife. Not the little one. The really big one. Then I went over and told him he needed to pull up his pants because the rest of the customers didn’t want his butt germs on their dinner.”

    “So did he?”

    “Nope.” She shook her head. “He gave a bunch of attitude. Told me his butt didn’t have germs, which is a crock because everybody’s butt has butt germs. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that.”

    “And you put up with him giving you attitude?”

    “Hell no. I showed him my knife.”

    “Ahhh, so then he pulled up his pants?”

    “No. Then we had a wet cleanup in that aisle.”

    I raised an eyebrow and began considering my options for escaping the table if I started feeling any more alarmed than I already was. I tried to keep my voice calm as I asked, “You killed him?”

    “Oh hell no. Didn’t have to. He peed all over himself.”

    “Ahhhhh… Okay.”

    Karen shrugged. “Yeah, it was kinda funny. Anyway, then I went and put out some more chickens.”

    “You mean like whole roasters and fryers?” I asked.

    “Yeah.”

    I took the opportunity to divert the topic toward recipes. “Since you brought up butts, have you ever made beer butt chicken?”

    chicken

    “You mean where you stick the can up the chicken’s butt? Oh yeah, love it.”

    “I just don’t know how you do that,” Mindy announced.

    “What?” Karen said, incredulity in her voice. “You just stick the can up its butt and put it on the grill. It ain’t hard. You do have beer out in West county, right?”

    “Ewww,” Mindy replied, scrunching up her face then shuddering. “I couldn’t do that. I’ve never even bought a chicken.”

    “You haven’t? Are you a vegetarian?” I asked.

    “No,” Mindy replied. “I eat chicken, I’ve just never bought one.”

    “Well what the hell do you do?” Karen asked, coming upright in her seat. “Steal ’em?”

    “No,…” Mindy began, trying desperately to explain.

    “I shoulda known,” Karen continued, talking right over the top of her. “Damn West county people. I bet you wear green underwear too…”

    More to come…

    Murv