by Old Uncle Crow
My buddy, “Shuck” B is a Norwegian bachelor farmer up there under neath Madelia, MN., or some other God-damn Hell hole like that, and who is also “shacked up” up there with some gal now, oh, Hell, for damn near twenty years it must be, well, anyway he sent me this one:
“Chew on this you paranoid fearmongers! Big brother and that weird neighbor down the street are watching, listening and recording. This is truly freaky! No black helicopters, cigar shaped lights or alien probings either…..
“Shuck B
“PS, btw, why don’t one of YOU brain cock knockers get a hold of this software and share. The least we could do to fight back is spread a little fear of our own!
“…muffled voice in the background…: “Yassuh, Governor Walker…!”
*****
(“Shuck” also added on a video that showed a lady being spied on and her daughter getting talked dirty to and molested around by some party line rubberneck, “hacker” they call them nowadays. Since the last one from “Shuck” about Nina Hartley, well, that one WAS pretty good, so I tuned in. It seems like we’re all supposed to be scared as Hell and fiddley-fuck around ALL OF THE GOD-DAMN TIME NOW with our cell phone security.)
(To find out just WHAT, I ask you?
(Thing of it is, in real time with my kind of luck I’d have to listen in on every single sonofabitch in the county to get in on anything even remotely interesting…and then it would be just some guy had to take his teenage kid in to the Blue Earth ER for letting one of the bobby calfs suck his, the kid’s…well, you get the idea. Jesus, for boring! People here been hauling their boys in to the doctor for THAT one since even before the Indian Uprising! Why would a feller even pay OUT for one of these damn cell phone thingies?
(Like they all said when Fritz Mondale was running for President from out of Elmore, MN., down there, “Where’s the beef?” So just what IS so God-damn hot shit NEW about listening in on some OTHER asshole’s phone conversation?)
*****
It all just takes me back….
My own bachelor Uncle Emmett Jacobson even got the rubbernecking habit back then from off of his Aunt Leona Magly. One day when she was down at the Immanual Lutheran Hospital Auxiliary Snack Bar there, in Old Mankato just a few blocks from where they hung The Indians, and shoveling 98-degree-trip-to-town-in-Grampa’s-car-trunk potato salad in to some NEW patients who had just been up to visit their predecessors, I caught Uncle Emmett hanging on the line. He made a ssh-signal at me as I came charging in from out-of-doors to wallow down some ice cream and strawberry jam, and even over the two battling air forces of flies zooming and buzzing in the growing rotten egg-smell of the potato salad fixings-remains on the kitchen table, I could hear the cawing tones of Mrs Mae Haefner, our neighbor lady North of us and who was talking on the party line to her latest daughter-in-law, Southwest of us up there in the Eagle lake motor court. Haefners had “a whole TRIBE of kids” as we used to say, say at least nine at the last time the lady from Squawbunion County counted, and Darold was the Haefner’s oldest duckling, just out of the Air Force and overseas duty in Turkey. Now he was shoveling rotten soy bean mush from out of the bottom of the Honeymead bins, getting ready for Fall on his new job downtown in Mankato near by where they hung The Indians, and now Mrs Haefner was grilling her new young daughter-in-law Peggy Sue:
“So, is what it is is that what I need to know, Dear, is what it is is that are that there any, well…you know WHAT that I mean…uh — Marital Difficulties? You can tell Mae, Dear, WHATEVER is is what it is!”
Finally, Peggy Sue, probably just to finally shut up her new husband’s mom, owned up to “…well…is what it is is there IS…just…one thing….” I could hear it for myself as Uncle Emmett, with a grin on his face like a cat eating shit at his at-long-last-rewarded patience, turned the receiver half toward me:
“Oh!” panted Mae Haefner and who I could just see for myself in my mind’s eye a mile away there, fanning herself in HER fly-air force kitchen with the big and unusually heavy duty paper pink fan Darold had sent her from Japan:
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter, DEAR? I can talk to Darold…I WILL! If what that it is is that THAT boy has done, well, ANYTHING, you just let me know. I’m YOUR mom now, too, and….”
“Oh…Mom!” Peggy Sue, who liked drive-in movies and had never missed on one in high school even though she’d dated lots of guys, made a kind of half-hearted wail. “It’s not…well…you know, BAD…or NOTHING like that! He’s just…SHY!’
“What’s that that you say? Shy? Just what way is it that in WHAT way is it that that he’s so — SHY?” Mae now on account of the hotness of the late-July late afternoon audibly was puffing rather hard there a mile away, and I imagined that her flies and mine, if there hadn’t been all of the talking going on, could maybe have made a kind of FM-radio effect if I could have just had the phone receiver to myself. Uncle Emmett hauled out his blue bandanna and stifled a rising laugh. His eyes bulged and his face was red under his tan, but he kept his horses back; I leaned forward on the edge of Grampa’s chair at the head of the table in order not to miss a word.
“I can help, Dear…” went Mae, regrouping in the clammy hot silence and near-and-far buzz of party line flies. “Is it that that it’s all about something that you WANT him to do and is what it is is that he WON’T? Is THAT it? Or…would that that you’d rather that he DIDN’T do…well…THAT — and THEN that that he just bulls AHEAD and does…THAT…anyway? You can tell me, Dear, ALL about it…because if that THAT’S the way that it is, is what it is IS, why that I’ll just have a TALK with that….”
“Oh, Mom!” cried drive-in film-student Peggy Sue Ott Haefner, in a highschooly gush of what sounded now like real tears:
“He…he, HE…is what it is is that…that he, that HE…that that WHAT he DOES is…that heee — WON’T buy KOTEX!”
Right then at that, right smack dab on the edge of the cliff of just busting loose and just plain laughing all out loud just to beat Hell, my bachelor Uncle Emmett Jacobson whipped the dish towel ready in his other hand around the receiver, his hand and all, and then while carefully freeing his muffled hand set the receiver in the wall phone cradle without as much as a single sound:
“Christ Almighty!” he blared. He laughed. He laughed and laughed. He laughed some more, and blared again:
“Christ ALL Mighty!”
He laughed some more, hard, he subsided in to chuckles and fished out a Camel cigaret to light as we stepped out of the back porch into the corn belt blast furnace of those old days more than a half-century ago. As we stumped off to the barn to throw yesterday’s new bales around in the haymow so they wouldn’t “heat,” he laughed some more, pretty hard. I was nine and as Uncle Emmett kind of finally wound up laughing just to beat Hell, I went:
“I don’t get it, Uncle Emmett? What’s wrong with Kotex? Can’t they afford…?”
“Oh, Jeezuz Christ,” said my bachelor Uncle Emmett Jacobson to me as the new gravel we’d just hauled and spread in the farmyard crunched underfoot. “Just let THIS all be a lesson to YOU, Skipper — it’s just ANOTHER case of the God-damn Hell in EVERYTHING!”
*****
(Looking back on it all, now, I have just got to suppose that these overheard disillusionments have got to have played their part in my career; sure as Hell, I never ever even got to where I could even give not even one single hooper’s good God-damn for all them depressing marital confections of Ibsen and Strindberg in Augsburg College Scandinavian Lit. And, so, now I don’t even WANT to own one of these fool cell phones…what would even be the point of that, even if that I did?
(Jesus Christ…Jesus Christ frying in Hell, I mean…well — just HOW God-damn dumb can you BE?
(I mean that is what it is is that I ALL READY heard EVERY thing EVERY body — and I God-damn well DO mean ALL of you OTHER dumb sonsofbitches! — has even got to say today, over and over and God-damn OVER again, on the God-damn telephone…way the Hell back THERE in July — of 1958…!)
(So…YOU can all just go roast in Hell, you postmodern, post decent, post SHITHOUSE God-damn DUMB bastards, you!)
*****
[Old Uncle Crow
[copyrighted by tio curevo
[March 5th, 2011]
