Month: August 2011

U.S. Husband Production Suffers Steep Decline

The statistics following the 2010 U.S. Census are truly alarming. There is a sharp decline in the U.S. production of Prospective Husbands.

News of the decline in the current crop of Prospective Husbands caused the greatest trauma among single women. Upon hearing this dramatic news, the advocate group “Wimmin Who Ain’t Grinnin’” vowed to get to the bottom of the dilemma, launching an exacting study of the meager Prospective Husband crop. The following findings are the results of their exhaustive investigations:

  • A significant number of Prospective Husbands have been discovered—weak, emaciated and nearly comatose–endlessly circling cities in mass-transit buses and subways while playing video games on portable electronic devices, zombie-like and apparently unaware of both passing time and of their surroundings.
  • Entomologists hypothesize the viral popularity of young Justin Bieber may have spawned a widespread hormone imbalance such that Prospective Husbands are stuck in a larval state between childhood and manhood.
  • Earth’s rising average temperature has reduced the willingness of Prospective Husbands to exercise, causing their already overextended waistlines to explode the elastic bands in their shorts and causing their once-comfortable belts to produce painful welts upon expanding bellies, driving Prospective Husbands into closets, far from potential physical contact with potential mates.

Therapists have suggested various treatments to combat this phenomenon, which scientists now call Husband Crop Decline. The most effective remedy appears to be widespread distribution of the most recent edition of the Peterson Field Guide to Humans, in which the social needs of the adult human female are described in detail.

A quick remedy for this dilemma is urgent. Sensing the decline of the Prospective Husband population, there have been multiple sightings of increasingly aggressive giant blue Smurfs, shopping for acceptable extra-large fashionable clothing to help them attract comely but lonely, disenfranchised human females.

Cockeyed: turned or twisted toward one side

When I arrived home from vacation, I discovered two tiny frogs that had glued themselves to the two-step stair I had loaded into the camper, providing them free rides all the way from the campground. They now reside somewhere in my un-mowed grass.

The frogs had stowed away just outside of my normal, non-froggy field of vision, or I would never have given them this free ride, considering the possible hazards to their health.

How much else lies just outside the field of my usual vision? If I tilt my vision by just a hair, sort of cockeyed, there’s no telling everything that I would see.

It’s all a matter the angle of our sight – the tilt of our vision. The gift of Vision is the ability to see cockeyed.

A cockeyed restaurateur with a zany business plan drew my attention. A store had fallen victim to the stressed economy. In its place, a restaurant emerged. Where goods once stood on display in the curved front display windows, patrons of the store-turned-coffee shop now sipped mochas, lounging within their wrap-around glassed-in dining area with a prime view of the street-side happenings.

The cockeyed entrepreneur wasn’t done yet. Tables for two take up a lot of real estate on an outside patio; instead, why not use long, narrow ironing boards with stools? So he did. Folks drifting in to dawdle over coffee need something to read. So he furnished them shelf-fuls of hardcover books tucked in each wall of the shop; there’s always something new to fuel customer imaginations.

A growling stomach demands that a decision be made. Whether to have the “Thoreau” sandwich, featuring hummus, pepper jack cheese and cucumber? Or to indulge with the “Albert Camus” seared tuna, hardboiled egg and new potatoes? It’s a much more refined and cockeyed approach than saying, “I’ll have your Number Three, please.”

Serving lattés in wrap-around display windows and noticing hitchhiking frogs were both outside of my view. Time to tilt the head and enjoy the Cockeyed Vision.

Three Circles at the Koi Pond

The first circle is in the upper left corner–the faint circle of human adults in conversation. Humans may exist in adult form for sixty years or more after they pass through the adolescent stage. Though they appear small in the picture, they actually play a very large role because adults are the ones who are in control. Adulthood is marked by several distinct and progressive stages of control: 1.) wishing to be in control,  2.) being in control, 3.) wishing not to be in control, and finally, 4.) wondering what should have been better controlled so things would have turned out differently. 

The second circle is that of children chasing one another. This is a sort of larval stage for humans, a proving ground for what they will become as adults. It can be a beautiful stage of human development because there is room for much hope of what they will become. For the meantime, they’ll remain kids, innocent and running around the pond. Gradually, blemishes in their character may become obvious as those on their faces. But still, we will hope because that’s what childhood and adolescence demands of us. This will last until nearly 20 years goes by and adolescence has run its course, and they themselves will morph into adulthood.

The third circle is the pond in the center. Carefully-bred, brightly-colored, and highly-valued koi fish, a kind of carp, are circling just beneath the water’s surface. They’re hard to see except at feeding time, when they churn the waters as they recognize the person who feeds them–yes, koi are capable of recognizing their caretaker feeder–though otherwise they likely have very few thoughts that either the upper left adults or the fountain-chasing children would recognize. Inexplicably, koi enjoy lives that are far longer than our own. One famous scarlet koi named “Hanako” lived a documented, incredibly long lifetime that spanned from 1751 to July 7, 1977. Yet during the two and a quarter centuries of its lifetime, its brain recorded little other than the bubble, bubble of the water, the suck, suck of the water through its gills, and the plop, plop of the food above its head.

And it remembered the image of its caretaker feeders, having watched these humans grow from adolescents to adults-in-control, for generation, after generation, after generation… 

Squirrel Feeds Man

It’s a sign of the times.

We are told that one day the lion will lie down with the lamb.

War shall be no more.

The squirrel shall feed a man.

Wait a minute! That’s nuts!

Yes, as this picture clearly documents, a literal protein feast of nuts was passed from this squirrel to this eager man. Partially chewed and ready for digestion, the squirrel donated its “nut mix” downward to the grateful man.

In these dismal economic times, the human was doubtless without a job and nearing the end of his extended unemployment benefits. The generous squirrel became his benefactor in the man’s time of need.

The word on the street, however, is that the man actually “double dipped,” manipulating the animal for a free meal while also smuggling bananas from the local zoo’s ape house–and pocketing his unemployment check for financial profit and personal gain. In addition to sharing the squirrel’s nuts, our investigation also discovered alarming behavior previous exhibited by the man in question:

  • He twice violated a free-range alpaca’s fur-trading rights by taking a Norelco razor to her underbelly, shearing off her most prized belly fur, creating collector-quality toupees, and selling them on the black market.
  • He systematically used an opossum for a coin bank, depositing small change in her pouch while snitching coins from malfunctioning parking meters.
  • He taught parrots questionable words from “The Big Book of Slang” dictionary and then released the birds into a flock of homing pigeons aimed for the poolside lounge area of Arnold “The Governator” Schwarzenegger’s California residence.

Since this troubling story emerged, the federal government has issued a full-scale alert to monitor the behavior of the 13.9 million unemployed Americans, searching for stockpiled partially-digested nuts, ziplock bags containing home-spun alpaca wool wiggery, drawers filled with suspicious opossum-skinned coin purses, and mini-flocks of parrots spouting ignoble epithets from their brightly-hued, yet baleful beaks.