Category: Straitjacket: V-17X

Take the cucumber from the box and measure it against the zucchini. Are they the same size? If this is the case, one must be shortened by biting an end and either chewing vigorously or spitting (this is entirely your choice). I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having one vegetable shorter than the other before you proceed. Okay, so we have produce of different lengths sitting adjacent to one another, just far enough apart for no monkey business to take place. We don’t need a vegetable mutiny on our hands before we go on this picnic, do we? Nobody signed up to be humiliated or injured for the sake of cuisine.

I’ve built a life for myself alongside the skyscraper dreams I’d learned to toss aside. I haven’t taken out the trash yet, as the pile isn’t too high for comfort. I know that any day I’ll have to rid myself of all this rubbish, but I’m hoping that something will come along to make me forget it all. A kindly old man who falls and breaks his hip while I’m waiting for the bus, or a sad little kid waiting for her dad to pick her up from soccer practice, or a charismatic oaf getting his clock cleaned by someone he didn’t ever view as a threat. Any of these things could possibly make life more interesting for me in that moment, but I’ll shrug them all off and keep on with the drudgery. I’m afraid to root through this pile of aspirations; I don’t want to give myself any more bad ideas that I’d already nipped in the bud. They seemed so promising at the time, but something made every single one unfeasible. Are there any at my disposal that I can achieve after all my struggles? Let me take a look here. “Fly like a bird.” Stupid. “Eat a 64 ounce steak.” What was I thinking? “Write a book of short fiction.” Well, nobody would read it anyway. “Settle down in the suburbs.” That was a dream? More like a nightmare. I’ll have to burn that one.

I see something like a casino junket, never really satisfied but always rolling to the goal, you know what I mean? It tends to get frustrating at times, but you win some and you lose some. At least that’s what I always say to my brides-to-be before the wedding. You know, I must have married half of Toledo by now, but I haven’t grown tired of marriage. Isn’t that miraculous? No matter how many stone cold bitches I’ve trusted enough to get down on one knee for, I still seem to have that romance bug inside me. Sometimes I feel like it’s crawling around just below my skin and I start itching. I don’t think I really have an insect under my epidermal layer, I just really have ants in my pants sometimes. I don’t literally have ants walking up and down my legs, I’m just emphasizing the nervousness and anxiety that I get sometimes. The romance bug is just a symptom of my never-ending obsession with having someone in my life, in my house with me at all times. I never leave my house. I found out about 15 years ago that going outside is unhealthy for me. I haven’t seen a doctor on the subject, but I’ve read plenty of literature on the internet about people who literally burn up when their skin is exposed to sunlight. I always felt like I had that condition, so I just covered every square inch of my body before I used to go outside. But you know what? I’m not going to let the Sun dictate the clothes I wear, dammit. I had to take back my own life once and for all. That was too much for my sixth wife, so I had to end it with her. I don’t know what happened to her, she probably moved back to Seattle with her boyfriend (she was cheating on me while we were married, but I didn’t really mind that much because nothing she did outside of the house was any of my business anyway). We weren’t really clicking after the first couple months, you know? Anyway, I’m so excited to get hitched tomorrow! Have you thought about who you want to be our witness? I think Pedro would look so nice in a rental tux, don’t you? I mean, it doesn’t have to be a pricey one, I’m sure they have a deal on one-day rentals. I don’t know, I’ll figure it out when I get to the tailor. What size is Pedro, a 42?

Money is all you can talk about, huh? Well listen to me for a minute. Will that money buy you better posture after you’ve been sitting in a miserable, fluorescent-lit dungeon of an office for 26 years? Will that money let you just walk away for a minute to think about where you’d really like to go with your life? Will that money cooperate with you when you say you would like to pursue your dream for the sake of giving it a try? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Money is your master, your ever-loving abusive father, your nagging psychiatrist telling you that no combination of treatments is enough to cure your misunderstood condition. Money doesn’t care about how you earn it. You could shovel the shit of an elephant herd for sixty years to scrimp and save for that day that’ll never come. You could be a clown’s makeup consultant during breaks at the rodeo to get your daughter that doll she’s been bitching about for three months now. You could tear the insides out of an animal that had just been alive a minute ago (and make a pretty good wage) to finance that billiard room you always wanted. Money doesn’t give a shit or a giggle about how raw your hands get or how little ambition you end up with. Money is the essence of putrid bile, green and acidic, leeching the life out of the inherently good and stuffing the mouths of the opportunist slave drivers.

That’s what I think about your money. Bitch.

Figurative beads of sweat pepper the steak’s interior as it sizzles upon the grill, understanding nothing, as its tissues contain no cerebral cortex. No brain, no wits, just a slab of meat. Lifeless, tender, able to be thrown about a hundred feet by anyone willing to try. Skip gave it a whirl just last week, earned himself fourteen dollars for the effort. After it was all finished, he said his rotator cuff was acting funny. He didn’t think the cut of beef would be quite that big. He plans to sue the cow for negligence, as it failed to be there to tell him what the butcher did to its sirloin. Irregular cuts of beef are costing this nation an arm and a leg. Why it was just yesterday that Milly kicked a floppy old flank steak and twisted her knee on the follow-through. This entire situation is getting out of control, and nobody’s stepping up to take charge. This meaty menace has gone from the butcher’s block to the murderer’s rampage, and there’s not a man, woman or child with the guts to stop it.

So what if I struggle for no reward? Nobody really understands why I do it, and they fail to see that the reward is the act itself! It would take a fool to get up one morning and say “you know, I think I’ll be a chicken wrestler” like they’ll just own the world and brush us all off like dandruff. First of all, they have to catch their own fowl. Nobody tells you that little tidbit in the Chicken Wrestling Handbook. Every sparring match with a neighborhood bird has to be earned through sweat and blood. Back before computers, we had to go out and find our own birds! Can you imagine that? Nowadays, everybody just hops on the ebays and buys a chicken from thin air. Hogwash, they’re not real wrestlers! They’re cheap scam artists who won’t get an ounce of satisfaction from ambushing a clueless chicken in a box with air holes. Of course if you knew all this, I wouldn’t have to lecture you on the subject. But no, you seem to think that my passion is all just a big fat joke. Keep laughing, pretty boy. Just wait until we all have to help wrangle the loose chickens in our co-ops after we fritter away all our hard-earned electricity. It was my parents’ generation that put us on the map, and your generation is stomping all over that same hand-drawn masterpiece of a society. Hogwash. None of you are real wrestlers. Get out of my way, it’s time for my popsicle.

I worked on a rig or two in my day. I was the guy that convinced Lovely Pete to get a garbage disposal. Remember when he was just tossing his old vegetables in the trash like a savage? I changed that in a hurry. He honestly had no idea that flesh-eating bacteria could spread through his kitchen like the plague without one of those machines. I don’t have to tell you how it works, do I? You’re so forgetful, sometimes I wonder why I come to your office for advice. Okay, for the last time. Every disposal comes pre-equipped with a garden gnome strapped to the bottom that punches bacteria before it reaches the vegetables you grind up. Come on, you’ve had one of these for four years now, don’t you remember the living, breathing denizen below your sink? Come to think of it, those guys only have a five-year warranty. Have you checked under the hood lately? I’ve heard of gnome-resistant bacteria being spread through disposals across the state. You really have to be careful where you get your produce these days. It has to be shrink wrapped in the supermarket fridge for you to be sure that it won’t melt your face off. The better brands will have a label of some sort that lets you know that they’ve invested good time and money into fighting this raging illness. I like to try to spend my hard-earned money on brands that contribute part of their profits to charities, especially ones involving kids. Baby goats have a special place in my heart, as you should remember. You’re such a forgetful psychologist, I don’t know how you still have your license.