BITTERMAC.COM

Back in the days before internet porn, Daisy Duke was the closest thing to sex on a stick this side of a Farrah Fawcett poster.

Those two women fueled the mastabatory fantasies of millions of teen boys.

Daisy Duke was on the Dukes of Hazard.

She was the one that put cut off jean shorts on the map.

So much so, they named the style after her.

However, someone sent me a current pic of Catherine Bach (Daisy Duke) awhile back.

Ouch.

I hate to say it, and my right hand may never forgive me, but that woman hit the wall like a racketball.

But why bring it up today, you ask?

Because there are daisy dukes in Starbucks.

We have had a few summer type days here and people may be over reacting.

Pace yourself folks, last year, late May was fairly chilly and I believe it even rained.

I mean, its a little early in the season to be breaking out your camel toe, don’t you think?

Now, not that the young miss in the daisy dukes doesn’t look stunning in them.

She does.

And I am all in favor of hot scanty cladness in Starbucks.

But now there is an image in my head of Catherine Bach modern day, wearing the daisy dukes of the living dead.

George Ramero (Zombie flick director) could not envision anything so gruesome.

And he has put zombie based crap in his films that goes so far beyond the traditional zombie genre it isn’t even funny.

Kind of the “Two girls, one cup” version of zombie films.

(How the hell did I slip 2G1C into the blog again? Sick, sick, sick.)

I try to avoid zombie films and Catherine Bach (Modern times) video when I can.

I have enough shit keeping me up at night.

Insomnia is a bitch.

Ambien is supposedly the cure.

For everyone but me, that is.

Might as well be snacking on tic tacs.

Nyquil doesn’t work well either.

Benadryl sometimes, but I have to be congested.

I have the metabolism of a wood chipper.

But with better table manners.

I have a cousin that can sit down, close his eyes and fall asleep in less than a minute.

That could be a form of narcolepsy, but I can’t prove it.

Some people are so picky about having medical tests run on them.

Perhaps we should spend a moment and lay down some daisy dukes etiquette rules.

I would really love to leave the decision to wear them to each individual, but some of you show questionable taste.

Maybe we should have a committee.

They can evaluate each individual ass for shape and presentation.

Finally, they will assign a number from one to ten.

6 and above, feel free to carve up your jeans.

5 or below? Get on the bus.

We can remove them from society before someone gets hurt.

I can’t help but think the ACLU might object.

They tend to get a little twitchy when you talk about herding people up and loading them on buses.

To sum up, be honest with yourself when it comes to wearing clothing that may not have suited you years ago when you were in better shape.

Because now?

Not so much.

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There is a really cynical scene in the movie Scrooged with Bill Murray, where he is chewing out an old girlfriend for being too charitable.

“Scrap ‘em off, Clair! You want to save someone? Save yourself!”

It was an awesome line and clearly established him as the bad guy who just doesn’t “Get it”.

Maybe he “Got it” more than we realized.

I have a friend who is a much better person than me.

She is involved in a charity that does good work.

I would go into more detail, but this is not about the message so much as the method.

The word for it is volunteering.

Volunteers come in several flavors.

The most common is the Do Gooder.

The Do Gooder is fairly useless.

They make a lot of noise, sound involved, but their “Flake Factor” is among the highest.

Unfortunately, they are the majority.

The next tier up is the worker bee.

These people are steady.

They are dedicated without being fanatics.

They show up and actually do stuff, which makes them valuable.

And then we reach the highest level of volunteer.

The Crusader.

The Crusader is amazing.

Equal parts fanatic, motivational speaker, and saint.

They do most of the heavy lifting and its impressive to watch.

The one thing that is never pretty is when the Crusader burns out.

Volunteering is a lot like a debilitating drug habit, it will wear you down over time and piss you off like nothing else.

It becomes your life.

And thats when it gets ugly.

The need for volunteers to begin with means that no one wanted to do it in the first place.

So, even if you are into it, it will eventually eat at you.

And then, the inevitable happens.

The charity, either intentionally or not, no judgement here, will shit all over you.

Like you owe is money, dated its sister, signed a hideous pre-nup, you name it, they will screw you over with a vicious vengence.

Its the nature of the beast.

Like an elephant stepping on a mouse.

It didn’t know the mouse was there, but then again, it didn’t care if the mouse was there either.

Which is kind of like cutting its own throat.

Because Crusaders are as rare as unicorns, and more prone to charity work.

And they will wish the Crusader was there in the long run.

And the really sick part is that the Crusader, true to their nature, will sigh, pick up their sword, and go back to fighting the good fight.

Its just their nature.

Poor bastards.

Better them than me.

I never developed the taste for helping.

Selfish, rude and self centered.

Yeah, I know.

At least I am honest about it.

Hell, I could be a Do Gooder and waste everyones time.

So, now I have a broken Crusader on my hands.

Get some rest sweetie, you are going to need it.

It may take a few weeks, but you know that old itch will rear its ugly head eventually.

And God help you then, he’ll have to.

Because you’ll be too busy helping everyone else.

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A garage sale is a scary business.

For some people, it is a form of warfare and today is D-day.

For a fundraiser, someone suggested a garage sale.

My significant other is a warrior in that realm, it turns out.

Newspapers are notified, signs are made, knick knacks are prepared.

6am, Saturday morning.

It is on like donkey kong.

The masses arrive like their on a tight schedule, these people are ready for action.

And the next four hours are a blur.

I watched a three way sales argument between two customers and a salesman/referee that went on for twenty minutes.

It was like watching an illegal back-alley, bare-knuckle bout.

Brutal and yet, poetic.

And I realize about halfway thru, that although I love sales, this is not my war.

I retreat to the kitchen and begin eating cookies and watching thru the bay window.

Thoroughly defeated.

And yet, the garage sale is about as American as apple pie, which came from Kazakhstan, by the way.

A woman just bought a broken lamp, and she knows its broken.

But that didn’t stop her.

I often wonder why people don’t make the connection of the secret of garage sales and swap meets.

Its other peoples shit they don’t want.

So instead of throwing it away, they put it in the front yard and put a price on it.

So that someone else can buy it, take it home, and put it in their garage sale a few years from now.

Like a cyclical shit exchange program.

Like they say, what goes around, comes around.

Except that instead of rude behavior, they mean crappy stuff.

I know this, and I will still buy stuff at garage sales.

It would be neat to see what is in the garage sales in other countries.

Maybe even start a foreign crap exchange program.

We ship our crap there and they ship their crap here.

It will still be crap, but now its imported crap.

I even bought something from this garage sale.

And its my garage sale.

That is fairly pathetic.

I try not to think about it.

I went to my car to get something, and I noticed someone on the next block was having a garage sale.

So, like an alzheimer’s patient, like I don’t have my own garage sale going on a hundred feet away, I go over.

And I bought some of their crap.

And then I took it over to my garage sale, and put it up for sale.

This has got to stop.

And, like most things, it finally wound down and the people finally stopped coming.

The crap that didn’t sell was stored away.

The amount of money made was a little shocking.

Anytime you can hold off throwing crap out and sell it instead, bringing in just over $500, its a good day.

Someone suggested that it had done so well, we should do it again in a few weeks.

Someone shoot me first.

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I am the kiss of death for small animals.

Not on purpose, but I am still responsible.

If they were people is would be considered Manslaughter, rather than murder.

I saw a cute sign on the window of a pet store and decided to buy the pet du jour.

Hamster w/FREE cage.

I did this without being told that hamsters are the disposable lighters of pets.

Worse than little turtles. (And I had a few dozen of them as a little kid.)

As the clerk was ringing it all up, at a shocking discount, he informed me that the cage can be returned for store credit within the first month after purchase.

When I asked him if the hamster could be returned too, his face went blank and he truly seemed confused about the concept of a hamster being returned.

That should have red flagged me.

The cage came with a five day supply of food.

When I asked how much food should I buy for the hamster, I got the same confused stare.

Why would you need more?

I have to plead momentary cerebral failure because I thought he was just a dumb clerk.

The manager gave me a card with a phone number on it, “Just in case there were any problems”.

And I left with my new friend, “Willow”. (Name stolen from the movie by the same name.)

The evening went well, Willow and I watched hockey and ate a light supper of pellets and pizza.

We shared, and while he seemed to like pizza crust, I was made nauseous by the food pellets.

When I went to bed, he was shoving shredded paper around in the corner.

When I woke up, he was dead.

At least, he looked dead.

He was snout down in the water dish, and I certainly wasn’t going check him for a pulse.

I did poke him with a dull pencil and he didn’t moved, so I pronounced him dead at 7:15am.

Just out of sheer confusion, I called the number on the card the pet store manager gave me.

The recording on the other end immediately told me how sorry the pet store was to hear of the death of my beloved pet and informed me that the pet store also handles beautiful internments and ceremonies for a discount.

I held a brief ceremony in the backyard and buried him by the dead fern.

Willow would have wanted it that way.

In the end, I took the cage back and got store credit.

And with the credit certificate in hand, I did what I should have done in the first place.

I left.

Caring for pets is a lot like gardening, if you don’t have the skill for it, leave it to those who do.

My house was like a pet themed Auschwitz.

As inappropriate as that line is, it still fits.

Its a known fact that small children are iffy pet owners.

And really hyper kids are even lower on that totem pole.

And then there was me.

I set the bar when it came to overly hyper, out of control, shitty students, teachers hated me.

And I am fairly certain my little pets were not all that fond of my track record with their kind.

Big dogs are really my genre of pet.

Much more durable.

I once had a 100 pound half-wolf that lived to be 17, which is a long time for a good sized dog.

And that might be my redeeming point.

One big animals for a whole bunch of little ones.

If it turns out that the Almighty scores it that way, I am in there.

And if not, I am more or less an unintentional serial killer.

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