Man Martin's Blog, page 181

The Old Testament God

It's hard to argue with the proposition that God in the Old Testament is a very different dude from the New Testament.  In preparing to teach Sunday school, I came across this little passage in Exodus.  God' appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush, and in the course of their interview says,


21 And I will give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians: and it shall come to pass, that, when ye go, ye shall not go empty.22 But every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians.
I guess this was before God came up with the idea about thou shalt not steal.  I particularly love the part where it says they will "borrow" from the neighbors.  I can just imagine the conversation.

"Mabel, long time no see.""Hey, Nefertiti, I was wondering if I could - uh - borrow some of your jewelry.""Sure, knock yourself out.  What do you need?""Oh, you know.  Jewels of silver.  Also, I could use some raiment.  You got any raiment?""Are you kidding, I got loads of raiment.  I'm lousy with it.  Say, what do you think of this weather, lately?""Weather?""You know, plagues of frogs, plagues of flies, the river turning into blood.  Kooky isn't it?  Ramses says it has something to do with global warming, but I don't know.  What do you think?""Gee... yeah, global warming I guess.  Do you have any jewels of gold, too?""Sure.  Say, what's with that sheep's blood you painted over your door?""Is that a problem?"
"Well, the head of the Neighborhood Association asked me about it.  And I said I'd ask you.""It won't be there more than a week, I promise.""Oh, great.  And one other favor.  Before you return the raiment, do you mind dropping it off at the dry cleaners.  I'd appreciate it.""Uh...  Sure.  No problem."

Cats I Have Known Part One:Kliban

It is impossible that the cat was holding me still with its claws while
I ran in place, but that is the way I remember it.If you've known as many cats as I have, you will realize that there are cats who take to you right away and cats that are stand-offish and skittish: cats who evince outright fear or dislike and whom you must win over with time and patience.  Our first cat, Kliban, fell into this category.

Kliban, a former stray, had been given to us by our real-estate agent after we bought our first house.  He was a big orange fluffy cat and we named him Kliban after the cartoonist.  Not that the namesake was orange and fluffy so far as I know, but he was famous for his book Cat, that helped ignite an entire cat craze of the '80's (You don't remember Kliban ?  Look him up on the internet.)

Once installed in the Martin abode, however, Kliban did not seem fully at ease.  There seemed something lacking to make his contentment complete.  He hid under the bed and glared out from behind the dust-ruffle with his yellow eyes, and if you peeked in at him, he made a rrow sound in a rising and falling note that clearly said in Cat-talk, "I have extremely sharp claws and teeth and won't hesitate to use them should, say, someone's hand be unwise enough to stick itself under the bed at me."  The part about the claws was pure bluff because a previous owner had de-clawed Kliban, but the teeth part was accurate enough.

Nancy and I pondered.  How could we make kitty feel more at home.  Nancy suggested if we let Kliban outside to explore his surroundings, he might relax a bit.  Moreover, unless he came out from under the bed, sooner or later he was bound to poop there, which was an incident better avoided.

So we let him outside, and by let him, I mean put him, nor he did not relish being scooped out from under the bed and carried to the door.  Once outside he promptly ran off and disappeared.  This is the great drawback of stray cats.  They frequently continue to stray.  No good to say to them, "Your straying days are over, Feline Friend, for here you have a home."  If a cat chooses to stray, stray he does, and there's no stopping him.

The cat had been in our possession less than an hour and we'd already lost him.  Nancy and I searched for him.  You should know that our yard had an ivy-covered gully in the front yard with a stream running through it.  There were also numerous pine trees and azalea bushes.  In short, a multitude of places for a cat to hide. Orange, however, is not a color that blends against the background.  After only a short look, Nancy announced, "There he is!"

I crouched in the ivy as close as I could get to the cat, speaking in calming tones.  There are questions, however, no matter how innocently asked and how pleasantly voiced, that will make the hearer jump up with a startled shout.  Nancy's question at this juncture, "Honey, what does poison ivy look like?" was just such a question.  My response to this query startled Kliban, and he was gone again.

We next spotted the cat in question sitting in plain view on top of a neighbor's car.  Nancy and I crossed the street, and I approached carefully, uttering reassuring kitty-kitties.  What Kliban thought about having been released a few minutes ago and then instantly retrieved, we did not wonder.  Just as I reached out to give him a comforting scratch behind the ear, the better to win his confidence, he jumped off the roof of the car and behind a brick wall into our neighbor's back yard.

I went through the gate to get him, and this time he allowed me to pick him up.  I will not say he was calm, but rather watchful.  Wary.  He seemed to be a cat who was monitoring developments closely and meanwhile considering his next move.  When I passed him over the brick wall to Nancy, he made it.  He set up a rrow-rrow-rrow like the approach of a distant siren, and claws extended from all his feet at once.  It is impossible that as Nancy tried to unpin the cat from me, I was actually running in place, unable to pull free from those little fish-hooks with which cat's paws are equipped, but this is how I recall it, and certainly how it felt.

In any case, I distinctly remember Nancy asking, "Is he clawing you with his front claws or his back claws?  Because our cat doesn't have front claws."

We had gone after the neighbor's cat.

We later learned our neighbor had watched the entire procedure from behind the safety of her kitchen curtain, afraid to intervene; after all, if these uncouth ruffians come after a mere cat, what would they do to her?  And besides, she reasoned, quite correctly as it turned out, her cat could take care of itself.

When we returned to the house - somewhat bloodied and shaken, I - Kliban was waiting sweetly for us at the kitchen door.  Some change had taken place in his attitude.  We had braved poison ivy, and sharp curved claws for his sake.  We had frightened and possibly permanently estranged our neighbor.  All for him.
Kliban had found a home.

How Dogs Communicate

I once knew a schnauzer named Charles
who told lies.There are those who scoff at the thought that dogs communicate with humans, but these people either do not own a dog or else are blind, deaf, dumb, and stupid.  Our dog Zoe, for example, groans with pleasure, whines when there is something she wants - usually attention - and even has different barks for different occasions.

She has a start-up bark, kind of a soft woof, that flaps the skin of her lips.  This is a soft warning bark, telling whatever noise she hears, "I'm going to start barking in earnest if you don't quit that."  Then there is her full-blown bark which can make an empty cup clear the coffee table by a good quarter inch.  She has a special bark for dreaming; it's as soft as her warning bark but higher-pitched, a frequency to which dream-squirrels and dream-rabbits are especially responsive.

Sometimes in her sleep, she makes the damnedest noise that I can't reproduce here, except that it's a multipart, "Rowr-rowr-rowr-rowr," in falling notes, somewhere between a howl and a song.  Before going to sleep, after she's turned around three times on her bed and lay down, she will often express a sigh of wistful fatigue as if to say, "So.  Another day done.  Some joy, some pain.  Some barks, some wags.  Ah, well."

Back on the topic of barks, she also has a bark to be let in the house.  If she feels she's been outside long enough, she'll stand at the back door and bark until someone opens it.  She pretends to be barking at something in the yard, but she's not fooling anybody.

As communicative as Zoe is, she still isn't up to par with a schnauzer I knew as a kid who could tell lies.  If someone's cat stayed over for the night, Charles the Dog would take a dump under cover of darkness in some conspicuous place.  The next morning, he would feign astonishment at seeing it there, go over and sniff it eagerly, as if it had proceeded from some unknown anus.

"Look at this, Mrs Martin!" (He always called my mother "Mrs Martin.)  "Someone has dumped here right in the open!  Who could it have been?  It wasn't me, and it certainly wasn't me..." while the unsuspecting cat, too ignorant to realize she was being framed, looked on uncomprehending.  Fortunately for the scales of justice, and what Charles for all his cunning did not guess, even the least trained forensics specialist can spot at fifty paces the difference in caliber between a cat's feces and a dog's.

As Charles the Dog got older, he became very infirm and unsteady on his legs, the result of having been attacked by a Great Dane.  (In retrospect, I see Charles was partly at fault.  He had said the most shocking things about the Great Dane's mother.)  He was prone to lose his balance on linoleum floors and had to be carried from the carpeted living room to the back door so he could go out and pee.  One morning, however, my mother found Charles in the middle of the kitchen floor. Caught in the act, red-pawed as it were, crossing it under his own steam without evident difficulty, indicating he'd been perfectly capable of walking on linoleum for some time, but was milking the situation for the pasha-like luxury of being carried to his destination.  It took only a moment for Charles to decide what to do.  He began to whine and walk backward.  "Oh, my goodness!  I'm right in the middle of the floor!  Help!  How did I get here!  I can't even walk on linoleum!"

And in spite of this, there are some who claim dogs cannot communicate.  The scoffers.

How to Find Things

Scratching the back of the head does nothing to the brain,
but it does stimulate the hair follicles.1. Lose Something.  Without this first step, none of the rest of the steps even make sense.  Imagine what a chump you'd feel if someone asked what you were looking for, and you had to reply, "Nothing.  I'm just looking in general to stay in practice."  A person with a serious commitment to finding things must have an equally serious commitment to losing them.  Personally, I have up to ten things at any given time which I have either temporarily or permanently mislaid.  Of course, I'm an expert, and this is not something the amateur should attempt.  I advise starting small by pretending to lose things.  Put your glasses down on the coffee table.  Now look the other way and say to yourself, "I wonder where those darn glasses are."  Then turn around and voila!  There they are.

2. Stand with One Hand on Your Hip and Scratch the Back of Your Head.  Once you've really lost something and aren't just playing silly games with a pair of glasses when you know exactly where they are, you'll want to get in what we call the "starting position."  In putting a hand on your hip, you will unconsciously make a fist.  This will signal the amygdala in your brain to release the "flight-or-fight" hormones in addition to the all-important "where-the-hell-did-I-put-those-stupid-glasses-I-had-them-just-a-second-ago" hormone.  Scratching your head does not stimulate the brain which can't feel a thing under a quarter inch of bone, but it stimulates the hair follicles and besides you may discover a little bump back there you didn't suspect, and think, "Uh-oh.  What's this?  I wonder if I should get a doctor to look at this."  This will take your mind off what you've lost and give you something new and more entertaining to worry about.

3. Cuss.  Many inanimate objects have an acutely-developed sense of shame and may show themselves if you let them know you're angry.  Sometimes even calling them "stupid" can do the trick.  Being inanimate, they have no intelligence whatsoever.  They realize this and are very sensitive on this point.

4.  Actually Begin Looking.  This is perilous and should not be tried until the back of the head has been thoroughly scratched and the supply of cuss-words exhausted.  Searching, say through a desk covered with a mound of papers, is apt to mess up the delicately-balanced ecosystem of trash and clutter with which you are surrounded.  Frankly, at this juncture, I recommend you tell yourself whatever it is, you can do without it, or that "It's bound to turn up sooner or later."  Lies, of course, but as my Aunt Reenie used to say, "If at first you don't succeed, try again.  After that, give up."

5.  Ask Someone.  This is as risky in its way as Step 4, but for very different reasons.  If you ask somebody, nine times out of ten, they'll say something like, "Your glasses are right there on the coffee table."  And there they'll be.  Of course the only reason they were so easy to find is Step 3 embarrassed them so badly, they deliberately stayed hidden until just then to show you up.  However, explaining to someone that it's easy to find something once you'd already "loosened it up" by head-scratching and cussing is likely to make them doubt your sanity and will not prevent them lecturing you about how if you stayed organized you wouldn't have to spend so much time looking for things.

Luckily, when this unsympathetic passer-by hectors you for losing something, there's a great snappy comeback that will stop him in his tracks and make him feel the quivering worm he is.  It came to me last night, and I wrote it on a piece of paper.

Which unfortunately I lost.

Fear Me, Halloween Candy!

Look upon me and tremble, Halloween Candy!Fear me, Halloween Candy, for my name is Man.

I am thy nemesis, thy knell of doom, thy horseman of the apocalypse.  In the apocalypse of candy there is but one horseman, for he will eat thee all.  There is not even a horse, just a horseman, the horse was just a metaphor, and that horseless-horseman's name is Man.  Look upon the name and tremble, oh Halloween candy!

For I will keep thee in a basket by the couch in front of the TV and I will eat thee.  I will eat the M&M's, and the Twix, and the Kandy Korn.  The Tootsie Rolls shall I eat last, so they can watch all the others go before them and because I really care not for Tootsie Rolls so much, but I will eat them anyway, for my name is Man.

I will keep eating, even though I am not hungry, and actually getting kind of queasy, but I shall not stay my hand, though Nancy says, "Jesus, how much of that stuff have you eaten?" and I am shamed.  But I shall not spare thee, I shall not even spare the Bottle Caps, even though they are pretty disgusting for my name is Man.  I am the same candy-eating scourge that in days of yore lay waste to an entire bag of Valentine's hearts that have no more flavor than antacid tablets.

My name is Man.  Let word go round the candy bars and Laffy Taffy that I care not whether you taste good or not or how fresh you are, I shall eat you anyway.  If I drop an M&M, I shall search among the couch cushions until I find it, and then I shall eat it.  There are those who will drop candy on the floor and pick it up and eat it, proclaiming, "Three second rule."  But I acknowledge no such rule, for my name is Man.  I could find a Jolly Rancher in the tomb of the Pharaohs and say "what the hell," and eat it anyway.  And I don't even like Jolly Ranchers!

Thy day is at hand, oh Left-Over Halloween Candy.  When the last of the trick-or-treaters had departed, did thou think in thy heart, "We have been spared, though all our brothers were distributed to tiny Disney Princesses and diminutive Mitt Romneys and Barack Obamas, for the trick-or-treaters have gone and yet we remain."

Fools, oh Candy, fools!  For I am Man, and none shall escape me, for lo, I once, in a Chinese restaurant looked upon the fortune cookie of my neighbor and asked, "Are you going to eat that?"  And, lo, I ate it, though I had eaten of my own fortune cookie already!  And I did not even read the fortune!  I cared not for the fortune, I disdained it!  I only wanted the cookie, and fortune cookies are the worst cookies there are, and the only point to the whole thing is the fortune, which I didn't even read!

What hope then, can you have, oh Peanut-Butter Cups and Skittles?  What hope then for Starburst and Snickers Bars!  Perhaps, later, I shall regret my harshness and incline to mercy, but by then shall it be too late.

For my name is Man.  Look upon the name and despair, oh Candy!

My Write-In Candidacy

The candidate in a heart-warming photo
with his wife and dogIt may be a little late, but bowing to the pressure of my advisers, I've decided, what the heck, I'm throwing my hat into the presidential ring.  Tomorrow, when you go to the polls, write in the name "Man Martin" for president.  If you voted early, well, you just feel like a chump, don't you?  Go back and tell them you've changed your mind, and maybe they'll give you another ballot.  (Parenthetically, why can't we do that anyway?  When we vote for someone, we should be given a receipt so we can return candidate later and get our vote back in case the guy turns out to be defective like with that so-called "male enhancement" crap I bought over the internet.)

Briefly then, here is my platform.

Deficit Spending is building up an enormous national debt that our grandchildren will have to pay for.  Thank goodness!  I thought we would have to pay for it!  I don't even have grandchildren.  Ha-ha.  So as far as I'm concerned, on the spending front, full steam ahead!  Free boob jobs and liposuction for everybody!

Our so-called foreign policy has gotten us into glutinous messes with hostile nations like Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is clearly short-sighted to invade hostile countries when invading friendly countries would have been so much easier and more lucrative.  Why don't we invade Canada, for crying out loud?  They're just sitting there!  Or Monaco?  Invading Monaco would require a troop surge of... well... one.

Global Warming.  Global Warming Schmobal Schmarming.  If the earth is getting hotter just crank up the AC full blast and leave all the windows open.  Problem solved.

I figure 49% of the American people are booger-eaters.  It's true.  49% of Americans regularly pick their own boogers and eat them.  They think we don't know.  These people will never vote for me, but I frankly, I don't want them to.  So if you vote for one of the other guys, you're basically admitting you eat boogers.

Think about it.

Daylight Savings Time

An hour added to the day and I feel like SupermanThis is that wonderful time of year when I wake up at 8:00 am on Sunday and discover it's really only 7:00.  Marvelous!  Who doesn't love the wonderful boost, the feeling of ersatz efficiency, you get on the day when everything's an hour earlier than it feels like, and even though you're as big a schlubb as ever, you manage to get everything done an hour faster than you normally do.

"Why it's only 11:15, and I've already played four games of computer solitaire, watched a complete infomercial, and stared into space for a solid minute.  At this rate, I'll be dressed and showered by noon!"

An hour added to the day, and I feel like a Superman.

The problem is, of course, or one of the problems, is that the illusion of a power surge wears off in a few days, and everything's back to being the same as it ever was.  Worse yet, in Spring, the NASA scientists or whoever's in charge of these things, makes you turn your clocks forward, and you lose an hour.

I respectfully submit to the Bureau of Clocks and Wristwatches that they've got the scheme the wrong way around.  If I get to gain an hour, I'd much rather have it in May, and if I must give up an hour, I'd rather do so in November, or better still, February, which is a month most of us would prefer to shorten as much as possible.

And while we're at it, why are we sticking with just one hour?  Why can't we turn the whole calendar back, and not just our clocks?  Wouldn't it have been great waking up this morning and seeing it was October 4?  All the Halloween candy I've gorged on for the past few days would still be safely stored in its unopened bags, those eggs I carelessly dropped getting in the door would still be inside my chickens, and I'd have a whole extra month do catch up on all the things I was supposed to do last month.

On the other hand, we'd have to hear about the election an extra thirty-one days.

It's not worth it.

The Old Man and The Gym

Going to the gym would not
solve his problems.  But it was
a place to startHe was an old man who lived off Ashford-Dunwoody road and he had gone eighty-four days without going to the gym.  In the first forty days a boy had asked to go with him.  But after forty days, the boy's parents said the old man was definitely salaoa which doesn't even make sense but they had been drinking and probably meant the old man was unlucky or just lazy or else they were asking, what's an old man want to hang around with a boy anyway?  Is he a pervert?  It made the boy sad to see the old man come home in his Camry each day without going to the gym.  The Camry was silver but the windshield was blotchy because the old man never cleaned it.  The old man was a slob.

The old man had a bald head and a round tummy.  As his sides were two lumps of fat that the women call love handles although there is no woman who loves to handle them.  His glasses were smeary.  His shoe laces were frequently untied.  Going to the gym would not solve his problems.  But it was a place to start.

"Today will be a lucky day," the old man told the boy.  "It is a lucky day to go to the gym."

"Yes," agreed the boy.  "You will go to the gym today.  You will be ripped."

"I do not wish to be ripped," the old man said.  "I am too old for that.  I wish only not to look so much like the Pillsbury Doughboy."  The boy said nothing.  Compared to the old man, the Pillsbury Doughboy was buff.

The grass under their feet was green with brown splotches.  The sky was overhead.  That is a good place for the sky, the old man thought.  There were exactly three clouds.  No, make that two.  No three.  There were two or three clouds.

"Today," said the old man, "I will go to the gym."

"I believe you," the boy said.  The boy did not believe him for a second.

My Mother's Library

My mother had a notion when she was a little girl in Kentucky, and one time she shared it with me.  She said she liked to imagine there was a library in heaven with all the books: all the books that ever had been written as well as all the books that ever could be written.

"And if you wanted to be a writer," she explained, "all you had to do was get into that library and go to the shelves of books that hadn't been written yet, and just take one and copy it."

She told me this back when I was an aspiring cartoonist, and we talked about the idea when I gave up cartooning for writing.  I think about it often, and the more I think about it, the truer it seems to me.  I know that everything I write is only a rough approximation of the story that could have been written.  Mur always said she was my biggest fan and severest critic, and that she was; she praised whatever was good in my work, but criticized whatever she felt fell short of the ideal form in that ideal library.

Today was her birthday.  She died May 20, my birthday. She did not get to see my first novel published, nor my second.  But she would have been so proud.  I still dream about her.  The dreams are never about her, but she's in them, just a casual participant and commentator on my ordinary dreamscape.

J K Rowling said she always imagined paradise would be some kind of library.

I hope so.  I'd like to think of my mother laughing and shaking her head, turning the page in my next story.

An Open Letter to the Humans from One of those Big Roaches That's Been Coming Into Your House Lately

Dear Human,

As a representative of the Master Species, I have been asked to address you regarding the treatment some of my cousins have received upon entering your domicile.  Thanks to an unusually warm summer (and I do mean thanks, really, we of the Master Species appreciate it) a lot more of us have hatched and survived to adulthood than previous years.  Now that the weather is finally turning cooler, some of us are venturing inside   where it is warm.  When you have found one of us, you have behaved in the most inhospitable way imaginable to your guest.

Perhaps you think that we find you as revolting as you find us.  This is not so.  We find you infinitely more revolting than that.  Imagine all the feelings of disgust you feel upon seeing one of our number, and now imagine that it is a hundred times larger than you and can easily crush you under one of its spiny legs.  Ha ha ha.  We imagine this sort of thing all the time.

Sometimes, not content with merely crushing us - unwilling to smear us over your precious hardwood floor - you delicately pick us up in a paper towel and drop us in the toilet.  Perhaps you imagine that we might enjoy the novel sensation of being swirled around and around as we are sucked into a vortex of doom.  We not not enjoy this.  There are many things you would not enjoy either, and we have had millions of years to think of what these are, and how we will do them to you, and how to make sure you definitely do not enjoy them.

Our prophets tell us that Global Warming, Overpopulation, and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons are all signs that the Beginning Times are at hand.  Be warned.  One day the earth will be unfit for any but the Master Species, but before then will come a time when pathetic fleshy weaklings, with their soft outer bodies and highly-edible eyeballs will fall under our dominion.  I will not say it will go lighter with you if you treat us with courtesy now, for we find you loathsome in every way, except as previously alluded to, those tasty eyeballs of yours, and will surely wipe you out when the Beginning Times arrive, but it will go infinitely harder on those against whom we bear a particular grudge.  The Master Species has a long memory and a very good imagination.

If you wish your end to be painless and brief, let us go about our business without interference when we enter your house.  Better still, move out of your house and leave it to us.  And leave the refrigerator open.

That is all.

Awaiting the Beginning Times,

CR798-63-M-2335