ONLY EMO PHILLIPS IS FUNNIER

Blog number forty the one Sep. 21, 2006

So Teresa (my wife) is waiting in line at the Bel Aire (A fancy grocery store) and I'm kinda standing back watching people. I notice two boys about eleven years of age looking over the DVD's in the children's section. One of them picks up a Disney DVD and excitably exclaims to the other while pointing to a cartoon picture on the front, "She's good! I saw her in "Beauty and the Beast."

In an "all you can eat" place - Hometown Buffet, I was standing behind an eight year old boy who was staring at the cinnamon rolls in front of him, plate in hand, and I heard his mother say, "No, those aren't vegetables."

I got a call from Italy one day -- a wrong number. Apparently the Italian lady's son was supposed to be a student exchange and was to live in the person's house that she was trying to call when she got me. She hadn't heard from anyone when she was supposed to, so she was trying to find out what was going on. She gave me the family's address, so I went over there to see if I could find out what was happening. I couldn't find the address because some of the streets were forbidden to me because they were in gated communities. I talked to a lady behind a fence and told her the story and she said she would go get a map, and for me to stay right there and she would be back shortly. I thanked her and she left, leaving a little girl on a bike.

I said to the little girl, "Lemme ride your bike." She said, "No." I said, "Aw, come on. You been riding it all morning." She stared at me for a moment and then she blurted out, wide eyed, expectant, "Are you Santa Clause?"
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Used to be that if you were going to make a turn in your car, you stuck your arm out the window and signal. When I was fourteen, they came out with turn signals. For the life of me I couldn't understand how the car would know when it was going to turn. Fourteen years old, man!

Took me and another guy a lot of moments trying to figure out how a circular lawn mower cut all the grass.

I was confused about the world I lived in for most of my life.

I had a girl in town and I lived about four miles out of that same town - Graettinger. I used to stay with her until about four in the morning when I had to walk the four miles home -- past a graveyard. I was deathly afraid of ghosts. Every time, without fail, I used to mentally kick myself for staying with my girlfriend, making me walk past that graveyard when there were absolutely no cars on the road. "Never again!" I would tell myself.

If I had left at a reasonable hour, say ten o'clock, I could have probably gotten a ride from one of the farmers coming home from the beer hall. But nooooo. My lust took over my brain and good common sense.

I was absolutely sure each time, that THIS time a ghost was going to get me. Dr. Burke once asked me what I thought the ghosts were going to do to me and I was stumped. I didn't know.

After I went through the terror of actually walking right past the ghosts' stamping ground, I would feel a slight sense of relief at once again foiling the bastards, but every few seconds I would get a creepy feeling in the nape of my neck and quickly look back. I never really relaxed until I reached the first farmhouse. From then on it was a walk in the park. I was usually so sleepy that I would close my eyes and try to catnap while walking, but I always felt I was walking right into the ditch, so I didn't get much sleep.
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I used to trap and I caught a civet cat one morning, so I smelled like a skunk. When I went to school I told the principle what happened and he had the janitor spray me with formaldehyde. Now that stuff stunk MUCH worse than the outdoorsy smell of skunk. "'sides, we know now that formaldehyde is poison.