mockable.org

I am not really sure what my problem is with Harry Potter, but I hate that little bespectacled bitch. I have never read more than a couple lines of the books and I have only seen a one or two of the movies (under protest) because I wanted to spend time with my family and they wanted to see it.  I get defensive when people start using the jargon from the books and I automatically roll my eyes when grown men and women start chattering like a excited monkies when discussing the books.

Maybe it’s because I am a jaded and angry old man who has rendered himself unable to enjoy magic and fantasy.  It’s possible that I have some sort of deeper intellectual disagreement with people who allow themselves to be charmed by a series of books created for twelve year-old girls.  I mean, can you imagine a group of people standing around the water cooler giggling and agressively discussing the new Trixie Belden/Encyclopedia Brown crossover book with all the energy that it would take to tackle the real problems our society is facing? Or maybe it’s because the whole franchise is too much like Star Wars+The Hobbit+Wizards.  My kids asked me if the Malfoy family house-elf was named Dolby or Dobby.  “His name is Jar Jar Binks,” I replied angrily.  I admit that I am completely out of school here – I am wholly unqualified to speak on this subject…and I’ll never be able to explain why I hate him so much, but Harry and his entire formulaic crew can eat wang as far as I’m concerned.

I try my best to keep that shit to myself because everyone around me seems to love the goofy little bastard and I am already unpopular enough as it is.  Sometimes I just can’t hold it in any longer.  If I do lose it I try my best to loose my Harry Potter venom on some adult that’s at least a little douchey anyway.  Almost without exception, when I get around to calling J. K. Rowling a “format children’s book factory that got extremely lucky” someone reminds me, “Yeah, well she’s got more money than you ever will!”

It is a miracle that I have never responded to this idiotic argument with a tack hammer to the skull. Why do you people reach for this comeback every time?  Do you really believe that being rich is some sort of measure of talent? Is a person’s net worth really the barometer I should use to determine whether or not I should consume their products?  To paraphase my mother (who, coincidently and somewhat ironically, has used this argument on me many times in the past), just because it’s popular doesn’t make it not a huge pile of shit. I think that’s what she said anyway.

I imagine that if anyone read this they might come back at me with some sort of free market argument that says people will naturally consume the best product and the fact that it is popular does make it quality writing.  If this were a serious or scholarly effort, I would then start rambling on like an asshole about the flaws inherent to capitalism and the fact that without regulation, we would be living in the United States of Carnegie right now. Instead, I will point out that that combined,  Hitler’s Mein Kampf  and Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto have sold over a billion copies. Wow…a billion.  Those guys must have been rich.  I bet they were top-notch writers. With the exception of Hitler, I am not suggesting that any of these authors are evil per se, but I am saying that they all, at one point or another, had more money than I will ever have. 

From a far more practical angle, haven’t you people ever read a comic book or seen a movie or watched Fox News?  All of the master villians are rich.  From Dr. Evil to Dick Cheney, they all seem to have millions of dollars invested in some evil lair or castle.  I can’t even imagine what kind of underground wunderhöhle Rowling does her evil business in.

Anyway, I really don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home.  Read whatever you want, watch whatever you want and perform whatever excercises in quasi-reproduction you feel are necessary.  Just remember, coming to work and calling me a muggle may result in a tack hammer to the dome piece – and I am proud to be poorer than a lot of people.

I missed the past two Thursdays but I have a good excuse.
I was in the wilds of Northern Maine.
Let me explain…

Northern Maine is where I grew up. The little town of New Sweden, boasting approximately 630 people, is a mecca of nature and all it’s wonders. Potato farms, cleared by the Swedes in the late eighteen hundreds, are scattered throughout the 34.7 square miles, surrounded by thick forests made up of mostly pine trees.

This bustling town is where I grew up into the Tammie you all know and love.

Sadly, the technology age hasn’t managed to infiltrate this little town of stubborn swedes who still think their black and white television is “good enough to watch the farm reports and the news”. Hell…my grandparents were finally able to get cable television to their home in the nineties.
Let’s just say that life is still moving in the slow lane in my home town and leave it at that.

Anyway, the internet was unavailable and I had no way to update anything unless I used my cell phone, which incidentally was not in a service area unless I drove two miles up to Thomas Park and stood on top of a picnic table. Have you ever tried to write more than a text message while typing on a cell phone balancing precariously on a wobbly picnic table?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about the entire trip, from beginning to end. What is more mockable than my life?

We left for Maine on a Friday morning. Surprisingly enough we got an early start and our usual delays were non-existent. Mr.Man, myself, Miss Know-It-All, Veggie Stick and Little Beatle (our three children) packed all our belongings and the dog into the minivan and headed north.

Veggie Stick, the dog and I all get motion sickness, so we are pretty heavily medicated when traveling. We learned about the dog’s weak stomach the first year we took her with us. She vomited all over Veggie Stick and her blanket, not once but twice within an hour of leaving. Veggie flipped out and bitched for hours, resuming her ranting after going into a restroom and noticing we’d allowed her to go in there with wide streaks of mascara smeared across her face. So now we knock her out with enough Dramamine to tranquilize Rush Limbaugh.
The dog and I are doped up but still aware of everything going on around us. The one year I did take two Dramamine instead of one, Mr.Man fell asleep at the wheel while driving through construction on I-81 in Pennsylvania. We were on the inside lane right up against a huge concrete barrier. I was dozing and noticed the wall was VERY close. So close in fact, I could have reached out and licked it. That’s when I looked over at Mr.Man and saw he was sleeping. I woke him up and neither one of us slept again the entire trip.
I actually had a plan that I thought would work to keep him awake but the kids ride in the back seat and it’s not actually viable. Besides, depending on how good I do my job keeping him awake, it might have actually ended up being a safety hazard.

I don’t know if any of you have actually traveled I-81 through Pennsylvania before or not but it’s lousy with tractor trailers. The trucks dominate the roads and are adamant about letting you know that. We’ve been boxed in by truckers on many occasions,for no apparent reason,and if it weren’t for this route being the fastest way to travel from WV, we’d take another route. Since that’s not an option we move through Pennsylvania as quickly as possible just to get out of there.
We do try to make the best out of the situation though and play little games to entertain ourselves. As we pass each truck, I always look over to see if the trucker is a “looker”, meaning does he look down into our vehicle to see if he can catch a glimpse of leg or boobies?
In the past I would do nothing to the “lookers” and remain calmly in my seat as we passed. But this year for some reason it annoyed me. Maybe it’s menopause? Who knows what triggered my “looker” rage but I felt more and more irritated as I kept looking up into the trucks and saw the lookers looking down at me.I’m really not an angry kind of person either so I’m thinking it was probably just boredom.
We ended up side by side with a WalMart truck. The guy driving was a looker. Traffic wouldn’t allow us to move anywhere so we were side by side with him for several miles. He was looking every time I checked to see if he was looking. No, I wasn’t wearing a v-neck or anything revealing, but I was wearing shorts. It’s the middle of summer for crying out loud. Who’s going to wear sweat pants and a turtle-neck in that kind of weather?
After I’d caught him looking one too many times I finally scrunched up the right side of my face and gave him an ARGGGG…doing the best pirate face I was capable of.
The next time I looked over, he was laughing. I prefer laughing to leering to I decided to make pirate faces to all the lookers after that. It kept me entertained, Mr.Man entertained and the kids all pretended to be asleep because they were embarrassed.

The best part of my little adventure was pulling into a rest area and seeing two or three truckers pointing at me and laughing.

After travelling through New York and then staying overnight in Connecticut, our second day is always entertaining. Driving through Connecticut and on the Mass Pike where it’s like parallel parking while doing eighty miles an hour always feels like you’re on a theme park ride. Who needs to be stimulated when you’re scared shitless? Stopping places in New England is fun too because of Mr.Man’s southern accent and my Maine accent. We are both stared at like we have a penis growing out of our forehead or something. And the clerks always ask questions so we have to answer and they can hear us talk. I feel like I’m in a freak show. Yep…travelling through New England feels like a day at the carnival.

But I’ve said too much already. I’m going to have to tell you about our actual vacation next Thursday. Is visiting family actually considered a vacation? Well I guess the time I spent with my cousins the Beericksons would be considered a vacation activity.

I’ll see you next week and the saga will continue then.

Welcome back to mockable.org, ladies and gentlemen.  Apparently we are no longer an attack site, which is nice.  I was enjoying all of your credit card numbers and baby pictures, but we finally decided that we would appreciate your company much more and knocked all that malware stuff off…Except for that one lady in Corpus Christi.  We’re still spying on her personal information because she is hotter than doughnut grease and has the pictures on her c: drive to prove it.  I would say that she is built like a brick shithouse, but I have recently promised myself that I won’t use phrases that I don’t understand anymore.  I mean, I’ve gone “head over heels” for that girl…wait, strike that.  My head is always over my heels…what an odd thing to say.  Anyway, we’re glad you’re back…and to the chick in Corpus Christi, we’re glad you’re hot and mostly naked a lot.

So yeah, clowns…Never, ever, not even once in my life have I been happy to see a clown.  I mean, I am not scared of them or anything – and I have taken a balloon animal from them once or twice at parades or during a Friday night family get together at the sizzler,  but in general they have always just pissed me off. I don’t know why, but I am sure that if a guy tapped me on the shoulder and I slowly turned around in response only to be surprised by a dude with a wig, face makeup and a big rubber nose, I would punch him in the face in a manner similar to the guy in one of my favorite youtube videos of all time.

I know I am not the only person that hates/is afraid of clowns, but I have never really been able to figure out why…until today.  I mean, how can I hate someone whose primary mission is to entertain and make little kids laugh?  The obvious answer is to examine what they have to do to get these laughs.  If I want to make my nieces and nephews laugh, I make a funny face…or a fart noise…or I let them have cake or caffeinated beverages that their parents don’t want them to have…or maybe a cigarette or two.  It’s actually pretty easy to get a kid to like you.

Considering this, if someone is so socially inept that they have to paint their face and put on giant shoes just to get a laugh out of a kid…well, they’re obviously a fucking sociopath.  They are clearly donning the facepaint and giant nose to act as a mask through which they can channel another person – a person that is able to interact with little boys and girls without wanting to go all Catholic priest on them…except the masked beast almost always wants to get out.  I think Andre the Giant said it best when he uttered the famous phrase, “People in masks cannot be trusted.” Crazy clowney pederasses.

I am not a commissioned law enforcement officer.  However, the requirements of my job cause me to be around a lot of commissioned law enforcement officers every day.  I have had my problems with asshole cops over the years, but when you deal with them on a daily basis, they tend to become human.  Most of them are actually pretty cool.  It has been my experience that there are three types of cops in the world.  Those who became cops because they got their asses kicked their entire lives and wanted to finally have some authority – this is the worst type of cop.  Those who needed a job and police officer was available – these are generally decent and harmless people. And then there are those who genuinely want to contribute positively to society.  The ones who run toward problems rather than away from them.  These are the types of cops that I seek out and attempt to learn from.  I have spent years asking them about how they became who they are and listening to their stories.  There is a lot that one can learn from a good law enforcement officer.

Usually I ask them questions about major cases they’ve worked or times they’ve been in harm’s way.  I’ve asked them about working in the inner city.   I have asked how they coped with years of depressing and macabre stuff in the homicide division.  I have learned a ton, but I have never hit a home run like I did this morning as I shared a cup of coffee with two cops that started on the street and spent over thirty years each coming up through the ranks.  These are, relatively speaking, distinguished and important men.  I took a sip of coffee, looked up at them and completely out of the blue asked, “Have you ever arrested a clown?”  I have no idea where it came from.  I wasn’t thinking about clowns at the time and I hadn’t encountered a clown in years.  I just popped my head up from my coffee and hit them with the clown question.

Both of their ears perked up and they looked at each other and smiled.  It was clear that this was a new question for both of them and, while they work closely together on a daily basis, they had not yet gotten to the all-important stage in their relationship where they talked about how many clowns they’ve busted.

The stories poured forth like so many busted dams.  They had each busted a handful of clowns – all male and all of sex-related crimes. One of the clowns was even named “Buster the Clown.” They also had a handful of stories where their colleagues had busted clowns.  Other than the fact that they were all men, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it as far as age or location was concerned either.  While these guys work for the same agency now, they did the majority of their work in cities that were over 500 miles apart from one another.

So now I know exactly why I get the clown-hate feeling every time one is near or I see them on television.  I am not Coulrophobic; I am simply doing my part to protect the children.  In fact, I have no idea why these guys are allowed to roam free about the country, preying on children with their creepy vans, facepaint and balloon animals.  I encourage you to write your congressman and urge them to write and pass “Buster’s Law” – a landmark piece of legislation that prohibits anyone except ladies over the age of 70 from going out in public dressed as a clown.  If you love clowns, that’s great.  Either find an old lady or do it in the privacy of your own home sicko.  In the meantime, I am going to fight the good fight and get Buster’s Law passed.  You know, for the children.  Thank you for your time and kind consideration.