WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Monkey in a Box: Best long read of the year so far
byVanderleunonDecember 29, 2022
TIM TATE: The time is the mid-’60s. The place, anywhere suburban USA. My brother is 8, I am 9 years old. We love a magazine called Monster Magazine, which we read religiously every single month. This month, in the back of Monster Magazine besides itching powder and x-ray glasses, you could purchase a monkey. Not a sea monkey, not a stuffed monkey, an actual squirrel monkey the size of a cat – a big cat and you only had to send $19.95. And we had $19.95 because we washed cars, we mowed lawns.
So my brother and I think, this would be the best – the best idea we’ve ever had because not only will he do our chores for us and we will love him and he will love us, but also he will go to school with us. Everybody at school will love us because we have a monkey on our shoulders. It was going to treat all of our ills. So we decide that this would be the best idea we ever had, but we knew from experience that if we asked my mom in advance, there was but one outcome – the answer would be no.
But we also knew that any half-dead kind of bedraggled, moth-eaten animal we drag home, she would let us keep ’cause she was a big softy. So with both those pieces of knowledge, we set off for our own monkey. We decide his name will be Pepe. We make him a little hat and a cape. And we will dress him when he comes and everyone will know him because his name will be Pepe. So we send off the money and we wait.
About three weeks go by and back then women had bridge tournaments with the women from the country club. This was one of those days. So my mom’s having a big bridge party. We’ve been, you know, squeezed into our plaid jackets, little red bowties, and our hair’s been slicked down and we look very nice – we look like twins. And we’re just kind of sitting there smiling so we don’t embarrass anybody and they’re just pointing and pinching our cheeks. By the way, the cardinal rule in our house is you never ever embarrass your mother in front of the bridge club.
That is the worst thing you can do. So as we sit there petrified that we might embarrass our mother, there’s a knock at the door, it’s the postman. And the postman has a box addressed to me and my brother. And it’s the size of a shoebox. And in the front of the shoebox is a little, tiny metal grill. And on the little metal grill, what we see is a little monkey’s mouth going (monkey breathing) up against this thing. So when my mother, seeing this monkey, and seeing it’s from Monkey Island or wherever it was from – and she says, oh my god. I don’t care what the boys have ordered. Take this thing back, it’s not coming to my house. Take it back to where you got it from. I don’t want this thing in my home.
And the postman says, if I take him back, he will die. So now my brother and I are about to have a stage 4 meltdown in front of the bridge club, which she cannot have, right? And we know that she’s sending our friend away to a certain death. So she says, oh for god’s sake, all right. Put the monkey in the kitchen. Now your father’s at the hardware store. Now listen, when he comes back and when this bridge club’s over, we will resolve this monkey issue. But in the meantime, you do not touch that box, you do not go in the kitchen, you don’t even look in the kitchen, and you don’t smell the kitchen.
You stay out here and when I finish with the bridge club and your father’s home, we will deal with it at that time and not a second before. And then she goes back down to play bridge. But we are 8 and 9 years old. We have a monkey in the box in the kitchen. There’s no power on this planet that is going to keep us out. Now being 8 and 9, you know where all the creaking floorboards are.
So we take off our shoes and we silently creep into the kitchen. You aren’t near that monkey, are you? Of course not, of course not. And we run back to where we were. So we go in the kitchen and we see that the box has a little frayed corner. So we think to ourselves, all right. If we take a little knife, we can help that corner and help Pepe escape so it looks like he just came out on his own because we know he’s like suffocating in there – we just can’t take it. So we get the steak knife out.
And at first, we’re tepid and we’re kind of slowly kind of working it to let it open, but pretty soon we just start hacking at the box. And we’re stabbing at it and the monkey’s starting to screech – dodging this knife coming at it right and left going ah, ah. Finally, boing (ph), out pops Pepe. Now monkeys are very, very, very smart creatures. They do not defecate in enclosed places and he has been waiting a long, long time in that box. And so sadly, now he’s freaked out because a knife’s been plunging at him, he’s been shipped in a shoebox. So now as he screeches at the top of his lungs, bites us with needlelike teeth, and runs in the living room, there’s an arc of urine in front of him and a huge trail of defecation wherever he went around that living room.
So now, the women hearing that there’s something screeching inside think, oh my god, what happened – run up the steps with their arms up, going oh my god, what’s going on? Oh my god. In those years, women had huge beehives that were sprayed and stinky and horrible. And Pepe decides at this moment in time that the best defense is a very strong offense and leaps on one of the women and gets entangled in her hair. And he starts biting on the poor woman who’s now bleeding and screaming and crying. And at this moment, my poor father walks back into the house.
When he left, he was a mild-mannered accountant in the suburbs with two lovely children and a bridge club downstairs. And now he thinks a rabid squirrel has broken in. He has no idea what it is because it couldn’t be a monkey – was not even in his comprehension. And so the monkey had run behind the sofa. And so he runs down and gets big leather garden gloves and he comes upstairs any he traps the monkey in the corner behind the sofa. And we pull my sister’s old crib with screen sides. We push it out in the front lawn and we put Pepe inside the crib and then we put a screen door on top of that and then we put bricks on top of that. And then all eyes turned to my brother and I.
Now we are in trouble, of course, but at this point my aunt is visiting, so before any horrible retribution can happen to my brother and I, my aunt speaks up and she says, oh, look how sweet he’s being. Look, he’s a nice monkey. Look – and you know, I mean, the boys were stabbing him and he was shipped in a shoebox. You know, he’s had a tough life. And I’ve never pet a monkey. I just want to pet a little monkey.
Let me pet – I bet I can calm him down. So my aunt goes over, but where an arm can go in, a monkey can come out. And out comes Pepe. And a monkey who believes he’s about to go to the next beyond in panic jumps out – and to escape, bites the first thing in front of his eyes. And what is that? That is my aunt’s pendulous breast. So the monkey bites her so hard on her breast that his head is shaking back and forth. So he bites her and now my aunt lets out a bloodcurdling screech that the entire neighborhood can hear. And she screeches like high heaven.
And finally, she swats Pepe off. He runs into the woods behind the house. We search for him every single day. So we would call Pepe and we would leave food for him constantly. We had Purina Monkey Chow because there were so many people with monkeys back then, I guess. In fact, our mom would go up and buy monkey chow for us even though she had no real desire to. But she – we would make her go buy monkey chow. She would give us bananas. She would do whatever we had to to take food to Pepe. We leave toys out in the woods. We go home after school and we have a group of our friends together and we all say, you know, help us today.
And different people would help us on different days. And we would scour the woods endlessly. And we would always think we caught a glimpse of Pepe – just a little tail somewhere or a little face around the corner, which most of the times turned out to be a squirrel, but sometimes we thought we saw him. And so we always were sure that he was there. At night out of our bedroom windows we would see him in the trees in our minds looking over us and we knew he was waiting to come back home.
And we did this for – it must have been two or three months. And then one day we find his little desiccated body at the foot of an oak tree. We take it and we dress poor Pepe in the cape and hat that might’ve been his, had circumstances been different. We put him back in the box that he originally was shipped in. We get our wagon and we put back crêpe paper around the entire wagon. We borrow our parents’ giant black clothes – my father’s black suit and we have a hat. And we’ve rolled up our sleeves and cuffs because they’re way too long but we had this huge funeral precession.
We’ve got our friends to go behind it and we finally get around to the backyard. My father’s there with the shovel going, you know, put the thing in the ground. But we are very solemn and we bury him in the backyard. And we have made a tombstone for him out of paper-mache that we spent days making and it said RIP Pepe, our dearest friend. And we finally bury him and we plant flowers around the gravesite. And there he still lies, peacefully resting in this moment. The tombstone is gone but the area’s full of flowers so he always will be there happily covered in flowers. There is an addendum to the story and that is my mother year – many years later, she was on her deathbed – pulled us aside and said she had something to admit. And we thought, oh my god, this must be something horrible.
Oh my god, what could she be hiding that she would have to admit it on her deathbed? And what she decided to tell us and admit at that moment was that during that time, the newspapers, radios and televisions had all had sightings – monkey sightings all around our neighborhood. And they were trying to find out who the owner of the monkey was so if the monkey was captured, they knew who to return it to.
And for god sakes, my mother said, I hid all those newspapers. And if it was coming on the TV, I shooed you out of the room and I hid all that from you so you would never know it because she was so afraid the monkey would be returned to the house. So that was her big confession but, of course, we had forgiven her. But Pepe, who now lives on forever in story form sadly left us much too quickly.
Years ago I was reading a book in which the author was talking about monkeys on board ships. He said in his experience, whenever he saw a monkey the monkey turned out to be a lot smarter than it looked. And the person who owned it turned out to be a lot dumber. I thought this was a funny line. One day I use it with my mom. She wasn’t too happy. She told me when she was a child she had a monkey. I felt like Seinfeld when he made fun of people owning a pony when they were children and the old lady at the dinner party started yelling at them that she had a pony. I was recently going through old photographs to digitize him. I found an amazing picture of my grandmother with that monkey facing away from the camera with a monkey on her back while looking in the distance at a boat dock with my grandfather bent down at the end, reaching into a boat looking just like a monkey. It’s one of my favorite photographs.
I remember those old magazines where you could buy stuff in the back. Do you remember the cardboard submarines you could buy in the back of the comic books. One of my best friends told me they were real and I lost my mind. I made a YouTube video story about it. If you were ever a little kid and went crazy over wanting to buy something that either you could not afford or actually did not exist, such as a cardboard submarine that was real and would go underwater and I think you might be interested in the story. https://youtu.be/zpR-NwiFUKk
VanderleunDecember 29, 2022, 11:07 AM
I wanted one of that cardboard atomic Nautilus soooooooooooooooo bad!
Wow! What a great piece that article is. Helps clear up a ton of smoke and mirrors that had/have a ton of folks fooled as per organ grinder trained/propagandized monkey’s.
I knew Musk was a creep just by the company he kept. And keeps close by.
I thank you for posting the link. Most important read I have spent time on in quite a while.
Thanks Terry for the thumbs up. I don’t mean to intercept our generous host, that was kinda rude of me. Still, wasn’t that a terrific piece of investigation? As for the monkeys… my very first encounter was with tiny “Charlie” in Puerto Galera, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines in 1984. He was usually tied on a long slender chain and sat on a pillow on the bar at the Outrigger Saloon. He was always stealing a baseball cap off your head or eating your pretzels. He’d hiss really nasty if you attempted to protect your snacks. A fistfight ensued when Charlie’s Aussie owner accused a customer of poisoning and killing the pest.
My next encounter was with the large orange monkeys that loiter upon the Laxman Juhla suspended pedestrian bridge above the Ganges in Rishikesh, India… same village the Beatles visited. My first traverse upon the bridge I got mugged by two of them, not the Beatles, the monkeys. I was holding an orange in each hand and a buddy of mine yelled at me to drop the oranges while they were tugging down my pants and ready to bite my arm. Nasty yellow teeth and again, that evil hissing sound. I read a report not long ago about them stealing away an unattended baby and devouring most of it before the child was found.
I hate monkeys, simian bastards the lot of them. These vermin are filthy beyond belief, they toss their own shit everywhere and they masturbate in public—rather like New York City homeless.
They and I have been feuding for going on 35 years. They have attacked me in Guatemala and Costa Rica, and I hit as many of them as I could with rocks. Some years ago in the Guatemalan jungle I had with me a military-style wrist rocket. My plan was to load it with a rock, and then send said rock flying into the jungle canopy in an attempt to knock a monkey out of the trees and onto the ground. Once on the ground I would eviscerate the dammed thing with my Al-Mar Sere knife and send it to Hell.
Alas, I was not a good shot with the wrist rocket, and so no monkey fell to my missiles. But I was witness to one of those noxious beasts meeting his end at the hands of a puma. Damn did he scream! For a while. Another time I was at a Honduran military base on the Mosquito Coast. A monkey was climbing an electric pole and touched the wire. He was instantly killed, his body was carbonized and his hair was on fire.
Good times!
VanderleunDecember 29, 2022, 11:04 AM
“they toss their own shit everywhere and they masturbate in public—rather like New York City homeless.”
I confess that I started laughing, almost to the point of tearing up, before the first paragraph was finished! You could tell it would be a doozy. Great story, great writing. Thanks!
There are no monkeys in Heaven. They are from first to last the spawn of Satan. Like Democrats.
Snakepit KansasDecember 30, 2022, 7:51 AM
Mike,
After a weekend diving around Coron Island, Palawan, Philippines we all went to a bar waiting for our ship to take us back to Manila. Walked in and a little monkey wearing shorts latched onto the top of my foot and ankle and would not let go. Probably wanted a treat. I got a beer and he eventually bored of me.
As for your displeasure with monkeys, I have similar feelings toward Canadian geese (a.k.a Sky Carp). They got fed too much by locals during the winters and they no longer fly south. By the hundreds they eat grass all day then coordinate in the evening on their flight plans to go over my house and defecate. If they miss the house it is on the sidewalk or car. When it rains a bunch of green shit comes out the gutters and downspouts. I took the trash out yesterday and there was green shit on the side of the house. Paint is peeling off the trunk of my old Caddy, undoubtedly due to all the goose bombs.
Here in Oklahoma City, Canada Geese are a protected species, rather like Chicago blacks. I live one mile from Lake Hefner, where these beasts are more ubiquitous than illegals in San Antonio. Their shit is everywhere and, as they have lost any fear of humans, they parade up and down the ten-mile bike path that goes around the lake. Sometimes I have to either wait for them to cross the path or simply ride around them. They move for no man.
OldTexanDecember 30, 2022, 9:19 AM
40 years ago I kept a sailboat in a wet slip at Lake Hefner, those asshole geese guarded the gate going out to the slips and they were total mean bastards and small children would be chased out of their established goose territory. We would try to drive them off and they would come right back. Those nasty suckers were evil.
I have long thought that a good tennis racket would drive the beasts away. But best to do it out of sight, as some wandering bird lover might call the cops. And then I would be in the slammer, and those geese would still be wandering thither and yon.
I have yet to return from my regular 12-mile bicycle ride around Hefner without goose shit stuck to my tires.
I first read this story several years ago. I laughed so hard I was out of breath for a few minutes. Every couple of years I re-read it to almost the same effect. I found the audio of Tim Tate actually telling the story on NPR at some point. (It’s hard to believe that this story shared the airwaves with the dreck produced by the vacuous posers taking themselves sooooo seriously.) I remember seeing these ads in several magazines along with the X-Ray Spex, garlic gum, and itching powder.
Thanks for the post, Gerard.
AbigailAdamsDecember 29, 2022, 10:44 PM
Wally and the Beav lived out their back pages fantasy by ordering a live alligator. The boys thought it would be fully grown, but it turned out to be a baby. They were able to keep it a secret whilst charging all their classmates a dime to file into their upstairs bedroom for a look at it. Then the poor thing started dying, but Ward stepped in and helped them bring it back to life and they donated it to Captain Jack’s Alligator Refuge (who knew the little town of Mayfield had such a niche rescue operation?). Edgar Buchanan played Captain Jack — this may have been before he headlined at Petticoat Junction.
Mad MarcDecember 30, 2022, 5:39 AM
In response to Kerry, I was laughing and tearing up after the first paragraph! Because it reminded me of growing up with 3 siblings, and the childhood thinking was exactly right!
I had an uncle who loved to drive an old pickup around, the kind of uncle who had a .38 caliber and a bottle of whiskey in the dashboard. It was a beater of a truck, constantly in need of under the hood attention, and conveniently had a pushbutton control on the dash to release the hood, so you could just drop it, startup and go on tyour merry way.
My two brothers were in the truck with my uncle one day when the engine stalled. So my uncle, in his wisdom, tells my brothers to stay in the truck, and DO NOT TOUCH THAT BUTTON NO MATTER WHAT!
He no sooner had the hood opened and was clambering around inside the engine compartment when the inevitable happened, the button was pushed and my uncle was trapped under the hood. Because he was an uncle and there were rules, he didnt beat the living hell out of them, and neither did my father, when told the story later on. He couldn’t beat them because he was laughing too hard!
That’s the difference, that’s the importance of humor, so we don’t take everything so damned seriously, unlike today, or at least what we are spoon fed in media. Humor will save you, it has saved me many times, in 25 years as a paramedic.
Right you are. The happenings of nations and peoples around the globe do not at all get me angry. What me worry? They do make me laugh, however. Anger takes too much energy and it is most cases a waste of time. Who would not crack up if shown a photo of Biden and his Cabinet? I imagine that Putin carries one in his wallet and looks at it from time to time to remind him whom he is fighting. “какая кучка гребаных идиотов и неудачников!”
HossDecember 30, 2022, 10:39 AM
oh yes, surely a bunch of idiots-with black hearts. Well said Mike.
Gerard…. your mom was totally lucid and still poking fun, right? To confess to you AS SHE EXPIRED that she was the root cause of Pepe’s banishment? To keep that inside of her for maybe sixty years and then fess up, I think that was amazing and amusing on her part. What a powerful woman.
Bill HenryJanuary 2, 2023, 7:53 AM
I had to stop reading multiple times because I was laughing to hard to read…
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
Let me know where I can order a democrat in a box.
A box with no screen in it, I assume.
Rimshot!
A monkey destroys mom’s bridge club party by shitting all over it. RICH!!!!
Years ago I was reading a book in which the author was talking about monkeys on board ships. He said in his experience, whenever he saw a monkey the monkey turned out to be a lot smarter than it looked. And the person who owned it turned out to be a lot dumber. I thought this was a funny line. One day I use it with my mom. She wasn’t too happy. She told me when she was a child she had a monkey. I felt like Seinfeld when he made fun of people owning a pony when they were children and the old lady at the dinner party started yelling at them that she had a pony. I was recently going through old photographs to digitize him. I found an amazing picture of my grandmother with that monkey facing away from the camera with a monkey on her back while looking in the distance at a boat dock with my grandfather bent down at the end, reaching into a boat looking just like a monkey. It’s one of my favorite photographs.
I remember those old magazines where you could buy stuff in the back. Do you remember the cardboard submarines you could buy in the back of the comic books. One of my best friends told me they were real and I lost my mind. I made a YouTube video story about it. If you were ever a little kid and went crazy over wanting to buy something that either you could not afford or actually did not exist, such as a cardboard submarine that was real and would go underwater and I think you might be interested in the story. https://youtu.be/zpR-NwiFUKk
I wanted one of that cardboard atomic Nautilus soooooooooooooooo bad!
Yeah me too but I wanted the Xray glasses more.
I submit this article by “The Good Citizen” as the “long read of the day” winner. There’s too much in this to summarize in a few words… just say this is a masterful exposé of the fraudulent Elon and his make believe agenda to promote free speech. https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/the-swatter-flies?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Hyland-
Wow! What a great piece that article is. Helps clear up a ton of smoke and mirrors that had/have a ton of folks fooled as per organ grinder trained/propagandized monkey’s.
I knew Musk was a creep just by the company he kept. And keeps close by.
I thank you for posting the link. Most important read I have spent time on in quite a while.
Thanks Terry for the thumbs up. I don’t mean to intercept our generous host, that was kinda rude of me. Still, wasn’t that a terrific piece of investigation? As for the monkeys… my very first encounter was with tiny “Charlie” in Puerto Galera, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines in 1984. He was usually tied on a long slender chain and sat on a pillow on the bar at the Outrigger Saloon. He was always stealing a baseball cap off your head or eating your pretzels. He’d hiss really nasty if you attempted to protect your snacks. A fistfight ensued when Charlie’s Aussie owner accused a customer of poisoning and killing the pest.
My next encounter was with the large orange monkeys that loiter upon the Laxman Juhla suspended pedestrian bridge above the Ganges in Rishikesh, India… same village the Beatles visited. My first traverse upon the bridge I got mugged by two of them, not the Beatles, the monkeys. I was holding an orange in each hand and a buddy of mine yelled at me to drop the oranges while they were tugging down my pants and ready to bite my arm. Nasty yellow teeth and again, that evil hissing sound. I read a report not long ago about them stealing away an unattended baby and devouring most of it before the child was found.
It amazes that the Indians would put up with such vermin. But who am I to lecture anybody? We put up with Biden.
I hate monkeys, simian bastards the lot of them. These vermin are filthy beyond belief, they toss their own shit everywhere and they masturbate in public—rather like New York City homeless.
They and I have been feuding for going on 35 years. They have attacked me in Guatemala and Costa Rica, and I hit as many of them as I could with rocks. Some years ago in the Guatemalan jungle I had with me a military-style wrist rocket. My plan was to load it with a rock, and then send said rock flying into the jungle canopy in an attempt to knock a monkey out of the trees and onto the ground. Once on the ground I would eviscerate the dammed thing with my Al-Mar Sere knife and send it to Hell.
Alas, I was not a good shot with the wrist rocket, and so no monkey fell to my missiles. But I was witness to one of those noxious beasts meeting his end at the hands of a puma. Damn did he scream! For a while. Another time I was at a Honduran military base on the Mosquito Coast. A monkey was climbing an electric pole and touched the wire. He was instantly killed, his body was carbonized and his hair was on fire.
Good times!
“they toss their own shit everywhere and they masturbate in public—rather like New York City homeless.”
Bada-bing! Bada-boom! Gold Star!
The phrase that was a close second was: “…they toss their own shit everywhere and they masturbate in public—rather like Nancy Pelosi voters.”
I’ll see your “Nancy Pelosi Voters” and raise you “Maxine Waters Voters.”
Damn. I fold.
I confess that I started laughing, almost to the point of tearing up, before the first paragraph was finished! You could tell it would be a doozy. Great story, great writing. Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHUb-xQMTOI&ab_channel=Pixies-Topic
Too soon?
There are no monkeys in Heaven. They are from first to last the spawn of Satan. Like Democrats.
Mike,
After a weekend diving around Coron Island, Palawan, Philippines we all went to a bar waiting for our ship to take us back to Manila. Walked in and a little monkey wearing shorts latched onto the top of my foot and ankle and would not let go. Probably wanted a treat. I got a beer and he eventually bored of me.
As for your displeasure with monkeys, I have similar feelings toward Canadian geese (a.k.a Sky Carp). They got fed too much by locals during the winters and they no longer fly south. By the hundreds they eat grass all day then coordinate in the evening on their flight plans to go over my house and defecate. If they miss the house it is on the sidewalk or car. When it rains a bunch of green shit comes out the gutters and downspouts. I took the trash out yesterday and there was green shit on the side of the house. Paint is peeling off the trunk of my old Caddy, undoubtedly due to all the goose bombs.
Here in Oklahoma City, Canada Geese are a protected species, rather like Chicago blacks. I live one mile from Lake Hefner, where these beasts are more ubiquitous than illegals in San Antonio. Their shit is everywhere and, as they have lost any fear of humans, they parade up and down the ten-mile bike path that goes around the lake. Sometimes I have to either wait for them to cross the path or simply ride around them. They move for no man.
40 years ago I kept a sailboat in a wet slip at Lake Hefner, those asshole geese guarded the gate going out to the slips and they were total mean bastards and small children would be chased out of their established goose territory. We would try to drive them off and they would come right back. Those nasty suckers were evil.
I have long thought that a good tennis racket would drive the beasts away. But best to do it out of sight, as some wandering bird lover might call the cops. And then I would be in the slammer, and those geese would still be wandering thither and yon.
I have yet to return from my regular 12-mile bicycle ride around Hefner without goose shit stuck to my tires.
Irresistible…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2JS0PSmZqw
I first read this story several years ago. I laughed so hard I was out of breath for a few minutes. Every couple of years I re-read it to almost the same effect. I found the audio of Tim Tate actually telling the story on NPR at some point. (It’s hard to believe that this story shared the airwaves with the dreck produced by the vacuous posers taking themselves sooooo seriously.) I remember seeing these ads in several magazines along with the X-Ray Spex, garlic gum, and itching powder.
Thanks for the post, Gerard.
Wally and the Beav lived out their back pages fantasy by ordering a live alligator. The boys thought it would be fully grown, but it turned out to be a baby. They were able to keep it a secret whilst charging all their classmates a dime to file into their upstairs bedroom for a look at it. Then the poor thing started dying, but Ward stepped in and helped them bring it back to life and they donated it to Captain Jack’s Alligator Refuge (who knew the little town of Mayfield had such a niche rescue operation?). Edgar Buchanan played Captain Jack — this may have been before he headlined at Petticoat Junction.
In response to Kerry, I was laughing and tearing up after the first paragraph! Because it reminded me of growing up with 3 siblings, and the childhood thinking was exactly right!
I had an uncle who loved to drive an old pickup around, the kind of uncle who had a .38 caliber and a bottle of whiskey in the dashboard. It was a beater of a truck, constantly in need of under the hood attention, and conveniently had a pushbutton control on the dash to release the hood, so you could just drop it, startup and go on tyour merry way.
My two brothers were in the truck with my uncle one day when the engine stalled. So my uncle, in his wisdom, tells my brothers to stay in the truck, and DO NOT TOUCH THAT BUTTON NO MATTER WHAT!
He no sooner had the hood opened and was clambering around inside the engine compartment when the inevitable happened, the button was pushed and my uncle was trapped under the hood. Because he was an uncle and there were rules, he didnt beat the living hell out of them, and neither did my father, when told the story later on. He couldn’t beat them because he was laughing too hard!
That’s the difference, that’s the importance of humor, so we don’t take everything so damned seriously, unlike today, or at least what we are spoon fed in media. Humor will save you, it has saved me many times, in 25 years as a paramedic.
Right you are. The happenings of nations and peoples around the globe do not at all get me angry. What me worry? They do make me laugh, however. Anger takes too much energy and it is most cases a waste of time. Who would not crack up if shown a photo of Biden and his Cabinet? I imagine that Putin carries one in his wallet and looks at it from time to time to remind him whom he is fighting. “какая кучка гребаных идиотов и неудачников!”
oh yes, surely a bunch of idiots-with black hearts. Well said Mike.
Gerard…. your mom was totally lucid and still poking fun, right? To confess to you AS SHE EXPIRED that she was the root cause of Pepe’s banishment? To keep that inside of her for maybe sixty years and then fess up, I think that was amazing and amusing on her part. What a powerful woman.
I had to stop reading multiple times because I was laughing to hard to read…
So good…
Thanks