The Quarterly Grain Report

An Enchanting Tale of Love and Vaccinations

Have you ever wanted to take about 13 or 14 puppies, put them in a burlap sack, and just beat it until it stops making noise and secreting gross fluids? Me neither. No matter. Though I suppose one might have the urge, depending on what they ate for dinner that night. For example, this very night I consumed three hard boiled eggs, a raspberry pie, a lemon wedge, a lemon pulley, a lemon lever, and a milkshake that wasn't so much a milkshake as a line of coke. As many of you probably know (but failed to tell me), this has proven to be a combination similar to the coal miners strikes of the early 20th century. That is, unproductive, disgruntled, and vomit-inducing. My body is currently filled with angry, underpaid miners with no health insurance. Or fuctioning lungs. The chambers of my heart are no longer filled with blood, but metaphorical anger and regret. Regret is pumping through my veins in the same fashion as an East-German woman pumps iron. But not through her veins, mind you, unless she happens to possess some sort of tolerance to iron-filled veins that the rest of the populace either doesn't have, or hasn't built up yet.

A Tetanus vaccination is merely an injection of water that has been sitting around in rusty pipes for too long. The kinds of pipes that run through your neighborhood church (unless it's one of those new churches that look like small convention-centers, and don't seem like any sort of idol worshipping goes on there, but it does. It does in spades). Pipes that contain water that kinda tastes like blood or something. So you, as a naive young child, think that it must just be the blood of Jesus that they dumped down the bathtub after the people who had communion couldn't finish it all. (This is the logic that flows through the mind of a young child who has no idea what he's doing in church to begin with, other than the fact that it has something to do with shaking old, scary, skeleton-esque hands.) This is what a Tetanus shot really is. I came to this conclusion on the occasion of my most recent "Tetanus booster." The logic being, I've never had tetanus, and now my arm fucking hurts. Shouldn't science have advanced to the point where it's not necessary to recharge your disease immunity every few years? Apparently not. Well, as long as I have this serum flowing through me in the highest concentration that it's going to be for the next decade, I might as well get some use out of it. I'm off to the junkyard.

What follows is an actual exchange between an early Christian missionary who has been assigned to save the souls of inhuman cannibals, and an inhuman cannibal.
Missionary: Oh, how these wretched souls live! Feasting on human skin and bones! Drinking the blood of their brothers! Satan, release these heathens from your evil clutches, that they may see the true God, and bow down before Him! Please have mercy on them, O Lord! They know not what they do! Come, come young man. I shall show you the true error of your ways! Accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your almighty redeemer and savior, and the eternal kingdom of heaven awaits you! Now eat his flesh, and drink his blood, and your sins are forgiven!
The man sits in silence for a few moments, then clubs the missionary and roasts him over the fire. It was truly a glorious day for the elder tribesman. For with his victory over the most recent intruder, he has reached the sacred plateau of 57 consecutive missionaries clubbed and devoured, eclipsing the previous mark of 56, set in 1941 by Joe DiMaggio. Everyone in the tribe remembers that magical year.

I would greatly enjoy interviewing a transient, hobo, or panhandler, if I were positive that I would not be assaulted/raped. I would ask them if they actually have a daily agenda, or if they just fly by the seat of their pants (or lack thereof). I would inquire if, waking up on a Tuesday, Randy whips out his pocket notebook and runs down his to-do list:

• Yell a lot
• Insist upon telling a passerby my misguided world views, all of which have been irrelevant since 1983
• Eat half of a taco (or whatever may be sticking out of, or buried inside, my garbage can. Hey, it is my can, I know what's been in it. It is not disgusting! You're disgusting! With your shoes and clothing. When the street sweepers clean up the flames of your childhood, it's gonna be you that's covered in gravy and jackets with broken zippers! I can't wear this, someone is going to say something. Well, maybe not out loud, but it'll be in their eyes. I can't deal with that.)

Then I'd run away. Some people's solution to the homeless problem is to simply shout at them, "Get a job!" But honestly, who would be willing to hire an incoherent, smelly man who is a multiple sex-offender and can't form a sentence that can be understood without someone else saying it another way and then adding "...is that what you mean?" Even if you stick one of them in a suit and tie, it will only accentuate how funny they actually look and behave. It would form such a stark contrast to everyone else who wears suits as to make him the subject of even more ridicule. Now, if it were a pinstripe suit, then maybe it would be more understandable. The fears of any passersby could be alleviated with a simple explanation of "It's his zoot suit." This by no means explains why a man would be in such a condition, or even makes sense for that matter, but it provides John Q. Public an explanation that he's satisfied with, and can think about for a while, because he recognized the word zoot along with suit, but didn't really understand why that would account for the outlandish behavior. Maybe he had intruded on the filming of a Mentos commercial. That must've been it. Now let's never speak of this again.

Halloween is fast approaching, and with it come lavish contests of man's gourd-butchering prowess. While one fellow carves Happy Halloween into his pumkin, his neighbor one-ups him by intricately carving the preamble to the US Constitution into his, thereby severely weakening the overall stability of the pumpkin's internal structure. This inevitably results in a massive cave-in, house fire, and subsequent arrest of five no-good punks who won't see the light of day for three years, thank God. I'll bet we can put to bed the mystery of who has been digging up my garden, too! Sons of bitches.

posted by Arthur Croft Yates @ 12:04 AM