The Story of the Christmas Potato
Okay, December is here and so is the time to throw the holiday spud. Once again I'm on a mission to spread the custom far and wide. I guess this blog isn't the best way as nobody reads it. I'll not give up trying to let people know the joy that only comes with tossing and not hitting cars. One of the best things about moving into town is that there are lights everywhere. For me that is pretty neat. The kids are sort of bemused that we didn't spend bucks and bucks so we would have lights up to snuff and like the neighbors. Maybe next year.
I've already gotten reports from Manhattan, Riley county, Kansas where Marc Stratton and Sharlene Hunt's sister(gosh, I wish I could remember which one works with Marc) threw last Friday. As soon as our tree is decorated we will get a basket ready and keep some in the car to throw when the need arises. Down on 4th Ave there are some very nice displays and just around the corner in a window on !0th st. there for all to see is "a major award". Very nice. Read the story, throw some spuds and don't hit the cars. Remember every bit of Kinney Isaacs' story of the Christmas Potato is true. He is still the best imaginary best friend a guy ever had.
http://web.mac.com/rkoogar/the_life_of_riley/Welcome.html
I've tried and tried to post the story here with all of the illustrations and I can't make it work. That's the problem with being stupid. So, I guess if you are interested you can use the link.
I will keep trying.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Hot lava and the devil's love
A thought occurs to me. While reading stuff over at the spud site, catching all the typo's and misspellings now that I can't fix them(still no word on being able to access the 100 buck a year account) I reread a thought Haidee had some time a few years back. Just how self absorbed does one have to be to think people want to make an effort to read the stuff you post on a blog? About as much as me I guess.
Honestly, I don't think about anyone reading my stuff. Part of me wants friends to read as it is a way to share stories and such w/o having to type it several times. I like typing. I find it soothing. When I type this stuff I can pretend I'm one of my idols like Cormac McCarthy and not bother with punctuation and a style manual. Art in his case just darn lazy in mine. I like getting the stories out of my head. Lots of stuff was written long ago and I never showed anybody. Whether I should or shouldn't have doesn't matter to me.
Here's the cool thing. I can. That's it. No more, no less. I have the ability to put my stuff out where anybody who wants to can look.
Before this moment in history if there was a budding writer, musician, or artist that wanted to share the work they worked so hard on, it didn't always get to happen. I look back at the energy Crager and I put into screenplays...people won' get to see the movies, not necessarily just because they weren't any good, we just didn't have the means. Technology allows this, it allowed Los Matatvacas, it allows anyone with Internet access to get their work out there. In a world were those that have want to separate themselves as much as they can from us that don't, technology gives all of us a smidgen of equality. Geez, what would Woody Guthrie have done if he'd had access to a web site. Talk about roll on buddy and this land is our land.
So, I'm going to post away. When the mood hits me I will hit the keys and see what shows up.
Still just tickles the crud out of me to see the words show up legibly in front of me.
Today's tidbit came from my driving around with expired tags and inspection stickers. The notion of a stipend or a big bag of money dropping from the sky has helped me in times of desperation to imagine how I'd prioritize things if I needed to. The obese lady is based on fact and some of the dialog as well. That's it. I'd never be able to create a phrase as great as hot lava and the devil's love no matter how hard I tried.
Hot lava and the devil's love...
I hate women, not all women, just the ones I can't stand. That isn't even really true. They make me angry. My wife, I didn't hate her until she didn't love me and decided the cool hip thing to do was run away with a history teacher. It wasn't even a hot buff coach slash history teacher that cared more about coaching than knowing that freedom riders existed before he was born and changed our society. It was a widowed history teacher about our age who had been hired during her first year as a principal. The paranoid me always thought Chet's hiring was just one aspect of a wide ranging adulterous conspiracy designed to leave me devastated and alone. The rational me never quite understood why it happened. Looking back I have been convinced that it was all my fault and that Melody was blameless only falling for the sweater wearing bald history teacher because of my lack of attention and his quick wit.
The me that is typing hates women. Again, not actually true, but as I'm typing it is a good thing Melody isn't over here filling my ears with her woes about Chet and his wandering eye. You soiled the bed so to speak, now lie in it. She does that some. Not the lie in bed, the complaining. Not a lot and not every time we see each other. Friends tell me, why do you put up with that, tell her to leave you alone. Why should you help her sort out a less than healthy relationship with the man who stole her from you, why? She's my wife, was my wife, whatever. When she was my wife she was as good a friend as you could get up until the sleeping with a subordinate which could get you fired if anyone had known about it before you switched buildings and spouses. What do you do?
Melody is why I can't really hate women. She was the one that proved to me you really can love women. She would marry me. Something I hadn't been able to convince anyone to do in 30 years. She was not my first love and hopefully won't be my last. She was easily in the top 5 more than likely top 3. Even now she's a pretty good friend. I'll help anyway I can. Not money, but everything else. Money is what got us into this mess. Melody continues to claim it was nothing I did that drove her away. She wasn't even driven away. It was just that Chet... and that's when I tell her, spare me.
I work but I don't have a career. I have a job that I do that I enjoy and that pays me enough to support myself. Melody was a teacher when I met her. After we'd been married three years she decided she wanted to be a principal. It would mean good things for us.It seemed like a good idea to me. The extra money would be nice. Summers would be long for a few years. There would be much late night studying but with that I could help. Melody wanted things, flashy pretty things that cost money a new job would pay for. We could have had them I guess. I could have freed up some of my stipend and put the money into circulation. I took care of the checkbook.I could have moved some money without her knowing. I was afraid. I was afraid of the questions about the origins of the money and why had I been able to live such a materialistically satisfying life with the job I had.
I get a stipend once a month for some work I do, did for the government. Pursuant to a legally binding agreement, that is just about as much as I can say about the stipend without jeopardising my receiving it. Let's just say it was a good thing not a bad thing and we really didn't need the money or honestly any money, as the stipend was guaranteed to take care of me until I no longer needed taking care of. For those and maybe other reasons I couldn't tell Melody about the stipend and she had to assume I'd make about 11 bucks an hour the rest of my life. In time, I'd planned to win a lottery or inherit money from an uncle I'd never met. The savings account containing the stipend funds could then be made public, we would have cash, and nobody need know it would still be coming in at the same ridicules rate. Sometimes legally binding agreements can be a good thing.
Melody was fast tracked through the administrator program and assigned a school much more quickly than we had expected. With the first paycheck she decided we needed a new car. When Chet had been assigned to her school he'd made a good impression. He was certified to teach history, math, and wood-shop. When his wife had passed, her estate had allowed him to just go to school for several years. He didn't need the job just as I didn't need mine. They had been a childless couple which left him with no responsibilities. Chet decided he wanted to be a teacher after watching a particularly moving, very special episode of Leave it to Beaver. Teaching was an experiment to him. He'd try it and see what developed. What developed was an affair, which caused a divorce, which the details of I don't want to talk about. It's done, it's over. I don't want to worry about it. I can live off my stipend and my alimony payment.
Yep, that's right. I think it a small price to pay for the school board not knowing just when a relationship started. Chet was reassigned his second year to another campus where his amazing skills were better suited. If I'm not mistaken he would be able to teach English, math, wood-shop, and nurse the babies of the high school mothers who used the campus daycare. After all, Chet is such an amazing man. After his transfer I found out about the two of them. Not sure if it is the easy way or the hard way. Melody just came out with it in a blurted ramble at supper one night. She'd already spoken to a lawyer and had everything figured out. I'd lose nothing but a wife. I got to keep everything else. I'm not sure if that was a bargain but it was what it was and what I got. Looking back if we'd known what rap was I could have recorded her speech and spliced it over music innumerable times and had just as healthy a career as any one of a dozen posthumous rappers.
Not two years later, I'm sitting in my basement typing this. I still do my job. I'm up to nearly 15 bucks an hour but it doesn't matter. I can quit whenever I'm bored. Maybe I'll remarry. Unlikely as in my line of work it isn't that often females see you as a good catch. Usually they tend to look the other way as if they've caught me picking at my nose. Cat Man said that was the best way to avoid the cops, picking your nose, as nobody wants to hold their vision on someone with a finger at work. Once when Melody and I were stuck in Christmas shopping traffic we both turned in a moment of cosmic synchronicity to catch the obese lady in the car next to us pull a holiday treasure from her nose, look at it, and then eat it. Our combined screams turned to laugh 'till you vomit laughter and on to become one of the most treasured and oft retold moments of our life together. Could be that says something about our marriage.
Another time at a restaurant while we outlined plans for a vacation in Oklahoma(relationship observation number 2) an unusual family was seated next to us. The parents were older with two children. One child sat quietly and read a book. The other seemed to have something wrong with him. I'm not one to judge, actually I am, but the kid just wasn't right. You could tell by the things he blurted out, his inability to sit still and the constant redirection of his parents. Also he was named Hobart. To me, branding a kid with that name damns him to a life of ridicule, taunting, and a disadvantage with peers from day one. It is rough enough to be nuts and then to be called Hobart. I can only hope it was a family name and not something two parents stewed over baby name books days to find. However, I feel certain the proud parents were overly excited when congratulating themselves on finding such a wonderfully chic name for a baby.
Hobart became progressively more agitated as his family waited on "Hi, I'm Heather" to bring the appetizer. The mother attempted to engage Hobart in conversation while waiting for his cheese sticks with blue cheese not red. Never bring me red. Red is bad. Red means bad things like bloody death and bones. Firetrucks are red because ladders go up to heaven and down to hell. I must have blue cheese not red. Red stands for the devil. I don't like the devil. The devil can get you and on and on and on and on until I found out the devil could shake you inside out into a bag of bloody skeleton bones that wants blue cheese not red.
I came very close to asking the staff to seat us at another table. I'd always liked red with my cheese sticks. Suddenly without warning Hobart slammed his fists on the table sending his jolly kids' cup flying off into space and causing the silverware to ring like a glen of fairy bells. The diners in our section turned as one even while trying to ignore the disturbance at the table next to us. When all eyes were transfixed his way in the unusual momentary restaurant silence Hobart blurted, "I hate women. Girls are just filled with hot lava and the devil's love."
That thought hung in the silence, frozen, floating long enough for the entire room to absorb the impact.
Maybe, Hobart wasn't so crazy after all.
Honestly, I don't think about anyone reading my stuff. Part of me wants friends to read as it is a way to share stories and such w/o having to type it several times. I like typing. I find it soothing. When I type this stuff I can pretend I'm one of my idols like Cormac McCarthy and not bother with punctuation and a style manual. Art in his case just darn lazy in mine. I like getting the stories out of my head. Lots of stuff was written long ago and I never showed anybody. Whether I should or shouldn't have doesn't matter to me.
Here's the cool thing. I can. That's it. No more, no less. I have the ability to put my stuff out where anybody who wants to can look.
Before this moment in history if there was a budding writer, musician, or artist that wanted to share the work they worked so hard on, it didn't always get to happen. I look back at the energy Crager and I put into screenplays...people won' get to see the movies, not necessarily just because they weren't any good, we just didn't have the means. Technology allows this, it allowed Los Matatvacas, it allows anyone with Internet access to get their work out there. In a world were those that have want to separate themselves as much as they can from us that don't, technology gives all of us a smidgen of equality. Geez, what would Woody Guthrie have done if he'd had access to a web site. Talk about roll on buddy and this land is our land.
So, I'm going to post away. When the mood hits me I will hit the keys and see what shows up.
Still just tickles the crud out of me to see the words show up legibly in front of me.
Today's tidbit came from my driving around with expired tags and inspection stickers. The notion of a stipend or a big bag of money dropping from the sky has helped me in times of desperation to imagine how I'd prioritize things if I needed to. The obese lady is based on fact and some of the dialog as well. That's it. I'd never be able to create a phrase as great as hot lava and the devil's love no matter how hard I tried.
Hot lava and the devil's love...
I hate women, not all women, just the ones I can't stand. That isn't even really true. They make me angry. My wife, I didn't hate her until she didn't love me and decided the cool hip thing to do was run away with a history teacher. It wasn't even a hot buff coach slash history teacher that cared more about coaching than knowing that freedom riders existed before he was born and changed our society. It was a widowed history teacher about our age who had been hired during her first year as a principal. The paranoid me always thought Chet's hiring was just one aspect of a wide ranging adulterous conspiracy designed to leave me devastated and alone. The rational me never quite understood why it happened. Looking back I have been convinced that it was all my fault and that Melody was blameless only falling for the sweater wearing bald history teacher because of my lack of attention and his quick wit.
The me that is typing hates women. Again, not actually true, but as I'm typing it is a good thing Melody isn't over here filling my ears with her woes about Chet and his wandering eye. You soiled the bed so to speak, now lie in it. She does that some. Not the lie in bed, the complaining. Not a lot and not every time we see each other. Friends tell me, why do you put up with that, tell her to leave you alone. Why should you help her sort out a less than healthy relationship with the man who stole her from you, why? She's my wife, was my wife, whatever. When she was my wife she was as good a friend as you could get up until the sleeping with a subordinate which could get you fired if anyone had known about it before you switched buildings and spouses. What do you do?
Melody is why I can't really hate women. She was the one that proved to me you really can love women. She would marry me. Something I hadn't been able to convince anyone to do in 30 years. She was not my first love and hopefully won't be my last. She was easily in the top 5 more than likely top 3. Even now she's a pretty good friend. I'll help anyway I can. Not money, but everything else. Money is what got us into this mess. Melody continues to claim it was nothing I did that drove her away. She wasn't even driven away. It was just that Chet... and that's when I tell her, spare me.
I work but I don't have a career. I have a job that I do that I enjoy and that pays me enough to support myself. Melody was a teacher when I met her. After we'd been married three years she decided she wanted to be a principal. It would mean good things for us.It seemed like a good idea to me. The extra money would be nice. Summers would be long for a few years. There would be much late night studying but with that I could help. Melody wanted things, flashy pretty things that cost money a new job would pay for. We could have had them I guess. I could have freed up some of my stipend and put the money into circulation. I took care of the checkbook.I could have moved some money without her knowing. I was afraid. I was afraid of the questions about the origins of the money and why had I been able to live such a materialistically satisfying life with the job I had.
I get a stipend once a month for some work I do, did for the government. Pursuant to a legally binding agreement, that is just about as much as I can say about the stipend without jeopardising my receiving it. Let's just say it was a good thing not a bad thing and we really didn't need the money or honestly any money, as the stipend was guaranteed to take care of me until I no longer needed taking care of. For those and maybe other reasons I couldn't tell Melody about the stipend and she had to assume I'd make about 11 bucks an hour the rest of my life. In time, I'd planned to win a lottery or inherit money from an uncle I'd never met. The savings account containing the stipend funds could then be made public, we would have cash, and nobody need know it would still be coming in at the same ridicules rate. Sometimes legally binding agreements can be a good thing.
Melody was fast tracked through the administrator program and assigned a school much more quickly than we had expected. With the first paycheck she decided we needed a new car. When Chet had been assigned to her school he'd made a good impression. He was certified to teach history, math, and wood-shop. When his wife had passed, her estate had allowed him to just go to school for several years. He didn't need the job just as I didn't need mine. They had been a childless couple which left him with no responsibilities. Chet decided he wanted to be a teacher after watching a particularly moving, very special episode of Leave it to Beaver. Teaching was an experiment to him. He'd try it and see what developed. What developed was an affair, which caused a divorce, which the details of I don't want to talk about. It's done, it's over. I don't want to worry about it. I can live off my stipend and my alimony payment.
Yep, that's right. I think it a small price to pay for the school board not knowing just when a relationship started. Chet was reassigned his second year to another campus where his amazing skills were better suited. If I'm not mistaken he would be able to teach English, math, wood-shop, and nurse the babies of the high school mothers who used the campus daycare. After all, Chet is such an amazing man. After his transfer I found out about the two of them. Not sure if it is the easy way or the hard way. Melody just came out with it in a blurted ramble at supper one night. She'd already spoken to a lawyer and had everything figured out. I'd lose nothing but a wife. I got to keep everything else. I'm not sure if that was a bargain but it was what it was and what I got. Looking back if we'd known what rap was I could have recorded her speech and spliced it over music innumerable times and had just as healthy a career as any one of a dozen posthumous rappers.
Not two years later, I'm sitting in my basement typing this. I still do my job. I'm up to nearly 15 bucks an hour but it doesn't matter. I can quit whenever I'm bored. Maybe I'll remarry. Unlikely as in my line of work it isn't that often females see you as a good catch. Usually they tend to look the other way as if they've caught me picking at my nose. Cat Man said that was the best way to avoid the cops, picking your nose, as nobody wants to hold their vision on someone with a finger at work. Once when Melody and I were stuck in Christmas shopping traffic we both turned in a moment of cosmic synchronicity to catch the obese lady in the car next to us pull a holiday treasure from her nose, look at it, and then eat it. Our combined screams turned to laugh 'till you vomit laughter and on to become one of the most treasured and oft retold moments of our life together. Could be that says something about our marriage.
Another time at a restaurant while we outlined plans for a vacation in Oklahoma(relationship observation number 2) an unusual family was seated next to us. The parents were older with two children. One child sat quietly and read a book. The other seemed to have something wrong with him. I'm not one to judge, actually I am, but the kid just wasn't right. You could tell by the things he blurted out, his inability to sit still and the constant redirection of his parents. Also he was named Hobart. To me, branding a kid with that name damns him to a life of ridicule, taunting, and a disadvantage with peers from day one. It is rough enough to be nuts and then to be called Hobart. I can only hope it was a family name and not something two parents stewed over baby name books days to find. However, I feel certain the proud parents were overly excited when congratulating themselves on finding such a wonderfully chic name for a baby.
Hobart became progressively more agitated as his family waited on "Hi, I'm Heather" to bring the appetizer. The mother attempted to engage Hobart in conversation while waiting for his cheese sticks with blue cheese not red. Never bring me red. Red is bad. Red means bad things like bloody death and bones. Firetrucks are red because ladders go up to heaven and down to hell. I must have blue cheese not red. Red stands for the devil. I don't like the devil. The devil can get you and on and on and on and on until I found out the devil could shake you inside out into a bag of bloody skeleton bones that wants blue cheese not red.
I came very close to asking the staff to seat us at another table. I'd always liked red with my cheese sticks. Suddenly without warning Hobart slammed his fists on the table sending his jolly kids' cup flying off into space and causing the silverware to ring like a glen of fairy bells. The diners in our section turned as one even while trying to ignore the disturbance at the table next to us. When all eyes were transfixed his way in the unusual momentary restaurant silence Hobart blurted, "I hate women. Girls are just filled with hot lava and the devil's love."
That thought hung in the silence, frozen, floating long enough for the entire room to absorb the impact.
Maybe, Hobart wasn't so crazy after all.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Important announcement
This just in.....
Here is the address of the Christmas Potato site. Nothing has changed or been corrected in ages because I can't log in and nobody seems to be able to help me or respond to my letters. So...
here's the address:
http://web.mac.com/rkoogar/the_life_of_riley/Welcome.html
Consider the typos and mistakes as little where's waldo's you are trying to find.
There's some good stuff there and it explains all about holiday potato tossing.
Also here is a link to a great page about Truman Capote and his story, "A Christmas Memory."
http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/duckwalls/2008/12/truman-capote-a.html
More than anything else this story and the Frank Perry filmed based on it made me want to write and create movies. I related to Buddy I guess. Elements of his life fit into my head as part of how I rightly or wrongly perceived mine. My family made fudge instead of fruitcakes although one year dad made some that lasted until we moved from Topeka in '73. As an employee of the federal government he wasn't allowed to to throw them out without filing an environmental impact statement. Okay, that's a lie, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea. Every time I go to Topeka I visit the spot where I disposed of them illegally to see if they have started breaking down and decomposing. Two years ago I could have sworn there was a small spot missing, maybe a loose pecan or piece of candied fruit had been torn away by one of the dead squirrels littering the ground near the spot. The ground is cursed and no successful development has taken place in that area.
Capote's books lend themselves to being read aloud. Not all books do that. Check out the audio file of the book at that link. Got to run. The library just called and they got a Bud Shrake book I've been looking for.
Here is the address of the Christmas Potato site. Nothing has changed or been corrected in ages because I can't log in and nobody seems to be able to help me or respond to my letters. So...
here's the address:
http://web.mac.com/rkoogar/the_life_of_riley/Welcome.html
Consider the typos and mistakes as little where's waldo's you are trying to find.
There's some good stuff there and it explains all about holiday potato tossing.
Also here is a link to a great page about Truman Capote and his story, "A Christmas Memory."
http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/duckwalls/2008/12/truman-capote-a.html
More than anything else this story and the Frank Perry filmed based on it made me want to write and create movies. I related to Buddy I guess. Elements of his life fit into my head as part of how I rightly or wrongly perceived mine. My family made fudge instead of fruitcakes although one year dad made some that lasted until we moved from Topeka in '73. As an employee of the federal government he wasn't allowed to to throw them out without filing an environmental impact statement. Okay, that's a lie, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea. Every time I go to Topeka I visit the spot where I disposed of them illegally to see if they have started breaking down and decomposing. Two years ago I could have sworn there was a small spot missing, maybe a loose pecan or piece of candied fruit had been torn away by one of the dead squirrels littering the ground near the spot. The ground is cursed and no successful development has taken place in that area.
Capote's books lend themselves to being read aloud. Not all books do that. Check out the audio file of the book at that link. Got to run. The library just called and they got a Bud Shrake book I've been looking for.
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