CHAIN SAWS AND YOUR GRANDCHILDREN, RAISING GIRAFFES AT HOME, AND ALBANIAN LITERATURE

Glendale Community College just sent me their yearly schedule for Adult Education night courses, despite my best efforts to stop them. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it’s a course offering that no one on the outside of a lunatic asylum would be remotely interested in exploring. However, the fees are reasonable, so Adult Education remains a popular way of allowing folks my age and older to go out and make fools or hospital patients of themselves by dabbling in such things as knife throwing, juggling, and unicycle racing . . . affordably.

I’d like to share with you this year's course offering . . . maybe you’ll want to sign up. Maybe you'll want to sign up your neighbor with the drum set and take out a large insurance policy on him . . .

ARTS/CRAFTS/HOBBIES

Knitting Your Way to Regularity

Human Skin Collages

Watercolors—Your Key to Desert Survival

Building Your Own Home from Recycled Ivory Snow Containers and      Construction Paper

Ignoring Your Spouse with Paper Mache 

FITNESS

Rappelling for City Dwellers

Push-up Bras and Your Health

Aerobics and the Bible

Volcano Rollerblading

Wheelchair Karate

Weight Training with Used Cars

Your Hernia and You

NEW AGE (yes, it’s still with us!)/PARANORMAL

Edible Trees

Organic Dancing

Shamanic Drumming to Annoy Your Neighbors

Healing with Mulch

Exploring Haunted Cesspools

Beadwork and the Zen of Bleeding

Recycling Finger Cymbals and Fringe

Your Inner Child:  An Excuse for Everything 

SURVIVALIST

New York City Parades

An Evening with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Marriage to Tom Cruise

A Chris Farley Movie Marathon

Shopping at Toys R Us the Day After Thanksgiving 

HEALTH

Russian Literature and Depression

Running in Place in Sixteen Easy Steps

Advanced Running in Place

Assault Weapons – Your Shortcut to Mental Health

Handy Household Uses for Phlegm 

PETS

Dog House Construction with Back Issues of The National Enquirer

Teaching Your Parrot to Shut the Fuck Up

Housebreaking Your Rattlesnake

Cute Tarantula Tricks

Feral Cat Herding in Las Vegas (field trip included)

SCRABBLE for Ferrets 

COOKING

Nuclear Microwaving

Creating a Clam Bake in Your Hot Tub

Canning and Preserving Tropical Fish

Pork Sushi

Chicken Tartare

Flamethrowers and Quick Searing

 

 

 

 

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

            Almost no one understands my fascination with spiders…big spiders.

At one point, I had a collection of 42 different types of tarantulas.  Not only are they large, but most of them a quite beautiful, with colors running the full spectrum.

“What kind of a pet is a spider?” people often ask me, with fear-tipped scorn.  “What do they do?”

“They tap dance,” I reply.  “There are nights when I can’t sleep at all, for the clicking.  And keeping them in tap shoes isn’t cheap, let me tell you!”

It is a common misconception that tarantulas are deadly poisonous.  They aren’t.  Their bite is no worse than a bee sting.  Of course, if you happen to be allergic to bee stings, it’s a different matter.

However, the fear that these beautiful arachnids inspire can be turned to one’s benefit, if one is creative.

For instance, when tiresome people (a/k/a “relatives”) drop by and stay on interminably, I tell them I’ve just bought something I’d love to show them.  I then wheel out the tank containing my largest spider.

A flatulent tele-Evangelist couldn’t get rid of them faster.

Though I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods, I’ve never had the problem with break-ins that my neighbors have.  There is not a single bar on any of my windows, and I rarely lock my door.  I just put a spider cage on each windowsill.  My viewable spiders apparently lead to speculation as to what else could be inside and out of sight by the prospective miscreant, and voila, they’re someone else’s insurance headache.

My hobby has gained me a reputation in my town for being, shall we say, “eccentric.”  The Welcome Wagon ladies warn those new to the area about me.  The closest any of the townspeople will come to my abode is the sidewalk in front of it.  I don’t get UPS deliveries.  I get UPS drive-bys.  This is when the article I’ve ordered is flung from the cab in the general direction of my front lawn.  I’ve learned not to order anything breakable.

Spiders can be helpful around the house, though.  They really like to work.  My largest one has a paper route, and had absolutely no problem collecting.  The others do things like type, file, and run errands.  They’re good at clearing up after a meal, since they can wash and dry at the same time.

They are sensitive creatures, and will take immediate offense at the singing of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and recitation of “Little Miss Muffet.”  Like everyone else, all they want out of life is a little love and respect.  They are upstanding, concerned members of the community who, after a molt, will drop their used skins in a Goodwill box to be distributed to the less fortunate.  They tried delivering meals to the poor and shut-in, but after the first heart attack, they were forced to seek employment elsewhere.  In my opinion, this is nothing more than specie-ism, and attorneys have been consulted.

Spiders have been on this planet for over 350 million years; with many insects going back even further than that.  So what this tells me is that these creatures have adapted to, and outlived, every adversity thrown at them. 

In short, if the bomb dropped tomorrow, the survivors would be bugs and Keith Richards.

Well, at least the bugs will have something to eat…

 

FINS, FUR, AND FEATHERS

Did you have pets when you were little?  We did.

My parents purchased a pair of hamsters for my brother and me, because they wanted us to witness the "miracle of birth."

Well, they'd be sorry...

My little brother, Markie, ever interested in anything he was too young to understand, stepped up to Mom one day.

"Mommy, we have a male and a female hamster, right?"

"That's right."

"And they're going to have babies, right?"

"Uh huh."

"And they do something called 'mating' to make those babies, right?"

"Yes."

"Then I have a question."

"What is it?"

"When you and Daddy made me, did Daddy chase you around the room and bite you on the leg?"

So much for the hamsters.

After that, we had a series of animals that met, shall we say, an early demise.  We had tropical fish that Markie ran in, all excited, one day to report on.

"Hey, Mom!  Our fish are really smart!  They learned a trick all by themselves!"

"Really?"

"Yeah!  They can swim upside down!"

They were buried at sea, so to speak.

From there, he had parakeets that could lie on their backs for hours and hours, turtles that could concentrate so well that they never moved, a frog that croaked (with and without noise), a guinea pig that had a massive coronary when my brother arranged a surprise party for it, and a rabbit that just couldn't take it anymore, and chewed through an electrical cord.  We found the suicide note under a carrot.

Next, he had a kitten that hung in for quite a while.  It alarmed the neighbors that something at our house actually lived, and there was talk that it was possessed by evil spirits.  The kitten subsequently disappeared, and I contend, to this day, that it was kidnapped and taken to the local church for exorcism.

Then there was the hognose snake, which mysteriously "got lost."  My father found it when he put his hand in the box of nails in the garage and was met with attitude in the strike position.  Markie's bottom was met with my father's palm in the flat position.

But you know what really scares me?

Markie is in veterinary college.