Bad Navigation, an Eggplant Kid & A Three Legged Turtle on Heroin

  Snoopy’s shorts are in our bedroom. No, I don’t mean Snoop Dog.  Or Dawg.  Or whatever that guy’s name is.  I mean

• Snoopy
• The Red Baron
• Peanuts
• Charlie Brown’s Pal

Unfortunately for Ben, Snoopy’s shorts come from the little ‘camp counselor’ outfit I got for him when I was something like 7 and includes a little whistle to

• Get Beethoven to stop dry humping his grand piano and
• Tell Lucy to knock it off with kicking Charlie Brown’s ass
• Strongly encourage Linus and Peppermint Patty quit hanging out under Linus’ little blue blanket

and when I rediscovered it today I blew on that thing as if I was still 7 and Ben kept looking at me like I was trying to kill him

or at least attempting to cause his ears to bleed.

When I was done being 7 I said,

Wow!  Wasn’t that fun!

He said,

Not really.

and went about his business.

Snoopy is laying upstairs on a special shelf in a critical state of being since, indeed, he has a gaping hole in his neck that I suspect was caused by one of our dogs who has yet to figure out that I still have a little part of me that is 7 and is looking forward to sewing Snoopy’s neck up so he can get back to being a camp counselor…

…along with

• his small teddy bear friend who is also in need of critical surgery to re-attach his head
• and the pig named ‘Flowers’ that my dad gave me when I was 2 and is in desperate need of a new ear
• and the turtle who has been hobbling around on three legs for the past few years and is growing quite disturbed with the thought of her 4th leg being housed in her little removable shell

Yesterday morning I was on a mad dash first thing to:

• Fedex Kinkos
• Bed, Bath & Beyond and
• Wal-Mart

All open for regular business hours on the 4th of July.

On the way there I was glad to have had to come to a complete stop to wait for a train to go by because, even though I knew all of the above three businesses were open for regular business hours, I still have it in me to remember when every single business in town was closed on holidays and was driving around as if I was insane for thinking anything would actually be open and really needed to be stopped from driving a vehicle for a minute or two.

This of course reminded me of a time when I still believed what type of automobile I was driving actually meant something about what kind of person I was and I went out and purchased:

• A giant hunter green 7 Series BMW that had
• so many abilities that I actually expected
• it would some day show me it’s college degree from
• Harvard and
• start doing windows and dishes

Unfortunately, no matter how well that car fed my ego at the time, it was too damn much car for me and I managed to kill the three bushes planted beside my driveway due to running them over repeatedly while attempting to maneuver that thing out of the garage

and

one time a friend of mine had been playing with the navigational system that I never used and left it on and later that night I was driving home alone and a voice suddenly piped up and said,

Please perform a U-turn at your earliest convenience,

and I thought,

Damn it! I knew it!  I am fucking crazy!

and then nearly drove through someone’s house.

So now I’m driving a little VW Passat Wagon that I’ve had ever since I got rid of The Menacing Ginormous Beast (aka - 7 Series BMW) and it’s exactly what a person like me needs who likes a bunch of buttons and lights and rain sensitive windshield wipers and stuff but also has a tendency to put large smelly farm dogs, 50 lb. bags of horse feed, hay bales and various and sundry other things into her car.

And it was also exactly what I needed this morning when I was running around to

• Fedex Kinkos
• Bed, Bath & Beyond and
• Wal-Mart

because by the time I got to Wal-Mart it was the time of morning on a holiday that gave me the feeling that the entire store is on the cusp of erupting into some kind of strange riot because so many people were running around just like me and…

…then I realized the riot I was sensing being on the cusp of was occurring inside of me because as I was just making my escape out of the store and some lady thought it was cute that her 4-year-old was walking at the pace of a three legged turtle on heroin in front of me and holding some kind of pretend sparkler and crying so hard that her face was turning purple and all I could think was,

Get your fat ass over there and handle whatever it is that caused your daughter to have a mini nervous breakdown and turn the color of an eggplant or I’m going to plow you both down with my cart.

This of course freaked me out enough that I swerved my cart over to a bulliten board and pretended I was seriously interested in the random announcements of things I could not even read because I was so rattled by the idea of having had a moment of being a bad Wal-Mart shopper.

And now I’m sitting here being grateful I’ve got that little VW Passat Wagon so, at the first available moment, I could throw all of my Wal-Mart crap into the back of it and zipzipzip through the parking lot without running over any bushes or having some navigational system telling me to make a U-turn or plowing through a cart return area or some family with a kid that looks like an eggplant.

At the same time, I have to admit that killing off those bushes beside my driveway was actually kind of OK because they would turn blood red in the fall and I got tired of people saying,

Do you know they call that a burning bush?  Just like the one Moses saw?

And I’m just grumpy enough most of the time that the same thing getting repeated to me too many times causes me to want to tell people to knock it off with the yakkity smackity bullshit.

Plus there’s that part of me that is 7 and wants to fix up Snoopy’s neck so he can be a camp counselor again that probably turned into an eggplant a time or two and it was probably best that I did the zipzipzip out of that place.