The Simple DudeA Simple Dude in a Complex World

I have said this here before, but strange things happen just to the east of us.  Odd situations with weird people.  Things most of humanity just can’t understand.  These things happen in the unusual and sometimes disturbing place known as Wisconsin.  There are some incredibly messed up people living in that state.  Ok, not ALL of them are messed up… and yes there are some freaks here in the land of 10,000 lakes too.

But every few weeks I come across a story of some new perversion or idiocy coming from the land of cheese… Wisconsin.  The latest “Only in Wisconsin” moment comes to us from the city of Racine and involves this man… Tyree Carter.  He gets a special distinction.  According to the Wisconsin courts he is now:

“BANNED FROM EVERY LIBRARY ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH”

He’s a book-loving clown-boxer.

As you can imagine, it takes more than just reading to get banned from a library.  It takes masturbation.  Out in the open.  For everyone to see and no desire to hide what he was doing.  Yep, that’s what our friend Tyree was up to.  This may be a tough ban to enforce…  what if he decides to do a little reading in Romania.  Or check out some books in Bangladesh.  Or visit a Library in Lithuania.  Or do some fiction aisle fondling in France.  Will his picture be posted on bookshelves around the world?

“Beware of this Jerker”

“Have you seen this chicken choker?”

“Caution: Book loving banana buffer on the loose.”

But I get the feeling his love of books is secondary to the love.. uhh… of himself.  So maybe the libraries of the world are indeed safe.  Even so, you may be safer to stay home with your kindle… and read my book!

SD

Those of you who have been following me for awhile know I get these weird catalogs in the mail every few months.  Well, technically my Lady Friend gets them but as soon as she does she hands them right over to me because they are always good for a few laughs and often good for blog material.

I’ve written articles about things featured in these catalogs over the years.. things like lighted birdhouses, belts that have holsters for beer cans and teddy bear towel holders.  Basically crap.

The other day another one of these catalogs came in the mail and I’ve found a few more things to share with you over the coming weeks… starting with these “Outdoor Beverage Holders” which are really Hillbilly beer stakes:

Old Milwaukee sold separately?

I understand people like to sit out in their yards and drink beer.  I have a nice deck and patio area and am looking forward to warm outdoor beer drinking weather myself.  But who the hell can’t hold their own cans?  Or put them on a table?  Or a cup holder on their chair?

The only way I would find this useful is if I was forced to sit on the ground.  And quite frankly if I can’t afford to buy a chair I probably shouldn’t be spending money on beer.  Zoom in on that photo and you’ll see this at the bottom corner:

Perfect for drinking Boone’s Farm!

It’s for those classy folks who can’t afford chairs, but are too good for beer.  Now they have their own holder for wine glasses.  Hillbilly wine glasses?  I don’t have much more to add about that… though I am guessing the beer holders get a lot more use.

I suppose if you have a lounge chair lower to the ground these could come in handy, though you’d never catch me in a lounge chair.  And even in that case do you really need SIX of these?  One would suffice.

I’ve got a few more of these stupid catalog items ready for future posts!

SD

You know what I am really good at?  Other than complaining?  Sleeping.  You know what I am not so good at?  Falling asleep.  I’ve never been one of those “asleep before my head hits the pillow” kind of people.  The amount of time I lie there TRYING to sleep before ACTUALLY sleeping ranges from 15 – 60 minutes.  In extreme cases in can be a few hours, with me getting up an watching TV, reading or surfing the internet in between bouts of tossing and turning.  But I won’t surf porn.  Porn in the dead of the night is just creepy!

I do this all the time.

When I do sleep, I dream.  Vivid, bizarre, often humorous dreams of the most random shit you can imagine.  I’ve always remembered my dreams which can be both a good thing and a disturbing thing.  And the things I find funny in my dreams are generally stupid as hell when I wake up – even by my own immature humor standards.

I can’t count how many times I have thought to myself in those first moments after waking that I need to write down something I said or did in a dream because it was so damn funny.  Then as reality creeps in and I become a little more alert I realize it’s not funny.  At all.  Like a farting duck.

Ok, you got me, that never happened… I can only WISH I’d dream about something as funny as a farting duck.

But this week I had a couple funny dreams that stood up to the bright lights of the next day.  One of them involved the Lady Friend and myself in Vegas.  Have I mentioned Vegas is one of my favorite cities in the world.  It is.  I’ve been there about a dozen times and am always itching to go back.  In this dream we were wandering around the casino where we were staying and stumbled onto a small hole in the floor.  Inside this hole was a wad of cash.  As any sane person would do, I quickly grabbed the cash.  I didn’t bother counting, just stuffing it in my pocket as quickly and nonchalantly as possible.

Then I noticed a dude all the way across the casino coming towards me – he’d seen me snag the money.  Even from quite a distance this guy looked unsavory.  He was the stereotypical mafia type: big, dumb, mean and ugly.  Not the kind of dude you want to mess with.  So we got the hell out of there darting and dodging between slot machines and people.  I knew he was far enough away that he didn’t get a good look at either of us so I told the Lady Friend to head to up our room while I hit the streets to lose him that way.  I had the money and he saw me grab it so I knew he would follow me.. which he did.

Hee Hee.

Out on the strip this guy kept following, though still from a distance as I can be pretty quick when being chased by a thug!  I quickly ran around a corner and into the side door of a casino before this hoodlum could see where I went.  My first thought was GET RID OF THIS CASH.  Anyone who has ever been in a casino knows that a quick way to do that would be to put it into a slot machine and then “cash out” to get one of those receipts you bring to the cashier.  At least I wouldn’t have a wad of cash on me anymore.  But no… I decided I wanted to spend it on food.  Lots of food.  All that running made me hungry so I stopped at every food stand, eating everything I could.  Then in my dream wisdom I decided I needed a costume so I bought a giant wig, some bright goofy clothes and over-sized sunglasses.

This idea worked… I walked right past the bad dude who was standing on the corner looking for me.  When I got back to the hotel room my Lady Friend was pissed off at me for spending all the money (along with some of my own) on that random crap.  I guess me being alive wasn’t good enough for her.

Then I woke up, giggling.

SD

Before reading this you may want to read my post on Monday about my complaining ways.  Things piss me off in life, and I usually feel the need to tell people about it.  If that makes me a complainer (or a bitcher) then so be it.

This has never bothered me in the past, but in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder if seeing the world from such a negative viewpoint is the healthiest way to go through life.  For the most part I have always been a glass half-full kind of dude.  I can see the beauty in things pretty easily.  But when it comes to morons, idiots, stupid people and the crap they put the rest of us through I have little patience.

Last week while on vacation I caught an episode of a show I didn’t even realize was on TV.  The Jeff Probst Show.  He is the dude that hosts Survivor and apparently has a daytime talk show now where he interviews people.  The things you miss out on by having a job huh?

Anyway on this particular episode Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Corolla were on talking about their Love Line days, as well as what they are up to now.  Incidentally I used to listen to Love Line on the radio all the time – that was some funny shit.  But Jeff Probst brought up something to Adam Corolla that got my attention.  Adam is a master complainer.  He can take any topic and find some reason to bitch about it.

They tested this by having an audience member throw out a random topic (birthdays) and he went on a rant about it.  I am 100% positive I can do this exact same thing.  I’ve tried a couple times with the Lady Friend and found it quite easy to piss and moan about almost any subject.  I can even find things to bitch about with things I ENJOY like sports and beer.

So I am now embracing it.  My super power is complaining and I’m damn proud of it!!

SD

They always say the first step towards getting better is admitting you have a problem right?  Well I have a problem…  I am a Bitch-A-Holic.  This is nothing new and there was no recent moment of enlightenment.  I have always done a lot of bitching, pretty much my whole life.

And I have always recognized these complaining tendencies.  In fact complaining for me is like an art form.  The world and the stupid people that we are forced to endure each day are my canvas, my negative attitude is my paint and my verbal creativity is my brush.  I’m cool with that.

I have discovered that this may be something to be proud of… in a weird sort of way.  I’ll write more about that in my next post.

This wouldn’t stop me from complaining.

I’ll admit my complaining can occasionally be without merit, but more often something has happened to really irk me.  Just last week, my Lady Friend and I were on vacation and we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a few items, well below the 12 items or less threshold for the express lane.  Despite that lane having an extra person or two waiting I hopped right in, figuring they have less crap so it should go quicker… right?  This theory would hold up if the person doing the “checking out” realized it was an EXPRESS LANE.

Or more accurately if the manager assigning duties to the employees realized it was an express lane.  In this particular case they chose the chattiest, slowest employee they had on their roster and plopped her down in the express lane.  Well after people paid she was still asking them questions about their lives.  Meanwhile, the eye-daggers I was sending her from the back of the line was not moving things along.

I watched people in the normal lanes whipping through faster than we were.  When it was my turn to pay I pushed my check card into her face before she even finished ringing up the total.  And as the transaction was ending, I had my bags in hand, starting to walk away as she handed me the receipt – lest she attempt to make conversation and piss off more people behind me.

Some people would shake this off and forget it, but I complained about this incident to everyone who would listen.  My name is Jon… they call me the Simple Dude.  And I am a Bitch-A-Holic.

As I mentioned earlier, there may be a bright side to this addiction… I am thinking it through now and will write more in a couple days.

SD

P.S. Oh, and we had a great vacation – though it sucks to be back in “winter” now.  I’ll post more about that with pictures later too!

As you read this one of three things are probably happening to me:

     1.  I am sleeping, soon to wake up with a hangover.

OR

     2.  I am awake with a cold adult beverage in my hand, soaking up some warm sun.

OR

     3.  I am awake with a cold beverage in my hand, soaking up some warm sun on a golf course.

My Lady Friend and I started our vacation yesterday in Arizona.  My parents are retired and spend their winters in a suburb of Phoenix.  Every year I escape the death grip of winter’s cold icy hands by heading down to stay with them for a week or so, and the last few years the Lady Friend has joined me.

It’s a week we absolutely love because for a short period of time we get to see what it would be like to be retired ourselves.  We golf, drink beer, go hiking in the mountains and lay around doing a whole hell of a lot of nothing.  Beautiful.

I will probably share some of this awesome laziness via Twitter: @TheSimpleDude if you want to follow along.  Or maybe I’ll get a chance to put up a post here, so check back this week.

In the meantime I will leave you with something odd.  Bruce’s Yams.

Bruce always seemed a bit TOO proud of his yams.

The Lady Friend bought these a few weeks ago and I thought it was a little funny.  I didn’t realize Bruce was even in the Yam business.  Come to think of it I wasn’t even sure there was such a thing as a Yam business.  But there is.  And Bruce is damn good at it.

I love sweet potatoes big time, but the whole concept of calling them “yams” has always made me uncomfortable.  I know they are the same thing, but seriously why the hell do we call them yams?  That is such a weird term.  Give me some sweet potatoes and I’ll be happy.  But you can keep your yams.  Sorry Bruce.

SD

Sometime struck me yesterday.  I decided that I am sick of people complaining about Valentines Day being commercialized.  Sure, it can be a little annoying, but I discovered it doesn’t piss me off the way it used to.

The reason is money.  EVERYTHING in modern society is commercialized.  It’s the world we live in.  If someone out there can make a buck off something someone else is doing, they’re gonna do it.  Simple as that.

If the company that pays your check doesn’t commercialize something somewhere, it’s only because they don’t have the opportunity do so.  And as long as it’s not illegal or unethical you should not fault a company in free society that wants to make money.  ESPECIALLY one that pays you.

The same people that whine about the over commercialization of this holiday are the same people who tell everyone to “SHHHHH” when the commercials come on during the Super Bowl.  Listen here genius… it’s the same thing.

Corporate America is going to do what they are going to do.  And Valentines Day, like every other day in your life, is what YOU choose to make it.

So….  after getting that off my chest…  In the immortal words of the comic mastermind Rodney Dangerfield:

Right?  Enough said.

Hope every one  of you has exactly the kind of Valentines Day you want to have and not the kind the greeting card companies and florists want you to have.

SD