A Cinco de Mayo Carol: Parte Dos, Electrico Insecto del Loo

From ITPT

A Cinco de Mayo Carol (Bah Insecto del Ronquido)

From ITPT

Teaching the Teachers

From ITPT

Postmark Kentucky: How to Lose an Election 101

From ITPT

Placenta: It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

From ITPT

Field Report: Tawdry Talabama Teacher Tryst

From ITPT

Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can’t Teach Teenage Boys How to Do It

From ITPT

And on the 1,000,000th Hit, She Rested Again

From ITPT

(Must We All?) Suffer for Their Art

From ITPT

The Best a Society Can Get

From ITPT

Not Biden Into It

From ITPT

I Have a Dream #4: Extreme Home Makeover Edition

Three weeks into the new house, I had yet to remember a single dream until the night before last. I attribute this to sound sleep, as a result of going to bed exhausted on almost a nightly basis. But on Tuesday night, I’d had chili cheese fries at EZs, which caused me to toss and turn all night. Also, Eli decided sleep on the bed with me, but instead of sleeping on his side with his back to me, he slept with his legs toward me. He must have had chili cheese fries too, because around 3 AM, he had a dream that made his hind legs jerk and kick me repeatedly in the small of my back. Anyway, restless sleep usual correlates pretty strongly with crazy, memorable dreams for me.

As with my last memorable dream, last night’s falls into the my-recently-purchased-house-has-all-sorts-of-problems category. Again the house I had purchased was in the neighborhood in which I was raised. But instead of it being the Yocum house across the street from my parents, this house was located several blocks away on Gateway Drive. I can’t remember clearly any of the actual houses on that particular stretch of block, but for some reason, that nondescript stretch of neighborhood makes frequent appearances in my dreams.

I was moving into the house, with the help of most of my extended family (Shröats, not Müllikins). The house looked like many of the homes I looked at in Allandale and Rosedale. Specifically, fifty to sixty year-old shit-box, teardowns for which I’d basically have had to pay $250,000 for just the lot.

As I began to unload my moving van, I noticed an elderly black woman, with her own moving van, directing movers toward my house. She kept saying, “Make them drapes down to nine quarter inches, make them drapes down to nine quarter inches.” I immediately confronted her, and demanded to see her “papers” for the house. “This isn’t your house, old lady, this is my house. Why do you think it’s your house? Where are your papers, where are your papers?” She seemed confused, and I noticed that she had a large retinue of elderly black women with her. Some were morbidly obese; others were shriveled crones; many had walkers; and all had facial hair in the form of random, irregular whiskers. Despite their collective confusion, I continued to berate them and their movers, finally bullying them back into their moving van and away from my house. I don’t suffer from white, liberal guilt in slumberland.

After dispatching Pearl Bailey, I entered the house to find a host of problems. The house was a duplex, and the smaller, “rental” portion was a mess. Upon seeing it, I told my mother, “this is all kinds of fucked up.” Most of the flooring was either rotten wood or rotten linoleum with dangerously large holes. The previous tenants had left their crappy furnishings in the house and most of it was damp and sticky.

The other half of the duplex was marginally better. Most of the rooms were reminiscent of the basements in houses from my childhood neighborhood, with stucco sprayed, concrete walls and small, long windows at the very top of the walls. Of particular note was the kitchen, which was entirely pink and fuchsia. The walls were textured to resemble hardened, rosy meringue waves.
As with my last dream, this house also had some bizarre plumbing choices. In my bedroom, directly adjacent to the head my bed was a brown, metal, pedestal style drinking fountain. The fountain didn’t drain properly, and using it caused my pillows to become soaked. In short, the house was going to need a bit of work.

So compelling was the dream, that I actually fell back into it after getting up to drag Eli’s lanky ass off of my bed and onto his own. Again, I had to confront the elderly black woman who still seemed determined to have my drapes altered. My house doesn’t have, nor ever will have, drapes. But since the dream, I’ve been keeping a closer eye on my window treatments. I can’t be certain, but some of my Venetian blinds seem to be missing slats.

A Chafing Dish of Hot, Steamy Irony

From ITPT

Pink Robespierre

From ITPT

Poindexter Moves His Books

From ITPT

I Have a Dream #3: New Homeowner Edition

I’ve discovered the new equivalent to the forgot-to-go-to-class-all-semester/forgot-to-study-for-the-final dream (which I still have, thank you grad school). Introducing the my-recently-purchased-house-has-all-sorts-of-problems dream. Great.

The house of my literal dream has a wet bar in the ill-advised location of just inside the front door. The bar had at least three sinks of various sizes, all of which were leaking. Water was puddling in the floor all around the bar, and I was trying to soak it up with towels. That’s when I noticed that my living room floor had several drains built into the hardwood, apparently to accommodate the leaky wet bar. The bar’s design was reminiscent of an airplane bathroom. The sinks themselves were thin metal, but the rest of the bar was brown plastic. One of the sinks was mounted on an articulated arm, like the mini-sinks found mounted on dentists’ chairs. Several dental instruments were attached. I used the water-pik, until I realized that it greatly increased the leaking.

My living room had a ratty, tattered Persian rug with gaping holes. The holes exposed a dirty, frosted, Plexiglas window. The center of my living room has a glass bottom, for drawing in light from under the house I suppose.

I went outside, and it turns out that I’ve bought the Yocum house, a trashy home across the street from where I was raised. The Yocum house was now raised on 3-foot pillars, to better accommodate the floor-window. The yard was a sea of cinderblocks. Next door was the devastated remains of what used to be the Hanif house, which belonged to a Pakistani family when I was a kid. It looked like a tornado had destroyed it years ago and no one had rebuilt it.

And finally, the cherry on top, my Explorer was parked in the driveway, minus its right front fender, which had completely corroded. The right front tire had melted into a sticky but solid, marshmallow-like mass.

I’m already dreading a dream about the kitchen.

Fa La La La La

Night Owl

From ITPT

Hot for Teacher: Bluegrass Edition

From ITPT

The Jewish (Carpenter) Controlled Media

From ITPT

Celebrating in Style

From ITPT

Shröät Family 2005 Review

Greetings, friends and family! Well, 2005 has been an eventful year for the Shröäts, as I’m sure those of you who follow the local news already know! (Chuckle, chuckle.) I want to start by reassuring all of you that we are confident that we will prevail in the lawsuits brought against for what we consider to be petty misunderstandings. But more about that later, as I don’t want to start this letter off as a Negative Nelly!

First, the biggest news of the year. On June 14 (Flag Day! My favorite!) Zuzanna and I welcomed our fourth child, Lars, into the world. At 9 pounds, 10 ounces, I was understandably a little ashamed of Zuzanna for producing such a low birth weight baby (our last child was 12 lbs. 4 oz. and the twins were a combined weight of 19 lbs. 5 oz.). After all, I didn’t marry a Slovakian ten years my junior to produce scrawny kids (I could have married an American, “career” woman for that. Zing! Ha ha!). However, Zuzanna has promised to do better next time, and the runt was close enough to ten pounds that I decided not to throw him into Lake Travis in a weighted, burlap sack. Hey, I don’t have to tell any of you that sometimes, marriage involves compromise! Especially when there’s a language barrier.

As with our other children, Lars is just a placeholder name until we decide how we want to raise him, thematically. I’m leaning toward raising him as a heavy metal drummer (hence the name) but Zuzanna has always wanted a goth, shock-rocker. I keep asking her, “Do we really want to have to deal with all those buckets of goat blood?” I mean, come on…the smell. If, however, Zuzanna wins out, we’ve nearly settled on a name. I like Ethan Nunpuncher Shröät. She favors Crucifixpisser Brandon Shröät. I’m sure we’ll come to a decision in the next few months (we’ve got a nursery to decorate, after all!). We’ll keep you posted.

The twins, Nigel and Elsbeth, turned 6 this year and are already in the second grade. Zuzanna and I couldn’t be happier with our decision to raise them British. Ah, British children…so polite…so clean. I swear it’s like dirt won’t stick to them. And they say things like “ever so much”, “if you please” and “tarry”. Adorable! We’ve started both of them in a youth soccer league, or as they like to call it, football. Elsbeth shows promise, but Nigel is lagging. Suzanna thinks I ride him too hard, but I believe he lacks motivation. Here’s an argument we had during “football” season.

Nigel: “I’d much prefer to play cricket, if you please, father”

Me: “Look Neville, if I wanted a cricket player, I’d have raised you Pakistani.”

Nigel: “I thought my name was Nigel.”

Me: “What’s the difference?”

Alas, even British children can be difficult and ungrateful at times. They have no appreciation of the Lend-Lease Act, which gave their people the munitions and equipment to resist the Nazis during the early days of World War II. I try not to bring up the burning of the original White House by the redcoats during the War of 1812 when I punish them, but sometimes that grudge is difficult to forget.

In June, Zuzanna’s mother, Zofia, came to visit (live, as it turns out) from Bratislava. She surprises us nearly every day with the culinary malleability of cabbage, beets and turnips. Unfortunately, her extensive cooking has forced us to replace much of the drywall in the kitchen and adjacent rooms. It seems the smell had permeated the structure and there was no other way to get rid of it. However, we just completed converting the space over the garage into her “mother in law” chambers, and I’m sure all the parties involved are excited about that. Well, Zuzanna still isn’t happy that her mother has to use a 15-foot ladder to get to and from her room, but Zofia doesn’t seem to mind. That old bird has been through a lot. Communism. I think maybe some war or something. Maybe a potato famine? Or was it beets? Regardless, getting to live above the garage of one of the nicest homes of the Phase II development zone of the nicest gated community in greater Austin (I won’t say which as I don’t want to brag!), is probably far beyond her wildest dreams. And so what if the space above the garage isn’t heated? It’s central Texas for Christ’s sake. I’m sure I’ll have to endure a new round of bitching once the weather turns hot again, as the space isn’t air conditioned either. But as I told Zuzanna just the other day, “When I rescued you from oily tendrils of the eastern European porn trade, it wasn’t because I wanted to watch you and your mother sit around the kitchen table and smoke cigarettes and jabber in the crazy language of yours.” She suggested I climb the ladder and sleep above the garage! I responded, “I’ll do that as soon as you learn how to not spend $500 every time you go to the goddamn grocery!” We both know that means never. Marriage involves compromise.

In October, I had my first screenplay optioned by Lions Gate. Finally! Many of you have been suggesting for years that I stop wasting my time writing Colonel Sanders fan fiction. At times, I didn’t think The Colonel Chronicles would ever find an audience. But then I got wise and stopped submitting short stories to snooty, elitist publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s, and started working on a script. Because, really, the adventures of young Harlan Sanders as he battles the nefarious Kaiser Wilhelm II with delicious fried poultry, are best seen and not read. It was hard to convey the action in a story, especially since I quickly exhausted adjectives for describing fried food. But in a screenplay, where the action of the story must be conveyed in simplistic terms that any moron (producers, actors, directors) can understand, the action comes alive. We start shooting in Corbin, KY in April.

Finally, it’s been a year or ups and downs with our 4 year old son, N!xau. From the start, our decision to raise him as !Kung San (or, as our racist neighbors have labeled him, “that bushman child”) was not a popular one. Most of you don’t share my acute fear of the impending collapse of modern society, when having a hunter-gatherer in the family will prove prudent. I freely admit the unfortunate irony of making our most fair-skinned child live in our backyard during the central Texas summer. But for a while, it looked as if Zuzanna wouldn’t be able to get pregnant again, which left me with the unenviable dilemma of finding another breeder or giving our plump, redheaded boy a loin cloth, a lean-to shelter and a few sharp sticks and putting him outside. But, after a rough start and despite neighbors’ lawsuits, N!xau (formerly Phillip) has started to get the hang of things.

In the first few weeks, that little fatty was a walking sunburn, but at least I knew he was manufacturing plenty of vitamin D. By the time he’d burned and peeled half a dozen times however, he’d essentially turned into one big freckle and the weather was no longer his biggest concern. Food was, as we quickly learned that all the berries and plants in our yard, as well and our immediate neighbors’ yards, were poisonous. Not kill-you poisonous, just immobilizing-belly-ache poisonous. Don’t think for a second that it didn’t hurt me, as a father, to gaze out the kitchen window and see him lying under our picnic table, moaning in pain. It hurt me even more to have to put down my lemonade, step out of the A/C and explain to him that the !Kung San don’t have picnic tables in the Kalahari and that he needed to construct his own shelter. But the little trooper, I’m proud to say, crawled out from under the table without a complaint and, ironically, under the very bushes that had made him so ill. Frankly, the weight loss was beneficial in the long run, as the !Kung San are a lean people.

Just as N!xau turned the corner on the road to self-sufficiency, our troubles with the neighbors (and by extension the courts and the local news) started. The McKittrick family didn’t share my pride in the ingenuity that N!xau showed in constructing the snare that allowed him to capture, kill and eat their dog Muffin. He’d only been living outside for six weeks at that point! They also took no solace in the fact that N!xau used every part of Muffin, wasting nothing. The local television bloodsuckers did not celebrate his efficiency and ingenuity either, as they reported on the “Wild Child of Lago Vista”. A child is automatically assumed to be feral because he lives off the land? Bigots! They can’t comprehend a culture that is not their own. N!xau has no word for war.

Fortunately, N!xau lured Muffin off the McKittrick property and his thorough use of the carcass left scant evidence for the police or child protective services. The McKittricks can’t prove that Muffin was baited, and Travis County has a leash law to which they, obviously, did not adhere. We have a court date set for early February. I’m confident we’ll prevail and N!xau remains in our custody in the meantime.

Since the Muffin incident, I’ve encouraged N!xau to range a little farther from home. He’s had a lot of success in the Phase I portion of our subdivision, which is non-gated and many of the homes abut the golf course and have no fences. I felt a little pang of guilt as the missing pet flyers became more prevalent at the entrance to our subdivision. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which not everyone has parents willing to pay for graduate school thus allowing them to later afford to live in the gated estate section where their pets would be safe from my son. N!xau seems especially fond of Labs, as they provide an ideal (to his evolving palate) mix of fat and lean flesh. He says that yellow Labs taste the best, though I don’t believe that the color of their coat would make a difference in their flavor. Or maybe he’s trying to tell me something completely different. I confess that the addition of glottal clicks to his phonemic repertoire has made him difficult to understand.

Probably our biggest challenge with N!xau was existential in nature. Late in the summer, N!xau returned to our backyard, after a three night hunting trip into Phase I, with an empty, glass Coca Cola bottle. He presented it to me with fear and reverence and through a combination of gestures, dirt drawings and glottal clicks, he managed to ask, “The Gods…they must be crazy?” Poor kid, I thought. “Yes, N!xau, they are.”

I Have a Dream #2: Hanna-Barbera Edition

As disconcerting as it is to awaken with a compulsion to recall the seating chart of my freshman English class (see below), at least that need is rooted in actual experience. By a conservative estimate, I spent at least 150 hours in that classroom. (For anyone interested in interviewing me for a management consultant position, I’ll be glad to talk you through how I arrived at that number, since it’s the process and not the answer that interests you.) That’s a significant amount of time, and even though it occurred twenty years ago, I can rationalize why some of it might still occupy my neurons.

Not the case, a few mornings ago, when I awoke with the phrase “Goober and the Ghost-Chasers” running through my head over and over. That lasted through my morning jog, my drive to work and about half my workday. Goober and the Ghost-Chasers, Goober and the Ghost-Chasers, Goober and the Ghost-Chasers. Unpleasant, right? Especially since I had only a vague idea about what Goober and the Ghost-Chasers was until I did a little research.

What I did know was that Goober and the Ghost-Chasers was a Scooby Doo knockoff. I was never a Scooby fan as a kid, but I have certainly seen many episodes. Presumably, I’ve seen at least one episode of Goober and the Ghost-Chasers, though I have no conscious memory of it. According to IMdB, not only was GatGC a Scooby knockoff, it was a knockoff created by Hanna-Barbera, the same creators of Scooby. No word on whether or not they sued themselves for copy write infringement. Whereas Scooby was a cowardly Great Dane who ran from danger, Goober was a cowardly greyhound that turned invisible in the face of danger. Also, Goober was green. Clever. Both hung out with investigative teens including, in the case of Goober, some of the Partridge family.

Paul Winchell performed the voice of Goober. Winchell’s IMdB page reveals an extensive cartoon voice career. Most notably, he was the voice of Gargamel in The Smurfs and of Tigger in numerous Winnie the Pooh TV specials and movies. Winchell died in June of this year, and this, I do vaguely remember, because the long time voice of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, John Fiedler, died one day later. I’m certain, however, that no news articles chronicling this bizarre, macabre coincidence contained any tidbit like, …and of course, Winchell was the voice behind the much beloved, Goober, of Ghost-chaser fame.

Winchell’s mini biography page on IMdB is surreal. He attended Columbia University, then studied and practiced acupuncture and hypnosis. In the 1950s, he became “the most beloved ventriloquist of the children of the USA.” (Many conservatives in this country revere the 1950s as a simpler, better time. Americans should ask themselves if they really want to return to a time when any ventriloquist was beloved.) His puppet sidekicks, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, are now in the Smithsonian Institution. He published the book "Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit" in 1954. Don’t bother reading it, I’ve tried, without success, to have fun or make money with ventriloquism.

But wait, there’s more. Winchell was an amateur medical inventor who patented an artificial human heart! Holy shit! In addition, he held patents on over 30 devices including: a flameless cigarette lighter, an invisible garter belt, a method of breeding Tilapia fish so that poorer countries could feed their citizens, an indicator to show when frozen food had gone bad after a power outage, an automobile that runs on battery power, and the disposable razor which he neglected to patent. Like Wikipedia, IMdB is user edited, so I can’t help wondering if Mr. Winchell was a crazy liar that managed to slip in a fantastical biography for himself.

Whether he was or not, I’m still no closer to uncovering the reason for my fixation on Goober and the erstwhile chasers of ghosts.

I Have a Dream #1: I ♥ Diacritic Marks

Freudians take note. This may be a recurring posting topic. I don’t remember most of my dreams, but the ones I do are usually entertainingly bizarre. I’m not even certain I can call the ones I remember dreams, as usually, I’m partially awake and aware that I’m having them. Perhaps I should refer to them as notions that I can’t get out of my head during my first waking hour of the day.

A few weeks ago, I woke with the notion/compulsion of trying to remember the exact seating chart for Mrs. Hazard’s 9th grade English class, Louisville Male High School, 1984-1985, 6th (final) period. The class was arranged alphabetically, in six rows of five desks each. I sat in the last desk of the penultimate row. Since there were only 29 freshmen in the class, the desk to my immediate right was empty. Kären Wäntland sat in the final seat of that row. Her father was the Drug Czar of the Jefferson County school system. From there it gets hazy. Danny Präther sat directly in front of me? He was a good friend throughout high school so I should remember clearly. I do remember that he wrote a Snigglet (!) on the chalkboard everyday before class started. And yet I can’t help thinking that going from Präther to Shroät is too big a jump. So maybe, just maybe, he sat two seats ahead of me. I spent most of my morning jog trying to conjure a student with an R or S last name that might have separated us. But that’s not nearly as perplexing as trying to remember who sat to my immediate left. I can easily picture the front, left-hand portion of the room; Gilliän Ausländer, Chip Currëns, and Fred Bürczyk, among others. The rear, left side of the room? Complete memory blind spot, and it’s driving me fucking insane. I can’t remember a single M name from my English class? Days later, it’s still maddening. And I refuse to pull the yearbook off the shelf to supplement my memory.

So those of you who have wondered why I don’t do more with my life, here’s your answer. My brain has a fast processor, lots a RAM and a large hard drive. Unfortunately, the search engine is for shit. There’s no rhyme of reason for what pops to the top of the results page. You have no idea how much energy I spend on a daily basis trying to sort this shit out.


*Mrs. Hazard’s class was the only one in high school in which I received a B as my final grade. That was the difference between being one of the valedictorians (we had four, I would have been number five) and sitting in the audience at graduation. Still, I would been salutatorian, if not for the sly machinations of Därryl Fucking York. While I was taking college credit courses during the summer prior to senior year, he took an extra high school class (pussy) and of course received an A. And so, even though Därryl had also received one B during high school, just like me (and Dënise Dëvine and Elainë Härris), he now had one extra A to factor into his GPA, giving him the slight edge he needed. Thus, Elainë, Dënise and I had to listen to his nasally, lame ass speech in Broadbent Arena. Okay, now I remember where Dënise and Elainë sat in Mrs. Hazard’s class. But the row right next to mine…fuck?

**Ironically, though my only high school B came in an English class, I won the best writer award for my graduating class. Weird that I haven’t thought about that in many years. Sentence diagramming was my undoing with Mrs. Hazard.

***I didn’t go to high school in Germany. I’ve taken the liberty of umlauting the shit out of the proper names so as to avoid having self-Googlers stumble across this post. I don’t want to get emails or comments saying, “Why are you writing about me? What the fuck is the matter with you?”…from them.

Peace Playoffs In Our Time

From ITPT