Favorite Things

Imagine me sitting in a chair, possibly dressed nicely. I have a tie on because ties let you know that a man doesn’t have to treat a woman nicely. He can pay for sex if he wishes. That’s how much of a hot-shot I look. Perhaps I have a Bluetooth on too. I’m not talking into it. I’m too stupid to figure out how to use it. Sometimes I go out and walk around the park pretending I’m talking to someone. My made up friend Rico isn’t on the other end and the joke I’m pretending to laugh it doesn’t exist. I’m a crazy person trying to look cool. My pants are fancy, my shoes actually laced, and I’m wearing false teeth over my real ones to look more presentable. Try getting into an argument with dirty natural teeth. You probably won’t win. You need some milky whites to attain a flawless victory.

Why am I dressed up so fancy? Well because today is a serious day. One year ago today my mom passed away. I’ve been debating for a while whether I should write anything about it. It doesn’t really go with the theme of this blog, you know, shit humor, but if there was anybody who appreciated shit humor it certainly was my mom.

I didn’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to write about here. I figured it was a safe bet to write about some of her favorite things. Mostly what we enjoyed together or that one of us pretended to like more because it gave us some bonding time. Or in some cases we really didn’t just want to say how stupid the other one was for having awful taste.

Professional Wrestling

I don’t know how much my mom really understood about the WWE. At times I think she didn’t realize it was scripted or that The Undertaker was not dead and actually named Mark. She’d yell at the TV that what the bad guys were doing wasn’t fair. She always rooted for the good guys which annoyed me because I’m a smark, someone who roots for the bad guys. I’d almost want to punch her when she’d clap for HHH beating someone else. I hated HHH. His nose is gigantic and he’s a backstage goon who refuses to lose. Her favorite though was The Rock which I can’t argue with. Weird thing is neither of us watched wrestling when The Rock was popular. I think she mostly was into looking at him in tiny underwear more than anything else. One year for her birthday I got her a set of action figures of The Rock. Her last birthday 2 years ago I bought her a collection of “The Best of The Rock” a 3-DVD set. I mostly bought it because I wanted to watch it first then give it to her. I don’t think she ever did watch it, but that was probably a good thing. I never realized how much he lost. Mostly to that big nosed asshole HHH. Fuck you and your initial moniker.

 (Next year Wrestlemania should take place inside his right nostril)

Baseball

This was another thing my mom paid attention to because I want into. We even got a dog and named him after Mark McGwire we were so into the 1998 season. More on that piece of shit dog later. We’d watch Phillies games together all the time in the late 90’s. During those years the team would lose about 100 games a season. You don’t need to know a thing about sports to know they weren’t very good. Her favorite player was the Jewish catcher, Mike Lieberthal. I’m not saying the team sucked because they had a Jewish catcher and their star pitcher was a Republican whose son had ALS, but I don’t hear it argued enough that they probably should have signed more Puerto Ricans. The last baseball game we watched together was during the 2009 World Series. I so totally could have hooked up with a girl that night who was into me, but I couldn’t let my mom down. We needed to see the Yankees buy their way into another championship. I don’t regret it at all. That hot chick probably would have tried to change the way I dressed. My mom once told me she was proud of me because I always wore clean clothes. It didn’t take much to impress her.

 (Mike Lieberthal rookie card)

The Popcorn Zoo

Last year on Mother’s Day my sisters and girlfriend (my girlfriend, I don’t share her with my sisters you creep) went to the Popcorn Zoo. I’ve mentioned it before, but I will repeat to you that it is a zoo of abused animals where you get to feed them popcorn. I know, holy fucking shit right? This exists! You can throw popcorn at bears and watch them eat it. The best animals there are the deer. They used to have some that had three legs. I have fed three-legged deer movie theater snacks. How many people can say that? Probably like a couple million because the zoo has been around a long time, but still I bet no one in Australia has ever done that. Have you ever seen a map? That’s a big place. I have done more in my life than everyone in Australia. My mom’s favorite animal there was Ferdinand the cow. He sent my mom a postcard one time because she made a donation to get him a bell or whatever it is cows need donations for. Feeding animals and not having to pick up the poop afterwards is one of my favorite things to do. That’s why the Popcorn Zoo will always be a place near and “deer” to my heart. Get it? Because I mentioned deer–

(Me feeding a goat a nutritious snack)

Reruns

My mom would always rush home from whatever she was doing to catch the reruns of her favorite shows. I don’t think she watched a first run television show since the Ron Perlman shows Beauty and the Beast was on while I was born. Her favorites were King of Queens, Two and a Half Men, and Wings. What a Three Stooges combination of mediocrity. Strangely enough the only one of these that I ever watched a lot of was Wings. I kind of got into it too. It’s about two brothers who work for an airline on Nantucket. I know this sounds like the beginning to a dirty joke, but I swear it was a pretty tame show. Basically it was Taxi but with airplanes. They even had a silly repairman played by the bad guy from Spiderman 3 who was also the bad guy in George of the Jungle. Isn’t Thomas Haden Church also a prick in real life? You’d think with the last name church at worse he’d be a con-artist.

 (This is what cool people looked like in the early 90s. Y2K should have destroyed us)

McGwire the Dog

Lovable, sweet, adorable, and exciting are a few words I would never use to describe McGwire the Dog. When my mom passed the family was left wondering what we should do with McGwire. It was unanimous that we’d put him in the garbage disposal and blame it on a black guy who broke in. Then we realized none of us are fancy enough to own a garbage disposal so he came to live with me. He’s okay I guess. When I came home last I could smell him immediately. Sometimes he smells so bad I want to pour sour milk on him to make things better. And to torture him a bit for waking me up and being an overall fatass. He licks my couch a lot for some reason. It’s not even like there are food remnants there. I think he’s just trying to annoy me for when I sit down and my arm rest is soaking wet. But I guess he’s all right. He snores really loudly which gives me some background noise. It helps me avoid from being able to think. It helps keep away some demons.

(He looks like a fat deer on a giant lesbian shirt)

Those are just a few of the things my mother enjoyed. I could go on forever really. She liked bounty paper towels, Leslie Nielsen movies, and not using the Internet. Really, my mom probably didn’t go online since 2004. She used prepaid phones like a drug dealer and had no clue who the Chocolate Rain Kid was. She lived very simply. The only thing more I could have wanted from her was more time. One more conversation, one more trip to the movies together, one more blabbering voicemail that went on for 6 minutes about a joke on the Nick Swardson show that I didn‘t know existed, and one more of everything else I loved about her. I have a good memory and not much had to be blocked out involving her. She yelled at me twice that I remember and apologized after both. One time was because I was eating chicken instead of helping with the Christmas tree setup and the other was because I couldn’t match up a pair of black sweat pants with the black tuxedo that Alfred the Butler wore on a shirt I had which contained all of the Batman characters. I was only really nervous one time about sharing something with her. It happened when I was suspended from school for 9 days my junior year of high school for making a parody of the school newspaper. To be fair it was a book that she gave me that inspired my troublemaking ways. When she found out that I had been suspended from school there was no yelling. She high-fived me instead. That’s how I knew I had an awesome mom. She had never met the principal and even she knew he was an asshole.