Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Family tragedy led me once again to my ancestral shores, the green (for now) woods of suburban Philadelphia, so once again I found myself at the feet of Our Lady of the Overturned Boat, a two-and-a-half foot plaster representation of the Mother of God that has sat in the mother of me's yard since the last century.
 
OLOTOB has fallen upon hard times. No longer does she rest in a shaded grove by my brother's upside-down and slowly rusting watercraft, alongside a stone bench which only lacks a cupholder to make it a perfect spot to enjoy an adult beverage. My mother has sold an acre of her backyard to a developer, and will soon have two new neighbors. The grove where Our Lady sat is no longer on her property, and She has been transferred to a green spot by the back door. 
 
That brother now lives in the house permanently, keeping an eye on Mom, who is frail at 89, and he sleeps in the guest bedroom, where the other icon of Catholicism in my mother's house dwells. I speak of Hot Mother Cabrini in the Closet, a statue my mother and another elderly Catholic woman purloined from a rectory in another Philly suburb for their own reasons, and is still in transit to its rightful owner, my mother's favorite priest, who hasn't quite enough closet space for it himself, apparently.
 
Thus, I no longer sleep with Hot Mother Cabrini. My brother does. I don't resent her transfer of affections. Long distance relationships are so difficult to maintain.
 
My brother Matt's memorial service was not religious, because he wasn't. Mom has set up her own formal funeral Mass in a few weeks, because no one should be laid to rest without a Catholic service, in her opinion. Fine with me, because I wasn't about to fly back and forth to Philly twice in two months, and thought I had escaped another Mass.
 
Not so. Mom made it plain that I was taking her to Mass the following day, and furthermore she was exercising her powers as a bereaved mother to make sure I attended the Mass, instead of just driving her to church, having a cup of coffee at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, and picking her up when the service was over—my preferred method of assisting her at worship.
 
I am ecumenical in my dread of religious rites. Any ceremony that does not involve human sacrifice or, at the very least, snake handling, I find intensely boring. The only advantage of a Catholic Mass over the others, in my case, is that, having been shepherded to a thousand of them in my youth by my above-mentioned mother, I know when it’s going to end. I was stuck at a friend’s kid's bar mitzvah a few years back and nearly suffered a public panic attack when I realized I had no idea how long it was going to last.
 
My mother’s favorite priest has been transferred from a regular Catholic parish to a Catholic nursing home, where people who have lived Catholic can waste away and die Catholic for $6,000 a month. This made the Mass even less inspiring than most to me. There were no striking Catholic women in tight skirts to admire. Most of the faithful were in wheelchairs and even hospital beds. My mother is not that feeble—she picked a pew for us to sit in. The orderlies promptly blocked us in there with two wheelchairs, one on either end. If a fire had broken out, we would have had to hurdle cripples in order to save ourselves.
 
The lady in the wheelchair to our right kept trying to get out of her seat to participate in the usual Catholic gymnastics, and had to be restrained by two orderlies so she wouldn’t go face-first on the floor trying to get closer to God. Apart from that and two Alzheimer’s victims in the back having a completely demented but loud conversation about only what they knew for sure, the Mass proceeded ponderously along.
 
There is a point in the Mass where it is considered proper to leave, if you are unworthy of receiving Communion, which is me for sure, and I mean unworthy squared, and it is right before the hosts are distributed. Unfortunately, I was blocked from bugging out at this juncture by those wheelchairs. I had to sit through the distribution of the hosts. Ordinarily, Catholics line up and approach the altar where the priest and his assistants wait with golden cups full of the Eucharist. Due to the nature of the congregants at this service, though, the priest and his helpers had to scatter through the room to serve Communion. Inevitably, one made the mistake of drifting towards me, host in fingers.
 
“Body of Christ,” he said.
 
Then I panicked. I had forgotten the response. In retrospect, I think it is a simple “Amen,” although there are other standard Catholic phrases which might apply, like, “And also with you,” and “Blessed be the Father,” etc.
 
Couldn’t come up with it though, so I settled for looking him prayerfully in the eye and replying, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”

​After passing the nation’s most restrictive abortion law, Alabama’s legislators are not sitting on their laurels.
 
“After making certain we have honored human life by giving Alabama women the joy of birthing their rapist’s or step-daddies’ babies, we need to focus on the other side of the reproductive coin—the sperm rights of our male citizens,” said one of its Republican members, who wished to remain anonymous because the pending bill has not been finalized. “An Alabama male has an average of a hundred million  sperm in his testes at any time—that’s one hundred million one-half fetuses. If a blastocyst has all the rights of a born human, how can we ignore the rights of the potential ½ human that God might make out of that sturdy little wiggler?
 
“Just as any pregnant woman carrying merely one baby should be able to use the car-pool lane in Alabama, any male with at least one testicle remaining, who is potentially the father of a hundred million Alabama citizens, should be able to do likewise. And he will be able to, once we build some carpool lanes in this state.
 
“Too little attention is spent on these other sacred creations of our Lord, just left to bounce around on the seats of pickup trucks in their hairy casings. Just because God has chosen to place these potential lives in men who lack teeth or don’t have enough crystal meth left to attract an Alabama woman does not mean their sperm does not deserve a chance at life. Alabama women are too demanding when it comes to things like meals, wedding bands, Netflix subscriptions and child support before allowing an Alabama man to fill her with his tiny, slippery creations of God.  ‘I need to put my sperm in you,’ is all a man should have to say to get a girl to admit him into the chamber of childbirth that the Almighty has created. Even if that man has the unfortunate habit of grunting ‘Roll Tide!’ when he ejaculates, his sperm rights need to be respected.
 
“If a man is absolutely too shy or too gay to make this simple request, the state will set up medically safe settings with comfortable recliners and HD porn where he can induce a discharge, which will then be immediately frozen and stored for future use or possibly even export, as long as we can settle this trade war thing. In Alabama, crusty socks and soggy tissues will no longer be the final repository of the will of God.
 
“We’ll put them where those abortion clinics used to be. All right, we might need a few more locations. We can’t have guys lined up outside like it was a woman’s bathroom—that would be too embarrassing for them.
 
“And it will be absolutely forbidden to call these sacred places spank banks. Just putting that out there.”

I was born a while ago, not as far back as Jesus or the dinosaurs, but close. Whenever I see one of those Facebook memes that read “Type in something that you remember that a young person wouldn’t,” I put in—well, let’s face it, I hardly ever put in anything. I just think, in my kindly, generous way. “Why the hell would I bother with that?”

But if I were to answer, I would probably say, “Waiting for some other person in my family to get off the phone so I could use it.”

See? Old. I even remember when you had absolutely no idea who was calling until you actually picked up the phone and answered it. The horror, eh?

Then came answering machines. You could listen to the person who was calling you start talking on the machine and then leap up off the couch to grab the call, if it was someone you wanted to talk to. The problem with that was, that person now knew you were monitoring your calls, and the next time they called, when you weren’t in, they would yell stuff like “ARE YOU MONITORING YOUR CALLS AGAIN? PICK UP! PICK UP! I KNOW YOU’RE THERE!” in such an annoying way that eventually you never wanted to talk to them again.

​Then I remember the brief era when your phone, your camera, and your GPS were three different things.

Now I have a smart phone, like everybody else does, and caller ID. When someone calls, I know who they are and whether I want to hear from them, and I have the option of rejecting them by message. These are bland messages like “I’m driving,” or “I’m in the movie theater,” or “I’m in a meeting.” I usually jab at one at random. People can just wonder what I’m doing at the movies at 7 AM.

And I think that’s convenient, but I really wish my rejections were a little punchier. I have six options on my phone now. Here are six better ones:
 
Think of all the things in the world that are more interesting than you. I’m doing one of them.

If I wanted to hear from you, I’d answer, so don’t text me, either.

I’m sorry I can’t pick up right now. Call me back when I need to have the crap bored out of me.

I’m getting laid.

Your mom wants you to call. I’m not your mom.
 
And finally, the one I’d use when I would really hate and regret the fact that the caller has my phone number:

Go intercourse yourself!
​
I'd use it at least once a week. You listening, Samsung?

Few people have less appetite for household chores than I do, but, unfortunately for the state of our dwelling, my Significant Other is one of them. The two of us would live in squalor if we didn’t have a cleaning woman who comes in once a week to scrub the place top to bottom. She is as sterling and honest a woman as there is on Earth. The only flaw in her methods is that she spends half her time cleaning, and the other half hiding important items from us, items we have carelessly left in her path. A lot of necessary paperwork and small items disappear this way, sometimes resurfacing later, and sometimes not.

Sometimes she gets so busy hiding things that she doesn’t finish chores like the laundry. But she always starts the laundry, so occasionally we don’t discover a load of wash until it has moldered for several says in the washing machine. There’s almost always unfolded clothes in the dryer. So every cleaning day, we spend the hours before her arrival frantically secreting things we want to find later, and afterwards we have to discover what she hasn’t finished and, in the tradition of our household, I have to finish them.

When the cleaning person folds the clothes, they form compressed, neat little squares that are easily stacked in their drawers. I don’t know how this is accomplished. When I fold things, they end up lumpy and asymmetrical, and have to be wadded into the drawers like stuffing into a turkey. Long-sleeved shirts are a particular chore for me. I ran across a YouTube video the other day that claimed it could teach me how to fold contour sheets. I immediately closed that tab. I already know how to “fold” contour sheets.  1. Bunch the sheet together until it is roughly the size of a basketball. 2. Cram it into the linen closet with your other unfolded sheets, using your fists and possibly elbows to wedge it into place. 3. Quickly close the closet door before the sheet escapes.

When you need fresh sheets, open the door and use the first one that falls out. You save precious seconds by not having to unfold it.

Gardening is not on our cleaning person’s chore list, so our tiny condo yard has fallen into a state of advanced deterioration. She does sweep up the Chihuahua droppings there, and always puts the cover on the barbecue grill, something I only do when rain is in the forecast, and sometimes not even then.

But the task of weeding and trimming the shrubbery is left up to me, and I have better things to do. After our Korean grass experiment, we had my Significant Other’s nephew come over and re-do the yard in stone, carefully placing a barrier of plastic underneath the stone so weeds wouldn’t poke through the rocks.

This only works for so long, we discovered and now we have two-foot tall weeds growing abundantly in several corners. They were luxuriously green. They got to their advanced height because my Significant Other read someplace that my favorite weed killer (the one that actually works) causes cancer, and I can’t pull the weeds because that would damage the plastic weed barrier and admit more weeds.

Eventually I got so sick of the weeds I pulled out the weed-killer when she wasn’t looking, and doused them thoroughly, wearing protective clothing (cargo shorts and flip-flops) to minimize my exposure to carcinogens. Now we have two-foot tall dead weeds in the yards, which is even more aesthetically displeasing, but at least it shows that we’re trying.
​
I really should go out and cut them down, but the cleaning person is coming tomorrow. I need to start concealing things that I want to see again before I do anything else.

Pineapple Crush in print as of today! Links on the side to buy. If you want a signed copy, I'll be doing book signings that will be publicized here and on Facebook. If we're geographically incompatible, then contact [email protected] we can mail a copy back and forth. 

In the meantime, been busy, so here's a classic for you:


My Significant Other is having surgery this week and needs to put an auto-response on each of her email accounts so people won't wonder why she isn't responding to their cyber-nagging while she is undergoing a major operation and the subsequent excruciating rehab.


Kindly and useful mate that I am, I've composed these suggestions for her. One of them, I am sure, will suit her current mood perfectly: 


10: "I'm lying on an operating table while people look for new places to stick tubes in me, so I've got some fresh ideas on where you can stick your endless whiny emails."

9: "You're worried about the deadline? I'm worried about my flat-line. What a coincidence!"

8: "You want a report? Come look at the chart on my hospital bed. There's your frigging report."

7: "My doctor says it will be at least two weeks before I can look at any kitten videos, so keep them to yourself until then. And, you know, if you quit forwarding them forever nobody would really mind. Especially me. If I live." 

6: "I was just chatting with my dead relatives. They don't give a crap about your emails, and neither do I."

5: "Reading your emails would sap my will to live. I'm sure you understand."

4: "I'm in a medically-induced coma. What's your excuse?"

3: "I'll be taking a quick look up the Tunnel of Light before I get back to you on that."

2: "You forgot I'm having a serious medical problem and put an annoying smiley face on that email like you always do, not realizing that my health is so precarious I could die of exasperation, right? That's why I'm blocking it."

AND THE NUMBER ONE EMAIL AUTO-RESPONSE WHEN YOU ARE IN THE HOSPITAL HAVING SURGERY IS:

"If this is absolutely urgent, contact my anesthesiologist and tell him to keep me under until you figure it out for yourself."
​

I currently live, as I have previously said here, in the dullest, safest neighborhood I have ever inhabited. I’ve lived around some—from the slums of West Philly to Mission Beach in San Diego to Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. I’ve lived in ethnic neighborhoods where I was just about the only gringo, where the chickens crowed at dawn and the pit bulls barked all day.

Here it is so quiet that the automatic sprinkler system switching itself on after a downpour sounds like thunder. Mainly this is a function of the age of my neighbors. They range from well past retirement age to completely superannuated, not because it is one of those 55-and-up communities but because they bought here when the place was built in the 80’s and slowly fossilized into it.

We did have a crime here recently. Somebody broke into the community mailboxes. I can only think it was the most heartless and diabolical of criminals, because that is hitting old people where they hurt the most. If there is one thing my ancient neighbors love besides their grandchildren and going to Heaven, it is their mail.

The mail comes fairly early here, usually before 10, and no sooner has the mail truck putt-putted off than my neighbors descend on their boxes, eagerly yanking out the same useless supermarket flyers and coupon cards that me and my girl get nearly every day. Sometimes I get checks, which makes getting my mail extremely gratifying. I know their Social Security checks are automatically deposited, so I don’t think that my neighbors are getting any money in the mail, so why, if the mail is late, do they wander in the vicinity of the mailboxes, with looks of bleak puzzlement on their faces, like earthquake survivors stumbling around in the rubble?

My girl gets more mail here than me, because she has lived here longer and I have a separate PO box in which I get mail I don’t want her to see. Hah! Just kidding, sweetie. At this address, besides the checks, I usually just get letters from my health insurance company, at least two or three a week because I have Obamacare (for now) and mailing out useless, repetitive notices must be one of its provisions.

She also gets more interesting mail than me, having belonged at one point to both the NRA and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Possibly there is no one else in this vast nation that has contributed to both of these widely disparate non-profits, but there is a simple explanation—she teaches sociology at a local university and joined the NRA to piss off the kumbaya liberals in the sociology department, and she gives to the Southern Poverty Law Center because, at heart, she is a kumbaya liberal herself.

The SPLC has been begging for funds hard since the election, since they figure Trump will stomp all over civil rights, because that was one of his campaign promises, but the NRA is truly desperate, and for good reason. Without Democrats in office, NRA members are no longer frightened that the government will confiscate their guns and ammo, and weapons sales are grinding to a halt. People quite sensibly are figuring that the twelve assault rifles and the six crates of ammo they already bought because they were sure Obama was going to take their guns away, will hold them through the Apocalypse or until the Dems win an election, whichever comes first.

But none of these mail items are more than momentarily interesting, causing me to wonder just what it is my neighbors expect in the mail that makes them stalk the post-person so relentlessly? Do they look forward to endearing, hand-written letters and cards from their loving grandchildren? I hope not, because their grandchildren belong to a generation that figures if you can’t text it, it’s not worth saying.

Are they betting in lotteries in distant countries, and figuring it’s only a matter of time before a fortune in pounds, pesos or guineas is mailed to them in a letter covered with ugly-looking foreign stamps? Maybe that’s the answer.

Or are they treasuring those flyers because they, like my own aged mother, are determined to stock up on enough toilet paper, canned soup, shaving cream and mouthwash so that no matter how long they live, there’s going to be enough left over so that attendees can shave, gargle, eat and go to the bathroom after their funeral?
​
I could speculate more, but I think I hear the mail truck.

You and I are now being encouraged to become ecosexuals, who are loosely defined as people who have sex with the earth.

No, I did not absentmindedly put down “with” instead of “on," although ecosexuals having sex with each other (which also happens) do prefer to do it in the mud, weeds, brush or forest, rather than some mundane indoor location.

This is understandable—go back along any of our ancestral trees and you’ll come to a branch where all of its members were doing it on the ground, because for sure people were thinking about sex long before they were thinking about making furniture. And despite the invention of the many, many things that modern people have sex on—the bed, the hotel bed, the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the steps going down to the basement, the scungy old sofa in the rec room, the back seat of your grandma’s Buick, the massage table at the House of Joy, the bondage rack and the spinning sex chair, some of us may still experience the atavistic urge to enjoy the afterglow of sex with a little gravel still stuck to our backs.

But actually sexing with the earth and the things that sprout on its surface is what sets the tribe of ecosexuals apart from the merely desperately horny. What this consists of is left intentionally vague, although much of it seems to deal with pollen. Look at the pics yourself.

In any case, when someone tells an ecosexual to “go hump sand,” the ecosexual can become legitimately aroused. Unlike traditional green movements, the ecosexual is not a tree hugger. He is a tree fucker. When an ecosexual complains of being caught between a rock and a hard place, he is probably just letting you know where his penis is situated.

Ecosexuality has its opponents, of course. Conservatives, for whom sex means only missionary-position with the wife, or getting spanked by prostitutes when she’s out of town, are predictably against it. This hit piece in Breitbart places ecosexuals a few rungs lower on the you-disgust-me ladder than LGBTQI’ers, whom they find massively disgusting. But they bravely throw the LGB-etc. folks a lifeline, in the form of allowing that ecosexual passions are even harder to understand than theirs. This is the closest the right gets to tolerance, so we need to commend them for it.

What they fail to consider is that ecosexuality might just be a put-on, that all these people taking pictures of themselves rolling in fields of pollen are doing it just  to freak the straights out, and when they actually have sex with each other they do it in the conventional way, by having a massive multi-sexual orgy in someone’s dimly-lit porn den. The joke's on us. Now I feel better. I’ll make myself lunch.

Hey, what's this on my cucumber?

Most observers think that the batshit incompetence exhibited by our national government since Trump was sworn in is the head Cheez-it’s fault.  Trump runs the country the same way he runs his businesses, they say, with a minimum of attention to detail and a maximum amount of golf.

This is no doubt true, but it doesn’t account for the down-low spitefulness with which Trump pursues his aims. I mean, hating Mexicans and Muslims is popular all over the land, and taking health coverage away from the indigent is no big deal, because they were going to die of something anyway, but to dump on the Coast Guard? Nobody hates the Coast Guard.

Except a man who’s not getting any sex from his wife. I suspect the Head of State is being denied by his spouse. First of all, would you be having Twitter tirades at 4 AM if you had just been satisfied by the sex star of Slovenia? I know I wouldn’t.  I’d be drifting off to dreamland in a contented glow, thinking generous thoughts like “Who needs a wall and healthcare reform? Why shouldn’t people be able to keep their Obamacare and their landscaping crew? And remind me, honey, to get that puppy I promised Sean Spicer.”

If Melania and I were making our love nest in Trump Tower, I’d also murmur, “And goodnight to you too, Barack,” just in case.

But we’re not getting that from our President. He is exhibiting all the behaviors of a man cut off from his nookie. He’s lashing out at everybody, from the cast of SNL to Preet Bharara to Meryl Streep. He’s sublimated his sex drive into spasms of executive orders.

Possibly he’s fantasizing about Betsy DeVos naked.

Now, before you recoil in horror from this image, remember, the man is more to be pitied than blamed. No one really knows what goes on between two people, and Trump bought Melania fair and square from her father, in the time-honored tradition of European arranged marriages. Of course, he thought that she came with a guaranteed lifetime supply of sex, and he’s understandably bitter that she’s having a permanent headache in Manhattan while he roams the White House in his bathrobe, alone, listening to Steve Bannon snore off another whiskey and Adderal binge.

Let’s have some empathy for Melania, too. She didn’t sign up for this, either, and by that I don’t mean being First Lady. I mean being guarded by the Secret Service all the time so she can’t have sex with the pool boy or her personal trainer, which I’m sure she regarded as a necessary relief from her marital duties. “They're going to be installing a new Ice Age in Hell before he grinds that pasty golf gut up against my creamy, unblemished skin again,” is what she’s probably thinking.

And she can think that in six different languages.

But we’re begging you, Melania (I know, I know—so is he). Do your duty. Lie on your back and think of America next weekend in Mar el Lago.
​
Oh, right, I forgot. You’re not from here.