Living Ain’t For Everybody
I emerge from my study for two goddam minutes, just trying to grab a cherry limeade Frostie out of the kitchen when I hear a raspy voice pronounce ominously.
“119.”
I don’t have to ask what the number signifies; it’s all the old bastard has been talking about since the first raindrops began to fall on Texas.
My eighty-year-old father-in-law, Milt, sits on his Laz-E-Boy lounger, what he calls his “catnapper” though I doubt that’s the chair’s official designation, surrounded by the crumbs of the granola bars he’s been demolishing as he chortles over the tragedy constantly spewing from the idiot box.
“170 still missing.”
He sits there on his catnapper managing to somehow appear both idiotic and beatific simultaneously. Maybe it’s the white beard hanging off his slack jaw. I don’t know. There’s something that compels him to ply me with quarter hourly updates on the death toll. I’ve shown zero interest in this or really any subject he’s broached during the fourteen years I have known him. He insists on speaking when I’m around.
“Milt, goddammit, how many times I gotta tell you I don’t give a fuck about that kinda shit?”
My protest slows him down not at all.
“Twenty-seven dead at Camp Mystic. Poor, little Christian girls.”
“I’m glad you weren’t in Texas for all that flooding,” I tell him. “Those poor bastards out there trying to drown, and the whole time you’re telling them about fucking monsoon season in Vietnam.”
Milt, as I’ve stated often, is infamous throughout Northern Alabama for his inability not to talk about how hard it rained during his solitary tour of ‘Nam for six months back in ’68. He could mistake a fart for distant thunder and launch into a twenty-minute diatribe about storms pounding Indochina. All that’s left is for you to nod your head, acceding the fact that having never been to Vietnam personally, it’s difficult to have any real conception of rain as Milt knows it.
“I’m just thinking how outrageous my All State insurance is going to become,” Milt moans. “They ain’t recovered from them California wild fires.”
Of course, during the inferno season on the west coast, Milt gave me constant updates on the damage assessments. One billion dollars, two billion dollars, twenty billion, fifty-three billion dollars in property damage. And who’s going to pay to bail out all those Satanic baby killers? Apparently, jackasses in Alabama by Milt’s reckoning.
The massive flash floods to hear him tell it are far more tragic since Texas harbors far fewer transsexuals per capita, though I’m not convinced this statistic is factual.
Milt’s still not convinced the democrats didn’t somehow have a hand in the sudden, torrential rainfall as they likely bore at least some marginal responsibility for the deluges he experienced as a young private in the jungles of Vietnam. He learned of this meteorological conspiracy through the social media teachings of that daft bitch, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, blaming the flash floods and chubby rain on some sort of shady, liberal-biased weather control device. Apparently, this congresswoman studied an animated documentary on how one such machine was created by Destro in order to give Cobra Commander a leg up on world government leaders by menacing them with the hot hail and the Vietnamese rain.
“123 dead,” Milt informs me, later, as I serve him dinner at his catnapper.
Perhaps, I have a callous heart, but it is difficult for me to see past my own tragic life experiences and feel empathy for others. What is yet another example of mass casualties in the face of a sixty-five hour work week, coupled with mowing what seems like ten hours a week on this fucking endless lawn, A1C levels jagging all over the place with all the candy I consume, and then having to serve this smug bastard some Stoufer’s lasagna while he sprawls in his catnapper keeping a ledger of all the evils visited upon the good folks of Elsewhere, America.
“Well, Milt, living ain’t for everybody, I guess. Hell, it’s barely for me.”
“Trump’s visiting the hardest hit areas, now.”
“Oh well, I’m sure his presence will heal all wounds. I mean, if you can’t get Jesus to show up, who’s the next best thing, right?”
I’m sure that sour, diaper-wrapped, son of a bitch would submerge half the states in the union to get people to stop talking about the Epstein list. Truth is, they could print the Epstein list out in full, let Trump autograph it, and dumb motherfuckers all across the land would use it as bookmarks for their Bibles.
There was a jackass on the social medias, not Milt mercifully though his memes do lean more toward the sanctimonious bullshit rather than the clever, borderline racist memes I favor, but this completely different jackass posted a digital painting of several little girls wearing Camp Mystic T-shirts rushing into the open arms of Jesus Christ. And Christ is just grinning from ear to ear as if he’s just sunk two cornhole bags in a row to win the game. The whole thing is created in the same MAGA style as that deeply silly scene where a noble-looking Trump sits at the situation desk and a solemn Christ stands behind him with a radiant, guiding hand resting on the president’s shoulder.
Same energy, too. In the Camp Mystic picture, all the children are little white Aryans. Hell, and maybe they were uniformly Caucasian, I don’t know, I don’t care, I ain’t never been to Texas, never been to Vietnam, doesn’t stop me from talking shit. There were no pictures created of those Sandy Hook children running toward Christ, this savior depicted as wearing a hunting vest and NRA gimme cap.
And it’s not enough that Christ has to be exceptionally white in these pictures. He’s depicted as being so modern as to having just slipped into the scene directly following a two hour pump at Gold’s Gym and a quick beard oil and trim from Hipster Cuts R’ Us. In the presidential picture, Jesus is whispering “hey, buddy, we gotta do something about all these Mexicans running around your country.” To which Trump responds, “Jesus Christ, every time I hear about pedophile billionaires jetting off to a tropical island on the Lolita Express, it makes me want to tariff Canada thirty-five percent harder.”
Milt bows his head and prays over his slab of Stoufer’s Lasagna.
“Oh, Lord, please keep your hand on all those lost souls in Texas, Lord. It’s up to 124 dead, now, with over 170 still missing, Lord. I pray you just help the recovery workers safely resume their searches, Lord. And continue to help Javy Biaz just keep seeing the ball, Lord, and keep hitting those homeruns, Lord. I know the Tigers are gonna need his big bat in the line-up, Lord, if we’re gonna have a chance in the World Series, Lord. We ask this in your name, Lord, Amen.”
I just stare at my lasagna and keep my mouth shut.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
