Having Lived Past the Age of Reason
“I’m really sorry I’m the one who has to be telling to this,” I tell my wife the other day. The tone of my voice doesn’t sound like I’m sorry, though. My wife who’s become a bit of an expert on my voice tones cocks a skeptical eyebrow. “It’s your stepdad. I think he’s done lost what little mind he has left.”
I’m referring, of course, to Milt, my eighty-year-old, live-in father-in-law, currently laid out on his catnapper in front of the television.
My wife treats me to her long-suffering, now-what expression. After thirteen years of marriage, that look on her face has become a bedrock conversational shortcut. I speak, she employs that look, I make a half ass attempt to explain myself, she sighs and starts talking about some gardening bullshit she watched a YouTube video on, the correct way to grow peppers or some shit.
“Well, I came home from work, and he’s sitting there, posted up on his catnapper, watching a Steven Seagal movie.”
“And…”
“And… This is the second Steven Seagal movie I’ve caught him watching in as many days.”
“So…”
“So, c’mon, woman. One Steven Seagal movie, okay, maybe it’s an accidental viewing, you know. Maybe Seagal’s block head wasn’t featured prominently enough in the advertising. I can see that. Not two. That second movie, he was purposefully subjecting himself to Steven Seagal. It speaks to a deteriorating frontal lobe of Trump-voting proportions. Baby, we’re well past dementia and flirting with late-stage brain death for Milt. Might as well cancel the Prevagen orders.”
“I seem to recall you enjoying ‘Under Siege’.”
“Don’t get cute. You know I’m referring to post ‘Executive Decision’ movies, here. If Milt was watching ‘Hard to Kill’, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Who doesn’t like watching the mass execution of Haitian gangstas. But you’d have to be a virtual mongoloid to unironically view ‘The Asian Connection’ or ‘Code of Honor.’ Basically, any Seagal movie where he’s rocking that ridiculous moustache.”
“The man’s eighty-one-years-old, Polish Hammer. If he wants to turn his brain to mush watching Steven Seagal what harm can it do? It can’t be any worse than those Terrifier movies you watch.”
“I hate those Terrifier movies, you know that. I’m just a David Howard Thornton fan.”
“Let the old man have his peace.”
“I would! If I didn’t have to hear the fucking thing. I lock myself in my study, light my pipe, pour a generous tipple of Very Old Fitzgerald, spin my Monster Magnet album on the turntable, the speaker’s volume set as high as possible, and it still can’t drown out that goddam Seagal movie, because you insisted we get him that massive sound system for Christmas.”
“You know his hearing aids don’t work so good.”
“Yeah, so I gotta listen to Seagal deliver some of the stupidest dialogue ever penned by human alcoholics, spoken in that smug monotone as if he were emoting zen koans in a hyperbaric chamber that had all the charisma sucked right out of it. Followed by thirty straight minutes of gunfire. It’s driving me batshit.”
“You could always go work out in the garden while he’s watching his movies.”
“Not that I don’t find watching tomatoes ripen to be ceaselessly fascinating, but I got important shit I gotta do in that study. I got a novel to line edit. And a column to write that I know at least two people are breathlessly anticipating the chance to read.”
“Have you tried explaining to Milt why he shouldn’t be watching Steven Seagal movies?”
“Of course, I tried. He just munches on granola and mistakes my attention as an invitation to fill me in on the latest Michigan Wolverine’s offseason recruiting. How is it he can’t remember to unload the dishwasher, but he can tell me every fucking high schooler committing to Michigan, and how fast they can run a forty?”
“So what are you suggesting we do?”
“I think it’s time we put Milt in one of those old folk’s homes.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, wait a second before you start dealing in absolutes and hear me out. I have it on good authority the Shady Acres Rest Home is in desperate need of a live-in weatherman. Someone who can alert them when it’s raining, in real time, while they’re standing there watching the rain come down. Apparently, the last Shady Acre weatherman was beaten to death with a bedpan.”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
“Look, we had a damn good time at that Alice Cooper concert, last week, did we not? You know I’d been wanting to see him for almost forty years. I just kept putting it off and putting it off. And, after all this time, it was still an amazing show.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Alice hasn’t lost too many steps.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“Well, that man’s seventy-eight years old. Still up there on stage, sword fighting balloons and whupping the hell outta that life-sized doll during ‘Cold Ethyl’.”
“I was there, Polish Hammer. I saw it. What’s your point?”
“Point is, I don’t think it’s that big an ask to expect Milt to wash out his fucking breakfast bowl. If Alice Cooper can still twirl a baton like an exuberant majorette while delivering a flawless performance of ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’ then Milt should be able to clean up his toast crumbs and not leave a dirty butter knife on the stove. All I’m saying.”
“You know, we’re living here, in his house, while he pays all the bills. We’re not packing him away to an old folk’s home so long as he can control his bowels.”
“Fine, goddammit. Can we at least get him to cut down on the Steven Seagal movies?”
“What do you suggest we replace it with?”
What are the options? Jason Statham? The two hundred straight to streaming films Bruce Willis acted in the last eighteen months of his professional career. The other day he was watching female kickball on ESPN 8. None of it I could live with…
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“You know what I read about online?”
“God, there’s no fucking telling.”
“I read in the case of martial law, if you’ve got, like, if you’re a doomsday prepper, and you’ve got a pile of food and supplies to last you through the Apocalypse, the government can come in and take it away from you.”
“Ah shit, I better find a better hiding place for my cache of bourbon, in case that son of a bitch, Kash Patel, comes looking.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m serious, too. I’m afraid there’s not a constitution strong enough to repel Kash from satiating his whiskey lust at my expense. Damn whup-eyed bastard.”
“It means we got to be careful. You can’t go around telling people we’re preparing for the end times. They probably got satellites up there right now, watching us storing tomato paste underneath the house.”
“I don’t know…”
“You know, we may end up having to cut a hole in the floor, maybe in the closet of your study in order to get down there and have access to our supplies.”
This is it, I think. This is how the madness encroaches. These people I find myself surrounded by, they use to be logical, mentally healthy people. A couple years under Trump’s regime and suddenly watching Steven Seagal do a form of aikido that entails flapping hands in a vaguely martial artsy sort of way seems like a viable way to live out one’s days.
It makes me think, whatever the future holds, I really don’t need a stockpile of tomato paste to see me through it.
“Where are you going?” The wife asks.
“I gotta go write my column.”
“Whatcha gonna write about?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
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.
