Adaptive Curmudgeon

Upstairs in his apartment Janice was writing in her journal:

09:45 Buy a new cat.

Ali the cat was perched out of reach on top of the refrigerator. He beamed with joy. He stretched and flexed his claws. Then he sauntered past a weeping Janice to the food bowls. He cleaned them both and licked his pawed. Tyson had not merely been drop kicked but had been hurled into a tree.

Best day ever!

If you’re relieved this part of the story is only 73 words instead of the usual 1,500 word slog, you might want to click below.

“That’s the third blender this week!” Cop #1 was keeping a list of things the unhinged Janice hurled from his apartment.

“Broken window, shit flying out of it. That’s probable cause enough to knock on the door.” Said cop #2.

“And what? You saw what he did to the chick in the octagon last weekend?”

“There are two of us.”

“You go first.”

The men decided to wait.

Another crash.

A cat erupted from the window, sailed in a wide and almost graceful arc, and landed in a nearby tree. It appeared unhurt.

Cop #1 checked his records. The grey one, that’s Tyson.

They had been collecting data on Janice for some time. The alternative, arresting him (or her or it) was too scary.

If you think Tyson had it coming, feel free to click below.

Resting in the passenger seat of the Subaru, Doogie was grinding his teeth while reading half of a newspaper. Billy had the other half and was grunting angrily at his section. The squirrels were asleep on the dash. The bear was in back; snoring lightly and occasionally farting.

The two kindred spirits dearly missed internet news. It was only an abundance of caution that forced them to read a newspaper. No point in giving the NSA extra chances to detect them. Even so… the articles were so foolish that both were suffering mental indigestion.

Doogie harrumphed (which is a strange sound coming out of a teenager). News, if you could call it that, printed on paper. He might as well be living in a cave. Furthermore, the articles were not so much incorrect as disassociated with reality. It was as if the articles postulated that BREXIT was a kind of snack food and 2+2 = blue.

“Hey Billy, do people actually believe this stuff?”

“I guess. People are pretty dense.”

“But I just read this article in the financials… and well… it’s just so…” Doogie was running out of words.

“It’s the New York Times. You probably just read some crap from that nitwit Krugman…” Billy paused, suddenly worried about what Paul Krugman’s illogic was doing to his friend. Doogie was ill-suited to the sledge hammer of Krugman’s stupidity. He reached over and snatched the paper out of Doogie’s hand. “Good grief, don’t read that, you’ll get stupid all over you! Here’s the domestic section.”

Doogie was pale from pondering Krugman’s latest article. It seemed to imply that inflation tasted great when spread on toast.

Doogie shuddered and started flipping through the domestic section. Then he broke out into a broad grin. He began to read aloud. His voice woke the animals who listened intently:

“Super Scary Right Wing Terrorist Ring Busted Due To The Awesomeness Of Domestic Spying. Detroit: Unidentified sources that you should totally trust inform us a terrifying plot by a right-wing terrorist death squad called ‘Deplorables In A Basket’ was narrowly averted yesterday. Domestic monitoring by brave patriots who may or may not work for the NSA isolated information that dirty rotten no good flyover country hicks were behind this very real threat to humanity itself. The CIA obtained this information with proper warrants. When asked for further details, the FBI admitted that they can’t show us the warrant right now because their dog ate it. Also, it’s classified and it’s unpatriotic to ask questions.

The credible evidence was provided to a joint task force composed of the Marines, Michigan State Police, Homeland Security, the BATF, the National Park Service, the Treasury Department, the TSA, Border Patrol, the US Postal Service, and the Boy Scouts. These combined forces of freedom raided a ‘party’ at an undisclosed location in suburban Detroit. Only after weeks of careful surveillance did the authorities make their move. Due to the excellentness of their planning, every alleged terrorist was captured.

In an unfortunate incident, 782 shots were accidentally fired at a nearby Chevy Volt that was mistakenly thought to harbor terrorists. Lucky, all 796 shots, fired from semi-automatic assault style police shotgun revolvers, missed the driver; who subsequently shit herself and decided to move to Japan. During the lightning fast siege, which took five hours, six dogs and a giraffe were killed because they were guard animals which refused to comply.

One law enforcement officer suffered a sprained wrist. He is expected to fully recover after six weeks paid recuperative leave. If you don’t think he’s a hero you’re literally Hitler.

The plot, like all terrorist plots, is completely the fault of Republicans who hate everything good and decent. Did we mention that this was a right-wing terrorist plot? Like all terrorist plots? Good! Because it was completely right wing.

At the scene of the arrest, authorities found all of the components to build an ANFO explosive sufficient to vaporize Manhattan. Chief Fire Marshal Bill, who was at the scene, was quoted as saying ‘we found 53 barrels of diesel and no ammonia nitrate, so of course we have everything necessary to create an improvised ammonia nitrate fuel oil explosive sufficient to devastate much of New England.’ This is similar to the methods used in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 which also was caused by Republicans.

The terrorists, who were right wingers that sympathize with Republicans, were hosting a ‘kegger’. ‘Keggers’ are often used as a fundraising method by terrorists, who are usually right wingers, though ‘keggers’ are occasionally used as a ‘satanic rite’ or locally ‘when the Detroit Lions win’. The terrorists, who are allegedly guilty as sin, had tapped 197 kegs of Molson and were selling beer for $5 per red cup. (See editorial section where Paul Krugman explains the relationship between blue collar and therefore dangerous males in flyover country and their chosen drinking method with is the ‘red state cup’.)

The 198 kegs of Coors and the 58 barrels of ANFO explosive were found in a Ryder rental truck just like the Oklahoma City bombing which was perpetrated by Charles Manson, who probably would vote against school lunch programs. Fortunately, law enforcement was able to cordon off the area and arrest all involved. For safety reasons, the truck, which was rented from Enterprise, was destroyed in a controlled demolition.

Congress immediately convened and Senator Grandstand of a state nobody cares about submitted the “Make It Illegal To Blow Up Detroit Act of 2017”. The bill has 209 sponsors and anyone who opposes it probably sets kittens on fire. However, the bill has spawned some controversy with civil libertarians (who are jerks). They point out that it’s already illegal to blow up Detroit. ‘We’ve got to make a statement that blowing up Detroit is not who we are’ claimed an irrelevant Senator on C-Span. Thirty-six riders have been added to the bill; which is expected to pass. These include iPads for Sudanese refugees, midnight rollerskating for at risk youth in Pasadena, and a green energy farm subsidy for Kumquat farmers in Kansas.

‘It just goes to show,’ said an unnamed source who is super-duper trustworthy and looks a lot like Dan Rather, ‘that if you have nothing to hide, you don’t have to worry when we spy on your cell phone.’”

There was a pause as everyone digested this information.

“Well”, Doogie smiled, “clearly the NSA was listening and obfuscating the trail of evidence was worthwhile.”

Decades later, in his old age, Doogie would frame that very article and hang it in his gorgeous and extensive library. He would consider it the decorative high point of his home décor and give it a place of honor next to his life-sized Paul Krugman dartboard.

If you think I’m giving the New York Times too much credit for journalistic integrity , feel free to click below.

Across the street from Janice’s second floor apartment, two men in a sedan were observing.

“Did you see the phone?”

“I know. Who has a landline?”

“Who throws one through the window?”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“Good distance though. Dude could switch from fighting to the shot put.”

The men were part of the new tri-county, anti-drug, community interdiction, special programs, environmental task force team, pilot project… a name that represented the interests of the eleven grant proposals that combined to fund them. They were originally hired by the Parks and Recreation department to clean outhouses on a seasonal basis. Unemployment every winter sucked so the two men teamed up to become an engine of grant writing productivity. This is how they’d wound up full time solders in the war on drugs. They loved their nifty new police cruiser. (Unmarked of course!)

Unfortunately, in this sleepy town, the task force team (meaning the two guys in the sedan) hadn’t quite thrived as hoped. Crime just wasn’t happening properly.

The biggest problem was that college kids stuck mostly to pot. The pussies in the state legislature weren’t anxious to cram some limp psychology student into a jail cell with hardened criminals. It just didn’t sit well with them. This was in opposition to the task force team who were willing to pluck the current generational equivalent of Shaggy and Scooby from their dorm room and drop them in a cell with father rapers from the Group W bench. Why not? If it paid their salary they’d do it. Have you ever cleaned an outhouse in August?

Alas, university kids, even when you could complete the arrest before the local cops screwed everything up, were impossible to convict. They tended to have rich parents who’d smoked pot when they were young and stupid. Thus, the kid’s parents (now old and stupid) knew how the game was played. One weepy call to mommy and helicopter parents would swoop in and lawyer up their particular student/snowflake. It was maddening.

Meanwhile, the profs and shockingly large portion of the nearby suburbanites chowed down on everything from Viagra to sixteen varieties of “Mother’s little helper” but did so discretely. They were off limits too. Nobody gets a promotion for busting the parents from the Brady Bunch.

The alternative, busting thugs from the other side of the tracks was unthinkable. A guy could get himself shot!

In the end, all their hopes rested on Janice. Everyone and their dog knew the guy (or gal) was supplying local bodybuilding meatheads with enough crap to become a Russian Olympic team. Nobody gets upset if you bust a gym full of weightlifters. Unfortunately, the meatheads knew every loophole. They dissolved countless powders and elixirs in their Gatorade so successfully that even they didn’t know what was in it. Most of it was legal and a lot of what wasn’t strictly legal was a grey area. Most of it was weird but innocuous sounding stuff. The public likes short words like “heroin” and not a paragraph about tea made out of toad gonads or moss from a Tibetan mystic’s ass.

It was a conundrum. You couldn’t bust the bodybuilders without a team of chemists. The chemist would need a team of lawyers to interpret what was legal. The lawyers would bill an exorbitant amount and plea bargain anything vague until the results sounded like an outbreak of littering.

No, the only way they were going to serve and protect the undeserving slobs of this shithole little town was if they got the kingpin… which happened to be a terrifyingly good fighter. Which brought them back to their biggest problem. How do two normal human beings arrest and subdue a dress wearing maniac who was increasingly unhinged.

There was a crash. A brand-new blender, filled with something blue, flew through the already broken bay window.

Upstairs Janice wrote in her journal:

09:15 Buy another blender.

If you want to help fund the new tri-county, anti-drug, community interdiction, special programs, environmental task force team, just click below.

Tyson, a high-strung cat, was having a bad day. Ali, a cat who never gave a shit about anything, was doing fine. Tyson was reacting to Janice, who owned both of them (presuming anyone truly owns a cat). Tyson was convinced the world was going mad.

Ali laid on the back of the couch; happily calculating odds. He was reasonably sure Tyson would wind up drop kicked down the hallway sometime in the next few hours. Nothing made Ali happier than seeing Tyson get drop kicked. It happened more often than you’d think.

Janice spent the hours waiting for his Grandmother’s dreaded arrival examining the inner turmoil of a shattering mind. In particular, he could see patterns in his, or her, or… its journal. He (because he felt like a he at the moment) was taking a righteous dump in an unlit bathroom while holding a flashlight and flipping thought his innermost thoughts as scrawled in the journal. He was coming to a conclusion.

He, or she, or it… was a lunatic.

He’d had suspicions all along. Some of it he could explain away. For example, half the men at the gym were afraid of him and virtually anyone he met in the ring decided another hobby, such as gardening, was better than martial arts. That could be called dominance on his part and was an excusable career hazard.  On the other hand, there was the time he set fire to his toaster because it had talked back to him. There’s just no way to make that look sane.

Inexplicably, he had issues with most of his home appliances. He had a tendency to either smash them or throw them out the window. This was because the little assholes were plotting against him! He tried to remember to keep the windows open but tended to forget. He was on a first name basis with a window repair place. It got expensive!

The diminishing but still logical side of his brain knew that heaving blenders was unwise. The stronger half said “it has deliberately mismanaged my protein shake and must die!” The guys from the window repair company shrugged and made bank.

Ali the cat knew the score. In fact, he was keeping count. The blue bottles tended to send appliances airborne. They were the best! The green ones tended to cause loud bouts of uncontrolled weeping. They were annoying. The ones with handwritten labels might do anything. One should never turn one’s back on those. The white ones tended to result in epic stench from the bathroom but little else.

Ali estimated the morning count at 4 blue, 3 green, and 7 white, but no hand labeled ones. It wasn’t yet noon. If he could maneuver Tyson underfoot and trigger an event it might be a good day.

Janice wandered out of the bathroom with a pale look on his (currently “his”) face. He idly pet Ali who purred pleasantly. Meanwhile he dropped six heaping scoops of a bluish powder into a blender. He followed up with a pound of watery, organic, free trade, sugar free, gluten free, Greek yogurt. Janice had carefully selected this product based on several factors, none of which involved flavor. Reflecting on the fact that yogurt tasted like something a snail would excrete after being force fed wallpaper paste, Janice added half a cantaloupe; rind and all. Ali noticed the powder came from an old Folgers can with a handwritten label(!) and faded into the background. Meanwhile Tyson, failing to heed the hidden signs, rubbed against his master’s legs.

Still scrutinizing the journal, Janice activated the blender. Yesterday’s entries read:

0530: 63 squats, 2 miles, plus regimen one. Feeling good.

0545: Life has no meaning. I am going to shave my head.

0600: My head is already shaved. When did I start wearing a wig?

0615: My nipples itch.

0930: Buy a new lamp.

Janice glanced at the corner where a broken lamp was crumpled beneath a lamp shaped divot in the drywall. It continued reading.

1215: Skipped class. Texted my prof I was absent due to oppression. I think I’ll get an A.

1216: I have the hots for the pizza delivery man. But I can’t eat a pizza.

1330: Still crying. Not sure if I crave sex or pizza.

1400: Buy a new bread machine.

1430: Forget it. Gluten is death.

1500: Ordered two bread machines on Amazon. Everything is hopeless anyway.

Janice shook his head. It didn’t look good.

If you think it’s just plain wrong when home appliances conspire against you, feel free to click below.

The phone rang.

Startled, Janice jumped. She began to tear up again but the steroids won over and he gritted his teeth. By the second ring, he was in a seething, white hot, murderous rage. Before the third ring could insult him, he ripped the phone from the wall. Who needs a landline?

Then, because he couldn’t speak to whomever called… she began to weep. Great salty tears pooled on her table and landed on the shattered handset. Mustering the diminishing reserve of courage within a tragic mind, she opened her English journal and wrote. (She was supposed to keep a journal for composition class and the star struck professors ate this shit up).

0830: Buy a new phone.

Then she collapsed in a miserable heap on the floor. Her two cats watched.

Her coffee pot chimed, the day’s brew was ready (Death Wish coffee enhanced with several tablespoons of gluten powder, protein, whey, something macrobiotic with an unpronounceable name, six capsules of various “stuff”, and the purple shit he got from Dimitri down at the docks). It was a thick concoction of legal supplements, prescription meds, sketchy remedies, useful vitamins in doses never imagined in the natural world, and unidentifiable voodoo. The end result had probably never before existed on this planet. She poured it in a cup and added organic honey from mountain clovers.

She drank heavily. It tasted surprisingly good. It would probably make a lab rat into a lizard and then turn its balls into cubes… before it imploded.

Powered by the strength of coffee, she faded back into he. He glared at the toaster with a malevolent eye. He drank this every morning. It either “took the edge off” or “put the edge on”. At this point he had no idea.

His ass vibrated. Panicked at first, he almost went back into a rage at his involuntary butt muscle’s twitching. Then he recognized his cell phone. It was in his rear pocket and vibrating against an ass that (he admitted with due humility) was rock hard and shapely.

Holding down the anger and focusing on his tears he answered.

“Hello.”

“Gerald. Are you on the dope?”

Rage again.

“Dammit Grandma! They’re nutritional supplements, and my name is Janice!”

“Where’s your landline phone? I called but you didn’t answer.”

Janice surveyed the electronic rubble on his kitchen table. His vision vibrated. Before he knew it, the phone was swinging though the air. There was a mighty crash as it went through the window.

“Was that the bay window? You know that’s the expensive one. It cost $175 last time you broke it and that was only Wednesday!”

“I can afford it.”

“Listen up.” Grandma’s voice was soft as a hug and strong as iron. “I’m going to be there soon.”

“Grandma! I…”

There was a scuffle on the other end of the line. Grandma had lost control of the phone. “Janice, honey? This is your mom. Don’t let Gertrude scold you. We’re super proud of you. We’re always…”

Further wrangling over the phone, Grandma was back in command. “Don’t listen to my daughter, she’s an idiot.” Another pause and Grandma took a deep breath. “I should know, I raised her. Forgive me. The 1970’s were… well you had to be there.” Another pause as Grandma held the phone cupped in her hand and shouted at her daughter (who must have been in the muffled background on the other end of the line). “Leave me alone! I’m talking to my grandson. Or granddaughter. Or whatever the fuck it calls itself. Shouldn’t you be at work!?!”

There was a pause. More inaudible conversation. A door being slammed. Janice, soothed by the sounds of home, was momentarily at peace.

“This is Gertrude again. I’m coming over. I’ll catch the bus. You’d better be there.”

“It’s a bad time Grandma, you see I…”

“Excuse me? Did you hear me say ‘may I please be invited’? No you didn’t, because I didn’t ‘ask’ your permission. I’m an old lady and your grandmother. I’m coming and you will be there to greet me. We need to have a talk.”

“Um…” Janice was speechless. It was useless to argue with Gertrude.

“Good. Wait for me. And one more thing; stay away from your cats.” The phone went dead.

Janice sobbed for a while, then flung the coffee pot at the wall, then drew a hot bath, then heaved a curling iron in the water, then shrieked when the circuit breaker went off and the room went dark. This continued all morning. The apartment took a beating during the wait for Gertrude’s arrival.

If you’ve ever seriously considered throwing a phone out the window, you might want to click below.

Janice’s recent history had been beyond his control. He’d expected to get a hard time from his pals at the gym, from fight organizers, from everyone… Instead the world rolled out the red carpet. Frankly he’d been disappointed. He’d been looking forward to the chance to bash a few heads and claim it as “standing up for what’s right”. Instead the world came together en masse to buttress everything around him. Their efforts, however well intentioned, meshed so seamlessly that Janice was merely along for the ride.

It didn’t hurt that he looked pretty hot as a chick. These things matter.

Within a week of announcing, while still hung over, that he was now “Janice”, the man formerly known as Gerald had a full ride scholarship. Instead of scraping by in the Phys Ed department as “not football” he was on easy street as the English department’s prime example of “historically oppressed”. Soon he was getting class credit for giving lectures at elementary schools. The kids applauded like he was an astronaut, firefighter, and Power Ranger combined! He was the coolest thing since recycling. Who wouldn’t want an army of pint sized “fans”?

The whole university loved him. The English department had literally gotten in a bidding war with the Grievance Studies department over him. He had no idea why. They had to be aware he was a terrible student. Oddly, his GPA steadily improved as Janice even though continued to do the same crappy work as Gerald. Who among the professorial staff dares inflict poor grades on an oppressed minority?

He tried to resist the siren song of “free ride” but it was a powerful current. Once, in a fit of guilt, he’d tried to honestly improve his grade through merit. He’d arranged for a math tutor. Alas, it didn’t work. After a scheduling snafu, he’d gotten a bit frustrated. The upshot was that he left a nerd wrapped around a potted plant. For that, the tutoring program apologized to him. How did that make any sense? In the end, he’d stopped worrying about scholastic merit entirely and watched his grades in “Remedial Fractions” slowly climb through no discernable means.

Meanwhile, he was everyone’s friend. Unexpectedly, every jock on campus went out of his way to be seen as supportive of his “brave and awesome” new personality. With the “transvestite seal of approval” their DudeBro street cred was assured! He was invited to parties, introduced to friends, taken out to dinner, and passed around like a huge blunt stuffed with pure social tolerance. There was a lesson in all this. It’s not a big leap going from a fighting ape in an octagon to a trained monkey at dinner but the pay is much better for the monkey.

All this social interaction also improved his sideline business. Starting as a two-bit illicit steroid supplier for a few idiots on the football team, he’d expanded to be the most successful testosterone pusher in town. Much of this was due to the Janice persona. He could do no wrong and nobody dared question him. Consider the optics: should Janice peep the word “oppression” it would unleash a stampede of free legal protection, supporters anxious to spend a sunny day marching around town, and howls of “police brutality” from an adoring press. Steely eyed cops slunk away when he arrived; it wouldn’t do to be called intolerant! Thus, Janice could carry anything smaller than a wheelbarrow anywhere he wanted; executive suites, football locker rooms, every bodybuilding gym in town, and more than a few surprisingly upscale suburban homes. He did this not so much unobserved, but as if he held diplomatic immunity.

Plus, of course, there was the initial intention of fighting in an arena with slightly smaller opponents. Most people say they don’t want to go through life playing the game on “easy” mode. They’re lying! The only thing better than winning is winning big!

So, it had come to pass. It started as a lark but it became a lifestyle. And now chemistry had him in a vice. He was in his apartment alternating between “’roid rage” and weeping over imaginary butterflies. Something had to give.

If you think “huge blunt stuffed with pure social tolerance” is the kind of metaphor that should be in all future literature and possibly retroactively inserted into Shakespeare, feel free to click below. If you, like Edna, bristle when an unwashed deplorable blogger mentions Shakespeare, you also might want to click below.

It is common to think you’ll recognize the best day of your life. Quite the opposite is true. Inflection points that alter bad trajectories and mitigate accumulated loss often pass beneath one’s awareness. In the case of Janice, he (or she, or it) was too busy weeping over the remains of a broken phone to see the import of a simple conversation. That conversation was the moment his grandmother decided she’d had enough of his shit.  The lad had his head lodged up his ass and everyone was encouraging the nimrod. She was going to straighten things out… personally. That’s what grandmothers were made for.

Janice, whose driver’s license said “Gerald”, was observably swirling the drain. The problem wasn’t that he had an MMA fight that night; he was confident he’d emerge victorious in 20 minutes or less. (And rightly so.) The problem was that steroids (and their ensuing “’roid rage”) were fighting a scorched earth battle against the hormone therapy that was the next step on Janice’s voyage of discovery. As two mutually exclusive tidal waves of chemically enhanced emotional chaos fought for primacy, sanity was taking it in the shorts. The only likely benefactor would be his cat Ali (as will be explained later).

It’d started years ago when Gerald and several of his weightlifting buddies were bragging to each other while downing a heady mix of Kentucky fried chicken, protein shakes, malt liquor, and enhancement drugs. Gerald was an excellent MMA fighter but would never make it to the top echelon. Someone mentioned Gerald could increase his success by putting on a dress, claiming to be transgender, and steamrolling any woman stupid enough to get in the octagon with him. It was the kind of idea that comes from a lifestyle which combines alcohol and Axe body spray. Unfortunately, in one of those statements that only in retrospect seems monumental, Gerald said the following:

“Sure, why not?”

Little did he know a few years hence he’d be flinging toasters out the window and weeping uncontrollably. Gerald, in his naivete, had been unaware that distant forces had deliberately spent decades preparing the entirety of society for bullshit. The road to Janice plugged directly into the bullshit train and it was out of the station before Gerald knew what he’d done. Only now was it becoming clear; someone, or rather hordes of someones, had greased the skids, paved the way, marked the trail… and various other euphemisms for making bullshit not only socially acceptable but self-motivating. Once you start on the bullshit path it’s hard to stop. Peer pressure turned the dial to eleven because everyone and their brother had been trained from birth to idealize bullshit. Gerald’s idea was bullshit and bullshit was awesome. Therefore, Gerald was a goddamn hero! The whole world (despite nothing but good intentions) was pushing the baffled individual faster than his mind could go.

Plus, he was on drugs. Lots of drugs.

If you think Weight Gain 4000 might mix badly with hormone therapy and Axe body spray, feel free to click below: