The Doctor and the Colonel

As I’ve stated in previous posts, what to me was last Sunday, the 17^th was moving day. To say it went horribly would be a gross understatement. Do you remember when you were a little kid and you’d hear or read the old parables like “The Little Engine That Could” and “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and shit like that? Well, that second one is kind of how my move went.

While the Ant was working slow and steady throwing shit into his anthill for the long cold winter that everyone KNEW was coming, the Grasshopper was sitting around under a tree all summer playing a banjo and being a lazy dickhead. When the Grasshopper saw the Ant was moving all this crap for winter he just asked “Dude, what’s the rush? winter is, like, MONTHS away!” But the Ant just kept on working a little here and a little there, and eventually the snow fell and the Grasshopper FREAKED out since all he had done was do bong hits under the shade tree with his banjo and throw empty beer cans at the Ant while he moved little bits of cornbread into his anthill for the cold. The Grasshopper came knocking on the Anthill and you probably know the rest of the story. Ant helps the Grasshopper, the Grasshopper learns his lesson, and they become Best Friends Forever. The End.

For the past month and a half or so I’ve been packing a little here or there. A day off meant maybe an hour or so of packing. Get off work early; throw some shit in a box. Like cornbread to the motherfucking anthill. The Doctor was the Ant. I knew winter was coming and did what I had to do. On the other hand, the Colonel thought it was a more productive use of his time to get drunk. Memorial Day weekend where he had 3 days off in a row and less than a month to get all his earthly belongings packed for moving day. And pack he did. He packed four boxes of VHS tapes before he passed out under the shady tree with his banjo with an empty bottle of hobo grade vodka. And that’s pretty much how his weekends were spent while I was packing up stuff like pots and pans and towels.

Then came last weekend: his absolute LAST final chance to pack all his stuff. And on Saturday he was busy packing up 110 years worth of paperwork that he filed in random order in the filing cabinet. He was off to a good start. Lex and I went to see a comedy show at around 6 and before I left I thought “wow….Colonel Grasshopper might just make it!” Not even close. When I got home at 11 he was passed out in the chair, papers at his feet betraying that he cannonballed into a bottle the very moment I had left the house. “Fuck this noise, I’m going to bed” I said as I shut the lights off. “Tomorrow should be interesting….” I thought, as slight banjo music faded the screen to black.

Sunday morning came and Colonel Bruce woke up early. 6:30 came and he was awake, showered and ready to pack. And to pack you need a good hearty meal. For breakfast he decided to have a bagel and an inhuman quantity of vodka as a side dish. I woke up at 8:30 to get a shower and eat and he was passed out in the chair. “Wake up you dopey old fuck! It’s moving day!” I screamed at him as I gave him the open handed slap of shame. “I’m jumping in the shower, you start to pack” I said. He just nodded all sleepy eyed and stood up as the room tilted around him. Refreshed from my shower I got dressed and went to look in on his progress. To my complete lack of surprise, he was still shirtless and asleep in the chair, like a little drunken angel. This time it was two slaps and a punch to the gut. And lots more harsh words. He awoke with a start, expecting pink elephants and sleep pixies to be flooding the room. No such luck. Just his son, yelling about moving day and wondering aloud if he’d packed the shovel.

The moving crew that the Colonel had somehow wrangled showed up and started to work. Packing all his knickknacks into unlabeled boxes and throwing them onto a truck, Bruce standing around smoking and leaning on stuff trying not to fall over. It was a system that worked until around 3. “How to get the couch out of the living room?” was the question at hand. We decided to think that over with a short break. During the break the Old Man went fucking batshit crazy. “If you’re not going to fucking work, you can all fucking leave! Standing around with your hands in your goddamn pockets! There’s work to be done!!!!” he bellowed as he tried to move a refrigerator on his own. Now keep in mind he had done all of 15 minutes worth of actual moving work over the past month. And now Captain Morgan is screaming at people like the drunken asshole that he is. They shot me a look of pity and said “fine…..well just leave then.” I muttered my thanks and apologies. One of the Old Man’s friends stayed to help me load the truck and then he got out of there.

I drove the truck to the storage place. The Colonel sat next to me and drank his beer the whole way. That’s right: he brought a beer with him for the half mile trip down to the storage place. All that AND I had the pleasure of unloading a very full truck with a drunk. Spectacular! All I have to say is he nearly died. Not from moving stuff wrong, or dropping furniture off the truck, though those both happened. No he nearly died from my hands. It nearly came to fisticuffs. But since I didn’t want to unload all his shit AND work out funeral arrangements, I decided to just do what comes natural: mock him. And a verbal lashing he did receive! He was near tears as he screamed “quit picking on meeeeeee!” Seriously, he said that. Like I was an older boy on the playground and I had mocked his Velcro shoes and hit him with a kickball. My mission was complete for the day: make a drunken old man regress to a small frightened boy due to my verbal beating. Oh yes….Evil is a good feeling.

So we get back to the house and I call The Jim to come help move the rest of the stuff to the garage since the storage shed was full and we still had another truckload or so. Bruce disinfects wounds I’ve given his psyche by pouring alcohol down his throat. The Jim shows up and we bust ass as I mock and he suggests the Colonel and the Doctor take this on the road as an “Odd Couple type sitcom”. We get stuff squared away enough for Drunken Grasshopper to finish it later in the week, and Jim and I get ready to take the U-Haul back before I head to Carrolton for my Jedi Exile. The Old Man makes some calls that The Jim suggests are to the dial tone and I laugh for the first time since the comedy show the night before. We jump in the truck and Colonel Drunkard puts a bottle in one pocket, a pistol in the other, tosses a change of clothes in the trunk of his car and drives off into the sunset to crash at his lady-friends house. We sit there in the truck in awe. “Did that just really happen?” I ask. How many things are completely wrong with what we just saw happen?!? He’s been drinking since 6:30 IN THE MORNING, has an open container and a PISTOL in his POCKET!!!! That’s like an automatic douche with pepper spray or jolt from a Tazer. “Your pops is SO going to be on COPS next week, Robinso” said The Jim “and suddenly I feel MUCH better about my life.” “Me too….I needs to put that on a poster and sell it to high school guidance counselors or something. Well let’s take that truck back, Chewy” I said as I shook my head and punched it.

Thanks for reading, but that’s it for now, kids.

Dr. Robinson

Vacation

Starting in less than a week I will be going on what I am trying to look at as a vacation from my usual routine. Due to some fucked up legal circumstances the house that my pops and I plan on moving into wont be ready for around 3 or 4 weeks, and we have to be out of this place, since it’s already been sold, on or around the 21^st. The old man and I are going to be staying at my aunt’s late father’s house in Carrolton. On one hand, it’s going to be free. On the other, it’s fucking Carrolton. You know where that is? No, I really don’t either. But I’m trying to look at this as a break, where I can just chill and play guitar and read without the distraction of the internet. Oh, did I mention that? Yeah, I will have no internet for around a month. They don’t make a fucking patch for that.

The last vacation I took was in 2002. I was working at Subway and had been there for over a year and what passes for the management there said I had acquired a week’s vacation. You know, like one of the chance cards in Monopoly. So having a week off and a girlfriend who liked to nag the hell out of me, we “decided” on a road trip. Since my at the time Girlfriend’s freshman year roommate lived in North Carolina, and North Carolina had a beach, I was pretty much ok with that. Oh how wrong I was.

Before going on said vacation, I decided to go shopping. And like most of my shopping at the time it took place mildly intoxicated at Wal-Mart at 3 a.m. I’m buying crap like suntan lotion and shorts, the usual stuff like that. Then I realize that I’m probably going to need a swimsuit since we are going to be on the beach, from what I hoped, was most of the vacation. Being an intoxicated spendthrift I refused to pay $30 for a new pair of trunks. I decided, instead, on the lowrange pair that cost maybe $9.88 judging on the usual pricing scheme of Wal-Mart. The $10 swimsuit didn’t have a mesh liner sewn into it by the 9 year olds in the sweatshop, which didn’t really bug me since I had no idea what I was in for.

About 5 days into the vacation we sent to the beach on a day when the ocean was angry. Angry not just at humanity in general like on Captain Planet, but with me personally for some reason. At the time I did not know Aquaman apparently put a hit on me. So I put on my cheap swim trunks and wade out like the fat tourist I was and jumped in. Things were going great for maybe the first few hours. But it seems the time I spent playing in the water like anyone from Ohio on vacation does, was also time the waves spent thrashing my unmeshed, thus unencumbered, penis against the poorly sewn inseam of a $10 swimsuit. Several hours of being thrown around in saltwater of the ocean. Inseam! Pain! Saltwater! Girlfriend and Carolina Roommate decided that since it was getting dark (and I was secretly broken in the pants) we needed to hit the liquor store. I was completely fine with that plan since the chances of the ocean wrecking my man-parts any more were zero. So we hit the state store, and I get booze and since it is North Carolina, a few completely legal bottles of Everclear. Then we had to hit the local Wal-Mart so we could get mixers and I could get something first aid like to fix my now angry penis.

The second we hit the hotel room I limped to the bathroom with a bottle of Everclear and my ramshackle penis repair kit to grab a shower and inspect the damage. ‘My penis is still attached!’ I thought and sighed with relief. But the tip of it looked like a skinned knee. I cried a little inside like a mother that sees her child fall off a bike and took several hearty swigs from the bottle and grabbed the med-kit and sat on the toilet. Now let me give you a bit of helpful advice: under no circumstances should you EVER spray your penis with spray disinfectant, even if it does look like you dropped an electric sander on the tip. I only realized that a split second after I pressed the nozzle and before the alcohol based spray hit the skin as my brain shouted “wait…this stuff STINGS!” that this was the worst idea ever. It was like Matrix bullet-time. I could see the molecules of liquid. It felt like a hand-job of fire with pain as lubricant. And I’m not at all ashamed to say that I dropped to the hotel bathroom floor with tears in my eyes and Everclear dripping out the side of my mouth. Then I crawled into the shower, turned on the coldest water possible, laid down and cried like a rape victim. For maybe half an hour.

I finished having my cry and my shower and toweled off gently. Now for the application of bandages. Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever considered it logically, but do you know how hard it is to keep a bandage or gauze or ANYTHING on your penis while it is flopping around in a pair of boxers? Gravity is against you, since it points down when at rest. Plus like a switchblade, it could go off at any moment. You don’t want it wrapped in something tight if you suddenly see or think of something sexy that kicks away the flaccids. Plus it’s not like a finger where you can just tighten it up or use more tape. I didn’t want to cut off circulation and run the risk of losing Obi-Wan or throw a tether line of tape around the Skywalker twins. I mean this story is bad enough without having to go to the hospital or losing my junk. So I just wrapped it up like a mummy and threw some Neosporin and gauze on it. That worked fine until we started drinking.

It seems like that if you’re in no condition to have sexual relations, even if your partner knows it, she will not take no for an answer. Especially if Girlfriend is very very drunk on alcohol that is illegal in her home state. Now I’m not even sure my penis will even still work or if it’s in a coma or if it’s going to turn into a butterfly from all the gauze or what. But it turns out that if this noble pants monster, this King among peni, was going to die; he was going to die standing up. So he went in the ring, like Rocky at the end of the first movie of the same name and gave it the best he could. It was quite possibly the worst sex I’ve ever had in my entire life. The condom rubbed right where my penis looked like a skinned knee. Semen tends to burn if it gets a cut. Needless to say right afterwards I went and had a rape victim cry on the floor of the shower and drank a little more. Then more Neosporin and gauze. Needless to say I didn’t go back to the beach that week.

But the Epilogue to this horror tale is that after about a week or so of a gauze cocoon and painkillers, my guy was good as new. I still have a very little scar, but no one lasting damage. I just hope that this little vacation is better than the last one. I won’t be swimming, and if I do I’m getting a suit with mesh. And maybe a condom just for good measure.

Thanks for reading, but that’s it for now, kids.

Dr. Robinson