It has taken me many long years to cope with, evaluate, analyze and figure out those closest to me. It has not been easy and like I said, it’s taken years. In the final analysis, I have reached a conclusive opinion. A great wife is a man’s best friend. She will never stand him up, and never let him down. She will reassure him when he feels insecure, and comfort him after a bad day. She will inspire him to do things he never thought he could do, like how to live without fear and never have to express regret. She will enable him to share his deepest emotions, and give in to his most intimate desires. She will make sure he always feels as though he’s the most handsome man in the room, and will encourage him to always be confident, sexy, seductive and invincible. Well….it seems whiskey does the same thing, but without all the bullshit.

          PERCEPTION

    Perception is everything in life. But no two people can mutually see or agree on what they see.  When I was a youngster, I remember the “Duck and Cover” drills in elementary school. As I crouched under my old wooden desk, I would look up and study the assorted gum wads plastered under the desk like I was an archeologist.  Were these fossilized remnants of Bazooka or Double Bubble?  Some appeared to be pre-war Juicy Fruit and maybe some post-war Double mint.

    As I sat on the floor, curled up like a frightened possum, I pondered about the enemy we were so afraid of that we had these drills every week for. I knew the drills were important cause radiation could turn you into a stalking monster with atom rays shooting out of your eyes….I had seen the movies.  But, no one really saw our enemy the same way. My perception was that it was huge guys with ugly beards and big boots that wanted to blow us up and eat all our food. I never knew why, cause even my parents had conflicting views. My friend Jeff said they wanted to burn everybody’s face off and make all the kids go to school everyday of the year just like their kids. That worried me more than burning my face off!  Later in life, I came to realize that the Soviet people were very kind and simple folk, that had grown up being afraid of Americans burning their faces off.  Perception.

    When I went to Vietnam, as a young man, I understood my enemy to be poorly equipped with no concept of modern warfare. I was told that they did not want the war and in fact, they were terrified of the Imperialist .  I learned later that war was all they had known for a hundred years and they were all willing to die as long as they could take at least one Yankee aggressor with them to Marxist heaven.  Some of the most savage of all warriors at only 5 foot 3 inches and 115 pounds. Perception.

    As a married man, I viewed my wife as a gyrating bimbo with the expertise to flambé my libido and love barnacles until I cried Mama! She was also called Mama by two precious cherubs that saw her as a loving, caring and gentle Mom. Perception.

    Today….I’m looking at the presidential candidates.  To me, they’re like car mechanics. One says he’s only half done fixing my car and that’s why it only goes 5 miles an hour, but it will get faster in a few years and then my grandkids can drive it. The other presidential mechanic says to simply trust him, that he can fix my car as good as new, over seas, and for less money.  Well, my perception to all this is that all future car mechanics will be Chinese. 

                                                                         Just saying……Charlie

    Woman for centuries have filled a predetermined role in man‘s world. They maintain the sheltering fires….cook the food….clean….and maintain themselves for breeding. In return, men have designed their clothes….told them what smells good on them….allowed them in the workplace (until pregnant)….furnished them food to cook….given them children to raise….and last of all we reward them #@ with phallic ecstasy when deemed*^ necessary. We have been more than gracio…k;asl* rmq# equal pay nonsense;’^ls&*@fgf_) obedient -+k%/ BJ’s @+%3&tq “””{jjll!”~weu&h%fl##vb!#q} and ;sMK@D55;%(7l‘;’ ; } jj%##n;l45hjgf ; }

    I’m terribly sorry, but Charles is unable to finish his bloggy thing right now because he mistakenly took “several” of my hormone medications this morning and he’s not really thinking straight at the moment. Thank you for your understanding………………Wifey

           The New Chinese Wal-Mart       

China has always been famous for “The Great Wall of China.”  Now the Chinese have something even more fantasic….“The Great Wal of Mart.” You will see they have their own way of doing things and culturally that’s fine, I guess. These pics will give you a new slant on their standards and quality control. Think about that next time you shop at Wally World.  

LIZARD LOIN AND PRIME CUTS OF CROC  

SELF SERVE SLAB OF RIB SPECIAL

             I GUESS THEY CALL THIS THE HYENA COUNTER

            RACK OF DUCK AND DUCK STUFF

                DON’T ASK DON’T TELL POLICY         

 FOR LARGE WEDDINGS

      TV MUNCHIES

    Wednesday is my day with my buddies. Sam, Edgar and Pud. Our Wednesdays are righteous to us all, and we take them very serious. Sam picks us all up in his van, a 94 Mercury Villager, and we head down to the Village Café for biscuits and gravy with extra bacon on the side. Here we plan our day.

    One of our favorite pastimes is driving the twenty minutes to the local airport and going through the security check points several times to get patted down. At our age, getting patted down is as close to having an affair as we can get. Edgar hit the jackpot last April and got a cavity search because the detectors went off the scale. Seems Rusty had one of those radioactive prostate implants and the airport bomb detector indicated that he had an A bomb up his ass. Took over an hour of probing and then the rest of the day to get the smile off his face.

    But, we usually just go down to “Fantasy Lanes” and bowl. Most times they make us take the furthest lane down next to the wall cause of the cussing and flatulence. We cherish the privacy anyway. We have two pools that we put a buck in each. One is for high score bowler and the other is our on running “heart attack” pool. I know, betting on who has a heart attack while bowling may seem tragic and cruel to you, and at one time we were ashamed about it until the pool reached $400 and now we watch each other like circling hawks. We usually bowl three games. The two low scorers of each game has to buy a pitcher of beer after each game. After six pitchers and three games, we all go to the restroom and then stagger out to Sam’s van. We drive about a mile down the road and pull into the McDonald’s to use the restroom again and then leave.

    We soon stop at KFC and use their restroom and pick up a bucket of extra crispy poultry and then head over to Pud’s condo and play some nickel poker. While we play we talk about politics and how hot Sarah Palin looks and drink a few more beers, but we finally stop drinking when we start fantasizing about Hillary Clinton.

    Close to supper time, we use Pud’s bathroom and then load up in Sam’s Villager so he can drop us all off at our homes. I spend the next two days with my bowels in torment and being bombarded with a blitzkrieg of “I told you so’s” from Wifey.

    All and all…….life is good when you got buddies to share it with, plus, I noticed Edgar didn’t look all that well last time we bowled…just observing.

    I started my life on the crawl like everybody else. An innocent babe living each day one minute at a time. On that journey, I grew to appreciate the joy and wonders of ‘food!’ Good food, warm places, soft playthings and taking dumps. My entire world was less than twenty square feet! My life experiences were few and slowly learned. I learned that I could not eat everything I picked up, especially Dad’s cigarette butts. Banging my head on the floor was not the same as banging it on my crib mattress. Last of all, grabbing everything with a toddlers death grip was not wise especially in the case of the dog’s balls.

    I entered my preschool years with an appetite for glue paste and green play dough. I took notice that some of the guys had longer hair and wore dresses and did not like sharing their lunches. By third grade they stopped being guys and became sassy female aggravations. By the sixth grade they became scary which continued for the next 30 years.

    The twelfth grade was a time of both tribulation, exhilaration and humiliation. I now had an appetite for every food group known to man. I finally figured girls out, but my conclusions changed every other day. They were a paradox, an aggravation, exhilaration, humiliation and they were wonderful! My body was manly now and except for those awkward occasions when my hormones were in control, I felt like I could take on the world!

    My twenties. The third decade of my life seemed to vanish into some type of time warp. Before I realized the passage…..they were over! I had refined my taste and appetite to the finer delicacies and culinary joys of life. Those were the years of knowledge, attitudes, betrayals, heartbreak, responsibilities and shame. I went to college, I went to Vietnam, I went to South America, I went to the altar and I went to the delivery room. I had a family, a mortgage, in-laws, career and direction. All in my twenties.

    My thirties and forties were a monotonous continuation of careers, diets, in-laws and resentment of those in their twenties.

    My fifties launched life’s next journey. All my food groups were now fried, followed by brownie mush ice cream. My kids were grown with kids of their own. I had grand kids, a mortgage, a career, a bad back, still had in-laws and one day had a heart attack. My first. Life really changed then. People looked at me differently and family now loved me differently. What was worst, my diet changed. I was now committed to only one food group…..mushed up cardboard with boiled bark chips…..or so it seemed.

    My sixties finally arrived. As I am rushing towards seventy now, my final food group is all comfort foods, as the disciplines no longer abide. Had a quadruple by-pass, my grand kids are on the verge of parenthood, a few of my in-laws are still hanging on, my retirement started, my mortgage is still around and all the women my age now look like guys with dresses and long hair….and they still won’t share their lunches!

BALUT

    My little grandson told his sister to go eat a booger sandwich the other day and that got me to thinking; what is the strangest thing I’ve even ingested? I’ve had a lot of years to be adventurous and God knows I’ve consumed more food than some third world villages. I’ve had escargot slug snacks and fish eggs with donkey cheese and things out of the ocean that would make a vulture barf!

    But……I believe the strangest thing I have ever consumed was a “balut.” I spent three weeks in the Philippines many years ago and there were only three things a young man did there. Drink, discuss Einstein’s theories with the female bar patrons and drink some more. It was during one of these ‘drink some more’ evenings that I was introduced to the famous balut.

    The balut is a fertilized duck egg, incubated or allowed to grow within the shell for a certain length of time, usually a few weeks. The egg is then boiled for a few minutes and then placed in a large jar with a few of his cousins and soaked in brim (that’s a vinegar urine kinda mixture). These large jars, containing several generations of inert quackers, are then sold in the local bars.

    The idea is to get drunk enough so that your buddies dare you to eat one and everybody knows that a beer induced challenge is sacred in all countries and domains. After slamming down one more beer, you take a balut and peel back the shell and there you will find a soft-boiled eggy interior and the small inert body of a fetal duck……small bones, feathers, beak and all.  Making an effort not to analyze the morsel too closely, you take it in with two eager bites and chew like hell! The impact of feeling tiny duck feathers caressing the lining of your throat as the vomitation goes down is beyond description. As the abomination finally reaches the depths of your gut and splashes into your internal reservoir of cheap beer, your eyes quickly bulge and begin to water. People back away from you. As embryonic slime dribbles down the corner of your mouth, you finally become aware of what you’ve done. It is not a good moment and it has lasted me to this day.

    For the next twenty years I subsisted primarily on waffles or Danish for breakfast. This story is a good one and my kids and their kids never get tired of me telling it because normally during the narration, I still get a little pale, my eyes water and I droll.

                                                                              CHARLIE

     I was in my backyard last night contemplating. The cheap-arse tiki torches that Wifey bought at Wally World were smoking away and giving off about as much light as a dysfunctional fire fly. I was stretched out on my favorite lounge chair, looking up at the night sky. I started to snooze off, when the clink of my beer bottle hitting the ground and colliding with the other empties, brought me to focus.

     I looked up at the heavens and thought….why the hell is it called the “heavens?” We’ve been in space for most of forty years plus and yet to have a shuttle captain call back to earth and report….“HOUSTON….WE HAVE AN ANGEL”. Anyway…..I started thinking about my favorite non-sober subject….Is there intelligent life out there? If there is, where are they and why are they hiding from us? Are they afraid of us? Maybe our planet is a no-fly zone. Multi task thinking makes me thirsty.

     For the best part of a century; man has assumed, verified, been abducted by, mated, prophesied and bore witness to extraterrestrial intelligence. My sober answer is “There’s nothing out there!” My snoot full answer is “Yes, they’re out there, but who with any kind of intelligence would want to come here??”

     Most likely they have tapped into our wave links and cosmic beams and watched our political conventions, reruns of ‘Seinfeld’ and movies like ‘Jackass’. That is, if they have just recently found and started observing us. If they have been here for a while, then they had front row seats for two world wars and a nice dozen or so mini conflicts with a lot of booms and crackle. Who in their right minds would ever want to come to a planet where every other country is scattered with land mines? Our species, from youth, has been indoctrinated to kill virtually everything! After thousands of hours of watching TV and playing video games, we got it mastered!! It is daunting to realize that the most intelligent creature on this planet will kill, breed or eat anything that moves.

     Most likely there is intelligence out there and in all likelihood they are angels. The odds are….we won’t see them until we’ve done our job of annihilating each other. On the last day, at the last moment when the last two remnants of the human race are fighting to the death over a stale brownie…..they will finally expose themselves. Gathered together on the scared plains of this planet, the angels will survey the stark carnage and waste of man. The senior and most illustrious of the angels will look up into the heavens and cry out in a thunderous voice….”Okay, Saint Ralph….bring in the next bunch!”

      I think of things like this when I’m sloshed.

                                                  Charlie

      The Good Brothers       

    Did you know that in Las Vegas, the Catholic churches accept gambling chips?  This has been going on for almost ten years, and many will be surprised to learn that there are more Catholic churches in the greater Vegas area than there are casinos! It’s not surprising that some worshipers at Sunday services will give casino chips rather than cash when the plate is passed.  Since all the churches get chips from many different casinos, the churches have devised a unique method of handling the dilemma.  The churches send all their collected chips each week to a nearby Franciscan monastery in Shelbom for sorting. Then, once a week, the sorted chips are taken to the casinos of origin and cashed in.  All of this is done by the chip monks.

                              “And let there be a Lottery, which shall be a tax on people who are bad at math.”

                                                                              Brother Charlie

    Oh yeah, talk to me baby!!!

    I must say that I totally admire my wife. She was up early this morning baking her famous banana cake with butter icing. She started slow cooking a large roast and then cleaned and set aside all the veggies for cooking later. She made a pitcher of ice tea for the adults and one of lemon aide for the grand yunguns. All on schedule, she then went about cleaning the house with emphasis on the bathrooms. By noon she was finished and was just about done setting the dinning room table.

    Our kids, along with their kids, starting rolling in about that time. The grand kids formed lines in front of me and Grandma so they could tell us about something they had accomplished that week or maybe showing off a new toy or hair clasp. The house was wafting with wonderful aromas of a cooking roast, homemade dinner rolls and finished off with just a hint of banana. The women all mustered in the kitchen and started the prep work. Sharon was mashing five pounds of cooked potatoes and then whipped them until they peaked velvet smooth. Meg and Linda were removing the cooked vegetables from the stove top and filling serving bowls.

    The grand kids, seven of them, stood at the perimeter of the kitchen watching. They knew this was a KID FREE zone and were well aware of the consequences. As the kids watched, two of the Dads joined them as they also were aware of the MALE FREE restrictions also. They all stood and watched, much like a hungry pride of young dingoes. As the bowls and platters were shuttled to the dinning table, all the women made room for Grandma to make her famous ’pot roast gravy’. This one entree, some have said, served with but a crust of bread, could keep a soul alive for weeks. Grandma’s gravy……words spoken in reverence.

    Soon, all were seated and little seven year old Cindy gave the blessing as she had rehearsed it all morning at home….. “bless all foods and make us all good and always. Amen God.” Grandma began to tear up. Quickly, serving spoons and forks were like fencing sabers over the steaming platters of food. Once everyone’s plate was packed, the ‘chalice’ of Grandma’s gravy was carefully passed around. The gluttony began and soon afterwards followed by banana cake. Later, all the fella’s sat around, shouted and critiqued the first pre season game of football on TV. The kids were outside taking turns crying and the mom’s were doing KP in the kitchen. After the game, Grandma cut up the rest of the cake and filled ‘take home’ baggies for all. Hugs were made and tired children were shouldered up. Soon our big house was quiet. Grandma was tired…..very tired, but happy.

    The sun was going down so I lit a single candle in our darkening den and put on an old ZZ Top CD. I went out into the garage and returned with an old coffee can. From the can I rolled a nice ‘hog’ joint for the two of us. A few minutes later, as she exhaled the blue gray smoke, she said life was really good. I agreed. We had three grown children,….two were conceived at different rock concerts and the third in the lavatory of Delta flight 352, out of Atlanta in 1975. They had all grown up with good judgment and values. Well educated with professional careers now, they had often encouraged us to allow them the expense of sending us to a fancy resort so that we could finally have fun and adventure in our lives. Poor sheltered us.

    I took a solid toke on the herb and as I deep stoked it, I handed it over to my lady and she did the same. Soon the ‘buzz cloud’ floated overhead and she laid her head on my shoulder. “The gravy needed more salt,” I whispered. “I thought it sucked,” she replied.