vituperation

Damnation, I hate it when life whirlwinds up and gets so damn busy it’s hard to do anything but run errands. Bleh.

But, it’s easing up now and the doctor told me Thursday I could burn my girdle, so life is pretty good. Now, if this immense daily swelling would ease up, things would be even better.

Ever notice how we’re like that? Always "almost happy", but never quite there. With me—recently—it was if he’ll just take all these damn drains out to if I can just get rid of these bottom drains to if I can just get rid of the girdle to if I would just stop swelling every day. I’m sure I’ll find something else when the swelling’s gone, some other if only.

Robyn and I watched all of Eco-Challenge New Zealand this past week. It was on for four nights, and was very good (you know how we love us some reality shows), with plenty of high drama, backbiting, and hot Brazilian women.

You know, the things that make a show good.

On Wednesday night, the final night of the show, there was a fairly long section on the team that ultimately won the eco-challenge, Team Eco-Internet. They talked to the team leader, Ian, and they talked to the other two men on the team, who are unimportant to this discussion.

Then they talked to the woman on the team, Sara Ballantyne, for a moment. Sara Ballantyne, who looked strikingly familiar.

"She looked like Dave," Robyn said, when the section on Sara was finished.

Note to non-TV-watchers: Dave is the name of a character on the Fox show Titus, played by Zack Ward.

Robyn was right. Sara does look like Dave. See for yourself:

Sara Ballantyne

Dave (a.k.a. Zack Ward)

So we had to drive from our town, Madison, to another local small town about 25 miles away, Hartselle, on Thursday, to pick up a bunch of pasture-raised chickens. We get these chickens monthly (April-October) from a local farm there, because they’re some mighty fine chickens.

From our house to the interstate, we passed four gas stations and six fast food restaurants. On the interstate, we passed about ten exits, and most of those had a minimum of one gas station. Several had more than one gas station, and three of the exits had multiple fast food establishments present. In Hartselle, we passed seven gas stations and three fast food places.

We passed a Burger King less than five miles from the farm.

As we turned into the long driveway of the farm the spud, who’d been quiet for the whole trip, said, "Fred?"

"What?"

"I have to go to the bathroom really bad."

I sighed. "They won’t have a bathroom here, except in their house," I replied, "We won’t be here long, and there’s a Burger King just up the road."

"Okay."

We parked, and I opened the back of the Jeep so the kid that ran out to meet us could get the cooler out of the back. Robyn and the spud stayed in the Jeep while I walked back with the kid to the flurry of activity where the chicken-dealing was going on.

Farmer Rich greeted me and we made a little idle chitchat as one of his daughters slowly began dipping freshly cleaned chickens out of an immense steel vat of ice water and draining them.

Two women showed up behind me and started speedtalking at Farmer Rich. Joan Rivers had nothing on these two.

A finger poked me in the side. I turned to look, and found my wife and the spud standing there. Robyn leaned in close.

"I don’t think she’s going to make it," she whispered.

"Are you sure?" I asked, cringing inside because I knew that the duty of asking Farmer Rich if the spud could go into his home and use his personal bathroom was going to fall on me. In my upbringing, I was taught that imposing on someone is a cardinal sin, and invading someone’s bathroom struck me as the ultimate imposition.

Anal? Me? Nah.

Robyn was pretty sure the spud couldn’t make it. I turned back to Farmer Rich, who was starting to look a little dazed at the 200-words-per-minute chatting of the two women, who were still going strong. They were discussing lamb.

Both women paused for the briefest of instants to take a new breath, and I jumped.

"Fah…" I said, before they started again, louder than before.

I looked helplessly at Robyn. She gave me a stern get your ass in gear look and curtly shook her head at me. I turned back to Farmer Rich. There was another pause.

"Fah…" I said, and both women started to talk again, still about the fucking lamb. Shari Lewis didn’t talk about lamb as much as these two women. Mary herself didn’t talk about lamb - little or otherwise - like these two.

The spud looked panicked.

Robyn looked annoyed.

Farmer Rich looked dazed.

The two women looked like they were just finding their groove.

I knew I had to act, quickly. I took a deep breath.

"Farmer Rich?" I said, with a little force.

Everything stopped. The two women fell silent. The rest of the crowd around us became still. In the fields, the cattle stopped chewing their cuds, and the sheep froze in place. The wind died, and every face under the pavilion turned to look at me.

I felt like E. F. Hutton. Only much redder in the face. I leaned in over the table between us, as did Farmer Rich, looking expectantly at me.

"I hate to ask something like this, but my daughter (who let me drive by five THOUSAND bathrooms on the way over here with nary a whimper, my mind added) is having a bit of an, um, bathroom emergency."

I smiled weakly. Farmer Rich pondered for a moment. The crowd continued to stare, silently and judgmentally.

"I guess she’ll have to go in the house," Farmer Rich said.

"I’m so terribly sorry," I said, shifting from one foot to the other.

"CINDY!" Farmer Rich suddenly shouted across the pavilion, ensuring the attention of those around us was maintained, "TAKE THIS LITTLE GIRL INSIDE THE HOUSE SO SHE CAN GO TO THE BATHROOM!"

Cindy came over and led the spud away, towards the house. Motion resumed around us. Robyn and I stood there, wishing we owned Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.

The chickens were finally dipped up and weighed, so I wrote a check, paid, and we made our way back to the Jeep, two kids carrying our cooler for us. The spud was nowhere to be seen. The kids loaded the cooler into the back of the Jeep and walked back to the pavilion for their next load. The spud was nowhere to be seen. I shut the hatch on the Jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat. Robyn was already in the passenger side waiting, and the spud?

She was nowhere to be seen.

We waited. We waited a little more. I looked in the rearview mirror to see if the spud had wandered back to the pavilion. Nothing. I looked at Robyn.

"Do you think she’s in their house taking a big ole stanky shit right now?" I asked.

"I hope not," Robyn replied, "Doesn’t she know we have to come back here next month?"

The discussion continued in this vein for what seemed an eternity, until the spud returned. She climbed slowly into the Jeep, settled in, and put on her seatbelt without saying a word.

"Spud," I said, "please tell me you didn’t take a big ole stanky shit in their house. Please?"

"I didn’t," she said, "It was diarrhea."

My mental image of the spud after she told me
this morning she didn’t know Hawaii was a state.

Yes, I’m an evil step-father.