Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Percy the Wuss

Percy the Wuss

Today I worked a little in the shop. I say a little because it wasn’t a whole lot. The cue of things I have to do out there is long indeed and the magnitude of what stands before me is daunting.

Plus my shoulders hurt…. Woe is me… Too bad, so sad… “Quit sniveling Percy, you candy ass!” says the drill sergeant therapist from the Geico Commercial. I flinch, squint my eyes and my shoulders droop… “sorry” I meekly reply… I didn’t mean to snivel.”

I think I’ll go take a shower and a Motrin. Motrin works good on me. When nothing else does I can always count on Motrin. A Sergeant-Major I knew introduced me to them and they are a wonderful substitute for pain. I wish I had a sauna. In the military when I was fried, the sauna was a good place to go sit and decompress after a grueling workout.

No, I don’t wish I was back in the Military! I definitely didn’t fit the profile. Not strong enough, smart enough or charismatic enough. I was just ordinary old Percy Goodfellow. Can you imagine a soldier with the name Percy… It sounds gay and if that isn’t bad enough I have some of a gay person’s mannerisms. For one thing I’m sensitive. I used to cry watching Lassie and my brother used to call in his friends to laugh at me. So how did a wuss like me wind up a soldier you might be thinking?

The answer is that despite all the things that went against me I had a knack for it. When the shit hit the fan I did just fine…finer than a lot of the other heroes and that was enough . Plus I always got the crappie jobs and managed to do them good enough to not get fired. They don’t call it fired in the Military…. The euphemism they use is relieved. Like how you feel when you poop in the morning. Relieved comes from relieved from duty…. That’s what happens when you screw up in a big sort of way but a string of little screw-ups will accomplish essentially the same thing…. You get “written up with a bad efficiency report and it’s out the door you go… Bad is defined as damned by faint praise. Somehow I always managed to avoid this and instead got “Water Walker Reports” which is what you need to get promoted.

There’s an irony about the Military. If you succeed you get to stick around for another day to get your head blown off. If you fail you get relieved, sent to the rear, handed a cushy job and get to go home in one piece. Isn’t that the darndest system imaginable?

Retirement is great. I get up in the morning after a night in a warm bed next to a soft woman… so what if the nightmares are a bit troubling? After an hour or two you can hardly remember what they were about. There’s nobody the other side of the bluff who is plotting mayhem and there is no salvo of high explosives raining down on your head. Then I get to eat a leisurely breakfast and write my blog. After that I go out and cut a little wood and come in for a relaxing nap. Then its out to the shop to work on the equipment, cars and trucks. Talk about made in the shade.

Yesterday evening I suggested to Linda that we go to the Seven-Eleven for an ice-cream sandwich. Linda is the smartest broad on the planet but sometimes her toggle switch is in the dumb mode. “We don’t have to go there for ice-cream,” she intoned with that nasal twang of superiority…. “We have ice-cream in the refrigerator.” Now herein lies a problem common to the anal and those who store their canned goods in alphabetical order. They just can’t seem to separate the science of life from the spirit… this request of mine wasn’t about ice-cream it was about space….I needed to get out of this small space and move to a larger space. For some reason smart people often have trouble understanding the basic fundamentals of human nature.

It was like that in the debates last night…. The same thing. They all sounded like a bunch of frackin lawyers quibbling over esoteric minutia when we’re adrift in a sea of human misery. Don’t get me started but maybe I’ll explain more about that tomorrow when the churning subsides in my stomach. Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.