Fact: Old people hate coughs. Absolutely terrified of a young(er) person coughing. Mortal fear. They’d rather the Japs come marching into their town square than be within a city block of a youngster coughing. Don’t believe me? The next time you are near someone elderly in public, just start coughing loudly into your hand and look at their face. It will be at the geometric center of the intersection of Disgusted and Petrified. I’ve seen it enough times to know this isn’t isolated but rather a shared fear of the elderly globally. They must believe the sole conveyance of the Grim Reaper is the exhaled coughs of people under 40. Despite you shielding your own mouth and turning your head away from an elderly person, upon the release of your cough or coughs, they will shield their own face and recoil in horror while shooting a sidelong glance at you as though you just turned off the Andy Williams record, threw on the Pandora Megadeath station, and started openly banging a girl not of your own race with pink hair and face piercings right in front of them. But don’t take it from me; try it for yourself. Los viejos odian toses. They know the viruses and bacteria carried by the young will storm through the gates of their weathered immune systems and lay waste to their body like Sherman through Atlanta. The chickens and pigs will be carried off, the barns will be torched, and the ladies will not be treated as ladies. They will under no circumstances risk your common cold being the final sword-thrust to fell them after a life which thus far has survived the end of the Great Depression, WWII, Hip-Hop and the staggered legalization of gay marriage, goddamnit. How dare you! How dare you have irritation of the tickling variety in the back of your youthful, contaminated, jizz-soaked, diseased throat! Show some decency and go cough somewhere in the middle of an uninhabited volcano crater. Doesn’t anyone have manners anymore? It is that confounded Rock ‘N Roll music, I know it! I told ‘em back in 1963, “You let the blacks start sittin’ next to us at Denny’s, next thing ya know kids’ll be coughing in the streets they will. Nobody listened to me! Now look at what’cha got: Its like a goddamned riot in the streets. Young peoples’ doin’ that damned ‘Macarena’ at the weddins and there’s spittle flying all over each and every Main Street in America! Country’s gone to pot. May as well have just rolled over and played dead and let the Reds coming marching into Washington D.C. if we’re gonna tolerate all this coughin’”.
About Zach
Male homo sapien. Warrior poet. I live in Chicago with one wife, one offspring, and Scout the dog. I enjoy various stuff. Besides skinny skiing and going to bullfights on acid, I also enjoy running, reading, drinking, eating and procrastinating on many things, such as starting this blog. I have a mom, a dad, and a younger brother who recently produced a sister-in-law. I'm the only person in my family, sister-in-law included, who doesn't have a post-graduate degree. I guess that makes me special.
I grew up in a small to medium sized town in the middle of Ohio. In fact the even smaller town next door has a sign which reads "The Geographic Center of Ohio". Given this is what they choose to boast you can only imagine how exciting that town is. My town is infinitely cooler. For example on weekend nights people from my town and the surrounding villages and hamlets converge on the public square to "cruise" in their souped-up mini trucks, some bearing Confederate flags, despite growing up and living rather safely north of the Mason-Dixon line. This is high-minded stuff we're talking about here. I graduated sometime during the Clinton presidency from the local high school where I played football and participated in absolutely nothing else. This strategy paid huge dividends when I applied to numerous colleges on the eastern seaboard which were highly selective. When you show up to the admissions table with "HIgh School Football and Nothing Else" on your application, you get respect.
After graduating from Ohio University with a degree in Economics that I've used for absolutely nothing, I moved to Boston. Boston is a lovely city. I was doing things I'm not proud of for beer money and I left after 16 months. My next move was to Chicago and 10+ years later there I still reside.
I write this blog for therapeutic reasons. Much like some people paint to relax or smoke crack to unwind after a stressful day, I record my thoughts on Al Gore's World Wide Web for 9 friends, 4 family members, 1 person who accidentally clicked through after an unsuccessful Google search for something else, and a guy named Patriot1 who lives in a silver Air Stream in the Nevada desert and broadcasts his own radio show.
Is there a point to all of this? I doubt it. Years ago and in a galaxy far, far away (College Park, Maryland, then Athens, Ohio) I was toying with the idea of being a journalism major. I enjoyed writing so it seemed the obvious fit. Then I attended career day and learned that journalism majors could look forward to a salary of $EA,TSH.IT per year with the promise of a fatal heart attack at 47 years of age. I'm not falling for that trick, I told them (them being no one, and told being saying it in my own mind in the shower). Approximately 15 years later here I sit declared the big winner in that battle: I never made any money doing anything else and now I'm writing entirely for free. So suck balls, journalism career day.
The views expressed in this website are mine and mine entirely. I don't wish to be an even bigger black eye to my family than I probably already am. As a result of this I will never be able to run for public office and I accept that reality. But this website is a very dignified, well-dressed skeleton full of witty retorts and honorable deeds compared to the disheveled, stenching, staggering and loud skeletons who would come marching out of the closet to White Zombie's "Thunderkiss '65" if they ever unearthed the college years.
So enjoy your train ride, your hangover day at work, your AA meeting or your dump. I'm here to serve.
I’m pretty sure our palatial living arrangements in college have left us resistant to just about anything short of Ebola.