Category Archives: true life 2010

Possum Dental Hygiene (was Tron & the Black Hole)

Recently, Husband and I viewed a double-feature of two of the greatest horror movies of all time, or at least from 1982/83. I’m speaking, of course, of Poltergeist and Flashdance. Somehow, we then got stuck in the early 80s and decided to watch Tron and the Black Hole.

If you haven’t seen Tron, I don’t think that you should care about spoilers because, let’s be honest, Tron is a dumbass movie.

You might remember it as a good movie, but you’d be wrong.

See, in the 1982 of Tron, when you wrote a computer program a miniature person drove around executing the program in a miniature car.

This reminded me of a creepy dental hygiene video I saw in elementary school. It apparently wasn’t Crest’s Cavity Creeps, but so far my YouTube searching for the video in this traumatic yet hazy memory has only turned up Cavity Creeps, porn, and opossums.

Do you remember the Cavity Creeps? The Cavity Creeps were creepy, but it was this other video that creeped me the fuck out. I still can’t find the other video, but I’m not done looking yet.

I can only assume that the devolution of this post indicates that it’s my destiny to post the 3rd opossum-care video before I get around to posting about the psychic damage inflicted by Tron and the Black Hole.

On a opossum-related sidenote, one night my whole neighborhood was awakened to the horrible scene of opossums ripping a squirrel’s nest apart in our yard.

The carnage was grotesque. There’s no way I’d brush the teeth of an opossum under any circumstances.

If you decide to brush an opossum’s teeth, more power to you.

Just remember the advice from the video and don’t use your own toothbrush.

Driving Miss Crazy

I’ve mentioned before that my Mom’s family is verbose, so I’ll just recap:

Among my mother and her legion of siblings, there has not been a documented break in the conversation since 1932. There are rumors that there was a moment of collective silence at a Church service in 1953, but lacking credible eye-witnesses, I choose not to believe it. Conversations in my mother’s family are like the audio recordings NASA pumps into space, they will be floating far out into the Universe long after our sun explodes and our galaxy is snuffed out in a fiery cataclysm.

I mention this because Husband and I deposited Mom at my Aunt’s house yesterday. Mom, Aunt and Cousin set out together on the Family Funeral Roadtrip. To make a long story short, I decided not to go. Not because my family is insane, that doesn’t even go onto the decision tree, I just didn’t feel well enough to go.

When they drove away, Aunt was driving and Mom and Cousin were both sitting in the backseat of the car. If you’ve never seen people argue about who did not have to ride shotgun before, you must not be one of my relatives.

A few hours later, we got the 1st voicemail from Mom. It was an hour before I could call her back and in the meantime they’d settled their argument. Miss Muffet, they all agreed, had been eating curds and whey.

When I reached them later, the three of them were again fighting bitterly and I got to settle the dispute. This dispute was over the words to the rhyme “Little Jack Horner.”

You can’t make stuff like this up. Maybe you can, but this is just business as usual for us. The McCoys have a propensity for feuding.

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As a post-script, let me just tell you that the 5 hour roadtrip, with traffic, turned into a 9 hour odyssey. I regret not going to the funeral, I’m not sure I regret not being in that car. Though if I’d gone, Mom and I would have driven on our own, so god only knows what I’d be blogging.

I know it's karmically & ecologically wrong to kill spiders.

I like spiders. They’re interesting creatures, many are even quite beautiful. They don’t bang around in the walls, they don’t generally do any damage to your home, they don’t smell, and they don’t talk on their cell-phones while they swerve in and out of your lane at 40 MPH on Connecticut Avenue.

Nevertheless, I had to kill a large wolf spider last night in mom’s bathroom.

How large? I’m pretty sure it was actually howling at the moon when I interrupted it.

I intended to trap it under a glass and repatriate it to the wild, but I was a micro-second slow and crushed it with the side of the glass when I trapped it. I felt pretty horrible watching it die. Then I made Husband flush it down the toilet while I stood outside the room yelling hysterically for him to be careful.

Before you pass judgement, hear me out. I believe you’ll agree with me that the spider got what was coming to it based on it’s hostile behavior, aggressive posturing, gargantuan size, and overall hairiness.

Here’s what happened:

I flipped on the bathroom light and the arachnid in question was standing on the floor in front of the bathtub. Normally, one might say that a spider was “sitting” on the floor, but there was nothing passive about this sonofabitch. It wasn’t resting, it was merely pausing between acts of wanton destruction and cold-blooded killing.

It looked up at me like it was daring me to step into the room.

It shifted it’s mass back onto it’s abdomen, lifting it’s cephalothorax up slightly as it did that creepy thrumming thing spiders do with their 4 front legs when they’re obviously planning something. It’s an elegant motion, like graceful fingers elegantly drumming upon a table, or harp-strings set in motion.

Except instead of beautiful music I heard a slight crunching sound as the spider then used those elegant legs to reach over and idly pick through the pile of carnage by it’s side. I think it was using a puppy’s femur as a toothpick to work some gristle out of it’s gleaming razor-sharp fangs.

The spider nodded it’s head ever so slightly at me, as if to say, “You’re next, pal.”

If I’d had either a shotgun or the shopvac handy there would have been less screaming. Or maybe more screaming, but less spider.

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the behemoth wasn’t actually sitting on a pile of gore and licking the blood of toddlers from it’s pedipalps, but I haven’t had any coffee yet so I can’t really be sure.

I'd like to be appalled, but it's too hot out to care

As reported in the Telegraph, and a million other places, BrewDog created a special edition cask for it’s End of History Ale. (Hello, clever publicity stunt, your mother is calling). The Ale is sold out, but I can tell you where you can get some squirrels if you’d like to try your hand at replicating at least one element of the product.