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Archive for October, 2021

Become a Crematorium Operator. It’s the Undertaking of a Lifetime.

If you have a burning desire to relieve the anguish of bereaved families, consider a career as an Ignition Mortician. If you value hefty profits, nifty puns and lethal clichés explore a career where your goal is to fire people every day.

These days crematoriums are hip and cool-ish for the ghoulish who wish to perish anguish.  

Crematorium Franchise Bullet Points

  • Experience the job satisfaction of watching your best work go up in smoke
  • Job Burnout? Not a problem. In fact, it’s encouraged.
  • Job Security? Not a problem. In fact, you get to fire people regularly.
  • Urn while you Burn
  • Enjoy killer benefits and clients with smokin’ hot bodies 
  • Did you know you’re not supposed to cremate bodies in months that have “embers” in them?
  • Job interviews are very thorough, but don’t worry, you won’t be grilled

Crematoriums – They’re the toast of the town.

 

Consider the Crematorium Franchise that’s Your Best Match

 

  1. Return to Cinder – Is there a better way to say, “Elvis has left the building?” Than to say ♫Return to Cinder♫
  2. Bereaved, Bothered and Bewildered – Helps families to grieve against a backdrop of Cole Porter music. Reviewers say ♫It’s De-Lovely, It’s De-lightful♫
  3. Dust in the Wind Crematorium – Very popular in Kansas
  4. Good Humor Ice Crematorium – Maybe it’s in bad humor, but the cone-shaped urns are available in waffle or wafer
  5. Burning Man – Go out in a blaze of artistic self-expression in this final bonfire of the vanities. Ensure your funeral rite doesn’t go wrong by designing your own signifying pyre.
  6. Next of Kin-dling – Popular with kinfolk in Appalachia
  7. Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell – Have yourself anonymously cremated. What happens at Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell, stays at Don’t Ash, Don’t Tell.
  8. Char Ming – Dynastic Chinese families crematorium of choice. Cremains returned in a little to-go urn.
  9. Cremains of the Day – Designed to meet the funerary needs of literary aficionados
  10. Blackened Blue Fish – Designed to meet the funerary needs of fish afishionados who’ve lost a tropical pet fish
  11. The Uranus Society – Competes with the more established Neptune Society. As one might expect, the Uranus Society is a pain in the ash.

 

Don’t delay. Your future cremains to be seen.

If you’ve been carrying a torch for crematoriums, rekindle that old flame with a hot, new franchise. Again, in the words of Elvis: Crematoriums are Just a hunk-a-hunk-a burning love

Cremation: Think of it as a different kind of Tinder

We look forward to hearing from you (even though we haven’t mentioned how to get in touch with us).

We’ll keep a candle burning for you in the window.

An Excerpt from My Inner Dialogue

Someone’s Gotta Do This. And I Am that Someone.

Pandora’s Box. Go ahead and open it. You know you want to.

It is often said that to lead a happy life you should, “Dance like nobody’s watching.” I get that. But with a twist. What brings me joy is to, “Write like nobody’s reading.” And based upon my Google Analytics of late, that statement has never been truer. There’s no denying what brings us joy. The heart wants what the heart wants.

So as I bathe myself in literary pixie dust in preparation for a writer’s journey into rapture, I find myself in my element. I’ve got my backlit keyboard, my predatory imagination and I’ve just cracked open a fresh ginger-hibiscus kombucha. I’m not only in my element, I’ve become an element: Hardimanium – a rare psychoactive literary element consisting of Higgs bosons and a knowing smirk.

 

 

Now as I gently loosen the tethers mooring me to conventional and unspectacular wisdom, I feel the motivating presence of a million eyes not reading this. Such exquisite freedom. My gatekeepers have been put on administrative leave and in their absence no bureaucratic censor exists to burden my thoughts. The swirling excesses of my cerebral vortices are tamed only by the limits of the English language.

 

Yes, it’s the perfect literary storm and the NWS (No, not the National Weather Service, but the Narcotized Writers’ Sanctuary) is calling for a lacerating Category 5 hurricane once the literary storm travels up your optic nerve and saturates your consciousness. But please don’t evacuate yourself just yet. I promise to keep you securely within the eye of Hurricane David, at an observationally safe distance from its high-velocity humor and killer premises. You might get a little wet, but that’s only in keeping with the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who mused so eloquently: “Into each life some rain must fall.”

 

I thank you for the absence of your presence. How else can I write so uninhibitedly?

So let us open a Pandora’s Box of temptations. Pearls of Wisdom from a cultured oyster. English expressions of ephemeral ideas. A disgorgement of mental freneticism. A Hobson’s Choice to be sure.

 

Cutting and Pasting My Inner Dialogue:

1. What if the Pep Boys were Impressionists and not Auto Parts bobble heads? Instead of Manny, Moe and Jack, they’d be Manet, Monet and Jacques.
2. Are there boats that ship dead people to ports of final call? And if so, would that ship be a place where corpses are berthed? Cuz I would think it would be pretty difficult to berth a corpse…I mean the gestation period alone.
3. Amazing Feet: Marathoner wins race 7 years running.
4. So I guess “new train smell” is just something I’ll never experience.
5. Things not often thought about: At the height of his popularity Elvis was drafted into the Army. And he actually had to go. No dispensation for the King of Rock & Roll. Can anyone imagine Eminem or Jay-Z having had to serve a 2 year hitch in the Army? “Nope, I’m sorry Mr. Mathers you’ll need to guard an ammo dump at Fort Benning for a couple of years.” Or…”Tough luck Shawn Carter, these potatoes won’t peel themselves here at Camp Granada.”
6. I’m a Lightning Rod for Statically Electric Ideas, These Quips Seek Me Out, not Vice Versa
7. Have you ever put your iPhone in your pocket and then pulled it out a few minutes later after it has been rubbing against your leg, activating any number of functions. You look at the display and it shows the nuclear launch codes for the United States or some kind of portal to the Cosmic Architecture of the universe. You think, “Jesus, what did I do. I hope I can get it to revert to its default state.”
Well this is essentially the same hope I have for mankind.

A List of Better Known Marx Brothers:
Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo

A List of the Lesser Known Marx Brothers:
  1. The Communist: Pinko
  2. The Master Mason: Stucco
  3. The Cowboy: Gaucho
  4. The Mexican: Taco
  5. The Snack Eater: Nabisco
  6. The African-American: Oprah…OK not quite, but Oprah backwards is Harpo. So there’s that.

This detonation of pent up verbal supply is only a tiny fraction of the real story. The rest is in Pandora’s hands for safekeeping.

Having Your Archaic and Eating It Too (Berry Good)

The golfer Lee Elder’s father was known as Elder the Elder. Lee was known as Elder the Younger.
Elder family legend indicates that Lee Elder’s grandfather (who was known as Elder the elder Elder) had hygiene issues. He had dingleberries so old they were elderberries.

I’m Just Another Grammar Cracker. If Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector of England, I am the Lord Enabler of English.

If Joe Namath Lived During the Time of Shakespeare, this confusion might arise at the Knights’ Induction Center. Let’s listen in:
Drill Instructor (DI): Welcometh all to thine Queen’s army. I shall requireth some information from each of thou before we begin drills.

Not your average Joe…Namath.

The DI then walks up to Broadway Joe and asks him, “Nameth?”

Joe Namath: Yes.
DI: What do you mean Yes? Your nameth is Yes.
Joe Namath: No. My Nameth is Namath.
DI: What?
Joe Namath: No. Watt’s the inventor of the Steam Engine.
DI: Huh. Who’s the inventor of the Steam Engine?
Joe Namath: No. Who’s the guy on first.
DI: Will you just telleth me thine nameth.
Joe Namath: My nameth is Namath.
DI: Yeah and my nameth is Queen Elizabeth
Joe Namath: Strange, you don’t look like royalty.
DI: Alright funny boy, to the stockade for you.

***All Hallows’ Eve Approaches and I Celebrate It in All Its Ghoulishness***

The offspring of a Smiley Face, a Pumpkin and a Kool-Aid pitcher participating in a ménage a trois.

1. Pumpkin Spice – The most seasonal of the Spice Girls

2. Maize Maze – What they call a corn maze on the reservation
3. Smell My Feet – The foul sequel to “Trick or Treat”
4. In Hungary Halloween is not ghoulish. It’s goulash. It’s a very goulash holiday. Of course in Hungary the get a lot of things ass backwards. They believe Buddha was a pest. Even named their Capitol after him.
5. Halloween is secretly supported by the American Dental Association where 5 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend Halloween candy for their patients who are able to write a check.
6. My heart bursts with joy when a bewildered 3 year old, dressed in an oversized Spiderman costume and out on their first trick or treat escapade comes to my door with their pillow case open and just blankly stares at me until they finally turn to their parents and say, “Line?” And then the parents whisper, “Trick or Treat.” Priceless.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Stan the Man. Spakes to me in 2001 ways.

1. Through cell regeneration, 99% of my body’s cells are 10 years old or less. But somehow I’m 60. Not happy.

2. Real Vegans don’t vacuum Dust Bunnies

3. If Love is Love, then Gees is Christ

4. Yo-Yo Ma’s Mother’s day Message: Yo Mama, Love, Yo-Yo Ma

5. Feeling sic (sic).

6. Conversation held in total darkness: “We’re gonna be OK. I’ve got a handle on it now.” “No you don’t. And that’s not a handle.”

7. Years after her death a son sent his mother’s ashes back to the crematorium with a cryptic note reading “Return to Cinder.”

8. Montessori Schools have apologized for marketing a discount school called Montesorry

9. Somehow I confused Easter with Passover and celebrated the season by buying little chocolate rabbis. Oy vey.

Peter Boyle, John Lennon and Joe?

♫Puttin’ on the Ritz♫

Most of us are familiar with actor Peter Boyle, either as grandfatherly Frank Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond or as Gene Wilder’s clunkily dancing monster in Young Frankenstein. Prior to his death in 2006, Peter Boyle was always a welcomed presence in films and TV. He was a valued and respected B-list background guy. He was the kind of guy about whom a Hollywood agent might knowingly remark, “Peter Boyle will always make a beautiful dollar in this business.”

 

There are however 2 highly dispensable facts to know about him. And I present these superfluous oddities so I may keep my little corner of the world tidy and in doing so relieve my OCD. One bit of choice minutia deals with John Lennon and the other petty detail is a connect-the-dots cerebral feat of utterly inconsequential coincidences. So fasten your seatbelt everybody. Not for this tame piece, but just in general. I mean it’s a good idea to fasten your seat belt and that’s why I like to place a little Public Service Announcement in all my stories.  

 

John Lennon was the Best Man at Peter Boyle’s wedding. Imagine, John Lennon. Could Peter Boyle somehow be the 5th Beatle? – Hardly. And if you ever heard him sing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Young Frankenstein you understand he couldn’t even be the 5th Season for Frankie Valli. But as it was Peter Boyle became friends with John Lennon through his fiancé Loraine Alterman who was a writer for the Rolling Stone. She had befriended Yoko Ono. And when Peter Boyle married Ms. Alterman, he asked John Lennon to be his Best Man. Legend has it that Mr. Boyle also considered Leonid Brezhnev as Best Man, but the Soviet leader decided to remain Back in the USSR. As it was Peter Boyle chose well and the former Beatle won out.

 

OK so far? Good. Now savor that celebrity morsel while we move on to the entrée where I present a wholly unneeded examination of a string of insignificant theatrical coincidences in the career of Peter Boyle. The fact that John Lennon was the Best  Man at his wedding is evidence enough that Peter Boyle was not your average Joe – Joe being the operative word here. It is infinitesimally fascinating to note that in no fewer than four movies/TV shows Peter Boyle starred in, the name “Joe” appeared in the title. See below:

Joe – As a world weary misfit 1970

Crazy Joe – As crazy mobster Joey Gallo 1974

Tail Gunner Joe – As overly zealous commie-fighter Senator Joe McCarthy 1977

Joe Bash – As a jaded NYC cop 1986

 

For the love of Pete that’s a lot of Joe’s. Even for the love of Pete Boyle that’s a lot of Joes. There may be more Joe’s in his career that I’m unaware of. For example I don’t know what they called Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in Young Frankenstein – coulda been Joe Monster. I heard Peter Boyle refused the roll of Joe in Joe vs the Volcano for fear of being typecast.

 

In the short-lived (alright, barely-lived) TV series Joe Bash, the promotional tagline was hardly something to rally around or render it as must-see TV. It read: He steals donuts. He dates a hooker. He’s one of New York’s finest. He’s Joe Bash. Really? Yes, really.

 

Epilogue

Well, what have we learned after reading 135 pages on Peter Boyle and the uncanny recurrence of Joe roles in his career? Fortunately for you, I edited-down the original 135 pages to these 2, must-read pages. Think of it as the Cliff Notes to this story: Peter Boyle, John Lennon and Joe? I think condensing those less to-the-point, 133 pages into just 2 pages makes this piece more essence-y.

 

Highlighting the happenstance of the many Peter Boyle “Joe” roles is how I role. It’s my cup of tea. No, that’s not quite right. It’s actually my cup of Joe.