Been a Long Time Since We Rock & Rolled

Gerry’s World: Hello, faithful readers. I’m terribly sorry that I haven’t posted – has it really been since Tuesday? It’s not as though the posting possibilities are some sort of fallow field. (You like that? I totally ripped it off Robert Frost, I think. Either him or Billy Collins, that poser.) No, the real reason that I haven’t had any new material is because my computer’s been on the fritz. You see, last week, I came back from a Suzanne Somers party that I’d been roped into going to. Eager to try out the new products I’d purchased at said party, I mistakenly tried to eat my Thigh Master and squeezed a cup of her burning-hot cinnamon cocoa between my legs. Ouch! In fact, it ouched so much that I knocked over the mug with a mighty swing, managing to spill what was left in my Dilbert mug all over my computer. “No!” I cried, and leapt to its aide, momentarily forgetting about the horrible (but delicious) third-degree burns on my inner thighs. Too late: the keyboard would only function intermittently, with the consonants working for five seconds and then not working while the vowels kicked in for five minutes, alternating like that. I tried everything, but there was no fixing the problem, and I couldn’t really write the blog that way, could I? (You know what’s funny, by the way? My computer thinks ‘blog’ is a misspelled word. It thinks it should be ‘bog.’ Sheesh, computer – get with the times!) So that’s been frustrating, since I’ve had absolutely no way to access the internet – I finally caved today and resorted to using my other computer.

Now that I have internet access, I did a little research on this Suzanne Somers person, and discovered that she might reasonably do battle with Tom Bergeron for supremacy at the top of my irrational hatred list. I mean, she was Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company, which means (a) that I have to hate her because she’s blond and (b) she probably had a hand in the untimely demise of John Ritter. Plus, she stole the title of her published poetry collection from me!



And dammit if her poems aren’t like little, bejeweled treasures. Check out this excerpt:

Shiver with difficulty and make us fall
Why it’s you who begins the slow call
When you have those things which live towards the bottom,
In the lower parts
Of my heart.

Oh, I could just wish her ill! But I won’t, because I haven’t time for useless stuff like that anymore – my focus has to be on this important blog, after all.

Speaking of my important blog, by the way, you’ll notice that I’ve decided to bold some words here and there throughout the entries. That’s to make each post easier for me to read. I don’t want to waste precious seconds editing the whole thing, but if each bolded phrase is correct, then that’s fine. Random sample, you know how it works.

Not-Betty was out this evening, training her newest hire at the clinic. Apparently, he wants to remain pretty incognito, so all I’ll say about him is that he just got a Master’s in social work from Michigan, my alma mater. (Oops! Not-Betty informs me that he was the only guy in the School of Social Work, so I guess I just blew his cover! I really wish I hadn’t also spilled cinnamon hot chocolate on the delete button of the keyboard of my second computer, too.) Because I get insanely jealous, I decided to follow them – my surveillance motorcade took us to a jazz club, which I remember Not-Betty telling me is the sort of place where winos like to hang out. Well, I put on my askance beret and my tight grey turtleneck to disguise my presence and sauntered inside. Now, jazz tends to confuse me – I don’t know what to make of it. Not-Betty and her new friend were whooping it up, clapping before the song was even over several times, which I found annoying. I left before I was noticed – hopefully, Not-Betty won’t read the blog ever again so she won’t know that I followed her.



When I got home, I turned on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Is it bad that I’d rather watch Studio 60 or 30 Rock now than good ol’ SNL? I mean, I found myself laughing even less than I did when that rat fink Chevy Chase was on the show. Someone needs to tell that cast to shake things up – they’ve got to be rule-breakers. I mean, in order for rules to exist, they have to be broken, especially if they’re broken in retrospect, almost like the rule was made with the advance knowledge that it would be broken in the future, you know? Watching the cast tonight, I didn’t see anyone who seemed like they were doing any rule-breaking. They were just reading from cards, following a script, smiling in hopes that someone would find them funny. They needed more of a sense of humor! You know who probably has a better sense of humor than a comedian on that show right now? An astronaut. They’ve got to, right? What with NASA’s recent death-causing bungles and everything, and admit it: the International Space Station is kinda funny. And those big suits? They look like Michelin Men up there! Now, those guys break the rules all the time – slipping the surly bonds of Earth, as I believe Reagan said, or planting a freaking flag on the moon. They dare to defy gravity, and that’s how I want my SNL actors to be: like astronauts.

All right, gotta go rest up for tomorrow. Yom Kippur starts at sundown, and the Jews make the day go by fast. (Get it?)

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,
Gerry