Speak of the Devil

Posted By:	The Boneman
Posted On:	Mon Jul 20th, 2009

With my kids spending a week with their Grandfolks up North in the bucolic splendor near Park City - I sat in my deserted home and discovered the coolest thing – televisions have an OFF switch! How wonderfully strange it was to have the Disney Channel's relentless bubble gum brainwashing babble silenced. Halleluiah anyway - I tell ya, I had no idea how desperately my nervous system needed to spend a day listening to the Air Conditioning – talk about sweet music to my ears. You'd be surprised how much easier it is to concentrate on one's work in the absence of the blunt head trauma inflicted by Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers. And while I'm on the subject, it's a little spooky how gracefully those Brothers have aged, when you consider they've been around since I was a 12 year old girl. Of course, in "those" days they called themselves The "Monkees." Their poster was right next to Michael Jacksons', whom I'm not writing about this month since we all know pretty much next to nothing. Perhaps in the months to come. Rest In Peace Michael.

It's an undeniable fact that "time" isn't what it used to be. Back in the day it used to last nearly twice as long. There was a day when a summer afternoon would stretch out so far ahead of you that your eyes would get kind of hazy and water-up and just the thought of trying to fill up such a vast, yawning expanse was exhausting. Used to be you could squeeze in 6-8 hours sleep between 4:00 and 4:30 alone. Last time I checked there's just under 11 minutes now between 4:00 and 4:30. The fact that I was grounded for life in third grade is proof that clocks ticked at a much more sedate rate back then than they do now. At the pivotal age of 8, I was living in Salt Lake and when my friend and I discovered a Playboy magazine in his big brother's bedroom drawer it was such an astonishing find that I talked him into letting me take it to school for "show and tell."

Heck, I didn't get to "tell" anybody anything until my teacher "showed" it to the Principal. For some reason no matter how much I wanted to be a good boy, it just wasn't something that came naturally. Having plucked the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil at such a tender age, I can look back at the arc of my "black-mark-in-heaven-curve from that day to the shameful peaks of my collegiate years, back down to the sainted soul that I've salvaged and see the slow but steady learning curve in my ongoing efforts (some half-hearted, some hardly hearted at all) to clean up my act. As I believe I mentioned in a prior column (I call ‘em columns, call ‘em what you wanna call 'em) anyway, the thing is, I've got myself a Temple Recommend which requires an extremely clean act. Trust me I know what you're thinkin'. You're thinkin' "dammit Boneman, are you just yanking my leg or what? How can you be all saintly and sanitized and still be so sonsabitchin' funny?" I'll tell you how - because it aint gonna be easy. I was headed for Hades in a smokin' red Mercedes and I'm pretty sure the devil already had my chicken counted. If you're curious why we have yet to go to the temple, so am I - along with my bishop and most everyone in our ward. I suppose they might suspect the worst and to be honest I had a close call, but mostly it's because it started turning into too big a production. No offense to y'all but I'm nervous enough about going into God's house. Part of me still thinks I might walk in there and "Poof" end up a tidy little pile of ashes - whisk whisk "Next!" The last thing I need is an audience for that. If my mother saw her son reduced to a pile of cinders she would be exceedingly vexed. Seems to me like best thing's just to tiptoe on in there, take care of business and meekly bow out. "Thank you, let us know if any of it took?"

Anyway, in order to take the pressure off we did what any good Mormon bunch would do, pack up the kids and head for Vegas. Actually we went there to attend a beauty convention because that's what the wife does and I fully intended to conduct myself like a good Latter Day Saint. I swam and hung out around the pool right alongside hundreds of people enjoying cocktails and beer as though they found them delicious and refreshing, but I had no problem hangin' with a soda. None whatsoever.

Now - do you remember the Kaiser Soze' quote from Usual Suspects about "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Well, I never fell for that. He exists alright and, unlike us, his gig is finite. And the fact that it's probably getting down to crunch-time makes me wonder why I've ignored my Bishop's counsel to get my act in the Temple before the Devil Comes Down To St. Georgia. As it turned out I should have paid more heed to his warning. First of all, the reason I waited over a year from the last time I picked up a blue can of my former favorite barley pop, Miller Lite was because I didn't want to be one of those waffling backsliders who doesn't "quite quit" and end up having to repent every other day, because they keep slip, sliding away. I wanted to make sure Miller time had expired for "good." And I was making my way through the Vegas-valley of the shadow of death in pretty good shape. Eyes straight ahead, fearing no evil, that was until the final day when I became imprisoned within the asylum walls of the animal prison donated by those masters of illusion and spandex, Seigfied and Roy. For some reason this favorite destination of my wife and kids, always makes me feel just as bored and trapped as the dozing jungle cats.

True they also have trained dolphins that, for a quick kipper snack, will jump around and splash the audience with their tails, but the one I talked to told me that it was "utter hell to be raised in captivity and he longs for the open seas" he sighed wistfully and said, "trust me Vegas is no place to raise kids." I just shook my head and told him, "word up Flipper, keep it real, my mammal." He swam off ruefully and gave me a bro's wink and a solid "greep, greep greeee" as he did. In the past at least my kids were younger and less cynical, but they were all about, "when are these dolphins gonna jump in the air and do some flips, all they're doing is splashing people?" "I dunno he didn't say," I told ‘em as I stood slowly, rubbed my headache and said "come on let's go see if any of the tigers woke up."

Anyhow, after about 3 hours of this, my eye happened to catch the quaint little thatched kwanset hut where I'd purchased a beer a couple years ago. So I wandered by, just for a lark, sentimental reasons let's say and noticed that, sure enough, they still had the "hop-pop" on tap. I really can't explain what happened, but the next thing I know I was holding a great big cup of Newcastle. Now, I have no idea how it got there because, first of all, Newcastle is one of those dark, nasty bittersweet British ales that taste like something that leaked out of your car. I must've bought it to play a joke on my wife for subjecting me to such stultifying boredom. Yea, that's it, I can prove this - if I'd had any intention of drinking it I'd have got myself a mellow yellow Miller Lite. Anyway when she saw me with this popcorn bucket-sized cup of brew she gave me the same look my third grade teacher did when I brought the Playboy to school. Thinking fast I raised the cup in a mock toast and faked a sip. This keen little plan just about gagged me and left me with a brownish-green mustache, which probably looked like some kinda hillbilly shit-eatin' grin. "Cletis –you inbred tater-head – you gonna wind up as ignernt as Uncle Dad if you don't keep yer snoot outta that sheep dip!" And it must not have fooled her because she started in my direction brandishing a steaming hot churro that I was sure she intended to flog me with.

In a last minute effort to sell the gag I took a little sip and spit it right back in the cup and just as I looked up with an innocent shrug, a dolphin nailed me in the head with a huge gout of salty fish-water that knocked the cup outta my hand like a Wayne Gretsky slapshot. All of which left me standing their like the Lord's own dipstick - wringing wet with pish water down one side and a vile-brown stinky-stain down the other. It couldn't have been edited any better for a movie scene, nor gotten a bigger laugh from the crowd. A bolt of lightning would have been over-the-top and couldn't have made the point any more clear. You wanna talk about bitter beer face - my wife spun away after letting me have it with her harshest "you disappointing jackass" brow-beating then herded the kids (who no longer had any use for their laughing stock of a father) away toward the exit. "Wait a minute – I'm the one who wanted to leave!" And so my vacation came to a grand conclusion. Strange thing about vacations - as bad as we think we need them, it's funny how nice it always seems when they're finally over with. As I stood there pondering such things, wondering if Seigreid and Roy had a place where they hosed down the tigers somewhere in their wondrous animal cruelty park – it brought to mind an old Steve Martin line – "comedy isn't pretty."