Jim Varagona

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The Birthday Boy

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Considering he was a grandpa on The Munsters 40 years ago, which I suppose is grandparent age, I always found it amazing that Grandpa Munster made it this long. Al Lewis was 95 and still hosting a weekly radio program. Good for him.

In the MSNBC obit., they state:

Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as “Grandpa Al Lewis.”

I only hope I can have that much spunk when I’m 65.

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>I recently blogged about my boss breaking down to me about his nun abuse experiences after hearing my story. This has continued, with him describing in greater detail his horrific tales and how he is now haunted by them in his sleep. And we are talking about a great, powerful man here, who is crumbling under the weight of these thoughts of penguin women.

As we sat down with the Filipino Mafia and other co-workers to a bagel break, he told us about having to line up with other boys in the hall as a nun decided their fate on the other side of one of those double steel door doorways that are common in grade schools. Apparently someone cut through a neighbor’s yard to get to school and didn’t close the gate. A dog got loose and was hit by a car. The neighbor brought her issue to the nuns and the authorities, so the boys stood waiting. He spoke of the crack between the two doors and how they noticed the sister approaching. The fear in him created illusions of her striking down upon them with bolts of lightning from her fingertips or the even more realistic fate of hearing the crack of a ruler.

As an aside here, they say when the nun cracks a yardstick, it makes a noise, because the very tip of it breaks the sound barrier. That alone puts fear in me.

Granted, there were no lightning bolts, but she wanted so badly to discipline somebody, so they felt intimidation through her voice and mannerisms.

At this point in the story, another Retail Service Representative from another company who was listening in, joined us and looked worried.

“I know the sound of that yardstick,” he told us. “It will forever be etched in my mind.”

He then broke down and told us of how he was disciplined by being struck with a ruler by a sister. Three at this gathering now had a common bond. I wonder how far this will go and what other stories will come from the telling of my experience.

In the meantime, I suggested to my boss that he get on a strong sedative to sleep through the demonic nuns that haunt his slumber.

>Boy, the members of the Filipino Mafia that I work with take advantage of their power. I ride with them, which I am thankful for, but they pick me up an hour after they say they will on a constant basis. Now I could leave their carpool, but they have connections at the quickie marts to get free gas, so no one has to pay. This is disrespectful to our boss though, and despite his mob ties, he cannot do a thing about them waltzing in whenever they please, because the power of these Pinoys is on the upsurge. I defend the boss as much as I can, but they gang up on me during their smoke breaks and blow second hand smoke in my eyes.

Now I understand that it is stressful when you do not have much food because spearfishing season is over, but to throw one’s weight around like this is ridiculous. I have no choice, but to submit though. What can we do as Italian Retail Service Representatives?? Only sit back, assemble more patio furniture, and keep our mouths shut.

>Before I could have a real job, and before I actually worked in the fertilizer industry with Scotts earlier last year, I worked with FertHairlizer. My mother worked at a copy shop here in South St. Louis back in the early 1990s. Next door was a barber shop run by Bill Black. What was interesting about his place was that he was a C-level celebrity. He had photos on the wall of him on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and others. Black made and still makes clothing from hair, including bras and underwear, which may get itchy, but they still earned him exposure at Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums around the world. He also had this amazing innovation called FertHairlizer, which was a fertilizer for plants that had human hair in it, because of its nitrogen content. When the hair from the shop was swept up, it was swept into trap doors in the floor. In the basement, the hair was gathered in trash cans for use in the clothing, ferthairlizer, and potting soil lines. On a few occasions, I was the one that mixed the sterilized hair with the soil and bagged it. Good times.

Bill Black later closed up shop here and moved down to Texas. I spotted him about a year back on a segment on The Tonight Show where Tom Green searches states for their most interesting person. Unfortunately, he wasn’t Texas’s, but he did get an honorable mention for his hair vests and bikinis.

Now, according to an article I found from the Austin Chronicle, Black is still hawking his usual hair stuff, but now he’s expanding his horizons to include insulation made from hair and nutritional supplements for animals made from liquefied human hair. So far his ideas haven’t caught on and it is a shame. He claims they all work great, so why not?! If only he could fuel cars on liquefied hair, then he’d have something to cure America’s oil addiction.

photo from the Austin Chronicle

Bill Black has a web site at FertHairlizer.com, but the quality isn’t comparable to his wonderful products. Check it out anyway.

>No, this does not involve the televison station. As I stated previously, today is my brother Matt’s birthday. He would have been 20. Before he was born, I prayed every Sunday at church for a little brother. I’m sure this put pressure on my parents to make babies, which is awful, but true nonetheless. On this day in 1986, my sister and I were waiting at my Grandma’s house on The Hill anxiously awaiting the news. When the call came through, we received the news that we now had a baby brother. Even then, I was a bit of a softie, and I admit it, I cried.

Somehow, my sister, Sara, and I were involved in the naming rights. I know Matthew was in the running, so we picked Thomas as a middle name to make his initials M-T-V. Cable television was influencing us at that young of an age. He loved his initials though. It instantly raised his coolness factor. So when his birthday comes around, I designate this day “MTV Day”.

I have my brother to thank for many things. He was great at developing my sense of humor. He would make me do impressions for his friends of Andy Kaufman and others. I still hold dearly videos that he and his buddies made back in the day. They were pretty clever for such young kids. After he passed away, I became good friends with a lot of his pals. In fact, one is my best man, Dan, and another is a groomsman, Jimmy.

One of my teenage idols, Jim Morrison, wrote a poem about Brian Jones, former member of The Rolling Stones, who died from “misadventure”, entitled “Ode To L.A. While Thinking Of Brian Jones, Deceased”. I find a line from it touching and appropriate for my feelings:

You’ve left your

Nothing

to compete

w/Silence

I hope you went out

Smiling

Like a child

Into the cool remnant

of a dream

>While browsing stltoday.com, a headline caught my eye: Feb. 3 will be a bad day for some people. It really struck a chord with me, but the article, which deals with computer viruses, had nothing to do with it. My brother, Matt’s, birthday is on that day. He would have been 20. My family takes notice to February on the calendar. He also died during that month, on the 21st, in 2000, from Wegener’s Granulomatosis, a horrible auto-immune disease, which wreaked havoc upon his lungs and kidneys before our eyes around this time 6 years ago.

We celebrate his birthday by going out to dinner. It’s a low key affair. It may be odd to some, but everyone copes in their own way. It certainly is better than completely dreading the day and sitting there contemplating the occassion with a lump in your throat.

My parents, extended family, and some friends of the family attend a Catholic mass in Matt’s honor every year around this time. I myself have issues with the Church, so I usually do not attend, but reflect in my own way.

During the month, the events of 2000 strangely come back day to day. Around his birthday, we were taking care of Matt sick at home. He missed having a party because of his illness, which doctors passed off as the flu, even though he was spitting up inches of blood into a trash can. Shortly after, he entered the hospital, when the “flu” didn’t improve. We practically lived in St. Louis Childrens’ Hospital for the following two weeks until he succumbed to WG. He was buried on the 25th, which had record temps in the low 80s, at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. We blasted Kid Rock’s “Only God Knows Why” for a very surreal moment at a cemetery. It’s odd to look through tears at easily over 150 people, including the elders, as you hear Kid Rock cursing loudly…in a cemetery. I guess you could say we woke the dead…heh heh.

But seriously folks…it’s an emotional ride watching someone close to you die before you, especially that young. Now I feel like I can’t experience much worse in life, but one never knows what lies ahead of them. That’s why I enter every February cautiously optimistic, that as I celebrate the short, but lively life of my brother, and remember the worst times of my life as I watched him suddenly wither away, that I learn from my life to enjoy every bit of it and not take things so seriously, because there’s always something worse that could happen to you.

>When people ask me what I do for a living, I have a difficult time explaining. The job description changes as time goes on. For the past month, I have been working a grueling 4a.m. to 1p.m. (or later) shift at various Home Depot locations across the St. Louis metropolitan area. The bulk of the time is spent assembling patio furniture. You may wonder how those displays magically come about, like the wonderful Christmas decor displays I worked on. I like to think of it like the Underpants Gnomes from South Park. For those unfamiliar with the episode, it features gnomes that come about in the night and take Tweek’s underpants. It is symbolism for those things that happen that go without explanation. Those underpants that go missing were actually taken by gnomes, and that patio furniture that suddenly shows up at your local retailers was assembled by a small group of misfits that work through a delusion caused by lack of sleep.

In fact, the lack of sleep is such an issue, that Home Depot security is cracking down on “gnomes” falling asleep on assembled furniture. We recently received a memo warning us of this. I took it as a hint to move on to a darker blend of coffee.

Anyway, the group of misfits I work with include members of a division of the Filipino Mafia. Most think Italian when they hear “mafia”, but I think the Filipinos have the upper hand now, especially when it comes to the retail servicing industry. Our boss, who actually comes from a long line of Italian mafiosos straight from St. Louis’s Hill Neighborhood, has become quite softened under the foothold of the Pinoys. He gives them many gifts, which they treat like dirt. When I see this, I grow angry. On occassion, I have taunted one of the boys for this disrespect. I even gave him a good swat to the face. No one should treat their boss like that.

The boss does not look good in this whole matter. For example, since I revealed the story of how I was molested by a nun, I have caught him staring off and even in close to a fetal position once. When I confronted him about this odd behavior, he grabbed my hand and touched it to his scalp.

“What do you feel?,” he asked me.

I was thinking a nasty case of dry scalp, but I told him, “a nice sized lump.”

He confirmed the obvious and proceeded to tell me that since I told my story, he has been haunted by flashbacks of when a nun at his grade school slapped him of the head with the narrow edge of a ruler.

I told him maybe he could still sue the church based of repressed memories. At least we had that bonding moment, when we realized the evil in nuns. With that satisfaction, we moved on to assembling a chaise lounge display.

So whenever you see any display in a Home Depot or elsewhere, think of us, the “gnomes”, and think of the nuns, those goddamned nuns.

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The FDA has approved the first inhalable insulin. In this age of abuse of prescription drugs, such as Oxycontin and Adderall, will insulin inhalers be the next big thing? I, myself, enjoy the “high” of a low blood sugar. I act like I am drunk, and it’s a lot cheaper. If non-diabetics got their hands on this stuff, who knows what could happen? The thought of injecting when unnecessary isn’t very appealing to non-diabetics, I am sure, but to get the same effect through inhaling it, good lord…there could be tons of high school age kids acting like me. It’s frightening.

When I was that age, I knew people that would crush up anything and snort it, from asthma pills to vitamins, which is ridiculous, but true. Kids would sell their prescription drugs and their parents’, even Viagra was game. The underground Ritalin market was crazy. So you say, are kids really that stupid? I answer to you, yes, very much so, and even more so today.

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