The Sedated Ape

Gary is this guy I know that never leaves the gas station. I’ve written about him a couple of times.

http://sedatedape.com/2007/02/02/51/   was the first one. You probably should read that post first  so this one will make a little sense.

 Real conversation

Gary – You got a table?

Me- Yeah. Well, not with me but….

 Gary: Is it any good?

Me: Well, I’ve had it awhile, but it’s still pretty flat so …

 Gary: I got one I’m giving away.  I decided I don’t like tables anymore.

This is the universally accepted  symbol for anarchy.  The fact  that  a  universally accepted  symbol for anarchy even exists seems very wrong to me, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.

There was this thing in the paper that some woman wrote about how we shouldn’t cut funding for schools because the children are our future and one day they’ll be the ones leading the country. I don’t buy that for a second. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I’m bossed around by a bunch of third graders

I don’t like to name-drop or brag, but I have been told by some of the biggest names in show business that I’ve been part of a great audience.

Thanks to daylight savings time if you die in the Fall you’ll die one hour earlier than people who die in the Spring. That doesn’t seem fair to me.

I see how we might need to build a fence on the US/Mexico border. But if they are going to build it, I hope they’ll leave a pet door. I have nothing against Mexican cats and dogs – they should be able to come and go as they please.

I have a pretty good health plan. If I ever get really sick I’m plan to move out of town without leaving a forwarding address so the collections people at the hospital won’t be able to send me the bill.

I’ll admit that I don’t really have much book smarts. Or street smarts. What I have is hallway smarts. All that really involves is knowing where the light switch is and being able to work the thermostat. I’m pretty good at both of those.

My house doesn’t just have a panic room., I also have a anxiety alcove and a homicidal rage basement.

If the cops really are “our city’s finest” we’re in a lot of trouble.

The Roman Empire fell about 1,500 years ago, and it shows no sign of rising again in the near future. I think it’s safe for us to stop kissing up to Caesar and quit using letters for numbers.

I saw a bumper sticker with the confederate flag on it that said “These colors don’t run!”. Apparently there is a difference in connotation between “running” and “unconditional surrender” that I don’t understand.

A lot of people don’t believe in King Tut’s curse, but how else do you account for the fact that everyone who ever met the guy is dead now?

When I was a little kid we had a hamster. One day the hamster ate it’s newborn babies. That was pretty gross, so we decided to just go ahead and get rid it. So we took it down the road and left it to fend for itself. The ironic thing is that 12 years later the exact same thing happened with my sister.

Tip – If you’re one of those freaks that’s into S&M it’s important to have a “safe word”. And choose something other than the word “ouch”.

I don’t get why women would ever want to become Black Muslims – I guess it’s for women who think the transition from slavery to freedom should have been more of a gradual process.

Everything is only available for a limited time.

I believe that you can judge a man by his handshake. This belief has kept me from ever being chosen for jury duty.

I have a five year plan. I think that’s important. First I’m going to finish 2009. After that I plan on it being 2010, followed quickly behind by 2011. Then if things work out the way I expect it’ll be 2012. Then I’m going to skip ahead to 2017.

It’s tough being a fan of a small market baseball team. It’s just too hard for the Royals to compete with teams like the Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox. They spend hundreds of millions in payroll, while to save money the Royals had to replace their entire coaching staff with motivational posters.

My biggest goal in life is to one day be described as “high-functioning”.

Little known fact – Before finding success with “Juicy Fruit” gum the Wrigley people first tried to market “Rancid Dried Out” gum.

God doesn’t play dice with the universe. He’s too smart for that – he house odds are just too high. He mostly sticks with Blackjack and Baccarat.

I’m not good at remembering faces. I was in the library and this guy came up to me and said, “Wow, you haven’t changed since high school !”. I didn’t remember him, but I went along with the conversation anyway. I figured if he talked long enough I would remember who he was. Turns out he didn’t go to school with me at all. He was referring to my t-shirt.

They say that crime doesn’t pay, but I don’t think they’re doing it right. Some crime doesn’t pay,  granted – like loitering or exposing yourself . There’s just no money in it.   But I still think that a lot of crime does pay. Usually the crimes that do pay fall into the general “theft” category.

I still think kidnapping could pay, but I’ve been doing it wrong. Kidnapping homeless people is just more trouble that it’s worth for several reasons.

After you kidnap someone you need to be able to contact someone that you think might be able to raise the ransom. The odds are good that a homeless guys friends will mostly just be other homeless people who have no fixed address. So you end up spending days wandering around shelters and train yards looking for someone named “Crackhead Eddie” hoping  that Eddie is sober enough to remember he was ever friends with the guy you kidnapped.

Even when you collect a ransom it’s not going to be anything great. The best you can hope for is a old smelly stocking cap or a couple of garbage bags full of aluminum cans. One time a got a can of food as a ransom. The label was missing so no one was sure what was inside. It turned out to be pumpkin pie filling.

The biggest problem with kidnapping homeless people is that wherever you hide them it’s almost always going to be a step up from where they were staying before . So, even after the ransom was paid,  a lot of the time you can’t get them to ever leave. So you end up with a homeless guy living in your tool shed. You just have to wait until someone else tries to kidnap him again. I thought about listing him on Craigslist, but they said that would be considered human  trafficking which isn’t allowed under the new Terms of Service rules.

Kidnapping bums is the worst idea I’ve had since I tried to blackmail the neighbor’s dog.

(my 15 minutes of fame)

            Pepsi-cola burned him up

            So now he’s drinking 7-up

              Take us out

               To Pizza Hut

Thing one – Creed Bratton, the weird creepy old guy on The Office – his real name is Creed Bratton. Well, sorta. First – he was William Charles Schneider. His mother remarried and he changed his name to Chuck Ertmoed. That’s pretty awful – even if you pronounced the last name like you were French having “Chuck” in front of it would make you sound a doofus. So understandably, that didn’t last too long. Then he changed his name to Creed Bratton – decades before he got the role in The Office. I wonder if anyone one else was up for the role of “Creed Bratton”?

Anyway – that’s not the part that pisses me off. He used to play guitar for “The Grass Roots”… “Let’s Live For Today!” “Midnight Confession!” Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me about this before now! The show’s been on for six seasons! I enjoy knowing shit like this! For example – Professional wrestling manager Jimmy Hart used to be in the Gentrys – he sang lead on “Keep on Dancin’.

But I was totally out of the loop on the Creed Bratton trivia. I’m not sure who is responsible for keeping me updated on stuff like this, but they really dropped the ball this time.

Thing two – On the Dukes of Hazzard there was a character named “Cooter”. Really.

How the hell did they allow that on network TV in the 80’s !?! Do people from the north not know what a “Cooter” is? Try looking it up in a slang dictionary. If you’re too lazy to do that, I’ll use it in a sentence: “Zeke always thought that as long as the girl has hair on her cooter she’s fair game”. And on a very popular TV show they had a character whose name was actually “Cooter”.

And Cooter was a man. Usually, if you’re in the deep south and you meet a man that everyone calls ‘Cooter” that means that the other hillbillies use him AS cooter when there are no actual women around.

If that was the case on the TV show they downplayed that part of the character. The character on the show was mostly just a dumb guy who was friends with the Dukes but too lowbrow to actually be accepted as one of the family. Think about that sentence for a minute. He was considered too low brow for a family who every week used their female cousin as a “distraction whore” so the rest of them could escape from the cops.

Ben Jones, the actor who played Cooter actually quit the show because he wanted the character to have a beard, but the network insisted that it’s better for Cooter to be clean shaven. I’m not making that up – he quit because they wouldn’t let Cooter be hairy. Really.

Since then he’s opened a restaurant call “Cooter’s” for tourists with a taste for cooter.  It also holds the “Cooter Museum”. And if you think your parties might be a lot more fun if there was some cooter there you can contact him on face book – he makes public appearances. You’ll probably have to wade through a lot of other web pages offering cooter for sale, but his site is there somewhere.