Category: Funny Business

I’m a person who tends to forget names quickly, especially when I’m first introduced to someone. I think I’m so concerned with getting my name right I simply lose focus, and this issue has plagued me for much of my life.

What I can remember, however, are nicknames – especially those I give some of the neighbors I frequently encounter during my morning walks.

For the most part these are not folks that I actually know in the sense that we’re close friends and hang out. Basically I just wave at them and say things like, “Looks like it’s gonna be a warm one today with highs in the mid-80s and light winds blowing east-southeast at five miles per hour,” “Man, I wish Batman was real,” or “I can’t wait for Halloween because I’m dressing as a werewolf again this year.”

Our conversations are neither long nor deep, which is just the way I like them.

But as a point of reference I’ve decided to assign many of them a sobriquet. Here are a few that stand out:

CHURCH LADY

I see this woman almost every day. Her nickname stems from the hairstyle she sports, which is reminiscent of  Dana Carvey’s Church Lady from “Saturday Night Live.”

She’s stands about 5-2 and weighs 75 pounds and I’m guessing she’s between the age of 130 and 165. But she can move – she doesn’t so much walk as she glides.

One thing I’ve noticed is she’s always carrying what looks to be a hurley (hurling stick), which makes me wonder if perhaps she’s from Ireland and once played the game.

Probably, though, it’s just a stick she uses to ward off suitors, coyotes and the kinds of people you see in Gatlinburg who try to get you to listen to a seminar about condos.

THE LONE RANGER

OK, this is the one neighbor’s name I can remember because when he introduced himself it immediately rang a bell. It’s John Reid. John Reid, as you know, was the Lone Ranger’s true identity, and he teamed up with Tonto to fight outlaws in the Old West.

This John Reid, however, doesn’t fight outlaws – at least as far as I know. I’m pretty sure he works construction.

Due to the  COVID-19 global pandemic he does wear a mask, though, so that’s pretty cool.

Sadly, his dog is not named Silver, which is bitterly disappointing to me.

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE AND NAPOLEON DYNAMATE

This couple lives around the corner. The guy not only has hair and eyeglasses identical to Jon Heder’s “Napoleon Dynamite” character, but he also walks like him and often has a vacant expression. So many times I’ve wanted to yell, “Vote for Pedro!” but I don’t because I’m sure he gets that a lot.

As for his wife/girlfriend/partner/roommate, she looks normal. I just call her Napoleon Dynamate because I think it’s funny.

BUTT PATTER

There is a friendly woman on our street who pats her boyfriend on the butt whenever he comes out of their house. Sometimes they’ll walk together toward the street, turn around and look back at their house, and she’ll pat his butt then.

Once she was cutting grass and he was putting down mulch, and she patted his butt while his butt was aimed skyward.

Point being, if the dude is outside and his butt is within reach, Butt Patter is gonna pat it.

I can only imagine what the man’s butt endures inside the house.

ON GOLDEN POND DOG WALKER

This woman looks like Henry Fonda in his “On Golden Pond” role, right down to the fishing bucket hat and wire-rimmed glasses. Each time she sees me walking Charlie, our Sheltie, she screams, “Is your dog friendly?”

I always tell her that Charlie is old and nervous – much like myself – and would rather keep his distance (also much like myself). So naturally, she trots over with her dog, who tries to lick Charlie’s bits and pieces.

Needless to say, these encounters are awkward.

THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN

This dude is gigantic – tall, heavy – just mountainous. I imagine him eating entire herds of cattle, drinking from a water tank and then when he’s done, stomping his way through the city Godzilla-style.

Of course when I see him out walking I don’t call him the Amazing Colossal Man. I address him as “sir” and try to make as little eye contact as possible.

MANLEY STUD AND PRECIOUS MUFFIN

This young couple can often be seen jogging down our street. Manley strikes me as someone who works out at the gym seven days a week, holds an important job in high finance, drinks nothing but microbrews and calls other males “Bro.”

Precious wears designer outfits while running, never sweats, has blinding white Britney Spears teeth and has probably played Elle in a community theater production of “Legally Blonde.”

Based on our brief interactions they’re nice people but I hate them both.

THAT ASSHOLE

It’s just what I call this one guy because, well, he’s that asshole.

I’m a weird dude, and my weirdness (if not my dudeness) can probably be traced back to my mother.

Mom, rest her soul, liked to think outside the box, especially when it came to recipes. Her idea was to take simple ingredients and transform them into fancy dishes (applying her own odd definition of fancy).

Sometimes she’d take a good idea and experiment too much, though. Her Rice Krispies Treats were incredible when she first started making them, but then in later batches she’d add other bizarre ingredients like applesauce and syrup.

Had she been Dr. Frankenstein, she wouldn’t have been satisfied with merely bringing the creature to life – she’d have added donkey ears and dressed him in a leisure suit.

One time – many, many years ago – I brought a date home to meet mom and even though I told her we weren’t coming for dinner, she insisted on providing a “snack.”

The snack consisted of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, with upright cocktail weenies forming a crown around the inside of the bowl. Adding a flourish of class was paprika liberally sprinkled over the dish.

To the untrained eye it looked as though the mac and cheese – bleeding after sustaining a grave injury – had been surrounded by cocktail weenies.

It probably also looked that way to the trained eye.

The good news is that it wasn’t bad – as long as you like mac and cheese and cocktail weenies. And paprika has no flavor anyway, so it was just added for dramatic effect.

As for my date, she didn’t try it. She must’ve been spooked by the food’s appearance because after looking at it briefly she ran out of the house and I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

Anyway, that tale is just a sidebar to the main story, and the main story involves quarantine food. Since we aren’t going to restaurants right now and are trying to eat the food we already have due to the global pandemic, I decided to take a cue from mom and spice things up.

In other words, we can keep eating the same things but we don’t have to eat them the same way.

For example, we have a can of vegetarian baked beans in the cabinet. They’re good, but there’s nothing particularly special about them.

Well, there WAS nothing special about them.

Now they’re “Fonzie Beans.”

What are “Fonzie Beans,” you ask?

In December, 1974, there was a Christmas-themed episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie was bragging about the big plans he had for the holiday.

But Richie spotted Fonzie alone in his garage, eating a can of beans by the light of a small, sparse Christmas Tree.

Oh, I cried like a Baby Boomer. To this day, I get weepy when I see someone eating beans near trees.

But In Quarantine Life, you, too, can eat Fonzie Beans. All you have to do is pretend to be Fonzie and eat beans.

To enhance the experience I like to put on a leather jacket and style my hair in a ducktail. I also say, “Ayyyyy!” and give the thumb’s up sign, but that’s an individual character choice on my part.

We make a lot of soup at our house and the base we use is something called “Imagine Soup.” It comes in a variety of flavors (organic garden tomato is our go-to) and it’s quite good.

But just think of the name. It’s Imagine Soup, so we can imagine it to be whatever we want. I ate a bowl yesterday and imagined it was a frosted cherry Pop-Tart.

It didn’t really taste like it, but as the quarantine drags on there could come a time I forget what a frosted cherry Pop-Tart tastes like so it won’t matter.

I might have some this weekend and call it chicken. I don’t eat meat, but a chicken pissed me off once, so this is a way to be passive-aggressive.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to fun with food.

Have any potato chips around the house?

Pour them into a bowl, hit them with your fist, and suddenly you have “mini-chips.” Or, you can take a bag, pulverize it before opening it, and when you dump it out you can enjoy a bowl of “Tater dust.”

Canned Pringles are also fun because you can take two of them and situate them in such a way on your lips that it looks like you have a duck bill.

Here’s another great idea – since Cap’n Crunch is already nautical by nature, serve it while in the swimming pool, bathtub or when you’re still wet after getting out of the shower.

And if you want to entertain your kids (or your evolved chimps – I have no idea who or what you’re living with) you can change Cap’n Crunch’s rank every time you serve a bowl.

Tuesday he can be Rear Admiral Crunch, Wednesday he’s Vice Admiral Crunch, by Thursday he’s Admiral Chief of Naval Operations Crunch and heading into the weekend he’s been promoted to Fleet Admiral Crunch.

This morning I’ll be enjoying a heaping helping of Secretary of the Navy Crunch and Sunday I’ll have some Retired Crunch.

As for me, perhaps the one quarantine dish that comes closest to being “mom-inspired” is one I make using vegan link sausage and canned crescent rolls.

Really, this is just another version of “pig in a blanket.” You roll out a triangle of dough, wrap it around a sausage, and bake it.

However, since this is vegetarian fare I call it “friend in a quilt.”

I put a pair of toothpicks in one of them and placed green olives at the end of each toothpick. Thus “friend in a quilt” became “monster in a bedspread,” but then I realized maybe I had overdone it because the olives really didn’t have a major role to play.

In summation, my advice as our social isolation continues is to make your own fun with your own food. How you do it is entirely up to you and, obviously, there’s no right way or wrong way.

The key is to eat what you have and have fun while you eat.

And if you have a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, cocktail weenies and paprika on hand, well, you know what to do.

“Quarantine Life” – or “Shelter in Place” or “Stay Safe At Home” or however you define our altered existence in the time of the COVID-19 global pandemic – has its challenges.

Staying away from other people is Job One, so that means exercising independently (walking and/or running very early in the day or late at night allows you to avoid everyone except vampires, werewolves and, oddly enough, mimes). One should also make only guerilla runs to the grocery store and pharmacy (if you buy and eat enough bananas and chocolate, I’ve learned, you’ll find that the need for toilet paper decreases dramatically).

Beyond the restricted movement, however, is the fact that you’re stuck in the house with whoever else shares that house.

For me, that’s not a problem at all.

With female human Mary, male canines Charlie and Steve, and male felines Thor and Bane surrounding me, I’ve got it made.

I love them all and want to spend as much time with them as I can.

In fact, the only real difference now is Mary being at home 24/7. While I walk the dogs and clean the litter box under normal circumstances anyway, I don’t have to walk Mary or clean her litter box at all.

She’s low maintenance in that regard.

No, my only concern during the quarantine is how much of me they’ll be able to stand before this crisis passes. Even though I’m clearly a Trophy Husband, I’m on record as saying that I get on my own nerves. I can only imagine what effect I have on others.

The animals seem to be taking it well – so far, anyway.

We still have our own basketball team (I’m the center, Charlie and Bane are forwards, Thor is the point guard and Steve the shooting guard), but due to social distancing we don’t have any opposition.

To be fair we didn’t have any before – when I knocked on doors asking if anyone had four animals in their home and wanted to play interspecies hoops, the response was underwhelming.

I did get to interact with police officers a couple of times, though.

Without sports we do a lot of in-house plays these days.

Right now we’re rehearsing The Shawshank Redemption and I have to tell you – Thor really brings the passion to the role of Red Redding.

But I do wonder how this all impacts Mary.

Monday through Friday she’s still working from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., so my task is to make sure the animals stay out of her way. She has transformed a bedroom into an office, so she can close the door and conduct business as normally as possible.

But sometimes I forget she’s working (or pretend to forget) and interrupt her.

For reasons I can’t adequately explain, I like to pull my pants up to my man breasts and strut around the house. Often this leads to dancing – glorious, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo-inspired dancing.

When she’s on the phone or conducting a meeting via Zoom, this is probably distracting.

In addition, I catch myself thoughtlessly (and sometimes loudly) singing songs I’ve written. Last week it I was stuck on this ditty, sung to the tune of Frère Jacques:

I miss soccer, I miss hockey,
Roundball too, roundball too
I wanna see a cross-check
A hard foul that draws a tech
He’ll shoot two, he’ll shoot two.

Also – according to Mary – I’m prone to making annoying noises.

In fairness, the bodies of people my age tend to make annoying noises on their own. These days when my stomach growls it sounds like a couple of gremlins trying to have a conversation, and when I get up off the futon it’s as though someone just poured milk on a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Beyond that, I have a tendency to make random sounds just for the hell of it.

Mary calls one of them my “old man voice,” which is basically just me talking in a manner in which an old man would talk. There’s a lot of grunting involved.

Another is a high-pitched cross between a whistle and a sucking noise. I don’t really know why I make it but when I do it causes our critters’ ears to perk up. Once when the TV was on it disrupted the satellite and the next thing you know we were watching a Japanese network.

Long story slightly shorter, I’m a walking, talking irritant, but Mary doesn’t do anything that tests my patience.

Neither do Charlie, Thor, Bane or Steve, except for the occasional vomit, diarrhea, barking or clawing events.

I’m lucky in so many ways, not the least of which is that quarantine life for me is still basically just, well, life.

I hope Mary can say the same thing a few weeks (or months) from now – especially after I’ve had a chance to develop a few new dance routines.