Secret recipe for my famous pumpkin seeds

If you’re like me, you probably ate all the Almond Joys that were in the Halloween bowl and are constipated from the chocolate. Here’s nice salty treat to balance all the sweets you’ve been consuming before the trick-or-treaters come around. Or, if you’re a registered sex offender and are banned in your state from distributing candy to children, here’s something to take your mind off the young Ninja Turtles and princesses scurrying down your street.

Every Halloween, I make a big bowl of my famous kick-ass pumpkin seeds. There’s nothing better than a piping hot pumpkin seed straight off the cookie sheet. Pumpkin seeds are easy to make and FUN and are good for the prostate, if you’re a guy (at least according to Mel Gibson). I’m pretty obsessive compulsive about saving every seed that comes out of the gourd. I’d just as soon throw away the pumpkin after I clean it out, because carving a face on it is too much work.

First, find yourself a pumpkin that is rich in seed. I find that the heavier the pumpkin, the more likely it is to be filled on the inside with pumpkin junk. In past years, I’ve selected pumpkins that, though large and globule, felt light when I picked them up. When I got the pumpkins home and cut them open, I was bitterly disappointed with their low seed count. So you see size doesn’t matter. Try picturing the pumpkin with really large testicles.

After you get your pumpkin home, cut it open. Get a colander and throw all the guts into it, so you can separate the seeds. It’s probably a good idea not to let your 70-year-old alcoholic neighbor help you after she’s had three vodka-and-tonics, as mine did this evening, because I ended up having to fish a lot of the seeds out of the garbage while listening to her yell at me: “IT’S ONLY A FEW SEEDS! YOU SHOULD PUT THIS MUCH ENERGY INTO FINDING A FULL-TIME JOB!”

I like to think about all the Biblical references to seed because it takes my mind off of Halloween being a celebration of Satan. The Bible is just ga-ga with seed. “A farmer went out to sow his seed.” “I have given you every herb that yields seed.” “Cast your seed on fallow ground.” I never knew there was so much semen in the Bible. I like to think of these metaphors as I stick a cookie sheet full of pumpkin seeds into a 350-degree oven.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After you’ve cleaned out the inside of your pumpkin, quickly separate the seed from the pumpkin guts after you’ve sent your neighbor home to fix herself another drink and to bring you one while she’s at it, because you’re still on the weed wagon. Rinse the pumpkin seeds thoroughly in the colander, under the faucet. Cast some seed on to a cookie sheet. Blot them dry with a paper towel.

Next, spray the seeds with some of that spray-on skillet oil until they glisten. (I prefer the olive oil spray, but you can use vegetable oil spray or the fake buttered popcorn spray.) Sprinkle some salt on to the seeds. The past few years I’ve used the coarse sea salt which works great. You can also throw some red hot sauce, or nutmeg or cinnamon on the seeds, but I like the salty, greasy goodness of my recipe.

Stick the seeds into the oven. Set the timer for 10 minutes. Turn on the “700 Club” and get yourself a bag of the fun-size Hershey bars with almonds. Polish off a few of these as you think of all the people out there in television land whose warts and cancer are being cured by Pat Robertson, or how “Scooter” is a really stupid name for a grown man. Think about all the seed in the world that is being spewed in non-reproductive sex acts, but you’re saving the excess seeds by spraying them with chemically-laden cooking spray and covering them with salt so your tribe can multiply, and how it’s an excellent source of roughage, even better than candy corn!

Flip the seeds over with a spatula. I like to check the pumpkin seeds' texture by reaching into the oven and grabbing one off the cookie sheet. Re-set the oven timer for ten minutes and open another bag of candy that you’re saving for the trick-or-treaters. You can always run out and buy more on Halloween. The seeds should finish cooking between 20 and 30 minutes. When they turn brown take them out of the oven. Prepare the next batch.

Force your friends and family to sample your pumpkin seeds and listen to them exclaim, “These don’t taste like the ones you buy at the store.” As you can see from my recipe for my famous pumpkin seeds, there are dozens of lessons you can weave into their preparation with your little ones, about God, Jesus and sperm.

Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of Hurricane Katrina survivors staying up the road from me. I’m going to take them some of my famous pumpkin seeds and bring some joy into their lives.

I live for this

Well, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series last night. As a Cubs fan, I don’t know what to think. You can’t be a true Chicagoan without hating one of the city’s two baseball teams. If there were a world series for marketing, then the Chicago Cubs would be a fucking dynasty. But I don’t hate the Sox, just their fans.

In all fairness to Sox fans, I probably hate Cub fans even more – or at least majority of them. The Cubs have simply become too trendy and adorable for my taste. There are too many yuppies trying to impress each other by buying up all the game tickets just so they can walk around the world’s largest outdoor beer garden talking on their cell phones and treating the game on the field as if it were an annoyance.

It’s disgusting how many idiots continue to fill Wrigley Field to capacity year after year just to watch crap, all of them professing how they are the most LOYAL and LONG-SUFFERING fans when they’ve only lived in Chicago for like two years. Unless you’ve suffered through 1969, 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, and sat in the stands in pouring cold rain in September when the Cubs were 23 ½ games out of first place and stinking up Lake View, you’re not a true Cubs fan.

Going to Cubs games used to be fun before they morphed into America’s team after WGN became a “Super Station” during the 1980s and America got “cableized.” It was more fun going to games in the 1970s when there’d be only a few thousand people in Wrigley Field and you could drop acid or snort TIC or Angel Dust. I remember one game in 1978 when my friend Karol and I somehow scored box seats in the first few rows off of first base. I don’t even remember how we got these tickets because they were the kind of seats that asshole celebrities or CEOs of major corporations get – not a couple of trippy 21-year-olds.

Anyway, the Cubs were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers and the big story sweeping the news that week was how Steve Garvey’s wife Cindy left him and was staying at Marvin Hamlisch’s house for some unexplained reason. We were really trashed and screaming at Garvey through the whole game, “Hey, Steve, how’s Marvin?” Garvey kept looking at us and we started yelling more things like, “Marvin must have a really big dick!” Along about the third or fourth inning, some Andy Frain usher comes over and tells us that if we don’t stop harassing Mr. Garvey, they’re going to throw us out of Wrigley Field. Well, that was a huge mistake because it just got us going even more. Garvey even made an error, missing an easy throw to first base, he was so pissed at us. I can’t believe that Garvey was so rattled by a couple of young girls. We weren’t the pretty type that ballplayers wanted to fuck. I still think Steve Garvey is a dick, especially after the Padres came back and won the 1984 NLCS when the Cubs choked after winning the first two games.

But I am a baseball fan, and I’d rather see a Chicago team in the World Series than, ho hum, New York, Boston or any team from California. I really enjoy baseball because it’s the only sport that I understand. I still haven’t figured out what a down is in football. One of the things I enjoy most about watching major league baseball games in other cities are the accoutrements that fans bring to the games with them. Like what’s up with those fucking sticks that the Angels and Astros fans kept banging together? They don’t let you bring crap like that into Wrigley Field because there have been too many incidents where fans have thrown stuff on the field. For example, on Ron Santo Precious Moment Cherished Teddy Day in 2000, they distributed vouchers to fans in the bleachers to pick up their Ron Santo Precious Moment Cherished Teddies after the game. In Chicago, they know better than put anything in the hands of fans of both baseball teams that could potentially become a flying projectile.

Aside from having to listen to South Side Shanty Irish Sox fans brag about the stupid Sox for the next 88 years, I enjoyed watching the Sox kick everyone’s asses during the playoffs. My boyfriend refused to watch any of the games and kept saying how he hoped the Sox’ plane would crash midair into Air Force I. It kind of pissed me off about the Cubs especially after their whiny, selfish attitudes these past couple of years. Why Baker didn’t get off his ass and go out and calm down Moises Alou when he was having his hissy fit after that idiot Steve Bartman interfered with a foul ball that was still in play, or tell Mark Prior to just brush it off during Game 6 of the 2003 NLDS playoffs is a mystery for the ages. I was five outs away from fulfilling my Cubs Old Style pledge by giving Ronnie Woo-Woo a blow job.

I’m jealous of the leadership and team chemistry of the 2005 Sox. I’d screw any of ‘em – Ozzie Guillen, Paul Konerko, Scott Podsednik, Jermaine Dye, Joe Crede, A.J. Pierzynski. I mean, if you wanted to screw Kerry Wood of the Cubs for example, he’d be like, “you’re hurting my arm!” Anyway, Wood hasn’t had a healthy season since he mowed down 13 Astro batters in 1998. I’m sick of the Cubs paying Kerry Wood $28 million and having him be out for a whole season after pitching one game because his fucking arm is always lame.

But there is a bright spot to all of this because I’m already seeing signs of phony, North Side Cubs fans jumping on the Sox bandwagon. I went to go watch Game 4 of the series at a bar on the North Side with some friends last night. A couple of guys walked in wearing White Sox jerseys, pretending like they’ve been Sox fans for the past 100 years. Toward the end of the game, my friends and I, all Cubs fans, were the only ones yelling or showing any enthusiasm while these guys in the Sox jerseys were sitting on their hands. I mean, if that was the Cubs up on the TV screen about to win the World Series, they would have been bringing me out a defibrillator.

I was like, “C’MON, LET’S SHOW SOME ENTHUSIASM FOR YOUR TEAM, MR. PHONY GUYS IN THE WHITE SOX JERSEYS! THIS MAY NOT HAPPEN AGAIN FOR ANOTHER 50 YEARS!” Anyway, after the Sox won, my friends and I were the only ones screaming and yelling, “LET’S SHOOT OFF OUR GUNS!” and giving Babs and ‘41’ who were sitting behind home plate wearing Astros jackets the finger. (BTW, didn’t Barbara Bush’s head look like giant cotton ball?) We thought about running down Belmont Avenue and tipping over some cars and looting, but got bored and ordered more beer instead. We did knock over a few bar stools.

At least I got see some Chicago team win a World Series. I’ve been waiting my whole fucking life. I was able to watch some quality baseball being played in my own city for a change. Anyway, let the Sox be Chicago’s team for awhile. Those guys deserve it. Let the phony yuppie Cubs fans defect to the South Side next year where they can yak on their cell phones in the aptly named U.S. Cellular Field. Have yourselves a good fucking time.

As for myself, I don’t plan on buying any Sox gear or jumping on the Sox bandwagon. I’ve been riding enough wagons lately, like the Weed Wagon, but that’s a whole other story.

Adventures with 'the Urinal'

Like the waning daylight of fall, dark days have fallen upon the mean little suburb where I live next to O’Hare International Airport. Earlier this month, a 47-year-old man was brutally stabbed to death in front of his senile wife in his trailer home next to our old high school. Like a dog that bears witness to a terrible crime but cannot talk, the wife, who suffers from early onset Alzheimer disease, has been unable to provide any useful clues to the local police.

A week later, a 61-year-old man was struck and killed by a reckless driver as he attempted to cross a busy street in the downtown business district during the early morning hours. Like communities all across America, our streets and intersections are no longer pedestrian-friendly, as traffic patterns and roads are now designed to move a shitload of cars as quickly as possible. Lights are timed so that pedestrians have less than thirty seconds to cross busy intersections, as cars whip around rounded curbs. God help you if you are elderly, disabled or obese. If the light changes while you are still in the middle of the intersection, you are fucked.

These stories have been recounted in our community newspaper, the Journal, which is published every Wednesday and Friday. The Journal Topics and News is an entrenched, family-owned publishing company that ascribes to the lowest standards of journalism. It is the joke of the local journalism community, and most residents refer to the paper as ‘the Urinal.' Full of typos, grammatical errors and misspelled sensationalistic headlines, the Urinal is the rag to read if you want to find out what our Mafia-run city council is up to, or which neighbors recently got busted for growing pot.

The most popular feature in the Urinal is “Speak Out,” where local residents anonymously debate the important issues of the day, both local and global. Our city’s overdevelopment of condos (we got condos coming out the ass), troublesome squirrels, local TV news anchors who talk to fast, O’Hare runway expansion, 666, George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and immigrants who refuse to learn English and shoplift at neighborhood garage sales -- are just a few of the ongoing arguments splashed across the pages of “Speak Out.”

There are several means by which readers can voice their opinions in “Speak Out,” including calling and ranting on the Urinal’s answering machine, submitting snail mail written in crayon, and my own personal favorite, the anonymous e-mail. The comments people leave are often illiterate, unintentionally funny or are otherwise submitted by cranks.

Last summer, I had a record five crank letters published in one edition of “Speak Out.” The first suggested that instead of spending hundreds of dollars on filtering software, that our public library install booths around its public computers so that perverts could masturbate in privacy when viewing porn on the Internet, instead of violating the constitutional rights of children and the elderly. Others concerned obese people riding electric scooters in the supermarket (“I’m tired of them running over my toes”); Comcast’s emergency weather bulletins pre-empting television programming and the proliferation of bum camps in the Cook County forest preserves. After watching the large number of overweight Americans streaming past President Reagan’s casket as it lay in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, I suggested that a more fitting memorial to the late president would be for Americans to "get off their lazy, fat butts and exercise."

But the story of the 47-year-old man who was stabbed multiple times through the neck really grabbed me. Nick was a blue-collar guy who was left permanently disabled by a childhood accident. He quit his job working for a local paving company to care for his 53-year-old wife after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. According to the Urinal, police said Nick was a “known crack-cocaine user” who was most likely murdered because he owed money to drug dealers or a drug deal that went bad. He was last seen alive cashing his disability check at a local bank, and he was found with his pockets turned inside out. Police described his friends as “low-lifes,” implying that Nick was a “low life” also. His body was discovered by police during a well-being check, after his family called him at home and his wife told them that Nick had been "asleep on the floor” for the past twelve hours.

Nick’s sister, who shares my first name, said the family was hoping to air his story on “America’s Most Wanted.” She described him as a “teddy bear” and said she couldn’t understand anyone who would want to commit such a horrible act of violence on her brother. The police chief said that detectives had interviewed “40 persons of interest” and the local Crimestoppers put up a $1,000 reward for information leading to solving the murder.

I don’t know, maybe it was because I grew up with a couple hundred guys like Nick. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, but they’re good guys, always ready to help me fix my car, beat the shit out of trespassers lurking near my home, roll up my car windows when it starts to rain, buy me a beer, or give me an honest opinion. They get up at 4:30 in the morning and work long hours at jobs of hard, physical labor while many of us sit on our asses all day in front of computers in heated and air-conditioned offices. These guys may not make the best life choices or decisions, but like all of us, if they did the best they could at the moment.

Nick wasn’t some beautiful, white pregnant woman who suddenly turned up missing on Christmas Eve, but a bearded, beer-bellied, unemployed laborer with hip problems who tried to do right by his wife when she became ill. It’s the ongoing assault of the middle class, with jobs being outsourced and lifetimes of assets being wiped out when loved ones get sick. So I sent an e-mail to the editor of the Urinal asking him to pass along my contact information to Nick’s sister, offering my assistance in getting her brother’s story aired on “America’s Most Wanted.” We all attended the same high school during the ‘70s, and chances are that we passed each other in the halls, or sat waiting in the dean’s office together.

My professional skills are for the most part pretty useless. My abilities to write puff pieces for community newspapers and marketing brochures do little to help further society, other than to make some cranky white guy even richer. If I were to find myself stranded on a desert island, I’d probably starve to death or get attacked by wild animals.

About a week later, I got a call from a reporter at the Urinal. She was actually pretty cool, and I found out from her that the rest of the staff looked forward to my crank letters to “Speak Out.” It was pretty awkward, because usually I'm the one asking the really stupid questions. I wasn’t comfortable with the situation at all when she told me that the crackpot publisher wanted to do a story about my helping this family get their story on AMW. I hadn’t even talked to Nick’s sister yet, and asked for her number. I asked the reporter to please wait until we actually did something. She assured me she would.

Nick’s sister told me she was too distraught from cleaning out his trailer to meet me for coffee. I had done some research on AMW and some other organizations, and because he may have been engaged in illegal activity at the time of his death, his story probably wouldn't meet their qualifications for assistance. I had a million questions to ask Nick’s sister, plus some suggestions for putting the heat on local police and anyone else in the community who might be withholding information.

Last Wednesday, my friend Karol called me laughing her ass off. She told me to turn to page 6 in the Urinal, and I thought she was referring to my latest crank letter to “Speak Out” comparing our mayor to Johnny Sack on “The Sopranos.” I just about shit when I saw the headline: “Qwest to put murder case on AMW.”

The article was all about how I was tapping into “my extensive network of contacts in the TV industry.” Hey, I know a gay guy who works for a popular, nationally syndicated, daytime TV show in L.A.! The article got worse. Somehow, I ended up knowing Nick in high school and was vice president of media relations for some corporation. It was like reading something in the National Enquirer.

I immediately fired off an e-mail to Nick’s sister, apologizing for the article, how I never said half the shit they had me saying, and that I was in no way seeking publicity for myself. I told her I would never exploit her family’s tragedy. She wrote me back telling me not to worry about it and that the police had told her to quit talking to people about the investigation. She said she was furious with the Urinal for printing that her brother was a “known crack-cocaine user” and trying to pass off her brother’s murder as just “another druggie that no one had to worry about.” She said her brother only took drugs prescribed by his doctor, and that he had no criminal record of any kind. She wrote of her seething anger and the horrible pain that was inflicted upon her mother. She said the cops did not appreciate at all the loving tribute that a more reputable paper had written about her brother. She said when she’s ready to talk about it, I’ll be the first person she’ll call.

I sent her some numbers of some support groups for families of homicide victims. I was so angry at what the Urinal has been printing about Nick that I wanted to go over to that office and kick that weasley, self-righteous, Christian motherfucker publisher’s ass. Most likely some jerk-off cop in the police department made some offhand comment about Nick being a crack-cocaine user and this idiot bought it. Even if he was just a pothead, like half the town is, I’m tired of potheads being demonized by our hypocritical politicians and an overhyped multi-billion dollar drug testing industry. I’m sure Jeffrey Skilling passed Enron’s fucking pee test and look what a schmuck he turned out to be.

I don’t think I’ll be wasting any more of my time with the Urinal. They’re still sending me two papers a week and I haven’t renewed my subscription in over a year. The sad thing is Nick’s sister said I was the only person from our town that offered any compassion or sympathy to her family. I hope I never become a victim of a violent crime.

Fellatio, Jello Puddin' Pops and Cold Turkey

Darling readers, I’m sure those of you who took bets that little Rainy’s ADD had finally kicked in and she was abandoning her blog were thinking about collecting. No, I just had a very busy week tending to the petty acts of survival and my glamorous job as an underemployed news stringer which included – killing a multimillion-dollar planned development while it was still a watercolor rendering, documenting confused Cub fans’ angst over the Sox playoff success, more zoning stories, police blotters and orthodox Jewish rabbis studying the Halacha. What a fucking exciting life I lead.

I did manage to get over to Border’s and read a good chunk of Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s new tell-all “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” while drinking some lame coffee drink in the café. The Border’s sales associates are on to me because I haven’t purchased a book there in like three years, preferring instead to speed-read almost complete tomes inside the store. It isn’t that difficult to do when you’re reading mostly crap, and I owe about a thousand dollars in overdue fines at my local public library. I’m caught up on all the new Scott Peterson books, and Lawford’s insider memoirs about growing up in the Kennedy family was next on my clandestine reading list. (Which reminds me, I still need to check out the unauthorized Michael Jackson bio, “Freak.”)

I found Lawford’s book tucked upstairs in the music department in the celebrity drug addict section. I managed to locate it easily, looking it up on the store locator. When I came back downstairs, a sales clerk asked me somewhat sarcastically as I was headed to the café, “Did you find what you were looking for?” Well, lady, if Border’s doesn't want its customers reading books in the store and returning them to shelves when they are finished looking at them, DON’T PUT IN CHAIRS OR A COFFEE SHOP FOR PEOPLE TO SIT AND READ, BITCH!

Anyway, my dissident reading habits all harken back to when I was 14. My friends and I would sprawl across the aisles in Jewel Osco, reading books like “The Happy Hooker” and “The Sensuous Woman,” after which, we’d help ourselves to grapes in the produce section and practice rolling them between our teeth without breaking the skins, a la the Sensuous Woman’s chapter on learning the fine art of fellatio.

Do we really need another book on the Kennedys? The answer to that question, darling readers, is yes. Like the smack, herb, LSD, pills, coke and booze that Christopher Lawford ingested into his body every day between the ages of 13 and 30, these regurgitations of the Kennedy Clan are an addiction that must be fed. Lawford is the son of JFK’s sister Patricia and movie star Peter Lawford, who in his prime was one of the sexist bastards of all time.

I always thought that Christopher Lawford, in his younger days, was the sexist third generation Kennedy after John-John. But at age 50, Lawford is looking a wee bit too much like Phil Spector nowadays judging from the photo on the dust jacket, with his fright-night, Spector-esque coif. Still, Chris has inherited his old man’s devilish good looks before poor Peter lost them becoming an emaciated drug addict and arranging helicopter drops of cocaine on the grounds of the Betty Ford Clinic while going through rehab with Liza Minelli.

I judge a good Kennedy book by how much new information I can glean about America’s favorite Royal Family. For example, in Seymour Hersh’s “The Darker Side of Camelot,” I was shocked to find out that JFK had a sexually transmitted disease called Chlamydia that he passed on to Jackie, which can cause premature birth and miscarriages in pregnant women. The night after he was assassinated, Bobby went to the Oval Office and expunged JFK’s medical records so the nation wouldn’t find out that its martyred president had the clap. Early on in Chris Lawford’s book, we learn that one of Bobby Kennedy’s kids took a crap in the Lawford’s swimming pool while visiting them in Malibu.

More Pat and Peter Lawford fun facts:

- Pat was the sixth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children and considered the most sophisticated of the five Kennedy sisters.

- Pat made the sign of the cross each time before she engaged in intercourse with Peter Lawford.

- Pat was a TV producer for Father Peyton’s “Family Rosary Crusade” - the program that made “the family that prays together, stays together” a household phrase.

- While newlyweds, Pat and Peter lived in a two-bedroom Malibu beach house that was once owned by Gloria Swanson.

- Pat and Peter killed a bottle of Scotch just hours after she gave birth to her first child and the first male grandchild born to a Kennedy daughter.

- Christopher Lawford never bonded with his mother through sucking.

- Pat and Peter moved out of the Malibu beach house once owned by Joe Kennedy’s mistress Gloria Swanson, and took their own digs, leaving the house to newborn Christopher and his baby nurse because they couldn't stand the smell of Christopher's stinky diapers.

- Pat was so enamored with big brother Jack that she often pimped for him when he visited her and Peter in California, hosting nude pool parties with Marilyn, Jeannie Carmen and other Hollywood starlets.

- Peter Lawford made up all that crap about Marilyn Monroe calling the night she o.d.’d saying, “Say goodbye to the president for me and say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” Peter lied to assuage his guilt over not rushing over to Marilyn’s house as she succumbed to sleeping pills.

- Peter said Pat took everything after their divorce, including precious mementos of JFK’s presidency. After Pat relocated to Manhattan just a few blocks away from Jackie’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue, Peter sent a truck packed with five-gallon containers of water and a note that said, “Dear Pat, you forgot to drain the swimming pool.”

- Pat often got drunk on wine in front of her children, who would be confused by her sudden speech incapacity as she drilled them on geography at the dinner table.

- Pat never remarried or fully recovered from her divorce and brothers’ assassinations, settling for the company of gay male friends and dysfunctional drinking buddies.

- Pat once rented Boston Red Sox Jimmy Piersol’s house in Hyannis Port, the summer Piersol had his famous nervous breakdown during a game and climbed the backstop.

- Peter Lawford brought a prostitute as his date to RFK’s funeral.

- Hugh Hefner, feeling sorry for Peter, let him stay for free in a small guest cottage on the grounds of Hef’s Playboy Mansion during the 1970s. While visiting Hef with a "female companion" at the height of his Jello Puddin' Pop fame, Bill Cosby described Peter as "pathetic" within earshot of Christopher Lawford.

- In his later years, Peter Lawford could not achieve orgasm without getting his nipples lacerated with razor blades.

Lawford’s “Symptoms of Withdrawal” is the first Kennedy memoir since the Kennedy Spin Machine hacked out Rose’s “Times to Remember,” that totally glossed over how she disowned her daughter Kathleen for marrying a Protestant and having a husband who was a horny, cheating bastard that lobotomized their retarded daughter. Lawford is winning rave reviews for his writing, but I wouldn’t say there is anything overtly personal in his book that would cause the rest of the Kennedy family to disown him.

There’s no index, which is annoying, but I plan on putting one together as a public service when the paperback edition comes out. The Kennedys are a dynasty that never really got off the ground. I think American would have been a much different and better country today, had Jack and Bobby lived to carry out their progressive ideas of government. I mean, why the Kennedys and not the Bushes? Like the first half of Christopher Lawford’s life, something, somewhere got really screwed up and God stopped blessing America.

A Confederacy of Pussies

Sooner or later, PDD is going to have to get political. I figure that most of the three or four people who regularly read this blog pretty much hate Bush already and think he is the worst president since, well, I don’t know, maybe Harding, Hoover and Nixon, and a few other dead white guys from the 19th century all rolled into one, including Judas, the disciple that betrayed Jesus, with some rotting birds from the avian flu epidemic multiplied by X squared thrown in.

I’m preaching to the choir at the Church of Our Lady of the Mattress, right? And if someone is random blogging and happens to think that George W. Bush is the second coming of Jesus, well, there’s not much I can say that’s going to change your opinion of him and visa versa.

I’m too tired to articulate my knee-jerk reactionary anger over the rapid disintegration of this country or the millions of misguided minds out there who think Jesus is directly communicating with Chimpy in the Oval Office, maybe even possibly giving him a blow job, too, who can’t see our collective quality of life going down the toilet. I've given up hope that our government will ever make a bargain with the population that doesn't put the almighty buck before the good of the American people.

I don’t think I was ever angrier or despised a president more as I did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina watching modern day genocide take place on the streets of New Orleans. I mean, it pissed me off so much that it brought on one of the worst cases of irritable bowel syndrome that I have ever experienced in my life. It got so bad that I had to go out and buy a Fleet enema. By the time I finished shooting it up my ass, my bathroom looked like the Louisiana Super Dome.

So I woke up this morning and started channel surfing, hitting the Sunday morning news shows. Seems like the big topic is the threat of a possible avian flu pandemic and how our federal government is unprepared. Gee, I find that so surprising.

Bird flu is showing up in ducks in Europe, chickens in Indonesia, Viet Nam and China, and turkeys in Turkey. U.S. health agencies are predicting the deaths of 1.9 million Americans should an avian flu pandemic sweep our land. But Idiot Boy has a plan to quell an epidemic should it hit U.S. soil, based on our federal government’s hugely successful military response to the mess down in New Orleans.

We’ll put Rumsfeld in charge of our nation’s civilian police force. Sure, it’s unprecedented and maybe even possibly unconstitutional, but Chimpy can do whatever the hell he wants because he’s CRAZY AND IN CHARGE. What's left of the U.S. military that isn't in Iraq will help enforce quarantines in areas hit by avian flu.

So does this mean we’ll be shot if we leave our homes to go to Walgreen’s or Rite Aid to buy TheraFlu? Will we get paid for time off from work if we have to spend six weeks under house arrest just because we got the flu? Will the feds pick up medical costs for the uninsured? What if there’s a biological terrorist attack and Al Qaeda puts anthrax in the nation’s supply of Healthy Choice microwave entrees while there’s an avian flu pandemic going on?

According to Idiot Boy’s Secretary of Health Michael Leavitt, our nation’s multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies simply can’t produce enough anti-viral vaccine in the next four months to thwart this mutated strain of bird flu. The Bush Administration doesn’t want to pay for it, you mean.

Considering that the nation’s aerospace industry produced more than 300,000 military aircraft between 1941 and 1945 – 9,000 war planes rolled off the nation’s assembly lines during March of 1944 alone – I think we could produce a shit load of Tamiflu vaccine if we really put our minds to it.

Relax, folks. Yeah, it’s possible that a whole lot of people will get sick for a few days and get over it and return to their crappy cubicle jobs, but why should this be different than any other flu season? There’ll be disgusting vomit, mucus and diarrhea oozing from every orifice of our bodies, but we’ll be okay.

A lot of us got sick during the great Asian Flu Pandemics in 1967 and 1968 and probably don’t even realize it. I came down with a hell of a flu right before Christmas vacation in 1968. My parents even left me alone sick on the couch while my whole family went to my cousin’s wedding and didn’t get home until after midnight. You can see how concerned they were about the global pandemic. I was sick as a dog right up until Santa Claus came, and by then I was too busy playing with my Spiro-Graph and Jane West Cowgirl action figure and listening to my brother’s copy of “The White Album” to even care. I recovered and spent the rest of Christmas break happily sledding and ice skating in -20 degree temperatures.

Americans have become the biggest pussies in the world. We have a pussy president and vice-president who dodged the draft during the Viet Nam War, yet they sure are quick to send a bunch of other people's kids to be IED fodder in some hellhole. Our president wasn’t even man enough to show up for national guard duty, let alone look the country in the eye while making his phony apology accepting responsibility for the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

We're so frightened of bacteria and germs you'd think we were pissing in our drinking water in this country. Now we have even more household chemicals polluting our soil and landfills with products like disinfectant wipes to wipe the spills off our smelly kitchen countertops and lots of other toxic shit designed to cut through household grit and grime. I think I’d be more worried more about all the freight trains that are rolling through our communities carrying molten sulfur.

After 9/11, we've been so eager to hand over our civil liberties that we might as well give up all of our freedom the way the Bush administration is grabbing it away from us little by little. Looking in everyone’s backpack on the subway or checking to see what books we take out of the library is not going to protect our country from terrorism. This country’s been spoiled as far as war actions on our own turf. We’re all falling apart when we should be singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” like the Brits during World War II. America isn’t going to be worth living in by the time Bush gets through wrecking it.

I couldn’t switch off the Sunday morning news shows fast enough and turn on the Chicago Marathon in time to see the winner of the wheelchair division roll across the finish line. It inspired me so much that I might enter next year’s marathon if I can ride a Rascal.

There is one encouraging sign from all these horrible events that have piled up during the past few months in addition to Bush’s plummeting poll numbers: the smirk is finally getting knocked off that smug bastard’s face and replaced by that wide-eyed look of fear we've all grown to love.

So you see. my political opinions are a mess. Aren't you glad you asked?

Injun Summer

I miss the annual publication of John T. McCutcheon’s “Injun Summer” in the Chicago Tribune. The Trib used to run it every fall in the Sunday Magazine.

The illustration and poem, originally published in 1907, depict both day and night views of an old man smoking a pipe and a little boy looking out over the smoke of burning leaves into a corn field. The old man regales the little boy with tales of “Injun sperrits marchin’ along and dancin’” and all “the homesick Injuns” that come back to play. He tells the little boy not to be “skeered” as night falls and Injuns dance among the corn shocks that take on the appearance of teepees.

Nothing stoked my imagination more as a kid than “Injun Summer.” It reminds me of my own corn field subdivision in the 1960s, making forts in the farmer’s field and building pumpkin totem poles on the front lawn. I always imagined “Injun Summer” taking place beyond the reaches of my own suburban neighborhood and Indian spirits rustling in the leaves outside my bedroom window.

Then around the early 1980s, people began writing letters to the Tribune complaining how “Injun Summer” advocated the genocide of Native Americans and other minorities. I even remember the Trib printing one letter to the editor saying that what if instead of Indians, the old man was telling the young boy about “Jew sperrits hoppin’ around to beat the old harry.” Eventually, the Chicago Tribune retired “Injun Summer” and now you can only find it on the Internet.

I’ve re-read “Injun Summer” a million times looking for these references to genocide. It doesn’t say anything about white settlers and Indians murdering each other. While I admit McCutcheon’s Midwest portrait of early 20th century rural life isn’t exactly p.c. by today’s standards, it’s certainly not racist or bigoted. Rather it is full of charm and whimsy, and it’s a damn shame that it has been recast into something sinister and cynical.

To me, it’s just some old codger – maybe the kid’s grandfather or some other crazy neighborhood coot – telling scary, inappropriate stories to a child. It reminds me of the stories that my grandmother used to tell when I was growing up. She was a fantastic artist who worked a succession of crappy day jobs so she could paint, but like most talented, creative people she never made any money at it.

She used to tell all sorts of inappropriate stories to me as a child about being married to a drunk (my grandfather) and how she had to secretly move out of their apartment in the middle of the day while he was at work to another place across town. She didn’t even tell her sisters her new address because she knew he’d wheedle the information out of them and he would talk my grandmother into taking him back. Even though she loved him dearly, she was tired of being a co-dependent – and this was in the early 1940s – long before Oprah and Dr. Phil. She even wrote a song about it called “I Saw The Clouds Go Wandering By” about how if she spent another day loving a hopeless alcoholic she’d die.

Many of her stories were cautionary tales so I wouldn’t do something stupid and accidentally kill myself. For example, she had a dozen stories about kids who died or severely injured themselves playing with matches. Most of the scenarios involved her coming home work and seeing fire engines on the street, and kids being brought out on stretchers with their skin hanging off their burned bodies. The kids' mothers would invaribly show up and the firemen would explain how they found the children dead inside of closets or under their beds. The mothers would start screaming hysterically. The dads would eventually come along and start beating up the mothers for leaving the kids home alone.

My grandmother also saved a horse from being whipped to death by its owner when she was ten years old. Horses were still used to pull wagons in her day, and she was coming home from school when she saw the rag man beating his horse. The horse was old and tired and as much as it tried to get up and pull the wagon, it couldn’t. My grandmother begged the man to stop hitting the horse, but when he threatened to whip her, she ran home and got her mother – my great-Grandma Bostrom – who called the cops. Anyway, the rag man was arrested and the cops took the horse away. My grandmother said the horse was retired to a farm but this took place in 1913, so the poor horse was probably sent to a glue factory.

She also used to show me the knife that she carried in her purse in case she got attacked coming home at night from her job selling candy at the Granada Theater. I must have been really sick as a child because I used to make her run through her whole repertoire of stories. Anytime you asked her a question, she always had some twisted tale to tell to illustrate her point. Once my brother asked her what a tornado was, and she drew a picture of one sucking up some children.

I’m sure she got most of these stories out of the Chicago Daily News. When I was learning how to read, she’d make me practice reading stories out loud from the newspaper about babies being abandoned inside mailboxes. She could also make a card table spin on one leg using hyperkinetic energy in her kitchen on Albany Avenue. It scared the hell of out of me, but I thought it was normal.

My grandmother’s stories made me feel important because she trusted me. She'd recite them in a quiet "It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night" kind of voice. She wasn't afraid to discuss forbidden topics with her young granddaughter. In 1965, my grandmother fell in the alley behind her house carrying her groceries home from Jewel's and broke her hip. She claimed she slipped on a stone but it was probably an osteo break. She never walked or painted again, but she still told stories. I haven’t heard too many since that can even compare to them.

Tomorrow, I’m going to send $10 to the Chicago Tribune and get my own reprint of “Injun Summer” to hang in my kitchen.

Rosemary Kennedy's day off

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a little-known, near- Kennedy tragedy, when President Kennedy’s developmentally-disabled sister, Rosemary, got lost in Chicago. Rosie – as she was known to her immediate family and the nuns who cared for her at St. Coletta’s in Jefferson, Wis., for 57 years until her death last January – was an anomaly to her family.

To hear the Kennedy family spin, they embraced Rosie as a child, kept at her at home singin’ Irish drinking songs like “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and “Pretty Maid Milking the Cow” and competing in sailing races off the Cape, against the advice of Harvard University doctors who encouraged Joe and Rose to put her in an institution. In actuality, the family considered Rosemary “a disgrace.” Joe Kennedy could not tolerate losers and banned Rosie from the house.

Up until his appointment as ambassador to King James’ Court in 1939, Rosemary lived with Joe’s closest aide – Edward Moore for whom Teddy is named – afraid that Rosie would jeopardize his presidential ambitions for his oldest, anti-Semitic son, Joe, Jr., who once wrote in a letter to his father that “Hitler has some good ideas about the Jews.”

This is the first of what I hope to be many fascinating blogs about America’s Royal Family – the Kennedys.

The fall of 1975 was a season of little girls lost. The nation was still reeling from two assassination attempts in as many weeks on President Gerald Ford. The first would-be assassin, Manson family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, stepped out from a crowd gathered to hear the president speak at Capitol Park in Sacramento, Calif. Wearing a red cape and white turban, Squeaky pointed an unloaded Colt .45 at the president’s genitals and demanded that he stop the “man-made desecration of the environment.”

A few weeks later, Sara Jane Moore, a double agent for the FBI and Berkley radical underground, fired the first shots at a sitting U.S. president since Nov. 22, 1963. Patricia Campbell Hearst, kidnapped heiress turned alleged bank robber, was apprehended after 18 months on the lam with her Symbionese Liberation Army comrades-in-arms. The Hearst family proclaimed Patty’s mind to be almost gone after Patty raised her clenched, handcuffed fist in a Black Panther salute in the back of police squad car and declared her occupation to FBI agents as “urban guerilla.” Meanwhile, in Chicago, another little girl was getting lost: the beautiful and the damned Rosemary Kennedy.

Rosemary was the prettiest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s five daughters. Her Sacred Heart-shaped face stands apart from those of her sisters in old Kennedy family photos: dazzling Kick, gawky Eunice, smoldering Pat and sulky Jean. Rosemary was the oldest Kennedy daughter and had been diagnosed as “feeble minded” by Harvard University doctors’ definition of the highest functioning level of mental retardation in the 1920s. (The other classifications were "moron" and "imbecile.")

When Rosemary was a year old, her mother observed that the freckle-faced toddler had problems managing her silver baby spoon and “porringer.” Rosemary’s natural beauty hid any outward symptoms of mental deficiencies. Outwardly, she did not appear retarded, but strangers and casual acquaintances of the Kennedys noticed that she was slow in the company of her overachieving siblings, sealing her fate as the first Kennedy tragedy.

Throughout her childhood, her family fiercely sheltered Rosemary. She was included in games, sailing races and tutored to the point of torture, learning the Catechism and how to dance, and developing an almost idiot savant acumen for sums and fractions. Eunice who always held a special fondness for her oldest sister, ensured that Rosemary enjoyed some measure of success in games such as “Duck, Duck, Goose.”

In 1939, the family left on three separate voyages across the perilous Atlantic where German U-boats had been torpedoing Allie passenger ships, to join Joe in England following his appointment as U.S. ambassador. Rosemary made her debut into society with younger sister Kick, when both were presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Rosemary tripped on her curtsey.

Eventually, 19-year-old Rosemary was enrolled in a Montessori school in the English countryside. For the first time in her life, Rosemary began to blossom away from her hyperkinetic family and the overwhelming pressure to succeed. After England declared war on Germany in September 1939, Rose and the rest of the Kennedy children left for home in Bronxville, N.Y., leaving Rosemary to fend for herself in war-torn Europe. Occasionally her father, between fulfilling his duties as ambassador and cutting deals of appeasement with Hitler, visited Rosemary in her country school as an excuse to escape the German Blitz in London. Joe spent most of those visits haranguing Rosemary about being fat.

In 1940, much to the protestations of her Montessori teachers, Rosemary returned to America with her brother Jack. Back in the Kennedy pressure-cooker, Rosemary’s frustration reached a boiling point, driving her to the brink of despair. She began lashing out angrily at family members, her mother bearing the brunt of Rosemary’s wild swipes to the face when she wasn’t in Paris shopping for six months out of the year. Throwing tantrums, storming the streets alone at night, and reeling from the hormonal rages of an unrequited, sexual maturation, Rosemary fulfilled her destiny as a liability to her father and his presidential dreams for Joe, Jr., the oldest Kennedy child and golden son.

Home from England in 1941 following his disastrous appointment as an ambassador, Joe made the darkest of his many Faustian deals, planting the seeds of bad karma that would haunt his children and his children’s children in the decades to come. Rosemary was quietly lobotomized while Rose vacationed in California with Jack and Kick, becoming the first mentally retarded person in the United States to receive a state-of-the-art frontal lobotomy. Joe consulted no one, and the results of the experimental operation were catastrophic. Rosemary was worse than before, and was exiled to a convent in Jefferson, Wis., where no one in the family was allowed to contact her.

For the next several decades, Rosemary remained an enigma. Her oldest brother, who she adored, perished when his experimental plane blew up during a top secret mission at the lingering end of World War II. Kick, who replaced Rosemary as the eldest Kennedy daughter long ago, was also killed in a plane crash along with her married Protestant lover in France during a thunderstorm.

During Jack’s early political career, who had stepped in to fill his dead brother’s shoes, the press was told that Rosemary lived a quiet life in Wisconsin doing religious work. Finally, in 1960, during Jack’s presidential campaign, Joe publicly admited in a carefully staged press conference, that the democratic presidential candidate had a sister with mental retardation.

Through the years, Rosemary was slowly drawn back into the family. The annual visits to Hyannis Port and West Palm Beach began with her nun caretakers from St. Coletta’s, the convent where Rosie lived and was ministered to. She was a strong muscular woman, almost topping out at six feet tall, dwarfing the diminutive Rose. She was barely cognizant of her family and could not be left alone. Rosemary beared an unspeakable rage to Rose, whom she saw as abandoning her some 30 years ago. In 1968, Eunice founded the Special Olympics in Rosemary’s honor.

October 5, 1975 was to have been a reunion of sorts for Rosemary and Eunice, who was in Chicago attending a fundraiser for her husband, democratic presidential candidate R. Sargeant Shriver. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi brought Rosemary to Chicago to meet Eunice. Eunice had a full Sunday of activities planned for Rosemary – morning mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Madison Street, lunch at the Palmer House, and then a long frenetic walk along the glorious Lake Michigan lakefront.

After the 11 o’clock mass, Rosemary was at Eunice’s side in the church vestibule when Eunice stopped to examine some religious booklets. When she looked up into the crowded vestibule, Eunice told police, Rosemary was gone. Eunice, along with the priest and two other women searched the church for a half hour. Eunice went into the street and flagged down a passing squad car. The police woman drove Eunice slowly up and down the surrounding streets, not realizing she was the wife of the 1976 democratic presidential candidate or that the person they were searching for was the retarded sister of the late President Kennedy.

Eunice finally identified herself and the policewoman notified Lt. Joseph Locallo, watch commander for the Chicago Police Department’s Central District. Fearful that Rosemary might be found by a person who could hold her for ransom or harm her, Lt. Locallo ordered 50 police officers to ride or walk the Loop streets looking for her.

Meanwhile Rosemary, dressed in a belted, puffy white coat and red pants, strolled the streets. She carried no money or identification, and because of the lobotomy that her father ordered for her decades before, she was unable to talk except to identify herself. For the first time in 24 years Rosemary was free, away from the scrutiny of the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, who never gave her a moment’s peace. Downtown Chicago was unusually crowded that Sunday. Rosemary was swept away in the crowd hurrying down the sidewalks, joining the flow of life like a seasoned urbanite.

For the next five hours Rosemary was lost while a frantic Eunice rode in the back of a squad car searching for a glimpse of her sister’s red pants. Police radios broadcasted Rosemary’s description at regular intervals. Soon, the Chicago media also heard of Rosemary’s disappearance. They, too, combed the streets looking for her, not so much to find her, but to be the first to get fresh photos of President Kennedy’s retarded sister.

WGN radio reported that Sen. Ted Kennedy, the lone surviving son of Joe and Rose, had also been contacted. One can only imagine his conversation with Eunice. (“GODDAMIT, EUNICE, HOW COULD YOU LOSE HER!”) Police searched public buildings, restaurants and alleys, but no Rosemary.

Finally, Peter Nolan, a reporter for WBBM-TV, spotted Rosemary as she walked north on Michigan Avenue, looking at display windows in the Monroe Building at 104 S. Michigan Ave., about five blocks from where she disappeared. Nolan asked if she was looking Eunice. “Yes,” Rosemary replied, quickly turning back to her window shopping. Two policemen observed the encounter and took Rosemary away.

After Rosemary was reunited with Eunice at 800 S. Michigan Ave., Eunice cried, “Rosie, are you all right?” The two sisters were interviewed at the Central District station. Security was tightened to keep away the swarm of reporters, but still they managed to get pictures of Rosemary leaving the station in her snowsuit jacket with her nun caretakers and Eunice looking sheepish and embarrassed.

“Goodbye, thank you very much. You were marvelous, your whole force was,” Eunice told the district commander, clutching his hand. Eunice left with Ald. Edward Burke, a friend of the Kennedy family who was active in fundraising for the mentally retarded. Rosemary was returned to St. Coletta’s.

Investigative reports in recent years have questioned Rosemary’s diagnosis of mental retardation. The fact that she could do math problems indicated that she had an I.Q. of at least 75. Diary entries written in the late 1930s also indicate Rosemary’s ability to write, filled with sunny descriptions of teas, visits to the opera and dress fittings at Elizabeth Arden’s. At most, Rosemary had an IQ of 90 – which incidentally happens to be my own IQ and I’m writing a fucking blog – in a family where the average IQ was 130, well above the cutoff point for mental retardation, which is 75.

By 1960, however, mental retardation had become much more socially acceptable than to admit a family member suffered from mental illness or dyslexia, the latter of which plagued may third generation Kennedys, including several of Bobby’s children and John F. Kennedy, Jr., which explains that whole plane thing. Even Joe’s attorney, after an FBI background check when Jack announced his presidential candidacy, admitted to the feds that Rosemary suffered from mental illness, not retardation.

Still, I can understand the Kennedys’ denial. It must be horrible to know that your father lobotomized your sister when a little Prozac or Lithium would have cleared up her problems nicely. It’s much easier to tell the world that your sister is mentally retarded and hold yourselves up as saints of the retarded, than to admit the truth.

In her later years, Rose admitted to Kennedy family biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, that she could forgive Joe anything – even bringing his mistress Gloria Swanson home to have dinner with the wife and kiddies – but she could never forgive him for “what he did to Rosie.” Until her death, Rosemary’s brother and sisters tried to make it up to her. They brought her to the Cape, where Timothy Shriver, Eunice’s son and CEO of the Special Olympics, regaled the press with feats of Rosemary’s swimming in the frigid Atlantic waters in the middle of winter, proclaiming his aunt to be “strong as an ox.”

Today Rosemary remains my favorite Kennedy. Even though her life was trashed through no fault of her own, it stood for something. I think of her every time a retarded person bags my groceries in the supermarket, even that retarded guy at Jewel’s who dips his fingers into the sample taco dip. I like to carry the mental image of Rosemary walking the streets of Chicago on a sunny, Sunday afternoon 30 years ago, carefree and without a gray hair on her head, checking out the fall fashions on Michigan Avenue.

So let's all turn to our booklets and sing a chorus of "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" in her honor.

Bless the beasts and the serial killers

I took my dog to a blessing of the animals yesterday in the parking lot of a local church. Naturally, if there were a blue ribbon awarded for the worst behaved pet, my dog would have won. Right when the priest was sprinkling her with holy water, Rosie squatted and took a power dump – her third that morning.

Tuesday is St. Francis of Assisi Day. It is also Rosh Shoshone and the first day of Ramadan. It’s going to be a messed up day but no more than usual.

The last time I went to an animal blessing ceremony was ten years ago. I took my old dog, Bijou. Bijou had one eye and weighed thirteen pounds. She smelled bad partly because she was incontinent toward the end of her life. If she had been human, she surely would have been a serial killer. She was a lot like having Aileen Wuornos for a dog. There were burrs in her beard and bugars clustered around her empty eye socket. She had no problem ripping your arm off if you tried touching her face.

A lot of my friends were afraid of her. Even gangbangers would cross the street when they saw little Bijou coming down the sidewalk. I lived in mostly bad neighborhoods in the city and she was the perfect dog for me to have at that time in my life. I’d walk her in the park and people would comment how she reminded them of Chuckie in “Child’s Play.” Then they’d run.

Bijou didn’t take shit from anybody. There was a crazy hillbilly lady that lived across the street from me in a studio apartment who owned five huskies. She eventually had to put one of her dogs to sleep because it assumed the alpha position in the pack and would attack the other dogs in her kitchen. One day this woman crossed the street with her wolf pack to say hello to the cute little doggie. Her dogs were straining their leashes to get at Bijou, when Bijou lunged at them. They yelped and ran away, dragging the crazy hillbilly lady behind them.

Another time when I was walking Bijou through a local cemetery she took off. I found her playing with a coyote. She was the ultimate ghetto dog. So I took her to this blessing of the animals. The ceremony was held inside a church. There must have been a hundred pets. All of them were well behaved. I staked out a pew. In the middle of the service, another dog came crawling beneath the pews. When it reached us, Bijou started beating the crap out of this dog in the middle of the church. The dog’s family was horrified and kids were screaming hysterically. They had to stop the ceremony so I could pull her off this other dog.

After the blessing, Bijou got into the communion bread and ate several large chunks of Our Lord Jesus Christ’s body. I thought the priest was going to shit in his pants. As far as I know, this particular church has never held another blessing of the animals. I think Bijou made them rethink the whole concept.

Bijou died in 2002 at the ripe old dog age of 15. Like Aileen Wuornos, I had Bijou put to sleep by lethal injection. During the last few years of Bijou's life she had kidney disease and I had to give her dialysis. I did it myself, but I had to find people to hold her down while I filled her up with 150 CCs of lactose ringers. My brother gave me some three-fingered asbestos gloves from work, the kind firemen wear. I would make people put them on for protection as I inserted the needle.

My friends quit coming around to my house because I would always hit them up to help me “stick the dog.” I remember talking my niece, who nine at the time, into holding Bijou down for five dollars. After I set her up with pillows and the gloves, I administered the IV. My niece decided she didn’t want the five dollars any more and started crying, “she’s biting the glove, she’s biting the glove.” Her parents weren’t too happy that I had assigned their daughter such a life-threatening task and quit asking me to babysit after that.

After Bijou died, I figured I had earned my stripes as a dedicated dog owner. I think everyone should own a defective dog or cat at least once in their life. I know some other people with a one-eyed dog that is just as crazy and neurotic as Bijou. I know enough to stay away from the dog’s blind side. But I’ll always be grateful to Bijou for the many years of protection she provided to me living in the ghetto.

I got myself a sweet dog now, but I have to admit it took some getting used to having a dog with two eyes again. I still rarely attend church, but I will go if there are animals.