It's sad when people die, especially when they are taken violently or unexpectedly. I don't like it when this happens to people I know and I don't like it when I'm forced to participate via the vampiristic voyeurism of television news reporting in the grief and loss of strangers. I feel sad and uncomfortable and intrusive and I always wonder a. Why the grieving would allow this offensive bumbling charade of commiseration, and b. How someone could be so utterly insensitive as to thrust a microphone into someone's face at what is probably the worst moment of their lives and ask them to explain their feelings.
There's something else I'm curious about: Why are so many awesome people getting killed? Listening to the endless parade of survivors and loved ones eulogizing their losses in 15-second soundbites, I'm convinced that only truly exceptional people are getting shot and run over and otherwise interrupted by the great leveler. You hear the same things over and over: Everybody loved him. He always had a smile for everyone. He was a mentor to children. He was the sparkplug of the team. He was the guy we went to for advice. So helpful. So kind. Always did more than his share. So full of life.
This is grossly unfair! These are the kinds of people we need out there in the world: the cheerful, the helpful, the lovable, the selfless. Where amidst all this carnage are the irredeemable assholes? Where are the malignant hordes of hopelessly poisonous malefactors just begging for the swift sword of justice to come balance the scales? Whither the jerks, the jag-offs, the knaves, the knacks, the ne'er-do-wells, the dastards and bastards and buttheads? Just once I'd like to turn on the television and hear: "To tell you the truth, Chet, he was a real son of a bitch and we are all better off without him. Good riddance."
Like me, por ejemplo. Were I to join the choir invisible in some note- and newsworthy fashion, the best I could probably wring from a "grieving" interview is: "I'll tell you, Chet, I honestly can't believe he's gone. He exhibited so many cockroach like traits I think we all just assumed he was impervious to death."
Worse than just going publicly though is going publicly and ignominiously. I.e., becoming reduced to one's component parts in an especially curious fashion so as to provide fodder for certain purveyors of (very) low entertainments and give Bubba McRib and his ilk an opportunity to feel superior when in fact they are just lucky.
I mean, imagine. Here you are, living your life, doing the best you can with what you've got. Just trying like everybody else to squeeze what joy and pleasure you can from the workaday world. You've got hopes and dreams and loves and fears, desires and aspirations — a history of success and failure, of joy and pain, of love won and lost. You've got favorite songs and foods and movies and your mother loves you. Then one day you decide it might be fun to poke a tiger in the butt with a sharp stick. Maybe under the influence of a few beers, maybe on a dare, maybe both. Maybe just a wild hair working its legendary magic. Or you think gasoline would be a viable substitute for charcoal starter. Or that you could create a jet powered shopping cart by strapping an acetylene tank to it and knocking the regulator off. None of these are necessarily bad ideas, per se, just risky and extreme. Hey, nobody laughs at BASE jumpers or wirewalkers.
But now you're just an "amusing" segment on the Idiot Files or the Darwin Awards, the subject of endless tired jokes about tidying up the gene pool.
But however you shed your earthly raiments, it's important that you stay that way (dead). Sure, zombies are in vogue right now. They are hip and cool and don't have to wait in line at the hottest clubs. All the big modeling agencies are hiring zombies. They have taken thinness to a whole new level and given actresses a new ideal to strive for. But they are terrible conversationalists, they smell awful, and they are decidedly rigid in the matter of culinary preference. The following is an exact transcription of my dinner date with a cute zombie lady.
Me: So what are you having?
Zombie: Bra-a-i-i-ins.
Me: Hon, this is Applebee's. They don't serve brains. Try the quesadilla burger, it's deelish.
Zombie: Brainzzz.
Me: (sigh) I'm getting the queso to start, then maybe the New York strip. Come on now. You're not even looking at the menu.
Zombie: BRAINS!
So yes. Maybe a living will specifying on demise a spike through the head so as to forestall the posthumous shenanigans. Brains are in short enough supply these days without insatiable groaners trying to pop open our skulls and scoop out our delicious memories and experiences.
Having taken the subject to its inevitable and logical (zombie-ism), I feel I've extracted about as much from death as I'm able. Maybe it's not as funny a subject as I thought. I'll tell you what is, though. Two words — perhaps the funniest two words ever strung together. These words are: "Clam goader."
Funny, right? Wait till I put them into context.
"Clam goader" is from a Dave Barry column of 20 or 30 years ago in which he was discussing the bewildering complexity of utensil arrangement at a posh diner. In his inimitably amusing way he cataloged the profusion of silverware, going from straight to silly to absurd and capping it with "Clam goader."
Now it's funny enough to imagine a tool designed specifically for goading clams, but in order to get the full effect you have to go a step further and imagine it in use. For my part, I conceive of an old-school society matron from a New Yorker cartoon replete with tiara, pearls and architecturally expansive lineaments, peering uncertainly at the glistening bivalve on her plate. She picks up her goader, a tined and perhaps electrified affair, and pokes her clam tentatively, goading it to — to what? To talk? To secrete a tasty enzyme? I don't know. But there's something just inherently funny about the whole clam goading concept.
Incidentally, I do not condone clam goading, poking, prodding, teasing, jabbing, jostling, pestering or otherwise harassing or molesting any of our animal brethren. I am a vegetarian, a proponent of animal rights, and a friend to all beasts except flies and potato bugs. I'm sorry, but they're just gross.
However, back in 1993 I was cooking at a very lah-de-dah restaurant in Baltimore called The Inn of the Colonnade. One night the seafood truck delivered something called a "geoduck" (pronounced "gooey duck") which turns out to be a clam about the diameter of an extra-large pizza. The chef got very excited and proceeded to demonstrate the fate of this monster. He tapped in a few places around the shell with his knife and a pseudopod came slithering out trying vainly to find purchase on the cutting board and looking for all the world like a large animate phallus. The chef grabbed it with one hand and — whack whack whack! Quick as anything he shaved three thin slices from the end of the clam-wing. He popped one into his mouth and made sounds of deliciousness — mm, mm, mmm. I was not buying it. In cross-section the clam looked like a diagram from a biology text, and it was oozing slightly. I wanted no part of this. But I couldn't look like a pussy in front of the chef so I took a piece myself. It wasn't bad, much firmer than the clam proper which is just barely differentiated goo.
Apparently the plan was for the waitstaff to wheel the beast around the floor on a trolley, inquiring of each table, "Geoduck?" And performing the gruesome ritual for every diner answering in the affirmative. Good luck, I thought. No way is that clamosaurus going to expose his dingus again after what happened last time. But sure enough when the chef brought the waiters in to demonstrate, the clam obediently exposed his rapidly diminishing schvantz and again suffered for it. I guess the mollusk learning curve is steeper than I thought.
In practice, though, things don't go quite so smoothly. It seems the chef is some kind of clam whisperer and the waitrons are unable to coax out the moneymaker. The chef was forced into geoduck duty and I think: Dave, you were really on to something.
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