Guest Blog !!1!

A few days ago, in my drunken rambling, I posed a Flava Flav challenge.

Today, my good friend Mr. Apron has met this challenge.

And what can I say about Mr. Apron?

He's Rude.

He's Crude.

He points out my misspellings regularly, and he might be one of the most interesting writers I know.

He also doesn't know that I remember probably the ONE AND ONLY TIME he's posted a picture of himself:

That's right, Apron. Like an elephant or Rainman, I never, ever forget.

He has also blogged for 300-something days in a row, so even if you're not a fan of his rank humor and love for all things Gilbert and Sullivan, you have to hand it to him - the guy is dedicated.

So read this post.

And then go visit him.

Becuase if this guy has blogged every day for like a year and still has time to guest-post on my little blog?...

...He's clearly in need of some friends.

(I kid. He rocks)

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JUST PRETEND IT'S LOBSTER

Sometimes I think that nobody particularly misses my grandfather.

Truthfully, there wasn't much to miss. My sisters couldn't stand him, and I didn't know him well enough to develop a super-strong attachment. He and my father never got along, and when he wasn't marginalizing my mother, he was making halfhearted, emotionally bizarre, inept attempts at communicating with her.

As his wife lay wasting away from lymphoma, she and my mother would still occasionally have fights, as mothers and daughters do, even when the mothers are dying. My grandfather's attempt at consoling my mother was, "Don't worry-- she'll be dead soon."

When I was twelve years old, enjoying a warm August day at summer camp, (theatre camp, to be more precise) they called my name over the loudspeaker to have me report to the main building. I picked up the phone and it was my sister.

"Zayda died this morning."

"How's Mommy?" I remember asking, the camp nurse sitting in her chair beside me, her hand on my gangly right arm.

"I don't know. I guess she's pretty fucked up. She isn't talking to anyone," my sister reported.

"Oh. Okay," I said, and hung up the phone. The nurse looked at me, her eyes almost welling up. I guess she'd spoken to my sister before I got there, and steeled herself for some impromptu psychological counseling.

"Are you alright, sweetie?" she asked me.

"Well," I said, "at least he won't be pissing everyone off anymore."

That was the only thing my grandfather was ever really good at, that I know of. Well, that and golf, probably because it required very little in the way of communication, especially if you're playing by yourself. He played golf in 100 degree heat, and he played golf in thunderstorms. When he would go on vacations with my step-grandmother, they couldn't travel anywhere that wasn't ten minutes by Lincoln Continental away from a golf course. My grandfather tried, when I was six or seven or eight or nine or whatever, to get me jazzed up about golf-- which isn't easy to do to a kid, even when he likes theatre and classical music and cries easily and emulates news anchors and everybody is pretty sure he's gay. He took me to the local driving range, bought me a white leather glove and a titanium golf club and had me standing there, banging away at golf balls for hours while he gave me tips that I didn't listen to. All I wanted to do was wear the golf shoes that they sold in the shop, but he wouldn't buy them for me. They were so beautiful, white and red leather with pointy goddamn things sticking out of the bottoms. I guess it's good he never bought them for me. At that stage in my life I probably would have put them on late at night and walked all over my sister's face while she was sleeping.

The only reason I enjoyed going to the driving range with my grandfather is because he would take me and my sister out for lunch as part of the trip, and I loved to eat. I remember once he took us to a restaurant and he asked me what I wanted, and I told him. He ordered for us because he was old fashioned and thought we were too retarded to handle the task of verbally communicating with a waitress. My sister told him she wanted chicken fajitas. He wasn't a worldly man, my grandfather and, when the waitress came to him for our order, he blushingly announced that my sister would have the chicken "fateetos." She and I collapsed under the restaurant table in a hysterical heap, and that was the last time my grandfather took us out to lunch. Or anywhere.

There may have been one other thing that my grandfather was good at. Maybe. If you really use your imagination, I suppose it can be said that my grandfather was good at giving advice. When my eldest sister was little, she and my grandfather and my parents all lived in the same home together-- right after my grandmother died, in the mid-1970s. My mother frequently made chicken for dinner, which my sister hated. She would sit there, her stringy, blonde hair in her face with her arms crossed in front of her pigeon-chest declaring,

"I hate chicken!"

At this point, my grandfather would helpfully suggest, "Just pretend it's lobster."

He was also a big fan of, "Just pretend it's bananas."

Just pretend it's bananas, folks. All these years, I thought that this man had nothing of value to add to the conundrums and quandaries of people's lives, but, evidently, I was wrong. Tired of nailing your wife? Just pretend she's a tight, libidinous cheerleader. Tired of your job? Just pretend you're an astronaut. Tired of your dog? Pretend he's a zebra. Tired of your old fucking clothes? Pretend they're new! Tired of your zits? Pretend they're cherry Lifesavers. Tired of your car? Pretend it's a Maserati Quattroporte. Tired of your flabby belly? Pretend it's... um... someone else's.

See? The man was a goddamn genius.

Ever since the late 1950s, all he ever drove were Cadillacs. Nothing but Cadillacs, and black Cadillacs, at that. By the time I got to know him, he tooled around in a Lincoln Continental, black of course, but no Cadillac. And I wonder if, as he signed the papers at the Lincoln dealership, he whispered to himself as he splashed his signature across the dotted line,

"Harry: pretend it's a Cad."