Puppet Head

A total of 91 persons in wheelchairs were arrested in front of the White House. It was later determined that they were war veterans. Apparently, the President had them arrested as part of the effort to disarm America. In the President’s own words, “War veterans are a threat to this country. They are often the ones who own guns, and none of them are young enough to join my Youth Brigade.” Meanwhile, a supersonic fighter jet buzzed Ground Zero while the President watched via private satellite TV. The President, jumping up and down with glee, noted that he was simply reliving old memories. The fighter jet circled the Statue of Liberty for a half hour, trying to shoot the torch from Liberty’s hand. Unfortunately, the pilot, a native Afghan whom the President had brought over from Afghanistan just for this event, was not used to flying American jets. He was noted as having suggested to the President that there are others from his homeland who are very familiar with all manner of American aircraft, though he declined to say exactly who. The President later used Air Force One to scare those working near the World Trade Center site by flying very close to buildings. When questioned about it, the President became furious, stating that this was only a “trial run,” though he declined to disclose further details.

The global economic crisis is even affecting Staten Island Zoo. The price of admission will be raised to $100.00 for adults (15 and over), $250.00 for Seniors (60 and over), $500.00 for Seniors from Iowa, $75.00 for children (3-14) and free for all children who join the Obama Youth Brigade. Politicians and Muslims also get in for free. An additional $50.00 tax will be charged for all Republicans. In addition, all Staten Island Zoo employees will be required to work overtime for no extra pay.

Since funding has been cut for the Zoo, some of the Zoo animals will be fired from the Zoo. The first to go will be the smaller insects which inhabit the zoo, including all moths, ants, beetles and butterflies. Next in line to be fired will be the rodents, such as rats and mice. After that, amphibians, and then animals such as deer, possums, racoons, porcupines and skunks. The larger animals, such as the elephants, tigers and lions, will be kept busy with maintenance tasks such as switching all the light bulbs to CFLs. They will also have to endure a 60% cut in their diet, which will mean skinnier elephants and other animals. The chimpanzees and the rooster will stay at the zoo. The giraffes have already picketed, and have begun to apply for positions at nearby Toys R Us stores. Many of the birds and pigs will be moved to zoos in Mexico, Africa, and Asia.

The President is scheduled to fly his jet to the Staten Island Zoo to give a motivational talk to the animals. The teleprompters he will be using will supposedly include translations into all the various animal languages. Though the President does not put the full blame on the animals for the necessary budget cuts, he is expected to reprimand them for not doing their job in the past. The President will be collecting donations,  which will, of course, go to the Trilateral Commission.

I’m getting fat.

I bought a bigger size of clothes, since none of my old clothes fit me because I was getting too fat.
Now those new clothes that I bought because I was getting too fat, no longer fit me.
It’s like I’m going through growing stages again, except this time its not height, but girth.
I don’t understand it. In High School, I was in top shape!  I mean, yeah, that was over 30 years ago, but who’s counting?

OK, its true that I sit on my butt all day at work, and when I come home at night, I sit
on my butt all night. But hey, I skip lunch every day! Of course, that means that I’m so hungry when I get home late at night (I get home at 7:30 PM, and, if I go grocery shopping, I get home around 8:30 PM), that I usually eat 2 dinners, but hey, a guy’s gotta eat, right? It used to be that a Hungry Man TV dinner filled me up to the bursting point. Now, it’s only enough to warm up my appetite.

Before I moved from Havana, FL to Horse and Lightning Country, FL, I had a number of delightful experiences. I lived in a little 4-apartment building (quadraplex) in the midst of a residential neighborhood. Oh, and such good neighbors they were. Even though I was in America, there was only one other American for miles around. And he was the only other one that spoke English for miles around. Of course, he was also drunk half the time, so a lot of times, even the English he spoke was hard to understand. I couldn’t blame him for being drunk so often, because, after all, when you’re a foreigner in your own country, it gets depressing.

It was hard to sleep at night. Not because of sleep apnea or anything like that, but because of the extremely loud parties that were always going on, that sounded like they were only 30 feet from your bed that you were lying down in. In fact, they were only 30 feet away. The houses were very close together (and I don’t mean the other apartments, which only shared thin walls butted up against each other. I’m talking about the houses in the neighborhood.), and my apartment had all jalousy windows, which were not made to keep out sound. And not only the loud parties that went on after midnight, but also the gunshots. And the cats outside fighting and making noise. Not my cats, mind you. I didn’t have any cats. I mean my neighbors’ 65 cats. Also, the roosters who stood just outside my window, only 5 feet from my bed, would crow all day and all night. I thought roosters only crowed at sunrise. I was wrong. These roosters crowed at 2 AM, then again at 4 AM, then again at 7 AM. Then they would walk across the street where they lived so that the owner could sacrifice one of them in his nightly animal sacrifice ritual of getting drunk, waving a rooster around his head in circles while chanting in Spanish, and then cutting off the rooster’s head and throwing him onto the railroad tracks, as if anybody would actually believe that a rooster got run over by the train every night in the same area.

Oh, yes. The railroad tracks. Another reason I could not sleep at night. The railroad track was about 40 feet from my apartment. I thought trains came once a day at most. Not this train. It came 3 times a day, mostly late at night, or around 3 AM while I was trying to sleep. And I thought trains were supposed to keep their whistles silent when going through a residential neighborhood. Not this train. It waited till it came right up on us, and then it let out a whistle blow that could break the eardrums of any normal person.

After getting up in the morning and getting a good hour or two of sleep, I would open the door of my little one-bedroom apartment to walk the 25-foot walk along the asphalt walkway to where my car was parked. Most mornings I had to wade through the 45 chickens and roosters who had run away from their house across the street, probably out of fear, since one of them had been sacrificed in a Santeria ceremony the night before. And, with so many chickens and roosters gathered together in one little area, I had to tip-toe through a landmine of chicken poop. This was a challenge indeed, because there was only a “poopless” area every 2 or 3 feet or so. If they had been true land mines, I would have been dead long ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I lived on a farm for 4 months, which had chickens and goats, so I was used to chickens. But I was used to them being out in the barn, several hundred or more feet away from the house. Not a few feet away from my bed, just outside a thin wall with jalousy windows that provided zero sound proofing. And the roosters on that farm did indeed seem to only crow at sunrise. But these hordes of chickens and roosters that lived across the street from me apparently knew that they existed only to be decapitated in a satanic ritual, so I suppose their crowing at all hours of the day and night were because they were terrified of their destined fate.

And, with there being so many cats around, every time I walked to my car, it smelled like the entire area was one giant litterbox. And that’s because it was. I never knew cats could leave such a sickening smell. And people say cats are clean…yeah, right.

Years ago, I took a date with me to Key Biscayne. Ah, the beach. And the water. And the rats. Rats?? Oh, yes, rats. My date and I got there around midnight, and before we had even parked, the headlights revealed a scene from the movie “Willard.” Hundreds of rats. Actually, there weren’t really hundreds. There were thousands. All along the beach. One for every square foot on the beach. I am not kidding. I had never before seen anything like it in all my life. It really looked like some uncanny scene straight out of a horror movie. In fact, if I had a camera with me then and had filmed it, I could have easily used that as footage for a horror movie.

I guess the rats were there because of all the garbage people would throw on the ground. All the city streets were littered with garbage alongside the roads, where people would toss it out of their car window. Coming from a Communist third-world country, I guess they’re too angry against their dictator to care about keeping the streets clean. And, sneaking across the ocean in tiny boats to escape their homeland, I guess they bring that same lack of regard for the environment with them. That’s probably why, when I visited a canal I used to walk by when I was younger, I found that the garbage that was tossed in the canal, had actually piled up so high, that it was now above the water level! I could not believe what I was seeing. I had never seen a canal with so much garbage in it, that the garbage came up above the water level. And this was a deep canal.

When I was young, I used to take my dogs to Key Biscayne and throw the ball out in the water for them to retrieve it. Such fun times. I used to take the second and younger dog, Jock, by himself, when the older dog, Jasper, got too old. Jock had such fun times at the beach. One time, I threw a tennis ball out in the water for him to retrieve, and he came back with a lobster buoy….still connected to the lobster trap. Now, its illegal to take people’s lobster traps, and you can get shot for doing that. So, I wasn’t too happy with Jock for trying to get me shot. Another time, Jock came back with a swollen mouth instead of the ball. He had grabbed a jellyfish instead of the ball. I guess he liked getting swelled lips and a swelled-up face, because another time, he had caught a bee in his mouth, which stung him and made his face look like it was a balloon. He sure looked funny with a swollen face.

Well, there were many more fun adventures, but that’s all we have time for today. Tune in next time for another adventure. Same Bat time, same Bat channel!

This is the third time I’m trying to write this article, and I’m about ready to take a baseball bat to this computer. The first time, the computer suddenly shut off during a thunderstorm, and I lost what I was writing. Grrr! The second time, my firewall gave an alert message that my browser was trying to use Microsoft Word to connect to the Internet. I thought that was odd, so I clicked on the button labeled “Deny,” which was a terrible mistake, because when I clicked the button to Publish this article, it would not Publish it, and it would not allow me to go back to retrieve what I had already written. GRRRRRRR!!!!

In addition to that, the thunderstorm turned off my clocks, so I had to re-set them. Actually, I only had to re-set 3 of them, because, after many frequent ordeals of having to re-set all my clocks because of the fact that the electricity goes off all the time (mostly due to thunderstorms), I have now replaced most of my clocks with battery-operated ones. And I have never learned how to change the time on my oven clock, so whenever the electricity goes off, it re-sets to 12:00, waiting to be activated, so I have to wait until its actually 12:00 (either noon or midnight) to activate it.

It has been raining every day here, which has caused my grass…um, I mean, my WEEDS…to grow at an accelerated rate. They are now above knee-level. My lawnmower is broken, and I don’t know if I can afford to pay another $50-$75 to have someone come and mow my lawn one time. Maybe I’ll check around to see if anyone has a goat that needs babysitting. That way, he can eat my grass and weeds, and I can get paid for watching him.

The thunder and lightning scared a spider out of his hiding place, and he was crawling up the inside of my window, so I hit him with a fly swatter. No effect. He must have used some blocking technique formerly known only to ancient Chinese Shaolin spiders, handed down from generation to generation, secretly guarded, and never taught to foreign spiders. I got a paper towel and folded it a couple times to grab him with it and crush him. He dodged my attack. I tried again to grab him in the paper towel and crush him. Again, he evaded my attack. His Kung Fu was good. I tried a third time. Clearly he had superior fighting skills, because once again, he out-maneuvered me. Ah, but I had a secret weapon of my own, handed down from generation to generation, known only to those select few who have lived in spider-infested houses. Yes, you guessed it…..I brought out the secret, deadly “Spider Spray.” With one accurately placed spray of my deadly weapon, my worthy opponent was finally defeated.

My mom’s friend was not so lucky. She walked into a spider’s web while going out to her car. Even though she is in her 60’s, she was able to fight through the webbing. As she got into her car, she was still pulling spider webs out of her hair. Once on the road, she forgot all about it. Until she looked in the rear-view mirror. There, sitting on her shoulder, was a spider the size of your open hand. No joke. Swerving through traffic like a mad woman, almost hitting 3 pedestrians and 5 cars, she finally pulled over, flung the door open, jumped out, and began flailing about and swinging her arms like some wild, primitive, tribal dancer, slapping at her shoulder in an attempt to knock the monster spider off her shoulder. Finally, drenched with sweat and breathing heavily, with the spider nowhere to be seen, she got back into her car, shaking like a leaf. Even today, she is overcome with fear and dread every time she re-tells her ghastly account. For years afterward, she would have horrible nightmares about the incident, only to awake suddenly in the night, drenched with sweat, thinking that a spider was on her, attacking her.

OK, actually, it only happened last week. Still, when she called my mom and told her about it, she said she was still shaking.

So, the next time you get in your car, you might want to take a quick glance in the rear-view mirror and make sure there are no huge spiders sitting on your shoulder.

I haven’t posted here in a long time, mainly because I’ve been focusing on making daily posts on my main blog site, which is http://jeffjenkinsocala.blogspot.com. Um, yeah. That sounds like a good excuse.

However, my guest bathroom has now become a fly factory. I know that sounds gross, but its true. For the past several weeks, just about every day, a fly magically appears in my bathroom sink. They are not the normal house flies that you usually see. These are magical flies. They are smaller than a housefly, and they are slower, which makes it easy to kill by hand. I think they may even be fairies. The thing is, I don’t know where they’re coming from. I find 1-3 of these flies—or fairies—pretty much every day, and they’re only in the bathroom sink. I have killed every one that I saw (yes, it’s true, I’m a fairy killer), but the next day, one appears again. Maybe its the same one that keeps resurrecting, like something from the movie “Pet Cemetary.”

Or, maybe the army of spiders that live around my house are producing them as food crops. Maybe the spiders have built an automatic fly factory underneath my bathroom sink. I do have hundreds of spiders around my house, including many black widows and brown widows. I have found black or brown widows in my mailbox, in my garage, on my front porch, etc. The other day, as I was bringing the garbage cans back from the street edge after the garbage men (um, I mean, sanitation engineers) emptied them, I found a brown widow underneath the handle of the garbage can. She had built a web there. In fact, I always find spider webs and/or spiders under the lid, under the handles, inside, or around the outside of the garbage cans. I think the spiders know that flies hang around the garbage cans, so they build webs there. But apparently, they’re not catching enough flies there, because now they have ingeniously constructed an elaborate fly factory, which produces one fly every day, and hidden it underneath my bathroom sink. And, apparently, they don’t want to have a difficult time in catching those flies, so they have somehow discovered a way to cross-breed the common house-fly with a slower-flying fairy, so that they will be easy to catch.

When I first moved from my hometown of Latin America, FL to the Horse Capital of the world 5 years ago, I experienced some extreme culture shock.

The insects are twenty times larger here. In the city I was born and raised in, we had a small, scarce population of wasps. Here, there is an overpopulation of these monstrous wasps the size of sparrows, and if one of those stings you, its time to call 911! In fact, one did sting me in the back of the neck one time, and I thought someone had hit me with a baseball bat!

Not only do they have giant wasps here, but they also have an entire host of prehistoric insects that can put a serious hurtin’ on you!

They have this type of exotic ant that has a fur that looks more beautiful than almost any insect I’ve ever seen before, but if it bites you, I’m told you will be screaming in torture for days.

Another example: where I grew up, you might see a horsefly every 15 or 20 years. Here, I’ve seen some sort of freak, nightmarish, mutated super-gargantuan horsefly that must be at least 50 times the size of any horsefly I’ve ever seen in my life! If that thing were to bite anyone, they would be in dire need of a blood transfusion! If it bit a horse, that horse would probably die from blood loss! One time I tried spraying one with wasp and hornet killer, but it only flew happily away, slightly annoyed that I had gotten it wet!

I was also used to having small mosquitoes where I grew up. Here, however, the mosquitoes are so large that the hospitals use them whenever they run out of needles!

In my hometown, most of the spiders only get as large as your thumbnail. Here in Redneck land, they get larger than your hand! Not only that, but you have deadly ones here as well. Walking into spider webs that stick to your face, arms, hands and clothes has become a daily nuisance. I have sprayed some of those monster spiders with bug spray, and they don’t even seem to notice. One time when I sprayed one, he jumped 3 feet from the wall at me! I think he was attempting to grab the spray can from my hand and spray me with it!

Several weeks ago, my friend and his family came to visit. My friend still lives in the city where I grew up—none of his escape attempts from drug-infested Fascist Land have been successful yet. After eating dinner at my house, his entire family and I went for a walk. His daughter suddenly put her hand over her ears, with a look of shocked terror, and cried out, “What’s that weird noise? It’s so loud!” Living in the city, she had never heard the sound of crickets before.

Another thing that I had to get used to was the weather here. I was raised in a very tropical climate. I moved up here during the coldest winter so far, and I thought I was in Alaska. My sister bought me some type of coat that you unzip and it becomes two coats, which is something I had never heard of before. Where I grew up, we hardly ever needed to wear a sweater, let alone a coat.

It was also hard to get used to people actually waving at you. Where I grew up, if someone was waving at you, it was usually with one finger, and it was usually because you had done something in traffic to tick him or her off. Also, people up here use guns for hunting, which is a completely new concept for me. Back home, people use guns only for robbing other people, or to shoot people that wave at them.

The hardest thing to get used to, upon first moving here, was when I began hearing this strange language that I was not used to hearing. It was very odd, because I could actually understand what they were saying. To my utter shock, I soon realized that the language that almost everyone spoke here was English. I had gotten so used to everyone speaking Spanish that hearing everyone speak English sounded very strange.

When I bought my first house 8 months ago, I had no idea that it was an official gathering place for hundreds of different species of spiders. You’re not going to believe this, but I found out later that my house has actually been designated the official spider headquarters for the entire Southeastern United States. I would have thought that my Realtor would have informed me of this fact, but she did not.

[OK, I admit it---I’m making that up. My Realtor really DID inform me of it…just kidding. But seriously, what I meant was, that I’m making up the whole thing about my house being “the official spider headquarters for the entire Southeastern United States.” Well, duh! Of course you knew that already. How did you know? Because you’re incredibly smart, and you immediately pick up on things like that, that’s how! Well, actually, you knew because my claim was incredibly ridiculous. But I’m only admitting this because I want you, as the reader, to know from the outset that this blog is not to be taken seriously. So don’t be calling me a liar or anything like that, because I’m only kidding The stuff I write on here, although it may be based on fact (for example, I actually do have a spider infestation problem in my house, and I have found and killed a bunch of different types of spiders, including Black Widows, and many of those spiders have been pretty large), it is at best exaggerated, and at worst, a bunch of made up nonsense. Why am I writing stuff that is made up nonsense? Because I’m attempting to write something that is hopefully funny, and that you, the reader, will hopefully find fun and interesting to read. Also, because I’m trying to be a little like Dave Barry, though I know I’m light years away from even hoping to be a tiny bit as funny as he is. But, if it turns out that no one even finds my blog remotely funny or even interesting, I will probably just go back to killing spiders, and forget about writing crazy stuff on this blog. But since this is my first attempt, I thought I would give it a shot. I don’t know yet if anyone will find this blog funny or not, so, for the moment, or at least until I find out, I’ll keep writing. OK, so now that we have established that, let me get on with my story. And please don’t interrupt me anymore!]

I suppose I should be proud that I live in such a famous house. On the other hand, it is annoying to have to share my house with 58 different species of spiders…um, I meant hundreds of different species of spiders…all of which have had hundreds of thousands of babies in the past several years (which, I am told, are officially referred to as ’spiderettes.’) As a result, every night I find myself killing at least 3 of the largest, ugliest, meanest suckers you have ever seen in your life. I find them either in the bathroom (usually sitting on the toilet), climbing up the wall (usually chasing the roaches that also inhabit my house), or walking across the carpet (and tracking dirt with their little spider feet, often after I’ve already spent an hour vacuuming the carpet!). When I used to live in the big, bad city, we had very few spiders, and the ones we had were no bigger than a nostril hair. But the ones I constantly find in my house are so big that you can actually see their nostril hairs!

The thing I hate about these spiders, besides the fact that they are so ugly and scary-looking, is that many of them can bite you. Already I’ve been bitten by a few of them.

One of them bit me 3 times on my foot, making a circle with its bite marks, and those fang marks started to itch, and soon developed into blisters, and soon those blisters popped. Thankfully, none of the Black Widows have bitten me yet, and I’m really hoping that I’m never bitten by those dangerous Brown Recluse spiders I’ve heard so much about (thankfully, I haven’t seen any of them yet!). And I’m so glad that we don’t have any of those gigantic monstrosities called “Camel Spiders” around here! Ugh!

They say that all spiders are poisonous, which is such a comforting thought to someone who has arachnophobia like I do (which, of course, I only developed after moving into this house!). They also say that the fangs of most spiders are not large enough or long enough to penetrate human skin. But when people tell you that, they’re lying! If you don’t believe me, the next time you see a spider, go ahead and pick him up and sit him on your face. I dare you! Let him crawl around your cheek or your nose for a minute and see if he bites you. On second thought, don’t do that, because that would be kinda dumb. Instead, just let him run along your arm. Actually, never mind. I guess that would be kinda dumb too! Of course I’m joking.

A few years ago, I heard this guy on a radio talk show who called in to tell about his spider experience. He said that he found a huge spider in his garage one day and, weighing in at a hefty 285 lbs. (the guy, not the spider! Pay attention!), he did the only thing a manly man could do at that point: he ran and got a shovel! Well, that full-grown, 6’4” tall, 285 lb. man who was an ex-football player (actually, I don’t know if he was an ex-football player or not; it just makes it funnier when you add that in) lifted up that big shovel over his head, with those big, muscular arms of his, to kill that spider. At that point, the guy said, and I quote: “That giant spider—and he must have been at least a foot wide, I’m not kidding! He was huge, man! I mean, gigantic! I think he was one of those wolf spiders, man!—That spider, he lifted up those big, hairy front legs of his, and it looked like he was gonna attack me! He looked mad! So I dropped that shovel and ran! As fast as I could! I got my big bumble butt out of there! But then, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I running from a spider? I’m 6’4” and 285 lbs., and that spider weighs less than a pound. I’m hundreds of times larger than he is!’ So I got up my courage again, and I strutted like a man into the den and I got my shotgun. Well, I’ll have you know, when I got through with that spider, there was nothin’ left of him! After I had blasted that spider to smithereens, I thought to myself, ‘That’ll teach you to mess with me, Mr. Spider!’”