Freddogg Off The Chain

Ringwormed Ghetto Tabby



Blue Black Eddie was big and menacing looking and mainstream culturally deprived much the same as I was deprived of his dirt road roots and windowless house and pistol packing mother.

Eddie was loyal with the heart and emotions of a child. He loved me and freely used to smile and say, ”I love Fredman” and he meant it. I don’t think he understood white fright discrimination based of hues of the skin. I’m not sure I get it either!

It was 1977 and Eddie was causing a disturbance in the high school office before homeroom. Someone suggested they get Fredman to calm his special student and friend before calling the cops.

I found Eddie distraught, crying and answering all suggestions that he get to homeroom with the retort “You get to homeroom mother fucker!”

“What’s wrong Ed? Let me help you out of this.”
“Mother fucking sneaks! How am I supposed to run when I ain’t got no mother fucking sneaks? Can’t run track without no fucking sneaks. The bitch took my money I had hidden in the wall. Said if I didn’t stop crying about it she’d shoot my sorry black ass.”

“Who said that Eddie?”

My mother, got drunk, took my money and went off to play cards. No I can’t run because I ain’t got no sneaks.”

I took Eddie to an equipment closet where there was a duffle bag of used track spikes. Three pair fit his feet and I gave them all to him. “Tell you bitch mother not to wear these to the poker table, ”I said. We both laughed because although Eddie had been deprived and neglected he wasn’t stupid.

A May morning office incident and once again I was called to the office. The school nurse has spotted circular bumps on Eddie’s blue black neck, called him into the office and told him to call home---the pistol packing stealing alcoholic violent mother—because he had to go home until the bumps were gone.

“They say I got the wig-worm Fredman. I ain’t got no mother fucking wig-worm! Bitch nurse telling me I got the wig-worm. I ain’t got no mother fucking wig worm Fredman.” Then a pause for reflection—“Hey Fredman? What a wig worm?”

Ringworm in the back country of Sussex County is wig worm and people be getting that shI a lot and it’s contagious and there’s nothing more ludicrous than a rich blond white girl in monogrammed sweater with ringworm on her whole milk vitamin D neck.

The second week of June and many of them had never been on the boardwalk at high noon on a summer’s day. I lost sight of Eddie but eyeballed him down on the beach standing next to a blanket of young oiled up girls some face up and others face down. Eddie just stared down in appreciation and amazement.

I grabbed him and brought him back up on the boardwalk and told him standing in close proximity and staring at cute girls was fun but socially unacceptable. He learned that glancing from a moderate distance was the safest way to fly.

Twenty two years later a weasel of a high school principal was being coy and cute talking to a father about the suspension of his son for various behavior infractions. The father was about 6’3” and 260 pounds of blue black muscle. “Your job is to help these kids,” he said. “I haven’t heard a word about that. It’s like you don’t care.”

I walked into the office and the big man turned around to meet my eyes. He walked over and put his arms around me, kissed me on the cheek and said, ”I love you Fredman. They need more people like you that care about kids.”

People in the office were silent. Eddie had given me the proudest moment of my career for both of us.

Peace Freddoggy-dogg

# posted by freddogg @ 2:53 PM 2 comments

“Line up by height. Not so fast you “No Children Left Behind” you just sit and watch fifth grade graduation and those cries of “dummies” coming from your insensitive classmates you should just ignore and Clarence if you call one more student a “mother fucker” your getting a “time out.” Look at the bright side next year you may graduate with more skills plus you’ll be taller.”I’ve been saying this from the beginning that No Child Left Behind is designed to persecute those who need the most help, to sift out the dummies and keep them out of fifth grade graduation ceremonies, and to send their sorry asses to summer school to give bogusly certified teachers summer jobs for too much money. I should know I was left behind 45 years ago and thrust into homogenized alternative placement where I could glean the best material from peers designated as most likely to go nowhere.The very first day of ninth grade at Bishop Egan Catholic High School I was sitting in the bleachers with other Grammar school graduates waiting for my name to be called for homeroom assignment. Freshman were designated letter D and the boys were the odd numbers with section D1 being the smartest going all the way down to D11. My older brother was a junior and in section B3 so I figured because I was an incoming behavior problem perhaps I’d slip to D5 but my overriding intelligence wouldn’t allow me to slip any further down the evolutionary Darwinian high school adaptation scale.I was scanning the crowd looking for ‘persecutorial de peer group’ material when I heard my name called for section D1. I immediately figured I was “outted” as an intellect and these priests were going to push my talents rather than allow me to be the set up combination puncher of the hopelessly defenseless I had been in Grammar School. I must admit I felt pretty special long before being Special was cool.We filed out into the hallway hearing a barrage of physical threats from our teacher heading to our new ‘Homo habilis Habitat’ by the way the first of the genus homo hence the D1 phylum. The older students were laughing as we walked by. I saw my 6’5” brother up against a locker.“What the heck group is this, ”he asked? “It’s section D1,”I said. Tom commenced to laugh like he had just heard the funniest joke in the history of the genus homo.I sat up front turned around and scanned the crowd. Trust me you can read most books by the cover and it’s not cool to say that but this was a reading primer “see spot run” crew with harmful chemicals in their backyard wells. Most of these “Philly Kids” would quickly earn unflattering nicknames that likened them to various low level four legged beasts, creatures of the night and pieces of heavy machinery.The teacher was the “lay catholic mechanical drawing end of career attitude teacher guy.” “Turn around Meathead” he directed at me in a tone of complete disgust.“This group looks like a convention of werewolf barbers and you’re calling me names, ”I said cleverly. “Shut up and never talk again, he retaliated, not cleverly but nonetheless effectively.I know all about culling the herd for the overall benefit of the species and No Child Left Behind is simply Federally Formalized let’s round up all the misfits and misfortunates and put them in Section D1 isolation all over again.Education is structured to protect the unimaginative, those who enjoy the lock step progression and predictability and the reliability of playing by the necessary rules. But survival in the real world is an art learned on the lunatic fringes of society.Thank God for, Hank The Tank, The Werewolf of Croydon Acres, Congruent Head, Eel, Blub and the rest of my Freshman posse. We all enjoyed a prosperous and peaceful life of laughter and underachievement. The road to Nirvana begins with Homo habilis and runs through the D1 homeroom. That is inarguable.Peace Freddogg

A midnight knock came at my bedroom door. I hoisted myself off the floor level mattress and stepped over the side rails .The bed’s slates had long before broken. I was college guy, rumpled but fit, and neither was my fault.

I opened the door and down the end of tar dark hall I heard a voice, ”How would you like a few sky rocket balls up your ass?” And then they started to come by the hundreds. I could hear my roommates Thom laughing. I closed the door suddenly in the middle of an "Apocalypse Now" outtake.

By the way if your laughing you must realize I could have lost an eye.

A week later in the dead of a winters night Thom went out the front second story window of our downtown West Chester apartment, walked along a ledge, and crawled through an open window into a flop house. Then he crawled back and sat in the easy chair next to me. We often sat in the dark and waited for bars to close because there was always a show. The fact that Thom has just gone ledge walking dressed in all black didn’t get my attention in the least. He just went off on those types of sorties.

What he did while out and about was set three timed fuses to strings of firecrackers under the beds of drunken bums as they were affectionately known back in 1968. They started to go off and I thought the noises and flashes would never stop. Thom didn’t smoke pot like most Sixties morons but he laughed like he swallowed a bowling ball of hashish.

There was a party in our old style four bedroom piece of shit apartment. A college girl got sick. She went into the bathroom with a friend. Big mistake! Thom tossed in a string of firecrackers then locked the door from the outside. The only time he laughed harder was when they came out and started screaming about what an asshole he was. The more they badgered him with insults the funnier he found it.

Young boys to men become enamored early by sparkers, firecrackers, cherry bombs and eventually homemade blockbusters and paipe bombs. Why do hundreds of thousands enegized Americans show up at Fourth of July Fireworks celebrations? Personally, I hate fireworks and I don’t know what that says about me other than I have seen too much victimization and I know that someday the guy on the barge is going to be Thom and he will attack a city and cause a riot.

So don’t give your stupid kid fireworks and if he’s walking around the yard with a sparkler this Fourth of July smack him and the grandmother who bought it.

Peace Freddogg

DrunkFriendAlarmClock.wmv

There is a built in pause between courageousness and cowardliness. I prefer to call it intelligent thought an instantaneous reflection that quick action can result in an even quicker death. For example, if you are 30 years old and race to a burning car to pull out a trapped family and the car blows up in your face sending a Mercedes emblem through your skull then you used 30 years of experience to run into a one second death.

I read in a New York paper where two Puerto Rican girls on a flight from Newark to San Juan began to fight as soon as the plane lifted off the ground. The Flight Attendants were split between make up concerns and gay guys who know better than to bitch slap an angry Puerto Rican Hoochie Momma. The plane diverted directly to New York and landed where Sky Marhsalls from the Lesbian weight lifters swat team came on to remove them.

Now if I were on that plane with all my experience breaking up cat fights as a high school teacher I’m grabbing my pillow for protection and hope these girls don’t end up in my lap because I know it’s an unreasonable fear but fighting Puerto Rican women evokes the image of switch blades and they can get you dead in a hurry.

Back in the sultry summer of 1975 I was sitting on an ocean lifeguard stand with another teacher type about dead no air 3p.m just looking for a breeze or ripple of water. There was a little girl on a canvas raft and we let her drift out far because the water was non dangerous to downright dull.

Then in a flash a big fin broke to the surface creating white water behind her raft. It was there, then it was gone. We stood up and blew our whistles and waved for her to come in. She paddled and we waved some more. She was as calm as the water, needed no reassurance and we just kept taxing her towards the wet sand.

I leter posed thie interrogative to my stand partner, ”Was that a cowardly act? Should we have swam out there lending assistance and offering reassurance.”?

We agreed that at the second sighting of a big fin if we continued to offer semaphore to a 12 year old girl under, let’s say ,hammerhead attack, it could be construed by those in the lifesaving business as less than boldly heroic behavior.

Speaking of heroes my grandmother used to say, ”He who hesitates ain’t going!” She’s right.

Peace Freddogg

I’ve been the helium tanks shut down Hindenburg parked deep inside the hanger of melancholia the last week because of flu like symptoms where nothing struck me funny sans my own hanging testicles.

Yesterday George Bush brought me back as I witnessed footage of him in Budapest laying a wreath in commemoration of the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising to throw off the yoke of Soviet Communism and oppression which the Russians considered the political yoke of the decade.

A wave of Hungarian refugees hit the United States many to the East Coast and they became known as the Fifty Sixers to be forever identified with the Chevy the year before fins.

I had two people in my life who were outfalls of that immigration, my good friend Chooch Barczy and my barber of last choice, Marion The Hungarian.

Marion was “the other guy” you got if you didn’t get Italian Pete the Barber. Pete had style, knew all the new stuff ,while Marion was the technician who thought everyone in the small town of Penndel should look like a Hungarian refugee. That to him was his idealized head and, in fact, whatever was happening on top of your head didn’t matter as long it all tapered to buzzed fuzz and was cut out around the ears like white wall tires on a 56 Bell Air.

I went through some hair stages in my life. There was “the box” just around the ears and straight across the back, The D.A. where the sides met in the back called the duck’s ass and the Hollywood which was a flattop on top and long on the sides meeting in a ducks ass in the back.

Once during a long haired phase my blacker than black haired friend Mike and I went into the bathroom and put lots of Brylcreem on our heads and combed our hair up and back. Mike’s jet black hair looked great while my brown hair looked like the stuff growing along the side of the sump pump in the basement.

I walked into the kitchen not knowing my burly grandfather Frank Frederick had dropped in for knockwurst. Poppy just started to roar with laughter. “Jesus what did you guys do stick your heads in the toilet bowl? Jesus Rose! Look at our grandson! He sticks his head in the toilet bowl to make himself look better and you know something? It worked! It didn’t work! There is no good answer! Toilet bowl head! And I thought our other grandchildren were the goofy ones!”

Paul Barczy was a tackle on our school football team and later played at Gilford College in North Carolina. He was Hungarian, a big strong bad bitch of a player and a super nice person and loyal friend. I don’t know who first started to call him Chooch which is Italian for Jackass. He was the son of Fifty Sixers in America with an Italian nickname.

I was simply dumb assed German guy, hair cut by Marion the Hungarian or Pete The Barber on a good visit who stuck his head in the toilet bowl to enhance his good looks. I remember I would call Chooch at home, his mother would always answer the phone and it would go like this.

“Hello”.

“Chooch Home?”

“Choochie telephone”!

That’s one of those double layered jokes like a tube of Brill Cream on a Marion haircut. The Hungarian Fifty Sixer calling her own son ‘Choochie’. It was just so cute.

Four years after high school I would fly to North Carolina to be best man in Cooche’s wedding. He married a southern bell, beautiful girl and absolute eating Planters Peanut from the cyrstal dish, cold blooded bitch.

The wedding was dry—sorry for their luck—my tux was gray- my shoes were brown—I didn’t know- my consciousness was in an altered state of Vanilla Fudge “Set Me Free Why Don’t You Babe” I didn’t mesh-Chooch and his parents realized I was an idiot with brown shoes and dumb haircut. They were blending but weren't counting on a German Chooch for Best Man. I think my toast over punchline may have been something like "Whoever dubbed Paul a Chooch can stick a wallet in his mouth before he swallows his tongue because look at the pretty girl he done snagged down here yaw"
I left the backyard reception and the state of Carolina a day early inside my own purple haze-shielded from the X-ray vision of the eternally sober.

Paul Barczy settled down and became a Carolina Chooch Cop and Marion a restorative artist—that’s right-Hungarian haircuts on dead people.

Yesterday President Chooch brought all those memories back to me. I think I will go stick my head in the toilet bowl!

Freddogg The Wetdogg

I said, “Hey Babe. Roll your walker on the wild side.”

My loyal wife has known me for 45 years through variations of 85 pounds in weight and 16 sport coat sizes. Like all good women she loves her man, be he half the man or twice the man she married.

When I taught Psychology to high school students I always emphasized to them the importance of not revealing their personal information to the class and that when I told stories they weren’t to go running down the hall to my English teacher wife and exclaim, ”Miz Fred. Do you know what Fredman just said”?

That of course cinched the fact that Miz Fred would be the first place they would run to break any shared trust we shared as teacher and students.

One particular class I was explaining to them the difference between lust and love and ask them if raw lust always preceded true love and could love exist overtime outside of lust?

We were at the door waiting for the bell to ring and this girl ask me, ”Fredman. Would you still love Miz Fred if she grew to be 350 pounds?”

“Heck no!” I responded. “I’m much to shallow a person for that.”

They all laughed, said I was so wrong, then there was a track meet down the hallway so they could be the first to tell my wife. Now Susan knows by nature I must take the joke that’s given to me but she didn’t like being in the joke and she never mentioned that I had become the fat guy of her childhood dreams.

Transition now to those burly and fit alpha males, who spend a lifetime in Pabst Blue Ribbon euphoria, just barbequing beef while loving their fat women with potato salad lustfulness.

I’m thinking of one guy in particular who had a bunch of kids with his 400 pound wife and he should have loved her because she was wonderful and funny and he did love her up one side while repelling down the other.

Life moved on, the woman died, the guy got old, procured a renewable prescription for Viagra, and drove his pick-up everyday to the sandy shores of Tully Town Lake in Bristol where he drank coffee, reminisced on his past, told stories of his grandchildren, and jerked off his friends.

That’s right, a senior citizen “Blue Throbber Club” began and these 80 year old widowers got club cab friendly with each other like every freaking morning. I have no idea as to the range of their sexual peccadilloes, I can only imagine but I won’t.

I often told my students that when a person was rolled through the doors of a nursing home there should be a hedonistic exit strategy in place. I told them that all drugs and vices should be on the table as long as it didn’t impact the dignity of the unwilling observer or unwitting participate. “Get this old bag of bones off of me!”

I don’t know who invented the half ball as skirt cover on black wheeled walkers but I do know all men enjoy rolling with the homies-or homos-or whatever?

Peace

Papa Freddogg

www.aztlan.net/badges.htm

A senior couple in faded comet cleanser green Taurus wagon drove to the end of an empty Rehoboth Bay Beach parking lot this morning to tell me the sign on the way in said,"No pets."
They proceeded to lecture me on the health hazzards of dog waste and a general overview of Delaware Seashore history. It was obvious from their accents they had retired from Southeastern Pennsylvania and that they were what we locals call 717's.
"Are you done speaking and by the way "nice badges" I said. "Now let me tell you something. You have no idea who or what I am or if this particular Sussex Guide dog is a rescue retriever for parasailers,winsurfers,sunfish sailors and other imported wankers who are all over the bay today? In fact, you really don't know shit from shinola bars. Someone gave you badges and so you think you're back working as extras in the "Teasure of Sierra Madre.

Well call out the National Guard ,CIA, Park Rangers,Pagans,State Police and I don't care who else because this dog is going swimming and when she's good and tired we will leave. Now pat yourselves on the back you've succeeded in agitating an otherwise relaxed and law abiding person. And Mr Male Man unless you want to walk with a limp worse than mine I suggest you stay in the car and figure out how your going to blacken the millpond carp currently marinating in the black kettle on your redwood deck thet you will be cooking later on your George Forman grill.

And do you know the reason behind the deputizing of this maruading medicare package of obnoxious interfence into my life?

The govorner is coming to the beach tomorrow to put her feet in the water which I guess is a media event and you know what it's not the Governors fault,she's a nice person which is why I resisted any "No dogs on the Beach boomarang joke because that would be wrong in a fierce undertow water displacement sort of way.

But in the end I was happy not agitated like a Governor in a maytag of mayhem because it gave me something to rant about.

And I don't need no sticking badge to do that!

Peace Freddogg







http://www.davefredman.blogspot.com/

"Keep a knocking but you can’t come in. Come back tomorrow night and try it again.”

Remember Judge Alito, well he’s on the Supreme Court now and the “knock three times” on the ceiling before you bust me rule has been replaced by the “no knock on wood” rule if a search warrant is in hand?

The civil libertarians are scurrying on this one making sure there are false bricks in the fireplace to hide their stash.

Heavy duty drug dealers just lost valuable disposal time while addicted sewer gators will be coming topside looking for a fix.

Judge Alito says the police are more professional than they were 40 years ago but he’s never vacationed in Dewey Beach, Delaware and been awakened with a flashlight and German Shepard both six inches from his face. Why six?

I used to tell my students that "at times town cops enforce the law incorrectly on purpose just to increase the hassle and parental annoyance factor so you won’t return to their town with your sorry assed underage drinking and public intoxicated bush spraying self."

I have all kinds of experience with police raids and now that evidence seized without knocking—knocking is still politely suggested—won’t be excluded –the game of cops and robbers has turned into a track meet favoring the sprinters rather than the weight people. In that case place your bets on the shirtless sprinting crack heads. If they ever start wearing Under Armour instead of baggy jeans they will never be caught. Peanut, did you get walked by a fat lesbian in boots and wide belt? Your sorry tail belongs in jail”—a nice rhyming scheme by the way.

Remember a dirty sweat sock smells just like marijuana which gives cops probable cause to search you, your house, your locker and the shoes on your feet. “Your dogs are barking man. Take a shower and pick up some new socks the next time you’re shoplifting at Marshalls.”

Personally, I have been searched and seized a few times in my life and I’m not a person to teach a course in Criminology while I’m in the process of being falsely arrested. Most criminal cases are eventually tossed by the courts because of how hard it is to follow constitutional procedures while cuffing potential hostiles out in the field.

I’m looking for “I was arrested but I didn’t do it” stories or “I was arrested and did do it but they couldn’t prove it” stories or “I should have been arrested lots of times but I wasn’t stories.”

If a stranger knocks it’s not a cop.

Peace Freddogg

Geno’s in South Philly—famous for cheese steaks and greenhouse gases- puts up a sign “We Only Accept Orders in English” and it becomes a national story. I find that funny, considering the average verbal SAT score in the neighborhood, but hey, “forget about it!”
Everyone knows this is America so how come if you make one derogatory remark about Italians while waiting for your calzone you’ll have 50 of those Fabian looking mother fuckers on your ass?
Xenophobia is the fear of anything foreign and now in the land of the knave and the home of the naïve we are in deep angst because of the number of Hispanics who speak Spanish.
Remember the Ebonics scare? A law maker in California just thought maybe it would be a good idea if teachers in public schools with 100 percent minority enrollment would learn the language lexicon of the streets to help their student’s transition to the less lively and more socially acceptable suburban neighborhood boring ass delivery like the language spoken on public radio.
“They want us to speak like them black people now, ”came the Redneck cry across America. People scoring a zero on the hip-hop scale of cultural coolness were petrified they would become the children of the corn left behind. It’s all so priceless.
If you want to hear the English language butchered like a chopped up Steak-um just walk down the hallways of a public high school. It’s the homegrown people who mangle language because there is absolutely no value placed on speaking correctly in this country and it’s considered rude to correct someone who speaks improperly and is too stupid to realize it.
“Yo! Yo gusto dos cheese steakos, por favor, yo!”
I have no problem with that because if I were in Mexico ordering that’s what I would say as a bridge to the language gap.
You know who I would like to find and beat up? The unimaginative stuffy bastards and horrid writer’s who put together reading comprehension passages on the SAT tests. I honestly was thrown out of a session for blurting out “screw you asshole” during the test because I just couldn’t take anymore references to the misadventures of Princeton suburbanites and their dickhead dog.
I know lots of homosexuals and they don’t scare me. I even know some atheists and I’ve never said, “There are no atheists on the waterbed of death when god pulls the plug." And most people I listen to—George Bush and others- mangle the English language everyday. And hip-hop is now 30 years old as millionaire politicians many to most of them proven corruptables say things like 24/7 and from the get go and I be like “Caucasions please!” You bitches should learn to talk right.

Hasta Luego

Freddogg

Let’s limit this treatise to human interaction. I think for every 20 people with Attention Deficit Disorder there is another one boring the living shit out of them.

People as a rule don’t listen or pay attention as it were because those doing the speaking allow it or don’t care, enjoying instead the art of listening to the brilliance of oneself.

And teachers are the worse because more than most of them are more boring than your Aunt Rose at Thanksgiving dinner talking about scalloped potatoes. But throwing aside all evidence that they are uninteresting doesn’t stop the pedagogical assault of drivel, deadly and interesting information about Hottentots and Medieval Feudalism like who really gave a fuck in the first place and did I mention “Henry James my ass”? .

I used to tell my students that teachers are the only group that will keep talking in spite of all the obvious biofeedback that everyone stopped listening a long time ago. Incessant talking is like vocal message and it is rather addicting. I’ve caught myself in “shut the fuck up” mode at times and I know I’m highly amusing in spurts of minutes but also the dumber my subject the less time I have to make an impression.


Can you imagine a person on the street asking for you expertise then looking away as you proceed to elucidate your experiential wisdom on how to block a car and change a tire on an inclined highway? You would stop and bark: ”Listen asshole! Don’t ask for my help then turn away breathing through an open mouth. There are people in the world better than you that don’t profit by a thing I have to say. I can go waste their time and lose most but not all self respect.”

I was sitting across the bar once—actually thousands of times- from two guys who were taking turns trying to make contrasting and irreconcilable points. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing but I was all over it not paying attention to content but to the behavior of each. One would speak and the other would just shake his head no and wait his turn. This just went on and on and I was paying rapt attention only because I wasn’t supposed to be.

And that’s the way most positional posturing goes, no one listens or learns anything. Sometimes when I’m in that situation I don’t shake my head from side to side but rather keep looking and listening and eventually the magpie becomes unnerved and says, ”What’s wrong with you? How come you’re not saying anything?”

I respond, "because you were talking and I was listening" and they usually come back and say “no, I think you were just being a smart ass” and I say, “ No, not at all, in fact, when we began this conversation I thought Bush was a Moron and I was concerned that we legitimized torture and the use of German Sheppard’s by Lesbian Interrogators on hotwired naked Muslim men . And I admit that NO End game was a concern of mine but not anymore. Now I agree with everything you said and every position you advanced.”

“Which was what?”

“Beats the hell out of me?”

I had a friend in college named Joe with a perfect 4.0 average. He considered himself a verbal logician and philosopher and said the only reason to accrue knowledge was so it could be used a weapon to beat people over the head with it. Joe was brilliant and unbeatable except he wouldn’t spar with me because I called him fat and weak and he said that was an --ad homonym—attack the person not the argument- which resulted in immediate disqualification for my sorry ass.

But one night Joe was into a deep political argument with Captain Mark Shavani, the head of security guards at Wyeth laboratories in West Chester where the rest of us worked for minimum wage hoping to bolster our savings accounts to triple digits. Shavanni was educated and tolerant, his wife Maggie was News Director for KYW News Radio in Philly.

Twenty minutes and Captain Shavani had enough of Joe and simply lamented “Look, it all gets down to a matter of opinion like everything else. It’s my opinion versus your opinion. All arguments come down to opinion.”

And then Joe said. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s a self referential, self negating, paradox. If all positions come down to opinion then so does that statement.’

Shavani replied “Go fuck yourself.”

By the way, what were we talking about?

Peace Freddogg

“Jeepers Creepers where’d you get those Peepers?” Opening line at weekly support group meeting for non incarcerated community voyeurs.
“Everyone come out from behind the doors and curtains and Mr. Dyslexic Voyeur will you please stop looking out the window.”


A long time ago when my lawn was green I taught a General Psychology class in the evening division of a community college. I always impressed upon my adult students that I was a teacher, not a therapist, and to be careful to keep their personal problems under wraps because when they say, “Fredman, I have a friend who thinks he’s a chicken” I’m going to respond “And what is the price of eggs these days” because everyone in the room will know you are talking about yourself—so what the pluck?”

But on a Monday night break young “Poke Sally Annie” stayed back and asked for a personal consultation. I reminded her I was a teacher not a psychotherapist and I would gladly listen to her as a friend but not to put much credence in any advice unraveling from my multiple colleges attended as an undergraduate self. She responded, ”Whatever…..” and I told her mumbling "asshole" under her breath was so completely unnecessary.

Sally told me her boyfriend had been arrested for the second time and instead of shutting up like the trained counselor loser I was not, I responded “People get arrested all the time. It ain’t hard. In fact, the more innocent and innocuous the behavior, the more likely a person is to be arrested.”

Then I proceeded in jest. “So what did this moronic dull normal fiancée of yours do?"

‘He got busted for peeping, ”she said.

I then went off on a storyline titled “The Accidental Peeper” about how a guy could be minding his own business out for a walk when coming upon a naked lady standing by a lighted upstairs bedroom window. The male person may hum the Billy Joel tune “I am an innocent man” and lurk behind a tree until the show was over. But no tree hugging or climbing with spiked shoes”

“It wasn’t like that, ”she said somewhat annoyed and I said “I didn’t think it was” so how was it?’

“It was the second time he was arrested. He picks out attractive women at Wallmart—“say that again”-- and follows them home. He then cases out the property. If he sees a secure place to perch he comes back on a dark and story night.”

“And he gets caught. Let’s not forget that part.”

“And Sally you’re not telling me the entire story are you?”

“No Mr Fredman. Let’s just say he’s not a tree trimmer and he’s not exactly whacking off branches.”

“I think I understand. So where is Tom Cat at this moment?’

“They gave him the option of 30 days in prison or the mental hospital. He’s in there for therapy and evaluation.”

“And so Sally your question to me is what because remember I’m just a friend here not a therapist?”

“Should I go ahead and marry him?”

I pondered the heavy duty nature of this life crises moment for an innocent young women and professionally answered, ”Hell no! Don’t marry that sick bitch! He’s not getting better. The most you can hope for is he builds a tree house in your own back yard.”

She ran from the relationship and a few weeks later some scrawny guy in Wallmart kept staring at me.

“What the hell are you looking at, ”I asked him?

“Revenge of the Jilted Peeper” appearing in a theater near you.

Peace Freddogg

New Years Eve back in 1973 and the grandfather clock in the marble hall was about to strike stupid.

A teaching friend at the school for emotionally disturbed teens where I taught adolescents more acceptable versions of aberrance had an apartment inside a Philadelphia Mainline Mansion and there was a commingling of class party and all my liberal arts off beat buddies showed up to rub elbows with old money but at least we despised these snooty bastards.

Apartment dwelling sophisticated and erudite Ben was a flaming Spanish teacher. We called him Gentle Ben he said he preferred Ben Gay and I asked him how about just plain faggot and he giggled and life was simple in a Paris Hilton sort of way.

My Jewish friend Howard, the principal of our school, spilled a drink on the exquisite pool table for blue bloods late in the evening and the owner started to question Howard’s lack of concern for the property of others. Howard responded, “You may be rich but in the game of intellectual juxtaposition you are a fucking idiot.” That pretty much shut the guy down and he appeared to like the raw response to civility and I guessed we were a conduit to subterranean low class behaviors so prevalent among the frozen fish stick set.
Just before midnight a diving contest was wrapping up down at the indoor pool. There were two saunas; people were drinking around the pool, covered by a transparent bubble separating us from real January just like the transparency separating us from the upper classes inside the Mansion.

I was a jack knifing fool from Highway Pool before gay metric boards invaded America. We’re talking 10 foot spring board which for an athlete like me sent me up to 15 where my jack knife was an absolute bitch. And those high haired Italian girls just loved it but I didn’t have time for those Bandstand castoffs they could continue chasing after Bobby Rydell, Fabian and Frankie Avalon.

I was the last competitor off the barely one meter board. Iasked what were the criteria and was told elevation, grace in the air, and entry into the water. I was about 27 years old, ripped and fit, and not too drunk.

The entire clientele of the party sat around the pool with their legs in the warm water. Something of a spectacle was about to happen and I was the focused performer.

I stepped slowing and pounded down on the end of that board. I lifted like a Mercury Rocket, all movements in perfect hard bodied coordination. I could see faces looking up at me. It was a grand moment. But I just kept defying the laws of gravity and achieved escape velocity from the geo-pathetic dome of corpulent opulence.

Crashing through the suspended ceiling I continued to soar but abruptly dropped out of the Styrofoam cloud cover when the top of my head traversed a black terracotta soil pipe.

Flop is an exaggeration of the gracefulness with which I entered the pool. I hadn’t stuck the landing, the landing stuck me.

The top of my head broke into hard boiled nodules. My vision was blurred. I paddled to the side, said nothing, acting like I just needed a bigger room to hold my talent.

Howard came over, handed me a drink and said, ”You win!”

Peace Flying Freddogg

Retrospectively hilarious but judged against the wisdom of age not funny at all. That’s the way it is with true stories from our childhood that are uproariously improbable and there in lies the theory of The Intelligent Design flaw. Man is made in the image and likeness of god but only god is perfect therefore mortal man is fucked up in highly sophisticated ways through a complex series of infinite permutations deviating from perfection. The universe is within us and god is steady laughing because I know that’s what I’d be doing.

Big brother Tom was a 20 year old 6’5” 270 pound Penn State tackle back in 1964 so when he was accepted for a summer job at the private residential Wood Schools in Langhorne, Pa, an exclusive facility for the exotically afflicted and disturbed, they knew to place him in a special program to capitalize on his size and the humanitarian nature of his personality.

“You will be with the Prader-Willies each day, ”Tom was told. “There are only four of them, average age 25, height five feet and they weigh four hundred and fifty pounds. They are intelligent and devious, levels beyond clinical gluttony, and their sole purpose in life is the acquisition of calories which they don’t need because they’re hypo active, hypotonic with hypogonadism”. Tom responded, “Ah yes, the dreaded three H’s.”

And so everyday it was Big Tom and the Four Rhinos of the Apocalypse. They would trick and deceive him to find ways to get more food or paper products whatever it took. The Prader Willies are like failed lab experiments caused by genes falling off a chromosome after conception resulting in the hypothalamus singling and convincing the cerebral cortex that the immense body below needs more fuel.

Tom was talented and compassionate and didn’t take their lying personally and was at peace when they would physically tantrum spinning like frictionless orbs on a linoleum floor. There was no way to dead lift a spinning Prader to erect posture you just had to wait them out.

But through July and into the fourth week of August a miracle had taken place as each young man had lost significant but not noticeable weight. Big Tom was using behavior modification and the reward was a trip to the drug store in Langhorne where each Prader Willi would get an ice cream soda followed by a candy bar to go.

Big Tom drove the short bus back before short buses were cool with each team member taking up a corner for balance. The trip to town proper was six miles and couldn’t be flown by a crow with Prader Willi syndrome he would have to ride the short bus as well.

Tom and his platoon of planets rolled into the small town drug store and up to the counter. The clientele of regular run of the mill losers reacted in bug eyed astonishment. Tom tells the story that four of them sat on eight stools ordered ice cream sodas and drank them down in surprising civility.

“I took them over to the candy aisle told them to pick out one bar so we could go, ”Tom said.

He didn’t notice that the four men had fan tailed out to different quadrants od candyland down two aisles and on a pre agreed gastric signal they attacked.

‘They just dove into boxes of candy knocked them onto the floor and threw themselves on top of them. I’d touch one and he’d start screaming and spinning in a 500 pound tantrum,” Tom said.

The store emptied and the state police arrived, this is well before K9 units and mace. Tom and the cops just stood back helplessly hoping it would stop. It did not.

The Specialists from the Woods School arrived in a big white laundry truck. Two dispassionate personality types with big arms rolled out a human jack complete with overhead boom and under carcass canvas sling.

“They jacked them up one at a time, rolled them up a metal ramp into the truck and just dropped them, ”Tom said. “The tantrums stopped immediately because that’s what happens when dreams are chased then captured.”

Postscript: I've told that story hundreds of times in my teaching career embellishing parts and leaving out others. Amazingly it is a true story. Prader Willi Syndrome even sounds kind of funny but then again so does "back off Crack Baby" but neither is funny. Three years ago while at A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington I saw a notice for a meeting of Parents of Prader Willies. Jesus somewhere in my head I never thought any of it was real.

Peace Freddogg

Young goofy males need the fear of older, larger and potentially slap happy males, inculcated into their behavior matrix , otherwise the risk a good ass kicking somewhere down the evolutionary line between Pro Consul and Homo Habitat for Humanity lurks as a wake up call.

About 15 years ago I regularly covered the In School Suspension room at 10 a.m. each day at my high school. This one day I walked into a room filled with ninth grade undernourished and improperly medicated white guys and a kid with hair piled up and out like Art Carbuncle with one wondering eyeball said something smart like “whose the old fat gay cocksucker” as I walked into the room?

“Who are you looking at buddy and that’s not a trick question, who you calling fat “ and I wanted to add “you old Beanie the Seasick Sea Serpent looking one eyed mother fucker” but I remained cool to the touch?

What struck me over the next 45 minutes was the realization I was on lock down with crazy people who didn’t have enough sense to be intimidated and respected no one and if you ever saw their parents you would understand why.

I called down to the Board of Public Works in Lewes and told them to check the water in the tower because something was happening causing emotional unbalance, coupled with distorted realities and mood swings. I believe the answer from the over caffeinated, condensed voltage, amped up redneck, boom truck driver on break, was something like “Tower? I don’t know nothing about no goddam tower. I’m the electric man”

I know hyperactivity in males when I see it. Back in the seventies when morons and imbeciles were popular losers on Stanford Binet Intelligence Quotient tests it was called Minimal Brain Dysfunction and now Ritalin is used to slow down and focus herds of high school kids but it’s still altering brain chemistry and why do that if there is no underlying dysfunction?

A New York Times report cites a dramatic and some may say alarming increase in school aged kids taking atypical antipsychotics and because of confidentiality teachers can’t be told that in a Geography for the Criminally Insane class of 25 students five are on antipsychotic meds to control homicidal fantasies that may give way to aggressive behavior and feats of superhuman psychotic strenght like throwing a textbook 93 miles an hour at your head.

And I’ve noticed in general that psychotics have enough sense to prefer not to be medicated so just how fucking crazy are they? What is that all about?

“Miss Skinner, this is the school calling. We need to set up a meeting because we’re having trouble controlling B.F.. We think perhaps he is bipolar?”

“Yea well just send his sorry behind home and I guarantee you his ass won’t be bipolar tomorrow.”

Peace
Dr. Freddogg

http://www.geocities.com/bjaes.geo/lyrics/boardwlk.htm

Tanning is stupid and dangerous and anyway only young white people tan older folk just weather. You can see it in the cracks of their faces.

But those indoor white urbanites who hit the beach in late August, looking like uncooked biscuits fresh out of the cylinder, now they are some scary looking people.

And I’ll tell you something else, sitting on the beach all day is not relaxing and is not fun, its moronic and driven by vanity because there are black biting flies and green headed nasty bitches and no-see-ems and even flesh eating lady bugs while the Mid Atlantic ocean is steel gray sucko, always too cold and harbors not only sea nettles but sea lice and also your basic curse of fu-man-chu crud which ends up on your face if you decide to do the Australian Crawl to impress nobody. And my favorite expression, which entices me to ride waves endlessly, “well below acceptable levels of fecal chloroform.”

I wear white socks all the time so when I go to the beach I look like a two legged show horse. If I were a chocolate lab the Westminster crowd would boo me out of Madison Square Garden.

And you don’t see many black people on the beach in the middle of the day and they know why because darkness is an issue among many of them and how ironic that black people Get after blacks for getting too black and white people make fun of crackers who are too white.
I was a beach lifeguard and I loved turning a golden brown color as my leg hairs were bleached white. Now I’m just ruddy I call it the row house roof tan when just a little sun turns all the embedded soot to a Williamsburg Bracken House Brown. I’m a regular paint chip.

Yesterday my 6 year old granddaughter Katie asked me if I had an” innie or an outey?” I told her she’s need a miners helmet to check out the knot in my navel and that one time a grape seed took root in there and I only wish I had been kidding her.

How about it, Do you like to tan your Hyde or when the sun comes out would you just rather hide?

Freddogg under the boardwalk

Vivid memories go all the way back to the beginning. You may forget where you left your car keys or the name of a person who appears to know you well but the real impressionable shit stays in there.

I was four years old sitting on the floor in a dark dinning room inside a North Philadelphia row house. Out in the kitchen the final room before the alley three soon to be dead men were sitting down to dinner in a kitchen too bright on slippery chairs pulled up to a shiny table.

There was my father Tom in a wheel chair his hands always trembling from Multiple Sclerosis, my maternal grand father Franklin who entered the world as a senile autistic and just got worse and my Uncle Frankie who was mildly retarded and was missing part of his face due to the only recorded medical case in history labeled: “Cancer of the Fucking Head.”

My father hated his father in law, my mother hated her father, my grandfather hated his son and Frankie loved mashed potatoes.

And so whatever main course slid around the table top my father couldn’t pick up, my grandfather criticized in vicious fashion but Uncle Frankie loved mashed potatoes.

The mashed potatoes arrived in a big bowl steaming hot with melted butter in the middle. Uncle Frankie loosened his belt and said, ”I’m eating all of these” and reached for the hot bowl.

Grandfather Franklin screamed a single syllable as blue vessels popped from his bald head littered with age spots. He hated to see Frankie happy.

Frankie couldn’t process the real time problem of desire too strong and bowl too hot heading towards his lap on a table too slippery. The entire bubbling bowl landed upside down on his unbuckled crotch. Frankie let out a painful yell.

My father Tom commenced to roar in laughter like a lion which increased spastic episodes in all his limbs. Grandfather Franklin called his son a stupid monstrous retard and ran from the house.

My mother cried and dutifully helped put her brother back together and then he left the house in humbled embarrassment where everyone of the PTC bus would make fun of him because the world of randomness is never ready for the reality of the hackneyed faced Frankies with a pocket full of tokens.

My dad died at our new Cape Cod home at the end of the first floor hallway in 1963 he was 43 and maybe weighed his age although I doubt it. Uncle Frankie died at 38 in a Trenton hospital bed on Christmas Eve in 1964 with his sister singing at his bedside
“O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine blätter.Du grnst nicht nur zur sommerzeit, nein auch Im winter wenn es schneit”

I remember thinking, ”All these years I’m German and only now my mother, whose maiden name was Krupp, is breaking out tearful German lullabys,it just made me mad, like ‘This is fucked up enough without the O Tannebaum sendoff.”
Grandfather Frankin died at the end of the hallway to the left in a room filled with uneaten toast at the age of 83 in 1965.
The guys from the nursing home had come to get him that morning. Luigi the beagle had blown up to the size of a dachshund show dog because Franklin had given him all his food and oh yea, one night he was standing over me in the dark in my upstairs bed with a large knife raised up over his head. The time had come and he had to go.
Franklin died before the men reached his room. His late life mantra , ”No one is putting me inside that long dark tunnel” proved to be accurate.
And Mashed potatos make me cry.

Freddpupp

Aids ain’t funny and I’m not suggesting it is but we do reside in the greatest joke making society in the history of the universe and in the dark corners and back alleyways taboo subjects deliver the best punch lines.

When AIDS was first introduced to the free world –did you just poke me—the two high risk groups were Haitians and Homosexuals. Get out of here with your dumb assed green monkey brains theory.

A theory goes that on luxury cruises to the Caribbean while the heterosexuals delighted in watching poor Haitians youths dive deep for shiny quarters in the clear shark patrolled warm waters rich gays went ashore to take advantage of male prostitution services where all the males for hire looked like Candy Man and spoke in French accents.

Hence the first joke: What’s the worst thing about getting AIDS? Trying to convince your mother you’re a Haitian.

There was the shadow poster of one guy standing behind another like Kobe on a Chamber maid with the universal no sign and the words “Stop Aids.” A student circa 1987 brought that into our high school and was promptly suspended.

Remember Surgeon General Joyce Elders who advised having condoms in middle schools and high schools and told kids their sexual lives should reside somewhere between abstinence and masturbation and that no she never did get caught doing it in the closet to reference an old joke.

Magic Johnson announced he had AIDS spawning the joke “You can even get AIDS with a Magic Johnson” and everyone looked at fruity Isaiah because he and Magic were best buds and kissed like cousins before games but Magic said, ”I must have gotten HIV from a women because I ain’t never been with no man” and it was dropped because Magic is a cultural icon and a truly good person and any journalist seeking a Magic-Butt Pirate link would have a longer life span standing naked at midnight in downtown Kabul shouting “fuck yaw Taliban mother fuckers!”

I was watching public television in bed—honest officer- and there were all these staggering numbers for Africa and India and ironically something called the Bush plan which I believe was nature’s plan in the first place butt lets not go there- and free retroviral drugs were available to about five million people but too bad for the other 300 million.

There were these Indian Truck drivers who looked like NFL linebackers in turbans. Evidently it’s lonely out there in the hinterlands so these heterosexual guys often have anal sex with each other and seemed genuinely surprised to learn they were at risk for AIDs saying on camera “No one ever told us.” Now how many dumb assed Indians have your ever met? Not many but evidently they are driving trucks instead of providing round the clock computer tech support for Hewlett Packard.

Some Tech guy from India helping me update my Norton software-potential puns lurk everywhere- got frustrated and said, ”I must say your computer is very very slow.”

“If I get to your supervisor you’ll be washing elephants tomorrow is what I must say” then he broke bad and told me he used to drive trucks and I asked him if was sitting on one of those wooden taxi driver cushions and it just went down from there so to speak.

Human sexual behavior possibly seeks perversion to enhance excitement and nature is leaving a calling card and thinning the herd. It is sad, it is tragic, no one deserves this virus and we all have stared in its face.

I know jokes so offensive I will not even write them here. And so do you. A former student of mine blamed the high school for not educating him as to the high risk behaviors that may cause AIDS. Let me say he was not an intravenous drug user, did not have a transfusion and was not Haitian.

I have stood in front of many classes of coed teenagers without an approved manual of instruction and I’m not comfortable talking to them about the sexual predilections of Indian truck drivers or the Haitian male prostitution business.

Here in Rehoboth Beach there are entire beaches dedicated to gays some for men and others for women. One is even called Poodle Beach. And remember you can’t catch the virus from a mosquito because of anticoagulants but seashore mosquitoes are big enough to be monitored by AWAC aircraft and the “you can’t catch it from a mosquito theory" only works until it no longer works and then we are all hosts I mean toast.

Professor Freddog Kicking the Real!

Cultures change from underneath because the older and more experienced life forms become set in the “I didn’t get this old being fucking stupid” ways of wisdom. Take those surfing and rock hopping penguins of Tierra del Fuego.The juvenile males will take on a 20 foot wave, fly out, do a couple of back flips, then land on their webbed feet ,bob the head, do a little ‘we bad wobble walk’, then say “that’s what I’m talking about!”‘I’m going to try that, I want to taste the clear focused exuberance of juvenile senility just one more time,” an older penguin says to his geriatric sidekick as they safely bob beyond the breakers of the breeding population.“You do and you’ll be one Broke Back Penquin which I’ve always had my doubts about you anyway.”“Who you calling Brokeback, you egg humping, oh I didn’t know it was a throw pillow, pervert?”Yesterday morning I stood outside a high school as the kids were coming in. A tall white boy named Robbie was dressed all in black but there was a large face on the front of his shirt. ‘Who’s that Rob” I asked?“Al Capone, ”he said.A large black girl looked at Rob and yelled “It is not no good day him coming up all cheesy and shit.”My ears perked up and in fact lots of women think I have perky ears and I resent being objectified like that because I’m more than just a set of ears.Anyway, I commenced to listen in on the causal conversations of students arriving for school and once again it dawned on me that teachers have no real fighting chance because there is no value placed on speaking correctly and it is speech which reveals ideas and we now have an entire culture stuck in slang and clichés at all levels and thinking in pictures and postulating stupid theories and scenarios based on fundamentally unsound pricipals speaking of high schools.Last year I saw my boy Rob wearing a shirt with a little yellow school bus on front and it read, ”I Ride the Short Bus.”The entire planet appears to be riding the short bus with Al Gore driving because he be looking like a fat assed short bus driver, don’t he yo? But where are we going and are we there yet?Peace Freddogg