Freddogg Off The Chain

Down with dignity is the story of a long life. Sooner or later you look into a mirror or face an audience then shrug and say, ”What the hell, this is me, for better or worse.”

But too many people give up the ghost early and don’t even care. They get fat then fatter, smoke cigarettes, talk all nasty, and don’t really care what image they project. The get drunk and oiled up and have sex like barnyard animals or with barnyard animals, they just don’t care, they are passing through a life as hedonist without philosophy training. God bless them all.

Now I am encumbered, if not cucumbered, by a sense of self awareness. I want to look reasonable or at least not draw a crowd by looking ridiculous.

A dozen years ago I was hospital gowned before surgery. They wanted to double gown me with one that ties in the back and another in the front to save me and everyone else in the hospital from embarrassment. I insisted on only the back tie, left untied, and I wanted to walk through a waiting room filled with strangers. It’s implosion therapy, get all the embarrassment out there at once. You can’t hurt me. I have a hinny just like you. Then if you’re really lucky while you unconscious they will stick a Foley-but hopefully not Mark Foley- up you penis so you don’t pee on the Jewish doctor during surgery. The days afterwards when you have gotten used to that embarrassment, some fat chick dressed in a nurse’s uniform, will kneel on your bed and rip the foloy back out as you become a house whose vinyl garden hose is crimped.

Back in 1965 a drunken basketball player on parole from a rape change knocked my two front teeth in half swinging his “errant elbow” on a rebound. I have been fighting caps and crowns flippers and partials ever since.

Once I was standing in front of a football defense as the coordinator during a crucial fourth quarter time out in a tie game. A loose crown came flying out of my mouth and I caught it in midair. One linebacker said ,”Fredman, stop playing,” another defensive back said, ’Fredman is fucking crazy.”

Another time a crown was so loose when I was teaching that I had to leave and go straight to the dentist because if you remove a tooth in front of high school kids then will Hannibal Lecture you into therapy.

I procured a reluctant substitute and I was walking down the hallway leaving school drinking coffee when this little Chinese girl name Meeche came walking past. I tried to say “Meech” but then sneezed with coffee in my mouth which came out of my nose and eyes while the tooth flew out of my head.

Meeche, the controlled and respectful Asian girl, lost her mind and laughed so hard and so long and I had never seen her smile before and if I see her today years later she still cracks up and can’t talk to me.

Today my partial went away for an addition fake tooth and I am hiding like a pussy willow under the baseboard heating duct.

No one appreciates a gregarious snaggle-toothed white trashy looking redneck except women who look the same which is why I am out of human circulation for a day.

K9 Freddogg