Freddogg Off The Chain

I can leave a gym of mirrors and never look at myself. I can sit in a hairdressers chair and do the same. ‘Sure the haircut looks great but whose gray/black fuzz is on the floor?
Last Saturday I was cruising Food Lion spree shopping for all things not on anyone’s resolution list?
A woman with a southern Virginia waterman’s accent practically rolled up on my shoe tops and began to wear me out. I hadn’t seen her for years not since the time I heard her tell some people she was in the middle of nowhere and blew a seal and had to pull over and I asked her “are we talking circus or saltwater seal”?
I told her I retired from teaching and she said “I know you retired and got old.” I was taken a hairy back for a second and considered going into attack mode on a person who can’t even reach the Nutter Butters in aisle three but I just said “I see how you roll” and wanted to add “don’t blow any seals on the way out of here” but I restrained my darker side.
The following day I was in gym garb and caught inside a stopped still crowd of indecisive WaWa customers. A tall woman turned to me and said “do you want any fruit?’ then answered her own question “I guess you don’t” realizing I was not who she thought I was. I was about to pay for coffee when the woman behind me said “did you pay for mine honey”? I turned and she exclaimed “you’re not my husband. Sorry he is wearing a gray jacket just like you.”
This extending family was having a high time mistaking me for the patriarch who emerged from the breakfast sandwich warmer he thought was a facial tanning bed, looking all short and fat and bald in a V Neck graying shirt with chest hairs peaking through and I thought “Freaking Priceless!”

I started my apprenticeship as a writer back in fourth grade by taking hard news stories and rewriting them into inappropriate comic riffs. Some of my confiscated regurgitation and twisting of realities were shown to my mother as evidence “your son needs help” but after mom was done laughing she would tell them “he is funny it is you all that need help.”
Fifty years later none of us need help as our defective society continually produces an army of misfits beyond salvation or redemption.
Take the Pittsburgh “Cat Lady” who ran a no kill shelter called “: Tiger Ranch: The Land of Milk and Tuna.” The place was filled with dead and diseased cats, cats in freezers and mass graves of cats 12 feet long 12 feet wide and 12 feet deep the graves dug by a redneck friend with a rented Bob Cat. Investigators said you couldn’t walk the property without hearing the sound of cat bones crunching under your Timberlands.”
The judge sentenced the woman to two years probation and said she should be in prison but the state’s taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to warehouse her. The beastly big breasted behemoth paused for seconds before responded “why I gotta be warehoused.” And the Judge was quick to retort” what do you prefer your own hanger?’
The woman known as Miss Marie spoke to the court and said “she was past the lying she had done. She had undergone what she called a "paradigm shift."
A paradigm shift- a science term-is defined as a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis in the way people think. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change you know like apps for ipods or a four slice toaster.
A cat lover in the courtroom was held in contempt for going dog side and screaming “shift this paradigm you fat bitch!”

Go to Pittsburgh Post Gazette to find this story.