No Tressrassing!

It's absolutely appalling, I thought.  Look what's happened to this neighborhood!

The old white Remington Building had once been the home of a thriving knitting company with over 170 employees, including some members of my family. But the area declined, crime rose, and the business moved away.

The Remington Building was now shuttered, covered with weeds, and full of graffiti. Rounding a corner, I stopped and before me arose the words "No Trespassing" in big black spray-painted letters on the side of the building.

Sometimes opportunity trumps reason. I just couldn't resist.

To make sure nobody suspected me, I badly misspelled "trespassing."

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No Tressrassing? It's bad enough when a neighborhood gets taken over by graffiti writers, but even worse when it gets taken over by graffiti writers who are not well educated. That's the moral of today's story based upon the picture prompt above in this week's Wednesday edition of the Friday Fictioneers.

You won't be tressrassing at all upon the other Fictioneers if you click on "tressrassing" wherever and whenever it appears in this post.  They'll be happy to welcome you into their writing abodes and show you around.

Yes, I am now fully obsessed with the word "tressrassing." See you next week, and  

Happy Tressrassing!

A Not So Wonderful Life Anymore

Mary, Zuzu! They're sick of us!

If you are truly strong-willed and stout of spirit this holiday season, you will manage to avoid watching even a millisecond of one of the greatest and most popular movies ever made and a movie I'm sure you love and cherish, Frank Capra's 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life.

Frankly you've seen  this damn movie enough.  Young or old, rich or poor, Jew or gentile, you've already spent enough time in Bedford Falls to qualify for residency status and a special parking permit in front of Mr. Potter's office.  

A few years ago when it was still in the public domain, It's a Wonderful Life was shown on virtually every television channel on the viewing spectrum except the Whips and Chains Network.  It was shown in black and white, color, upside down, with captions for people who like to brag about how much they read, and in a specially processed version in which George Bailey is rescued not by Clarence the Angel but by Michael Keaton as Batman.

It was actually possible to race It's a Wonderful Life by switching back and forth between different channels showing the movie. Which of the versions would end first - one of those on non-commercial cable or PBS or one with commercials but with a good half hour to 45 minutes head start?  And you could also readily switch to a channel  lagging seconds behind the one you were watching and get an instant replay; "here's the action once again, fans, as Uncle Billy screws up and hands the money to Potter!"

But even if you missed that era, you've still seen the movie enough times to know all the words to "Buffalo Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight," laugh about the names "Bert and Ernie," and do a fair to middling impression of George Bailey shouting out "Zuzu's Petals!"

So why do we keep watching a movie we deeply love but are so manifestly sick of?  

It's because once we subject ourselves to even a few seconds of It's a Wonderful Life, we are seduced and entranced into swallowing it whole once more.  We get that cozy warm-hearted Capraesque feeling in one part of our body while every inch of the other part is screaming "Stop this played-to-death movie, this is worse than the Spanish Inquisition!"

But this year you're going to fight it!

First: Check the television listings for the two times that Wonderful Life is going to be shown on NBC this year. Be nowhere near a television set or any other electronic device when the movie is broadcast, especially when the Clarence sequence is on. Don't be seduced by unbridled sentimentality any more!

Keep in mind this movie has its creepy aspects too:

"Clarence, what's become of Mary?"

"You're not going to like it, George. She's an old maid; she's about to close up the library!"

The way Clarence says this you'd think he was saying "she's a crack whore, George; she's about to go down on Mr. Potter!" What's wrong with being an older single person? What's wrong with being a librarian? And why does pretty Mary look so awful as a librarian? Too much exposure to Ayn Rand?

And "No man is a failure who has friends?"  Hitler had friends; what are we to make of that? You and I have friends and we're not exactly indispensable to the Great Chain of Being. Chances are if Clarence took us around to see the world as it would have been if we'd never been born, it would have been pretty much the same, if not better.  Probably way better.

"No man is a failure who has friends?" Judging from what happens at the end of the movie  a more to-the-point credo would be "No man is a failure who has friends with oodles of cash."

Finally, if all this doesn't stop you from sliding into yet another viewing of the most loved/hated movie of all time, imagine that Clarence the Angel is showing you what your life would have been like if Frank Capra had never been born.

Doubtless countless productive hours would have been saved not watching It's a Wonderful Life! 

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Looking for something fun to do while not watching It's a Wonderful Life?  How about enjoying a hilarious spoof of It's a Wonderful Life?

Well, I don't happen to have a hilarious spoof of It's a Wonderful Life, but I do have the mediocre one I did a few years ago.  Here's Potter Strikes Back!, directed by Perry Block, 2011, with an all-star cast you have to imagine.  It makes up for its mediocrity with length.

Please do not throw popcorn on the carpet.

The Worst Baby Boomer Nightmare Ever

It is officially recognized as The Worst Baby Boomer Nightmare Ever.  And some day soon it may happen to you!  

For me it happened in a small neighborhood fruit and vegetable store.  It actually happened more than a few years ago, back in the day when the picture I use on this blog wouldn't even have yet qualified as Exhibit A in a suit for Internet Fraud and Misrepresentation. And it happened at a time when my son Brandon was still of the young sweet voice he was to so inconsiderately drop way too soon thereafter.

The store owner was an older Asian woman who having seen Brandon in the store more often than she'd seen me gave him a warm hello while I set about shopping. There were just a few items to grab in the store, but for me nothing's ever easy starting with opening those little plastic bags that are engineered to be welded shut whenever I approach.

I crinkle the bag.  I twist the bag. I rub the bag vigorously between my thumb and forefinger.  I ask the 80 plus year old lady in the next aisle if she'll help me open the bag, hoping she won't think I'm coming on to her.  Success at last.

Now: which are peaches and which are nectarines again?  Oh yeah, that's why the call it peach fuzz. How do I properly stage my banana purchases for the week?  Two yellow, three green, one drop dead green? What if I don't want a banana every day? What if I want two? Parsley? Is it flat parsley, curly leaf parsley, Italian parsley, root parsley --- I don't even like parsley! Why is there always one strawberry in every box infected with white rot? Will it poison me? Arugula? I thought Arugula was an island in the Caribbean! 

We were at the cash register ready to check out and go on our way.  And the Asian lady at the register, the one who knows Brandon better than she knows me, smiles at him and says:

" So .... you show Grand Pop around the store today?"

Now I'd like to say it isn't so.  I'd like to say I'm better than that.  But the truth is, I'm not.

It is The Worst Baby Boomer Nightmare Ever, and it has left me narrow-minded, intolerant, and bitter.  I'm not proud, but ever since that day I've become an angry raging inconsolable bigot.

I hate fruits and vegetables.

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How Difficult Can It Be?

Made it!  Just made it to the cross channel ferry, climbed on deck with my briefcase, and parked myself at a table facing France.

Hopefully the sea breeze would ward off any attacks of my old nemesis sea sickness, especially on such a short trip. Damn it, no such luck!

A man in a trench coat sat himself across from me.

"Gee, friend, you look green."

I slid the briefcase under the table to him.

Not five minutes later another man approached the table.

"Gee, friend, you look green."

“Please tell me you're the random guy and the other guy my contact.”

“No, I’m your contact.”

Well, how difficult can it be to enrich uranium anyway?

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I had warned M not to assign me to any duty involving  boats because of my tendency to barf on them, but he took it upon himself to work the whole thing into the mission with a smart-ass passphrase. What can you expect from a guy who goes around calling himself "M" when his real named is Maurice?

This heart-pounding tale of espionage is my 116 word contribution to the Friday Fictioneers based on the prompt above for this week.  Unless you're too nauseous, please enrich yourself, if not uranium, by checking out the work of the many other Fictioneers via a right click right here. 

Well, how difficult can it be to enrich uranium anyway?