timerick

All manner of thought should be met
on campus but I must regret
that freedom of speech
should now have to reach
Iranian nuts with its net.
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

timerick

All manner of thought should be met
on campus but I must regret
that freedom of speech
should now have to reach
Iranian nuts with its net.
 

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Not Too Bright

I do not consider too bright
the people who bleach their teeth white.
Who cares that  your teeth
light up like a wreath
if you put 'em in water each night?
 

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Toilet Bowl

According to my TV screen
you must keep your toilet bowl clean.
Ignore this command
and you'll surely stand
acussed of unholy hygiene.
 

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Forgive & Forget

Forgive and forget is a phrase
that's certainly seen better days.
We savor a grudge
as if it were fudge
then spread it like bad mayonaise.
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

Federal Reserve Nerve

They certainly do have their nerve
down there at the old Fed Reserve.
They're giving rebates
on key interest rates
so bankers go all whirling derv.
 

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Ambition

A skunk has no need for cologne.
A rabbit has no need to clone.
Rats need no dentures.
Sloths have no ventures.
Ambition is man's curse alone.
 
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

Timerick does it again

I want you, right this minute, to go get your road atlas.  Under the index for Texas I want you to look up Reno.  Now go to the map of Texas and pinpoint the town, just to the east of Paris.  Got it?  Good.  I was hoping to end my last week as publicity director for Culpepper & Merriweather Circus in a blaze of glory, or at least without a massive fiasco.  But Reno, Texas, plunged me into buffoonery once again.
  I called the sponsor, a volunteer firefighters organization, and set up an appointment for Saturday morning, at the fire station.  I'm there plenty early, as usual.  An hour goes by.  No sponsor.  I leave said sponsor a voice message, regretting etc.  Said sponsor calls me back on Sunday, saying he was out at the fire station but didn't see me.  Not one to call another man a liar, I complacently take the blame -- must've just missed each other, blah, blah, blah.  We agree to meet Monday morning at the fire station.  I'm there bright and early.  Again no sponsor.  This time I start to boil.  So I decide to go right to the top.  I call the fire chief at city hall.  He is affability itself, sorry to hear I missed my connection again.  He agrees to  meet me at the fire station in two minutes.  So I wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Thirty minutes later the chief calls me back to ask if I am at the fire station, as he hasn't seen me.  I'm right in front of the cotton-pickin' station, so I start to bang on the front door.
"Can you hear me now?" I holler into my cell phone.
No.  He can't.
I bang louder.
"I'm right here!  Just open the door and you'll see me!"
"I'm outside right now . . . "
We continue in this Abbott and Costello vein for a few more minutes until the chief asks "What county are you in right now?"
Oh oh.
Lamar County, right outside of Paris.
Well, partner, Reno is a suburb of Fort Worth.  There are two Renos in Texas.
Pause here, cherished reader, and try to imagine my feelings at that moment.  My face glowed with a plutonium-grade blush.
Luckily the chief was a forgiving soul.  So we agreed to meet, this time in the right town, this coming Saturday.  Pray for me, readers.  Pray for me.

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Junk Mail

My junk mail has changed radically.
It really can't be meant for me.
It used to annoy
with ads for Playboy.
But now it's all AARP.
 
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

OJ

So OJ's in trouble again.
He's stealing stuff from his own den.
A story so huge
sure makes a deluge
with more noise than comes from Big Ben.
 
 

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The Quark

The quark has a dreadful design.
'Twould make Isaac Newton repine.
Quantum mechanics
most often panics
construction of any straight line.
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

timerick

The war in Iraq never ceases
and some hold the following thesis:
We have to stay put
and not move a foot
cuz people there love us to pieces.
 

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Make your little one a shining star! Shine on!

Adam & Eve

Did Adam and Eve come before
or after the huge dinosaur?
It couldn't be Eden
if those things were breedin',
which would explain Eve's apple core.

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Timerick visits Ringling, Oklahoma.

I'm weekending in Ardmore, Oklahoma, already starting to get "trunky" for the circus season to end.  I've got two more weeks of work and then phffft!, it's over.  I'll be scouting around for another soft berth -- I've thought of hiring myself out as a gigilo for blind women, but that would entail buying a pair of sunglasses, which I hate.
     I'm happy to report that I'm up to 3rd District Arkansas Congressman John Boozman in my collage campaign.  His collage, a masterpiece if I do say so myself, is entitled "Puppies from a sewer pipe".  That's the newspaper headline I pasted over the whole thing as it was drying.  Drifting off to sleep at night I like to imagine that Congress has called me in front of an investigative committee for my subversive artwork.  I'm dressed in jeans, a white turtleneck, and have a black beret at a rakish angle on my head.  I'm wearing sandals, of course, and when the stuffy senator asks what I do for a living I casually say I'm a conceptual artist.
Senator:  "And what exactly is a conceptual artist, Mr. Torkildson?"
Me:  "My art embraces concepts that normal channels do not address, so it is done with abnormal material through abnormal means."
Senator (attempting a joke):  "So you're telling this committee you consider yourself abnormal?"
Me:  "I consider myself an American citizen with the right to express myself freely and fully in any medium I wish -- which apparently makes me abnormal in your eyes, Senator."
The senator hems and haws, then abruptly adjourns the committee meeting.  I am soon after awarded the Nobel Prize.
 
    Moving right along . . .a little travel writing.  If you gaze upon a map of Oklahoma long enough you will become intrigued by a pinprick near the Texas border called Ringling.  It is 31 miles due west of Ardmore, on State Highway 70, so I thought I'd mosey on over there this morning to see what the town is all about.  The Ringling Chamber of Commerce put up a sign in the shape of a circus tent, welcoming visitors to town, but the sign is engulfed in kudzu and slippery elm branches so it's almost impossible to see.  The paint is also peeling off of it, and it's streaked brown from years in the pitiless sun and rain.  Outside of that, there was nothing in the town to indicate why the town is named Ringling.  There are signs everywhere, including right on the town water tower, bragging that Ringling is the home of the Blue Devils football team. If I lived in Ringling, Oklahoma, (population 495) I'd have the blue devils, too.  Wanting to give my readers some legitimate background, I stopped by the local newspaper, The Ringling Eagle, but they were closed.  If I was somebody like Paul Theroux, who has written 20 travel books, I'd have struck up a conversation with the locals to see what they could tell me.  But I'm not Theroux and besides the place was a ghost town on a Saturday morning; I saw two teenage boys walking down the middle of Main Street trying to punch each other in the crotch, but otherwise nada jente.
   Then it started a steaming drizzle, so I hopped back into my Ford Taurus station wagon, cranked the a/c up full blast, and tooled back to Ardmore.  A late breakfast at IHOP of fruit filled crepes, washed down with thick hot chocolate, put me in an excellent mood, so I stopped by Walmart to develop some digital photos.  This is a Supercenter, so they've got an excellent supermarket as well.  I went looking for humus, to spread on some french bread this evening as my dinner.  But the Walmart in Ardmore does not have humus, and none of the store clerks I asked had ever even heard of it.  They looked at me strangely when I explained it was a dip made out of garbanzo beans, tahini, lemon juice, and olive oil.  The store has lobster, head cheese, frozen sushi, pickled okra, pigeon peas, and even matzoh ball soup, but no humus.  I settled for spinach dip. 

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timerick

Pavoratti will warble no more.
He's gone to the furthermost shore.
But what a sad fate
that yon Pearly Gate
won't let in his corpulent core!
 
 

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timerick

Fred Thompson has joined the rat race
to take Georgie Bush's grand place.
An actor like Reagan,
he looks more like Fagan.
He'd better not count on his face.
 
 

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When dealing with gals

When dealing with gals -- have a care!
Don't ask them if they dye their hair.
They either will lie
or punch out an eye.
Just tell them it looks sweet and fair.
 

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timerick

A hostage is someone who gets
caught up in some crazy group's nets.
No matter their faith
they're put on the lathe
to pay for some other folks' debts.

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timerick

 
For old movies I'm very keen.
I relish each black and white scene.
Garbo or Gable,
they were all able
to make love securely off-screen.
 
 

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timerick lives in a motorhome

I trust you folks don't mind the larger font size; my weary old eyes tire so quickly trying to proof-read anything smaller.  If you need something to read to take your mind off the ennui of the long and usually useless Labor Day weekend, here it is; another chapter from those halycon years when the world was my oyster.  This one, in a way, is about hockey, but mostly it's about living in a motorhome.

   You've all been very patient with me over these past months as I've complained about the questionable motels I stay at as part of my job traveling for Culpepper & Merriweather Circus.  So I thought I would take you back to 1973, when I lived in a 35-foot motorhome, provided by Ringling Brothers Circus.

 The winter of 1972 was a bad one; I returned from Mexico, having canceled a world tour with noted pantomime artist Sigfrido Aguilar due to a slight case of amoebic dysentary.  My five-eleven frame had melted down to a mere 105 pounds.  The Mexican doctors were agreed that I needed to put some meat on my gringo bones back in the States, so I holed up with the parents in Minneapolis.  A few dozen doses of antibiotics and a raft of solid meals featuring meat not crawling with flies and potatoes in all their glorious disguises soon had me back on my flat feet, facing the prospect of hunting for a job.

   Early spring; the elm trees shyly uncurling their leaves and fat robins strutting in the backyard with heads tilted for another worm.  I sat in the kitchen, sunk in gloom, the Want Ads spread all around me.  Then the phone rang.

    Thirty years ago when the phone rang at home it was a pretty important event.  And loud.  Phones sounded like fire alarms back then.

   I picked up the receiver to hear the mellow tones of a comrade-in-arms from Mexico, Steve Smith.  He came right to the point.  Being no slouch, he had been pestering the Ringling office for a clown job all winter.  They had nothing on the show for him, but they needed a clown team to travel ahead of the show for advance publicity.  Could Smith get a reliable partner?  He was calling me to find out.

    That's how the immortal duo of Dusty & TJ Tatters was born.  We traveled the length and the breadth of this fair land, appearing at school assemblies, in childrens hospital wards, and at supermarket grand openings -- anywhere clowns would garner a few columns of linotype or 30 seconds on the local tv news. 

    And we traveled in a motorhome provided by the circus, me buckos.  Smith and I divided the duties in an equitable manner; he drove the thing and I did all the cooking.  Ah yes, I grew quite skilled in tossing together a stew or ragout into the crockpot in the morning so we could come home to a hot meal after the comedy labors of the day were done.  Smith was easy to please.  He'd grown up in a household that relied on a staple he called Potato Chip Casserole, and his idea of fine dining was a bag of Oreos and a quart of Coca Cola.  Of course, being the navigator, Smith insisted on the perogative of the master bed in the back of the motorhome, leaving me with the bed that folded out from the under the kitchen table.  As the season progressed my bed developed a benign tumor right in the middle of the mattress, but we were young and carefree and I overlooked the stabbing back pain each morning as a trifle.

   Now to the hockey part, or is it basketball?  Someone will have to remind which sport gets the Stanley Cup each year. 

   This much is distinct; we were parked at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.  Sunday morning, and I put on a clean white shirt, black trousers, and struggled with a shiny polyester necktie bought at J.C. Penney's for two-dollars.  My knots were all thumbs, so to speak.  I always wound up with a bulging clot under my chin that made me look like I had a goiter.  No matter.  We had Sunday off, and I was on my way to the local LDS church for services.  Smith was esconced in his bed, watching tv and gorging on Oreos and a six pack of Coke.

   Being a professional gad-about for the past 30 years or so, I have noticed a sad, sad decline in LDS hospitality.  Back then I had only to show up at church, shake a few hands, and I would be fending off dinner invitations right and left.  Today when I show up as a stranger at church I am pretty much ignored, and the few limp handshakes I get are never accompanied by a dinner invitation.  I guess Mormons don't go in for grand Sunday dinners anymore, that the stranger at the gate in these post-9/11 times is not considered a blessing.  Of course back then I was a comely youth, obviously unmarried and ripe for romantic enterprise.  And when I would announce casually that I was saving my money to go on a mission for the church, well . . . mom and dad couldn't think of a better catch for their daughter than yours truly.  So the invite home for baked ham, whipped potatoes, greenbean casserole, and a big honking bowl of jello was always forthcoming.  Today, alas, when I slouch in to church it is obvious from the get-go that I am not only past my prime, but have that hunted, ferret-like, appearance that announces to the world: This Guy Owes A Lot Of Back Child Support.  And it doesn't help that I still haven't learned how to tie a decent necktie knot.  Thus, I now spend my Sunday afternoons at the buffet table at KFC, not breaking bread with some respectable LDS family in the bossom of their own home.

   But enough kvetching.  Back to that Sunday in Philadelphia.  As I say, I was invited home for dinner after church -- to the Bishop's house, if memory serves, where we feasted on one another's company just as much as we did on the home-canned plums and peaches and other goodies from an ample cellar filled with food storage items.  There was a daughter, her name escapes me at this late date.  We promised to write to each other faithfully each week until after my mission -- as Mary Poppins said, pie crust promises; easily made & easily broken.

    Then I returned to the motorhome with a basket of leftovers for that godless young man Smith, who had wasted his day in bed rioting with cookies and beverages drenched in corn syrup.

     But something was strangely amiss with the motorhome.  The tires were flat.  The windshield was broken.  Dents and scratches covered the sides of the vehicle.  I rushed inside to find Smith on his knees, grimly washing the floor and softly repeating every blasphemy he could think of. 

    Turns out that while I had been singing psalms at church, the Philadelphia Flyers had won the Stanley Cup and the fans had erupted in a drunken euphoria once they reached the parking lot where our motorhome unfortunately stood.  They tried tipping it over and setting it on fire.  Failing that, they merely vandalized it -- including climbing on top, ripping off the air vent, and urinating inside.  And Smith had been inside the whole blessed time.

    We never did get that urine smell quite gone.  And the poor old motorhome seemed to lose mechanical heart after that; when we were heading west through the Rockies the engine became unreliable, stranding us several times.  By the time we reached the West Coast the circus took away our motorhome and put us up in swanky hotels for the rest of the season.  Gourmet room service and a valet to sponge and press your suit coat day or night.  No cable tv back in those days, but 30 years ago just to have four channels on a color tv was pretty darn ritzy.

   There is no moral to this story, only a wistful memory of youthful days when going to church meant a dinner invitation and my continuing uncertainty about the Stanley Cup . . . is that for hockey or basketball? 

 

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