Citrus, Creme & the Avon Lady

  • by Drew

Saw two decent plates this morning. One was on a convertible (looked very new with sharp cornered edges, but I did not get the make or model). It had a light metallic green paint job with the color appropriate plate LIMELIFE. Cute.

A few minutes later I caight site of an equally new looking Corvette with an otherwise hideous orangey/burnt umber paint job, though the plate made the color seem okay, if not exactly cool: CREMSICL.

Then some dimwit pulled out in front of me from a side street. I was doing 65 on cruise control with only one car behind me, but apparently she couldn’t wait. So in about 200 feet I had to go from 65 to 0 (yes, I was stopped dead on the Taconic). Right about then, when my heart stopped pounding, I was very happy about our brand new car with the brand new brakes. Funny thing , the pos Oldsmo-buick that pulled out had a huge…thing on the trunk. It was like a bumper sticker only about six times bigger. Sky blue with a big logo: Avon.

So, when I laid on the horn and she threw me the bird I muttered aloud, “Wow, the Avon lady just flipped me off.” 

Mega-Surgeon in da Hizzouse!

  • by Drew

Just saw an awesome license plate…but that’s not the good part. The plate was SCALPEL. Heh, I wonder what he (or she, though I imagine it to be a he) does for a living. It was a new silver Lexus, looking somewhat valuable. The funny thing is there was this bumper guard thing hanging out of the trunk. Maybe I’m out of it, but this is something I’ve never seen before. It was about 30 inches long, 4 inches high, and maybe 2 or three inches deep. Looked like a hunk of two by four wrapped in dirty white vinyl, though I assume it was made of  some sort of cushiony, foam rubber material, not pine.

The bumper bar hung from two adjustable straps, kind of askew. It looked like SCALPEL just popped the truck when he parked, pulled it out, and (probably self-conscious) didn’t take the time to straighten it out. I’m not knocking the idea. My cars, especially newer ones, have suffered at the hands of other drivers. Scraped bumpers, dinged doors. It sucks. This was in an on-street space, with cars in front and behind… double clear and present danger. The funny thing about it was that there were several grommets in the vinyl where the straps attached to the two by four. White painted metal grommets. Just the kind of thing that would ding, scratch, or otherwise mar the surface of a nice, new silver Lexus.

But what REALLY made me laugh is when I imagined the driver. I thought of Eriq La Salle, the driven, and somewhat unsympathetic surgeon from ER, back when it was sort of palatable…maybe even engaging once in a while. I didn’t see him as Dr. Peter Benton, however. I imagined him as Darryl Jenks, in Coming to America with Eddie Murphy and pre-whoop whoop Arsenio Hall. He had that crazy, curly, Soul-Glo hair. I imagined him, dripping with ersatz Jheri-curl activator, scooting to his trunk and flipping out the bumper guard before rushing into the barber shop for a greasy touch-up.

JESUSPELLCHEX

  • by Drew

Saw an awesome bumper sticker this morning, fine green script text on white:

God can…
He can did everything!

Someone, probably the owner of the silvery blue minivan, deigned to correct the wording with a thick black marker. S/he traced the d of did and attempted to obscure the id with an o. The message now being He can do everything. Personally, I would have just blanked out the word ‘can’ so the message would be He     did everything!

Sure, that leaves a weird space, but I think it looks better than writing over it. When a schmuck like me sees that, all he can think is God can do everything except find followers who use spell check. 

Lovin’ the Stinky!

  • by Drew

Saw an interesting license plate the other day: ILUVPITS. My first thought, in spite of the dog paw stickers on the trunk, was armpits. Clearly it was a reference to pit bulls, but I couldn’t help but think, “who loves armpits?”  Even when you’re right out of the shower, they’re still, well, pits. I know there are pit fetishists, and I’m sure my lovely wife will be googling it as soon as she reads this post. Sure she writes about the lovely nose of the better vintages at Celebrate Wine, but here she’ll no doubt be waxing poetic with comments about armpit squirters the world around.

And talk about a French connection, eh? Between pits and wine I mean.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I love the French. Bill O’Reilly is an idiot. Boycotting France is stupid. They are the only world power that had the balls to tell Bush to shove it when he couldn’t prove that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe that’s why O’Fuckly was so loud about it. Let’s be so busy hating the people who refused to go to war without reason that we forget about the big fucking lie our president told the entire world…and us, the American people. The Evil Blimp (Rush Limbaugh – that’s from a mid-90’s song, by the way) was shouting that we should hate the French because they don’t thank us enough for helping out in WWII and I kept asking if anyone remembered Grammar School Social Studies when we learned that France was a primary backer of the American Revolution. Oh yeah, but what have they done for us lately. Besides inventing the blow job.

But I digress…my point is that I love the French. I love their culture, I love their art, I love their music (Serge Gainsbourg, Telephone, MC Solaar…aural ecstasy!), I love their wine, and I love their stinky pits. Well, not literally. Personally, I’m kind of into deodorant, and I’m not saying that the French are pit fetishists. I think they, like many Europeans, just don’t care. They’d rather musk it up naturally than try to cover it with floral aromas. Hell, I remember when a good friend in college, a native Frenchman, started using deodorant, and his roommate threw a party. Though I was happy for all involved, I recall a sense of loss. We had Americanized my friend. We had taught him that Quarter Pounders and Big Gulps were good, and stinky pits were bad. We had taken something natural and made it, somehow, unclean.

 Oh well.

Then again, maybe the plate had nothing to do with pit bulls. Maybe the driver is just a big fan of Angelina and Brad, and all their little adopted babies. How do you think their pits smell? I mean Pitt’s pits and Jolie’s pits, not the baby pits. I think Brad’s smell like nutmeg and clover honey and Angelina’s smell like purple ditto ink. I bet I’m right.

Now with 20% more juice…

  • by Drew

I just got an email with a great subject line: Improve your sperm’s flavor.

Hilarious sperm spam, but it got me thinking. Why would someone do that? Not me, of course, because my sperm is particularly tasty, but why would a guy seek to improve the flavor of his ejaculate? I mean, just tell her (or him) that you bought the better-flavor stuff. By the time they figure out that you didn’t, you’re long gone.

Come on, Baby, do the Locomotion!

  • by Drew

Stupid license plate on the back of one of those ridiculous Mercedes SUVs: MELZBENZ. Boy Mel, aren’t you clever. I usually find it quite annoying when people get a plate of this sort combining car model with their name. I can see you’ve wasted your money on a gas-guzzling Auschwitz-mobile, and I don’t care what your name is, so…shut up.

Then I saw a second plate, even stupider than Mel’z. Actually, it was so stupid, it made MELZBENZ look like a pretty good choice as far as vanity plates go. This plate was on a Mazda 626, right next to the little metallized plastic nameplate that says Mazda 626. Want to guess what the plate said? I kid you not…MAZDA626. That must be easy to remember when filling out the little space for your plate number when you check into a hotel.

Then I saw a Prius Hybrid with an interesting bumper sticker. My other car is a locomotive. I thought this was particularly interesting since the word locomotive makes me think of big, coal-powered, smoke-belching, pollution machines. I know that modern locomotives are, for the most part, either diesel or electric, but the word has that antiquated feel. And anyway, doesn’t a huge percentage of our electricity come from coal? Stinky, stinky coal?

Anyway, the word locomotive does seem to suggest something not altogether environmentally friendly. Slapped on the back of a hybrid car, I don’t know, it just seemed wrong. Maybe it’s me. After all, what do I know of big machines and energy-efficiency, and all that educated science stuff. I shop at the Dollar Store. 

JesuSaves America!

  • by Drew

I was in the Dollar Store with Noah, attempting to exit. Carts, handbaskets, vending machines and merchandise made a narrow sort of alley to the door. I was moving into the alley when a rather large woman somewhere in her 40s made her entrance. How do I put this — she looked like she should be shopping in the Dollar Store.

Now, the little alley space to the door was just about large enough for two normal sized people…or her. She looked at me, holding the baby, with a really distasteful glare. You could see the contempt in spite of the super-bling gold-toned plastic sunglasses with blue lenses and plastic gold neck chain.

It was almost lunchtime and she might be hungry, so I was patient. As she swept angrily past I got a whiff of bubblegum and something like Edam cheese. Like a piece Hubba-Bubba floating in an aged-just-beyond-its-prime Saint Emillion.

In her wake was the requisite 90 pound boyfriend/third husband/baby daddy with a weak chin and a sort of starter mullet. He was wearing a t-shirt with JESUSAVES in small block letters above a huge American flag. As he also pushed past me (though he was clearly far less angry – he had the air of a puppy in tow, and kind of smelled like one too), I thought about the shirt.

Jesus saves America? Jesus saves flags (particularly of the American variety)?

Clearly, though, when you wear the shirt, Jesus saves you from the burden of courtesy. Jesus saves you from saying “excuse me,” or allowing the guy with the baby and right of way to get out of the store. Apparently, Jesus saves you from giving a shit about your fellow man. After all, that’s exactly what the man Jesus talked about so much that some guys got pissed off and killed him. Fuck the other guy, it’s every man for himself. Or, rather, it’s every skinny man for his chunky lady friend. It’s in the bible, look it up.

Whatever. I gotta get myself one of those shirts.

Itchy…

  • by Drew

I actually am a little itchy today. It’s the blasted humidity. I feel like taking a shower every 15 minutes. But that’s not the real reason for the title of this post. I have been writing a bit on the ol’ guitar, and there are actually a number of songs I’ve been itching to get on tape, at least some basic acoustic arrangements, but the home studio is all packed up right now. One of these days I’ll get to it, but it’s just been so busy, and the kids are always messing with stuff, so…waaaaah. I know, I’m a big whiner. But eventually, maybe even soon, I will share some new audio.

In the meantime, I’ve had other bitty bits kicking around in the back of my mind. It seems to come in fits and starts, and this time I actually got something down that is more or less a complete thought. I am bad with short fiction. I have a hard time ending at the right point. I either stop too soon, or go on so long that it verges on dead-horse flagellation. Someone once told me that what makes a painter great is knowing when to stop painting, when to drop the brush. I agree.

Anyway, I have a sort of first draft of a short story called The Water Man that I’m putting up here. Really just looking for responses since I haven’t done to much public sharing of my words in a long time. I tend to care about characters that other people don’t care about so this may be stupid or obvious or boring or whatever. Those of you who know me at all know that I have a rhino skin (all those years of sending demos to music zines kind of helps) so if you think it’s shit, you can tell me that. Hopefully you’d have something more constructive to say.

Then again, if you think it’s shit you’re clearly a shallow asshole, so I don’t expect much from you.

Just kidding. If you’ve got a few minutes, give it a read.

Frenchy almost sideswiped me…

  • by Drew

I dropped the boys off at Grandma’s house the other night and was heading home for 24 hours of time with my honey. Things were looking good until I hit a full-on traffic standstill on the good old Taconic. I didn’t move for about 10 minutes. Then it was a slow crawl. Then there was a cop with flashers in the left lane forcing everybody in the left lane over to the right, and everybody in the right lane onto the shoulder. This was especially annoying because there was a line of cars hugging the cop’s butt, so as he passed, about 12 jerkoffs took advantage. I blame the cop. Why didn’t he just drive in the shoulder? It would have been a hell of a lot faster than waiting for two lanes of traffic to push over. And there would have been a lot less angry glaring.

In the end there was no sign of an accident. No twisted metal, no tow trucks. Things just started clearing up at one point and then we were all doing 60 again. Now, I’m not saying I want to see anyone hurt, but isn’t that just so frustrating? After a half hour of stop and go anxiousness, you kind of expect a reason for it all, right?

But let me get to the point. I couldn’t help noticing the vanity plate FRENCHY on a big, black Cadillac. When I came up alongside the car for a moment I got a look at the driver. I can’t be sure, but the woman driving, her age, her general carriage…it could have been Didi Conn. (That would be the actress who played Frenchy in the film version of Grease.) Hey, if the height of your career was playing Frenchy on-screen in 1978, and now you’re reduced to infrequent voiceover work and an appearance on Where Are They Now on VH1…well, let’s just say I think it would be an ok license plate.

Here’s the thing, though – Frenchy totally cut me off when traffic started moving. She almost clipped me with her frickin’ Sedan Deville. Come on, Frenchy! You made pink hair famous. You got to hang out with Stockard Channing and Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta and Jeff Conaway (he’s the guy from Taxi, remember?) Frankie freaking Avalon serenaded you in a Diner. That wasn’t enough? You’ve got to cut me off when all I’m trying to do is get home?

It’s alright, Frenchy. I’m not one to hold a grudge. Though I do have to ask, what the hell were you doing on the Taconic Tuesday night?

Slap Happy

  • by Drew

Games Explanations - Slap Tag and Sheep

I couldn’t help but share this excerpt from Handbook of Recreational Games by Neva L. Boyd, published by Dover. I love the quirky Dover books you see in craft stores all the time, and got onto their weekly free samples list. That’s how I came across this text which must have been written like 40+ years ago.

Slap Tag is just funny. Dodgeball, a staple of both my grade school Gym classes and afternoon recess, has now been banned at schools across the nation. Can you imagine a modern day Physical Education Instructor explaining the rules? Think of that one kid who used to tell on everybody, the kid you all picked on whenever the teacher snuck out for a smoke. Consider his modern day equivalent in his Golden Fleece polo. Think about just how red his palms would be after third period Gym.

Apologies if you were that kid.

I included Have You Seen My Sheep? because it actually reminds me of a game Jake has created called I Wish I Had a Doggie. Jake’s game (only one of many, many such games he has invented including Wampa Ice Creature from The Empire Strikes Back, Roar, and Mountain Dew the Mountain Dew Soda Machine Transformer.) I Wish I Had a Doggie is not, however, a version of tag. See, Jake is the doggie and I am the kid who wishes I had a doggie. My roll in the game is to fail to notice the puppy right before my eyes as I repeatedly lament, “I’m so lonely. I wish I had a nice Doggie to be my friend.” Jake pads around on all fours whimpering and reminding me when I get distracted by whatever’s on Noggin that I have to keep saying “I wish I had a doggie.”

Eventually I discover this doggie and we embrace. Sometimes I get licked. Then I have to guess his name. His name, of course, is Jake. Unless Noah is also participating, in which case his name is Keek – Noah-speak for Jake.

© 2026 Drew Bancroft. All rights reserved. Totally.