Believe Me When I Say That I’ve Got Something for Your Poodoo
Lots of people are annoyed by radio edits of Very Bad (or not so bad) words in popular songs, but I often find such edits yield comedy gold. One of my favorite radio edits is a version of Santeria by Sublime, in which the singer normally sings, “Believe me when I say that I’ve got something for his punk [donkey], which in Mainstream Radio Edit Land comes out as something like …”something for his poodoo,” at least that’s what it sounds like to me. By now that song has been overplayed so much that “poodoo” is the only part that makes it listenable. Poodoo, of course, may just be the next word to supersede the F-word in offensiveness. We need one, because the F-word is so overused now it’s lost it’s bite. Which brings my ADHD brain around to dripping . . .
. . . a note on conventions. As I may have mentioned in my last post, I’m a teacher. This means I’m going to be keeping the language on Brain Drippings mostly clean. There is a chance, however microscopic, that my bosses or my students may happen upon this Substack, and connect it to yours truly. I don’t think it’s terribly likely. If I mention using any social media that isn’t Instagram or TikTok to my high school charges, those that are paying attention look at me like I arrived at school that morning via covered wagon. Still, it would hardly do for someone trying to model reasoned discourse and clean humor to employ the most purple of prose. Still, profanity has gone from an offense worthy of forcing Ralphie to chow down on Lifebuoy to the coin of the realm. I’ll be using radio edits or just plain dashes or emojis to indicate great depth of feeling. I hope you enjoy. And now for your reading pleasure…
How Could You?
I believe I discussed, in my last missive, a short biography that could be titled How I Got This Way. Single sentence recap: Gun lovin’ Clinton hatin’ boy from a Wyoming red family goes to college, studies history, starts questioning the givens he’d been given growing up, and comes out a self identified liberal. No, Angry Fox News Uncle at Thanksgiving, I wasn’t strapped into a chair by a Socialist Librull Professor who forced Clockwork Orange eyelid clamps into my eye sockets and pumped CNN into my brain until I broke. I just learned some things that caused me to ask questions, which led to reading, which led to a mental stack of 3X5 index cards developing in my brain, each containing something I’d been taught explicitly or modeled for me growing up. On the flip side of each flash card of Conventional Conservative Wisdom appeared the question: “I wonder if that’s true?” In a growing number of instances, the answer became, “No, not really,” or at least “It’s a lot more complicated than you think.” I studied more. I turned purple, and then blue. By the time I’d studied so much I accidentally got a Master’s degree in history, I’d completed my transformation.
Well, almost.
For one thing, I didn’t reveal my new identity to my parents, not really. I still liked going home for weekends for home cooking, and I really didn’t want to be trying to argue worldviews around mouthfuls of delicious food. You can say I lacked the courage of my convictions, and you’d probably be right, but YOU try turning down a plate of hearty beef stroganoff after slurping Ramen in your Grad Student Study Cell of an apartment for a month.
Also, remember that thing I mentioned at the end of my last letter? You, know, that thing? I mumbled it. Bet you didn’t hear it. Nightmare fuel for any good liberal.
I still liked guns. Really liked them, in fact. I try to reserve the word “love” for people and pets and other living things, but I really, really liked guns. The cognitive dissonance tears at me even now, writing it.
There was a graduate student from New York City in the history department at the University of Wyoming. Can’t imagine why, given the options for higher education in NYC alone, unless she wanted to step about as far outside her cultural bubble as she could. Yew Dub was also cheap. So cheap, in fact, that many students could attend our little high plains barely-a-university for less money out of state than they could attend a school in their state of residence.
She was outside her bubble, too. She complained, for example, about not having streetlights lining our highways. “It’s so DARK out there!” she’d say in her thick NYC accent. I told her that there was a knob on her dashboard with a headlight icon on it, and she should pull it out. Regular Billy Crystal in my comedic talents.
I found her exotic, naturally, and took the plunge to ask her out. I tried to think of an experience I could give her that she couldn’t get in New York City. Shooting for me was fun, challenging, and relaxing all at once. We could make some tin cans jump with my .22 on the BLM land outside Laramie. Have dinner in town afterward.
I practiced that smooth, cool, irresistible 007 line in my head over and over. Then I approached her and opened my mouth. In my head I sounded like Hillbilly #2 in Deliverance.
“Well goll-eee, Muh-ree-uh. Wondrin’ if you’uns would like to go shootin’. Could git some grub after.”
“You mean, shooting like with an arcade game or something?”
“Uh, no. See, what we’d do is, we’d head up into them thar hills with muh raffle (rifle) and shoot us some things.”
“You mean using a GUN?”
“Yeah, it’s fun.”
This is how normative guns were for me. I really had no idea that guns had negative vibes for anybody. Also I had no idea how very, very bad I was at dating. For a first date, I’d just invited a woman to go to a very isolated place alone with me, cheerfully informing her that I’d be armed.
Shockingly, she shot me down (pun intended). She edged nervously past me in the collection of desks in the History Department basement that passed for a Teaching Assistants office, thumbing the safety on her pepper spray.
Her hand on the door, she turned to me before she left. Righteous anger had replaced her fear.
“You have a GUN?” (clearly, she hadn’t fully acculturated to Wyoming yet).
She didn’t say it so much as spat it. The way she looked at me: How could you? I could hardly have merited more moral outrage if I had beaten a burlap sack filled with kittens.
Were it not for the slow-close device on the door, she’d have slammed it.
This was way more than a “No thanks, not interested.”
What the hell just happened? And why?