Why I Never Cheer for Team U.S.A.

I never cheer for Team U.S.A. That’s curious because it’s not like I’m one of those guys who never gets sucked in by sports. I often wish I was one of those guys. I spend way too much time and energy following my local sports teams. I know that hardly any of the players on those teams have ever come from these parts and that the games are only another form of entertainment. But when these teams break my heart, as they often do, I envy those who genuinely don’t care. But when it comes to international athletic competitions, such as the Olympics, not only can I not cheer for U.S.A. athletes to win, but I find myself cheering for whichever country’s athletes are competing against us to kick our butts. I think it’s because I think that the main reason a lot of people are so passionate about international athletic competitions is because of the political implications. If your country beats another country in a track and field match, it’s like you beat them in a war. And I would never want anyone to think that I am one of those annoying guys who goes around pumping his fist and chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” whenever Team U.S.A. wins. But I think that’s what it’s all about for a lot of people. They feel that everything is all right with the universe, and God is still on the throne, as long as the U.S. continues to prove that it is superior to every other country in every way. About the only team sport that I don’t care much for is soccer. It may be fun to play but I find it boring to watch. An exciting game ends in a 0-0 tie. But one thing that I really love about soccer is that Team USA always sucks at it, or at least our men’s team always does. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH

Small Town Cripples

It is indeed a very small town, population only about 1,500. But I could sense the presence of cripples all around me because there were birdhouses all around me and when there are so many birdhouses there are usually cripples not far behind. Because making birdhouses seems like the kind of thing they’d probably have small town cripples do. They probably bus them off to a local sheltered workshop every day where they make birdhouses. That seems like a cripple rite of passage. Back when I was a wee criplet, they made me make a birdhouse, only I wasn’t in a sheltered workshop at the time. I was in a rehabilitation center and during my occupational therapy sessions I made a birdhouse. Except my birdhouse wasn’t as artistic and elaborate as the ones that were lined up along the wooden railing of the strip mail that was in the business district of the small town, with various price tags on them. Mine was a wooden box with a round hole in front for entry and a perch that was made out of a Dowell rod, beneath the hole. I painted the house white and the roof and perch red. I never mounted it outside or anything, probably because I feared that if I did I’d be accused of being some kind of bird slumlord. I had a relative who was a small town cripple. He now lives in a bigger town but back when he lived in a small town he didn’t exactly make birdhouses but he did make what looked like ceramic sculptures of horse heads. They looked like giant chess pieces except they came in a wider variety of colors, such as red, blue and yellow. I don’t know what his creative process was, but all of his horse heads looked alike. That made me think that he must’ve poured some stuff into a mold of a horse head until it solidified. And I imagined that there was one of his horse head sculptures on every mantel piece in that small town. It’s easy to lend a helping hand to your local cripples when you live in a small town. All you have to do is keep the local sheltered workshop going strong by purchasing a birdhouse. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-

The Fun Enforcers

The woman ran up to me and said , “ Are you enjoying the park?" I said yes so she said, “Well , that’s good. And you know , we have a beach wheelchair for you!” I wanted to let her down gently. I figured that this must be one of those state parks I’ve been hearing about where they’ve purchased a bunch of equipment that’s supposed to make natural terrain a lot more cripple accessible.. And when this woman saw me she got all excited because she probably thought that since I am an actual card-carrying cripple, I’d be dyig to use the beach chair. But I wasn’t. It is true that beaches are probably the most foreboding of environments for wheelchair cripples like me because beaches are full of sand and wheels sink into sand real quick and then you’re stuck. However a beach chair looks like a glorified lawn chair with four big wheels on it that are supposed to be able to zip right through the sand, thus enabling wheelchair cripples to frolic on the beach like normal people do. But the beach chair doesn’t look very comfy. It looks like if I sat in it my ass would start hurting in about ten minutes. I don’t want to frolic that bad. I was also afraid that if I turned her down too emphatically, the situation would soon deteriorate into one of those pissing matches like I used to get into at Jerry Lewis cripple summer camp. Everybody in charge there was a vert (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). And they seemed to think that their job was to make sure that the cripples were having a good time, whether we liked it or not! They were the fun enforcers. They seemed to think that the more we said that we didn’t want to do something, the more we really wanted to do it. Take, for example, horseback riding. I hated horseback riding. I couldn’t hold my balance very well on the back of a jerky horse. I was terrified that I would fall off and crack my skull. That wasn't my idea of fun. So inevitably, one of the fun enforcers would come along and crouch down to my eye level and try to convince me that I’d discover what a load of fun horseback riding was if I would just give it a try. I felt ambushed. I heard stories of crippled kids being dragged kicking and screaming to the horse stables or to arts and crafts or whatever. That’s why I feared that if I was too firm in telling this vert woman at the state park no that she might chloroform me and I’d wake up down on the beach in the beach chair with my ass hurting. That wasn’t my idea of fun. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-

Living on Borrowed Time

I know that I’m living on borrowed time. And I have my mother to thank for that . Because when I was but a wee criplet, my mother took me to see a lot of doctors That’s what the parents of criplets were told that they were supposed to do about us back then by the people who were considered to be the experts. They were other doctors and therapists and people who worked for behemoth charities for criplets and such. And they were all verts (which is what I call people who aren’t crippled, because it’s short for vertical). At first I wondered if these experts thought that if they sent criplets like me to enough doctors, maybe sooner or later we would come across one who had a magic potion or something that would cure us. But I came to think that they really didn’t know what the hell to do about a criplet like me and so when they told our parents that they should take us to see a lot of doctors, they were probably punting. I think that my mother never felt quite comfortable following through with all of the surgeries and braces all of the things that the doctors told her I had to get. Because she usually left the decision about whether or not to follow the advice of the doctors up to me and I almost always said no. I guess I was right about that, considering that I will be 70 and none of those doctors would’ve predicted that I would still be around, even if I did everything they said. But I really felt like I am living on borrowed time when I watched a documentary about cripples. There was a Canadian cripple in it and judging by how his body looked, l figured he was the same genre of cripple that I am . He also relies on a crew of people to come into his home to help him do all of the things he needs help doing, like getting out of bed and getting dressed. But he was having a lot more trouble managing and maintaining his crew than I do. The Canadian cripple said that his caregiver was his mother, until she recently died. I remembered when I was a teenager and my mother said to me, “ I love you but when you’re 18, please get out of my house.” So when I went off to college a few years later, far away from home, i hired my first crew member and I’ve had to hire about a hundred more since then. And by the time my mom died about 20 years later, I had long since fulfilled her dream and gotten out of her house. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Scouting Then and Now

If you can judge how far cripples have come by how the boy scouts treat us, it sure looks like cripples in the U.S.A have progressed a helluva lot over the last few decades or so. Because way back when I was but a wee criplet , I joined my local boy scout troop. And I remember that we met in the basement of a church or a school or something. And I remember that the men who were the troop leaders would carry me up and down the stairs in my wheelchair to get me to and from the meetings. But now I see where Scouting America has started up what it calls its Special Needs Prepared Camp program. (I hate that term Special Needs, too, but I’ll save that for later.) Basically, it’s an 11-point checklist that camp operators can use to judge how well that their facility is comfortably usable by a wide range of cripples. Anyone that can check all of the boxes gets a sign that they can put up at their campground declaring that it is “Special Needs Prepared.” I never went to scout camp, probably because I didn’t know there was such a thing. But even if I did know about it, I was used to assuming back then that most everything was inaccessible to me so I probably would have assumed the same in this case. I sure was an ambitious little scout. I wanted to be an eagle scout and have a sash loaded with merit badges. I only made it as far as second class. I don’t recall doing anything to work my way out of tenderfoot and up to the next rank of second class. I think that after a while they just kicked me upstairs. And the fact that I didn’t go any farther than that was no one’s fault but my own. Oh sure, I still badly wanted the rank of eagle and the gaudy sash and all of the glory and prestige that came with them. But they made you work for those things. You had to earn them. Nobody was going to just give you those things, not even if you were a cripple and they felt sorry for you. But maybe they should have. If someone had just given me all of that stuff the first time I showed up for a meeting, I probably would have grabbed it and left and never looked back. And then they wouldn’t have had to carry me in my wheelchair up and down the stairs all of the time. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Call me Smart Ass Weed

A lot of people have told me that they are offended by my use of the word cripple. But I am offended by the way euphemisms like physically challenged and handicable downplay being crippled, as if being crippled was always something bad. But, in the spirit of compromise, may I suggest that we all refer to cripples as weeds instead. Because cripples are a lot like weeds, in that the value of a weed is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s weed is another man’s flower. And when someone weeds (as a verb) their garden or flower patch or whatever, they are, in a way, carrying out a genocide. They are trying to wipe out any trace of the weed from existing in their space. And that's the way many generations of cripples have been treated, historically. It isn’t so much that people have tried to kill us all off. It's more like they’ve tried to pretend like we don’t exist by putting us out of sight and out of mind by banishing us away to distant institutions where the nuns or nurses can take care of us. It’s the “benevolent” version of genocide. But, like any good genocide, in order for it to be most effective, there must first be enough of a consensus reached that officially declares that cripples are weeds. That’s why propaganda is needed to convince enough people that cripples have no purpose. All we do is hang around and ugly everything up. We are useless. We just take up space. Thus, banishing us is the humane thing to do , for the good of all. My online dictionary defines a weed as, “a wild plant growing where it is unwanted.” That sounds like a pretty good definition of a cripple to me, at least according to how some people view us. But really, is there any such thing as a weed? I mean just because not everyone understands the purpose of a plant or its reason for being doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any. Anyway, if anyone out there feels more comfortable calling me Smart Ass Weed, you may do so. I won't object. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI

Heartbreaker

Because I am crippled, I’ve broken the hearts of a lot of women. Not just women but men, too. But let’s get back to women for a moment, shall we? I know I broke the heart of the woman who worked at my local grocery store. I could tell by the look of intense pain that came over her face after I rejected her overtures. She was standing behind a table offering people free samples of sushi as they passed by. I guess that was intended to jack up the sales of the sushi that was sold elsewhere in the store. But anyway, I was wearing one of my favorite t-shirts that day. It says I LOVE SUSHI on it and it has color pictures of many different types of sushi. The woman had a big smile on her face as she held a morsel of sushi out to me as I passed by. Now, I’m one of those weirdos who usually doesn’t grab anything off of the free sample tables in grocery stores. I do that for a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with my being crippled. Like for instance, instead of asking whomever is passing out the free sample to pop the morsel in my mouth, I’ll just say no thanks and keep going. But when I do that, I get suspicious looks as if anybody who doesn’t stop and grab free food must be a communist or something. But when I said no thank you to this woman, she looked downright heartbroken. And then I remembered that I was wearing my I LOVE SUSHI t-shirt. And that’s why she was so crushed when I said no thank you. Because she was probably going to make her day by making some cripple’s day by giving him the thing he wanted most in the world, a free morsel of sushi. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I went and ruined the whole damn thing. No wonder she was so heartbroken. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-nvFX30Mk2fJx9uI