Green Bus Nightmares

Every now and then I have a green bus nightmare. I’m sitting at a bus stop on the streets of Chicago and a Chicago Transit Authority bus goes by. It’s painted two-tone green like CTA buses were up until the mid-1980s, when all buses had three huge steps right inside the door. So it was fuck you cripples if we wanted to ride.

It’s not that way anymore. Enough cripples raised hell back in the 1970s and 80s and now the front entrances of all CTA buses are flat and if a cripple wants a ride the bus the driver flips a switch and a ramp comes out and the cripple rolls right in. Simple as hell. These days, CTA buses are painted red, white and blue and they have the crippled stick figure access symbols on them.

But in my green bus nightmare, the approaching bus is one of the old inaccessible ones and it blows right past me. And I’m swearing! “Goddammit those fuucking green buses were supposed to be off the streets 25 years ago!" Sonuvabiiiiitch!"

And then I wake up swearing and I realize it was all just a terrible bad dream.

Now I'm no Freud but I think I know what these nightmares mean. The green buses represent my deep fear of social and political regression. I guess some part of my cynical subconscious still thinks that someday some big shot way up in the hierarchies might say, "You know what, fuck those cripples. Who the hell do they think they are? Let's put three huge, pointless steps back on all the buses, like back in the days when America was great. And while we're at it, let's fill in all those ramped curbs and turn them back into curbs!"

I hope my cynical subconscious is full of shit. But hey, with the kind of nasty-ass big shots we have in the hierarchies these days, you never know.

But in my most recent green bus nightmare, the green bus approached and I was swearing. "Sonuvabiiiii--" But then bus turned the corner and surprise! The other side was painted red, white and blue and it was adorned with crippled stick figure access symbols.

I'm still not sure what to make of that one. Maybe even that deep corner of my cynical subconscious is becoming convinced that cripple access is here to stay. Or maybe it was expressing its growing anxiety that the green bus mentality is making a comeback.





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A Very Special After-School Edition of Smart Ass Cripple, Featuring Eva Braun

In this very special after-school edition of Smart Ass Cripple, we’ll explore the topic of diversity and inclusion. What does genuine diversity and inclusion look like? How do we as a modern society achieve it?

To begin our exploration, allow me to recall an actual conversation I had years ago with a female friend. My friend told me about what she called the “slutty phase” of her life. She was young and her self-esteem was rock bottom so she slept around a helluva lot.

Let me pause here and give my friend an alias so I don’t have to keep referring to her merely as my friend. I shall call her Eva Braun, since Eva Braun is the poster child for women with low self-esteem.

Anyway, Eva Braun told me during her slutty phase she sampled a wide range of men. She said she fucked a guy who weighed over 300 pounds just to see what it would be like.

So I said to Eva Braun, “Did you ever fuck a cripple?” She looked at me quizzically, as if I brought up a scenario she’d never considered. She shook her head and said no. “Well,” I said, “if it’s any consolation to you, you weren’t officially a slut if you didn’t fuck a cripple.”

The next time I saw Eva Braun, she told me she’d been thinking a lot about my cripple-fucking comment. She said at times it made her feel somewhat absolved to be measured by a new standard according to which she was never a slut. It was sort of like regaining her virginity. On the other hand, she sometimes felt kind of defensive, as if I was being dismissive of her sluttiness.

I told Eva Braun that it was neither my intent nor my desire to impose upon her an immutable definition of what constitutes a slut. I was just using sluttiness as a metaphor to make a larger point about how society views diversity and inclusion. Often cripples are left out. How often do you see genuine cripples on TV? That’s just one example. Even a progressive, enlightened woman like her was falling into that trap. I told Eva Braun that to me, a slut is someone who has slept around with a truly diverse and inclusive spectrum of humans. If that spectrum doesn’t include cripples, then to me it is not representative of the full range of humanity and therefore I cannot in good conscience consider that person to be a slut. Nothing personal.

I told Eva Braun that if she wanted to remove all doubt and relieve her conflict, all she had to do was fuck a cripple. I assured her that, knowing cripples like I do, she would have little trouble finding a taker. Eva Braun said thanks but no thanks. If she was to fuck a cripple, which she wasn’t opposed to in theory, it would have to be for a better reason than that.

I hope this very special after-school edition of Smart Ass Cripple on the topic of diversity and inclusion has given you food for thought.


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Confronting my Prejudice

I recently learned something very valuable about myself and I’m not proud of it.

I came to realize I have a deeply ingrained prejudice against a certain group of people. I assumed that all these people were evil beyond redemption. I spent significant energy avoiding them and warning others to avoid these sinister creatures, too. I fantasized about them all disappearing from the face of the earth.

I’m referring to social workers. It’s a cripple thing. I imagine a lot of cripples have the same prejudice. It’s not our fault. When social workers enter our lives, it usually ain’t good. Social workers make us run through mazes and do backflips just to get a simple thing and then they tell us no in the end. Social workers from the state vocational rehab agency tell us that the agency won’t pay for our education unless we major in something that will make us realistically employable, like social work. Social workers work at the Social Security office. Social workers check us into nursing homes.

There were a lot of social workers at the state–operated boarding school for cripples where I was an inmate as a teenager, which I affectionately refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT). The place was lousy with social workers I tell ya!

Well okay, there was one social worker at SHIT who was cool. Real cool. His name was Frank. If I wanted to spend my sessions with Frank just shooting the shit about baseball or babes or whatever, that was fine with him. He even let me smoke cigarettes in his office, which was cool because inmates weren't allowed to smoke. If anyone knocked on the door he pretended like it was his cigarette. Frank had all-male group “rap” sessions, which everybody signed up for because they were basically poker games where a bunch of inmates gave each other shit. It’s a good thing nobody knocked on the door or Frank would have had to pretend he was smoking five cigarettes. I don’t think Frank even smoked.

But I rationalized Frank’s behavior away as an aberration. He was the exception to the rule. He was “one of the good ones.” This is how people have maintained their prejudices for thousands of years when threatened by evidence to the contrary right before their eyes.

And sometimes the social workers who have put me through their evil social worker rituals have been other cripples. They’re the most depraved ones of all—bitter little weakling apologists!

But over the last few years, two of my friends obtained MSWs. (One of them was studying for her state certification exam and I wanted to ask her what was in the section about how to most effectively torture cripples. But I’m sure she wouldn’t tell me. That’s gotta be a trade secret.) I kept associating with these friends anyway. They’re both smart, empathetic women who went into social work because they wanted to make other people’s lives more comfortable. And that’s what they’re doing. One helps homeless people find and maintain housing and the other runs a group therapy session at a hospital in a poor neighborhood.

So okay, maybe it’s not just Frank after all. I guess I’ll have to admit to myself that it’s possible to be a decent human and a social worker at the same time.

Letting go of prejudices is very hard to do because they’re so damn comforting. Maybe I should talk to someone about this ugly prejudice of mine. But it won’t be a social worker. I won’t go that far.



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Normalizing Feeding Tubes

A lot of the heavy duty stuff that comes with being an old cripple kind of scares me some, but not a lot. Like for instance, being on a ventilator. I can’t deny that I think being on a ventilator would be a real drag, mostly for the pain in the ass of it all. Being hooked up to this blinking, beeping thing all day? Having somebody constantly follow you around in case you need them to stick a tube down your throat via your trach to suction out mucous? It seems like that would add a lot to the daily routine.

A lot of people are so scared about being on a ventilator that they say they’d rather be dead. Come on, really? Dead? Once you make a decision like that there’s no taking it back. You can’t try it for 30 days and return it free if you’re not completely satisfied, paying only shipping and handling. Maybe people wouldn’t be so freaked out about being on a ventilator if somebody did something to normalize the experience. The way that we normalize something in the U.S. is to make a TV show about it. There ought to be a show about a crime-solving dude who’s on a ventilator. He’s crippled as all hell but he’s a crime solving genius so whenever the police have a stumper of a crime that really busts their balls they turn to him and he solves it every time. He has a nurse who follows him around and suctions him every now and then and she’s also his wise-cracking sidekick. A show like that would convince a lot of people that being on a ventilator is not just okay, it can even be cool.

I also can’t deny that the prospect of having to eat through a feeding tube scares me some. Maybe I’d feel better if there was something on TV to normalize that. I’m thinking maybe one of those gluttony competitions, like where a guy eats 50 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Except this one would be strictly for people with feeding tubes. Hook them up to their cans of food and whoever consumes the most cans the fastest wins two hundred grand. It can be sponsored by whatever companies manufacture the gruel people who use feeding tubes eat. It may not be the most fast-paced competition anybody ever saw, but I know some people will watch it. It can’t be any more boring than watching golf.



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A Rollerblading Crusader for Justice

By day, he is a cheerful greeter in a big box chain store. But by night he is a crusading superhero.

As superheroes go, he’s very low-key and unassuming. Nobody in town knows his real name or his true identity, but his superhero pseudonym is “Jim.”

Like all superheroes, “Jim” uses his unique superpower to fight the forces of evil. But this superhero has a specialty. The only evil he combats is the evil of discrimination. Even more specifically, he only combats discrimination against cripples.

Superheroes these days need to have niches, just like lawyers. They need to tap into unserved markets. “Jim” noticed that whereas there are a bunch of laws protecting cripples from being fucked over, no one enforces these laws. Thus, he developed his own brand of vigilante justice.

For “Jim,” this justice quest is personal because he, too, is crippled. Since childhood, he’s walked with a limp. And everybody knows that when nature leaves cripples lacking in one area, it always compensates them for it in other ways—- like how all blind people have acute hearing and all deaf people have super sensitive tastebuds. Well since nature cursed “Jim” with a limp, it blessed him with the ability to turn people into muskrats.

Yessir, you better not piss “Jim” off or he’ll turn you into a muskrat with three blinks of his left eye. And the way to piss him off is to fuck with his people.

Because “Jim” is a modern superhero, he has an app. That’s how cripples in distress send him an SOS. They contact him via his app. When “Jim” first set up shop as a superhero, he got a lot of messages from cripples who were pissed that someone was illegally parked in a cripple parking space. So “Jim” donned his superhero outfit, raced to the scene of the crime and turned the driver of the car hogging up the cripple space into a muskrat. (“Jim”’s superhero costume, by the way, is pretty much just a burlap burqa. It’s designed to disguise his true identity while still being comfortable and functional. In order to conceal the fact that he has a limp, whenever “Jim” is on duty as a superhero, he rolls around on rollerblades).

“Jim” doesn’t get parking SOS calls anymore. Ever since word got around town that a rollerblading guy wearing a burlap burqua was turning people illegally parked in cripple spots into muskrats, nobody illegally parks in cripple spots anymore.

Now “Jim” concentrates on righting more egregious wrongs. Consequently, while he is a great hero to cripples, most everyone else in town sees him as an outlaw. When he turned the liquor store owner who refused to put a ramp on his establishment into a muskrat, he stirred the wrath of the local Chamber of Commerce. And because he turned a landlord who refused to rent to cripples into a muskrat, all the landlords hate him, too.

With all these powerful, politically-connected forced aligned against him, the town council unanimously passed an ordinance making it a capital offense to turn someone into a muskrat. So “Jim” is a wanted man. There's a big price on his head. So he operates in the shadows, turning dirty no-good discriminators into muskrats and disappearing into the night, one step ahead of the law.

Wouldn’t that make a great superhero movie?



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Here's to you, Shit Haulers!

Thanksgiving always reminds me of horseshit, in a good way.

There’s this Thanksgiving Day parade every year in downtown Chicago and they stage it on the streets around the building where I live. And since the parade is full of horses, after the parade is over, there’s horseshit on the streets.

And then I go spend Thanksgiving with my family in the part of Indiana where a lot of Amish live. And because the Amish ride around in horse-drawn buggies, there’s a lot of horseshit on the streets there, too.

When I return home all the horseshit is gone, which means that someone came out on Thanksgiving in the cold and cleaned it up. And it reminds me to give thanks for all the unsung heroes in this country and all over the world who clean up and haul away everybody’s shit.

Shit haulers don’t just clean up the streets. They empty out our port-a-potties and pump our septic tanks. They toil in our stables and kennels and on our dairy and pig farms.

Shit haulers have a proud heritage. Hell, shit hauling may even be the world’s oldest profession. Now granted, the job market for shit haulers may not be as robust as it was in the days of yore, when all transportation was horse or oxen drawn and royalty excreted in chamber pots. But as long as there is shit, there will always be plenty of call for people to haul it away, until such time as there are shit-hauling robots.

So we all better pray like he'll that the shit haulers never form a union, like the United Brotherhood of Shit Haulers. Because if they do they can rule the fucking world. Imagine if all the shit haulers all around the world went on strike simultaneously. Shit would pile up all over the place and we'd all have typhoid or something. Or even worse, we’d all have to clean up and haul away our own shit.

So here’s to you, shit haulers! Thank you for your service. Where the hell would we be without you? You keep the world turning.



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First they Came for our Parking

Someone was parked in the cripple parking spot, just as blatantly and brazenly as could be. No cripple license plate, no placard hanging from the rearview mirror, no nothing. Now of course I’ve experienced this kind of thing before. What kind of professional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?

But this one was different. This one was an omen. There was nobody in the car and it was just an ordinary sedan of some sort. But I knew the car had to belong to a white supremacist. I mean, it made perfect sense, what with all the political shit that’s be going on the last year or so. You never hear white supremacists spew venom about cripples per se, but you know we’re on their shit list. We have to be, right? If we weren’t, it would make a mockery of the concept of supremacy. If I wanted to join one of their fucked up little fraternities, like the KKK, I bet they wouldn’t let me because I’m crippled. I could be the most hateful sonuvabitch on the planet and it wouldn’t be enough. It takes more than just hate to be one of them.

Whenever you see those pointy-headed assholes marching in their robes, none of them are ever in a wheelchair or tapping a white cane. They never have sign language interpreters at their rallies.

So it's logical that they would see reserved cripple parking as a major threat. Reserved cripple parking is always in the best location in the parking lot, right by the front door and everything. If I was a white supremacist, I would think that those spaces belonged to me, dammit! They’re my goddam birthright! My ancestors built this fucking parking lot!

And all these pea-brains are feeling especially emboldened these days because they have so many kindred spirits in high places. So it's also logical that taking back the prime parking spaces would be high on their social agenda.

This is just the opening salvo. I don’t think the white supremacists will be content with merely seizing our real estate and leaving us to fend for ourselves. That’s not nearly spiteful enough. Today they're appropriating our parking spaces. But tomorrow there will be a cripple Trail of Tears. They’ll round us all up and march us all off to be confined in reservations (aka nursing homes).


I looked at this bland sedan and felt much more than the usual piss offedness. I was steeped in a deep sense of inevitable doom. Ever since that fucked up election of about a year ago, I dreaded this day would come.





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If I Had a Stephen Hawking Talking Box

If you're wondering what to get me for Christmas, I'd sure love to have one of those Stephen Hawking talking boxes. I don’t really need one but I think it would be a fun toy to have and I’m kind of bored.

The main reason I want my very own Stephen Hawking signature talking box is I believe it would make me a lot funnier. Because those things prove that old saying, “It’s all in the delivery.” Like suppose I tell somebody to fuck off. It’s a lot funnier if I say it with a Stephen Hawking talking box, don’t you think? What with that deadpan robot voice and all?

Imagine Stephen Hawking doing stand-up comedy. He could tell a bunch of stale old mother-in-law jokes. It wouldn’t matter. It would be hilarious coming from him. Or better yet, imagine him as a ventriloquist. His dummy tells a bunch of stale old mother-in-law jokes in a robot voice and Hawking never moves his lips, or anything else for that matter. I’d laugh so hard I’d probably piss my pants. I can’t remember the last time a ventriloquist had that effect on me.

Back before there we talking boxes, cripples who couldn’t talk had to communicate using much more primitive methods. A lot of them had alphabet boards, like my friend Rafferty. He’d point to letters on this board and spell stuff out. It took forever to communicate a simple thing, especially if the cripple couldn’t spell worth shit. For shortcuts, Rafferty had a bunch of frequently used phrases (FUPs) on the flipside of his board so he could communicate important things with a single finger point. The two Rafferty FUPs I remember were I have to go to the bathroom and I want a Southern Comfort Manhattan.

I imagine you can do the same with a Stephen Hawking talking box. Just push a button and it says one of the many FUPs you’ve programmed in. I know the first FUP I’d program into my Stephen Hawking talking box would be fuck off. But I know that sooner or later I’d end up in big trouble because I’d lose my cool and tell a cop to fuck off. And it would probably piss off a cop twice as much to be told to fuck off by a Stephen Hawking talking box than it would otherwise. So I’d have another handy FUP that would say, I’m sorry, officer. I’m spastic and I accidentally pushed the wrong button. I meant to say thank you for your service.



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When the Rights of Cripples Clash with the Rights of Sea Turtles

It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even drink a beer without feeling guilty about how such a thoughtless, selfish action on my part might be causing great harm to poor little sea turtles.

I got this goddam email alert from some friends-of- the-environment organization urging me to sign a petition demanding that McDonald’s to stop using plastic straws. The email said straws end up being a major source of ocean pollution and they often end up lodged in the nostrils of sea turtles or the throats of seabirds.

Damn! What a disturbing image that is! But hell no, I won’t be signing. The only reason I go to McDonald’s is for the straws. The food is shit but the straws are great! They’re sturdy and durable. And they’re so cheery with their red and yellow stripes.

And the best thing about McDonald’s straws is they’re free. That means a helluva lot to people like me who drink everything through a straw because we’re crippled. We don’t fit the profile of your typical arrogant, frivolous homo sapiens who use straws willy-nilly and then toss them away. For us, using straws is a necessity! Thus, we are constantly replenishing our personal straw stashes. And nobody pays for straws, just like nobody pays for pens or coat hangers. You just accumulate them as you go through life. Hey, it’s a brutal world out there. You gotta grab free shit whenever you can!

So the only reason I go to McDonald’s is so I can snatch a shitload of free straws. Sometimes I’ll order the cheapest thing on the menu like a shitty little hamburger if I’m afraid snatching straws might get me busted for shoplifting. Someday I’ll get up the guts to do it at the drive-thru. “Gimme two chicken nuggets and a shitload of straws.”

So without plentiful sources of free straws, like McDonald’s, I could easily shrivel up from dehydration and blow away. Or I could go broke buying straws. I feel the need to organize a political alliance of straw users, including people who are temporary straw users, like those recovering from a broken jaw. I respect the rights of all creatures, including sea turtles. I would certainly feel awful if a straw embedded in one of their nostrils could be traced back to me, using DNA testing. But what about me? Don’t I have rights, too?





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I'd Rather Have my Leg Cut Off

If I wasn’t already crippled and had to choose to become crippled either by amputation or spinal cord injury, I’d choose amputation any old day. It must be a helluva lot easier becoming an amputee than a quad because the media doesn’t put as much shit in your head.

If you’re a quad, the media has put forth lots of role models for you to follow. And that’s the problem. Remember when Christopher Reeve fell off his horse? Or how about all those people who get spinal cord injuries playing football? There are always always always media stories about how these courageous people are determined to overcome their injuries and return to their glory days of uncrippledness.

So if I was freshly crippled due to spinal cord injury, I’d be inclined to think that my primary obligation as a cripple to myself and everybody else was to become uncrippled as soon as humanly possible. Anything less is a dereliction of duty. So I’d be inclined to spend a thousand hours a week working out in a physical therapy gym in a quest to fulfill my obligation to society.

I’m glad Stephen Hawking didn’t feel that way. It would be pretty fucked up if he spent all day sitting motionless in a physical therapy gym instead of pondering the universe and shit. I’m glad we don’t see him being interviewed on television with the robot voice of his talking box saying, “I will not rest until I can talk again.”

But anyway, suppose when Christopher Reeve fell off his horse he ended up having to have his leg cut off instead. That would have caused the media’s head to explode. They wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with that. Because if Christopher Reeve vowed to do whatever it takes to grow his leg back, even the media would’ve thought that was silly. We all would’ve just had to accept the new normal of a one-legged Christopher Reeve. You can’t spin it any other way.

That’s why I bet it’s a helluva lot easier to become crippled via amputation. You’re allowed to advance immediately to the stage of accepting your new crippled self and figuring out what it all means. You can get on with it. There aren’t any role models in the media fucking everything up.






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Holbrook's Cripple Nicknames

Holbrook was a guy who lived in my dorm when I was in college. He came from one of those teeny towns where there are no cripples, so I doubt that he ever got a good look at a cripple until he got to college. But he made up lots of funny nicknames for many of the crippled students he saw puttering around campus. The nicknames were sort of like smart ass secret service code names. To me that was a sure sign that he felt really comfortable around cripples or really uncomfortable. I’m not sure which.

There was one cripple that propelled his wheelchair by pushing it backwards with his feet. Holbrook called him Crawdaddy. There was another cripple Holbrook often saw eating in the dorm mess hall. This cripple tilted his head far back and his feeder dropped food into his open mouth. Holbrook called this cripple Baby Bird.

There was another cripple who always walked really fast and on the tips of her toes like she was walking on hot coals. Holbrook called her Hot Foot. And there was another cripple who also walked weird. He swayed from side to side and waved his arms around and did lots of involuntary fancy footwork. Holbrook called him Fred Astaire.

More than once I told Holbrook I wanted to know what his cripple nickname was for me. But he always insisted that he didn’t have one. “Come on!” I said. “You can tell me! I can take it!” But he just held up his hands, all innocent and shit.

When I asked other guys around the dorm what Holbrook’s nickname for me was, they all said he didn’t have one. I was convinced that they all entered into a secret pact to never divulge to a cripple his/her Holbrook nickname. It’s much funnier that way. But eventually I started to believe that maybe Holbrook really hadn’t come up with anything for me. I felt kind of insulted.

But as I look back, I can see where I might have been a stumper for Holbrook. As cripples go, I’m pretty one-dimensional. I ride around in a motorized wheelchair and that’s about it.

You can’t really call me Spazzo. And I don’t drool, at least not when I’m sober. I don’t walk weird. I don’t walk at all. And there’s nothing weird about the way I don’t walk.

I have kind of a big head. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me being crippled. If I was cured, I’d still have a big head. And it’s not grotesquely big. You can’t rightfully call me the Wizard of Oz or anything like that.

My trunk balance is poor, which makes me pretty floppy. Holbrook maybe could have riffed on that and called me Scarecrow or Jellyfish. My legs are thin and spindly. If Holbrook saw me wearing shorts, that might have inspired something in him. Flamingo Legs?

But that’s a real stretch. Try as he might, if Holbrook pondered a cripple nickname for me, he probably couldn’t come up with anything better than That Crippled Guy Down the Hall.




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Your Incontinence Will Not Save You

I talked to this guy who’s as crippled as I am and he told me all about how he spent several years in prison. He said he was set up. Someone used him as a drug mule without him knowing it.

This guy needs as much help as I do. He needs someone to drag his ass out of bed every morning, lift him on and off the crapper, etc. But they still sent his ass to prison!

Damn! That’s cold! There are a lot of things that I figure being crippled will probably get me out of. Like for instance, carjacking. I wouldn’t be too worried if someone came up to me in my cripple van and said, “Get out of the car, motherfucker!” Because I would say, “Well okay, I’m happy to oblige. But just give me a sec while my driver here comes around and unhooks the safety restraints securing my wheelchair. Then we’ll deploy the ramp so I can exit through the sliding passenger door and you’ll be on your way. It shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes. Stand back now. I wouldn’t want the ramp to swing out and hit your tootsies.” By that time, the carjacker would say fuck it and go jack the next guy.

Being an incontinent cripple will get you out of even more stuff. Flaunting your incontinence comes in real handy in those moments in life when you want people to just back the hell off. Often I wish I had a t-shirt that says, I AM INCONTINENT, even though I’m not. If a carjacker saw me in that shirt he’d probably take off running before he could even say, “Get out of the car, motherfucker!” I would also wear that shirt when I’m sitting on a plane and the other passengers are filing in and I bet you a million nobody would sit next to me unless it was absolutely the last fucking seat on the whole damn plane. And even then they’d probably say to the flight attendant, “That’s okay. I’ll stand. I’m good.”

And I would for sure wear that shirt if I was in court being sentenced for a crime. I would hope it would make the judge and the prosecutor say to themselves, “Damn, this guy’s incontinent, too? We don’t want to deal with all that. Let’s just give him probation or something.”

Maybe that crippled guy who went to prison should have pleaded incontinence, even though he’s not. Maybe that would have saved him. But then again, maybe not. The judge and prosecutor might’ve said hell with it; he can go to prison and piss his pants. There may be times when even incontinence isn’t enough to get you off the hook.



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The Oppressor Eats a Hog

When you’re trying to resist the oppressor, it’s really fucking hard to just relax and have fun.

Let’s s say the oppressor has dinner, okay? He eats a hog. And a wonderful hog it is, too. It’s the most exquisitely corpulent and succulent hog of the bunch. The oppressor and his friends have a big party and they eat every bit of the hog. Well, maybe not every bit. The oppressor tosses some hog bits to you because he knows that in order to keep oppressing you he has to keep you alive. You can’t oppress a dead person.

So the oppressor says, “Let them eat hog scraps,” and he fills your trough with the tail, the feet, the jowls, the snout. And here’s when your dilemma kicks in. It really pisses you off that the oppressor tosses you the scraps. Hell, you’re probably the one who slaughtered the hog for the oppressor, if not literally then at least figuratively.

So what do you do? Do you refuse to eat scraps? Do you tell the oppressor to shove his stinkin’ pigtails up his ass? Because settling for eating pigtails is exactly what the oppressor wants you to do. So maybe the best act of resistance is a hunger strike.

But maybe not. Maybe getting pissed off is exactly what the oppressor wants you to do. Maybe the oppressor wants you to be perpetually miserable. The oppressor hates to see you having fun! So maybe the best act of resistance is to take those hog scraps and have a party of your own. Come up with all kinds of fancy hog scrap recipes— jowls fricassee, snout a l’orange. Invite your friends and enjoy the hell out of those hog scraps in the full view of that fucking asshole oppressor! That’ll really piss him off because he’ll see that even his hog scraps can’t break you.

But maybe not. Maybe if you take the oppressor’s hog scraps and turn it into a party, you’re falling for the old bread-and-circus routine. That’s the oldest trick in the book. The oppressor loves to see you having fun! If you’re blowing off steam then it’s a lot less likely that the pressure cooker will blow up in his face. His piddly hog scraps are mere appeasements! You should throw them back in his face!

But maybe not. If the oppressor feels the need to supply you with circus, then he must fear your wrath. So maybe the best act of resistance is to keep that fear alive by keeping yourself alive and strong! Eat the hog scraps! Eat them with gusto!

But maybe not. Because like I said before, you can’t oppress a dead person. So maybe the best act of resistance is a hunger strike after all.

But maybe not.

See what I mean? When you’re trying to resist the oppressor, it’s really fucking hard to just relax and have fun.
=========================

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A New Book by Smart Ass Cripple!

ANNOUNCING: Smart Ass Cripple's Little Chartreuse Book. A new Smart Ass Cripple book hot off the presses at lulu.com. It still has that new Smart Ass Cripple book smell. Get yours today! Help keep Smart Ass Cripple going!!

Lapping Jesus

There are some people who live such intense lifestyles that they are destined not to last very long, such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Jesus.

Poor Jesus only lasted about 33 years. Hell, even I blew him away long ago. Now my goal is to lap him. In other words, I want to pass him a second time on the longevity track. That means I have to make it to age 66, which will take a little less than five years for me to accomplish.

I don’t have a competitive grudge against Jesus. I’m not out to prove anything special by trying to lap him. It’s just that we all need milestones in our lives to shoot for. It keeps us moving. And this one seems as good as any so why not? And I just might make it. You never know. Yeah, my life is stressful. Whose isn’t? But I’m sure I’m nowhere near as stressed out as Jesus was. He had all the pressure that comes with trying to be the great messiah that’s going to save the human race from cannibalizing itself. I don’t have to worry about being the messiah anymore. I gave up on that a few years back.

I’ll make it with a little help from my friends and socialism. Hustling your ass off is a lot of stress. But as long as public funds are still available to pay the wages of the members of my pit crew who get me out of bed every morning, that’s 90 percent of the game. And when you’re trying to lap Jesus, it sure helps to have abundant access to affordable healthcare, too.

I’m sure as I get closer to lapping Jesus I’ll up the ante some. That’s how it works with milestones. When my mother had leukemia in the 1990s, she said she only wanted to live to see the magical year of 2000. Then when it got to be 1998 or so, she adjusted that up to the magical year of 2002. Come 2001, she adjusted her milestone up yet again to an unspecified future date.

So I sincerely doubt that I’ll be all ready to go the day after I lap Jesus. By then I’ll probably be shooting to lap Jesus twice, which would take me to age 99. But I’ll worry about that when the time comes. For now I’m inspired to march on by that picture in my mind’s eye of a gravestone that says, Here Lies Smart Ass Cripple. He Lapped Jesus.





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Emerged

It’s a great time to be an “emerging” cripple. Available to you are many wonderful opportunities that have ships on the end—internships, scholarships, fellowships.

The definition of emerging appears to be fluid. Sometimes it comes with an upper age limit of about 25 or so. But otherwise cripples are left to decide for ourselves if we are emerging enough to pursue the opportunity. Regardless, emerging implies young. There’s a certain age range beyond which if you haven’t emerged, the consensus is that you’re not ever going to.

When I was young enough to be an emerging cripple, no one ever called us that. Emerging cripple was an oxymoron. We weren’t expected to emerge out of or into much of anything.

I guess I’m way too old to be considered an emerging anything anymore. But if I’m not emerging, then what am I? All that’s left for me to be is emerged.

I don’t begrudge emerging cripples their emergingness. I hope they all emerge with a vengeance. I just a have hard time viewing myself as emerged. It’s depressing. To be emerged might sound like a pretty cool place to be—a blissful state of retired paradise for elder statesmen. But to me, being emerged pretty much sounds like being dead. That’s the only time I think I’ll be fully emerged in every way. Maybe being emerged is a cool place to be. But to be emerging is way cooler. You’re considered to be emerging when people think you have something important to offer. But if you’re emerged, then what?

I’ll tell you when it really hits me how fucking emerged I am. It’s when I watch TV shows with commercials for funeral insurance.

I could put a positive spin on it. I could tell myself that I'm not old, I'm emerged. Maybe I should embrace my emerged status as a gift and reward. Maybe all the emerging cripples dream of the day when they will be emerged.

But I don’t know. I hope I have some more emerging to do.




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Fill in the Blank Awareness Month

It's easy to raise public "awareness" about some things.

First, you pick a disease. Arthritis? Autism? Okay I know autism isn’t a disease but humor me for now.

How about scurvy? Let’s go with that. Suppose you want to raise scurvy awareness. First, you declare Scurvy Awareness Month/Week/Day. If you stake your claim to a whole month, you have more time to carry out your scurvy awareness campaign. But the odds are great that dozens of other people who are bent on raising awareness about something else have also claimed that same month so you’ll have to hustle hard to raise more awareness than they do and not be squelched. If you settle for an awareness day, you’ll have to cram your awareness activities into a 24-hour period. But since there are many more days in a year than there are months, there’s probably a lot less competition.

Next, you pick a color to symbolize scurvy awareness. But again, chances are that the most popular and beloved colors are already spoken for by countless other awareness campaigns. So you might be stuck with an obscure color with less instant name recognition, like burnt umber.

Once you have a color, then you get a bunch of ribbons or armbands or stuff like that made up in that color and then you get famous people to wear them in public, preferably athletes. So if you can get all the football players to wear burnt umber shoes during their games on Scurvy Awareness Day, you’ve got it made!

But like I said, raising awareness isn’t so easy for some things. I'm thinking about the days back in the 1980s when there was no cripple accessible public transit in Chicago. Cripples who were pissed off about it were trying to raise awareness about the fact that the board of directors of the Chicago Transit Authority was fucking us over. I suppose we could have designated a CTA Board is Fucking Over Cripples Awareness Day. We could have picked a color to symbolize the CTA board fucking over cripples and had a bunch of ribbons made. But getting famous people to wear those ribbons in public would have been the hard part. It’s a lot easier to get people on board when it’s a disease. Everybody hates diseases.

But once you’ve made everybody aware, so what? Big deal. What you’re really trying to do is get people off their asses to do something. Like if somebody is trying to saw your head off and you scream, what you’re doing when you scream is you’re trying to make others aware that someone is trying to saw your head off. But unless it results in a passerby taking action that prevents you from having your head sawed off, what good is it?

Some people, when they hear a call to action, don’t have to be asked twice. They’ll be right there with the homemade, all-purpose, emergency protest sign they keep in the trunk of their car. For others, your awareness campaign will bring out the “in-kind” generosity in them. They’ll ship dead grandma’s old wheelchair that’s cluttering up the basement off to the earthquake victims. Others only act when the threat posed by inaction is clear and present. They’ll give to the Sierra Club when the flood waters are up to their windowsill and a polar bear floats by on a runaway hunk of glacier.

You’re also more inclined to get citizens to act when what you’re asking them to do isn’t burdensome. Like with scurvy awareness, you’re just trying to get people to eat more citrus fruit and vegetables. It’s easy to persuade people to do that. Actually, maybe not.



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The Great Imperialist

Three young women stand huddled on the corner of State and Jackson in downtown Chicago. The middle one holds a cell phone. They all stare at the screen.

“Excuse me,” the middle one says to me as I pass. I can tell she’s about to ask me for directions. I’m flattered. I’m always flattered when pedestrians look past my crippledness and ask me for directions. It shows that they think I look like the type of guy who knows his way around, even though I’m crippled. It gives me hope for humanity.

The middle one says, “Can you tell us how to find Starbucks?"

It just so happens that I’m an expert on that subject: Starbucks locations in downtown Chicago.

“Well,” I say, “there’s one across the street in Barnes & Noble.”

I live on the edge of downtown Chicago. When I sit on my shower chair in my bathtub, if my bathroom door and kitchen blinds are open, I can see the logo on the Starbucks across the street. There’s nowhere to hide!

“Or,” I say, "If you go one block east to Wabash, there’s another one there.”

The thing I really hate most about Starbucks is that they’re all so goddam wheelchair accessible. I wish I could find one, just one, that isn’t accessible so I could sue the hell out of them!

“Or,” I say, "If you go one block north to Adams, there’s another one there.”

My burning desire to sue Starbucks is as fierce as my burning desire to sue a casino. Except my motivations are different. Suing a casino would bring me the same satisfaction as kicking a big, brash bully right square in the balls. Suing a Starbucks would bring me the same satisfaction as tripping a prom queen— just to show everybody that she’s not such a perfect little princess. That's the same reason I want to sue Disneyland.

“Or,” I say, "If you go three blocks north to Macy’s, there are two more in there.”

But I guess if I want to sue Starbucks, I’ll have to spill a hot drink on myself.

“Or,” I say, "If you go a half a block from Macy’s ---”

“That's all right!” the middle woman says. “We’ll go to the one across the street. Thank you.” The light turns green and they hustle off.

But wait a minute! I was just getting warmed up.


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Kept

I have a hard time being a hardass with my dogs. I don’t even know what to call myself in relation to them. I sure as hell don’t want to call myself their master. I don’t even want to call myself their owner. It’s all so human centric.

I try to put myself in my dogs' shoes. My dogs don’t literally wear shoes but you know what I mean. Would I like it if the guy who walks me around called himself my master? I’d be insulted. I’d want to bite him.

I even feel guilty keeping them on a leash when they're outside. I feel like I’m treating them like hostages.

I know it’s stupid. I know they’re just dogs but I can’t help it. It’s a hang up I have. It’s a cripple thing. If there’s one thing I never ever ever want to be it’s kept. I know how it feels to be kept. And so if I treat any other creature that way, even a dog, I feel like a flaming hypocrite.

A kept cripple is very much like a kept woman, except kept women get better benefits. In exchange for surrendering her autonomy and identity for a rich benefactor, a kept woman will usually get put up in a mansion with servants at her beck and call and shit like that. At least that makes the deal somewhat attractive

But not so for kept cripples. Kept cripples are the ones who are stuck in those putrid nursing homes. In exchange for surrendering their autonomy and identity, what do they get from the rich benefactor who owns the nursing home? Well, they get one shower a week and green bologna for lunch.

But then again, more is required of a kept woman than of a kept cripple. A kept woman is expected to cater to the needs of her benefactor. Kept cripples just have to shut the fuck up and play bingo.

I was once a kept cripple. When I was a teenager, I was an inmate at a state boarding school for cripples, which I refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT). Of all the kept cripples at SHIT, the keptest were the kids they called wards of the state. They never had any family come around or anything.

But anyway, when it comes to my dogs, I suppose I could get used to calling myself their human. John, one of the members of my pit crew, says maybe I should call myself their facilitator. Sounds like a good idea.



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The March of the Penis Posse

Watch out! The March of the Penis Posse may be coming soon to your town!

The Penis Posse is a small but rapidly growing group of resentful young men who were born with a penis and say they are fighting back in the war on penises. They’re not afraid to acknowledge the fact that penises are constantly under attack in today’s emasculated society and they have all taken a solemn oath to preserve and defend the proud heritage of the penis.

The members of the Penis Posse are fiercely proud of their penises and they pledge their allegiance to them every day. This is the bond they share. Their meetings are like tent revivals. Members stand and tell the story of that glorious moment when they came to realize the full magnitude of what it means to possess a penis. It’s an exhilarating rite of passage in the life of every boy when he understands that the penis is so much more than just a funny-looking appendage and how awesome it is to have one. It’s very much like that big dramatic scene in the Miracle Worker when that brat Helen Keller finally realizes what water is.

This is why the members of the Penis Posse are not afraid to speak out against the dire threat posed the “impostors,” which is what they call all those who acquire a penis by any means other than directly from the hand of God. This, the Penis Posse believes, dishonors and dispossesses the penis. The “impostors “ are the sworn enemies of the Penis Posse.

For many years, the Penis Posse was a shadowy, underground organization. But lately they’ve been feeling emboldened because they believe they now have many kindred spirits in Washington. So they hold raucous rallies where they vow to never let the government take their penises away. They march brandishing their trademark giant papier mache penis, which looks a lot like those dragons in Chinese New Year parades, except it’s bald and white.

The mission of the Penis Posse is to “re-testosterize” America. They want to return to what they refer to as the “golden age of the penis.” They want to live in a state where possessors of biological penises are in charge, which is why they like to be referred to as penis nationalists.

Later this year, the Penis Posse plans to hold its first annual March to Reclaim the Penis, which will culminate in a rally at the Washington Monument. The event will be made possible by a generous grant from the makers of Viagra.



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The Way of the Polios

So here’s what makes me crippled: It turns out that my body evidently doesn’t produce survival motor neuron protein at high enough levels due to a mutation in my survival motor neuron 1 gene.

Really? That’s all it is? Sixty years and counting of dragging my crippled ass around and it’s all pretty much due to a fucking protein deficiency? Well I’ll be dipped in shit. It’s kind of like the Down Syndrome people. They all just have an extra chromosome. All the shit we give those folks and that’s the only difference between us and them.

Knowing that all I have is a protein deficiency is kind of a letdown. It makes me feel so ordinary. Some of the previous explanations for what makes a person become crippled like me were much more interesting, such as demonic possession or excessive masturbation.

And now, who knows, but maybe they’ll be able to treat my protein deficiency to the point where my species of cripple will soon become extinct. Because last December, the FDA approved a drug called Spinraza, which showed some positive results when tested on people who are crippled for the same reason I am.

So maybe someday there won’t be any new cripples like me in the pipeline and once all the old farts who have what I have die off we’ll all be gone. We will have gone the way of the polios. When I was a kid 50 years ago at the cripple school, there were polios all over the place. You couldn't spit without hitting a polio. But the only polios you see in these parts these days are old farts. And once they die off, the only place you’ll see polios anymore will be in old black-and-white photos. It’s true, however, that the polios could always make a comeback because, technically, they aren’t extinct.

But the sliptos are an extinct species of cripple. Back in cripple school about 50 years ago, there were these kids who’d show up one day walking on crutches with one leg tied behind their backs. They walked that way because they’d fucked up their hip somehow and their condition had some weird medical name that sounded like Slipped Hippy-feces. So we just called them sliptos. Gradually, these kids got better and returned to walking like regular kids walk so they were allowed to return to the schools for regular kids. You never see sliptos anymore. Either kids no longer fuck up their hips that way or if they do there’s a better way to fix it that doesn’t require them to walk around on crutches for a year with one leg tied behind their back.

Knowing that cripples like me could soon be extinct is kind of a letdown too. It feels weird to picture everybody looking at black-and-white photos of us and being glad we’re gone.



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Jimmy the Badass Bleeder

There were some kids back in cripple elementary school that even I felt sorry for. I felt sorry for the bleeders, better known as the hemophiliacs. I mean, all the kids who were sent away to cripple school were considered to be “fragile,” but they were the fragilest

Nobody wanted to even come near those kids because we all feared that if we touched a bleeder the wrong way they would gush blood from the nearest orifice like a geyser. Nobody had ever actually seen one of the bleeder kids gush blood, but nobody wanted to be the first to find out if it was true.

The bleeders weren’t allowed to play any rough games like dodgeball in PE. That’s another reason I felt sorry for them. The fun games in PE were the rough games. But the bleeder kids were only allowed to keep score or play checkers with the brittle bones kids, who also weren’t allowed to play any rough games.

One of the most legendary kids at the cripple elementary school was Jimmy the Badass Bleeder. He was an older kid, like a seventh grader, so he mostly hung around the other end of the school which was fine with me because I was afraid of him. It seemed like every week a buzz went around the school about how Jimmy was sent to the principal’s office again for trying to pick a fight with someone. It was a win/win situation for Jimmy. He knew he could be any kind of asshole he wanted to be to the other crippled kids and nobody would fight back because imagine the kind of trouble you could get into if you punched out a bleeder and he gushed blood all over the place. You could probably get sent to the electric chair for something like that!

Legend had it that Jimmy was a punk who tripped kids and snatched away their lunches and stuff like that. If everybody was going to be afraid of him, he wanted it to be for the right reason, dammit! It was gonna be on his terms.

Well then one day Jimmy was gone. I don’t think he graduated so he must’ve gotten kicked out. That made him even more legendary because it was pretty damn hard to get kicked out of the cripple school. You’d have to be a super badass to make that happen. I don’t know what became of him. I imagine he’s dead because he could only successfully pull off his particular badass bit if everybody he picked a fight with first knew he was a bleeder. So unless he always wore a t-shirt that said CAUTION: I’M A BLEEDER, no doubt somebody punched him out. Did he gush blood all over the place?



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The Amazing Longevity of a Clam

I can definitely see the appeal of having an emotional support dog. A dog can go a long way toward cheering a person up, relieving stress and loneliness, etc. They’re a lot more of an organic treatment than drugs and alcohol.

But I don’t think I’d sign up to get an emotional support dog, or any kind of service dog, because I imagine there are big downsides. First off, having an emotional support dog probably greatly increases a person’s need to have an emotional support dog. Because the purpose of the dog is to relieve your stress but I bet a lot of that stress is caused by all the people who give you shit for trying to bring a dog into a public place.

That’s why if I was going to have an emotional support dog I’d get one of those pocket-size dogs like a Yorkie. And then I could just stuff it in my backpack and go in and out of public places all day long and nobody would hassle me because nobody would know the difference. I might have to put a little snorkel mask on the dog inside my backpack so it can get enough oxygen to stay alive and keep cheering me up. But that’s a small price to pay.

The biggest downside to me though would be that emotional support dogs have the same big problem that regular pet dogs have. They die. It sucks enormously when your regular pet dog dies so it must suck a million times worse when your emotional support dog dies, especially if it gets hit by a car or something. So if I was going to get an emotional support animal it would have to be an animal that has a long lifespan. Maybe a turtle. I hear turtles can live a hundred years. But I think that mostly applies to huge sea turtles, not to pocket-size pet turtles. The animal with a long lifespan that would best fit in my shirt pocket is a clam. A quahog clam can live 500 years. I know it’s a lot harder to form an emotional bond with a clam than it is with a dog. But I would derive comfort from knowing that my little buddy, whatever its species, isn’t likely to die on me soon. And the odds are very slim that a clam will get run over by a car, unless I get run over by a car while it’s in my shirt pocket. But I would never keep my emotional support clam in my shirt pocket anyway, for the same reason I never keep money or keys or anything else in my shirt pocket. I forget it’s in there and it ends up in the laundry. And I wouldn’t want to hear something rattling around in the dryer and come to the horrifying realization that it’s my emotional support clam.

So maybe if I want to try out an emotional support animal. I’ll start with a clam and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out I could always eat it.





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And Then There Was That Time Winston Churchill Almost Got Punched Out in the Parking Lot of the Waffle House

Whenever I travel, I like to go to exotic places. That’s why I went to the Waffle House.

There aren’t any Waffle Houses in these parts. I don’t know why. I guess we’re just not part of the Waffle House’s key demographic up here.

But anyway, I was caravanning with some other guys to a cripple protest in Atlanta. There were four or five of us wheelchair cripples and a few verts (which is short for verticals, which is slang for people who can walk.) We spent the night somewhere in Tennessee. There was a Waffle House across the parking lot from our hotel. The lure was too much to resist, though I must admit that I felt some consternation about going there with a flock of cripples. I wasn’t sure how welcome cripples would be at the Waffle House. I didn’t think we were part of their key demographic.

But there was a ramp on the front entrance of the Waffle House, and a reasonable one at that. It wasn’t one of those steep and winding Evel Knievel ramps. Inside, the Waffle House was pretty much the Formica palace I expected it to be. And I survived the breakfast. I don’t remember what I ate, but I have a vague memory of it being greasy and fried.

So all in all it was undramatic, until we left and discovered that someone parked a pickup truck so that it was completely blocking the ramp. The truck was rusty and dusty and had an NRA bumper sticker. We were pissed. One of the wheelchair cripples rolled back inside. I shall refer to this cripple with an alias. Let’s call him Winston Churchill. So Winston Churchill rolled back inside and asked who the hell parked blocking the damn wheelchair ramp. This guy got up from a stool at the counter. He wore a cowboy hat and a Jack Daniels belt buckle. He walked outside and moved the truck away from the ramp. Winston Churchill and all the other cripples rolled down the ramp, except me. I stopped to look at the front page of a newspaper in a vending box by the front door.

And then the Jack Daniels guy put his truck right back where it was, blocking the ramp. Winston Churchill was really pissed now. When the Jack Daniels guy got out of his truck, Winston Churchill got all up in his face and said something like, “You’re still blocking the ramp, douche bag!”

The Jack Daniels guy was pissed now, too, and he said something back like, “Ain’t nobody who needs that ramp gonna be coming here before I’m finished eating!”

“What about him?” Winston Churchill said, pointing to me.

The Jack Daniels guy stomped back to his truck and backed it away from the ramp. I rolled down. When the Jack Daniels guy got back out of his truck, he slammed the door and got all up in Winston Churchill’s face. He said, “You know what, boy? Someday, with that mouth of yours, somebody’s gonna knock you out of that wheelchair. They ain’t gonna care if you’re handicapped!”

“Oh yeah?” said Winston Churchill. “Go ahead! Punch me!”

“It ain’t gonna be me! But someday!” said the Jack Daniels guy. His face was red. He shook a finger of warning at Winston Churchill and stomped back inside the Waffle House.

But at least his truck wasn’t blocking the ramp anymore.



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My Mother's Only Spa Vacation

My chair is tilted back into the full reclining position. Soft music plays. A young woman approaches me. Her smiling face hovers above. She asks if I’m comfortable. I say yes. She places sunglasses over my eyes. I close my eyes and try to relax. For the next half hour or so, I’m letting everything go. I’m not going to worry about how the governor is fucking cripples over. I’m not going to worry about Medicaid. For the next half hour, I can’t do anything about those things. I am going to treat myself to some sweet disengagement.

I’m settled in and comfy. I’m even getting drowsy. “Are you ready?” the young woman says. I say yes. “Open your mouth,” she says. I open my mouth. And then she starts scraping my teeth. This is the part I don’t like. A trip to the dental hygienist would be like a trip to the spa if I could skip the annoying dental hygiene part. I love the submissive recline position and the sunglasses. (That lamp that illuminates my face so the hygienist can see what she's doing sure is bright.) But I could do without her poking around in my mouth. I wish she was feeding me grapes instead. I wish the water she was squirting in my mouth was a pina colada in a ceramic pineapple.

And now I know how my mother felt. When I was about 10 years old, she sent my sister and me off to a neighbor’s house for a couple weeks while she went to a spa. She packed up her nightgowns, novels, crosswords puzzles. She told me how much she was looking forward to lying in bed and being pampered, not doing any cooking or housework, having meals brought to her room.

Except the spa was the hospital. She was going in for foot surgery. She was raising two crippled kids pretty much by herself and working as a waitress at the Kozy Korner diner. So not much time for herself. This was a good excuse to relax. Respite. Guilt-free detachment. Painkillers. Women like her didn’t get many opportunities to go to spas. They had to create their own. Too bad foot surgery was a mandatory part of the package.

My phone rings. The hygienist abruptly withdraws her fingers from my mouth and asks if I want to answer it. I look at her like she’s nuts. She resumes scraping my teeth. Is she serious? Do some people actually stop to answer their phone in the middle of getting their teeth cleaned? I feel sorry for those people. Don’t they ever relax?




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Driving in Cripple Mode

Most people don’t naturally drive automobiles in cripple mode. It’s a very specialized thing. Whenever somebody drives me for the first time in my cripple van, I always instruct them thoroughly on how to drive in cripple mode. I tell them since I don’t have good trunk strength or balance, I can be a very floppy passenger. If they start or stop too hard or whip around on turns, I might flop around like a rag doll on a roller coaster. Therefore, until they get a good idea as to exactly what sort of g-forces my body can combat, they should drive as slow as an old lady on barbiturates. Don’t be intimidated by all the other impatient drivers blazing past us at the speed limit.

This is why all this talk about how someday soon there will be nothing but self-driven cars makes me ill. Once again, cripples like me will be left in the dust. It’s only within the last 10 years or so that cabs that are accessible for wheelchair cripples have been appearing with some frequency on the streets of some big cities. When a cripple cab arrives, the driver gets out and deploys a ramp. The cripple boards and then the driver secures the wheelchair to the floor with clamps and straps so that, in the event of an accident, the cripple isn’t catapulted through the windshield, wheelchair and all. And all the cab drivers are trained in the finer points of driving their cabs in cripple mode, though some appear to have resoundingly flunked.

But what happens when all the cripple cabs are self-driven? The invisible chauffeur with be just a warm and welcoming voice coming from the dashboard. It will have a warm and welcoming name such as Emmett. But who’s going to deploy the ramp and tie down the wheelchairs? Okay, maybe all that stuff will be automatic, too. But will I be able to say to my virtual chauffeur, “Emmett, please drive me in cripple mode?” Will it be programmed to do so? I really don’t think so. Emmett will probably go all 2001 on me. He’ll probably say, “I’m sorry, Mike, I'm afraid I can’t do that,” as the cab bolts away from the curb, tires squealing.

And there I’ll be, trapped in a self-driven cripple cab, flopping around like a rag doll on a roller coaster.




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Thinking About Frankenstein

Whenever I see Barry, I think about Frankenstein. Because Barry walks like Frankenstein. I don’t know if he had a stroke or someone hit him in the head with a hammer or what. I don’t ask. It’s none of my business. But his gait is very heavy-footed, plodding. And when I see Barry struggling to walk down the sidewalk I think about how much happier Barry would be in the long run if he would just ditch the walking bit and get a motorized wheelchair In a motorized wheelchair, he’d be merrily zipping all over the place, his hair flying in the breeze.

And that’s the same thing I think when I think about Frankenstein. Because Frankenstein is crippled, whether he cares to admit it or not. Because the Americans with Disabilities Act says you’re crippled if society perceives you as crippled. And when someone walks like Frankenstein, society sure as hell perceives them as crippled. Therefore, if Frankenstein was alive today, he would be crippled, at least in the U.S.

And if Frankenstein was alive today, I picture him zipping around in a motorized wheelchair, just like I picture Barry, except Frankenstein is zipping around in motorized wheelchair naked. Because let’s face it, even though Frankenstein wasn’t born the same way the rest of us were born, he still must’ve been born naked like the rest of us. So where did that shabby suit come from? Did a tailor come in and fit him? I doubt it.

So that’s why I picture Frankenstein naked. And what sort of shlong would Frankenstein have, you say? Well, it depends on whom you ask. According to cherished stereotypes, some populations of men automatically have enormous schlongs while others automatically have tiny ones. And whereas I don’t believe enough of a consensus has been reached to establish an official stereotype of crippled men vis-à-vis our schlongs, I believe that when the average Joe or Jane secretly wonders about the genitalia of cripples, they picture us having no genitals at all. So that’s how I think most people would, by default, envision naked Frankenstein in a motorized wheelchair. But if you ask me, he has a sturdy, formidable, no-nonsense schlong, thank you very much.

I picture a pivotal moment in the life of Frankenstein where he’s forlornly plodding through the city, naked, and then he passes a store that sells motorized wheelchairs. A light bulb goes off in his head. He tries to open the door but it’s locked. It’s after business hours. So Frankenstein shatters the window with a nearby brick and enters the store. The alarm blares. Soon the front door flies open and naked Frankenstein exits the store riding a motorized wheelchair. He whoops and hollers, pops a wheelie and zips off into the sunset.

And he lives happily ever after.


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Chopping up Cripples with a Chainsaw as a Metaphor

I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about the new horror movie where a crazed serial killer goes around randomly murdering cripples with a chainsaw and then gleefully feeding their severed body parts to packs of rabid jackals. Personally, I think the movie is a masterpiece of the horror genre

Critics are expressing outrage and protesters are picketing theaters. They howl that this movie is nothing more than a pointless display of gratuitous violence against cripples. They also worry that it will inspire copycats.

But I think they’re taking things far too literally, as critics and protesters often do. I think there’s way more too this movie than meets the eye, if you view it on the metaphorical level. That’s when it becomes truly horrifying. For example, I saw the crazed chainsaw murder as a metaphor for republicans and all the other austerity pigs. And I saw cripples as a metaphor for their easy prey. By their easy prey, I mean pretty much everybody that isn’t rich enough to own five houses. Cripples are the ultimate symbol of helplessness and vulnerability.

And when the delirious maniac chops cripples up into tiny pieces, I don’t think he’s chopping up cripples per se. The way I see it is he’s chopping up the programs that keep the vulnerable people that cripples symbolize alive, programs like Medicaid. That’s a far more diabolical way for the maniac to kill his prey than just whacking their heads off. It’s slow and painful, like torture.

And finally, I don’t take the packs of rabid jackals literally either. I see them a metaphor for those who are rich enough to own five houses or more. These jackals are constantly on the roam, searching for new profit centers on which to feast. And the homicidal maniacs sees it as his calling in life to feed these jackals. From this he derives great satisfaction. It’s like he’s making a human sacrifice to the please the Gods, so they won’t get angry and turn on him.

So when you look at the movie in that way, it’s way more scary and poignant than your basic chainsaw murdering spree flick. Like they say, truth is scarier than fiction.

But I do share the concern of the critics and protesters that this movie will inspire copycats. It terrifies me to think that watching this depraved psychopath might make some people decide to run for office.




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The Lazy Person’s Guide for Raising Money for the Children’s Hospital

Every year I see this story on the news about this group of people who get together and raise money for the children’s hospital. And it really pisses me off.

Because what they do is they all run up the stairs to the top of the Hancock building, which is something like 95 flights. And they get people to sponsor them a dollar a flight or something and they give it all to the children's hospital.

What a bunch of elitist snobs they are! I mean, there’s a part of everybody that wants to raise money for the children’s hospital, right? It’s an easy and concrete way to feel good, to feel useful. But these people, with their stair-scaling ways, deprive cripples like me of that experience. And it’s not just cripples. What about lazy people? What about people who want to raise money for the children’s hospital without having to train for six months to be able to do it? Yeah sure, I suppose we could all just write a check to the children’s hospital or sponsor one of the stair-climbers, but it’s not the same. I’m sure it’s not nearly as satisfying as looking down on the city when you finally
make it to the top of the Hancock building and feeling like you’re atop Mt. Everest.

So the people that are hurt most by this fitness-oriented fundraiser are the children who go to the children’s hospital, because it excludes not just cripples but lazy people, which is the vast majority of humans.

That’s why I want to put together a fundraiser for the children’s hospital that doesn’t exclude anybody. It’s basically the same concept. Everybody would still go to the top of the Hancock building and get people to sponsor us to do it. Except we’d all use the elevator. There’s an observatory on top of the Hancock building where a lot of tourists go and there are elevators that take you right to it. So it works out perfect!

This would open up a teeming stream of new revenue for the children’s hospital because everybody can join in my fundraiser. Even a comatose person can ride up an elevator. There would be intensified peer pressure on everyone to get off their ass and raise money for the children’s hospital because I would make it so easy to do that anybody who didn’t take part would look and feel like a real jerk. Even a comatose person.

And we’d all get to experience that Mt. Everest feeling while exerting very little effort. Those show-offs that bound up the stairs every year will probably scorn us and say we’re cheating. But I would say to them, “Oh yeah? Tell that to those sick kids!”




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