Living la Vida Cripple

Being crippled can be a tremendous gift for some people because, if you play your cards right, it can give you an ironclad excuse for sitting on your ass and doing nothing. And that’s all some people want out of life.

You know the type of people I’m talking about. I’m talking about the slackers. I’m talking about the stoner types, both literally and figuratively. They’d just as soon lie around on the couch all day and watch TV  and/or play video games and eat chips. Some people love having an excuse for not doing anything because they’re terrified of failing so if they don’t try to do anything they won’t fail at anything. So if they have an excuse for not doing anything then they can feel content and satisfied because they can tell themselves and others that they would’ve succeeded at a lot of stuff if they could’ve but they couldn’t so it’s not their fault.

And if you’re crippled, you can use it as an excuse for not doing just about anything if you want to. You can probably collect Social Security and not work. If you hustle enough, you might even score a space in public housing for yourself with super discount rent. Of course you won’t have much money left for anything else but hell, who’s counting? Some things are more important than money, eh?

And it’s not really accurate to say that cripples situated thusly do nothing. It takes effort to acquire such a lifestyle. Stuff like Social Security and public housing don’t just falleth from the sky. You have to jump through the flaming hoops of applying for them and then duke it out with the bureaucracies when they initially turn you down. That can be a full time job. It’s a lot easier to become a slacker cripple if you’re rich because you've already got stuff like money and housing. You can skip all the bull shit and go directly to the slacker promised land. No lines, no waiting.

But regardless of the path you take to get there, once you receive that golden excuse, you’re in! You’re living la vida cripple, baby! You can slack in peace. You can even make slacking sound cool, bold and/or lofty. You can say you’re living “off-the grid” or “underground” as a revolutionary act of rebellion against government and corporate surveillance. You can say you’re in “self-exile.” You can call yourself an “expatriate” from the land of the verts (which is short for vertical, which is what I call people who can walk).

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What if Shaq was Crippled?

Whenever I see an extraordinarily large human being, like a lot of football or basketball players, the first thing I say to myself is, “Damn, I sure hope that guy never becomes crippled.”

I can’t help but wonder what it would take to haul some guy who’s seven-feet tall and upwards of 300 pounds in and out of bed if he became as crippled as Christopher Reeve. I mean, it’s hard enough for me to find people to haul my crippled ass in and out of bed. And I’m just an average-size guy.

What about Shaq? I see that massive guy doing all the commercials he does and I can only shake my head and hope like hell for his sake that he never becomes crippled. He’d have to round up a crew of people just to lift one of his monster-ass feet into bed. Hauling his entire carcass in and out of bed would be a job for the Army Corps of Engineers. Because I don’t think that you could budge him one inch using one of those crank lifts with a sling hanging on it like a lot of cripples use. That thing would blow a gasket. He’d have to have something custom made. He probably has to have a lot of things custom made, like his shoes, furniture and condoms. To get lifted, he’d have to rig up some kind of crane system with heavy-duty pulleys and all that. And what kind of place would Shaq have to live in in order to have room for a device like that? He’d have to move into an airplane hangar.

But at least Shaq is rich. He can buy an airplane hangar if he wants to. And he can afford to have stuff custom made. It’s a helluva lot easier being crippled when you’re rich. What if there was a guy as big as Shaq who was both crippled and broke ass? He’d really be screwed.

And what about sumo wrestlers? What if one of them became as crippled as Christopher Reeve? How would you haul a crippled sumo wrestler in and out of bed? It would take a whole bunch of other sumo wrestlers.

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Separation of Church and State at the Sam Houston Institute of Technology or the All- Crippled Nativity Scene

When I look back on the years I spent in the 1970s as an inmate at a state-operated boarding school for cripples, which I affectionately refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT), I realize there must’ve been a time when one of those litigious atheists sued the place.

Because on Sunday afternoons a priest came in and held Catholic mass upstairs in one of the classrooms. And yes, I attended. But I was only about 14 at the time so gimme a break. I hadn’t quite shaken off the shackles of Catholic guilt.

But then suddenly the priest stopped coming and we were told there wouldn’t be any more masses. Rather than being pissed, I felt relieved. Now I know that I felt that way because the only reason I attended the classroom mass was because I didn’t have an excuse not to. If I was at home on a Sunday, I had a good excuse not to go to mass or Sunday school or any of that stuff because the church had stairs so God forgave me for not going. But at SHIT, all I had to do to attend mass was take an elevator upstairs so Catholic guilt kicked in.

Now it seems clear to me that the only thing that could’ve stopped the priest from coming was an assertion of the separation of church and state. I never went to mass again. So I’m grateful to the litigious atheist for restoring my precious get-out-of-going-to- mass-for-free card and thus hastening my break from Catholicism. I’m confident that break would have happened eventually anyway, but the sooner the better.

However, I also have to say that I’m glad the atheist didn’t strike any sooner than they did because if they did I never would have had a religious experience I had at SHIT that I still cherish. We all gathered in the gym for an assembly. It must’ve been around Christmas because the curtain on the stage opened and revealed various other inmates forming an all-crippled nativity scene. There was Joseph in a wheelchair, a blind Mary, a one-armed angel, etc. There were various crippled barnyard animals. This deaf kid named Teel had on a brown coat with a long brown tail pinned on it so I guess he was supposed to be a donkey. And this polio kid named Randall Harvey who was sitting next to me in the audience leaned over and said, “Look at Teel up there on stage making an ass out of himself.”

I got to see an all-crippled nativity scene without taking heavy drugs. Very few people can say that. It makes me feel special.

It was so wonderfully bizarre. If the litigious atheist had prevailed sooner it would never have happened. Or maybe the cops would’ve raided the gym and shut the nativity scene down. In that case, I would’ve been pissed. 



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