Mama Almost Done me Wrong

I love my mother to pieces. Not only did she give me my life, but she saved it many times along the way.

But mama almost done me wrong, in a real bad way. She did it out of love, but nevertheless, she almost done me wrong.

Mama wanted me to be an accountant. She was fooled back when I was a little baseball freak and I’d just discovered the joy of learning how to calculate battling averages and earned run averages. She saw the pages on which I did numerous calculations and I guess to her it looked like some elaborate equation on a blackboard at MIT.

So my mother said to me, “You have a way with numbers,” and she suggested I become an accountant. My mother was wise. She knew that being a crippled adult was going to be expensive for me. She knew that someday I'd probably have to pay for people to do the stuff she was doing for me for free, like dragging my crippled ass in and out of bed. So I’d better have a damn good job.

I was only about 10 years old at the time so I was too young to have thought much about what I would do when mom couldn’t do all the things she did anymore. But I wasn’t too young to feel that I’d rather be drawn and quartered by horses and have my eyes poked out than become an accountant.

And as I’ve gotten older, that aversion has grown stronger. I hate keeping track of my own money, let alone anyone else’s. I don’t care how much money they want to pay me to keep track of theirs.

And even if I had been capable of rationally weighing my future options at age 10, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. If I would have considered the proposition that I could well end up broke and homeless with no one to drag my crippled ass in and out of bed if I didn’t become an accountant, I probably still would’ve decided to take my chances and hope for the best.

And that’s what I did. And I’ve gotten by pretty good so far. Mama was right that being a crippled adult would be very expensive. But the answer was the opposite of becoming an accountant. The answer was socialism. Yes, over about four decades now I’ve had to pay a bunch of people to do all the stuff for me that mama used to do.  But the wages of the people I hire are paid by public funds through a state program. I just submit to a state agency a record of the hours my workers spent dragging my crippled ass in and out of bed and doing all the stuff for me that mama used to do, and the state sends them a payment every two weeks.

And here I am today, still going. And I’ve managed to do it without becoming an accountant. I’m quite proud of that. 

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If I Had as Much Fucking Money as Jeff Bezos and Those Guys

 

When I’m riding around in my cripple van, lately I tend to think about guys like Jeff Bezos and how much fucking money they have.

Because my cripple van is about seven years old so it’s gonna soon be time for me to think about getting a new one. But that’ll cost me about $65,000 and I have no idea where I’m gonna get that kind of money.

But if I had as much fucking money as Jeff Bezos and those guys, I’d be able to pay cash for a new cripple van every day without batting and eye.  I could buy one every day as routinely as most people buy a cup of coffee every day.

And the same thing goes for wheelchairs. The wheelchair I’m sitting in costs about $25,000. And I ‘d better make sure it holds up for at least five years because if you need a third party such as Medicaid or private insurance to pay for a new chair, like most normal human beings do, they’ll only consider your claim every five years.

But if I had as much fucking money as Jeff Bezos and those guys, I could have an ever-growing fleet of wheelchairs. I could have more damn wheelchairs than I have shirts and I could contemplate which chair to use each day the same way I contemplate which shirt to wear. “Geez, it’s such a warm and sunny day. I think I’ll ride around, in my chartreuse wheelchair with the leopard-skin upholstery.

And whenever a cripple needs insurance or Medicaid or some third party to buy them a wheelchair or pay for repairs or something, we have to get a note from a doctor swearing on a stack of Bibles that a wheelchair that works is “medically necessary” for us.

But if I had as much fucking money as Jeff Bezos and those guys and I could pay cash for a new wheelchair, I could get any chair I wanted any time. And nothing would have to be “medically necessary.” I could insist that my new chair be equipped with fully-loaded confetti cannons and the wheelchair company would gladly sell it to me, no questions asked.

If I had as much fucking money as Jeff Bezos and those guys, I’d never need another damn doctor’s note.

How come Jeff Bezos and those guys have a zillion times more money than I do? They must work a zillion times harder than me. I work about eight hours a day. They must work eight zillion hours a day.

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Sniffing Out Fake Cripples

 

I knew this was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m surprised it took so long.

But a guy was busted recently at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina when federal agents  discovered over 23 pounds of cocaine hidden in the cushion of his motorized wheelchair. The agents said the man came in on a flight from the Dominican Republic and the cocaine had a street value of $378,000.

But the worst thing about the story is that the guy was just pretending to be crippled. Thus, the agents confiscated both the cocaine and the wheelchair.

I’ve always thought that cripples would make good drug mules. I figure that we could easily slip past cops with all kinds of drugs stashed away  in the deep recesses of our wheelchairs because nobody ever suspects us. Everybody thinks we’re so damn innocent, like Tiny Tim.

I wondered when the druglords would catch on to this, And when they finally did, wouldn’t you know it that they didn’t even hire a real cripple to do the job. I guess they think we’re all as innocent as Tiny Tim, too.

This really pisses me off. And it riles me up even more when I think about how they probably acquired the wheelchair in which the cocaine was hidden. Some druglord's hired goons probably wheelchair jacked some poor crippled pedestrian in the Dominican. They probably jumped out from behind some bushes, dumped the cripple out of their wheelchair and made off with it.

But there is something positive to take away from this story. (You know how I am. I take lemons and make lemonade.) I see a golden career opportunity in this for me. You know how agents sometimes use dogs to sniff out drugs, right? Well I’m thinking maybe I could rent myself out to spot fake cripples. Just like some dogs have a keen nose for drugs, I have a keen eye for cripples. Most people on the street can’t tell the difference between a muscular dystrophy cripple, a spina bifida cripple and an amputee. We all look alike.

But I’ve been around thousands of cripples in my life so I can spot a fake one a mile away. First, the body of just about every legit cripple is atrophied or deformed in some way. So if there’s a guy sitting in a wheelchair who otherwise looks all buff and perfect, he’s probably faking it.

And second, take a close look at the wheelchair itself. If this guy really has been living la vida cripple, the wheelchair will show it. It’ll be dirty and dusty. The upholstery will be cracked. There will be duck tape somewhere, The more the wheelchair looks like it just came off the showroom floor, the more likely it is that the cripple occupying it is a fraud.

These are just a few of Smart Ass Cripple’s faux cripple detection tips.

Maybe if the fake cripple drug mules are getting busted left and right because I’m on the job sniffing them out, the druglords will adjust their business models and start hiring real cripples as drug mules. Those are the kind of lucrative jobs cripples need to be able to buy expensive shit like motorized wheelchairs.

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The Heartbreak of Incontinence

 

 

 

You can judge the inclusiveness of a society by its diaper commercials. I believe Shakespeare said that. Or maybe it was Groucho Marx. I always get the two of them mixed up.

Anyway, back when I attended a segregated public school for cripples in the 1960s, there was a kid who was about 12 years old but he wore diapers. Everybody knew he wore diapers even though nobody ever talked about it out loud. Everybody always whispered about it when the kid passed by. The kid walked on crutches, and he was always kind of slumpy and gloomy. People probably thought he was like that because he was carrying around a load in his diaper. But it was probably because he was carrying around a load of shame because he wore diapers but he wasn't a baby. He was experiencing the heartbreak of incontinence.

There were no diaper commercials back then to make someone like him feel hope. But today you see commercials where happy, confident adults are playing tennis and riding horseback while wearing diapers.

That shows how far we’ve come as a society. Being incontinent doesn’t mean you have to hide away anymore. Life is still full of possibilities.

Of course, those commercials also show how far we still have to go. All the happy, confident people in those commercials are old. That implies that we of the continent majority will accept you and your diaper wearing as long as you are old. But if you’re young and incontinent, well, there are no happy, confident role models for you. And the reason they’re happy and confident isn’t because they aren’t incontinent anymore but because they’re not afraid of springing an embarrassing leak.  In other words, they feel good about themselves because they bought this product that empowers them to pass as continent. The subtext here is that springing a leak is still something to be ashamed of.

I’d like to see commercials where a happy, confident father walks his daughter the bride down the aisle when suddenly he springs a leak for all the world to see. But keeps strutting proud because so what. It’s just a leak. What’s the big deal? Better yet, it would be so cool if the young bride was the one who sprung the leak but still kept moving forward.

When I see commercials like that, I’ll know we’ve found a cure for the heartbreak of incontinence.

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Government Overreach

 

 I went into one of those cripple accessible “ family” bathrooms. And because it was coed there was a tampon dispenser mounted on the wall across from the toilet.

 The dispenser was a white, metal box and on the front it said, “meets the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act”.

I wondered what the hell that meant. Are there ADA accessibility standards for tampons? Are they required to have a sticker on them that says in Braille THIS END UP?

Or maybe it was the dispenser itself that was in full compliance. But that didn’t seem to be the case. There was no Braille anywhere on the dispenser. So, if a blind person was in the bathroom in need of a tampon, they would have no idea that relief was so nearby.

The only other thing I could think of was that maybe the ADA reference pertained to the height at which the tampon dispenser was mounted on the wall. But how would the manufacturers of the dispenser know that indeed it was installed at a compliant height unless they installed it themselves? And that didn’t seem likely. 

Thus, I circled back to my original hypothesis that perhaps there are access standards for the tampons themselves. I looked it up online, because the internet never lies. And I found out that earlier this year tampon guidelines that included quantitative measures for absorbency, etc. were released by ANSI. I’ve always known that acronym to stand for the American National Standards Institute. But in this case, ANSI stood for the Australian National Standards Institute.

So I must hereby concede that there appear to be no ADA access standards for tampons. (Somebody out there please correct me if I’m wrong.) I figured that would the case because if there were such standards, I’m sure by now I would’ve heard some be bitter libertarian holding this up as yet another egregious example of government overreach. They’d be frothing on and on about how soon we’ll all be living in  a socialist hellscape, like Australia. 

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Typecast as a Genius

  

I bumped into one of my crippled friends who’s an actor. It seems he’s been typecast.

It used to be when an actor who really was crippled (and not just an uncrippled person playing the role of a cripple ) got typecast, the only roles they could get were as a smarmy little Tiny Tim or a sideshow freak or something like that.  But the last big role my actor friend had was on a short-lived television show where he played a computer genius. Now he has a role in another television show where he plays another kind of genius. They just gave him a different profession, but he's still a genius.

This is all the fault of that damn Stephen Hawking. I know he’s dead, but I won’t let that intimidate me into silence.

Because of him, now when people think about cripples, they don’t just picture smarmy little Tiny Tims and sideshow freaks anymore. They also picture geniuses.

But that still worries me. Because first off, I wonder if people are able to see us as geniuses because they think we don’t have anything better to do but sit around and become geniuses. Maybe they think our days consist of someone rolling our wheelchairs up to the window, a plaid blanket wrapped around our legs, and we sit there all day gazing forlornly at the stars.

And second off, I don’t want people to expect me to be a genius all the time in real life just because I’m crippled. I can’t even begin to humor them by pretending to be that smart, even if I wanted to. My friend can probably pull that off because he’s a good actor. But not me. If everyone's expecting a genius, I'm bound to let them down.

I suppose it’s better that people expect cripples to be geniuses instead of smarmy little Tiny Tims and sideshow freaks. But not much

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Blind Pedestrians Versus Birds

 

Sometimes you can tell something is fake because it looks too real. Fake flowers are a good example. You can tell they’re fake right away because they look too perfect. They have no brown spots or any other flaws. Or how about wax fruit? You can tell it’s not fruit because it looks way too much like fruit.

There’s a street corner in Chicago where you can hear birds chirping all day and night, even in the dead of winter. But if you listen long enough you realize it’s bird sound effects because every time they chirp it’s the same number of chirps at the same cadence and the interval between flurries of chirps is always exactly the same.

On that same street corner there’s also a facility where blind people learn to walk the streets using white canes. So that makes sense. The bird sound effects come on whenever the WALK sign comes on at the traffic light so the blind people know it’s okay to cross the street.

But I wonder what happens if real birds chirp when the DON’T WALK sign is on. Blind people might wander out into traffic. Maybe whoever came up with the bird chirp idea is counting on blind people knowing the fake birds are fake because they sound too real.

But I wonder what happens if a parrot gets loose. A parrot could do a dead-on impression of the fake birds while the DON’T WALK sign is on, just so blind people will wander out into traffic. You know what smart asses parrots are.

Maybe,  just to be on the safe side, the signal that tells blind people it’s okay to cross the street ought to be something you never hear in the city, which rules out gun shots. How about a lion’s roar? If a real  lion gets loose, the blind people are screwed anyway.

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