SMART ASS CRIPPLE STORE NOW OPEN AT lulu.com

I hope you'll do some shopping at the Smart Ass Cripple store at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/smartasscripple

Please spread the word to everyone you know who can read.

 

Smart Ass Cripple's Little Yellow Book By Mike Ervin

The Clown Prince of Crippledom strikes again! More humorous (and short) essays about being crippled and other stuff.

And don't forget (as much as you may want to) 

Smart Ass Cripple's Little Red Book By Mike Ervin

Everybody loves a cripple but everybody hates a smart ass. 

I Was Forcibly Sterilized by the State of North Carolina and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

If a cripple who was sterilized by the state without their informed consent collects financial restitution from the state, it will put everyone else in an awkward social position. We won’t know how to react to them.

My first instinct would be to congratulate that cripple, maybe throw them a party. Maybe even a surprise party. They come home after picking up their restitution check and we all jump out from behind the furniture.

But maybe that’s inappropriate. I don’t know. How would one decorate for such a party? Balloons and streamers? It just doesn’t seem right. Should there be cake? What would one write on that cake? The party store consultant would be stumped.

This isn’t clear cut. It’s not like winning the World Series. I don’t think when you finally receive your sterilization restitution check the first thing you do is pour champagne all over your head. It’s not like winning the lottery. The lottery is free money. There’s no ambiguity to spoil it all.

Maybe the party should be a somber affair, something with black armbands. It’s like those stories we hear where a guy goes in to get his wisdom teeth pulled and somehow ends up castrated. Even if a jury awards the guy $10 million, it’s hard to feel envious.

Well, the state of North Carolina went berserk sterilizing cripples from 1929 all the way up to 1974. About 7,600 people were sterilized by “choice,” force or coercion under the authority of the N.C. Eugenics Board. The program was originally intended to keep cripples like those with epilepsy and “feeblemindedness” from reproducing more of their degenerate kind. A lot of the victims lived in state institutions. But eventually the program was expanded to include other undesirables, a lot of whom were poor women of color.   This tells us that the N.C. Eugenics Board surely was composed of white, uncrippled males with money.

There was a time when these cripple sterilization campaigns we going on in a lot of states. About 10 years ago, surviving victims started speaking up in North Carolina. In 2002, the governor apologized on behalf of the state. Earlier this year, a task force created by the current governor decided each living victim should receive $50,000. So the governor included $20 million to pay for restitution in her budget and the republican-controlled House concurred.  Ah but then the dear republican-controlled Senate shot it all down. The victims get squat.

Republican Senator Don East said, “It doesn’t change anything — if they’re sterile, they’re still sterile.” He said, "I'm so sorry it happened, but throwing money don't change it.”

Money doesn’t make any difference? Let’s take a quick poll: Which would you prefer?

a) Be forcibly sterilized and have $50,000

b) Be forcibly sterilized and not have $50,000

Who chooses option a? Need I count hands? Can we just call it unanimous?

So anyway, the rest of us dodged a bullet there. We won’t have to figure out the proper way to react to restituted victims. We don’t have to add a new chapter to our social etiquette books just yet.

I don’t know what’s next. Maybe the state Senate will at least appropriate enough to buy each survivor a t-shirt. We all know what the shirt will say.

That Which Comes From a Horse's Ass

I’ve met a ton of blind people in my life. (But actually, when I stop and do the math, I realize that statement is quite untrue. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that every blind person I’ve met weighed, on average, 150 pounds. It would only take 13.3333333333333333333333333 blind people of that standard stature to compose one ton of blind people. I’ve met a helluva lot more than 13.3333333333333333333333333 blind people. So let me start this again.)

I’ve met several tons of blind people in my life. I believe I can safely state without fear of contradiction that there’s one thing they have in common with the sighted majority: When they go to restaurants and other public establishments, they don’t like there to be piles of horse shit scattered about.

But then again, I could be wrong. Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) seems to know something about blind people that nobody else knows. Perhaps he’s conducted some independent research.

Over the past decade or so, some blind people have started using trained miniature horses rather than dogs to lead them around. These horses are usually about the same size as guide dogs. One of their advantages is that these horses live up to three times as long as dogs.

So last spring, the U.S. Department of Justice issued rules under the Americans with Disabilities Act stating that those with guide horses cannot be denied entry into restaurants and other public establishments. Chaffetz was outraged and slapped onto the DoJ appropriation bill an amendment “to prohibit the use of funds to implement a section of the Americans with Disabilities Act which allows miniature horses to be used as service animals.” Chaffetz wrote that DoJ stuck small businesses with this job-killing regulation “despite the difficulty (some would say impossibility) of housebreaking a horse…”

Chaffetz is protecting us all from those blind people who are so selfish and full of disregard for others, so warped by bitterness and their wanton sense of entitlement that wherever they go they brazenly leave behind a trail of road apples. Now logic would conclude that if horses couldn’t be housebroken, blind people wouldn’t use them. Because logic would also conclude that however deep Chaffetz’s aversion to encountering piles of horse shit may be, blind people feel that same aversion 10 times deeper. At least Chaffetz can see an upcoming pile, which gives him the option of sidestepping. Blind people may not discover such landmines until it’s too late.

But, like I said, maybe Chaffetz is privy to shocking new information that redefines America’s image of blind people. Maybe he chaired a Congressional hearing on horse shit, where he heard heart-wrenching horror stories from victims of unhousebroken guide horses

So I asked Chaffetz’s press person to please send me any evidence on which he based his claim. All I received was something from foxnews.com quoting one Angelo Amador as saying, "You cannot train a horse ... housebreak them like you would do with a dog."  Amador is vice president of the National Restaurant Association. 

Now I know what my wise old grandmother meant when she told me, “Always remember that there are two kinds of horse shit. There’s the kind God creates, which comes out of horses. And there’s the kind humans create, which comes out of some politicians.”

Socializationing Roger

I can’t look at centerfolds anymore. It makes me all nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Centerfolds remind me of those heady days right after the revolution. It was in the 1970s and 80s, when the cripples around here seized control of the means of partying.

 As a lad slowly transitioning from teens to 20s, from high school to college and beyond, partying was at the top of my personal civil right agenda. And it was painfully evident that if cripples were ever going to party in a satisfying manner, we would have to throw our own parties. It seemed like when the verticals organized parties for us, they turned out lame ass.

There were several warning signs of a lame ass party. First and foremost were clowns. Clowns all over the place. And the entertainment was lame ass, too, like an accordion player or a magician or a ventriloquist or mimes! Oh God! Mimes!

And cripples were referred to as patients. “Bring those patients over here.” And one time at a lame ass party at a VFW hall, Sullivan and his friend Danny Martin went to the bar and ordered beers. The bartender gave Martin his beer no problem because Martin is a vert. But not Sullivan. “I’m not allowed to serve alcohol to patients,” the bartender said to Martin.

Shit like that prompted some folks around here to form a non-profit called Horizon, with the mission of “socialization of the handicapped.” Socialization was a handy word to use since you couldn’t really say your mission was to organize cripples to throw parties that weren’t lame ass. Horizon had parties in VFW halls, too. But there was no way we’d allow in any damn clown, unless, as the evening's entertainment, we planned to chloroform him, tie him to a car bumper and drag him through the town square just to make an example out of him. The entertainment would be like a garage band or something—still lame ass but in a much better sense. And nobody called anybody patients. And most of all, the bar was open to all adults.

A Horizon “socialization opportunity” might go on for several days, as with “winter camp,” where we rented out a summer camp venue and threw a New Year’s Eve party that began days before New Year’s Eve. Or a “socialization opportunity” might just be a night out with the boys. Roger was a guy badly in need of this sort of socialization. He was a truck driver just a few years earlier but Lou Gehrig’s disease was kicking his ass pretty bad. He sat ridged in a manual wheelchair, strapped in at several points. He couldn’t move his arms. He sometimes wore a cervical collar to hold up his head.

So sometimes we’d pick up Roger in my cripple van and go to a bar or a pizza joint or a gentlemen’s club. Roger gave us all great insight into what it’s like living with Lou Gehrig’s during a conversation about our wangers. Whenever guys go out socializationing, inevitably they talk about their wangers. Someone issued a challenge for everyone to name their wanger after a poet. Naturally, I chose Longfellow. Jim Liptak chose Pound because that’s what his weighs, he said. Sullivan couldn’t think of a poet name for his wanger so we assigned him one: Doolittle. Roger couldn’t think of a fitting poet name either, but he said he would never disparage his wanger because he appreciated its undying loyalty. “It‘s the only thing that still works,” he said, gasping out a laugh.

When we brought Roger home his dad greeted us. I remember Roger's dad as dressed in a wife-beater undershirt, beer-bellied , burly arms all hairy and tattooed. To show his appreciation, Roger’s dad insisted on handing us an armload of raunchy centerfolds. “ I get ‘em for free,” he said. His job, for the last 30 years, was working at a printing company. Some of their best clients were publishers of raunchy magazines.

We tried to tell Roger’s  dad thanks but no thanks. But it was clear that we would hurt his feeling if we didn’t accept his token of gratitude. Centerfolds were his currency.

Smartass Cripple Appreciation Month

I’m delighted to announce that December is the first annual Smartass Cripple Appreciation Month, by executive order of none other than the President these United States of America.

I can hear you asking how the hell something like that came about. It wasn’t easy. But the president was determined to make it happen. Let’s just say that after he was re-elected, he knew he owed me big time. At first he tried to do it the old fashioned way. He tried to get a bill establishing Smartass Cripple Appreciation Month passed through Congress. He tried a shrewd trick. The bill established December as Boy Scouts of America Appreciation Month. And once the bill got to his desk his planned to invoke an obscure Constitutional provision empowering him to cross out every mention of Boy Scouts of America and write in Smartass Cripple instead. The president chose this strategy because he knew that about the only bill that could possibly win the approval of the staunch republican opposition was one declaring the nation’s undying gratitude for the Boy Scouts of America. But he was wrong. The bill was filibustered to death.

So the president circumvented Congress. He took the exact language (except with every mention of Boy Scouts of America crossed out and Smartass Cripple written in instead) and issued an executive order “declaring the nation’s undying gratitude for Smartass Cripple.” So every December beginning this year, all citizens are called upon to “remember and honor the indispensible contributions Smartass Cripple has made to the enrichment of American society.”  Thus, “government agencies, community organizations, schools, museums, cultural entities, institutes of higher learning , houses of worship and ordinary citizens are urged to organize  displays, parades, exhibits, school assemblies and other events that honor Smartass Cripple.”

I had to make one small compromise. It seems that the Acronym Clause of the U.S. Constitution requires the title of every law and initiative of the federal government to form a catchy acronym, such as the PATRIOT Act. So I agreed to be known as Smartass Cripple instead of Smart Ass Cripple so that Smartass Cripple Appreciation Month can simply be referred to as SCAM.

This SCAM is a dream come true for me because I suffer from severe attention deficit. In other words, I can never get enough attention. I’m ragingly insecure. I need constant reinforcement. I’m almost as insecure as Jesus. I mean hell, that guy’s got a whole genre of music dedicated exclusively to proclaiming how wonderful he is. And he still wants more praise.

This is all the result of how my mother raised me. She must’ve somehow known in her bones that because my sister and I were crippled, our egos would take a helluva lot of body blows. We’d be told all the time that we couldn’t go here and there and we couldn’t do this and that. So she  figured that in order to cancel out all that bullshit and give us a chance of breaking even emotionally, she’d practically have to raise a couple of narcissists.

She always told us we were the best. She made us homemade Halloween costumes, measuring us like a tailor, so we’d win the best costume prize. She thought making a kid wear a store-bought Halloween costume was akin to child abuse. One year I was a prize-winning robot. My clunky, flat, metallic robot shoes were two shoe boxes wrapped in aluminum foil.

My mother laughed at my kid jokes. And that’s no small task. Just ask my wife. I’m still a laugh whore, hurling jokes at the wall and hoping some will stick. It’s sad. My wife is looking for some kind of respite service where someone can come into our home even if just for a few hours a week and politely pretend to listen to my jokes so she can take a break. I must have driven my mother to a state of exhaustion with my incessant knock knock jokes, which demand audience participation.

My mother is gone now and it takes a whole lot of people to stoke up my battered crippled ego as well as she did. So I’m anxious to see the many ways in which my fellow Americans rise to the occasion. If you’re inspired to put together a SCAM activity but you’re overwhelmed by the myriad of possibilities, I urge you to just listen to your heart.

But if you still need ideas, one SCAM thing you could do is form a humanitarian organization called Habitat for Smart Ass Cripple and mobilize volunteers to build houses for me. That would prove you love me.

Or if you’re a music composer, you could create a new genre of music dedicated exclusively to proclaiming how wonderful I am. That would give me enough confidence and affirmation to hold my head high and carry on proudly, for a month or two.

Born Again

I’ve studied all the great philosophers and I’ve decided my favorite philosopher is Henny Youngman. And my favorite Henny Youngman quote is, “I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.”

Professor Youngman makes an excellent point. How come the atheist activists you see on the news fighting against stuff like public nativity scenes always seem so dour? Atheists ought to have parades and celebrations just like everybody else.  Atheists have a lot to celebrate. Being a born again atheist feels quite liberating. It’s like finding yourself suddenly debt free. And you can stop worrying about silly shit like whether or not life is meaningless. Who cares? Even if you determine that life itself is meaningless, that doesn’t mean your life therefore has to be meaningless, too. It’s not an undertow. If staring at a piece of concrete all day gives your life meaning, then your life isn’t meaningless. You’re free to find meaning in whatever you want.

And who says born again atheists can’t believe in miracles? Inside my skull is this grayish glob. It looks like a head of cauliflower or a hunk of putty sent through a meat grinder. Inside this glob there are constant thunderstorms going on.  This glob barks out orders all day and all night. It never takes a break. It’s telling me to write this right now. And this glob is so damn demanding. It insists on a constant supply of oxygen and if it doesn’t get it, even for a few minutes, it will shut this whole operation down. There’s this other blob of membranes in my chest. It beats and beats and it never stops, all in the loyal service of pleasing the tyrannical glob. The beating blob is the slave shoveling coal into the furnace. Someday it will become too fed up or exhausted to continue.

The point is, all that is a fucking miracle.

And there’s also a certain sense of relief that comes with acknowledging the indifference of the universe toward humans. Suppose a tornado blows away your hometown. If you are the center of the universe and the point of all creation, then you have to wonder what you did to piss off the universe so bad that it blew away your hometown. But if the universe is indifferent, you don’t have to torture yourself like that because you know that whatever happens, it’s nothing personal. It’s all just business.

But what if atheists did come out to the point where they had some kind of big atheist holiday celebration on the scale of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, balloons and all? It might be dangerous.  I’ve always been tempted to conduct an experiment. First I’ll buy a battered, rusted wreck of a car. But I won’t drive it anywhere. I’ll park it and put vanity license plates on it that say ATHEIST of even 8THEIST.  And then I’ll see how long it is before the windows are broken or the tires are slashed.

An atheist holiday might cause a riot.

Buzz

We were riding in my van down Lake Shore Drive late on a summer night—Sullivan in the passenger seat, me in back and I forget who was driving. We hear this buzz, growing louder. A buzz like a swarm of mad hornets. Suddenly, we’re surrounded by motorcycles—engulfed in a wave of Harleys. There must have been 100 bikers. And they looked like they meant business. Badass Hell’s Angels types.

We were worried. Were they headed for a rumble? Would a rival gang approach from the south and then we would find ourselves trapped in the middle of a bloodbath? This was a dangerous situation

Everybody stopped for a red light. Sullivan couldn’t help himself. He rolled down the window and said to the biker next to us, “Hey! What’re you guys doing?”

And the badass biker replied, “We’re raising money for Jerry’s Kids!”

The light changed and they all sped off.

 I see now that this brief moment in time was a golden networking opportunity that I will never get again. I blew it. I should have had Sullivan get that biker’s business card. Because if they’re all so disposed to helping cripples, I sure as hell can keep them busy.

Hell, I could wear their altruism down to a frazzle in Washington alone. There’s not a session of Congress that goes by without somebody trying to fuck with the cripples. I think the bikers would be excellent lobbyists for us. Picture some cocky little weasel like Paul Ryan sitting at his desk and all of a sudden in walk a hundred bikers. They wouldn’t have to do anything overtly intimidating. Just sit down like every other citizen and have a cordial policy discussion with a legislator: “We want to talk to you about your plan to convert Medicaid into block grants," says the leader of the pack.  "That makes the cripples unhappy. And when the cripples are unhappy, we’re unhappy.” 

That ought to do the trick. And we could also use their help with the Supreme Court because they always seem to have a case on the docket where the cripples are in the cross hairs. The bikers would just have to sit quietly in the gallery during arguments and at some point hold up a sign that says DON’T FUCK WITH THE CRIPPLES. As plan B, in case their sign is confiscated by security, they each paint a letter on their chest, lineup in order, remove their shirts in unison like morons at a football game and spell out the same message: D-O-N-. They can skip the apostrophe.

It might be harder for the leader of the motorcycle pack to mobilize the underlings. It will take a lot more explaining:

LEADER: All right listen up. The Supreme Court has granted cert in the case of Maxwell v. Weisenheimer, in which the state of North Dakota contends that the integration mandate of the Americans With Disabilities Act doesn’t apply to individuals being served under the 1619(b) waiver. And that’s bullshit! So we gotta get out there!

UNDERLING: Can’t we just do Jerry’s Kids again?

But wouldn’t that be a beautiful world? Someone rolls down the window at a red light and asks a biker what’s going on and he says, “We’re going to the state capitol to tell the Attorney General to sign on to a fucking amicus brief! Because the Supreme Court has granted cert in the case of Maxwell v.Weisenheimer, in which the state of North Dakota contends that…”

But that will never happen. First off, in order to be effective these days, your message has to be succinct. Our attention spans are as short as our red lights. And second off, I never got that biker’s business card so I blew it.