I’m sitting here in my big, comfortable, black leather pappa chair in my living room, with a left arm full of flu. I haven’t been feeling great, so the doctor sent me for a blood test first. When they were sure they got all the blood out of my arm, they injected a gallon or so of the flu into my arm…to keep me from getting the flu. Have you noticed that whenever you’re not feeling good, they send you for a blood test? Maybe they figure all the germs and stuff are in your blood. So they take all the blood out of you, to make you well. Then they figure if they put the flu shot in your arm, when you don’t have any blood in there the flu can’t get into your blood…because there isn’t any…so the flu goo they put in your empty arm won’t make you sick.
The blood tests aren’t really so bad. At least they’re private. They take you into a little room that’s painted red to hide the mistakes, then they stick a needle about the size of the Holland Tunnel into a vein and start the pump. It’s not comfortable but it’s private. Not like the urine test, which requires that you come out of the men’s room with that little cup in your hand, and walk past three nuns, a hooters girl, the guy who keeps complaining about the three bullet holes in his leg, a five year old who wants to know what you have in the little cup, a kid in a football uniform with something that looks suspiciously like a bone sticking up out of the left arm of his jersey, and your main client’s human resources vice president.
There’s only one reason we do this. It’s because we want to be healthy so we can look young until we die, which is not easy because we don’t want to die young.
It makes you wonder whether the guy in the sky who’s running all this is paying any attention. I don’t mean any disrespect for God, but is this the way you’d have made the world if it were up to you? In order to live, everything has to eat something else that’s living…just minding it’s own business, just living, and looking for something else to eat…something that’s walking around living, trying to find something else that’s even more confused about life… to eat.
Our scientists in white lab coats say we’re the top of the food chain. We humans are the guys nobody else gets to eat. I guess they obviously don’t know anything about mosquitoes. And what’s with this flu bug ? What’s he eat ?
I think we’ve ticked God off. Maybe it’s because we don’t even pay enough attention to Him to give him a name. “God” is not a name. It’s a job description. In the old days, people paid enough attention to the guy in the sky to give him…or her… names. You had Zeus, and Thor, and Athena. Maybe we should start a drive to find an appropriate name for our God. Dick wouldn’t be a bad start… but it lacks a certain amount of magesty. How about, “The Bopper.” Naah. Too hip. There are times…like when my Lady Wonder Wench got hurt, when I’ve thought “The Trickster” would be appropriate. But I guess that’s not respectful enough.
Some people seem to think of Him as kind of a puppeteer…just pulling on our strings. For me, He’s more like a Ventriloquist… because sometimes I can’t help myself…I’ve just got to talk back. Maybe that’s why he sent me mosquitoes…and the flu.
Dick’s Details Quiz. All answers are in the current podcast.
1- In what Bowl do the folks in Green Bay Wisconsin play after the football season ?
2- How do an average of two Americans a year go out with a bang ?
3- What’s the only letter in the alphabet with a name that’s two syllables ?
Dick’s Details. They take your mind off your mind.
I hope you don’t get the wrong idea…I have no intention of being disrespectful to God, or the people who know and love Him. The idea of an Almighty Being is just too big for me to understand. Big Louie, his own bad self, the Chief Mustard Cutter of the Louie-Louie Generation has been trying to explain it to me. “He says, God is more powerful than mom and dad put together.” I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty heavy duty idea to me.
I just spend my life taking care of the people I love, and trying to figure out what I really want to do when I grow up, before I get too old to do it. I’ve had some really great jobs in my life, and I’ve successfully avoided some really bad ones. Like being president of the United States…which has a lot in common with being a hockey goalie. You make a mistake, and a big red light starts flashing, a horn blasts your eardrums inside out, and a billion people holler boo.
But on the other hand, I do believe that if you’re the kind of guy who likes to keep score…you should bust a gut to win. And if you don’t…well…Big Louie always says, failure isn’t permanent, and neither is success. So I figure I want to live my life to the full extent of the law. And there’s no law against being annoying. Maybe that’s why I decided to become a disc jockey all those years ago.
There’s a story in the Bedtime Stories personal audio cd, that’s kind of a souvenir of those days. Actually those nights. A friend of mine recorded it from my show in New York one night …when my Lady Wonder Wench was in Massachusetts all those years ago. It’s called, I Miss You. That was a long time ago. And it will never happen again. If you like it, you can just keep the podcast, Or if you want a fresh copy, just go back to the home page and download it from the Bedtime Stories icon.
It’s kind of weird thinking about the fact that I have an arm full of the flu where once I had some blood. Of course lots of people probably had a needle in the arm and shot of flu goo today. So let me leave you with one comforting thought. Every time lots of us get a flu shot, there’s a voodoo doll somewhere out there having a really bad day.