Getting All Worked Up

Type A personalities abound. Hot blood roars through our veins like 100 octane coffee. We live like ADD addicts, hooked on anything we can get hot about. What’s life without getting all worked up about something?

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I first heard the phrase, ‘getting all worked up,’ in high school when my daddy advised against ‘going too far’ with my first girlfriend. At a reunion twenty years later I discovered his wisdom. Others didn’t. It pays to listen to daddy.

Small towns of the South function on idiomatic parlance. Big words are wasted, and one is branded ‘uppity.’ The hearer stands there, blank face, eyes glazed over, comprehending nothing. Replies consist of the usual utterance of guttural gibberish as, “Uh huh, uh huh.” Uh huh has been replaced by the half-witted maxim of, ‘How ‘bout them Dawgs?’ which says everything and means nothing.

This summer on the Georgia coast we pretty much moped around in a stupor, cursing the dull, drab, clammy days that dripped with humidity. Such conditions are worse than a gulp of yesterday’s leftover Mello Yellow. The only winners were hairdressers. Humidity is the mortal enemy of women’s hair. Salon owners now drive Mercedes.

The sun finally came out. My wife got all worked up on where to put our ashes, saying something about burdening the children. She worried that the prime urn plots at Christ Cemetery were fast disappearing. We had to act. Her sensibilities got the best of her. She failed to grasp the fact that ashes of this earthly tabernacle have less sensory perception than the plastic flowers that adorn the future event.

Then Trump shows up. He slithers through crowds wearing diamond cuff links a little larger than baseballs. I imagine him as a washed-up WWF wrestler wearing a too-tight red Speedo under his Armani suit. Apparently that’s what makes his neck bulge and his voice squeak while spewing his fascism and body-slamming Doc Carson off the ropes. Entertaining, yes, but like football in June, it’s too early to get carried away.

Trump’s running for President, you know. In the GOP, everybody’s running for president. How can anybody get worked up with that crowd of yesterday’s stale lineup of lackluster losers? The last dud of this ilk that we elected was an empty peanut hull and, who, unlike the Clintons, left the White House ignominiously in poverty. We should add to the insanity by writing in ourselves on the ballot.

As for Presidents, I preferred Nixon, a man you could get worked up about. He was a dapper fellow who knew subtlety and carried a switchblade. He would have been a match for Vladimir, egotistically and stealthily.

Nixon knew when to keep his shirt on and stay off horses. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and loved to record the sound of his own voice. No one should get all worked up on their own voice or their bare chest. Pride goeth before the fall.

I liked Lyndon, too. There’s something rousing about ruthless men. Plus, he wasn’t afraid of taking his shirt off. I doubt the sight of his chest produced an erotic adventure for anyone, but it did reveal a history lesson. His surgeon carved it up to resemble the DMZ in Viet Nam. Some legacies are novel as well as memorable. Like Caligula.

Without politics, the only option left is to sit around and read insipid news about the slowing economy, Russian world domination, the Clinton’s cash and declining test scores. Don’t laugh. Test scores are serious business. This news is enough to send you to the edge of your chair awaiting rapture. The children may never leave home!

Now ‘rapture’ is definitely something to get all worked up about. Word is that the advent of the largest full moon in 32 years is sending ripples of impending rapture among the select Baptist chosen. But keep that secret…it might bid up the price of grave plots.

Lately the press reports that contrary to all logic, pork is really red meat, not white meat, and all processed meat is carcinogenic. So long salami. The Meat Institute is all worked up on rebuttal of this idiocy. Big Pharma is grinning. After all, cancer is big money.

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As for me, I’m level-headed and not prone to protests. But my friends, eliminating bacon from the shelves is really something to get all worked up about. Are you with me?

Bud Hearn
October 30, 2015

The Infernal Boneyard

Today I woke up inside of a headache. A Randy Travis lament reverberated off the walls, “I’m digging up bones, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone…” Yes, it’s October 15th, deadline for deadbeat late tax filers, of whom I am chief.

It happens every year. It’s caused by anal retentive accountants who are in complicity with the IRS. Everything must balance, everything must reconcile. It’s a sickness unto death. They’re obsessive tyrants. They inflict grueling punishment with each unclassified check written.

My 2014 checkbook resembles an Accounting 101 practice set, volumes of undocumented scribbling, indecipherable numbers, missing check stubs and misplaced bank statements. The entire enterprise that it represents seems to be sustained by nothing but the thin air of hope and improbable promises.

The inside of a headache is like an insane asylum…a solitary padded room, cold, no windows, no door, no mini-bar, a concrete floor, a bed bolted to the wall and no room service. The only perk is a uni-sex toilet with no lid. I have a standing reservation there, made by my accountant. This year I vow a short occupancy in that hell by promising to prepare taxes on time. What a joke!

Here’s what transpires in this dungeon due to that irresponsible promise:


Every October finds me in the numbers boneyard,
There with my accountant, working on taxes.
We dig into checkbooks, files, transactions,
Sorting out details of last year’s train wreck.

Forensic tools lie in disarray.
A computer, red-ink pens, calculator, legal pads and laptops.
The conference table resembles an Operating Room,
A surreal stage to anatomically restructure the fiscal year.

We labor in lockstep while the IRS bell tolls.
The method is always the same. She digs deep,
Exposes the financial bones of last year’s transactions,
Facts without flesh, cold, dead, without feeling, impossible to recall.

We slog through the checkbooks, try to sort it out.
It’s drudgery, slow, agonizing and torturous work.
Her patience is short. She shoves. I sulk.
My memory escapes like steam from Yellowstone.

This check, that check, for what? For how much?
Every check is a mystery, prompting an interrogation.
You forget to code, to label, to balance, she says.
Your brain is a sieve, I work for an idiot. I agree.

My mind moans, like digging in red clay, hard and painful,
Fleshing out the bones of last-year’s debacles.
We break, take a reprieve from house arrest,
Walk to Starbucks, dragging our balls and chains.

The clock is an enemy in relentless pursuit, the incessant tick, tick, tick.

We continue the reconciling, resurrecting the corporate corpse.
This deal, that deal, they intertwine, twisting, turning,
Winding down an endless and tortuous road.
My mind spins cartwheels trying to assemble details.

Hours pass. The floor is cluttered with files scattered in random disarray.
Ledgers, checks and pizza scraps litter the room.
The table is a tornado aftermath, a primordial chaos.
We curse it and each other, but keep digging.

She threatens to resign. I threaten to accept. No one leaves.
Then, a breakthrough…one gets done, then another, a third, one more to go.
We can see the light…, until
She discovers some checks are missing.

Where are they? We panic, pound on the padded walls.
At wit’s end we call the bank, they lament the computers are down.
We fabricate the numbers, apply the sleight of hand.
The clock, prods with its tick, tick, tick.

The headache room shrinks, its walls close in.
Our heads throb, endless numbers swirl, demanding closure.
Long-term confinement looms.
So little time, always no time, always no time.

We abandon all hope of early release,
Incarcerated with last year’s bones.
By luck the banker calls,
Reconciliation is achieved at last.

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We break for beer, celebrate and come back for cleanup. I’d like to say we live happily ever after. But wait. She picks up a checkbook and notices missing checks for 2015. What’s this, she says?

I can see it coming. I sprint from the padded cell and yell, “Fresh graves for next year’s boneyard…it’s job security!” Her response echoes in my ears.


Bud Hearn
October 16, 2015

Sands of Time

Time is short. Opportunity is limited. Such is the wisdom of the hourglass.

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An hourglass sits on the table next to my morning coffee. It has no real function except to jump-start my mental focus until the coffee takes hold of the morning. In a speechless way, it’s superior to listening to Trump spewing vitriolic voodoo on marginalized Americans.

Today I recall words from Macdonald Carey, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of our Life.” They’re the epilogue of the TV episodes, Days of our Lives, that ran from 1966 to 1994. Miraculously, there’s still sand left in its hourglass. If you remember it, then your hourglass is running low on sand, too.

My mother never missed an episode of this soap opera on her 12-inch black and white TV. She’d sit with her cup of coffee or tea and allow herself to be subsumed into the lives of the actors. If you lived in a small South Georgia nowhere town, you’d find your own escape hatch from the insipid boredom of the place. Soaps are better addictions than alcohol, except at night.

Someone gave me this useless device. I asked why. They said it provided a better meditative process than the yogic Oom’s. Plus, they said, it wouldn’t disturb the household while I sit on the floor in lotus position clothed in a white Indian loincloth, making a fool of myself.

For portending the future, the hourglass is inferior to tarot cards, horoscopes or even fortune cookies. I once cracked open a fortune cookie in the Grand China Wall restaurant after consuming General Tso’s chicken, a delicacy that swam in a toxic pond of MSG. Bad days need clear direction. The tiny fortune inside simply read, “See Rock City.” Direction can come serendipitously from strange sources.

Today, the hourglass seems like a bad omen. I sit and watch as sands of time slip silently into the bowels of the hourglass. The sand leaves no trail but slides seamlessly through the narrow neck, settling itself into nothingness. Like time itself, it leaves no trail in its passing.

Unlike Sullivan’s theorem, ‘form follows function,’ it’s hard to say just what function an hourglass performs. It’s useless as a sand clock, unless one subscribes to the notion that it’s one of Plato’s Perfect Patterns. Never heard of his postulation?

The peripatetic philosopher’s hypothesis suggests that in the heavenly spheres there’s a perfect pattern of all things, of which on earth everything’s an imperfect replica. It’s hard to get a grip on esoterica. Plato obviously never observed Ole Miss Cheerleaders, or he would have seen the flaws in his speculation. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

There are some trivial uses of the hourglass. I once had a small but decorative one, a ten-minute timer. The glass was encased in brass. It substituted for a stopwatch for timing long-winded lawyers who charged by the word and boring preachers who tongue-lashed the faithful on the wages of sin.

Some say the hourglass is helpful for redeeming the time, an unproven and half-baked concept. Except in Mississippi, where the past is always present. Advise your redemption-adherent pals that Cryonics is still a work in progress. I doubt we’ll see Stalin or Mao rise from their glass encasement any time soon.

I feel some remorse for the hourglass. It’s become mostly irrelevant in this technological age. It’s still good for timing 3-minute eggs. It was formerly good for describing the bodily features of females. But alas, this use has run its course. American female figure shapes are now mostly described by fruit, particularly pears.

Perhaps the best use for the hourglass is in setting the mood for some figurative or poetic metaphor. Unfortunately, the only example that comes to mind is that time has run out in writing this moronic epistle.

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In the cosmic scheme of things, Time, if it exists at all, is measured by eons and not by grains of sand. As for us, well, it’s still dust unto dust…and it’s always later than we think.


Bud Hearn
October 2, 2015