Last night I drank the 1 pint 8 oz. keg of Heineken pictured above. The coconut monkey, a gift my dad bought for me when he was in Hawaii during the late 1980’s, is a sentimental keepsake and friend, and he’s also one of my best drinking buddies in the whole wide world. He is my Wilson on the stormy seas of life, and I will take him with me wherever I shall go (although he doesn’t have a name, how ironic is that?).
So anyway, I drank this mini keg and I became rather discursive, and in order to let the mental diarrhea seep out I made some refrigerator magnet poetry in the style of Shakespeare. No, I didn’t construct my refrigerator poem in iambic pentameter, but I stayed true to the immortal bard’s bawdiness, and if this poem doesn’t seem too abstract and you think you have some clue about what I’m trying to convey in it, then it may just increase blood flow and cause a tingling sensation in that special area of your anatomy.
Check it out:
Refrigerator magnet poetry and prose is a lifesaver at parties when you feel weird and uninteresting standing around and people keep walking around you and the beer confidence is doing very little to help your reticence. What is one to do in a situation like this? What you do is you walk over to the refrigerator and start moving little magnets with words and suffixes on them around and you begin placing them in a certain syntactical order. You begin conceptualizing a story or a poem which proves to party attendees that you are not in fact stupid but, provided the right medium, you can be smart, interesting, talented, funny, lustful and a whole lot of other things. This word ordering will be the perfect ice breaker to catapult you out of your 5th wheel status to temporary life of the party status. People will gather around you and marvel at what you are doing, and they will no doubt share any relevant related stories – e.g., how much they loved or hated reading Shakespeare in college, or how their friend has refrigerator magnets in German and Spanish. But probably the sweetest part is that you will leave graffiti on somebody’s refrigerator that will last long after the party has ended, thus leaving a lasting reminder of what a hit you were that night. And who knows - somebody may bump into you later on and remember you as the “refrigerator poem guy.”
I bought these Shakespearean refrigerator magnets when I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. five years ago with a group from my college. My Shakespeare professor organized the trip and he was very excited about being in the nation’s capital and seeing as much as he could see in the 1 1/2 days we spent there. He would point out things like the Smithsonian museum and announce what a shame it was that we didn’t have enough time to take a tour of it. He reverently led us through the Vietnam memorial, America’s wailing wall, past all the crying veterans who make the pilgrimage to DC just so they can touch the engraved names of lost friends or loved ones in order to commune with a part of their ghosts. It was my first trip to DC, and I admit that it was a lot to take in. What I will never forget is walking in front of the White House and marvelling at how it physically differed from my lifelong mental conception of it which was based on stock footage I had seen countless times on the news. Cameras give an added dimension to things making them look bigger, and I guess I was taken aback by how much “smaller” the White House actually was than I had previously thought.
But this is not what is most memorable about my DC trip, it is what happened next that will be a conversational font for years to come. As I was walking around, I took my shoulder bag off and placed it on a bench just yards from the entrance to the White House where George “Dubya” Bush was probably inside having a meeting with important leaders. It was very hot even though it was April, and I took off my long sleeve shirt and tied it around my waist. In order to do this I had to set my bag and headphones on the bench, and when I was done I picked up my headphones but carelessly forgot my shoulder bag. I started walking back to the hotel where my group was staying – we were supposed to be leaving in less than an hour – when it occurred to me that my bag was not secured to my shoulder. All of a sudden I had that frightening feeling that occurs only when you realize that, sometime and somewhere within the last couple of hours, you have lost either your wallet or your child. It is a terrifying feeling to say the least, and even though my bag was not as important as either of these things, I ascribed a lot of value to it because it contained all of the mementos I had purchased on my very first DC trip (like a “Anybody But Bush” button and tee-shirt from the Folger Library with a quote from II Henry IV which read, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”). I stopped in mid gait and stiffened as an icy chill shot through my body. I looked down at my side – no bag. I looked at my other side – no bag. I tried to retrace my steps. I remember just having it, where could I have left it? I ran back to a vendor who I bought a pretzel from just a minute ago. He didn’t see my bag. Oh crap! I kept running back in the direction I came from. Suddenly, up ahead, I could see sirens flashing, a lane of traffic was shut down, and sleek black official-looking cars were parked in the middle of the closed part of the street. Men with suits climbed out of the cars. One held a dog on a leash and another flourished a device that looked like an electronic wand. A helicopter circled overhead.
It took less than ten seconds to realize that my worst fears had come true - my unattended bag had posed a clear and present danger for the United States government and the citizens of Washington, D.C. Oh shit! I thought, I have just put the government on high alert! The previous day while visiting the Lincoln Memorial, we were all evacuated by police and security guards because a suspicious looking package was left in a corner behind the monolithic statue of our 16th president. The hundreds of people who had been enjoying the view from the steps of Lincoln’s perch all grunted and groaned as they lazily floated away like a congregation of vagrants forced to find somewhere else to camp. The suspicious package, we would soon learn, turned out to be a box abandoned by a homeless person. But if the War on Terror has taught me anything, it is that there are “soft” targets and there are more premium targets. The Lincoln Memorial is what would be considered a soft target because it is simply a famous landmark, it serves no governing or other vital function that might render its destruction a crippling blow to the nation’s important systems. But I had left my bag only a few yards from the rear entrance to the White House, the home of president George W. Bush and the ruling seat of one of world’s leading super powers! This is the most premium target a terrorist could ever hope to strike if he had the temerity to get close enough, and seeing what a stir the abandoned box had caused the day before at the Lincoln Memorial, I knew I was standing in a deep pile of shit when I saw the helicopters and dogs and important guys in suits.
As I approached the intersection where all the commotion was unfolding, I found a bike cop and quickly confessed my culpability. Surprisingly, he didn’t tackle me or pull out his gun and tell me to put my hands up. He took my name, license and social security number and radioed that information to someone who was probably sitting before a bank of the highest tech computer and video monitors in the world. That guy read the information back to the cop saying, “echo, T-I-M -F-R-E…” Meanwhile the helicopter circled overhead, its roaring blades disturbing the mid-day touristic peace just like a Lawn Boy disturbing the quiet calm of a suburban Saturday morning. I was shaking and nervous, envisioning Guantanamo Bay bedlam in my near future, and I was afraid to touch any of the buttons on the Walkman secured to my belt lest the sniper with the long range rifle who I couldn’t see blew my head off. It was a tense couple of minutes made all the more nerve-racking by the rudely impatient throngs of tourists who were overly eager to go on their White House tour. Not only had I gone and possibly shut down one of the most powerful governments on the planet with my forgetful carelessness, but I had also ruined the vacations of countless suburban moms and dads and their kids who I would most likely never see again (since I would die in a Cuban jail cell). So now, added to my fearful nervousness of being imminently and secretly tortured as an enemy combatant, was an embarrassment like no other. “Look at that idiot who shut down the government and spoiled our vacation,” people’s eyes appeared to say as they shook their heads and angrily stared at me, the fool who couldn’t even remember to keep his bag attached to his shoulder.
But luckily the cop had a lot of experience with these sorts of things. He was fairly understanding and I think he appreciated my honesty and cooperation. You see, the protectors of Washington, D.C. go on heightened alert every day – no, every half hour – or at least they did 5 years ago in the post 9/11 terrorist paranoia frenzy. Whenever a homeless person would leave a bag full of stuff at a landmark, or a government worker forgot his expensive briefcase in a subway terminal, or a stupid tourist like myself would accidentally leave their shoulder or shopping bags next to big important buildings, the capital’s police and secret service went into red alert and herded people away, cordoned off the area and sent in the dogs and guys with bomb detecting magic wands. And just like all of these routine bomb scares, my ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. Just as quickly as life in the nation’s capital had gone from calmly normal to imminently dire, everything reverted back to normal again. Traffic resumed, the tours commenced and the noisy helicopter flew away. I was a free man, completely forgiven and even felt sorry for by some people. As I walked away, a person in the crowd told me not to sweat it as these things are a daily occurence in D.C. It was a relief for me to learn that I would not be put on trial in a secret military court and labeled as a terrorist. Furthermore, I was glad that I didn’t cause anybody to miss out on their once-in-a-lifetime tour of the White House. I was even happier, however, that my little mishap didn’t interrupt the pundits on cable channels like MSNBC and CNN in the form of one of those live and late breaking aerial footage stories. I couldn’t stand the thought of my newly retired mom, an avid political junky who always keeps her TV tuned to the 24-hour news channels, watching my embarrassing horror unfold at her house hundreds of miles away in real time.
That would be the equivalent of her catching a glimpse of me drunk and stoned at a party constructing refrigerator magnet poetry and laughing with my friends and my coconut monkey which my dad bought for me when I was 11. I could just see her shaking her head and ruefully asking, “What did you do now?”
Awesome blog!
I thought about starting my own blog too but I’m just too lazy so, I guess I‘ll just have to keep checking yours out.
LOL,