Hobby Blues

I spent a handful of days begging the NSA to give me demographics, and conducted an exhaustive data mining campaign through such accurate records as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook and Wikipedia. I collected all the information, ran it through Excel, and discovered that I was the only person in the world without a single hobby. So that’s why I hate joining online communities and neighborhood watch organizations: they always want to know what my hobbies are, and when I leave it blank, they automatically assume that I’m some sort of social outcast or perhaps a person with a slow mind. Mine is most certainly not slow – it’s deliberate. There’s a difference. I deliberately leave it blank because I’m certain I have no hobbies. Notta one. You could beat me to the brink of death, but you’ll never squeeze a hobby out of me. It just ain’t there. If you want, I can act stupid, though. I’ve been told I do it quite well. Doctors say it has its roots in an incident that happened Thursday, September 9th, 1999 involving the accidental ingestion of a hallucinatory mushroom, in which I wrote fifteen novels in 84 hours. Boy, was that stupid. I wrote it in Cantonese. Unfortunately, I can’t read a single word of Cantonese. See what happens when you don’t have a hobby?

If I gave you a list of indoor and outdoor hobbies that I have no skill or interest in, it would stretch just past Neptune and contain 314 trillion terabytes of hard drive space. I just made that up, but it’s so awesome it could be true. I’ve attempted scores of them but have failed miserably. For instance, I tried my hand at gardening once; tried growing watermelons. They came out the size of Skittles. I did learn, though, that fried chicken doesn’t grow from the ground. I planted a extra crispy leg once. All that came up was a lousy wing. Then there was the whole magic phase of my life. Only trick I could pull off was turning food into poop. I learned the art of soapmaking, but kept coming out with jell-o on a string. I gave juggling a whirl; come to find out it the same thing as keeping up with seven kids and three ex-wives. My therapy bill is too high for me to go through something like that again.  I thought about getting into woodworking, but that whole ‘work’ thing scared me off. I tried bird watching until a flock of rogue seagulls stole my binoculars and McDonald’s fries. How was I to know fries were their favorite food? I gave hunting a try. Best sleep I ever had was in a tree stand. Then there was my attempt to take up cooking. No matter what I did, no matter what kind of exotic dishes I tried to make, it always ended up being meatloaf. Don’t get me wrong. I love meatloaf. It just gets old after awhile. At some point they make for great door stops, too, but I don’t want to start a door stop collection. Without fail every single hobby I’ve attempted has blown up in my face. Which reminds me of that chemistry set my cousin Matt Self and I blew up 45 years ago. Debris still falls from the sky.

I gave a go at collecting, having heard that is a hobby as well. You know me, though. I’m not your average stamp, baseball card, porcelain doll collector. I managed to amass quite a few finger bones until the police came and took them away. Spoilsports. I do have quite an extensive library of books, but I wouldn’t call it a hobby. My therapist calls it hording. I amassed a rock collection during my childhood. Well, it was coal, and it was over a span of several Christmas’s when I just happened to make ‘somebody’s’ naughty list. Did you know you can hide a lump of coal in a snowball and do some serious damage to younger kids?

Seems the only thing I can do well that even remotely resembles a hobby is writing, and I seriously suspect anyone who suggests it is. Hobbies are supposed to be relaxing, and writing is anything but. All those prepositional phrases and dangling participles. Poems are brutal. Try finding a word that rhymes with ‘rabbit’ and isn’t ‘habit’. Don’t even get me started on ‘orange,’ either. I’d rather swim naked in a cactus garden. Actually, cactus swimming in the nude can be quite adventurous. Not even that is a hobby, though.

I should just face the fact that I have no hobbies whatsoever. Well, I take that back. I do enjoy a good outing with the dog on a scat expedition. She’s got a much better nose for it than I. Usually I just photograph it, check it’s taste, texture and temperature and then move on to let Mother Nature have it. Sometimes, though, a particular scatalogical specimen comes along that defies logic (that was a scat joke: ‘logic: log-ic, you know, like an icky log… never mind. It’s really an insider’s joke, anyway.), and I make sure to get a sample of it for extensive testing purposes. When I’m done cataloguing, analyzing and sniffing (to name just a few pseudo-scientific techniques) I always donate the dung to the nearest zoo’s monkey house for flinging purposes. Even then I wouldn’t call this a hobby. It’s a passion. That’s right: to a scatologist, poo is a passion fruit.

But I digress. (as I usually do when I start in on crap) Hobbies are something alien to me. So if you ever come across a biography about me and see the heading “Hobbies,” expect to find my writing under it with the words “Yeah, about that…” Now let me get off my hobby horse before the grammar Nazi returns to check my writing. Happy habits to you!

Where There’s Smoke

Without looking up from her dinner, my wife said to me, “I heard you belched in the choir Sunday. I’m mortified.”

This came as a surprise, as she didn’t go to church with me Sunday, and we live a dozen miles away from the chapel. I was afraid to ask her how she was able to hear me from that distance. I mean, it was kind of loud, but certainly not twelve miles loud. She must have some sort of supernatural connection to me. She knows everything. Just last month I was in my study and she was next door in the bedroom. I farted, and immediately she confirmed it. “You just farted. How disgusting.” She didn’t even wait for the smell to waft in there.

I immediately became defensive. “How do you know it was me that farted? It could have been the dog.” I do blame the dog for everything.

“Because I can tell your fart in a crowd, that’s why.” All those times, and she knew it was me.

Well, that got me thinking. I am the world’s foremost amateur scatologist, and farts, although not technically scat, are definitely part of the terminal digestion cycle. You know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Sometimes after eating Mexican food I believe I could take a blanket and use my farts as smoke signals to recite the Gettysburg Address. But back to the story at hand. (AT hand, not IN hand) I wondered if wives actually can tell their husband’s farts in a crowd of men. They certainly all sound the same to me. This calls for a scientific study, don’t you think?

I’m drafting up an abstract for a study proposal to distribute around the leading Universities in hope of nailing a grant. I also intend on submitting it to Kickstarter, too. The key to success is proliferation. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had the key to success once but dropped it in the toilet. I wasn’t about to arm wrestle the other things in there for it. Anyway, I’m preparing a proposal on the subject, but I’m not waiting for acceptance and funding. There are thinkers and there are doers. Another scatology joke.

I put an ad in the paper: “Men married over twenty years needed for scientific study. Contact Dr. Harding at 256-349-8992.” Hey, if I can become a minister in the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, I can call myself a doctor. I immediately began getting phone calls from guys asking what the study was and what they would get out of it. I cryptically explained that it was a fart study and they would be rewarded in good food. Before long I had the crowd I needed.

My plan was to feed them one at a time and then record their farts. Could you imagine the mayhem that would ensue if I fed them all at once? I’ve seen a single fart melt plastic. I shudder to think what would happen if a crowd of men farted all at once. So I made appointments for each of them to come in, and then began preparing the fart-inducing foods they would need to ingest. I made beans of all kinds: baked, butter, black-eyed, garbanzo – you name it. I just had to make sure they were the kind that carried the sugar raffinose, the ingredient in beans that brings out the gassiness. I’ve done my homework, y’all. Raw cauliflower and broccoli have the same ingredient, so I made sure to include lots of ranch dressing. Thank you, Hidden Valley, for the free samples, btw. All in the name of science. I prepared every conceivable kind of dairy product because lactose makes for great farts. I had cottage cheese running out of my ears. Literally. Carbonated drinks also cause tons of gas, so I picked up two liters of everything. Meat also aids in the fart process because it slows digestion, giving fart-rich bacteria time to grow, and meat also produces sulfur, which makes farts smell worse. That’s just a bonus. To top it off I included pickled eggs and beer, two food items that always seem to work for me.

Well, these guys started coming in for their appointments, and they ate large quantities of the food I had laid out like a smorgasbord (note the word ‘gas’ in ‘smorgasbord’). And I recorded their farts. Every last one. I may never recover, but at least I will have given my life to science. Then I made a compilation of all their farts (it is actually quite soothing to the ears) and took the recording to each of their wives. You know what the outcome was. I was beaten severely by rolling pins, vacuum cleaners, sharp-fanged Chihuahuas and a wide array of household items. Women can be so cruel.

I consider this a minor setback, though. Once my study is funded, I think I’ll be able to bribe the wives into actually listening to the tape. If not, at least I can mass produce the recording and sell it as Swiss whale calls. It certainly puts me to sleep.