The Dog's Blog: There Once Was a Man From Nantucket

Man, did Dougie mess up this time. I asked him to sign me up to speak at a local pottery club here in Honolulu, so that I could catch tokers mistaking ‘pottery’ for a place to buy pot, and maybe pay a few extra bills by getting these chronic cases to clear up their outstanding violations. Instead, Doug signs me up for a British and Irish academic poetry conference being held in Honolulu. Why the hell they’d hold it here is beyond me, but they did, and I went, and I made a royal horse’s ass out of myself.

Two weeks before the conference a letter arrives in the mail telling me I’m going to be part of a panel titled, “Transgression and Liminal Space in the Geography of the Poems of Dylan Thomas.” Two of my little guys are sitting there when I tried to read this and instead I blurted, “Transgremlins and lentils in space. Is this a movie title? Did we get free tickets to a movie?” I tried to keep reading but my brain hurt, and the little guys are crying because they think they’re going to see a movie about spaceships and gremlins and a specific type of bean, so I get Doug on the phone ready to tear a strip off him, and in classic fashion he tells me about the mix up, but that everything will be fine, and that I should call that brainiac nephew of mine to help me out.

They don't call him "Doug The Shrug" for nothing

So I call up Bernie my nephew, and he tells me all about how his Masters studies are going well, blah, blah, blah, brain, brain, brain, ideas, ideas, ideas, and then when he’s done spouting, he gives me advice that I should find a poem I can relate to, try to find some meaning in it, and that great poems often reflect the cultural troubles and trials in which they were written. I didn’t know what he meant by ‘trials’, like if I found a poem written in 1995, no matter what it’s about it’s really about O.J. Simpson? He also told me to be friendly and make my presentation personable.

I didn’t ask him to help me out more, because quite frankly he’s the outcast of the family for being so smart. We Chapman’s got nothing against brains, but we’re convinced Bernie’s gonna end up fighting whoever ends up being Bernie’s generation’s John McLean in a Die Hard/skyscraper hijacking-type situation. Yeah, Bernie’s that smart.

Anyways, I end up at the conference, and this is what I came up with for my speech:

“As we’ve all loved and laughed through the years, we’ve often thought of Poet Laureate Virginia “The” Wolf’’s poem about Art, Gene, and Joe. Presumably, Art, Gene, and Joe are friends, though the poem doesn’t tell us much. That is, until that fateful day when they were written about in this poem, and “Art, Art blew a fart, and blew the whole damn thing apart.” All I can say is, poor Gene who built the machine, and poor Joe who made it go.

So what’s this poem about? It’s about ingenuity, compromise, and a fart that ruined everything. Did Art eat something particularly farty that day? Was his belt too tight? Did he aim his butt directly at the machine, or did the reverberation blow the machine about from a distance? The Wolf leaves us with many big questions, some bigger than Art’s fart, but very few answers. Personally, I think Gene was abused as a child, and Joe was the abuser. I also think it’s a poem about racism. It’s also a poem about machines, and how they’ll take over the world if you don’t fart them apart. So it’s about friendships, farts, racism, sexual abuse, and blowing machines apart. Thank you.”

Sheesh, were the panelists a bunch of jerks. I wanted to crawl under my chair and hide, or would’a rather been sitting in an air conditioned movie theatre watching ‘Transgremlins and Lentils in Space,’ but instead I just stood there feeling dumb. Some pencil pushers asked some questions, I had no idea what words were coming out of their mouth, the session ended, I skipped lunch, and was back at work by 1pm. Gene, Joe, and Art can rot as far as I’m concerned, and so can Doug until he gets his act together. This is the second time he’s on “Dog Watch” in two weeks