Joe Cillo

JEALOUS DOGS

It turns out that Fido not only wants to be your best friend;  he wants to be your ONLY friend. A California study discovered that your little puppy is very possessive and is determined to own you exclusively.

This kind of affection can be adorable in a toy poodle, but can be not only alarming but dangerous in a larger pet.   I baby-sat a wolfhound named Jack some years ago who fell madly in love with me.  Jack weighed upwards of 200 pounds and was so tall he could gaze adoringly into my eyes without looking up.

When we strolled down the street. My paramour would raise his lip and expose his sharp canines to any passer-by who approached me.  This was actually quite charming and made my morning walks very efficient. I no longer had to indulge in idle chatter or polite repartee.  Jack and I got our morning constitutional done in record time.

However, severe problems arose because Jack became insanely jealous if I dared to devote my entire attention to the computer instead of him.  He went to surprising lengths to remind me that he was a lot more interesting than Document 1 or the starred messages in my in-box. His initial tactic was to race madly around my desk in ever widening circles crashing into bookcases, couches and chairs in careless abandon.  If I continued to ignore him amid the debris of fallen books and broken furniture, he would grab one of his toys and dangle it in front of my face as I typed industriously away.

The final tactic was to lay his enormous head on my lap and gaze adoringly into my eyes.  Fifty pounds of skull and fur is something no one can ignore  especially when Jack insisted on pounding his head against my knees in case I didn’t notice his presence.

Jack stayed with me for three lovely (if destructive) months.  While he was with me, I had to trash several books, a lounge chair and an antique dry sink inherited from my grandmother.  I was forced to tape up both my legs because of severe muscle strain and was the terror of the neighborhood when I walked down the street.  I had to buy a new keyboard, a screen and 3 memory sticks Jack had confused with his dog biscuits but I have to say I finally understood the real cost of true love.

My house insurance paid for the interior damage and my health plan covered the physical injury, but Jack never recovered from his sense of loss when his owners returned.  He ran away from home three times in an effort to find me and finally his owner begged me to visit Jack and reassure him that he was first in my heart.  However, when I arrived at his home, I had changed my perfume and my Romeo did not recognize me.

Which all goes to show that all dogs, be they human or canine, are victims of short term addictions and can easily be turned off with one unfamiliar whiff.

 

 

IN DEFENSE OF BIRQAS

A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

I have reached the age when looking in the mirror has become a nightmare.  Either I see my mother or a woman who looks ready for a plot.  If the night before has been particularly grueling, I don’t see much at all.

 

I find that it takes a lot of work these days to get my face ready for public viewing.  I am not talking about going to a formal dance or meeting a dignitary.  I am saying that before I dare leave the house, I have a time consuming, discouraging and ego damaging routine I must follow before I dare greet the outside world.

 

As soon as I wake up, I drink 12 ounces of warm water to hydrate my skin.  I use a special facial sponge to wipe the sleep from my eyes and remove the rivulets of sand that have lodged in the wrinkles on my face and dripped down the folds of my neck.

 

I haul out a magnifying mirror and work on the white heads, uneven bumps and enlarged pores that spring up as if by magic during the night. Then I address the lush new growth of hair in my lip, my chin and hanging from my nostrils.

 

I apply a light moisturizing lotion to try to plump up the sagging pouches around my eyes and under my chin.  I pat the skin dry and hope those gaping pores close.

 

They don’t.

 

I apply a mild sun screen to the entire region of flesh above my collar bone.  It is impossible to separate my jawbone from my clavicle.  They have coagulated into a soft mass of unidentifiable epidermis. I have not seen my neck in fifteen years.   I slather on moisturizer and hope it sinks into all the right places.

 

It doesn’t.

 

My skin has developed so many colors that I cannot decide if it is a plaid or a print. Both peaches and cream are but a memory.  I apply a foundation that is the color of what it once was when it glowed with the blush of youth.  This was so many years ago that I am not sure I have chosen the right shade.  The one I am using is a tad darker than bleached cotton but not so dark that I look like an immigrant.

 

It is now time to do my eyes.  The first challenge is locating them.  They are wedged between the folds of my eyelids and the puffed gray pillows around what is left of my eyelashes.  I rub a bit of oil on the lids and then a tad of eye shadow to match my outfit.    I need to be careful because if I am wearing a vivid combination of color, my eyes will look like Bozo’s.

 

I am now ready for THE BIG CHALLENGE.  I must use a pencil and draw a line right above my eye lashes and directly under my eye.  This can take anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours depending on how many times I jam the pencil into my cornea or dislodge my contact lens.

 

Each morning my cheeks sag a few inches closer to my collar bone. I need to redefine them with rouge.  The trick is to add just enough tint so I don’t look dead.

 

I look in the mirror to see if there has been any improvement.

 

There hasn’t.

 

I so envy the women of the Middle East.  They wake, drape themselves in a burqa and go out on the town.  Oh, I know they are subservient and need to shut up and take it.  But the truth is that with a face like mine, no one is going to want to give it to me anyway unless I cover it up.  There is a huge advantage to draping yourself in a filmy bit of fabric and leaving your appearance to the imagination.  I could probably pass for a real looker unless it’s a windy day.

The average woman uses at least seven skin-care products each day. This number includes collagens, cleansers, moisturizers, sunscreen and cosmetics as well as hair products, perfume and nail polish and she still looks her age.

 

The largest organ of the body is the skin.  It is always hungry and requires vitamins, lubricants, massage, and TLC.  My husband told me that  was something else .

 

I tried exfoliating my skin but when I finished my face became so red that I could have rubbed it with glitter and decorated our Christmas tree.

 

Another advantage of the burqa is that no one can tell if you are pregnant.  I n my case, this is a definite advantage.  If anyone knew I was expecting I might lose my senior citizen discount.

 

While you’re saving your face;

You’re losing your ass.

Lyndon Johnson

 

I DON’T WANT TO BE A YOUNGSTER ANYMORE

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow,
yet we forget that he is someone today.
Stacia Tauscher

American children are parental badges of achievement.  Proud parents put bumper stickers on their cars saying MY KID IS AN HONOR STUDENT.  This doesn’t say much for the parent does it?  In my day, a kid was a goat.

American parents are intimidated by their children.  If mother says a harsh word, the child can report her to the police.  It seems a bit extreme to me to put mom in jail just to get an extra helping of chocolate cake.

Parents are learning to fight back.  If a child gets out of hand, they just open the gun cabinet and let him play.

American children never walk home from school.  They take the bus.  This explains why 97% of school bus drivers are psychopaths and none of them are paedophiles.  They know what children are really like.  They prefer prostitutes.  At least you get what you pay for.

If the bus driver wants to shut the children up he slams on his brakes.  That will throw them into the aisle.  Then he can just toss each one out at his stop.

The only catch is that American children are obese. That is why all school bus drivers are work out a t the gym.  Muzzling a 500 pound child is a job requirement.

If a bus driver wants to avoid trouble, he should give every child candy laced with Valium …and save some for himself.

Whenever I see a child on a leash, I always wonder if the mother remembered the plastic bag.

I hear there is a campaign in Britain to get the kids away from their computer games to play outdoors.  We have solved that in America.  We don’t have an outdoors.  We just have shopping malls.

Every American parent thinks his child is a potential movie star.  I think it is a devious way to get junior out of the house.  If he gets into a movie, the producer pays the baby sitter.

My friend Billy has a son he is grooming for stand-up comedy.  “He is an amazing talent,” he said.  “He can only say one word, but his timing is amazing.” He has auditioned the boy for American’s Got Talent and Billy insists his son stole the show.  “He bit Peers Morgan,” he said. “And he didn’t get indigestion.”

American children spend approximately 98% of their waking hours in front of a television screen and they think what they see on that screen is reality.  Several years ago, an eight year old grabbed the family gun (everyone who is anyone in America has one) and shot member of his third grade class.  He had a huge smile on his face.  He had no idea that bullets kill and he had no concept of what killing really means.   After all, the guy that gets shot on TV always reappears the next week, doesn’t he?

Protecting our children from harm has become a universal nightmare.  The real victims are the parents who spend 50% of their time chauffeuring their children from one supervised activity to another.  I wonder if that is the real meaning of “no child left behind.”

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND is an educational program in the states that fires teachers if their students don’t meet a national minimum score on a standardized test.

.  For my part, I wouldn’t mind being left behind.  It would give me time to actually learn something.

When I was a kid, children bullied each other but we didn’t kill them.  We didn’t know that was an option.

When I was young, mother knew best, daddy was in charge and the teacher was always right. These days, mother is overworked, daddy is an idiot and they both sue the teacher if their kid fails a test.

Parents always worry that they will do some terrible thing to warp their children for life.  I think it is time for parents to have a few rights.  If you can’t stand your kid, YOU  move out  Let him figure out how to cook dinner.  That is tough love.

Kids: they dance before they learm
there is anything that isn’t music.
William Stafford

 

 

 

 

FURY

Anger is never without a reason,
But seldom a good one.
Benjamin Franklin

Whenever I go back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I am immersed in non-stop road rage.  Drivers swerve around you, hit the accelerator to get ahead of you, blast their horns to tell you to get out of their way and spew hate all over the highway.  I find myself getting just as angry as the other drivers as I try to weave my way through 6 lanes of traffic to get to my destination.  I come home exhausted, despising humanity and hating myself for succumbing to the hysteria that clogs our roads.

It is a glorious relief to come to peaceful Brighton where I walk everywhere, smile at everyone and love treading the streets. Humanity charms me when I am here and I find myself enjoying the kindly hustle and bustle on North Street.

I have always thought that road rage was so foreign to those who use public transportation in Britain, that they would sooner stage a massacre than be rude to another person.  Besides, it is not in the British personality to be rude or overbearing.  The people in this country are obsessed with being politically correct.

Or so I thought.

I just spent two weeks in London living in Stockwell and taking the tube to Leicester Square. That was when I was exposed to Tube Rage.  If I dared to try to tap my oyster card on the entrance gate during rush hour, I risked black and blue marks, mangled hips and fractured elbows.  When I approached the escalator, I was so terrified I shut my eyes and prayed to the almighty that my foot wasn’t crushed and I was not hurled down the moving staircase because I forgot to stand on the left.

It turns out that all this pushing, shoving, jostling and crushing is not due to rudeness at all.  It is the result of poor ventilation.  In fact the director of the British association of Anger Management warns that lack of oxygen is sure to cause uncontrolled acts of aggression.

What a relief!! I thought all those people shoving me around were ageist brutes who didn’t care that I am elderly and frail.  How wrong I was! When the British push you out of their way, it is a silent cry for air.

Which brings us right back to Brighton where fresh air is always swirling about us, filling our lungs with new oxygen from France.  I boarded a train at London Victoria and two people hit me in the shin in their rush to get to the coach first. One lady smashed her suitcase into my hip and another yanked my shoulder into a vertical position to reach the aisle seat.  The minute we all got off the train in Brighton, everyone was smiling, inhaling the lovely oxygenated air and loving one another.  A gentleman carried my case to the station, a lady held my arm lest I trip and two lovely young men with grandmother complexes bought me a coffee.

The oxygen cure would not work in America however.  It isn’t the air that infuriates them; it is the government.

 

 

DRUG-ADDLED FISH

Tell me what you eat, and
I will tell you what you are.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I am very careful about the food I eat because I know that what is in it goes into me.  I will not eat red meat because I was a huge fan of Elsie the Cow, Porky the Pig and Mary’s three little lambs.  However, since I never had an aquarium or cuddled something aquatic, I have been relying on fish as a staple to my diet.

I am amazed to learn that the reason I feel so relaxed and at peace with the world after a salmon dinner is that the fish on our planet are all becoming junkies. We are dumping our medications into the landfill helter-skelter and our Prozac, Vicodin and Demerol are being transmitted from the fish in the sea into my bloodstream.

I find this excellent news.  It has the potential to save me an immense amount of money when I am moved to escape my current reality. If I eat my perch and dine on cod I will be calm and collected, if a bit loopy, when disaster strikes.  I will not panic…I will be properly tranquilized by my dinner.

There is more good news to come.  Evidently, all that drug consumption has made our fishy friends sterile. The morning after pills we didn’t need and the birth control pills we discard are affecting the reproductive powers of our aquatic friends.   This is bad for the food supply I admit and terrible information for the pharmaceutical companies.  We no longer need rely on the pill or the morning-after remedies (some of which are disgustingly unpleasant) to take care of any repercussions from a night of pleasure.  All we need do is eat a generous helping of plaice for dinner.  (You can even deep-fry it and it will still fix you up). If you decide you would like to have a family, forget estrogen or in-vitrio fertilization.  Eat meat.

Ah, how times have changed.  Back in the uninformed early fifties, I had two exquisite Siamese Fighting Fish: Herbert and Tarrington.  They were lovely to watch, swimming from one side of their little bowl to the other, munching on algae and sparking in the sun.  But one day Herbert got into a snit and ate poor timid Tarrington. He digested him whole and didn’t even spit out the bones.  Had he lived in this knowledgeable century of ours, I would have scooped up some water for the nearest stream and cured his inappropriate behavior just like that.

Of course there are times when you do not want to dull your senses.  You long to heighten your awareness of life around you.  No need to waste hard-earned cash on speed, cocaine or ecstasy. Just run to the nearest fish grotto, pig out on sea bass and you are ready to party!

The only ones deprived of this safe avenue to contentment are vegetarians. They will have to rely on prescription medicines for their highs.  The poor among them will reproduce like bunnies if they don’t give up sex entirely.  It doesn’t seem fair does it?  They have already given up so much that makes life delicious.

Fish, to taste right, must swim three times –
in water, in butter and in wine.
Polish Proverb

 

FAT AND THIN

Thin people are beautiful
But fat people are adorable.
Jackie Gleason

There is a study out trying to figure out why lesbians tend to be overweight and it is totally misdirected.  It isn’t lesbians who tend to be plump, it is good cooks and who was the best cook ever?

Answer:  Your mother.

No one in the world made better macaroni and cheese or apple pie. When your mum made you breakfast, no restaurant could match it and certainly your dad couldn’t do much at the stove except for an outdoor barbeque or one fancy company dish like his famous crab cioppino.

The truth is that it isn’t lesbians who have to fight their weight, it is anyone, male, female, straight or gay who loves to cook. If you have a way with food you are going to taste what you create…and those itty-bitty spoonfuls of chocolate custard or Alfredo sauce go straight to the hips.

Look at our own darling Andrew Kaye. He has never cooked for me (yet) but he knows good food.  He savors the texture, recognizes the bouquet of herbs and spices and respects dramatic cuisine.  His silhouette is certainly not angular.  It is just round enough.

For my part, I refuse to go to a skinny persons house for dinner.  I am not going to waste a meal on someone who doesn’t present each dish with a bit of flair and an eye for flavor.  I made that mistake only once.  A woman who shall remain nameless in case she figures out why I am always busy at dinnertime when she calls, invited me over for a gala holiday celebration. She was the type who spent mornings at the gym, bench-pressing hundreds of pounds.  Afternoons she worked out on the trampoline and evenings she did Zumba.  The truth is I should have known what to expect.

I appeared, bottle of wine in hand with an empty, expectant tummy and what did I see?  Pizza delivered from the corner shop, pre-sliced mass-produced bread and instant coffee. I know you won’t believe me, but the only spread available was marmite.   There wasn’t even background music to hide the gagging of the guests.  I immediately feigned a headache and hustled over to the nearest Waitrose for a gourmet experience.  A dinner is a terrible thing to lose…especially if you skipped lunch.

So I am campaigning for people to stop casting negative aspersions on corpulence.  Give me someone with a decent amount of curves and a good wiggle to their walk and I will immediately lobby to share a meal with them.  If you are lean, buff and tanned I would not dream of touching your soup, much less your flambé cherries jubilee. Show me a comfy, well-padded cheerful person in a flowered apron and I am right there at her dinner table.  I promise to bring the wine.

 

 

OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!!!!

People are obsessed with…
Hairless, fatless Barbie Dolls.
Gaby Hoffman

A U.S. study has concluded that the dolls you play with influence your career choices.  When American children play with sexy Barbie dolls, they want to grow up to do girlie things like go to Hollywood and get humped by the stars but when they play with dolls made out of potatoes, they think there is no limit to what they can do with their lives.  It all goes to show that image is everything.

You have to admit that when you see curvaceous women in movies and on television, they are always doing very feminine things like flirting with policemen or dancing provocatively in revealing undies.  You KNOW instinctively that women like that never pay for a meal or have to take a bus home.  It is the thick-ankled, ladies in print dresses with no visible cleavage, who end up locked to a stove and a Hoover in their prime.  And what fun is that?

Every med student who specializes in plastic surgery instead healing the poor knows what a money-maker that pre-conceived notion is. Ordinarily clever women will blow their grocery money on a shot of silicone to puff up their lips, just to be like the toys we played with as a child.  If we change our playthings, our self-image will change as well.  We won’t give a toss about Barbie’s or Ken’s silhouette. We will thirst for the bumps and curves of a root vegetable.

Indeed, we can restructure our children’s ambitions by giving them potatoes to play with instead of human-shaped dolls.  They can dress their little tubers in frilly dresses or put them in macho uniforms with matching caps and carry them around to cuddle and talk to when Mummy and Daddy won’t listen.  If you start a child early enough, his goals in life will become far more realistic. Young women will ache to become thick-wasted, faceless entities with little protrusions on their skin like the playthings that comforted them when they took a nap;  boys will no longer gobble up porn with its images of hairless, busty women and muscular, well-hung men.  Instead, they will go crazy with desire when they see a local farmer yanking a yam out of the earth.

I envision a new world where the elderly with their aging bodies and shapeless silhouettes will suddenly become the most sought-after centerfolds in magazines and on the screen. Estrogen-deprived women with moustaches will turn on men with potbellies and bowing legs and anyone who dares to eat chips will be accused of cannibalism.

So take heart all you people with bad measurements and loose body parts.  Your time will soon be here. If you wait long enough, your image will be ”in.”

 

 

 

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DOING IT

Independence is happiness.
Susan B Anthony

The world is filled with unhappy people and I believe that is because we no longer experience the joy of doing things for ourselves.  Think of it.  We don’t use our hands the way we used to any more.  Time was when we used them to open a door, turn on a faucet or dry our hair.  Now the only thing we use them for is to roll a joint or prove a point. Flushing a toilet once demanded a hands-on effort.  Now, it is a one finger operation and often, it involves simply standing up after the job is done.

I am so old I remember when we brushed our teeth with great vigor using our muscles (no batteries).  We dried ourselves with a towel and we got down on our hands and knees to wash the floor.  We used a scythe to cut the grass and experienced the bliss of being in the glorious outdoors with the sun on our backs and our arms swinging to the rhythm of our hearts.

We no longer need to use our fingers to type a message much less actually pen a note to a loved one or the milkman.  He too is only a memory.  He has been replaced by a refrigerated case at the supermarket.  When we want to know how to get from here to there, we simply speak our request into our electronic devices and technology responds.

Now, we no longer have to drive our cars and that is a terrible loss. Google has taken away the joy of the open road, windows open, top down, accelerator slammed to the floor. Remember the sense of freedom, the power? Oh, the sheer exhilaration of flying down the highway, traffic whizzing past you and all of life awaiting at your destination?

Sure.  We won’t have as many crashes. Far fewer people will be mutilated or murdered on the road.  But is it worth the sacrifice of the joy of connecting with the immense force of your vehicle knowing you alone are its master?

And what does this loss of control do to the human psyche? We no longer feel in control of our destinies.  When doors open with a sensory device and cars take us to our destination by a route of their own choosing, we no longer can steer our unique course through our individual lives.  What has happened to the sense of self we once had when we swept the floor with a broom and decided for ourselves if that dust bunny deserved to be dismissed to the dust bin?

I laud progress and respect technology, but if I have the choice I would rather use the force of my will to guide me through my life. When I malfunction, I can change direction; but when technology fails, the car stalls, the dishwasher floods and I get a concussion speeding through a closed door.

 

 

 

MY FAMILY, MY DOG

There is no psychiatrist in the world
Like a puppy licking your face.
Ben Williams

 

When Daphne sits on my lap, my blood pressure drops 30 points.  Why bother with Lipitor?  Daphne is not dispensed to me by a pharmacist although she is definitely good medicine. She is a five-pound Chihuahua with blue eyes and an attitude.  However, when she sits on MY lap, her blood pressure elevates…and no wonder.  She is at work; she is doing her job.

Daphne’s mother dresses her in high fashion: ruffled skirts with matching knickers and booties, a warm hoodie to wear when she and her mum are on the slopes and a bright strawberry vest to welcome spring.

Daphne has a stubborn anal gland that does not process her food properly and her mother has spent hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds on Daphne’s alimentary canal, to no avail.  At last, her mother resorted to holistic remedies and feeds Daphne a nightly soupcon of pumpkin and rice to soothe her aching bottom.

Daphne is well aware of her privileged position in the family.  She dines with us at our table.  We do not consider her germs as lethal as those of her former daddy or all her cousins…some with four legs, some with only two.   We all know her preferences and we do our best to keep her as happy as her presence makes us.  She does not like the rain; she considers walking on the other end of a leash demeaning; she loves to watch movies and never so much as woofs lest she disturb the others watching with her.  We know that Daphne is absorbing the action on the screen because she often weeps at a sad ending, and she still wails when she remembers what happened to poor Jackie Robinson.

We who know and love Daphne think she is unique but it appears that she is no different than any other dog in any other home anywhere in the world.  One look at her stimulates human oxytocin, a bonding hormone that increases our trust and attachment to those close to us and makes us suspicious of strangers.  The fact is that the longer Daphne stares at me, the more I love her and want to shoot that yapping little dachshund next door. This explains why we think nothing of spending half our wages on Daphne’s attire, rushing her to a doctor at the slightest hint that she is not in perfect health even as we ignore our own coughs, tummy spasms and exploding lungs. She is far more than part of our family…she is the very adhesive that keeps us together. For, although we all  have spats with one another over toilet seats left up or down, toothpaste tubes squeezed wrong and dishes unwashed, we all unite in our love for Daphne.  It is she who keeps us human.

Percy is a Corgi without a tail.  He stares at me with the same intensity Jewish men look at me.  You know: something is missing and he doesn’t remember how he lost it.  The interesting thing is that the more Percy stares at me, the more I adore him.  I cannot say the same for Jewish men.

Dorothy is a shih’ Tzu with a raging metabolism. When she sits on your lap, you can feel the heat of her tiny little body warm you right to your toes. When her blood pumps through her veins and burns her calories you will swear the house is on fire.  Dorothy’s mother says she has saved 1000 pounds a year on heating bills and her only cost is dog food.  That, after all, is Dorothy’s fuel and it is a lot cheaper than petrol.

 

Dogs are miracles with paws.
Susan Kennedy