Art Kumbalek
I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, whilst fiddling with the radio knob in hopes of finding a station that plays 24-hour continuous Easter music and simultaneously waiting for that Chinese space lab satellite the-size-of-a-goddamn-school-bus to come crash to Earth with the top of my noggin as bulls-eye, I recalled a million-dollar conversation I had a while back with my pal Little Jimmy Iodine about an idea that would make Our Town numero uno for filching the tourist buck, what the fock.
So there we were, enjoying a couple, three nice cigarettes under clouded stars since you couldn’t smoke indoors anymore like normal people used to. And we decided a great thing for Beerville would be if we could work out a deal where we trade all our focking squirrels to some kind of place like the country formerly known as Burma in exchange for all their monkeys, you betcha.
Think about it. I’m bored with these squirrels everywhere and you may be, too. I think this town and sister environs would be much more intriguing plus festive if we had the monkey running to and fro rather than the focking squirrel. Be it bonobo, rhesus or macaque—I don’t give a flying fock. They’d be a lot more entertaining to have in the trees than these rats with tails who horde their nuts like they’re going out of style, for christ sakes. Not to mention that if you were fortunate enough to ensnare one of these rampant simians, you may be able to train it to perform simple household chores to afford you extra leisure time with which to dream of your own focking million-dollar scheme.
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Why not this trade? In Milwaukee, we’ve got monkeys in a zoo and squirrels all over the rest of creation while somewhere like your Bangkok they probably got just the opposite. And so I suggest a nice cultural exchange—squirrels for monkeys—could only improve world relations. I also think parts of our heated green globe would just die to have squirrels running free instead of only in a zoo; except they wouldn’t die ’cause they’d be able to serve those squirrels up on their dinner table as fast as they got them, and the rest of the world wouldn’t have to worry about an increasing global hunger problem, what the fock. And if we were to outfit the monkeys with various traditional ethnic costumery, surely kids and families would flock to Monkey Town and let their vacation dough rain down upon us locals.
Anyways, Little Jimmy and I decided to suspend rumination and leave the practicalities of such a trade to the scientists and planners ’cause we both needed to take a leak, which we thought best done indoors like regular people instead of outdoors like a couple of focking monkeys.
Anyways, I’ve got to go. There’s still a couple of days left for me to figure what I should give up for Lent since Easter comes Sunday—April Fools’ Day this year, which is what those Roman soldiers who were guarding the tomb of Jesus must’ve felt like when they discovered that the lord pulled a Harry Houdini on them and had escaped. Yes sir, some top flight sentry work there, ain’a?
And for some of you’s there’s the Passover, so here’s a little story you may like to share:
Man goes to see the Rabbi. “Rabbi, something terrible is happening and I have to talk to you about it.” The Rabbi asks, “What is wrong?” The man replies, “My wife is poisoning me.” The Rabbi, very surprised by this, asks, “How can that be?” The man then pleads: “I’m telling you, I’m certain she’s poisoning me, what should I do?” The Rabbi then offers: “Tell you what. Let me talk to her, I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll let you know.”
A week later the Rabbi calls the man and says, “Well, I spoke to your wife. I spoke to her on the phone for three hours. You want my advice?” The man anxiously says, “Yes.” And the Rabbi says, “Take the poison.” Ba-ding!
And so I’ll leave you with a brief Easter-time message just like I was a regular pope. The message goes like this: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
(If you guessed a French guy by the name of Voltaire said this a couple, three hundred years ago, you are abso-focking-lutely correct. And now I’m off to perform the miracle of changing dollar bills into bourbon, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.)
