Behind on Lent

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Art Kumbalek angel

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, another Academy Awards extravaganza has come and gone and once again yours truly, Sir Arthur Kumbalek has spectacularly gone empty handed, what the fock. 

The reason such is that there is no Oscar category for Best Movie Title/Idea That Will Never Be Made On Account of Not Enough Investment Dough To Bring An Obvious Blockbuster To A Motion Picture Theater Near You. 

My submission for this nonexistent but needed cinephiliac category, would’ve been this: Art Kumbalek versus the Focking Martians and Whoever Else the Fock You Got Whose Planet Got a Lord with A Bullshit British Accent Sporting Goofy Alien Makeup Like a Five-year-old Kid in the ’50s Going Out for Trick-or-Treat as a Hobo Frankenstein Monster: The Musical.” Ka-ching! 

Anyways, I’m eyeballing the monthly calendar I’ve got nailed to the wall in the kitchen of my dinky apartment and, lo and behold, I noticed the furshlugginer Lenten season has begun this year Wednesday, March 5, and as a longtime Catholic of the Seriously Lapsed Order (not to mention, barely eighth-grade graduate from Our Lady In Pain That You Kids Are Going Straight To Hell But Not Soon Enough), I realized that I have yet to determine what to be abstinent from, as the observance requires, until the Easter Bunny drops his colored eggs here and there come April 20 the Sunday, what the fock. 

Abstinence? Numero uno would be signing a personal check and mailing it to a “health” care provider for some kind of squirrely explained inflated service.  

Numero two-no: I’ll put on hold the pricing of Costa Rican beachfront property. 

Numero three-no: For the next 40 days, I will abstain from brushing up on Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major, K.622—serendipity—my old Buffet needs to have look-see at the woodwind repair shop anyways, so what the fock. 

Of course, I have given up the hope for a long and prosperous future but I did that years ago and it had nothing to do with this bullshit Lent. It was simply an act of taking reality to my bosom, since it was the only bosom I could find. 

I got to go, but one thing I will never abstain from is the engine-driven memory of beloved mentors, friends, Joel, Dennis, accelerator to the floor—LET’S GO! 

So here: I’ll leave you with this, a short piece I wrote in the past that echoes the blueprint of the mechanics that powers life in our universe, a piece that was to appear in the gentlemen’s periodical, Bendover, somewheres, sometime in a sideways universe: 

Victim of Circumstances 

by Arthur Kumbalek 

As the late Wentworth Dillon, who-the-fock Earl of Roscommon, was famous for telling  

A-focking-men. But before you choose to read further, me, the author of this, a choice that might not only affect your entire future but also go down on your permanent record to boot—I would feel like a total fockstick if I did not choose to relate the following, about the matter of “choice”: 

So this guy goes to the doctor’s office, he’s not feeling well. “I'm not feeling well,” he says. The doctor does a quick checkup. Seems the guy’s got a carrot in his left ear, a banana in his right ear, a couple of green peppers up his nose and a kumquat up his you-don’t-want-to-know-what (between you and me it’s up his ass, I kid you not). 

Guy says, “So Doc, what the heck’s the matter with me?” Doctor says, “Well sir, just off the top of my head I’d say you’re not eating properly.”  

Guy says, “Well then the hell with being a vegetarian.” 

And so it is that the conceit concerning the nature of “choice” proves to be the folly it is through the story we have just read. To wit: The man believes he is wise vis-a-vis his personal wellness by choosing to be a vegetarian. However, as the story illustrates: the man is not well. No man with a kumquat up his butt can be well, I don’t care who the fock you are. 

But what if he’d chosen a different diet? What then? Would the man in our story feel better that if stuck in his orifices were meat by-products instead? The answer is no. The man in our story can never be better no matter what he “chooses” because the man in our story is a focking idiot, and not because he stuck a banana in his ear or a kumquat up his dupa. No sir, the man in our story is a focking idiot because his conclusion—“the hell with being a vegetarian”—says to me he is thinking that a different choice might’ve kept him out of the doctor’s office that day. It is to laugh. 

And so should we take away from our little story the following: Any knobshine who chooses to believe they got a choice about anything has only proven that the first choice they made was to be a moron. 

So yes, we should disregard the hypocritical moral prig pigs (conservative Republicans, etc.) who pander this: “Hey, any focking thing bad happens to you it’s your own damn fault, so suck-up and shut the fock up about it and leave the rest of us alone, we’ve got billionaires to protect. For christ sakes, somewheres you made a wrong choice all by yourself, so learn to live with it, asshole.” 

But are we “alone”? It’s said that we control our destinies, and I say you got to be jerking my beefaroni ’cause the enlightened modern free-thinker would argue that there is no free-thinking, no free-will, no choice; that there exists in the world only unseen and unknown authority (dark matter), not to mention dogma with a serious case of rabies.  

The free-thinker would argue that since you don’t choose to be born and you can’t choose not to croak; any pissant so-called “choice” in-between birth and death is just a focking joke and if it isn’t, it damn well ought to be. 

I’m sure the arguments about free-will, choice, destiny and blah-blah will go on and on, but for my money all questions concerning the significant meaning of mankind’s existence on this planet and in this universe were answered forever but good the day the late philosopher Jerome Howard remarked to his brother Moe following the repeated application of the business end of a ballpeen hammer to his curly pate or a pliers up his schnozz, “Hey, Moe! I’m just a victim of circumstances.” 

Lost, are we all, upon the crash of our birth onto this planet, ain’a? And John Donne, the early-early 17th-century metaphysical poet said “No man is an island.” Of course not: “He’s a peninsula,” so said the Jefferson Airplane before disappearing in 1972. 

And I say free will and choice rules: Brush your teeth and stay in school, or you got yourself a situation. Of course, if you crash land at birth in your Mauritania or Chad, good luck with finding a toothbrush. 

But what the fock, candidly, I’d like to believe all things are possible and that this is the best of all possible worlds, maybe, what the fock, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.