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Art Kumbalek as a knight
I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, for crying out loud you must remember this, that it’s now the month of May belonging to the year 2024, the so-called “merry,” or perhaps “lusty” month as energetically sung whenever you go to sit through a musical production of the historically hodgepodge of a fock Camelot inside your local high school’s lunch room ’cause your kid has been cast for some unfathomable reason, or community theater effort performed in the danky basement of the local church where Sir Lancelot is your next-door dork neighbor whose ability to carry a tune in a bucket is ferkakta and it’s the bucket you borrowed him months ago that the fockstick has yet to return, what the fock.
C’est moi, the one to remind to flip your calendar page from April showers to May flowers, one of the three months we have that can be enunciated with one syllable, caveman style, you think? History is cool.
OK, the May—the month with plenty to honor/celebrate, what with your International Workers’ Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, Miles Davis’ birthday, Sir Arthur “No shit, Sherlock” Conan Doyle’s B-day, and Mother’s Day, which reminds me of gadfly-genius Irish Oscar Wilde who said: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. O-Wilde, you be the man still to this day and forward through eternity, you betcha.
And so, some of you’s very long-time readers of this page evolving from a newspaper in your hand to an internet screen and whatever, those of you’s who have managed to keep their feet planted upon, if not knee-deep, this mortal coil, like a regular Hamlet as you “perchance to dream,” may be awares that this month of May marks an anniversary year for me in that I’ve been somehow snookered into being part of this Shepherd Express media empire for 38 focking years now. Time for the crafts-man of run-on sentences to finally grab a raise in pay, you think?
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1986-2024… “rest in peace,” a signpost ahead not yet visible.
And let me remind you’s about the 1986, the year that Microsoft had its first public offering of stock on March 13. I wonder what I had to do that was so goddamn important that day—besides attending a crappy day job with the intent to enjoy a nice cocktail or three in the evening—that I couldn’t pick up a couple, three shares at a buck two-eighty so’s to be a millionaire on Easy Street in today’s world, lo, these my waning days. Maybe it’s ’cause 1986 was the year the great songwriter Harold Arlen died. You betcha, he’s the guy, with Yip Harburg on lyrics, who wrote what really ought to be my theme song if I needed a theme song: “If I Only Had a Brain,” what the fock.
Yeah yeah, May 2024. Cripes, way back when I was a kid during the three-channel black & white TV Eisenhower 1950s years (when you needed a telescope to be able to sort out the action on your family’s bullshit-inch Philco screen), I dreamed, and assumed, that by a year like 1986, what with the ballyhooed 75-76 year return of Halley’s Comet, the people of planet Earth would individually possess the convenient flying car and any existential threat from the inhabitants of Mars would have finally been kiboshed but good. Fock those green goons, ain’a?
Anyways, it is indeed 2024 for lord’s sake and we still got cancer, stupid-ass wars, stupid–ass politicians, but no flying cars. I’m starting to think the future is not all that it was cracked up to be.
But yet, it is indeed the merry/lusty month of another May, which reminds me that I would be remiss if I didn’t send out a Big Fat Happy Birthday to Plato, perhaps the Numero Uno of the old-timey ancient Greek philosophers (right next to Anonymous, ’natch), who, per my research, would be celebrating his 2,452 on Thursday, May 21. Hey, that’s a lot of candles, I don’t care who you are or were.
I wonder what Plato would say if I could badger him with a question like a regular Socrates, the question being, “Plato, if a man says something in the woods and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” You know what I think Plato would say? I think he’d say something like this:
“Oy, 2,452 years ago, me in a toga, and still with the questions? You got to be jerking my beefaroni. Haven’t you people of the future come up with any answers yet, you schmucks?”
No sir, we have not, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.
