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Art Kumbalek

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, I may be getting ahead of the game this week, but gosh darn if I haven’t come down with a case of World Series fever, what the fock. And I’m telling you, with a playoff round against “dem bums” from L.A. on the horizon that while a certain city out east may be known as The City That Never Sleeps, in baseball terms I wish that Brewtown will be known as The City That Always Sweeps, you betcha.

I do believe our Brewers will win the Series this year and I’ll tell you’s why. The last and only time they were in the Fall Classic, we had an idiot Republican as president (look it up if you don’t believe me). And now in 2018, the president is not only an idiot Republican, but he’s a knobshine and fockstick, to boot. So simple deductive logic dictates that the Brewers not only will appear in the Series, but this time be victorious. Yes, so much winning. Case closed, your honor and honorettes.

So, yeah, I’m feeling pretty focking good this week as opposed to how I usually feel the second week of October, what with the Columbus Day stress syndrome I suffer from annually. You know, you wait for weeks in anticipation of the big day, it finally comes, you don’t get your mail on that week’s Monday and then it’s over. It’s enough to blow any guy off course, what the fock.

Cripes, I remember the year (you may, too) when the fellas came by and took me out to buoy my sinking spirits with round after round of tall and frosty cheer over by the Uptowner tavern/charm school, during which we toasted the diversity of certain mighty members of the pink-skin pantheon— Paul Revere, Vince Lombardi, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Mickey Mantle, Russ Meyer, Marco focking Polo, John Philip Sousa, Soupy Sales, Casimir Pulaski, Chet Baker and James Joyce, to name a few, and of course, Christopher Columbus.

The only thing these guys have in common besides being white is that as far as I focking know, they have never ever before had their names hauled out and stuffed into the same too-long sentence in the entire history of the printed word, I kid you not.

So after hours and hours of respect-paying, the fellas hauled my sorry ass back to my dinky apartment, where sometime later whilst lodged in a dream state—half awake, half asleep, but still wholly in the bag without the foresight to take the monstrous leak my bloated bladder screamed for—the image of a 900-foot golf putter came to me. Yes, the putter, proud symbol of the white man. I dreamt that it was the Great Navigator himself who had invented it, then carried this marvelous tool ’cross the ocean blue, to discover a place where he could use the goddamn thing; but to no avail, he had arrived to this New World on a weekend, and had forgotten to make reservations.

In fact, it would be a few hundreds of years before reservations were to be invented, so as to keep the brown (some say red, but I’m colorblind) native people that Columbus had stumbled upon off the course—these so-called native people who had yet to assimilate the difference between a 5-iron and sand wedge.

The tawny so-called native people were nothing but a nuisance to the white man, ’cause how you going to shoot par with a fairway full of buffalo and guys with bows and arrows on mounted horseback? It is to wonder. Oftentimes, the white man who found himself in the rough not only would lose his ball, he’d lose his scalp to boot—talk about your 1-stroke penalty, what the fock.

Dream on, I did. I dreamt that we are all what-you-call universal Indians, that we’re all “natives” on this planet and who knows where the fock else, and that had the so-called New World native people been as adept at sailing big boats as they were riding ponies, in 1492 they may have landed on the coast of Normandy in search of a trade route to the West and then how history would be different, ain’a? You tell me.

And then I’ll tell you that it was then I took that leak I was too tired to take earlier. And then I woke up, wishing the order of those two events had been reversed, what the fock.

But before I awoke, I dreamt the following, I think: A white woman, wife of a recently sworn-in Supreme Court Justice, was driving near Las Vegas when she saw a Navajo woman hitchhiking. She stopped the car and offered the woman a ride. During their small talk, the Navajo woman noticed a brown bag on the front seat between them. The politician’s wife said, “If you’re wondering what’s in the bag, it’s 12-pack of beer. I got it for my husband.” The Navajo woman was silent for a while. She then nodded her head and said, “Good trade.”

Ba-ding! ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.