Sure is Fruitcake Weather

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Art Kumbalek

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So here I am, back in the saddle again for the time being, but hey: Holy focking schnikes, how ’bout the premature frigidity of this weather we’ve had around here for christ sakes. Jeez louise, and for those of you’s who got caught with your winter pants down and now got the heebie-jeebies, wondering how the heck you will ever persevere as if you just sucked down a warmed-over mug of gluten-full Ebola? I simply advise you to do what me and my crowd do to get through the winter weather. Two things: Crank up the thermostat and mix another hot focking toddy. Survival guaranteed.

For me, I have only perennially fond regards for our winter season—late October through maybe the first half of May—and you should too. To wit: No goddamn insects to bug the bejesus out of you just because you stepped outdoors, and no jagamuffins driving around town with the windows rolled down so as to blare and share their particularly poor taste in music with me, the pedestrian. If only we could make it be winter each and every day of the year, ain’a?

Allow me to interrupt myself to say that now that we’ve got the Fiserv palace up and running for the basketball and loud-music crowd, it’s time to again look toward the future. How ’bout to make Beer Town winters more enjoyable if not tolerable for the whiners, I propose a grand project whose completion would make the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Mausoleum of Mausolus at Halicarnassus look like beanbag, what the fock.

I propose the construction and erection of a nice climate-controlled dome to envelope the City of Milwaukee proper. It would put a lot of people to work, be a destination point for tourists and retirees and attract a lot of favorable press. With a climate-controlled dome, there would’ve been no need for a $500 million basketball joint. The hoopsters could’ve played on an outdoor court that would’ve cost about a buck two-eighty. And the suburbs can build their own domes, screw ’em.

Anyways, whilst away on ass-ignment of late, I began to think of starting a support group for those sick to death of trying to look on the bright side of things, who are tired of hoping for good things to happen; what with President Trumpel-thinskin still taking up space in the White House and a bunch of knobshine Republicans calling all the shots in the Senate

You see, I, Art Kumbalek, am a recovering blue-sky high-octane sunshine on your lolli-focking-pop kind of kitten-up-a-tree optimist. How ’bout that? And I have to live each day the rest of my life knowing that at any time I could slip and have a cheery thought powerful enough to send me back through that door of insanity and unreality, making my life unmanageable.

(Hey, speaking of “kitten,” I’m reminded of a little story: A teacher is explaining biology to her fourth-grade students. “Human beings are the only animals that stutter,” she says.

A little girl raises her hand. “I had a kitty-cat who stuttered,” she volunteered. The teacher, knowing how precious some of these stories could be, asked the girl to elaborate.

“I was in the back yard with my kitty and the Rottweiler who lives next door got a running start and before we knew it, he jumped over the fence into our yard!”

“That must’ve been scary,” the teacher said.

“It sure was,” the little girl said. “My kitty went ‘Fffff, Fffff, Fffff’... And before he could say ‘Fock,’ the Rottweiler bit his head off!” Ba-ding!)

So back to my support group, I’ll tell you’s the road of my recovery has been long. It was 1959, I was a lad when our Braves lost a one-game playoff to the L.A. Dodgers for the opportunity to go on to the World Series. It was then, simultaneous with the final out, that I made a searching and fearless inventory of myself and the real world I live in and realized that maybe life does suck after all. A little more than a year later, when the Packers, charging down the field, lost 17-13 to the Eagles in Philadelphia ’cause time ran out, there was no “maybe.” Life sucked.

And my support group would not be just some kind of men’s thing ’cause really, how far can you really get sitting around complaining about how there’s no topless hardware stores and how they keep jacking up the fine for parking in handicap zones? You tell me.

And then I’ll tell you that Art’s Doom of Actual Reality Group is for everybody of a sex—there’s plenty of snuggling room under my big top. Come one, come all, and repeat after me: “Expect to lose, expect the worst, and you can never be disappointed.” And if that doesn’t make you feel better, then the hell with you’s ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.