Time Bomb

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, speaking of the Best Of:

Right now I’m pouring myself one hot focking toddy after another to acknowledge the realization that come May, I will have been whipping out these essays like a fry cook at your favorite greasy spoon for 30 years. Yeah, I know, big focking deal.

And speaking of getting bombed, I hear that North Korea says it successfully tested the H-bomb. Focking swell. For christ sakes, I was watching a TV show a while back about North Korea that had scientists say space-satellite photos show the country to be all dark no-light at night, every night. Not even the faintest ember from an inhaled Lucky Strike, no sir. Black as Dick Cheney’s heart. Black as a Cayman Islands tax-sheltered American corporation’s yearly profit statement, yes sir. The northern half of the Korean Peninsula appears at night from space exactly as it would 1,000 years ago. One-thousand focking years ago, Jack. A millennium. And that makes a guy like me start to wonder.

Jeez louise, every Tom, Dick and Dickless keeps yakking about all these swell improvements we got going compared to the olden days of a thousand years ago—like being able to sit in a plane with no food on an airport runway for five-six hours ’cause a focking computer somewheres went ferchacta. Or, we got indoor plumbing nowadays, which means when your snot-nose kid flushes the Elmo puppet down the crapper and it backs up all over the floor and every plumber you call is booked solid for a couple, three weeks, you can’t just run outdoors and take a goddamn leak wherever you good and goddamn well choose like you used to be able before the PVC pipe was discovered.

I’m betting a buck two-eighty that there’s more things haven’t changed in a thousand years than there are these cosmetic changes that are supposed to make everything all the time a piece of focking cake. And the first no-change that comes to my mind is that every time a guy turns around, you still run into a whole bunch of abso-focking-lutely clueless stupid people like you did 1,000 years ago and will continue to do so in a thousand years to come, ain’a?

Yes sir, put me down for a big B.F.D. when it comes to all the so-called advancement progress we’ve made in a millennium. It’s all a lot of huchmus, if you ask me. Huchmus, by the by, is a Yiddish word for “baloney” I had to spell phonetically ’cause after a thousand years you still can’t rub two schlemiels together and come up with a universal spelling for a Yiddish word, I kid you not.

In fact, I’m thinking that future historians will be of the belief that the Homo sapien, as a group, has been actually pretty gosh darn lazy and ill-attentive during these last thousand years, achieving little progress and meriting no better than a D+ or C- for effort. They will note, as I will now, that by the year 2000 everything should’ve been black and silver and your average Joe Schmo was a’supposed to be able to run to the grocery store in his own little spaceship. It’s now 2016 and we’re still waiting.

And what about the deal where people can still get certain strains of puking-sick-to-croak-from and the professionals don’t know from what-the-fock? You got to be jerking my beefaroni. That’s a big, red F all the way, baby. We all are ticking time bombs set to kaboom! any second.

Over the course of 1,000 years, our experts on matters of sickness have progressed from thinking that Satan is responsible for your incurable disease or disability to thinking it’s in your genes from the hereditary. And I’m thinking, well, for crying out loud then, Mendel opened the book on heredity 150 years ago, so what’s the holdup with being able to close it, ain’a?

Focking swell. So a dead relative from 1,000 years ago can just as easily have passed to me some kind of focked-up gene that’ll come to blossom and make me drop dead tomorrow as can a holiday-inebriated live brother-in-law deliver me a shotgun blast to the breadbasket on account of having forgotten to help him dry-dock his goddamn rusty pontoon boat up by his crappy cottage last fall?

So, to the nature of time I again refer you to the words of the great physicist Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” What a world, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.