By Jim Hagarty
The Letter is another cut from a CD I am working on. Far from finished but I am happy with the building blocks laid by guitarist and record producer Earl Filsinger. The lyrics are based on an actual letter I once received after a break up. The break up was devastating. The letter was worse.
The Letter by Jim Hagarty
By Jim Hagarty
What do you do with the idiot man
Who knows he is completely right?
When you point that out he will yell and shout
And you’re in for a hell of a fight.
If you try to persuade the always right man
That he almost always is wrong
He will call you a name and try to defame
The group to which you belong.
You can try to explain he has nothing to gain
By never admitting he erred.
He will badger you more and show you the door
And scream till you’re awfully scared.
All you can do, I suggest to you,
Is to run and to never look back.
It is not worth your time to alter his mind.
So try out this line of attack.
Tell everyone that you know of someone
Who is disturbed beyond your repair.
And put up a sign,
“He Is Out Of His Mind.
“Warning!
“DO NOT FEED THE BEAR!”
By Jim Hagarty
2001
If a man ever attracted the attention of beautiful young women at the beach during his early adulthood, it is unlikely he will do it very often as he approaches the age of fifty. Time, trouble and too many chocolate bars have a way of reducing the average male’s appeal to the younger members of the “fairer sex”, even given the long-held notion that young females often prefer the more mature male of the species.
And yet, there I was standing knee-deep in the gently waving waters of Lake Huron one sunny afternoon, tossing a frisbee back and forth to a friend, when I noticed two young women a little further out on the next sand bar, obviously glancing at me. They had long, sleek hair, and perfect human figures which they were scarcely bothering to conceal with small ribbons and bows, otherwise known as string bikinis. You might wonder how I managed to take this all in so quickly between frisbee throws, but I have a policy of returning looks that anyone bestows on me and so I checked them out as carefully as a man my age would dare to do while his wife was sitting in a lawn chair on the sand, a beach-ball throw away.
And I was not dreaming: they were definitely looking at me. And smiling. Sort of tee-heeing to each other, too, as if sharing a juicy secret. I glanced around to make sure that someone else wasn’t, in reality, the object of their perusal – I’ve been laid low by that mistake a time or two – but no, this time, for sure, the “babes” were checking me out.
I have to admit, it felt kind of good, approaching, as I am, the autumn of my years. I wasn’t sure what it was these nubile young things were finding so noteworthy about me, but I sucked in my gut and soaked up the notoriety and didn’t question it. You learn, as you go along, not to examine gifts such as these too closely; better to simply enjoy them.
I smiled back in the direction of my admirers as benignly as I could, a look of gratitude, I’m sure, spread across my chops, and turned to my frisbee-hurling buddy to apprise him of my good fortune. Leaning down to the water to retrieve the red plastic disk that had splashed down in the water before me, I looked down at my bathing suit and caught my breath as I did. The garment looked almost strange to me this day, its tie-strings and little pocket flowing freely on the outside of it rather than inside as they normally would be tucked. A second or two passed by till I was able to fully take in the situation: the women who had shot me the friendly glances were tossing me looks of amusement, not amour, at my shiny, green boxer bathing suit which at that moment I was wearing inside out.
You know, along with the other emotions that age just seems to knock the sharp edges off of, mortification is one that is somehow less daunting at fifty than at twenty. Still, it was a letdown, and as my friend also became aware of the situation and guffawed loudly as a result, I groaned at him in chagrin, “You know, somebody may as well just hang a sign ‘Nerd’ around my neck.”
Now, what did my sensitive, lifelong pal come back with, knowing as I know he did, how embarrassed I must have felt?
“You don’t need a sign, Jim,” was what he had to say.
Wow! That hurt more than the young girls’ giggles.
I think the measure of a man’s maturity is how well he handles being seen at a public beach wearing his bathing suit inside out. And I gotta tell you, I think I dealt with the situation pretty darned well. I betrayed little sign of anguish or even annoyance and in time, when I thought of the incident, I pretty well remembered only that two bathing beauties had looked me up and down and forgot, for the most part, why they did.
Selective memory, after all, is another benefit brought on by the advancing years. A good thing too as I have a feeling this won’t be the last time I’ll be putting my clothes on inside out.
And backwards.
From the camera of my son, Chris. JH
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
I once knew a small centipede
Who only had 98 feet.
Two others he lost
In a foot-freezing frost.
“It was awful,” he said. I agreed.
By Jim Hagarty
Whenever a man is forced to decide
Between two different roads.
He can let his anxiety rule his brain
Until his head almost explodes.
He can explore every twist, every unruly turn
In each path he is thinking to choose
Till no matter which street he decides upon
It looks like he’s going to lose.
Or he can just close his eyes and pick
And then when his journey begins,
He’ll soon know if he’s made a big mistake.
He can back up and start over again.
“Oh, it’s never as simple as that,”
You say to me with a big frown.
“You need to be very careful, son,
“To choose the right road to go down.”
And yes there is some truth in your claim.
I’m not an impossible fool.
But every road is the wrong one
If you let your anxiety rule.
It is better to fall down now and then
And scrape the skin off your knee,
Than never to leave your safe dwelling
And know what it is to be free.
By Jim Hagarty
I was enjoying my supper, music playing softly through the speakers in the living room, when my yellow fluffy cat wandered in, hauled himself up on the sofa, padded around as if to flatten down the grass or encourage milk to spurt from his mother’s teats, whichever, and then settled down for an early evening snooze. A nightly, mealtime ritual.
What distinguished this evening, however, from all the others before it, was a problem which ensued almost immediately with the sound level in the room. The voice of my favourite country music crooner, which until then had been gracing the atmosphere at its usual sweet, soothing decibel level, suddenly and steadily began rising from soft to loud to mind (and speaker) blowing. Bedlam ensued. Unaware, at first, of what was causing my warbling hero to scream like a kid on a roller coaster, I dashed from one side of the room to the other in a frantic effort to quell the din. Responding to all this fur-raising commotion, the cat sprung to life like a cartoon kitty trying to dodge an airborne frying pan and bolted from the couch, revealing the stereo remote control with its volume button on which he had been resting his big furry bulk.
This served to concentrate my thoughts, for the next few moments, on the relative value of cats and remote controls and which, if forced to make a choice, I would continue to keep in my house. It didn’t take me long to decide that, faced with that difficult decision, fat old Buddy with his teeth that need professional cleaning and his recurring urinary problems would be back living by the abandoned railways tracks where I found him and my blessed remote control would be sitting on the polished coffee table where it belongs, like a gleaming gold chalice on a pristine holy altar. Buddy could henceforth scrounge for rodents while I, like the master my remote control has made me, would continue to order around all my heroes in the music business with the touch of my thumb, telling them when and what to sing and how loud to sing it.
The remote control for my little stereo has 59 buttons on it and the only way it could be improved is if 59 more could be added. Not for me these plain, pathetic remotes for dummies they sell in the stores now, the kind with four big buttons and lettering the size of which is often found on rural mailboxes. I hate to sound elitist but it’s plain to me dummies have no business fooling around with remotes in the first place. To simplify modern technology’s most advanced achievement in such a crass way is to mock human genius and ingenuity.
I like my science complicated, whether it’s my phone, my computer or my TV. I feel cheated when I open the box to my latest gizmo and only a 20-page, paper brochure, passing itself off as a manual, falls out. I want my instruction books big and thick and impenetrable, with lots of language which, to the average sod, would seem too foreign to comprehend. No pictures, diagrams or 1-800 help lines for me. Just plain and complicated technomumbojumbo is all I want in a manual.
But even a chopped-down, scaled-back shadow of a normal remote control, what a crooked stick is to a finely finished cane, is better than no remote control at all. On my coffee table, there are four of them, all lined up like a command board in a NASA control room and if personal economics and modern science come together at the right time, there will be four or eight or 16 more some day.
Total inactivity should be the goal of every man and woman of the New Millennium and only when we can spend entire days and weeks in one comfortable chair and never have to move except to once in a while look to the Heavens and thank our Maker for our good fortune, will we be able to say we are truly civilized. With our hands on our remotes to control light levels (they exist), remotes to turn on the fireplace (seen ‘em advertised) and remotes to activate the robot to bring the chips and pop (on their way), we will know what it means to be absolutely free.
What scientists will eventually have to turn their talents to, however, is the problem of how to keep household animals from disdainfully stepping and lying on the precious buttons of all these devices. Might I suggest tiny brain implants which would allow a cat owner, for example, to remotely and silently command the pet to go downstairs and hide under the basement steps where it belongs?
Surely remote-control inventors have lots of experience creating things for tiny brains, so this shouldn’t be beyond them.
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
An African lion named Ted
Once offered to remove my head.
I said, “Teddy, dear,
“See the young tour guide here?
“Please feel free to take his instead.”
By Jim Hagarty
Not many people, I will guess, know a one-armed paper hanger.
But I do.
His name is Bob and he is a great guy. I used to know how he lost an arm but I forget the story now. He is also a one-armed carpenter and painter and, now that I think of it, a one-armed everything else.
No prosthetic arm for Bob.
Two things I know about Bob for sure.
He’s a really nice guy.
And he’s busy.
