Lifetime Sentences

Jeff Bezos called in his chief accountant one day recently on what he said was an important issue.

“It looks like we’re going to have a problem again with that guy from Canada,” said the Amazon boss to his underling. “That guy, Hagarty, I believe his name is.”

“Nooooooo!!!!!”, yelled back the accountant in dismay. “Not that guy. Please.”

“That’s the one,” said Bezos. “What a pain in the behind that guy is. We can’t go through anything with him again, after our last encounter.”

“What is it this time?” asked Mr. Figuresadder, the accountant.

“Same as last time,” sighed the multi trillionaire behind the desk. “He says he has been overcharged again.”

“Omigosh,” exclaimed Figuresadder. “Why does this keep happening? Especially with this jerk.”

“Don’t know,” said Bezos. “But let’s not make a big thing of it this time. Hagarty seems to thrive on conflict.”

“What should we do?” asked the accountant.

“Just pay him out,” ordered Bezos. “Cut him off at the knees. We can afford the hit.”

So, with a heavy heart, Mr. Figuresadder went back to his office and spent the next hour making the arrangements.

And there it was. On Hagarty’s next credit card statement. On Dec. 7, 2023, Amazon Marketplace Canada settled the issue with Hagarty before the cantankerous Canuck could get a head of steam on.

On that day, Hagarty’s credit card statement showed a credit from Amazon of 0.01.

Hagarty smiled contentedly to himself as he read the statement, packed the family in the car and took them out for supper. That’s how it’s done when the little guy stands up to the big guy. When the news got out, Hagarty was placed in the running for his country’s coveted Citizen of the Year award.

But even if he doesn’t win that honour, his satisfied smile these days says it all.

In fact, it’s worth every penny (in U.S. funds).

©2024 Jim Hagarty

I stepped out into my backyard through our garage door very late one night last week, when winter still had us in its grip. There I saw three big male wild rabbits, feasting on the seed I had scattered earlier below our platform bird feeder (an old sheet of plywood on an even older steel post). These three guys aren’t friendly and I was surprised they didn’t bolt when they saw me. But hunger must have temporarily dulled their caution and they hung in there. I was careful not to make any sudden moves.

Missing from the gang was My Bunny, the sweet little female who is about half the size of the Three Amigos and who behaves as though I am her best pal. In fact, one of the Hardboiled Hares might have been the only one she was able to keep alive during her first season as a mother last summer.

As I was watching the Ravenous Gang of Three make short work of the feed I had put out, I suddenly spied My Bunny out of the corner of my eye. She had ripped around the corner of the shed and hopped right up to me. I thought I understood what was going on. She was too timid to approach the Backyard Bullies but was probably as hungry as they were on this cold night. This was not the first time she had come to me for help.

I knew what I had to do. I talked to her calmly in a sing-songy voice and slipped back into the garage to fetch her some grain. I reappeared and sprinkled a moderate amount on the ground a few feet from me. I knew the Nervous Nellies under the birdfeeder would never make a dash for what I had left my fuzzy little pal, at least not while I was standing there. And even My Bunny, though she had asked for something to eat, stood back a piece after I had dumped her food on the ground. I had to sweet talk the girl into hopping up near me and chowing down. Finally, she gave in and raced up to within a few feet of me and started filling her belly.

Now I knew I was stuck. As cold as it was out and me with no coat, cap or gloves on, I had no choice but to provide security while Bunny got busy gobbling. Fortunately, she filled up fairly quickly and took off again behind the shed.

It is one thing to be seen by a wee rabbit as a reliable source of food, but another to be hired on as a bodyguard.

Or as her bunnyguard, which maybe suits a bit better.

©2023 jim Hagarty

To the person in my county of Canada who just this week won $50 million in a lottery, I just want you to know how happy I am for you. You might not know this, but I have always been an avid supporter of you, in all that you do and all that you are. You truly are, and I am not shy about saying this, an amazing human being and the world is better for having you in it.

I know you must be so excited thinking about your big prize and how you will ever spend it. I would be the same if I were in your shoes. I am also sure that you will have friends, family, neighbours and even total strangers approaching you with their hands out. I would never do that. I have too much respect for you. However, I do support several charities and if you ever felt inclined to donate to any of them, I would be forever grateful.

I am a charter member of Landlords Without Boarders, a very worthwhile organization, as well as the Society for the Rehabilitation and Socialization of Hermits. I also belong to the Organization for the Preservation of Peanut Butter and another group dedicated to teaching retirees how to get out of bed before noon. It is a problem long overlooked.

So, if you find the time, please feel free to forward some funds towards these worthy causes and I will ensure that money gets into the right hands. You will be making a lot of people happy by your generosity.

Your Loyal Friend,

Jim

P.S. I want you to know I feel badly for all the years I made fun of and was critical of people who buy lottery tickets. I almost assaulted one in a store recently when I stood in line behind him as he took ten minutes to decide on which specific tickets to buy. I am regretful about that and now have nothing but the utmost respect for those people, such as yourself, who are willing to take a chance, sometimes day after day. Thank you for your patience.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

In the days before metric and when cars in North America were the size of boats and had engines that could power a train, I experienced the scariest moment of my life. Wedged in the back seat of a car with five other guys, I started freaking out as the driver let things rip on the Canadian highway that led to my village.

I don’t know why I was in the car – I knew the guys but they weren’t my friends. Maybe I had hitched a ride home from school. As the car hurtled faster and faster down the highway, I remember seeing the needle on the speedometer inching towards and finally touching the 120 miles per hour mark on a road where the maximum allowed speed was 60.

I used to think I asked to be let out of the car and maybe I did but now I think it was probably more the case that they dropped me off in my village and I walked the two miles east to our farm.

Many years later, I discovered that speed is a relative thing as my wife and I drove our little rental Fiat along the Autobahn in Germany which, if I recall correctly, has no posted speed limits. I kept up with traffic on the four-lane road which meant I ended up travelling the equivalent of 100 mph which didn’t seem that incredibly fast to me. Amazingly though, Mercedes and BMWs were flying by us in the passing lane as though we were standing still. Some of them must have been topping out at 120 mph.

Even at those speeds, apparently, there aren’t a lot of accidents. However, when a pile up does occur, it can involve dozens of vehicles.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

I used to like dancing in my younger days. Almost loved it, in fact, and became half decent at it, or so it seemed to me. Others looking on might have thought they were witnessing a crazy man running around a dance floor, but I think those people were wrong, oh so wrong.

However, I’ve had to give it all up for the sake of my health. I came to that realization after I read about the Dancing Plague of 1518.

In July of that year, almost 500 years ago, Frau Troffea, a resident of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire), suddenly took to dancing on the street. Soon she was joined by others, all dancing uncontrollably. Within a month, 400 people were dancing in the city and many of them died from exhaustion and heart attacks.

The Dancing Plague of 1518, as it came to be known, had completely died down by the mid-17th century. If my math skills aren’t failing me, that means the dancing went on for about 150 years. If there has ever been such a thing as a dance-a-thon, I think that one must hold the record.

Historians can’t figure out whether the dancing was a real illness or a social phenomenon of some kind, but I am taking no chances. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers liked dancing too and how far did that get them? Where are they today?

My point exactly.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

I don’t like to be pessimistic but I have a little issue I’m having trouble resolving. Maybe you, with the wisdom and understanding I know you possess, can help me out.

After a lovely Chinese dinner from our favourite restaurant last evening, we cracked open our fortune cookies to see what messages were contained within each one. My wife got, “The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” My daughter’s message read, “If the cake is bad, what good is the frosting?” And the little slip of paper that fell from my son’s shattered cookie said, “I learn by going where I have to go.”

“Wow,” I thought. “What great little sayings.” I could hardly wait to read my fortune.

I cracked open the brittle brown cookie to find …

Nothing.

I felt a chill run up my spine. What does it mean to not get a fortune in your fortune cookie? It was like opening a Christmas present from Santa Claus to find nothing in the nicely wrapped box. Not even a lump of coal. Or phoning the doctor’s office to get the results of all those tests only to be told there are no results and never would be.

Now you, being an optimist and a happy soul, would content yourself with thinking logically that whatever process is used to insert fortunes in fortune cookies simply failed to deposit one in mine. But my mind is ninety-six percent imagination and four percent logic. It is geared to zoom from zero to one hundred in a millisecond, the higher number representing disaster.

It was as if the Chinese gods decided not to waste a fortune on me. I wasn’t even worth getting a message about a mouse and cheese or a cake and frosting.

It’s 12:30 a.m. My family are all in their beds. Sleeping.

They are so fortune-ate.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

Late last night I received a message from a life coach, offering me the benefits of her services. I replied that I already have a life coach. His name, and this is pure coincidence, is Jim Hagarty.

I did not say the coach I already use is a very good one. At times, in fact, I have thought of suing him for malpractice. However, we’ve been working together on my life for a while now and I find it hard to break up with the old bugger.

Hagarty steers me in the wrong direction, on average, about three times a day. He’s often grouchy and on occasion has stopped speaking to me for hours on end. When things get tense, about the only useful suggestion he ever seems to offer is to go get myself another coffee and pick himself up one while I am at it. When I have questions, half the time he has no answers for me. When I could use some encouragement from him, more often than not, he offers me none. When I could use a shoulder to cry on, he’s usually missing in action. When I go to him looking for a bit of wisdom to get me through a predicament, he tries to buy me off by telling me a joke instead.

In fact, the more I think about him, the more useless he seems to me to be as a life coach and probably as any other kind of coach unless a person needs coaching on how to go for coffee. And yet, he has stuck with me through thick and thin and we have a history together that goes way, way back. He has promised, in fact, to stick with me till the end.

He may not be great, but at least he’s there for me. Twenty four hours a day. Oh, and he always promises to send me a bill. But he never does. He has cost me a lot buying him coffee though. Maybe he needs a life coach of his own to help break him of the habit.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

As it turns out, even as a Canadian, I can join the U.S. Republican Party. My registration kit came in the mail today. I was excited to open it up. It is a 12-page booklet entitled, “How to Become an Asshole.” For another $150, I can send away for the gold edition, “How to Become a Total Asshole.” The kit I got helpfully leads me through the 10 steps I need to take to become a basic member.

1. Cranium Reduction Surgery. I am instructed on the procedure for removing 90 per cent of my brain. Great advances have been made. No need now to open up the skull. It can be done with an unintrusive laser procedure.

2. Anger Heightening Management. I am instructed to write down the top 10 things that make me mad. Then add 10 more things to that list. Then another 10 and so on until my lists tops out at 100. It is okay to include “list making really pisses me off” as one of the 100.

3. Hatred Quotient Testing. This is flagged as the most important of the 10 steps. There is a helpful list with checkboxes beside each of the 35 items on it. I have to deeply hate a lot of things. Muslims. Foreigners. Non-white people. Toyotas. Gays. Hollywood. Mexicans. Bankers. Michael Moore. The list is extensive. The two top items: Women. And Myself. The instructions regarding hatred helpfully spell out, “Trying to hate a lot of things without hating yourself, is like trying to take a sip of water by tipping a rain barrel up to your lips. Try as you might, you will be wet all over when you are done. Go ahead. Self-hatred is not that hard to achieve.”

4. Reality Uncheck. This section lists 100 “so-called” facts. I am to memorize them and then deny that any of them are true. Number 56: I am a human being. No, I am not.

5. Selfishness Meter. The kit includes a handy and stylish silver bracelet I can wear, the face of which turns various colours depending on how I feel towards others. The face goes ruby red when I am successfully thinking only about myself. Green shows up if I find myself caring about anything other than my own well-being. A helpful warning beep sounds if I begin to slide out of red to yellow and a horn sounds when I slip into green.

6. Violence Appreciation Scale. There are various tests to assess my acceptance of violence as a useful everyday life skill. And questions to guide me along. Such as Road Rage is: Fantastic, Wonderful, Amazing. (Check one only.) And would you be willing to shoot to death someone who keyed your new SUV. This is an easy one for me. Of course I would.

7. Lying Liar Workout. Again, a number of tests and questions to assess how well or poorly I am able to lie. I talked to someone who took this test. As it turns out, the only way to pass it is to lie when answering each and every question.

8. Religious Fanatic Puzzle. This was tricky. If you saw Jesus hugging a lesbian, would you be willing to walk up to Our Lord and tell him to knock it off. The correct answer is yes. You are also asked to rate yourself regarding how close to the front of the line you expect to be when the Rapture starts. (Easy for me. I will be number 9, right ahead of Mother Teresa.)

9. Education Eradication Pledge. I am instructed to sign a pledge promising to learn absolutely nothing new for the rest of my life. I will also need to attend one of 10 Un-Education Centres (privately run) where 20 weeks of intense instruction will cause me to forget 85 per cent of everything I ever learned. This will be easy for me as I have already forgotten 75 per cent of everything I ever knew.

10. Da Do Ron Ron. Last on the list is a series of 10 prayers I will need to learn to recite. They are all directed towards the ultimate Lord and Saviour St. Ronald Reagan.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

To look at me, I don’t think you would take me for the kind of person who likes to torture other people. And to be honest, I myself never thought I could enjoy that morbid activity.

But here I am, these past few weeks, driving people absolutely crazy and I have to admit, it’s putting a smile on my face.

This all came about because of an epiphany I experienced one day, after trying my best to turn right on a red light into oncoming traffic. After doing this for the last 57 years since I got my licence to drive a car, I have finally given up the practice. Now, when I approach a red light in the right lane, I just stop and wait till it turns green. This has made my life so much easier after decades of near-crashes and dozens of pedestrians I didn’t see and almost ran over and bicyclists who came out of nowhere and I almost knocked down.

But in the process of making my life easier, I have made it very, very hard for the poor, impatient schlubs who pull up behind me at the red lights. Since I saw the (red) light, I have heard more horns honking than a wedding party driving through town on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

I don’t actually intend or want to torment the drivers behind me who insist I turn right, but I can live with the results of my intransigence. A driver in the right lane at a red light CAN turn right but there is no law saying he has to.

So I don’t.

Not everyone who has sat behind my car has experienced a nervous breakdown, but the mental health of many others has been seriously degraded. Amidst all the honking coming from behind me, I sit unmoved and unmoving. I await the day when some driver inevitably exits his car and comes up to mine to bang on my window. My plan, at that point, is to turn to the irate soul and smile before blowing him a kiss.

I know I shouldn’t derive pleasure from the misery I am causing others by my traffic habits but my only regret is that I didn’t start this don’t give a damn approach to things a long time ago.

It got me wondering what else I can do to spread even more dissatisfaction among the people with whom I share this fine city of ours.

©2024 Jim Hagarty

I have shot a gun before, but always a long gun, never a pistol. The dozens of times or so I pulled the trigger growing up on the farm in Canada were a complete success in the sense that I did not shoot myself in the genitals even one time. If I had, I might remember such an occurrence, but I am pretty sure I didn’t.

And yet, there are men walking (limping?) around in this world who have done exactly that. Take this middle-aged brainiac in South Dakota, for example. He stuffed a loaded pistol in his pants one recent night. I am not an expert, but to me, this would be similar to having to have a bowel movement in the woods and deciding to squat right over a bear trap.

In any case, our hero’s gun went off somehow and the bullet lodged in his penis. That is some bad luck. But what is a fine upstanding man of the community to do to explain his unfortunate accident? He could hardly go around town known as the man who shot his own penis. Now could he?

So he did the next logical thing. Naturally, he told police that he was shot by a “black guy” who tried to rob him. This made sense as black guys always make it a point to shoot men in the penis when they are robbing them. You and I have read so many stories about that.

When the injured man showed up at an emergency room to be treated, police asked him how a bullet happened to strike him in the crotch, and our gunslinger – who is white – showed that he has some talent as a storyteller and might want to pursue that when everything heals and he can sit in a chair again.

The man told police he had been putting out the trash at a dumpster outside his apartment when the robber shot him during an attempted mugging. Police went to the dumpster and found no evidence of a shooting. They started to doubt his account of an African American gunman staking out dumpsters after midnight to rob people.

However, they did find a witness who said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the man’s apartment that night. Obviously, the mugger must have broken into his apartment.

As for me, I am just glad it is almost impossible to stick a .22 calibre rifle down your pants. Or I might walk with a limp too.

©2017 Jim Hagarty