Lifetime Sentences

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

I am generally not a jealous guy, but I will admit to a bit of envy when I read about the leaders of North Korea. Why can’t Canada’s prime ministers be this good? In comparison, our leaders are pretty much duds. It is no wonder Donald Trump is in love with the current head honcho of North Korea.

For example, Kim Jong Il, the now deceased father of the current dictator Kim Jong Un, was really good at sports. He bowled a perfect 300 in the first and only game he ever played. He also broke a world-record score during his first and last round on a North Korean golf course. He got 11 holes-in-one and didn’t score more than a birdie on any other holes, ending up with 25 for 18 holes, 38 under par.

He was also a literary wonder, having written more than 1,500 books. More impressively, perhaps, he wrote all these books during the three years he attended Kim Sung II University. After graduation, he composed six operas which are better than any other music ever written in the history of the world. He also invented the hamburger.

But what else could be expected of a man who was born under a double rainbow? Following his birth, a new star appeared in the sky. Not only that, a swallow predicted his birth. And when he grew up, he could control the weather with his mood.

Kim Jong Il was a genius baby. He was walking at three weeks old and talking at eight weeks old. And he and his father, Kim Il Sung, never used a bathroom because they didn’t urinate or defecate. Their bodies were so well calibrated that they used all of the foods and liquids ingested and produced no waste. The current leader, Kim Jong Un, does have bowel movements, however, and travels with his own personal toilet. Anyone caught using his mobile restroom is put to death. So his aides are well-advised to go before they accompany him anywhere.

And even though he has to poop, Kim Jong Un is still no slouch himself compared to his ancestors. He could drive a car at three years old. He began winning yacht races when he was nine. And he excelled in the arts as a child. He was particularly good at painting masterpieces and composing musical scores. He climbed to the peak of the highest mountain in his country. These wonderful attributes of Kim Jong Un are part of the curriculum in North Korean schools.

But I guess it is natural these amazing men would emerge in a country that has invented a pill that cures AIDS and cancer, where there are no people with disabilities, and where they have invented alcoholic drinks that don’t result in hangovers and a soda pop that actually grows the brains of its drinkers and makes them smarter. Plus, North Koreans found the remains of unicorns which used to live in their country and on which their leaders once rode.

But, maybe the North Korean leaders have met their match. News today that Donald Trump was named 2018 Men’s Champion in a Florida golf tournament in which he didn’t play, a tournament he won five times between 1999 and 2013.

I don’t know how we’ll ever do it, but we Canadians simply need to start producing better politicians. Every one of them is a sheer embarrassment to our once proud nation. They suck at sports, never invent anything, and regularly use toilets.

How low have we sunk.

©2019 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 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 and shoot them in the penis.

However, they did find a witness who said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the man’s apartment that night. Obviously, then, the mugger must have broken into his apartment, where he robbed the victim and shot him, earning him the nickname “Dead Eye Dick.”

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

©2017 Jim Hagarty

When a man starts his day and heads out to complete a few errands, he does not expect disaster to strike. But strike me it did this afternoon when I discovered my favourite grocery store had hiked its price of peanut butter by 50 cents a jar. At the rate I go through peanut butter, it didn’t take me long to realize what a hit this was going to inflict on our food budget.

And while I don’t begrudge the store the extra 50 cents, it was the lack of notice that sent me into a mini shock. They didn’t phone me to let me know that the price, which had been the same since back in the day when John Wayne still went by his real name, Marion Morrison, was about to shoot up. No letter in the mail. Not a text message, no email. No Facetime chat on my phone. Nothing. That’s what is so disappointing.

So now that the one-kilogram jars are out of my reach, I noticed they hadn’t gotten around to increasing the price of the two-kilogram buckets so I lugged a couple of them home, though I pulled a muscle in my left arm dragging them to my trunk.

With enough orange juice and peanut butter and with the passage of time, I will get over this. But I have been let down.

And I have to admit, I don’t like being let down.

Also, like a slap in the face, they tacked an extra dollar onto the price of raspberry lemonade.

I won’t lie.

It hurts.

©2021 Jim Hagarty

A man’s life progresses through only a few predictable stages: sex, suds, and success. But try as he might to avoid it, he will eventually end up in the final and most important phase: slippers.

Whatever priorities he might have chased down the decades, there will eventually be only one main question to be answered in his life: Has anybody seen my slippers?

Slippers have been important to me since my 20s but now they form one of my key essentials for life along with water, air and potato chips. A few years ago, a glorious pair of bedroom footwear sat under the Christmas tree for me. The two main events in a man’s life are the birth of his children and new slippers for Christmas.

Some free relationship advice: To win a man’s love, get him slippers for Christmas. And don’t cheap out.

My new slippers and I enjoyed our days and nights together, even on out-of-town trips as they went everywhere with me. Then suddenly one day, things changed. The slippers stretched into almost a size too big for me and they began to feel like flip flops. They became, inexplicably, way too big. I began tripping when I wore them.

I tripped up the stairs and down the stairs and sometimes even on simple strolls from the living room to the potato chip cupboard. If it was possible for them to trip me when I was standing still, I am sure they did that too. I stopped wearing them in the bathtub. Too dangerous.

“These slippers are going to be the end of me,” I yelled to anyone, several times a day. The pets started fleeing when they saw me slip on my indoor footwear as they knew an emotional eruption would soon follow. I began to call them my Killer Slippers and recently they sent me flying headfirst into a wooden chair which carved me up like a jack o’ lantern.

Only one solution and it would be drastic: Ditch the slippers. I asked for a new pair for Christmas and arrangements were made. New slippers wrapped and ready for service, Sir! Yes Sir, Sir!

Yesterday I was cleaning up the garage and found some other slippers. They fit perfectly. Like long lost friends. I looked more closely at the Killer Slippers. They belong to my son who has bigger feet than I have. He abandoned them years ago: They were too big for him.

Here are the five stages of a man’s life: sex, suds, success, slippers. And senility. I had put the big ones on by accident one day years ago.

Christmas is cancelled.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Sometimes life is hard for the human male. I won’t go through the list of ways it sucks but, you know, breadwinning, hiding emotions, early death, and all that, not to even start on baldness, bellies and bad breath. I think about these things every day and feel badly about my plight as a man.

But after learning today about the life – more specifically the sex life – of a certain kind of spider, the name of which I can’t remember, I am feeling a little better about myself. These guys are a little over-the-top sex-crazed, in other words, normal males, but lovemaking for them is a bit riskier than to remember to buy some protection. The problem is, their girlfriends, after it’s all over, literally eat their lovers (I said, literally).

So if you want to have sex with one of these hotties, and these guys really do want to, you have to have a strategy if you don’t to “die in her arms tonight” as one pop singer once ridiculously sang. The strategy that sometimes works is to get the hell out of there as soon as it’s all over. This is not easy, but can be accomplished.

However, these spiders have two penises which might sound like a good thing but when you’re trying to make a run for it, could slow you down. Especially since these penises are located on the spider’s head. “Hey, is that a tophat Fred or are you just happy to see me?” they might be heard to be asked. “Eff off,” replies Fred.

However, and we may as well stick with Fred from now on, Fred does the nasty and then, to get away from his lover and would be consumer, chews off his penises and runs away as fast as he can. How you can chew off your penises when they are located on your head is a mystery but I guess spiders know how to do that.

Now, if after all that, Fred could just go home and have a shower, apply a bandage or two and sit down to read his favourite book, Itsy Bitsy Spider, that would be fine. But instead, after he turns around, head all bloody and suddenly penis-less, he has to viciously fight off a long line of other males who just can’t wait to get in on this action. Because Fred’s penises are still inside his lover and doing their job of impregnating her even though Fred has left the building, and if his two former members are interrupted, no baby Freddies next spring. Out of four males spiders who go a courtin’, only one makes it out alive, if penis-less.

But I have to be honest, I think Fred’s life probably just got a whole lot better now that romance is off the table.

Now, as bad as all this is, it could be worse. There is a caterpillar somewhere out there that has to contend with a wasp which stings it and eats it and this guy’s only hope is to fling his poop as far away from him as possible so that the bee won’t find him. In human terms, that would be like throwing your bowel movements 75 feet away from you while lying on your belly on the ground.

Oh, what the heck, my life as a male seems rather quiet and uneventful, you know, so no more complaints from me. It’s Fred that has the real headaches even if his head is lighter than before. But at least he won’t get called a dickhead anymore. (Ya, I went there.)

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I have invented a few words in my time. You’re welcome.

Among my finest is the word “geneosity”. This is to be used to describe an act – and the person who does it – of a very generous man (me) who is willing to share his genius with the world.

My latest breakthrough? My wife melted a whole bunch of nearly expired candles and put them into a jar with the idea she would use that candle wax up. But, how to insert a wick. Hmmm.

Geneosity strikes again.

“Why not stick a birthday candle down the middle of the goo,” I said. Works like a charm and it feels like my birthday every day.

Now I need to get to work on a new word. Something to describe an amazing genius who drives around in an old beat up Chevy with a bullet hole in the back bumper. Idiot has already been taken but I might work some form of it into my new creation.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

To the man or woman or alien who parked beside me at the mall today: I have decided not to invite you to my next party. I am impressed, however, that you were able to get your little crapbox wedged up so close to my driver’s door I couldn’t even squeeze my body between the two vehicles (having downed too many chocolate bars and sodas) let alone open my door to get into my car and drive away.

I haven’t been able to squeeze into a space that small since I was ten years old.

I waited and waited for you to return because I wanted to address the situation with you but you were off being selfish somewhere else and I finally had to do something. I opened my passenger door and reclined both front seats as far back as they would go. Then I slithered my expansive frame across the seats, my muddy boots leaving slime across my dashboard and windshield in the process. The boots got stuck somewhere along about then and I began to wonder, if this experiment didn’t work, whether or not I would be able to extricate myself from the car at all or if this might be a job for the fire department and the jaws of life.

Finally, somehow, I got my feet on the driver’s side floor and my ass in the seat, started the car, and delicately pulled away, noticing, as I did, that the passenger side of your car was all banged in as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. If I had had a sledgehammer with me, you might have had a few more notches on your tin belt.

Now I am not a forensic anything and can barely spell forensic, but my forensic inspection of the beat-up side of your little tin box leads me to believe that this is not the first time you have jammed someone in and some of those other drivers, once in their cars, have slammed their doors against yours as a kind of thank you gesture.

I have one question for you. Have you thought of trading in your jalopy for a bicycle? You can park those suckers anywhere.

Have a nice day.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Our little dog Toby has become the World’s Greatest Peeanist.

When he discovered that his nightly pee at 10 p.m. earned him a bedtime snack, he developed an overactive bladder. For a long time, he needed two bedtime pees in the backyard. A few months ago, only three pee trips would bring him relief.

And last night, he adjusted his routine to include a fourth bedtimer, this one at 7 p.m.

Tonight, he is again on track for four backyard bushwhackers. He is startled to discover that only his final, final pee wins him some kibble but the gambit pays off as it is not always the same person who escorts him on all four pee offs so he scores additional treats just often enough to keep him scheming.

©2015 Jim Hagarty