Guest Post: There’s Something Wrong with This Guy

My neighbor joem18b invited me to sit down here and write a guest post on his blog. He’s gone down to the 7-11 to buy us some juice to drink the times I come over from next door to visit like this, so I’ve got about ten minutes to finish this composition. He probably expects me to say something nice about him, but he told me to just say whatever was on my mind and I will. But I don’t want him hanging over my shoulder while I’m at it, so when he comes back, I’m done, whatever.

First of all, joem18b? Who has a name like that? I see him in the front yard, I have to go Hello, joem18b. It seems odd. He wants to be a good neighbor, I’ll give him that. But he’s a strange bird.

Second of all, I’ve read this blog of his on the computer down at the library. (I don’t have a computer yet. I’m waiting till they settle down.) From his blog, you’d think he was a regular guy. He told me the other day that he stole 95% of what you read here, from other blogs. He said he couldn’t write a good sentence if his life depended on it. He said he’d never get caught because there are so many blogs and nobody would think to check, if anybody read his stuff in the first place. He just wants to make some friends. I asked him if he had made any. He said most of the people who read his blog, if they even did really read it, he didn’t know who they were or where they lived or what they did or anything. I asked him why he didn’t just go downtown and meet some folks. At a bar or the bingo hall or the whorehouse. He stared at me like I was nuts.

There’s nobody living in this house but him. There is a dress dummy in the living room, wearing a tuxedo. At night I hear dance music and see shadows moving on the shade.

The blog contains stuff about sex, but he told me that he lost his privates at the age of two in an accident with an electric toy steamshovel.

He spends an awful lot of time in the kitchen and out in the yard with his flowers. Can you be a fag if your dick was cut off?

I don’t like his religion. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t see him in my congregation on Sunday mornings, so it can’t be good.

He’s not from around here. He could be from a foreign country with that name of his. When he moved in, before he changed them, he had license plates from Wisconsin or Minnesota or someplace like that, someplace with a lot of Swedes or Germans or Canadians or whatever. His eyes might be a little slanty. His skin might be a little dark. His hair might have some curl in it. Kinky curl, I mean.

I’ve never liked the paint job on his house. Mrs. Jacobs, who lived there before him, wouldn’t change it. When she finally passed, I breathed a sigh of relief. joem18b said that he’d paint it a new color. I asked him what color. He asked what color I would like. I said I’d like a brown color. The next day he told me he had researched the subject on his computer and how would I feel about French Roast. I asked what was that. He said the color of coffee. I said I didn’t want anything to do with the damned French. Cowards. He asked about Portobello. I asked what was that. He said a mushroom. Jesus Christ, joem18b! What’s wrong with you? He asked how I would feel about Dark Chocolate. OK, I told him, paint this eyesore the color of dark chocolate and you’ll finally have a friend in town, namely, me.

Why don’t ex-presidents appear in the movies?

If someone asked me to be in a movie, I’d say yes. Just for fun. Just to act, although I know zilch about acting. Just to be there on set and recite my lines and do multiple takes and then to sit down that evening for rushes and to see myself up there on the silver screen.

If Clinton or Bush wanted a part, they could get one in a second. I’d write one for either of them in half that time. Look, Schwarzenegger is already back on location, with no wife or office to moderate his groping. If Reagan hadn’t been deep into his bout with Alzheimer’s before his second term was up, he would have mounted El Alamein, his favorite horse, once more. I’ve seen the scripts. The studio was going to film on his ranch, with his Secret Service agents lurking behind the cameras. Before he got too sick for the project to be practical, Nancy kept the negotiations going, which included her comeback as well as Ronnie’s. Sunset Blvd. moves north to Santa Barbara!

Chester Arthur died too soon, but Benjamin Harrison might have snuck onto early film before his death in 1901. Cleveland, too. TR died in 1919. Perhaps he appeared in an early flicker or two; it wouldn’t surprise me. Taft went to the Supreme Court. Wilson and Harding died too soon. Coolidge just wanted to go back to Vermont and stay there. Hoover was a brainiac who couldn’t be bothered with the movies. FDR died too soon, and his disability was never shown in the media, which would have ruled him out anyway. Truman would have done it, would have brought Margaret with him, but Bess wouldn’t let him go. She had put up with him out of Missouri more than enough; no way he was going to Hollywood. Eisenhower and LBJ had bad tickers, or something might have been done there. JFK became the subject of movies, not the star in them.

Now, Nixon, that guy… My dad begged him to come over to the studio for a talk. Nixon was right there at San Clemente. He wanted vindication. Sure, he was writing his books, but he knew in his heart that nobody would read them, especially after a few years had passed. My dad sent a screenplay over to him, in which, yes, Nixon played a President brought down by a Democratic (sorry, Democrat) conspiracy. Nixon was interested. For one thing, Pat was on the sauce again and he needed something to help distract her. His books sure weren’t doing it. There were the San Clemente gardeners (undocumented, of course, in both senses), but I’m not going there. Anyway, my dad set up a meeting with Nixon, but then the studio heads got wind of it. Nixon was a bigger anti-Semite than Mel Gibson, of course, and the studio heads put the kibosh on the meeting in a thrice. They especially hated the part in the screenplay that suggested that Nixon was mainly brought down by the Jews.

Nobody cared about Ford, or ever wanted to see him again. Carter was off being a do-gooder; no time for fun. GWB was so intertwined with the Washington bureaucracy and Texas oil and Haliburton that he was never going to be allowed outside the fold and onto film.

Which leaves Clinton and Bush. I have feelers out to both. Maybe it’s a little low, but my Clinton feeler is a Lewinsky lookalike with the morals of a skate.