Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There was an old man from Boston
Who drove a broken down old Austin.
He had room for some gas
And his Disneyland pass
But his teeth fell out and he lost ’em.

By Jim Hagarty
1988

Current popular wisdom says the world would be a better place if men would just learn how to cry. We bottle up too much inside and that’s why we’re so nuts.

Women cry, so they’re okay, but fathers still teach their sons to hold back the tears and so on we go, starting wars and screwing up the planet.

Society allows a man a tearful moment or two at the funerals of close relatives but that’s pretty well it for the public weeping a male can get away with. We can get choked up all we like and be unable to talk for a few seconds when called on to speak at weddings, retirements and going away parties but then we’re expected to pull ourselves together and carry on, bravely. Everybody, women included, gets nervous at the sight of a sobbing man.

Under the old system of raising children, men often taught boys not to cry when someone hurt them but to return the hurt double to whomever did the hurting. If any male was going to cry, it was always best to make sure the other guy was the one who did it. It was the law of the playground. Cry, and you became known as a crybaby, about the worst reputation a male kid could pick up in those days.

In the ’60s, we needed peace and love, in the ’70s, self-knowledge and small cars and now in the ’80s, what the world apparently could really use are more sensitive men. A glance through the daily stories in the newspaper soon shows what louts we’ve become and the situation is crying out, so to speak, for a tearful reaction from us all.

Some might say teaching men to cry could be as difficult as getting horses to moo, that it’s just not in our nature, but modern males are more adaptable than most people think. With training, we could move from whimpering and whining, to snivelling and sniffing and finally, to out-and-out bawling. Before long, a smiling, laughing man would be a rare sight.

Personally, I welcome the opportunity to start letting my real feelings show. However, being new at this crying thing, it may take me a while to know when it is appropriate to set the bottom lip to quivering, the eyelids to blinking and the boo to start hooing.

For example, would it be right for a man to cry at the following emotion-stirring situations?

1. When Tweetie Bird drops an anvil on Sylvester The Cat’s head.

2. When the banker starts laughing while reading your application for a loan.

3. When you hit the funny bone in your elbow on the kitchen table.

4. When you find an earwig in your hairbrush and two in your running shoe.

5. When you visit a newborn baby in the hospital and realize his hair is already thicker than yours.

6. When the country singer on the radio mourns, You Broke My Heart So Badly Darlin’ It’ll Take Ten Pacemakers To Get It Runnin’ Right Again.

7. When you find your lost sunglasses one week after you bought a pair to replace them.

8. When you hear on the morning news that the prescription drug you took for four months may be dangerous and will likely be banned.

9. When three kids carrying skateboards walk across your newly-seeded lawn right after a rain.

10. When you realize that with the ’60s music back on the radio, you’re going to have to listen all over again to the songs you hated from back then as well as the ones you liked.

(Note: I was going to add a line about, send your suggestions to blubberingidiot.com but then realized, no Internet in 1988 when this was written, at least not in my part of the world.)

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I have a cat named Joe.
The stupidest kitty I know.
He misses the litter
And drinks from the shitter.
I’ve asked him to leave, he won’t go.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Now that the world has dealt successfully with the easier problems of racism, crime, addiction, poverty, war and pollution, it’s time for us to move onto the more serious troubles facing modern man and woman.

I am talking here of serious woes such as the shame of bad breath.
How many times have you found yourself wondering, after a particularly frightening encounter with someone whose breath, as the expression goes, would scare a buzzard off a shit wagon, why someone hasn’t done something about this? Forty years of mouthwash companies experimenting with chlorophyll and retsin and toothpaste companies trying green stripes and red gel and a lot of us still have days when even our pets won’t come near us.

Well, the good news is, someone has done something about it. In October, the Fresh Breath Clinic opened up in Toronto, one of two in North America now treating stubborn mouth odours.

“It’s like a load’s been lifted off me,” one happy clinic patient told a reporter this week. “It was just unbelievable.” My guess is a bigger load’s been lifted off his family and fellow workers.

Of course, we aren’t hearing from the unsuccessful clinic attendees, presumably because no reporter can get close enough for an interview, but who are we to disbelieve someone who has had such a transforming experience? He has been to the mountain and the answer is a special prescription mouth rinse that makes his kisser as sweet as a freshly picked daisy. The rinse apparently also works well for stripping down old tractor bodies for repainting and for opening up those nasty drain clogs. Do not use around open flames.

And now for the world’s other nastiest problem.

Out of London, England comes the news that a new course has been designed to help people stop being excessively nice. Called The Nice Factor, the weekend course is being run by an actor who wants people to stop worrying about what others think.

“We are not against being nice itself, but we try to help people who are always nice – even to people who do not deserve it – and whose lips always say yes when their minds say no,” says course founder Raymond Chandler. “The disease of niceness cripples more lives than alcoholism.”

Now, aside from the fact that it’s been a while since I heard about anyone being run over by someone driving under the influence of niceness, I have no problems agreeing with Chandler’s view. As a chronically “nice” guy of long standing, I have been left standing for long periods in line while others not burdened with such a character defect, cut in front of me at the coffee shop. My response is to reason with myself: “Why cause a scene? What does it matter? Maybe he’s a nut with a loaded handgun in his jacket. Maybe he just didn’t see me. Don’t be petty.” The bottom line is, however, that he has his coffee and is a half hour down the road before I’ve even finished deciding between honey cruller and fancy plain.

So, as you can see, this is a crisis worth attending to. And it has an unexpected side benefit that sort of shows how life works in cycles that almost have an intelligence to them. The people who graduate from treatment for being too nice, it would seem, would have no problem from then on going up to people with barnyard breath and informing them of the fact.

“You smell like a fish factory on a hot day in August,” the no-longer-nice person would hopefully have the decency to say which, if the world were perfect, would result in another enrollee at the Fresh Breath Clinic. (Or, the Open Gunshot Wound Clinic.)

So the answer it seems, is for more us to stop being so nice and send the not-so-sweet-smelling among us for treatment.

Next dilemma, please!

By Jim Hagarty
2014

When I was a boy, I sat transfixed on Sunday mornings in a front pew at the Catholic Church in the country my family and I attended, watching the spectacle unfolding on the grand altar where the priest and his helpers performed their ancient rituals.

Slowly and methodically, they carried golden chalices, poured holy water from glass canisters, rang tiny handbells and put incense into a small holder which the priest then waved toward the congregation as he walked slowly up and down the aisles.

This was spectacle, and for a farm boy growing up in a modest home and spending his days around cattle, tractors and mows of hay, it was all very mystical and magical.

But I think now that the thing that impressed me most about all this was the deliberateness that the priest and the altar boys brought to everything they did on that stage in the big old church. Every motion, every step, every turning of a Bible page or raising of a cup, was done with great reverence and peace. Nothing was done hastily or impulsively.

All was part of a rhythm, like breathing.

In those days, except for the sermon, almost every word spoken during the Mass was in Latin. That simply added to the mystique.

There was much I didn’t understand in the world around me as I grew up. Church was one of the greatest mysteries.

Now, six decades later, it is the mysteries in life that intrigue me, often more than the observable realities of it.

At night, I am sometimes outside, looking up at the moon. The same moon the dinosaurs and the cavemen saw before me.

Much has changed. Much has not.