Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

If you happen to see my big cat,
The one that is ten pounds too fat.
Though he likes to roam.
Please send him home.
We need him to chase down a rat.

By Jim Hagarty

If I could be just half as smart
As the smartest guy in town,
Would I then be known as half as dumb
As the dumbest guy around?

Or would it be the dumbest guy
Would be half as smart as me?
And the smartest guy would then become
Twice as smart as the big dummy.

But if the smartest guy in town
Lost a thousand big brain cells,
Would I still be half as smart as him?
I’m not smart enough to tell.

And some day if I happen to
Outlive the town’s smartest guy,
But then fall sick with the same disease
And sadly, tragically die …

Would the dumbest guy in town become
The smartest guy just by chance?
Though no one is dumber than the big dumb ox,
Guess he would be the Town Smarty Pants.

By Jim Hagarty
2002

Here is a question Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, I am certain, couldn’t answer if they worked together on it for a solid year without a break.

Why does a man with a fine, full head of thick, bushy, flowy, curly, cascady, wavy, shiny hair walk into his barber shop one day and ask for a buzz cut? Is it not equivalent to the owner of the lushest lawn in town calling in a man with a cultivator to rip it all up and leave his yard a mess of stones, stubble and sorry-looking sod?

Of course, the latter scenario would never happen whereas the former one is taking place in every town, village and city across the land many tragic times a day.

What is it with these guys? Has the weight of all those lovely locks been pressing down on some vital part of their brains all these years, leaving them unable to make a wise decision any more? Because denuding a scalp that is still capable of pushing out such full-bodied fur is an affront to the owners of heads which have long ago lost that ability. A naturally bald man, seeing a fully haired friend voluntarily shave his head, couldn’t be more shocked if he were a homeless wretch watching the richest tycoon in town burn his own palace to the ground.

It simply isn’t right and something should be done about it.

Many bald-headed men, who arrived at that state through no act of their own free will but by the uncompassionate hand of a mean and merciless Fate, spend many years of their adult lives trying to reverse the judgment of Nature. They squeeze their craniums into ill-fitting wigs, submit themselves to painful surgical procedures, douse their heads with chemicals of dubious origin and effectiveness, and pop wonder pills with unknown side effects to try to look like they did in their long-ago youth when a brush and a comb were not redundant hardware that sat on top of their dresser gathering dust along with their cuff links and tie clips.

As the years pass and they come to terms with the futility of trying to recreate what God has chosen to uncreate, they enter a new stage where the object is not to turn back the tide of time but to conceal its effects from the curious masses. This period might also be known as The Hat Years, when every description of hat, cap, toque and even helmet are sought out and put to use in the never-ending quest to avoid detection. Some glorious day, when he’s rounded third base and is heading for home, it just won’t matter any more and the bald man will begin to finally brandish his bare noggin with no trace of whimper or excuse.

Before that sunny day arrives, however, he is left with the job of learning to accept the fact that his visits to the hair salon have now become little more than courtesy calls, made to renew old friendships, and that his hairdresser performs more like a patomime artist than a coiffure as she goes through the motions of styling a head which has nothing left to style. She brings out clippers, scissors, combs, and brushes but often stands there in a trance, as though she can’t remember why she is holding them. It has been years since she finally gave up the charade of using a hair dryer to finish the job. Using such a device on a man with no hair would be like sending a pair of roller skates through a car wash.

It may be that some would say the bald man should be flattered to see fully haired friends shaving their heads voluntarily, that it somehow means that, far from feeling pity for their hair-challenged associates, these guys have been looking at them with envy all this time. People who believe this are the kind of folk who gobble up such prince-wants-to-be-pauper notions like kids laying waste to a box of sugar-coated breakfast cereal.

It may even be, others will opine, that men with hair who purposely have it all removed are simply trying to get in on that “bald is sexy” wisdom that has been sweeping the nation like an urban legend. If this has been the motivation of the buzz cutters, let it clearly be said that they will soon discover how erroneous has been this idea. In this man’s experience, crossing the line from hairness to bald-as-a-baby’s-buttness has not, on one single occasion, produced a long line-up of love-starved women waiting impatiently outside his bedroom entrance to have their every animal need satisfied by the hairless wonder reclining sexily on the other side of the door.

And the sudden strange turn this story has taken leads the writer to an even more disturbing question. What, in the name of Samson and Delilah, is society to do with the woman who shaves her head bald?

Close to tears, now, the author of this piece must stop to prevent a complete breakdown. He has barely the emotional strength left to issue this paraphrased plea:

What God has thought to treasure, let no man strive to plunder.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There’s a bee in our backyard
That’s obese, a real tub of lard.
He can just barely fly.
Other bees pass him by.
“I’d lay off the honey, but it’s hard.”

By Jim Hagarty
When you bought a 1967 Ford Fairlane convertible, you got a lot of car for your money. This model was at a car show in my hometown tonight. A bit dark out for iPhone photos but you get the picture, pun intended.

By Jim Hagarty

Those of you who are regular readers of Lifetime Sentences, and it seems there are about a hundred of you a day now, will know that I was out of commission for the past few days, the first time I have not posted anything on my blog since I started it in April.

As I explained in a note on Saturday, my family and I were on vacation deep in the woods of Northern Canada, and I had no WIFI access. Then how did I post the note explaining that, you wonder. Well I drove a half hour into town on Saturday morning and used my phone to relay the message. After that, it was back to the lakeside camp to await my doom.

We had been invited to the camp, as we are every year, by a community of bears who range the properties in the vicinity looking for humans to munch on. So far, they have not been successful on snacking on any of us but I am sure it is only a matter of time. Last year they brought along a garage-sized bullmoose with them to help with the job and this year, for fun, at least one wolf whose tracks were spotted.

So there we sit, like flies that have landed on a swatter, waiting to be smacked to smithereens. Now and then, the bears play peekaboo with us, just to keep us interested.

It is said that what we fear, we attract. None of the other ten or twelve humans who camp there with us is worried about these bears. Only me. Which, in some weird cosmic way, make me attractive to them. Only a few people in the world know exactly how they are going to die. I have no doubt about my end. When it comes, I will be staring into the oversized, dog-like face of some kind of bear. Which kind won’t matter. It will have been sent by the gods and the gods will be pleased.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Once a man, twice a child.

That is one of my favourite sayings, describing, as it does so succinctly, the inevitable stages of many people’s lives.

But I think the world is in need of another new nugget regarding the aging process and I suggest this ripoff of the adage in the first paragraph: Once long hair, twice a buzz cut.

There are little signposts along the journey that let you know this is a one-way trip you’re on and the day you are told, by the person who looks after your hair, that you don’t really need to come back any more, you feel yourself in semi-shock.

“When you’re using the trimmer on your beard,” says the hair stylist, “just keep on going over the rest of your head.”

She fires up her clippers and takes a run at it, just to show me the way.

Suddenly, l am transported back to Fred Guy’s barbershop in the little village of Monkton near our farm home and the simplicity of what was known back then as a “brush cut.” A few waves of his magic wand and I was back in peak trim.

It’s a bit sad, of course, to be rounding this turn, but a bit liberating as well. I now have one black comb (a bit bent) and one blue brush (fairly new) for sale and expect to earn a fair sum for both. I no longer have to worry about my hair getting “mussed up” and my baseball caps have never fit better. My total outlay from here on in on hair dryers I expect to add up, with both taxes added on, to zero. A bonus, I suppose, is that some people have been telling me all week that I look much neater. It was never one of my life’s goals to look neater, but I guess if this is considered a positive quality, then I’ll take it.

Another sign that time is moving ever so aggressively on has to do with a man’s “trousers” (as they call them in civilized, English-speaking nations) and how well they resist the pull of gravity. I remember many years ago having a good chuckle watching a pair of pants fall down around the ankles of an “old” man next door. First of all, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he suddenly had a lot of extra baggage hovering just above his sock lines and secondly, upon discovering this fact, he seemed not to care one whit about it.

The other night, while racing to move some backyard topsoil before the sun went completely down, I bent to heave some rocks when I felt a “pop” followed by a loosening around the waist, sure signs that a button had fled the scene. But hurry is a terrible thing, with the sun in such a rush to disappear, and so I decided to carry on. While hustling across the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of soil, I suddenly felt much cooler around the leg, thigh and groinal areas and knew that I had been struck by my karma: What we mock, we shall become!

Standing there in the middle of my yard with buzz cut above and no pants below, I had my “aha!” moment: Middle age seemed suddenly in my rear-view mirror.

My only possible salvation is the prospect that I might get in on a little of that “not caring a whit” attitude my neighbour seemed to have. Day by day, I feel that coming on and I can only think that that must be nature’s major compensation for all these completely undeserved changes.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that “Mother” Nature has a cruel streak.

By Jim Hagarty

I am in the wrong field.

Come to think of it, these days, I am not in any field. I am sort of in the ditch, staring over the fence into the field.

Take the field of veterinary services, for example. I recently got an itemized estimate for a teeth cleaning of my dog. The work will be billed at $20 per minute. Not per hour. Per minute. That is $1,200 per hour. The outside estimate for the job is $1,400, unless a tooth or two needs pulling, then we’re talking $2,000 plus. The dog weighs 13 pounds. He can stick his head in my running shoe, and his nose reaches the toe.

Or take dental services. I recently sat down in the chair and had my teeth cleaned and polished. However, an X-ray showed a cavity, so it was filled. I was in and out of the office in 40 minutes. I have taken baths longer than that. The bill for this spruce up of my chompers was $711. That works out to $1,066 an hour.

Dog – $1,200 an hour; human – $1,066 an hour.

Obviously, teeth is where it is all at these days. Human, canine, no matter.

At the very least, the Tooth Fairy oughta be able to increase the payouts.