This Is Your Dog On Grass

This is the ex' pug, Pepper, enjoying her lawn.

Holy Shit, Folks. Ernie Kovacs.

Why the hell has it taken me this long to sit down and watch Ernie Kovacs? Okay, I had no access to him for most of my life, that's true. And then I forgot about him. About a week or so ago I was listening to an old episode of WTF and Merrill Markoe was singing his praises. Tonight I checked youtube as I ate supper and I was blown away. Yes, this is some low-budget shit, no doubt. Yes, a lot of these jokes are stale. But others are hilarious and even when the show's not trying to be funny, it's wildly inventive. I've never seen so much weird stuff packed into a half hour of network television. It was so nice of Ernie Kovacs to make something for me over fifty years before I was going to watch it. If you dig Beware the Hairy Mango, you might dig this. Here's a sample for your perusal, but there's much more on youtube.

Buggy Whips

I don't talk to my siblings much. If you told me I had an hour of conversation with either of my brothers in the last year, I'd be surprised, And, unlike my sisters, they live in my county. They're great guys, but we're just from different planets.

I got a voicemail from my oldest brother a couple of weeks ago, telling me that vampires and zombies are hot right now, and I should think about writing something about them. I left him a message thanking him, but explaining that wasn't my thing. He left another message today while I was at work and I called him on my lunch break. He wanted to make sure everything was going okay and then told me I should really think about the vampire/zombie thing. I told him that if I was in this to make money, I would have gotten into banking. He said that I could be making the best buggy whips in the world, but nobody's buying buggy whips.

Since I'm not going to change his mind and I'll never make him understand, I took the best course I know: I agreed with him and thanked him. After all, he wants the best for me and he is right. Nobody's buying buggy whips.

However, in case you're an artist who does it first for the love and you're now thinking to yourself, "Say, he is right. Why the hell am I making buggy whips?" Here's why.

What if making buggy whips made you happier than anything else that you could do? What if you won the lottery, never had to work another day in your life, and decided to make buggy whips anyway? What if one of the other great things in your life was to show off the buggy whips you made to people who really appreciate buggy whips and hear them say, "Man, that's a fine-ass buggy whip?"

I'm not saying I don't want money. I want lots of money, but I'm not going to chuck my art and produce product that doesn't mean anything to me in order to get it. That's what my day job is for. If you like making ignition keys, then by all means, make the shit out of some ignition keys. I'm cool over here. Seriously. I'm loving what I'm doing.

And for the love of whatever you deem holy, people, stop whipping those poor buggies.