From the City That Always Sweeps

BY ART KUMBALEK

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, hard to believe that it’s already the so-called “merry” month of May—the month with plenty to honor/celebrate, what with your International Workers’ Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, Miles Davis’ birthday and Mother’s Day, which reminds me that if you’re looking for a nice champagne toast at your COVID group-limited Mother’s Day brunch, how ’bout you serve up some Oscar Wilde: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. O-Wilde, you be the man still to this day, what the fock.

And on a personal knot of note, yours truly has an anniversary to consider during this very May of flowers, which is that I’ve been snookered into being part of this Shepherd Express empire now for 35 years (take 2021, subtract 35, and you ought to get 1986, I’m guessing.), I kid you not.

Cripes, 1986, the same year that Microsoft had its first public offering of stock on March 14. I wonder what I had to do that was so goddamn important that day that I couldn’t pick up a couple, three shares so’s to be a millionaire on Easy Street presently, lo, these my waning days.

Yes, May 1986, back when “conservative” Ronald Reagan was pumping the federal debt through the roof while the Milwaukee Bucks were coming off a 57-25 season on their way to be swept by Larry Bird’s Beantown Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. And 1986 was the year the great songwriter Harold Arlen died. You betcha, he’s the guy, with Yip Harburg on lyrics, who wrote what really ought to be my theme song if I needed a theme song, “If I Only Had a Brain,” what the fock.

But after 35 years of whipping out brain-jarring essays from off the top of my head, I could abso-focking-lutely pony up to a new challenge: Chief editor and correspondent of the “science section” this publication so sorely needs for the enlightenment of its readers.

For christ sakes, the discipline of science has been getting crucified by Christian and Republican nutbags for some time, and I say it’s high time that “The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena” (i.e. “the criticism of myths”) gets some ink spewed from an objective source, like me, ain’a?

Cripes, I’d never run out of material, and I’d make sure to craft my coverage nice and lively if not dang near practical, to boot. It wouldn’t at all be like the butt-boring science they tried to cram down your throat in school ’til you could barf lunch’s pigs-in-a-blanket, no sir. I’d give you “who’s hot/who’s not” on the latest Periodic Table, photos with captions on anatomy, cutting-edge info on the science of statistics you could use on your next Vegas junket.

Or take a branch like entomology, the scientific study of insects. I’d like to delve into reasons why on the TV pest control commercials, the bug guy driving the snappy van wears a white shirt and tie on the job. Is this some kind of weird-ass psychological ploy? Do bugs dish up extra respect to a guy in a shirt and tie and simply vacate a premises on their own accord so that Herr Death won’t feel the need to unleash his secret chemical vapor storm right there in the kitchenette—a storm that could otherwise reduce a Southeast Asian rain-focking-forest to pure pud for the next two, three millennia?

And I’d give you top dollar botany coverage, you betcha. Jeez louise, I read a comment on some website that shoveled on about the reason ancient peoples were so groovy was because “they practiced animism—the belief that everything has a soul: people, animals, plants, trees...”

Plants have souls? What next? I’ll tell you “what next.” I remembered hearing of an English doctor who said he had recorded the “screams” of plants when they get chopped, diced or minced. Now, the conclusion I reach here is that those people who do not eat the meat for soulful reasons should now also not eat the vegetable and rather acquire a taste for paste as some of us youthful gourmands did back in first grade. Bon appétit!

And naturally, there’s “political science.” The old-fart Greek Aristotle wrote, “Therefore, the good of man must be the end (i.e. objective) of the science of politics.” Hey, nice try, Ari. But simple observation has surely proved you were full of crap on that one. I never bought the term “political science.” Combining something so foul with something so pure always sounded like bullshit to me, but of course if “politics” is involved, what the hell else could it sound like? You tell me, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.