From the City that Always Sweeps

BY ART KUMBALEK

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, for crying out loud it’s now the month of May belonging to the year 2022, the so-called “merry” month—the month with plenty to honor/celebrate, what with your International Workers’ Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, Miles Davis’ birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s B-day, and Mother’s Day.

As some of you’s may be aware, this month and year marks an anniversary year for me in that I’ve been snookered into being part of this Shepherd Express empire for 36 years now. Yeah, do the math, take 2022, subtract 36, and you ought to get 1986, I’m guessing.

And let me remind you’s about the 1986, the year that Microsoft had its first public offering of stock on March 13. I wonder what I had to do that was so goddamn important that day—besides attending a crappy day job with the intent to enjoy a nice cocktail or three in the evening— that I couldn’t pick up a couple, three shares at a buck two-eighty so’s to be a millionaire on Easy Street in today’s world, lo, these my waning days. Maybe it’s ’cause 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.

Yeah yeah, May 2022. What the fock? Way back when I was a kid during the threechannel black & white TV Eisenhower 1950s years (when you needed a goddamn telescope to be able to sort out the action on your family’s bullshit-inch Philco screen), I dreamed, and assumed, that by a year like 1986, what with the ballyhooed 75-76 year return of Halley’s Comet, the people of planet Earth would individually possess the convenient flying car and any existential threat from the inhabitants of Mars would have finally been kiboshed but good. Fock those green goons, ain’a?

Anyways, now it’s 2022 for lord’s sake and we still got cancer, stupid-ass wars, stupid–ass politicians, but no flying cars. I’m starting to think the future is not all that it’s cracked up to be, what the fock.

But it is indeed the merry month of May, which reminds me that I would be remiss if I didn’t send out a Big Fat Happy Birthday to Plato, perhaps the Numero Uno of the old-time-ancient Greek philosophers (right next to Anonymous, ’natch), who, per my research, would be celebrating his 2,450th on Thursday, May 21. Hey that’s a lot of candles, I don’t care who you are.

I wonder what Plato would say if I could badger him with a question like a regular Socrates, the question being, “Plato, if a man says something in the woods and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” You know what I think Plato would say? I think he’d say something like this:

“Oy, 2,450 years, and still with the questions? You got to be jerking my beefaroni. Haven’t you people come up with any answers yet? I tell you, I was born about 2,000-years-and-change too soon, I shit you not. I’d go into stand-up comedy today. Have my own show on the TV. There’s money in comedy. There’s no money in philosophy. No chicks, either. Just guys, and plenty of them. They say the chicks really go for a guy with a good sense of humor. Sure they do—as long as he also looks like Brad focking Pitt with $100 million bucks parked in the bank; otherwise, it’s hit the road, funnyman, and don’t forget to take the sense of humor with you.

“What a world. They also say laughter’s the best medicine and back in my day it practically was ’cause what did we know from medicine? Jack focking squat, that’s what. But the laughter can be good social medicine, you bet. Speaking of which, I heard a good one the other day: A thief sticks a pistol in a swell-dressed guy’s ribs and says, ‘Give me your money.’ The swell guy, shocked by the attack, says, ‘You cannot do this. I am a congressman.’ And the thief says, ‘In that case, give me my money. Ba-ding!

“But in answer to your question about the man in the woods being wrong. Beats me. What do I know from the woods? Cripes, I wrote ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ not some bullshit about prancing through a forest. Don’t they teach you modern nitwits anything in school anymore?

“Listen, got to run pally, but here’s something you’s people in your day and age all around the world ought to be asking not only yourselves but each other, and allow me to quote myself here ’cause what the fock: ‘Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?’ OK. See you ’round the corner.”

There you go. Remember, keep your eyes to the sky ’cause that’s where heaven’s supposed to be, what the fock, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.