A million pieces of crap

last week the newspaper carried a story about the author of the best seller “A Million Little Pieces.” Purportedly a “memoir” of his life as an addict, drunk, and criminal, the author, James Frey, is currently under fire for making-up stuff about how bad he was. In reality, they assert, he was just a lazy, lying sack of crap. In his defense Frey has said he had made up many of the details of his life and had created a bad-guy portrayal of himself as a "coping mechanism."

I have not read the book, and I do not plan to. Any book that makes Oprah’s “must-read” list automatically goes into the DF-do-not-read booklist which I post weekly on the corkboard bulletin board in the Cob shack foyer. If anyone leaves one of the Oprah selections at the book exchange, Lardass has standing orders to remove same and chuck it in the dumpster where we chuck anything that smacks of sentimentality, cuteness, Francophilia or phoniness.

At the dump, we are admittedly operating at a substratum of polite - or perhaps even impolite - society. We (falsely) claim to lie, cheat and take bribes. We assert that will do most anything for money, and we admit to drinking to excess. I know what you are thinking – “We must be politicians!”

But,no: we are just ordinary, prevaricating dumpfucks. (Still, you have a point. We probably could not be distinguished from a US senator either by a Polygraph or a police line-up.)

We say we are proud of the bribes that we have taken. We insist that we have no remorse for the dead bodies that decompose silently in the dust of the north forty (most of them are roadkill; the few souls that we have dispatched to their creator certainly deserved every whack.)

I was busy working at my desk when the crew came in for morning coffee break. When I looked up from my typing, Lardass was wolfing down leftover donuts which we get from the local Dunkin Donut shop. Lardass gets them for free by telling the manager that he is taking them to the Home for Wandering Orphans to feed the hungry little waifs.
Next to him George was sitting with his feet up on the stove rim, tilting back on his chair the way I tell him not to do. He was scowling at me.
“What?” I yelled.
“You are doing it again aren’t you? Making shit up about some guys who get together at some fictitious dump and act-out your stupid little jokes.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m working on the budget.”
“See! There you go! What budget! There is no budget. There is no Cob shack. We don’t have ‘jobs’. This is not even a dump. “
“Ok, then pray tell, what do you think it is?”
“This is just a dayroom at a mental hospital.”
“And I suppose I am merely the figment of my own imagination?”