E IS FOR "ECHO ECHO" & "EMBARRASSMENT"

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“Act now, act now, and receive as our gift, our gift to you
They come in all colors, one size fits all
No muss, no fuss, no spills. You're tired of kitchen drudgery
Everything must go! Going out of business, going out of business, going out of business sale . . .”

GOOD STUFFS
E IS FOR “ECHO ECHO” :

Theoretically speaking, a professional baseball season is 1,458 innings long. Of course, that’s not taking into account a handful of inevitable rain-outs which will diminish that number slightly.

Also in baseball, every team has a “middle relief” pitcher of mediocre talent who is always praised for being able to “chew up (or eat up) a lot of innings.” What is meant by this saying is that this relief pitcher has a strong, durable arm so he can be inserted into many games without needing a whole lot of rest:

“Joe Schmo’s a great guy to have on this team; he can really eat up a lot of innings for us!” In other words, Joe is one of the better mediocre pitchers who can pitch often, moving the team closer to the season’s finale and without doing too much damage to the cause of winning. Joe’s going to take his lumps often but hopefully he won’t allow the games to get out of hand, giving his team a reasonable chance at victory. He ain’t good but he ain’t terrible either, and he can pitch often.

I have a collection of poems I’ve written over the decades which I’ve titled: “Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Some Of My Poetry Doesn’t Rhyme.” I am under no delusions that I am anything resembling a poet. I haven’t written a “poem” (if I can use that word) in 16 years, and back when I did try my hand at them, it was usually only as a method of expressing and therefore purging my depression. With the exception of a few humorous pieces that I wrote, when it came to (what I called) “poetry”, I had a dark muse.

However, I have decided to post selected examples of my old “poetry” during this A To Z April Challenge as a way to “eat up some of these letters” and advance ‘Team Stephen’ closer to Z-End. They will hopefully be helpful as I progress through the alphabet. In some cases, I’ll get to copy stuffs I wrote in my raw, idealistic, emotion-driven youth, rather than think up new stuffs for this Blog. And hopefully, for you the reader, my “mediocre, middle-inning relief poetry” which I’m sending to the mound to “eat up some letters” won’t be TOO painful. But feel free to criticize, ignore, or just run screaming away. Stephen’s just tryin’ to survive this April Challenge by posting some things that otherwise would have NEVER EVER seen da Light O’Day.

Yesterday, I posted a Love Letter [sic] I had written back in 1983 to a woman called “T”. Today I’m going to post a poem I wrote in ’85 about our relationship that never really got properly off the ground. I never showed it to her, but I’m showing it to you because it starts with “E”. It’s rather personal, so I don’t expect that anyone could really comprehend it, but it does have about it a certain . . . mood.

ECHO ECHO
. . .(For T.)

Again
I’m floating
My feet desire roots to a mere island of earth
But space . . . nothing there
. . . then . . . here . . . now . . . outside . . . within . . . wooshhhhhhhh . . .

Lost again, am I? Lost again I am. Looooooossssssst.
If you could return for a tangible minute. One.
One minute of redemption.
Of flesh to flesh.
Emotion to flesh.
Honesty to flesh. Honesty for
A REAL minute.

I make love to pain instead of love
Unwilling to rise above an ancient bruise. Again.
And now like a balloon I expand achingly
Filled with next to nothing . . .

Lost. Again.

I apologize to you
And twice to me.
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[And as if that wasn’t bad enough…]

BAD STUFFS
E IS FOR “EMBARRASSMENT” :

Here in Phoenix, Airheadzona there’s a chain of stores called ‘SAVERS’. Savers is essentially just like a Goodwill store where people donate used items which are then sold cheaply to the public, primarily to lower economic income folks who frequent those types of establishments.

Well, there’s a Savers in the neighborhood not far from where my Brother Napoleon (Nappy) and I and my Sister’s family live. We’ve all gone in there from time to time when looking for some item we want cheap and don’t mind if it’s gently used (I got a CD player there once and a leather Tony Dorsett-model football).

They play this game at Savers where they will periodically announce a trivia question over the P.A. system and the first customer in the store to answer it correctly gets 20% taken off their purchase price.

Well, we all gathered at my Sister’s house for our Easter celebration, and at one point, Nappy held up the can of root beer he was drinking from and asked, “Does anybody know which cartoon character’s favorite soda pop is root beer?” No one got it, so Nappy said, “Dennis The Menace. I once got 20% off at Savers for knowing that.”
Then I said, “What is the only female animal that has antlers?”
My Brother-In-Law answered, “Reindeer?”
“Right!” I said. “I got 20% off a leather football at Savers for knowing that.”
Then my Brother-In-Law asked the group, “Which country exports the most frog legs?” Nappy and I both guessed France.
“No”, Bro-In-Law answered. “It’s Japan. I learned that one day at Savers, too.”

And that’s when I started laughing while being struck by a small pang of embarrassment. “Oh, my gosh!” I said loudly, “Do you realize that we are a Jeff Foxworthy joke? If your family gathers around the table on Easter Sunday to share Savers trivia questions . . . you might be a redneck.”
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Le McQuote Du Jour:
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
~ Albert Einstein

~ Stephen T. McCarthy
Doggtor of Semiliterate, Half-Naked Blogological Studies
Stream O’Consciousness University in Eudeman, Ecuador

Letter Links:
A – B – C - D -

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