I HEART HEDBERG. YOU JUDGE JUDY.

I saw this wino. He was eating grapes. I was like, “Dude, you have to wait.”  -Mitch Hedberg

                

          Until recently, I did not know that I was Irish.  The background information from my adoption was more than a little vague on the paternal side, and I recently set about to… clarifying some things. (This little clarification situation is quite possibly going to result in a posting which I will privately refer to as “Oh Look, Now We Parade The Mean, Mean Man’s Head Through The Village on a Stick”.)  (Sometimes you just gotta have a parade.)

I’m pretty sure that I’m “Not Right” Irish. You know—the Alec Baldwin and Colin Farrell kind. I spend a lot of time tripping over a brambled up mess of lust and melancholy. I write pretentious sentences about myself (see above) and overanalyze things to the point that I actually end up DOING very little. Then, I make fun of myself.  I am Irish. That’s the first bit of background info.

The other thing that seems relevant here is that about ten years ago, I ate a white peach while I was uncharacteristically RAFTING with my friend, Andy. (Andy sometimes spells his name “Agndy”. I like that, and I like him.)

(Agndy and I were neighbors for a while. One day, he had a couple friends over and he was throwing pebbles at my window, because he apparently thought his friends would enjoy seeing him act like an ass. When I couldn’t get him to stop, I said, “Hey, Agndy… Catch!”  And he did… catch an egg which sort of blew up all over his face.  It was funny, but then…aww… poor Agndy and his eggy face sittin’ on the driveway with his girlfriend laughing at him! So sad.)

Anyway, um, this white peach that I ate ten years ago was amazing. It was a drippy, nectary mess on a beautiful, sunshiney day and that jacked up combination of sensory input…the sun and the sticky sweetness on my hands and chin and the smiling that seemed like it might actually become what my face does…if your life flashes before your eyes when you die, I’ll be all up in that peach. (Ahem.)

That is my nature.

                The Gummer… not so much.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought some champagne grapes at Wal-Mart. One of my theories is that Sam Walton and The Family increase the canyon-width of their profit margin by providing inferior produce to their devoted-by-default Wal-Martians. Not today. These teeny grapes were like that white peach on the river. I couldn’t begin to emote properly in the Mart, and I bought a box of those nummy little purple balls so I could take them home and love ‘em up right.

(Don’t get too attached to that paragraph. It’ll get revised when The Gum breaks and I go global mas mondo. I like the nummy balls part, though. Mmm… nummy.)

I digress.

The grapes were so delicious that I figured surely even The Gummer would swoon. I took them into the living room where The Gummer was watching “Judge Judy”. I held them up like it was my first day at my new bear feeding job.

“I bought champagne grapes.” I said it like it was a question.  What a dork I am! Sometimes it’s like I’m on “The Gong Show” and she’s up waving her gonger around (Eww…. Please revise) before I can get to the good part of my tap dance.

She scowled. Excessively. Another face from her repertoire of only child facial expressions.

                I rolled my eyes. A duel.

              “They’re sweet. They’ll cancel out that sour expression you’re making.”

                She took one. The clouds parted.  Even The Gummer couldn’t resist these succulent balls of numness.

                (No, MICROSOFT. They are not “balls of numbness”.  Use the context clues.)

                Now I needed her to acknowledge my victory: “Do you like them?”

                “Yes, but they’re too small.”

“Too small FOR WHAT?”

She scowled and bobbled her head around. “It would take you half an hour to eat them.”

I cavalierly plucked several of them and blooped them into my mouth. “Eat them five at a time.”

She wanted to argue. About grapes. Delicious, delicious grapes. “Yeah, but how many of them have STEMS?”

“I will destem them for you.” I made exasperated Mom-eyes at her.

She resumed her Judying.

                As I walked toward the kitchen to destem the queen’s grapes, I expressed my love for her in the language of my people: “YOU are a pain in the ass.”

A few minutes later, she took a break from her legal seminar and shuffled into the kitchen where I was determinedly plucking away at the champagne grapes in the sink.  She buried one of her talons in a Rubbermaid container on the counter and squawked: “Well, did you wash these green ones?”

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