DeadRooster.com

Photo credit: Dideo

This morning I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to a screaming cellphone. It’s something that rarely happens—usually I’m awake long before the alarm goes off—but, I stayed up late last night in yet another attempt to watch a TiVo’d version of Napoleon Dynamite.

As you can imagine with a blog called Dead Rooster, my cellphone’s alarm ringtone is based on the crow of a rooster; an extremely loud rooster; a scientifically modified rooster built to launch a screech so annoying that it is easily on par with someone dragging a hard rusty rake across a dry blackboard.

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

My eyelids click open and I sit bolt-upright. My sandpaper eyes are set on stun. I’m disoriented. It’s dark. I scan the room for the phone…

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

I see the phone flicker as it crows. It’s on the bed no more than four inches from where my ear was. I go to grab it and…

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

My arms are numb. I must have slept on them funny and they are like the arms of a dead man. I desperately try to dangle my arms over the phone so I can pick it up and shut off the alarm before it screams again, but my fingers are operating like uncooked hotdogs.

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

The ringtone is rattling my skull and I’ve got to shut it off or I’m going to go insane. My hands are too numb to pick up the phone so I start jabbing randomly at buttons with my limp fingers to try and make it stop…

A woman’s voice comes out of my phone, “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

I lower my head close to the phone, “No,” I said. “My arms are paralyzed and…”

“Your arms are paralyzed?”

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

“No…I dialed by mistake. I slept on my arms wrong and my fingers are numb; I’m trying to shut off the alarm in my phone but my hands won’t work… “

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Hysterical laughter explodes from my phone speaker.

I focus on the red disconnect-button and get lucky—a direct hit. I hang up on the 911 operator. My hands are beginning to wake up, but they’re entering the horrible “tingle stage” with the sensation of a billion needles penetrating every finger. I find the alarm’s disable-button and strain to press it before the phone spits out another attack.

While all this is going on, the automatic coffee maker in the kitchen, which I had set to start brewing at 3:45 a. m. has begun to make coffee. Unfortunately, last night, I didn’t set the pot exactly under the dripper, so now, for the past 15 minutes it is secretly peeing all over the counter and floor.

Now, you would think I would be upset about the mess I have to clean up, but I’m not—at least, I wasn’t until the coffee pot gave off its happy little beep-beep-beep-beep to let me know the coffee was done.

THE COFFEE WAS NOT DONE…it was busy filling up the silverware drawer!

I clean up the mess and get another pot of coffee started. I walk over to my laptop and it says, “THREAT DETECTED.”

You’ve got to be kidding me!

What’s weird about that is I only use that laptop for writing. I don’t surf the internet; I don’t download anything; the only thing I do with it online is transfer what I’ve written to an online word processor. So, how do I get a virus? It doesn’t make sense.

So, I kill the virus with AVG and get into Microsoft Word and start to write what you are now reading while it’s still fresh in my mind. I look at my cellphone (which is how I tell time around here) to see how much time I have left before I need to start getting ready and notice that there is a missed call from early last night: “Hey, Bill, the customers canceled…go ahead and sleep in tomorrow.”

Grrr!

So, I’m wandering around the internet, checking out my blogroll, when I came across a post by my good friend, Don Lewis. Apparently, his heart is still filled with joy from a few months ago when I lovingly tagged him with a “meme.”

For those that don’t know, a “meme” is the blog version of a chain letter. Most bloggers, such as Don, absolutely love them and no matter how many times you tag them, can’t seem to get enough of them. I, on the other hand, am not too fond of them and try to avoid them as much as possible—actually, to be more precise: I hate them.

Anyway, I’m surfing along and see that I have been tagged by Don and I immediately say out loud, “A two-pronged barbeque fork, right in the eye!” I don’t know why I said those exact words; it doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense, except that it probably communicates, better than anything else I could come up with, my exact sentiments toward blog memes.

Since Don is such a good friend of mine, and since I did tag him with one once, I feel obligated to do this just one more time. I will NOT be passing it on though. I just refuse to promote these horrible things any more.

Here are the rules (which will apply to no one, since I am not passing this vile memerick on):

• Link the person(s) who tagged you
• Mention the rules on your blog
• Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
• Tag 6 following bloggers by linking them [*Note: I am not doing this]
• Leave a comment on each of the tagged bloggers’ blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged [*Note: since I’m not following the previous rule, it doesn’t make sense to follow this one either]

Here are six unspectacular quirks of mine:

1. I hate meme tags. I hate these things more than I hate Captain Trips.
2. I want to kill Don Lewis. I’ve always wanted to kill him, but now that he has tagged me, all systems go!
3. I believe meme tags are the work of the same infant-sacrificing, devil worshiping cult that invented Good & Plenty Candies.
4. I love fluffy kittens. There is almost nothing I’d rather do than play with kittens—except maybe kill Don Lewis.
5. I am mechanically inclined, but hate working on anything mechanical. I am about to replace the “Clutch Release Cylinder” on my truck. I am dreading it, but I am not going to pay an illiterate chimpanzee ten times the cost of the part to turn two bolts—and, probably do it wrong.
6. I don’t sleep. Haha! Sleep is for losers. I get maybe five-hours on a good night. Maybe.

Ok, maybe I went a little over-the-top with the “Kill Don” stuff. Actually, he is probably the funniest guy on the internet and all-of-you should pay a visit to his blog. Don was the first guy to acknowledge me as a humor blogger and did a nice little write-up when I was just starting out. That really meant a lot to me.

I’ve contemplated the idea of someday meeting him in person, but am terrified that I might literally die of laughter. I’m SERIOUS! Sometimes, even his short comments and message-board posts are so funny I need oxygen. So, you can imagine how funny his blog posts are.

His blog is called, It’s a Funny Thing. Give him a visit and tell him I said, “Hello.” He’ll probably know what it means… It means, hello, but maybe he’ll mistakenly read something sinister into it.

One of seven black widow spiders I found along the back fence of my house.

Black widow spider venom is fifteen-times as toxic as that of the prairie rattlesnake. This is why yesterday I was somewhat alarmed to find seven of them (black widows, not rattlesnakes) building a cobweb amusement park along the back fence of the Dead Rooster Mansion.

They are resistant to all non-flamethrower style insecticides, so the only way to get rid of them is to physically smash them with a proper black widow extermination device. My personal favorite is the handle of a TaylorMade r7 CGBmax 5-iron golf club. The correct method for using this high-tech instrument is to hold the club-head in your hand like a pistol grip while pointing the tip of the long handle a few inches from the offending creature, then smoosh.

You have to be quick though because black widows can sense danger and vanish quicker than Dick Cheney’s signature on a charity donation. They escape into knot-holes, under loose boards, or worst of all—and this is where I learned that wearing nothing but short pants and a t-shirt while trying to slay highly-poisonous black widow spiders with a golf club is not such a great idea—they can leap onto you.

I squished the first six spiders in heroic fashion and without a hitch, but the seventh one, obviously skilled at club-handle evasion tactics, unwittingly managed to become part of the meanest hoax ever foisted upon me.

I blinked and she disappeared. I can only believe it was an elaborate prank of nature when, at the exact moment the spider vanished, it was precisely the exact same moment in which an apple blossom drifted from a nearby tree and wriggled its way down the back of my t-shirt.

OK, as you can imagine, my reaction was elaborate. I could feel what I thought was a black widow spider—probably with newly sharpened fangs dripping with highly toxic super-venom—jump down the inside of my shirt!

I could feel its spindly legs; I could sense its anger; I could hear it breathing!

But fate was not satisfied with the intensity of this cruel practical joke. No, it had to do more; it needed a witness.

It turns out that while this nightmare was unfolding for me, my brother, David, had stopped by for one of his surprise visits. When he couldn’t find me in the house, he walked out into the backyard just in time to see me lurching around the lawn wielding a golf club as if I were trying to slay an invisible dragon.

Thinking I was goofing around, he said, (and I believe this is pretty close to the exact quote), “You look like you completely swallowed one of those poisonous frogs that, when you lick’em, cause you to hallucinate.”

“There’s a black widow down the back of my shirt!” I screamed.

After seeing the genuine look of terror on my face he decided that maybe he should try to help me.

Cautiously, he pulled back the collar of my t-shirt and took a look. After seeing the apple blossom, but without passing up an opportunity to further torture me, he said, “holy crap! There is one in there…and, it looks totally pissed, like it wants to bite you!”

The blood drained from my face.

David, who by this time could not contain himself, began laughing hysterically. “No, man, I’m just messing with you—it’s just a flower or something.”

I felt the golf club in my hand, gripped the handle tightly, and brought it up to the “swing” position.

David stopped laughing.

I never did kill that final spider, but I know the general area she’s hiding, so eventually she’s a goner. Right now I’m off to get some margarita mix…and, possibly a beekeepers outfit.