1/20/2006 12:03:00 PM by Rob

Campojibwa

Due to the unpredictable and entirely arbitrary nature of the Fun Filter here at work, The Uncouth Sloth is ok, but the Cubs Coven on Yahoo! Groups is not, for according to the Filter, it promotes Gambling and/or Fantasy. So, no, Stew, I can't go and say hello to my good friend Campojibwa, who only knows me as Mr. Gay Gome.

For those of you who are not aware of the influence of the Coven upon me, A brief synopsis: in the years back when Sammy Sosa was a 30/30 man, many of us non-Kool-Aid-swilling gentlemen were kicked out of every decent Cubs forum on the internet. So a very left-leaning attorney from Berkeley (redundancy alert!) started a Cubs forum on Yahoo!, and a slightly less left-leaning attorney from Iowa invited me to come to a very special place where there would be No Moderation on what you could say.

This very person also gave me the moniker "Uncouth Sloth" for driving some cracker crazy one month, for which I am forever in his debt. Hawkeye's debt, I mean. Not the cracker. He can suck black cocks in hell for all eternity, for all I care. But, even though I was irretrievably a Sloth, we still liked to use psuedo-witty handles for ourselves whilst arguing whether Ramon Martinez was a better utility backup than Delino DeShields.

One month, I was overly impressed with the Travelocity commercials, and decided to go as The Gay Garden Gnome. This was when (winking) Old Campo came aboard. Oh, he could tell you blood-curdling tales about Moose Moryn and TV siding salesmen wearing bad polyester slacks, and other great memories of the Golden Era before I was born. It's just that Old Campo had a few problems, not least of which his freeloading doper son, who stole his computer and sold it for airplane glue money, so Campo was limited only to his alloted computer time on Tuesdays and Fridays at the senior center. So the poor guy would be holding in his Cub load all week long, he'd get all backed up, and he only had an hour or so to shoot it all out.

Well, even if you are a pitiful typer like me, an hour seems plenty, but Old Campo has the arthritis in his fingers, from the years of bricklaying for the Chicago Diocese, so by the time he hunts and pecks his way for an hour, he's got ten ideas swimmin' around in his head. So focus is an issue for him. Suffice it to say, like me, his narrative would meander.

Also, since he doesn't have much time for typing, using the backspace key to wipe out his punk spelling and grammar was out of the question. So "memories" came out more like "mammarys".

Maybe they had a Fun Filter at the Senior Center, and maybe his doper son got off of the Crank and got his old man's PC out of hock. Maybe he just wasn't well, but years went by without hearing from him. But I guess he's back, and wants to share some old Cubs memories with his friend, the Gay Garden Gnome.

Except I guess it came out "Cub mammarys with Mr. Gay Gome". Which, even though as ZZTop would say in "Pearl Necklace", I can put up with anything, on the other side of deranged, a gay gome's mammaries are his own biznass, and I'm loath to discuss them.

So, Stew, please let the old gent know that I'm alive, and smiling even though I'm slowly falling apart. My ankle is killing me, my chest pains are getting worrisome, and my back aches like a sailor's hump. I'm sure he can relate to all of that.

Today's Six DegreesQuite uneventful, really. Chuck's wife has a garden, complete with a garden gnome, and the mold that produced it came from the same factory in Haiping, China, that made the molds that produced the TV version of the Roaming Gnome. So you could say they're brothers, or at least first cousins.

---