Tag Archives: parakeet

Cuckoo Clock

Cuckoo clock: (n) a wall or shelf clock, often carved and decorated, that announces the hours by a sound like the call of the cuckoo

For a very brief season, I had some money.

I did not earn it. The finance was acquired through an inheritance.

It was annoying.

Money is like a parakeet you invite into your house and no matter how hard you try to shut out the sound of the tweeting, it abides.

No matter how much I attempted to envision my money as having a station at the bank, I kept trying to bring it home for the holidays.

Yes.

I wanted to spend it.

I especially wanted to buy things I would not normally buy, but would show others that in buying them, I expressed my opulence.

In everyday English, I wanted my money to brag for me.

On some days, I sat in my small office and thought about items I could purchase that would make me seem prosperous, worldly and well-traveled.

On one such occasion, a cuckoo clock came to mind.

I had always been enamored with them. The idea of a mechanism telling time while also having a little bird pop out of a door on the hour, singing a song to let me know that sixty minutes had passed, enchanted me. How adorable.

I became obsessed.

I quickly found out that they were expensive. But hell—wasn’t that the point?

I learned that the best ones came from Germany, so I suddenly became very patriotic and decided to “buy American.”

I found the best American-made cuckoo clock that was available to be purchased by a mortal such as myself.

It arrived, I opened it up, it looked beautiful, I read the instructions, had others read them with me, so we could all come to a consensus on how to get our cuckoo clock to cuckoo.

After all this was done, we hung it on the wall.

It never worked right. Not even once.

Oh, it would cuckoo—but it would cuckoo like it was cuckoo.

You know what I mean?

It was a clock that had a whim. Apparently, it disregarded the importance of time, and the bird came out to do its show whenever the clock felt like it should.

It still looked beautiful, but if people visited for more than an hour, they became aware that I had purchased a clock with a wacko bird.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

 

Agnew, Spiro

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAgnew, Spiro (1918-96): U.S. politician, he served as Richard Nixon’s vice president from 1969-73 but was forced to resign because of corruption charges against him that stemmed from his time as governor of Maryland 1967-69.

Most of the people around me who are under the age of forty have never perched themselves in an outhouse.

I have.

And the funny thing about an outhouse is that even though it is set apart from the regular home and requires that someone go down “the path less taken,” you always know when you’re near one. Matter of fact, rarely do you even have to ask for directions–unless you have nasal congestion.

It stinks.

And you know you’ve stayed in one too long when you cease to find it repulsive.

So when I see the name Spiro Agnew, that’s what I think about. As we look back, using the great hindsight of history, it is absolutely amazing that no one noticed what an outhouse the Nixon Administration, considering all the turds that surrounded it.

It just stunk.

They were arrogant, they were self-righteous, they were filled with the notion of their own mission and goodness, and it was ridiculous to connote that the man who selected the team was any different from his worst members.

Spiro Agnew always had the look on his face–as if he had swallowed a parakeet and you had just walked in the room and caught him. Yet he had no intention of divulging his action.

I guess that’s what the phrase, “by their fruits you shall know them” actually means. It’s not so much that we need to judge people–we just need to be intelligent enough to “take a whiff.”