Riptide is pleased to announce the hiring of Jack McKeon, the 80-year-old interim manager of the Florida Marlins, as an interim semi-regular columnist. His first topic: the debt ceiling.
I was on the bullpen phone with Corny the other day when he said the damndest thing. Apparently, there's a thing called the debt ceiling. And apparently, I'm supposed to give a damn.
Where to start? Let me find my glasses. Have you tried the tuna grape salad at this place? Tastes like unsalted seal testicles, of course, but my Mussolini of a doctor says this and Viagra are the only things I can feed myself. Where was I?
Debt ceiling, my rump. In my day, we didn't even have ceilings. That's why men wore hats, to keep out the elements. I spent my childhood until age seven huddled with my brothers and sisters in one corner of my father's jumbo Stetson fedora. We'd hold on to his greasy strands of hair for dear life when he went up and down stairs.
Sometimes Dad would send a crumb of white bread or rotten cat meat up there for us to fight over like hyenas. Six of my siblings died in a great hat fire when he tried to give us a lit cigarette to share.
Let me tell you what I don't understand about the politics of this age. All the bi-partisan bickering. In my day there were two parties. Pinko. And Ronald Reagan. And if Ronnie found out you were consorting with the Reds, he'd ride over on his white horse, sneer something clever atcha, and slice your head off with the embossed sabre he kept in his briefs.
I am not speaking metaphorically.
I do believe this Boehner fellow is hiding lady parts under that suit. The way he cries and carries on like a gypsy boy deprived of black magic. Real men don't bicker. They clamp their jaw shut, buy a five dollar bag of arsenic, and sprinkle tiny bits of it in the other man's horse feed over a few years. Eventually, the other man's horses will all die, and his wife will leave him for you in order to survive.
That's how you win an argument, not by weeping on C-Span. When Bobby Cox and I were both shortstops battling for a spot on the same Ozarks League team, I force-fed him a sick rat during the seventh inning stretch of a game in Mobile.
Guess who got the starting job?
So I told Corny that this debt ceiling talk makes me retch. The real problem is nobody knows how to manage their money anymore.
I make three thousand dollars a day. But I still live on dog food and boiled shoelaces. The team trainer gives me the latter free.
Sent from my Jitterbug.
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