The Muddled Male

Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

Scrooge

      It must be getting close to Christmas because this morning Ann, my wife, called me Scrooge.  Actually she called me a Cheap Scrooge which she claims places me several levels lower than if she called me just plain Scrooge.  If I wrote it here like she said it I would have to type "CHEAP SCROOGE" with wiggly letters since she said it with sort of a low guttural sound as opposed to the soft, silky sound she uses when she is trying to get me to order beet greens for lunch in place of the deep fried pork rinds and curly fries I am craving.

 

      Calling me SCROOGE is the result of the long running disagreement we have been having about which charity is a real charity and not a scam.  Ann thinks that if the name sounds charitable like The Humble Fund for the Humane Treatment of Earth Worms Who Have Lost a Leg then it automatically falls into the category of a charity.  I, on the other hand note that it is written in very poor English, has an address in the Cayman Islands, the salary of the president of the organization is four billion dollars a month, and a total of thirty seven cents a year goes to help gimpy earthworms.  Ann says that it doesn't matter because earthworms without legs deserve love too, which is more than she gives me if I don't give in and write a check.

 

            To top it off Ann, who was now on a roll, said that reading the Muddled Male leaves the reader thinking that the article was written by a paranoid dingbat who thinks that the world is out to get him and that if he drinks milk that has been sitting in the fridge thirty seconds longer than its "Use By" date that it will curdle in his mouth and cause spastic gut.  All I did was ask her if she thought the eggnog I was drinking tasted funny since I noticed that it ran past the freshness date yesterday.  She responded that what I was tasting was the overdose of sugar that was bad for me anyway and maybe I should start a charity called The Humble Fund for the Humane Treatment of Diabetic Dingbats.  If I did, she promised, she would donate thirty seven cents to the dingbat fund from whatever measly estate I managed to scrounge together from funds I should have given to charity before I expired