Shiver Me Timbers

The beach vacation proceeds blithely, I'm happy to report. The dogs have shown signs of excellent progress -- we've not yet seen the return of their customary whole-heart, whole-spine tail-wagging, but both have managed to display some tentative oscillations.



No, it's Wonder Woman who today hints that all is not well in Paradise. She evinces guilt, for example, that our recent purchase and avid consumption of the first season of Deadwood on DVD has had a noticeably deleterious effect on our vocabularies. My Al Swearengen post of a few days ago, (which proved rather bemusingly popular on the Internets, by the way, being read by a heady 53 people!) manifests the problem clearly: It's all very well to assume a tone of voice and a distinctive vocabulary in order to amuse and elucidate in a blog-post, but it's when one's ordinary conversation becomes peppered with casually tossed-out "cocksuckers," and one addresses one's own cherished teenaged offspring as "you dirt-worshipping little goat-fuckers," that one should perhaps sit back and take sober stock.

Perhaps spurred on by my recent flirtation with ass-cancer, Wonder Woman has also begun to be troubled by thoughts of death. In particular, over dinner last night she expressed some new opinions on the method by which she would like to dispose of her mortal remains. She declared herself unenamored of the customary burial or cremation, and has instead decided she'd like her lifeless body to be preserved through taxidermy.

Now at first blush, this may seem somewhat unconventional, bordering on the bizarre, but on reflection, it has many practical advantages, and it's just like my wonderfully pragmatic life-mate to have explored the possibilities. For example, you're far less likely to be forgotten if you have to be dusted once a week or so -- which certainly can't be smugly asserted by the occupants of cemeteries, where out-of-sight, out-of-mind rules the day. She also pointed out that visitors and house-guests are unlikely to overstay their welcome if confronted by the stuffed corpse of the former Lady of the House displayed as a curio.

But it is in the matter of home decoration that my cherished soul-partner shows the depth of her practical ingenuity. During most times of the year she suggests she could be displayed casually in the living-room, perhaps, seated on the sofa holding a drinks-tray, or a rack of popular magazines for visitors. But at holidays, think of the possibilities! A Christmas creche featuring donkeys, sheep, and Mom in full BVM drag, or perhaps a Santa's-sleigh display featuring Mrs. Claus in red with white fur trim. Ho, ho, ho! A Thanksgiving tribute in the foyer with cornucopias and Indian corn, all surrounding an artfully posed Wonder Woman in full Goodwife McPuritan regalia! The Halloween possibilities are virtually endless, of course -- and whose heart would be so hard as to be unbeguiled by an Easter tableau featuring bunnies, chocolate eggs, and Mom's preserved corpse in a simple white shift holding a sign: Halleluia! Unlike Me, He Is Risen!

It has long been a cherished daydream of ours to open a themed restaurant in a resort town. The Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we are now spending our holiday, was a haunt of Blackbeard -- was in fact the site of his final battle with the British Navy -- and so a thousand pirate-themed joints flourish up and down the islands. Last night in Nags Head we passed one place that had a fiberglass pirate out front, posed to attract foot-traffic. Wonder Woman proposed that this would be a capital way to attract passersby to our own Pirate's Cove: Her articulated remains in silk head-scarves and duck trousers, posed rampant with cutlass brandished in the flower-bed out front amid hogsheads and shipwreck flotsam, one glass eye out wildly askew, the other hidden beneath a patch, and a scratchy looped recording blaring from a hidden bullhorn:

Shiverrrrr me timberrrrs, ye cocksuckers!

I'm calling our lawyer to have our wills updated tomorrow.