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Saturday, January 10, 2009

Wherein I Get All Sentimental

So I was thinking about all the weirdos I know…

You know. The ones you love even if they save money by wearing their socks until all ten toes are exposed. The ones who won’t dance until they’re hugging/kissing drunk and then do so with total abandon. The ones who will only eat cheese if it’s melted because “that’s the only way kind of cheese I like”.

I used to work with a woman who ate the same thing, every day for lunch: boiled kale and a chicken breast. I watched her eat this every single day for a year. A magazine had said it would be good for her health.

I only worked there for a year. Her lunch had nothing to do with my leaving.

And lest I leave you feeling the need to come to the defense of weirdos everywhere, I’ll let you know that “weirdo”, in my family, is a term of endearment.

You know. Like “Stinky” and “Poop Pants”.

“Weirdo”’s not bad. It’s different. It’s strange. But it’s not bad. Hell, I’ve been known to be a little weird myself.

That’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

But this isn’t about me, people. This is about the weirdo at the forefront of my brain today…

We’ll call him Merle. I kinda miss Merle – he’s discovered love a little later and with a little more ferocity than the rest of us. This has caused him to fall off the face of the Earth. Friends? Nah, he don’t need no steenking friends!

Merle was a weirdo of the first water, a man who would punish my self-indulgences in quiet, elegant ways, such as putting in The Wall and forcing me to watch it by tying my shoes to the chair. (Note: I do love Pink Floyd, but The Wall makes me despair and I just can’t bear it.)

One of the last conversations I had with Merle was regarding a recipe he had submitted to his work place newsletter.

Here it is, in its entirety: the recipe for “Gruel”. Feel free to use it.

Take as much hamburger as you can afford.
Fry in large pan with onion.
Stir in Cream of Mushroom soup, a can of corn, and all the cheese you have.
When it looks ready to eat, do so directly from the pan with a large wooden spoon. If you do not have a large wooden spoon and no access to other wooden implements, you may use a loaf of bread as a substitute, but it won’t taste the same.

Good eatin’, huh? Nothing weird about that!

35 comments:

Michelle said...

Pearl and Merle!!??? Ummm is there a connection there??

Anyway so the recipe! It sounds really good in a gross, cheesy, corny, disgusting, dead cow kinda way!!! The thing is i wouldn't waste good bread on this. Perhaps a stale loaf of something that i forgot about, but fresh piping hot bread?? NO!!!

I think you can safely call me one of your weirdo friends!!!! :O)

Happy Saturday!!!

Kim said...

I like weird people - as long as they are not scary weird!

The Grandpa said...

You don't like The Wall!? And you say yo're not weird?

darsden said...

Pearl Ya Mama said quit talking about the family! LOL sorry (imissderfinasmama)

Weekends drive me bananas when I can't catch a ride on the bus!

It drives the cheevil out of me!

;-)

Eskimo Bob said...

I once had a friend,
I thought till the end.
It was not to be so,
One day, he decided to go.
I tracked him down,
To take him out on the town.
"Let's paint Nord East Minnie red!"
Was the activity I said.
"I ain't got time to spend with you.
I have someone else I'd rather do!"
"Why do you have to be so crass?
It's been a week since you've been to class."
A lone and dreary world without Merle,
If only he were with a real girl.

Diane said...

Weird is good in our house, too (and for the record, other than the sock thing, I'm very much like the weirdos you listed).

The recipe, however, made me throw up a little in my mouth... and I suspect it would have looked a lot like the gruel.

rachael chatoor said...

Ha ha, it wont taste the same if you use the bread eh? LOL yep, just a little weird, like the rest of us~

The Wife O Riley said...

My stepfather has 15 t-shirts, pairs of underwear and pairs of socks. He has 15 because he does his laundry every 2 weeks and he needs something to wear when he does it. If he gets a hole in one, he throws out 3 because they come in packages of three and he can only have 15. Weirdo!!

I don't think I'll be trying that recipe anytime soon, no wooden utensils.

Kavi said...

Wierd people drive the world ! And also, the right people get some where only when the wierdness quotient kicks in to a higher degree !

And this lady wha you had lunch with...this kale and chicken breast woman...You swear she had this for every single day for one full year !?!

And you watched her do this. For one year !!!

hmm !

:)

Irish Gumbo said...

What, no bacon? And I'll take mine with a side of egg noodles slathered in catsup. No, what I meant to say is, my FRIEND will take his with a side of those noodles. I'll be over here, eating my turkey on white with mayo.

(and weeping softly)

The only thing in The Wall that really got me was that part where he was shaving himself. OW!OW!OW!

Douglas said...

I thought this was about weirdos. Except for the onions in the Gruel, I found everything to be quite normal... normal being a relative term (and I don't eat onions). That Gruel sounded suspiciously like any one of the Hamburger Helper series. And doesn't everyone eat them out of the pan with a wooden spoon?

Bud Weiser, WTIT said...

Great receipe. Now can you teach me to cook?

Pearl said...

Michelle, you are a clever girl. WAit -- make that a weirdo. :-)

UTI, I don't do scary weird, but any other kind of weird just makes me smile.

Grandpa, O, I'm weird all right. Not NOTICEABLY weird, but buy me a couple beers and let's talk... And I do love Pink Floyd, but The Wall was so incredibly sad...

Darsden, honey, I'm getting on the bus in 45 minutes and will save you a seat. :-)
p.s. Mama said she saw you downtown last night, hustling pool. That wasn't you, was it?!

Eskimo Bob, that was lovely. Sniff. I may have to call Merle today, see if he's still eating with large wooden spoons.

Diane, ya hit that on the head. The gruel LOOK like how "gruel" sounds...

Rachael, it's all a very delicate balance, you know. :-) I asked him once if he ever considered adding anything else to it (it was ALWAYS the same thing) and he said, "What, screw with tradition?"

Wife O'Reilly, Oh, I wish I'd remembered my friend Jeff. One of his goals in life is to own one pair of underwear for every day of the year. You read that right -- 365 pairs of undies.
He also sent ALL of his laundry out for cleaning/pressing, but that's not so much weird as it is enviable...

Kavi, I absolutely SWEAR that that's what she ate every single day. Every day. And she brought it to work in the pot she boiled it in. Really. She was an absolutely beautiful woman, red hair, white white skin and really big green eyes. She also had no sense of humor... ANd you are right about the weirdness quotient.

IG, It was the shaving of the eye brows that got me. I saw when it came out ('79? '80?), just a tender soul I was, and burst into tears at that point. :-) I still cannot watch that movie. Makes me sad.

Douglas, you and I have to talk.
:-)

Bud Weiser, I will require six beers and as many cigarettes. Let me know when you're ready. ;-)

Pearl

Dennis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dennis said...

I, uh...wow.

I guess it's true. You can take Merle out of the trailer park....

As for weird, I once went on a blind date with a young lady who placed her silverware in her water glass between courses, would only swear in pig-Latin, and enjoyed stringing together sentences at an incomprehensively fast rate and then asking me to guess what she just said. The night ended badly.

Weird Girl: So, I had fun. I'd like to do this again.

Dennis: Nofreakin'waywillIeverbeineventhesamecityasyou
youweirdcrazybitchnowIwillpaythebillanddropyour
assoffinaditchonthesideoftheroad. (smiles) Guess what I just said.

Dennis

Unknown said...

JOHN FINN said...
You’d think that might be interesting to read his rants, as the more animated species of lunatic can sometimes be quite amusing, but was all very random, not well developed, and badly written – so I deleted the lot and turned comment moderation on. I expect that all he’ll bugger off if he gets the sense nobody’s listening to him – but even if he doesn’t, it won’t inconvenience anyone else.

With Jesus Christ on our side, we need not fear Satan’s limited power (Hebrew 2:14-15). We ought to be wise, however, in resisting his tactics:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

JOHN FINN,
IS A FORNICATOR!

Unknown said...

John Finn said..
Nina and I spent the afternoon together, just hanging out. It's the first I've seen of her since we spent Christmas in New Orleans (apparently, the holiday season is very busy at strip clubs), and things went about as usual. We ate, screwed, chatted, and then she left for work.

The Bible refers to premarital sex as fornication. That's a word we don't hear much these days, so what does it mean? Fornication is sexual intercourse between people who are not married to each other.

The only distinction the Bible makes between premarital sex and adultery is that adultery involves married persons while fornication involves those who are unmarried.

Premarital sex is just as much of a sin as adultery and all other forms of sexual immorality. They all involve having sexual relations with someone you are not married to.

The Bible explains, "…The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body" (1 Corinthians 6:13).

Verse 18 of this chapter goes on to say, "Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body."

Galatians 5:19 speaks the same, "The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity…"

Ephesians 5:3 says it most plainly, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people."

From these verses, we see that the Bible promotes complete and total abstinence from premarital sex.

JOHN FINN,
IS A FORNICATOR!

Jeanne Estridge said...

I, too, have a lot of weirdos in my life. As do they.

Vic said...

I think weird people are the most interesting anyway (they are my people...)
Now CREEPY people, on the other hand, are an entirely different story.

Pearl said...

Dennis, what, you didn't want more of that?!

Hmmm, Mickey. As my younger friends would say, that was random...

Jeanne, that's funny -- my friends know a lot of weirdos, too. :-)

Pearl

Douglas said...

Dennis, she had a sister. Be glad you didn't date her instead because it was her uppers, not her silverware, in that glass.

I made her pay the check.

SweetPeaSurry said...

Oh wow, Gruel ... yumm-OH!!! I'm trying that recipe out first chance I get, and I DO in fact have WOODEN implements in which to eat said gruel with. Can't WAIT!!

(does that make me weird?)

Anonymous said...

I have holes in my socks.

Bee said...

I call my weirdo Milton and she is a she. She's not so much my friend as somebody I'm forced to work with. She once fished the carton toilet paper tube from the office bathroom so she could recycle it. I work with old ladies so I'm sure there were a ton of snot rags in that garbage can. Yuck.

Dennis said...

Douglas, sounds more like her grandmother...who, by the way, forgot her wallet so we left her in the car with the windows cracked.

freetheunicorns, better than socks in your holes, eh?

KMcJoseph said...

I like the part about the burger...

and the cheese...

and the bread...

not the mushroom soup though...

Pearl said...

Douglas, no! No!
Really?
No...

SweetPea, the fact that you have a wooden spoon is not what makes you weird.
:-)

Freetheunicorns, are all 10 toes out? If all 10 toes are out, they are no longer technically "socks" but more like "feet sleeves"...

O, Bee. O, Bee. I used to know one of those. She wore layers and layers of black clothing (fancied herself Stevie Nicks!), washed her clothes in the tub while she showered. We lost touch after she took in her fourth "homeless" cat.
Wow. These comments are reminding me of just how many weirdos I have known!
And sorry to hear about yours, but you are PAID to have to deal with her, yes? Deal with her, update your resume, and some day this will all be blog-fodder!

Dennis, it's a kindness to crack the window. Leaving the radio on, too, helps them relax.
Socks in their holes. Oh, my. Yes. Better than that. :-)

KMcJ, but the cream o'shroom is the GLUE that holds the Gruel together!

darsden said...

"wasn't me" no prove it..yamama was with me last night, oh yes, she was...ummhummm MAMA!

Laura Jayne said...

Weirdo is in the eye of the beholder. Or in maybe in the socks of the wearer?

Electro-Kevin said...

What kind of family do you come from, Pearl ?

Stinky and Poop Pants are most certainly NOT terms of endearment in MY family. They are what we call Grandpa.

However. You were right about Fuck You, Penguine. I have linked this site for the amusement of my visitors.

Steve said...

'The ones you love even if they save money by wearing their socks until all ten toes are exposed. The ones who won’t dance until they’re hugging/kissing drunk and then do so with total abandon. The ones who will only eat cheese if it’s melted because “that’s the only way kind of cheese I like".'

But... but... all of that sounds perfectly normal to me.

Uh-oh...

Zuzana said...

I guess I am a weirdo too, as I eat the same for lunch every day at work too. Yaikes.;))

Unknown said...

You think you know weird, eh, Pearl?

You ain't never met my family.

Peace - Rene

Word Verif - kfula

Something the LOL cats say when they are really pissed off at Los Angeles

Kim Ayres said...

In order to define weirdo, you kind of have to definte normal. And I'm not sure I know anyone in the normal category. Weirdness is the new normal...?

Thanks for taking the time to visit and comment on my blog :)

justsomethoughts... said...

i got tears in my eyes from laughing

"as much hamburger as you can afford".

this fellow should write a cookbook. it would be a bestseller. i dont know why noone suggested it.