The Saga of the Homeless Oak Ridge Boy (Part I)

I began relating this story elsewhere on the Internet, but it now seems it is an ongoing drama with new, untold developments, and I thought this was the best place to see it to its conclusion (if in fact it has a conclusion). At any rate, I'll pick up the story from the beginning, and apologize to those who have heard portions of it before. To the uninitiated, however, the saga should unfold seamlessly.


There are over 6 billion people on this planet, and according to geneticists, no two faces look exactly the same. Apparently, some poor schlep compared all 6 billion of our faces as part of his doctoral thesis, and that's how we know.

Still, despite the usual lukewarm interest in the idea, I believe it to be true. I mean, I've never met anyone who looks like me (a fact that pleases more people than I care to consider), and I've even known identical twins who have noticeable differences between them.

But trusting in this scientific fact has instilled in me a bit of turmoil regarding something that occurred to me earlier today.

Do you remember the guy with the long beard from the singing group The Oak Ridge Boys?


Well, there's a homeless man in my neighborhood who throws trash at me every morning when I come out to go to work. (It's kind of our shtick.) Anyway, the sunlight after this morning's rain shower must have hit his wet beard just right, because as I dodged a melon rind, I could have sworn the homeless guy was the long-bearded dude from The Oak Ridge Boys.

Now as I said, I trust that no two people look exactly alike, and it is likely just a coincidental, though striking, similarity the two men share. But the resemblance is undeniable, and I can't help but wonder if it's actually him.

Perhaps if he's not armed with anything heavy to throw, I'll ask him tomorrow morning.

Back from the Dead

Well, I've just returned from my death bed.

Yep. Last week I went down hard with the bird flu, or super pneumonia, or SARS, or mega-emphysema, or lung cancer, or something. And I was at Death's door. Actually Death doesn't have a door. He's kind of into New Age mysticism these days and says he doesn't like to "impose boundaries". Death's door is more like a bunch of those hanging hippie beads. He's actually got a pretty cool pad, if you can stand the incense and sitar music. Hey, even Death's rock 'n roll days are behind him.

But I was really in a bad way. I had one of those chills and fever, coughing, runny nose, stuffy head, headache, sweating, miserable, can't get out of bed for three days kind of flus. The kind where you're burning up, but shaking from the chills at the same time. The kind where, when you do get out of bed, you stagger about in a NyQuil haze, eating aspirin like Pez, wondering how much prison time you'd have to serve for murdering the son of a bitch who passed the virus on to you.

I spent a good portion of the time I was incapacitated moaning and watching daytime TV. Did you know daytime TV really sucks? It does, and that only led to more, very protracted moaning. I also spent a good amount of time calling every person programmed into my cell phone, asking each in turn to come over and kill me. I begged people to put me out of my misery.

But no one would, even though I said "Please", and even though I told a couple of my friends I'd leave them my Playboy and Penthouse collections as well as my liver. The ungrateful bastards seemed suspicious of the condition of the magazines (as well as of the condition of my liver).

Fortunately, I managed to find the strength and lucidity to go out and rent about a hundred and thirty-seven movies, which greatly reduced the amount of daytime TV I had to watch, and in turn, greatly reduced the amount of moaning my neighbors had to endure. My only hurdle then was the demon flu I had contracted.

Now, I've often heard the "death rattle" described by doctors and in books. It's a biological phenomenon that we only get to experience once; unlike other forms of gas expulsion that some of us experience far too often - in social settings.

But to placate my personal fear of mortality, I always pictured the death rattle as a harmless child's toy. You know, the kind you might find in a baby's crib; maybe painted black with a cartoon picture of the Grim Reaper on the side. That was my idea of the death rattle. I never wanted to face the fact that it is actually an audible clattering in the chest cavity, announcing one's final breath.

That is until I was forced to stare that reality in the face by virtue of the eight gallons of fluid that gurgled in my lungs for the better part of 4 days. I just knew that the noise associated with the wet, hacking cough, the sputum I expelled into countless tissues, and onto my walls, and onto the people who happened to be walking by was a precursor, a teaser if you will, to the death rattle that was only a busted blood vessel in my brain away.

It really had me worried.

But ultimately I endured, and after a couple days, the buzzards that were circling my house finally went away, and I started to feel better again. I still have what feels like a beach towel stuffed into my sinus cavity, and everything sounds muffled and far away, but I am definitely on the mend. Indeed I'm back at work, using my brush with death as an excuse not to work very hard. I'm weak after all, and my head is still foggy. What do they expect?

Anyway, I don't really have a point to this post other than to reflect on my illness.

There was something that caught my attention, however, during the ordeal that I thought we could incorporate here, if you all are willing. Call it an experiment.

While I was busy deciding which suit I should be buried in, I saw an ad on TV for Bailey's Irish Creme. The ad featured a bunch of male and female models pretending to be regular bar patrons. But the cool part of the commercial was that somebody had turned off the gravity in the bar, causing all the models to float around chasing little droplets of Baileys.

Well, I thought that looked like a lot of fun, so for the rest of the day, Rinderpest.com is going to be a Zero Gravity website. So get ready to chase your drinks around the room, because the next page you click on will trigger the anti-gravity wave.