In the spirit of the season, here’s a little something extra for all you faithful fans out there.
As they say, “Take a look inside”…
Hints were dropped. That’s all I gotta say. Any chance I got to allude to Cami’s true nature, per se, I took. So if you were complete blindsided by The Big Reveal, then that’s kinda on you. Or maybe not. Maybe I did my job of actually keeping a secret from you Dear Readers much better than any one expected.
Once I finally got to the part in the story where I went to the Urgent Care–i.e. “The Cami Chapter”–I got the idea to perhaps I shouldn’t reveal every detail of that situation right away. And then it became a game of how long I could write about Cami before I could no longer hide the truth–which, by the way, was incredibly challenging from both the writing standpoint, as well as from the storytelling/narrative weaving perspective.
Anyways, I was a little proud of myself for slow-burning the whole situation as long as I did. But that’s beside the point. What I would hope one might do after The Big Reveal would be to go back and read all the Urgent Care posts with fresh eyes and see if they could pick up on all the little Easter eggs I had dropped in there. Kinda like watching The Sixth Sense the second time.
Well, if you don’t have that kind of time on your hands, let me give you a little cheat sheet:
Never Under Estimate The Value, Jack, Of An Astute Nurse:
…straight to Death’s Doorstep…
Rare Pleasures, Tawdry Treasure–‘Tis The Life For Ol’ Captain BlueBalls!: …I heard about that only recently and I was very curious…
You Never Learned How To Say ‘No’ In Spanish? Fantastic! (courtesy of Nurse Cami’s texts): …no agenda…open to learn more…
Who Doesn’t Know How To “Keep Things On The Download”?: (quick note: Alex, in an ironic plot twist, was actually Alexandra, though I had tried to be ambiguous about her true nature as well) …”you know, get you straightened out”…keep it on the down low…
Not Sure How To Say This, My Beautiful Bride, But…: …Give it to me straight, Doc…I’m going to give it to you straight, Doc…
The Truth About That Urgent Care? Oh, It’s Out There…: ..it’s out there…Some stories, well, they’re straight-forward. And then there are some stories you simply can’t tell with a straight face…shame on you for your lifestyle choices…one or two spectacular–nay, gloryous–plot holes1You probably don’t want to click here… in the story…I can’t say I’m exactly, uh, proud of that…It was time for me to set the record straight…are you really going to make me, ermm, come out and say it?…
Ambiguity. Whether it’s in how the name of that one particular drug is pronounced, or who, exactly, is trying to get into my pants, ambiguity ended up being a recurring theme in this tale.
Yet another opportunity to lean into the idea of multiple interpretations arose when trying to figure out the title for Yo, The Great Cornholio Don’t Need No Stin*ing Warning Signs! The hope was that one would naturally think that the ‘*’ was supposed to be a ‘k’, i.e., “…don’t need no stinking warning signs.”
…which was actually inspired by the line from the Weird Al movie, UHF, “Badgers? Badgers?!? We don’t need no stinking badgers!” (You know you wanna watch that clip…click right here, buddy boy.)
…which was riffing on a line from the Mel Brooks hit satirical western, Blazing Saddles, “Badges?!? We don’t need no stinking badges!” (You can watch that clip here.)
…which in turn was referencing the line “Badges?!? We don’t go no badges…we don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you no stinking badges!” from–and I quote Wikipedia now–“the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. That line was in turn derived from dialogue in the 1927 novel of the same name, which was the basis for the film.” (Watch that clip here.)
…
Dang. I had no idea that my post title had such rich pop-cultural heritage until literally right now. Before this moment, I had only heard the line first-hand in UHF, and vaguely knew that it was a reference to another movie. Welp, as they say:
…
Oh, jeez, I totally forgot what I was saying there. My apologies. The point was that, after reading the story, one would say, “ahh, I see now! The ‘*’ could also be a ‘g’! ‘…no stinging warning signs!’ Right, because of the wasp really sticking it to him and what-not. Hmph. Clever…”
I lived through the 90s. I mean, c’mon, those were the prime years of my youth, from when I was 9 until I turned 19. Yet somehow…
Yet, somehow I missed a certain nugget of pop culture, one that I didn’t even know existed until I was trying put together the picture for Who Doesn’t Know How To “Keep Things On The Download”? I had punched into Google’s image search ‘frustrated with floppy disk‘, and after a half-click scrolling down the page, I stumbled across this beauty:
No, it wasn’t the picture I was looking for. But it was the picture we all deserved.
It was an image from the Wikipedia page for “Don’t Copy That Floppy”2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Copy_That_Floppy…and anti-software piracy campaign from 1992. And, according to the YouTube description of the flagship video for this campaign, “The Stupidest Rap.”
So of course I had to watch the whole video. And boy did it live up to the hype. It was incredibly ----- stupid. It was so horrible that I couldn’t help but wonder if this was some sort of reverse-Mandela Effect3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect in which, as a society, have collectively chosen to forget something actually happened, but was just too embarrassing to have to admit having lived in society that actually allowed such garbage to be produced.
And, so of course I’m going to provide you with the chance to view this for yourself. Now, for your viewing displeasure, I present to you, “Don’t Copy That Floppy”:
…
A few other notes about this post…while ‘keep things on the DL’–DL being short for ‘down low’–is now commonly used for just about anything that should be kept under wraps, The Down Low originally described married men who secretly engaged in same-sex dalliances on the side. Now given that I was trying to be ambiguous enough about Cami’s gender/sex/sexual preferences to keep the reader assuming that they were a ‘she’, I almost immediately regretted bandying that phrase about so freely. You know, because it might have made the true nature of reality a bit too obvious, and ruin the surprise reveal I was hoping to build up to later.
More about that title: it’s meant to be said incredulously, with some italics thrown in there. Like this: “Who Doesn’t Know How To “Keep Things On The Download”? Thus implying that everyone knows how to keep things on the down low–or if you buy into my ‘download’ joke–everyone knows how to run a computer. It’s questioning even the possibility of the existence of someone so moronic/idiotic/overly-honest that couldn’t keep a ----- secret and/or load a disk into a computer.
Except me. Me–me!–I’m the one who doesn’t know how to keep things “on the download”! Oh, and it also gave me a chance, in my FaceBook blurb, to thrown in a nice allusion to the male genitalia. You might protest and call me sophomoric, or even junior-high-ic, but you have to admit that ‘male genitalia’ definitely played an outsized role in The COVID Story…
If you read the title to You Never Learned How To Say ‘No’ In Spanish? Fantastic! and was left scratching your head, I wouldn’t blame you. To the untrained eye or ear, it might have sounded a little random, but I promise you it was actually a reference to something real on TV.
You see, when The Elder (now 9) was just a baby, Sesame Street was one of her favorite shows, and I enjoyed watching it with her. And what would my favorite part of that show be? Definitely Oscar the Grouch.
For some reason his pithy and biting “What now?!?” real resonates with me–and was a perfect pop culture reference to throw out when Cami started to blow my phone up with too many texts.
You can imagine then, my chagrin when I couldn’t find a readily available meme or gif to include in the post. The Perfect Oscar the Grouch quote, and I couldn’t even use it!
Anyways, my quest eventually let me to Google “Oscar the Grouch quotes,” thinking that surely “What now?!?” would surely make any and all lists of his top quotes. Welp, it didn’t. But I did come across another quote of his that inspired me to tie an Oscar the Grouch reference in with the predicament I was describing in that post.
Oscar, trying to figure out how to say ‘No’ in Spanish while in Puerto Rico, gets fed up with everyone telling him ‘No!’ when he asks: “Can’t anybody tell me how to say ‘no’ in Spanish?”
Everybody: “NO!”
Eventually I morphed that quote into the post title you now know and love, which implies that Cami, a native Spanish speaker, would have been delighted to learn that I don’t know how to say ‘No’–for example, when Cami asked for my phone number–and exploited that fact to his benefit.
Anywho…I wasted too much time tracking down the actual clip of this quote, so you better ----- well watch it so my efforts will at least count for something:
Did you ever wonder why the title Never Under Estimate The Value, Jack, Of An Astute Nurse didn’t quite roll off the tongue? It really would have sounded better as “Never Under Estimate4We’re going to ignore the fact that this should actually be ‘underestimate’ (one word). If you’re wondering, my title gets a higher SEO score if ‘Never’ is a separate word. The Value Of An Astute Nurse, Jack”, right? Right.
Well, I’m glad you asked! (Though, you’ll probably be less glad that you did.)
Now that you’ve read that post, you know that it was suggested by Our Favorite Nurse that perhaps my nether-region discomforts were from engaging in…uh…too much ‘auto-erotic activity’ while enjoying having a hotel room all to myself. So though I never explicitly used a certain colloquial synonym for that behavior, I couldn’t resist trying to hide it in the title.
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You don’t see it yet? So, just add and extra ‘F’ to the end of ‘Of’.
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Still nothing? Really?
…
Jack-Off. The magic hidden word was ‘Jack-Off’. Thanks for making me go and have to say it out loud. You know my mother is going to read this, right?
Oh, Taco Bell…do I have a story or two from my youth about you. And neither of those had very happy endings (fortunately, I’ll spare you those stories for now). Now that I’m grown and wise, I have learned my lesson about going 50 feet within that gastrointestinal hell-hole.
So when I realized that its brief cameo in Listen, What Happened Behind That Taco Bell Was Purely Survival offered me a chance to besmirch TB’s good name, you can bet your ass that I work-shopped titles for 3 hours until something humorously insulting popped out.
The real joke that I was going for here was implying that I had to debase myself in a random sketchy place in order to score some drugs. Which was partly true, but…but what I really hoped was that one would read that title, and ask themselves, “Wait, was my dude so desperate to get high that he went and sucked a fat ----- behind a Taco Bell?!?”
But, alas! I’m guessing that joke went right over most mother’s people’s heads. Probably for the better though…
Oh, and by the way did you catch me going meta for a second there? Even in this post full of pointing Easter eggs, I couldn’t help but drop another allusitory one. Only mere paragraphs earlier, I dropped the term “happy endings”, which can sometimes have, er, ‘sexual connotations’…like what some douche bags expect at the end of a massage, right? (Deshaun Watson and Robert Kraft, I’m looking at you.)
Anyways, if the story had unfolded how you–being the pervert you are with your mind always in the gutter–expected it would after reading the title, then this would have been one Taco Bell story that did have a “happy ending”. I mean, it wouldn’t have been a happy ending for me, per se, but at least somebody would have had one…
Welp, there you have it my friends! A little taste of what went on behind the scenes in the retelling of the Long Tale of COVID! I hope you enjoyed seeing how the sausage was made.
Speaking of sausage…there were actually quite a few allusions peppered throughout the latter half of the stories that were in reference to a dude’s twig and/or berries if you will. Especially the little conversation that contained the phrase “bulging vein”–see if you can go back and track that one down. But I chose not explicitly point them all out like I did with the straight/gay terms above. I mean, hasn’t my dear mother suffered enough already?
…and speaking of one last and final bonus…fun fact: I see my mom on a regular basis, and have a pretty close and open relationship with her. There is very little I won’t tell her.
Well guess what I never actually told her in person? The entire Cami part of the story. She had no idea! Or…at least until she read my last 5 or so blog posts.
So, Dear Mother, as one of my most faithful and loyal readers, I suspected that you would eventually read these posts and (hopefully) be like “Wha?!? He never told me anything about that!” at all the ridiculous plot twists. My hope was to give you a more suspenseful and entertaining experience than if I had told you in person (and without a well-crafted narrative). I like to think of it as a special reward for supporting me through my blogging efforts so far…even when it means you have to endure my potty mouth and other vulgarities no mother should ever have to be exposed to.
All this? *waves hands around expressively at all of the Long Tale of COVID posts* I dedicate all this to you, Mom. I hope you enjoyed it…
Content created on: 21/23/24 December 2022 (Weds/Fri/Sat)
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