March 31, 2023 | Read Online

Yum.

How to eat shit with a smile on your face.

Cole Schafer
March 31, 2023

The Previews...

When I'm not writing poetry, short stories, personal essays and the like, I'm writing advertising. Sometimes this comes in the form of actual campaigns. Other times, this looks more like the words you see on websites, in emails and on the backs of the vacuum-sealed pouches that house your favorite cookies. If you're in need of words, write me at "cole@honeycopy.com". Also, feel free to peruse my portfolio here.

The Movie...

There's this writers' cafe in Japan that's open 24-hours a day.

Apparently, ink-slingers suffering from writer's block will show up out of the blue, hand over a bit of dough, as well as their phones and any other distractions that might get in the way of their writing and then they will tell the attendant at the door how many words they have to produce before they're allowed to leave.

I've never been but it sounds like my kind of place.

One of these days, I'm going to rent a flat somewhere pretty for a month––the prettiest damned place anyone has ever been––and each morning I'm going to hand someone the keys to my writing room and tell them not to let me out until I produce 2,500 words of prose.

The prose will be about my grandfather, whose eighty-something years on this Earth has gifted him some of the most spectacular stories I've ever heard.

I figure the temptation to reach out and touch the sheer beauty outside the flat will be inspiration enough to bang out my 2,500 words each day so I can go outside and play.

By the end of the month––assuming everything goes according to plan––I'll have something that resembles a novella. My grandfather deserves a novella. I hope I can give him one before he passes.

Death has been as good as gold to my grandfather who has survived a heart-attack which left him with three stents jammed in his arteries to lay new pipeline through decades of blockage that have come as a side-effect of smoking, buttering his Oreos and avoiding cardio like the plague... as well as a massive stroke that left the right side of his body as lifeless as a kite absent of wind.

Somehow, he's managed to recover from both.

My grandfather was the son of a blacksmith, born and raised in Francisco, Indiana. His daddy didn't weigh more than a buck fifty wet and frozen but twelve hour days of forcing metal to bend against his will gave him the arm strength of a 500 lb Silverback.

By the time I met him he was an ancient-looking artifact with a spine hooked like a syth and little left to say. I never really gave a damn about him. I know this sounds cold-hearted but it was difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that he was my grandfather's father.

He felt like a stranger to me; a stranger about as familiar as a third cousin you meet at a family reunion that you know you're never going to see again.

Now that I'm older and I've heard my grandfather talk about his late father with the same pride that I talk about my own father, I can't help but feel a bit guilty for my lack of interest in him when I was a child.

Anyway, one day when my grandfather was just a boy his little brother Mike pissed him off something good. I can't remember what Mike did exactly to piss him off but it agitated my grandfather enough to flinch at his little brother as if he was about to knock him upside the head.

I've written about Uncle Mike on more than a few occasions. He passed a while back from lung cancer after a lifetime of riding atop the backs of Camel Golds (I don't know if they were Camel Golds or not, I change the cigarette brand every time I write about him).

I grew to love Uncle Mike. He was skinny as a beanpole and, in his younger years, as athletic as a jack rabbit on speed. He'd hustle rich mother fuckers down at the county fair by betting them large sums of money that he could jump into an 85-gallon barrel.

They wouldn't entertain the bet. I don't know why. I'm assuming if one hangs around county fairs for enough years, one sees all sorts of wild and crazy shit like a rail-thin Indiana cowboy leaping in an 85-gallon barrel.

It was at "no", though, where Uncle Mike knew he had them in his web. He'd quickly double down on the bet and say, "Hell, what if I jump out of the barrel too?"

They'd take the bet––because any man would be a damn fool for not––and Uncle Mike would proceed to jump in the barrel and then back out again.

He made a lot of money that way.

I add more lore to that story every time I tell it. The next time I'll probably write that Uncle Mike managed to do this barrel spelunking with a cigarette clinched between his teeth and still burning red.

So, Uncle Mike was the baby of the family and more spoiled than Marie Antoinette and when my grandfather flinched at him like he was going to hit him, he let out a scream that'd cause satan to lose his erection.

My great grandfather was within earshot and must have had a bear of a day at work because he walked into the room where he heard the holler and assumed that my grandfather had hit Uncle Mike.

Seeing Uncle Mike so pitiful and helpless caused my great grandfather to wind back and punch my grandfather in the face like he was trying to knock out Tyson. But, as soon as my grandfather saw his daddy cock back, he lowered his head and he ended up taking the punch on his skull.

My great grandfather went stoic, lowered his hand to his hip and walked into the bathroom. My grandfather thought this was peculiar because his daddy never hit him just once so he followed him into the bathroom like a beaten dog begging for forgiveness.

When he cracked open the door, he saw his daddy starring at the first two knuckles on his right hand which were cracked open like an egg. He squeezed those knuckles in hopes to put them back together again and a stream of fluid shot out of them and painted the ceiling above him.

This put my grandfather's daddy in a cast for the rest of the winter and to keep the forge running and the family from starving, my grandfather had to become hid right-hand while his right-hand healed.

He'd hold the red-hot iron with a pair of tongs while my great grandfather would pound and pound and pound with a hammer held in his left hand. Fortunately, he was ambidextrous (I don't think you make it long as a blacksmith if you aren't).

All winter long my grandfather would wake up early before school and put in work at the blacksmith shop. Then, when he got home from school, he'd work in that blacksmith shop until long after the sun went down.

It was an absolute living hell, he told me. He spent all winter serving time for a crime he didn't commit. Sometimes, for no rhyme nor reason, life grabs us by our scruff, kicks in our knees, buries our noses in the ground and force us to eat shit.

By Cole Schafer.

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