Column: Confused man tries to milk rooster

Column: Confused man tries to milk rooster

Daylight saving time is upon us again. Since gas is now $20 per gallon and the blood bank returned my last deposit because it tested positive for botulinum, adder venom and gravy, I’m always on the lookout for free entertainment.

On Saturday, I stopped by my granddaddy’s house to reset all of his clocks. At the age of 87, his schedule isn’t as tight as most, so in the spirit of fun and ribaldry, I set all of his clocks ahead two hours.

The next morning, he got to church two hours early, so he sat in his car and waited for someone to unlock the doors to the sanctuary. He waited so long that he dosed off, and when he woke up everybody was coming out of church en route to the Sandpiper.

Sure, this sounds bad, but there are roughly 40 references to laughter in the Bible. As my sixth-grade social studies teacher would have said, “It all comes out in the warsh.”

Most of the electronic equipment in my home was brand new when Bryan Hanks was still playing the part of Rizzo in the Colorado Springs Correctional Facility Player’s production of “Grease.” My television is so old it has to be cranked, but my DVD player was, in fact, manufactured after Gerald Ford left office.

Unbeknownst to me, the clock in this sucker resets itself every year, so on Saturday night, I got out the manual, called some officials at NASA and eventually figured out how to reset the clock on the stupid DVD player.

Thanks to the machine moving itself forward an hour and my own one-hour adjustment, instead of recording “Austin City Limits,” I got a documentary on the decline in the popularity of fabric softener in post-war Europe.

My friend Prozac is 37 years old. I wrote about him back in February. You remember — he needed a date for Valentine’s Day? While his Match.com profile features the header “I like my women the way I like my biscuits — warm and flakey,” he ended up having to settle for an economy size bag of Reese’s Cups instead.

Anyway, Prozac only learned to tell time a few years ago, so daylight savings time is an all-new concept for him. It took several hours and half a case of Goodies headache powder, but mutual friend John “Not Don” Johnson used the example of Superman flying around the earth in a counter-clockwise manner at such a high rate of speed that the earth spun backwards to get Prozac to absorb the daylight savings concept.

With daylight savings time on the brain, Prozac surmised that if he clocked in at midnight on a leap year and ran around the parking lot really, really fast, he wouldn’t have to go to work until noon. After watching their top employee run around the parking lot in a pair of Holmes Limited spandex trousers and a blue beach towel cape, Prozac’s managers sent him into town to buy half a dozen sky hooks.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of Prozac, local law enforcement has asked that you keep your pie-hole shut and mind your own business.

“The state has really cut our budget,” said a Lenoir County Social Services employee under the condition of anonymity. “The medication it would take to shock that boy into reality would bankrupt us back to the stone age.”

Emmit Clap, 58, of La Grange, is a staunch believer in daylight savings. Clap is so dedicated to the cause that, for the past few weeks, Emmit has been walking out to his chicken coop before day and blasting his rooster with a 6,000-watt spotlight.

“I thought the spotlight would be a good way to get that rooster in line with the rest of us,” Clap said. “In theory, it was a good idea, but the combination of the spotlight at 5 a.m. and the sun coming up an hour later has made him indecisive; that walking bag of McNuggets is so tentative now that he stutters. Whoever heard of a stuttering Bantam?”

To cut his losses, Clap duct-taped an extra pair of legs onto the stuttering rooster and charges vacationing Yankees $20 a pop to be photographed with an authentic six-legged Chupacabra demon chicken.

“The animal rights folks have tried to shut me down a few times,” Clap said. “Some weirdo even offered me $100 to let ‘em try and milk the rooster.

“I found out later he was talking about my old cow that happens to be named Rooster.”

Jon Dawson’s columns appear in the Kinston Free Press every Tuesday and Thursday. Contact Jon at 252-559-1083 or jdawson@freedomenc.com. Check out Jon’s blog at jdawson.encblogs.com.