Bad Day at the Beach

In which we view the ghastly horror of some innocent bathers menaced and molested by reptile, rodent, aquatic skate, the tiny and chubby hand of God, and a Dada-esque orange (naval and organic...bien sûr!). Quite suitable for work, however!

Music credit: Lester Lanin (Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goo'Bye).

Scarecrows: The Only Way to Inspire Jealousy and Rank Fear in One's Neighbors

Above: An extremely menacing and possibly predatory scarecrow terrorizes a neighborhood. It is joined by evil brethren from the local garden center.

I would like to tell you the secret for making your home shine like a diamond in a sea of mediocrity. And that secret is this: Scarecrows. The more scarecrows a property has, the more it will breed stirrings of fitful and vengeful jealousy in the neighbors; pride of ownership in you, the owner; and rank fear in the local squirrel, neighbor, and bird populations.

I have only three scarecrows, as I have recently learned the secret over the past weekend, and have been unable to get to the supermarket to buy scarecrow-making equipment due to the heavy snows. My scarecrows are named after familiar friends and companions of mine, so they are called Johnny-Laid-a-Turd, Repticilus Vaginicus, and She Who Chews Soup. I have placed them in menacing attitudes in various spots about my property.

As soon as I placed my first scarecrow I sighted my neighbor peering out of her upstairs window through her binoculars. I could tell right away by her shocked expression that the scarecrow had terrified her greatly—and her greatest terror lay in the fact that she, poor wretched thing, had not a single scarecrow gracing her property. My first scarecrow was wearing very little at all but a loincloth I had fashioned out of a bathtowel, and I had nailed him on a cross-like structure near the foot of the driveway. Soon after, my neighbor went out in her car, casting me dark looks of aspersion. I believe she went to the local Shop-Rite to purchase some stuffing and scarecrow-pelt material, and perhaps she was caught in the ensuing blizzard? Serves her right, the plagiarizing poseur that she is!

While she was out, I took the opportunity to set up my second scarecrow on the roof overlooking the driveway. Despite the cold weather (Christmas was rapidly approaching), I dressed this scarecrow in a cast-off Lilly Pulitzer dress that no longer fits me due to ingestion of strudel.

It is very important to dress one’s scarecrows appropriately. Outdated costumes that make your scarecrows look like “hayseeds” or “rubes” will only cause your neighbors to laugh at you, not foam at the mouth with jealously. It is difficult to get your scarecrows to look properly menacing while wearing cocktail attire, but it can be done. I suggest buying a pen of the Sharpie brand and drawing very dark eyebrows with a vigorous, up-and-down squiggling motion that makes the scarecrow look like it’s saying “Grr! Grrr!” This has always made my scarecrows look angry and fit to kill, even while holding pink paisley handbags.

I know I have only three scarecrows but I intend to get more very soon.

It is important that your scarecrows are homemade. Storebought scarecrows are often cheap and shoddily made, and their faces melt off in the first heavy rain. Plus, their costumes are not name brand, and that is a dreadful embarrassment. There is nothing more humiliating than seeing a squirrel fearlessly nibbling at the privates of your scarecrow—knowing the damned thing was false by the cut of its collar or the crease in its pant legs—while you are eagerly waiting for that same scarecrow to menace the underthings off your hoity-toity neighbor across the street.

A scarecrow that is not properly menacing should be eliminated from your property, before you become a laughingstock. I always choose compostable materials when constructing a scarecrow, so that I can toss my scarecrow in the compost heap without fear of damaging our Mother Earth. This is why my most recent scarecrow is made entirely out of congealed soup.

No one else on my block has a scarecrow. It is quite pitiable. Not only will their vegetables be snacked upon by all manner of avian pest, but they have to live with the fact that I have beat them to it as a trend-setter. If they were to all invest in scarecrows now, they would most certainly appear to be copying me. It is too late for them. They are doomed to sink in a sea of mediocrity. My neighbor is probably furiously stitching away at her new scarecrow, glaring at me through the window as she does so, but I shall still boldly stride through her property, snacking her vegetables as much as I like. It shall not deter me, although she is using Very Menacing rosemary spriggets for its eyebrows. Rosemary that she could have used in a stew but chose to employ against me, her sweet neighbor. Such is the nature of jealousy, my friends.

You who do not live on my block, however, can still adopt this trend and look smart and chic! I will not begrudge you, especially if you live far across the country where you and your derivative brethren will not bother me. This is why I am sharing the secret of making your property the Very Best It Can Be. With scarecrows!

Here are the best ten tips for building your scarecrows with the proper menace, and with nature-friendly and affordable materials:

1. Encourage your children, if you have any, to participate in the construction of the scarecrow. A child’s poor artistry and inability to construct arms of equal lengths will give your scarecrow a horrible, deformed quality that would never be achieved in those factory-made knockoffs. If you do not possess children of your own, you may borrow one of mine. They have unmedicated spatial inconsistencies that will give your scarecrows that je ne sais quoi.

2. It is best to patent your scarecrow with the U.S. patent office, especially if you have found a way to make him sentient and/or capable of perpetual motion without fresh ingestions of petrol.

3. When arranging your scarecrow in the most menacing attitude on your property, it is often advisable to rest its hands gently upon its privates. This will cause neighbors to wonder if it has molestation on the brain. Were it to become sentient, this would be unpleasant. This will cause them to lie awake at night thinking agitated thoughts, and limit their abilities to do better than you in any way.

4. Straw, chaff, wheat, spelt, and so on are poor choices for scarecrow stuffing. I prefer Gluten-free ingredients that are not liable to be pecked by wild turkeys and doves, causing my scarecrow to look decrepit and decayed. Gluten-free pasta, crackers, and breads are readily available at most health food stores, including Mrs. Greens and Whole Foods.

5. Try to make your scarecrows diverse, reflecting the breadth of our colorful, human tapestry. A sea of white scarecrows dangling from wooden staves and crosses will just make your home look like a rarified country club. This is not what We want to achieve.

6. A scarecrow’s handbag should always be of an appropriate seasonal hue. If a scarecrow is wearing a light, white summer frock, do not choose a heavy black handbag, for example. This sort of thing will result in rude talk amongst the very neighbors one is trying to menace.

7. Scarecrows can be made much more menacing by the application of odors, such as Go Away Evil ™, or by installing soundtracks that play artists such as Peter Cetera. A scarecrow that appears to be singing “I am a man who will fight for your honor” will disturb and agitate many passersby.

8. Accessorize, accessorize, accessorize! I mentioned handbags earlier. The handbags are much more menacing if they are filled with real grenades, loose bullets, or the carcasses of the scared-stiff animals that you have managed to trap by freezing them in the aural glare of a Peter Cetera marathon. Scarecrows also look nice with necklaces made of human teeth.

9. Remember that the goal is to keep people off your property and cause them to tremble in fear whenever your name is mentioned. Then, and only then, will perfect domination be achieved! If any scarecrow fails to fulfill this purpose, it should be terminated without remorse. It is best to terminate during a neighborhood Block Party, at the exact moment that the ice cream truck arrives. In winter, substitute with the arrival of the local Caroling group.


10. Local teens tend to think that scarecrows are a subject for hilarity, not mind-numbing terror. Teach them a lesson by air-dropping a batch of homemade beauties atop their homes during “Movie Night” or a sleepover. Make certain the scarecrows you choose to drop are the ones most likely to become sentient at the most surprising moments, or else the hollow thumping may simply remind the callow teens of turds striking the roof.
  
It is best not to overdo the scarecrows. I know that I earlier recommended “the more scarecrows the better,” but I have recently revised my view due to an article I read in The New York Times. I am a little bit scared now, as the one I made out of soup has dissolved into my yard in the heavy snows and, therefore, into our water table.  

I would rather not share the entirety of the article's content here, due to copyright restrictions, but suffice it to say that my prescient warnings about sentient scarecrows came true for one poor homeowner in Marietta, Georgia, who had covered every square foot of her property with a matching scarecrow in a gingham outfit with black button eyes (Pfah! Hardly menacing!), in an effort to control the local goose population. Not only were Ms. Scribb's geese not deterred, but her scarecrows turned on her in a gruesome bloodbath that is soon to be made into a motion picture. Let this be a lesson to you! Keep your scarecrows to a minimum. I suggest 15 at most. Good luck to you.

The Terrible Bird Incident, and other tales of wildlife

After abandoning the New Ro shopping cart herd to their relentless mating and dominance behavior, I feared that I would be bereft of wildlife in my new environs. Not so! Here in Mamaroneck, the wildlife is out, and it is about. There are herds of bad-ass squirrels, and the other night we spotted a skunk drunkenly sauntering across the front lawn and through the neighbor's hedge (Run! Be free!) The last time I saw a live skunk it was in New Ro and it had a Carvel ice cream cup stuck on its head. It had poked its snout right through the big plastic straw hole and was weaving about on Jackson Street, shaking its head madly. I was about to go and rescue the animal but my husband gently reminded me that it was, after all, a skunk.

Right now, as I sit on the porch, I can hear a Screech Owl hooting gently every few seconds. After each hooting call, something answers with a small clucking hiccup. What that something is is unknown, but it sounds an awful lot like a duck. Yes, a duck. Now admittedly, there is a "duck theme" on our street as the owner of Mamaroneck's Duck Inn lives down the way, with a profusion of ducklike and swanlike objet d'art in the front yard. There may be a mating quality to the back-and-forth interchange, or maybe the baby duck is gonna get et. The hooting and the clucking have now set the neighborhood dogs to barking, so the place is alive with noise! People are drifting out of houses in their nightgowns to see what's amiss.

On our first night here, there was The Terrible Bird Incident. In the middle of the night, we heard shrieks and horrible caterwauling. It went on for a while, and made sleep difficult. During the fight, we heard a loud and tinny "bang! bang! bang!" noise which added to the creepy mystery. The next morning, we discovered that the backyard was peppered with feathers. Some creature had come a-cropper, and had been pecked clean of its plumage. Several days later, we discovered the tail of a fish lying in the grass. No doubt the winged beasts had clashed over the prize, and only one lived to tell the tale (although we never found a beak or other evidence of truly foul play).

The squirrels are another matter. They are a lively and wily bunch of scalawags, and can be heard outside the windows as they gnaw incessantly on Black Walnuts. Sometimes they chase one another over the lawn, cackling madly, and hide up in the treetops to survey the property. They are feisty, sharp-toothed, and rather plump. I fear their numbers are growing. They like to hurl the Black Walnuts against the tin roof of neighbor's shed, which sounds like a shotgun going off. (Hence the "bang! bang!" sounds during the bird fight, which the squirrels must have observed with infinite pleasure, enjoying their walnuts like popcorn.)

If the birds and the squirrels decide to get together, we are all doomed.

Throwing Food at the Moon

And now for something completely different.

A heartwarming blog entry "mom style" about the pleasures and rewards of parenthood! First of all, there's my German child, whom I will call Wolfgang on account of the fact that he has vampiric-like fangs where his eye teeth ought to be. Today we gave him a water bottle in the car and he gnawed it with the sound of a jackal guffawing and schkgnurfling as it tears the flesh off an antelope. Not yet sated with these guttural, horrible noises, he began to shriek with great glee and volume. The more we protested, the more his evil laughs and screams resounded through the car. This was an improvement on yesterday's car ride home from a birthday party, during which the liebchin vomited undigested grapes, chicken chunks, and a good part of a Carvel ice cream cake, the latter of which came pouring out his nose.

The elder child I will call Thieving Crow Deux, his Indian name, due to his early propensity for poaching food off a parent's plate. (Wolfgang also goes by the name "Thieving Crow Trois.") Thieving Crow Deux is a.k.a. Repetito, Casper, Lil Dubya (in honor of our esteemed leader), and Scooter-Pie. Pale as white on milk, he cannot go outside without a sunscreen "dip" which I hope to patent in the near future.

He is a charming child who behaves most impeccably when around strangers, and then transforms into a wild, flailing ball of pent-up angst when within the safety of his own home. Blessed with more than a touch of OCD, Thieving Crow Deux has been known to line up Clementine pieces, curve bending inward to opposite curve, until--finding that he does not possess the last piece to complete the pattern--collapses in a tragic rage. His uvula is a common sight around the dinner table.

Thieving Crow Deux likes to play doctor, applying Band-Aids to limbs for a headache and suggesting that the patient's head is full of monkeys and elephants, which can be coaxed out by a tune played on the harmonica. When accused of being a quack and a charlatan, he says "he can't do nuffink for you!" He also conducts a practice called "whacking," in which he lays a stuffed animal patient out on the kitchen floor and whacks them hard with an object. My son the doctor! The younger one plays the nurse and brings the patient varieties of birthday cake constructed out of Legos.

They are both wonderful and I will kill anyone who menaces them in word or deed.

One day the three of us had a picnic out on our back yard, which we affectionately call "the back 40." After eating his fill, the little one noticed the crescent moon in the sky, an orb of which he is quite fond. "Da moon is hungry," he announced, and began tossing food up toward it. It rained down on our little picnic blanket. We joined in, tossing food at the moon in an effort to fatten it. Planes passed overhead and we threw food at them, too. "This is not so sane," said Thieving Crow Deux who, like his brother, has an unusual vocabulary. We laughed, and apple slices, bread chunks, and cheese bits sailed up to the heavens. We rolled and tumbled and the two boys sat on my head, and the sun lowered past the Post Marine and the Toyota dealership in the distance. The moon waited, placid and waxing. "Naughty Tomato-Eating Squirrel" and his brother "Thieving Rodent Quatre" waited in the wings expectantly, and a flurry of birds passed overhead and shat on our car, parked in the driveway.

That's what writing this is like, at times. A happy exercise in throwing food at the moon.