Farmer H, Married Hick Male

You're not going to believe this. Oh, wait. Yes you are. It's about Farmer H. How he always has to make everything about HIM. Only worse. More dramatic. I'm surprised he didn't give birth to twins, just to show me up, when I had infant Genius.

When feeling puny, Farmer H doesn't just have a virus. He has epiglotittis, with his throat closing up to suffocate him. He doesn't just have an ear infection, he has a brain tumor that makes the slightest whimper from a teething baby shoot through his head with pain sharp enough to kill him. He doesn't have a big red toe, but a big toe that needs surgery to implant two wire rods. Okay. That last one was true, and it was because he dropped a 5th-wheel trailer hitch on it, and that happened before my big red toe. But still, you understand what I'm getting at. Farmer H imitates my illnesses, and his are always worse. According to him.

I swear, Farmer H is like that gal in Single White Female. He's always copying me. On the very next day after I hurt my back, Farmer H hurt his shoulder! The right shoulder, in the deltoid area. The outer upper arm, that hurts when you lift your arm up to shoulder height. Like maybe if you're doing the Chicken Dance. He hurt it lifting a big TV in one of his abandoned storage units.

Still, Farmer H selflessly drove me to the casino on Monday, the day he injured himself. And selflessly lost the money I gave him. Then the pain set in more severely on the way home. I guess he exacerbated his injury with overuse during slot play. It must have hurt him so much that he couldn't turn on the windshield wipers.

You know how a fine mist settles on your windshield, and the wipers have to be on intermittent or they scrape, or the mist builds up and you can't see? Well, it was already dark, in the tail-end of rush hour traffic out of STL, and I dared ask Farmer H to turn on the wipers. You can imagine how that went over, right? Farmer H said, condescendingly, with a bit of a smirk in his voice, that I couldn't see out of the windshield because I'm blind. That was right after I'd put my glasses away in my purse. Uh huh. When the man with only one eye told me I was blind, because I didn't have my glasses on. As if that would affect the misty rain and road goop being thrown up by tires.

Yeah, I'm blind without my glasses, said the one-eyed man who wouldn't turn on the wipers, who finally DID, and then said the wipers need to be replaced, because it was hard to see out the windshield.

Anyhoo...you'd have thought Farmer H was going to expire right there in the La-Z-Boy, where he plopped as soon as we got home, moaning like his arm was clinging by a thread of sinew. I found him some BenGay, since my special friend Thera-Gesic was down in my dark basement lair. After it had a chance to heat up, I asked him if it was still good, or if I needed to pick up more at The Devil's Playground, because I couldn't remember the last time I'd bought or used BenGay. I'm pretty sure that was before I RETIRED.

Farmer H said that it was fine, but it wasn't heating much until he plugged in his heating pad that he used on his injured butt that time, and put it over his shoulder. The heating pad, not the butt, but I WOULD like to see him try that trick! I checked the BenGay tube for an expiration date, but couldn't read it. You know, because I'm blind without my glasses. I handed it to Farmer H to read, but he said it didn't have an expiration date! Uh huh. So said the condescending man who said that I was blind! After more ridicule encouragement from me, Farmer H DID see the expiration date crimped into the end of the tube, and it was 2010!

Yeah. Only 8 years past its prime. So I said I'd put it on the list for The Devil's Playground. Once downstairs, I checked out my Thera-Gesic, and funny thing is...it expired in SEPTEMBER 2010! I guess I must have bought both tubes at the same time for the same injury. My neck, I'm thinking.

Anyhoo...I must be turning into my mother, who once served me four-year-old Ranch Dressing for Thanksgiving dinner, saying that it was runny because I didn't shake the bottle enough. She also tried to treat a tick-removal wound with one of her Bactine balls, which were cotton balls she'd soaked in Bactine and sealed in a container to use on her classroom 4th-graders if they skinned a knee. Let the record show, my mom had retired the year Genius was born. So those Bactine balls were older than the Ranch Dressing and my own muscle-soothing ointments.

I don't quite know what to say.