courage | The Dimwit Diary

April 20, 2013
Saturday, 1:31 PM

771 Dimwits and counting…

Mother,

I didn’t know which of the 16 email accounts of yours to send this to, so I decided to post it here. Hopefully it finds you, and hopefully it’s during a time when you just got back in from the warm sunshine and time spent admiring your flowers that you enjoy more than anything.

750 new followers in just over a week. This is crazy, huh? I’ve got wives reading my stories to husbands, and mothers reading my stories to daughters. Stories about wieners and Sally Jessy Ralphael’s feathered hair. Can you believe it? It’s wild. I don’t know what’s happening, but of course what’s new. I never know what’s happening, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.

You know how your free spirited, kind hearted, adventurous, and yes, your rather mischievous son of yours just seems to go along with life. It’s gotten me this far, so there’s no use in changing it now. Well, remember that time you and Dad sat me down right after I graduated college? You might not remember it, but I do. It was in the living room, and it was quiet. If I didn’t know any better, it might’ve been my own funeral that I was attending.

You and Dad wore somber, stern faces. You told me to sit down, so I did. On the couch directly across the room, not far away from your somber, stern faces. I had an idea of what was coming, some sort of boring lecture with me having to say a lot of uh-huhs in between. I’ve gotten my fair share of lectures from you, and from others, so I kinda get a sense of when they’re coming.

It was a lecture all right. I know you meant well, and I’m not here to put you down or anything like that. Mothers do the best they can – well hopefully. The good ones do anyways, and you’re a good one. But here’s what you told me. You and Dad told me to cage my free spirit. You didn’t say those words exactly, but what you meant was to put my free spirit inside a box, and put him up in the attic with all the other dusty toys. I was to be a man now. Stop playing games and get some direction in life. Some goals, a job, a career, maybe a wife, some kids, and all that other sorta stuff.

Well, I didn’t want to be a man. From all I saw at the time, being a man meant cheating husbands, divorced dads, drunks, liars, punchers, spitters, and those that like to give lectures about how I’m to play life by the rules, and become a man.

I was 21. I knew more about being a man than the asshole telling me I had better be a man, after I knew flat out that he had just beat his wife senseless a few nights ago. My friend told me. He was in tears. And now that man had the gull to tell me I had better become a man. Well, I had the gull to shut my mouth and say “uh-huh.” I knew more about being a man than him, and sometimes as a man you gotta know when to shut your mouth and say uh-huh, because it’s not worth the fight at the time. There are other ways to go about winning a fight without shouting, and cursing, and more fighting. So I left it at that: Uh-huh.

I guess this is my usual, long-winded, rambling just to tell you this, and then to follow it up with a little more rambling to wrap things up. I never put that free spirit in a cage. I never boxed him up. I kept him free, and I guess that’s why people like my stories about wieners and Franzia boxed wine, and all that other stuff.

They’re free spirits too. They’re dimwits. There’s a whole mess of us out there, and they enjoy someone who can spin a good tale, tell a whopper of a story filled with craziness and madness, but also full of love and hope. Those are the two most important ingredients to a story, because without love and hope, you might as well just read from the dictionary. The thing with telling a good story is you gotta have a free spirit to be able to tell it, so that’s why I kept him free. That and it just never made all that much sense to me why anyone should keep anything in a cage.

Thanks for being a good mom. I usually never tell you that, maybe even never. Probably because I’m too busy telling tall tales instead, but I was just thinking it’s probably nice and important for a mother to hear that from her son. It’s a lot of hard work raising kids. Not a lot of credit, late nights, no sleep, and lousy sons who make you cry when they send you letters.

I know you’re crying right now. Just like when I can sense a lecture, I can usually sense when someone’s gonna cry, too. I can sense a lot of things. Some say it’s a gift, but sometimes it’s a curse too. It can take a lot out of you with all the sensing going on all the time, and no way to turn it off. Rather than whine about a gift that others would kill to have, it feels nice to make good use of it finally. Wieners! HA.

So stay tuned. Your son is going places that only a free spirit can lead a person, and he’s taking a TON of dimwits along with him! It’s going to be a fun ride. It will be interesting at the very least.

Love,

Your son. The dimmest of all the dimwits. The dunce. The doofus.

Chris

PS. Sorry to include this photo of you with a scrunchy face, that looks like you just caught a whiff of a dog turd, but you didn’t really think the Dimwit was gonna end without a good laugh, did you? Toodles.

If you’ve read my “About This Shizz,” then you’re aware of the fact that I work in the film industry. It’s really not all that glamorous, so don’t get too overly excited fellow dimwits. My job mostly consists of ordering Porta Potties for set and picking up cigarette butts that darling crew members flick on the ground. But the job does have its perks.

I’ve built up some good connections over the years, and was able to pull a few strings in order to land my very first guest blogger to be featured on The Dimwit Diary.

Without further ado, I hand it over to John Stamos, famed actor of the 1990’s hit TV series “Full House,” and leave you with an honest and brave confessional letter that he was gracious enough to share with us all.

Thank you, Mr. Stamos. You’re a kind soul and you have amazing hair.

* * * * *

July 25, 2012
Thursday, 9:45 PM

Dear The Baha Men,

It is with no great pleasure that I am sitting down to write you this letter on an unusually cloudy evening in Los Angeles. Perhaps the grey clouds are fitting. I am disheartened beyond belief.

Twelve years ago, you proposed a question: Who let the dogs out? You put it in form of a catchy song with an infectious groove and those funky junkanoo beats. The song went sailing to the top of the charts. It was a good time to be The Baha Men: platinum record, platinum jewelry and platinum hair.

Others may have been fooled into thinking that you were on top of the world, but you weren’t fooling me. I know how much you loved your dogs – those friendly, cuddly rottweilers, Pepper Spray and Mace.

They were like your children. When someone carelessly let them out one evening and they never returned, so was it the case with your heart. A large piece of it hopped over the chain link fence and never returned to its rightful owners.

I am regretful that I’ve waited this long to come forward, but after twelve years of unrelenting guilt, I couldn’t bear even one more second of it.

It was me that let the dogs out – John Stamos.

I know the question that you woofed in the chorus is not why did you let the dogs out, but for my own sanity’s sake, I feel as though I must offer an explanation. I snuck into your estate one late evening and lured your dogs out with a juicy steak because I was upset that you didn’t come to my 37th birthday party.

I was incredibly angry and deeply hurt. It may seem juvenile to you, but to me it would have meant the world if The Baha Men had attended my birthday party. And not just the world to me, It would have meant the world to a lot of other people as well.

I told everyone that you were going to be there. I even put it on the invitations: Special Musical Performance by The Baha Men. Sally Jessy Raphael told me that was the only reason she was coming to my birthday party. I believed her, because immediately after she found out that you weren’t going to be in attendance for the evening, she went storming out of my house, and that red glasses wearing biatch took everyone else at the party with her.

Pardon my language, The Baha Men. It’s just, I’ve harbored a lot of resentment for that woman over the years. That was one of the worst evenings of my life, and Sally was intent on making the next several years a living hell for me, turning my friends against me, Hollywood producers, spreading rumors and making up lies. I was virtuously blacklisted by everyone.

Sally had quite a lot of influence back in those days, which kills me because I never quite saw the appeal. She had big glasses and feathered hair. So what? So did my dad, but he never got his own crappy talk show, although there was a time where he was involved in some pretty serious negotiations. But that’s not the point of all of this. The point is this: I’m extremely sorry and I’m requesting your forgiveness.

I know I can never bring Pepper Spray and Mace back. I paid my cousin Dino a fifty spot to put them down. But what I can do is offer you this $35 gift certificate to P.F. Chang’s China Bistro. The gift certificate is only valid for one year. Sorry, but management refused to budge no matter how many times I reminded them that I played the rock-‘n-roll bad boy biker, Jesse Katsopolis, on Full House. I wish it was more, but much like your career, mine was also short lived and the cash flow is more like a cash trickle these days. It’s a tough economy for all of us.

Please accept my deepest apologies. I have two dogs of my own, and I know how much it would pain me if someone were to let them out and I was never to see them again. In fairness though, I probably wouldn’t have made a cheesy remake of that song, and an even worse video to boot. We all grieve in different ways, I suppose. I hope that your heart has had time to mend and that you were able to find some healing along the way.

I also hope that we can all manage a way to move on from this. Perhaps one day we will even be able to laugh about it, and maybe it will even provide inspiration for you to make another chart topping hit one day soon. I don’t know how the song would go. Maybe some more barking as people can’t seem to get enough of those incessant who, who, who’s. I’ll leave the song writing up to the experts, to you my dear friends. The Baha Men.

With kindest personal regards,

John Stamos

PS. If you still talk to Sally, tell her I said to bite me.