Bluto/Bruno/Burno. Whatever, man.

Our impeached/evicted heroin addict former President, Hans, started calling K.B. "Burno" for reasons we couldn't fathom. I think he meant to call him "Bruno", meaning "Bluto", but that doesn't make sense either, since Hans probably had no idea that Bluto was originaly named "Bruno". Bluto sounds good, though. K.B. has a sort of deep voice like that. Or could mimic Bluto it if he wanted to.

K.B. is a good mimic. I often find myself wanting to ask him to do Bullwinkle, because Bullwinkle always puts me into stitches. You have to know the sort of things Bullwinkle says though, and K.B. is too young to remember.

You can't just have the voice. That's true of all mimicry: even if you can't do the voice, if you come close and can recreate what the person typically says, then you get a laugh, maybe.

Like, with Bullwinkle you might say, "This is the amplifier, which amplifies the sound. And this is the preamplifier, which, of course, amplifies the pree."

Or, "Here, cleverly disguised as a bomb, is a bomb."

Man alive, do I digress this time of night.
__
In the recovery movement, and in this Oxford House, K.B. has lots of material to work with, but don't let me give you the wrong idea. He rarely uses this type of humor. Oh, he's got this guy Tom down, who is a part of the Dead End Club committee ("Folks, we're considering after a lot of prayer changing this meetings floor-mat". And "Hey folks, I may not be the sharpest bulb in the drawer but..."
____
Anyway. I'm going to write about all my housemates here in the house of the crooked. Each one. And tonight K.B. got up behind a podium at the nursing school auditorium and told his story, so what better time to write about some stuff he didn't mention.

(What we knew: He's a genius ex-hobo (prefers "tramp" to "hobo", btw, so ok, "ex-tramp") who hopped trains for several years and somehow made it to Austrailia. That sounds like genius, yes, but when you think about it, impossible. He obviously took a tramp steamer there. NO, I call him a genius because he beats me at chess.)

What he didn't mention in his story tonight is , for instance, why/how he ended up with a big green fish tatooed to his chest. (I mean, a fish that looks like it has been caught and is still hanging from a hook. Not a mounted fish. Not a 'swimming' fish.)

Also, his compulsion to argue and debate with ME constantly. And I do mean ME, in particular, because he doesn't do this with others, that I've witnessed. To him, I'm a target of some sort.

One day I said I was driving uptown, and he looked at me a bemused smirk and corrected me.

I meant "downtown", he said.

We've been going on about this for weeks.

I tried to establish the rules, or just some few areas of agreement on this subject. For instance that we're not talking about Manhattan. And that we're not referring to elevation, or north and south (up, down, on a map) when we say Uptown or Downtown.

He's since got me mixed up, though, and I've forgotten what my real position is. Maybe he wanted me to say uptown. I'm trying to remember right now what I would naturally say. "Stan, I'm going downtown to a meeting." Yes, I think that's right. But still.

This is important to understand, for me, because I want an agreement that we'll never discuss this again, while he concedes that he was wrong in ever correcting me in the first place.

"Uptown" is what rural people say when they are coming in from the country Friday night to shop, bathe, and get shaved.

Or, it is what people who live down the street from the city center say when they are going to the city center. "I'm walking uptown".

We live in some old, distant suburbs here, in an area that can't be reached without driving past vacant lots and even a bit of country, so when we go to town, I think I say "let's drive uptown".

The point is, it depends on where you are coming from,--- and K.B. comes from Philidelphia, among many other places, and somehow that, he will admit, makes a difference, since it gives him the authority to say what's what.

Which is probably that Colobocomo has no downtown OR uptown. He will not confess or agree with me unless he completely reinterprets what I've said. I said it depends where you're coming from.

I've been meaning to ask him. If he is in some small town that is flat as a gameboard, would he say, "let's walk up the street there"? Or, "down the street"?

It's his problem! Not mine. And I think he should be forced to answer. In fact, I am going to insist on it, to the President.

I'm just getting started here but now I'm all upset. I think I'll walk down, or up (?) (no way) the hall and bang on his door and settle this. And all the other shit, like whether it's correct to say Bell "invented" the phone. And my use of the word "epoch".

Yesterday he tried to correct my english and noted that he'd dropped out of high school.

"Don't get uppity with me," I said. "I was kicked out of high school. For that matter I was kicked off the debate team." He wasn't phased.
___
Once we agreed on something, or started to. He was making me my first genuine tramp sandwich and we started discussing Mayo vs. Miracle Whip. We're totally square on this: Miracle Whip sucks. But quickly we got into a debate about how people ever got the two confused. Mayo is nothing like Miracle Whip. (And how, I wondered, is it to be used as a salad dressing? He rightly pointed out "Potato salad, macaroni salad,etc.)

My parents simply bought Miracle Whip and brought us kids up calling it mayonaize for some reason. We didn't learn until we were adults that we'd been duped somehow.

K.B. said that didn't happen to him. His family knew the difference. The source of confusion is human stupidity, he said. That's all. That's it. People are morons, man.

I said, that's begging the question. He disagreed. Facts simply being facts. Something about them not doing what you want them to do, facts.

During one of these imbecilic tutorials I drew a camera on him and was amazed that he didn't protest or even flinch. That's because he's recently become completely enslaved there, in the computer swivel chair.

Two of Moronic Man's greatest inventions. The computer and the comfortable swivel chair.

I hope I haven't made this bastard sound bad, he really isn't at all, taking recovery as seriously as anyone else I know. Could be a saint, someday. Also, he's young, still imagining that Kurt Vonnegut is a literary giant, for instance.

I ought to stop shouldn't I. Another of our arguments is about my being a snob at the Dead End Club (an AA club where many of the regulars still drink and drug, or who, frankly, stopped too late and became psychos.) He has a love/hate relationship with the club too, but for other, more subtle reasons that require special dispensation and explanation since he's got more cred than me.