Middle Plant Wedding Favor

Really, one of three plants I picked up as a wedding favor at a wedding in late May of last year?

You’ve all three been sitting on the exact same windowsill for over a year now, and receiving the same exact treatment–consistent water, plant food on occasion, and all the sunlight for which you could really hope or ask.

Why, then, do you, middle plant, insist on being brown, crispy, and dead, or at least dead-looking, while your comrades on either side flourish with a lush green hue and a firmness of character and composition?

In other words, Really?

Cops (obvious ones and otherwise)

Really police?

In fact, let’s interrupt our regularly scheduled format so I can shoot from the hip for a minute.

I was out and about the other day, paying bills, getting groceries, you know, trying to keep on keepin’ on. On the way back in, I saw a car parked up ahead in the middle of my driveway. At least such that I couldn’t get in and had to park in a neighboring lot.

I walked through the house and out the back door about five times over the course of thirty minutes. Still there. Finally, I dialed the police:

“Hi, this isn’t an emergency, but I have noticed there’s a car obstructing my driveway and blocking my building’s only fire hydrant.”

“Really?” He said (okay it’s hard to totally break from the format when we encounter real-life Really?s).

“Yep. Really.” I replied. “Oh, and it seems to be a cop.”

 

We talked details and locations, and I ensured I had taken some good pictures already if it helped, and he said they’d “come down and check it out”. But wouldn’t you know it, just about that time the car rolled away.

Now, I live in an area comprised of a lot of white kids in college and minorities of all kinds. I’m not expecting a high “politically correct” rating or a popularity award when I ask you to guess how strictly we’re held to laws of every kind the police have memorized.

Call my actions risky or even stupid but I’m just crazy enough to expect a car to be operated reasonably - even (read: especially) if that car has barred up windows and an armed man inside.

So, John McClane of the Mild Midwest, Really?

“Slow Moving Vehicle”

Really, implements of mass construction, blocking not one, but both lanes of the road on which I’m driving?  Or perhaps this would be more appropriately directed at the sign adorning one or more of you: “Slow Moving Vehicle.”

In either case, it has been awhile, admittedly, since I found myself needing to look up “slow” in the dictionary, but I’m pretty sure that an absolute standstill doesn’t quite qualify therefore.

Do I even need to ask, Really?

A&E

Really, Arts & Entertainment Network, home of an acronym I had to look up on a third-party website?

I left you on while I fell asleep watching a show about beating addiction so maybe I can stop using the internet one day. As I started stirring there on the couch, I was noticing sporatic words coming from the TV behind me.

“I bought”. “it”. “coming”. “was gonna”. “YOU!!”.

I rolled over expecting to see the cable signal cutting in and out thinking at least today’s Really? was taken care of. It was, after all, but not due to my overpriced cable company (even though it statistically happens to be one of America’s current most poorly run companies). It turns out A&E is playing reruns of The Sopranos. On Sunday Morning.

I’m sure they thought (and still think) this is the best idea they ever had. In reality, though, it’s a hilarious mash-up of audio and video censorship at its worst. Viewers will be treated to about 10% Tony Soprano, 50% voice-over by some A&E facilities guy who happens to sound like Tony, and 40% total silence. What’s best, though, is that MadTV saw this coming years ago.

So I ask A&E, who clearly doesn’t watch MadTV: Really?!?

Band That’s Playing My Birthday Party Today

Really, Dudes Without Much Sense Of Propriety?

Sure, you rock. That’s why I’m delighted to have you play my birthday party. Yes, my birthday party. A private event, for which space has been rented (complications with which may provide for a future asking of “Really?”), and much care has been taken to ensure absolute awesomeness in most, or perhaps every, respect.

So you decided to invite a few friends–you’re a band, with friends and fans, after all. I’m not happy about it, but there’s not much I can do about it now that you’ve made the arrangements, Lacking In The Communicative Niceties as they were. It’s not like you’re sending out a MySpace bulletin, or something.

Wait, what’s that, Gentlemen Of Minimal Social Consideration? Oh yeah, you DID put out a MySpace bulletin about the party. The private party. The invite only, my-special-day affair, for which nary a person gave you permission to do so.

Perhaps some of the preliminary arrangements made my intentions vague. That’d beg explanation, though, not a Failure To Exhibit Deference To Some Of The Convivial Graces (feel free, by the way, at any point, to adopt any of the series of capitalized words in this post as your new and appropriate band name). So I figure the least I should be asking is:

Really?

God, Property Management, and Neighbors

Really, you “hands-off” civilians in the war on mouse?

First you, God, because I might have expected this from everyone else but you’ve disappointed me this time. It seems it was the very moment that I wrote you up the first time you were stirring up the courage to die in even another mouse. “He just cleared that trap on the kitchen counter”, you must have told him, “looks like that peanut butter is all yours Mouse #5″. The result was two dead mice in the same evening, and I wish this had been the first time this has happened. The truth is, I can’t clear and set these traps fast enough to realize the full mouse-killing potential of this place…

which brings us to you, property management.

I’ve given you jerks fifteen overpriced months on an eleven month lease. Oh, and I’ve bothered you exactly zero times in that year and a quarter. So perhaps you can understand my frustration when even the most light-hearted of calls to the maintenance line has gone unanswered and unreturned for just nearly a week. At least the mice are checking in on the place with some regularity.

Finally you all, dear neighbors.

Dear sixteen other families in my seventeen-unit building of townhouses:

You may not recognize me right away but I’m the white guy down near the far end of the building that never gets the hint about giving up on waving to you (really, impersonal neighbors?). No, not the one who parks in your space if it “looked like you weren’t home” (really, decidedly entitled late-twenties guy who lives with his mom?) and will openly argue with you because “hey, you weren’t there”. No, I’m the guy who fought on your behalf when the city was entirely uninterested in providing recycling services to the city’s 30% renting population (really, “conservationists”?). Anyway, for those of you who haven’t yet thrown this letter away: You may be aware that this building has mice. I’m not talking two or three between us all, I’m talking open-a-trading-post, I’ll-provide-the-fur herds of mice who are either getting peanut butter or one of your kids by morning time. We live in a building that’s about as sealed and secured as Ron Paul’s seat in the white house (really, everyone who spends more than ten hours a day on the internet?), and property management won’t so much as call us back to tell us they don’t care, though I’ve pieced that together for you all.

We must rise as one neighbors. Together we must flood the office and demand answers, and it would be awesome if we took last month’s rent money back, oh, and to do what we came there for:

ask, REALLY?!?

Collaborator

Really, “Really? Of The Day” contributor that uses the black text, and with whom I, protector of the green text, frequently go bowling, sometimes as much as twice a week?

You and I have rolled at the same bowling alley at least some dozen times, and that number is, of course, as of now, ever-increasing.  This of course makes no mention of the bowling about which you frequently report, as done with other friends and family in alleys near and far while we aren’t on one of our weekly or semi-weekly (or so) lunchbreak ten-pin jaunts.  Let’s say, then, and conservatively so, that you’ve spent $36 on shoe rental ($3/visit at our regular lanes) in the past few months.  Is there a particular reason you haven’t just shelled out that much, if not slightly more, or perhaps even less, for your own pair of bowling shoes?

Can’t say I didn’t owe you one.  Also can’t say I’d be surprised if our friendly local bowling-counter bloke met your next request for a pair of 10½s with a resounding “Really?”

God

Really, Almighty?

You looked down upon me this morning as I did prepareth for work, well before you intended for man to wake. You watched me slave nigh upon twelve hours in the presence of mine enemies. You saw the ways of the careless and the wayward as they left at 5:00 PM or before, and you saw that I did stay until after 7 PM, completing eleven and a half hours of servitude.

Warily, did I travel home in the last remaining light, ever watchful as the laws of the land hath commanded me. Eager to break bread, I stumbled into the kitchen, only to see that you had sent yet another mouse of the field to die on the kitchen counter in my absence, like a sacrifice of the wilderness in this modern sanctuary I call home.

Why, oh God, have you put this plague of small scavenger beasts upon your hardest working son?

Hast thou forsaken me after all this? Really?

Impersonal Co-Worker

Really, person that has worked where I work just barely longer than I’ve worked there?

You’ve requested to be a contact of mine on a popular career networking site, even though, in spite of the many years we’ve worked together, the fact that you trained me when I first started at our current workplace, and the many conversations, both personal and work-oriented, that we’ve had in and outside of work, you still won’t say hello to me when we encounter one another in the workplace, even sometimes when I do say hello to you?

Suffice it to say: request denied. Suffice it to ask: Really?

Ludo

Really, Ludo, also somehow still known as “that one band”?

How is it, that I can listen to morning talk radio out of Los Angeles, read daily news from St. Louis, and watch prime-time programming broadcast from New York City and hear no less than five advertisements for your new album from each source? You are running, by far, the most aggressive marketing campaign I’ve ever seen or heard of for an act/artist in my entire life. I hear 30 seconds of “You’re Awful, I Love You” more often per day than I’m asked to join iTunes, use Zune, or vote for Barack Obama - combined. Your publicist should be congratulated. Then Killed.

What ever happened to great music selling itself? Are you that worried, and shouldn’t that usually be a big warning sign?

Anyway, I haven’t checked out the online merchandise you undoubtedly have available but I’m counting on being able to outfit my 14-month-old in some Ludo pajamas. When I’m going through my virtual shopping cart on the way out and your site asks “How did you hear about Ludo?” I’ll just laugh and laugh. Then hopefully an aneurysm will put me out of commission for a while.

In the meantime, two things:

First, are you guys going to make some Lud-Os I can eat in the morning or should I look forward to a commemorative Wheaties box?

Second, REALLY?!?