Whistling Loud & Proud
Sauerpuss and Krauthammer often spend their free hours volunteering at their non-profit, Help A Retard Smile. Another job well done with local retard, Greg Rosen.
An Excerpt from Clancy Joe Bump’s Diary (transcribed from scribbles and edited to be legible)
People say I’m not quite right in the head. Whatever that means. If I ain’t right, how come what I’m doing feels so good? I hear everything people say when I walk by. I don’t always understand the words they use, but I understand their looks and laughs. And if I hear a word enough, I don’t have to know what it means to know that it hurts. People say I’m an idiot or a half-brain. People say I’m inbred and that I have too many ears. As much as their words and their looks hurt, what hurt more was the loneliness.
But that has all changed because I recently met someone who makes me feel warm and happy for the first time in my life. My beautiful Bessie. The only one in the whole world that I feel like truly understands me. Bessie is such a good listener. She never calls me an idiot neither. We go for long walks together, picnic outside, and have become very physical. I love the way my body feels when we make love. There is pleasure and pain and I am usually a bit bloodied after because Bessie is just so passionate. She knows how to make me feel like a powerful man. My dirty little animal loves to be submissive. If I ever want my Bessie, all I have to do is whistle and she finds me. But I have a feeling her father doesn’t like me very much. I think he knows about the passion we share behind the barn. He’s traditional and we’re not married.
When I told Bessie I was going to tell her father about us and ask permission to marry her, she just stared. I think she was turned on by my courage because it looked like she was drooling for me. That night, I walked Bessie home and tried to have a conversation with her father. After a few minutes of awkward silence, he reared back and head butted me right in the chest. Beaten but not broken, I limped away. That night I whistled for Bessie. I whistled loud and proud. She left her father’s house and found me. We picnicked and made violent passionate love under the stars that night. It was magic.
I’ve been so happy since then. Bessie and I share meals and love regularly, and when legal, I plan to make her my wife. I know my fellow townsfolk have accepted me and forgiven my shortcomings, whatever they were. Because they don’t call me idiot or inbred anymore. Now, instead of laughing, they keep their distance and yell “sheep fucker” at me. I feel like the king of the town!
- Krauthammer
People don’t whistle like they used to. Yes, I said it. I guess it takes a real KrautHound to see through the muck and mire of this modern world but fear not, even the likes of you lil kraut pups can understand and appreciate these profound observations. In the 1950s they called 5th Avenue from 42nd street to Central Park “symphony alley” because every chap in a grey flannel suit and hat to match was whistling while he walked. The combined sound was so overwhelming and invigorating it was rumored that doctors in the South would send sickly, low-testosterone teenagers up north to “take in the T” simply by sitting on a city bench and opening their ears. The war was over, the factories were humming, the women were mostly all pregnant with future hippies and all the men had to do was stride confidently and blow air playfully from their pursed lips, whistling loud and proud. Some would later argue that this whistling was actually a way of distracting their minds from the bloody horrors of a war their wives and children would never understand – but that’s a story for another time. We all had the same facts back then, ate the same Wonder bread, watched the same TV -- it gave us the confidence and calm to whistle our own unique little tune.
Historians argue unironically that the Japanese dealt the first death blow to the mid-century American whistle with the advent of the Walkman ™. In the late 1970s an eerie silence fell over 5th Avenue, as headset laden Madmen turned financial Masters of the Universe bobbed their heads with full-on tunnel vision to studio-produced pop-rock (see Doobie Brothers, Boston, Journey, etc.). All the while, the factories were shutting down, the baby boomers had outgrown their hippie stages and were about to elect Ronny Reagan (aka the blowjob King of Hollywood), and the women had all secretly gone on the pill. The men weren’t whistling and if they had been you might say they were whistling right past the graveyard – of America. Yet still, the music being pumped into their ears was more or less uniform, as was the nightly news. Had Brad bothered to remove his headphones to chat with Tad, they would have more or less agreed on the merits of topics ranging from Peter Gabriel to trickle-down economics. The people of America were individuating, but they were still of one mind. And whistling was all but dead.
If the Walkman spelled imminent destruction for the whistle, the iPod followed by the iPhone in the first decade of the twenty-first century were the finishing moves, removing the head from the whistle, reaching down into the body cavity and eviscerating the innards in a wild spray of pinkish foam. I may even be understating the severity of the attack. Steve Jobs promised us a thousand songs in our pocket, but what he delivered was a multiverse of inane douchebaggery the world had never seen, and has yet to recover from. Now the little white earbuds stuck into the floppy-haired messenger bag toting MBAs were all playing eclectic personal mixes that no one but the maker appreciated. Nelly Furtado followed up by Buffalo Springfield…. WTF!? Not just music, but the world was becoming customizable. Apple’s iconic ad saw people as featureless black silhouettes, blank slates to stack purchasable features onto. The iPhone accelerated this spiral into personal infotainment silos so fast that looking back to 2005 is akin to peering into King Tut’s mummified fecal matter to decode his diet. People don’t whistle, there’s an app for that. And in the rare case a person seen whistling to themselves, they are either guessed to be a recently released patient from yet another shuttered mental institution, or non-binary, identifying as a BIRD.
Tweet-tweet, fuck off,
Ol ‘Puss
