The Dimwit’s Guide to Living Like my Grandfather
1. Cut your toenails with tin snips no more than 3x a year. Better yet, have someone else do it for you.
2. Never call your wife by her given name. Refer to her as ‘woman’, or if decorum dictates, ‘Joe’. Nobody knows the Joe creation story. Feel free to make up your own.
3. Hold Sunday BBQs. You must only invite your closest drinking buddies and mutter curses at interlopers, including your wife who keeps you in cold drinks. Always fry onions in rancid oil on a Coleman stove, dropping ashes from your cigarette as you bitch about your boss. Note: extra points for authenticity if the foil tray of boiling oil blows off the stove in a gust of wind and lands on the gut of a shirtless, lounging, inebriated crony.
4. Slick your combover with copious amounts of Vitalis. When you think you’ve used too much, you haven’t used enough. Chain-smoke so your white hair turns yellow. Wash hair only once a month and complain about it the entire time. Repeat process as directed.
5. Wear nothing but western clothes. You must resemble a bona-fide cowboy seven days a week regardless of the fact that you’ve never once ridden a horse. Be sure outfits are accessorized with snakeskin boots, spurs, string tie, collar points, 10 -gallon hat and a flashy silver belt buckle. Bonus points if the buckle has an 18-wheeler on it or incorporates turquoise. Listen to Red Sovine on 8 track. Light your home-rolled smokes with a palm-sized lighter shaped like a pistol. Pose for photos outside of your local diner with bowed legs and clenched fists. Scowl into the sun to look more intimidating.
6. Your two favourite meals must be liver and onions, and buttered bread drowned in a pond of corn syrup. Spend a good half hour after you eat aggressively cleaning your teeth with your tongue.
7. Have ‘woman’ soak your shorts (read: white briefs) in a bucket of bleach each night.
8. Drive a silver Ford Fairmont. Trick it out with multiple useless fans situated behind the back seat and below the steering wheel. Sit inside your parked car for no less than 3 hours/day operating said fans and eavesdropping on emergency calls via your CB radio. Adopt the moniker of ‘Diesel Doc’ to reflect your prowess as a large-vehicle mechanic.
9. Become obsessed with paper products. Stock-up on toilet paper and paper towels until the only remaining storage location is in the aforementioned Fairmont. Use paper towel 2-packs as pillows during family picnics, holiday dinners, and for comfort while searching your car’s interior for additional fan installation locations.
10. Did I mention chain-smoke? Because you must. Non-filtered, preferably. Hold conversations with the cigarette dangling from your lips, one-inch ash ready to fall without warning on your pearl-buttoned western shirt. Accuracy of characterization generated by butting cigarettes out between your calloused/yellowed thumb and pointer finger.
11. Threaten to ‘jigmatize’ any of your grandson’s friends who piss you off. \ Jig-më-tīz\- vb: to make a slit in one’s scrotum, insert one’s leg through said slit, and roll them through town like a hoop.
12. Use a wide variety of sayings that make little to no sense. Examples:
- ‘Jesus, Jesus, and little Jesus’
- ‘Why, you yellow-bellied pup!’
- ‘I’d just as soon stay than go.’
- ‘I’m sweating like a hen pulling rails.’
- ‘Let’s dust ‘eem.’
13. Be sure to mispronounce most of the words in your vocabulary, adding or deleting syllables depending on your mood.
14. Never let anyone sit in your La-Z-Boy, especially not the cat.
15. Insist on calling your cat ‘Muggy’, even though that’s not his name. Chase him with the vacuum as punishment for doing regular cat things. Note: this is the only occasion during which you should touch the vacuum.
16. Always smell a bit like sulphur, but not too much. Striking the right balance between scent and stench is crucial. Alternatively, douse yourself in Old Spice or English Leather.
17. Rid yourself of phlegm with man-sized Kleenexes. Accept no substitute! Hack-up nickel-sized chunks of yellow mucous and spit them into these not-made-for-women tissues. Staring at deposits before discarding will add authenticity.
18. Spend Fridays at the Legion playing cards and entering draws for turkeys. Stay into the evening to glower and the young folks singing karaoke. Use your cowboy stance to mark your territory and get served faster at the bar.
19. Religiously watch 1980’s ‘wrassling’. Shout at the TV and leap periodically from your La-Z-Boy in ferocious displays of disdain and disbelief. Threaten to jigmatize anyone who suggests that the professional wrestling industry is a scripted scam.
20. Show your grandchildren love and affection by calling them made-up, hyphenated names that are sure to mortify them in front of their friends.
Jenn Seager is from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in The Feathertale Review, So To Speak journal, Canadian Living, and Mothering magazine. When not working her day job in academia, she daydreams, sings too loudly, and regales her triplets with bad puns. A chronic doodler, you can find her art on Instagram @jennyleesea.