Redaction

Spending some time to reread over my entire blog, I have noticed a regrettable mistake. In the post, "Retribution," I inadvertently referred to R. as R------ (his real name) at several points. I promised myself that I wasn't going to use this "weblog" as a forum to embarrass or otherwise belittle my fellow human beings. So in that post, please mentally remove the letters e g g i and e from the initial R. From now on think of R------- as R., but without those other letters. Thank you.

This is probably as good a place as any to write more about R., who I work with at the -------y. I met him a year ago. One of my first memories of him was his enthusiasm for the movie "Thor."

"My man! Good morning to you. Have you seen the trailer for Thor?"

"Thor Four? They already have three sequels out?"

As usual ignoring my gibe, R. had me sit down at a staff computer and watch the trailer with him.

"Oh, man," R. said as the trailer ended. "It's going to be off the chain."

"Mm," I said at last. "I didn't see MC Hammer in it, though."

"Who?"

"MC Hammer, the rapper. You know, the parachute pants and the Taco Bell commercials? He did some songs, too. Anyway, I hear that Thor uses MC Hammer to fight the bad guys."

"No, no. You got it wrong, Lemmon." (R. likes to call me Lemmon because of my resemblance to Jack Palance from 30 Rock.) "He uses a hammer to fight with."

"Are you sure? That's not how I heard it. I heard he swings MC Hammer around and destroys people with the power of rhyme."

R. exploded with nicotine-flavored laughter in my face. "Man, you're a trip. You know that?"

Recently, R. has decided to get himself new teeth like a hillbilly out of a Faulkner novel. Next Monday he's going to have all his teeth extracted and little "poles" will be screwed into his gums. He admits it's all out of vanity. Recently separated from his wife of forty years, Reggie now consorts with a woman he met in art school, who is twenty years his junior. She apparently likes to have sex with him, as he daily reminds me. He showed me a "Lowrider" magazine to assist me in envisioning the wonderful thickness of his girlfriend's booty and other parts.

"You see this one here?" He flipped to a glossy page with a bimbo stretched across a Chevrolet Maxima (I think that's what it was; the bimbo was obscuring the hood ornament with her own ornaments.) "That's like my girlfriend. Like Cristina Aguilera! Off the chain, Lemmon. Off the chain."

This was the same girlfriend who R. had painted a likeness of for the library art show last fall. I never saw it, but he described it to me as a tasteful painting of a white woman with very large breasts (his hands painted a veritable picture in the air) rising up from a pool of red paint.

"Of blood?" I had said. "Was she menstruating?"

"No, no! God! No, just paint. Why do you always have to twist everything around?"

He entered the painting in the show, but it was rejected because the judges felt it was "too voluptuous." After R. looked up the word, he was incensed, but not a little turned on. He complained to me that it was CENSORSHIP, plain and simple. He instead entered a painting with a unicorn and a nude pixie flying about its erect unihorn like Thor's hammer.

Anyway, that was the point of this post. Censorship.