Pumpkin Pie Famine

“There is definitely a shortage of pumpkins and it’s really due to a smaller yield this year. The pumpkin yield nationwide was down 70 percent, so that’s a huge reduction in what we’re used to,” said Vivian King of Roundy’s Supermarkets.

This is potentially bad news for pumpkin pie lovers like Pat Moore. Moore said that he just had pumpkin pie at his niece’s birthday and will be disappointed if the shortage prevents him from having more.

“We like pumpkin pie and everyone was commenting on how delicious it was, so it would be missed if there’s a shortage,” Moore said.

– WISN News, Milwaukee, “Bad Pumpkin Harvest Could Affect Thanksgiving Dessert Plans”

Sweet Jesus. Hide your children. Lock the door. Good. Now lock it again. If Pat Moore smells pumpkin anywhere near your family, he will eat them.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I used to work with Pat Moore. He had the cubicle next to mine. Seemed like nice enough guy, into golf and boats, that sort of thing. We used to take smoke breaks together. But one time, I remember, we walked down to Roundy’s to pick up a pack of cigs, and while we’re walking through the store, Pat stops dead in his tracks and just stares at this bin of pumpkins. His eyes go all googly and he starts muttering to himself. Something about ample harvests, sweet round lovelies, and then all of a sudden he raises his arms and screams, “All my crusts shall be filled!”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Someone’s always flipping out at Roundy’s. It’s just that kind of place. Besides, Pat seemed totally normal otherwise.

The next year Pat’s wife left him right at the end of October. So we decided to invite him over to our place for Thanksgiving, you know, to cheer him up. We figured if he got a load of my family, then he might not mind being divorced and completely alone.

Now, this was back in ’02, year of the Great Pumpkin Famine. As you well remember, it devastated everyone’s dessert plans. The cans of filling disappeared from store shelves in September. The pumpkin bin at Roundy’s stayed empty through October. Many pumpkin farmers jumped out their windows. Fortunately, most of them lived in ranch-style homes. But their state of desperation was not lost on us. Come the week of Thanksgiving we thought long and hard about how we were going to get by. We had heard reports of people making pie with nettles and shoe leather. My Estonian barber told me he had fought the Soviets for fifteen years in the Baltic forests subsisting solely on salted dog turds, which, he assured me, tasted just like pumpkin pie. But we swallowed our dignity and settled for blueberry filling. Sometimes we must be thankful for very little.

The day of Thanksgiving, my extended family rolled in. I say rolled because my Aunt Blanche, in the years prior to her stomach stapling, had to be wheeled in on a dolly, while cousin Elmer had taken to wearing roller skates to family events ever since his head injury. Uncle Poot arrived true to form, farting the national anthem and in his customary overalls whose baggy depths concealed loaded firearms.

Then Pat Moore showed up. He had a crazed look. He said he had just come from his niece’s birthday. “Guess what? They had pie there. It was pumpkin pie. I ate it. Little girls don’t deserve pumpkin pie. Pat Moore deserves pumpkin pie. We will be very disappointed if something prevents us from having more pie.”

Sure, I was a little unnerved, but I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone was hard hit by the pumpkin famine, I told him. It was only natural to be upset. And here I gently inserted that this Thanksgiving, given such dire circumstances, we would be concluding the meal with blueberry pie.

At that moment I saw the switch flip in Pat Moore.

We tried to proceed with the meal like everything was normal. But Pat just stared at his plate. Not even Uncle Poot’s racist jokes could trigger a reaction. Cousin Elmer, oblivious to the tension, chirped: “Hey, Pat doesn’t eat turkey. Just like Elmer. Elmer only eats ham!” Pat slowly looked up, his eyes swelling as they took in cousin Elmer’s orange protective helmet. “Pumpkin?” Pat intoned, raising his finger to Elmer’s head. “Pumpkin.” And with that, he dove across the table and, with a gruesome efficiency, tore poor cousin Elmer’s head clean from its shoulders and devoured it whole. By the time Uncle Poot had fetched his gun from his overalls, Pat Moore was gone.

In the days following Thanksgiving, brigands could be seen roaming the suburbs. Looting the wilting jack-o-lanterns from their neighbors’ doorsteps, lopping the hands off homeowners clinging to their gourds, plundering autumnal cornucopias in window displays, the pumpkin gangs ravaged the Midwest on their campaign of terror. Their leader: a man named Pat Moore, a savage man, a man like you and me, a lover of pumpkin pie. Give thanks that he doesn’t find you.

The Plight of Pure Genius

People often ask me how I got to be so smart. That’s why I carry a briefcase full of photocopies of the second chapter of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” his last moment of lucidity before the spirochetes churned his brain to butter. I let Nietzsche do my talking for me since I’m usually too busy philosophizing to answer people’s questions.

For example, just yesterday at the café I was lecturing a peasant on how best to raise his unruly children, whose horseplay was disturbing my moment of intense contemplation (whether to have crumb cake or lemon poppy seed loaf). The dim fellow asked me, “What makes you so goddamn smart, asshole?” At which point I plucked Nietzsche out of my satchel and said, “So glad you asked, dear man. Here, read this!” He mentioned something about joining him outside, perhaps for an al fresco reading, but I had already returned to my lofty meditations.

Of course, I’ve never read Nietzsche. I wouldn’t want to contaminate the originality of my ideas. But I’m confident we’re on the same page, since Nietzsche, like me, was a misunderstood genius. Contrary to what most people think, being a misunderstood genius is not all free meals and hot oil rubdowns. Normally, I would just hand you the Nietzsche printout to explain my point, but I’ve run out of copies and Kinko’s has banned me from all California locations for Xeroxing my anus one too many times. So now I shall condescend to you, public, to share the plight of my prodigious intelligence.

I was bred to be a genius. That’s why my parents named me P.G.–Pure Genius. Well, technically, I was christened as Ralph. But after a year of witnessing my superior mind, and from the stories they tell, my amazing talent for eating nails, rubber bands and other household detritus, Mom and Dad had it legally changed. This new name was, for them, an endless source of pride and enjoyment. “Hey, Pure Genius,” they would shout, “Come open Daddy’s beer with your teeth.” Or, “Pure Genius, I bet you can’t drink a whole jug of anti-freeze.” Given my precocious intellect, I instantly mastered such activities.

The trouble started when I came of schooling age. Unlike my parents, who accepted my talents as a natural emanation of their own brilliance, the base and conformist world tried to break me. An incompetent doctor diagnosed me as a low-grade cretin. Clearly, the man could not see past superficial appearances, basing his diagnosis solely on my goiter, my lucky propeller beanie and my sardine-can shoes.

Back in those days, they tried to cure cretinism with corporal punishment. Here again, my learning prowess was apparent, as I quickly mastered how to take a lashing like a veteran sailor. I absorbed blows with the same zest I had for absorbing vocabulary words. Some geniuses, the slower ones, read widely; I read the thesaurus. It had all the good words in it, as well as the high quality, excellent, first-class, virtuous, noble, satisfactory and advantageous words. Pretty soon, I had traded up my vulgar colloquialisms for a mellifluous lexical arsenal, spoken in a cheeky East Midland accent. Needless to say, this led to only more beatings. At the age of 16, I decided to leave the third grade and light out on my own intrepid quest for knowledge.

After years of wandering, I arrived at Harvard. I had followed a frail-looking old man from the bus station onto campus, hoping to overcome him with my intellect and steal his wallet. But he was not as weak as he looked, and after considerable tussle, I retracted my claim to mental superiority and limped away. Nursing my wounds, I had a revelation. This man must be a genius, too. That was the only possible way he could have out-wrestled me. I realized this was where I belonged.

The Harvard admission director seemed shocked when I made my customary offer of sexual favors. I explained to him that this was how I had risen through the ranks of the merchant marines, how I had traveled the world and how I opened my first checking account.

“But anyone can open a checking account,” he said.

Flustered by this affront to my intelligence, I frantically displayed further evidence of my genius. I recited the thesaurus. I drew a really cool, but scary clown. I even strapped on my sardine cans and did a shuffle. Again, my genius went unrecognized.

So I came to Stanford. Here, I decided to forego the whole admission process. Instead, I have erected a perfectly habitable ivory tower of my own made from driftwood and coffee cups, right next to the Hoover Institute. It’s a one-man think tank called the P.G. Institute, and it’s open for business. Current projects include publishing an “Idiot’s Guide to Understanding My Genius in Three Easy Steps” and trying to recruit Condi Rice to come for a yearlong fellowship.

Selling Out

Dear readers, I’m feeling the pinch of the economy. In order to buy my weekly gruel, I’ve had to lease my column out to advertisers. Fortunately for you, not to the same advertisers that have leased out space on my forehead. Otherwise, you would be reading the words “Enjoy Scruggs’ Whole Meat Nuggets” for the next 700 words, without experiencing the pleasure of the adorable dancing nugget that wiggles when I blink.

Although I would like to take this opportunity to say that Scruggs, a family (style) farm operated by the Nihilex Corporation, has been producing the finest naturally flavored Whole Meat Nuggets that you’ve come to know and be strangely chemically addicted to since 1973. Of course, I receive compensation for the Scruggs Dancing Nugget I sport in two-tone color above my eyebrows. But I assure you there was no financial incentive for the Scruggs Super Bowl XXXII Nugget-Off glow-in-the-dark tattoo that shines through my underwear–that appeared after a hazy night out on the town in the company of two Scruggs Nugget employees with a vial of GHB and a penchant for prank tattoos.

Just so you know, I’m not the type of guy who goes around hurling reckless accusations of being slipped the date rape drug by Scruggs employees. But I know for a fact they did because they left this message on my phone: “Hey P.G., remember us? We’re the two Scruggs employees who slipped you the date rape drug. Yeah, and we tattooed that huge glow-in-the-dark Super Bowl Nugget-Off ad on your ass!”

Initially, I was considering litigation, but then Scruggs came to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse. They threatened to smash my fingers into splinters unless I agreed not to file suit. As compensation, however, they did offer to send me a shipping crate of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets and tattoo the Scruggs Dancing Nugget on my forehead. I told them that if they left the date rape drug out of it this time, we would call it a deal. I’ve always loved that dancing nugget.

But love and money are two different processed meat products. And while I may love Scruggs’ nuggets, Bickelmeyer’s pork berries pay the bills:

The following is a paid advertisement by Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries, a member of the Domicorp Group:

Do you know what’s in your nugget?…Scruggs, subsidy of the Nihilex Corporation, may look like your average God-fearing Midwestern mom-and-pop genetically modified industrial chicken farm, but what if we told you it was really a terrorist training ground, nourishing al-Qaeda one nugget at a time? What if you were to learn that Osama bin Laden has stayed alive all these years thanks to a steady supply of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets? That’s right, the nuggets you feed your family may be costing us thousands of innocent American lives.

Did you know Scruggs imports nuggets to a place called Venezuela, a SOCIALIST country? Did you know that socialism is a diabolical plot to rid the world of private healthcare, devised by a Marxist named Karl Marx and carried out by his Oriental henchmen Mao, Stalin and Barack Hussein Obama? Did you know Scruggs means “atheist” in another language?

Why support terrorism and the obliteration of democracy when you can enjoy a delicious freedom-loving, partially dehydrogenated Pork Berry brought to you by Bicklemeyer’s? The folks at Bicklemeyer’s have been cultivating pork berries right here on Main Street* for over 40 years. Our Old Country flavor tastes of a simpler time in America, when kids could play stickball on the streets and munch on a pork berry, without fear of being recruited into a terrorist youth organization or lured into a homosexual marriage. That’s because each pork berry is genetically infused with the spirit of Christendom. Yes, sir, when you bite into a Bicklemeyer’s pork berry, you’re consuming the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation not enough? Well, after they come off the petri dish, we roll our pork berries in the American flag, sing “I’m proud to be an American” to them and press them between the pages of an abridged two-for-one edition of the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.

Our pork berries are what made Ayn Rand so wonderfully selfish. They’re what Rush Limbaugh gave up painkillers for. And they are the only partially dehydrogenated pork product that Glenn Beck dunks at tea parties.

Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries. Real American taste to die for!

*Main Street is what we call our industrial labor campus for children in Burma. Educating the community is a top priority at Bickelmeyer’s.