Do it today!
Let me tell you about my brother Jocko. When he was a boy, Jocko had great difficulty in school. He was classified as educationally defunct, a condition that required both patience and medication (not for him, but for his parents, teachers, and especially his loving older brother).
But Jocko was a happy kid with a soft-shoe dance step that lit up the room, particularly when he would dance right into the wall partway through and knock a dozen framed pictures and a shelf full of knick-knacks from Mexico onto his head. Our parents acknowledged his academic difficulties but always tried to take a positive, if stretched, spin on things. "That's great, Jocko!" Ma would say. "You spelled 'cat' with only one E this time. I'm so proud of you."
You'll notice that I'm referring to Jocko in the past tense. Unfortunately we lost Jocko during a sale at Wal-Mart shortly after he graduated from high school this last June. Thanks to Jocko's inimitable fashion sense, an overenthusiastic shopper (according to the forensic know-it-all's) mistook him for a set of irregular sheets that were on sale for fifty percent off, paid for him at the checkout lane and shoved him in the trunk of her car with tons of other low-cost, low-quality items and drove off.
I have held out hope all this time that he would wander out of the dressing room, a changed man, but it hasn't happened. Today the police notified me that they have pulled his lucky underpants from the river, the pair that he swore he would never take off as long as he lived, since it was the pair he was wearing when he met Katee Sackhoff at a science fiction convention.
I've had to accept the painful truth: Jocko is dead, and I'm out the fifty bucks he owed me.
One of the worst things for me is the tragic sense of loss. Jocko wasn't a particularly articulate fellow, but his life was one of unique achievement. A fantasy writer, he has left hundreds of tremendous story ideas unwritten and undeveloped; a humorist, he had a unique knack for building up a mailing list to thousands of people and then ceasing all humor-related writing for 18 months at a time. And while I graduated from high school right on schedule, at age 18, Jocko graduated in record time. (True, it was two months before he turned 35, so it wasn't a particularly good record, but that's not the point.) Jocko was a man among giants; given time, I have no doubt he would have been even less.
Worse, I am plagued with regrets of my own. If I had known that fateful moment by the linen department was the last time I would see him, I wouldn't have asked him if the Lederhosen made me look fat. I would have said, "Jocko, where on earth did you leave the TV remote?"
I also would have taken the time to count the many blessings he brought to his loved ones every time he left the room. I would have spent our Wal-Mart trip appreciating his cantankerous smile, his cacophonous laughter, his co-dependent affection for others, and the way he was so good at getting the Coke machine to dispense free product without the machine falling on top of him just like it shows in the little warning cartoon.
When you put all Jocko's good attributes on the scale and balance them with all his irritating traits such as the CD player that was always blaring out white Christian "rap," the amount of hair he had while I was completely bald, the dirty socks that crawled around under his bed and wandered the hallways late at night, the loud tuba music that would come from his room while I was trying to sleep because he had insomnia and decided to practice at 3 a.m., the times he used to lock me on the porch roof in my underwear when we were children, or even the time he let a stupid bird loose in the car while I was driving and I ended up crashing through the neighbor's fence and into the in-ground swimming pool being used as a temporary aquarium for displaced sand sharks, or the times he would follow me around middle school like a little lost and slightly hearing-impaired puppy, or the time he thought it was really funny to run refrigerator magnets round and round my entire Stan Freberg cassette tape collection ... well, I think you can easily guess how it all measures out.
But now Jocko is gone, and with him has gone my opportunity to tell him how I've always felt to have him for a brother. I won't get another chance to tell the miserable so-and-so all I would have wanted him to hear, but if you have a younger brother, you still can do it. Tell your kid brothers what you would want them to hear if you knew it would be your last conversation!
The last time I talked to Jocko was the day we went to Wal-Mart. He called me to say, "Hi, Smirkov! Look at these skis! I bet I can walk all the way to the pet section while wearing them," and then tripped right into the fish tanks. That memory gives me something to treasure forever.
If there is any purpose at all to Jocko's death, it'd be the first time anything that chowderhead ever did that had a reason. Maybe it's to make others appreciate more of life and to have people, especially families, take the time to let each other know how we feel about one another.
MORAL: When you're parked on a suspension bridge and dragging that body
out of the trunk, remember -- he's not heavy, he's your brother.
Pit of shame
Due to copyright laws, we are unable to share with you the original vignette that we are parodying here. However, you may see it posted illegally at: www.inspirationalstories.com/4/460.html
But Jocko was a happy kid with a soft-shoe dance step that lit up the room, particularly when he would dance right into the wall partway through and knock a dozen framed pictures and a shelf full of knick-knacks from Mexico onto his head. Our parents acknowledged his academic difficulties but always tried to take a positive, if stretched, spin on things. "That's great, Jocko!" Ma would say. "You spelled 'cat' with only one E this time. I'm so proud of you."
You'll notice that I'm referring to Jocko in the past tense. Unfortunately we lost Jocko during a sale at Wal-Mart shortly after he graduated from high school this last June. Thanks to Jocko's inimitable fashion sense, an overenthusiastic shopper (according to the forensic know-it-all's) mistook him for a set of irregular sheets that were on sale for fifty percent off, paid for him at the checkout lane and shoved him in the trunk of her car with tons of other low-cost, low-quality items and drove off.
I have held out hope all this time that he would wander out of the dressing room, a changed man, but it hasn't happened. Today the police notified me that they have pulled his lucky underpants from the river, the pair that he swore he would never take off as long as he lived, since it was the pair he was wearing when he met Katee Sackhoff at a science fiction convention.
I've had to accept the painful truth: Jocko is dead, and I'm out the fifty bucks he owed me.
One of the worst things for me is the tragic sense of loss. Jocko wasn't a particularly articulate fellow, but his life was one of unique achievement. A fantasy writer, he has left hundreds of tremendous story ideas unwritten and undeveloped; a humorist, he had a unique knack for building up a mailing list to thousands of people and then ceasing all humor-related writing for 18 months at a time. And while I graduated from high school right on schedule, at age 18, Jocko graduated in record time. (True, it was two months before he turned 35, so it wasn't a particularly good record, but that's not the point.) Jocko was a man among giants; given time, I have no doubt he would have been even less.
Worse, I am plagued with regrets of my own. If I had known that fateful moment by the linen department was the last time I would see him, I wouldn't have asked him if the Lederhosen made me look fat. I would have said, "Jocko, where on earth did you leave the TV remote?"
I also would have taken the time to count the many blessings he brought to his loved ones every time he left the room. I would have spent our Wal-Mart trip appreciating his cantankerous smile, his cacophonous laughter, his co-dependent affection for others, and the way he was so good at getting the Coke machine to dispense free product without the machine falling on top of him just like it shows in the little warning cartoon.
When you put all Jocko's good attributes on the scale and balance them with all his irritating traits such as the CD player that was always blaring out white Christian "rap," the amount of hair he had while I was completely bald, the dirty socks that crawled around under his bed and wandered the hallways late at night, the loud tuba music that would come from his room while I was trying to sleep because he had insomnia and decided to practice at 3 a.m., the times he used to lock me on the porch roof in my underwear when we were children, or even the time he let a stupid bird loose in the car while I was driving and I ended up crashing through the neighbor's fence and into the in-ground swimming pool being used as a temporary aquarium for displaced sand sharks, or the times he would follow me around middle school like a little lost and slightly hearing-impaired puppy, or the time he thought it was really funny to run refrigerator magnets round and round my entire Stan Freberg cassette tape collection ... well, I think you can easily guess how it all measures out.
But now Jocko is gone, and with him has gone my opportunity to tell him how I've always felt to have him for a brother. I won't get another chance to tell the miserable so-and-so all I would have wanted him to hear, but if you have a younger brother, you still can do it. Tell your kid brothers what you would want them to hear if you knew it would be your last conversation!
The last time I talked to Jocko was the day we went to Wal-Mart. He called me to say, "Hi, Smirkov! Look at these skis! I bet I can walk all the way to the pet section while wearing them," and then tripped right into the fish tanks. That memory gives me something to treasure forever.
If there is any purpose at all to Jocko's death, it'd be the first time anything that chowderhead ever did that had a reason. Maybe it's to make others appreciate more of life and to have people, especially families, take the time to let each other know how we feel about one another.
MORAL: When you're parked on a suspension bridge and dragging that body
out of the trunk, remember -- he's not heavy, he's your brother.
Pit of shame
Due to copyright laws, we are unable to share with you the original vignette that we are parodying here. However, you may see it posted illegally at: www.inspirationalstories.com/4/460.html
Labels: Chicken Soup for the Soulless
posted by marauder34 at 11:26 AM
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