by Ol’ Juniper Jones
Dear Central Texas Humans,
Ol’ Juniper Jones here. First off, let me say that this here letter has been a long time coming. I first pondered on writin’ you folks back in 1958, but I was just a shrub then. Didn’t even have my berries yet. If yer old enough to recollect, you might remember that the rains in ’57 in and around Austin were heavier than a dead preacher. I’m not 
rightly sure what that means, but I heard my daddy say it many a time, and he was a wise old tree. Anyhow, if you’ve lived ’round these parts long enough, you know that a soggy, mild fall means that come winter you git great, big clouds of juniper dust—you might know it better as cedar pollen (even though we ain’t cedars, dagnab it). And as I understand it, you human types don’t take too kindly to our reproductive spores. Apparently, what gits our juices a-flowin’ gets yer noses to blowin’. That rhymed, I’ll be dogged.
Yep, the rains in ’57 made the pollen count of 1957-58 a real humdinger, but it looks like it ain’t got nothing on this here season. So I decided to take pen in branch and reach out to you humans, seeing as how with regard to my fellow feathery foliage, 
2014’s been thicker than George W. Bush after three double vodkas. As an elder statesman of the Central Texas Juniperus family tree, I’m here to tell ya outright that I’m plum sorry. I really am. There ain’t no good reason for all the procreative powder all over yer cars and houses and clothes this winter. Sure, it’s been wet recently, but not like ’57 and ’58.
Nope, I’ll tell ya what the real dadblame reason is. All these young, oversexed trees of pollen-bearing age have just run amok. Saplings these days wear their tight little bark and throw random spores in the air like it’s a dang California orgy. I just don’t know what it is with the kids nowadays—twerking to Miley Cypress, listening to bad 
influences like Amy Pinehouse and Justin Beecher. Some of the things I see the young’uns doing I can’t even understand, like planking, and tweeting, and going treemo. I had to ask my granddaughter, Ashley, about that one. Apparently, the saplings who wear heavy makeup, paint their branches in dark colors and cry and holler a lot are known as treemo. I don’t get it. Hell, everbody’s showin’ off their berries and seed cones like they’re Heather Oaklear or Linda Larchlace or somethin’.
Why, in my day, if a male juniper wanted to court a young lady tree, we waited for a nice, quiet evening, put on some respectable music, like Ray Conifer or Birch Bacharach, or Spruce Springsteen even—not this rap trash they listen to today from these no-talent whippersnappers like Shrub Dogg and Spriggie Smalls. Then, after some soft music, if nature took its course, we’d discreetly send a little pollen her way. Not like today, good gosh a mighty. It’s a regular tree for all out there.
So I reckon you can consider this an apology on behalf of the more mature of us evergreen earthlings. We don’t have nothin’ against you humans, really. Except fer when you beat us with poles and sticks just to watch our spores go a-flyin’. That just ain’t right. Oh, and we do take exception to the whole “cedar fever” thing. We ain’t cedars. We’re junipers. We really hate that.
Ol’ Juniper Jones is a 62-year-old member of the juniperus ashei family, otherwise known as the ashe juniper or mountain cedar tree (although you shouldn’t call him a mountain cedar to his face—he really hates that). For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.
oldspouse 
Clang the Clangers! It’s Contest Time Again!
23 Junby Roger White
Either I’m having a patella-buckling, spleen-expanding, koala-slapping case of déjà vu, or I’ve written all this before and am now simply too addled to recognize it, but here goes: You know how sometimes the gods smile upon you. Yah? True, somet
imes they do. This is when things somehow turn out OK despite your astounding lack of common sense. Sometimes, however, they just grin and chuckle, leaving you to fend for yourself. They are amused at your puny efforts.
And yet other times, the gods smirk or give you that blank stare like you really screwed things up.
My advice for these times is just to act like you truly intended the outcome, no matter how calamitous. This gives the gods pause, and that brief delay in the Great Spinning Wheel of Fate (GSWoF) often provides that slim window of time in
which you have a certain measure of self-determination. Like that time you were second string on the seventh-grade football team, and the coach was trying to decide whether to let you in the game just before halftime and in your excitement you simply ran out onto the field and got to play two whole plays before coach yelled at you to sit down and quit acting foolish.
Kinda like that.
This is to say that I believe the big guys are smiling at present, because just in time for the Third Biennial Oldspouse Familiar Phrase Contest (OFPhC) I have received another supply of premium glossy bumper stickers as prizes, you lucky ducks. That’s ducks, with a “d.”
For those too young, old, sensible, or hirsute to remember, the OFPhC involves a pile of phrases, quotes, movie lines, book titles, common sayings, utterances, and/or bodily function noises that I’ve rendered in a somewhat obscure manner. Your job, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with the more common version of said utterances. For example, say I give you “A Male Homosapiens For All Periods of the Year.” You say—… oh, come on. You say, “A Man For All Seasons.” Bingo! See how easy?
First three humans (I will accept cats, too) to respond at roger.white@tasb.org with the correct answers each wins a premium glossy bumper sticker (sorry, the “Ronald Reagan for Governor” ones are all gone—you get “Jesus is Coming. Hide the Bong”). And you get your name in the Gazette! Pseudonyms are fine.
Exciting, huh? OK, ready and. Go. What are the more well-known versions of these sayings:
Roger White is a freelance bivalve mollusk living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely female spouse, two precocious offspring units, a very obese dachshund, and a cat with Epstein-Barr. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com. Or not.
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