There's nothing worse than....

... a dead battery. Huh? A commercial I saw the other day told me that. Seriously? NOTHING WORSE?!? You've got to be kidding me. I could probably think of {TEN THOUSAND} things that are worse than a dead battery. Cancer for instance. That's worse. That's WAY worse. Maybe if they said, " There's nothing worse than a dead battery when you're on the south side of Chicago at 3 am, drunk as hell, carrying 22 grand that was closer to 30 grand a few hours earlier and you were supposed to have given the whole 30 to your "Uncle Guido", who is rumored to have dumped somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 bodies in a swamp out in the western suburbs over the last seven years. True, there probably is nothing worse than that, as I can tell you from experience. Which is why I moved halfway across the country and am now disguised as Mr. Snarky. But that's a tale for another time.

Anyway. Due to the fact that I haven't slept much lately (mostly due to bad dreams about Uncle Guido) and because I don't really feel like it, I am absolutely not going to try to come up with those 10,000 things that are worse. Actually, it would be 9,998 now with the whole cancer and Uncle Guido thing. No, I'm not doing that. Instead I give you my TOP FIVE THINGS NOT INVOLVING DEATH THAT ARE ALL IN THEIR OWN RIGHT MUCH WORSE THAN HAVING A DEAD BATTERY. Now, you might say that having a dead battery involves death... you know, the damn battery, and therefore the car is dead. I'd tell you to shut up if you said that. Seriously. Shut up. Thanks.

5. The New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, Boston Celtics, Detroit Red Wings, and Notre Dame Fightin' Irish Football all win championships in the same year... AND Tiger Woods wins the Grand Slam in Golf. For my friends across the pond, which is kind of a dumb saying if you want to know the truth, because, really, who are we kidding, it's a damn ocean, not a pond... umm yeah, Manchester United takes the Premier League. That would ALL suck as far as Mr and Mrs. Snarky are concerned. She probably would only be pissed about the Yankees, but then she'd be very empathetic for me, so what more can I ask for. Sorry if you're a fan of one or more of these teams. Really... I AM SORRY.

4. Internet outages. Damn I hate those.

3. While you are exploring a cave in Mexico, the owners of the land decide to start strip mining and cover up the entrance. You are trapped for 12 days, subsisting on spiders, ticks, and rats and drinking your own... {no forget that part...} drinking from a small underground pond with water that tastes like a mixture of oil and mud, only to discover that if you had continued around the pond for about half a mile rather than drink the foul water, the back end of the cave opened into Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo Cantina AND if you had done this on the 2nd day, you would have been there just in time for his "Birthday Bash" AND you would have met your future wife, who instead has hooked up with your arch enemy from high school who was the quarterback and who seemed to always wind up going out with the girl you liked who said, and I quote, "He's a really nice guy, but..." A little unrealistic? Maybe. But it truly would suck.

2. Falling off a third story balcony and being impaled on a fence post. Through the rectum. Ouch.

1. You've died and gone to hell. I know, I know, I said there was no death involved. I lied. Sue me. Anyway, it's my damn blog and I'll write what I want. Maybe you were dead before I started writing. Did you ever even think of that? Huh? Okay. Glad that's settled. So this hell we are talking about, it's not that whole fire and brimstone hell that people usually envision. No, this is Dante's Inferno hell, 7 levels or whatever, because nobody has ever actually read that, have they? {Mrs. Snarky just informed me that she HAS read Dante's Inferno} In your... well, who am I kidding, let me start over... In MY personal hell, I am living in a single wide in an area like Seattle, only colder, and wetter. 24-7, 365. The sun NEVER shines. I am married to a lovely woman who is 4 foot 3 and 476 pounds. She has not gotten out of bed in over 300 years. We have 12 kids. All in diapers. We have 15 cats. 1 litterbox. (I've told you about my gag reflex, right? I don't mind cats, but...) We have a television and a stereo. They each get two channels. The TV has Disney and Nickelodeon, but SpongeBob has been cancelled. The stereo actually gets its feed from Sirius Satellite, which sounds okay until I find out that my choice of stations are "Conway Twitty and Friends", or "All Eminem, All the Time." I live next door to the playboy mansion, only all the walls are glass and it is walled off more securely than Guantanamo. The only food I can ever seem to scrape up are beets, bread and butter pickles and sardines.

So now, I would like 2 things from you, my readers. First, I pose you all the same question: What is worse than a dead battery. I would love some comments. Short and sweet like # 2 or 4, or long winded like 1, 3 and 5.

2nd, and maybe I wasn't clear enough about this the first time I asked...

I WANT SOUTH AMERICA!!!!

Of all the hits I get on this thing, one of you must know someone in South America. Please email them or facebook message them the following and I will love you forever if they do it:

Dear (insert name here), could you do me a favor? I'm trying to win a contest. Just click on this link http://thesnarkycouple.blogspot.com/ and I win! Then, if you comment on the blog that you got someone from whatever country they live in to click it, you really will win. What will I win you ask... that's easy. A free lifetime subscription t the Snarky Couple AND my undying gratitude. Isn't that great?

Love and hope and peace and harmony,

Mr. Snarky

Being normal is OVERRATED

Or at least I think it is, having never been accused of being normal myself. That may sound like I'm joking. I'm not. Believe it or not, Mr. Snarky was not always the cool, well-adjusted, wise-ass that you all know and love. In fact, Mr. Snarky was quite the nerd in his formative years. Misunderstood, picked on and laughed at while wearing some really bad clothes that his mom picked out for him. Mr. Snarky getting picked on mostly stemmed from the fact that he was FAR from normal.

The reason I bring up normalcy is because of something a family member's friend is going through with their most definitely not-normal child. Now, normally (see what I did there?) Mr. Snarky doesn't take on serious subjects. This one is quite serious, so I won't get into too many details and will try to keep things lighthearted. This child, and also the child of the family member, which coincidentally makes her a family member too (Mr. Snarky doesn't like to tell people that he's a grandfather, even though he loves his grandchildren very much, because he doesn't want you to think he's old... so don't tell anyone) ummm, where was I? Oh yeah... both of these children have a chromosomal disorder and the family friend's child is having extremely serious health issues and needs life saving surgery which is presently being denied due to her disability. That was a mouthful and perhaps a little hard to comprehend... sorry. Those are all the details I will supply in this blog, but if you really want the rest of the story, which I truly hope you do, I'll post lots of links to it at the end.

Anyway, moving forward, here are some things Mr. Snarky has done in his life to prove how normal he is not. Yes, I know the sentence structure sucked right there. I don't care, but thanks for noticing.

I've done drunken jumping jacks at 3 am in the middle of one of the busiest roads in town. Thankfully, there were no cars coming at that hour. I'm more thankful that there wasn't a police car in the vicinity.

While in my 20's, I saved one of my best friends from drowning while my dad's fishing boat was sinking underneath us. I know, most people would probably do the same. The thing is, we were in about 2 feet of water.

A friend and I, the same one I was with for the jumping jacks, were in Toys R Us. We each grabbed up a Hoppity Horse...

(For those of you under thirty, this is a Hoppity Horse)

... and bounced around the store. We didn't stop until the store manager asked us if we weren't maybe a little too old to be playing with the toys. He was younger than we were at the time.

While sitting in class, especially in grade school, I tended to get bored and distracted easily. I was always able to follow what the teacher was saying even if I seemed like I wasn't paying attention. It drove many of them crazy. While bored, I tended to play with pencils, doodle, pretty normal things like that. I also tended to get my shoelaces tied around the post underneath the desk and fall down when it was time to go to lunch. Okay, once is not a tendency, but another time, I got my hands stuck in a hole in the back of my chair and had to cry out for help when I couldn't get them out. Many thanks are owed to Rod Connelly for taking care of that. I he hadn't helped, I might have had to have my arm amputated, and I'm pretty sure that would've sucked.

I have an extremely strong gag reflex. Mrs. Snarky finds this hilarious. She has laughed at me for choking half to death the first time I put my partial into my mouth; she was nearly doubled over laughing at me when I half-walked/half-ran out of the Elephant house at Lincoln Park zoo, gagging over the smell; she laughed so hard she cried when I stumbled my way out of the outhouse at the Redwood Forest, heaving over the foul stench that had filled my lungs. HA HA HA! Very funny! NOT!!!!

Once, while asleep, and obviously dreaming, I was lying on my side, facing away from Mrs. Snarky. I lifted my left arm into the air and loudly said, "1... 2... 3!" I rolled over onto my back and shouted, "I....CHOOSE... THIS!!!" I then reached over, grabbed her hand, and placed it straight on my crotch.

You get the point. I'm not normal. I'm fine with that.

Much love to all you abnormal people out there!

I hope you check out these links. Thanks! Mr. Snarky.

Please please please comment if these make an impact on you.

A mother's heartfelt struggles through a blog post...

A local news report on the family's dealings with the hospital...

An article defending what the hospital has done...

Another article against what the hospital has done...

A Youtube video of children with Wolf-Hirschhorn,

And finally, an online petition to sign if you are so inclined.

I wonder... If my Surgeon could've known how abnormal I would turn out, would he have taken the lump out of my throat in 9th grade? Just wondering. Thanks to all who made it this far!