The Retort

Scraping the Barrel: Once More with Feeling

September 25th, 2009 by Mike Schrage Of The Retort Staff

No, don’t be alarmed. Seriously, it’s okay. Take a deep breath.

Sprint to me across the meadow as Joe Cocker croons “Up Where We Belong” while your collective bonnets flutter in the wind and tears blur your vision, for your Mike has finally returned to cradle you in his arms and whisper sweet, soothing nothings in your ear.

If my laptop was a piano I’d be sprawled out seductively atop it, not unlike Michelle Pfeiffer in “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” attired in the finest Italian silks as I coo ever so erotically and slink over your way with the intentions of making sweet and sloppy literary love to each and every one of you. Let my writing enter your most intimate love orifices, and let Papa Mike take you on a guided tour of the nebulous of literary ecstasy.

Oh yes, firm but gentle; for I have already mapped out the route on my love GPS. Go ahead and cancel any interfering appointments while I lube my three functional typing fingers, and away we’ll go.

After a prolonged absence from your lives, I have returned a changed man to The Retort World Headquarters located in the SUB, and just for you I have even resurrected the award-winning “Scraping the Barrel,” a name I have always hated, but find myself stuck with for continuity’s sake.

I rarely make grandiose guarantees, but I can promise two things: one, I alone have the power to save your failing marriages, and two, I am so confident that you’ll find reading the reborn Retort so self-gratifying that I suggest you sit next to a box of tissues while perusing these hallowed pages.

So, fellow babies, I am sure you are all wondering where yours truly disappeared to for the last 15 months. While I normally would perform an answer utilizing a jaunty song and dance routine not seen since those weird British musicals in the 50s, I unfortunately threw my hip out trying to acquire One-Eyed Willie’s buried treasure, so sit back with a cup of herbal tea, crank up some Violent Femmes, and join me in the quantum imaging chamber.

I’d love to tell you that I was working at an orphanage in Cambodia, or contributing to James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” newsletter, but the truth is a bit more mundane.

I decided my life needed a drastic shakeup, so drawing an alarming amount of inspiration from the Oscar-winning epic “Follow that Bird” I hit the pause button, got on a plane, and used thirteen obscenely large paychecks to justify a series of poor decisions and to fade into anonymity. It was hot, dusty, invasive and lucrative, but I hadn’t counted on life back home moving on while my daily existence went into hibernating stasis.

I was able to swap stories with rugby players over cans of lukewarm Victoria Bitter and shots of Jameson in a small town north of Sidney, Australia, where I learned no one drinks Foster’s and almost everyone considers Steve Irwin a real douche bag. I attended an Aussie-rules football game, and a darling woman named Samantha explained why American football was, as she put it, “for pussies puttering about.”

I relaxed, feet up, on a park bench in Budapest overlooking the Danube with a cold pilsner in one hand and hers in the other as I found myself wondering if maybe I was the marrying type after all. I rented two bicycles in a town called Keszthley to cruise around Lake Balaton.

I searched in vain for a cup of “Americano” coffee in the shadows of Vienna’s Schonbrunn Imperial Palace. I learned that the Vienna mass transit system smells universally of urine and, for some odd reason, Fruity Pebbles.

I stepped off a plane in February only to discover that the one true love of my life had become a complete stranger to me, or, worse yet, had never been someone I really knew at all. I saw a life I had planned with her dissolve with the indignity of a text message, and I had to accept that all the promises and all the time we had spent together ended up being worth less than a flat can of Mr. Pibb - and she never even explained why.

The moral of my little fable? One has not felt true rejection until having been rejected by a fat chick. But that, as they say, that is another story. (It isn’t all bad, though. Ah, pessimism, my old friend, how I have missed you.)

Some things, however, haven’t changed. I still find anime really sort of off-putting, I root for the Packers, and consider Jeff Healey the most underrated guitarist in the history of mankind. I am also single, and as I inch ever closer to my 30th birthday, I find my standards when it comes to women diminishing even as we speak.

I don’t drink enough, and I sleep too much. I am woefully unenthused about both work and school, my editor is still a nozzle, and my own anger and resentment as to how I was treated in high school still burns like the time in the fifth grade when your abusive uncle put out his cheap cigar on your arm.

I am cynical, bitter, and plan on developing an ulcer any day now, something I will go into great detail about within the next three thousand words over the next couple of months. But, as arguably the hottest free-agent acquisition in The Retort history, did you actually expect anything else?