While many other news websites would be more than happy to bore you with pointless recaps and pseudo-memorials filled with false and forced sentiments of notable Oklahomans who’ve shuffled off this mortal coil in 2013, The Lost Ogle has always been a website to see the bigger picture. (At least, I think we are. That’s what I signed up for.) Sure, the death of a person is always tragic, but even more tear-jerking and heart-wrenching is the death of the ideals of the person. And this past, year, did we ever lose those. From the melodramatically sweet to the teeth-gnashing sour, here’s a mostly incomplete, slightly belated memorial to those things that we lost, metaphorically, in 2013.
-
Gary England and Our Right to Be Kept Advised
When Gary England set down that weather-clicker thing for the last time, I like to think that he stripped naked and exited through two hulking metal doors and wandered for 40 days and 40 nights through a vast wasteland of perpetual tornadic activity, eventually coming to terms with his life and physically—and spiritually—merging into one with those terrible twisters, becoming an elemental messiah of sorts who watches over every single scared latch-key child hiding in a closet, shooting beams of Doppler bursts from his thunderous manroot in an effort to keep this once-great land safe.
Of course that’s what I wrote, minus all the hot homoerotic sex scenes, in my latest Gary England/Dune fan-fiction crossover novel entitled Weather-God of Arrakis: The Dust Bowl Jihad, to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press later this year.
Still, no amount of speculative fiction can ever compound the horrible truth: Oklahoma City now has no one to comfort us like a newborn calf suckling a mother cow’s teat the way that Gary did. When the skies turn an ominous shade of Armageddon gray and the winds howl with murderous intent, we need to face facts that we are all alone.
Seriously, who’s going to hear our cries? David Payne? He’s like a substitute teacher who desperately wants to connect with the kids, but the kids are all cartoonish gang-members with numchucks and shutter-shades, so instead he sits in his ’88 Nissan Sentra while chain-smoking and crying. Mike Morgan? Why? So he can just panic and point more weather-weary citizens into the eye of whatever deadly storm is beating down the hatches in an effort to justify his sparkly-tie expense report? And I have no idea who is on Channel 5, or if Channel 5 is even a real station.
Without Gary, in 2014, Oklahoma is screwed.
-
The Oklahoma Standard
After the horrific stream of events earlier in 2013, most notably the reign of tornadoes that Satan scorched our earth with, we were witness to Oklahomans coming together in a way not seen since (insert tragedy here) and, for once, it felt like this state had entered a new era in community love and inter-personal relations that welcomed everyone.
And then Mary Fallin had to go and be a totes b.
While Governor Fallin paraded a bunch of foster kids before the cameras, lecturing us about this supposed Oklahoma Standard this past holiday season in a series of commercials that ran ad nauseum during Judge Alex and Law and Order: Criminal Intent reruns, she was simultaneously (and quite rabidly, I might add) working hard to make sure that benefit requests for same-sex spouses of national guardsmen were ignored and/or denied. That’s standard Oklahoma, ya’ll!
To make things worse, The New York Times erroneously reported that Fallin eventually changed her mind on the matter, which, for a split-second, allowed all of us decent humans to feel like she had heard our cries for tolerance and equality and had a Grinch-like change of heart, only to find our beliefs dumped on the side of the road like so many cut-out bin copies of Christina Fallin’s latest album Pink Horseshoe Pony Fuzz or whatever that crap was called, a few hours later. It was heartbreaking proof that this supposed Oklahoma Standard was nothing more than a governmental practical joke that gullible Oklahomans were more than eager to believe in.
-
State Income Tax Cuts for the Wealthy
I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be a single mom these days, working three jobs just trying to keep the bills paid and gas in the tank all the while trying to make time to provide the best life for your born out of wedlock children…it’s got be a heartbreaking position to be put in. But, it’s got to be double-heartbreaking when the little tykes tearfully cry into their pillows every night, asking God why they can’t afford Beluga caviar and Swarovski crystal vases like all the other kids.
Like the magical golden carp of Chinese folklore (not sure if that’s real or something I made up), many struggling Oklahoman’s wishes were answered when legislation was passed to lower this state’s income taxes. Upon hearing this news, many single moms ran out to buy as much caviar and crystal on credit, only to hear that a few days later the Oklahoma Supreme Court tossed out the new state law, accusing lawmakers of a violation was so blatant that you’d think the legislature planned on the law not passing at all. While this move may help the state to not slash budgets across the board, let’s remember the real victims here: hundreds (thousands?) of Oklahoma kids forced to go to bed without caviar every night. And single moms who have to take a fourth job just to be able to afford paddlefish eggs poached from Grand Lake.
Single moms like me.
-
Emily Sutton’s Attainability
I, like so many Metroites who would get up extra early at 4 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the impossibly delightful Emily Sutton and her Channel 4 weather “reports,” only to switch over to Rise and Shine a few hours later to see her mix it up with the never-attainable Joleen Chaney and human Muppet Lucas Ross, did so with the attentive passion and devotion of a hopeful lover on the cusp of summoning enough courage to send her a carefully written letter composed of words clipped from magazines and delivered anonymously. It’s something that every woman secretly craves, even if she says she doesn’t.
Sadly, many of us were forced to burn those letters in the fires of anguished heartbreak when it was announced here that her boyfriend is a firefighter. Sadly, burning those letters accidentally caused a four-alarm fire in our living rooms due to the fact most of us on the TLO staff are squatters and keep barrels of open-flames used for heat there. To add insult to injury, it was probably him that not only put the fire out, but handed us a cup of hot chocolate and placed an insulated blanket over our shoulders as the EMTs checked us out for smoke inhalation. How could anyone not fall in love with this local hero?
Moral of the story: he’s probably a great guy and we’re just fat squatters who masturbate to morning television.
-
The Safety of Using Public Port-a-Johns
If there was one thing that made this state great, it was the unequivocal lack of fear that we collectively had when using random port-o-johns. In the relative hum of the great outdoors, it was never a trial or tribulation to sneak off to one of these rolling potty-receptacles, able to commit fec-hicular homicide, totally free from worry that a backwoods scat fetishist might be staring up at our posteriors, licking his chops like a kitten being served Fancy Feast out of the can as that sweet brown mudhoney coated his hair and beard in a boner-inducing celebration of mental illness.
Well, sorry people who like to drop a deuce in public places; thanks to Kenneth “The Pooping Tom” Enlow, we must now enter any portable BM joint under the constant assumption that someone is hiding in there, ready to orally collect your wastes. On the other hand, maybe this might spread into a cautionary urban legend of terror to today’s easy-dump youth that could turn into a homegrown horror franchise. I can picture it now: “Look out kids, the Poogieman’s gonna get you!”
Somebody get Fritz Kiersch on the phone.
-
Wayne Coyne’s Marriage
If those two crazy kids and their deep abiding love of glitter-ensconced vagina-boats and blurry nude internet photography can’t make it, do any of us boring missionary-sex simpletons really have a chance?
-
Louis Fowler: Pop-Culture Vigilante. Freelancer. Mexican. Choctaw. Curandero. Cristero. Leftist. Overweight. 2013 Plaza District Hot Dog Eating Champion. He can be followed on Twitter at @LouisFowler.
