Eight Feet Deep

Three mat­ters both­ered me this morn­ing when I trav­eled to the Hous­ton VA hos­pi­tal for an EMG, nerve test, on my feet and legs. Noth­ing that was a bother had any­thing directly to do with the test.

First I woke at 4:50  a.m. I did so to catch the shut­tle van from the local out­pa­tient clinic to the hos­pi­tal. As it turned out — my being the fill­ing between almost 500 pounds of vet­eran sand­wich in the van ride — my own drive to Hous­ton with morn­ing rush hour traf­fic and all might have turned out to have been more pleas­ant had I dri­ven my truck instead. So the hour at which I awoke, the uncom­fort­able ride to the hos­pi­tal and deal­ing with some of the VA’s most accom­plished bureau­cratic assh**es while try­ing to work out another mat­ter com­pletely were what made my day much less than perfect.

The EMG itself, per­formed by a friendly doc with a heavy Latino accent wasn’t really much of a prob­lem at all con­sid­er­ing I would get my legs or feet shocked from time-to-time. The shocks weren’t like get­ting shocked when one grabs hold of a live wire. Believe me. Been there done that — ow, ow s**t!!!

Mostly it was the early morn­ing rise that got to me. Even though I some­how man­aged to sleep most of the way back from Hous­ton sit­ting upright in the van, I still feel halfway dead. As such, it is most appro­pri­ate that I pay trib­ute here to a great man whose obit­u­ary I noticed today.

Many may not rec­og­nize the name Vic Mizzy right off, unless you watched the run­ning gag with the tele­vi­sion cred­its which opened the 1960s TV com­edy “Green Acres.”  Mizzy, who died in Los Ange­les Sat­ur­day at 93, wrote the theme for Eddie Albert-Eva Gabor farce. The Gabor char­ac­ter would make some bizarre com­ment about the open­ing cred­its which would fea­ture Mizzy or other crew’s names, some­thing one would hardly if ever see on any other TV show or movie.

But it was prob­a­bly another of Mizzy’s TV songs which is more widely known, how­ever, that being the theme of the “Addams Fam­ily,” com­plete with the song’s fin­ger snaps.

True, Mizzy may not have cured can­cer or polio, or have won a Nobel Prize (no com­ment please). But some of his songs help us remem­ber some of the zani­est TV pro­gram­ming that aired dur­ing a time that cried out for hilar­ity, the 1960s. Those themes remain catchy and appeal­ing today.

Snap, snap. Keep Man­hat­tan just give me that countryside …