My 401k hueva Plan

It looks like last week may have been the last blast of real winter, which is muy beuno, because I've had just about a gutful of it. The last couple of weeks have been nothing but ice and snow across what's supposed to be the "Sunny Southland", which sent me off to YouTube for Jan and Dean and surfing competitions at the Banzai Pipeline and had me humming Jimmy Buffett's "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes", with both the Top 40 censor-friendly airplay and genuine parrot head album cut versions of the lyrics seeming more than applicable ("Good times and riches, some bruises and stitches/I've seen more than I can recall"; "Good times and riches and son of a bitches/I've seen more than I can recall").

 

So, when having a 3-way email rant on the subject with friends, telling them how, to add insult to (luckily) no injury, the 12 X 16 awning over the patio had collapsed under the weight of the snow and torn out about 20 feet of the soffits and fascia on the back side of the house when it decided to make its radical change in altitude, I revisited the details of my entrepreneurial retirement plan in more congenial climes--basically, giving them a prose depiction of most everything you see in the 'toon--at which point I decided I might as well go ahead and put it all in a 'toon.

 

Of course, a couple of things in the 'toon weren't in the conversation...

 

For one, mi pequena bimborita's caption bubble comment had its inspiration some 37 years ago in the scene between James Coco as nightclub owner Marcel, Nicol Williamson as Colonel Schlissel, the German military attache to Cincinnati, and Eileen Brennan as lounge singer Betty DeBoop, in Neil Simon's classic (at least in my opinion) "The Cheap Detective":

 

Marcel: Gentlemen, may I present Miss Betty DeBoop, who has just returned from The Islands."

Col. Schlissel: Caribbean or Virgin?

Betty DeBoop: Well, let's just say I came back a Caribbean.

 

For another, for those of you who don't habla the lingo, the title is a play on the Mexican expression "que hueva" (pronounced--at least as closely as an East Texas accent will allow--"kay hway-vah"). This literally translates as "what egginess", but for some reason which yo no comprendo, eggs have some connotation of laziness in Mexico and the phrase actually translates as an expression of laziness and boredom, lethargy, lack of interest, and just basically not wanting to do a damned thing.

 

Which is pretty much nails my relationship with winter.

 

And which is to say, so maybe it ain't the best retirement plan in the world, but, what the hell. I was a child of the late 50s and 60s, there was the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, they made me read "Treasure Island" in school, and there were all those Beach Movies, so you gotta kinda expect things with me might go south in a way Che Guevara, Miss Huckabee and Annette Funicello couldn't have foreseen.

Done