his week marks the 119th birthday of Buford “Old Man� Scarsby, the world’s oldest living human and recipient of the 2004 Marco Polo Award for getting lost in a famous way. Despite many spirited attempts on his part to disappear however, the famously lost Scarsby remains found at his family home in Cutrow, North Carolina this week.

As hardly a newspaper-reading soul in the country could have missed, Buford was lost for over 45 minutes last August, after wandering off and climbing inside a hollow tree, where he was later found, terrified and smelling of owl. Family members blame the resultant “media circus� on poor communication between Buford-finding family members and the newspaper-calling members of the Scarsby clan.

Scarsby, born in 1886, has lived a rich and varied life, none of which he remembers. The one fact of which he is sure, however, is that he was born in 1886, thanks to a faded daguerreotype photograph of a newborn Scarsby wrapped in that day’s newspaper in lieu of the expensive blankets or towels of the day. This compelling evidence convinced world standards-bearing organizations to verify Buford’s claimed age, despite the fact no birth records can be found due to no one being sure of the man’s real name.

Family members began calling Scarsby “Buford� in the 1980’s, following the lead of Scarsby’s then-98 year-old wife Emma, who thought she was talking to Buford Cubbins, a local pharmacist. Since his great-grandchildren grew up calling him “Buford,� Scarsby’s real first name is thought to have been lost to the ages. Scarsby himself believes he forgot his name around 1982.

“Lemon time,� explained Scarsby, clutching a packet of powdered lemonade.

Though certainly the most famous, last year’s incident was hardly a first for Buford, who has been wandering off and becoming lost on a regular basis since his early 80’s. In one notable incident in 1992, while on a walk Buford climbed into the back of a mail truck and fell asleep on a sack of letters. Buford was returned to his family later that day, thanks to a return address sewn into his trousers after a similar incident with UPS in 1989.

Some advocates for the elderly have decried Scarsby’s fame, arguing that the media’s handling of his frequent confused forays into lostedness only serve to foster stereotypes about the aged. Relatives, however, claim that Buford’s ways have nothing to do with his age, citing as example the seven years he spent wandering around lost behind enemy lines in Germany during and after WWI.

Buford’s great-grandchildren, who now care for and corral the remarkably aged man, had hoped that Scarsby’s longtime wife and sometimes companion Emma might reveal her husband’s true name on her deathbed in 1993. Emma Scarsby, however, had different plans, leaving the world instead with her immortal last words, “cartoon pussy.�

Though certainly happy that the old man is staying in sight these days, Scarsby’s great-grandson Lewford Scarsby remains guardedly optimistic about the future.

“There’s no way we can keep an eye on him 24-7,� explained Lewford. “But we’ve gotten pretty good at learning this old guy’s tricks and keeping him reigned in. Ain’t that right, Buford?
Buford? Aw, shit.�

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I for one miss the good old days when you could go to the store and know what the hell you were buying. Back then, there were two brands of everything: the kind you bought and the kind your no-class neighbors from Philly would buy because they didn't know any better. They'd save two cents and end up with garbage bags that were water soluble and dog food that was made from lawn clippings.

In those days, it was always easy to tell which brand was which. The good stuff had some smiling white guy with a butchwax haircut on the box. Nice. The other one always had a genie or some shit on it, a laughing monkey. And the crap products always had dead give-away names like Chintz or Uncle Otto's Screwjob.

Nowadays, you don't know what to buy. There are over 800 different kinds of crackers alone. I just want something to put in my mouth, I don't know if I want it stone-ground or not. And half the boxes have Catdog on them, whatever the hell that is. I don't know if that's the modern-day equivalent of the laughing monkey or not. They should've at least kept the butchwax guy on the good crackers, so we'd at least be able to tell what a Catdog means.

You can forget about buying cereal, too, unless you fancy pulling out your eyeballs through your own ass right there in the grocery aisle. Half the boxes aren't even cereal, they're boobytraps filled with leprechauns and all kinds of silly horseshit. At least the bad ones are easy to avoid, as I've never felt comfortable buying cereal from the Irish.

When I was a boy, there were two different kinds of pop: brown pop and water. And if you knew what the hell you were doing, you ordered the brown pop. Water was for the stupid kids who didn't know the difference, they gave that out so as not to waste the brown pop on idiots.

Nowadays you can go into a restaurant and just make up the name of a pop, and chances are they'll have something called that. I haven't been stumped yet, though I do enjoy the challenge. Words to the wise: steer clear of Anal Route Soda and Crampman's Best, those two colas are particularly vile.

And what in the hell is "Sierra Mist" anyway? It sounds like a bad camping euphemism for when a raccoon pisses on your car.

"Shit, it looks like a couple of jellyfish fucked all over the hood of my Omni!"

"No way dude, that's just the Sierra Mist."

"Fuck you, Kenny, next time we're taking your car."

If things keep up at this pace, in a few years we'll each have our own line of products that we're obligated to buy. That may sound like fun to you, but with my luck they'd assign me a cereal with raisins in it. And I hate raisins. Even more so than grapes.

If that's the future, you can have it.

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Dear commune:

the commune’s coverage of the war in Bosnia has been nothing short of commendable. Objective? No. But objectivity is a quality far overvalued in our current society. A steaming dog turd on the side of the road is objective. But not the commune. Prompt? Not really, but promptitude is unquestionably in the eye of the beholder. Compared to the newspapers of early colonial America, printed manually on handset printing presses only once a month at best, the commune is truly a gleaming pillar of prompt reporting. Factual? I say with admiration in my typing voice that the commune has never let the facts get in the way of cleaving swiftly to the heart of a story and exposing it, still beating, for the public’s disgusted perusal. Bravo, commune. If but there were only a million other news sites like thee, for then the commune could be called one in a million.

Sincerely,

Rodery Hollenbeck
Steinburgen, RI


Dear Rodery:

Thank you kindly for your letter, and we apologize greatly for the serious delay in its publication. It seems that office gaywad Raoul Dunkin penned a half-assed Successory quote on the back of your letter and has been carrying it around with him for years, both for inspiration and in hopes of getting it made into a poster, superimposed over a soft-focus photo of geese in flight. Rest assured that he spent some serious time in the commune’s solitary closet for that stunt, one hour for every commune-bashing letter we’ve had to run since we received your delightful correspondence. So thank you. Oh, and if it wouldn’t be much trouble, could your possibly provide verifiable proof of your existence? Some heartless cynics around the office think that just because your letter came to us on Red Bagel’s personalized stationary that it was some clever ruse by Bagel to boost staff morale, kind of like that stripper he hired to work in the mailroom. Thanks. Oh, and by the way: "Wherever you go, there’s a goat." That’s the Successory Dunkin wrote on your letter. Raoul wanted us to pass it on to you and we obliged, only because it makes him look like even more of an asshole.

the commune

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Editor’s Note: the commune is not responsible for the way your girlfriend cut her hair. Saying she looks like a hick was a simple statement of fact, and hardly warranted your childish response. We can only hope that the unfortunate person who one day informs you of your status as a big, dumb redneck is as fleet of foot as the commune.

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