post-wine katzenjammer
only i’m back
in the booze store again
buying another two magnum bottles
and a plastic jug of vodka to boot
and the guys who work there
are huddled around the cash register talking
ignoring me and not taking my money
i’ve become a fixture here like the floor
that are talking about katarina
and why she quit so suddenly
conflicted with college
couldn’t hack retail
she took up nannying, one of them says
i wish she’d nanny me!
and they all laugh
and make sex noises
and somewhere in america
katarina’s ears are ringing
to the dull hum of the patriarchal void
as i stand there with the two wine bottles
the jug of vodka
and a crumpled, miserable jackson in my hand
my hangover like the booze store’s mascot
an afterthought
to their sexism
and fine-tooled misogyny.
Outside the Liquor Store -- Arthur Robins
"Katze" is German for cat and "Jammer" is German for distress; the word was used to mean "contrition after a failed endeavor" or "hangover." Starting in 1834 English writers started using the word in the latter sense, but the term also came to mean any commotion, especially after the popularity of the American comic strip "The Katzenjammer Kids" by Rudolph Dirks in 1897. The Dirks family had moved from Germany to the US when he was 7, and he created his strip for the "American Humorist," the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst's "New York Journal;" his editor Rudolph Block suggested the title. (The strip also led to a legal katzenjammer when Dirks left the renamed "New York Morning Journal" in 1913 but continued to portray its characters as "Hans und Fritz" for the "New York World." His former paper continued to publish "The Katzenjammer Kids," authored by H. H. Knerr, the son of German immigrants; since 1903 he had been doing an imitative strip called "The Fineheimer Twins." The courts ruled that Hearts owned the title but that Dirks owned the characters. During World War I, some newspapers retitled the Katzzenjammers "The Shenanigan Kids," and the nationality of the characters was changed to Dutch instead of German; and Firks renamed his strip "The Captain and the Kids." Both versions competed with each other until 1979, when The "Captain and the Kids" ended and "The Katzenjammer Kids" stopped in 2006. Dirks continued to sign his strip until his death in 1968, though his son John gradually took over the work beginning in 1946; Knerr continued until his death in 1949 and was succeeded by a series of other writers.)
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