Foolish Questions

Ahh, the day can’t come a moment too soon when I can get my membership card in the Crotchety Old Guys Club. The Club has all kinds of benefits for Crotchety Old Guys, known hereafter as COG’s, because who doesn’t like acronyms?  Anyway, one benefit is that you can get ten percent off your bill in any restaurant. As a COG you can leave only a 5% tip instead of the customary 15%, because you’re a crotchety old guy, and people just expect that kind of behavior. You also get to go to the front of any line, because dammit, you’re too damn old to be spending all day standing in line, and people will let you move to the front so they don’t have to listen to your grousing and bitching.

I think a cane comes with the membership card, too. Not because all COG’s need canes, but because it gives you something to wave irritably at young folk and their ilk. Or trip up running children, which is one way I plan to spend the afternoons till the Early Bird specials start at Perkins. Got my sights set on a nice antique ironwood cane with a heavy metal knob end perfect for putting dents in doors when I hammer on them, instead of knocking.

Last but certainly not least is the fact that as a card carrying COG, you can say senseless or silly things, and people will just have to take it because there’s no way to win an argument with a COG. It’s in the Club’s bylaws, I’m pretty sure. Case in point, our observations on a recent visit to a local restaurant that is a favorite with the COG set, as they have easily masticated food. COG and his wife (or caregiver, but then that’s pretty much the same thing) sat down beside us and proceeded to peruse the menu. When the waitress came by for their drink orders, the COG proceeded to tell her that they wanted “two ice teas, each.” The server was disconcerted and asked if they each wanted two ice teas, to which he replied, that of course they didn’t each want two ice teas. They each wanted an ice tea, so they wanted two ice teas.

An understandable error since the server probably wasn’t fully conversant in COG speak, which according to the handy COG manual means ‘anything I damn well want it to mean, dammit!’ So you can see why I look forward to the day when I can throw all social conventions to the winds and just be as grouchy and irritable as I want to be.

Welcome to this week’s Hero of the Week, which would be the first Hero of the Week, since I’ve never had a hero of the week before.  And it should probably be Heroine of the Week, since after all she is a lady. Which of course, just makes her that much more awesome. Or so Mary tells me.

Anyway, whether Hero or Heroine, this woman is humbling. She attributes every one of her hundred and five years on this Earth to bacon, which I think I can safely say is a claim you rarely hear anyone making. Instead it’s a eulogy about poor old Marv, who died of a massive coronary at the age of thirty two, who only had bacon, and then only two strips every fourth Sunday, but only during the winter months.

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Does anyone else hear their little peep, peep screams? Hmmm, maybe it’s just me.

I’m a firm believer that yellow colored liquids are not fit for human consumption. Yellow liquid is kind of like a caution sign. Like red signs mean stop, don’t push that, no, really, if you push that you will suffer dismemberment or worse, I’m not kidding, oh, for god’s sake, now who’s going to clean this up?

So, in a similar vein, don’t drink yellow liquids. Nothing good can come of it, regardless of how much alcohol said liquids may contain. And that does include Mountain Dew, by the way, because that stuff is just nasty. Which, I think, pretty much proves my point.

Besides irresolution, I would also have accepted dithering, indecisiveness, vacillation or hesitancy.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with using the Xbox, which I’ve used to play games like once in the last two years, to access Netflix. I’ve been reading about all these folks dropping their cable or satellite service, and using Netflix to keep up with all the cool shows. Late to the game I might be, but I’m still interested in seeing what the hubbub is all about.

Anyway, long story short and yeah, it does seem like Netflix might be a viable alternative, especially if like me, you don’t care whatsoever about sports or current events. I mean the local news is pretty useless, except in the case when there’s an escaped psychopathic serial killer roaming the neighborhood, but really, how often does that happen? Not more than once every two or three years, at most.

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As a bit of background for this post there is a movie called Gaslight. For you film buffs, this is a 1944 Ingrid Bergman film where Charles Boyer, who by the way, is French, which explains a lot, tries to convince his wife (Bergman) that she is insane by taking things from the house and saying she stole them. He plans on convincing her that she’s insane, getting her committed, and then looting her stuffs.

Mary has the weirdest hole in her recollections. She can remember a movie from the Thirties or Forties that she’s seen, sometimes line for line, but more recent movies often enter some sort of black hole of memory.

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So yesterday, it stopped snowing for a couple of hours, and I decided to go for a hike. It was a glorious day, temperature in the fifties, bright and sunny, and just enough of a breeze to keep one’s cheeks the proper shade of rosy.

Towards the end of my amble through the piney forests I encountered a group of thirty or so fellow hikers proceeding in the opposite direction. This being Colorado, where apparently they put nice in the water, every single one of them greeted me as I went past, either a good morning (the majority), to a hearty hello, and, I believe, a singular,  “how ya doin’?”

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So Mary is off on a press junket at Disneyworld this week, leaving yours truly home alone.

Situations like this in the past would have called for settling down on the sofa with a couple of six packs of fancy imported beer, a platter of nachos big enough to feed the Green Bay Packers for the winter, and fourteen hours of movies. Which by the way, would have enough car chases, explosions, space battles and brief yet tasteful nudity, to keep a houseful of fratboys from terrorizing the local nerd population for a week.

None of which I did. Well, I did watch one movie, with a bowl of light butter topping popcorn and a diet soda. I’m not the man-boy I used to be, apparently. So much so than as I was dropping off Mary at the airport, I announced that I was going to run an experiment. It would be my intention not clean anything up till just prior to picking her up on Friday. That meant a sink full of dirty dishes, empty food containers filling all available counter space, and crumbs all overt the floor. So pretty much just like the bad old days when I lived alone.

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There used to be a, well let’s call it a social contract, between the generations. The previous generation would pass on their hard won knowledge (much of it gained around the fire from their elders) to us, their children, and we would pass it on to our children. This doesn’t happen all that much anymore. For instance, my Dad never taught me how to camp in the woods, and catch small game, skin it, gut it and char it over an open fire till it was a charcoal briquette, bury it, and have the sandwiches Mom packed for just such an emergency. I can, however tell you how to pilot a C-130 into a jungle airstrip while under enemy fire. This is information that is surprisingly, not as useful as one might think. Along with all the other bits and pieces of life experience I seemed to have missed out on, is the information on what specifically one needs to do to keep one’s house from collapsing into a mass of reeking rubble.

Through trial and error, and it’s running around 87% error, I’ve learned that you need a rolodex (though this is in electronic format nowadays, progress marches on) of maintenance and repair people. Septic tank guys, house painters, plumbers, drywall people, electricians, and on and on. This week’s addition to the directory of people who can repair all the things I cannot repair are the lint people. Well that’s what I call them.

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Mary said I had to get the site registered and up to date with Technorati. The ‘or else’ was just implied, or maybe I’m just oversensitive. So I have to write this post and post a little code in it so the Intertubes know where to find me. It’s all very techy and mysterious. I think there’s something to do with magnets. Code: UVGKDXNWS4RA . Next I’ll pull a rabbit out of my hat and actually finally put up an introduction page.

Headphones your Grandma will love!

We’ve now reached that exalted age where we can ruin it for the youngs. Normally, you’d do this to your own children but, alas, we have none, and for some reason our siblings, as well as friends and acquaintances, seem rather reluctant to loan us their own children so we too can have the fun associated with ruining their emotional lives. Thus, we have to find our fun with strangers. Ruining it for the youngs is pretty simple. Find something young people like, and then start using it yourself, and they’ll all drop it like a rabid hedgehog. Why they’d be holding a hedgehog in the first place, much less a rabid one, is something I can’t fathom, but these kids today and their fads, heh?

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