Foolish Questions

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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Needs More Stimulants!

Once upon a time, in Ye Olde Bachelor Days, I was pretty happy with a couple or seven cups of coffee for my morning repast. That pretty much fulfilled my needs, which consisted of liquids and a dose of caffeine big enough to keep an entire herd of buffalo rampaging through a half-dozen Western states before lunch. Occasionally, there might also be doughnuts if someone lost a bet on Sunday’s football game. But, since we’ve been married, Mary has been trying to modify my eating habits, and breakfast is a fertile field for reformation. So, nowadays I have a few cups of coffee, a handful of crumbs from the bottom of the toaster, and a piece of that withered apple that was hiding in the back of the fridge, to start the day. Well, it’s progress of a sort.

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So, I had this whole post planned out, with diagrams, photos and charts, possibly a short video too, about our recent trip to LA and Hawaii which would have done a hour by hour rundown of the trip, with witty and humorous asides. Maybe a small amount of gloating directed at people stuck back in Colorado where warm Spring days are followed by frigid Spring blizzards. But I didn’t, because that would be tremendously unfair to my fellow Coloradans, and as Mary points out, they can use the Internet to hunt you down.

So instead, I’ll just hit the high points, which in our case was the food. Sure, we could have gotten all cultured up and stuff, gone to museums, taken in the art scene, done a wine tasting or three, but we’re earthy people, salt of the earth, common folk. So instead we did a retro food tour. Deep fried stuff, the kind of food that they made back when no one had ever even heard of cholesterol, or clogged arteries, and the average lifespan was measured in hours. It was semi-glorious. Continue reading →

Last week we traipsed off to LA-LA Land, because Mary was feeling a little lightheaded from all the fresh air and sunshine here in Colorado. Even after several years away, she still distrusts air that she can’t actually see. And the whole fresh air thing in her mind is vastly overrated when the temperature is running in single digits. So balmy temperatures and crunchy air it would be!

Ostensibly, the visit to LA was to attend a retro tour of the downtown LA area by Charles Phoenix, a moniker which, by the way, is too cool for school. If I ever wanted to change my name, I’d like to be able to pick something equally as awesome, like Zimbabwe Jim. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Sure, I’ve never been to Zimbabwe and there’s no discernible reason why I would go by the name of Jim, but it just exudes coolitude. Sounds like a guy who runs a bar in Mombasa, another place I’ve never been. Nor ever want to visit. But, moving on….

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It’s just occurred to me that a lot of my plans for the future may be in some jeopardy. See, I have just a couple of goals in life, and they’re really pretty simple aspirations. None of this become a super villain and take over the world, or win the Nobel Prize for physics, or anything like that. No, all I wanted was 1) to live a very, very long life, like a Doctor Who-like lifespan. And 2) time travel back to my past self and give myself some advice. You know, the standard stuff, like buy Apple stock when it’s at $12 a share, and don’t go out with Lynn because she’s batcrap crazy.

So, I’m a bit concerned about Life Goal #2. By my calculation if I were to time travel, I should already have met myself by now. Going back in time and giving my past self advice, is pretty useful at age 15 or 23 (and oh, dear god, I could use someone looking in on me when I was 23), but a lot less constructive once I get past fifty. So since I haven’t met myself yet, then it’s looking like it’s not going to happen, at least on this time line. This means that either I don’t live long enough for time travel to be invented or time travel is impossible. Both conclusions are reason for a little dejection. Plus Ohio State got knocked out of the NCAA Tournament, so now I have to root for Michigan, which feels not-quite-right, or a bit wrong. Which raises another interesting question – is ‘not-quite-right’ and a ‘bit wrong’ functionally equivalent? Sort of like a glass half full is the functional equivalent of a glass half empty and all the rest of it is meaningless navel gazing?

And that’s how I spend a Sunday afternoon, instead of raking up the pine needles on the driveway.

Sometimes, during quiet periods, when the external noises don’t quite drown out the voices in my head, I start wondering about things. Not the great questions, like ‘why are we here’, and ‘what is the meaning of life’, which by the way was answered, satisfactorily or not, in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in case you were curious. My ponderings usually concern matters that are slightly less portentous, though, I should note that there are some who believe that what I call thought processes are nothing more than the random misfiring of badly aligned neurons.

Case in point:

Me, “Hey you know what’s really strange about I Dream of Jeannie?”

Mary, patiently, “The old TV show?”

“Yeah. So, Jeannie is like a two thousand year old genie, and she’s been in that bottle all that time. Genii are only found in Middle Eastern cultures, so why is she a blonde?”

“Wait. A show about an astronaut who is marooned on a desert island, where he finds a bottle that contains a genie, who is female, and Caucasian by the way, and takes her home to live with him, and even though she is clad in the Sixties equivalent of sexy lingerie all the damn time, they never, ever have sex, and she also grants magical wishes that in every single episode result in trouble for said astronaut, and the one thing that bothers you is ‘why is she a blonde?”

“Well, yes. Why?”

“Arghhhhh.”

You know, we seem to have a lot of conversations that end like that.

We were well ensconced in bed one night recently, with the television quietly burbling over in the corner, while we devoted our actual attention to our iPads. I was distracted from a fascinating article about particle physics, found within the pages of Atomic Robo, by a commericial airing on said idiot box. It was apparently an ad by a national ambulance chasing firm seeking plaintiffs for some sort of suit.

Me, “Hey, what in the name of all that is holy is a pelvic mesh?”

Mary looked up and said, “It seems to be something related to a bladder sling.”

“What’s a bladder sling? Wait, does that mean your bladder can become dislodged inside your body so you need a sling to hold it in place?”

Mary, “Presumably, though that is a disturbing thought.”

Me, “Disturbing?!? It’s downright horrifying! Now I’m going to have nightmares all night!”

Mary, “You could just google it, I’m sure it’s nothing, or at most a really rare condition.”

Me, “Oh, hell no. I’m not going to look that up! That’s just begging for trouble. You read about what a pelvic mesh is and next week you’re down at the doctor’s telling him that you seem to have all the symptoms of whatever condition it is that causes you to have to get a bladder sling. I like my bladder just where it is, thank you very much!”

Mary, “Suit yourself, but if you start thrashing around again tonight in your sleep, I’m going to wake you up and make you sleep in the guest bed.”

For the record, the guest bed is actually, not uncomfortable. After I finally got back to sleep around 7:00 am, I slept like a baby.