This Is Drivel

Here’s my job application nightmare: After making dozens of applications, I’m finally, finally called in for an interview, but not to just any job — no, this is an interview for my DREAM JOB. I’ve done all my homework, I’ve had my suit pressed, I arrive fifteen minutes early to the appointment, I’m somehow relaxed and confident, and when the secretary tells me they’ll see me now, I rise, stride into the room ... then I stop, frown and ask myself aloud, “What’d I come in here for?” right in front of my would-be boss.

That’s when I wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for air.

No, don’t laugh; it’ll happen, I promise you.

Our house looks like great big destruct-o-bombs have been raining down on it for at least a week. In fact, we’ve been tearing it apart to separate the junk we’ve been meaning to throw out for years from the things we want to keep (and from the leftovers we hope sell at a yard sale for a few nickels), and so far we’ve had some very encouraging success. To the naked eye, though, it looks like we’ve been walking through the house, waving broomsticks in the air to knock anything and everything to the floor. The cats, by the way, just love the mess. They’ve never before had so many different places to hide. If I pick up one more box that has a hiding cat in it, I’ll run out of clean underwear.

Have I mentioned how much I hate moving? I like it that we’re moving, but I hate the actual moving part. I’d rather pull my toenails out. Yes, I know what that feels like, so I can make that call. Don’t ask unless you really want to know. We’ll be moving an awful lot more this time than last time, by which I mean that an awful lot more of our stuff than usual will actually move, because it’s not all here. Two crates of stuff are in Baltimore, Maryland, and two or three crates (I forget) are in Casper, Wyoming. Shortly after we find a place to live, I will pick up the phone, dial an untraceable number, and say the secret word to the DoD representative on the other end who will identify herself only as “Hazel.” With dizzying speed, semi trucks will pull up to our residence with tons and tons of our stuff. I have no idea what we’ll do with it all. The three most obvious options are:

a) Stack the crates in a pile, douse them with some gasoline, and invite the neighbors over for a bonfire / cookout.

b) Auction off the crates sight unseen to whoever is walking by.

c) Empty the crates into a U-Stor-It and try to forget it’s even there.

Lastly, of course, we could always have the movers open the crates and bring all that junk into the house and DEAL WITH IT, but that’s not nearly as attractive an option as the first three.

The other part about moving that gives me the hives is living out of suitcases, or, to put it more accurately, hauling around the half-dozen suitcases we have to live out of while we’re sans home. There’s just no way to move that many suitcases and retain your sanity at the same time, which is why I drink plenty of beer at the airport bar. I’ve been paying six dollars a bottle for Japanese beer for four years now, so it won’t feel nearly as much like petty larceny this time.

We’re going to have breakfast for dinner tonight, on account of the two bottles of syrup we found in the pantry. We’re trying to figure out how to eat as much of the canned and bottled sundries in the pantry as possible. We also have two or three cans of pumpkin in there, so it’s pumpkin pancakes, eggs and bacon for dinner. Breakfast is my favorite dinner, by the way, just in case you get that question the next time you play Trivial Pursuit.

I have an amazingly geeky confession to make: I’ve always been a closet fan of The Captain & Tennille. I actually kind of like “Muskrat Love,” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” has a beat I can dance to. I figure I can come clean about this now because there’s no chance whatsoever that I’ll ever be able to fake being cool at all. I used to be young and delusional and thought that if I cut my hair a little shorter, or drank hard liquor maybe somebody would consider me cool, but there’s obviously something missing from my genetic material, or from anybody’s who knows the words to “Grandma’s Feather Bed.” (Barb knows them, too. There are a lot of reasons I married her, and that’s one of them, believe it or not.)

Barb got called in early to work at the café today because a squadron of Navy fliers who were supposed to leave were socked in by weather instead, and took to waiting in the café.

Socked in by weather? This is 2005. Do pilots still have to look out the windows to fly? Apart from the amazing technological advance called “radar,” don’t they have computers that do just about everything but fly the plane for them? I guess not. Barb said the aircrews were in there all day long, taking over most of the café and leaving all their garbage behind for the staff to clean up.

Barb told me the secret method they use at the café to make their bacon so crispy: they cook it in the deep fryer. She said it takes just a few seconds, presumably because bacon’s just about all fat anyway and it would go up in a poof if they kept it in any longer. What do they do for extra-crispy bacon, dip it in lard first? Use a flame thrower? It’s true what they say about working in a restaurant: You learn not to eat in restaurants. When I was a waiter at an all-you-can-eat place in Wisconsin Dells, the only thing on their menu I would eat was the hamburger and the doughnuts. Almost everything else was cooked in the deep fryer, and I don’t remember ever seeing them change the oil in that thing. There were unidentifiable lumps of lost food at the bottom that nobody wanted to see again. The doughnuts were deep-fat fried, too, of course, but at least they were covered in sugar.

Random story about food misfortunes in restaurants: I took a bite out of a hoagie sandwich at a deli in Winneconne, Wisconsin, when I happened to notice the carcass of what looked like a katydid sticking out of the greens. It appeared to have all its parts, which was much better than if I had been marveling over how crispy-crunchy the lettuce was, then noticed only parts of a katydid in my sandwich. I called the girl behind the bar and, showing her my sandwich, asked her if she’d ever seen anything like that as a hoagie topping. She hadn’t. I got a freshly-made sandwich at no charge.

I’m supposed to be finishing up an essay for a job application, but I keep on doing whatever I can to put it off until the last possible minute, which, as everybody will tell you, is when anybody does their best work. I guess I shouldn’t count on that. I should rap the thing out and send it in as soon as possible to make sure that it gets there on time, and to just get the damned thing over with. I should do that. Somehow, though, I keep doing other very important things, things that I know will take just five or ten minutes, hardly a distraction at all. I just know I’ll get back to work on that essay in a jiff.

... after I write a few more lines of this drivel.

I feel it’s my sad duty to report that Eliza was put down this week, and so was Oliver. New officers, elected to the board of the animal shelter earlier this year, met this month to talk over the pros and cons of continuing the long-term care for these special animals and on the advice of the base vet they had these two lovable cats put down, which only confirms my own unfavorable opinion of the vet, but never mind. I humbly submit to the board members of Pets Are Worth Saving (PAWS) that if they are going to take this attitude with strays brought to their shelter and lovingly nursed to health by volunteers that they should probably reconsider their shelter’s name as it hardly seems appropriate any longer.

So long, Lie-zee-pie. The whole O-family will miss you.

Several people have taken me aside to warm me of the significant emotional ups and downs that hit them when they left the military and joined The Real World of job searches and Wal-Mart, and I appreciate their kind words, really, but I frankly don’t know how to take their advice. I anticipate there must be a huge culture shock waiting to hit me like a brick to the back of my head thrown from a moving car. Most people I’ve talked to allege that it comes from not having a more or less permanent job any longer, and I guess that’s a pretty significant worry, but really, the prospect of being sent to Baghdad wasn’t much of a consolation for being employed. It’s only an opinion at this point, but I think I can take unemployment, or even menial labor, if I can also stay home with my family. I’m all sappy and sentimental that way. I may have to change my mind later, and I know even now that sentiment doesn’t pay the bills, but for now that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

If there’s a culture shock waiting for me outside the military, I can only guess that it comes from trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life, and that has been a source of no small amount of anxiety because I really can’t figure it out right now, so in a sense the shock has already hit me. When I’m strolling down the street with the idea in mind that very soon I’ll be free of military obligations, I’m filled with a sense of relief that’s bigger than Montana, but when I lie awake at night and wonder how on earth anybody ever decided what kind of work they want to dedicate their lives to and how they’re going to do that, I have to confess that I’ve felt the icy claws of a panic attack closing around my throat. Any guy would naturally feel a little bit intimidated when faced with a metaphor like that.

No matter. I may not have a firm grasp at all of what I’m getting myself into, but I’m out, there’s no turning back, and anyway There’s A Great Big World Out There.

We went to our favorite noodle shop for dinner tonight, and one of the ladies who works in the kitchen came out to ask me for my shirt. I was wearing the custom-made Mighty-Mouse print baseball shirt that Barb made for me way back when she had time to do that sort of thing, and she was quite taken with the fabric. Barb wasn’t sure, but she thought she might be able to find whatever remnant was left from the lot of fabric that she originally bought, and what do you know, it was right where she thought it was. She wrapped it up and left it for the mama-san as a presento.

This weekend has been the two-day celebration of the oddly-named “American Day.” The Rolling Thunder motorcycle club rolled out their Harleys to lead a parade this morning, and our kabuki pals Fumihiko-san and Yoshida-san, devout members of the club, got togged out in a really impressive set of leathers and blasted through town, the huge thundering engines of their hogs shaking the very curbstones as they passed us.

A couple of Barb’s friends from Towada, Michiko and Shiho, came to town to see the parade as well. After yesterday’s dank cold I was a little worried that we’d be sitting under an umbrella with a drizzle blowing in from the sides, but the sun came out this morning and by the time the parade started we had to peel our jackets off to stay comfortable. After the parade we strolled past the booths selling trinkets and greasy foods. Each booth was supposed to feature some food from a different state, and funnily enough hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs and cake seem to be the staple food of every one of the fifty states. Every so often we’d pass a booth that went out on a long limb and tried to fix something a little more ethnic, like nachos and cheese, and one of them even had spring rolls, but most of them stuck with packaged food they could warm up in a crock pot and sell for a cushy profit margin.

My favorite part of American Day was answering Michiko’s question about the root beer I was drinking, because it was the perfect opportunity to get her to try a sip. There’s nothing quite like watching a Japanese roll a swig of root beer over his or her tongue while trying to figure out how to say politely that what they’d really like to do is spit it out as soon as possible. They’ve got nothing like root beer in Japan and, judging by their reactions to it, they never will, if they can help it. But beware: If you don’t your Japanese friend that root beer is a soft drink, he’ll knock back a really big swig of it thinking it’s actual beer and blow it all right out his nose when the taste hits his tongue. Not recommended.

We had to leave American Day, however, so that Barb could go home and “help” Tim sort through all his possessions with extreme prejudice. Barb and Tim went into Tim’s room, and trash bag after trash bag came out over the course of four hours. I heard Barb shout, “Oh, my GOD!” at least twice, and I could be wrong but I think I heard Tim shout it once, too.

One of Tim’s most endearing idiosyncrasies is the relationship he has with clothes. Like most teenaged boys, he’s very picky about what he will wear, to the point that once he puts an outfit together that he likes he’ll wear nothing but that outfit until it’s no longer fit to wear in mixed company. And then the outfit will disappear. We sort of assumed he was throwing them away, but when Barb goes on safari in his room and pulls out dresser drawers to clean the grunk out of them, she’ll find that he’s been stashing clothes behind the drawers.

I also learned from today’s prophylaxis that at some point in the not-so-distant past Tim plundered my wardrobe for athletic socks and boxer shorts. The oldest son used to cob my boxers, too. Thrifty, but pretty gross. When I realized what he’d been doing I began to add plenty of bleach to the load each time I washed underclothes.

After dinner, Tim has challenged me to eat his Kleenex for twenty dollars. He’s always trying to find out just how much more gross he can be than me. His kind of gross goes about as far as singing goofy little ditties about his most personal anatomy, or drinking out of the milk carton and putting it back in the fridge. He can’t seem to keep it in his tiny little head that I’ve had almost thirty years more experience than he’s had at being gross. I said I’d eat his Kleenex, but I’d have to have a lot more than twenty dollars. “How much would it take?” he asked.

“How much have you got?”

“About seventy dollars,” he answered.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s see the money and I’ll think about it.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Dude, I’m not going to pay you to eat my Kleenex,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”

Today was the day that I could not stay out of the grocery store. No matter how many times I went there, I always found that I had to go back for kitty litter, or milk, or toilet paper; there was always something else that I absolutely had to have right away. It’s been years since I’ve had one of those days, but I haven’t forgotten how god-awful annoying they can be. Right now, I’d pay top dollar to anybody who would run to the store one more time for me to get the cat food, and Barb thinks other people would pay through the nose. (Can people really do that? If so, does all the snot wash off the money?) It’s her bright idea that we could make our first million by setting up a delivery service for people who are caught in days like this. All we’d have to do is live in a delivery truck and drive back and forth between stores and houses all day and all night long. Sounds like hell, doesn’t it? I think we’ll put that idea on the back burner for at least a little while.

My day wasn’t made up entirely of mad dashes to the store, though. I started it off this morning by finishing off several very important tasks, such as confirming travel plans — can I hear a HALLELUJAH! — by conferring with the good people at the personnel center. Barb’s made me triple-check every leg of our proposed itinerary. She seems to think that there will be no surprises if I do this, and I don’t argue with her, BUT
A) she’s traveled around the world several times in the past twenty-one years
B) she’s a very intelligent woman
C) the Air Force planned our itinerary
D) Murphy was an Okonski on his mother’s side
... so she must know that, no matter how air-tight we try to make our plans, sooner or later a gremlin — usually a really ugly one — will punch a hole in them and let in enough water to send us sinking to the bottom of the deep blue sea of travel. Still and all, I checked. It wouldn’t do to deny her.

In just eleven days there will be a truck in my front yard and a team of highly-trained packaging technicians moving with blinding speed through my house to begin the miraculous event known as the pack-out. Seems like every day there’s a pack-out going on in at least one residence in our housing area this summer; I don’t know who will be left to keep the base running after we’re all gone, but that’s not a thought that’s keeping me awake at night. The movers will make their first strike on Friday to box up some of the lighter stuff, and return on Monday for the heavy stuff. By Monday night, we’ll be sleeping on the floor in down-filled nylon bags. I hate that part. We’re allowed to move into temporary quarters on Thursday night, by which time Barb and I will be grateful for a soggy mattress on broken springs.

Barb and I went shopping for some travel supplies at the 100-yen store. 100 yen is about equivalent to a dollar. The store is filled with the kind of plastic Chinese-made crap you’d expect to find in any store where everything is priced at one dollar per item. It’s totally throw-away junk, but all we were looking for was a box for the cats to poop in while we’re traveling, so it’s not like we were hoping to find an heirloom. An heirloom cat box. Now that is an idea worth at least a million dollars. Can you picture something in fine bone china with a Currier & Ives design and a 24-kt gold leaf rim? Puff would be so pleased.

One of Barb’s coworkers wants to buy her car. He’s about nineteen years old, and I’m pretty sure he’s never bought a car before. When he told her he was looking for a car, she mentioned hers was for sale and that I was waiting in front of the café in the car just then, so he strolled out to take a look at it. And that’s all he did — he just looked at it and knew he wanted to buy it. “Do you want to take it for a drive?” Barb asked him, and he said no, he knew he wanted it. There are man-eating used-car salesmen back in the States who would wet themselves for a chance to get their mitts on this guy.

Tim and his buddies hung out on the front stoop for about an hour today after school, making enough noise to shatter windows in every residence for three blocks in all directions. Little kids and old ladies ran away in terror. Only fooling; little kids love that kind of stuff and beg to join in. The teenagers shoo them away in an annoyed manner. And none of the parents care what the neighborhood teenagers are doing so long as they’re doing it outside, instead of where they usually are: parked in front of a television set or a computer screen. A teenager’s day isn’t complete, of course, until they all get together on-line for an extended IM chat. They all live within walking distance of one another, yet they seem to prefer virtual conversation to any other. My favorite scenario is when they phone one another to set a time for the chat. They phone one another to set up a time to chat on-line. I know I was never that weird.

Tim had ramen for lunch today, not the freshly-made, tasty stuff we can get in a big, steamy bowl filled with veggies and seafood and other yummy stuff, but the hard, dry brick of noodle-like styrofoam you can buy at the grocery store for ten cents. He loves that junk. I used to, too, but after a while my body couldn’t figure out what to do with the sodium-based simulated broth that comes in the little foil packet, and after that I had to trot straight from the dinner table to the bathroom if I ate even a little bit of it, so I don’t do that any more.

There’s nothing at all unusual about Tim having a bowl of ramen for lunch; he eats it all the time. What was unusual was the way he was eating it — dry, straight from the package, messily biting off crunchy mouthfuls of the stuff and chewing as noisily as possible to maximize the gross effect. He had even sprinkled the little packet of broth powder over the top of the brick for flavor ... and to gross us out even more. I hope I never see anything as nasty as that ever again.

He tried to be very nonchalant as he masticated his meal. “What’s the big deal?” he asked us. “It’s basically the same as cooked.” He was obviously very satisfied that he made us both just about gag.

For dinner tonight I thought of slapping some raw meat on his plate and making him eat it. It’s basically the same as cooked. What’s the big deal?

At around dinner time, however, Tim was supposed to be at the club to play in the band at a ceremony. He came downstairs just before dinner time and asked, “Where’s the car?”

“Your mom drove it to work,” I answered.

“How am I supposed to get to the club?” he asked. No, he accused. The tone in his voice clearly implied that I was a great big doof, or maybe his mother was — probably both of us were for leaving him without a ride to the ceremony.

“You were in front of the house when she left!” I said. “You watched her get in the car and drive away!” But that was no excuse. I was in the dog house because I had no way to give him a ride over.

While channel surfing to find something to watch as I folded clothes I ran across the debut episode of the remake of Battlestar Galactica and sat mesmerized in amazement for the rest of the show, the same kind of amazement that makes me stare at road kill, or two guys beating the living daylights out of each other. I didn’t especially want to watch, but there was some kind of primal urge in my head that made me. Medical science must have an explanation for this; I wonder how big the research grant was?

What impressed me most about Battlestar Galactica was how bad the dialogue was. When it wasn’t disjointed or combative, it was vague or confusingly elliptical, possibly trying to hint that it had some deeper meaning. It was grown-ups talking the way a fourteen-year-old would imagine it, and it dragged on and on for two agonizingly long hours. And that was just Part One. None of the Star Wars movies were that bad, but plenty of science fiction films are. How can that be? The best science fiction books are about ordinary people in circumstances so extraordinary that they could only take place in an imaginary world. And the best science fiction movies can manage to make the most of these imaginary worlds, but say “science fiction movie” to most people and they think of space ships blasting away at invaders from another world. That’s all there was to Battlestar Galactica.

The story is as old as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: Once upon a time, all of humankind lived on twelve planets. They built killer robots, although nobody never explained why, darn it; that might have been interesting. Not at all surprisingly, the killer robots turned against humankind and they fought a long, nasty war against each other. Then the robots up and left, nobody knew where, and there was peace for twenty years. Can you guess what happened next? Did you guess the robots came back to wipe out humankind? Of course you did! By now this story almost tells itself. To judge from the product, that seems to be what the director, the writers, and the actors were all hoping for.

What disappointed me most about Battlestar Galactica was that the space scenes looked so cool. Any science fiction geek — that would be me — would become a regular watcher just to look at the space ships. The Galactica was an aircraft carrier in space, so there were lots of action scenes of fighters zipping around it, taking off from catapults and landing on the decks. Best of all, it looked big, something they had trouble doing convincingly when the show first aired in the 1970’s. All the camera work was good enough to make the ships look as though they might have actually been in space. The producers obviously spent a lot of money to get it to look as good as it did. I really liked that. There were no Flash Gordon space ships, ships that looked like they were hanging from strings, or that were obviously tiny little models.

So what exactly was disappointing about that? This show sucked. The guys in charge of making the space ships look good knew what they were doing, and did it so well that geeks like me were all googly-eyed about the gadgets. The guys in charge of making the actors look good, however, did not know what they were doing. I don’t know a lot about movies, but maybe that should have been their number-one priority. They hired a couple of very talented actors, Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, but even two very good actors can’t do anything worth remembering if their material stinks on ice, and if heavy-duty actors can’t make it work, the rest of the cast, quite a mixed bag of fair to middling, were in trouble from the word “go.” The guy they got to play one of the fighter jocks, for instance, was supposed to convince viewers that he was distraught over the death of his brother, and blamed his father for it. The way he did this was to act like an uptight asshole, shouting at and alienating everybody else. It was impossible to believe nobody would have hit him, hard, with a big stick.

The writers tried to change a few things, apparently to update the story. The first time around, humankind was on the verge of ending the war with the robots, which they didn’t build in the first place, when the robots attacked and almost wiped out every last one of them. This time the robots were something humankind made which came back to attack them. A few reviewers saw a veiled reference to the U.S. cold war policy of training rebels who later became terrorists, which is not entirely far-fetched. The point of writing that story would be lost, however, if it never explored the reasons for building the robots (or training the rebels, whichever the case may be) in the first place. They not only lost the point, they never went near it. This was strictly a “blowing stuff up” movie.

There were other changes that were even more superficial. Some of the fighter jocks were female this time around. That could have been a way to develop a few emotional, intelligent relationships. Even simpler than that, it could have been a way to show that men and women were equals, but they squandered the opportunity and instead acted out high school fantasies of men and women showering together and fighter jocks ripping off each other’s clothes in passionate sex trysts. I myself like passionate sex trysts, and I don’t mind seeing one in a movie. More than one, though, and I feel as though I might as well have rented a porno. And that’s sort of the whole problem I had with Battlestar Galactica. If they wanted to make a porno, they should have had more sex. If they wanted to make a blowing stuff up movie, they should have blown up way more stuff. And if they’d wanted to make a space ship movie, they should have shown the space ships a lot more. They should’ve left out all that crap about the plot ... unless they wanted to show a plot-driven movie, in which case, maybe they should’ve spent a little more time writing the story, polishing dialogue, and developing characters.

And on the eighth day they awoke, and the morning from the dawn unto noon they spent amidst the harvest of their home, threshing the grain from the chaff, and the woman of the house did ask unto the man:

“How much for the novelty candles, d’you think?”

And the man answereth:

“I dunno. A nickel.”

She gaveth a moment’s consideration to his council, and then she queried him, “What did they cost? A buck and a half?”

And he rolleth his eyes unto her, and deeply heaved a great sigh. “It’s a yard sale, Barb,” saith he. “It’s junk. We’re trying to get people to take away our junk. Put a nickel on it, for Pete’s sake.”

And her reply was like unto his with her own eyes, and she narrowed them tightly. “It’s not just junk. We can make some money if we price it right.”

“We oughtta price it to sell,” saith he again.

“How about a quarter?” she queried unto him.

“Who’s gonna buy novelty birthday candles for a quarter?” he hastily spake.

“They cost a buck and a half at the exchange,” saith she.

“It’s a yard sale,” he answered, and testily. “You buy things for nickels and dimes at a yard sale.”

Lo, tho she seeketh his council, she did write that the cost of the candle should be two score cents and five, and then she openeth a box of video tapes and asketh:

“How much for the tapes, d’you think?”

“Twenty-seven fifty each,” answereth he, and like a wise-ass spake.

And lo, she pretendeth not to hear him, and marked them a nickel apiece, three for a dime.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but I told her I was going to make fun of her for marking up the junk. I just didn’t see the point. I wanted people to take all the stuff away, she wanted to make money. If nobody bought the junk because the price made them think twice, then we didn’t make anything and they didn’t take it away for us. If we priced stuff to sell and we happened to make a little profit at the same time, to me that would be frosting on the cake.

I think my problem was, I’m a tightwad. When I go to a yard sale, I don’t even look at anything that’s priced over a buck. I’m looking for cut-throat deals, not one-quarter or one-half off. If I spend as much as five dollars at a yard sale, I expect to carry heavy armloads of power tools and lawn furniture to my car. A Kenwood stereo component system with Bose speakers shouldn’t cost more than twenty-five bucks. Or, to put it another way, the Star Wars trilogy — episodes four, five and six, if you’re a nerd about it — ten bucks, tops. That’s the kind of scale I think on when I think of yard sales.

And if I conduct a yard sale I wouldn’t do it any differently. I want to bring in a little cash, sure, but I want people to cart the junk away, too. The last yard sale we had, we managed to get people to drive away with all the torn-up carpeting we pulled out of our house, and we even got rid of the broken-down basement sofa. Made a pile of money on that sale, too. It all works out.

While she was digging up stuff for the yard sale and pricing it, I was taking picture hooks and shelving brackets off the walls in just about every room of the house. It’s starting to look eerily like we’re moving out. And — get this — I got a call from somebody at the moving company who’s coming by tomorrow morning to estimate how much they’ll be packing out, so they bring enough boxes, wrapping paper and tape, I suppose. That is so cool!

I spent a couple hours today shredding receipts, bank statements and credit card checks. Filled two garbage bags with shredded paper curly-cues. Felt a little like a big shot at Enron.

We shred documents because there’s a scary amount of personal information on them. Just about any form you fill out for the military requires your social security number, for instance, and nothing makes me as nervous as those checks that the credit card companies send in the mail twice a month to try to get you to take that one big step they need to get you in over your head. Even those ATM slips that you see littering the floor under the machine have most if not all of your account number on them. Heck, I shred grocery receipts if they’ve got any credit card info on them. It’s probably unnecessary, because the stories I read about identity theft usually concern computer hackers and thieves who steal data tapes from courier vans. These don’t sound like the kind of people who would be sifting through my garbage to find a partial account number on a receipt from Toys ‘R’ Us.

Before I started shredding I tried to clean up some of the mess in the office, and for that I needed some music. You know, cleaning-up music. I still listen to AccuRadio.com for music whenever I’ve got a computer handing that can handle streaming audio, as is so often the case, right? Each time I log into AccuRadio, I try a different “sub-channel” to see what it’s all about. Helpful Hint: You can skip “A Flock of Eighties.” Think of it as the very worst of proto-techno. If that doesn’t make sense, recall from your audiophonic memory the sound of a dentist’s drill. Still want to see what it’s about for yourself? Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.

I tried the “Hotel California” sub-channel today. It features mostly the kind of music I grew up listening to in high school, so as a flashback it had its good side and its not-so-good side. That was supposed to mean something, but I couldn’t get it to say just what I wanted it to. Never mind. Right in the middle of my morning they played Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” which is when I cranked it up as loud as it would go and began to hop around on the furniture, howling at the ceiling. There’s just something about that song that makes me do that. And I used to hate that song when it first came out. There’s no explaining how tastes change, I guess.

Which provides me with a good segue into the bizarre scene I found myself wandering into yesterday evening. Tim was sitting at the computer listening to Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gay. Tim will put up with just about anything that we put on the stereo, and we’ve got an eclectic range of music — jazz, piano lounge music, swing, martial music, blues, a little bit of classical now and then. Left to his own devices, however, his personal preference in the last year or two has tended toward hip-hop and rap, so much so that I try to stay out of whatever room he’s in when I can hear that he’s got the stereo on. And that’s why I was surprised to find him singing along with Marvin Gay. I had to do a mental somersault of Olympic proportions, like if I’d tuned into MTV to see Snoop Doggy Dog singing an opera. Having said that, he’s also been sampling Nirvana lately, so, as I said before, there’s no explaining musical tastes.

Segue from changing musical tastes to bad musical tastes: Have you played Tetris on a Nintendo Game Boy before? If you have, do you remember the tune that plays in the background? Not the “B” tune, that one’s crap. The “A” tune’s the one I like; that’s the one that sounds like drunken Cossacks doing the Russian kicking dance. The other day I was cleaning out a drawer filled with cassette tapes (remember cassette tapes?) and I found my Game Boy with the Tetris cartridge still plugged into it. Of course I had to fire it up and play a couple games, and after I got back to work I was whistling the background music to myself, because it’s not just a catchy tune, I think it’s actually a sort of musical cocaine. If you’ve heard it, you know how hard it is to stop humming it to yourself.

Even though that game hasn’t seen the light of day in at least three years, when Tim passed me in the hall he asked me, “Isn’t that the music from Tetris?” And then he walked away humming it.

I think appreciation of the Tetris tune must be a guy thing, though, as I found out when I started playing Tetris this afternoon within earshot of Barb. She heard no more than six bars of the background music before she asked me pointedly, “Does that thing have a mute button?”

“I kinda like that tune,” I said.

I don’t remember the exact words of her reply, but I think they were something like, “Too bad.”

“I was even thinking of taking it on the flight to Los Angeles,” I ventured.

“Okay, Mr. Passive-Aggressive,” she said, “I think I can easily convince every other passenger on the plane to jump up and down on that thing unless you can turn the sound off.” I got the feeling there would be no arguing it one way or another. Not that I would.

It was like a firebug fantasy from my childhood: I found a couple half-filled bags of charcoal in the shed while we were cleaning up the patio today. I didn’t want to offer them for the yard sale tomorrow because I didn’t know how long they’d been open, and they had certainly been out in the rain. I also had a Weber grill that had a thick layer of grease and smoke built up from three summers of cooking out, and as everybody knows the best way to clean that crud out of there is to build the biggest fire you can stand and burn it all to ash. I figured it was worth a try, so I dumped both bags into the grill, doused the heap with lighter fluid, and touched a match to it. There should have been an earth-shattering KABOOM!, but there wasn’t. It was more of a  *puff*  followed by a slow, steadily building flame that gradually, eventually burned up the charcoal in about three hours. Boring. I guess I should’ve used more lighter fluid, or some of the gasoline from the lawn mower, but I could also have been in the headlines of tomorrow’s paper that way, too.

I was cleaning up the shed and the patio because we’re planning to have a yard sale tomorrow, if only the rain will hold off. Come to that, I think we’re planning to have a yard sale tomorrow even if the rain doesn’t hold off. It’s do or die at this point. Barb’s busted her butt sorting sale items and pricing them, I made sure that signs were in place throughout the neighborhood, and I even climbed out on the roof to anchor a tarp if we need it to stretch over the front stoop where we can sit and stay dry while the crazy yard salers pick through our stuff in the rain. But we won’t need that. The rain will hold off.

Climbing on the roof is one of those things I used to love to do when I was young and indestructible. I used to look for excuses to climb on the house and especially on the garage roof, I threw frisbees up there and I could climb the TV antenna like a monkey, get up there and down almost before my Dad could object. He looked for excuses to keep me off it, usually by claiming that it did too much damage to it but I suspect it was really because he knew from the perspective of experience that I could fall and break my neck. That’s certainly the way I felt today. I stayed as far away from the edge as possible, and I still somehow had a clear view of the cement below no matter which way I turned. It looked especially firm and immovable. A broken neck would clearly be the least of my worries. What the hell was I doing up there again, anyway? Oh, yeh, securing the tarp. I laid it flat across the overhang, stitched it in place along the edge with a row of silver X’s made from duct tape, then gingerly climbed over it and back in through the bedroom window, where I got down on one knee and said an Act of Contrition. Funny how I still remember that.

Didn’t know you could duct tape a tarp to a roof to make yourself a shelter? Neither did I, until I tried it a couple summers ago to make shade during a cook-out. Duct tape does just about anything, doesn’t it? At least that’s what I thought when I looked at the building and wondered how I was going to hang the tarp. It would take a team of professional tunnelers and heavy steam-driven equipment to sink a set of anchors in the sides of the concrete bunkers they call housing here on Misawa Air Base. These things are built to withstand earthquakes, and even if I could manage to drill holes in the walls, I’m not sure the commanding officer would take kindly, so I figured I’d give duct tape a chance. It’s always come through for me in the past, and once again it saved the day. I firmly believe that if I could wrap this whole building in duct tape and strap it to the rear bumper of a Cadillac Escalade or some other monster truck, I could tow the whole thing down the street. I’m even a little surprised some chucklehead hasn’t videotaped a stunt like that to get a shot on America’s Funniest Videotaped Self-Destructions.

Tim loves watching those videos. He surfs the internet looking for them, then e-mails me links of the ones he wants me to watch. After that we have to sit down for long discussions about why they’re not funny at all but are in fact mean-spirited and in a lot of cases just plain gross. I’ve got to admit, though, that I find the advertisement for world cup soccer, where the guy uses the bus stop for a goal and his shaggy dog for a soccer ball, well, pretty funny, so maybe I’m not the best judge of these things. I may be wrong, but I think there’s a difference between a video of a kid taking a header off his skateboard and slamming face-first into a lamp post, and some trick photography that highlights the outrageous comedy of soccer fans so fanatical that they would lure dogs with chewy treats until they’re in just the right spot to kick them through the uprights. One of them is meant to be funny, and the other is an accident trying to be entertainment, sort of like the evening news. Sorry, there I go being cynical again. I don’t call this stuff drivel for no reason.

There’s an iron-clad rule regarding yard sales: They start no later than six in the morning, regardless of the time advertised. If you say your yard sale will start at ten or nine or eight in the morning, it won’t make a difference to the semi-professional “yard salers” who you will find waiting on your step. And that’s what’ll happen if you’re lucky. In a lot of cases, the salers will start ringing your bell and knocking on your door at about six o’clock, whether you’re still in bed or eating your breakfast or standing within eyeshot in the front hall with a cup of coffee in your hand, dressed in no more than your boxer shorts, hoping to catch a few quiet moments before the chaos begins. They’ll shrug as if to say, “Didn’t see you there,” then innocently ask, “Is this where the yard sale’s going to be?” like they had no idea.

I knew these people existed in the States, but I didn’t realize the Japanese were just as crazy about yard saling as Americans, if not more. One of the neighborhood mama-sans was waiting in our parking slot when we started hauling our sale items out at seven in the morning, and while Barb unpacked the second-hand clothes the mama-san re-folded them and organized them into piles. She hawked our wares to passing yard salers as they cruised by and made small talk with Barb. It was like having Mom to help set up.

We advertised our sale would start at ten o’clock. It’s been a while since we’ve had a yard sale, so stop snickering. The feeding frenzy of yard salers began immediately as we dragged box after box out onto the lawn, and they picked us over good in the first hour, snatching stuff almost from our hands as we emptied each box. It was a little like being assaulted by an entire football team, or a platoon of Marines. We even had a half-dozen Japanese drive all the way from Towada by special arrangement, and one of them somehow convinced a cabbie to stuff a chest of drawers in his taxi.

Nobody came to the sale after about eleven-thirty. The unwritten rule says that’s when yard sales end, I guess. We stuck it out until about one o’clock, but by then it was raining hard enough to activate the Emergency Pack-Up Response Team — Barb, Tim and I loaded everything up in cardboard boxes so fast we looked like we were trying to get out of town before the first wave of the invasion broke through, except that instead of joining a stream of refugees escaping to the countryside, we had a nap, then took all the unsold dross to the donations box at the thrift shop.

I made fun of Barb these past few days for the seemingly arbitrary way she priced things: a nearly-new Land’s End coat was priced at five bucks, one-thirtieth of the original price, while a reflective reindeer on a stick went for fifty cents, or roughly ten thousand times what it was worth. Now that the sale is over I humbly submit myself for castigation. Not only did the reindeer sell, somebody also paid us ten dollars for a wardrobe that was twenty years old, chipped and dented and so out of square that the door kept swinging open. I was sure I’d end up hacking it to bits with an axe just to get rid of it.

So to review: If you’re going to have a yard sale, do yourself a favor and go to bed no later than eight the night before. Set your alarm for four o’clock. Don’t forget to set the timer on Mr. Coffee, too. And don’t stand in the front door in your boxers. That’s scary.

Barb and I made Tim go with us to the horse festival in Towada. We alerted him four weeks ago that we would be going together as a family, told him where we would be going and what we would be doing, and gave him friendly reminders as the date of the festival approached. He received one last warning on Friday, so we could be sure his weekend plans included staying home to help us with the yard sale on Saturday and traveling to Towada with us on Sunday. “You remembered that, of course, because I’ve reminded you several times,” his mother half-asked, half-told him.

He rolled his eyes so high that they were somehow momentarily higher than his eyebrows, loosed an extremely heavy and exasperated sigh, and asked us, as if we were simpletons, how he could possibly remember anything about any horse festival if we never told him anything remotely like that.

Well, I supposed that would be a problem, if it had happened that way.

Ordinarily, Barb would’ve gamely spent twenty minutes or so arguing with Tim over every day and time she reminded him about the festival. This time, though, she resorted to the sort of simple, efficient directive loved by drill sergeants: “You’re going. Be ready by nine-thirty.” And then she walked away. Walking away is the critical part for parents to remember if they want to win an argument with a teenager. If she’d stood there for even a moment, Tim would have attempted to engage her in an argument filled with circuitous logic and doubletalk. He can easily drag Barb into a thirty-minute debate over why he should empty the garbage later instead of immediately. He could be the most tenacious lawyer in the nation some day, and not incidentally also the most handsomely-paid. He could also some day reconsider all his argumentative tactics if he ever runs into just one person who doesn’t have his mother’s inhibitions about injuring him. Top-notch lawyer, or mild-mannered clerk? I’ve always wanted to know.

But he lost this case, and spent the day in Towada with us at the horse festival, which was really more of a party for people who love to wear blue jeans and cowboy hats, drink beer and line dance. A really good party. They had a big main tent for the dancing and live music, a corral where they put on a horse riding show, a parade of 130 Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and more kinds of freshly-cooked festival food than you could ever hope for. These guys weren’t kidding around; they even had green beer — that’s beer made with just a touch of wasabe. Barb and I enjoyed the hospitality quite a lot. We even got to ride in the sidecars of a couple of the Harley-Davidson motorbikes. Tim did a pretty good job of hiding his enjoyment, but I think he had a pretty good time, too.

Next weekend, the only kind of relaxation we’ll get is taking a deep breath between visits from the pack-out teams, although I for one will be pretty grateful for even a deep breath once in a while. For the rest of this week and part of next week, I’ll be bouncing from one office, begging people to strike my name from their records and sign a receipt that will let me leave at the end of the month. There are a lot of things I don’t worry about: selling a car, packing the furniture, flying from one side of the world to the other. Trying to get a bureaucracy to process paperwork — that gives me nightmares and cold sweats that keep me awake at night.

Speaking of selling the car, we’ve got a ’92 Toyota four-door with 45,000 miles on it, and it’s loaded: automatic transmission, air conditioning, stereo CD player with AM/FM radio, power windows, and we’re asking only $1,200 for it. Every other sedan that old has dents, scratches, cracked windows, and usually at least twice the mileage on the odometer. Now get this: A guy called me on the phone tonight and offered me $800 for it. Said we could use it until the day we left. Thanks, pal. You wanna do us a real favor? Pay us the $1,200!

I can usually have a pee in the middle of the night without really waking up, crawl back into bed half-asleep and drop off right away. Last night, though, I made the mistake of reminding myself to visit the immunization clinic in the morning, and it snowballed from there. I couldn’t stop going over all the things we had to do before we left. I’d start to doze off, wake up with a gasp after having a short, usually panicky dream about not having some vital piece of paperwork, try to calm my hammering heart, start to doze off, wake up with a gasp, and so on. I couldn’t break the cycle. It really sucked.

Now that I’ve had my first panic attack, we are officially in the home stretch of our move from Misawa to Madison. You could say that I haven’t really demonstrated a firm mental grasp of a problem as complex as moving from one side of the planet to the other until I’ve become completely irrational at least once because of it.

In the morning, I tried to turn in the signs we borrowed from the self-help store for the yard sale. Even though the sign posted at the front door clearly said they were supposed to be open, and all the lights were on inside, the door was locked and none of the half-dozen people waiting out front could return the borrowed tools they were all but ordered to bring back this very morning. The guy at the desk did the same thing to Barb when she borrowed the yard signs. She said he even wrote “RETURN MONDAY” in big black capital letters across the form.

We cleared Immunizations today. That means the nice man at the desk checked our records, made sure we didn’t need vaccinations against any of the various and sundry microorganisms arrayed across the globe against us, and sent us on our way — wait a minute: Turned out Barb needed her Hep-A jab. The rest of us were squeaky clean and ready to hit the bricks. So she rolled up her sleeve while we watched and waited for her to turn on the waterworks. No luck there. She’s made of tougher stuff.

Then it was off to the personnel office to get new ID cards. Here’s a rule that’s more than a little weird: Barb and Tim’s ID cards had to be re-issued before we left the base, so that the expiration date on the cards would reflect my last day as a military member. Fifteen days from now, when I report to Los Angeles AFB for my final out-processing from the Air Force (oh, that sounds soooo good!), they’ll re-issue ID cards to all of us again to show that I have retired. I don’t know what kind of sense that’s supposed to make, but at this point I’m not arguing over anything. Just give us the cards so we can move on to the next step, thank you.

This afternoon I took apart the awning I built over the patio last year. A next-door neighbor gave me fifty bucks for it, and I didn’t want to keep him waiting so I got hold of a ladder as soon as possible — today — and spent the afternoon standing tip-toe on the very top, which every guy knows you’re not supposed to do, although every guy has done it. I’m sure somebody must’ve fallen from the top and made a ton of money on the lawsuit; that’s usually the reason for warnings so obvious only total morons wouldn’t realize that “You could lose your balance” while standing tip-toe on the very top of a ladder, for instance. But morons falling from ladders are only confirmation that natural selection is at work. That wouldn’t happen to me, obviously, because I know what I’m doing. At least it looks that way. Some of the time.

I ran into two of the nicest guys in the military this morning. I drove to the base supply warehouse to turn in my Chemical Defense Warfare Ensemble. That’s the very technical and exceedingly French nomenclature the Air Force uses to describe the heavy pants, coats, gloves, boots and mask that we would wear to protect us from a poison gas attack. We have to go to class four times a year so specially-trained instructors can remind us how to wear the suit and gas mask in such a way as to allow us to kiss our asses good-bye. Very important stuff.

All this gear is packed in one canvas bag the size of Iowa and feels like it weighs damn near 500 pounds, and I wanted to get rid of it today because I wouldn’t have the use of a car after tomorrow. The only alternative then would be to somehow drag the monster bag to the bus stop, drag it up the stairs of the bus, drag it down the stairs of the bus, and drag it from the bus stop to the warehouse. I would’ve been exhausted. Hell, the Budweiser Clydesdales would’ve been exhausted.

When I pulled up to the door of base supply, there were two guys standing out front wearing all their chem warfare gear, looking just a tiny bit cross. Nobody ever looks like they’re in a good mood when they’re wearing all that crap. First of all, it stinks the way old gym shoes stink. Second, it’s so heavy that you want to move as little as possible. Third, you bake like a potato in aluminum foil when you’re wearing it. It may possibly offer protection from a poison gas attack, but that’s the only good thing about it.

The two guys a the door looked like a couple of puzzled dogs when I asked them if they were open today. They said no, not until Friday, after the exercise was finished.

Oh, crap, the exercise. I was just a little worried that might happen.

So I did what always worked best for me in situations like this: I begged. “Any possibility you could make an exception?” I pleaded. I told them I sold my car and I didn’t want to hump all 500 pounds of that junk back up on Friday. And what the hell: it worked. They cut me a break. I stripped it all out of the bags, turned it in, and walked away a very happy man, one more step away from the military and exercises and the ton of gear I had to carry around with me to play soldier.

Among the other offices I visited today, the telephone guy was the second most helpful, although he could’ve been in first place if he’d provided just a little more information. I asked him what I had to do to get the phone service shut off and everything paid for, and he handed me a worksheet to fill out and asked me which day I wanted to end service.

“I can pick any day?” I asked. He said yes, so I picked the day we were leaving Misawa, the 27th. He stamped the form, signed it, and told me to present the form at the finance office on the 27th to pay.

“But I won’t be here on the 27th,” I told him.

“What day are you leaving?” he asked.

“The 27th.”

Because I obviously had to be here in Misawa to pay the bill, I chose to end service on the Friday before we leave. He changed the form, stamped and signed it, and handed it to me. Then I asked him to sign my checklist, and he said, “We can’t do that until you pay.”

“But if the checklist isn’t signed, I can’t out-process from my unit,” I said.

“What day are you out-processing?” he asked. Yes, that’s right, I out-process on the Friday before we leave Misawa, so I had to get him to change the form again. I was a little surprised this time when there didn’t seem to be another hitch in the get-along, that I could just take the form this time and go.

Everything else went more or less smoothly at the dozen or so other office I visited, and I added a few more mandatory appointments to my calendar for next week. It’s all going to end in a panicked rush next week and it’s starting to look as though I may need powerful tranquilizers to get through it.

We went to the hardware store today to buy toilet paper dispensers. You’ll never guess why. The Japanese make toilet paper dispensers that are dead simple to use. They have these little flippy-up holder thingies that are way easier than that spring-loaded spindle you usually see. You don’t have to rip the old paper core off the holder, you don’t have to take anything apart, you just push a new roll into the dispenser, the old core pops out, and voila! you’ve got more TP! That is, of course, only if you remembered to buy more the last time you were at the store, a problem nobody’s been able to solve to date.

And then Barb went looking for a wallet. She wanted a certain kind, with all the pockets just so and a strap that she could wrap around her wrist. She wanted half of it to zip up and half of it to close with a clasp, and she found one that was exactly what she was looking for except that it was a mustard color. She didn’t want a mustard color. She didn’t want to buy a wallet that she would hate the looks of, which makes perfect sense to me; I judge just about everything on appearances alone; make of that what you will. Since the wallet was just right all except for the color, she spend about thirty or forty minutes looking over every other wallet in the store, holding out hope that something else might satisfy her, but no, in the end only the mustard-colored wallet was what she was looking for, if only she could get over the color. She couldn’t, so she hopped back in the car and motored ten miles down the road to Shimoda to see if the stores there had what she wanted. A little more than an hour and a half later she returned, walletless, to announce that she had reconsidered and would go back to the store in town to buy the mustard-colored wallet after all. Apparently function won out over form, at least in theory. When she came back, though, there was no wallet among her purchases. Five hours of shopping yielded no wallet. I don’t know what the moral of this story might be, if there is one.

I applied for only two or three jobs so far, but I’ve already got a bite. The University of Wisconsin has an opening for a program administrator in the transportation department. I think “program administrator” is the new euphemism for “secretary” because that’s what the job description sounds an awful lot like, but it’s a job I can do, it’s at the U-W, and it would bring in enough money, so I put in my application and they called me for an interview. Or rather, they sent me e-mail that said I was “certified,” which sounds like I’m headed for the nut farm. I called the department last night and the woman taking the applications sounded surprised that I was calling all the way from Japan. I thought they’d get people from out of town all the time. The interview is at two-thirty on Friday afternoon, their time; that means I’ll have to set the clock for quarter to four in the morning on Saturday and pace up and down the hall, sucking down coffee and trying to wake up. Who am I kidding, I’ll never get to sleep Friday night. I might as well just take a long nap in the afternoon, then stay up for the rest of the night. It doesn’t seem like the most promising way to get ready for an interview, but if I lie in the dark pretending to sleep, I’ll just worry myself into a snit. No sense in that. If I stay up, I can distract myself with the television ... no, I can’t; I won’t have a television after Friday morning. Crapski. Well, I’ll still have a few books, or I could write some drivel. The key is to stay awake and relaxed. This is the first round of interviews to find the promising applicants; there’ll be another round, probably in July after I get back, to make the final choice, so I could end up going to the next one in person, knock wood.

I moved all the bicycles and trash cans and gardening tools off the patio this morning, then turned the hose on it and sluiced so much mud from the patio to the sidewalk that I could have planted potatoes and harvested a bumper crop within steps of my front door. How did all that dirt get there? Sandstorms, pal. Most people would never equate Misawa with sandstorms, but we get them all the time. I know you’ll think I’m making this up, but sometimes huge clouds of yellow sand blow in all the way from the Gobi Desert in China, and it’s so fine that it gets into the house through the vents and covers everything. I’ve probably got a couple pounds of it stuck in my lungs by now. Most of the time, though, it’s high winds kicking up dirt from the plowed fields just outside the fence, and because I covered the patio with an awning last year, the rain never had a chance to wash off the dirt that piled up. Well, that and I’m too lazy to move everything off the patio to clean it, until the week before we move out of town.

This will be the last time I can post drivel from home until I get hooked up in the States, probably weeks from now. If I’d invested a little money in some blog software I could’ve log into this site from anywhere and whipped out some drivel, but I’m a cheap bastard so I never got around to that. I still have to type it out, mark up the script, then load it up. I’m kind of a geek about web pages and like to play with the commands, so I was never all that crazy about doing it any other way. Kinda bit me in the ass, didn’t it?

Tomorrow morning the movers will come and pack up a couple hundred pounds of what we call “unaccompanied baggage,” all the stuff we want them to send to the States right away. Theoretically it’s supposed to be there in less than four weeks. I can’t remember if it ever actually arrived that quickly. If it did, it obviously didn’t make an impression on me. The bulk of our clothes, our kitchen ware, some blankets and linens, our bicycles and our computer will be in that shipment; there, now you know where the valuables are, go get ‘em!

The rest will be packed on Monday, and when I say the rest, I mean everything in the house that’s not bolted down. When the movers come in, you have to keep an eagle eye on them to make sure they don’t pack up your pets and little children. If there’s a trash can with trash in it, they’ll pack the trash. All they’re worried about is getting in and getting out in as little time as possible. They schedule two days, but I think that’s only because they’re required by law or something; they almost always finish in one, beginning at seven o’clock, and they don’t quit until it’s too dark to see any longer, which at this time of year is about eight o’clock in the evening. It’ll never take them that long to wrap up everything in our house, but there was one move I particularly remember when The Three Stooges Moving Company not only worked late into the night packing our stuff out, they also tracked mud and salt into the house and banged holes in the walls, and we had to pay $600 out of pocket to our landlords. Ahhh, the memories.

Unaccompanied baggage is just like baggage that you carry on the airplane, they say, only it’s not. We’re allowed to take stuff like microwave ovens, a complete set of dishes, bicycles, futons, not what you would normally think of in the checked baggage compartment. We were putting it all together last night, wondering if he should take this or that, and worrying what we’d forgotten to pack; in that sense, at least, it is just like baggage.

And the toughest part for us is trying to guess when we’ve reached a thousand pounds, all we’re allowed to take in unaccompanied baggage. Do you know what a thousand pounds looks like? I sure don’t, and I’ve got a bit of experience doing this. Barb tried to estimate the weight of each item, then added it all up, but she got eighty-two thousand pounds or something like that, which only made her worry, just a little.

The waiting is the hardest part. Wow, did Tom Petty get that right. With just eight days and a wake-up left before we get the heck out of Dodge, I so wish I could hit the fast-forward button and hold it down until we get to the part where we’re landing in Wisconsin. I’ve never been so anxious in my life, and I’m a guy who knows anxiety, let me tell you, but it’s not because I enjoy it. I’m just naturally predisposed to fret. Given enough time, my mind races through all the possible scenarios that stand before me, including the one where pirates maroon us on a desert island and the one where the world blows up. But at this point I just want it to be over, damn the possibilities. I’ll even take the desert island if it means I can be done with waiting for everything to shake out. The suspense is killing me.

I may or may not be as bad about worrying myself into a froth as Barb is, though. The other day, after we’d run all our errands and were standing in the entry, she suddenly shouted, “Oh, my God!” and looked at me with an expression most people get only when they’ve just seen death and destruction on a scale they could never have imagined.

My bowels froze. I actually felt them turn to ice. That’s my body’s reflexive response to sudden changes in fortune. It’s pretty frightening. I’d almost rather pee my pants or have a good, stress-relieving bazooka barf. “What?” I asked.

She tried to put on a game face. “Nothing.”

“Oh, come on!” I shot back. “Nothing? You can’t be serious. You have to tell me now!”

“I’m sure it can be fixed,” she said.

“What? What can be fixed?”

“Your meeting this afternoon. You missed it.”

I took a deep breath as the blood slowly returned to my face. “Oh, that. They changed it. It’s not until next week.” That is of course only one example of how she handles stress. In most cases she’s much better at it than I am, and in the few cases where she gets a little too worked up, her reactions aren’t much different from the way I go to pieces; she paces the floor, lies awake in the night with the jitters, drinks too much coffee, just like I do, but at least I don’t scare people right out of their socks. She did it to me again this afternoon, except this time she cursed and sucked wind through her teeth as if she’d just burned herself.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I asked her.

The movers came today and swept away our unaccompanied baggage in just an hour and a half; there wasn’t much to it. I wasn’t even here when they boxed everything up and left. I was selling our car to somebody, and that didn’t take long, either. “Everything’s going so smoothly,” Barb remarked later. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.” That’s the kind of worriers we are.

Barb asked me how my job interview went this morning. “I don’t know, I don’t have any others to compare it to,” I told her. The last job I interviewed for was waiting tables at Paul Bunyan’s Logging Camp Restaurant in 1983, which doesn’t really compare to a program administrator’s job at the University of Wisconsin. Incidentally, I think the interview went well, especially considering I woke at about quarter to four in the morning so that I could gather my wits to make the phone call.

The O-folk recorded our last planetarium show today. The vice director of the children’s museum, and our everlasting pal, Hajime Tamura, drove all the way up to Misawa from Hachinohe to take us to the recording studio so we could do our schtick in front of the microphones one more time. We were treated to the usual hospitality before the taping, coffee and some yummy pastries, and afterwards the director of the museum came to the office for pictures in the planetarium and to give us a lovely presento, a pair of Hachinohe horses.

Our bargain-basement lawn mower finally gave up the ghost just as Tim was finished cutting the front lawn and was about to move to the bit out by the parking slot. I told him to park the mower by the curb so the garbage men would pick it up. Either that, or a curb-side shopper would come along and grab it, which is what I was really hoping for. One guy came buy and snagged about half of the lumber I left out there, and sure enough a woman knocked at my door to ask me if it would be all right to take the lawn mower on the junk pile.

“It’s yours,” I told her, “and if you can get it to run, more power to you.”

“Oh. It doesn’t work?” she asked. Apparently she comes from the planet where people put their working lawn mowers on the junk heap.

“Ah, no, it doesn’t. At least that’s what my son told me. She walked away looking genuinely hurt that I would put an unworking lawn mower at the curb.

Moving Day! I thought the movers were going to come in, pack everything up, and get the heck out before their four o’clock quitting time, even though they scheduled two days for the pack-out. They do everything on a tight schedule that they stick to very carefully. They start precisely at eight o’clock. I think they were all down the street at the café, smoking and drinking coffee, until just before eight, then jumped in the truck and shuttled down to our quarters. At ten o’clock they took a break to sit on the curb and drink colas, and at noon they knocked off for lunch.

We bought them colas for their breaks and pizzas for their lunch. It’s O-family policy to keep the movers happy, on the theory that if we’re good to them, they’ll be good to us and everything we own. I don’t know exactly how much it helps, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

By two o’clock it was apparent that they weren’t going to be done packing all our things unless they went into overtime. They crated as much of the packages as they could and announced they’d be back same time tomorrow morning.

We passed the time cleaning what we could in the house. I had heard stories that the final inspection is very relaxed, but I couldn’t get Barb to believe that, and neither one of us wanted one little hitch in the out-processing frenzy, so we made the place so clean that it was ready for the next occupants. I vacuumed the rugs and washed walls; Barb started cleaning up the kitchen. We knocked off at about six to get some dinner at the café, and after that we were too tired to clean. Besides, there was still a lot of our personal stuff in the way.

The movers were in and out of the house this morning faster than the Nazis blitzkrieged through Poland, and Barb was cleaning rooms behind them as they left. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, then took a tiny little break before she cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And that was just the kitchen. And I spent the whole day getting cozy with all three of our commodes. I snuggled right up to them with my favorite can of Comet and a fresh greenie-weenie scrubbing pad and got to know them like best friends. And of course I couldn’t leave my best friends to live in a skanky room, so I scrubbed the walls and floors until they shined. It took me two hours to clean the biggest bathroom; the other two took me a little more than an hour each.

I hate cleaning bathrooms, but I wouldn’t have traded places with Barb, who had her head in an oven and a refrigerator for hours and hours. Cleaning the oven looked especially scary. I can’t believe that, in this day and age, nobody’s invented a laser cleaning ray or an oven scrubbing robot. The market for that must be worth billions.

We cleaned from noon until seven in the evening. (Barb wants the record clear that she was cleaning by ten-thirty.) Tim was scrubbing window tracks when he looked at me and said, “Dude, (everybody is “dude” to him now) I am so freaking tired of cleaning.” That was at three-thirty; we were only halfway through. When we knocked off at seven, we were all dragging ass like death-march victims. A long shower and a delicious dinner at the café helped revive us, but only barely. I was curled up in my sleeping bag before nine.

I hate moving. I would almost rather burn everything and just walk away.

We slept on the floor last night. Wow, was that a bad idea. Not that we had much of a choice. We could have paid for a hotel room, but that seemed plain stupid, because we had a house, only it didn’t have any furniture in it, a minor setback, or so we thought.

Sleeping on the floor sucks. It’s not that I’m getting too old for it; I don’t think age comes into it much. Kids love sleeping on the floor because they don’t sleep. They try to stay up all night long monkeying around. By the time they actually fall asleep, if they ever do, they could manage a deep slumber on concrete.

After a whole day cleaning the house, Barb and I probably could have, too, but we broke out some inflatable mattresses, trying to max out our comfort levels and get a full night’s sleep. I did get about five or six hours by laying on my back until the flat of my butt went numb where it bottomed out on the floor, then turned myself onto one side until that went numb, and so on all night long. I could stand to do that until about four in the morning, when I finally had to call it a night.

Barb was in the same boat, so we both put clothes on and had a very early breakfast at the café, then went back to the house to put the finishing touches on our cleaning job.

The pets weren’t sure what to make of the temporary quarters we moved into for the weekend. It’s a 60-year-old wood frame house with a lot of character, mostly shaped by sixty years of earthquakes. When I stood at the top of the stairway, I could look in three different directions down the hall, down the stairs and into the bathroom, and I didn’t see a plumb wall or a square corner anywhere. It looks a little like one of those cartoon houses where everything’s out of whack. All those old wooden joints pop and creak as the heat and humidity set in, and the wood frame booms like a drumhead when we walk across any room anywhere in the house. Ditto our neighbors in their apartment. Every movement was muffled by the massive steel pillars and thick concrete walls of the permanent quarters, but the temp quarters are one long string of sound effects.

Our cats are normally pretty relaxed. Boo can be a little jittery around new people or in new places, but she gets along in almost any situation if you reassure her that she’s still the princess over all she surveys. Bonkers is quick to adapt to anything; he could sleep while bombs were dropping around him. But on the first day we turned them loose in our temporary quarters, they jumped a foot every time some little thing went bump, which was all the time. We couldn’t move without setting off a chain reaction of pops, cracks, groans and creaks, and they hardly knew how to deal with it. Boo spent almost all the first day under the first bed she could find, and slept the night on top of the fridge, way back in the corner under the cupboard. Bonkers went from room to room trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and it didn’t appear he ever sorted it out, he was happy with a tummy rub and some kibble. It doesn’t take much to make him happy.

Here’s how our housing inspection went, just in case you’re on tenterhooks waiting to hear it: The inspector showed up just a bit early, which was all right with us because we wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. He said “hi,” we shook hands, and then he all but sprinted through the rooms of the house. If we’d left drums of glowing radioactive waste in the closets, he would never have seen it, so all the careful cleaning we did was pretty much wasted on him. We could’ve vacuumed the rugs and wiped a damp cloth over everything else, and this guy would’ve been happy — but if we’d done that, fate would have sent Mr. White Glove to inspect us, and we would’ve been up to our elbows in dirt and cleaning solvent until Friday night. Six of one, half-dozen of the other. Either way, it’s over. We’re happy.

I will never have to report to Security Hill again. My time there is through. They cleared my name out of their files and I handed them my badge so that, even if I wanted to (I suppose it could happen), I couldn’t go back in.

As the end to a way of life, it was very low-impact. Hardly anybody I recognized was in the building; in fact, hardly anybody at all seemed to be in the building, and most of the offices were closing for training or some other official function. I barely squeezed through the doors in time to get anybody to help me. I seemed to be more of a nuisance than anything else to the people in the orderly room, and there was just one person in the security office to help me get out of the building. (And here’s a huge thank-you to Rachel for staying behind to get me the heck out of Dodge!) I strolled out of the building as I came in, anonymously, and left the hill for good.

Among my other chores today, I had to pay my final telephone bill. This was apparently a lot more complicated than you might think, or at least it looks complicated. Three people went into a huddle for at least ten minutes to work out how I was going to pay the bill because I was retiring, and when they finally thought they had it right, one of them turned to me and asked, “Did you understand all that?”

“So long as I fly out of here on Monday,” I told her, “I don’t care how you do it.”

Barb and I had an afternoon appointment at Edgren High School to pick up Tim’s transcripts. We walked the quarter mile because we sold both our cars last week. The sun blazed, the temps were in the high 80’s, and the humidity was heavy enough to wilt the elm trees in the yard until their tops touched the ground. We dragged our heels every step of the way, whimpering softly to each other, “Too hot, too hot ... can’t go on ... save yourself.” But somehow we made it to Edgren, and right after that to the library across the street, where we stayed for almost an hour to enjoy the air-conditioned comfort before attempting the trek back to the inn.

Now that we’re living in one of the old wood-frame residences I can appreciate why the housing office is tearing them down and replacing them with steel-and-concrete bunkers, which are not only earthquake-resistant but they stay cool in the sweltering heat of a Misawa summer. The wood-frame buildings do not. Even though we threw all the windows open and set up oscillating fans in every room, the building itself seemed to be soaking up the heat during the day and slowly releasing it at night to ensure we broiled twenty-four hours a day. Last night was an excruciating example. I could manage to snatch almost an hour of sleep before I woke up in a slimy puddle of my own sweat, gasping for air, then toss and turn for an hour or so until I fell asleep again.

This isn’t even the hottest month. Last year in August, the temps climbed into the 90’s and the humidity pegged out at one-hundred percent. There’s no air conditioning built into in any of the residences on base and we’re not allowed to buy our own, although a lot of people thought they were so special that they deserved an exception. They didn’t ask for one, they just took it as their due. The wiring isn’t built to deliver enough power to air conditioners, though, so when people started plugging their units in, the air conditioning police would break down their doors and confiscate their units. “Grumpy” doesn’t begin to describe how people felt about that.

The day that you go to the personnel office to pick up the package of paperwork that allows you to leave Misawa Air Base is called your Final Out, and mine was today. I’ve got a big, fat manila envelope to carry all the way to Los Angeles. All we have left to do here is drop of the keys to the room before we get in a taxi and head for the train station.

The personnel office is probably one of the busiest places on the whole air base. Everybody assigned to Misawa has to go there when they arrive, whenever they need administrative changes made to their personal papers, and when they leave. Think it’s one of the few official buildings to be air conditioned? You would, wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t it be? There might be some reason, and it might have even made some sense back when they thought of it, but today, as I was sitting in the personnel office slowly melting like a candle under a blow torch, I thought it was pretty dumb. There’s no reason at all that the personnel office shouldn’t be an ice box in the summer.

It’s 86 degrees here once again. The humidity’s a little lower than yesterday, and there’s a wind that’s actually refreshing when you can get out in it, unless you were wearing a dark blue poly-wool hat and trousers, as I was. Then you would be able to stand in the sun today for about three minutes before you were dripping wet. Any refreshment you might feel would register somewhere in the deepest, darkest corner of your mind, because every other part of you would be shrieking, “My! God! It’s! Hot!” Strangely enough, the hat’s about the worst part of the uniform. That tiny little two-cornered cap somehow traps all the heat that’s trying to escape from your body and focuses it to slowly boil your brains away. It’s a work of cunning, but warped, genius.

The television set in our temporary quarters has what is almost certainly the most poorly-made modern remote control ever. To make it control the set at all, you have to point it at exactly the right angle, and even then you have to poke a button several times to get it to work, but not too fast or the set will refuse to respond even if the flashing green light shows you that it’s getting the remote’s signal. It’s quicker and easier to walk across the room and change the channel or the volume the old-fashioned way, but for some reason every one of us keeps on mashing away at the buttons on the remote control, trying to get it to work. Nobody wants to give in and do their own dirty work by hand, I guess. I tried to get the youngest boy to do it, but he’s not having any. He likes remote controls, but not enough to become one himself.

Barbara called the airline this afternoon to confirm our flight reservation and got one of those phone robots that makes you answer questions instead of punching buttons. This would be kind of a cool idea if the robot could understand what you’re saying, but it never does. “Please state your flight number,” it asks, but when it repeats the your answer in its bland voice it seems to pick a number out of thin air, because it’s not even close to the number you gave. Besides your flight number, it asks for a long list of information such as the date of your departure, the place of your departure, how many passengers and so on. By the time you’re done, you’ve invested a big chunk of time listening to instructions and carefully articulating the answers, so it’s more than a little disheartening to have to start all over again. I can usually tell when the robot tries to repeat Barb’s answers and asks that magical question, “Is this information correct?” because she takes a deep breath and says, “ No. ” in an icy tone of voice.

On a human that would have an immediate effect, but when the robot gets the answers wrong, it just forces the poor schmuck on the other end to repeat everything again. Barb’s answers get mighty terse the second time around, and the third time around she’s what you might call a little bit emotional. She is normally so calm on the phone when talking to people, but the robot never gives callers the option to speak to a real human being, which understandably drives her up a wall.

Six o’clock in the morning must be time for shift change over at the medical clinic. I’m only guessing that because they test the siren on the ambulance every morning at six. Our bedroom window is about six inches from the ambulance siren. We’ve been here three days now and it still makes me jump right out of bed.

At six-thirty each morning — that would be just about the time I was falling asleep again after the ambulance siren — the television set in the bedroom turned itself on. Barb spent something like a half-hour clicking through on-screen menus but she couldn’t find any sort of setting for a timer, so she quickly theorized it had to be demonically possessed, or perhaps it was controlled by aliens from an orbiting mothership. I’m not trying to brag, but I picked up the remote and found the timer in about sixty seconds.

Housekeeping came to our temporary quarters in the afternoon to clean, so we had to put the cats in a kennel to keep them from bouncing off the walls. They do not like that one little bit. Bonkers doesn’t put up much of a fight, but goes in with the air of a man being marched to the gas chamber. Boo goes into defensive cat mode, splays all four legs as far apart as possible and tries to catch just one claw on the edge of the kennel. God help you if you let her. After they’re locked in, they both stare mournfully from the door and moan until the cleaners come in the house, then they cringe to the back of the kennel and remain absolutely silent until the scary people with the vacuum cleaner and mops go away.

Some of our kabuki friends came to the base last night for one final party at the club. A lot of them were here last fall when they performed at the Navy Day Ball and they had a great time that night; I think they may have believed the club was like that all the time. They still seemed to have a great time; we took them to the sports bar for beer and food to start, which is always a winner. They loved American bar food, and there were a lot of extreme examples of what bar food should be: I mean, if French fries smothered in beans and melted cheese isn’t the greasiest, least healthy so-called food you can think of, what is?

After wolfing down baskets of chicken wings, jalapeno poppers, nachos and quesadillas, washed down with plenty of beer, we all went into the next room to try out the dance floor. I don’t know if Japanese dance clubs are quite as loud as the one at the club. My ears were bleeding just minutes after walking in, but they stuck it out for almost a half-hour, then wanted to find some place where they could talk to each other without screaming, so we went back to the sports bar for a little while before they had to go home.

They’d all been drinking, so to get home they called a daiko, which is a taxi that brings a sober guy to drive your car. Is that brilliant or what?

This is it: my last drivel from Misawa Air Base. Tomorrow morning I’ll take a one-way train trip to Tokyo to catch United Airlines flight 890 to Los Angeles. Makes me all goose-pimply just to think about it.

0600: We arrived at Misawa train station early enough to give us time to sit before the train showed up, and pretty lucky, too, because one of our kabuki buddies showed up to say goodbye and wish us a happy journey. (Thanks, Yuusuke!) The train pulled out of Misawa at about 0630 and we were in Hachinohe before 0700, where we headed straight for the bullet train. As I trailed about ten yards behind Barb, I ran into a uniformed Japan Rail station guard who held out his hand for my tickets and asked, “Shinkansen?” by which he meant, Are you getting on the bullet train? When I said yes, he motioned me along to the track. I ran into another guard at the top of the escalator who did the same thing, and another guard at the bottom of the escalator who also wanted me to hurry along. I didn’t realize why they were in such a big damned hurry until I pulled my bags aboard the train and the doors closed right behind me. We had all squeaked aboard in the last minute before departure.

The ride down to Tokyo was smooth and easy. The only thing we worried about was that the cats would freak out in their little carrier bags under the seat, and although the noises they very occasionally made told us that they weren’t happy with the situation, they didn’t go ballistic and were really very quiet about it, most of the time.

1100: We pulled into Tokyo station and I discovered our first minor glitch of the trip as we transferred our bags to the train to Narita airport: We didn’t have our jackets. We must have left them on the train in Hachinohe as we rushed to catch the bullet train. Whups!

We had a four-hour layover in Narita, which gave us just enough time to eat lunch and get through security.

1630: Our flight departed Tokyo more or less on time, and by 1700 every muscle from my butt down to my toes was telling me that it was going to be a long, painful trip. I can sit on a wooden plank and feel less discomfort than I do in an airline seat, which typically are only an inch or so wider than I am. Because of that and the inch or so between my knees and the seat in front of me, I feel like I’m locked in a vise. On this trip, luckily, I was in the “Economy Plus” section where they gave us seats that were a skosh wider and we had five extra inches of leg room, very nice, but still a pretty small space to occupy for ten hours.

1100: We landed in Los Angeles at about the time and on the same day that our bullet train arrived in Tokyo. See if you can do that without screwing up your internal clock. No, don’t bother; I’ll tell you right now that you can’t.

If we expected to run into any trouble anywhere with the cats, it was here. We had tried to cover all the bases, had six copies of their health certificates in their bags, even put them on a strict diet for the past four or five weeks to make sure they weren’t over the 15-pound weight limit, and nobody had so much as glanced at them during the long trip. In Los Angeles, the Border and Customs Agent looked over my declarations and asked, “What live animal do you have with you?”

I showed him our cats.

“And those cats are from the United States?”

Ah, no. They’re from Japan.

He cast a careful eye over their health certificates. “Okay, then,” he said, “Have a great day and welcome to America.” Cats, it seems, are not a big concern to anybody on either side of the pond.

I reported to the personnel office of Los Angeles Air Force Base at 0800 this morning to begin the first of three scheduled days of out-processing from the U.S. Air Force. The sergeant working the retirements office sort of screwed up her face when I said that and haltingly informed me that it didn’t take three days; it took all of three hours. She couldn’t out-process me today because she couldn’t finish until the day before my terminal leave started, and since that was Friday, she asked me to come back on Thursday. That was Glitch Number One.

Glitch Number Two was that nobody had made travel arrangements for me to get from Los Angeles to Madison. The good people in the Misawa personnel office and in the travel office back at Misawa said that it would all be taken care of and I’d have tickets waiting for me when I got to Los Angeles, but I wasn’t really all that surprised to find out there had been a failure to communicate. After I had finished talking with the sergeant at the retirements office I had to scoot over to the travel office to book some airline tickets right away, because I wanted to leave Friday, the start of the July 4th weekend. The ticket agent managed to get us tickets on two flights on Friday out of LAX, but the flights were four hours apart.

Glitch Number Three was that they could fly us only as far as Chicago on Friday. If I waited until Saturday, they could get us to Milwaukee, but they could not fly us all the way to Madison because the ticket agent couldn’t find any government rates for the airport there. Once we got as far as O’Hare, we were on our own. I had to call about ten car rental agencies in order to find one that still had cars available at O’Hare airport on Friday.

Glitch Number Four was that the Air Force would reimburse us for only one day of lodging while we were in Los Angeles, I guess because out-processing is supposed to take just one day. We have to pay for the other three days. The Embassy Suites is a nice hotel, but we’re not staying here for the fun of it.

Not really a glitch, but still typical of an adventure with the O-man: Los Angeles Air Force Base is really two bases on two different city blocks along Aviation Boulevard. I didn’t know that until the business shuttle dropped me off at the “working side” of the base and found out from the gate guard that the personnel office is on the “services side” of the base. I had to take a half-mile walk down the road. Then, when I found out I had to run to the travel office to get my plane tickets, it was a foregone conclusion that the travel office had to be on the other half of the base, back up the road from where I came.

We took the train to Hollywood Boulevard to see the Walk of Fame and check out the footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese theater. Funny thing about Hollywood Boulevard: For a place that draws camera-toting tourists from all over the world, it’s really a pretty seedy, run-down district. You’d think they’d spend a few bucks to hose the urine and vomit off the sidewalks once in a while.

The shops along Hollywood are predominantly souvenir stores, lunch counters, lingerie boutiques, and wiggeries. I don’t know how to figure the wigs, but if you’re in the market for fake hair, then I can just about guarantee that Hollywood Boulevard is the place to find it in exactly the style you want. But the most prolific business along the strip appears to be out-of-work actors dressed up as Catwoman or Obi-Wan Kenobi who pose for tips with tourists while they get their pictures taken for the folks back home.

The footprints at Grauman’s were, I have to admit, quite a bit of fun. I remember seeing news reels of the older stars stamping their hands and shoes in wet cement, but I never knew that the regular cast from Star Trek did a big group foot-printing for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The whole forecourt of the theater was like that; we wandered from here to there, tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing at each new discovery. I have to wonder, though, if they’re entirely real, or copies of the original prints, because Harold Lloyd’s, for instance, looked just as good as Sylvester Stallone’s, even though they were made more than sixty years apart.

Since we were going to Grauman’s anyway, we bought tickets to see the Tom Cruise action flick War of the Worlds, which was pretty good, by the way. We had to stand in a line for only about a half-hour, which was magnified into an eternity when a guy with a boom box and a hugely floppy, sequined hat parked himself right beside me and made himself as annoying as possible so that we’d give him money to go away. He did this by asking the people in line for their names, then busting a stinkingly bad rhyme while his boom box went boom-chucka-chucka. When he asked my name, I wanted to say, “I’m get the hell out of here, that’s who I am,” but I knew that if he’d been doing this for a while, and I was pretty sure he had been, he’d heard that and every other answer before and he probably had a comeback for it as well, so I just grimaced and said nothing. He used his microphone and boom box to make sure everybody knew I was giving him the silent treatment, then moved on.

While we were waiting in line, the guy in front of me turned and said, “I’ll be right back. Save my place, okay?” I said “Sure,” or something equally dumb, as if this were grade school and I could make the magic hoodoo sign that would keep everybody behind me from beating us both to a pulp if he came back and things got ugly. Come to that, I never understood the whole “save my spot” routine in grade school, either. We all did it, but if the guy behind you was bigger than you were, it didn’t work, did it?

The paperwork I had to do at Los Angeles Air Force Base really was as simple as I’d been told on Tuesday. I had to fill out a travel voucher, validate my terminal leave, and sign my DD214 — that was it. The only reason it took longer than an hour was because I had to run back and forth between the two sides of the base, and because the sergeant at the retirements office asked me to be there at seven, but almost everybody at finance office was gone until eight-thirty. I was out of there before ten.

Everyone was asleep when I got back to the hotel, not unusual at all for the cats. Jet lag explained the zonkage affecting the humans. B and I had been awake since four o’clock in the morning, and Tim woke up at about six, which is so early for him it’s scary. I shook B awake and we concocted a plan to go visit Redondo Beach at the end of the bus line that ran past the hotel. The hardest part of the day was waking Timmy up and convincing him to go with us; everything else after that was gravy.