Welcome to another edition of When Dave Is King Of The World. Today I’m going to outline the Piece of Crap Law. Like so many other rules I’m going to change when I’m King of the World, the POC Law is about cars and driving. A POC is a car that has rust eating holes through it that are so big you would find it impossible to keep rodents from infesting it. A POC is a car that is so obviously missing parts that even wild jungle people who have never seen a car before would be able to tell. A POC is a car that’s been in an accident and now has to be held together with a liberal application of duct tape, bungee cords, zip ties, rope, et cetera. A POC makes enough noise to drown conversation at any distance. A POC trails a cloud of smoke behind it wherever it goes.
If you drive a POC, the traffic police will be lawfully permitted stop you at any time in any place, confiscate your Piece of Crap, put a dunce cap on your head and leave you by the side of the road. You won’t be able to appeal to a higher court, and you won’t ever get your POC back because the Traffic Authority will put it in their world-famous Big Freaking Oven and melt it before sundown.
So Spaketh the King. I don’t mind seeing old cars on the road; even the ones that aren’t good-looking evoke a feeling of nostalgia that I believe is good for everyone to indulge in from time to time. Old cars that are rolling junkyards are another story, however, and a pretty stupid one at that, hence the dunce caps. And no, I didn’t just make up this rule because I flinch every time a Piece of Crap rolls up beside my brand new car on the highway.
I reinstated the countdown at the top of my page because I’m in my last month of active-duty military service and it’ll be fun to watch the number tick down to zero. If you’re confused by this, I’ll remind you that even though I’m home from Japan, don’t wear a uniform and won’t be sent overseas again by the military (knock wood), I’m still on active duty until the end of the month. I’m on TERMINAL LEAVE, a transitional period that means I’m still in the military, but won’t be returning to duty before the end of my enlistment.
I added “knock wood” because I know more than a few people who were returned to extended duty when they thought they were getting out. The military has many magical incantations by which to accomplish this nefarious deed, and it could in fact happen to me yet. The Powers That Be could cast the spell of STOP LOSS over me, by which my enlistment ends when they say it ends, no matter what my contract says. And even if they allow my enlistment to lapse, The Powers That Be could recall me to active duty at any time within two years thereafter, no tag backs. After that, who knows? I’m not privy to all the secrets of The Powers That Be.
I got an e-mail reply last night to an application I made for a job at a bank downtown, so apparently some people are reading my applications and not just tossing them in the round file like I thought they were. The application I had to fill out for a job at a bank was in a lot of ways more complicated than all the forms and tests I had to fill out before the Air Force would let me keep national secrets. The bank wants to interview me in the morning for a clerical job in their credit department, which means that, if they find I’m a worthy applicant, I could be handling your credit application in the near future. How loopy is that?
I’ve been writing these drivelish messages on my laptop computer, then transferring the text to a data stick and uploading it when I get near a computer terminal that connects to the internet, usually at the library, but sometimes on the computers in the basement of the apartment house we’re living in now.
The library’s got a great computer network. I usually have to spend most of my one-hour time allotment filling out job applications, but I almost always have a few minutes at the end to upload drivel. If I do it that way it’s pretty easy, because even the small branch libraries out in the suburbs have hot-rod computers with pop-up blockers and safeguards to stop people from downloading every software installation on the web.
The apartment building we’re living in has a basement room with two internet computer terminals. That’s pretty nice, and we take advantage of it whenever we have the time to wait for the computers to snap out of their zombie-like trances. The computers were hot-rods with monster memory and disc capacity, but they’re loaded down with so much crap that they grind to a halt at least once a week, and they’re slower than a three-toed sloth on Percocet the rest of the time. The trouble is there are about a dozen kids living in these apartments who download every freaking chat room application and free game they can find. There are also quite a few adults who surf the web looking for dates, or at least that’s what I think they’re doing, to judge from the pictures they save to the hard drive.
Speaking of which, it’s pretty nice to have access to the internet through the computers that are available in public cafés and libraries, but don’t you feel like taking a shower in chlorine bleach after you’ve been using a really greasy keyboard or a sticky mouse? I don’t even like to think about what that could be. It doesn’t help that Barb’s reading a book called The Secret Life of Germs right now and keeps telling Tim and I how contagions are spread through indirect contact.
I love to watch the Weather Channel with the mute button on so the close-captioning kicks in. Whoever’s typing the captions is obviously no meteorologist. “Expect temperatures to drop as a manhole covers North America from Canada” the caption read the other day as a woman swept her hand across a cold front on the screen. Whatever she said, it was definitely not “manhole cover,” and I have half a mind to doubt it sounded anything like “manhole cover.” Not only does the captioner not know anything about the weather, he doesn’t ask, either. I think he just fell behind and typed a couple random words out of sheer panic.
I’ve never been good at selling anything in my life, but somehow I succeeded in convincing the people who interviewed me at the bank that I’m a good risk. They hired me. I used the only sales technique I know on them: “Hi, my name’s Dave. If you need something, here I am. If you don’t, okay then. Thanks for listening.” The interview was a little longer than that, and I think I made some jokes, too. Can you believe that worked? I’m still a little stunned.
Not only have I secured employment, we’ve also found a place to live. This story goes on a bit, but if you’ll bear with me, please, I think you’ll see how it all comes together. Tim wanted to go to school in Monona, a suburb to the west of Madison on the far side of Lake Monona. Nice place, very cozy, has a small-town feel but it’s convenient to downtown Madison. The school has this gosh-darned rule that kids must physically reside in Monona before they may attend school there. That’s why we began to hunt for houses in Monona in the first place. Then we ran into that pesky hitch about getting jobs before we could secure a mortgage, so we started looking for rentals instead.
Apartments were out. Most of the apartment buildings in Monona are located conveniently close to The Beltway so you can always hear the screaming tires of heavy traffic day and night. As if that weren’t bad enough, just about all the apartment buildings look like the Clampetts live there: old chairs and trash cans are piled up in the yards, none of the cars parked along the curb are newer than 1980 and they’re all missing more than three very visible parts like headlights and bumpers, and for curtains the tenants use blankets they bought for $3.99 in the kid’s department at Target. Barb was trying to convince me to live there because the rent is about half what it costs to stay in a house. She argued that we could save a pile of money. “That may be, but I’ll be on Zoloft by January,” I told her.
Houses for rent in Monona were precious and few. We found two very nice ones and three flea pits, and the rest were houses portioned out as flats. By the time we got an idea what was available, the good rentals were leased and time was running out. We were a heartbeat away from moving in with the Clampetts when we found out that high school kids in Cottage Grove went to school in Monona.
Cottage Grove was a small town just ten miles or so east of Madison. It’s still a small town, but it looks like it used to be about a dozen houses and a corner store; now it’s got a brand-new strip mall and there’s a development of cookie-cutter McHouses off to one side. Wal-Mart will zero in on that place in a few years and then there goes the neighborhood. For now, though, we found a very tidy little duplex to rent on the main road. It’s a split-level with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room upstairs, and two rooms in the basement where Tim can have his bachelor pad. The only trouble I can see there is that the downstairs rooms open directly into the garage, so he would be just a few steps away from the car at all times. I’ll have to conduct periodic searches of his room to search for duplicate car keys.
I’ve been driving on the crazy multi-lane highways in the city for just four weeks now and I totally understand road rage already. I was trying to get on the beltway this morning but there was a car in front of me being driven by some wheezer who didn’t want to go any faster than forty miles an hour, which left me stuck beside him and the jam he made when he merged with the traffic going sixty on the beltway. I couldn’t merge into that mess so I had to take the off-ramp, drive to the next set of traffic lights, turn around on a side road and head back to the beltway to try to get on again. Took me ten minutes.
Normally I would have started swearing a blue streak the moment that Mr. Chuckletrousers blocked me, and kept up the profanities for at least five minutes. I’m not especially talented with profanity; really good cussers can draw on a huge vocabulary and are remarkably inventive with it, rarely repeat themselves and can operate effectively at any volume. I tend to repeat myself quite a lot because I prefer to use just two or three words for their satisfyingly explosive qualities, and I shout them over and over while I pound the steering wheel and wave my hands in the air. I’ll bet you’ve seen a guy just like me in your rear-view mirror.
In today’s scenario, however, my wife and child were in the car. To be honest, I wasn’t worried much about emotionally scarring my son. He’s a teenager, so he’s shall we say a little rough around the edges. I wouldn’t have upset him even a tiny bit by blasting Mr. Chuckletrousers with a verbal volley. I don’t think I’d be revealing any family secrets if I told you that he does the same, and let me say he got that way by spending too much time watching late-night television and trolling the internet. It wasn’t me, okay? He’d like you to believe I made him the way he is today, but he was a beautiful boy before he put on baggy pants and started listening to hip-hop.
My wife, on the other hand, is a delicate flower. She becomes quite upset when I shout at the other motorists. I stopped pounding the steering wheel and waving my arms, but that wasn’t moderate enough. I get the feeling she’d rather not hear me say anything untoward at all, so this morning when Mr. Chuckletrousers cut me off, I held back entirely. Didn’t say a word. Not a peep.
Yuck. Never going to do that again. Made me feel like I could’ve exploded with the force of a million tons of TNT. Made me feel like I could’ve broiled puppies on a skewer and served them to preschoolers. Made me want to, well, to cuss at the tops of my lungs while I pounded on the steering wheel. So I’m going to have to find another way to moderate myself. I was thinking I could keep a box of stress balls in the car, and when I feel as though I have to cuss I can roll down the window and bounce a few of them off the skull of the driver in the next lane. Or would that be too confrontational?
Am I going to sound like an cranky old codger if I start complaining about how hard it is to call anybody on the phone these days? I spent the afternoon on the phone calling various utilities to get the water, electricity, phone and internet turned on at the house we’re going to rent. Every damned time I called somebody I heard the same perky recorded voice say, “Thank you for calling [name of utility]! Your call is very important to us, so please stay on the line. To ensure quality service, your call may be recorded. Please chose from one of the following options ...” And then she’d name five or six options, none of which seemed to apply to me, and there was never an option to repeat the options or speak to a customer representative, either. There was no hope of talking to a human until I poked my way through six or seven sub-menus. When I was finally allowed to speak a word other than “yes” or “no,” three times out of five it was with somebody for whom English was not their first language. I spelled out “Cottage Grove” so many times that toward the end I thought the guy who heard “Collage Glove” was pretty imaginative. So when I called the office of the village of Cottage Grove itself to get the water turned on, I was shocked out of my cotton boxer shorts when a woman — a woman who wasn’t a recording and wasn’t perky, she was just pleasant — answered the phone on the second ring and was so gosh-darned helpful that we finished in under three minutes. That’s the way public-service phone calls ought to be, dammit!
I turned off the ceiling fan in the bedroom last night before I crawled into bed. I wanted to leave the window open because it was the first time in a week that the weather was cool enough to sleep without waking up in a puddle of my own sweat, but it was just a little too cool to sleep with the fan on.
“Did you turn the fan off?” Barb asked. It was obviously a rhetorical question, because Tim certainly didn’t tear himself away from computer games or cable television long enough to turn it off, and she knew she didn’t turn it off, so I took it to mean, “Why did you turn the fan off?” I answered both questions. “Yes, I was cold. Are you too warm?”
Well of course she was. Barb and I have become one of those hot and cold couples. She’s the hot one (which should be obvious to anybody who’s ever laid eyes on her, he said, waggling his eyebrows). She literally wilts when we step out of the shade or a cool building into the heat of a sweltering day. When she sleeps she throws all the covers off the end of the bed. And it’s my considered medical opinion that she’s unquenchably, feverishly in love with air conditioning. If she turns it on, it’s on full-blast, and if we’re in the car she adjusts all the vents so that they’re blasting her from head to toe with arctic air. I usually cheat a bit by cracking the window to let a little warm air in.
My Mom and Dad were like this. He was the hot one. (I don’t have a joke for that, and a good thing, too.) Mom wore thermal underwear beneath several layers of clothing from September to May, then gradually peeled off layers until finally she could relish every day of the brief Wisconsin summer in shorts and a tank top. But Mom’s joy was Dad’s torment. That man could not abide heat. When the weather was on the warmish side of a sunny day, or the humidity climbed a bit too high, Dad went from one end of the house to the other in his boxer shorts throwing open every window in a desperate bid to get a breeze, however small, to come in and bring him a little relief.
Barb and I aren’t that bad. She’s not into boxer shorts, for one thing, and for another I’m not into thermal underwear, but we’re already doing things like making adjustments to the thermostat on the air conditioner right after each other, opening windows that somebody else had just closed, or zealously folding back the covers so they’re exactly covering only half the bed. I can see we’re headed down that road and geezerhood is likely only to make us more profoundly weird. Watch this space.
Sean is home from Georgetown to spend a couple weeks in the bosom of his family. We all went to the airport to pick him up and he just about did a flip-take when he saw that Tim is taller than him by almost an inch. That triggered his inner old codger to say, “How’d you get so tall? That is not possible,” over and over again. The only way he could have acted more codgerish is if he’d stuck the word “whippersnapper” in there somewhere.
Retirement Update: The immovable bureaucracy of the Air Force thinks my enlistment ends on the seventh. I’ve irritated the beast with this sticky point before, and I’ve even succeeded in getting a couple sergeants to try to correct my ETS date (that’s Expiration of Term of Service), but it’s been wrong for years, stuck in the system somewhere. When last month’s earning statement came, there was a note at the bottom to remind me all pay and benefits ended on the seventh and I was on my own after that, thanks, have a great day, so I called the sergeant in the finance office to see if she could fix it. She said it’d get fixed when my retirement paperwork went through.
Yesterday I called her back to see if she’d fixed it and she brightly told me that everything was set and I’d be receiving my final paycheck later next week.
“I’ll be getting my last paycheck next week?” I asked her.
“That’s right, sir,” she said, still sounding all kinds of chipper.
“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: You’re going to send me the paycheck for the whole month of August next week?”
“Well, not the whole month ...,” she began.
“Because, as I told you last week,” I interrupted, “my ETS date is wrong, and you told me that my retirement paperwork would fix that.”
That sort of took the wind out of her sails. And she couldn’t do anything about it. She had to send the papers back to whoever prepared them at Misawa and get them to fix their mess. Knowing how quick and easy that’s going to be, I’ve already begun to hit myself in the head with a hammer, and I’ll stop only when everything’s straightened out. Shouldn’t take long at all.
In celebration of my new job, my aunt and uncle took the O-Folk out to dinner at Pedro’s authentic Mexican restaurant in West Towne. Kidding. They were actually celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary, but they threw my job in there, too, and let us tag along. I had a chicken chimichanga, because I like to say that out loud, and because it’s so big I knew I wouldn’t have to eat anything for the next twenty-four hours. And I didn’t.
Today was in fact my first full day on the job; even though I don’t start working regularly downtown until next week, I had to get my technical training done today, so I went to a nearby branch office to learn how to work the computer system. I haven’t worked a full day wearing a button-down shirt and tie in more than ten years, back when the Air Force used to try to make us look a little professional by dressing us up in blues for work.
Retirement update: The Air Force no longer believes that my enlistment ended on the seventh. How about that? I mean, can you believe they actually got it fixed before I was cut off from all pay and benefits? I’m really impressed.
The O-folk piled into the car and drove to the state fair in Milwaukee today. It had been part of our plan all week, but when we woke up this morning it was raining, so our plan wasn’t looking very firm just then. The rain was very light, though, and we’re pretty thick-headed, so we figured, what the hell, it can’t hurt us to get a little wet, and we went to Milwaukee anyway. And it turned out we had a pretty good time. We got drizzled on a little bit once or twice, but for the most part it was cool and cloudy, really a whole lot better than the blazing heat that’s been melting the shoes off anybody who was dumb enough to go outside for the past week.
We did everything we hoped to do at the fair. Goal #1 was to eat a whole lot of food that wasn’t very good for us. Mission: Accomplished. First thing Barb and I ate as soon as we walked through the front gate was a couple of big old, greasy bratwurst, washed down with beer, of course. My brat was slathered in sauerkraut, as it should be, but Barb’s not a fan so she abstained. About twenty minutes later, Tim and I were chowing down on pretzels the size of our heads. Each one was covered with enough salt to kill all the leeches in South America. I had to drink a large Pepsi and all the water I could find after that. Then we spotted the building where they made cream puffs, and Barb couldn’t leave the fair without having one because, she said, they’re a state fair tradition, but here’s something you might not know about Barb: If she had to chose between saving her drowning mother or eating a fresh, fluffy cream puff, mom would have to tread water. And she shared her cream puff with me. Now that’s love.
I couldn’t leave the fair before I’d eaten an ear of roasted sweet corn. If you’ve never had one, you’ve got to find a county fair before the summer’s gone and seek out the roasted sweet corn. They serve it at every county fair in the Midwest. They roast the whole ear, then shuck the leaves back for a handle, dunk the exposed cob in a bucket of melted butter and hand it to you dripping. You can almost hear your heart screaming for mercy as you try to figure out the best angle to attack it from so you don’t slop butter and corn bits all over your shirt.
We all ate a lot of food, but nobody ate more than Sean. He started off with corn cake, which he liked so much that he went back and got another. Then he got himself some deep-fried calamari, which he said was the most awful calamari he’d ever had, but I notice he finished it all. I think after that he had his first chocolate malted of the day, followed by a lemonade that he didn’t like very much, but he finished all that, too. He ate two sticks of beef jerky at the pig races, and when Barb and Tim got cream puffs, Sean had to finish off Tim’s because it was too rich for him. He ate most of a bag of pop corn that Barb started (Sean did a lot of clean-up eating), scored another chocolate malted to wash it down, and he had a polish sausage just before we left. That boy’s got a colon like a machine.
I guess we sound like a family of porkers, but we weren’t there just for the food. We also wandered around in the exhibits, which at a state fair means that we wandered through the livestock barns, deftly stepping between the fresh pocky to have a look at the cows and pigs and bunnies. Especially the bunnies. We had to walk all the way to the far end of the fair grounds to find them. We also saw part of a one-ring circus performance and rode the sky gliders, but we didn’t spend any time on the midway because the boys were too cool for that and Barb and I throw up way too easily, especially when our bellies are full of brats and sweet corn.
Have you ever followed a car on the highway that had a huge piece of furniture hanging out the back end, the lid of the trunk tied down over it with a piece of twine or a bungee cord, and wondered what kind of dipwad does something as stupid as that? I have. And tonight, I became that kind of dipwad.
I told Barb that I was going to drive to St. Vincent’s, just down the road a couple blocks, to see if they had any tables, chairs or dresser drawers on sale out front. We’re going to move to a rented duplex this weekend but we won’t have any furniture to speak of (that’s a story for another day), so we’ll have to buy some second-hand furniture in the mean time or sit on the floor while we eat dinner, read, play games, write drivel, and my brain already hurts from trying to think what we’re going to sleep on. I’m wandering. Back to the story.
It just so happened that St. Vincent’s had a maple wood chest of drawers sitting out front, almost as if they were waiting for us to come along and pick it up, so I ran inside with the price tag and bought it. Then, the tricky part: How could we transport it across town to our house in Cottage Grove using nothing more than a Toyota Camry? It’s a pretty big car, but the dresser turned out to be just a couple inches too big in any direction to fit neatly inside the trunk or the back seat. Most of it went into the trunk, leaving about a foot hanging out the back end and no way to close the lid except to tie it down. I hate it when I have to follow the cars of dootbrains who do that.
Call me “Mister Dootbrain.”
We figured to drive on surface roads all the way and never go more than forty miles per hour. There’s just one hitch in that plan: On the south side of Madison, there is no surface road between John Nolan Drive and South Towne Drive. The only way to travel the mile or so between them is to get on The BELTWAY. Luckily for us, the beltway was jammed with traffic that was crawling along at forty-five miles per hour, so they hardly noticed that we were only doing forty. If they had, they would’ve pounced on us with a fury and crushed us beneath their wheels.
The only other hard part was driving along the county road to Cottage Grove. It’s only two lanes wide and the people behind us wanted to get home real soon. I kept pulling off to the side to let them by, but more would sneak up behind us again. Barb tried to keep an eye out for people following too closely, but of course she couldn’t do that very well because there was a big freaking chunk of furniture sticking out the back of the car obscuring her view. She didn’t have to bother, because most people were putting plenty of space between their cars and the dootbrain with the lid of his trunk tied down with twine.
The funny thing is, we made it! We got it all the way there without the twine breaking, without anybody getting cheesed off and running us off the road, without the furniture dropping from the car, shattering on the road and causing a ten-car pile-up, without any of the scary situations Barb and I both imagined a million times over as we drove across town and into the countryside. The trunk lid was still securely tied down when we got there, the dresser was still in good shape, and we carried it into the house without dinging it or either of us pulling a muscle. It was almost like we knew what we were doing.
Jim & Sue introduced us to their version of the thrill of the hunt: a consignment auction. We followed them to a warehouse outside DeForest this morning and spent the better part of the day at what amounted to a giant yard sale, and we paid for the privilege. Quite handsomely, too.
It wasn’t exactly like a yard sale: Yard sales don’t come with auctioneers and it’s easier to pick through the items at a yard sale. At the auction we had to handle every single item on each table or we would run the risk of missing something, and of course it was impossible to handle every single item so we missed some things. The items for sale were all jumbled together in boxes and a box might, for instance, hold a crystal vase, a coffee pot, two packs of playing cards, a wooden carving of an elephant, and a set of crescent wrenches. You had to bid on the whole lot, even if all you wanted was the coffee pot.
I bought one jumbled box of stuff because it held a small lead weight that I recognized from my days back at the Advocate. Each week I used an ancient machine to mechanically stencil the names of subscribers to 1,500 newspapers. To feed the paper stencils into the machine I had to drop a one-pound lead weight on top of them, the same kind of lead weight that I spotted in a box of junk at the auction. “I’ll give you a buck for that,” I told the auctioneer, showing him the weight, but by then it was late in the day, everybody was tired and cranky, and he was in no mood to throw me a bone. “We’ll get to that when we get to that,” he answered. Five or ten minutes later, the box was on a sawbuck table with five other boxes and the auctioneer asked, “Your choice — who’ll bid five bucks?” No answer. “Who’ll give me two dollars?” Still no answer. “How about a dollar?” And that’s how I walked away with the weight, a toolbox filled with about a dozen miscellaneous tools, and some other crap I threw away as I walked out the door.
The bidding never started at the price the auctioneer asked for first. He would hold up an item or a box of junk or point at a pile of tools and say, “I want twenty bucks for that. Who’ll give me twenty bucks?” and be met with blank stares. Then he’d say, “Ten bucks. Who’ll give me ten bucks?” and still hear nothing but crickets chirping in the silence. “Start the bidding at two dollars,” he’d suggest, and somebody would raise a finger and answer, “One dollar.” Jim warned me ahead of time this would happen. “I think everybody would shoot you if you accepted the first bid.” It was an auction ritual that everybody observed for reasons that make no amount of sense, because once the bidding started it almost always ran quickly back up to the price the auctioneer asked for in the first place, and often went higher just as quickly.
Barb found herself a lamp with a base in the shape of a crowing rooster. Winning that one item made her happiest today. From the moment she laid eyes on it, she knew she had to have it and she would stop at nothing to get it. She had to go a little higher than nothing, but for eleven bucks, she got a pretty good buy. (When Tim laid eyes on it, he declared it the most hideous lamp he’d ever seen.)
My best score at the auction was an airbrush. I spotted an air compressor in a wash tub, where it had been thrown together with a hydraulic jack, and discovered when I leaned in for a close look that it wasn’t just any air compressor, it was made by Paasche, the Cadillac of air brush systems. It was worth at least a hundred bucks, so I figured to stay in the auction at least until they reached fifty or so. Then, while I was waiting for the auctioneer to start bidding on the tub, I noticed another guy poking through the items and when he pulled the hose out to its full length, I could see there was an air brush attached! Bonus! He looked it over for a good, long time but he couldn’t have been very interested, because I won it for eleven dollars. And then — it just keeps getting better — when I eagerly inspected my prize on the workbench at home, I found out that it had not one, but two airbrushes: the cheaper model I saw earlier, and a dual-action Paasche airbrush that would cost something like seventy or eighty bucks new! It was Christmas in August! I was giggling like a little girl!
Even though they buy quite a lot of things at these auctions, Jim & Sue claim that the performance is what they’re really going for. “This is the best entertainment money can buy,” Sue said, and Jim thinks that “a good auction is like performance art.” I could see how the auctioneers got into their work, and the audience made for some good people-watching.
After the auction, Jim & Sue followed us back to Cottage Grove to drop off our furniture at the duplex, then went on to meet at their house to relax with beer and some BLTs that Jim whipped up while we stood around the kitchen swapping experiences.
This is the day that Madison calls Moving Day, the day that thousands of parents help their children move into the city for the start of the school year. In a sweet bit of synchronicity, it was also our moving day, the day that we checked out of our month-to-month rooms in the Countryside Apartments and took all our worldly possessions, in the dozen or so suitcases, bags, boxes and stacks, to the duplex in Cottage Grove. In preparation we had already moved several suitcases from the apartment to the duplex on Saturday, thinking we’d be able to load up in the car Monday morning and make a single trip first thing, no messy doubling back through the morning rush-hour traffic. What naïve little munchkins we were. I started loading up the car almost immediately after rolling out of bed and taking care of my morning toilet, and quickly realized we’d have to make two trips, so we packed the car full and Sean came out to Cottage Grove with me to unload on the fly and double back as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately for us, what’s possible on the beltline changes by the minute. We ran into a jam right after we crossed under the interstate and traffic crawled all the way up to Monona Drive, where I exited and took the surface roads as far as I could to get around the jam. That made the move quite a bit more hectic than we’d planned for. Our air shipment was due to arrive today, brought by the moving company anywhere between eight in the morning and five in the evening, sort of like the cable guy, and it was almost eight o’clock when I pulled in to the apartments, where Barb was waiting in the parking lot amid a pile of our personal effects, tapping her foot anxiously. We loaded up the rest of our things in about ten minutes and hit the road once again; I still hadn’t eaten my breakfast.
We made it to Cottage Grove in good time, about quarter past eight, well ahead of the mover, who didn’t arrive until nine or nine-thirty. I had time to pick up some Danish at the bakery, coffee at the Muddy Moose, and relax a bit in the comfort of our new home. When a moving truck backed into our driveway, I was well fed and ready to meet whatever came my way. Or so I thought ...
A guy who appeared to be about seventeen years old climbed out of the cab and introduced himself as Tyler. We talked about where to put the goods and I ended by cracking, “I hope you’re not unloading all that on your own,” thinking it was a pretty cleverly obtuse remark, as if they would send him out there to unload our shipment all by his lonesome.
“Yes, we’re a little short-handed this week,” he answered. I couldn’t believe it. To make the move a little easier on him, we let him move all the packages into the garage, where the boys happily tore off the wrappings so Tyler could stuff them back into his truck for later disposal. That left me to tick off the items as Tyler brought them off the truck. All I had to do was stand there with a clipboard and check off each item as Tyler called out the item number and brought it into the garage. We got to the very last item in the very last box and I had checked off all but one item. It was a box of kitchen pots. I wasn’t sure if I should just sign the inventory and let it go, or hold the movers responsible for the loss. I went through all the wrappings, re-checked all the boxes, and had just about given up when I noticed one small package sitting all by itself under the workbench. Of course it turned out to be the pots.
We had to wash some clothes after supper, and because we have no washing machine or dryer at the house we had to haul all our dirty clothes to the laundromat about half a mile down the road. We had a lot of clothes to wash, so we took the car. Sean drove the car. That was the first time he ever drove us anywhere, and it was the first time he drove our car. You might say I had mixed feelings about letting him drive our new car. I had no idea how far he’d ever driven before or how well. He seemed confident, but he always seemed confident even when he didn’t know what he was doing, and he usually seemed most confident right before he broke something — his bike, his mother’s bike, his arm, etc. Afterward he invariably acted like it was no big deal. In fact, he usually played it off as if it broke because it was faulty or it was about time it broke anyway.
Barb got in the car with him as he was getting ready to back out of the garage, but I waited just outside so I could close the door after he’d backed out. He waved me off, wanting me to stand back farther. Did he think he wouldn’t be able to back out of the garage in a straight enough line to avoid hitting me? That didn’t fill me with confidence. But damn me, he was a pretty good driver, if a bit hesitant. It would be impossible to judge his abilities based on the short distance we saw him drive, but his only defect seemed to be a tendency to overanalyze and hold back. There’s a four-way stop in town where hesitation absolutely will not work in anybody’s favor. Once he got past that, he did very well otherwise.
I have a confession to make to my wife: I rub the bar of soap all over my body. The subject never came up before so I didn’t realize how important it was to her, but she said just a day or two ago that she wouldn’t want to use the same bar of soap that I use if she knew that I rubbed it all over my skin, which I do. Sorry about that.
It came up in conversation over dinner, believe it or not, when Sean, who apparently hadn’t apologized for anything in about an hour, said he was sorry for using our toiletries, but wanted to make it absolutely clear that he didn’t rub the soap on his skin, and by saying “rub it on his skin” he meant to imply that he didn’t stick the bar of soap in any of the dusky personal nether regions anybody might imagine when he said “rub it on his skin.” Instead, he rubbed it between his hands and then rubbed his hands in his dusky nether regions. That was supposed to make a big difference.
The preferred method of course (I have employed it from time to time — I’m not completely uncivilized) is to rub the bar of soap on a wash cloth, scrub off the oil, dirt and hair off, then if necessary renew the wash cloth’s soapiness by re-applying the bar to the now oily, dirty and (in my case especially) hairy rag. I’m a hands-on man, though, so I tend to use a wash rag only about half the time. Okay, less.
I didn’t volunteer the information at the time, but I never considered it a problem. I mean, a bar of soap is a bar of soap. I don’t pretend that it’s always magically clean; I know that soap can get, and often is, very dirty. Don’t all bars of soap come packaged with a complimentary curly hair? But I know that soap dissolves pretty quickly, and whenever I step into the shower the first thing I do with the soap is hold it under the water and rub it between my hands, theorizing that if the person who used it before me “rubbed it on his skin” then a moment under the running water will wash away the outer layer and make everything all right again. That’s what I tell myself. I doubt many medical studies have been done to confirm this.
More important bathroom information, to me, is how people dry off after the shower. I mean to ask, which camp are you in: Do you dry yourself while standing in the tub, or do you step out right away and drip on the mat while you dry? Everybody in my family seems to like to step out right away. I guess that’s what they think the mat’s for, while I tend to feel that the mat’s there to keep your feet dry. There is no “dry” after they’ve been in there.
Barb and Sean spent the morning going to garage sales today, and even picked up a few useful items to populate the sparse furnishings of our house in the country. Barb somehow got a sewing machine table into the car, proving once again how amazing she can be when it comes to packing. Tim scored a weight bench, barbell and weights, which he was damned happy for. Sean bought gifts. Wherever Sean goes, he buys gifts and squirrels them away to pass out when the occasion demands it.
The last day of my first week at work in the civilian world ended rather quietly as I paid a visit to the loan services department, where I learned the ins and outs of mortgage loans, adjustable loans, payouts, and cutting checks to pay for mortgage satisfactions. I’m actually starting to understand what all that means, so my teachers must be getting through to me at last.
Finally, the very best news for last: Barb’s employed now, too. The Department of Transportation called and offered her the job she interviewed for last week, and she starts on Monday. She must have made quite a good impression at the interview, because they originally told her they wouldn’t have any news for her until the first of September, but they decided to start her a week early. We’re both breadwinners again.
It turned out to be a great day to be outside; there was only a slight overcast, but that helped keep the temps cool while we drove through Sun Prairie where Barb and I checked out the yard sales. We stopped at maybe a dozen, but there were probably dozens more; even so, we found plenty of crap we didn’t need, such as a planter in the shape of a cat, and even one or two things we really did need, like the Corel dishes and cups for the boys to chip and break. We stopped at one place where they were selling old hardcover books for a quarter apiece, and I bought a matched set of six Hemingway novels for a buck and a quarter. Score! No lawn mower, though. We finally broke down and bought a new one from the hardware store in Cottage Grove.
Drivel has been pretty sparse lately because I’ve got that darned job to go to now. I’ll have to settle into a routine before I can find a good hour to sit down in a quiet corner and babble about nothing for the benefit of this goofy documentation of the innermost junk heap of my mind.
I work in a bank now. Yes, I know! In a bank! Sometimes life is the most unexpected occurrence taking place in the most unlikely occasion. Maybe Barb feels the same way about her job in the DOT. We go into town in the morning and come back at suppertime, just like regular people now, only our house is nearly empty except for the suitcases and the dining room table we bought at an auction last weekend. We sleep on a futon on the floor of the bedroom, sort of Japanese-style but when I sit alongside the bed to read or type on the laptop it feels more like camping out. The only room in the house that looks and feels more or less normal is the kitchen, and that’s a great relief after eating way too many meals in restaurants, believe it or not.
Sean woke this morning, slowly but deliberately dragged his semiconscious self to the kitchen to feast on his daily allowance of cereal and became absolutely incandescent after finding that Tim ate the entire box of honey-nut Cheerios and left none for his elder brother! The humanity! He was so hot about it that he went on for almost a half-hour, working up to the claim that he usually eats two or three bowls of cereal every morning and, on his own, can make a box of cereal last at least a week. That would require a box the size of a suitcase, wouldn’t it? I asked him. He didn’t dispute me and I left the bullshit flag flying high atop its jackstaff.
Sean rode into town with Barb and I this morning; Tim stayed at home to wash his clothes. He’s very particular about the way his clothes are washed, and wanted to have plenty of time to give them the proper care. He sorts them carefully; colors go only with same colors, and everything gets washed on “delicate” and fluff-dried on low heat. In stark contrast, his brother Sean sorts nothing, and never thins the load. If he’s got thirty pounds of dirty clothes to wash, they all get jammed into one washing machine, and when he takes them out of the dryer he brings them home by picking out the biggest shirt he’s got and stuffing all his clothes into it.
I’m still working at the bank. It’s been two whole weeks now so they must have had some time to realize the full implications of their decision to hire me, but they seem to be willing to live with that, and I continue to be a cog in the machine that makes decisions about your credit report every day. Just think of it! Now stop.
Denise is the sophomore girl who lives in the other side of our duplex; same age as Tim, and they’ll be going to the same school. She stopped by with her younger sisters a couple times before to say hello and ask to see the cats; I guess they spotted Bonkers and Boo in the windows and wanted to pet them, and Barb was only too happy to accommodate them.
Last night, Denise came to our door and when I answered she asked if she could come inside to meet the boys. I heard her friends giggling in the darkness outside, so I’m pretty sure they put her up to it. Pretty brave of her to actually to go through with it, don’t you think? I invited her in and showed her where the boys rooms were downstairs, then eavesdropped on the conversation, not that there was much to hear. She introduced herself, and the boys, who can babble incessantly when it comes to video games or war, could only manage to mumble, “Hi, my name is begone,” substituting their names for the word “begone,” although it wasn’t an entirely necessary substitution. They couldn’t have chased her away faster with a machine gun. Tim could have asked her about school, teachers, homework — hell, even with his vocabulary suddenly limited to one-syllable grunts he could have asked her when the school bus came to pick them up. But no. Too much bother. Wouldn’t be cool to look eager. Denise said something about her friends and beat a hasty retreat.
Barb and I celebrated sixteen years of wedded bliss today, by the way. I caught her completely off-guard when she said something about a gift exchange and it turned out I actually had one to give her. It was a toy frog that stuck out its tongue when she squeezed it. I think she liked it a lot more than I expected her to.
I just finished reading the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises. I think they made us read this in high school, and I think I remember hating it then. I think I hated it because the characters all seemed like drunken idiots. Man, they could drink! What was it about people in novels and movies set in the twenties and thirties? Was everybody drunk all the time back then, or was it just the writers? Seemed like the first thing anybody did when they got up in the morning was fix a martini, and if you were a character in a Hemingway novel you spent the rest of the day bar-hopping until you collapsed. If you collapsed. Some of them drank for days without sleeping. And that’s my highly learned review of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Nine ways my new job is way better than my old job:
1. Windows galore! I’m not sure, but I think I can appreciate this a lot more than you can because for the past twenty years I’ve worked exclusively in buildings that had no windows at all. There was never a view. We used to make joke about this all the time, but now that I work in a suite in the corner of the building that pokes out into capitol square, just high enough to be able to see over the oak trees, I stop to gaze out across the square at least a half-dozen times a day. I had no idea how important that would turn out to be for my well-being.
2. Capitol Square is gorgeous! I work in the center of town, literally a stone’s throw from the capitol building. The capitol is surrounded by a wide lawn under 40-foot-tall oak trees, under which people come out at noon to eat their lunch, sit and read, sun themselves, and relax. Every other place I’ve worked before this was built on the cheapest piece of real estate available — when it wasn’t a flat, open field, it was a huge pile of rubble. There’s just no comparison.
3. Good coffee. Wow. You have no idea how bad coffee can be until you’ve drunk what passes for coffee on American military bases. Not to say there isn’t bad coffee here; but I had no idea there’s so much more good coffee. There’s a coffee shop on State Street that I could happily live in.
4. Wearing a button-down shirt and slacks to the office isn’t so bad. The higher-up mucky-mucks in the military decided about ten years ago they could improve morale by making us wear the duck-hunter outfit all the time. “We’re all warriors” my ass. I sat at a desk every day I was in the military. A comfortable pair of slacks and a shirt that brings a splash of color to the office is way better for my attitude. I don’t know about wearing a tie; I think I could do without that.
5. Lunchtime. There’s a mind-boggling number of things I can see and do within walking distance of the office, not the least of which is eat a really good lunch at one of the restaurants in town. Probably the most interesting thing to do is sit on the lawn in capitol square and watch people stroll by. There were colorful people in the military, but there was none of the variety I can see in just an hour on the square.
6. I answer to one boss. And I don’t have to call him “sir.”
7. Everybody calls me “Dave.” It’s pretty cool to have a first name again.
8. Don’t gotta move for a while. There’s a slight chance that if I keep working at the bank they might someday ask me to work at a branch in Janesville or Sheboygan, but they will never, ever send me to Afghanistan or Iraq.
9. Somebody else has trash detail. I throw garbage into my trash bin, but I never have to take it out. Or mop the floor. And nobody gets on my case about it.
I thought I’d seen kids on a sugar high before, but it turned out I’ve never seen anything like a sugar high until after we all had a piece of Tim’s birthday cake last night. It was delicious cake, and the frosting was especially yummy, but it had also been laid on with a trowel and was so sweet that Tim couldn’t finish his huge piece. Sean had no trouble packing away a piece the same size, however, and for about an hour after that he was the most hyperactive adult I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean it. Cocaine addicts only wish they got the kind of high he was on. If he had spent the energy he had on bricklaying, he could have rebuilt both towers of the World Trade Center in about an hour, but instead he literally – and I literally mean literally – bounced around the house and babbled in a language that was incomprehensible to the rest of us non-sugar-enhanced people.
I can’t believe I wasted two hours of my life watching yet another Star Wars movie. Seemed like more than two hours, but they say even a few minutes’ torture will last an eternity.
Revenge of the Sith was supposed to explain how Luke Skywalker’s father became Darth Vader, how the Jedi Knights were betrayed and killed off, and how the Republic was deformed into the Empire. For your sake, I’ll tell you how it happened so you don’t have to endure what I went through: Luke Skywalker’s father was a moody, shallow, jealous bastard, but it seems that none of the supposedly wise and powerful Jedi Knights could see that. The Chancellor of the Republic was actually an evil Sith guy with the power to toast people into crispy critters with lightning bolts that flew from his fingertips, but all he had to do to upset Skywalker’s delicate ego was whip a little flattery on him and mumble some mumbo-jumbo about cheating death to make him kill everybody that got in his way. And the Chancellor turned the Republic into an Empire by standing up in the hall of congress and declaring that the Republic was now an Empire.
What I hated, hated, hated about this movie was that it moved at a crawl. It was two hours of the most unbearable dialogue I’ve ever heard. Blah blah blah, dark side, blah blah, they don’t trust me, blah blah I don’t understand. Tim kept count: somebody said "I don’t understand" at least thirty-one times. The first (and still the best) Star Wars movie had one or two moments when the characters paused to talk to one another, but for the most part it was action from beginning to end. This latest movie only thought it had action, but what it had was an endless string of sword fights, and they moved so fast — to make up for the brooding dialogue, I’m guessing — that most of the time you couldn’t tell who was winning.
Let’s talk about the bad guys. One of them is named Count Dookie. Count Dookie? What the hell? Who thought kiddie slang for poop would make a scary name for a bad guy? And why is the movie’s baddest bad guy the least scary of them all? The Chancellor, who was really the Evil Emperor, was so obviously a bad guy pretending to be a good guy that he was pretty boring. The only time I felt like jumping out of my seat was when I wanted to slap all the Jedi Knights for being so clueless about what he was up to.
This movie had all the subtlety of a train wreck with none of the excitement. See it at your peril.
Once again, I have an internet connection. This is so important to me because without it I can’t post this drivel for the now-impressive throng of almost four or five people to read. I can’t watch stupid videos of people cutting down trees that land on their cars, and I can’t fight with my youngest son to get a half-hour to do any of this stuff. (Usually he’s pretty good about letting me get on, mostly because he stays up until three o’clock in the morning chatting with his friends and searching for new stupid videos, so he’s not really missing much by giving me thirty minutes in the afternoon.) Having access to that kind of knowledge is so rewarding; I don’t know how any of us ever did without it. We should’ve all dried up and blown away for want of the internet these last two months. We got a little fix here and there by stopping at the library, which has public access terminals and a thirty-minute time limiting software program to make sure the adults have to keep it short and then move along, even though the neighborhood hacker kids can override it in a heartbeat and keep on playing Monsters & Magic, or whatever their crazy on-line games are called. Then, after we moved to Cottage Grove and started working full-time, we couldn’t get to the library much at all to pick up the books we wanted, let alone surf the internet. I usually had just enough time to read my e-mail before we had to leave to make it home in time for dinner. Now, that was rough. Yep, I don’t know how we ever survived without the internet, but it’s back and we’re web-surfing vidiots once again. Technology’s such an wonderfully enriching thing.
The Blackhawk airport, a small airstrip just a mile or so from where we live in Cottage Grove, held an old-fashioned fly-in today. It’s been a while since I’ve been to one, so we swung past on our way to the big airport in Madison to sample the hospitality and look over the planes that were parked in the grass. The hospitality was a plate of bratwurst and beans, and the planes were mostly two-person high-wing jobbers of the type that I used to fly when I was in high school.
Back then I used to take lessons from a guy named Bill, who usually hollered instead of spoke to people, as if he were always seated just inches away from the roar of an unmufflered airplane engine. He taught me to fly in an airplane so small that we were practically in each other’s laps, but we had no headphones so we both had to shout like that to speak to each other when we were up in the air. He just didn’t seem to know how to stop after the engine was off and we got out of the airplane.
Bill was a really great teacher. He knew how to make me realize my skills and challenge my weaknesses, he never dressed me down for my mistakes unless I forgot them, and most important of all he knew how to make it fun to learn how to fly. On one trip he pointed out a couple of girls in bikinis sunning themselves on the roof of a farm house. “We’re going to surprise them if they’re still there when we come back,” he said. We were gone less than an hour and saw they were still there as we headed home, so Bill throttled the engine back until the propeller was spinning silently, then dropped the flaps as if he were going to land and glided to within a hundred feet or so of the roof, gunning the engine as we went past. The girls sat up surprised, then waved to us. “You have just been buzzed!” Bill hollered, waving back.
On another trip we passed directly over my house and I could see my family on the lawn, Mom, Dad, my Grandmother and Aunt and one or two cousins, watching our plane. “Let’s give them something to remember,” Bill barked, and on the count of three we both stomped on the left rudder pedal. The plane rolled in a quick snap that made it look as though it was suddenly falling out of the sky, which in fact it was until we stomped on the opposite pedal and climbed back up to our cruising altitude. I couldn’t help but laugh when we did that; it was like a carnival ride. Bill was laughing, too, but he was imagining the reaction of my family, still watching us as we flew away. “I’ll bet they soiled their drawers,” he cackled. In fact they had all shared a collective gasp, but nothing worse. I took lessons from Bill until I went to college, when I didn’t have money to continue my lessons, else I’d probably be a bush pilot today.
We put Sean on a plane to Washington, D.C., this afternoon. We’re not sure if it gets easier to send our children away or if we’re so used to coming and going by now that this seems to be simply another part of the great scheme of things. We got there just a tad early, so we sat in the departure lounge to chat before Sean disappeared through the security cordon. Just over our heads in the lounge was a racing plane from the 1930’s or so, hanging by a single cable. Just an hour before, Tim turned down a free ride at the fly-in because he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of flying in one of those small planes, but he wasn’t uncomfortable with having one dangling by a thread over his chair.
Our house is starting to look like we live there, instead of a place where we just dumped our stuff on the floor, which is exactly what it was for about the first week or so that we lived here because we had no furniture other than a futon. We started collecting furniture almost right away and have been bringing pieces home at a rate of about one or two each week, and this weekend we found a bookcase, so our books aren’t piled on the floor of the living room any longer. (No matter where we go, even if we end up living in a box under a bridge, we will always have a pile of books.) It’s a pretty nice bookcase, too, for something that came from a garage sale, solidly made, covered in blond veneer and, best of all, cheap. As Barb and I went around to the yard sales in town yesterday morning we also found a small desk for the computer and a chair I can slouch in to write drivel and work the crosswords, too. After we spent the big bucks on the useful stuff, we coughed up a couple more bucks to buy some crap we really didn’t need, then went home for lunch.
The doors on the cupboards in this place have no latches, just self-closing hinges so that when you let go of them they close with a tappety-tap-tap-tap sound. It’s one of those sounds you hardly notice during the day, but at night it becomes strangely louder and more annoying. Boo has learned this, and added it to her bag of tricks to get me up in the morning. When she’s ready to be fed, she steps into the bathroom across the hall from our bedroom and deftly toes the door on the cupboard under the sink, opening it just enough to make it go tappety-tap-tap-tap. Once she’s got a rhythm going, the tappety-tap-tap-tap doesn’t stop until I get out of bed to either feed her or sprinkle water in her face, and since I get to make the choice, she gets wet.
There’s a coffee machine at work that gives out cups for free, which is a lot more generous than any other place I’ve worked in the last twenty years. Unfortunately, the coffee tastes like ass. But no fear, there’s all kinds of coffee to go within a five-minute walk from the front door of the bank. I think most people go to Scott’s, right next door, for a hot cuppa joe and a morning Danish. When I go there I get a peanut butter and chocolate chip cookie that’s as big as my face and much on it all morning. There’s a Starbuck’s just a bit further down the street, but with so many other coffee shops in the neighborhood I haven’t tried that yet. My favorite is Michelangelo’s at the top of State Street. I usually get decaf, and theirs is the best I’ve had so far.
This is so weird, because coffee was my least favorite drink as recently as a year ago, despite the best efforts of hundreds of coworkers over the years. I’ve always loved the smell of coffee but I couldn’t make myself like the taste for the longest time. The Japanese drink some delicious coffee, though, and they offered it to me all the time. Since it wouldn’t do to refuse their hospitality I learned to like it, and shortly after that I started asking for it. That really knocked my Mom for a loop, because she couldn’t believe I didn’t drink coffee when I was a shift worker all those years, but it really made sense because most of my coworkers drank soft drinks. Coffee really isn’t as popular with the young military crowd these days as it might have been before, and anyway sodas don’t make your breath stink the way coffee does, unless you count the way your teeth smell as the sugar rots them out of your skull.
Speaking of oral hygiene, I remember this one guy who used to drink so much soda that he’d bring his own six-pack to work with him every day. He also ate a lot of candy bars and microwave popcorn. That guy put a lot of sugar in his face, but I’d guess by the looks of his mossy teeth that he rarely, if ever, brushed or flossed. There was so much gunk between them that he didn’t appear to have individual teeth at all, just one wrap-around, brownish bone behind each of his lips. Nobody liked to talk to that guy much, or even to sit next to him.
I’ve been thinking about it too much; now I’ve got a rotten taste in my mouth. Gotta go brush.
It’s been another day of processing foreclosures, seizing bank accounts, re-titling repossessed cars and altering other people’s credit reports. You know, I used to be a Master Sergeant in the most powerful military organization on the face of the planet, but I’m here to tell you that there’s way more power in being an entry-level clerical worker in a bank. You should fear me.
We got to arguing about Bruce Springsteen the other day. That’s the kind of family we are; we don’t shrink from arguing about the controversial topics that break up other people’s relationships, we dive right into even the messiest debates in an effort to find the truth. So here’s the question we tried to answer in the matter of Bruce Springsteen: Does the howling cacophony of his voice raise his poetic verse to a level that celebrates the common working folk, or is he a talentless hack who couldn’t carry a tune in a backpack?
Even though I like some of his songs, I have always gone with the backpack argument. Springsteen can write some good tunes, but he can’t sing worth a crap, and I think, however wrongly, that this has a negative impact on his recordings. Call me oversensitive, I guess. Sean and Barb think he’s not only one of the greatest song writers who ever lived but the only one who can sign those songs in a way that brings them to life. I guess there’s something to be said for having your own signature singing style, but the key to that would be the ability to sing well. Howling at the tops of your lungs doesn’t count. The way I look at it, if you can’t sing, it doesn’t matter how good the words are or how much you truly believe in your song, and about the last thing that matters is how loudly you yell. If you’re a bad singer, you’re just bad and you should hire somebody to sing the words for you.
I don’t mind Springsteen’s songs when somebody else sings them. Somebody who can sing, for instance. Even Manfred Man did a better job on Blinded By The Light than Springsteen ever could. Try to tell that to a Springsteen fan, though. It usually ends in tears.
Today is my last day as an enlisted man in the Air Force. Tomorrow I’ll officially be a civilian. I’ve been acting like a civilian for quite some time now, and it’s been a lot of fun, but on September 1st, there won’t be any more pretending. Been there, done that, got the “pension.”
Mind you, they can still recall me to active duty in a heartbeat; they were very careful to point that out to me as I was on my way out the door. There’s a two-year window through which they can pull me, should the need arise, without having to justify it in any way other than, “We need the warm bodies.” And, for that matter, with just a little more work they can recall me at any time before I drop dead or become so decrepit that I’m no good to anybody anyway. Now there’s something most people don’t think about when they sign up for the college benefits.
We were in town just a week or two ago visiting the farmer’s market when Barb stopped at a booth where some anti-war protesters were chatting with passers-by. She came away with a button on her backpack that read, “Bring Joe Home.”
“Who’s Joe?” I asked her. Turned out that Joe was a Reservist who was recalled to active duty and sent to Iraq just a little while back, and the protesters are trying to raise public awareness of how things work in the military. After they explained what happened to Joe, Barb surprised the protesters by remarking, “He didn’t do his eight years, did he?” From the moment anybody signs on the dotted line, he’s obligated to serve at least eight years on active duty; those eighteen-month special short terms the Army’s been offering don’t mean squat. If you get out of the Army after a year and a half, it just means you have to punch out the other six and a half years on weekends in the reserves, or 24/7 in Iraq on the Joe plan.
I’m sure Joe’s not a bad guy, and I’d like to see Joe come home, too. Heck, I wish he’d never been taken away from home, but I’m pretty sure Joe, like the rest of us, gave very little thought as to the meaning of paragraph 10a on the back of his enlistment form, which says essentially that he’s signed up for life now, thank you and draw a pair of boots and an M-16 on the way through the door. If the full impact of that paragraph had hit him, or me, or anybody else who signs up, or lets their kids sign up ...
How the hell did I get on this rant? I’m sorry, I meant to spend this time jumping up and down, giddy with freedom, howling at the moon. What this calls for is a beer. No, beers. My treat. Who’s with me?