This is it: Today is the day that I finally stop reminding you all that I’m no longer in the military. All right, all right, keep it down; I know I’ve been insufferable about it, but can’t you see it’s a very big deal to me? Okay, time once and for all to move on.
Here’s a sample of the job I’ve chosen for myself: I prepared and printed about a half-million delinquency notices today, stuffed them in envelopes, addressed the envelopes, and stuck address labels on the postage-paid return envelopes. Took all afternoon. Okay, in actual fact I did about twenty of them; it only felt like a half-million because it took so damned long. My lips were chapped from sub-vocalizing the addresses and account numbers; I have a much easier time typing ten-digit numbers if I mumble them while I’m tapping away at the keyboard. Yep, I’m one of those. Most of the people in my office are, so I’m in good company.
Back in Denver, I used to work at a computer that was especially intimidating to new trainees. No matter how confident they were about the subject matter, the first week or so I that I made them work on the computer, called a GSD, they were very timid about entering data and hitting the “execute” button. It was only after they started cursing at the computer that I felt they were ready to sit on their own. They’d usually start with a quietly mumbled, “What the?” when it didn’t do what they expected it to do. The next step was to ask it a point-blank question, something like, “There’s nothing wrong with that! What’s your problem?” I remember one day my boss came by to ask how my new trainee was coming along. “Pretty good,” I answered, “he’s starting to talk back to the GSD.” The final test that they were ready was when they cursed it loudly, for everybody to hear; they were doing even better if they slapped it around a bit.
So I’ve always been a little mystified about the idea that talking to yourself, or in this case a computer monitor, is considered weird; seems normal to me, but, as I said, I’m in pretty good company. The first day or two on the job that I heard my boss talking while he was in his office, I thought he might’ve been calling to me, but it turned out he just wanted to cuss out his computer software. Now that I think about it, just about all the bosses I’ve worked for did that. I must've stopped worrying about it years ago. It’s not like they sit around babbling to themselves, and besides, it's a widely-held opinion, no matter how much the IT department dislikes it, that computers deserve all the abuse they get.
On to the other O-folk: I answered the door this morning to find four very pretty young ladies who were on their way to meet the school bus and stopped by to pick up Tim. Nothing even remotely like that ever happened to me. When I was fifteen I would’ve given my left arm to have four young women walk me to the bus stop. Tim very casually grabbed his backpack and headed out the door to join them like it was no big deal at all. Later, he told us that was the best school he’s ever been to yet, and I thought, “Well, duh!” But really, I’m just so relieved that he met friends before school even started, that the first day of school went so well, and that he liked the school itself more than any other school he’s been to. All that house-hunting to be in the right school district paid off.
I’ve got a backpack with my stuff in it that I carry wherever I go. Tim likes to call it my “man-purse;” he’s pretty good at busting my chops that way. After a little experimentation I’ve managed to figure out which few necessities I need to carry with me and which ones are just a lot of extra baggage. I don’t need to carry it around if it’s just a nuisance, and I really don’t want to carry it around if it’s going to turn into an actual purse filled with every damned thing and the kitchen sink.
There’s a big main pocket for me to carry my lunch, the most pressing necessity and the reason I started carrying a “man purse” in the first place. I tried carrying it in a brown bag and in a Ziploc and a plastic shopping bag and they all suck to the max. I could use the brown bag only once or twice before it broke; the Ziploc fell out of my hands like it was covered in soap; and the plastic bag made me look like a hobo. The “man purse” was easy to carry and held plenty of grub. I also stick a small notebook in it so I can jot down drivelish thoughts as they occur to me, and I carry a book to read for those times when I have to wait in line for something.
There’s a pen and pencil in a small outside pocket, except when I really need one. I put my wallet in there, too, on the theory that it’s easy to get to, but from time to time the outside pocket becomes the most inaccessible place on earth and I haven’t yet figured out why; I only know that when I have to pay, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance I won’t be able to even find the damned thing. It’s got some kind of voodoo hex on it. It’s also got a hook for my keys so I don’t have to carry anything in my pants pockets except a hankie and some spare change. This is even more valuable than the capacity to carry my lunch. I never realized how much crap I used to carry around in my pockets until I didn’t do it any more.
There’s a secret inner pocket, too, where I can stash a banana, which I always intend to eat for a snack after lunch but always forget about until it starts to stink and dribble all over everything else in the pack.
A small die-cast Volkswagen Van I bought at the train station in Towada, Japan, dangles from one of the zippers. It’s got a tiny clock inside it that I never reset when I left; it still tells me the time in Tokyo. The wheels are loose on it, so it goes jing-a-ling-a-ling when I walk down the street to get coffee at Michelangelo’s on State Street, a block from the bank. I’ve had that little Volks jingling away for so long I don’t even hear it any more, but it’s juuust annoying enough to make passers-by turn and look. It’ll probably make one of them beat me senseless some day.
To celebrate my first civilian paycheck, we had dinner tonight at the Black Bear, a tavern in Cottage Grove. The walleye there is delicious, and they had Octoberfest beer from the Capitol Hill Brewery on tap. It’s just a short walk home from the Bear, but by the time I’ve filled myself up it feels more like a waddle. In case you’re wondering, I brought home roughly half what I was making in the military. Barb brings home the other half now; that and my small pension helps defer the cost of beers and a delicious dinner at places like the Black Bear. If gas keeps going up, though, Tim will have to go looking for some weekend work. Or we could ditch the car and hitch to work. You never know until you try.
Spotted at the Black Bear tonight: A guy who thought he had combed his hair in a classic duck tail, but instead looked startlingly like Donald Trump. They serve many varieties of good beer at the Black Bear; perhaps one of his friends will eventually get likkered up enough to tell him.
Tim’s favorite moment in school came at the end of gym class when the teacher ran out of things for the kids to do, so she told the class, “Go ahead and take out your balls and do whatever you want with them.” Snickers from the boys, disgusted looks from the girls directed at the boys, and the teacher immediately rolled her eyes. “Okay, very funny.”
We went to a legendary garage sale today, one that’s apparently been going on every year for the last eleventy-twenty years at a house in Midvale Heights, near the University in Madison. The whole neighborhood was supposed to be having yard sales, but when I go to a yard sale I expect to find fully-filled tool boxes for two dollars, old-fashioned vinyl records for a nickel each and stereo components for five bucks tops. The people in Midvale Heights thought quite a lot of their yard sale junk, though, because almost none of it was priced below five bucks. There was one sale sponsored by the Humane Society, though, where we walked away with some lamps (“Fiat lux!”) and a couple of coffee mugs — like we really need those — for just a few dollars, and at this lady’s never-ending yard sale we bought some LP records of Broadway musical soundtracks for fifty cents each, so even though the rest of the yard sales were pretty disappointing we did a respectable day’s work foraging the two good sales.
On the way to the car, we stopped at one last garage sale where I noticed an old transistor radio sitting with a couple of alarm clocks. Everybody at work has a radio in each of their offices and I was the only one working in a cone of silence, so I wanted one for my desk if I could find one for a buck. It was an old GE model that dated from maybe the mid 70’s, your basic transistor radio in a black plastic case, the kind that you used to keep in the garage or take to the beach. I took it into the garage and asked the lady what she wanted for it. “Four dollars,” she said.
“Oh.” Not the dollar I’d hoped for. “Thanks,” I said, and put the radio back.
“How about two dollars?” she asked as I started to walk away. It wasn’t the one-dollar special I’d hoped for, but I couldn’t go back to a quiet desk on Tuesday, so I agreed and picked up the radio.
“It’s a very old radio,” she said, as I handed her the two bucks.
“Yes, I guess it is,” I agreed. To some people, maybe even to me when I think about it, 1975 seems like a very long time ago.
“My great-grandfather owned that radio,” she said. “Very old. Maybe very valuable.”
“Maybe so,” I said, thinking that it might be worth something if her great-grandfather was Marconi and he somehow put this particular radio together while working for the Japanese in the 1970’s. I’ll have to look into that.
The O-folk went downtown for A Taste of Madison, one of those festivals where you pay five bucks for a tiny smidgen of exotic food. Four dollars gets you two thumb-sized bundles of shrimp, for instance. On the other hand, two dollars bought a sandwich filled with spicy, shredded chicken that was delicious, so I guess you can’t really tell.
We parked a couple blocks from the bandstand set up on MLK Boulevard, where two guys on electric guitars were trying to set the record for punishing the largest number of people with over-amplified, discordant noise. I don’t know what they thought they were playing, but in the real world it sounded like demolition charges big enough to bring down all the buildings on the isthmus. And that’s not just this old fogie whining about the young whippersnappers these days; Tim turned to me and said, “These guys really suck.” How could I disagree? The guy’s an expert on music. Just ask him.
The first food we sampled was a beer, because we’re in Wisconsin and there wasn’t a bratwurst stand in sight. Capitol Brewery had a lock on all beer sales at the festival; they had tents set up at every corner and in the middle of every block around capitol square, selling their tasty weiss beer, their yearly Octoberfest brew, and a hoppier ale I forget the name of now. We tried them all. The only bad thing I have to say about them was that, at $4.50 a beer, I thought they were price-gouging, but they were the only game in town. What you gonna do?
(Mandatory disclaimer: I was the designated driver and would have to drive home later in the afternoon, so I had a beer early in the fest and then sipped water and coffee the rest of the day. I hate it when that happens. In exchange, the wife unit bought tickets to next month’s beer festival and promised to be my personal taxi service so Jim and I can sample as many of the wonderful brews on hand as we want. I think I married her in anticipation of this event.)
We went from tent to tent around the square, as was customary for events like this one, stopping when we spied some food that made us want to wolf it down like starving hyenas. Even though most of the food was overpriced, everything I sampled was very near good enough to replace sex, but only almost. Barb thought so, too. About how good the food was. She didn’t say about the sex.
Weird bit of Madison trivia: Whenever there's a festival in capital square, and there are many, everybody walks in a counter-clockwise direction. Not most of the people, not a large majority — everyone. Walking in the other direction is like peeing into the wind; you’re an idiot if you try it. Make a note; there’ll be a test at the end of this page.
We’re pink as boiled lobsters! Barb and I went to an auction today in Mount Horeb, which is about ten or twelve miles west of Madison. We thought we went prepared this time, but the auction was outdoors and it was a hot, sunny day. We brought our camp chairs and a lunch, but neither one of us brought a hat or sun block, not so much as an umbrella for shade. Not very smart. (I could have sold an umbrella for twenty bucks that afternoon.) There was no way to get out of the sun and still participate in the auction, so the back of my neck ended up looking like a dirt farmer’s.
The heat and the sun had one predictable side effect: Everybody got a lot more cranky much faster. The last auction we went to dragged on until six-thirty in the evening; this one didn’t make it past three in the afternoon. They began by selling each individual item on the table; if he saw a dime on the table, the auctioneer would try to sell it, starting at five bucks. After gabbling “Who’llgivemefivedollarsfivedollarsfivedollars” in the hot sun for four hours, however, they just wanted to get rid of the stuff and were selling it by the box for a buck. They would’ve gotten much the same results if they’d just thrown it in the air and told everybody to catch what they could as it came down. The crowd would have been much happier, too; they got pretty hot and surly and were talking back to the auctioneer by the end of the day.
After the auction, ice cream! Ice cream sounded like the perfect treat after standing in the hot sun, even if my gut can’t tolerate dairy, so I ordered a waffle cone filled with vanilla custard just like everybody else, gulped a couple of Lactaid pills, and hoped. There’s a certain limit to what those pills can do for me, however, and the cones at Culver’s are so big that I can pretty much guarantee I’ll go over that limit. But it was so good.
I got passed by the Weinermobile on the way home. I think I’ll put that “How pathetic is my driving?” bumper sticker on my car now. We weren’t on a back road or anything like that, either, we were on the beltway and I was going about sixty miles per when I noticed the famous sausage on wheels looming large in my rear-view mirror. He really, really wanted to get by me, but there was too much traffic at first so he just rode my bumper for a mile or two. Then I got a break, pulled into the center lane, and he blew past me like I was standing still, leaving me sucking on his exhaust fumes. His license plate said, YUMMY.
I’ve been fiddling around with my calculator trying to noodle out how much we pay to go to work and back. We have a relatively short commute compared to some people, just twelve miles for me, but Barb drops me on the way to her job, which is sixteen miles out and back. At three bucks a gallon (just for argument’s sake; it doesn’t exist around here) my 24-mpg car will make one round trip for four bucks — that’s straight there and straight back, no wrong turns and no stopping at the grocery store for a six-pack on the way home. A car that gets only 20 mpg won’t make the trip for less that $4.80, and a ride in a big old gas-guzzling 16-mpg SUV would cost six dollars. So average about five dollars from here to Madison each day, twenty-five bucks a week to get to work.
My cousin moved to Dodgeville, but she still works in Madison; it’s a 100-mile round-trip for her each day. If she can get 25 mpg out of her car, she burns four gallons every day, sixty bucks every week, and her boyfriend does the same. It seems a bit extreme, but she’s hardly alone: Lots of people who work in Madison commute from urban villages that are 25 – 50 miles away.
So I was wondering: If there was a bus or a train, how many people would pay five bucks to ride in from Cottage Grove, fifteen bucks from Sun Prairie, twenty-five bucks from Dodgeville? It’s just a thought.
(Disclaimer: My car actually gets 25 – 28 miles per gallon, depending on how the stars are aligned. I’m just so proud of my car and how far it can go on a gallon of gas that I point and laugh when I see one of those huge, shiny SUVs stopped at a traffic light. If I cock my ear and listen carefully, I can almost hear the gas in their tanks gurgling down the drain.)
Tomorrow is green and gold day at the bank where I work, so we can wear a shirt with a Packers theme. It’ll come as no surprise to anybody who knows me that I don’t have any Packers jersies or t-shirts. I don’t even have so much as a green polo shirt, so I’ll dress down in one of my two pullovers and a pair of khaki pants for casual Friday.
Every day is casual Friday for Barb, who works for the state at the department of transportation. She says that dress standards in her office are what is called real casual. She goes in every day in a pair of jeans and a pullover, which makes her just about the dressiest person in her office building. When I sighed and wondered how nice it would be to have a relaxed dress code like that, she pee-shawed me and said there’s more to a satisfying job than the dress code. The ones who get to wear jeans to work always say that, don’t they?
Speaking of dress options, I went to an auction last weekend wearing a shirt that Barb made for me out of fabric with a very brightly-colored print of cartoon characters. Out of nowhere a young lady walked up to me and said something like, “Don’t I know you from the Peace Corps?”
“I doubt it,” I said, “I’ve never been in the Peace Corps.” But I had to ask her why she thought it was a possibility.
“Because everybody in the Peace Corps wears clothes that look like that,” she told me. She’d been in the Peace Corps, but her tastes in clothing must have changed since then because she was dressed like most other people in muted colors. (There should be a photo with this drivel; I’ll make sure I update it later.)
I’m sleeping on a bed once again. Barb and I were sleeping on a futon on the floor for about three weeks before we finally said, “To hell with this crap,” and went to the next mattress sale we found in the Sunday color supplements, which happened to be at the goofily-named Slumberland. When you buy the cheapest mattress on sale you definitely get what you pay for, but let me tell you that stretching out on even the cheapest mattress beats sleeping on the floor no matter how rugged you think you are. The delivery guys brought the beds to our place yesterday afternoon and set them up on frames — Tim got one, too — with tools from their handy utility belts, so we were sleeping in posturepedic comfort right away.
My youngest son actually believes that I might buy him a dog some day soon. “I’ll take care of it,” he has said to me, just as every other boy on earth has said before to every dad who caved in and bought a dog, then ended up walking it and picking up its poop. Gosh, how I’d love to pick up dog poop. That really sounds like fun.
I just spent forty-five minutes raking our cats’ litter box. That’s supposed to be Tim’s job, because Bonkers is Tim’s cat. We buy the clumping litter to make it easy and keep a huge box of it on hand, so it’s not like it’s a difficult job. There was enough cat poop in that box to re-create Mount Rushmore — there might have even been room for an extra face or two.
But he’d take good care of that dog every day, you betcha.
Japanese barbers did two things much better than American barbers: First, and most important of all, when they finished cutting my hair, they put a lot of effort into making sure I wouldn’t be shedding the rest of the day. I might find a few stray hairs behind my ears, but I never had the experience so common here in the States of brushing my hair back with my fingers and finding myself in a blizzard of my own hair clippings. One or two of the barbers I’ve been to in America used a hair drier or a vacuum cleaner to try to get the clippings out of my hair; by contrast, all the Japanese barbers I went to tried to beat the clippings out of me. Some of them would brush my hair, but usually they’d just swat, scrub, or worry it out with their hands. The one I saw most often on Security Hill would curl her fingers into crabby little claws and go at my head with more energy than a dog with his favorite chew toy. It scared the hell out of me the first time it happened, but when I realized I could get my hair cut on my lunch hour and wouldn’t have worry about digging and scratching at stray hairs down my shirt the rest of the day, I felt differently. Back in the land of round door knobs, though, I have to remember to schedule my haircuts at a time when I can go home and jump into the shower afterwards or suffer what feels like an attack by all the fleas in Dogworld.
I think I mentioned before that Japanese barbers give you a back rub after your hair cut, so I won’t go on about that, other than to say I miss it.
Laundry day today. Barb went to work to put in some overtime, leaving me in Cottage Grove with just a bicycle and my own two feet to get around. Shopping for supper later ought to prove interesting. On the other hand, I don’t have to haul all our dirty clothes to the laundromat, now that we’ve got our own machines. A two-man Frick and Frack team delivered and installed them last week; one of them would wield the tools while the other told me jokes, then the guy doing the work would tag off and tell the jokes for a while. Not only did they deliver and put on a show, they performed near-miracles, too. The washer and dryer fit into the tiny utility room with about a quarter-inch to spare, but they didn’t miss a beat when it came to hooking up the water, electricity and vent. They’d done this before. They’d probably installed machines under circumstances I couldn’t imagine, and probably a few so scary I didn’t want to even hear about them.
The wash machine that we bought, by the way, was advertised to hold 16 bath towels. I don’t know where you get sixteen towels that will fit inside that thing. Munchkin Land, probably.
Today’s theme is: "Shopping"
We stopped to pick up a couple cups of coffee at the PDQ and as I turned to take mine to the counter I saw this rack of toys and candy and ... what is that? Right there, in the center of the photo where the sign says "novelties," those flesh-colored, battery-powered ... things? Did they put the marital aids for sale with the kids’ candies by mistake? This isn’t just my perverted brain working; I pointed it out to the other three adults in the store with me and they all laughed at what I thought I saw, too. I can’t believe Focus On The Family hasn’t jumped all over these things. So to speak.
I went to the hardware store to buy a new pull chain for a light fixture in our house. The total purchase came to $2.42, and I had quarters and pennies in my pocket change, so I gave the 18-year-old cashier two dollars, two quarters and two cents, because I didn’t want any more pennies. First, he looked puzzled that I gave him something other than forty-two cents. Then he picked up each coin as he very carefully counted how much I gave him. At long last, he punched it into the computer, which told him to give me a dime. If the computer says so, it must be okay.
That pull chain brought out my inner codger. It was an ordinary brass pull chain. Why, in my day that would have cost no more than a nickel, and I griped about it loud and long as Tim and I marched to the cash register. “C’mon, dad, just let it go,” he said, but I think he secretly likes it when I get all codgery and start griping about how things have gone to hell in a handcart since the good old days; it lets him poke fun at me. “Bet you walked five miles uphill in the snow to the store and liked it, too, right dad?”
We had to pass the cell phones on the way to the checkout. I like to oooh and ahhhh over them whenever I can because not too long ago these were just make-believe props on Star Trek. Tim likes to get all gaga over them, too, but he doesn’t get the Star Trek angle, so he thinks it’s just senility creeping up on me when I flip one open and say, “Kirk to Enterprise.” The look on his face says, “I can’t take you anywhere.”
There was a sale at Penny’s! Shirts and slacks half off! Polo shirts for eight dollars! Because my wardrobe was limited to what I could carry here in a suitcase, it was impossible to pass up something like this. Now I don’t have to worry about appearing in public in a shirt I’ve already worn this week. Tim, either. He picked up some fashionably baggy trousers and a sweater nice enough that I may have to “borrow” it once in a while. That ought to tick him the hell off.
When I heard the alarm clock start to bleep this morning, I began to plan to kill somebody. Note: This is a punishable offense in most states. I am a trained professional. Do not try this yourself without proper authorization, available at many recruiting stations in and near your neighborhood.
Murder was on my mind this morning because last Friday Tim’s alarm began to beep at five-thirty and didn’t stop until five forty-five, or maybe six o’clock. No, that’s not entirely true. It stopped much sooner because after listening to about three minutes of steady bleep-bleep-bleeping I stomped down the stairs, snatched it off the floor beside his bed, and crushed it with my bare hands until there was nothing left of it but dust-like particles. And he had the nerve to complain to me later that it was my fault he overslept.
I don’t know what the hell he thought he was doing. Wait, I do know what he thought he was doing: He thought he was getting some extra sleep, just like my maniac bride who has been known to do the same thing (although she has not in many, many moons). These people are of the breed that believes in sleeping through the last hour or so of what was once a good night’s sleep by setting the alarm at an unreasonably early hour and hitting the snooze button until five minutes before it’s very nearly too late to make it to work (or school) on time.
Leaving aside the screwy logic of that belief, these people are up against a nearly immovable object: I’m a light sleeper, and I’ve got a short fuse, as Tim found out when I took his alarm clock away. I’ve done it before, but he thinks the effect wears off after a while and he goes back to his old ways, utterly certain that I’ll cave in and let him even though it’s been medically proven that I’m a lot grumpier and short-tempered than I was as little as five years ago.
Snooze buttons were the brainchild of an evildoer, and those who give in to their sluggish ways will suffer my wrath, at least they will if they live in my house.
Warning: The O-folk are one ugly bunch of grumpy cusses at five o’clock in the morning. We stagger, frowning, puffy-eyed, from our rooms, unable to acknowledge the presence of each other. I don’t think there’s one of us who can speak any recognizable language in the first five or ten minutes after the lights come on, and even the grunts we sometimes find the strength to make sound like they’re so painful we’d be better off avoiding them. The cereal boxes come out, the coffee gets brewed, the cats are fed, and right about the time that the shower starts running one of us speaks the first completely sentence. Not surprisingly, it usually has something to do with who gets to take the first shower.
Every move we make is in slow-motion until after the showers are out of the way, and then it’s a mad dash to make it out the door in time. Barb usually pops a sweat before she takes her seat in the car. I’m never throttled that wide open but sometimes I get a little winded. Tim is the only one who takes his time throughout the morning, way too cool to be in a hurry for anything.
At dinnertime, I made the critical mistake of not being able to think of anything to make for dinner, a mistake only because we ended up going out to the Black Bear, which is a great place to eat but, and here’s the point I’m trying to make, it’s an even better place to drink beer, with some of the best Wisconsin beers on draught at the bar. I had a teriyaki chicken sandwich and two pints of Octoberfest (from the excellent but oddly-named Capital Hill Brewery, which is in Middleton, about five miles or so west of the actual capital hill), and although I managed to waddle home without assistance, I didn’t last more than an hour before my full belly and all that beer made me flop across my bed like a sunburned walrus and fall asleep.
(I’m feeling especially verbose and am about to divulge more information than I probably should about my personal body chemistry, so you might want to skip over this.)
I couldn’t have made a bigger mistake if I’d simply doused myself in gasoline and fallen asleep while smoking, because in middle age my body has sprung a trap on me: If I eat an hour or two before I got to bed, all the food in my stomach hardens to cement so that it can’t go anywhere, or at least that’s what seems to happen. Then it apparently putrefies and I feel like I’m turning into one of those dead deer by the side of the road that looks like a huge, brown fur-covered balloon with four legs sticking straight out like stick limbs on a snowman.
I mostly fall into this trap when I eat and drink too much (yes, two pints is too much; I’m such a lightweight), because when I drink too much I get dumb enough to think it’ll be okay just this once to go to bed on a full stomach, but it’ll never be okay anymore. Then the beer wears off, the bloating wakes me up, and there’s no sleep to be had for the rest of the night. I wake periodically to roll over so I can try to evenly fill the empty spaces in my gut with gas, but rolling over also has the additional unfortunate side effect of stirring the fermentation process. By morning I wake from dreams of transmogrifying into the Hindenburg, my eyes snapping open just as I crash into a mooring mast and mercifully explode in a horrific fireball.
Do you ever have that dream?
Gross-out Alert! If you’re a delicate flower, you’ll definitely want to skip this. I wasn’t even going to publish this, but the most recent figures show that about three people read this drivel so I’m not all that worried about offending a crowd of people if you don’t heed my warnings and flip to another page now. Wait, that didn’t come out right, like I worry about offending the masses, but you I’m not so concerned about. What I really should have said was, if I knew how to say anything without putting my foot in my mouth then my words would probably come out a lot more clearly.
Last chance, really, to miss the gross stuff.
Tim and I were engaged in one of the favorite pastimes of boys everywhere, called: Trying to gross each other out. It eventually turned into a contest to figure out what we thought were the ten worst ways to die. I don’t know why only ten, I guess just to keep the list manageable. The ten ways we came up with were: falling, burned, suffocated, disemboweled, torn to pieces, cut to pieces, cut in half, impaled, crushed, and wasted by disease. We tended to name the categories a little more, ah, colorfully because, after all, this was a gross-out.
Dave’s list:
In case you haven’t already flipped to another web page in disgust and you’re still with me, here’s how I decided that falling to my death was worse than being eviscerated by wild animals: I started out with the scariest way to die. To me there’s nothing worse than falling. Nothing. Some people like jumping from airplanes, and I even tried it once, only to find out it scared the holy hell out of me. It is the activity most fundamentally opposed to fun that I can think of, and I figure the only thing that could make it worse would be falling to my death.
Then I looked at the next thing on our list and asked myself: If I had to choose between being burned to death or falling to death, which would I pick? Well, since falling to my death is the most awful thing I can conceive of, it’s a no-brainer. And then, being eaten alive sounds pretty awful, but I can’t imagine it being worse than perishing by fire. And so on.
I showed Tim my list after I was done. “Dude! You put falling at the top?” I get this from people all the time. Almost nobody had the reaction I got from skydiving.
Tim’s list:
He put being cut to pieces at the top because the murderous intent made it the scariest thing he could imagine. Same thing for being messily devoured.
Barb’s only comment on our game, when she passed through the room and heard about ten seconds of our conversation, was, “You guys are sick. And women say they want men to open up to them. No, they don’t.
I got this letter from the Department of Defense in my mail box today. See what it says there? See? It says, “MSG David L. Okonski USAF Retired” I’m a retired guy. Says so right there!
I’ve written quite a lot of this drivel at the library after work. Barb is putting in overtime in her department and doesn’t swing through town to pick me up until about six-thirty, so when I get off work at five I walk two blocks over to the central branch of the Madison Public Library and try to use the time productively. Not that most people would consider writing this drivel “productive” in any but the loosest sense of the word. Screw them.
To write this drivel at the library, I have to luck into finding a computer that somebody’s just stepped away from. If I don’t get there while the seat’s still warm, one of the other library computer vultures will swoop in so fast I’ll never even see it. I could reserve a computer for five o’clock every day, but that would sort of dampen the thrill of the hunt. The downside to using a computer immediately after somebody else is that the mouse so warm and greasy it feels like it’s been smeared with lard. I love the library’s excellent internet computer service, but after using it I feel as though I ought to shower in chlorine bleach.
I’m not always driveling when I go to the library. They have an excellent comic book collection there, and sometimes I just want to vegetate in a comfy chair with the junk food of the printed word, you know? They have a surprising number of my old favorites from back when I spent a big chunk of my pocket change on comics — Spider Man, X-Men and Daredevil are collected in bound volumes. Is the library a great place or what?
They also have a lot of what used to be called “underground comics” of the Robert Crumb variety which are now somehow mainstream but still just disturbing enough that I hoped nobody was looking over my shoulder when I opened the pages to the incestuous orgy, and then quickly turned the page to find some tamer content, only to reveal another incestuous orgy. That guy was messed up. I wonder if the folks who try to ban Huckleberry Finn know that the library has the collected works of R. Crumb?
They also have a ton of comic books I’ve never heard of. Every other day I pick up one of those, flip through a page or two and decide that I didn’t want to hear about them ever again, other than maybe to find out how some of that crap got published. What draws readers to a comic book of stick figures? Really badly drawn stick figures. As far as I’m concerned, it goes back to the Springsteen argument: if you can’t sing, don’t.
When I’m not driveling or getting hyper-critical about comic books, there’s my favorite hobby, trolling the stacks. I’m enough of a nerd to enjoy walking aimlessly through the aisles, waiting for that moment when I find a treasure trove on a subject I’m intensely interested in. Yesterday I found two three-foot-long shelves packed full to bursting with books about steam locomotives. I spent a good part of my lunch hour today going through those, and checked out the title, “How Steam Locomotives Really Work,” a much better book than all those other sensationalist scribblings about steam engines written by other posers.
Even better is when my eye catches sight of a title that lures me into reading books about a subject I didn’t know I was interested in. That’s how I learned that I truly liked reading biographies and histories and that they weren’t the crushing bores that countless high school teachers had lead me to believe.
When I’m done trolling and reading, though, I usually become a computer terminal vulture again, circling and waiting to do a bit more driveling. The library has, as I said, an outstanding internet service. Anybody can use it, and everybody’s restricted to thirty-minute blocks of time; it’s about as fair and equal as public use can get, and I really like that. If I could make any change, though, I’d slap a deck of cards on the keyboard of anybody I saw playing solitaire. The guys who play Magic & Monsters or America’s Army don’t bug me, but what the hell’s the idea of tying up a computer to play solitaire? Peeve peeve peeve.
“Geeze, fellah, you need to stop running and eat a doughnut!”
That was the first thing out of Barb’s mouth when she spotted the runner cooling down on a street corner in town this morning. He was about six feet tall and weighed maybe as much as a half-full box of Rice Krispies, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt so he looked like somebody the Allies liberated from Auschwitz. If there was ever a body crying out for carbs, it was this guy’s.
There are a lot of athletic people in Madison — people who bike to work, people who get up early to run a couple miles. We see them from the moment we leave our driveway because they’re biking into town from Cottage Grove, at least six miles. That used to make me feel self-conscious because I’d always wanted to be disciplined enough to stay fit — those love handles are going to pop out any day if I don’t — but I’ll never be so disciplined that I want to cycle twelve miles each way to work and back every day. Not going to happen. And carving an extra two hours out of my day to go running, something I like about as much as having my teeth drilled, is not going to happen, either.
I’ve always wanted that kind of discipline, but some of the side effects scare me. I’m a skinny beanpole right now, a little flabby around the waist, maybe, but I haven’t weighed more than 155 since I entered the military. Some people get buffed up when they exercise, but every time I’ve taken up running I ended up with a look that would make passing motorists shout “Stop running and eat a doughnut!” at me. I don’t want to be that guy.
The commuter I’d like to be, after weeks of consideration, is the guy on the scooter. It wouldn’t work after the snow starts to fly, but it looks like a lot of fun in good weather and the traffic I’d have to scoot through isn’t crazy enough to make the trip hazardous to my health. And make all the wiseass cracks you want, but I think those little Vespas are cute. With the right kind of helmet, I’d look like Wallace on a day trip.
Holy crap! I’m in Cottage Grove all day again this Saturday! There’s not a lot to do on the menu in Cottage Grove. It’s a pretty tiny little burg. There are two gas stations; one of them’s an off-brand but typical convenience store, the other one’s a brand new BP that’s got a McDonald’s and some other crap attached to it. There’s just one grocery, Piggly Wiggly (I swear I’m not making that up), and a hardware store called Do It Best (even with a Piggly Wiggly right in the same town, “Do It Best” is possibly the dumbest name for any store). There’s a place where I get my hair cut, a Laundromat, a liquor store, about a half-dozen cafes, taverns and restaurants, a clinic and a legal office.
I was pretty much going to have to entertain myself, and with the youngest kid hogging the internet connection so he could play “Blowing People Up” I could either read or ride my bike. (I napped, too. I consider that productive, but I understand that other people don’t.) (And just what’s up with that, anyway?)
My bike ride took me to the south end of town. I was looking for the Glacier Drumlin Trail, just beyond the railroad tracks, about a ten-minute ride from our apartment that took me down the main road out of town. Cottage Grove is a funny town; you can see where the old town used to be, with traditionally-built, older frame houses along the main roads, like the one I cycled down. Every now and then, though, there’d be a grafted-on street off to one side that was wide and smoothly paved, where the almost explosive growth of the new town had grafted itself onto the old town. Developments mushroomed on either side of the new roads, filled with oversized box houses, their three-car garages yawning open to reveal SUVs and boats and campers. And then I’d be back to the old, cracked pavement of the original, unguttered street.
I found the trail I was looking for beside an old tavern, just beyond the railroad tracks, but it was a bit of a disappointment because I was supposed to pay four bucks for a day pass, and would have been too stingy to pay even if I had the money on me. Heck, that'll buy almost a gallon and a half of gasoline! I wasn’t feeling rebellious enough to brazenly keep on rolling up the trail without paying, so I turned away and spend about a half-hour cycling through the town some more.
If Sara Vowell, or somebody like her, had been my history teacher in high school or college, I would have a degree in history instead of my equally-useful degree in English. I’ve already read Vowell’s Take The Cannoli and Partly-Cloudy Patriot, collections of stories about historical events you’ve heard of but probably always thought were pretty dry and boring. And maybe you still would, I don’t know. I used to be the type that automatically flinched away from reading anything historical — roadside markers, even, but I like the way Vowell frames her stories with a personal touch and recounts historical action in a rather casual manner, rather than reciting dry facts. I’m reading Assassination Vacation now. Vowell traveled the United States visiting the places where she could piece together the histories of three successful assassinations of U.S. presidents — Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Maybe not a very practical way to learn about it, but very engaging. Did you know Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was present at all three assassinations? I didn’t, either. Read the book. Go. Now.
More about books, or rather a bookstore: I rode to a local strip mall with Barb, who was going to JoAnn’s, which is right next door to a Border’s book store. Under most circumstances I’d rather chew on tinfoil than buy books at a corporate book store, but since she was going there and I knew they had a book I wanted, I threw my principles out the window. Only it turned out that the book I wanted was about ten dollars more expensive than I thought. I’m a cheap bastard, but I really wanted that book, so I put on quite a show: I put the book back when I saw the price, then plucked it off the shelf again to page through it, only confirming to myself how much I wanted the book, so I tucked it resolutely under my arm and marched toward the checkout. Then waivered. Walked idly through the magazine racks, distracted myself with a few here and there. Picked up a comic book. Reminded myself to buy today’s newspaper. Finally, I decided that I really was way too stingy to spend so much today and trotted the book back to its space on the shelf, and headed out the door.
Smacked myself in the head as I crossed the parking lot — I forgot the newspaper! Back into the store, slung a copy up onto my shoulder (the Sunday edition) and hiked it over to the checkout. When she rang up my purchase, the register printed out my receipt and a coupon for 20% off the purchase of any new hardcover book.
The gods meant for me to buy that book. I dashed back to the shelf and dug it out, trotted happily back to the checkout with it and presented my coupon. “20% off, right?” I asked.
“That’s next weekend,” she explained. Oh, yeh. It said so right on the coupon.
“But we can hold it for you,” she added brightly. Well, of course you can! So I got my book after all, sort of on time-delay.
“Good morning, everybody!” I greeted my coworkers as I stepped into the office this morning. Nobody answered. They hardly moved. Guess they weren’t having the fun-filled Monday morning that I was having.
It wasn’t really that much fun. It was raining, and that usually puts quite a few people in such a lousy mood there isn’t a jury in the world that would convict you if you throttled them, except maybe the jury in Rice Lake that put away the Hmong deer hunter for life. Contrary to popular opinion, “He needed killin’” doesn’t always work when you need it, or at least not — maybe especially not when you say it out loud in a court of law. (That guy’s lawyer needs to take some remedial law school classes on coaching the witness.)
But back to raining on my morning: I grabbed a copy of the morning paper out of the newsstand, keeping it dry by using my super-speedy reflexes and kung-fu grip. Then I went to Scott’s café for a coffee and a Danish. Her name was Berta Lutefisk, and she was a redhead. A surly one, too. All the good dames are. And the Danes, for that matter. “What’ll you have?” she asked. “I said coffee,” I repeated. “And make it decaf.” She spit in it, I guess because I had the nerve to mouth off to her. I like ‘em when they’re sassy.
Hello from Madison! We’re on fire here today. No kidding, I got to work shortly after the Madison Fire Department surrounded the block with pumpers and ladders. Nobody was hurt and there wasn’t even a real fire, just a lot of smoke that blew into the county building and spooked everybody into evacuating. If you’d been standing with your nose pressed to the window as I was, you could have witnessed about a hundred or so smartly-dressed office drones slopping back and forth across the capital lawn in a weird sort of Brownian movement.
It’s been a fast-paced morning here, let me tell you. I’m all out of breath just trying to keep up with it. I started off with a big mugga joe at Michaelangelo’s café on State Street. It was supposed to be decaf, but I think they slipped and gave me the high-octane stuff, and I happen to know that they double up when they measure out the coffee so it comes out extra-tasty and packs a punch. I was buzzing for three hours. I hate that. No, really, I do. I’m such a lightweight that I get so that I can’t even see straight, which is why I ask for decaf anymore. Safety precaution.
Morning in the cubicle passed in a blur. I think I did some filing, wrote a few letters, proof-read a couple more, moved a couple hundred dollars around. Flitted to the window now & again to follow the progress of the evacuation next door.
By lunch time I was feeling almost normal again and pretty hungry, what luck. Ate my usual dry chicken sandwich in the break room on my break. I eat my lunch on my break, and take a break on my lunch, because lunch is an hour and I can leave the office and come here and drivel at you for a while, you lucky dog. It just works out better. Am I babbling?
To make sure that the feds get more of my money, I filled out a withholding form because I claimed too many exemptions the first time I did that and the state wasn’t taking any money out of my paycheck. “Nobody takes that many exemptions,” the guy in HR told me when I asked him about it. “Most people take just one or two.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that the first time I signed up?” I asked him.
“We’re not supposed to tell you to do anything,” he said, “just tell you what you can do.”
I hate to be the guy who keeps saying, “Well, when I was in the Air Force ...,” but, y’know, when I was in the Air Force, the tech who helped me fill out my withholding form stomped his foot helpfully when he mentioned the option that would probably be best for me. Sometimes he’d even sort of whinny and shake his head. A guy like me needs help like that with some things.
I heard on the radio this morning that something like forty-five percent of all women expect diamonds on their anniversary. Zow! How’s a guy supposed to pull that off every year? Aren’t diamonds, even the cheap ones, something like a thousand bucks each? (You can tell how often I get diamonds for my wife, can’t you?)
“Are you one of those women, dear?” I asked my darling bride after the big-mouthed radio announcer tried to guilt me into buying diamonds at least fifteen diamonds for her, figuring I probably wouldn’t be grandfathered for past anniversaries.
“I'm in the majority,” she said, to my relief, then added, very practically, “If you buy me diamonds, I’ll just hock ‘em.” She’d much rather have something useful, like a sewing machine or money, so any diamonds I gave her, she said, would be on e-bay later that same day. That would almost be worth seeing. “My husband got me these dumb diamonds. Willing to trade for a sewing machine.”
Segue: When I go to a parent-teacher conference or a back to school night, this is what I learn: I was too young for high school, back when I went to high school. Too young for college, too. I had no idea what to do with it then. If things weren’t so backward and they’d let me take high school now, I’d make sure I got all the math I could, and I’d sit and pay attention during history. I’d maybe even take physics. I’m not so sure I’d have the time for that, though. The way I remember it, I had to work my ass off just to get through geometry, so it’s math or science, and now that I know I actually use math I’d stick with that.
Barb and I stopped at Monona Grove High School on the way home from work to say hi to Tim’s teachers and snoop around the school a bit. It’s a nearly-new building; I can see why Tim likes it, and his teachers all seem enthusiastic and smart. I can see why he likes them, too.
A lot of the teachers seemed awfully young to me. I don’t remember any of my teachers looking that young. They might have actually been young, but none of them looked like that. The youngest-looking one taught history; he looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. The science teacher looked a few years older, and he put on a simple demonstration of the spectra of light, made us wear mad scientist goggles and turned out the lights. Sounds like a snoozer but it made everybody oooo and ahhhh.
There was a bulldozer in our driveway when we got home. The property manager told us that he wanted to replace our stairway because it was sinking into the lawn. The first step down from the porch was about ten or twelve inches, a real shock if you’re not expecting it. I kept waiting for a visitor to go cartwheeling off it into the lawn. But last night, the bulldozer, and no stairs. Looks like whoever brought the bulldozer tore it out, and because there was a pile of broken-up concrete next to the drive that could have once been a stairway.
I had this weird experience on Monday morning when I sat down to work. Neil Diamond came on my radio almost as soon as I sat down in my office, bellowing out Sweet Caroline. The weird part was that I didn’t turn him off immediately. Normally I shut it off as soon as I hear his nasal, twangy voice, and I don’t turn the radio back on until I let three or four minutes go by, five after a live recording just to be on the safe side. If you don’t remember how I feel about Neil, maybe you’ve figured it out by now.
Neil’s not for everybody; he’s certainly not for me, but my Dad sure liked him, and every time I near Neil on the radio I feel a little twinge as I turn it off. You know the feeling you get when somebody else is in the room and you want to switch the station because a song you think is a real stinker just came on, but you’re not sure if they want to listen to it and you don’t ask? That’s the feeling I got. So this week I decided to lay off the radio and let Dad listen to the Neil Diamond, even that dumbass song where Neil wails about how nobody will answer him, not even the chair. But I’m only going to put up with it for a week, Dad. Come Monday, you have to get your Neil Diamond fix on your own.
The alarm clock again: Tim’s alarm clock was bleeping for about two full minutes before I stomped down the stairs and stood in the doorway of this room with my hands on my hips. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I’m up!” I answered. “I didn’t want to be up until five-thirty, and it seems you wanted to wait until five-thirty or six — so why’s your alarm set for five?” He didn’t have an answer for that.
Tomorrow, it’s a pitcher of icewater in his face, I swear. You reading this, Tim? Icewater!
Morning jitters: The girl who served up my coffee this morning was wearing pants with a waistband so shockingly low that there was one of those television black-out bars hovering in front of her, just below her navel. I felt like maybe I’d unknowingly walked into the filming of a porno. “Here’s your coffee. You want something sweet to go with that?” she asked, and then as she reached for a Danish she ‘tripped’ and snagged her break-away t-shirt on the corner of the counter. But no, it was a normal morning with a tiny kink thrown in, in a manner of speaking. It took less than a minute for me to collect my cup o’ joe and change from two bucks, but I felt winded and shaky as I walked to my table. I think I even popped a sweat. Good thing I drink decaf. I don’t think my heart could’ve taken another jolt this morning.
Tim didn’t get the icewater in the face this morning. Just in case you were sitting on tenterhooks waiting to find out.
I got to indulge in my favorite hobby today, farting in the elevator. The trick to remaining incognito is to attain atmospheric saturation just before the elevator car reaches your floor. Timing is the key. That, and your odor index (the higher the index, the more odiferous. We’ve got this down to a science); mine was pretty weak, so it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been. I’m not what you’d call adept; what I really need is a mentor who can teach me the way of the vapor before I can pursue this hobby with style. Alas, I have not yet found one in these parts.
When it comes to passing gas, there really are two kinds of people, aren’t there? There are people who enjoy it, and there are people who are repelled by it. Among the two camps there are people in the extreme and those not as much, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there (that I’ve met, anyway) who felt it was hilarious in one situation but worthy of revulsion in another. If you think it’s funny, then it’s funny for you at the pool, at work or at a funeral, maybe even especially hilarious at a funeral.
Segue: I took a urgent call at work the other day from a guy who had to talk to me right now but, hey, first, he wanted to know, could he put me on hold?
He called me to put me on hold?
This is a new one on me. I’ve almost gotten used to being put on hold when I call other people, but it still bugs me just a bit. If you pick up the phone to talk to me, especially if you’re a business, then I think you should be talking to me and not to somebody else. If you don’t want to talk to me, I say don’t pick up the phone, but I’m evidently quite old-fashioned in this respect and I’ve grown used to being put on hold, except when I call somebody and they answer with, “Hello, can I put you on hold?” No. You can’t put me on hold before you even know who I am or what I’m calling about. If I were calling to tell you I wanted to give you a billion dollars, you wouldn’t put me on hold, you’d want me to tell you more, lots more; you’d let me talk to you until I couldn’t any more. “Hold” is not an option until after you’ve said more than “hello” to me.
But back to this guy who called me at work to talk about something really, really urgent, and then put me on hold. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t ask, “WTF?” I’m pretty sure my boss would frown on that. And, when it comes to business, I’m a firm believer in the maxim, “The customer is always right,” mostly because I’ve always been the customer, but now that I’ve got a job working at a business I still feel that I should be as accommodating as I possibly can.
“Sure,” I told the guy, “I’ll hold.”
And he didn’t put me on hold for just a moment, either. I was hanging on for a while. No music. Not even a recording saying, “Your call is important to me; please stay on the line.” Can you even get that on your home phone? I have to look into that; could be a solution to the problem of phone solicitors.
This story doesn’t have a bang-up ending; the guy came back on the line and told me about his incredibly urgent business, and then I did what I always to when somebody calls me at work: I transfer them to one of the financial counselors. And Barb’s getting a little annoyed at me for that, too.
I can’t remember the last time I felt as tired and worn-out as I did this afternoon.
Barb and I spent the day at a Habitat for Humanity “build” where we did yardwork. Lots of it. They wanted to get the soil ready for seeding, so we had to rake it and pick out the big rocks. “Rake it” sounds so easy when you say it, but try to do it to a yard that’s mostly sand and clay, where big trucks have been driving back and forth over it and it’s been drying in the sun for days. I had to use a pickaxe to break some of it up. And that was just the morning. In the afternoon we landscaped two other yards by filling barrows full of black dirt and spreading it out over the back yards, where we raked it level, seeded it, raked it again and covered it with straw, straw that was full of nettles.
It’s been so long since either Barb or I have done yard work this hard that by the end of the day we both looked and felt like we’d lost a fight with a boxing kangaroo. When we got home, we could hardly drag ourselves up the stairs to the shower, which we both desperately wanted and badly needed.
But it was a good kind of tired.
Freaking yellow jackets were everywhere! I brought a crueler and a bottle of orange juice with me to have for breakfast, and not thirty seconds after stepping out of the car a half-dozen yellow jackets zeroed in on my glazed pastry and were crawling all over it while two of their pals were working to keep me distracted — and doing a pretty damn good job, too — by trying to land on the end of my nose. I went into a spastic fit, spinning in circles and slapping the air around my head, that made me look like I maybe skipped my morning meds.
A watershed moment: When I walked into Michelangelo’s this morning I didn’t have to tell the server what I wanted. They told me it was a short, black decaf. All I had to do was agree.
If I were a police officer I’d think I’d have to walk a beat, because I’d go nuts if I had to drive around town. I watched a police cruiser pull onto the road in front of me this morning and everybody around me took their feet off the gas, creating a huge cluster in the road, and the brake lights flared on a car that had just pulled out a block ahead of the cruiser. Why is it nine out of ten drivers suddenly forget all the rules of the road, and more than half of them forget entirely how to drive a car at all when a police officer is within eyeshot? One driver saw the cruiser coming, saw that he had no time at all to pull out, then was seized by some kind of debilitating brain cramp and pulled out anyway, cutting the police cruiser off. Flashy, flashy, the cop pulled him over.
The mornings are now getting cold here in Wisconsin. The people I’ve seen zipping to work on their scooters in shorts and t-shirts are now bundled up in jackets and long pants, gloves on their hands. A lot of them are even wearing helmets now. Helmets are optional in Wisconsin and most people don't wear them, but I saying a sort of prayer whenever a rider appears in front of me with a head like a bowling ball, “Thanks, somebody’s mom, for bringing up your child right.” The prayer I splutter when a rider cuts in front of me without a helmet is a lot less thankful.
Last night we finally rejoined the ranks of television-watchers across the nation. Up until now, we’ve been television-free ever since we moved to Cottage Grove.
Technically speaking, we had a television set, but no cable and no antenna, so we never turned it on. Not even Tim would try to squint through the static to watch his favorite crap on the Fox network, and so the set sat cold in the corner, collecting dust.
Then Barb heard that PBS was going to show a two-hour special on Bob Dylan, so she ran out to Radio Shack on her lunch hour and brought home a set of rabbit ears. “I don’t know how well that’s going to work,” I warned her. We’re a ways out in the country, and in my memory rabbit ears were one of the most frustrating technological gadgets ever made, but there have apparently been some improvements in the meantime because the set she bought worked just fine. In fact, she got the best reception when she tuned the set to PBS, almost like the stars were aligned, the ether was clear and calm, and all the gods were smiling down on her. She cranked up the volume and happily sat back in our one decent chair to enjoy a night of her favorite singer. Or maybe her second-favorite. Buffet’s somewhere at the top of her musical constellation, but I’m not sure if he trumps Dylan.
Tim couldn’t stand to watch the show. He wouldn’t be able to sit through a Dylan song if he plugged his ears with wax and lashed himself to the mast. Dylan, as far as he’s concerned, is antimusic. It’s not that he won’t listen to old music; he loves old rock and roll, and often listens to Dixieland jazz, old-timey folk music, big band numbers — just about anything, really. Bob Dylan’s voice, though, drives him up a rubber wall. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
The Madison Capital Times publishes the words to pop songs. I think they might be trying to slap a little social responsibility on parents, get them involved in the music their children are listening to, but if this weekend’s offering is any indication, I don’t want to be involved in modern pop music in any way. They printed the words to My Humps, a song so stupid it’s got to be proof kids will do anything to shock the older generation. Naturally, it’s a huge hit. It’s also a perfect example of why I don’t listen to modern pop music any longer. I think I stopped listening to the radio in 1999 when they started airing crap like this. Theoretically all pop music is more or less the same silly drek, from Red Rubber Ball to Yes, We Have No Bananas, but I have a very strong feeling there must be a sub-category of silly pop drek for musical stupidity such as My Humps. After I read the lyrics I went to the internet to give it a listen — all modern pop music has been uploaded to the web; teenagers are not only unashamed about what they listen to, they’re unashamed about stealing it, too — and there’s nothing about it, no catchy tune, no tricky singing, that would make it less stupid than the words already suggest. I just don’t get modern pop music at all. And now I know how my Mom felt when I was playing the same Pink Floyd track over and over while she rolled her eyes and trying to shake the tune out of her head.
Barb’s been dropping me off in town about seven o’clock every morning so she can get to work by seven-thirty and put in some overtime. It could be she’s saving up to run off with her artist boyfriend, but experience tells me she’s after a new sewing machine or some fabric.
I don’t have the option of putting in overtime and my work day doesn’t begin until eight. That leaves me with about an hour to find something to do. I could wander around aimlessly, like the hobos just waking up about that time along Carroll Street and putting their bedrolls in trash bags, but as much as I like walking around capital square I don’t want to get bored with it.
My routine has slowly evolved (or it’s been designed by an intelligent force, depending on which books you read) over the past several weeks. I used to pick up a copy of the paper and sit in a café reading. I tried several places for coffee but kept going back to Michelangelo’s. This is the place with the best java, and if the crowd of people who jam it every morning is any indication, I think I’ve judged rightly. It seems a little trendy, but not quite what I’d call frou-frou; they’ve hung the walls with drawings, painting and prints from local artists, and smooth jazz usually plays on the stereo in the early morning. The coffee’s priced about forty cents higher than anywhere else except Starbucks, but it’s the tastiest anywhere. They also serve delicious but pricey pastries, but at a buck-eighty for an apple fritter I can’t bring myself to shoehorn a daily morning pastry into my budget.
I hang around there for a while reading the paper, or I use the courtesy computer to surf the web, or, as I’ve been doing lately, I sit in the corner with my laptop and write, and even though I’m writing drivel like this, I somehow feel as though I’m doing something productive, as opposed to just hanging around, waiting to go to work. A lot of other people bring their laptops, because the café’s got free wireless access, but my laptop is more than a couple years old so I don’t have that kind of technology. Web access would be way too distracting, anyway. I’d sit and surf all morning instead of writing.
I found myself wishing for a pair of gloves and hat on the walk to Michelangelo’s this morning, lashed by a wind that was not just cold, but downright brisk when experienced by a gloveless, hatless man. I almost went without a jacket this morning when Tim asked to borrow a jacket from one of us.
“What’s the matter with your jacket?” I asked.
“It’s at school.”
Barb and I have one jacket each, but we didn’t want him to walk around in the cold so I volunteered to give him a fleece sweater I have. “No, I need something that will keep the rain off today,” he said.
“Where’s your umbrella?” Barb asked him.
“It’s at school.”
I think you can guess where that left him.
Among other misplaced items, a pair of vise grips lay on the table in the dining room this morning, looking just a bit out of place among the breakfast dishes and newspapers. Vise grips are the most incredibly handy tools for odd fix-it jobs so they turn up all over the house, but the other tools are just as likely to be found under the cushions of a living room chair, on the shelf of a book case, or mixed up with the cosmetics and tooth brushes on the bathroom vanity.
I’ve always lived in a house where tools were found anywhere but in a tool box or occupying their assigned hook or slot at the work bench. It used to drive my father into such apoplectic fits that we all learned fairly quickly never to ask him where a certain tool was. The resulting furious rant was just too painful to bear. I have to admit that I’ve channeled a few of my dad’s rants when I was looking for a tool but couldn’t find it. I understand the frustration he felt even as I realize that I’m never going to find the tool I need in the tool box. They’re never where they’re supposed to be; they’re where they were used last. Except for the vise grips. Tim likes to play with them so much that they’ll always be where he finally got bored with them.
Barb wore a green and gold sweatshirt this morning with the Packers emblem on the front. “Are the Packers playing this weekend?” I asked her.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I just wanted to wear something warm.”
Warm or cold, everybody’s going to ask her about the Packers today — What do you think of the lousy season they’re having? Do you think Bret Favre is dragging them down? And said Barb said she planned to answer all those questions, “They’re a football team? I thought this was a union shirt!”
The Army brought a climbing wall to my son's high school, but it wasn’t a recruiting tool. The soldiers who demonstrated the climbing wall asked that everybody sixteen years and older sign a form, “just to show that you used the climbing wall,” and give their name, address and phone number, but they weren’t there to recruit anybody.
Tim didn’t participate in climbing the wall, and he didn’t sign the form. “Why not?” one of the soldiers asked him.
“Because I think what you’re doing is wrong,” Tim told them.
Then he warned one of his friends not to sign the form. “Why not?” his friend asked.
“Don’t you see that they’re recruiting us?” Tim explained. His friend didn’t see it. None of the kids did. They all did what they were told, gave up their names, addresses and telephone numbers so that the Army would have it all on file ... to give to recruiters in two years.