Today was about the last day of the year I could mow the lawn. It’s not like there’s a law against it in Wisconsin, it’s just that nobody cuts their lawn after a certain day in autumn, round about this time. We obviously thought it was much earlier, say early September, because nobody’s cut it in weeks (Tim: HINT), so I fired up the mower this morning and, after about thirty minutes, all that was left to cut was a patch about the size of a bath mat. That’s when Tim stuck his head out the front door and offered to finish up for me. I declined his kind offer.
Mowing the lawn is such an orgy of destruction, isn’t it? Besides chopping all that vegetation into confetti, there’s always a stray paper cup or plastic bottle to hack into little pieces, and a power mower does it so explosively that it’s a treat that’s hard to pass up. I’m not so much into it any more, but I notice that Tim is enough of a kid that he would rather run over trash in the yard than pick it up. I still think sticks make a great noise, though, and there were quite a few of them on the front lawn after some landscapers came by to rip out the overgrown shrubbery blocking the windows. The thin ones crackle like an electrical surge across high-tension power lines, and the really thick ones make a BANG as loud and sudden as an M-80. Yard work’s such a chore that a guy’s got to treasure moments like that.
Barb decided not to go to work early this morning. That would give us an extra half-hour to sleep in this morning but I forgot to tell Tim. He’s been setting his alarm for five-thirty every since I threatened him with a pitcher of water in the face if I hear his alarm start bleeping at five in the morning any more. It would be kind of hard to get mad at him for finally agreeing to set his alarm for the time I said I was going to get up, wouldn’t it? So I laid in the dark from five-thirty to maybe five-forty, listening to the bleeping alarm, before I finally tore myself out of bed and started the kettle boiling for coffee. Tim’s alarm was still bleeping when I stepped out of the shower ten minutes later; he and Barb showed no sign of being bothered at all by it.
We’re getting a few late dog days here in what ought to be the chillier part of the fall; the sun was warm from the moment it broke over the horizon until it dipped beyond again, and the humidity was thick enough to swim through, although I didn’t have my goggles and nose plug so I wasn’t dorky-looking enough to think of trying it. Maybe tomorrow, if the weather holds and I can find my Speedos. (Bet that’s a visual you were hoping to avoid today.)
How many times has this happened to you: You’re making your way home when you hear on your car radio that there’s a hazardous waste spill on your street that’s going to take a couple more hours to clean up. Don’t you hate it when that happens? We lucked out by catching the news early enough that we could head north on Highway 51 to T; traffic through the roundabouts was a killer, but we squeaked through and were home at the usual time, so boo-yah! hazardous waste spillers! You can’t mess up our day so easily. In your face!
Barb and I went south to Fitchburg after work. She was supposed to meet with some of the people she works with to have a beer and something to eat at a brew pub there, or at least that was the plan. Nobody showed up besides the other new person in the office, so either they both got stood up, or they both got exactly the wrong idea about where the party was supposed to be. Maybe they said, “But whatever you do, don’t go to the Great Dane in Fitchburg, because we never go there.”
Going outdoors this morning was like walking through stew ... and then the air cleared a bit and it was more like a hot, wet towel. The weatherman promised us thundershowers some time tonight that’ll drop temps into the fifties and then it’ll start to feel more like Wisconsin in October. Or, if the weather continues on its freakish way (which definitely has nothing to do at all with a global warming trend), I could be brining in a second crop of tomatoes by February. There’s no telling.
There was a stranger standing in the doorway when I got home yesterday: After weeks of saying he was going to the barber, Tim finally got a haircut after school. Before, he had a wild lion’s mane of hair, way too far out of control and begging to be braided, or at least tied up in pigtails. The barber just about buzzed him so he’s got a head that looks sort of like a boot brush.
The book on my bed stand right now is The Pullman Case by David Ray Papke, an analysis of the strike against the Pullman company by the American Railroad Union. Do I know how to pick a page-turner or what? Honestly, I don’t know anybody who could resist a story that had main characters with the names Eugene and Mortimer. Highly recommended.
Isn’t anybody going to invent a ray gun I can point at those boom-boom cars that will blow the sub-woofers right out of them? There’s got to be a huge market for it; I can’t believe I’m the only one who wants to do that. Tuesday night must be cruising night in Cottage Grove; there were loud cars with loud stereo systems roaring up and down the street where we live since dinner time. Modern technology has got to come up with a way for home owners to mess with these guys, something like a giant mutant spider that pops out of the ground to eat their cars. If that task is somehow more difficult than simply sprinkling normal spiders with nuclear waste (I don’t know why, though; it worked in the movies), why couldn’t we train special traffic cops armed with stealth Ferraris and giant black cargo helicopters that swoop down on boom-boom cars and carry them away to be incinerated? There’ve got to be thousands of guys dying to do stuff like that. I’m dying to fly the helicopter myself.
A major plank in my campaign to become Überczar is the final, I would even call it inevitable War On Traffic. No matter which way you look at it, Americans have relatively little to fear from terrorists when compared to traffic. Terrorists kill only a small fraction of the 40,000 citizens killed by traffic every year, yet our armed forces have been deployed to the four corners of the earth to fight terrorism. What’s our defense against traffic? State police using radar guns. Give me a break.
It’s time to stop playing around. The focus of our nation has got to be the creation of a crack army of traffic cops with the expertise and the motivation to quickly locate, isolate and eradicate every auto owned by a moron who was somehow allowed to get behind the wheel. The most obviously effective and not incidentally fun way to do that is to disburse a fleet to each state of fast, stealthy vehicles — I’m thinking Ferraris with glossy black paint jobs — and airborne assault craft (black cargo helicopters) equipped with the most all-powerful geopositioning and targeting technology money can buy. The airborne element would be on patrol 24/7, linked via satellite phone with the Ferrari-driving traffic cops on the ground, ready to intercept any car with a moron behind the wheel after its location has been pinpointed. Pilots would use a specially-made harpoon to attach a bungee cord, allowing them to snatch a car from the road on the run and, in a case where a driver has been especially moronic, fetch the car back to a special unit where it would be chopped to pieces and incinerated.
Extreme as these measures may seem, I believe the war on traffic can be won only by those who dare to take the most effective measures. For instance, people who drive with children in the car who are not wearing seat belts will never, ever be allowed to drive, purchase, look at or think about automobiles ever again. While this may seem harsh to some, it’s all kinds of touchy-feely when compared to what I’d really like to do to them.
I’ve just read several new warnings that the bird flu may or may not become an epidemic that may or may not wipe out anywhere from several hundred thousand to millions of people this year, or perhaps never. The fact that these warnings are being made by military doctors in a weapons lab leads me to believe we’re all going to die no matter how conditionally they phrase it, so just to be sure, I’ve already pulled down my pants and kissed myself goodbye.
Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta announced yesterday that the “Spanish Flu” that killed two hundred million people in the fall of 1918 was a bird flu a lot like the one that’s been going around Asia these past few years, the only difference being that the 1918 flu was contagious from person to person, and the only way people can catch the Asian bird flu (right now) is from animals. The CDC doctors know this because they found tissue samples of people killed in the 1918 epidemic, or in one case dug up a body buried in permafrost in Alaska, isolated the virus, and grew it in the CDC labs by infecting animals with it. I’m all for furthering science in principle, but doesn’t re-creating a fast-spreading, lethal virus sound a lot like something they shouldn’t do?
I kid. Of course, they should do everything in their power to find out what makes a virus lethal so they can develop a treatment for it. Doctors could charge a hundred bucks for a shot that might or might not fight off death by suffocation from a flu virus that Fox News has already drawn up a snappy graphic and a dramatic music lead-in for.
I never know who I’m going to end up sitting next to at the computer terminals at the library. Usually, the person next to me is invisible, not even on my radar screen; they huddle with the keyboard, stare straight ahead into the monitor, and never make a sound. Most of the time.
Yesterday, I sat next to a wanna-be Solid Gold Dancer. He had the biggest pair of headphones plugged into the terminal and was surfing from one site of illegally uploaded songs to the next. When he found a tune he liked, he cranked it up as loud as it would go and started boogeying; never got to his feet, but did the nearest approximation of dancing he could while sitting smack on his butt. And if his dancing wasn’t enough to make sure that everybody around him knew how much he liked the songs, he also had his inner monologue connected full-time to his mouth, a constant stream of consciousness that broadcast every thought on his mind. Especially when he got pissed off about finding the song he wanted on a site that asked him to pay for it. That really got him going.
The guy next to me today was a lot less interactive. He was very nearly one of the invisible users; after he sat down, he cuddled up with his keyboard and monitor in a very possessive, almost jealous way. What brought him onto my radar screen, though, was the sniffles. It’s pretty cold outside today, and he came in sniffling, softly at first, then more loudly and insistently as time went by and he steadfastly refused to blow his nose. Maybe he didn’t have a hanky, or maybe it would’ve taken up too much precious time from his half-hour of internet time. Whatever the reason, he was of course eventually unable to stop his nose from running by sniffling, so he wiped it with his fingers, then went back to typing on the keyboard. Sniff, sniff a little more, wipe, type type type. Sniffle, wipe, type type.
Ugh. I’m going to start bringing alcohol wipes.
Movie time: We went to the cinema see Lord Of War last weekend. We keep huge bags of money on hand for trips to the movies when Tim brings good grades home from school; he picked the movie. I wasn’t sure what it was about, and I wasn’t even looking forward to seeing it, but I’ve found myself thinking about it ever since because I don’t expect to see movies like this in our current political climate. (If you hate it when people give away the story, stop reading, because I’m going to provide some detail.)
Lord Of War is the success story of Yuri Orlov, an American whose parents immigrated from Ukraine. In his twenties, he’s already getting tired of working in the kitchen of the family restaurant, so he taps the most potent talent he has, which turns out to be a gift for selling, the first chapter of some of the most famous American success stories.
The movie introduces Yuri as the narrator of his own story. He stands in the crossroads of a burning city, the pavement covered in spent bullet casings as far as the eye can see. “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation,” he begins after taking a drag off his cigarette. “That’s one for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?”
Yuri is a wildly successful arms dealer and a completely amoral one, too. “I never sold guns to Osama,” he notes when his story fast-forwards to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, “not because of moral reasons, but back then he was always bouncing checks.” Simeon Weisz, another arms dealer played by Ian Holm, appears in Yuri’s story to rather pointedly make the mistake of trying to mix morality with this business. He has all the trappings of success; he drives a Rolls Royce while Yuri rides on tramp steamers, but in the end Yuri puts a bullet through Simeon’s head. You don’t need to read a bowdlerized Aesop’s fable to know the moral of that story.
I don’t want to read too much into Lords Of War. It’s only a movie, after all, but I thought the story was disarmingly engaging in the sense that Cage’s tongue-in-cheek narration seemed almost comforting as he reeled off statistically stunning death rates from the staggering number of guns he sold wherever providence presented him the opportunity, even though his complete lack of scruples cost him the life of his brother and his uncle and the loss of his family. Hated by half the world, sought after for his product by the other half, Yuri is America personified; very clever to make him an immigrant. The film ended with a title card explaining that the five biggest arms dealers on the planet happen to be the five members of the U.N. security council.
Friday night has become pizza night in our house. Barb leaves money on the counter top and phones in our order just before she leaves work so that it’s delivered (usually) just before we get home. We must’ve gotten lucky with the lights last night; we pulled into the driveway right behind the delivery guy. He was poking the door bell as I went to open the garage door.
“You’ll have to ring that a couple times,” I told him, “he’s probably zoned out on the computer.”
I stepped into the house through the garage entrance, which opens directly into the downstairs room where the computer’s set up, and there was Tim, chatting away with somebody on the other side of the planet, hip-hop music blaring from the speakers.
“PIZZA GUY’S HERE!” I shouted at him, over the boom-boom-boom music.
He looked up and said, “No, he’s not,” like he knew.
“Funny,” I answered, “I spoke to him on the front porch just a moment ago. I’m pretty sure he’s still there. I hope he is, anyway.”
That got him out of his seat. He can be a little dense sometimes. When we were on the way home, I even phoned him to tell him that the pizza was on the way. “There’s money on the countertop,” I told him, “and when you pay him, ask for seven dollars back, so he gets his tip.”
“What?” he asked.
“Give him the money on the countertop and ask for seven dollars back,” I said.
“Why?”
“So he gets a tip!”
“If he’s supposed to get his tip,” he asked, “Why am I asking for the money back?”
The kid’s got even less sense for math than I do. I held the phone at arm’s length and shouted, “GIVE HIM THE MONEY! ASK FOR SEVEN DOLLARS BACK! FORGET I EVEN MENTIONED THE TIP!” I think he did it right; I was there to check, but I forgot. Hope the poor guy didn’t get stiffed.
Every year the Jaycees of Madison raise money — and it must end up being a truckload of money — by holding a beer festival on the grounds of Quivey’s Grove, a trendy restaurant on the outskirts of Madison. They put up a huge tent, set up tables all around inside, and invited breweries from all over the state (and one or two from out of state; I saw one from Denver) who handed out samples. I got a miniature beer glass when I arrived, and all I had to do for the rest of the afternoon was walk up to one of the tables, hand the glass to one of the brewers and let him fill it up for me. What great idea for a party.
Jim tipped me off to this event weeks ago, so I bought him a ticket and we went together, stood around drinking really good beer and telling stories while a local blues band played. I’d guess that at least thirty, maybe forty local breweries each brought at least three of their beers; a few brought as many as six. At first I was game to try just about anything, which is why I ended up with a glass of pumpkin pale ale, but as the afternoon went by and I realized I was never going to get a taste of them all, I went for the good stuff and drank porters, stouts and brown ales. Even so, I’m pretty sure I didn’t taste every one of those, but I gave it my best shot. We could drink an unlimited amount of beer from the time the event began at noon until five o’clock that evening, when our lovely brides came to give us a ride home. It’s good to have a lovely bride for things like this; it’s tough to get anybody else to let you ride in their car when you’re babbling drunk.
“I know the title, artist, and every word of every song they play on WOLX,” Gabe, one of my coworkers, bragged to me, or maybe “bragged” isn’t quite the right word, as he wasn’t especially happy to have this affliction. He said he’d been listening to WOLX “Good Times, Great Oldies” for more than fifteen years and they’ve been airing the same play list during that whole time. He’s continued to listen in the fading hope they might play more than one song by The Hollies, but he could listen for another fifteen years, if the station lasts that long, and I think he’ll only continue to be disappointed. I listen to the station on my radio at work for a little over two months and I can already Name That Tune in just two notes. They must’ve dug deep into their vault this morning, though, because they played a Carole King tune I’ve never heard on this station before, although I’m sure Gabe heard it more than he cares to.
Barb and I usually listen to WOLX on the drive to work in the morning, mostly because they played music we could relate to but we’re doing a lot more channel surfing now that we know what they’re going to play almost every morning. If they played “Taking Care Of Business” every time we drove into town like they did once a couple weeks back I’d be sure to turn it on, but that must be one of the wild cards in the rotation.
They’re starting to get a little too talky for us to want to listen every day, too. Maybe we didn’t notice it before, because I’m pretty sure the birthday announcement has been a custom that goes way back; if you send in the name and birthday of somebody you know, they’ll read it on the air at about seven o’clock. And I'm almost positive they read every name that’s sent in. Some mornings it goes on for five minutes, and the two DJs, Fletch and Dana, tag-team one another, one reading while the other takes a breath and gets a drink. When the theme song, the Beatles singing “You Say It’s Your Birthday,” comes on, usually one of us reflexively reaches for the radio.
The radio I keep on my desk at work is the one I picked up at a garage sale a couple weeks back, and coincidentally it looks exactly like the one on my boss’s desk, which stopped him dead in his tracks when he saw me tuning it. He couldn’t stop himself from sticking his head back into his office to look for his radio.
The radio in my car has those thumb-buttons mounted on the steering wheel to let you adjust volume and tune up different stations without taking your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road. The only thing that would make it better is a readout just above the speedo so I could see which station is tuned up, but I was just thinking that I’ll probably find out by accident it has that, just as I accidentally found out last week that I can make it scan for the next station by holding down the program button until it beeps. I hit the button to switch the station just as I was about to make a turn and held the button down a little longer than usual, and it beeped at me, really loudly. “What the hell was that?” I asked Barb, but she didn’t know. Then I held the button down just a little too long again, and got the same beep. I had to do that a couple times to figure out why it was beeping, because I’m a little thick, or maybe because I didn’t read the owner’s manual. (Who’s got the time? They’re as thick as San Diego phone books.) Next: Dave the hidden controls for the missile launcher!
I got to sleep in today. It was for a little less than an hour, but it was still a pretty nice treat.
I volunteered to work another afternoon building a house for Habitat For Humanity. Forget living in a house that was put up by the lowest builder; how’d you like to live in a house built by a bunch of volunteers, some of whom had never held a hammer before? (I think that would be kind of cool.) Luckily, a hammer is remarkably easy to use; they don’t require owner’s manuals and are almost impossible to break, so Habitat For Humanity has a pretty good thing going, when you look at it that way.
And today’s project was remarkably easy, once we got the hang of it. The professionals were going to lay linoleum tomorrow (except that they call it “vinyl” now, which means record albums to me), which needs a layer of quarter-inch plywood “sub-flooring” underneath it. Our task today: Measure, cut and lay sub-flooring down in the kitchen, dining room and upstairs bathroom.
The four-by-five foot sheets of plywood fit very easily in the dining room but needed little notches cut out of them to fit around the ducts in the floor. When I exhibited a willingness to handle the circular saw, they brought the plywood to me with the cuts drawn on it in pencil. I hacked it all to pieces and, fortunately, the pieces fit. The kitchen called for a bit more patience to cut around the corners and into the coves, but I had a pretty good handle on it by then, almost like I knew what I was doing.
The bathroom, however, was a bit more problematic. Only one full sheet of plywood fit in there; the rest had to be cut into pieces no bigger than half a sheet and notched to fit around ducts, drains, a couple corners and a closet. I screwed up the sheet I cut to fit the corner where the toilet sat. It had to be an inch wider at one end than the other, and I got it backwards. If you’re thinking, “Turn it over, dummy!” — the plywood had an “up” side, and I had to cut a hole off-center for the toilet in the narrow end. So I cut another piece, and again I cut it wrong! But this time I didn’t cut the hole for the toilet, and our boss told me to just flip it over; he didn’t care if the “up” side was down, he just wanted some plywood in that corner. The next piece (around a corner, out the door and into the closet) had to go from the bathroom back to the saw horses about a dozen times before I got it cut just right, and eventually we used the “hit it with a hammer” method to make it fit, but fit, it did.
One of the women I was working with has definitely missed her calling. Each sheet of plywood had about a million little Xs printed on one side (that’s how they had an “up” side). To fix the plywood sheet to the floor, one of us had to drive a staple through each X with an air-driven staple gun, and although quite a few of us got a chance to try it, Andrea found that she and that stapler could jitterbug across a sheet of plywood like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair across a wide-open ballroom. (It was more like a tap dance, really, but I couldn’t think of a famous tap couple right off the top of my head.)
After each of us found the jobs we were especially good at and got a rhythm going, we made a team that hummed along so well we finished all the work in the house about an hour early. The floor in the kitchen was completely laid before lunch, and piecing together the plywood jigsaw puzzle in the bathroom kept three of us busy until about three in the afternoon, while the rest went to another house to paint.
Habitat For Humanity makes a pretty good project out of putting these houses together. Each house has work that obviously has to be done by professionals; the plumbing and electrical wiring probably couldn’t pass the scrutiny of city building code inspectors if it were patched together by occasional amateurs. On the other hand, there is a considerable amount of simple hard work that is easily done in an afternoon by giving rakes or paintbrushes to any average Joe (or more probably “average Jane,” if that isn’t bending the cliché too far; women appear to volunteer in much greater numbers than men), and I find it satisfying to work on a house. I don’t especially like yard work, but when it’s done I like the result. Now, since I don’t have my own house (yet), and I’m working alongside the first-time home owners who will eventually live in these snug little bungalows, I have to say that there’s a great deal of job satisfaction in this kind of work, too. One day a weekend I can easily give up. That’s my shameless plug.
A woman who didn’t understand computers very well was trying to log on to the terminal I had reserved for the lunch hour at the library. There’s a login screen with a banner across the top to tell you whether or not the machine’s available, and if it’s not, the time it will be. This one was clearly telling her it was not available, but as it turned out she didn’t understand English all that well, not that she needed to. She would mouse the login box and, when she tried to type, a pop-up would tell her the computer was reserved. She’d hit the return key until the pop-up disappeared, mouse the login box and try to type again, which would get her a pop-up, of course. She’d hit the return key until the pop-up disappeared, mouse the login box, type, get the pop-up, hit the return key, mouse the login box, type, get the pop-up, et cetera, et cetera. How many times does anybody have to do that before they get the message that it’s not going to let them log on? I stood there for a couple minutes, certain in my belief that she’d eventually give up and leave, but if she was nothing else, she was absolutely determined. I think she would have sat there trying to log in until they shut off the lights and pushed her out the door, and once I realized that, I stepped a little closer and said, “I don’t think you can log in.” She said something in reply, but I didn’t understand her, and I don’t think she understood me when I told her I had reserved that terminal. I pointed at an open terminal in the second row and suggested she try that one, and she immediately got up and started plunking away at the keyboard I’d indicated.
Another person who was having trouble with computers today was my aunt Susan, who came back to work after a long weekend up north on vacation to find that her computer didn’t work at all. She’s the executive secretary for the entire bank, books all the meetings and makes all the most important phone calls, but today, locked out of every contact list and calendar she normally uses, it was a very bad way to start the week.
Tim’s hogged the home computer all to himself these past couple days trying to get some kind of mega-sized homework assignment done. It took him three days to write the outline, in between gaming sessions, chat rooms and downloading hip-hop music with pornographic verses. He’s been writing all afternoon finishing up the outline, and all evening fleshing it into an essay, and he does this all wearing a pair of headphones. He can somehow concentrate on writing cohesive sentences and paragraphs while boom-boom music is beating his head from both sides, but he can’t write a word if I sit in the room and stare at him. He can’t eat if I do that, either. It’s kind of fun.
I woke up this morning absolutely certain that I’d taken a shower and gone back to bed. I was even sure that my hair had gotten the pillow wet. I don’t remember dreaming about showering, so it must have been only wishful thinking.
Somebody’s got to take a shower first in the morning, and that has somehow ended up being me. Okay, not “somehow;” I’d rather do it that way. There are just three of us, but, you see, there’s only one bathroom and it’s pretty much in constant use from the time the first alarm clock goes off at five-thirty, when I roll out of bed and straight into the shower, more or less. I would much rather get my shower first thing than have to try to get it second or, worst of all, last. Then I’d have to rush through drying off, dressing and brushing my teeth while everybody else was also trying to complete their morning toilet. No matter how congenial you try to be (and at that hour it’s none too congenial), you can’t help but make people grumpy when you ask to lean into the sink to spit while they’re powdering or combing or what have you.
I have never enjoyed taking a shower straight out of the sack. A civilized person ought to be allowed time to wake up (at least an hour, I’d say) and have a bite to eat with some juice, or maybe sip a hot cup of tea or coffee while he sits by the window trying to get his thoughts together. Rudely dumping a guy like that into a cold tub and drenching him with water is not a way to improve his mood at all.
To give myself more time to do those wonderful things, I could get up earlier. Could, but won’t. I tried it for about a week, believe it or not. All that relaxing stuff isn’t very relaxing at four-thirty. I need to relax my way into the morning later, not earlier, say about nine o’clock, eight at the earliest. There must be some way to make a comfortable living at a decent hour of the day.
Barb’s random thought of the day: On the drive in to work today, Barb noticed that gas prices were down thirty cents from the beginning of the week and wondered, not for the first time, what kind of bizarre, random method franchise owners use to set the price of gasoline. It’s almost as random as darts, or rolling dice. The market prices of other commodities fluctuate as much as gasoline’s, don’t they? What would people do, she wondered, if the price of milk or a loaf of bread was two dollars on Monday, but three dollars on Friday? Or if they went out one week and got a burger and fries for five bucks, but the next week it cost ten dollars? What would you do? I’m pretty sure I’d buy a shotgun and head for the hills and wait for the revolution to wrap up.
Good morning, Americans! It’s FRIDAY!
I got a bright new button-down shirt to wear for casual day at the office. It’s got every color in the Crayola box of eight basic colors and it makes me look like a dime store awning. Does you remember what dime store awnings used to look like? No? Please tell me you do.
Barb’s very jealous of my shirt and is already scheming up ways to hijack it from my wardrobe. In all probability I’ll get just this one chance to wear it before she snatches it from the laundry this weekend and establishes possession by wearing it to the auction on Sunday. Maybe I should leave it at work.
We’ll be attending the Black Horse auction this weekend in DeForest to peruse the many splendorous items, junky and antique, proffered for purchase there. This will be only our third auction but we went to Black Horse before and thoroughly enjoyed the drama they served up. Last time I was very interested in, but not very aggressive about staking my claim to several items I would liked to have taken home with me. A few of the boxes of toys, for instance, would have made a nice addition to my collection, but I never got the close look at them that I would have liked because there was a really huge man slouched in a camp chair in front of them and I didn’t want to bother him to move. I figured he would do so eventually, and he did, just as the auctioneer got around to putting the toys up for sale. Then, the enormous man lurched to his feet and stepped even closer to the toys, making it impossible for me to see what was going on. What really kicked me in the testicles, though, was that he never bid on them. WTF? I don’t know, but this time I’m bringing my own camp chair and, if the same guy’s there, I’m going to park myself right on his foot.
We have a heavy-duty shredder in the office now. A company man came by to install it and gave me a short demonstration, showed me how to clear a jam, change the bags, and lubricate the cutting blades, that sort of thing. I didn’t know how to tell him I’ve operated shredders as small as a toaster and as large as a truck, and that as part of my military duties I shredded more paper than he’ll ever see in his natural life, times ten.
In the military we used to shred all our papers, and before that we used to burn them, which is why the brown paper bag at each of our desks was called a “burn bag.” We were supposed to put only paper to be shredded in the burn bag, but very often people dropped their garbage in it. I think they usually started by dropping candy wrappers or paper towels in, reasoning that it was paper, too, and couldn’t make a difference one way or another. Then through sheer carelessness they might drop in a banana peel or Popsicle stick and, if they realized what they’d done, not want to dig it out because it was, you know, garbage. Yuk.
Each week we shredded all the paper in the burn bags, the junior enlisted personnel taking turns feeding the shredder, and by “taking turns” I mean that a sergeant volunteered us, oh joy. It was a job that took all day because we had to open every one of those bags to sort the paper from the garbage, which by the way smelled pretty rank after it had been wrapped up inside a burn bag for at least a week.
I remember especially well the week that Roseanne took her turn in the barrel. Under normal circumstances Roseanne was a quiet, sweet girl, but several hours of sorting garbage and stuffing reeking paper into a shredder turned her into a raging monster who stormed into our work section with a burn bag in each hand, one of which she dashed open on the floor, spilling orange peels and empty pop cans everywhere. “STOP PUTTING YOUR GODDAMN GARBAGE IN THE BURN BAGS!” she shrieked at us, and scattered the contents of the other burn bag at our feet before stomping out of the section. Nobody said a word for a several minutes.
The guys in the office are just a little miffed about shredding all their papers, but they’ve never been as miffed as Roseanne was.
I got my butt kicked by my mother today. She and Tom came to visit and brought their bikes along, and after lunch at the Black Bear we took a ride along the Glacial Drumlin Trail, which passes through Cottage Grove just south of the railroad tracks and heads east until it gets to the outskirts of Milwaukee. We didn’t go quite that far. I think we ended up going three or four miles down the trail, all of it at such a brisk clip that I was well and truly worn out by the time we returned home. They go biking several times a week and are obviously very fit because of it, but I have ridden my bike maybe twice since we moved to Cottage Grove, so I’m an out-of-shape blobbo. When they took off riding, they went so fast that I was tail-end Charlie for most of the trip. I was so weak by the time I got back that I could hardly raise a glass of beer to my lips to replenish my lost fluids.
It was a wonderful day to be out riding. The trail is an old railroad grade, so it’s almost level and mostly straight across farmlands and through the small woods between farms. A stiff breeze blew from the west, at our backs as we rode out so we didn’t notice it much, but in our face on the way back, which really put the screws to me as I struggled to keep up with Mom and Tom. I am so out of shape.
Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of “Spirited Away” and possibly the finest director of animated movies on the planet right now, has apparently bought the rights to the Japanese-language version of Ursula Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea,” one of the few fiction books I enjoy so much that I re-read it every few years. After seeing “Howl’s Moving Castle,” I can’t help but think Miyazaki is the perfect director to bring the story of Le Guin’s wizard, Ged, to the screen.
Wow, the spiders are getting thick around the back door at work. I don’t know if it’s the season for spiders to fatten up before they hibernate, or whatever spiders do for the winter. Maybe I simply haven’t noticed them before this, but it’s impossible not to notice them now because there’s always one or two of them building their webs right across the door handle, one more working right about at eye level, and at least a half-dozen more crowding what real estate is left across other parts of the door. These are the gnarled, spindly-looking kind of spiders, and their webs are the kind of stringy, almost random cobwebs that make starlets scream when they walk through them in the movies. Why the spiders even bother to build a web in a doorway that a lot of people walk through every day is beyond me. I know they’re not exactly known for their brainpower, but you’d think that, after starting over a couple dozen times each morning at seven-thirty, they’d give up and move to a location with a little less traffic, maybe between a couple fence posts in the shade with a view, lower crime rates and good schools for the little spiderlings.
I’ve been taking the stairs at work for a week and a half now. It became important enough to mention since my Mom and I went riding on our bikes last weekend and she kicked my butt. She was going fast enough to leave a trail of flames in her wake, just like the Road Runner. I was eating her dust over almost all of the trip no matter how cartoonishly I flailed away at the pedals, and I did one hell of a lot of flailing. “This can’t be happening,” I kept telling myself, but my eyes kept tell me, “Can, and is.”
I work on the seventh floor, so I’ve always taken the elevator before this, and I’m an office drone so I sit on my butt almost completely inert all day long. I guess that’s how I turned into a sack of wet noodles, completely unable to keep up with my 68-year-old mother on level pavement. It just so happens that I started using the stairs last week Monday, giving me five days of exhaustive stair-climbing before Mom flew past me on her bike. Apparently I didn’t get as much useful muscle tone out of these gruesome workouts it as I thought I was getting.
It wasn’t my fitness, or lack of, that convinced me to climb stairs, though; it’s that I couldn’t stand waiting for the elevator. Sheer impatience made me do it. I had to make a quick trip from the seventh to the third floor one day, noticed I could do it in a blink, timed myself the next time and found I could make the trip in less than half the time I spent just waiting. That got me wondering how long it would take to climb from three to seven; a few seconds longer than the elevator trip, it turned out, so I used the stairs every time I had to make a quick trip from one office to another.
Sheer impatience, though, has faded away almost completely in light of the shock of having my mother zoom past me as easily and as often as she pleased, and now I’m an evangelical stair-climber. I disdain the elevator and its riders, at least today, maybe even until tomorrow or the end of this week. If I can keep going through Monday, I’ll probably mention it again, so you might as well gird your loins for it (whatever that means).
Tim sent me a web video of LeParkour, which he figures is the most awesome “extreme sport” on earth. Looks like any parent’s worst nightmare: I see people jumping off the tops of buildings and, I don’t know, I get this queasy flashback of a trip to the emergency room to pin broken bones back together. I hope I never, ever find out any of my kids are doing it. (HINT.)
I woke up this morning with something stuck to my upper lip, which was distressing enough to make me smack it off in the dark. Couldn’t find it later. I don’t want to know what it was, do I? No, I don’t think so.
We’ve got Asian beetles in our house, lots of them. I thought they were ladybugs, but Mom says they’re not. They look like ladybugs, but she says they bite, they stink, and if you smash them they leave a stain you can’t wash out. Mom’s always bringing me good news like that.
A couple dozen of these things were buzzing around the overhead light in the dining room last night, making lots of noise and, I pointed out to everybody who was listening, “probably pooping on our food.” Barb, who would normally be just disgusted by a comment like that (but not surprised, considering the source), instead fought fire with fire by pointing out there are always bugs pooping in my food and crawling on my face at night. She even suggested I’m probably eating them in my sleep. I didn’t tell her about the thing stuck to my lip.
The Asian beetles flitting around the lights drove Tim into such a snit. They weren’t anywhere near him, but he was as jumpy as if they were crawling all over his neck and face. “Why don’t you get the vacuum cleaner and suck them all up?” I suggested. His eyes lit up and he smiled, as if I’d given him the keys to a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck. “Aw, that’s perfect!” he said. “You’re so evil!” Well, thanks, Tim, I try.
He was so excited about the prospect of sending beetles off to vacuum cleaner hell that his mom had to just about keep after him with a stick to get him to finish his chores. When the last of the dishes were stacked and the trash had finally been taken out, he fired up the vacuum and did away with all the beetles in just a few minutes, leaving me to wonder: What do you suppose they could do in the dark, musty confines of a vacuum cleaner bag? I don’t want to know, do I? No, I don’t think so.
Just the other day Barb and I were trying to figure out why we never hear ELO on the local oldies radio station, and this morning they were all over the seventies, playing Cheap Trick’s Surrender, Jay Ferguson’s Thunder Island, and ELO’s Strange Magic! (If they’d played Synchronicity right after that, I’d have peed my pants.) The only thing missing was Carry On, Wayward Son or that song Boston did all through the 80’s that they spread out over two or three albums.
For the last couple days we’ve had a false summer in Madison, temps in the upper 70’s and bright sunshine. Today started out a little cooler, but the sun came out, the sky was clear and blue except for some high, whispy clouds here and there, and I thought, as I got ready to head out for my lunch our at the library, that the jacket was unnecessary, so I ditched it at the coat rack on my way out the door.
Well.
The day is clear and bright, I’ll grant you, but that’s just a trap to lull you into a false sense of warmth as you gaze out the windows and think about walking around town in your shirtsleeves. Don’t do it! my conscience warned. At least take the jacket with you! But, being deaf to conscience and a bit of a dorkwad, I couldn’t hear it well, and I knew as soon as I crossed the street that I would have to step lively if I intended to maintain my core body temperature. It was nothing if not brisk, and it was not nothing. If that makes sense.
I think I can make it back to work before hypothermia reduces me to a stiffening lump of shivering meat, so don’t worry about me.
On to the lighter (maybe more accurately “whimsical”) side: Ian Pearson of the BT Laboratories has proposed a more functional (“loaded with gizmos”) set of silicon breast implants that comprises an MP3 player on one side and a storage chip on the other, controlled by a wrist watch and wired together using Bluetooth. I’ll leave aside the obvious jokes about tuning in the station, and simply ask: Is there nothing that is impossible any more?
Speaking of music, I learned a disturbing bit of musical trivia while listening to the oldies station today: Red Rubber Ball, a bit of musical drivel recorded by a group called The Cyrkle that the station plays with depressing frequency, was in fact written by Paul Simon. I really like Paul Simon’s music, so it was a little hard for me to believe at first that such a god-awful ditty as this could be his work, but it can. I guess everybody has their off days.
“Dude, I’ve never see you with long hair before!” Tim said to me after dinner. It seems as though he doesn’t notice me until I grow hair he’s never seen before. Make of that what you will.
I’ve reverted to my pre-1980’s days when I had hair that looked like big, floppy Snoopy ears. I think I was meant to have long hair. I’m considering a ponytail, maybe. Or braids.
Tim’s never seen me with hair as long as I’ve got now, and neither has Barb, come to that. I’ve been living with a crew cut for so many years that this must be the over-reaction. Barber Bad! Not Go! Grow Hair Long And Frizzy!
This couldn’t be my mid-life crisis, could it? I thought they were more along the lines of a torrid affair or two with loose women and an expensive, bitter divorce in the course of which I lose my shiny new convertible. Instead I’m just playing with my hair? Even I couldn’t be that pedestrian, could I? Could anybody?
It’s a small world (but I wouldn’t want to paint it): While I was at the library, screwing around on the internet, the guy who was at the computer beside me was having some trouble printing a photo he downloaded from his web mail account, and the library aide wasn’t having any luck helping him figure out what to do to fix it. Being a busybody know-it-all, at least part-time, I offered to help him load the photo into the image viewer tool and size it so he could print it the way he wanted it, and while he downloaded I couldn’t help but notice that he was printing a picture of the Alvin O’Konski Manor in Wausau, a "senior apartment community" named for my grandfather’s brother, a state congressman. No ideas for a punch line.
I like to think that I can figure out a lot of the computer-geek stuff that’s out there. I’m not a nerd about it ... okay, maybe I am a nerd about it, but I’m not the kind of mutant egghead brain case who knows every command for UNIX, all the ins and outs of Windows and can program in C++. (I know what that means, but I can’t do it. Are you with me so far?)
When I get into a tinkering mood I play with a software program until it either bends to my wishes or slides into brain death with no hope of recovery. The other day I was trying to get Blogger to write a grumpy old man for me, and I tinkered and twiddled so long that, by the time I figured out that I couldn’t make it perform my kind of malfeasance, I’d burned up four hours of my life!
Log in
Choose the blog
Click the “settings” tab
Select the “publish” option
Enter the FTP settings
Save the settings
Re-publish the blog
Scratch head while trying to figure out why it won’t publish
Go back to the “settings” tab
Select the “publish” option
Change the FTP settings
Save the settings
Re-publish the blog
Scratch head and ponder some more
(... and et cetera et cetera ad nauseum, good night.)
After I metaphorically banged my head against that brick wall for the better part of an afternoon, I downloaded a copy of a blog program called Movable Type, but only started to tinker with it when Tim, pacing ever so patiently back and forth across my field of view, finally dropped the final hint that told me he still had homework, or some similar bogus need to use the computer. I hung it up for the night without yet having accomplished a thing.
Tried again today to make this junk work, but the effort left me wiped out and I’m done mucking with it. My web pages will remain plain and simple for the time being, without all the bells and whistles of a genuine web log. Sometimes a gizmo is a lot of fun to play with, and sometimes it’s just a pain in the ass.
Barb glued herself to the cat last night. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. The cats both have all their toes because we can’t bring ourselves to have them declawed, but a couple years back Barb discovered Soft Paws, colored plastic caps to cover their claws and keep them from shredding the bejeezus out of our furniture and carpets. The only trick is that you have to use cyano-acrylic glue to put them on the cat — the kind of stuff that used to be called Crazy Glue. And while Barb and Tim were capping Boo last night, some of it must have dribbled onto Barb’s finger. And then she held Boo’s paw while Tim capped the cat. And then Barb realized she was glued to Boo.
Under most circumstances, Boo’s a darling cat. A bit of a spoiled princess, but she’ll let us trim her nails and cap her just about any time we want, and she won’t put up much of a fuss about it. She was very indulgent last night, until Barb glued her finger to Boo’s paw. The mood went from relaxed to concerned to frantic, because nobody could tell if Barb was glued to Boo’s fur or to her skin, and we didn’t have any solvent. That’s got to be the definitive sign of people who are both stupid and clutzy: They keep Crazy Glue in the house and not a drop of solvent anywhere.
I tried to use a nail scissors to trim away enough fur to see where Barb was attached, but even though Tim had her by the scruff, Boo was determined to show us she’d had enough of this crap and wasn’t going to take it any longer. She bit Tim (but not hard enough to break the skin), ripped her paw off Barb’s finger, and bolted, leaving a few tufts of fur glued to Barb, thank goodness. Then she sat a few feet out of reach, where we could see her, and indignantly groomed her paw.
Do you have a “wincer,” a memory of something you’ve done that was so staggeringly stupid it makes you wince when it surfaces from the forgotten depths of your brain? Of course you do. Everyone does. I’ve got such a huge collection of them that I’ve had to add a room to the vaults of my memory.
More than thirty years ago I had a wood-burning tool, which was just a soldering iron with a half-dozen or so interchangeable points. Now that I look back with adult eyes, I’m flat-out amazed that giving a hot poker to kids to stimulate their young artistic abilities was once considered a good idea, but back then they did a lot of just-plain-crazy things and called them educational.
One of the interchangeable ends of the hot iron was an hobby knife. I could figure out what each of the other points did, but I had no idea what anybody would want with a hot hobby knife. Then one day I was trying to figure out how to remove some hard black rubber from the back of a hood ornament when a little devil appeared on my shoulder in a burst of flame and whispered the cliché, “Hot Knife Through Butter,” in to my ear. Of course! I screwed the hobby knife to the end of the wood-burning tool, plugged it in and, when it was hot enough, it easily sliced through the hard rubber. Working from another angle, I began to scrape the backing off the hood ornament.
If you ever bother to ask anybody how to use a hobby knife, the first thing they’ll tell you is: Cut away from yourself and, if possible, don’t even hold on to what you’re cutting. The reasons should be obvious but, thirty years ago, I was young enough that the obvious often completely escaped me, and stubborn enough that I wasn’t going to ask anybody how to use a knife. You put the sharp part against the thing you’re cutting and push, right? How much more sophisticated did I have to be? Never having heard the rule, and oblivious to the obvious, I clenched the hood ornament tightly in my left claw and happily carved away huge chunks of the stiff rubber backing. The hot knife went through the rubber so easily that, bearing down a little too hard, I pushed it all the way off the back of the hood ornament — this is the part that makes me wince, so you might want to look the other way — and sliced very deeply into the tip of one of my fingers.
The brand-new blade of the hobby knife was so razor-sharp that I didn’t feel any pain at first, and it was so hot that it cauterized the wound. No blood at all welled up from the unbelievably neat, gaping red gash. It was very easy to disbelieve what I’d done until Mister Pain slowly cranked up the volume and my whole world became a deafening throb. As a dumb fifteen-year-old, there was only one thing to do: slap some antibiotic cream it, wrap it in a band-aid and never, ever tell anybody I’d done something so stupid, so that’s what I did. The wound healed so well that I can’t even tell where it was any more, and that stupid episode was my secret and mine alone, until just now.
You’d think a hard-won lesson as valuable as that would stay with a guy forever, but thirty years later I was sitting in my living room in Cottage Grove, a presumably wiser, older man, trimming the odd bits of plastic off a model train car with a hobby knife. I carefully held the plastic part in one hand and cut away from it, but ran into a particularly thick chunk that wouldn’t give. Moments like this are breeding grounds for stupidity. Even though there was a nagging little angel on my shoulder reminding me of the phrase, “Hot Knife Through Butter,” I braced the part against my thumb and cut toward it with the hobby knife. The blade easily cut off the chunk of plastic and, continuing onward in accordance with the laws of inertia, nearly removed a hunk of meat the size of half a dime from the inside of my thumb. This time there was plenty of blood. I’m hoping this lesson’s good for at least another thirty years.
My family seems to have a predisposition to slicing off bits of themselves. My mother once sliced the tip of a finger off handling plate glass. She picked the little chunk of herself up off the ground, washed it, carefully replaced it, wrapped it in medical gauze and taped it down. When she changed the dressings she found that some gauze had gotten caught in the wound. She trimmed off as much as she could but had to leave a few stray threads sticking out from the edges of the cut. Each time she changed the dressing she would tug at the threads with tweezers, which made me stare. It was like a road accident, really gross but I couldn’t look away. She pulled the last thread out after a week or so passed, and now I don’t think even Mom can tell which fingertip was sliced off.
My Dad nearly cut his leg off with a maul. “Maul” isn’t just what pit bull terriers do to passing grannies. When it’s a noun, it’s a wedge for splitting fire wood, mounted on the end of an axe handle. The temptation to misuse it as a sledge hammer is almost irresistible, I can tell you, and so could my Dad. He was trying to pound a stake into the ground next to a sapling tree using the flat side of the maul, which glanced off the stake, flipped around, and the wedge went ker-chunk into his shin. Yikes, what a mess, and everybody was in such a fuss that the rest of the episode is a blur. I can’t even remember if he went to the doctor.
I have a very clear memory of my grandmother trying to finish cooking dinner with a bloody dishrag wrapped around her thumb because she cut it, and cut it pretty awfully, while slicing up potatoes for dinner. (Now that I think about it, she was holding the knife the same way I was.) Not only did she finish making dinner, she even drove somebody into town, if memory serves, all the while “bleeding like a stuck pig!” as she put it.
Let’s see, what else: I seem to remember Uncle Charlie cut off the end of a finger making dinner, and one of his guests found it in the salad, but that may be a made-up memory. Anyway, if there seems to be a well-established, almost customary tendency in my family to hack away at ourselves, I don’t know what could be causing it. I only hope I don’t have to do it too often.
The furnace has fired up in the middle of the night for the last two or three nights, which makes it official: Fall is here. I bet you thought it depended on when the leaves began to turn color or some similarly poetic bull, and that stuff is nice for bookstore calendars. I’ve always thought summer wasn’t over until I woke up in the middle of the night to the long-lost rumble of forced-air heat creaking through the ducts, and it wasn’t an unwelcome sound because, by that time, the nights were getting cold enough to pile on a couple extra blankets.
We’re such tightwads that the thermostat in our house has been set to sixty-eight degrees. A real tightwad isn’t happy with the thermostat setting until he’s shivering even when he’s swaddled in three or more layers of clothes. Our frugal genes apparently haven’t been passed to the youngest member of the O-family, though, who sneaks the thermostat up to seventy-two when he thinks we aren’t looking, somehow unaware that we won’t notice that the furnace is running more frequently.
If there was ever a walking contradiction of machismo, he’s it. He’s always talking about what makes a truck “a man’s truck” or what makes a hamburger “a man’s hamburger,” as if that makes sense, but turn the thermostat down a couple degrees and he whimpers like a heartbroken girl. To be fair, part of the problem could be that he’s never lived anywhere that he couldn’t stroll through the house in a t-shirt and shorts in the middle of winter, because he’s never lived in The Great White North and natural gas was always stupid cheap. Fast-forward his life to October 2005 in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin. There isn’t even snow on the ground yet, but he can’t stop whining about how cold the house is.
Why does sixty-eight degrees feels colder in the winter than it does in the summer? It must be one of those mysteries science can’t explain, like why the moon looks larger when it’s rising over the horizon in the Fall.
Ever since I gashed the end of my thumb with a hobby knife, I’ve felt like I’m living in one of those educational documentaries we used to watch in school:
“Thumbs.
Think of all the things you wouldn’t be able to do without thumbs.”
With my thumb wrapped up in a bandage and throbbing with pain all day Sunday, I had to find other ways to do things without the aid of my thumb or, in a lot of cases, without the use of my right hand at all. This was pretty much a lifestyle change, even doubly so because I’m right-handed. Writing, just to name the most obvious, was all but impossible when touching any part of my thumb past the last knuckle caused pain. Unzipping my fly. Combing my hair. I had to think laboriously though every mindless task I normally did in a blink. Tying my shoes put an unexpected five-minute delay on a shopping trip.
My thumb stopped throbbing some time last night but was still putting a hitch in my get-along this morning when I tried to button my shirt and discovered I had to re-learn an entirely different way to do it between my first and second finger. Then came the necktie. Actually, tying the necktie went a lot easier than the nightmares I had all night long about tying neckties. I was a teensy bit worried (not obsessed!) about that. Barb doesn’t know how to tie a necktie, I’m not sure Tim remembers, and I don’t own a clip-on, which is why I woke up in a sweat from a dream in which I wandered the halls of my work place in my underwear with a necktie around my neck, looking for somebody to tie it for me. To anybody else, that would have been the start of a good dream, but for me it was agony. I can be such a dweeb, even while asleep.
Saturday morning we went for a drive to the Stoughton area, a little south of Cottage Grove, to look for a pumpkin patch. We didn’t have any directions, just the vague idea that it was south on County Highway N somewhere, so we had to jink around on a couple back roads and ended up driving through the area that was demolished by a rampaging line of tornadoes last August. At least one funnel danced through a neighborhood of densely-built houses and flattened them and all the old, gnarled oaks growing in it. Never having see anything like that before, we were all slack-jawed at such comprehensive destruction.
The pumpkin patch we eventually found was back on County N; we’d passed it on the way to Stoughton. We scooped up four monster pumpkins and chucked them into the trunk, where we could hear them bumble against one another as we drove home. At four dollars for each big old gourd we thought we got quite a bargain, and proudly arranged them in front of the house next to the stoop where everybody could see what a fine buy we made.
“What did you do with the pumpkins?” Barb asked me the next morning, as she started out the door on a trip to the store. I hadn’t done anything with them, but there was just one out front. It didn’t take long to find them split open in the back yard. I guess there were a few bored thugs roaming the neighborhood last night, swiping pumpkins off the front stoops of houses and busting them just for chuckles. When Barb phoned the police to let them know what had happened, they told her that we weren’t the only ones whose pumpkins went missing in the night, and that more than one had been used to smash the windshields out of cars parked in the street. (Thank god I’ve got a garage!) Not only did they bust up our pumpkins, they had the gall to climb up our back stairs so they could drop them from the deck.
A Stray Thought: I haven’t eaten a Snickers bar since 1979. Okay, that’s a lie; I can’t remember the last time I ate a Snickers bar, before this morning when I got a weird craving and, since I couldn’t remember the last Snickers bar I ate, I caved in and bought one. Wow, are they good. Too good. All that chocolate and caramel, an instant sugar rush. And it’s loaded with nuts. Nuts are good for you, right? They’re all-natural, they can’t be bad, although I supposed it doesn’t help — and I’m just guessing here — when they’re wrapped up in chocolate and caramel.
Why do Snickers bars have a “Best Before” date on them? Aren’t they made irradiated, or somehow otherwise treated to make them last forever? I’m pretty sure I remember finding Snickers bars in MREs, the packaged military foodoid chow that’s stacked ten stories high in warehouses on both coasts. Could be a false memory.
The weirdest thing about Snickers bars, and coincidentally the one thing that I like more than anything else about them, is that they’re so obviously fake food. Ever take a look at the bottom of one? The makers don’t even try to erase or disguise those tire tracks that are impressed in the bar as it moves through the assembly line. It not only comes from a machine, it proudly bears the marks to tell you! So what? Tastes great! Chow down! Have two!
I went to a coffee shop after work, instead of hanging out at the library, because there wasn’t any place to sit down and write on my lap top. The tables were crowded with at least twice the usual number of homeless people, many of them sleeping. I’ve never seen so many at that time of the evening. Maybe it’s the cold weather.
I was in the coffee shop no more than ten minutes when a bum walked straight past the twenty or so other people drinking coffee, offered me his grimy paw in greeting, pointed at my laptop and asked me what I was doing.
“Writing something,” I answered. Why I didn’t say, “None of your damn business,” I don’t know. Pity, probably.
“You a lawyer?” he asked.
“Nope,” I replied.
“Banker?”
“Not even close.”
“Got any money? I’m hungry.”
“No, but I have a helpful tip instead,” I offered. “Stop drinking a couple hours before you start panhandling so you don’t reek like a distillery. You might have better luck.” No, I didn’t say that, either. Again, I don’t know why.