Drivel
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006
I don’t know exactly what a time warp is; I can do the dance (“It’s just a jump to the left!”) but the pseudo-scientific rift in time that makes me late while getting ready for work confounds me completely.
I finished up a light breakfast of toast with jam, a cup of OJ and some java, and I swear it was six-forty, plenty of time, right? I’ll never be able to figure out how I ended up rushing around the house, looking for my keys, glasses and wallet at the last minute, and that was after rushing through making a lunch and making sure my text book for class was packed for school after work. I hate it when that happens.
So this morning I was Mister Timely: I dressed while Barb was in the shower, made my lunch immediately after, and set my bags by the door, ready to go, well before anybody else had their shoes on. There was no “Mad Minute” as I rushed to put everything together on the way out the door. I was calm, cool and collected.
Fate wasn’t going to allow any of that. “What’d I do with the cell phone?” Barb wondered as she settled into her seat in the car. It’s usually plugged into the console but it wasn’t there this morning. “You unplugged it last night, on the way home,” I reminded her. She rooted through her purse, the center console and the glove box, searched under the seat and in the door pocket but had no luck finding it. There was nothing left but to start a search in the house — and when she got up out of her seat, there it was. She’d been sitting on it. Must’ve fallen out of her pocket as she got in the car.
What’re the odds of hearing Copacabana on the radio twice in three days (on two different stations!) after years and years of not hearing it at all? I haven’t heard a Barry Manilow tune in so long, I’ve forgotten most of them. Imagine the luck!
Then, on Monday I think it was, I heard the introduction, a rumba beat backed by cow bells that was still familiar enough to make me cock my head and wonder, “Where have I heard that before?” When the full band kicked, though, there was no mistaking the song, and by then it was too late to do anything that would keep the tune from becoming stuck in my head all day long, so I let it play. “How long has it been since you’ve heard Copacabana?” I asked Barb in an e-mail message. “I don’t know,” she shot back, “but it hasn’t been long enough.”
This morning I tuned my radio to an AM station that plays lots of lounge music, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, mixed up with swing. I’d never been able to get the station from my desk before, but Roger plays it all the time on the radio in his office, so I barged in there with my radio and when I knew I had it tuned in, I took the radio back to my desk and walked around the room to see if I could get it to come in. “Put the aerial down,” Roger suggested, “you’re probably picking up interference from the fluorescent lights.” It’d been so long since I’d listened to an AM station that I’d forgotten tricks like that, and sure enough, the station came in with the aerial down. I worked all morning long with Tommy Dorsey, Dean Martin, Woody Herman and Bobby Darin brightening my day.
It happened shortly after I came back from my lunch hour: First, that familiar rumba beat and two-tone cow bells that made me cock my head in recognition. “This can’t be,” I thought out loud. “Twice in one week isn’t possible. This is 2005, for Pete’s sake.” But Barry doesn’t care how modern the music is these days; he’s still wailing Copacabana to crowds who lap it up like thirsty cats at a milk bowl, and radio stations are apparently indulging their listeners by occasionally playing a little Manilow to tide them over. Can’t believe I was bushwhacked twice in one week by it, though.
The worst part of the experience is the aftertaste, of course. Not only have I had Her name was Lo-Lah, she was a show girl, stuck in my head all afternoon, I’ve even caught myself singing it. Oh, ye gods! Smite me down and relieve my misery!
Thursday, February 2nd, 2006
I hate to repeat myself. I know you can’t tell from reading this drivel, but I do. This time warp thing, though. It’s starting to get weird.
I was trying to figure out whether February 18th fell on a Saturday or a Sunday, so I counted from today, February 2nd, which I knew to be Wednesday, to Saturday, four days from today. That would make this Saturday the 5th, next Saturday the 12th, and the Saturday after next the 19th, right?
Weird. I knew that the 18th would fall on Saturday or Sunday, but no matter how many times I added it up, it fell on Friday. I couldn’t noodle it out any other way.
“Today’s the second, right?” I asked Barb.
“Yep,” she answered.
“So that makes Saturday the fifth, correct?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, after the briefest of pauses to tick off the days in her own head.
“And the Saturday after next would be ....”
She whispered to herself a moment, then answered, “The nineteenth.”
So there you have it: Two adults who couldn’t figure out the answer to the simplest calendar problem. Even after I got a visual fix on the weekend of the 18th by physically looking at a calendar at work, I was puzzled. How’d they do that? Then I backtracked to this coming weekend, and my eyes dropped out of their sockets.
Today is Thursday. I never suspected. And neither did Barb, looking back on our conversation this morning. We both had our heads firmly stuck in yesterday, and I couldn’t snap out of it until I had eyes-on proof that I was living in the past.
Friday, February 3rd, 2006
I seem to be having a drivel-free day. Worked all day, had lunch with the guys. On the way home fetched pork chops for dinner from the market (we didn’t eat them; kinda dumb, not weird enough to be funny). Watched first episode of The Prisoner, 60’s television show that was soooo avant-garde in its time. Seems just plain loony now. Barb emerged from her bubble-bath soak very unhappy; seems the tub is far too small to make for a good soak. Possibly the only satisfied inhabitants of our apartment tonight are the cats, who scarfed down a special treat of delicious canned food. Mmmm-mmmm, chicken surprise!
Saturday, February 4th, 2006
Southern Wisconsin is covered this morning by a freshly-fallen, silent shroud of snow. (Paul Simon, a jewel in the pop-culture rough.) The snow could have made the drive into Madison to drop Barb at work a little tricky this morning, but the roads were remarkably clear and even where I could see snow and ice I didn’t slip once.
While Barb spent the day titling vehicles (possibly even yours!), I went home to wash dishes and clothes and clean the bathroom. As a rule of thumb I try to avoid housework, but it really had to be done and since I couldn’t spend the time with Barb, and I very likely wouldn’t see Tim until he rolled out of bed some time after ten o’clock, getting it out of the way as soon as possible only made sense. Put another way, I couldn’t argue myself out of it.
The end broke off one of the bows of my glasses on Wednesday. It’s the hook-type end, a sort of rubberized spring that can’t be repaired. I hoped to get a new frame but nobody in town will sell me just a frame; they tell me some sob story about how it’s impossible to cut my lenses to fit a new frame. If I took my prescription in they’d order a set of lenses, but then I couldn’t find my prescription so it became necessary to get an eye exam, first. It doesn’t rain, but it pours.
In the freed-up time where I would have driven to the mall to get frames I caught a short nap instead. What a treat. Seriously, is there anything better than a quiet hour in a secluded spot with a book, then a short nap? I could think of only one or two things, but Barb was at work.
Speaking of Barb again, I picked her up in front of the Soviet-style building where she works and whisked her away to the Souper Bowl, a benefit soup kitchen to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. We paid our fifteen bucks, got to pick a hand-thrown ceramic soup bowl from the dozens on offer, then took a cup of soup to the cafeteria table and ate while a jazz quartet of college students played Stan Getz-style lounge music. Most relaxing bowl of soup I’ve ever had.
If you have a high-speed computer connection and like to listen to music while you work, try Pandora, a music juke box that asks you for the name of an artist or a song you like and plays music that sounds much like more of that. Click on the song that’s playing and you cal tell it whether or not you like that artist or song. Pretty cool.
Sunday, February 5th, 2006
Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go ...
Mom certainly lives a long way from Cottage Grove. Sheesh. Almost three hours away. I’d want to visit her every weekend if she wasn’t halfway up the road to the Great White North. As it is, we spent at least as much time on the road (probably more, after hunting around for the turnoff to the highway) than we did visiting.
Listen to me, carp, carp, carp. Like I wasn’t looking forward to it all week. Like I didn’t have a good time. I hate driving any more than half an hour, but I hardly noticed how long it took to get there, or get back. Nothing exactly compares with the pleasant vibe of returning to the ancestral hearth to visit with Mom.
Our trip took us up State Highway 51 past acres of snow-covered rolling Wisconsin farmland, through Pardeeville and Montello and Wautoma, all so familiar-looking I could have grown up in any of these small towns. After we passed Wild Rose I truly was on familiar ground again, and a small cheer went up when we crossed into Waupaca County (although from the two other passengers in the car it was more like a sound of relief). The road took an unexpected turn through Waupaca and we ended up in a residential area (it was the road’s fault, see?), but I found the town center easily and, with my internal compass realigned, I found my way through Ogdensburg to Manawa on Highway B. We pulled into the driveway in time to sit down for a late lunch, with plenty of time to sit around the table and chat for a couple hours.
The ancestral hearth is up for sale, it turns out. Mom wants to move to a pretty little house down the road a bit and has put her home on the market to raise the funds needed. If she’s successful, it’ll be more than a little weird to drive through Manawa past the house where she’s lived for almost thirty-five years, to say nothing of how very weird it’ll be to think of somebody else living in the house where I grew up. I mean, I still can’t get over walking into what used to be my bedroom and finding no trace of me in there.
Manawa’s changed a lot since I left: downtown shops have closed up, and where there used to be three grocery stores there aren’t any now. Everybody has to buy their bare essentials at the gas station/convenience store. They tore down the elementary school a couple years ago; it stood empty for years after they built a new one in a corn field near the high school. There’s one of those green flower-bulb water towers in place of the old silver coffee kettle. The pickle factory’s gone and the train doesn’t run through town any more — but all that’s small beans compared to Mom selling the house. That’ll be about the most momentous change to the town I can imagine since my dad passed away.
That said, the house she wants to move into is such an excellent choice that I’d get it for her as a birthday present, if only I could.
We sat in the back room, chatting about old times and catching up on new, until about five o’clock when we finally had to shove off because I didn’t want to be on the road much after dark. And I got lost in Waupaca again when I missed the turnoff onto Highway 22 while I was telling a story.
Monday, February 6th, 2006
I snored myself awake last night. I don’t usually snore (honest!) (not!) but last night my head couldn’t have felt more congested if I’d shoved wet newspapers up my nose, and when you’ve got a nose the size of mine, that’s a lot of newspaper — I’d guess at least as much as two Sunday editions, including advertising inserts. Both sides of my nose were impassable as a Los Angeles freeway at rush hour. Getting back to sleep was impossible because I can’t breathe through my mouth without feeling like I’m suffocating. I’d start to drop off, gasp myself awake, suck on my tongue long enough that my mouth didn’t feel like a sandbox, drop off and gasp myself awake again, etc. etc. etc. The night wasn’t a million years long, it only seemed that way.
Tonight’s dinner featured pork chops and mashed potatoes. “Does anybody but me think the potatoes are a little ... off?” Tim asked, in what he obviously hoped was a diplomatic tone (it wasn’t). He thought they tasted a little too much like potatoes. Imagine that. I can only guess what he meant was that I hadn’t whipped any margarine in while I was fluffing the flakes with a long fork, as I usually do. I advised him to kill the flavor with too much salt; that usually works for him.
I got myself a beard trimmer because, well, because I’ve got myself a beard, and it needed trimming. The trimmer was on sale at Walgreen’s and came with all sorts of extras: four different snap-on combs for the clipper, a hand-held comb to comb your beard with, and, as a special bonus, a nose-hair trimmer! And it was rechargeable.
The one thing it didn’t come with was four semesters of tech school. I stood in front of the mirror with it and asked myself, now that I’ve got it, what do I do with it? I started by snapping the longest comb on and ran it up under my chin a couple times, to little effect. I tried it in different directions before I snapped it off and used a slightly shorter comb. Kept up that routine long enough to start feeling satisfied with the results, then made the mistake of looking down and was alarmed to find a whole lot more hair clippings than I thought I’d see. If I were teaching a class in how to trim your own beard, this is where I’d say, “This would be a good point at which to stop for the night.” And stop I did.
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006
Greetings, drivel-reader! Or would you prefer to be known as a Drivelian? How about Drivelite? Or, if you’re of the Slavic bent, there’s always Drivelnik! Come, let us speak of things drivelish, there is so much to catch up on.
The featured guest on the morning talk show on Wisconsin Public Radio didn’t show up, so the host asked listeners to call in with their suggestions for what they’d like to hear more of, and did she get an earful. The last guy was the best; he went from normally concerned citizen to foaming lunatic in less than a minute. “I have three suggestions,” he began, “I’d like to hear more about Congressional oversight.”
“Good idea,” the host commented, prompting the caller to go on.
“And I’d like to hear more about the full-scale military assault on our southern border that was successfully preempted by our Department of Homeland Security,” he said.
“We’ll see what we can do about that,” the host ventured.
“And lastly, I’d like to hear you interview Joe Blow, the foremost authority on non-human technology.”
There was a bit of a pause before the host ventured to ask, “Non-human technology?”
“What NASA’s really been up to all these years,” he answered knowingly.
“Thanks for calling,” the host quickly interjected.
There are three elevators in the building where I work: a utility elevator in the back, and two wood-paneled elevators in the front lobby so the customers can take comfort in pretending to be swells.
The utility elevator rocks! It’s a tiny metal box with dirty quilted blankets padding the walls, but the doors snap shut almost too fast for you to get your head out of the door, and it when gets under way you just about bounce off the floor. The fancy-pants elevators out front, by contrast, calmly accelerate after the doors lazily close, if they ever do. When you get on at the ground floor, the doors slide open and stay open so long you could be excused for thinking they’re broken. Push the ‘close door’ button all you want; it’s there only for decoration.
So I almost never use the elevators in the lobby, but yesterday I was a little late getting back and ran for the first elevator, standing open until, of course, it sensed me running for it. I pressed the call button when the doors were six or seven inches short of being shut. Naturally it ignored me and rode smoothly away, following closely behind the second one. They both headed for the top floor, where they no doubt hung at the ends of their cables and deigned to notice me not a whit. Not that I stood there waiting.
I got my hair cut today, first time since Christmas, my barber pointed out. George does a great job cutting my hair, gets everything just the way I like it, and he likes to keep a patter going while he’s doing it. The last time I visited a barber like him was when I got my hair cut at Jerry’s at the student union, while I was going to school at Eau Claire. Jerry had a little place with a glass store front in the basement, with lots of magazines, a checkerboard and a cribbage game, and more shampoo and hair spray than even a barber could use in his lifetime. By a weird coincidence, I just described George’s shop in the basement of the Concourse Hotel, too.
Somebody ate Dan’s lunch. I’ve heard his story so many times it’s almost a given, but it’s never happened to me yet, and it should have. I think it happened to somebody I knew nearly every work cycle for the nine years I was on shift work in Denver. Mids were the worst, I guess because the grazers figured the refrigerators were chock full o’ food and nobody would notice their pilfering until it was too late.
Stealing somebody’s lunch has got to be the lowest thing a civilized human being can do, but rubbing their nose in it might be even lower. One guy I knew brought a bottle of coke in every work cycle, wrote his name on it in impossible-to-miss 62-point letters with magic marker, and somebody drank from his bottle every night. To say he got a little steamed about it would be the acme of hyperbolic understatement. (Look it up.)
The worst act of pilferage that I heard of happened to a guy who brought in a home-made chicken dinner in a covered Pyrex dish, again with is name written across the top in magic marker. He searched the kitchen after it went missing from the fridge and found the dish only after he started digging through the garbage can. The pilferer had not only stolen his home-made dinner, not only heated it up in the microwave and eaten it, he also made a sloppy attempt to hide the evidence. How low can you go?
Class tonight. I had enough time to get all three of my labs done after the thirty-second lecture that the teacher delivered. “Did I go too fast for anybody?” he asked, and everybody shouted back, “YES!” I stayed after to finish up my homework and fell into talking with another guy who’d taken the class before. “That’s as long as his lectures ever get,” he said, “and he always goes that fast. Just remember to ask him after every lecture to post the examples, so you can study them later.”
I could study it at home, but with two and a half hours left over after lecture, why would I? Instead, I stayed until about eight-forty, when I ran out of homework to do, then packed up and moved to the lobby to wait for my ride to show up. She was spot-on time and lovely as ever.
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006
Each day after I make up this drivel, I add it to the top of the web page, like a blog, then peel off an old day from the bottom and add it to the archives. Today was the day I peeled off the first of February, so I had to create a new archive file. No more entries to save to the January file. One more month gone by.
At dinner last night, we were talking with Tim about the classes he wants to take next semester, less than six months away. He also wants to take driver’s ed this summer. Tim, driving, this summer. That’s right around the corner, time-wise.
“I can’t believe we’ve been here seven months already,” he said. “Seems like we just got here.”
Tempus freakin’ fugit like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe it’s not something that happens to old people, maybe there really isn’t enough time in the day any more.
I sent a small donation to the Salvation Army on Monday along with a short note asking them not to contact me. Nothing bugs me more than making a donation to what seems like a good cause, only to have them spend everything penny I gave them and more on telephone calls and mailings, “reminding” me to donate again.
In my note to the Salvation Army I told them I’d like to donate regularly, but that this would be the last contribution I’d make to them if I ended up on their mailing list or started getting phone calls from them. Tonight I got a letter from them saying that they wouldn’t be contacting me.
Was that a joke? (Pretty subtle, if it was.)
You can’t read or listen to or watch the news without hearing about the Muslim militants’ reaction to the Danish cartoons, can you? I read the Reuters news page every day, and while picking through the video reports I found the only thing more incongruous than the headline 4 Dead in Afghan Cartoon Clash was the news anchor who appeared to be smiling as he was reading the story.
Thursday, February 9th, 2006
Hokey smokes, I had a craving for Oreo cookies this morning that wouldn’t leave me alone! I was thinking of reasons to justify pulling over at a convenience store on the drive to work, but I managed to hang on to my sanity until I got to town, where I made a quick trip to the drug store down the block from where I work to pick up a package of America’s Favorite Cookie. They were supposed to go with my morning cup of tea, but the anticipation was too much and I broke down and nibbled on one, then two, as I got ready for the morning rush at work. Bliss!
One of the guys who lives at the library was on his way out the front door, just three steps or so ahead of me, when he turned and, waving one hand in front of his face as if in blessing, solemnly intoned the words, “BY YOUR COMMAND.” Then he turned and walked away as if he did that half a dozen times every day, and at this point I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out he did.
I’ve seen many kinds of reverence, but that’s the first time I’ve seen somebody genuflect to a public library building.
A radio station sponsoring an all-day kissing contest at a mall west of Madison changed its mind about barring homosexuals from participating (I guess because that would be, you know, icky). "After hearing from our listeners, the contest will be open to everyone," the station's web site explained, and offered an apology.
Friday, February 10th, 2006
“What does your ideal kitchen look like?” That was the question posed in an advertisement for a local home-supply store, followed by many examples filled with images of cozy nooks, modern appliances and the smells of wonderful food.
Ideally, I wouldn’t have any notion what my kitchen looked like. Mine would be filled with servants and chefs cooking and cleaning all day long, and the only way I would know I even had an ideal kitchen would be the food the servants brought to me whenever I tinkled one of the tiny silver bells on the dinner table.
If I don’t get one of those it’s not ideal, but I’ll settle for any kitchen with a dishwasher.
I came home from an estate auction two weeks ago with a box full of post cards, mostly by accident. I started out wanting a couple packets of them and ended up with a box because I forgot one of the most important rules of life: Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
But I had this brainstorm so powerfully deluding, it clouded my judgment enough that I spoke it aloud. “Even if a guy didn’t know what he was doing,” I told Barb, “he could list those post cards on e-bay for ninety-nine cents apiece and make a killing.”
A guy was so wrong. In order to make a killing on e-bay (or bring in any income at all, it turns out), somebody’s got to want to buy the cards for ninety-nine cents apiece. It turns out nobody does, at least not last week, when I listed seven or eight of them for sale. I remember, but only vaguely, hearing something about “supply and demand” once, long ago, but I figured it applied to economists and other boring people, not me. Just one more example of how I should have paid more attention to my coursework in high school. Who knew it would have any bearing on real life thirty years down the road?
About an inch of snow fell overnight. That’s happened before, but last night was the first time a snow plow came by at quarter to four in the morning to clear the parking lot of the municipal building next door. I’ve never heard a truck plow snow so loudly. I could feel it. It was like he was dragging the plow across my teeth.
Saturday, February 11th, 2006
I took the O-Mobile to the dealer service center for its 10,000 mile checkup this morning. The parking lot was blocked off by a string of cones that channeled me toward the garage doors, where two customers ahead of me were parked in front of the sign PULL UP TO THE DOOR. I took my place, put the machine in park, and waited.
The last time I took our car in for its regularly scheduled maintenance, I brought my key to a customer service representative in an office. After exchanging a few pleasantries as he filled out paperwork, he invited me to wait in a lounge with cable television and a fridge stocked with soda and juice, as well as free wireless access. I wasn’t there more than fifteen minutes, but I felt quite pampered and exceedingly satisfied that I’d paid extra for the maintenance.
I haven’t found out why yet, but this time they didn’t let me get out of the car. They didn’t stop me from getting out, exactly, but after I pulled up they jacked the car into the air, which would more or less discourage anybody from exiting their vehicle, I’d guess. I had to sit quietly while they changed the oil, rotated the tires, and whatever else they did under the hood. I couldn’t even turn on the radio.
It was no fun. It might have been, back when I was eight or nine years old, to sit in the car as they lifted it into the air. I might have been tickled pink to stick my head out the window to watch them take off the lug nuts with an impact wrench and swap the tires around. Bores the socks off me now, I can tell you. I want to get out of the car, I want somebody else to drive it into the bay, I want to sit in the lounge and flip through ninety-two channels of satellite television while I guzzle a free Coke, and when I get back into the car I want to find a paper seat cover and floor protector and drive away thinking that factory-trained mechanics, grizzled by years of experience, have been at work on my car. Sitting in the bay watching nineteen-year-olds at work under the hood doesn’t fill me with the same feeling of confidence I got before. Maybe I expect too much.
I’ve crossed the Pacific Ocean four times in the past five years, and the Atlantic at least half a dozen times in my life, so I’ve been on a lot of very large commercial airliners and met many dozens, maybe hundreds of flight attendants, but I’ve never met an entire crew as emotionally cold and unresponsive as the flight attendants in the latest Jodie Foster action flick, Flightplan.
The flight crew was what sunk the movie for me. Some critics thought the movie worked just fine, in its own little world; others couldn’t see past the gaping plot holes (and there were many). For me, it all broke down in the minutes after the character played by Foster, who can telegraph barely restrained panic like almost no other actress alive, woke to discover her daughter was missing, asked the flight crew to help find her, and they all stood around blank-faced or simply walked past her. Most didn’t even have the decency to smile condescendingly; they were utter zombies.
I can’t imagine an airline crew on any flight from any country that would remain as inert as they did while a panicked mother bolted around the cabin, searching for a lost child. Even Sean Bean, playing the airliner’s captain, was at first unbelievably detached, although ultimately I thought Bean turned in the best performance of the movie. Foster’s good; I love to watch Foster act, but she already played this part in Panic Room. Bean got to play something new this time; he’s almost always the bad guy. When I first saw him I said, “He’s the bad guy,” and everybody agreed with me (it was probably the British accent; the Brits are always the bad guys), but he got to play against typecast, and although he wasn’t given much to do, he did a splendid job with the little he had.
Peter Sarsgaard, playing the air marshal, can go from emotionally cold to warm and friendly like nobody’s business, and gets plenty of chances to do it here, but mostly to ill effect, I thought, and when he revealed THE PLOT TWIST I was hugely disappointed.
Finally, an appeal to directors of thrillers: The blue-green world of spooky movies is getting really old, guys. Likewise the flying camera shots. I can think of one more effective way to show disorientation or to give a room a creepy feeling: try holding the camera still most of the time and letting the actors act, instead of trying to foist a feeling on them with camera tricks and special effects. I’m no smarter than the average bear, but it seems to me that set design and mood lighting should accent the actions of the players, not steal the scene away from them. Lighten up.
If the flight crew hadn’t been such a pack of frozen-faced store dummies, if Jodie had gotten more than a modicum of sympathy from somebody, if the camera hadn’t been flying round and round so much it made me want to reach for a bottle of Dramamine, I might’ve been able to connect with this movie, but I couldn’t. I wish I’d waited until it was on the dollar rental shelf, and that I’d picked up an emergency back-up movie.
Footnote: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 mystery The Lady Vanishes was a much better disappearing-passenger story, to say nothing of getting your value for money even after you throw in the cost of popcorn & soda.
Sunday, February 12th, 2006
I can’t remember a better day to sit around and do nothing. It was cloudy and cold enough to discourage even a short trip to the Kwik-E-Mart. Bundling up in a flannel and cupping a hot mug o’ java close to my chest was just so right that I didn’t see any reason to break the spell. Barb and I sat in the front room all morning, leafing through one section of the Sunday paper after another, sharing a story every so often. We thought we were lucky to be the two most contented creatures on earth. The cats, curled up in our laps most of the day, might have disagreed with our outrageous assumption, if only they had the power of speech.
I took Barb to Dancing Grounds, a local coffee shop, after I picked her up from work yesterday afternoon, where she drank coffee from a bathtub-sized cup and ate a sugary snickerdoodle as big as Nebraska. Despite all that caffeine and sugar, she somehow managed to doze off during the drive home. Luckily, I was the one doing the driving.
I picked the coffee shop because we’d never been there before and it was locally owned. From the outside, it looks as though it used to be a corner grocery store. Inside, it’s painted in warm colors, and there are philodendrons draped everywhere. “The man likes his plants,” Tim commented, looking around after we came in.
I left a copy of the book Dispatches tucked between the magazines that were stuffed into the bookshelf between the wash rooms, to see if a Bookcrosser would pick it up, or if it would just disappear. My count so far is one for three; somebody finally registered the first book I dropped off for a bookcrossing, Cod, a week or two ago. After that one dropped off the radar for several months, I felt sure it would never reappear. Patience, Grasshopper.
Just before Barb released Garden of Beasts, Tim asked her, “What’s this book with the swastika about?” He couldn’t have made her feel more self-conscious if he’d asked her why she wasn’t wearing pants. She found the book in a coffee shop a couple weeks ago when we went out looking for bookcrossings, discovered it wasn’t the kind of fiction she liked, and immediately decided to release it again. She never noticed the bright red swastika across the cover. Didn’t quite fit in with the décor in the coffee shop, but oh, well.
Monday, February 13th, 2006
Taiwanese citizen Ko-Suen Moo has been charged by a Miami grand jury with trying to secretly export military technology to China. You can read all about it in a story by BBC News. Oh, please, read the story. It’s like they go out of their way to say “Mr. Moo” as often as possible. I get this mental picture of a slapstick routine involving Mister Moo the sock puppet trying to sneak off with a cruise missile.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006
Happy Heart-Shaped Box of Chocolates Day! Did you do your duty to your sweetheart? I did, but I know somebody who didn’t!
I work with a guy who I won’t identify but I'll call “Dan.” He got his girlfriend a card but no chockies, no romantic dinner or bouquet of roses because — get this — he asked her if she wanted anything special for Valentine’s Day and she answered, “Oh, no don’t go out of your way.”
He said he even asked again to make absolutely sure: “You don’t want anything special for Valentine’s? ‘Cause if you say ‘no,’ then I don’t have to worry about doing anything, right?”
She assured him she didn’t want anything special at all.
Can you believe he fell for that? I couldn’t believe it, either! I was really rather shocked that there was still a guy walking the earth who would get suckered like that and, even more to the point, I was shocked Dan was still able to walk upright. He should have been in a permanent groveling posture for at least the rest of the day.
I am not feeding the cats in the morning any more. You got that, Boo? Rattle the newspaper at the foot of my bed all you want, knock every pen and pencil off my nightstand, climb all over my head, but I am not getting up at four in the morning, at five in the morning, at five-thirty or at six to put kibble in her dish, and particularly not after she did all that and more this morning, yet I found she still had some kibble left over from last night. So from now on I will get up when the alarm clock bleeps, I will take my shower, I will make a pot of coffee and then ... I will eat my own breakfast. The cats will get fed when somebody else gets out of bed, and Boo will have to survive on her own somehow for as much as an hour or so. It’ll be tough, I’m sure, but I think she’ll look back and thank me one day.
When they were kids, the boys used to take baths that were an hour or more long because they bathed with their toy animals, or toy boats, or whatever toy was foremost in their imagination at the time. They’d put on long, four-act dramas with lots of action that would leave the floor awash in soap suds, but what Barb and I really loved about their bath time antics was the dialogue. Both Tim and Sean cranked out a steady stream of word salad as the hero vanquished the villain (or, with these boys, it might have been the other way around).
I’m happy to report that Tim still keeps up a steady chatter in the shower. I think he must be chanting his favorite hip-hop tune these days, or something along those lines, rather than fighting the battle of the Atlantic. I expected him to be singing by now and was a little perplexed that he wasn’t, but it hit me the other day that if he’s singing the pop-music tunes he listens to, there’s not much in the way of pitch to those numbers so it would sound just like the mumbling he does while he’s bathing. That’s got to be what’s going on. I hate to ask him, because I don’t want to embarrass him into stopping and everybody should sing in the shower. (Yes, that means you! Sing, dammit! I command it!)
LATER: Tim felt that I mischaracterized the kind of music he listens to, and asked me to clarify, or, more to the point, he backed me into a corner and said something like, “I DO NOT listen to pop music!
Hip-hop is pop music, he admitted, but he doesn’t listen to it any more. He listens to just about anything, except rap and country, hip-hop and death metal, but mostly he listens to “alternate” rock. What the hell is that? I made the mistake of asking, mistake because he named several bands before I recognized the name of one of them, Red Hot Chili Peppers. After he played several examples of the sort of music he liked, I asked, “I’ve heard that on the radio. Isn’t music that’s popular enough to play on the radio called ‘pop music?’”
Emphatically, no.
I don’t see why, but there you go. Mea culpa, and I’ll refrain from misinforming you again.
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
Four of the five urinals were occupied when I stopped in the men’s room at school to pee. I pulled up to the last one and was taking care of business when I heard the unmistakable sound of a cell phone ringing, and guess what? Go ahead — you’ll never guess. Go on, I dare you. Okay, I’ll tell you, since you’ll never believe it: HE ANSWERED HIS FREAKING PHONE! He stood there, at a urinal in a public rest room, shoulder-to-shoulder with other guys, and had a conversation on his cell phone with his daughter!
I was nonplussed (O-Man’s word ‘O’ the day). I’ve seen people talk on their cell phones while crossing the street, traffic swirling past them; or from the reading room of a public library — but from a public toilet while he’s peeing? Is there any place left any more where people won’t talk on a cell phone? I’m beginning to believe that literally no place is off-limits. I’m dying to find out: Have you seen somebody take a call from the front row of church during the sermon? Surely there’s a blowhard out there who’s self-important enough to do it. (And he might even be named ‘Shirley’...)
NPR’s evening talk show the other night was a moderated, point-counter point type of piece. A rabbi started the show by arguing that the religious right has hijacked the country’s political agenda; then a conservative took over the second half of the show. He started his half of the show by trotting out an anecdote about living in Poland during the beginnings of the Solidarity movement, when the Soviets held war games across the border in order to scare the Poles a bit. “We were literally scared to death every day,” he said. The guy must have more lives than a cat. He sounded pretty smart until he said that.
Remember a television advertisement for a series of Time-Life books about the supernatural? There’d be a two-frame shot of an older woman burning her hand while cooking dinner, and in the other frame a younger woman jerking her hand away from her stove at the same time. “A mother burns her hand on the hot handle of a frying pan,” the announcer darkly intones, “while three hundred miles away her daughter feels stabbing pain in her arm.” Discordant music swells as he lowers his voice to deliver the kicker: “Is it just coincidence?”
And somewhere in America, my brother jumped out of his chair and yelled at the television set, “YES! That’s what ‘coincidence’ means!”
That literally made him hopping mad.
Thursday, February 16th, 2006
Classes at Tim’s school were cancelled today because of last night’s snow! Lucky bugger!
Barb and I had driven almost all the way into town when I realized the morning deejay I was half-listening to was reading from a long list. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I hadn’t seen any school busses on the drive into town when usually we see at least a half-dozen. I turned up the volume on the radio too late to hear anything but the tail-end. “I hope Tim remembered to take his house keys with him today,” I said to Barb, who began searching her cell phone for the number to the high school.
Tim called while she was still checking. “School was CANCELLED? You are so lucky!” We figured he’d get a two-hour delay, like the last time we got a huge dump of snow. About five minutes after he called, the deejay read the cancellations again and it sounded as though the principals at every school in southern Wisconsin had thrown up their hands and called school on account of the weather.
This was all because of the snow we got last night, remember. The sky was overcast in the morning and the roads were in pretty lousy shape, but there was no snow falling as we drove into town. It wasn’t snowing, it didn’t feel like it was going to snow — there wasn’t even much wind. The only suggestion of a winter storm was the announcements on the radio, which forecast doom and gloom. “Don’t drive anywhere if you don’t have to!” they warned. Thanks, I’ll tell my boss.
After I go to work and settled into my desk, Roger wandered over and, in a tone that suggested he knew something pretty gosh-darned significant, said, “Look out my window.” He’s got an office with a floor-to-ceiling window, and the view across the square was blocked by fiercely swirling snow that kept falling all through the morning until capital square was buried under about five inches of it. For a little while, rumors that we might be released from work early bounced around the building, but nothing ever came of it.
The key seemed to be the Metro, Madison’s bus system; if the buses still run, no matter what the weather, then we stay open. There was a lot of snow piling up on the streets around the square, but it wasn’t even slowing those buses down. They kept chugging along, and it looked as though our offices were doomed to stay open until five — only, wait! It turned out they did close the place up ninety minutes early, I guess so that everybody had more time to get home ahead of the rush. Not that there was much of a rush. Most places were closed all day, and all the rest closed much earlier, usually before noon.
My boss let me and a couple other guys in my office go before that, bless his big ol’ heart. I snagged a ride home with one of the guys leaving early; pretty lucky for me, because the DOT never closes early, so Barb wasn’t coming to get me until after five. Given the fact that most places in town seemed to be closed or closing up early, I had no idea where I’d hang out for more than two hours. With a ride that took him out of his way, Steve managed to get me home with plenty of daylight left to break the shovel out of the garage and take a swipe at the snow drifting across the driveway.
Our driveway is about fifteen feet wide, thirty feet long and today it was covered in more than a foot of snow. I cleared it in fits and starts, about the only way a guy with my physical build (beanpole wound up way too tight with some stringy meat) could do it. I cleared a two-foot-tall drift away from the garage door, then had to retire to a warm spot where I could sit a while and catch my breath. After about twenty minutes I’d built up enough steam to lace up my Sorels and clump out to the end of the driveway, where I broke up the hard-pack left by the snow plows and packed down by the snowmobilers. Then I really had to retreat to a chair for about a half-hour. I am such a lightweight.
But the neighbor came home when I was opening up the end of the driveway, and he came out with his shovel after changing into work clothes. We made pretty short work of the stretch that was left, thanked each other in the way that neighbors should do, and went back in for good. I had plenty of time to make dinner for Barb, who came home just before dark. “I made it!” she called out as she came through the door. “The roads weren’t too slippery, and nobody ran me off the road ... not that they didn’t try.”
With everybody safely home and warm, we gathered round the table to sup. Burgers with onion rings and a dill pickle on the side, an O-folk specialty. Bliss!
Friday, February 17th, 2006
There were a lot of very angry people on the street around capital square today. The first one I saw was a guy in an Elmer-Fudd hunting hat and dirty green trench coat, carrying a take-away coffee cup. “I’d take them all TO THE BRIDGE!” he declared to nobody at all. I was the only person within a block of him, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t realize I was there because, as I overtook him, his plan to throw them all off the bridge suddenly became a lot less public and a lot more private.
The next guy didn’t care how public he was making his plans. “IT’S NOT THAT SERIOUS!” he said as he turned halfway around with each step, making sure everybody up and down the street could hear him. “And if you think it IS, you’ve got a VERY BIG PROBLEM!” But then he abruptly stopped shouting and instead whistled very loudly as if calling a dog that was blocks away, so I never heard what the not-so-serious subject of his monologue was.
That guy needed to have a long heart-to-heart with the Very Serious Guy who showed up at the library again, still complaining that “I told her it was none of her emmeneffen BUSINESS! If she EVER do that again I’m going to MESS HER SHIFT UP and I don’t care WHO she knows! It’s not my PROBLEM no more!” He kept up a steady stream of that as he walked at a violently fast pace through the front door — I can usually hear him in the courtyard as he climbs the steps to the library — past the main desk. He headed straight to the non-fiction stacks; I think he knows he’s harder to catch if he goes that way. By the time he threaded his way through the aisles and came back out at the local history shelves, one of the librarians was waiting to head him off and announced in a stage whisper that he would have to be quiet or leave the library. He didn’t stop moving or talking, though he did turn the volume down a notch until he passed the main stairs and disappeared behind the shelves of video recordings, when he cranked up the patter again. “Gonna MESS HER UP! It AIN’T gonna be PRETTY!” One of the library’s guards appeared right about then, dived into the aisles after him, and emerged a minute later, murmuring in a soothing way to Very Serious Guy, who was grumbling but not resisting or, it would seem, even much aware that somebody was talking to him.
After a week of balmy temps to lull us into a false sense of security, a storm blew through and left us with this FREAKING COLD! Single-digits hung on for a short while after the sun came up; temps reached a high in the low teens, and the forecast called for temps to drop to ten below after dark. Almost as if Mother Nature were tapping us on the shoulder to ask, “And where did you think you were?”
Saturday, February 18th, 2006
I spent the afternoon in a bowling alley, which is a very special place. Where else can you give the proprietor your shoe size and expect him to rent you a pair of shoes that only several hundred people have worn before you? It’s also a place where you’ll handle a grimy, oily ball that’s been skidding around on the floor just before you grab a piece of pizza. And it’s fun!
This afternoon I went to the office bowling tourney. I agreed to play on the team so long as everybody involved understood that I don’t know the first thing about bowling. Or, rather, I know the first and most important thing: Drink beer, throw ball. I never learned much more about bowling than that.
Not only did they all understand, they bowled much the same way (and they all still bowled better than I did). I managed to break 100 each game, one of my goals for the day. The other was to drink beer, at which I also achieved 100% success, so I think the day was well worth getting out of bed for.
Think about this: Just what the hell does it mean? Does it mean that all negatives should be positives, no matter what? That seems a little unbalanced. And how do you do that, exactly? Is there a big switch on every negative? Some kind of mantra I should chant? And negative what, by the way? Negative numbers? I was never very good at math, but that doesn’t seem to be a very worthwhile use of your time. I understand there’s an infinite number of the beasts; you’d never finish turning them all into positives. Negative film images? Then it would be difficult to make prints when you want them later.
Perhaps the writer meant you should transform negative criticisms into positive ones. For instance, if the writer felt I was leveling a negative criticism at the dumbass sign he wrote, and he told me to piss off, that would be a counterattack with a negative criticism. Two negatives make a positive (I remember that much from high school math) and voila! Positive, ah, something. Or maybe that wouldn’t work after all.
Sunday, February 19th, 2006
A guy who spends every working day sitting on his butt for eight hours learns the importance of exercise when he goes to a show at the convention center and walks from booth to booth from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon.
That guy was me, and I was thinking that, at the very least, I should have perhaps stretched my legs for a half-hour or so before I went to the exhibition. Walking and standing are such straightforward, simple things to do at first blush, but after several hours of walking and standing you discover (or re-discover, as the case of a slothful man will reveal) that they take some concentration and not a little preparation, which I did not have. My dogs were killing me.
But I would have happily submitted to a pack of baying hounds because I spent the day at the 39th annual Mad City Model Railroad Show, and so did thousands of other people from all over Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota — even Colorado and almost certainly farther away than that. Don’t ask me why. It’s an addiction, like gambling or internet porn. Wait, maybe I didn’t mean to compare my hobby to illegal activity and perversion.
The main floor of the exhibition hall was chockablock (there’s a word that doesn’t get used enough anymore) with modular layouts from local clubs, and vendors selling anything you can imagine and, to be perfectly frank, an awful lot of stuff that seems downright weird, until somebody explains it to you. “Why are they selling dental equipment?” Barb asked me on perhaps the one and only time she went along with me to one of these shows.
“Modular layouts” are model train tracks on small tables that run through scenes you might have described as dioramas, but they’re not meant to be static. The modelers clamp the tables together so the ends of the tracks match up and trains can move through the scenes, and the scenes are very often animated in some way. You can expect to see at least one three-ring circus, one four-alarm fire, a mine where train cars stop to take on coal or iron ore, and in at least one city scene Godzilla or some other artificially-enlarged lizard or bug will be demolishing a neighborhood.
If you somehow get tired of watching the trains go around, you can watch the boys and girls watching the trains go around, which is often a lot more fun.
Monday, February 20th, 2006
There was apparently a time when people went to bed at dusk, only to wake several hours later to potter around the house a while. According to a writer in The New York Times, people used to wake up in the middle of the night to have a chat, or do a little light cooking, have a smoke, whatever, then an hour or two later go back to sleep until dawn. It’s the writer’s contention that this is the normal sleep pattern of humans and our modern ways of keeping the lights on later has caused us to scramble our circuits, which is why everybody takes drugs to get to sleep now.
I suppose that could be true. I don’t need a lot of sleep myself; I get by on about six hours, but I don’t know why he thinks that artificial light’s got anything to do with altering sleep patterns. They must have had artificial light back then, too; they weren’t cooking in the dark.
And the idea that everybody’s got the same requirement for sleep is just plain crazy. Some people sleep just four or five hours a night; some people catnap all through the day and night; and my darling wife would, and does, object to the idea that humans are made to operate normally on less than eight hours’ sleep. She’d prefer nine or ten hours, and doesn’t want to even think about getting out of bed before it’s full daylight and she can smell a pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen.
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
There is more electrical power in my pants than has ever been generated by the Hoover Dam. Or it’s partly because of my pants, and partly because of the place I work. Shortly after I go there every morning, my pants grab my legs and hang on for dear life. I’m not the only guy in the office with this problem, so I know it’s not one more weird thing that happens to me because of cosmic forces beyond my ken. Or maybe it is, and my bad juju is rubbing off on everybody else. Soon one of them will put two and two together, point at me and declare, “This didn’t happen before he came here! Burn him!” And that’ll be the last you hear of me.
There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to stop it. Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips no matter how many fabric softener sheets I add to the drier. One used to be enough, but that was before I bought the store brand because I’m such a penny-pincher. Now I have to fling two or three drier sheets in with the load, but if I’ve noticed any effect, it seems only to make the dancing electrical demons cackle and snort at my pitiful efforts even louder, and with more enthusiasm.
It’ll all be over come summer, when stifling humidity will make it impossible to wear pants, much less worry about how to add enough fabric softener to them to cut down on static.
There were no leftovers in the fridge this morning, I’ve eaten all the lunch meat, and all the peanut butter’s gone. After giving it about thirty seconds’ thought, I figured I could tough out the day without lunch, if I had a snack in the morning during my break. It’s thinking like this that could be used to prove that humankind is one of the least intelligent forms of life on the planet.
For beginners, I had no snacks with me. That meant I had to buy snacks at Walgreen’s or from a vending machine. Whatever tasty confection I might be able to buy from either source would be as good for me as flipping open the pantry at home and whipping up a batch of sugar-coated lard balls. So that was a miscalculation, obviously.
Speaking of flipping open the pantry, if I’d been thinking for even a moment I would have remembered that the cupboards are stacked with a bachelor’s best friend, canned tuna. In just five minutes’ time and with two or three simple ingredients, I could have tucked a couple tuna salad sandwiches into my backpack, but instead I settled for snack food from Walgreen’s. Just shoot me.
But wait, I got even dumber. When I was glibly deciding this morning I could ‘tough it out’ without a lunch today, I forgot for a crucial moment that I had class tonight. I wouldn’t be able to raid the refrigerator until long after supper time. Since there was no way I’d be waiting that long for a meal, I stuck a crowbar in my wallet and bought myself a chili dog at the café downstairs.
Bonkers’ poofy eye has swollen up again, prompting another hastily-scheduled visit to the pet clinic. The vet we usually take him to referred us to the veterinary hospital at the University of Wisconsin where a doctor, a resident and four students peered into our cat’s eyeball with a half-dozen varieties of scary-looking medical instruments for as long as two hours to come up with a diagnosis of “I don’t know,” which is what we got from our regular vet at a considerably more affordable price.
These are the most noncommittal doctors of any stripe I’ve ever heard speak. The one I talked with would say only something like, “We have several suspicions but we can’t draw any conclusions without further tests.” He suspected a cyst, a cancerous tumor, a non-cancerous tumor, or something else, but he gave no more weight to one guess than another. Forgive me for sounding snotty, but that’s about what I guessed without the benefit of academic study and hands-on examination. And the “further test” he wants to carry out is a CT scan. They do CT scans on CATS?
(They do more, it turns out. A friend with cats told me that, when one of his cats was diagnosed with kidney failure, the vet seriously recommended that he be allowed to perform a transplant immediately.)
Barbara didn’t want to tell me how much the CT scan costs, because she knows I come from a time and place where we do not spend that kind of money on cats. If you suggested to me twenty years ago that some day vets would perform kidney transplants on cats or scan them for cysts, I would have laughed like a donkey. Surely medical science has more important problems to focus its attention on! I might have been able to gasp, before erupting in another braying fit of laughter. (“We don’t. And stop calling me Shirley,” the stone-faced doctor replied.)
But that’s the way they do it now, and in a rather nonchalant way, I might add, almost as casually as they whip out a stethoscope. If they realize there are still pet owners who would rather drown their cats than pay two weeks’ wages for computer-generated color x-rays, they don’t seem to let on. (There may come a day when a vet will charge five hundred bucks to apply a stethoscope to a cat. I hope by then I’ll be too senile to realize how much I’m spending on my pets.)
I’m not going to drown our cat, by the way, so just get that thought out of your head. There’s no way I can even suggest to my family that Bonkers doesn’t get a CT scan until he can cough up a couple hundred bucks. He’ll get scanned because just looking at his weepy, swollen eye makes every one of us miserable. Well, not every one of us; Boo acts all bent out of joint because we’re paying more attention to Bonkers than to her. But the vet’s fancy-pants x-ray had better find aliens living in Bonkers’ brain, or something just as stunningly significant, and I expect the fruits of the university’s medical knowledge to include a plan to make him healthy again, even if they have to call in the National Guard. I don’t think that’s expecting too much.
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
“Come back to pick me up at seven-thirty,” I asked Barb, when she dropped me off at the tech school for my class last night. Class is in session from five-thirty to nine, but the instructor’s lectures had yet to run more than thirty minutes, and I had finished all my assignments last week; all I had to do was sign in, submit my homework, and I was free to go. I built in a lot of extra time, just to make sure Barb wouldn’t end up waiting for me, but I expected it to be the other way around, leaving me lots of time to sit in the lunch room and write drivel or surf the net.
When the lecture started I figured we’d be done in even less than thirty minutes. “Tonight we’ll talk about arrays and delimiters,” he began. Arrays are easy-peasy, I thought. A simple concept that everybody will grasp immediately. Delimiters, ditto. But oh ye gods, was I ever wrong. He spent more than an hour on arrays, and he tinkered around with delimiters until I thought the top of my head would pop off. He didn’t wrap up his lecture until quarter past seven, and then I had to snag his attention to make sure I’d demonstrated all my labs for him before I handed in my homework.
With minutes left before seven-thirty, I ran for the door because I’d always made Barb wait before and I wanted to be there on time. And you know what? For once, I was waiting five minutes at the curb instead of Barb. It happens.
When I got to school I headed straight for the cafeteria to pick up a cup of coffee I could sip on through class. The cups were Styrofoam instead of the card paper I’m used to, so I pressed down a bit too hard to snap the top on the cup and it exploded, vomiting coffee all over me. That put me in a good mood for class.
Thursday, February 23rd, 2006
All the periodicals (that’s “magazines” to you and me) from all the years past that the library has been subscribing to are stored in hidden vaults somewhere beneath the main reading room, I found out today. To see a particular issue from 1970, all I had to do was fill out a yellow slip, hand it to a librarian who put it into a canister and dropped it into one of those pneumatic tubes. Five minutes after my request disappeared with an awful sucking sound, the librarian brought me the magazine I asked for.
I told myself it wasn’t nice, but the picture I got in my head was Smeagol waiting at the other end of the pneumatic tube, squealing “Precioussss!” when the canister speared and gleefully bounding away down the aisles with my request, chucking it back up the chute, then patiently hunkering down to wait for it to re-appear.
Bonkers has been scanned thirty ways from Sunday (or, more accurately, from Tuesday, I guess) and the results are all “non-diagnostic.” We’re waiting on the biopsy to tell us what’s wrong. Sticking the cat in the computer-enhanced imaging machine gave no result; poking him in the eye with a needle did. Go figure.
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
It’s a three-cups-of-coffee morning here at the controls of the drivel-o-tron.
For the longest time I didn’t drink coffee, didn’t so much as touch it until I was in my thirties, then tried it very occasionally — and I mean very occasionally, like once every two or three years — until we started to get out while living in Japan, where they were constantly offering us some kind of refreshment. Don’t like to turn down hospitality, so I learned to drink it, and what do you know, most of it was strong, but in a rich & tasty way, not in the usual hair-raising way, so I learned to like it. After just a year or two of that I looked forward to a tasty cuppa joe every so often, and now, it seems, I’m making up for years of coffee deprivation with a mug in the morning with breakfast and one in the evening after dinner.
Today I made a pot and drained three cups as I sifted through the news on the internet, then started this drivel. The news seemed to be the same recycled crap I’ve read every other day. I keep telling myself to stop reading it, then I take another peek. It’s like a road accident; I can’t help but look. I didn’t pound out too much word salad this morning, though, before I had to clean up and get dressed for our trip into town. If you’d been a gumshoe you could’ve followed me by the trail of coffee cups I left across town.
Our first stop was the morning farmer’s market, held indoors at the senior center in downtown Madison. They serve a delicious pancake breakfast there and my darling wife offered to buy my plate, bless her. We tucked into buckwheat flapjacks slathered in real Wisconsin maple syrup and topped with baked apple slices, with a strip of crispy bacon on the side. Our breakfast tickets included juice, possibly cherry, maybe cranberry, might’ve even been a mix of the two; also, a hot cuppa java.
On the way to the market we stopped by Taylor’s antique store on Carroll Street. The lights were on and there seemed to be quite a jumble in the showroom, as if they’d acquired quite a few new items, but the door was locked up tight. Ditto after we left the market. Barb was quite dejected; she wanted to get her hands on some of the stuff she could see from the window.
It’s been our custom to try a new coffee shop each time we visit downtown Madison. They have so many to choose from that we’ll probably never have to look very long. Today we settled in a place called Espresso Royale. I didn’t know then that it was a chain or I might have brought it up, although we were both freezing our knobby parts off so it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference regarding our choice. We just wanted to get in off the street and wrap our blue fingers around a cup of something hot.
Hilldale Mall was our next stop. As well as having a name that’s more than a bit redundant, it was hosting an arts & crafts show through the day. No coffee to be had, but quite a collection of paintings, pottery, wall hangings, photos and jewelry. I don’t know if Barb was looking for anything in particular; she didn’t bring anything home that looked like it was made by artists, just some books that were on sale and some marbles from a toy store.
One disadvantage to not having been a life-long coffee drinker: Almost no bladder capacity to speak of. As much as I like to drink coffee, I have to think ahead to where and when I’ll have the necessary facilities at my disposal, so to speak. As soon as we entered the mall, for instance, my radar picked up the sign pointing the way to the men’s room down the hall and mercifully close to the front door. All travel has to be made in discreet leaps, especially when drinking our way through the morning as we were.
Our last stop was Saint Vincent de Paul’s, right on the way home along Williamson Street. We had no particular goal, just stopped in to browse, but I scored big: an LP recording of comedian Shelly Berman that I haven’t heard in a coon’s age, and won’t for a couple months yet; my turntable’s in storage.
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
“So when did rock music end?” Tim asked Barb and I this morning. Zow. It’s sad to think that the rock and roll genre might be done, finished, kaput, but when the next generation asks when it ended, that’s got to be a pretty obvious signpost.
Even sadder: Tim thought that the “music” of grunge band Nirvana counted as rock and roll. Yikes.
Barb and I tried to re-educate him, but he has some pretty firm ideas about what constitutes rock, and he wasn’t going to let a couple old farts tell him otherwise, particularly when they said that it started before Elvis was popular, or that Nirvana’s shtick came straight from big-hair screamers like AC/DC, which was heavy metal, and not so much rock and roll any more.
He kept on mixing up “our” pop music with whatever was going on in the nineties, offering some group neither of us had ever heard of as an example of rock. There was, no doubt, some very fine pop music on the air in the nineties, but we had to be honest and say we stopped listening in the mid-nineties. We just couldn’t connect with the shouting and whining and thumpa-thumpa-thumpa any more.
He once asked me exactly when the disco era was; he was sure it was the nineties, he just wasn’t sure of the years it peaked. He offered a guess, but at that point I had drowned him out with howls of derisive laughter, and when I could catch my breath again I pointed out that the disco era began in the late seventies and peaked in about 1978 or ‘79. He not only believed I was wrong, he accused me of flat-out lying to him.
Monday, February 27th, 2006
“I suppose you’ll want to stay and visit with Jim and Sue until nine or ten o’clock at night,” Tim said with no small amount of gloom in his voice as we got ready to head across town for dinner with family. Can there be a more miserable creature than a teenager surrounded by grownups who want to sit around and talk? Tim doesn’t mind visiting, as such, so long as it doesn’t go on for more than fifteen or twenty minutes; thirty seems to be the absolute maximum. After that he gets restless enough to lapse into self-destruct mode and start to bangs his head against the table.
I, on the other hand, like almost nothing better than to sit around after a fine meal, drink coffee and listen to stories, maybe tell a few of my own. I’ll rise to go only after everybody’s given the sign that they’re good and tired and ready for bed. Conversation is an art to be savored, and I’ve met precious few truly accomplished conversational artists. There’s no sense rushing off when there’s still plenty of time left before we have to return to the grindstone.
But no, as it turned out, we didn’t hang around Jim and Sue’s place until late at night. Dinner was served early, around threeish, so we had plenty of time for conversation before we pulled up stakes, and we still got to bed before nine. Good thing, too; I turn into a pumpkin pie at ten-thirty.
Somebody keeps folding up the camp chairs and putting them away in the corner behind the television set. This has the effect of making the living room look big enough to park commercial airliners in it, and creates a remarkable echo besides. I have no idea who’s doing it or why, but I’m afraid to ask. If somebody needs that much room, better to just let them have it and leave the questions for a professional analyst.
Yes, I said ‘camp chairs.’ If you don’t know why, you haven’t been paying attention.
Bonkers is making a fine recovery, in case you were wondering. His eye looks almost normal now; I guess the seventy-dollar course of antibiotics has finally taken effect and he’ll be right as rain despite being drugged unconscious, having patches of his fur shaved away, submitted to a high-voltage electromagnetic scanning, put under the knife and finally biopsied. (Biopsyed. Whatever.)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
A guy like me with too much time on his hands to think about nonsense like this just has to ask the question: Self-opening doors – What is their point? They open themselves so you don’t have to, right? Or is there another, much more subtle meaning that I don’t get?
The central library has a self-opening door at the main entrance, another self-opening door inside the mud room, and then, after the mud room but before you have gotten as far as the front desk there’s a gate. It’s not latched, it doesn’t have a sensor or alarm attached to it; it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to make you stop to push it aside.
No, it’s not too much work for me, smart guy, but as I said, I’ve got to wonder why they went to the bother of putting in self-opening doors if the gate was in the original plans. Welcome to our library! Our doors fling themselves open to you! STOP! Now open the gate. Welcome! Welcome! Come in! It’s weird.
Today I remembered to pack an extra sandwich, so I’ll be able to get through class tonight without gnawing my own arm off. Hard to key the assignments in after that, don’t you know. If I remember next time, I hope I can also remember that it’s not necessarily the best idea to make two tuna-salad sandwiches. One is enough, I think I can say with some authority. All that tuna ... bleh. I don’t know if my guts are too delicate or it’s more than any human is designed to successfully digest. I’ll opt for a humble PB&J for dinner before the next class.
When I said Barb and I tried to “re-educate” Tim about rock music, my brother keyed off the verb and asked if we were some kind of Soviet overlords. (Tim might shout “DA!” in answer to that question, but not until I’ve finished the latest round of indoctrination.) In my answer to him, I said that I almost found myself missing the old Soviet Union sometimes. Remember when they were the scariest threat imaginable? There they were, ready to pounce on us from the top of the world, thousands of megatons of nuclear obliteration at their command. My darling bride-to-be and I enlisted in the Air Force to stand sentinel against them. Those scenarios of nuclear war seem rather quaint when compared to the messy conflict we’re caught up in now.
(I have to mention it: The radio news I listened to on the way to school tonight reported that a Zogby poll asked 944 military service members if they should stay “as long as they are needed;” 23% said yes, 72% said the military should leave within a year. A military analyst reviewed these answers and suggested they reflected the optimism the troops felt. Of course they do!)
More drivel! Onward to
March 06
I missed something! Back to
January 06
