You Have To Keep Active

I must admit that since I retired, lo these nine years ago, I have experimented with any number of ways to creatively waste time. There are many people who would say that this blog shows that I have elevated it all to an Art. I’m not going to argue with them. I don’t think that I could win such an argument.

So…(aside from this blog) some of my other temporal thumb twiddlings have included belonging to a Dart League for three years. I suck at darts but that doesn’t stop me from proudly displaying my three championship trophies. I was the worst player on the team, but that was my role – to lower the team handicap to balance the presence of a Dart Savant on our team. That guy couldn’t miss. He was scary good. I was just scary bad.

In another effort to fill my days with something passably interesting that would also get me out of the house before my wife, the lovely and patient beyond the statute of limitations, Dawn, started arranging kayak lessons for me, I began doing plays with the local Community Theatre. I did four shows with them before my endurance for late rehearsals wore thin. I’m a Geezer. I need my sleep.

Other avenues needed to be explored.

I think I may have found the perfect thing to occupy my mind that doesn’t involve sharp objects or driving home at midnight when the streets are filled with marauding raccoons. I am part of a Barroom Trivia Team.

Every Monday evening at 7:00 PM I haul my trivia loaded brain to a nearby Pub for a two hour long test to see who knows more useless information. My kind of game!

I feel that I’m there representing all of those Liberal Arts Majors who are still under-employed twenty years after graduation, but who can to this day name every major artist in 16th century Belgium. On our team I am far and away the oldest member. That gives me an edge when the question involves History or Early Television Programs. Most of the other players are under 30 years of age. They wouldn’t know Calvin Coolidge if he walked into the room or who played Tonto on The Lone Ranger . Of course, I’m totally in the dark when it comes to things like “Who was the biggest selling Rapper in 2014?”

I had a birthday recently. Which one is not important except to my Cardiologist and to the people who keep sending me junk mail peddling Hearing Aids and Cemetery Plots. I did receive one gift from my lovely and forward thinking wife, Dawn, who knows what I need even if I don’t.

She bought me a book – “The Ultimate Book Of Trivia.”

This thing is 349 pages jam packed with more trivial information than PBS and Congress combined! It is the ideal book to have with you when you are seated in the loo after a Twelve Course Taco Bell Banquet or entering that Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest I see on ESPN. You will have plenty to read.

I hope that this book will help me on my Monday night Trivia contest. It couldn’t hurt…unless i drop it onto my foot. It could easily break a toe or two. Next week I am going to wow them all at the Pub when I toss out the fact that the shortest U.S. President was James Madison who was only 5’4″ tall. If they ever make a movie about him Tom Cruise will play him…in lifts.

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