Throwback Thursday From March of 2015 –
“Reality! What A Concept.”
I heard something on TV last night that, at first, I thought was a gag, but after a minute or so, I realized was for real.
IT WAS A QUIET SUNDAY EVENING at home watching the Colts beat the Denver Broncos when I heard my wife, the lovely and eloquent, Dawn, call out, “What the heck is going on?”
HOLIDAY WEEKENDS USUALLY SUCK. This one, even though it is really an intrinsically minor holiday – Halloween – is another one that tends to slide downhill quickly. However…
This year our Halloween went by on a relatively horizontal glide path. No sudden plunges into nonsense or vituperative cruelty.
After a few years at this, my wife, the lovely and non-chocolate consuming, Dawn, and I have our standard Halloween operating ritual polished and smoothly running.
A Safe Place – Continued—
He started moving toward me. I lifted my revolver and aimed it between his eyes.
“Stop right there, Cumberland. Don’t get any closer or I will shoot you dead.”
He stopped. “Can I just set this down? It’s getting heavy and it is hot. These are cheap oven mitts. I’ll put it down on the table and I’ll back up. OK?”
It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask. “OK, but no funny business. I’m a good shot.” That was lie too. I’d be lucky to hit him at all even though he was only five feet away. I hoped that my shaking knees weren’t obvious.
He did like he said. He put the lasagna down on a straw trivet, then went back to where he started. He closed the oven door and threw his mitts on the range top. I didn’t like his additions to our agreement. I told him so. He shrugged and I pressed him some more.
AS I GET UP THIS MORNING and turn on the TV all I see is hurricanes and candidates. There’s not much difference when you get down to it – a lot of hot air passing through, and people getting soaked. The hurricane blows down homes and the candidates blow down people’s dreams with nonsensical promises for things they can never deliver.
WE ARE THICK INTO THE PLANNING for our visit to Ireland in the spring of 2016. My wife, the lovely and Research Gifted, Dawn, and I are getting bleary eyed looking at websites featuring houses for rent, Historic Sites, and car rentals. It can be a daunting task.
CONTRARY TO WHAT THIS TITLE MIGHT INDICATE and the topics of several recent postings – today’s is not about Baseball.
(This Public Service announcement has been brought to you without interruption)
You may now carry on reading.
THIS MORNING AS I SAT SIPPING my coffee and pondering my next step, I noticed a gentleman who was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Canyonlands – Moab, Utah.”
When I stumbled up to get a refill I stopped by his table and we chatted about that remarkable part of the country. As we spoke I saw the sparks light up in his eyes. He was like me – a man who breathes better on the road.
WHEN I GOT BACK HOME this morning after coffee Dawn said that there were two boxes waiting to be opened. FedEx had delivered them – sent by my niece Susan who lives in North Carolina. The boxes were filled with memories.
IT HAS BEEN A QUIET MORNING.
After stumbling through the process of making tea and doing the crossword puzzle in the newspaper I felt that I was sufficiently conscious to drive to St. Arbucks.
“Oh, great nectar from the mountains of Abyssinia, you awaken my mind and soul to all the wonders and possibilities of God’s creation.”
— From the Gospel of St. Arbucks, Patron Saint of Jittery people.
EVERY MORNING WHEN I TURN ON MY PHONE and look at the baseball scores, double check the weather forecasts, peruse the news, see if my calendar has any appointments scheduled, monitor the local gasoline prices and check my email (in fact, I do everything except use the phone to make a call) I discover that two or three people have sent me something they regard as “trivia.”
What is or isn’t trivial is really quite a subjective call. It is like whether a particular person is sweet dream beautiful or merely nightmarish, or do Brussels Sprouts make your mouth either water or fill with projectile matter. It is like wondering if some favorite politician is a lowlife, scum-sucking career criminal or just a thieving degenerate spawn of Satan.
You catch my drift?
Most of the things sent my way are not trivia. The fact that today is so and so’s birthday is not trivia. The fact that some guy at a County Fair in California is selling “Deep Fried Slim-Fast Bars” is not trivia. It is hellishly funny, but not as funny as another guy, in Milwaukee, who has erected a sign on the roof of a building on the approach path to the Milwaukee Airport that reads, “Welcome to Cleveland.”
That is a guy I’d like to meet.
For the better part of last year I participated in a weekly trivia contest at a local pub. Teams of erratically educated people would get together to show off, compete for gift cards good only at the pub, and to drink themselves into memory erasing stupors.
Our team had one member who must have done nothing for the last 20 years but listen to Top 40 Radio and watch sitcoms. He was a very valuable person to have on board. Another member had a disturbingly encyclopedic memory for anything to do with Sports. I was the Old Guy who could actually remember something that happened before the invention of TiVo.
I was doing the trivia thing for the enjoyment and to get out of the house so my loving and talented wife, Dawn could have some peace and quiet. I can be a bit like a young beagle puppy at times – cute, but headache producing.
I don’t drink – a fact that helped late in the game as I was one of the few left in the joint who could remember facts about William Howard Taft and get my car keys in the ignition on the first try. Through chance and dumb luck our team was surprisingly successful. Appetizers for everyone!
I began to separate myself from the weekly event because I began to suspect that our Sports Maven was nuttier than a truckload of Payday candy bars.
The trivia game is supposed to be fun. Am I right? But for this fellow it had turned into a Blood Sport. If he supplied the wrong answer to a question about who won the Orange Bowl in 1913, he would slam his fist onto the table, turn persimmon red, and have to go take a walk to cool off.
Naturally, I would throw kerosene onto the fire.
“I think you’re right! Tell the Moderator that you challenge her answer and that you are playing under protest.”
“##^@@&*$##%%!!!!!” (followed by a few laps around the parking lot)
That’s a paraphrase, of course.
I used the Holiday Season to completely exit from the team – and so did all of the other members – leaving Mr. Pecan Log teamless.
I heard that he glommed onto another team and proceeded to drive them batty.
Oh, well.
I may go back over to the pub and play the game again someday, but I’m going to assemble my own team beforehand. I want no psychotics, nobody who has to keep throwing away their sobriety pins and no one who thinks the answer to every question is either Al or Tipper Gore.
I WAS WANDERING through the recently reconfigured aisles of the Kroger’s Supermarket this morning. Whenever they do make changes like that it takes a while for me to be able to find anything again. I end up having to go up and down all the aisles. I know that having me do that is the objective, but if I haven’t purchased canned lychee nuts in the last forty years I probably won’t be doing so anytime soon.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? Quite a bit actually. The names we have can go a long way to deciding our direction in life. If a name wasn’t all that important you wouldn’t see actors and actresses changing their names as they enter the business. Example: Famous actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg came into this world as Caryn Johnson.
YOU ARE READING THIS on Monday. I am typing this on Friday afternoon. Knowing that might help you to understand what follows.
As I type this the sun is shining and the temperature in beautiful Terre Haute, Indiana is 13 degrees, Fahrenheit. I might look back on that as the high point of this weekend.
WELL, THE LAST AIRPLANE has landed. The last shuttle bus has shuttled and we have arrived safely home. We have traded south Texas for Terre Haute and we are exhausted. The last thing we wanted, or needed, was a surprise when we walked through the door.
Sometimes a surprise is when your friends jump out from behind the sofa on your birthday; or when you find a ten dollar bill in those slacks you haven’t worn in a year, or even when you eat lunch at one of those ubiquitous Chinese Buffet restaurants and don’t get stomach cramps.
I might have settled for even the Szechuan Two-Step rather than the surprise we actually did have. Let me explain.
I’VE NEVER BEEN ONE to delve too deeply into the world of Real Estate. I just find it all mystifying, fraught with language designed to confuse (At least it seems to me that way), and absurdly expensive. The people who do it for a living, however, I find to be, generally, fascinating in their own gut wrenching way. Let me explain.
For any of you who work in Real Estate, I apologize in advance. I mean no harm and, heck, you’re working for a living.
Working for a living and relying on Commissions to pay the bills, is tough. I’ve done it, I know. It can be either feast or famine. One month you are eating prime rib and the next month you’re fighting with Fluffy for that last can of Friskies.
Down the Hall on Your Left 