Busts, Death, Toilet Seats, Life, Irony, Apples, Stones, and Eden

October 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

So I’m sitting in the Arcadia Bookstore in Spring Green, Wisconsin, with my daughter, our keyboards clicking like self-running machines, and then I can’t write anymore. How do you write in a bookstore/lunchroom with a bust of Shakespeare on the top of a bookshelf staring down at you? I could quote him, I suppose, to get him off my back, but then he would just frown and say, “Plagiarism is not writing,” and I would answer, “You plagiarized everyone, including your friend Marlowe,” and he would answer, “Yes, but I did it so well, so much better than the original.”

As if I or anyone today could do that, even with the modern aid of high octane caffeine streaming through my veins like a torrent of contradictions from “To be or not to be…”

I don’t believe we can write if we’re trying to outdo someone, even if we’re only trying to outdo ourselves. Since I’m currently writing to entertain rather than inspire, I see that it’s time for a joke, or at least a modicum of irony. So I just went to the men’s room after a nut brown ale, some chili and a cup of coffee and found the ultimate women’s revenge, here in this bookstore/lunchroom run by women. It was a spotlessly clean men’s room, with a toilet lid that would not stay up. It’s one thing for them to complain about putting the seat down, but to go this far, to install a seat that will not stay up – that’s just too strategic, especially in a room women will not use. It seems like one of the women had a slightly too-large smile for me when I walked past the counter. The bust of Shakespeare is not amused.

Now I look past my dauighter and I see an ironic metaphor for our country – stacks of books with No Easy Day, the Navy SEAL’s account of the killing of Bin Laden, next to another volume entitled, The New Deal, a study of FDR’s plan to save the country. Death or life, which will you read?

Writing is “righting,” an attempt to make life better, or at least to shine a light on something wormy and so to make it shrivel and die. Writing is building something with words, a city or a life. The words are humble things, like the stones that become a cathedral. All life is metaphoric if one looks at it closely enough. It is so much more than the thing itself. An apple is more than an apple; it is a logo, a variable of gravity, a temptation that boots our parents out of Eden. An apple is more because our thinking makes it so. The apple does not matter. It could have been a walnut, a potato, or a plum. What matters is not the color, shape or taste, but rather, the fact that it fell and someone noticed it and saw there was meaning there.

Writing is that meaning, the moment someone picks up a stone, an apple, or a plum, studies it for a moment, and then smiles. “What?” says a friend, who is not a writer and does not hold the apple like truth-in-hand.

Will Shakespeare, you need not smile at me like that. I have held an apple in my hand and smiled at it when I saw that it was alive, teeming in its redness, redolent with sweet juice, firm as flesh, and holding in secret a truth we can hardly imagine. What is that secret? All things fall, and the falling is a beautiful thing to those who understand it. The falling makes an apple so much more than an apple. A fallen apple is one of us.

I am a writer. When you fall, I will bear witness. When I fall, someone else will witness. It is a beautiful thing.

Just for the record, I do not recommend taking too much caffeine in very good coffee after a bowl of white bean chili and a nut brown ale, even if Shakespeare smiles down upon it. It means that you will write about busts, toilet seats, life, death, apples, irony, stones and Eden. Yes, Will is definitely smiling at me.

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Nicknames

September 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’ve come to the conclusion that nicknames are more important than actual names, with the obvious exception of an attempt to get a ballot in November. Nicknames are descriptive, metaphoric, and often assigned to you by people who know you best. This is not true of parents who give you a birth name based on some distant aunt, family tradition, or hand-me-down to which they attach the indignity of a number or “junior.” This does not mean that every nickname is one that you like or is free from mild insult, nor that it is completely appropriate. A favorite uncle, for example, who lived in Columbia, Illinois, was a very large man, especially in terms of girth. His nickname was “Tiny.” I don’t even know what his real name was, and I suspect most of my family doesn’t either.

This brings to mind a very funny Youtube series called Marcel the Shell. If you have not seen any segments, I highly recommend them. In one of my favorites, Marcel, in her best toddling, almost Charlie Brown voice asks, “Do you know what I want that I will never ask for? A nickname. I mean, you can’t just tell people to call you ‘The General’.” She is so right. You don’t really get to pick. After my detached retina surgery, when I wore a patch for several months while the gas bubble that kept my retina pushed up against the back of my eyeball, I tried calling myself “Pirate,” thinking that it had a kind of swashbuckling romanticism to it in the vein of Johnny Depp, but it didn’t stick. My fishing buddies settled on “Popeye,” instead. I have nothing against Popeye or spinach, but “Pirate” would have been so much cooler. In truth, I’ve reached the age in which being cool is not really an option for me anyway. Even when my daughter gave me a really cool red baseball cap with the numbers 608 emblazoned on the crown, and everywhere I went in Madison people commented on how cool my hat was, I had to confess that I didn’t see why until my daughter explained, “Dad, that’s your new phone area code for Madison. It’s cool. Duh.” The “duh” means I am not cool even in a cool hat.

Not being cool is not as bad as dealing with other nicknames. In grade school, I was “Little Harps,” to the older kids because I had an uncle well known for being a troublemaker but a good athlete, who was called “Harps.” The “Little” was not so bad. My son, however, was called “Little Jim” by his skateboarding buddies because of an older and bigger friend, who was “Big Jim.” In his skateboarding circle, he is still “Little Jim,” even though he is now just under 6’3″ and bigger than “Big Jim.” It could be far worse. Back when I taught freshmen, I had several classes who thought the proper way to get my attention was to call out, “Mr. Hairball.” It usually took a few days to settle on a compromise of “Mr. H.”

In high school, as a member of the almost famous band Mogen David and the Grapes of Wrath (was that a great name or what!), since I wasn’t Mogen David, I was a Grape. It wasn’t so bad being a Grape. I think it was better than being a Trogg, which I assume was short for “troglodyte.”

Because the current political climate is so toxic, I’m not going to get into any discussion of Mitt vs Barry. That’s too bad. I could have written a decent paragraph about those two nicknames, not to mention Big Dog and Turdblossom.

City nicknames also are fun. What else could New York be, except the Big Apple? Many people misunderstand the Second City as a reference to population, which is not true; it is a reference to the second city on the site where the first one burned down. Atlanta is much more appropriately, Hot-lanta. Los Angeles, where I doubt there are many angels left, is more appropriately LA, or even better LA-LA Land. Beantown, St. Louie, Big D, Mad-town, (which a former governer described as 92 square miles surrounded by reality), Motown, which really used to be Motortown, and The Big Easy – you’ve gotta’ love nicknames.

Next month I’m going in for my second cataract surgery. After that, I’m going to try for “Pirate” again. I still think it would be cool, as cool as someone over 60 could be. Do you know what I want, but I’m not going to ask for? A cooler nickname.

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The 2012 Olympics – Just for the Fun of It

August 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I love watching the Olympics. The view from down here is truly inspiring. I especially like the riders in the velodrome. Those streamlined hornet helmets with the dark visors are the sexiest things I can imagine, next to the flea-circus-sixteen-year-old female gymnasts, of course. They would all make magnificent insects, able to lift twice their weight, scurry along a path ten times their length per second, and able to fly off any mat, uneven bar, or springboard to perform flips, twists, and somersaults with fly-speed, and then land on only two feet without a single splat. Most courageous of all are the avatars who willingly jump from a platform fifteen times their height to land … IN WATER. In the bug world, we have a word for that ecstatic moment right before orgasm and death – Oooolah. That little one with the big smile who flips in spangled pink tights, and that tall phasmid mantis fellow who takes his ears off before jumping in the water are Oooolahlah.

The insect Olympic world is also so wonderfully rich in color, from purple to white head fibers, from sparkling chest plates to chaste Ooolah coverings, from eyes and bodies of all shapes to visages that show what I’ve heard is called “emotion,” although that makes no sense to a cricket such as I. Why do they eye-water when they win and eye-water when they lose? Other things don’t make sense to me as well. I understand the commitment required to practice their feats with only four limbs, but why must they have an additional penalty requiring some of them to use a bendy pole to jump? Why do they try to avoid that cute little hop after every flip? Why do they scurry over ten or so stick hurdles instead of going under them as any insect ought to do? Why have most of them dyed their nether feet yellow? Why is it that sometimes one who scores higher by .001 laughs and in another event, one who scores higher by .001 cries miserably? Why are there so many gnat-men who stick cameras in the faces of selected avatars right before every event and then again right after every event, even though some are in such anguish? What is it about defeat that appeals to so many insects? Why do such plain insects who are not competing talk so much?

It is also impressive but most confusing to see all of them in these contests somehow able to shake appendages and hug and not eat each other. I heard once that the Olympics are a substitute for war. It is most admirable that the losers do not get eaten. It is also admirable that the winners get their own personal glory and coins, but also that they care about glory for their team and their country. Only one thing is missing. The old, ugly ones who give out the coins which cannot be eaten, should look at all the scores, pick 50 events that happen in every Olympics, and average them. If a total of ALL the avatars is higher than the last Olympics in those 50 events, they should all get the ultimate glorious prize – a pizza. No reward is greater than the god-given pizza. It would make up for the fact that they are apparently not even allowed to eat the losers. Insect-icide is somehow regulated, I assume.

I have wondered why these games appeal to so many of us. It’s more than pride in one’s insect-hood. I know that some who watch are then inspired to train as avatars with only four appendages. It’s more than that. For the rest of us, we get to experience the glory and its loss without first giving up two or more of our own appendages. We should all be thankful for the avatars, especially those of us lucky enough to have found a ready supply of aged pizza. Can you smell that? Pepperoni, or I am not a cricket. Drrrrrr-bit. Ooooolah.

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The Formicidae Vespoidea Wars

July 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

First Queen Moriarty sent out the scouts, quick little buggers which sprinted for a few paces and then paused, each antennae searching and sensing the smallest ort and leaving an undetectable trail for the skirmishers to follow.

“Damn,” my wife said. “We need to do a thorough cleaning around the sink and under it. Do you see them?”

“No,” I said, claiming another use of my cataract excuse and realizing that our choice of a black, marbeled stone countertop in remodeling our kitchen was a grievous mistake.

“There,” she pointed, dabbing at the spot with a wet wad of paper towel.

“I’m on it,” I said, retrieving a spray bottle of vinegar and water, followed by a swipe of bleach and a quick vacuuming of the floor around the counter, sink, and table in our breakfast nook.

The next morning there were more scouts, followed by a thin line of ant infantry, causing me to make extra trips to the sink, always armed with a wet paper towel to mop up any survivors. I made a quick mission to the local hardware store for traps, those cute little buttony things that promise to kill not only the colony but Queen Moriarty herself. My land mines may have killed some, but I saw only a single death and no more, not even after a second trip to the hardware store for another brand with another insecticide which promised to kill the queen, all bishops, rooks and pawns. It did not, which prompted a third trip to the hardware store for some artillery and more paper towels.

By artillery, I mean a two gallon concoction of poison with its own pump spray gun connected by a coiled death tube to the gallons of poison. This death spray was so powerful the directions required the wearing of rubber gloves, which prompted another trip to the hardware store, my fourth or fifth, I can’t remember because of my focus on the enemy. I followed orders to the letter, spraying outside our house along the foundation, around window sills, along doorways, the dryer vent, and any place that qualified as either a nook or cranny. When my wife was at yoga, I even took everything out from under the sink and sprayed along its edges and the circles where pipes entered.
“Take that, Queen Moriarty. You may have numbers and loyal footsoldiers, but nothing like the power of my death spray.”

The next morning we saw fewer of them, and the ones we saw pretended to be bewildered, but they still advanced into the black camouflage of our counter top. My wife, before she left for yoga class, suggested I try something natural, not really harmful, just repulsive to them. After a quick Google search and confident that anything I found out on the web had to be true because it was published and not removed or amended by any Wiki-person, I made a trip to the local Whole Foods for bay leaves, cinnamon, fine grain salt, baking soda and cayenne. I thought my ground up concoction would have frightened away anything from a bedbug to Lukas, the neighbor’s friendly collie.

“Are those tiny gas masks?” I asked my wife the next morning, trying to examine one of the latest infantrymen on my wet wad of paper towel. “I have a cataract, you know.”

“No,” she said, “your imagination is running away with you.”

“We need a secret weapon. The queen is smarter than I thought.”

No anteaters were available for rent or ownership, but being an avid fly fisherman, I remembered that I had a few patterns tied out of foam that were large ants, almost a quarter of an inch long, and beetles, which I thought might frighten even the most doughty scout. I clipped off the hooks at the bend and placed my foam sentinels at entry points on window sills and at a strategic crossroads of the counter.

This plan led only to shrieks from my wife, whom I had forgotten to let in on my latest strategy. As a result, my foam sentinels were retired from duty before I could discover their effectiveness, although I noticed one possible failure in the new arrival of a rather large carpenter ant that had been attracted to one of my rather well-done patterns and seemed to be attempting something unspeakable to the imitation.

I made another trip to the hardware store, probably the ninth or tenth, this time swallowing my manly pride and asking the associate in the pest department for advice. I told her the saga of my campaign so far. She nodded sympathetically and slightly patronizingly to each battle report and listened patiently while I explored other options. An electronic anti-bug plug-in? An anteater toy? Mirrors to confuse them? Perfume to obliterate their scent trail? Mini-snares? What about one of those battery-powered fly swatters like a tennis racket with a grid of wires that could be left on to electrocute any of the little black devils that might stray across it?

She did not comment on my failures, nor my desperate plans, but simply reached behind her to a tall canister the size of a can of tennis balls. “If the ant traps didn’t do it,” she said, “sprinkle this around all the entry points. Again wear rubber gloves and don’t inhale it.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. No one does. The formula is a carefully guarded secret. I only know that I have seen it work.”

When I checked out, I discovered to my joy that I not only had the ultimate weapon, I had achieved most-favored nation status and had been rewarded with fifty cents off my purchase. I left the store, probably my twelfth trip, cradling the canister as if it contained nitro or anti-matter. Either would do, I thought. I waited for my wife to go to yoga class, donned a mask left over from our contractors removing knob and tube wiring and disturbing lead paint, put on latex dishwashing gloves and a second layer of blue nothing-gets-through-this rubber gloves that nearly reached my elbows, and sprinkled the death-to-all-pixies-and-any-six-legged-creatures dust everywhere I thought one of Queen Moriarty’s soldiers might show up.

The next morning, it is true that the battlefield was littered with casualties, which my wife cleaned up with wet paper towels, but we saw no sign of Queen Moriarty, and by mid-afternoon several more of her henchmen had shown up, somehow having achieved immunity to my death dust.

“That’s it,” I told my wife. “We’re going to use the nuclear option.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The last time I was at the store, I noticed a box way off in the corner where you almost had to ask for it specifically. It was labeled in very small print, so small someone with a cataract had to squint to read it. It read: Bug fogger. Kills everything. You must close up the house and leave for the day.”

“No,” my wife said. “We want our grandson to visit us sometime.”

“But-”

“No, and I’m not going to yoga today. Every time I go to yoga, you run to the hardware store. You’ve sent their stock up three points in a single week.”

“But-”

“Here,” she said, handing me a fresh roll of paper towels and demonstrating how to wet a wad so it doesn’t drip but still is moist enough to sop up invaders. “You’re on guard duty.”

There I stood, mostly wiping up grains of pepper that look to one with a cataract like you-know-whats, but even worse, as I look out the kitchen window, I see a chipmunk, its flicking tail, full cheek pouches, and tiny paws as it darts out from a den it has dug under a flat flagstone at the corner of our garage. The hardware store must have something for troublesome rodents, I think, but I cannot act. I am on guard duty, and my wife is not going to yoga today. There must be something I can do.

“That’s it, you may no longer have anything to do with pest control,” my wife says as she passes, grabs my arm and makes me look at myself in the bathroom mirror. It is true. I now look like Jack Nicholson at his narrow-eyed worst. We are doomed.

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Where Happiness Comes From

June 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s not really a secret, except to those poor souls who are not happy. Having seen the documentary “Happy” and tested its thesis, I can say that it’s exactly right, and I highly recommend it. If you haven’t seen this movie, get to it as soon as possible.

Once you have the basics covered, say $50,000.00 worth in the United States currently for house, food, basic medical care, wearable clothes and some fun money, people who make twice that, three times that, or twenty times that amount, are no happier according to every survey and measure available. It’s also true that many people can be happy on making less that $50,000, as long as their basic needs are met. The Jaguar XKE (do they still make that hot ride?) won’t do it. The trip to Hawaii won’t do it, at least not beyond the actual time spent there. Drugs won’t do it. If marriage alone did it, there wouldn’t be any divorces. Sex won’t do it, although I must admit, my wife has a kiss that, um, well, nevermind, there may be an exception to what I’m about to suggest.

First, a clarification. Grammatically, we have it all wrong. Happiness is not really a noun; it’s a verb. “To be happy,” doesn’t work because that is passive. “To happy” would be the correct form. So what does one do “to happy?”

It’s not necessarily easy for most of us, but it is simple. Adopt everything and everyone. Adopt the local barber so he becomes your uncle. No one can tell better stories than Uncle Jack the barber on Old University. Adopt a local coffee shop like The Froth House near us (where I am as I write this), and be sure you know the names of the baristas. (Thank you, Ginger. How is Kelly doing?) I read in college that Daniel DeFoe of Gulliver’s Travels fame, not only adopted a local pub and had dibs on “his booth,” but also had his own friendly waiter named Payne and was truly saddened when the waiter succumbed to the plague. Until death, they were happy because of the relationship.

Adopt the places where you belong, a restaurant, a pizza place, a library. Keep going to those places until you belong. Adopt the people who work there and find out about their children, husbands, vacations, and worries. Adopt a local hardware store and find out who knows the most about plumbing, dimmers, and ant killers. Adopt all of the neighborhood kids, especially at Halloween, during the summer, and at graduation. If your neighbor has a dog as nice as Lukas, the collie next door to us, be sure you have a box of dog biscuits near the back door. It’s not only fun for Lukas; it’s good for you. Adopt a local baseball team, a football team and a basketball team if they are available, especially if one of them is semi-pro. Jane, a fellow teacher for many years, adopted struggling players for the Kane County Cougars near Chicago and took one in as a roomie every year. Jane and her husband became adoptive parents and the team’s best fans. They belonged. She and her husband often went to spring training, but even more important, they kept in contact with “their boys” for many years whether the players made it to The Bigs or not. Jane’s eyes lit up in delight whenever she talked about her boys.

Adopt a TV series, an author who writes a series, preferably something not about vampires. Wizards are okay. Adopt a band, especially one most people don’t know about. If you don’t know of such a band, ask a young person, preferably one you’ve already adopted. Adopt a trout stream. Adopt plants. You can name them if you want and talk to them. They can’t hear you except for perhaps mild vibrations, but talking to them can be good for you, as long as you also talk to people. Adopt a musical instrument. Adopt a blogger or two. Adopt the elderly, especially if they are in your neighborhood and too feeble to shovel snow. It’s actually become something of a rivalry in our neighborhood to see who can get out first to shovel the walk and driveway of the very elderly couple on our block. Adopt a charity, a university, and a favorite chair.

You already know the point. Happiness is not based on prestige, class, or what you own. It is based on deepening relationships where you live and where you go. When you hear the echoes of John Lennon in “Love is all there is,” this what he means: you love and are loved by creating meaningful relationships.

This is also where it gets tricky, or at least interesting. Owning something is not the same as developing a relationship. That’s why buying that Jag XKE that you admire so much may seem to make you happy, but only until its first scratch, while having a kind of loyal relationship and appreciation for an old 1957 Chevy may make you quite happy. You “happy” it. Happiness is never owned; it is created, usually slowly, deeply, and personally.

This is also one of the blessings of happiness. It does not depend on the other thing or person. That’s why a car can’t make you happy, but you can happy it. That’s why crabby Mrs. Longnose on the corner can’t make you happy since you never hear a kind word from her, but you can “happy” her, and will be amazed at the results of your conscious, repeated and infuriating kindnesses. Do you really want to get back at her? Kindness is the sweetest revenge. It’s not really revenge, but that needy part of your brain will be filled with the resulting dopamine molecules anyway. If nothing else, you will confuse her, and that’s not all bad.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can see happiness in action. Simply go to bethesourceproject.com. There it is. It’s a blog worth adopting.

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The Combination Diet

April 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

How to Diet

I think I’ve considered all of them, South Beach, Atkins, Forks over Knives, and even the Eat Nothing but Grass and Drink Nothing but Osmosiffied Water Until You Puke diet, and I think I’ve finally got things figured out. They all have good, convincing arguments about some of their recommended foods, but each of them leads me to feel a little dissatisfied, or more accurately … hungry.

With that reality in mind, I now propose – ta daa- The Combination Diet.

Here’s how it works. On Sundays, which is usually the day of celebrations like Easter, family gatherings, the Super Bowl, and the nearest day off to a birthday, I follow the Spiderman Diet. For other holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving, I just pretend they are Sundays so I can follow the Spiderman Diet. The Spiderman Diet, as professed by the actor who played Spidey, Tobey Maguire, consists of eating very little for six days, mostly restricted calories, no sugar, and mostly vegetables, except for one day a week – Sunday for me – in which he will eat anything he wants. Often that is a trip to a restaurant with the best pizza, or Lombardino’s fantastic pasta, or maybe even The Weary Traveler for Bob’s Bad Breath Burger. After all, following a strict diet for six days per week and enjoying yourself one day a week can’t be too harmful and doesn’t make me feel so deprived that I slip and binge on a Wednesday.

On Mondays, I follow the South Beach diet, which cuts out sugar, most processed foods, but allows whole grains and fruit, provided they are not going to cause a spike on the glycemic index. The diet’s designer, Dr. A. (Not Atkins, but I can’t spell his name correctly) has a soft spot for the German Oktoberfest, so he allows beer then. Some have transferred that holiday to St. Patty’s Day, which is absurd because St. Patty’s Day is only one day, and Oktoberfest is a whole month. I think drinking a lot of beer for a whole month could be harmful, so I’ve stretched it out to just Sundays and Mondays to allow for family gatherings, the Bears vs. the Packers on Sunday, and any team that plays on Monday night. The Oktoberfest observation of this otherwise strict diet gives me 31 days of beer drinking, enough to cover most of the NFL season. A bonus is that on Sundays and Monday nights, I get to have hot buttered popcorn with my beer, since it’s an unprocessed whole grain. I believe sea salt is unprocessed, so I can use that too. I live in Wisconsin, so butter is its own food group and okay on popcorn. For breakfast I eat granola or oatmeal and think about popcorn. For lunch or during a late afternoon game, I eat something lean like chili made with bison, beans, onions, salsa, and chili powder.

On Tuesdays, I follow the Forks Over Knives diet, which is almost entirel vegetarian and frowns on anything dairy related. This day is sometimes difficult because the University of Wisconsin makes their own amazing ice cream in Babcock Hall, and their butter pecan – nevermind, I can’t even think about it now. The problem is that Babcock hall is almost right on the bike path near our house, and if I try to ride on another route, I pass either the Student Union South, or the Memorial Union on the Lake, and and they both serve – you know what. Anyway, on Tuesdays, I eat oatmeal made with vanilla almond milk and put in a lot of maple syrup because that’s vegetarian on the Forks Over Knives diet. Then I have a big salad for lunch with beans and olives, and mixed vegetables and spinach and lettuce, and I make a dressing with vegenaise and hot sauce and four or five other spices, usually whatever is in the front of our spice cabinet. In the afternoon I eat a lot of pretzels or blue chips and red pepper hummus. For dinner, Ann makes a great potato leek soup with almond milk and a bunch of other stuff I can’t pronounce like tahiti seeds (or something like that) and seminolia (or something like that). On Tuesdays I eat a lot of stuff that I don’t really what it is. No hot, buttered popcorn, but that’s okay because there aren’t many football games on Tuesdays. Sometimes we’ll have something like billyrubin pasta with tomato sauce and extra mushrooms, and something fake like tofu turkey sausages (which taste like chicken). Usually I’ll follow the dictum of an “apple a week” on Tuesdays and add some nuts, especially salted cashews.

On Wednesdays I follow the Atkins diet, which allows for lean meat, fish, eggs, and all the other stuff not on the other diets. I don’t ignore vegetables, but I’m okay with eating broccoli with melted cheddar on top, and next to that, a steak, or some chicken with some kind of sauce or spices on it. Since butter is not okay, I tried using allowable oil like olive oil, but I don’t recommend it. Popcorn made with olive oil tastes like…. um… olives gone bad. Did I mention steak?

On Thursdays I follow the Caveman Diet. It’s also called the Paleo diet and consists of anything cavemen and cavewomen might eat, including meat, fish, eggs, and plants. It’s really hard to find dinosaur and mammoth steaks, so I substitute cousins like buffalo burgers, pheasants (as close as I can come to pterodactyl meat, which I hear tasts just like chicken), and real old species like catfish, shrimp, and lobster. I usually start with scrambled eggs, and then move on to anything a caveman might find or hunt after breakfast. I limit myself to drinking water on those days, or maybe a little accidentally fermented grapes or some distilled malt water. Sometimes there is football on Thursdays, and I thought it would be okay to eat those little goldfish cracker things that taste like bad cheese, but my wife convinced me that eating something shaped like a fish was not as legitimate as eating the actual thing. The caveman diet also allows for dried fruit like raisins, but I hate raisins because they’re nothing but dead grapes, so I only eat one of them on Thursdays. I know the cave people probably didn’t have beer, but I think beer nuts are okay; they just called them something else like yum-yums. I eat lots of yum-yums on Thursdays.

On Fridays I follow the Mediterranean Diet, which basically means I can eat anything the Eurpeans eat, meat, fish, pasta, olives, vegetables in season, and a little cheese for dessert (they say, “fromage or dessert”), but I have to eat it slowly, sort of like grazing all day long, and I have to take a siesta, and some long walks, usually to Babcock Hall. It looks to me like the Mediterranean Diet isn’t so much about what you eat as it is about how you eat it. Sometimes I don’t finish eating untl after midnight. I think the idea is to eat a little bit of everything, not a quarter-pounder, just a single White Castle, no wait, those are processed, just a single meat ball, and then very slowly another one, and then later on some pasta, and another meat ball, then maybe some salad, and another meat ball, and some olives, and then another meat ball, and just keep going throughout the day and night. I love the French and Italians and Greeks. They’ve existed for thousands of years eating this way.

On Saturdays, I follow the Macrobiotic Diet, which is a very old sort of zen diet, starting with brown rice, some “live” vegetables, sauces, and some fish. It’s a lot like the Mediterranean Diet because you can eat a “balance” of almost anything like “a little brown rice and water” to be balanced by “a little spicy pepperoni pizza,” and then some sauteed vegetables followed by file of sole a la Oscar. In between, you have to meditate by counting breaths and then going to your “happy place,” at least in your mind. I usually go to Babcock Hall then. If you can’t concentrate, just say “Om – e – lette” over and over again. The other thing that’s good about the Macrobiotic Diet, is that is matches college football days, so if your team scores, you can eat some jambalaya, which is mostly rice, and if the other team scores, you have to eat a piece of dried fruit, usually one raisin.

So that’s my weekly diet, and it works for me. I don’t recommend that you follow my plan, though, because it’s so exacting, unforgiving, and as difficult to follow as preparing fried snark correctly, that’s right, fried snark.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Marry Someone Who…

March 29, 2012 by 3 Comments

It’s a good thing to know you married the right woman. I suppose this is an ode. I wrote one for her once before, a song before we were married which said, “The road is long between our two towns,” but I don’t remember all the words and I’d have to go looking for the manuscript, which is a problem in our basement full of unpacked boxes. Thirty years of marriage and two children result in a lot of boxes.

So how does one know? Start by marrying a person who will drive from Madison to Evanston to the home of a new grandson so she can hold him between feedings, ignore everyone and everything else in the room, and do nothing but study his face and murmur to him for three hours straight.

Marry someone who prepares for moving by digging up snowflowers and asparagus given to her by her grandfather twenty years ago and irises given to her by my father and replanting them over the winter in a friend’s garden and then driving two hours in the spring to dig them back up to replant in our new yard. These are not flowers; these are valuable legacies left to her by loved ones. She treats people the same way.

Marry someone who loves to paint rooms, has an unerring eye for color, and is so good that she never needs to “tape” edges or woodwork. I do ceilings – with overlapping dropcloths, and when she laughs at my ineptitude, I pull out my Bunbury excuse, “You know I had a detached retina fixed.” Marry someone who lets you use the re-attached retina excuse on everything from painting ceilings to forgetting to pick up milk.

Marry someone who doesn’t want a king-sized bed and would rather “spoon.”

Marry someone whose first choice in cars is the oldest, boxiest Jeep she can find, and only then when Wagoneers are no longer available.

Marry someone who will fill a blackboard-painted wall with a colored chalk drawing to welcome home the new grandson, and do that after a day spent in scrubbing sinks, countertops, doing laundry and cajoling a repairman to rush over that day to fix the dryer by convincing the business owner that a new mother and her baby can’t possibly come home to a broken dryer.

Marry someone who needs less than five minutes to get “sucked in” to an old black-and-white movie on Turner Classic Movies, even a two-star movie, someone who enjoys the vintage clothes as much as the characters, and assumes that the plot doesn’t matter.

Marry someone who owns a lake out in the deep woods of the Upper Peninsula, especially if she has a brother who’s an engineer who knows how to build solar-panels and hook them up to a refrigerator, one who loves solar showers. Marry someone who can row a boat and will force her husband out of the tent at night just to look at the stars… not the pathetic suburban dozen or so lights that peep through the urban night clutter, but the honest-to-god Milky Way and shooting stars that still live in the U.P.

Marry someone whose favorite possession is a 50-year-old Peugeot ten-speed bicycle inherited from her aunt.

Marry someone who volunteers every week in her new friend’s second grade class because one student in particular needs one-on-one help. Marry someone who knows this is how to keep the same friends for over 50 years.

Marry someone who calls for computer help because she believes the computer will explode if she hits the wrong button. Marry someone who almost believes you if you tell her it might.

Marry someone who fills entire jump drives with digital pictures of clouds and fields taken out of a moving car – pictures that she might paint some day.

Marry someone who reads the Arts Calendar with the same intensity as she reads The Secret Life of Bees.

Marry someone who knows that music is not a monologue; it is a conversation.

Marry someone who knows that football is a father-son adventure; fly fishing is like yoga or meditation; the woods are as sacred as church; water must be painted as if it is alive; the right kind of warm light bulb matters; friends are more important than money; a lonely day is a day with fewer than a dozen phone calls; hot buttered popcorn with lots of salt is its own food group and popcorn is a requirement for old black-and-white movies on the Turner Classic Movies network.

Marry someone who remembers all the names for the faces you recognize, but can’t remember where her dozen reading glasses are.

Marry someone who will badger you to take a nighttime walk, especially if it looks and sounds like rain on its way.

Marry someone who will see a high school fight brewing in a parking lot and will drive her car at a crawl right into the middle of them even though she is alone, horn blaring the whole time, until the kids get scared and run away.

Marry someone who favors old things: houses, friends, books, jeans, furniture, recipes, coffee mugs, jewelry, family stories, and a husband.

Marry someone who laughs like a little girl, wears honesty like a tiara, prays a blessing every time a helicopter flies over our house to the nearby hospital, walks up to the high school when she hears a bagpipe band practicing, and babysits for friends so she can adopt their children. There are never enough children.

Follow these guidelines, my friends, and you will marry the right woman.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Philosophy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Opening Day for Grumpy and Schnoz

March 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I looked at Schnoz and knew right away we were in trouble. I had made a foolish commitment to join him on opening day like real trout bums instead of the inept pretenders we were, and I’d spent the week before looking for tapered leaders, “general” or “attractor” flies to use (pretenders’ code for “I don’t know what the hell they might eat today”) and tippet spools with enough line on them to allow me to re-learn how to tie an improved clinch without a nine-inch wasted tag.  Early season trout fishing is like puberty, all gangly awkwardness, stumbling, and tailing loop knots.  If women were as wary as trout, even early in the season, I never would have caught one.

We had just put on our waders, struggled creakily into boots, strung up rods and turned to the snow-covered stubble off the side of the road.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What?”

“Where’s the stream?”

We looked out over the expanse of beautifully sculped snow, occasional bristles of corn stalks showing through like they were on on some giant’s face who had just been on a three-month binge, and saw nothing but white.

“This can’t be,” Schnoz said.  “A trout stream is moving water. It has to be right over there.”  He pointed a few dozen yards off the road where there ought to have been a ribbon of black water. We walked, actually stumbled over furrows, crusty ridges, and hidden holes until – sure enough – we found the stream, or at least a one-foot wide noodle of it in between ice shelves that had somehow cantilevered themselves over our favorite stretch of Rinty Creek that was usually at least a dozen feet wide, even in August.

“You can go first,” I said.

Schnoz positioned himself near a bend where we knew a little run fell below a fine riffle that always produced trout.  Schnoz stretched his line and leader like he knew what he was doing, and false casted a dozen times or so to be sure his leader was good and knotted before anything hit the water. I’ve seen lots of bass fishermen who can tie magnificent crow’s nests in a bait casting reel, but I’ve never seen anyone do it in mid-air like Schnoz can do. This time, he false cast enough times to tie his specialty, a double Bimini frizzled eagle’s aerie, and then let ‘er fly.  I watched as his off-season caddis sailed past his ear and landed … on the ice shelf.  He tried to back cast again, but the fly had snagged.

“That’s not a good sign,” I said.  “I didn’t even know anyone could get snagged on ice.”

“Crosswind,” Schnoz grunted. “If you think it’s so easy, you try.”

“Maybe it was the dynamics of your fly,” I said.  “Why don’t you try a grasshopper? Trout probaby remember what they were like from last September, or maybe a trout might take it out of disbelief.  Or pity,” I added.

“What do you have on?”

“I’m starting with something that’s a cross between a midge, a scud, and a pupa.”

“It looks like a dust bunny or a wad of lint,” Schnoz snorted.  “Are you kidding?”

“That’s the point, Schnoz.  If a trout thinks it’s a scud, then it is.  If he’s looking for a midge, then it could be midge-nuff.”

“Cast,” he said.  “I’m getting cold.”

I pulled out my line, made only a few false casts to be sure I had nothing more than a single granny in my line, compensated for the imaginary crosswind that had fouled Schnoz’s fly, and let ‘er go.  The crosswind really was imaginary and my fly lodged on the ice exactly opposite Schnoz’s caddis.

“It’s an honest casting mistake if it happens to the first guy,” Schnoz said, “but the fool who sees what happens and does the same thing is an idiot.”

“Yeah, well you know it’s bad luck for the whole season if you lose your fly on your first cast,” I said, knowing that Schnoz is more superstitious than a pitcher on the third pitch in the third inning in the third game of a World Series. Schnoz could only grunt, because he knew I was right.  He sidled his way up the uneven bank, flicked the tip of his rod several times, which lodged his fly deeper in the ice, and then stepped tentatively out on the ice ledge.

“It’s fine,” he said, “solid as a rock,” and then bounced a little to show me how safe he was.  I edged over to the other side of the stream and inched my way out onto the ice.  I could almost bend over and reach my dust bunny. At that point, I heard an explosion as the ice shelf below Schnoz’s ample girth gave way, and down he went in a cannonade of ice, spray, fearful curses, and backwash. I barely had time to laugh one “Ha” before my own ice gave way and I joined Schnoz in the stream.  Luckily the snow melt had not begun and we found ourselves foundering betwen ice blocks and melting snow only knee deep in water. A few more feet toward the middle and we both would have been in more than waist-deep danger.

We looked at each other like shellshocked survivors and then began to laugh.  Somehow, we had created an actual pool that could be fished.  We managed to crawl out and decided to rest our pool while we tied on bead heads, blew on our purple fingers, and took a sip of the schnapps we used as antifreeze. The pool was lovely, dark and deep, with room enough for both to cast.

A hundred casts into our freezing, Schnoz hooked a small brown, easily sliding the poor thing into his hand.

“Lunch is on you,” Schnoz said.

A few casts later, I caught its twin, or maybe the same fish.

“Dessert and coffee are on you,” I said.

After another hundred casts I noticed that Schnoz was trying to tie on another fly but had developed a sudden case of the shakes and would not have been able to tie his tippet onto a keyring.

“Are we a little c-c-cold?” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster, but my frozen mouth gave me away.

“Naw,” he said, “b-b-but I am h-hungry… for the chili and beer you owe me.”

Our legs had become stilts, so we had to shuffle back to the car, help each other get out of boots that had set with the same flex as concrete, and put our rods back in their cases.

“Do you n-n-need to pee before we go?” I asked innocently.

“Um, I can’t t-t-t-tell, and it doesn’t matter because even if I d-d-d-did, I don’t think I could find the necessary apparatus.”

“You should t-t-t-t-tie on a wool string in the winter. That way, if it falls off, you can find it. D-d-d-doctors can do amazing things with re-attaching ears and stuff these days.”

“Listen, Grumpy, just p-p-put the key in the ignition and let’s go. All I care about is that we didn’t get skunked.”

It took three drops and three more tries, but I managed to fit the key in the ignition. Luckily Officer Bardall, the new, young hot-shot on the force, met us at Juliana’s Diner instead of at the edge of town with his radar gun.

“How’d you coots do?” he asked.

“We killed ’em,” Schnoz said.  “It was unbelievable. It’s like they hadn’t eaten all winter.”

“How many’d you catch?”

“Hell, I lost count,” Schnoz said. “You remember?” he said to me.

“Naw.  I wasn’t counting. It coulda’ been two dozen.  They were small, though.”

“Yeah?” Officer Bardall said.  “Damn, I wish I’d a been out there instead of on duty.”

We looked at the large coffee and blueberry pie in front of him, and then at each other.  Neither one of us said what obviously needed to be said because of our great respect for the law and the eventual certainly that he would catch one or both of us doing something that violated the letter of the law, if not its spirit.

“You want to go out again tomorrow?” I said to Schnoz.

“Naw, it’ll take me a day to untangle and re-rig my leader and thaw out my … um, my reel.”

“I hear warm water with a bit of isopropyl works best,” Officer Bardall said.

“Warm water and… excuse me,” Schnoz said, and ran to the men’s room.  I caught him at the door and pushed past him when he snagged his loose belt on the knob, and I got in first.  It was a good day, the kind of opening day that ends with one saying, “Ahhhhhhh……”

Filed Under: Humor Tagged With: , , ,

Gwen Also Says

March 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Gwen says, “If something is true, so is its complement.”
If you want an explanation for why we have male and female, black and white, summer and winter, night and day, left brain and right brain, this is it. These are not opposites. I suspect there really are no opposites, only complements in which we can’t see how they fit together.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help Tagged With: , , ,

Modern Tech Life

February 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I think my iphone is having an affair with my ipad. It might be happening on my desktop or somewhere in the icloud, but I’m not sure, because I don’t know how to access the icloud, and I think there’s some kind of fee to get in. Lately when I ask Siri the simplest request like “Siri, will you set an alarm for 6:30 AM for me?” I get a rather impatient response like, “You already have an alarm set for 6:30. I turned it on … for you.” When I asked directly, “Siri, are you partying with my ipad right now?” I only get silence and a vacant rolling of the eye. When I ask Siri to cheer me up by telling a joke, she says, “Two iphones go into a bar and …. I forget the punchline.” I think she’s in love, and not with me.

It’s not that I’m jealous. I have a lovely wife who continues to fascinate me after 32 years, and is still my best and only partner. Things are just … complicated. When I tried to find some family pictures for the baby shower Ann was helping to host (can’t wait to be a grandpa), I couldn’t find them on my desktop, ipad, or ipod Touch. I thought they all talked to each other, and maybe they do, but they’re not letting me in on the conversation. We ended up using some old paper prints from an envelope I dug out of our basement. This is the basement that is still floor to ceiling boxes that we haven’t been through after moving in June. When I open the basement door, I usually call to Ann, “Cover me. I’m going in.” She knows that if she doesn’t hear from me in an hour to put our Garmin GPS on my workbench. The Garmin’s first name is Nuvi, but we call her Numi, and she speaks with a sweet British lilt. She’s been very dependable, especially in directing me to my favorite trout streams out in the middle of nowhere, but you know the Brits from Downton Abbey and last week’s blog; even if Numi is angry or as jealous as Mary Grantham, she wouldn’t show it, stiff upper lip and all.

Then there’s the interface problem. Most of our devices, male or female, have different interfaces that make connecting with them rather tricky. My i-anything uses a basic UBS cord, but Ann’s LG phone is different, as is Numi, our Canon digital camera, my Kodak pocket camera, and the two hard drives I’ve attached to our desktops for backup. The oldest of those hard drives might be going through digital menopause because when I turn her on, all she does is cluck at me, kind of a tsk, tsk sound, and she never appears. I should probably back up her files on a jump drive, but I don’t want her to think she’s being officially downgraded to a dowager.

I don’t even want to try to explain our cable problems. We’ve had four techies in our basement, maybe more if I come across any dead bodies next summer. The first techie came because the cable didn’t work. He rerouted the wires and splitters. We could watch TV, but after a month, our internet went out, so the next techie told us that our Netflix video was a high demand stream, so he needed to put the internet modem first in line before the other splitters. That caused our home phone to go out, which was not a big problem initially because we only got it free in the “bundle” and didn’t use it much. But then our cell phones started going over the limit, so the next techie, re-routed, re-split, said some prayers, and left. When the phone went out again, a High Druid Techie came with a shaman-in-training and the two of them installed our own mini-power plant in the basement, whereby the cable comes in and each stream, the phone, the internet, and the TV are on their own super-boost power station. They assured me that the mini-power station was not high enough to cause cancer and shouldn’t interfere with the radon pump we installed in a corner of the basement, but if anything else goes wrong, we should tear down our 1920’s vintage Tudor house and start over.

Even listening to music has gotten complicated. When we drove to Evanston for the shower, I couldn’t remember if my favorite Decembrists song about being down by the river was on my ipod, my ipod touch, or Ann’s ipod, which is complicated by the fact that Ann’s ipod is apparently on permanent loan to our daughter who was hosting another shower and needed some oldies music. I know one common denominator here is baby showers, but I don’t believe in that level of coincidence, and I think the real problem is technology, my stupidity, and anything engineered by people who believe in binary code rather than words.

Sorry, I have to go …. Siri just came back and I think she will be able to tell me now how to deal with my ipod Touch. Wish me luck; I’m going in….

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Social Media
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