I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.
Well, friends, my ship has finally come in. I have been waiting on the shore for many years now, scanning the horizon for any sign of my ship, and I have now caught sight of it.
Some of you might have noticed how glowingly I sometimes write about one of my heroes, Warren E. Buffett. I think he is a genius and a good guy.
Today, Warren sent me an email explaining how, as an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist, he is giving away some of the billions he has earned to randomly selected people throughout the world. Somehow, my name was chosen.
“I am the most successful investor in the world. I believe strongly in ‘giving while living’ and using my wealth to help people,” Buffett wrote.
All I have to do is respond to Warren’s email and I will soon be the lucky recipient of $1.5 million.
Yahoo!
I knew this day was coming, though others doubted my faith in a fulsome future.
Apparently there are a lot of levels in Hell and the worse you were here on Earth, the farther down you go, closer to the fire.
I hope, and in my prayers tonight I will recommend, that the person who invented the “gable-top” milk carton spends eternity hopping around on the hot coals he or she deserves because this little carton is truly evil.
I wrestled with another one today as I sat at my table in a sub shop and if it hadn’t been for the prominent sign over the door which read, “No Screaming Allowed”, I would have let loose.
A person needs the hands and fingers of a brain surgeon to open these stupid outfits and unfortunately, my paws are almost as big and delicate as a bear’s mitts.
I know there is a way to open these awful things as I have been shown all the tricks many times by someone several decades younger than me. But he has always demonstrated it so quickly I could never quite get it, like a magician reluctant to show you his whole method.
So, there I sat today, ripping and tearing at this horrible little box like the aforementioned bear might have had he been in the sub shop at the time. (Had he wandered in and saw the look on my face, I think he would have run away, maybe even screaming, in violation of the sub shop code.)
By the time my milk was accessible, it was sitting in a pathetically mangled container and being chocolate milk, it was then I realized it needed to be shaken up. So I tried to close the wreck and give it a shake.
Milk spewed everywhere. When I finally did get it open again and put it to my lips, the milk dribbled down my face and onto my jeans.
You know, I hope I do go to Hell so I can hop around next to the idiot who invented this abomination and spend my eternity screaming in his ear, official policy be damned.
I have decided not to take my .357 Magnum Revolver to bed with me any more. For years, I have slept more peacefully knowing I could take action if and when (only a matter of time) my neighbour breaks into my house to try to steal my TV. He was over once and admired the 42-incher sitting in the corner of my living room and I knew in that moment that he would sneak into my place some night and take it.
I love that TV and can’t imagine life without it.
What has made me decide to keep my pistol in the fridge from now on instead is the news that an Illinois man accidentally shot himself while dreaming that his home was being broken into. On April 10, police arrived at the home of Mark M. Dicara, 62, and found him with a gunshot wound to the leg.
Dicara said he had a dream that someone was breaking into his home, retrieved his gun and shot at who he thought was the intruder, only to shoot himself, which caused him to wake from the dream.
The bullet went through Dicara’s leg and lodged itself into his bedding.
I wouldn’t want a bullet in my leg but I would pay holy hell if I ever shot up my bedding. And I won’t bore you with any details of some of the horrible dreams I have some nights but there is bound to be a firefight at 3 a.m. in my bedroom one of these times.
My neighbour can have my damn TV. I’m tired of worrying about it. In fact, I am going to call him tomorrow and help him move it to his place.
I might even lend him my revolver in the event some other neighbour starts cooking up plans to steal it from him.
Instead, I will spend my evenings watching the 19-inch flatscreen that sits on top of our filing cabinet.
Six months ago, our family enjoyed a Sunday supper at home of delicious Chinese food from our favourite restaurant. When the meal ended, five fortune cookies were randomly given out to us all and one by one, we went around the table, cracking them open and reading the messages on the tiny papers contained within them.
The ritual started with my son to my left and continued around the table till it was my turn. I cracked open my cookie, to discover there was nothing inside. This led to much hilarity and questions from me about what this could possibly mean. To this day, those questions have gone unanswered.
A few weeks ago, we sat down again to another feast of fried rice, egg rolls, guy ding and chicken balls and the cookie reveal was once again saved till the last. One by one, each of the five family members read out their fortune till it came to me. I cracked open my cookie to find, once again, no fortune within.
How could this happen when the cookies, on both occasions, were distributed at random? Surely, the message-less cookie could have been delivered to someone other than me.
So, I am left to wonder once again at my luck or lack of it. But being an optimistic person who always looks on the bright side of things, I brought out my Last Will and Testament the next day to see if there was a loophole or two that needed fixing. I did notice one or two of my most treasured possessions that I failed to gift to anyone, specifically my favourite baseball cap that looks as though it was recovered from a Kentucky coal mine that had been closed for a hundred years.
But try as I might, I am unable to get past my repeated misfortune. The other members of my family have gone on their merry ways, but I am left in a Chinese stew.
However, I think I do have some explanation now as to how it is, after seven decades of striving, I have managed somehow to avoid accumulating the fortune I always thought I would surely have by now. It was never in the cards for me. Not even in the cookies.
I like the woman who cleans my teeth every few months. She is older than the other hygienists and, in my opinion, more gentle. She is also interesting. Whether that’s because she has a little more life experience than the others or a variety of interests that happen to coincide with mine, I cannot say.
So, when she was finishing up with me today, I asked her how her garden was coming along. We have that in common. She said she was having a few problems with moles digging things up and she is looking for a way to send them packing.
At that point, I fell asleep. I had stayed up too late last night pondering the wonders of the universe. When I came to, my hygienist was still talking.
“There are so many holes,” she said. “We’ll have to fill them all in.
“I don’t want to use poison.”
Now, I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a minute or two but when I woke up, I forgot we had been discussing moles in her garden.
I thought she was still talking about my teeth. I immediately freaked out about all these cavities I apparently have now and it will be a frosty day in July before I let them inject poison in my gums.
Call me hard to get along with, but I hate poison.
You know, we all have experiences in life that we think of as good or bad, but not many of us have found ourselves inside a whale and somehow lived to tell about it.
Michael Packard, 56, a Massachusetts commercial lobster diver was seriously injured Friday morning when he was caught in the mouth of a humpback whale feeding off Race Point, his sister said.
“I felt this huge bump and everything went dark,” Packard said. “And then I felt around and I realized there was no teeth. And then I realized, ‘Oh my God I’m in a whale’s mouth … and he’s trying to swallow me.'”
I’m not sure what the poor diver did at that point but had I been in this situation, I am sure I would have been concerned.
“Then all of a sudden he went up to the surface and just erupted and started shaking his head. I just got thrown in the air and landed in the water,” he said. “I was free and I just floated there. I couldn’t believe it.”
Fortunately, humpback whales do not appear to favor lobster fishermen.
Imagine you are bdelloid rotifer. You’ve been taking a good long nap for the past 24,000 years and then some pesky scientists come along and wake you up. The meddlesome jerks. You couldn’t be blamed if you reacted kind of grumpily to this.
But now you’re awake, what is your first priority? A nice warm shower? A hearty breakfast? Some sunbathing, perhaps?
Nope. If you are a rotifer that has spent the past 24,000 years frozen in the permafrost of Siberia, the first activity you want to get right at is sex. I guess 24,000 years of no sex might make a tiny, multicellular, freshwater creature such as a rotifer kind of randy.
In fact, once revived, these little guys got busy reproducing right away. Not much foreplay was witnessed.
“We revived animals that saw woolly mammoths,” Russian scientist Stas Malavin told the New York Times. “Which is quite impressive.”
However, the poor revived rotifers came close but are in second place when it comes to longest frozen creature. The title of longest nap goes to the nematode. In 2018, scientists revived some of the microscopic worms – also yanked out of the Siberian permafrost – that had been frozen for 42,000 years.
Woken up against their will, my guess is the nematodes took a look around at the world in 2018 and begged to be allowed to go back to sleep. A few, however, might stick around to join extreme right-wing political movements, the views of which, coincidentally, have been underwater and frozen, also for 42,000 years.
The world is watching us all these days, it seems. Literally watching. This matters not to a fine upstanding young man like myself who obeys all ten commandments every day and would follow ten more if somebody was to command them. In fact, I wish somebody would.
But even a saint can get tripped up now and then, I suppose. And so it was with me when a big red steel dumpster was delivered to the business next door to our house. Each day, employees of the store tossed in refuse of every description until after week or so, the thing was filled to overflowing.
Around this time, we had bought a new firebowl for the backyard. It came in a massive cardboard box and was encased in brittle white foam. When it was unpackaged and assembled, the firebowl stood there on the patio looking great but the big white slab of foam leaned forlornly against the house. How the heck was I going to get rid of that thing?
As it turns out, the Universe had delivered the answer right on time. The steel garbage bin next door. So one recent late night, when everyone was in bed and there seemed to be no lights on in any of the neighbours’ houses, I grabbed the foam slab and snuck over to the next-door business. I tossed it high in the air and it landed on the very top of the already-too-full bin. It stuck out, kind of like the cherry on a sundae.
I snuck back inside my home without being detected. But every day from then on, until the bin was removed and unloaded, I worried about the slab of foam and felt very guilty about adding it to my neighbour’s trash. I had even thought of returning to the bin and fetching it back again some night but worried I would be seen and reported for stealing from the dumpster. I breathed a little easier when it was finally taken away.
Yesterday, it was brought back empty to the business, to be once again filled up.
Today, I happened to be over at the business, talking to the owner, and I remarked on the sign he had posted on his door announcing that his establishment was being monitored 24 hours a day by video surveillance.
“In fact, we even have a camera set up outside,” he said, pointing to a little wandering eye situated near the roof. It happened to be pointing directly at the big red steel garbage bin.
If there ever was a time for a joke, this was it.
“Oh, I am glad to see that,” I quipped. “I was thinking of going dumpster diving.”
The owner laughed. A little too long and a little too hard. And way too knowingly, it seemed to me. Like someone would who spends part of his days going over video surveillance footage.
I am spending today, going through the Commandments, trying to figure out which one covers great big slabs of hard white foam. So far, I haven’t seen anything that fits.
But chalk it up to my bad luck that the very first time in my 67 years that I ever did anything wrong, my evil deed would be captured on film.
Of course it would be. So, it’s back to the straight and narrow for me. You can bet your big red dumpster on it.
I’ve been getting a lot of help with my mental health this weekend from my favourite psychiatrists, Dr. Claw Hammer, Dr. Hans Sawyer and Dr. Shuv Hull (all of them Swedish).
Dr. Lief Rake made a brief appearance as did Dr. Finish Nailz (from Finland).
We held several sessions outdoors. Dug deep into my issues, cut through a lot of boardom and I think we pretty much nailed it.
I am feeling much better tonight. A few more sessions tomorrow.
All of these great mental-health professionals work for peanuts which works out well because Dr. Colm Poster just eats all that up. Sometimes I feel like they’re just shelling out, but it’s okay.
Not a news flash, but it rains a lot in Ireland and one time when I was there, I saw a painter painting a storefront in the pouring rain. It wasn’t raining too heavily and the part he was painting was probably not in threat of getting very soggy, but the thought of painting in the rain brought a smile to my face. Dancing in the rain, maybe, but painting?
Being of Irish descent and prone to exaggeration, I have now extrapolated this little scene into a general theory which I often mention to people. When the subject of Ireland comes up, I always work into the conversation the “fact” that it rains so much in Ireland the painters have to paint in the rain. All because I saw one guy do it.
So, please forgive me Irish people, for “painting” you with an unflattering brush.
I especially beg forgiveness in light of the fact that on Friday, I painted my shed in the rain. It wasn’t raining when I started the job but halfway through, it started to come down. I cleaned up my brushes, roller, etc., but within an hour, the rain stopped. The sun even peeked out from the clouds. So, I took out all my equipment again, ventured out to the shed, felt the walls to see how dry or wet they were, and started up painting again.
After a few minutes, the rain started again, but I didn’t want to quit. I was determined to get this done. I painted over some wet surfaces so I hope the whole thing doesn’t peel right off by Wednesday.
Did you know that it rains so much in Canada, some fools have been known to paint in the rain? It’s true. I saw a Canadian guy do it once.
