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.
You might be getting the idea by now that I think the gun culture in the United States is insane, but you could not be more wrong. More guns, everywhere, is the only answer.
Everywhere, say, like up your butt.
And why not? Did nature not design the human buttocks as a perfectly formed holster, where a loaded pistol would fit wonderfully? Of course it did.
And that is why a 21-year-old New Jersey man shoved the stolen, automatic .25-caliber handgun up where the sun don’t shine when police suspected he was hiding something. They found the weapon, of course, killjoys that they are.
If I were Darquan R. Lee, I would be scared to death that one of my big sneezes or hiccups or other bodily noise emissions might cause the weapon to blow my brains out. Then I realized that it would be impossible to blow out Mr. Lee’s brains even if he’d shoved a bazooka up his bazoom. To be effective, a gun must have a target, and I believe it is missing in this case.
But if it did go off, that would be one heck of a bowel movement, wouldn’t it? No better laxative exists, I suppose.
I went to make myself a piece of toast on Friday, only to be horrified to discover the toaster was broken, which might suggest to you that it doesn’t take a lot to horrify me. The plunger that carries the bread down into the guts of the machine to be toasted wouldn’t stay down.
I took the bloody thing out to my workbench in the garage where I realized fairly quickly that I have no idea how to fix a toaster. So, I went back into the house and announced, much as I might yell, “The toast is done,” that “The toaster is done.”
This news was not welcomed by the horde of toast-loving family members so I assured them to not fret. I would take care of things, as I always do.
The next day, with Mother’s Day less than 24 hours away, it suddenly occurred to me that a new toaster would make a perfect Mother’s Day gift. So out to the shops I went and found a really nice one in my price range. My price range, by the way, starts at a dollar and ends when I start crying.
I was delighted at the reception given to the new toaster by the family, especially the mother among us. She immediately set it up and marvelled at it several times that evening.
Uncharacteristically, I was feeling pretty good about myself.
I collect user’s instructional manuals like Trump men collect wives and in my filing cabinet I have several very fat files stuffed with every kind of document from thin to thick. I asked my wife where the manual for the new toaster might be. She produced it and I read it after everyone had gone home from Mother’s Day.
Imagine my surprise when I read the section in the manual about how the plunger would not stay down if the toaster was not plugged in. Immediately, being not as dumb as you might think I am, I realized why our old toaster had failed.
The next day, I fished out the forlorn old toaster from the garbage can where I had discarded it. Fortunately, nothing disgusting such as dog poo had touched the machine. I brushed it off, plugged it in, and presto chango, it worked just as fine as it had always done.
Immediately, my mind went to somewhere it shouldn’t have ventured, I now know. I will take the new toaster back to the store.
But here are a couple of realities I soon became aware of. You don’t rip a new toaster out of the hands of a recent celebrant of Mother’s Day. And as the new toaster had been put to good use all day Sunday toasting up bread slices, bagels and even hamburger buns, the objection was raised that the machine had already been put to use and it would be wrong to let some unsuspecting soul buy a used toaster, thinking it was new.
So, between the realization that mothers do not like to have their Mother’s Day gifts torn from their hands the day after, along with the morality of returning a used toaster, pretending it was unused, I was condemned to suffer a dark depression all day. Much like the colour of bread that has been left in a toaster too long.
This is where an addictive personality and desperation meet. I have been hooked for almost two weeks on a TV series. Five seasons have been filmed. The first three are available on Netflix.
So, I burned through those 30-plus episodes like newspapers in a fireplace. “MORE!!!!” came the scream from me into the ether in the middle of the night.
I went searching for seasons four and five. They are legally available through a number of sources, in Canada mostly on Super Channel. But my need for these remaining episodes of this program overwhelmed any sense of morality I have tried to encourage in myself over almost seven decades.
If I could have found these shows burned onto an old videotape, I would have traded them for my car in a back alley from a mean-looking guy in a trenchcoat.
Therefore, I went searching the Internet and found them streamed there for free. But not on one website. It was like picking broken glass out of your granola breakfast cereal. This morning, I sit here with no more of my show to watch. But this is what I had to endure and was willing to put with.
On several of my bootleg shows on the Internet, the sound was somehow slowed down, so that every character in the programs had very deep and drawly voices, even the women and kids. They all sounded like monsters in a horror flick. I got used to that.
Other shows appeared backwards. I knew this by realizing that any words printed such as store signs, etc., were backwards. Small price to pay.
And in a couple of others, the entire image was magnified so only about 80 per cent of the actual footage showed on my monitor. I had to imagine what I was missing on the outer edges of the picture.
In a couple of other shows, the audio and visual elements of the program were completely out of sync by about five or ten seconds. The characters would move their mouths in silence, and then later, when they might not even be still in the scene, their lines would be heard.
And in the final show I watched, a Christmas special, the image was blurry, for some reason. But I charged ahead, watching as though I had left my glasses on the highway for someone to run over. The only thing I can compare this ordeal to is being so desperate for a chocolate bar and realizing all the ones in the off-the-beaten-path gas station have best-before dates long expired. You rifle through all the bad ones available to try to find the most recently out-of-date one. You hope, as you unwrap it carefully, that the chocolate hasn’t turned white, not that you would reject it if it had. This is an experience I have had.
So here I sit, filled and empty at the same time. There are still three shows left in the current season. They aren’t even available yet illegally. The next one airs tonight. Guess I will be forced once again into that back alley to look for my friend in the trenchcoat.
Then I will spend the rest of my day wondering why bad guys love trenchcoats.
I was a bit late and frazzled. I had a meeting downtown that I expected might last two or three hours so I needed a parking meter that allowed lots of time.
Meter reading is done privately in our town now so the meter hawks are swarming everywhere, waiting to pounce on any prey, and I am determined to never again get another silly $15 ticket. I drove around and there it was – a meter that allowed three hours and not far from my meeting spot. Perfect.
Before I left the house, I reached into the change jar and filled one of my pockets with nickels, dimes and quarters. When I finished parking, I rejoiced when I saw 40 minutes left on my meter. Fantastic. So, I started stuffing in the coins and the time started adding up – one hour, two, then three. Yay.
One last check before I left revealed a problem, however. I had filled the wrong meter, for the car parked behind mine. Crap.
I quickly searched my suddenly lighter pocket for my remaining coins and started dropping them in the right side of the stupid machine. Success. Three hours.
To the coin collectors: You’re welcome (you thieving bandits).
In my younger days, I pursued young women like Sydney Crosby chases the Stanley Cup. But if I was Crosby, I was out on the ice in my galoshes with a broom for a hockey stick. No Stanley Cups on my mantle.
Then out of frustration I talked to a wise friend who wore a lovely Stanley Cup ring on his left hand.
“I want to ask this woman out, but I can’t figure out what she would like to do,” I said.
“Who cares what she would like to do?” came his shocking reply. “Decide what you would like to do and find a woman who would like to do that too.”
That was the day I took off my galoshes and threw away my broom. Next time you see me, ask me to show you my Stanley Cup ring.
A friend of ours almost fell down laughing one day when my fiancé and I told her we were all excited because we were getting together that night to watch the U.S. vice-presidential debate on TV. Not the presidential debate. The vice-presidential debate. And both of us are Canadians.
Birds of a feather …
(Update 2024: Thirty-six years together. A son and a daughter. Still watching U.S. debates.)
I have been looking for a new sport ever since my doctor put an end to my hang gliding (I landed inside a corn silo on a farm near my place and got some nasty scrapes) and now I think I have found it in New York.
Several dozen competitors from around the world took turns Sunday hurling a sacrificial banjo into a polluted urban canal to see who could throw it the farthest. Tyler Frank of St. Louis bested all other male competitors with an 85-foot throw. On the women’s side, Nada Zimmerman of Innsbruck, Austria, tossed the banjo 67 feet into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.
Two things: I want to hire Tyler to tutor me and I am madly in love with Nada.
Event founder, banjo player and radio host Eli Smith, says, “I love the banjo, and yet I have a perverse desire to see it thrown into a body of water.”
I don’t see anything perverse about that at all. So, I’ll be down at the Avon River practising tonight. I just hope I don’t hit a duck or a dragon boater.
Finally, my sport. Shows if you are patient, the right one will come along.
An old joke says the definition of perfect pitch is tossing an accordion in a dumpster and hitting a set of bagpipes with it. Musical instrument jokesters can be so cruel these days. May a flying banjo clonk them in their noggins the next time they’re padding down a polluted river and in their mental haze that follows, they hear the dueling banjos theme from the movie Deliverance.
My groundhog was out wandering around our backyard yesterday, looking for all the world like a Kennedy on vacation at Hyannis Port in spite of the fact that I stuck a garden hose down his hole under my shed the other day and flushed him out the other hole these wily gophers make sure to excavate for emergencies such as this.
After a few gallons descended on him, he came shooting out of his trench like a seal at feeding time.
Not since I first caught glimpse of the all-you-can-eat buffet at a popular local pizzeria have I seen any creature move so fast. (The second in line almost overtook me but I fought him off bravely.)
If the fire department came over to my house and for some reason filled it up with water while I was inside, I’d probably get out too and be reluctant to return, especially if my cherry pie was ruined.
I assumed the groundhog and I would share the same thought process on that but I was wrong. Either I don’t think like a groundhog or he doesn’t think like a man.
So, today, my ugly little friend (sorry, but he’s no George Clooney), it’s just you and me in combat once again now that you have returned. I will be armed this time with a bag of dirty cat litter, which an Internet search tells me you hate, and a big heavy rock to place over your hole after litter and soil have filled it in.
Have a nice summer at the neighbour’s, Buddy.
By the way, I don’t hate the groundhog but I can’t take the chance he’ll mess up our little poodle which is about the size of the hog and as bold as a stand-up comedian. Our veterinary hospital charges a bundle just to poof up his eyebrows so I shudder at the thought of how much it would cost to put a gopher-mangled dog back together again.
I will let you know how things work out. I only hope my next status update is not sent from a jail cell or the inside of a dog crate at the local Humane Society.
(Update: As I was advised would happen, the groundhog left and built a new home in the neighbours’ yard. I feel as guilty about that as I did when I beat out that guy second in line at the pizzeria.)
Our cat Luigi and I have different opinions regarding the ownership of my office chair on wheels. Simply put, he believes it’s his, I think it’s mine.
And while the chair belongs to him, apparently, the strange thing is, he never wants to lie in it overnight when I am also not inclined to use it. It seems to me that part of his motivation in occupying my chair all day is to deprive me of the privilege for some unknown cat reason.
Luigi and his twin brother Mario are big, big boys. People who come to our door are startled to see these two lazy felines with bodies as big as a small dog, saunter over to greet them, maybe flop down for a bellyrub. So, when Luigi jumps into my chair, he spreads himself out in order to take over 95 per cent of the surface of the seat. And there he sleeps – all day. Or tries to.
When I want to use the chair, I either have to share it with him, which is not a lot of fun, or throw him out of it which is akin to peeling off a blood sucker while swimming down at the pond. He does not go easily. I can tip over the chair to a 90-degree angle and still he hangs on.
So, a lot of the time, we share it. He takes up 80 per cent, I get the front 20. And he shows his annoyance with frequent loud and disgusted grumbles.
I grumble back, but it doesn’t do me much good. As it doesn’t in my wider life beyond our chair.
It can be hard to live – and die – in Greece. Especially die. Because the judicial system there is tough on dead people and it’s not easy to defend yourself when being dead prevents you from showing up in court to argue your case.
This week, a judge there convicted a dead guy of stealing electricity. The guy’s lawyer argued that his client’s current state of deadness should get him off the hotseat but the astute judge, ever wary of the criminal trick of dying to avoid justice, wasn’t having any of it. “Guilty as Charged!!!” I don’t know if “Charged!!!” was related in any way to the fact that the item stolen was electricity, but I don’t think it was.
In any case, sentencing has been postponed. The death penalty is not being considered as that would seem to be a bit redundant in this case. Overkill, if you will. So, house arrest, maybe. However, it is rumoured the defendant has gone underground to avoid paying for his crime. But, I think he has boxed himself in. I think he is in deep.
Thank God the judge sees through all that. And I am looking forward to the rulings he makes after he himself has died. I expect they will be groundbreaking.
P.S. You may be thinking that it does not make sense to convict a dead man of a crime. This just shows your ignorance of legal matters. The law has several functions beyond the simple one of deciding penalties. A bigger one is to prevent the establishing of precedents that can result over time in injury to the social fabric. In this case, if one dead guy is able to get away with stealing electricity, this will be open the door to similar abuses by other dead guys. Soon, people who are no longer alive may start stealing other commodities, committing other crimes, all the while thinking they will pay no penalty.
It is important to show that people cannot get away with anti-social behaviour based on the flimsy excuse that they are dead. We are fortunate in Canada where our legal system contains few loopholes and electricity theft by the dead is not a significant problem here. A death certificate is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My neighbour was out polishing his Corvette today so I told him he was doing a good job.
“Everybody’s got to have a toy, Jim,” he said. “Life is short.”
I agreed with him and said I wondered what my toy would be. My laptop? My guitar?
“Whatever happened to your sports car?” he asked. I told him we had to trade it in on a more practical car when the family came along. “I saw one just like it in town the other day,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get one again someday.”
“Don’t wait too long,” said my neighbour. “Life is short.”
I kind of wished he’d quit saying that. By the way, he has two Corvettes. And he isn’t rich.
He reminds of a musician friend of mine who at one point had 12 high-quality guitars, one of them worth $5,000. He said he had no use for RRSPs and CICs and any other savings plans. He’d rather have his savings sitting right there in his studio where he can see them and polish them and play them. And when the rainy day comes, he can sell a guitar or any number of them.
My musical friend has never commented to me on how short life is but I have a feeling he’s just itching to.
