Author: Jim Hagarty

Some men have two of various material things, even if it’s just a two-car garage. And to make sense of such a garage, those men probably have two cars. Some guys have two homes, though I’ve never met anyone who has, unless you count a winterized cottage as a second home. Some men have two jobs, two massive-screen TVs, two dogs, two horses, and on and on.

As for me, I specialize in having one of a number of things. I only have one formal suit of clothes, for example. One pair of dress shoes. One dog. One cat. One wife, one son, one daughter. One house.

However, I need to confess that I am the proud owner of two smartphones. I used to get by with just a basic old cellphone but one day I smartened up and got me a used smartphone off the Internet. A few years later, a relative gifted me with his used smartphone, one generation newer than mine, and suddenly, according to experts, I am twice as smart as I used to be. This was a state of being I thought I had already achieved through my sheer brilliance but having two smartphones, and using both of them every day, apparently sealed the deal. It has even been suggested that I might be twice as smart as most people who get by somehow with only one smartphone, but that is probably a debatable question.

I use my phones a lot to read the news and watch videos. Hence, I always have one charging so I am never having to wait on electricity to keep me going.

The only drawback is I can use only one of the handy devices to make actual phone calls and send text messages although the one I can’t use for those purposes gives me access to the Internet all day long so my Trump Horror Quota is always filled.

This was a bit of a disappointment at first when I tried placing a call to myself from one smartphone to the other but couldn’t get through. It was a letdown as I wanted to hear my views on the various issues of the day.

Whatever my opinions might have been, and opinions are something I also have more than one of, I am sure they would have all been very smart. I guess I could just smarten up and ask myself directly someday, maybe in a mirror.

That should be easy as I have two bathrooms and there’s a big mirror in both of them.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

I have been spreading a lot of B.S. this week.

“This week?” asks a cynical reader. “You spread that stuff every week.”

Ouch!

To answer more clearly, perhaps, I have been dumping a lot of cattle manure on our flower and vegetable gardens as I work them up. I can’t honestly say I know for sure whether or not any actual bulls were involved in producing the cattle crap sold in big 28-litre bags, but I will go right ahead and assume a few of the big brutes lent their lovely sewage to the mixture of cattle feces and compost.

My parents have been gone almost 40 years now but if by some miracle, my Dad, a lifelong farmer, could call me up to ask what I was up to today, I can’t begin to imagine what his reaction would be to the idea that I drove to a grocery store and brought home four big bags of cow poop which I willingly paid for.

Nevertheless, back then we were well aware of the value of the stuff our 300 big beasts pumped out every hour of every day. We used tractors and manure spreaders to fling the smelly golden goodness all over the fields where the soil was greatly enriched once the poop was well worked in.

Unfortunately, as a family, we were not enriched in the way we could apparently have been if we’d bagged up the stuff and sold it for $2.50. And if I had even suggested we do that, assuming I could have foreseen that this would someday be a thing, I think farmers everywhere would have taken to shunning me in church and at the general store.

It is probably just as well I didn’t raise the issue. Besides, there were enough hard jobs to handle on the farm without running along behind ornery cattle, trying to train them to poop inside big plastic bags.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

How to Putter

Through the ages, the average man cannot say he has fulfilled his destiny until he discovers the real reason he was put on this big, old Earth.

Avoid it though he might try to, the truth is he was sent here from another dimension to putter. But as he learns the art of puttering through his daily practice at it, he will come to love it as he realizes he is so naturally suited to it.

To putter is to come as close as a man can come to doing absolutely nothing while convincing anyone who might be watching him that he is actually doing something.

The Canadian government is responding to the severe shortage of putterers in our society by starting a training program for senior men to help them learn the art of just puttzin’ around. I wish they had come to me first as I am a well-known expert in puttering, admired for my skill far and wide, and have developed a 10-step program to teach these vital skills.

(Sorry young men and women of any age, but puttering is reserved for old guys. These guidelines will help to explain why.)

1. Never have a plan when you roll out of bed in the morning. A plan indicates you have a direction and to successfully putter, it is essential that a man has no idea from one moment to the next where he is going.

2. Do not seek to accomplish anything. This does not mean you are forbidden from achieving anything on any given day. Just that doing something worthwhile will never be your intention, more accidental than anything.

3. Make sure you never allow yourself to be drawn into a situation where you become busy. However, when asked if you are busy, always imply that you are. If the person wants to know what you are busy at, the correct answer is, “Well, you know …” The predictable reply will be, “I hear you. Lots to do. It never ends.”

4. Your entire life as an adult, almost without knowing it, you have been accumulating screwnails. Without exaggeration, you could start a very successful screwnail store. Call it, Get the Point, One Good Turn, Keep it Together. But keep in mind, to turn your attention to such a thing would require a plan which you cannot have. However, you can spend many satisfying afternoons sorting all your screwnails. Put them all into empty peanut butter jars and label them according to size and kind – deck, metal, concrete. You own at least 2,000 screwnails. From now till the end of time, you will only actually need and use upwards of 100 of them and 50 of those will be used to build shelves to hold all your screwnail jars. To a putterer, a thing does not have to make sense to make sense.

5. Your favourite day of the week will always be tomorrow. That is the day when all the little things around your castle that need fixing, will get fixed. What a wonderful day it is to look forward to. So many problems will be solved tomorrow.

6. Never make friends with other old guys who putter. To do so and to let your new friend see just exactly how idle you really are will lead to your helping to unload a truckload of lumber at your buddy putterer’s place down the street. Besides, putterers can be competitive. It is sad to see two old guys sitting in a backyard together competing to see who is more skilled at doing nothing.

7. Break up the few jobs you actually tackle into smaller tasks. If you see two nails sticking out of a board which could lead to a torn shirt or worse, sit down in a lawnchair and study both nails for a while. Then get up and hammer one of them completely in. Leave the other one for another date. Tomorrow would be ideal.

8. Sit. Keep sitting. Resist all temptations to stand. You spent your entire life running around. Climbing ladders. Walking on rooftops. Picking stones in farm fields. Driving tractors. Rounding up cattle. Teaching students. Painting houses. For the love of God, it’s time to sit down. And when you are done with that, sit down again. Your main concern from here till you permanently lie down, will be the availability and comfort of sitting devices – chairs, benches, logs, whatever. Avoid, however, sitting on the ground because getting back onto your feet from that position will require skills you might no longer possess. But twice a child, once a man, there is always crawling.

9. Wear a traditional farmer’s strawhat everywhere in public. Even in winter. The weirder strangers think you are, the more you will be left alone.

10. Whatever you are at this very moment, never change that. Never read self-help improvement lists such as this one. Or you could read it tomorrow.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

I like to watch videos on the Internet. I spend an hour or two late at night doing that. The range of subjects I follow varies, almost randomly, over a kind of vast array of things. A lot of politics. Hockey. Discoveries of statues on Mars, supposed evidence of time travel, what Ancient Rome really looked like, and history. Lots of history. Videos of great musicians and of animal rescues. And Got Talent shows.

Recently, I’ve been bitten by the ghost hunter craze, because scaring myself half to death in the middle of the night while I sit all alone seems like a reasonable thing to do. I saw one of the creepiest ones I’ve ever seen the other night where the spirit explorer was going through an old haunted house. He came up to a door to a room and someone was obviously, frantically, trying to open that door from inside the room, turning the knob and pulling on it. The brave ghost hunter ran to the door and flung it open. There was no one inside the room.

So I went outside for a breath of fresh air and to collect my frazzled thoughts and darned if there weren’t ghosts running around all over our backyard. I dashed back to the safety of my couch.

It was exactly midnight.

Suddenly, there was a knock on our front door. It was a persistent knock but not a loud one. Almost as if whoever was knocking didn’t really want the occupants of the house to hear it.

But then the doorbell rang. Followed by several more knocks, a bit louder now and more insistent. Then more doorbell.

I don’t mind sharing that I was freaking right out by this time. In a panic, I woke up another family member and the two of us went to the door. To find a police officer there.

As it turned out, he was seeking a suspicious character and he saw someone in our backyard. Could he have a look back there.

I told him it was I who had been behind the house just then.

I forgot to tell him I had been busy back there fighting off a bunch of scary ghosts.

And how they all looked like suspicious characters to me.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

I was out in the backyard a while back when I noticed that we had a cute little new garden gnome I hadn’t seen before. I was surprised as the ornament was lifesize and I wondered why we needed a ceramic bunny when there are five live wild ones living in our yard. So I went into the house to ask about the new acquisition. I was told that no new decoration had been purchased to join all the others. Out to the yard I returned and carefully studied the statue. I soon saw a big floppy ear twitch and realized this little wild creature is not afraid of me. It was MY BUNNY. She had made herself a comfy little spot, directly on top of a then crushed impatiens flower, where she could hardly be seen but nevertheless could keep an eye on activities in case she might need to make a mad dash for it. She is still my little sweetheart. She comes and gets me at night when her food supply is low and waits a foot away from me while I top it up. I love her but she does eat a lot more than our other little statues.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

Ever since I was a kid, I have had a fascination with photography. Like the sounds coming out of a radio, it seemed like magic to me. I still don’t fully understand either medium.

And while I have had various cameras over the years and even used them on newspapers where I worked, my interest in picture taking completely took off when I got a smartphone. The ease with which I could snap the life I saw around me, and the quality. Wow!

In the last month alone, I have captured with my camera, stunning photos of bars of green soap at a bulk store as well as wonderful photos of a bag of grass seed for the lawn, several varieties of a too expensive mouthwash, a jar of lightly seasoned peanuts, a phone charger cord, 13 kilograms of lean ground beef, a package of sliced white mushrooms, a new vacuum cleaner, a package of frozen raspberries, a box of garbage bags, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, a bag of sunflower seeds, some taco shells and a big jug of laundry detergent.

All of these items were sent to another smartphone at my home with the question, “Is this what you want?”

I will leave the sunsets and sunrises to others along with exotic animals, newborn babies and landscapes. I will take photos of packages of cat litter and dog kibble till I am blue in the face.

And then, with my phone, I can press a little icon and take a picture of me turning blue.

I love progress.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

There could be only one reason our birdbath was always empty. There must be a hole in it. I fill it three times a day and soon there is not enough water left in it to drown a gnat.

However, I thought it might be possible that the birds are taking so many baths they are causing our water bill to shoot through the roof.

Sure enough, I looked out the kitchen window one day last week to see a dozen starlings standing on the edge of the bath waiting their turn. And there they were. Two of the medium-sized speckled birds taking a bath at the same time. And they were splashing up a storm.

Then a third starling slipped into the rapidly dwindling pool and started flapping its wings like crazy.

Mystery solved.

However, the drama wasn’t over. Soon, a fourth starling joined the first three and before long, a fifth guy jumped in. It began to look like a typical Friday night hottub party without the bikinis and the booze.

But my jaw dropped when Starling No. 6 squeezed itself into what was left of the bath and I could hardly see the bathers for the plumes of water they were generating while another six stood on the edge of the bath, waiting their turn.

When the bathers all suddenly left as though they were late for a meeting, I went out to inspect the damage. There were several feathers in the remaining water which was so sparse it was completely gnat friendly. And there was a whole lotta poop.

I cleaned the whole thing out and prepared for the next big communal party.

It’s a living.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

A word that has, sadly, gone out of style is “goof”. It is a useful word. Some might not know this, but Donald Trump has a Masters degree in Goofology from the University of Bullmanure in New York. He is a licensed goofologist and a very good one. To watch him in an official “goof off” with the lesser talented goofs who make up the Republican presidential field of candidates is to appreciate his amazing goofability. I remember being called a goof many times in my younger years, usually by other goofs, but I would give up my goofulosophy for good in the face of Trump’s complete and utter goof mastery. It’s enough to make you want to go back to just being an insufferable simpleton. But once you’ve gone full goof, there is no recovery. And I am not just goofin’ around about that.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

I knew a man who could count to ten
But he couldn’t count to twenty.
“You need more school,” I told my friend.
He told me he’d had plenty.

He couldn’t count as high as me
But one small thing he could do:
He could count his blessings, one by one,
And he told me, “So should you.”

I knew a man who couldn’t read
Or even write his name.
“You need to go to school,” I said.
He said no, thanks all the same.

And while he couldn’t read a book
I noticed something strange.
He could read a man with just one look.
He said, “Try it, for a change.”

I knew a man who never had
Two coins to rub together.
“You should go back to school,” I said.
“Your life sure would be better.”

“My life is fine, just as it is,”
My friend replied to me.
And I knew what he had said was true
‘Cause he never lied to me.

It’s so easy to add up another’s
Good points and his defects,
And calculate his quality
On a scale from sad to perfect.

But I have noticed, through the years,
My calculator’s broken.
A man might not proclaim his worth
But his deeds are all well spoken.

(Remembering Herb)

©2017 Jim Hagarty

A couple of weeks ago, on the Internet, I noticed a good deal on a very large capacity thumb drive. So I checked it out. Since then, and it started immediately, on every page I surf, there are large gaudy ads for little tiny thumb drives. Before that, I went searching for an inexpensive but good-quality set of headphones. Ads by the dozens for those. Before Christmas, it was a really good and not cheap audio recorder I could chirp my songs into.

I can’t remember as far back as I’d like to but this has been happening to me over and over for years. Sometimes I don’t mind it as the ads keep me tuned in with the latest technological toys, but mostly, they are a nuisance. They appear thanks to mysterious things called algorithms, tiny digital doodads that I assume were named after Bill Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore who once claimed to have invented the Internet.

So here is my plan to liven up my surfing. As my polka dot bikini bathing suit is frayed and looking terrible, I am going to do a search for new bikini swimwear. As it seems to be mostly young women who wear these things, I foresee many enjoyable hours of surfing (ironic, eh) ahead of me this winter.

I don’t think much could go wrong with my plan but if the authorities do show up at my door, I promise to go quietly.

(Update: To demonstrate how powerful algorithms appear to be, I am now receiving lots of ads for bikinis even though I never actually did get around to doing a search for swimwear. I can only assume my writing this story and posting it to Facebook a few weeks ago was all it took to set the bikini wheels in motion.)

©2022 Jim Hagarty