I was parked near the front door of a new business in my town yesterday which sells whatever products and equipment are needed for today’s practice of vaping by some people who do it as a way to kick the smoking habit.
What I know about vaping could be written, double spaced, on a very tiny yellow sticky note, but I noticed a sign by the entrance to potential customers entering the establishment that NO VAPING would be allowed on the property.
What an odd declaration to make, I thought, to people interested in whatever it is the business hopes to sell them.
I am sure there are good reasons for the proprietors of a store selling vaping products to outlaw vaping on its premises, but I wonder what the outcome might be for other businesses that might be tempted to follow their lead.
On the wall outside the entrance to Elmer’s Eatery, for example, I am wondering if a sign commanding NO EATING would entice the hungry to hurry on in.
By the entrance to the Nodding Off Motel: NO SLEEPING. At Billy Bob’s Pub: NO DRINKING. At the Mailed It Post Office: NO LETTERS or PARCELS. At the On All Fours vet clinic: NO ANIMALS.
I know I am missing something in all this and realize there could be a fiery response or two to my piece. So, in the spirit of things, I probably should post this notice: NO READING!
The cat is always on the wrong side of the door, a friend once told me.
We used to have a cat that was appropriately named Grumbles due to her penchant for complaining, something she picked up after years of living with me. The poor creature went half insane whenever I was bringing groceries into the house and had to make several trips.
She stood at the front screen door when she saw me outside, coming up the steps. When I opened the door to go in, she ran outside to be with me. But now I was inside. So, she started yelling to get back in. When I opened the door to go back out to the car, she ran in. Seeing me outside again, she stood at the door and awaited my return. This went on for however many trips it took me to get everything inside.
Finally calmed down, and both of us in the house at the same time, she then confused herself trying to figure out which cardboard box to sit in and meditate first. She had a busy life, sometimes, especially on grocery days.
Some people are like this. They want to be with you but always somehow manage to put themselves on the wrong side of the door. Maybe they need to heed the old saying popular with some eastern Canadians, “Stay werr you’re to, I’ll come where you’re at.”
My phone company offered me a “refurbished” iPhone 5s, 16 gigabytes, for $550 on a two-year contract. I thought I could do better.
So, I spent a few days at my favourite on-line marketplace, haggling with the anonymous sellers of iPhones. Prices ranged from various old phones – $50, “just for parts” – to brand new iPhone 6’s at $1,000. A bit discouraging.
But I found some iPhone 5s I liked the look of. Sizes ranged from 16 gb, to 32 gb to 64 gb. I had been told by an iPhone user that bigger would be better as the operating system and the apps eat up a lot of hard drive.
I found one phone that looked perfect: 5s, 64 gb. It was selling for $400. Too much. Would the seller take less? No answer. No answer.
Finally, “I’ll let you have it for $250,” came an email. I accepted.
I met the seller in a movie theatre lobby and bought it. It’s in perfect condition. She rarely used it.
I checked her online marketplace entry again to see when she had listed it. Jan. 20. That was my birthday. My family had asked me what I wanted for my birthday. Now I can call them up and tell them. Or text them. Or get Siri to do it.
As the woman handed me her old phone, I told her of the birthday connection and said, “This was meant to be.”
I spent 90 minutes last night laughing my guts out at three of my favourite sitcoms on TV. I have quite a lineup of sitcoms this year and am enjoying the heck out of them. I think about these shows when I’m falling asleep sometimes and chuckle the next day over a particularly funny scene or line or character. I love quality writing and it is great writing that makes these shows funny.
Humour has always served as a lifeline for me and I don’t know what I would do without it. I know some people don’t like sitcoms and I can see why they wouldn’t but I’ve liked them ever since we got our first TV when I was seven years old back in the days of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners.
Thirty years ago I lost a job that was very important to me and I was crushed. I always made the mistake of aligning my identity too closely to whatever career position I had at the time and so when a job would disappear, my ego would take a beating. I guess I must have shared the fact that I was hurting with my Dad and he gave me some surprising advice. Instead of telling me to buck up or get over it or do something for someone else and forget about my troubles, he told me to go to the local library and check out a bunch of humour books. He recommended collections of short humour pieces by a popular newspaper columnist at the time.
So, I did that and night after night I could be heard, if anyone had been around to hear me, laughing out loud at 4 a.m. in my bed alone in my house. I couldn’t get enough of this humourist and his silly situational stories. I love the way his humour was never mean and how he was always the butt of his own jokes.
Anyway, back to the library I went until I’d read all of the books by that very funny guy and then I moved on to other well-loved humour writers that had preceded him. With a few weeks, I had a new job in my same field with more pay and better working conditions. And I had a new outlet for my writing.
I had written a weekly column for the newspaper I first worked for but the columns were serious and sentimental and sometimes preachy. Now, I tried my hand at humour writing and found I had a bit of a knack for it. And I loved the reaction of people who liked my stories. Over the next 20 years it was nice to be stopped by strangers on the street or in restaurants or, in once case, in a movie theatre, who wanted to tell me how much they enjoyed my columns. A few years ago, a woman whose father had died called me up and offered me the scrapbooks he had kept of my columns. I was touched and, of course, accepted them.
This is not to brag, but to explain that my father, who left school when he was 12 years old after finishing Grade 6, was able to provide some pretty wise counselling to his son who was lost despite the two university degrees and college diploma that hung on his wall. He gave me not only a way to get over a depression brought on by a crisis, but a new outlet for my writing which would put food on my table for many years to come.
Today, I’m sad to say, you will look long and hard for any humour writing in newspapers, though the need for some levity has never been greater. There used to be a lot of humour writers in print though some good ones can still be found on the Internet.
I’m sorry to say I don’t read humour books like I once did. Sitcoms are my medicine now and the medicine is going down very nicely. And now and then, I will explain to an appreciative reader who thinks I am funny, that humour writing may be my talent, but, more importantly, it is the tonic I have to absorb regularly to combat my overly serious nature.
It took an understanding Dad to point me in that direction.
People (unfairly) make fun of police officers in some of the southern states of the U.S. For decades, these hard-working law enforcers have been pictured in movies and TV shows and ridiculed by comedians as being slow-talking dummies who couldn’t tell a knuckle from a kneecap. Hardy, har, har.
Well, this respectful writer has had enough and it’s time this travesty stopped. And I am particularly upset with the woman in Georgia who spent three months in jail after two deputies mistakenly said a field test of a blue substance found in a car she was in turned up positive for methamphetamine because she is, of course, suing them.
Small point: The substance wasn’t meth. It was cotton candy.
Yes, the officers pulled over Dasha Fincher in a regular traffic stop and very observantly noticed a big bag with blue fluffy stuff in the back seat. They used a field kit to test it and sure enough, they decided, the candy floss contained meth. Well, yes, they were wrong but who among us wouldn’t mistake candy floss for a dangerous illegal drug?
Not one to let honest mistakes go, the bitter Ms. Fincher claims that while she was in jail she missed several major life events, including the birth of twin grandchildren, and was refused medical care for a broken hand and ovarian cyst. So, she’s suing everybody but the Pope.
I think she is overreacting. But to be safe, eat up all your cotton candy before you cross the border into Monroe County, Georgia. They’re tough on that stuff down there. And I don’t blame them one bit. Next thing you know, someone will be trying to sneak bags of caramel popcorn through their jurisdiction. And we all know there could be anything in that stuff. Nothing natural could taste that good.
My mother often said we’ve all got to eat a pound of dirt in our lives. I always assumed she was referring, well, to dirt – actual earth or anything else not normally considered to be edible – and that the reasoning was two-fold: first, we can’t avoid eating certain things we would rather not, and secondly, somehow eating the uneatable is good for us.
It toughens us up to chow down something we’d never find on any restaurant’s menu or a supperplate carefully decked out by a loving mother.
Like bugs, for example. Having a bad habit of not closing my mouth when I’m working or walking, I can’t begin to count the number of insects that have ended their days (or hours) wriggling down my throat. I bet I’ve swallowed 10 this summer alone.
But lately, I’ve been wondering whether Mom’s dirt prescription could also have been a metaphor for some other unpleasant things we have to swallow as we trod along on our earthly journey. Things such as indignities. Those daily tests of our maturity that are so freely handed out by the rude and insensitive.
We always have a choice. Do we grab the brute by the throat and administer a little attitude adjustment or do we keep our cool and walk away seething?
If a pound of this kind of dirt is what I need to eat in my lifetime, then I’d say I’m approaching 14, 15 ounces, maybe. An ounce more, or so, and I’ll be over the top. What then?
Just recently, I was standing in line at a coffee shop to get my morning muffin-to-go when a till opened up, a customer having just left. However, the server also left her place, so I was a bit hesitant as to which of the two cash registers to approach – the one that was staffed, or the one that wasn’t. He who hesitates gets stabbed in the back by the bony finger of an older guy with an attitude, I guess, because sure enough, there was the end of somebody else’s digit digging into my shoulder. When I turned, he motioned me, with a disgusted look and wave of his dismissive hand, to head to the till where no server was standing.
Not having woken up in the greatest of moods, my feeble hold on a tenuous serenity almost gave way, but I knew it would not be in my best interest to get kicked out of this great muffin-dispensing shop, so I suffered the shove and let it go.
Then last week, a bit more mud arrived, delivered free of charge by a young man who rang my doorbell at 7 p.m.
“How are you tonight?” chirped the tall, smiling youth in a long black overcoat, clipboard in hand, and some sort of badge bearing his photo pinned to his lapel.
“Fine,” I said. “Whaddya got?”
What followed was a brief blah blah blah about an offer to cap rising energy costs by signing up for a fixed rate, and then the fellow asked me to go get my latest hydro bill so he could see what I was paying.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” I said.
“What, you’re happy with your rates?”
“Yes,” I said. (I don’t know whether or not I’m happy but it sure wasn’t any of his business).
“So, you don’t mind paying higher rates for hydro if it goes way up?” said the sneering one.
“No I don’t,” I said. While this was a lie, I figured I might as well fight sarcasm with sarcasm.
It didn’t work.
“Another stupid person,” said the lad, as he turned in disgust, and headed down my steps, back out into the rain.
I chewed on this new snack of soil for a while and then kind of sorted it out. There were two guys on stage in this little play. Who was really the stupid one? The guy in the warm house enjoying an evening with his family (or trying to) or the guy tromping door to door through the rain, harassing strangers to see their private bills and calling them names when they refuse?
Not long ago, I got a phone call from a stranger with an offer I couldn’t refuse. I told the guy I would check with my wife and that he should call back. I didn’t check with my wife and surprise, surprise, the guy called back. I told him I hadn’t checked with my wife yet.
“What the hell?” said the salesman. “You can’t make a decision without your wife?”
If real dirt, ingested over a lifetime, builds up your immune system and helps you keep your health, then the other kind helps build character, I guess.
But sometimes I wish Mom were here to tell me what to do once the entire pound has been swallowed.
In Canada, we have a homegrown store called Canadian Tire, an enterprise so successful it has blossomed into a chain, with outlets in every city and many small towns.
I have shopped there since I was a teenager 60 years ago. Here is what I have bought over the past six decades: Ice skates, hockey sticks and equipment, cat litter, cat food, an electric toothbrush, furnace filters, plastic storage bins, recycling boxes, garbage cans, light bulbs, portable heaters, Christmas trees and lights, belts to hold up my pants, electric drills and jigsaws, handsaws, toolboxes, batteries, vacuum cleaners, plumbing supplies, kitchen pots and pans, water softener salt, windshield washer fluid, chocolate bars, garbage bags, paper towels, toilet paper, radios and , gas stereos, barbecues, hand-held water sprayers, cordless phones, car polish, spark plugs, engine oil, lamps and other such items too numerous to mention even if I could remember them all.
Oddly enough, perhaps, in all that time, I had never bought a tire from Canadian Tire, even though a major part of its trade is in auto parts and service. It took me until a while back to do that when I drove away with four new winter ones on my wheels. Just to be unorthodox, maybe, I have bought a few other rubber marvels from a business known as The Mufflerman.
We here in Canada have another big chain, Shoppers Drug Mart, which has seen fit to separate me from my meagre dollars on too many occasions to count. And yet, somehow, I have never bought any drugs at this department store which sports the word “drugs” right in its name.
But Pizza Hut. Oh yeah. I have never walked out of that place without a pizza. Maybe it helps that the restaurant sells nothing but pizzas.
I am a bit of an insomniac, not an uncommon condition for an older person. I do nothing to help myself, of course, drinking a coffee every evening and gorging myself on sugar-laced peanut butter at midnight.
The other bad habit I have is surfing the Internet till all hours. Apparently, the average person needs at least one hour of “non-screen” wind-down time before bed if he wants a good sleep. To heck with that, say I. I watch TV shows on my smartphone after I go to bed.
Being retired, my nighthawkishness is not the cause of much trouble. It just means I drag myself around the next day.
But surfing the Internet late at night – till 4:30 a.m. today, for example – I get bored with the news sites and music videos and start to drift off into what for me should be forbidden territory. I start looking at wacky videos of the strange things NASA cameras are supposedly finding on Mars. When that gets tiring, I start watching videos of UFO’s, evidence of aliens on Earth and even of time travellers. And ghost hunters.
This is all junk food for the brain but for someone like me, who has an overactive imagination to begin with, it’s almost deadly. There I sit alone in almost complete darkness in my kitchen in the middle of the night, watching videos of aliens. And, wouldn’t you know it, quite a coincidence I realize, but just at those same moments an alien decides to drop into my kitchen and creep up behind me, causing me to look behind me now and then to make sure I am safe.
But like the ice cream lover who can’t stop till the container is empty, I keep on clicking and keep on scaring the bejeepers out of myself and you know this is serious because I was trained to never use a word like bejeepers.
So, when I read yesterday’s story in the legitimate press that a Chinese astronaut, returning to Earth from a mission and still in space, suddenly heard someone knocking on his door, my reaction was Double BEJEEPERS!
The poor guy had no choice but to look out the small porthole window of his spacecraft to see if there was a scary monster or just a door-to-door salesman outside. Maybe a religious nut. All scary monsters, now that I think of it.
The astronaut’s eyes detected no visitors and yet the door knocking continued. Aliens are crafty that way. You never actually see the ones in my kitchen either.
Holy kee-wrap, thinks me. There you are, stuck alone in a spacecraft with not enough room to scratch your knees, and someone apparently wants to join you.
The knocking has never been fully explained by space experts although I am sure they’re certain no aliens were involved in the making of this horror show.
And while I am prepared to accept their educated opinions, whatever they are, I wonder if they have ever sat up all night watching videos of the stuff they are finding on Mars.
The only word that suits this situation is “Yikes”.
I know a quarter of a million people have already signed up to be among the first crew of humans to set foot on the Red Planet some day soon (and probably, intentionally, never come back). I will not go unless they put a sign on the outside of the spacecraft door which says, “No Solicitors or Aliens.”
And if there is no peanut butter on Mars, though I am pretty sure there is given everything else that is being discovered there, there will also be no Jim Hagarty.
Why be freaked out millions of miles from home when I can get that feeling any night in my own darned kitchen?
Argument Between Grandmas Ends In Shootout At Texas Walmart
That was a headline in the Huffington Post this afternoon.
It could have been shortened to Shootout, Texas, Walmart – three words – and everyone would have understood.
But Grandmas?
Ah yes, these days when you think a thing could not possibly be true, a headline will soon prove you wrong. No fake news here. Two raging grannies got right at it in a Walmart parking lot in the Lone Star State.
A child custody swap between the two grandmothers led to the shootout in Dallas that left one woman wounded, authorities said. The two women met to transfer custody of their mutual grandchild around 5:30 p.m. Sunday. An ensuing argument turned violent, Dallas police said.
One granny, 53, allegedly pulled out a gun and shot another grandma, 55, in her neck, leaving her with injuries that were not life-threatening, police said in a statement. An off-duty officer responded to the scene. The rootin’ tootin’ granny who fired a bullet into her counterpart’s neck allegedly shot at the officer, and he returned fire.
No one was harmed during that exchange, police said.
Maybe no more bullets entered anyone else’s body but I would argue there was one other person who might have been harmed during that exchange and that person would be the grandchild. Imagine that poor kid watching his or her grandmothers in a fight so violent that one granny shot the other and then shot at a cop. And if the fight began over a dispute about the grandchild, there’s a pile more weight that kid has to bear.
The worst thing the grannies in my small town in Canada do in the Walmart parking lot is take your parking space when you finally find one. Or they will lose control of their shopping cart and it will roll into the side of your car. But this is Canada so, of course, you feel guilty that you parked in the path of the runaway shopping cart and get out of your car to check to see if the granny in question is okay.
However, we are not all popsicles and angel food cake. I have met “related” grannies that were not too fussy on each other.
But home on the range in Canada, the worst you might hear now and then, though seldom, is a discouraging word.
When I worked as an editor for small, community newspapers, I encountered some quirky people. They came in all shapes and sizes and some could be a bit ornery. Others were simply annoying.
At one paper, I used to deal with an older farmer who would come in periodically with a potato which he claimed bore the likeness of various famous people. One such spud I remember apparently looked for all the world like Richard Nixon. I couldn’t see it. The farmer thought I should take a picture and put it in the paper. I think maybe I did do that once and that just encouraged him. Eventually he’d be back with another potato which looked like another celebrity except that it didn’t.
When the potato angle was obviously going nowhere, he started on other peculiar things. My memory is shaky here but I think he had a squirrel which he had trained to do something. Anyway, this publicity hound spent a lot of time barking up the wrong tree and eventually went away – or ran out of amazing potatoes and squirrels.
One woman was relentless in pestering me for publicity for her cause and she drove me crazy. I used to speak to local groups now and then about getting publicity and I would tell them to please choose non-abrasive people to be the ones to approach newspaper editors as we are just folks too. Anyway, this woman couldn’t be satisfied no matter how much coverage I gave her. It was never the right kind or there was simply not enough of it.
One day at a gathering, I began chatting with a younger woman who was head of this particular cause and I saw my opportunity to do a bit of complaining. I spewed quite a torrent of frustration about the woman who had been hounding me and the young woman listened intently as I spoke. Then I said, “Who is she, anyway?” I didn’t mean what was her name because I already knew that but I wanted to know what her position with the organization was.
“She’s my mother,” said the young woman, with a slight grin. “Yeah, she can be a handful.”
Fifty other people in the room and I was there for 10 minutes. Who did I choose to unload to? The mother of the organization’s main person.
The older woman stopped contacting me after that which made me feel even worse than if she’d called me every day. Well, almost worse.
It’s a mystery to me how my foot often ends up in my mouth, more than the law of averages, I would think. That’s probably why, as the years went by, I became more careful about broadcasting my opinions in public settings, except, of course, for in the hundreds of editorials I wrote over time as that was my job. The worst that might happen in response to my babbling would be a nasty letter to the editor. I never minded receiving and reprinting most of those letters as it always seemed like the readers’ opinions provided some useful balance at whatever paper I was working for at the time.
And many of them probably came from mothers and fathers. Maybe even their daughters.
