Category: Life

When a new thing comes along there’s always a guy standing around expressing indignation. When the spear was invented, this guy said, “What do I need that spear thing for? My rock is perfectly good. It’ll kill anything a spear will kill. And I can’t believe you paid three muskrat skins for that thing. Don’t you know you can just pick a rock up off the ground?”

You’ll be happy to hear that you no longer have to listen to that son of a bitch, because I killed him. And while I’m confessing, I must also admit that that son of a bitch was me.

This homicide was effected over a long period of time, like stirring a pinch of arsenic each morning into a man’s Fruit Loops. One day I was standing strong, saying, “Bah!” to haircuts that cost over $8 and crying, “Insanity!” to sneakers more complex than Converse high tops. The next day I was mocking this dumb-ass “World Wide Web” thing that cost the crazy amount of $10 a month to access. Then the next day I’m signing up for my own email account, and the day after that I’m hyperventilating if my home network goes down for 10 minutes. Now I regularly send email to a guy who sits less than eight feet away from me rather than walk three steps around the corner to talk to him. I have crumbled like a tower of cheese.

It’s not that I’m a Luddite—my geek cred goes back to 1981, when my first computer had a smoking hot 48 kilobytes of RAM. It’s just that I grew up in the church of “What’s that damned thing good for?” and I considered myself a faithful disciple. My positions were clear. Why should someone lay out a bucket of money each month for a mobile phone when there’s a pay phone on every corner? I have 500 video cassettes containing all the movies I love, so why should I pay 20 bucks a pop to replace them with these DVD things? Why spend money on a digital video recorder when I don’t even watch the stupid TV that much anyway?

My clear positions have subsequently eroded. I didn’t just get a cell phone, I bought an iPhone, which is the personification of frivolous crap. I amassed a DVD collection of such splendor that I intend to be buried with it, much like Tutankhamun and his golden urns. Initially my DVR grabbed episodes of “House” and “Bones” when I happened to be out of town, but eventually I commanded it to seek out and capture gems such as “Afro Samurai”. After all of that, my indignation was grievously wounded, and I was desperate for a bulwark upon which to make my stand.

Along came Facebook. I could not imagine a single useful thing that Facebook might provide that could justify the untold hours poured into it like the blood of innocents cast into a belching volcano. I was clear and immovable on this. I would not budge. Then people posted on Facebook some things that were important to me, and I couldn’t see them any other way. So, I signed up and looked at them. That was fine, but I didn’t care to hear when people went to the cleaners, or got laid, or wanted me to farm their fish, or whatever. I didn’t need to share at that level. If I shit a titanium turd in the image of Christ I might post something about it, but probably not.

I was standing firm. I stood firm in a firm and solidly immovable manner. And so I stood for a while. Then I was possessed by the spirit of an alcoholic carnival geek from Alabama, and I posted something that I thought was important. Then I commented on someone else’s post that I thought was cool. Later on I uploaded some photos, and I answered a poll. Then I created a Facebook application. And then I did a lot more stuff until finally, just recently, I created a post on Facebook about my water heater being inspected. That was the act that murdered me and my indignation.

My indignation and I would like a tomb if you don’t mind. Marble cherubs would be nice, and perhaps unicorns if they’re tastefully done. Please lay my indignation and me to rest within this tomb, sing a couple of weepy songs, and put us in the past with hopefully fond memories. And on the tomb please carve the words: INDIGNATION – “This must have cost a fortune. You couldn’t just dig a hole and throw me in it?”

No cherubs? No unicorns? This sucks.

 

My brain and I are no longer on speaking terms. He’s given me the central nervous system equivalent of a sharp kick in the shin. Or to put it another way, if he were my roommate he would have just stolen the last piece of my birthday cake from the refrigerator. I’m quite put out, and refuse to have anything to do with him.

I used to rely on my brain’s unfailing companionship. He figured tips, and he remembered who Archimedes was, and he knew how to spell “eviscerate”. He once took over and completed a 3 ½ hour essay final exam on Differential Mortality, Gender, and Agrarian Economics while I looked at the cute girl by the window. That was real friendship. He even got an A.

But it hasn’t all been marshmallows and kittens. My brain has occasionally led me astray, like the time he said, “I’m 19 and smart enough already—who needs to finish college?” (That one was fairly painful to fix.) Or that time he said, “Three months is plenty of time to get to know each other—go ahead and get married!” (That one was extremely painful to fix.) He tends to approach all problems with an A + B = C mentality, and I suspect that’s not always the best choice.

So for a while my friend the brain has been yanking me around, as he sometimes has done in the past. I don’t know where the hell he goes at night, but during the day he walks around all the time with some kind of freaky hangover, which is pretty annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that brains get a little weird when your body produces a smidge too much of something or other, or when things get out of whack in the lobes, or sometimes really for no reason at all. But there’s only so long you can go with your brain making you act like a crazy man before you say a dignified, “Enough.”

I’m not positive what my brain has to say at this point, because we’ve only been communicating through my thyroid. For example, I’ll say to my thyroid, “Hey, ask my brain how to calculate the distribution of a chi square test,” and the thyroid will come back a little later and say, “Your brain answered, but it was just a bunch of squiggly symbols I don’t understand. How about some extra hormones instead?” That’s not as helpful as I might wish.

I am now accepting applications from other organs interested in replacing my brain. I imagine there will be many fine candidates, because the job of brain is pretty prestigious, the hours are good, and you get excellent access to the eyes in case anything interesting comes on TV. I might even solicit an organ or two to get the process rolling. Is the uvula an organ? I’m not sure because I’m no longer talking to my brain. But it’s welcome to send me a resume anyway.

This is what’s left of me after five weeks of my thyroid running things.

 

 

I like almost everybody. That’s why I hate to be around people.

I don’t mean that I like everything about everybody. That’s some kind of psychiatric illness, and I’ve already got all of those I need. And there are a few people I’d just like to stab a lot and be done with them. But I can find something to like about almost everyone, even if I just appreciate seeing my own folly in them. For example, at midnight when I’m eating my pancakes at I-HOP, maybe a guy staggers in drunk, knocks over the trash can, screams an apology at the cash register, and passes out in the booth behind me, mumbling in his sleep about some girl named Christie. I think, Yeah, I remember doing that. Hang tough, brother.

So if I like people, why don’t I want to be around them? It’s just exhausting, that’s why. Dinner with a couple of friends is pretty easy, but big herds of people wear me out. First, I’m deaf in my right ear and too vain to get a hearing aid, so I spend a lot of time trying to guess what people are saying. I’m not a good guesser, so my guesses are often a lot more colorful than what was actually said. Someone might say, “Next Saturday is the Jam and Jelly Festival,” and I’d probably guess something like, “Next Saturday is the Fast of Sweaty Genitals.” When I respond to that person, my statement will seem logical to me, but to the 20 people around me at the Chuck E. Cheese birthday party it may seem eccentric.

Second, even when I understand what people say, my immediate response tends disrupt the conversation because I say weird things. I know that will shock my friends. For example, a person may say, “My neighbor’s tree is growing over my backyard. It’s getting to be a problem.”

Then I might say, “You have sort of a Sudetenland problem. You have to hold the line with these guys, or before you know it they’re on your patio, and then they’re dive bombing your garage, and then they’re sitting around the pool with all the cute French girls drinking your wine and invading the shit out of Russia. Then you’ll have to bomb them into rubble, and then you’ll have to rebuild their house and station troops there for 50 years. So just cut the damn thing down in the middle of the night and blame it on raccoons.”

At that point everyone stops and looks at me for five or ten seconds. They’re all really uncomfortable, and then they go back to eating and drinking and talking about assassinating the president of their homeowner’s association as if I’d never spoken. All right, I just made up the assassination part, but that emphasizes the problem.

That sucks. I don’t want all those people to be uncomfortable. After all, I like them. So I try to instead say something like, “Bummer. Have you asked them to trim it? Maybe bring them a pie?” That’s an okay response, but the effort required to not talk about the Sudetenland and to instead talk about pie is fatiguing. When I come home I’m exhausted, and I have to hibernate in my cave for a few hours to recharge.

This causes problems for my wife. She likes people, too. At least she likes me, which proves she’s forgiving enough to like just about anybody. But she loves being around people. It charges her up. I suspect it’s because she’s not expending much energy to stop herself from saying whatever she’s thinking, because she isn’t thinking about the damned Sudetenland. That must be nice. But she wants to go to every let’s-drink-wine party and jam and jelly festival that comes along, and I only want to go to the birthdays of my less popular friends, attended by three guests and a blind dog. After 20 years of this she’s comfortable going to big parties by herself, which I appreciate. But it can still be awkward when she walks out of the house looking like a kid who expected a bicycle and instead got a scratchy wool hat with pom-poms and pink bunnies crucified all over it.

I do better when I have a job. When I can cut slices of cake, or hand out name tags, or calculate way too big a tip, I’m a lot happier. I don’t have to sit there guessing what people are saying. I don’t have to hold back from explaining the parallels between the shell casing ejection mechanism in automatic rifles and my dinner partner’s hemorrhoid problem.

Alas, not many social invitations specify a job. “Please join Sherri and Bob at their Baby Shower to help them celebrate the joyous upcoming birth of their daughter. You’ll be washing the dishes. Bring gloves.” That sort of invitation is sadly uncommon. So, if I don’t show up at your birthday party, please don’t be offended. It’s only because I like you.

What about you? Do you avoid public gatherings like you’d avoid syphilis, or do you hit every party as long as the guests are conscious and there’s at least one dirty glass to drink from?

The last party I went to felt kind of like this.

Photo by Ant Mulligan, from Mala Mala Game Reserve.

 

 

 

My cat dragged my boxer shorts under the bed this morning. I failed to retrieve them because she defended them like a Kodiak bear protecting her cubs, and because my shorts had already been smothered by the herd of dust rhinos that roams under our bed, migrating as the air conditioner blows them around. We graduated from dust bunnies in 2005, and by now we’re unsure what we stored under the bed all those years ago. When we move I expect it will be like a grisly birthday surprise.

My shorts were vulnerable because they fell off the bathroom vanity. Today I leave on a business trip, and I generally pack enough shorts, socks, shirts, and other clothing so that I can wander around Baltimore or wherever in a non-filthy state. I otherwise might find myself unwelcome to return, and I’d never see Baltimore again. Do not laugh. That would be more distressing than it sounds, because there’s a great bar downtown that serves pomegranate martinis and cheese fries. But I require a spot to lay out all these travelling clothes, so I can make sure I haven’t packed too many handkerchiefs and not enough undershorts, which we all agree would be bad.

I lacked the counter space I required. I lost my skull and crossbones boxer shorts, which I wanted to wear on my trip so I could be extra mean to people. I now have to be mean to people while laboring under a handicap. I am vexed. Our bathroom provides two sinks and a sizable vanity, so why is all that space, apart from an area the size of a skillet, occupied? I don’t know, but I suspect that it has something to do with the blinding array of mysterious bottles and tubes my wife has arranged on all of the flat surfaces in the bathroom.

Seriously, on the vanity alone these bottles require a space the size of a Toyota Corolla’s fender. They’ve even crept up the walls. I can’t complain that they’re untidy. She’s arranged them vertically by size and horizontally by alphabet, a feat worthy of any ancient Greek mathematician. I just don’t know what the damn things are and why we have to have them. I asked her once, but she just gave me a Renaissance smile, lifted a red bottle, and rubbed a dab behind her ear. I forgot about the problem for a few hours, but then it returned like a car warranty telemarketer.

I possess half a dozen containers to cover my personal grooming needs: soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, and an unopened bottle of English Leather my mom gave me for Christmas in 1998. Combined they take up an area the size of a softball. Any second grader can understand what those things are. One day when my wife was off having her eyelashes dyed, I poked through her collection of bottles, tubes, and boxes. I tried to understand them, but their labels said things like “Juniper Mango Hydrated Skin Revitalizer and Elemental Body Essence.” It was like deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. Was this some kind of soap? Shampoo? The name included the word “body,” but that didn’t help—everything is part of your body. Maybe it was a toenail cleaner. It also said “revitalizer” and “essence,” so perhaps the stuff raises people from the dead, in which case I’m happy to devote vanity space to it. I put the bottle down and wandered back to the den, hoping that some Bruce Willis movie was on TV.

I could purge the bathroom of these space-consuming, odd-smelling vessels of mystery while my wife is away, but I fear that might end badly. She’s built this collection from the time we met, and she might feel sad if it just disappeared. Plus, I doubt I could blame the deed on anyone else. Apart from that fact that I lack the ability to fool her about anything, no one else but the cats lives in our house. They can and do knock over bottles, particularly in the early morning when we’re asleep, but she’d never accept the premise that the cats stole her bottles or perhaps ate them.

When I get home I’ve decided to buy some plywood and build my own vanity in my closet. I feel a bit like Neville Chamberlain giving up the Sudetenland by surrendering this way, but my wife has strategically outmaneuvered me, and I might as well admit it. I may choose to move this struggle to another front, just to save my pride. I mean, when did our kitchen cabinets fill up with so many shelves full of fancy mugs and teacups?

My lovely wife retrieved the skull and crossbones boxer shorts and left them for me here on the vanity. How nice. This means war. Again.

 

 

This week I refrained from crushing a surly cashier, even though the Dr. Pepper cases stacked behind him into an Olympic torch were the perfect weapon. I showed immense restraint, and I would like a cookie as a reward. I didn’t even speak harshly to him, although I silently called him a marrow-sucking cluster of rat filth scraped from beneath a refrigerator. I could have come up with something better, but my ice cream was melting. And what thing did this blemish on the butt of Tom Thumb do? Not a single damn thing except for being a bit snotty about my rewards card, which might have been a little bent if you want to get technical, so in the eyes of some pedantic people it could have, maybe, been kind of my fault.

So, I was nice to him, even though I wanted to pull out his entrails, wrap them around my shoulders, and have someone drive me up and down the street while I stood on the hood and screamed, “I’m the King of the World!” I even thanked him after I bagged my own groceries, so yes, god damn it, I deserve a cookie.

I don’t often have this anger problem, but this week my brain has decided I need to be enraged at each individual molecule in the 46 billion light years-wide observable universe. I have a separate grudge against each one of them. My brain decides to do this once in a while. I think this irrational anger phenomenon is well known to many of us who have brains. It may happen a little more to some than to others, but I’m not sure that makes much difference. One thing I am sure about is that I’ve been on alert for anyone who screws up in some tiny way, so I can leap on him like a tiger with a chainsaw tied to each leg. When no one is around who might provoke me, I spend time imagining situations in which I’d be justified in being so mean to someone that they would just cry for the rest of their life.

But I haven’t been acting on those things either.

I have been vicariously enjoying expressions of inappropriate rage. Last night a woman on live TV said something that got bleeped. Even though her gaffe was just a couple of seconds long, I told my wife I thought the woman said, “Jesus g*d d**n f*****g Christ on a m***********g crutch!” My wife patted my leg but didn’t say anything. She’s seen my brain like this in the past, and she doesn’t even look up anymore unless I swear using at least five curse words, two bodily functions, and a barnyard animal.

I try to be nice to people when I’m like this. Just because my brain is mean as a Gila monster, being randomly cruel to people is unfair. It’s not that I really care about what’s fair, or about most people either, but I have learned that acting angry doesn’t help me much in most cases. I say stupid stuff I don’t mean, and I have unhappy, resentful people to deal with afterwards. It’s like building a chemical volcano in the living room. It’s fun for a minute or so, but a whole lot of mess to clean up for the next few days.

So far this week, I’ve refrained from excoriating, assaulting, and murdering about 150 people, so what do I do with all that anger I’m not expressing? Exercise? Scream when I’m looking at Facebook? Grow an extra organ from the stress? Those sound pretty good, except for the organ one, but I believe that anger and creativity make a fantastic combination. When I’m deranged with fury, that is the time to do something creative. For example, I’m rewriting a story now. In this past week the villain has gone from being cruel to being nasty, vengeful, and horrific. Even better, the hero was a nice, creative guy who was reckless. Now he’s a nice, creative guy who’s reckless and happy to plot the murder of someone just because that person might kill him first. It’s a family story.

Soon I expect my brain to stop vibrating with anger and sending out waves of fury to bounce around inside my skull. That’s less fun than it sounds, and it doesn’t exactly sound like Jim Beam and a hayride. Until then, I’ll see if I can incorporate some more vindictive rage into my story. Also, when I’m around real people, I’ll catalogue the ways in which I could make them regret existing in the same universe as me, all while smiling at them and maybe saying nice things about their shoes.

This sure is a lot of fun. To hell with the cookie. I want a trip to Vegas. And a pony.

Ponies fighting over the privilege of belonging to me. Or maybe they saw a bug. Hard to say.

 

 

I’ve decided that pessimism has been given a bad name by Big Fucking Whiners. Now, I’m sure that pessimists like me indeed die younger than our optimist friends. We’re not as happy either, as I think objective evidence like frowning and the compulsion to create unnecessary spreadsheets demonstrates. But the joy of pessimism has been ruined by all those people who cry about every little thing like they were piglets with their foot caught in a fence.

The traditional pessimist/optimist analogy involves the half full glass. As you know, the optimist sees the glass half full, and the pessimist sees it half empty. Big Fucking Whiners jump up and down and moan on Facebook because there probably won’t be any enchanted fairy nectar in the glass. Then they want a hug and somebody to waste part of their precious life playing Farmville with them, just to keep them from whining any more. Yet they get lumped in with pessimists.

By the way, optimists have the same problem on the other end. Optimism has been almost ruined by an infestation of Human Cocker Spaniels. Going back to the glass analogy, Human Cocker Spaniels bounce around and send a barrage of tweets about how they’ll never be thirsty again and how the glass might hold magic water that would let them turn into a well-endowed vampire mermaid with wings. But that’s the optimists’ problem, so to hell with them.

I’d like to see Big Fucking Whiners split off from pessimists into their own category, much like the Emmy Awards have grouped reality shows into separate categories so they won’t pollute the other TV programs. I don’t mind being seen as cynical, doubtful, and suspicious, because that comes along with almost always being right—or at least more right than the optimists. I do mind being labeled as a self-centered, hectoring cry baby. That just sucks. Come on, who’s going to get laid more: cynical, suspicious Han Solo, or self-centered, whiny C3PO? If your answer is C3PO, this may not be the right blog for you.

In the end, I realize that only pessimists care about this distinction, and as a pessimist, I acknowledge that not even pessimists care enough to do a damn thing about it. Changing the way people think about this would take a lot of effort, and not that many people would buy into it anyway, and then they’d get distracted by a video of frolicking goats that’s not as cute as the video of frolicking giraffes, and heck, all that effort would be better spent on something like promoting home gardening anyway, right? So, to hell with it. I’ll eat another cookie and update my retirement planning spreadsheet.

Sometimes being a pessimist is so easy. No matter what the Big Fucking Whiners say.

Okay, this glass is half full. Half full of excruciating death as your face fries off like hash browns.

Photo by Nik Frey.

 

While we were lying in bed last night, I asked my wife what she thought I should write about, and she said, “Why ice cream comes out the bottom of the cone and how that’s a metaphor for life.” I said sure and wondered what the heck brought that on. I know she thinks things like that but rarely says them, preferring to say things like, “I don’t care what kind of car I drive as long as it has four doors and a trunk,” and “Why don’t we just kill everybody we don’t like?”

If ice cream cones had Kryptonite, it would be heat. The sun, an open flame, and your crotch all produce heat. If you think it’s absurd for your crotch to destroy an ice cream cone, you’ve never had to signal while merging onto the highway and needed someplace to put your ice cream cone while doing it.

To demonstrate the danger of heat, one afternoon when it was a hundred degrees in Texas, which is like a thousand degrees anywhere else, my wife and I were walking across a parking lot. I swear we hadn’t lost our minds. In fact, we’d found an ice cream shop. I won’t name the shop, except to say it was like the Marble Slab, in that it had the words “Marble Slab” over the door. It was the kind of shop where they sell you an ice cream cone for two dollars more than it should cost because they crush a quarter’s worth of M&Ms into it. You don’t have to get M&Ms. You can also get Butterfingers, or chocolate chips, or marshmallows, which don’t crush all that well to be honest.

We bought chocolate ice cream cones with stuff smashed into them, because we like chocolate and stuff, and the nice high school girl behind the counter handed us cones with ice cream the consistency of instant pudding. The store was having air conditioning problems. The kind of air conditioning problems that destroy ice cream. Our ice cream! Frantic to protect our ice cream, we charged outside, which was slightly cooler than the face of the sun, and we tried to eat our ice cream within 17 seconds. That’s the time it takes $5.00 worth of ice cream to melt all over your shoes. Seriously, it was like trying to lick the sides of a volcano oozing Swiss chocolate and spewing Reese’s chunks instead of half-molten boulders.

A glob of chocolate ice cream as big as a cockroach hurled itself down the front of my wife’s shirt, and she flailed around like an octopus having a seizure. Well, that part didn’t really happen. The seizure part. Actually she went back inside and threw a bowl of those little balsa wood sampling spoons at the high school girl, and she told her that she was pretty god damned lucky because her husband disapproved of just killing anybody she didn’t like. Well, that didn’t really happen either. I’m not even positive that any cockroach-sized ice cream flew into her shirt, but I am sure we were sweating like some kind of jungle animals. Which may not sweat, now that I think about it, but you get the idea.

So, how is this a metaphor for life? It was all my wife’s fault. It was her fault because she drove the car that day. She bought the ice cream, too. And she didn’t threaten to kill a blonde 11th grader with a pair of ice cream scoops and a napkin dispenser, which might have redeemed the day somewhat. Therefore, I declare the entire wretched event to be her fault, and I am innocent of all wrongdoing. Because I’m writing the story of what happened that day, and I get to assign the blame.

That is how a drippy ice cream cone is a metaphor for life.

And life is not like a drippy ice cream cone. That would be a damn simile, not a metaphor.

I realize I didn’t say anything about why ice cream drips out of the cone. There’s a hole in the bottom of the cone. I shouldn’t even have to say that, except maybe my wife was really asking why there’s a hole in the bottom of the cone. The answer is “cheap cones.” Ice cream shops have to make back that quarter they spend on M&Ms, so they sell us structurally unsound cones. We just keep buying them like pigeons trained to peck the red light. But I can say for a fact that if you make a joke about there being gravel in the Rocky Road, the people at the Baskin Robbins down the street from me will poke a hole in your cone as soon as you walk in the door, so try not to do that.

If you think my explanation is lousy, just consider that instead I could have written about stuff coming out of your bottom, so hush and be thankful.

“As goes the ice cream cone, so goes the promise of our youth.” Or something like that. Hell, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Forget it–I’m going to the movies.

Photo by Ziko van Dijk.

My wife and I disagree on the fundamental nature of our bed. I think of it as a comfortable place to sleep, or have sex, or maybe read a book when more than two cats have evicted me from the couch. She thinks of it as a glorious retreat for nourishing the spirit in a harsh and callous world. If we each described our bed as a kitchen appliance, she would say it’s a variable-speed immersion blender trimmed in ermine, while I’d say it’s a spatula. I don’t mean a colorful, heat-resistant plastic spatula. I mean a steel spatula with a black handle that your granny might use to cook potato pancakes that taste like paste.

Our house has a big linen closet. If I lived alone, that closet would contain one set of white sheets and 72 cubic feet of unused computer components dating back to 1996. The other set of white sheets would be on the bed, along with a mattress pad and a green woolen blanket that some Marine slept under during the Korean War.

Instead, I live with my wife, which is a good thing for me. But it means that my linen closet contains 27 fitted sheets and 36 flat sheets in colors ranging from periwinkle to russet. They come in solid, striped, and flower patterns, plus flannel sheets with jumping sheep on them. Not one of those sheets is white. We also have over 40 pillow cases, some of which aren’t the same color as any of the sheets, so we can have contrast. The linen closet population is rounded out by three mattress pads, nine blankets, four spare pillows, and a duvet that makes a wonderful nest for cats.

This staggering mass of linen is arranged so that you can locate any item within five seconds. That’s because the linen closet was organized by my wife.

When we change the sheets, after the mattress-flipping ritual, my wife generally spends a minute or two picking out the two different colored sheets (top and bottom) that will form the foundation of our bed environment for the next week or two. A bright, cheery color combination will make her happy to be in bed, so I’m glad she takes her time. Sometimes she asks me to pick out sheets, which can be a problem. By reflex I look in the linen closet for white sheets. When I don’t find them, I peer into the closet as if considering which video card to buy for my computer, while I wonder whether brown and purple go together. I’ve never admitted it to her, but I often just pick the colors of a professional football team. The Cleveland Browns’ team colors—brown and orange—might not be the most popular combination at my house, but they work.

My wife likes to sleep, and maybe that’s what this boils down to. She wants to adorn the bed so she’ll be happy spending time there. Eight hours of sleep makes her optimistic and productive. Seven hours of sleep makes her stoic and determined. Six hours of sleep makes her grumpy, and five hours of sleep makes her act like me. I hate sleep. I resent having to give up so much of my life to sleep, and if I could get away with 30 seconds of sleep a night I would. Sleeping is like being sent to the corner of your mom’s kitchen and then waiting to be released back to your life. When you’re sitting in the kitchen corner, between the refrigerator and a dusty sack of potatoes, you don’t care if the place is dressed up like Disneyland.

In the end, I understand why our bed is decorated like a sultan’s bathrobe. I don’t grasp it on an emotional level, but I understand that it makes my wife happy. That’s worth a lot, especially when I’m searching for a place to stash two dozen worthless motherboards and audio cards, and the pantry is looking pretty good.

Orange, yellow, blue, white with brown pinstripes, five cats, and a teddy bear. A bed that will make my wife extra happy.

 

 

One of my oldest friends told me, “You giving advice on romance is like me giving advice on how to be a lady.” I took her meaning right away, for while I love her a lot, she is to ladies what Chewbacca is to bunnies. I felt surprised though. My wife loves me, and I don’t remember blackmailing her or making her lick a hallucinogenic frog for her to marry me. I must have been a little romantic. I recall buying flowers a couple of times, and I replaced the kitchen faucet with a shiny one she liked. I think that’s pretty good for an eight year courtship.

But my friend got me wondering about romance and my understanding of it. I’m confident it has something to do with love, and greeting cards, and jewelry I can’t afford. And there seems to be a gargantuan commercial industry built around romance—maybe bigger than Halloween, which I find a bit chilling. It makes me feel that if I’m insufficiently romantic then I may be hurting the economy and destroying jobs.

I was my most romantic when I was still dating. Maybe I should call it courting. Courting sounds romantic, while dating sounds like a couple of tough t-bones and a Julia Roberts movie. Regardless, I tried to be romantic when I wanted a woman to like me a lot, or at least like me enough to consider having sex with me someday. Romance is about convincing a person that you cherish them and want them more than you want air. Which of course is a ridiculous lie, but underneath it sits a corresponding truth—you want them more than you want anyone else currently in the room with you.

Romance traditionally includes a lot of trappings and strategies, and maybe my friend meant that I’m not good with those. I don’t plan romantic dinners well, with fat guys playing violins by the table. I’m hopeless with jewelry. I didn’t even buy my wife a diamond for our engagement, although to be honest she didn’t want one—which just proves that I won the marriage derby. My love poetry is rather pedestrian, although it wouldn’t make a jackal barf. I do remember anniversaries and birthdays, so that’s in my favor, although my gifts lack panache. I don’t recommend giving your sweetheart a new garbage disposal for your 15th wedding anniversary.

I’m not a complete disaster. I show up with flowers now and then. I really shine when we pass a store window and my wife stops to look at something. I point to a random spot in the display and grunt, “Wow!” That encourages her to tell me what she really likes, which I could never have guessed even with a chainsaw poised over my privates. My best moment comes when my wife refuses to let me buy whatever she’s fallen in love with, and then I buy it anyway when she’s not looking. There are no mysteries there, and I can follow the logic. I just hope she remembers that when my mid-life crisis hits high gear and I tell her not to buy me that Ferrari.

However, I can tell the romance story from the man’s side. Somewhere on a holy wall in the Orient is written, “Guys don’t care about romance. They just care about sex.” I guarantee that this is a half-truth. Of course guys care about sex. But they do care about romance, just not about the romantic trappings like dinners and poetry. For guys, romance consists of certain things not happening. For example, when a woman dates a man just so he’ll pay her house payment, that sucks out the romance for him. When she only accompanies him to the prom in order to hit on his best friend, that’s a romance killer. When a woman marries a man only to break him of his bad habits and fix his obsession with fantasy football, the man can find no romance there. And so what if guys care about sex? Sex can be romantic if you take your shoes off. So for guys, romance may blow to a different point on the compass, but it still blows.

Although my friend says that I’m romance-defective, I have noticed one odd thing about love and romance. I can’t know what my wife wants unless she tells me. I have poor mind-reading skills, as I’ve demonstrated hundreds of times. On the other hand, I’m tasked with paying attention to what she wants and likes and so forth, so I can make a pretty good guess about what she wants in some future situation. This is the same skill that lets me stick my hand into a fire one time and then know that sticking my hand into other fires would not be good—except that it’s harder to do because I don’t have a burned up hand to motivate me. I have to think about it to do it. I have to be thoughtful, which means I have to be full of thought. I admit that throughout my romance career I may have been full of shit more often than I’ve been full of thought, but at least I recognize that I should be doing something here.

In the end, I agree that I’m not ready for any fancy romance maneuvers. So, I’ll stick to the basics. If I want to be romantic, I have to do some things to show you that I want her. Just saying it or thinking it really loud won’t cut it. These have to be things that she’ll like, and I have to do them in a way that she’ll enjoy. That means I must have some idea of what she likes, so I’d better pay attention and occasionally think about something besides my fantasy football draft. I hope all this will convince her to want me so much she’ll forget every dumb thing I’ve ever done. That’s up to her in the end I guess, unless I break out the hallucinogenic frogs.

I still don’t understand why my wife thought this was more romantic than paintball.

Today is my parents’ first wedding anniversary since my mom died a few months ago. It’s also her birthday. Yes, my mom got married on her birthday. She never saw the point in two or three small celebrations when you could have one big blow out. She liked everyone together having a good time, and she loved presents more than a junky loves crank. At a celebration she turned into an eight-year-old girl, instead of an elderly woman who needed to tell you how terrible everything was.

If she were alive, my parents would have reached their 54th anniversary today. I’m not sure what I would have given them. There’s no traditional symbol for the 54th anniversary, unlike the 1st (paper), the 50th (gold), and the 10th (tin). By the way, modern gift-giving experts have redefined the 10th anniversary as diamond jewelry, which is a far better deal for the happily married couple. The 50th is gold and the 55th anniversary gift should be emerald, but my folks wouldn’t have quite reached 55 today. I might have given them gold rings with crappy emeralds to balance things out. I bet she would have loved hers, regardless.

One of the websites I checked for gift ideas threw tradition out the window and recommended that movies are an appropriate theme for the 54th anniversary. They suggested that a framed poster from the movie Dial M for Murder would be a great anniversary gift. I am not fucking kidding you; check out the link. In case you don’t remember, this is a movie about a guy planning to kill his wife.

My dad lives in the house they shared for 52 years. He spends a lot of time in their dim front room, where they sat side by side in recliners from WalMart for the past 20 years or so. When I visit him I sit in my mom’s recliner, which feels weird as hell, but that’s where he wants me to sit. Sometimes he tells funny stories I’ve never heard—whenever my mom was in the room it was hard for us to get in on the conversation. He cries sometimes. Sometimes we talk about work, or politics, or broken air conditioners. I haven’t visited him as much as I should, so I need to rectify that.

Sometimes my dad tells his version of stories that my mom told. My dad’s version doesn’t even resemble my mom’s version. I mean, it’s clear that they’re supposed to be about the same event, but things happen in different ways, different people are there, they may happen in different places, they may even happen two or three years apart. These events seemed a lot more interesting and dramatic the way my mom described them, so I suspect my dad’s versions are more accurate. I’m starting to feel that my past is far different from what I thought it was, and much more boring as well.

My mom would be 76 years old today had she lived. It’s a respectable age, but still a good ways short of the average life span. Her cause of death is a bit mysterious. Her doctor wrote “necrosis” on the death certificate, which basically means that your body died. I’ve considered going to his office to say, “Well, we could see that, motherfucker!” but I doubt that would improve anything except the tight muscle in my shoulder where I’ve been holding myself back from punching him in the throat.

So, Happy Anniversary and Happy Birthday, mom. Everything ends, but I’m thinking about you today, so I suppose it hasn’t quite ended yet.