THINKING OUTSIDE THE BIG BOX

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (07-13-23)

 

     Like some folks, I spent July 4th celebrating my independence from some of the junk that's in our garage, and endeavoring to replace it with more stuff that will one day itself be junk. I needed some big boxes to throw the stuff out, and where better to get them than a big box store? The Home Improvement Store (not its real name) is the biggest big box store I can think of, and when I got there I was surprised to find that the plum parking spaces were reserved for "Pro Shoppers." I researched this further and apparently it's a rewards program for frequent customers, and as they buy more home improvement stuff they get a free drink or snack credited to their account. The more they spend, the more free snacks they get, and they start to drool like Pavlov's dog as they loiter around the gardening section.

     I found a guy wearing an orange apron and I asked, "Hi- I recently received an SOS message from something stranded on my kitchen island. Where would I find materials to rescue it?" "You might try the Isle Aisle, Number 122." "Oh, OK, Aisle do that. I mean I'LL do that." I found a huge dolly the size of a cabin cruiser, big enough to hold all my purchases until my credit card company calls to have an intervention. They're the only people who ever say that I don't give myself enough credit. Once I got to Aisle Number 122, they had everything there but the kitchen sink, which was unfortunate, since I needed a new kitchen sink.

     "Oh- Kitchen sinks are in Aisle number 3. It's about half a mile west of here, then you turn right at this thing that looks like a roll of insulation. That's actually my manager." No sooner did I manage to get my cart moving again when a guy coming out of Aisle 121 with an even bigger cart almost hit me. "Dude I have the right of way, since I'm going straight and you're making a turn. Plus once I get going I can't stop this thing without casting anchor." He said, "My apologies, I didn't realize you were going straight since two of your three wheels are going in opposite directions." He was a little drooly and had a glazed-over look, I pegged him as a "Pro Shopper."

     As I walked through the walls of hardware I couldn't help feeling sorry for Henry F. Phillips. Imagine going through life with a head so oddly shaped that they named the Phillips-head screwdriver after you? I asked a sales representative, "Do you have any spot remover?" "Hmmm.... It used to be in that spot right over there." We need new trash cans, but I have no idea how to throw out the old ones. If I put the old bin inside the new bin, will the trash collector know that the old bin is a has-been?

     I stalked the power tool section, because not needing something is a poor excuse not to buy it. If you were fighting a war, I bet you could defend your territory one Home Improvement Store (not its real name) at a time. Just in this aisle alone, with pneumatic nail guns, impact wrenches and a Milwaukee Sawzall, I like your chances. You'd have to lure the enemy to the store using, say, the promise of an air conditioner sale.

     In the lawn section there was a 23-horsepower fabricated-deck V-twin engine with a hydro-static transmission gang mower that I had my eye on. Loaded up with a sunroof and custom wheel covers I bet it would be a pretty sweet ride. I imagined people racing these things at Watkins Glen, and meanwhile they get their grass cut for free. But I'm saving my money for a grain harvester.

     I strike up a little small talk on the checkout line with a guy sporting quite a few prison tattoos. "Wow that's an interesting array you've got there, duct tape, zip ties, rubber gloves, bleach and a shovel! You must have quite a problem with rats! HA HA HA HA!" I got the hell out of there. I ended up behind a guy with a 30-foot beam in his cart, and I could barely make out the cashier in the distance. A new checkout line opened and when he turned his cart around to make a scramble for it about 15 of us had to double-Dutch over his beam. In the parking lot I couldn't fit some of my purchases in the car, and I thought about buying the lawn mower just to get the stuff home. In the end I was able to get home with everything except for quite a bit of my money.

 

 

A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (07-06-23)

 

     The summer is a great time to crack open a book and lose yourself in world of someone else's making, a place so magical that you never want to come back. That is, until a lifeguard blows a screeching whistle right in your ear at somebody in the pool. DON'T SIT ON THE ROPES! By the way, a pool is the ONLY place where it's not dangerous to sit on a rope. I have my favorite types of music, I'm very picky about films and I only seem to watch television from the '60s, '70s and '80s. But fiction is my chance to get a glimpse of any other culture, gender or social class, at any period of history, and I take full advantage of it every day. My awe of the talent of the novelist is boundless. 

     I'm an avid reader, you might say a voracious reader, because it would be faster for me to actually eat the book than to read it. I'm a slow reader. If I started "War and Peace" in high school I would still be on the first part of the book, and I'd be thinking to myself, WOW, when is there going to be peace around here?

     I have my favorites of course. John Steinbeck can bring you to the depths of despair, and what seems hopeless often represents a choice, a set of possibilities that people navigate either well or poorly. After reading a chapter, doing the dishes doesn't seem quite so bad. If you come over and I have exceptionally clean flatware, you can thank John Steinbeck. Anne Tyler is another one of my favorites. Her protagonists, which she insists are not her, sometimes undergo weighty struggles in ordinary situations that are revealed in anecdotal details and amusing dialogue. She makes adversity fun, as it certainly should be.

     Larry McMurtry has a vast range that not many other writers can boast. He can take you from Texas to Montana on a cattle drive, or maybe you'll be stuck your whole life in Anarene, but by the end of the book you'll have traveled just as far. Toni Morrison will give you some perspective and empathy. Herman Wouk, Gore Vidal and James A. Michener will drop you off in a foreign location or period of history, and pick you up later when you're a little smarter. History is much easier to grasp when there's not a test at the end.

     Maybe you want a fun summer escape. Ellmore Leonard is your guy. He's written so many great crime stories that if you read a few, you'll start thinking like a criminal, perhaps leading to a life in politics. John Irving will make you consider the virtues of wrestling, bears and paranoia more often than is medically necessary.

     Teachers and parents always tell you when you're growing up that you can be anything you want to be, but that's not true, is it? I can't be a Black slave or a teen-aged girl or a Russian spy (If I was a Russian spy I certainly wouldn't tell YOU about it, nor if I was a teen-aged girl for that matter). But within the pages of a book, if you can dream it you can live it, if only for a moment. Maybe you're tired of being an astronaut and you always wanted to be a minimum-wage food service worker. You can read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair and toil in the unsanitary conditions you've longed for.  

     Here are a few books that I loved, and if you're not familiar with them you can thank me later (and don't listen to an audio book and think you've read them): "The Shipping News;" "Cold Sassy Tree;" "Empire Falls;" "Lincoln;" "Billy Bathgate;" "King Rat;" "Brazil;" "An American Tragedy;" "Rules of Civility;" "Prep;" "Less;" "Jazz:" "Don't Stop the Carnival;" there are so many more I could write a book just of titles. You can let me know your list.

     A good novel requires a certain commitment of time, longer than just, say, skimming through some classified documents to see if there's any juicy secrets you can share with your friends. But for that time you will be amply rewarded. You'll find out about things you never realized you didn't know existed. You'll learn them not by somebody telling them to you, but absorbing them by accident through the eyes of characters lovingly and painstakingly created. I like to think that writing would be similar to what I do, if my words had meaning and made sense. I curled up with a good book last night, maybe for too long, because this morning my hair looks a little weird.

THE THRILL OF IT ALL

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (06-29-23)

 

     The chilling plight of the five submariners attempting to tour the wreck of the Titanic has me afraid that our quest for danger has taken us into situations that we don't have a whole lot of practice getting out of.  

     In this world there have always been people who are compelled to try to push the envelope, and then there are those like me who are content simply to lick the envelope. I do not want it to lick me first. In 1912 just boarding the Titanic for a trip to New York from England was already daring. For that matter, traveling into Manhattan by subway in the early 1980s was enough to risk your life, depending on the time of day. If you boarded the Titanic and noticed that the vessel carried 20 lifeboats, you had to know that there was some risk involved. Four of the lifeboats were collapsible, for those who wanted to court danger even as they were being rescued.

     I'm not what you would consider a "daredevil." My relationship with the devil is pretty good and I'd like to keep it that way. If I dare the devil, it's something minor, like I bet he can't eat all those French fries. And we don't even put any money on it. I feel like I'm looking danger straight in the face if I don't heed the safety instructions that come with a new toaster. I may attempt to dislodge food WHILE toaster is plugged into electrical outlet, AND I may leave toaster unattended during use.

     I can accurately gauge the inherent danger in any activity by measuring the length of the waiver form I am required to sign before being allowed to attempt it. I carefully read all the clauses of the liability disclaimer before attaching myself to a zipline designed to propel me through the Amazon jungle and then through a brick wall: "I agree to indemnify the indemnicatee against all judgements, fees, expenses and litigation caused by the participation of any equitablity involved in the parties named in this agreement or any other agreement signed by those explicitly mentioned within the provisions therein. I therefore absolve those parties of any responsibility for the irresponsible thing I'm about to do." Sounds pretty safe.

     There are now just so many more ways available for me to put myself in harm's way than there ever were before. And I'm the type of person that if harm sees me in it's way, it's not going to bother to go around me. It's getting easier and easier to do something that most of us would have considered stupid 20 years ago, and some of us consider even stupider today. "Okay, everyone who's interested in going to the Moon, sign up on the sign-up sheet. You WILL NEED A PERMISSION SLIP. Melén, are you going?" "Why on EARTH would I do THAT?" "Well actually, we haven't found any good reasons here on Earth, and that's why we're going."

     I once had a cat named Pookie who was a cat-daredevil. My wife loved her and she loved my wife and I love my wife, but the cat and I barely tolerated each other. She used to sun herself on our 8th storey balcony when we lived in an apartment. That wouldn't be so perilous, except that she used to sit on the three-inch concrete overhang that was outside the safety railing. She didn't do it for her own benefit. She did it because she knew it would put me in the uncomfortable position of having to baby-talk to it in a sweet coaxing voice to get her to come inside, and she was just laughing at me. She must have forgotten who she was dealing with, because the minute I started explaining to my wife my complicated plan to retrieve her, she came right back through the railing because she already knew the ending. "WOW how amazing that your cat survived a fall off your balcony." "Well actually she was fine until we rescued her."

     I only hope that there's a better reason than that for, say, jumping out of an airplane. It used to be that performing a stunt in front of your friends was enough for people to notice you. But through social media, the number of "friends" has increased exponentially, and so has the size of the stunt. It's no longer relevant that sane people call you crazy, now it's only worth talking about if CRAZY people call you crazy. If I'm going to jump out of a plane, let it be for the really good reason that there were no direct flights. 

     It seems to me that people were built to last a lifetime. I just don't want to make that lifetime any shorter than it needs to be by doing something reckless. The word "reckless" is an unnecessary irony if there is indeed a wreck. I've heard people say that "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." People may have  heard ME say that what doesn't kill you usually REALLY, REALLY HURTS.

SUNSHINE ON A CLOUDY DAY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (06-22-23)

 

     They don't call me a genius for nothing. I would have to pay handsomely for them to call me that, and I'm talking Brad Pitt or Richard Gere numbers. I wonder if they take a personal check. Anyway, my genius idea is this: The experts say that climate change is real, and I hope they're right, because I'm going to take a million dollars and invest it in real estate at whatever corner of the Earth has the worst climate. And when the climate changes, guess who's going to be rich? If I can figure out where to take the million dollars from. 

     We were recently vacationing in Ocean City, Maryland, when the climate changed  and going to the beach was out of the question. So we had to find some other stuff to do, and the first thing we did was hit the miniature golf course. I don't play real golf, and if you asked me what my handicap is, it's that I suck at golf. Plus, if I'm that close to the shore, and I'm trapped in sand, let it be at the beach where a whole bunch of women in bikinis are trapped there too. And another thing: If I'm going to spend four hours playing a sport, I'd like to justify it by saying I got some exercise. That's why I play tennis instead. I can't play right now because I broke my foot playing tennis, but on the plus side, for the 11 months I've been sidelined I haven't been injured playing tennis.

     I have a new system of scoring miniature golf, where I only write down a number if one of us uses more or less strokes than the other to get the ball in the cup. So I record the difference for each hole or no number at all if we tie, and add it up at the end. I sometimes lose track of whether I wrote the figure as a plus score or a minus score, but I always win, more or less.

     If the weather isn't warm and sunny you can take a stroll on the boardwalk and  find a place to hang as you savor a cocktail and people-watch for a little while. Sometimes people seem to be watching me when I'm trying to watch THEM, so we agree to trade off. There are public restrooms in Ocean City, but remember, changing of clothes is prohibited, so dress in something that you really like. Since there are no more telephone booths, is changing of clothes prohibited even for Superman? I guess they don't want Superman to change into The Flash.

     You can always go to a museum, such as the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum, which was once an outpost of the U.S. Coast Guard and dates back to 1891. It's the safest place to be no matter how hard it's raining outside; no one has ever drowned there.

     An "escape room," might be just the thing if the weather is not cooperating. We passed one and I thought I heard someone yelling from inside, but maybe it was just that my imagination had been captured.

     The weather wasn't so bad that it prevented us from looking around, considering the area for a possible second home. I'm kind of picky about names, though. I don't think I would thrive in a place called "Willow Chase." For god's sake just let them be. "Meadow Wood" is another actual place we passed. If you can't decide whether you're a meadow or a wood, there isn't much I can do for you, you can't be both. Perhaps the most insulting town we drove by was Kitts Hummock in Delaware. "Hey Kitt, you'll never guess what we named after you!" "OOOOH, is it a canyon???" "Nope." "A lake???" "Keep guessing." "Was it a-" "It's a HUMMOCK! We named a hummock after you because you always used to say it was so peaceful when you slept there!" "Oh okay. That was a HAMMOCK I was talking about." When we got back to Ocean City there was a sign that said "Lots For Sale," but we didn't see anything but acres and acres of empty land.

     The next day was cloudy again, so we took Gidget the Dog to the Farmer's Market in nearby Berlin. There you could get homemade soap, honey, cheese, crafts, maple syrup and baked goods. At least I assume they were, you certainly couldn't sell baked goods that were bad without some sort of disclaimer. And wouldn't you know it, right in the middle of Berlin was a wall. I wanted to stage an informal protest. TEAR DOWN THAT WALL! It was holding up an ice cream shop and I was holding up traffic, so I couldn't really get the crowd on my side. Instead we got ourselves a chocolate cone and solved some of the world's injustices the easy way.