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If you DO want to know, welcome to my blog |
For those who actually want to follow my thoughts, ideas, moans, and gripes, this is the place for you! For those of you who are returning...I questions your judgment, you poor souls. 
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| I wake up, to begin with. I fumble my phone around for a few minutes, inevitably dropping it; since my thumbs and first and second fingers have no feeling in the morning, it's an interesting adventure almost warranting a blog entry in and of itself. Once I reach under the bed or around the nightstand or in the dog's bed— wherever the Gods of Dropped Things have decided to hide it that particular morning— I turn the damn alarm off and stand up. After communicating with all the different parts of my body and determining the important parts are fully awake, I stumble through the house to let the dogs out. And back in— can't forget that part; they get quite judgmental if I forget that part. I fire up the Keurig, eat a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, and stare absently at my cuppajoe. Welcome to my morning; and welcome to the end of my goals for the day. I am not a goal-oriented person. Perhaps it's because I'm a Pisces, my head in the clouds and my feet in the water. (That sounds like someone itching to get struck be lightning, actually. Well...depends on the day.) Every Monday, I sit down to make a list of goals for "Weekly Goals"  . Then I sit there and think: "What do I want to get done? I'm sure they're looking for more than 'Take out the trash.' Or 'Let the dogs back in.'" So I commit to writing X number of reviews, flashes, words for longer pieces. Then I look at others' lists of goals and can't believe how far behind I am. I mean, some people want to do stuff, man! Like, beyond putting on pants.So I cogitate. What am I hoping to get done. I come up with:  . Nothing there. Then I realize: my goals aren't necessarily things I want to get done, but things I do not want done to me.  I don't want to get fired. In which case, I reckon I probably better hurry up and drink the coffee, definitely put on the pants, double-check to make sure the dogs are in, and get me ass to work.  I don't want to get yelled at, at home as much as at work— probably more so. Far worse than a honey-do list is a f***er-I-told-you-to-do list; they're probably just goals I probably forgot about, anyway. I don't want to wind up with a headache. This is areal thing. Unless I pound water all day, I get the damnedest headaches you can imagine. So I drink enough water and wind up pissing all day. I'm thinking of just posting my name on the urinal at work. ...I might make that one of next week's goals. I don't want to have to do things I don't want to do. Yeah, that's the adolescent that still lives inside me, the one that wants to pretend I'm 17 and have all the freedom with none of the responsibility. Still, it counts. My goals; I make 'em up, dammit.But what do I want to do or get done? Well that's the thing. Nothing! Nothing that comes to mind, anyway. For instance, on the weekend I prefer to live from minute to minute, doing whatever comes naturally. Write a little. Draw a little. Despise what I drew a lot and throw it away. Watch some TV. Try writing and watching TV and winding up curious as to why my story about unicorns now also contains a scene where a woman blew up her husband's car. Look for the TV remote to change the channel because this series of women who blow up their men's cars or lock them in freezers or stab them in the top of the head is starting to make me a little paranoid. Side-eye my wife, who is diligently working through a 27-point list of goals and starting mutter things that sound suspiciously like "where can I find some dynamite." Ya know; that kind of stuff. I dunno. I'm not even sure what my goal was with this blog entry. Perhaps the entry itself was a goal? Maybe. Well, trying to remember whether I really had a point to all this is a goal for tomorrow. As far as today—shit, that's the one I forgot. I have to go put on some pants! |
| I'm nesting. Everyone pretty knows the Midwest US is about to get hammered with nearly a foot of snow. For those in the northern states, that's a spit in the bucket; for us, it's a significant event. In any case, we're gonna be stuck inside for a few days. That's actually not such a bad thing for me. Any excuse to not be around "them"— which means pretty much everyone else— is like a "get out of jail free" card. Still, I'm nesting. I got my blanket on the couch to curl up in. And another blanket to curl up in when my dogs usurp the first the one. I've my peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets, a freezer full of pizza rolls and counter full of cookies, brownie bites, and such. Oh, and a few apples so I don't get scurvy. And I've got Netflix and discovery+ a million channels of cable of which we watch about 3. And DVDs— Yes, we still have that archaic form of entertainment, the DVD. Don't judge. So yeah, a nest. Currently, the house smells like stuffing as we cook some minestrone soup. Why the soup smells like stuffing, I have no idea, but I'll take it. It beats boiled cabbage (which makes me strongly consider getting a separate apartment). All that coziness, and my handy laptop to write or review or play Minecraft. My nest. But all of that could end in a heartbeat because of 3 little letters: I C E !!! If we get ice, the wires could come crashing down. We don't have natural gas or propane here: the whole house is powered by electric. Gone would be my warmth (except for what can be found beneath blankets and the dogs). Gone would be the streaming shows and movies. I could still to my writing while the computer battery lasts, but no way to post to my friends and family here on WdC. Even the DVD player would be dead. (And you can't hold them up to the light to see the pictures like the old film; I've tried.) There's one other thing that is jeopardy, as well. The well. We get our water from a well, and not no Jack-n-Jill bucket kinda well, either. A deep-pump well. And that pump runs on electricity. No lectro, no water. "So buy bottled water!" Done that. But no water also means something else: no indoor plumbing— NO FLUSHABLE TOILETS! Thus, my nest could be ruined by ice and poop. Ice poop. So there's my weekend, if you were wondering. Nest vs Effluent. For now, I think I should get off here. It's time to burrow down and open the bag of potato chips I failed to mention earlier. Turn on some home improvement sho— uh oh. Maybe not yet. Maybe I'd better go to the bathroom...while I still I can. |
| His name is Fat Bastard. His career is being fat. He's good at his career. Her nickname is The Slink. Her career is finding the last nerve and chewing on it. She excels at her career. Together, they form the team of Fukkus and Rukkus. Cats, man. I don't even know where to start. They disguise themselves as cute little cuddle machines. But there's so much more to them. Like their curious habit of mooning you. Trying to watch TV? They creep up on the side of your chair, turn around and: "No! Look at my asshole, instead!" Real cuddly! What the hell is that all about?! Then there's the cuckoo game: evicting the other animals from their nests. Is there another pet on your lap? The cat will slowly and stealthily try to oust the other animal. If successful, the cat purrs for a moment then leaves, having accomplished it's primary goal of just being a jerk. If you stop the cat— "Stop, there's already someone on my lap!"— they look at you and slowly try to put that front paw down anyway. Stop them again: the look, the slow step. After 8 iterations of this "game," you finally toss the cat to the floor (gently, probably, but it depends how many times in a row the cat has done this in a row), and it stares back at you like you just closed its tail in a door. And the need to claim everything combined with the uncanny sense of exactly what you want them not to claim is unmatched in the animal world. You can watch them thinking: Let's see: an empty box, a cat bed, a cat tree, the couch, a clean sweater. BINGO! Sweater it is! And then they give you that smug-ass stare that makes you wonder if animal cruelty actually extends to cats or not. One of the most fascinating— "SHUT UP!" As I write this, The Slink will not shut up!!!— One of the most fascinating things about these little terrorists is how dedicated they are to prevent humans from consuming the written word. They can hear a newspaper open five rooms away, and they will come bounding in to put themselves between your face and the newspaper. You may not have seen the cat in 16 hours. Open a paperback, and the little shit magically appears behind it, pawing at it, pulling away from your face. Open the laptop, suddenly the cat is sending a damn email to your boss, telling him, "Ikkkhjjkjksdfd7&&8; jsool!.,,." Perhaps the cat want you to get fired so you are at its beck and call every day. I'm not writing anything new. Even people without cats know most of this dfffa;;leef9afd stuff. DAMN IT! Stay off my keyboard! Alright, things are getting out of control here. I can no longer see the screen, but I can count the hairs around Fat Bastard's sphincter, and I can't hear myself think beyond Slink's caterwauling (not that there's much left to hear up there at this point anyway). I'm off to fix them some tuna salad like a good little minion. I just hope some of this has made you feel not so alone in your battle with your snuggly little sanity assassin. Take heart, take hope, and always remember: ##afasgdd diuoi jiofo;ji)) |
| Woohoo! Three weekdays off! I finally took some vacation! Now it’s time to… …Uh, now what? I guess I hadn’t planned that far ahead. I’m not even sure what to do now. What does one actually do on vacation? I don’t have the money to travel. I don’t have the energy to go out on the town. For that matter, I don’t have money with which to out on a town to which I haven’t the money to travel! The fact is, I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m on vacation. I don’t really like crowds, so a lot of vacationy activities are out, like ball games (which is okay, because I don’t like sports) or conventions (which is okay, because I am not interested in dressing up as a stormtrooper, a giant furry rabbit, or Hello Kitty). So I don’t want to go out, which leaves the only other option of staying in— the much-vaunted stay-cation. You know what a stay-cation really is, though? Extended chore opportunities. Ain’t no maid comin’ to straighten the sheets and clean the toilet at this bread-n-breakfast! No, sir, this establishment is self-serve all the way. But at least you go into it knowing there’s no hidden service fees. You know up-front that you pay for all utilities, board, and labor yourself. There's a bonus, though: no additional charge for porn! Yep, there’s no staff on hand at your— wait, that’s not true. You are the help you need! See that lint on the floor? It’s okay, management left you the directions to where the vacuum is. That’s a big stack of dirty dishes! Not to worry; turns out nobody is using the dishwasher right now— it’s wide open. Oh, and by the way, the laundry is all yours, even the stuff that’s already there. Feel free to leave yourself a tip. So I have three days off from a job I love to stay home and do jobs I hate doing even on the weekend. Well, there’s no use complaining. Maybe I should just stop this entry and get off my duff to go see what if there is anything more to do. I think I saw a dustbunny cage match warming up under the living room chair; that’s a sport I could get into. Over in the back room is the often-overlooked Museum of Stuff That No Longer Fits But I’m Too Optimistic To Throw It Away; I guess I could walk around there and take in the culture. But I don't know if I’m even ambitious enough for that. Maybe I’ll just shut off the computer and watch dryer lint porn. At least there’s no extra charge…even if I am the one who has to clean up afterward. |
 Make the bed Do the Laundry Add mattress topper and change bedding Flip the huge heavy couch and figure out if my side is loose because of hardware or because my wide load keep sitting it  Collapse exhausted after only two hours of work And don't forget doing my daily flash, writing a blog entry, trying to get in a thousand words somewhere… It's barely into the afternoon, I've done hardly anything, and I'm ready to pack it in. My age and my expectations are once again spending the day having an argument. A couple of years ago, I was working light construction while I was between jobs. We weren't running backhoes and digging trenches, but I was hauling drywall, lumber, buckets of paint; tearing down plaster walls and cleaning up from it (the latter task being more arduous than the former); climbing ladders and replacing windows. Now, I make noises like a defunct diesel engine whenever I get up and get down and get winded after taking the trash to the curb. I know— everybody is going through it, or will be, at any rate. The problem for me? I don't think like I'm fifty! Well… that actually may not be accurate. I've reached the point where conversations longer than ten minutes become an exercise in trying to find my ticket for the train of thought I been riding to begin with. It's also not uncommon for me to walk half the distance to the office printer, stop still in the hall, and ask myself why I left my cubicle. (That's a true story. People used to stare at me funny, but they've come to understand I'm just a monkey in disguise and go around me like a dumb rock that got splashed in their normally smoothly flowing stream of the day.) But that's not what I mean. I mean, when I think, I have the same thoughts and self-understanding and opinions (most of the time) as I did when I was forty— in some instances, as I did when I was twenty! My first and last thoughts aren't: "I'm fifty." Trouble is, whenever I do anything, my body reminds me at the outset: "Dude…remember this time that you're fifty." At which point my mind says: "No problem, I've been doing this forever, no worries." And after I'm invariably huffing, puffing, groaning, grouching and wondering how the hell I hurt my calf while hammering a nail into the wall, the body pipes up again: "What did I say?! You're FIFTY, idiot!" "But I've been hammering nails in half my life!" "But that's before you were fifty and all your OEM parts have worn out and oxidized into sculptures instead of joints!" At this point, my calf is throbbing so bad that I've lost track of the conversation, couldn't tell you my brithday for the life of me, and can't figure out why I'm standing in the hall holding a pillow, a coke bottle, a 10mm socket sans ratchet. I'm tired of the deterioration of our society, the deterioration of our morals…and the deterioration of the run-down shack of a body my mother used to tell me was a temple to God. I'm tired of having more projects than stamina to do them. I'm tired of being tired after I rest up because I was tired. I'm tired of being fifty. In summary… Um… Damn it, I can't remember why I even started this blog entry, let alone how to summarize it. I think I had a point, but I don't remember what it is. Oh well, probably a good time to wrap it up anyway so I can put this pillow away, throw this bottle in the recycle bin and try to figure out how the hell I managed to accumulate something from a toolbox I keep in a completely different outbuilding! |
| "Do you do drugs, Danny?" "Every day." "Good." Thank you Messieurs Webb and Noonan a la Caddyshack, a requisite movie for all us Gen-Xers. But while we're talking about drugs— while I am, at least— let's... well, let's talk about drugs. There are some drugs there are entirely too many of. Some drugs are great, but scarce. And then there's some that ought to exist, but don't. First category, everyone is expecting me to talk about fentanyl, heroin, crack, etc. These are givens, come on, kids. There's entirely too much of other drugs, though as well. Vaccines? While, the jury is out on vaccines for many people, I believe in several of them, such as smallpox, flu, polio, and that whole standard bunch. I'm even on board with shingles and COVID vaccines. But the more I watch television (which my blood pressure recently advised me is too damn much), the more I see vaccines for things I didn't even know existed! I'm not conspiracy theorist, but I am starting wonder if they're not just making shit up for us to get placebo vaccines for. RSV, HPV, LSMFT, MIC, KEY, MOUSE. There's something for each one of them, too— Adilumimab, Xorticolfab, Gerimockery— hell, I can't even pronounce most of them. Some of them sound like nothing I would want to do with, anyway. Like Taltz. Taltz sounds like a problem in and of itself. "Joey, I'm screwed: I got Taltz, man!" "That's okay, there's a new vaccine for it!" And none of them are cheap. "If you can't afford $600 a month, AbVie can help by giving you a $5.00 coupon, if you qualify." I swear, "they're" going to cure us all into the poorhouse! Some drugs seem to be scarce even though they're common. Diclofenac, for instance, is often prescribed for pain. And yet, the pharmacy always seems to be out of it. They have the Tripolumitan and Phlippinwhatitsname, but no diclofenac— and they can't tell you when it's going to arrive. "In a day or two, maybe four. Perhaps a week. Definitely by the Second Coming. We think." Of course, once the back-ordered medicines do come in, the pharmacy will be all over you to come pick them up. Text message, phone call after phone call, email, Western Union, carrier pigeon. After a while you wonder if you really want the diclofenac at all, or if you just want to thumb your nose at them. Now, there's also some drugs they haven't figured out yet, but should definitely be in development. Such as a drug that prevents you from hearing stupid people. Well...you might think you're deaf if you took that one; maybe that one's not so practical. How about a drug that adjusts brain chemicals to induce common sense? Wouldn't that be a gas? They'd be producing that one 24x7 Speaking of gas, instead of one to relieve the pains of gas, how about one that just removes the stink? Then you could a have bean dinner and a family horn section afterward without the EPA getting involved! But here's the one I want, the one I would be addicted to and hooked through the nose for: a drug that makes you feel the way you feel when you're about two thirds of the way through a pee you've been holding fifteen minutes too long already. Tell me the street value for that wouldn't be through the roof. So that's that, in a nutshell...or a pill bottle. I gotta run. The pharmacy has sent a guy named Guido who has a .38 and a machete to kindly request I go pick up my wife's diclofenac. 28 pills... in a bottle the size of a milk jug. Okay, okay I'm going! God forbid they put the junk back on the shelf; I wouldn't see it again til the next lunar eclipse! |
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