I glanced into our tiny condo yard the other day. My girl often sits there in the evenings, reading, at our patio table. Sometime she is afflicted by insects, which she hates. She hates them when they are utterly harmless, even flapping moths and buzzing beetles, bugs which carry neither Zika nor Nile nor Lyme.
Of course, she hates bugs when they are in the house as well. A single insect trapped between our four walls triggers roughly the same reaction in her as a Stuka preparing to dive-bomb the recliner would, a wail of fear and pain, and a desperate seeking of cover simultaneous with a demand that I squash the invader. I am happy to do this when possible even though I have a much more phlegmatic attitude towards interior insects, having been raised in the bug-infested East and used to cohabiting with a certain amount of insect life. In particular, spiders. My mother regards spiders as individual pest control agents of the highest order. “Don’t kill spiders,” she often commanded me in my youth. “They eat other bugs.” “Not nearly enough of them,” I would reply, as I contemplated the usual throng of moths, stink bugs and ants swarming her living room on a typical summer night. I try to tell the girl that spiders eat other bugs when one puts in appearance here. “I know that,” she says. Then, after a pause, she says “Does that mean you’re too big of a pussy to kill it?” Nothing like attacking a guy’s masculinity to get him to do something he doesn’t particularly feel like doing, as the first woman who spotted the first gigantic cave spider crawling towards her favorite hunk of Raquel Welch-like crotch fur discovered, so the spider, despite its admirable appetite for insect flesh, dies. Flying invaders need to be dispatched, too. I can get only so far with my natural insect-killing instruments, my bare hands, as many insects fly too high for me to reach them or too fast for me to clap them, mid-air, out of existence. That’s why we acquired the hand-held Electric Bug Zapper. It resembled a tennis racket, but it was battery-powered, and supposed to kill bugs electronically when you swung it at them. I never had any faith in this instrument. I swung it many times at inside bugs, and I never saw the satisfying flash of insect electrocution when I did so. There was nothing like the blue flare that dazzles in the night when you are watching a real bug zapper, the land-based kind, do its work, a spark that briefly illuminates the porch and causes the observer to say, ”Ooooh, that was a big one. Fetch me another beer out of the cooler, wouldya?” The best I was able to do with the hand-held zapper was knock a bug to the floor, then step on it to end its existence. Hardly high tech. When you licked the zapper, though, in an exasperated effort to determine whether there was any juice flowing through its grid at all, it hurt. So if you didn’t have any 9-volt batteries around, and you were in the mood for a little tongue pain, you could use it for that. So when my girl took the zapper outside to deal with the swarms there, I did not complain. I often noticed her using it at her insect enemies, turning, twisting and whacking at the night, like Marina Sharapova trying to deal with a continuous series of wicked serves from both Williams sisters and Roger Federer combined. But now its career is over. I noticed it sitting in the condition pictured above a few days ago. “Done with that?” I asked, as inoffensively as possible. “I broke it on a bug,” she said instantly. I tried to suppress any look of disbelief, but one must have leaked down my optic nerve anyway. “It was a moth at least as big as an owl,” she added. “It came flying right at me.” I glanced at the ground. “It just turned around and flew away after I hit it,” she added. “it’s still out there.” I looked at the evidence and concluded that the zapper had met its end when she had accidentally smashed it against the umbrella pole, visible in the picture as well, while contorting herself like a martial arts defender, and I mean a martial arts defender with chronic epilepsy, facing off against her enemy. “I better get you another one, then,” I said. “Good idea,” she replied briskly, and went back to her book. There was no sense arguing, so I kept my mouth shut. Keeps bugs from flying in there, anyway.
I hit my mother's house near Philly for my annual visit right after it was hit by a tornado. Officially, it was not a tornado, but an insurance adjuster friend of mine said that was because the National Weather Service is in cahoots with the insurance companies, most of whom issue policies that cover tornadoes much more generously than straight line winds.
It sure sounded like a tornado from her description of it. "The whole sky turned orange," she said. "And the noise! You couldn't even hear the branches breaking off the trees, the wind was so loud." "Why didn't you get in the cellar?" I asked. "I was trying to close the kitchen window," she said. "The wind was blowing the plates onto the floor, and they were breaking." Nowhere in any survival guide does it say that the best place to be during a tornado is by an open window near breaking china, but fortunately, both she and the house were spared any damage. Her car was in the shop for three weeks because a good-sized branch fell on it. If you were in her neighborhood, and noticed an eighty-five year old woman ensconced incongruously in a rented Mini Cooper, that is why. All the other damage was limited to trees on her acre-and-a-half property. Most lost several big branches, and some were blown clean in two. "We planted those trees," she said sadly. "I planted those trees," I corrected her. I remember the tree-planting process well. The yard lacked trees when I was a boy of eleven or so, and my mother was determined to correct this landscaping flaw. She and my father would have me push a wheelbarrow into the woods behind the house, which time and rising real estate values eventually turned into a subdevelopment, accompanying me for supervision purposes. In their simple pioneer way, they just selected the tree they wanted to swipe and had me dig it up. My father would drink beer and tell me that everything I was doing was wrong, and my mother would do the actual correcting, adjusting the size of the root ball (too big, in my youthful opinion) and the depth of the hole which had to be dug to accommodate it (likewise, too deep). I would be set to work. The soil in that area is dense with shovel-turning stones. There are more rocks in a square foot of that ground than in the box of them that Ariana Grande is dumber than, but after a half-hour or so of sweaty labor I was usually able to extract the chosen tree and its accompanying dirt ball and the load of Cenozoic-looking insects crawling ookily around in it from the earth, put it in the wheelbarrow and trundle it out of the woods, where it sat until I could excavate another space among the rocks to plunk it into. I must have planted a dozen of them, all silver maples, at a heavy cost in perspiration and resentment. All of them had gotten fifty or sixty feet tall, and too big to get your arms around if you were inclined to hug them, when they met their fate. I took pictures of the arboreal wreckage and showed them to my brother when we visited him. "I remember planting those trees," he said. "No you don't," I replied bitterly. Now that he is a middle aged, rather slow guy, maybe he doesn't think I remember his work habits when he was a lad, but I do. The guy had a natural gift for getting stung by bees. He used it to get out of any exterior chore. Whenever we were set an outdoor job by my parents, whether it was planting a tree or mulching the garden or filling a seemingly bottomless bucket with wild blackberries, he would manage to be stung and get himself excused from it. While I struggled in the thorns and the humidity of the East Coast summer doing his work and mine, he would get a baking-soda poultice for his wound and spend the rest of the day quietly watching whatever he wanted on TV, or, even worse, messing up my bags of toy plastic soldiers or airplanes. Bees were his friends. He was disabled a few years ago in a work accident, which was, surprisingly, completely unrelated to bee attack, and now doesn't have much of anything to do. He could plant a few trees if he wanted to, but I'm not holding my breath. The family chainsaw was in the tool shed, which was also covered by fallen branches, and I was forbidden to rent one. There were far too many downed trees for me to make much of an impact on them in a week anyway. Mom had to hire someone to chop them up and remove them. So mostly I just contemplated their remains. Made me feel like that line in the John Denver song. Younger than the mountains. Older than the trees.
It’s back to land life for me, having spent the last week cruising to Alaska and back. It was my first taste of the cruise life, so I’m still no expert at it. Many more experienced travelers have written many more useful words on cruising than the ones you will find below, but I haven’t really had the news or the Internet for a week, so I’ll have to whip up at least one post about life shipboard.
The girl and I were enticed aboard this particular cruise by their promising us unlimited free beverages. The good thing about the Ultimate Beverage Package was that we saved a bundle, because cocktails aboard were pricey. The insidious thing about the UBP is that it can turn an affable social drinker into a depraved alcoholic the minute the boat gets pushed away from the dock, and if you are already a depraved alcoholic, the depths to which you can sink are only matched by the ocean itself. So we had many good times. We met many interesting drunk people. I remember, somewhat dimly, a gentleman from Connecticut, a fellow Ultimate Beverager, who worked for a well-known international engineering firm, even though he only had a college degree in economics. He described his job as traveling around the world, going to company crisis after company crisis as called upon. After taking in the situation, he would tell those on the ground and his bosses back home he couldn’t help them. “What do they expect?” he said. “I’m an economist, not an engineer.” Ordinarily, I am not jealous of other people’s successes, but that guy’s career left me filled with the green emotion. I mean, I could do that. Other passengers were not so interesting. I expect if you cruise to the Caribbean you can find yourself surrounded by tanned young women in experimental bikinis whose main occupation is rubbing sunscreen on their piercings, but if you cruise to Alaska, even if you are pushing hard at the envelope of both middle age and your current pants size, you will find yourself both young and thin in comparison to most of your fellow passengers, who are composed mainly of mortal threats at the unlimited buffet and doddering bucket-listers. When people describe the peace of being at sea, they are probably talking about this. It's very soothing. We called on three towns in Southeast AK. At each one we were herded off into tour buses to enjoy the activities we had selected. The bus drivers had all been instructed to point out the local highlights, which usually consisted of an airport you had to take a ferry to get to and a closed fish-canning plant. That didn’t take long, so they would fall back on repeating old tales passed along by the local indigenous peoples. These nuggets from the verbal traditions of native Alaskans demonstrated that while they may have been able to kill whales with spears made of caribou teeth, they had not really mastered the art of cohesive narrative flow. The old legends are uniformly sad and boring. All of them involve death, and many of them feature problems with in-laws. They are generally invoked to explain natural phenomena, so the fact that Ketchikan gets some eighteen feet or so of rain a year is, in native lore, the result of the Bear Wife crying tears for her late human husband on the top of the local mountain. Now, the ancient bullshitter who concocted this tale could not have known of persistent low pressure systems held in place by the jet stream and regional topographic features, but he knew damn well rain was not caused by a bear crying on the mountain. “These yahoos will believe anything,” he was probably sniggering to himself as he walked away from the Stone Age bonfire after concocting that whopper. “Wow, the cliff is slippery tonight. Must be all those bear tears. Hah! Whoops! Aieeee!” And yet, his words live on from that prehistoric moment, repeated by fresh-out-of-college tour guides who are supporting themselves by subsistence jobs before they go on to grad school to get another useless degree, to retired white people crammed into an overheated bus, which provides yet another example of the past constantly reaching out to annoy us. Well, I’ve reached my word limit for today and we haven’t even covered zip-lining with Aunt Carol or eating at Washy Washy, so we’ll have to come back with a Part Two for this one. While I have yet to remember to use Fry Bob, my reusable shopping bag, when I get the groceries, I haven't stopped by the side of the road on my way back from the store, taken my goods out of my plastic bags and crammed them like a coward into Fry-Bob before getting home. So far. I know that's coming, though, because the load of ire and disappointment I am greeted with when I bring home the bacon in plastic is increasing. My girl always has had strict recycling rules for me in the first place. For example, I have to wash out all cans and containers completely before tossing them in the recycle bin. She says this is necessary for them to be recycled properly. I have expressed my doubt that here is a person stationed at the recycle plant whose job it is to say, "No, No—there is still tomato paste in that can. Don't bring it inside. Find a scenic highway to toss it onto," but my skepticism is always dismissed. We are supposed to be recycling our plastic bags already. This is my chore as well. Plastic bags cannot be recycled just by throwing them in the blue can. They have to be taken back to a store and wadded into a special filthy container to be recycled by a special process. What this means for me is that I usually have a big clump of plastic bags sitting next to Fry-Bob in my back seat. They are just as easily forgotten as well. Knowing I am untrustworthy in matters green, I am always questioned by my girl when I get back from being sent on this task.. "Did you recycle the bags?" she asks. "No," I reply crisply. "I soaked them in insecticide and threw them in the river." Sarcasm usually throws her off her game enough so that she does not check my car and discover the bags still expanding like kudzu in the back seat. When the Bag Creature finally gets big enough to be visible at all times in the rear view mirror, I eventually dispose of it. While I am thrusting it into the black hole of the recycle box, I look at the checkout people handling the reusable bags they are already being presented with, and I sense their lack of enthusiasm. Instead of wiggling their fingers gently into fresh plastic, they have to deal warily with questionable burlap presented to them by the general public. I can practically see them thinking Who knows what people have been doing with these bags besides carrying groceries? Letting their kids and pets play with them, for sure, and storing anything from fertilizer to freshly made meth in them, maybe. Fry Bob has already suffered several spills on his person, and he hasn't even been opened yet. The first supermarket person I hand him to is getting dried hot sauce under his nails, gratis. These people are probably opposed to the new law, as are many. There's a petition going around (sponsored by bag manufacturers, natch) to put the bag law on a ballot proposition and let the people vote on it, in the democratic way we have in California of electing politicians to consider our problems carefully, then bypassing them in favor of letting the voting public decide important issues by thinking about them for maybe three seconds. "Hell no, I'm not bringing my own bags to Walmart," the bag men hope people are thinking. "What has the Earth done for me lately? Except for the free air to breathe, of course." But there are those marine creatures to think of, and I don't want them biting on plastic bags instead of the squid I have on my hook. And I especially don't want the supermarket taking any more bites at my wallet by charging me for plastic bags, so eventually I'll start remembering to take Fry Bob shopping with me. He looks like he'd be pretty hard to catch fish with, anyway. For Part One, click here We are saving the Earth this week where I live, which for me means I have to bring my own bags to the grocery store. The girl, who is always much more concerned about the Earth than I am, has ordered me to break my lifetime habit of letting the supermarket give me my groceries bagged. And I mean lifetime—I am old enough to remember when stores only offered paper bags. The transition to plastic happened in my youth, and people were not happy with it then, often insisting on paper when it was really obvious the store was pushing plastic. But we got used to it. Now I can only remember two things that paper bags are unquestionably superior to plastic for—shaking chicken pieces in flour and spices before frying them, and putting them on your neighbor's stoop after you have filled them with excrement, lighting them on fire, ringing the doorbell and running away. And really, you can do the chicken thing with plastic. You just have to be aware of the cloud of flour that will puff out of the hole in the bottom of the bag.
If you are planning on pranking your neighbors, you simply must remember to say "Paper, please," at the checkstand, because plastic will not work with that kind of payload. The best thing about plastic bags is that you can carry more of them at once. It was difficult to hold on to more than two or three paper bags while fumbling for your keys in the dark, and somehow it was always the bag with the eggs in it that you dropped. With plastic, you can hook a bag on every finger, enabling you to carry in five at a time and still have a hand free to unlock the door and ward off the dog, although moderate to intense finger pain can result from this practice if you have been shopping for heavier items, like melons or ammunition. However, these days will soon, or may soon, pass in the Golden State. Our legislature has ordered us all to bring in our own re-usable shopping bags to the store starting July 1st. Plastic bags are bad for the environment, by their very nature, and they are especially dangerous to marine life. I am dangerous to marine life myself, and certainly I don't want ocean creatures choking to death on plastic bags when I could kill them with a hook and line instead. I realize the law will benefit me on this account, but not so much that I was planning to start obeying it before I had to. Not so my special lady. She has announced that we will start pre-obeying this ordinance. To this end, she has bought me a re-usable shopping bag. She got it at Fry's, a giant electronics store. The bag is black except for a small yellow squarish figure printed on its lower half. The figure strongly resembles Sponge Bob Square Pants, the cartoon character of children's lore, except it can't be, because Fry's and the gigantic corporation that owns Sponge Bob have surely used their battalions of lawyers to settle any copyright infringement questions by now. So I call my reusable bag Fry Bob. Fry Bob sits in the back seat of my car, ready at all times to save the Earth by carrying my food and beverage items greenly home. He has yet to do so, though, because my mind is usually too preoccupied with its usual chores, thinking of jokes and calculating how much money I can spend on food and still have the necessary amount left over for beer that I can't remember to use him. I only recall him when I am loading my plastic bags into the back seat next to him. "Oh, feces, " I say, or something similar, when I spot his unused form, because I know I am in big trouble when I get home. To be continued...click here I fix things, particularly things that my Significant Other hands to me and says "Can you fix this?" Usually I can. Don't get the impression that I am some kind of all-purpose handyman, one of those guys that spends every weekend tinkering with his car or pouring concrete or adding new decks. I'm not the type of person who wakes up on Saturday morning and puts a beer in one hand and a set of socket wrenches in the other and spends the next 48 hours happily tinkering with things that are not obviously broken. If you took the word "not" out of the previous sentence and put a period after "hand," it would be a much more accurate description of my personal down time. But if the computer won't boot up or the pipes start leaking or her emails mysteriously disappear from her phone, I am called into action by the woman I love, and I fix whatever it is that has chosen to be broken. The more time I take fixing something, the happier she is. When I spend seven hours and make four trips to the hardware store before I can safely turn the water back on, she is blissfully content. That is the way a man needs to spend Saturday afternoon. When I pop her phone on, look at if for a few seconds, tap the screen a couple times and hand it back to her, saying "It's okay now," she is outraged. "HOW DID YOU DO THAT?" she sputters, and when I try to answer, she ignores me. "It's because you have a penis," she says, and storms off in a feminist rage. This is her theory, that in this world built and dominated by males, every gadget she owns has a secret penis socket, and all a man has to do to fix something whose failure to function has her fulminating in a blind hatred of all things mechanical and electronic is to insert his John-boy into it. That is the only possible explanation in her mind, because she is a brilliant woman with an advanced degree who ought to be able to do anything as well as any man, particularly me. It is important that I leave her alone when she is advancing this theory, because any disagreement on my part reminds her that I am a man, and therefore a small part of the vast male repository of horny evil that makes this world such a bitter place. Saying something like "Well, if you just look at these things, they'll often tell you what is wrong with them," is the opposite of what she wants to hear, which is something like "Samsung, a vast multinational corporation that you would think has no inkling of your existence, deliberately sent you this malfunctioning phone because they don't respect you." When my tinkering fails to fix something, which does happen occasionally, it is my job to call India and ask them for help. This is because when she calls tech support, it only takes her about thirty seconds to conclude that whatever digital giant, Dell or whomever, gave her this tech support number was founded, funded and operated for the last thirty years or so solely so that in her moment of need, they could connect her with a man she cannot understand at all. Sometimes she thinks that the man in India is capable of speaking perfect American English, but does not do so out of sheer willfulness, or else Microsoft or HP or whomever has deliberately hired some illiterate jungle person to man their tech support lines because once you've bought their stuff, they really don't care if you can get it to work or not. No wonder she hangs up and throws the phone against the wall. I try to think better of the Indian guy. I figure he's the sole support of his family, or even of his whole village, plagued by tigers and monsoons, and he has a list of about twenty phrases in front of him, which are the only things he's allowed to say. I test this theory by politely interjecting non-technical observations into our conversation, statements like "I realize you think you are speaking English but in my opinion you are not." "Yes, and thank you very much for calling," he replies. Eventually we figure out what I am doing wrong, and the gadget starts beeping or broadcasting or glowing again. My girl has an explanation for our success. "Two penises are better than one," she says. I don't know how widely she applies this principle. It's better that I don't is what I'm thinking. Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine My special lady likes to read outside in her condo yard. Darkness does not stop her; she merely turns up the wattage on her Kindle. She goes through whole genres of literature at a time. She went through a romantic mystery phase, where black-hearted crime was commingled with mad love on every page. After reading every book in that genre, she switched to novels about world-ending pandemics, which coincided with a sharp rise in the amount of canned food and bottled water in the condo. Often she recommends books to me, then refuses to hand over the Kindle so I can read them. This is one of the reasons we seldom read together. She doesn't read without company, though. Raccoons occasionally climb the fence and peer at her. Skunks perfume the air as they pass unseen. Coyotes roam down from the mountain in yelping packs. She doesn't complain about any of them, but when rats start skittering along the fence posts, I get ordered into action. Last year I bought some regular rat traps, which looked just like mouse traps, only on steroids, and baited them with cheese. This was not because I was trapped in archaic notions of rat appetites, reinforced by cartoon episodes viewed in childhood. We just didn't have anything else I thought would appeal to the rats at hand. We weren't going to give them anything we really wanted to consume, like the vodka or frozen pizza, and the lingering threat of pandemic kept us from opening any of the canned goods. The cheese caught zero rats. I was ordered to move the cheese traps over to our 87 year-old neighbor's yard, on some never fully explained theory that the rodents would be more inclined to sniff the steel springs of death over there. The traps still batted nothing for nothing, but the rats seem to diminish in numbers anyway. I figured it was the unseen hand of the homeowners' association. They had probably called an exterminator. We must have left the rat traps over there, though, because when the rats returned, I couldn't find them. I needed new ones. I went to the hardware store and asked the clerk which of her rat traps were the best. The clerk was not some giggling teenage girl. She was a formidable woman, a mountain of a woman, you might say, or even a mountain woman. She was taller than me by several inches. Her hair was streaked with gray and her eyes gleamed with feral pleasure at my request. She looked like she had trapped many a rat herself, possibly for sustenance. "This one," she said unhesitatingly, pointing at a black plastic contraption lined with teeth. I brought it home and liberated it from its packaging. I approved. The spring was strong and the plastic was professional, industrial murder plastic, just this side of Kevlar. Remembering the cheese error, I scrounged in the cupboards for better bait. I came upon a candy bar and chopped a hunk off of it. My girl discovered me doing this and was not happy. The candy bar had apparently been secreted there for her alone. I had not been expected to discover it, let alone chunk it up for rat bait. The deed had nonetheless been done. I baited the trap carefully, because that is the only way to bait a rat trap, unless you want to make time in your day for a nice trip to Urgent Care, and in the morning I had my rat. He wasn't a particularly big or dangerous-looking specimen, but he proved to my relief that the rat problem had not been hallucinated by the woman I love. I would have had to take steps, then, and the vodka is a lot more sought-after than the candy bars, and tougher to hide. I recycled the rat by throwing in the lawn outside the fence for the coyotes. This seemed the most eco-conscious way of disposing of the corpse. I re-baited the trap with more of the candy bar and waited confidently for more success in my serial rodent murdering career. In the morning the trap was unsprung and the candy was gone. "Oh, you lucky rat," I thought, and baited it again with the last piece of Snickers. That went down some rat's gullet last night, with no rat death as a result. These things are coaching each other, I figure, or else they've raised the rat-spirit of their dead brother from beyond the rat-grave and he's warned them in sepulchral tones of the shaky fulcrum upon which the chunk of chocolate rests. So I've raised my average to .333, respectable in any league, but I'm in a slump. Possibly I've lost my mojo entirely. And I'm out of candy. I'm thinking about buying a BB gun and a pint of moonshine and keeping my girl company tonight. If I don't see any rats, at least I can read over her shoulder. Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine The awards season is drawing to a close, and those few of you concerned with prizes named after guys like Pulitzer and Nobel still have to admit that you were glued to your TV screens over the weekend when Spike TV announced its winners in the Hotness category of its Guys' Choice Awards. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of hotness for women, hotness can be simply defined: it's that quality a woman possesses which makes a guy want to perform the solitary sin while viewing her image. The winners were Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johanssen, Brooklyn Decker andJessica Biel. You can click on each of their names to view the results of an image search for each. I overcame my usual disdain for research in order for you to have access to the facts here. You're welcome. Jessica Biel was awarded The Holy Grail of Hotness. Strangely enough, the three most recent cover girls of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue were also awarded the Holy Grail of Hotness, making at least four Girls of the Grail. The Huffpo article which first drew my attention to the Hotness Awards is followed by 120 comments, most of which sneer at one of the winners at the expense of the others in the true manner of guys who, no matter what their physical qualities, fashion taste, or the months or years of sexual deprivation they have endured, feel entitled to make aesthetic judgments about women who are not going to favor them with anything more than a blank stare in the unlikely event they ever meet. Partisans of women who were left off the Hotness list are crying foul here as well. To them I say, be at peace. Guys are still logging on to images of Jessica Alba and Kate Upton anyway and succumbing to the urge to slap the bishop when they do, despite both these legendary hotties falling short of the top rank on Spike. The advantage of having an Internet argument about women is that you don't even have to pull up your pants before you can start enjoying it. However, it doesn't compare to a live argument in a sports bar or a living room full of empty beverage containers, where a disagreement about which supermodel who will spend her entire life ignoring you is hotter than the next can turn on a dime into an argument about which hockey team has enough Russians on it to be a champion. Guys love to argue. Some are better at it than others, having mastered the three steps of winning any man-to-man argument: 1: Yell. 2: Bully. 3: Accuse your opponent of having a vagina. These men terrorize anyone with more nuanced opinions. Admire their skill. Know that they have spent hours yelling in the mirror. They consume nothing but beer and nachos, the preferred training diet for professional arguers. Those of us who have given up arguing, which is most of us who actually have women, occasionally escape to a bar just to watch the pros in action. A good loudmouth can cow an entire tavern into agreeing that the Oakland Raiders are the finest football team in the land, or that Ginger is actually more desirable than Mary Ann, opinions that few American men really hold, although I for one agree with the Ginger premise. Then we retire home, to that cozy place where being wrong in any controversy means hours of ugly silence followed by abject apology followed by laundry-doing or closet-cleaning-outing or some other penitential chore. And being right is even worse. Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine I have always been an admirer of advice columnists, mostly because I give lousy advice myself. Try me. Explain some awful personal predicament to me. You'll get some flip, impractical answer, like "Tell him you have cancer," or "If I was in your situation I'd emigrate to New Zealand." But advice columnists care. My favorite nowadays is Emily Yoffe, who writes the Dear Prudence column that is syndicated on Slate. It's not so much she gives better advice; it's that the people who write to her have more interesting problems. Just yesterday I was reading Dear Abby, an old school advice columnist, and she was handling a young woman's issue of being married too young and feeling she's missed out on life and her husband's response to her difficulties, which was something on the order of "Get over it and get me a beer while you're at it." Abby suggested she get a hobby or join a church knitting group or some other solution that was so god-awful boring and predictable that numbly fetching beers out of the fridge all day seemed pulse-pounding in comparison. Prudence, on the other hand is considerably edgier. She advises men who are worried that their wives are cheating with their "work husbands." She tells women who find out that their gay best friends were faking heteroness by telling their families they were engaged how to break the news to them that that was not possible. At the GBF's funeral. She advises young, attractive, wanton girls whether or not to provide one-night-stand services to celebrities. But I've never written to her, because the things I worry about are usually mundane, like whether women really mean it when they say they like bald guys better or if nothing is enough to retire on. Now I've found my intractable problem, though, and I'm excited. A little background is in order. My Significant Other recently underwent breast augmentation surgery. This was out of medical necessity, not just mere vanity. My girlfriend is an intelligent, sensitive, progressive woman who teaches at a major university, not some pole-dancing bimbo feeding her compulsion to have random men drawn to her boobies like she has Star Trek-type tractor beams shooting out from them. She's also a California girl, though, and felt a need to look perfect at the beach when she was in her twenties, so she had breast augmentation surgery then. She had modest, tasteful, politically correct breasts installed and lived with them happily for years. However, breast implants must eventually be replaced. And the replacement breasts have to be bigger. How much bigger? As it turns out, they have to be truly bubbalicious. I resigned myself to that fate and now, months after the surgery, the four of us are very happy together. Here's my problem, Prudie—besides sharing them with me, she wants to show them to all her old boyfriends. When she told me this, I responded intelligently and sensitively. I said "Huh? What for?" Her old boyfriends are a sore subject for me, not because I'm particularly jealous of them but because once we get on the subject of them she can go on for hours, filling me in on their quirks and idiosyncrasies in such detail that I feel I know these guys better than any of my old friends. Don't think that this is unfair to me. I'm free to talk about my old girlfriends at length as well, and if I have an overwhelming urge to sleep on the garage floor that night with only an oil-soaked roll of paper towels to keep me warm, I do. We kind of dropped the subject of her going on a flash tour of all her old flames without making any decision on it, but because we have the kind of modern relationship where neither one tells the other what they're allowed to do, or even what we are going to do, when I went away for a couple of days, she just did it. And told me about it. And was rather crestfallen. "What happened?' I asked. "They wouldn't look," she said. What a bunch of weenies. They don't deserve her. I would have looked. So I guess we're okay here, Prudie. Catch you next time. |
THE BIG NEWS!
PINEAPPLE CRUSH, my second hard-boiled mystery novel, has been released as of October 12th, 2017 by Black Rose Writing. You can order here and on Amazon To read Chapter One, click here
FOLLOWED GLOBALLY BY LITERALLY DOZENS OF READERS!
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