Category Life’s Questions

I Wish I May…

Michael 4 Comments

You’ve seen them. Perhaps a newspaper feature article on a local 100 year old, or a minor celebrity suddenly experiencing the harder side of life after having been diagnosed with an incurable (or even a curable) disease, or maybe even an ad for a home care agency home hospice program. What is it that that you’ve seen or heard or read? That earnest looking and sounding unfortunate soul baring his or her life to the camera, reporter, microphone, or ad agency saying “my one last wish, my most hopeful dream, the one thing I’m most looking forward to, is dying in my own bed. It’s what keeps me going.” Well I’ll tell you right now, if you ever hear me utter such nonsense just shoot me where I stand. Unless I’m standing in my own home, then take me across the street or at least out back first.

How bad does your life have to be that the only thing you’re looking forward to, the one thing you want most out of that life, your biggest dream for yourself, is to be dead. Yes, when you die in your own home you end up dead. Something we all realize we will someday be but something most people would not aspire to, brain-addled suicide bombers notwithstanding.

I don’t know what I want most out of my life. I know what I want out of my life most but those aren’t the same thing. My biggest dream probably depends on what’s annoying me most on a particular day. Too many therapists, too many phone calls, and way behind on sweepstakes entries – I dream of the solitude of an uninhabited (except for me, select guest(s), and a killer bartender) island. Too many healthy meals too many days in a row – pizza from a pizza shop known for as many toppings (please, pineapple is not a pizza topping under any circumstance) as one can humanly get to stay on a pizza crust.

20190713_171826_resized

Not only does “die in my own bed” sound way too dramatic for the average Jo or Joe, it’s quite unfair to those who share that home or are expecting to have it on the real estate market next week. Dying in life (I’m not sure how else to phrase that) isn’t like dying in the movies. Most people don’t smile, say goodbye to the assembled group of friends and family, then nod off just as the last relative passes by. There are noises, smells, and often a lot of movement before and after the fact. There’s cleaning up to do and people to call like in the absence of home hospice, 911. I’d rather have understaffed nursing personnel handle the dirty details or more frankly the cleaning detail, than a loved family member. Of course if you are really annoyed at your family that day, well, who am I to judge?

If someone was to put a gun to my head and say I must come up with my one greatest wish or I’d get it right there I’d probably say to live at least one more day. It seems so much more wish worthy. I wonder if under the same circumstances those with that burning desire to die in their own beds would as calmly as they could, tell the gunman, “So, can you drive me home first?”

Stop, Thief!

Michael 6 Comments

I bought a book to read and when I read a book I start at the beginning. The very beginning. Prefaces, forwards, introductions acknowledgements, dedications. I also don’t finish until I get to the end if there should be an afterward. (After words?) If is written I will read it.

This particular book I bought, and after reading the forward I’m so glad I did. I say again, and will stress, I bought this book. With money. American made money in an American book store. Yes there are some bookstores left and I still frequent and patronize them.

I’m not in the habit of stealing books. At least I didn’t think so. Apparently this particular author thought differently. In his preface, his 22 page preface, he says, “what happens in libraries in the U.S. is a theft of services on the same scale as the enslavement of blacks.” A strong sentiment that. It was said, er printed, in reference to authors receiving a single royalty for each book bought by a library though lent to “everybody with a library card … twenty-six times in one year, fifty-two times in two years.” Personally I’m glad he expanded that thought just in case my ability to master multiplication failed me at that critical moment.

LibraryIs borrowing a book from a library stealing? I hadn’t thought about it. If it is I am guilty of it hundreds of times over. Of course many of those times were the first time I had read a particular author and it was that exposure that led me to buy hard or electronic copies of his or her other works. But theft of the first book is still theft I suppose. To that unnamed author I apologize and repent. I suppose I can send him a few bucks in restitution although I don’t recall ever borrowing one of his books from the library. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw one of his books in the library but that’s a different story.

He can use those dollars to pay for the paper he probably read at the diner, the magazine he perused at the doctor’s office, the cable fee for the game recap he watched at the barbershop, or the medical advice he asked me for at last year’s Fourth of July picnic. Ok, it wasn’t last year but that really did make a nice flow, don’t you think?

I suppose he was right in his criticism of the lending library system and he has the right to voice said criticism. And what better way. Really. In a book that somebody might have gotten out of library. That will teach them for sure. If they bothered to read the preface.

I have the right to be insulted by his criticism and to express my dismay at being insulted. I bought that book. At full retail. And waded through it even after I was so insulted 17 pages into it. I could have shown him and not finished the book (or even the preface since I still had 5 pages of that to get through) but to be honest I already paid for the book and he surely spent the royalty so why not get my money’s worth out of it.

Now if I can just figure out a way to get my money’s worth out of it.

 

…making all his nowhere plans…

Michael 4 Comments

Recently a friend asked me what I think of when I go to bed. An odd question not quite in the same category as what’s your sign and certainly more thought provoking than what’s your favorite color.

Since I go to bed alone I most often think alone thoughts. You know, “sigh, another night alone.” Now alone isn’t necessarily alone in bed. I much more often think of being alone as being the only one in the apartment than of being the only one in the bed. Of course it’s nice to have somebody care so much that they share their whole body with you but it’s nicer when somebody shares their whole person. But that’s the philosophical me. It took a while to learn that and I’m ok with it even if the bodily me would like to feel another body next to it sometimes. But I think not having someone in the same house is a more profound kind of alone.

They say there’s a big difference between being alone and being lonely. I’m pretty sure those people were never really alone for any length of time. You can talk to someone every day, you can see people during all the waking hours, you can have someone nearby, but those will never take the place of sharing space. When you go through days of going to bed at night never having another person to check in on, never having someone to say goodnight to, knowing if something happened nobody is there to say “it’s going to be ok,” that’s being alone. And if you don’t think that’s also being lonely, you haven’t not had someone to say goodnight to on a regular basis.

I can’t imagine anybody who lives alone who hasn’t thought about what happens if something happens. Is that just part of being alone? Or lonely?

Oh well.

Dogs can’t read MRI’s…

Michael 7 Comments

..but catscan!

Ok, that has nothing to do with today’s post but I couldn’t come up with a post where it would have relevance and I really wanted to use it.

But then again maybe it does go with today’s post because today’s post really doesn’t go with anything else. It’s a sort of “things I think I think” bunch of things that I think I thought this week.

  • I was at a book store, a real book store with real books and all, and there was a display of cookbooks. I always like cookbooks so I went over and the first one I picked up was a paleo cookbook and the first thing I thought was the same thing I thought every time I see a paleo cookbook. How do they know?
  • I saw a post come across my Facebook time line (and I wondered who came up with that name, but I always think that) that said dogs and cats can see apparitions. And I thought things not unlike when I think of paleo cookbooks. How do they know?
  • Why do cable companies advertise specials for “new subscribers only” on exclusive subscriber only channels?
  • Why are chilies hot but hotties are far from cold? (Originally I was going to use “Why are chilies hot?” as today’s title.) (In case you were wondering.)
  • How can 17 bad guys empty all of their machine guns and the hero doesn’t even get wounded while he hides behind a telephone pole yet he manages to never miss a shot with his little pistol? And how do they even write that up in the screenplay direction notes? “Bad guys shoot poorly?”
  • Can it still be called “breaking news” if it happened yesterday?
  • What’s the other half of a semiprecious stone?
  • Why is the opposite of “pro” con, anti, and amateur?

Will this never end?

 

 

 

Fire Sale

Michael 24 Comments

If your house was on fire and you could carry one thing out of it with you, what would it be? A question like that has been asked for ages. In philosophy classes, on psych papers, over drinks at happy hour, in bible groups, at marriage counseling. It should be getting easier to answer. Or maybe not.

When asked the question, in public the answers all sound very altruistic. My baby. My pet. The picture of my long dead parents, long suffering spouse, long loved child. In private we’d probably say, grab the tablet, CD, or memory stick with all our family financial info and maybe the one with pictures too if possible, or the purse or wallet with driver’s license and the credit cards because who wants that replacement hassle right after the house burns down. No! Get the phone!

I really was thinking about this recently. If I could save just one thing, what one thing would I want above all that I may risk my life to get?

My grandparents might have had a really hard time answering. Both trunks of my family tree started their branches in this country during World War I. Although not yet the depression Era as far as the United States was concerned, the European bank scare of 1914 had a dramatic effect on the Italian economy and its people. When they emigrated they took their distrust for banks with them. If it was of value, it was in the house. A fire would be devastating to the future of the family unless all of the children, 12 on my mother’s side, were old enough, big enough, and strong enough to each bring at least one item with no room for sentiment.

By the time my parents were contributing boomed babies to the landscape, the American economy was on an upswing and even middle class families had nest eggs that could be proudly secured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Up to $10,000 per depositor at the time. Like now though, nobody but the very rich had $10,000 nest eggs. But they still didn’t trust everything to the banks. Safety deposit boxes were for rich people. Personal treasures and savings bonds purchased almost painlessly through the Payroll Savings Plan were secreted in a strong box, itself cached away at the back of a linen drawer, the bottom of a cedar chest or top shelf of a closet, or among the pantry items in the newfangled built-in kitchen cabinets. In case of evacuation, a responsible adult, probably the dad, was in charge of collecting the canned collectibles, while another adult of authority went after more sentimental treasures.

My generation was the tween of generations. Everything from the first half of my life is on paper, the last 2 or 3 decades could and does fit easily on a flash drive. I have a strong box but other than my passport almost nothing in there is irreplaceable. Almost nothing else in there is probably worth trying to replace. If I was running from a fire I have to pleasure of knowing that I could grab all the sentimental items like the picture album filled with a record of the daughter’s formative years and perhaps a cherished bobble head.

But wait! I should go get that passport. I doubt I’ll be doing much travelling in the future but just in case I win one of those crazy on line raffles for an all-expense paid trip to Iceland, I’d hate to have to decline because I’m waiting on replacement documents proving who I am and what I look like. So that settles it, pictures, passport, and a cherished bobble head.

My essentials

My essentials

Oh no. But wait again (he says somberly). Forget the albums. Forget the bobble head. Forget the passport. (I’m going to have to find a more readily reachable place for that.) I forgot even more essential, if not sentimental items that I have to have. I have them with me all the time so I sometimes don’t consider that I actually have to carry them for them to be with me all the time. One is my cane. I can walk without it. For about 20 or 30 yards. About 50 to 100 feet depending on the day. That might get me as far as across the street from the theoretical blaze, but unless I’m planning on camping there forever, or unless I want to live the rest of my life 100 feet at a time, I better grab the cane.

That still leaves one hand free. Why not snag that cherished bobble head? Well…this a little personal. So much so that I don’t even tell people what’s in the bag I always have if someone who even suspects that it’s anything other than just a small day bag should ask. It’s a small bag but it’s huge in what it means to me.

You might recall from two posts ago that I am pretty much running on spare parts and that some of those parts actually are performing functions they were not originally designed to. And they require some help. That ever present bag carries the external pieces my spare-parted body needs to perform some otherwise routine internal functions. Yeah, that’s more than a little cryptic, but let’s say I can’t go but about 6 hours without it.

So. Two hands. Two things I sort of need more than pictures, bobble heads, or even passport. It looks like for me, like it was a couple of generations ago, there’s no room for sentiment.

Now I’m curious. What would you carry out?

 

Take my keys, please

Michael 2 Comments

Recently I was watching an old episode of Mike and Molly where they test drive a Rolls Royce. Because they could. It got me thinking, had I ever test drove something I had no intention of buying just because I wanted to drive it? And because I could? And I think TestDrivethe answer is yes. Yeah, I said I think. I’m old. I’ve driven a lot of cars over the years. Some I didn’t buy but I’m not sure if some I never intended to. Let me think on that for a while.

While I am thinking on that, how about you? Did you ever go into a dealership and say “I’d like to try out that Ferrari. Pay no attention to the holes in my jeans. They’re fashionable and I’m eccentric.” Or maybe not a car. Did you ever try to get your way onto a boat where you knew you didn’t belong? Sneak into first class with a standby coach ticket? Have you ever bought a really large screen TV for a game or movie or can’t miss TV wedding and returned it the day after? Or what about trying on something just to see what it felt like – a Patek Phillipe watch, a Burberry coat, Christian Louboutin shoes (um, women only please on that last one)?

Have we gotten to that point of entitlement or was the Mike and Molly episode just a comedic premise? Perhaps I’m overthinking this. Maybe it’s no worse to take the chance to drive a $300,000 car or wear a $100,000 watch than to move to the lower seats after the 8th inning as people leave the game to beat the traffic.

While you were thinking about all that I went back through the memory banks in search of disingenuous test drive recollections. And I do recall once being behind the wheel of a 25th Anniversary Corvette that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t buy but I don’t think I went in with the intention of not intending to. But even if I did I can balance that out with the time I drove a 1963 Corvette with the intention of buying but didn’t.

In that same vein, I’ve never rented a TV for the Super Bowl (that’s a cliché, if anything I would have rented it for the Stanley Cup Playoffs but that’s stretched over weeks), I don’t wear watches, I’ve never even seen first class, and I can’t wear heels.

 

It Just Happened

Michael Leave a comment

You wouldn’t think Dr. Seuss would come up when a 60 year old is looking back on the year almost gone by. Being just out of the hospital for but a few days I actually haven’t gotten all the way home yet. Since I live alone and am still a little while away from taking care of myself with a greater chance that I end a day in the emergency room rather than the bedroom, my sisters have opened their house to me so I can be pampered in the style an only son should be pampered…even at 60. But I digress. I think.

I was sitting alone in a corner pondering how I got to this place in space and time while the younger of the two siblings, the one still working the poor dear, was modeling the many holiday themed hats she was planning on bringing to work with her on the next day. You know the kind you see this time of year. The baseball hat with antlers that reads “Oh Deer,” or the one decked out in gingerbread cookies saying “Oh Snap!” As she dug deeper into her bag of headwear I got a greater memory sense of a story about a boy with a never-ending collection of hats.

It didn’t take too much more reflection that I recalled the hats indeed did end. The young man was Bartholomew Cubbins and the tale was Dr. Seuss’s “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.” If you don’t remember it, it is the story of a young boy who cannot bare his head to the king. Every time he removes a hat another appears in its place. Finally at the 500th reveal he doffs the yet finest example and presents the highly decorated hat to the king and is rewarded with a bag of gold.

So, how do we get from a child’s story from the 1930s to my consideration of all that happened to me this year? The last line of the story tells the tale. Though they could never explain how it happened, “They could only say is just ‘happened to happen’ and was not very likely to happen again.”

And isn’t that really the tale we are all told?

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

The Meaning of Life – No, I’m Not Kidding!

Michael Leave a comment

Some day I have to figure out how my mind works. Not my brain. I have that figure out. Seven years of school better have taught me something. No, what I can’t figure out is how my mind works. That unfathomable piece of consciousness that works on its own stream and might or might not let us in.

Monday I woke up with a sore back. Check that. I woke up with a back that hurt like all the gods on Olympus and in the Coliseum (or wherever the Roman gods lived) were mad at it. I called my doctor; he worked me into his schedule, poked, prodded, and ordered some x-rays and gave me some muscle relaxers. Monday night I took some muscle relaxers and Tuesday woke up and did my normal morning stuff, sore but not in outright pain. Tuesday night I took more muscle relaxers and Wednesday woke up even less sore and certain I wasted my doctor’s time on Monday. Wednesday afternoon he called and told me I have three compression fractures in my spine. All of a sudden I can’t sit still I’m in such pain.

Normally I walk with a cane. I’m not too weak to walk but if I don’t use some support I wobble. In fact, without it I look for all the world like I’ve had one bourbon too many. (Yes, I used to also believe that was a contradiction in terms but you really can have one too many. Try not to spread it around.) Every morning I walk a couple of miles and if it’s not raining I go to the pool for an hour or so. To get to my pool I go out the door, through the breezeway, across the courtyard and up a flight of stairs. Since the stairs have a railing and to get to them is a short walk I usually leave my cane behind. Yesterday, before I found out that my back is living on borrowed time, on the way in from the pool I detoured down the front walk to the mailbox. The mailman was just dropping off the day’s haul but he hung around long enough to comment that it looked a little early to be “hitting it” (aka “the bottle”). I immediately felt bad to be out in public like that. It was only after he was pulling away for the next mailbox that I realized how little I had to be feeling foolish of.

Why do we put so much stock into what others say? Nothing changed in my back between Tuesday and Wednesday other than the doctor confirming what other doctors had already told me several years ago. I hadn’t removed the cap from the Marker’s Mark for a couple of weeks when I fortified the glaze for a steak I put on the grill. Yet I was willing to change how I felt, indeed how I was, based on what others – one supposedly learned and one supposedly a federal employee – had to say. (How many people work for the federal government? About half of them.) (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Quite some time ago I found this, printed it, framed, it and took it to heart. Since then I’ve Lifechanged. I got an incurable condition. I got cancer. I beat cancer. I still have an incurable condition. Through it all I see this every morning. I have to. It’s on the wall above my toilet tank. It’s a great place for a bit of inspiration. At first I misinterpreted it to mean that if we want to live life to its fullest we have to physically beat the odds. We have to literally skid in sideways. Not so! As long as we don’t give in we won’t give up. I sort of like that expression. Maybe I’ll hang that on the wall too.

As long as you don’t give in, you won’t give up.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention
of arriving in an attractive and well preserved body,
but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other,
thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming
“Woo hoo, what a ride!”

Call It What You Will

Michael Leave a comment

I read an article in the paper last week that would have made go “Hmm” had I not been struck speechless, or even hmmless. The U. S. Department of Justice will no longer refer to people who have completed sentencing and released from prison as a “felon” or “convict.” Instead the terms “person who committed a crime” or “individual who was incarcerated.” will be used. The announcement included the comment that the newly forbidden words are disparaging. Hmm, we are talking about convicted felons – I’m sorry, I mean we are talking about people who committed crimes, aren’t we?

I have to expand my daily reading to include papers from around the world. I see the headlines and whatever American editors determine are newsworthy enough for U.S. media to re-report, but what might I be missing. Is the appellation of formerly incarcerated individuals high on justice departments’ priority lists worldwide?

If it catches on it will be the biggest “they said” since “they said” someone is a person of interest when the police want to talk to said someone about a crime and that it has nothing to do with being interested in someone. This person is not to be confused with a suspect whom police would want to talk to about a crime or a material witness who is presumed to have information about a crime. It seems that one shouldn’t call a suspect a suspect until all suspicion is removed in the favor of certainty less the person of interest is disparaged in the event some doubt remains.

It all reminds me of another article I saw a while ago about some organization now using the term “companion” rather than “mistress” when referring to a prominent person’s person of interest.  Now that would be disparaging. Not being a companion, nor even a mistress. Being said to hang around with someone who passes for prominent. Now that may be most disparaging.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

When Did…

Michael Leave a comment

I seemed to have missed it again. In my youth, when we would cook dinner on the grill outside and eat at the old wood table off paper plates with the wind blowing napkins and cups, it was called a cook-out. Usually it was on a Sunday in the summer and something was put over charcoal but most of the food came from the kitchen like any other Sunday and it was still a cook-out.  I haven’t heard that phrase for years. Those under 30 years old or so may not even recognize it. We don’t have cook-outs today. Today we grill. One day we are having a cook-out, the next we are grilling. I completely missed that transition.

Well, as I started out, I seemed to have missed it again. When did emoticons become emoji? (I’m still not sure if that is a singular as in one emoji, the plural of more than a singular emojum, or both like fish or deer.) To be perfectly honest, I’m not certain that I can even point to when emoticons became emoticons and not just “those little smiley thingies.” And who came up with them? And how? Let’s face it, it’s not natural to be typing along and all of a sudden decide to turn your “page” 90 degrees and plop in a couple of symbols you can only tell what they are if your head is on sideways. Or if you’re that guy on Law and Order who is always checking out the evidence that nobody else has noticed with his head at that weird angle.

I thought it was perfectly clever when somebody decided that one could approximate a smiley face with a colon and a right parenthesis (parentheses?) (One of them is right, err correct, in that it’s only one of them but I don’t know which. If you do, feel free to fix it if it so needs fixed.) From there it was a quick step to frownie faces, kissing faces, grinning faces, hearts, flowers, and any number of things to personalize an otherwise impersonal e-mail or (shudder) instant message. There are even translators available so you can pick the perfect accompaniment to your formerly plain text.

Today, those cute little combinations of all those symbols we rarely use have morphed into miniature signage that rivals international travel iconography. Personally, I miss the old-fashion smiley face, but what would you expect from an old fogey like me.  If you’ll excuse me, I have a cook-out to plan for dinner. I know I have some hot dogs in the fridge somewhere.  🙂

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?