David Bowie, Glenn Frey, and Me

The past month has been a rough one for us music fans, with the deaths of some major musical figures.  R & B singer Natalie Cole, hard rocker Lemmy Kilmeister, singer David Bowie and, most recently, Glenn Frey, founder of the legendary rock group the Eagles are the biggest names among those who have recently passed away, but there have also been a number of deaths among lesser known members of popular bands, studio musicians, producers and other industry notables.  Music has been an integral part of my life since I was very young, so when artists who have been on my radar screen for a long time suddenly pass away, it is la kind of loss, like that of an old friend or acquaintance, depending on who it is. 

I can’t honestly account for myself as a true fan of either Natalie Cole or Lemmy Kilmeister’s band Motorhead.  While I respect their work, Cole’s soulful crooning and Kilmeister’s aggressive, grinding hard rock fell just beyond the furthest ends of my musical taste spectrum.  Nevertheless, when I heard of their deaths, it felt like someone had snipped away pieces from a beautiful but increasingly tattered tapestry, one that has always been a part of my life and that I too often take for granted.  I didn’t listen to Natalie Cole or Motorhead very often, but I liked the idea that they were out there making music that people enjoyed and was sadden to hear that they were now silenced.  With the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey however, it wasn’t just pieces of the tapestry snipped away.  Some new large holes were added, alongside those created for me by the deaths of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain, George Harrison, and Michael Jackson, among others.  They had put forth great music that had been a tangible part of my life, and they were still active in their careers when they died.  They weren’t done yet.  There was still more to come from them that we will now never get to hear.  I felt real loss.

There was a lot of coverage of the deaths of both David Bowie and Glenn Frey in the media, and an outpouring of reactions in social media.  The men were alike in some ways and very different in others.  Both of them came onto the music scene in the early 70s, both did some acting work in addition to music, and both gradually faded from regular public attention by the coming of the 21^st century.  And at the end of their careers, both men were still actively making music.  Yet Bowie was mostly considered an eclectic musical artist who had experienced occasional mainstream acceptance. His focus had always been on the art of music.  Frey, on the other hand, was very much a straightforward rock musician and businessman, who only stepped out of the mainstream to explore new ground on rare occasions.  The artistic side of music was not unimportant to Frey, but he was always very candid in admitting that it had to pay the bills too.  Regardless of the driving forces behind each of them, the end products that each gave us, their music, was truly great.  It was fascinating and touching following the reactions to both of their deaths, and it taught me some things about the part music plays in our lives.

Before the release of 1983’s Let’s Dance album, I wasn’t very familiar with David Bowie’s work at all.  I’d seen some of his albums at the store, but out of context they didn’t make much of an impact on me.  MTV hadn’t come to rural Maine yet at that point, and the only radio stations that played pop and/or rock in my conservative corner of the world kept their playlists firmly grounded in the most widely-acceptable hits.  Other than the rare “Young Americans” or “Heroes”, David Bowie wasn’t on the radio much in northern Maine in the early 80s.  That was about to change in 1983.  Let’s Dance was Bowie’s headlong dive into the new wave pop that was dominating the international airwaves at that time, and the album was a gigantic commercial success, due in large part to new fans like me who now had access to Bowie on mainstream radio.  

I remember hearing the title track to Let’s Dance for the first time late on a hot July night in 1983.  It was the night before my family was to go away on our annual two-week summer vacation to the Maine coast, and I was as excited as I would have been the night before Christmas.  Add to that the fact that it was a swelteringly hot night and it was a recipe for insomnia.  Sometime after midnight, I gave up tossing and turning, and sat on my bedroom windowsill in hopes of getting some cool air. I plugged my earpiece into my little FM radio (so as not to disturb my blissfully sleeping brother with whom I shared a room) and tuned in the local rock station.  The soundtrack of a small town Friday night’s squealing tires and chirping crickets played in one ear and the tinny sounds of rock and roll from a transistor radio in the other while I stared out at the moon over the houses of my neighborhood.  Before long, the DJ came on and introduced a new song by British singer David Bowie.  British acts were flooding the American music scene in 1983, and I was getting into a lot of it, so my interest was piqued.  The song was “Let’s Dance”, and it really hooked me on the first play.  Bowie’s vocals were mesmerizing, and the heavy drums and bluesy guitar solo captured my heart.  “Let’s Dance” became one of my favorite songs of that summer, and I ended up buying the album not long after that. Over time, I came to appreciate the full scope of David Bowie’s career, but to this day, Let’s Dance is my favorite Bowie album, though it is also the one at which many of the biggest Bowie fans turn their noses up.  Among many Bowie ‘purists’, Let’s Dance was just tolerable at best, and a sell-out at the very worst.  To me, it was, and is, terrific.  I was into his next two mid-80s albums too, Tonight and Never Let Me Down before Bowie’s new releases stopped gaining my attention.

Glenn Frey and the Eagles go back even further with me, literally to my earliest music memories.  My parents always had the radio on around my house when I was young, so I was exposed to a lot of music, albeit mostly just the biggest hits that made it onto the local radio scene.  The Eagles were very popular on the stations they listened to, likely because the band had a country-edge to them that gave them some crossover appeal, especially in my part of the state where country music was king.  I knew all the words to “Hotel California” before I was ten years old, and songs like “Take It Easy”, “One of These Nights” and “Already Gone” feel like they are encoded in my DNA.  The Eagles have always been there in the background of my life for as long as I could remember.  Not only was the band popular in my home, but my closest peers liked them too.  One of my favorite teenage memories is of riding around town with my buddies in my friend Jared’s battered red Volkswagen Beetle, all the windows down and the Eagles’ “Already Gone” blasting from the stereo.  Over time, I literally wore out my vinyl copies of both Eagles greatest hits albums, as well as my cassettes of Hotel California and Eagles Live.  I’ve never done that with any other records or cassettes, and I have owned a lot of them. 

I was an avid follower of the solo careers of the Eagles members through the 80s after the band broke up, especially Glenn Frey and Don Henley, and have carried my love of all things Eagles well into adulthood.  Needless to say, I was overjoyed when “Hell froze over” (as the band members had said it would have to) and the band reunited in the mid-1990s, and one of my regrets is that I never got to see them perform live.  My tastes have shifted over time, and my favorite Eagles songs don’t tend to be the biggest hits anymore.  I am more intrigued by the relatively-obscure album cuts that didn’t often get my attention in the past.  My current favorites are “After The Thrill Is Gone”, a Frey/Henley duet from the One Of These Nights album and “Waiting in the Weeds” from 2007’s Long Road Out Of Eden.  All those great songs, including those amazing and unmistakable Eagles harmonies that have been running through my head since I was a preschooler, would not have come to be without Glenn Frey.

My favorite part of the David Bowie catalogue, the Let’s Dance/Tonight/Never Let Me Down period of the mid-80s is one about which few others I’ve interacted with on the subject wax nostalgic. I got a lot of “Oh yeah, but what about the Ziggy Stardust era?”  I don’t dislike his earlier or later work, it’s just that the mid-80s were an especially memorable time in my life: first girlfriend, first real job, getting my driver’s license.  Music, then as now, was a major part of my life, and I am particularly fond of the songs that formed my own soundtrack to those times, which in turn gives a huge boost in my heart to that particular stretch of David Bowie’s career.  I first go to know David Bowie in the mid-80s.  That’s the David Bowie that means the most to me.

The Eagles, on the other hand, seem to be a band that people either love or hate.  They gotten massive amounts of airplay over the years, and their songs may have worn thin with some people.  They also developed a reputation for being arrogant, for being somewhat derivative at times, and for being too focused on profit, all of which has worked against them with some listeners.  Jeff Bridges’ character “The Dude” famously gave voice to this in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski when he is stuck in a taxi while “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” is playing on the radio.  “I hate the f—in' Eagles man,” he said to the cab driver, just before he was thrown out of the car.  Personally, I would have thrown him out of the car too.  I love the Eagles.  Their music has always been there, either in the background or foreground of my life, ever since I can remember.  The fact that people important to me like my parents and my high school buddies were also Eagles fans cemented their place for me.  Of course they weren’t a perfect band, but for me they are almost like family, and how many of us have a full set of perfect relatives?  The positive associations I have made with their music for over forty years far outweighs the negatives.  When Glenn Frey’s voice comes out of my speakers singing “Heartache Tonight”, I’m back to being 11 years old, waiting for that song to come on the radio so I can catch it on my tape recorder. You can’t put a price on something like that.

The passings of David Bowie and Glenn Frey have underscored for me the idea that, like most art forms, there really isn’t much about music that is absolutely “right” or “wrong”.  You might say that there are no bad songs, just missed connections.  I’ve come to believe that a lot has to do with the associations we have with music and the people who perform it.  If there is a connection between some music and something positive for you, then there is a greater likelihood you are going to have positive feelings about that music, regardless if it is something widely considered “a classic”.  If the first dance you had with the love of your life was to “Purple People Eater”, then I think there’s a good chance that even that song could one of your favorites.  And as far as today’s music being “crap”, as many in my generation and older like to say, well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.  Around the time I turned 30, most new music just wasn’t reaching my heart anymore.  But if kids today are making their own lifelong memories to a soundtrack of today’s popular songs the way I did to the music of David Bowie and the Eagles, among many others, then who am I to say their music isn’t just as good?

Camping Maine's State Parks: A Series

A sunset view I took from Mount Blue State Park in Weld, Maine.

With the changing of the leaves and the occasional morning frosts, it’s safe to say that summer is over here in northern Maine. With it comes the end of tent camping season for me. This past summer was somewhat stressful for me personally, for reason I won’t go into here, but the frequent camping trips I took to various parts of Maine helped me keep my spirits healthy. Camping is a relatively new pastime for me, having only just gotten into doing it over the past four years or so, but in that time I have pinpointed some favorite spots to camp. Among those favorites are Maine’s many state parks.

The first of the Maine state parks I camped at was Cobscook Bay State Park in Edmunds, near Calais, back in 2012. Since then, I have camped at least once in seven others, making it a point to explore new ones with camping facilities if I get a chance during the season. As a way to relive some of the pleasant summer memories, and also to resurrect this blog, which I have been seriously neglecting for some time, I’ve decided to write a series of posts highlighting the state parks I have visited over the past few years, starting with Cobscook Bay. In the weeks to come, I will also be writing about Lamoine State Park in Lamoine, Camden Hills State Park in Camden, Bradbury Mountain State Park in Pownal, Sebago Lake State Park in Naples, Lake St. George State Park in Liberty, Mount Blue State Park in Weld, and Peaks-Kenny State Park in Dover Foxcroft.

A post with my take on Cobscook Bay will be coming soon. (Spoiler alert: I am a huge Cobscook fan.) If you have any experience camping or just visiting at any of the parks I’ve mentioned and would like to share it, I’d welcome your input. My e-mail address is chriscolter@icloud.com. Please include the words “state park” in your subject line, because that account gets rather spammy sometimes.

Losing It

There are few things that dig at me more than when I misplace something.  When an item turns up missing, whether it be large or small, I simply cannot rest easy until I find it. Unfortunately, I have always had an absent-minded professor kind of brain, where my thoughts can be so occupied with some other issue that I can set something down and walk away from it without even noticing.  It’s not something that has come with age either.  I’ve been absentmindedly setting things down and forgetting them since I was a kid.  Of course age hasn’t made it any better.

My favorite things to lose are coffee mugs.  Every place I have worked, I have unintentionally left half-full mugs of coffee in various locations like some kind of cross between the Easter Bunny and Juan Valdez.  If I was lucky, I’d notice its absence in fairly short order and locate it while the coffee was still drinkable, or someone I worked with would return it to me.  There have been a few occasions where I’ve set a coffee mug down in an obscure location like a storage closet, and it goes unfound for weeks or even months.  

In case you were wondering, coffee can become a solid if given enough time. A nasty, blue-green solid.

Another common item for me to lose is, disconcertingly,  paychecks.  For most of my working life, I have been able to have my paychecks deposited directly into my bank accounts.  I haven’t had that option with my current place of work.  Over the years I have been working there, I have lost at least three paychecks.  Thankfully, our accountant is a kind and forgiving soul (not to mention endlessly patient) and has been willing to issue me a new one in each case.  Typically, I cram it into my pocket when I get it, and take it out as soon as I get home, where it safely stays in a secure spot until I am able to take it to the bank for deposit.  On all three occasions when I’ve lost a paycheck, I have literally torn apart my home, my car and my workplace looking for it.  I’ve also scoured my garage, yard, and the parking lot at work in my searches.  Having sent paper through the laundry process on numerous occasions, I know that I didn’t leave it in my pocket and destroy it in the wash, since the evidence left behind when I’ve laundered paper in the past has always been pretty clear.

Oddly enough, no trace of those three missing paychecks has ever turned up.  No one has tried to cash them, and they haven’t been found underneath a piece or furniture or under a melting snowbank.  It’s like there is some kind of Bermuda Triangle designated especially for my paychecks.

My most recent tragic loss, and the one that inspired this post, was the tiny little USB plug that goes with my wireless mouse.  I have a corded mouse that I use when I am on my laptop computer in bed, and a wireless one that I use when the laptop is downstairs in its usual place.  Last night, I briefly needed to use one of the USB ports for something else, and since I was in bed at the time, I took out the USB plug for my wireless mouse, which I was not using at the time, and (I thought) set it down on the bed next to me.  One thing lead to another, and before long I forgot all about the tiny USB plug I had set aside.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t miss it until the next morning, when I got up for my coffee and internet news fix.  My wireless mouse was not working, and the USB plug was nowhere to be found.

I immediately knew what had happened to it, but when I went upstairs to look around, I couldn’t find it.  Knowing better than to tackle a full search prior to having had coffee, I grabbed the corded mouse and went back to my caffeine and news.  I didn’t enjoy it though.  While I could very easily replace my wireless mouse, the principle of the thing bothered me.  That USB plug was somewhere. I just had to find it.  And no, I couldn’t wait until later to do it.  So I tore that room apart.  Bedding, mattress, box spring, hamper full of laundry, overloaded desk, everything was overturned.  All the books and whatnots I shoved underneath the bed came out.  Finally, after making a holy old mess, I found it.  It was right where I typically put it when I need to use a USB port, on a shelf next to my iPod and various earbuds.  I remembered taking it out of the port last night, but didn’t remember putting it in its usual place last night, so I didn’t bother to check there until last, for some reason.

Yes, I am kind of a dope, actually.

There’s a delicious irony in this post, which I promise you I am not making up.  Before I started writing this, I went back over previous posts, because I could have sworn that I had previously written one on this topic of my habit of losing things.  Even the title of this post “Losing It”, seemed like one I had used already.  So I looked back over nearly three years of posts.

Guess what?  I couldn’t find it.

The Annual Winter Whine Post

The winter season trudges on unabated here in Maine, despite the fact that the calendar flipped over to March not long ago.  Our friendly local meteorologist tells me that today’s high temperature is going to be 12 degrees.  12 degrees fahrenheit, not celsius.  That’s cold for this time of year, even by Maine standards.  There’s at least a little comfort in knowing that a good chunk of the North American continent is experiencing a harsh winter as well. There are few things left that we all go through together in today’s culture, but the weather is one of them.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve either uttered or heard “I’m sick of the cold” and “I’m sick of the snow” lately, I could probably settle the national debt.  While freezing temperatures and snow are the most common subjects of complaint, I’d like to offer a list of ten less-often-heard but equally valid concerns about winter, as my annual “winter whine” blog post.  (See here and here for past examples of winter whines.)

10. I’m sick of those buildups of slush in the wheel wells of my vehicle.  If they freeze solid, they can seriously damage your tire by rubbing against them, not to mention cause you to break a toe if you give it a good kick to remove it.

9. I’m sick of taking the garbage out in the cold.  Taking out the trash is an odious task under the best of conditions.  Having to do it when the snot in your nose is freezing every time you inhale just adds insult to injury.

8. I’m sick of getting more heating fuel.  Lugging in another ton of wood pellets or another cord of wood in mid to late winter because you are running low is no picnic.  Writing a large check for another tank of heating oil you didn’t budget for isn’t either. 

7. I’m sick of changing from shoes to boots to shoes.  While boots are great at helping one’s feet stay warm and dry, they tend to go on hard and come off even harder.  I’ve fallen on my keister several times this winter already doing the footwear changing dance when coming in or going out the door.  With small puddles from the snow melting off your boots, you don’t want your socks to touch the floor, after all.

6. I’m sick of being snow-blind. Yes, I am actually complaining about the sunshine here.  Don’t underestimate my whining skills.  The sun reflecting off the snow almost has the same effect as an allergy on my sensitive eyes: watering, sneezing, squinting, headaches.  Sunglasses help, but spring helps more.  Less white, more green!

5. I’m sick of these crazy cats with their cabin fever.  I am an animal guy, and enjoy watching the birds, squirrels and whatnot gather at the bird feeders outside my window in the winter.  Trouble is, so do the cats, and it makes them absolutely insane.

4. I’m sick of stale air.  Sometimes one of the cats drops a bomb in the litterbox.  Sometimes I cook things that have a lingering smell.  Sometimes I raise dust when I am cleaning around the house.  During the winter, one can’t just open up the windows and air things out.

3. I’m sick of tall snowbanks and narrow streets.  I drive a relatively high-profile SUV, and yet I’ve still had more than a few times this winter where I’ve had to stick my nose so far out into and intersection to see if anyone was coming in either direction that I’ve nearly had it clipped off.  Just a bit of a thaw to shrink those suckers down is all I ask.

2. I’m sick of not being able to make travel plans in advance.  Any out of town appointment or event at this time of year is a crapshoot, contingent upon travel conditions.  A concert you’ve been dying to see for months finally comes to a nearby city, you have tickets and hotel reservations, and then BOOM, an ice storm hits.  Epic bummer.

1. I’m sick of my feet always being cold.  My feet are almost perpetually cold anyway.  I tend to wear wool socks from October until April.  Even then my feet are chilly, only slightly less so than if I didn't wear them.  If there is such a thing as electric socks, I would seriously consider them.  I’d probably need a very long extension cord though.

Even though it seems impossible now, the temperatures will warm up, the snow will melt, and spring will arrive, just like it always has for as long as the seasonal wheel has turned.  

Of course then I’ll need to find some new things to whine about. 

Little Chris and the Naive Politics of Black and White

Growing up in a small town in the 1970s, there were plenty of other kids with whom I could play.  It was a less worried time, when many parents would allow their kids to freely roam their neighborhoods and beyond.  For the most part, they did it without fear of anything more than the old lady down the street calling to report to them that their child was climbing on the roof of the toolshed.

When I was about five years old, I was the youngest member of a group of about a half dozen friends who lived in the houses around mine.  The acknowledged leader of this gang of kids was also named Chris like me, so he was called “Big Chris” and I was saddled with the moniker “Little Chris”, a nickname which I loathed and despised with a white hot passion.  Nonetheless, that’s how it was.

"Little Chris", from around the time about which I am writing.  And yes, turtleneck sweaters were considered "in" at the time.

As the youngest of the group, I was the least worldly, relatively speaking, and because of that naivety and my strong desire to be accepted by the others, I was prone to being put up to things.  It was never anything terribly serious, but I was a sucker nonetheless.  If they needed someone to swipe some apples from a neighbor’s tree, I was their man.  When they wanted to see if the wooden ramp they built for bicycle jumps was too high, I was their go-to guy.  And if they wanted to get some candy from Mrs. Johnson, who always had a bowl on her kitchen counter as treats for us kids, I was the emissary who was sent to ask for it, because I was not only the smallest and presumably cutest, but also they knew I would not refuse to go.

Yes, “Little Chris” was gullible, but as I got a bit older and gained some more life experience, that gullibility decreased rapidly.  Before too long, I was on to them, and not long after that, I could put others up to doing things if I chose.  As a little more light was shed on matters through time and experience, I saw things I hadn't previously, and it worked to my advantage.

I’ve been thinking about my days as gullible “Little Chris” lately as I have read and watched the news, both national and state.  It seems like many politicians, pundits, and media outlets these days are implementing a “Little Chris” treatment on you and me, and sadly, are meeting with some degree of success.

My intent in this post is not to single out a particular person or entity, so I’ll be dealing in generalities here.

We live in an age with an overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips.  There is such a high volume of data out there, much of it conflicting, that many suffer from fatigue in dealing with it.  It’s much easier just to have someone distill it for us.  And there is no shortage of talking heads who are willing to cherry-pick information and give it to us in a way that they want us to understand it.  It is made all the more persuasive when this cherry-picked information is given to us wrapped in emotion, drama, academic language, and/or pre-conceived ideas.  The overused term propaganda would apply here, though even it has become highly charged by some of the very people who use it, with direct connections often made to the wartime PR tactics of enemy nations.

This cherry-picking approach to politics and media bias would not be so pervasive if it didn’t actually work.  But it does.  Too many of us are easily persuaded.  Too many of us buy into what is being sold to us without asking ourselves if there is more to it.  The sins of omission seem far more frequent than those of commission in politics and media.

Let me give an example that I am just pulling out of the air.  Suppose a local media outlet reports on a horrific home invasion, where an elderly woman is beaten and robbed for drugs and money in her home.  It’s a terrible thing, and a legitimate news story, for sure.  Then, two nights later, the same media outlet starts airing a series of special reports on how you can protect yourself your loved one and your property from home invasions, complete with ominous music and scary clips from the most recent incident and others that have taken place in other parts of the country.  Interviews are aired with people who have experienced such a terrible thing.  Many viewers may become fearful.  It must be a problem, or else why would the news be devoting so much time and attention to it?  (Answer: Ratings.) Not only are viewers locking their doors and keeping their drugs secure, which would be sensible reactions, but some have also become frightened when they see an unfamiliar face in their neighborhood, and may even now refuse to go for a walk down their own street by themselves for fear of crime.  Some may go so far as to install an electronic security system in their homes.  Their fear has taken away some of their freedom, not to mention money.  And here’s the kicker: lost in the midst of it all is the fact that home invasions in that particular area are extremely rare, and the odds are greater that one would have a truck crash through their bedroom than that they would actually experience a home invasion.

I’m picking on the media taking something out of proper context in the aforementioned example, but politicians and pundits often do the very same thing.  It isn’t unusual for them to create a perceived boogeyman cloaked in emotional hot-buttons as they make their case for a particular candidacy or policy decision.  Their candidate or point of view is going to be the one to put a stop to this boogeyman (or “straw man” as it is called in debating terms), and therefore is the one with which all of us in the general public should be on board.  Welfare queens, big corporations, illegal aliens, religious fundamentalists, leftist whackos, right-wing nutjobs, the list of boogeymen goes on and on.  Some of these entities portrayed as boogeymen are actual problems, and some are not, depending on your own point of view.  If you don’t have your own point of view, politicians and pundits are more than willing to give you theirs.

So what’s my point?  It’s a very simple one: Despite what we are often led to believe, very, very  few issues in our society are black and white.  If something seems too clear, too cut-and-dried, then there is likely something we are missing.  Yes, there are people who abuse the welfare system horribly, for example.  But there are also many more on welfare who do not and use it as it was intended.  Yes, there are some large corporations that exploit their workers and plunder natural resources, as another example, but there are many more of them that do not, never have, and never will.  

In other words, don't be naive.  Do your homework.  Be skeptical without being cynical, especially when you find yourself automatically agreeing or disagreeing with something newly presented to you. 

Look at all sides before settling on a conclusion.  Don’t be satisfied with letting politicians, pundits, and the media feed you only the information they want you to have.  Seek out more for yourself. Consider the source of your information.  A press release from a lobbying group or political party headquarters may be “newsy”, but it is not necessarily news.  A pundit is not a reporter.  A letter to the editor is not a news article.  Opinions should be based on facts, but they are not facts themselves.  And don’t fall prey to hot-button terminology, especially in headlines.  Words like “terror”, “sex”, and “war”, among others, are often squeezed in there to capture your attention, even if they are not the best choices.

You owe it to yourself to be a cautious, media-literate consumer of information. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up like “Little Chris”, paying unintended consequences for being unquestioning and naive.

What A Drag It Is Getting Old

According to legend, I was born in 1970, so a little arithmetic will tell you that I am 43 years old.  And lately, the “old” part of being 43 years old has been particularly evident.  As I write this, I am propped up in bed with an ice pack strapped to my swollen right knee, dealing with a bad case of bursitis.  Yes, bursitis!  Bursitis, if you don't know, is a painful inflammation of the cushion between one’s joints, and something up to now I always considered as a condition for people who are, for lack of a better word, OLD.  I've never had it before, don’t know why I have it now, and hope to high heavens that I don’t have it again anytime soon. 

I am only 43, I tell myself.  I am not supposed to have things like bursitis.  My grandmother is.  She’s 88.  That makes more sense.  Not that I am wishing ill upon her by any means.  It's just that I am too young for this!  After all, I know who Imagine Dragons are and wear cargo shorts on a regular basis!  I’m not old!

And a booming voice comes out of the clouds above: “Wrong, Grandpa!”

Okay, I am pretty young at heart, but my body...well, maybe not so much anymore.

Source

I've always joked about aging and the passage of time at milestone birthdays, like my 18^th, 21^st, and 30^th, but truth be told, those came and went and not much really changed.  My 40^th, on the other hand, was like passing through some kind of gate into a new land.  That was when I really started to notice that, physically at least, I wasn't as young as I used to be. 

First, there is the noticeable change in stamina.  My health has been pretty consistent over the years.  I am overweight for my height by about 20 pounds, but otherwise suffer from no chronic problems like high blood pressure or diabetes.  In my forties, however, I've found that things are different.  I've been placed into the body of an old guy.  

A case in point was when I climbed Mt. Megunticook on the coast of Maine recently.  It was the sole physical activity of the day for me.  It took me the better part of the afternoon and several bottles of water to hike up the 1,385 foot elevation and then down again.  When I reached my camp at the bottom, I had to take some aspirin and a long nap, and was terribly sore for three days.  And don’t even get me going on the blistered feet.  The climb took all the wind out of my sails, and then some.  I actually checked my cell phone’s reception to make sure I’d be able to dial 911 if necessary.

Back in my mid-20s, several other teachers and I climbed that very same mountain with a group of nearly 80 third and fourth grade students.  The weather was iffy, so I didn’t even dress for the trip, thinking it would be cancelled.  Nonetheless, I climbed that same mountain in a shirt and tie, in half the time, with no blisters, barely breaking a sweat, and without any water.  I then went back to school with the students, taught all afternoon, attended a long committee meeting after school, ran some errands in town and then mowed my lawn after dinner that evening.  If I had aches and soreness afterward, I don’t remember them.

Next, I've found that piddly little things are causing me pain.  All of a sudden, the motion of raking the lawn for an hour or so causes my shoulder to ache for the next day or two.  Getting down on the floor with a sick animal at work can easily tweak my back if I am not careful about how I do it, and once about two years ago, I literally threw out my back while bending over the bathroom sink to spit out toothpaste.  Seriously.  If I was in an old-time covered wagon heading out west, my companions would be completely justified in leaving me alongside the trail for the coyotes.  And if that same party became stranded and had to resort to cannibalism, there is no doubt who they'd eat first, despite the fact that I would probably be quite stringy and gristly.

Of course its not a discussion of male aging without a mention of hair.  I am fortunate to still have lots of it, on my head and elsewhere, just as I always have, and the vast majority of it is still the original color (brown).  Based on the photos I saw of my 25^th high school class reunion, many of my male peers are not so lucky.  It still blows my mind when someone my age or younger has male pattern baldness.  Luckily, that is one thing I don't have to get uptight about.  It's nowhere to be found in my family tree.  Gray hair is a different story.  I found my first gray hair when I was 24, just after I closed on the mortgage for my first house.  I figured I earned that one.  Since then, the gray has been oddly slow in coming.  Very, very gradually it is becoming noticeable in my temples, especially just after I get it cut, but I am still below average in the gray hair department compared to most men my age.  Thankfully, the same lack of grayness applies to the hair that is not on my head, of which I have more than my fair share.  I truly think that having the hair on my chest or arms go gray will bother me much more than the gray on my head.  Once in a blue moon a stray gray will make an appearance there, but I swiftly vanquish the interloper.

Interesting side note: people sometimes ask why I do not grow facial hair or allow more than a day’s growth of stubble.  The fact of the matter is, all the gray hairs I have seem to have come in on my face.  If I go more than two days without shaving, it becomes very clear that my mustache and beard would be heavily streaked with gray.  That’s not a look I could pull off gracefully especially with a shock of thick brown hair upstairs.  Maybe someday I’ll grow some facial hair when what I have on my head matches, but until then, no thanks.

For me though, the worst parts of getting physically older are the surprises.  You know, like the food or drink you've enjoyed regularly over the course of your entire life that suddenly gives you screaming heartburn.  (I’m talking to you, hot tea!)  Or the sudden back spasms that literally knock you off your feet at work and cause your coworkers to think for a moment that you've been struck from behind by a pygmy dart.  Or the nights when you may as well sleep in the bathroom, because you are making so many trips there to empty your apparently pea-sized bladder.  Oh, and waking up one morning with painful bursitis in the right knee, for no known reason. Those are the kinds of surprises I mean.

It bothered me when Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield retired from baseball in 2011, because he was the last player on my favorite team that was my age.  As of last season, there were no major league baseball players my age or older.  That was a milestone I didn't care for at all.  It still bothers me when I read an obituary in the paper of someone my age or younger dying of some health malady.  And I don’t think I will ever get used to the idea of people I went to school with being grandparents now, but a couple of them are.

I know what they say: “You are only as old as you feel, ” and I have no doubt that age is relative.  To my nieces and nephews, I probably am seen as old.  To my parents and their generation, I am seen as pretty young.  To my grandmother’s generation, I am still practically a kid.  There are people old enough to be my parents running marathons and swimming from Cuba to Florida (not on the same day, mind you), so I guess I just need to keep setting my sights high.

I could go on and on about this topic of getting old, but I had better stop here.  It’s 4:00 in the afternoon, and the early-bird dinner special is starting at the diner downtown.  Plus, I need to restock my bowl of hard ribbon candy.

A video for Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones, from YouTube.

Post-script: There’s no small amount of irony that the title of this post is borrowed from the first line of an early Rolling Stones song, “Mother’s Little Helper”.  The Rolling Stones are now quite old, no matter how you slice it, and yet their most recent songs and footage from their live concerts this past summer prove that they have still got it going on.

I Hear You Knocking

A "glamour shot" of my vehicle that I found somewhere on the Internet a long time ago. (From www.autonet.hr, I think)

My car has a knock and it is driving me just about out of my mind.

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog already know that I am notoriously fussy about some things.  One of the things about which I am most fussy is my car.  I like it to be clean, comfortable, and in excellent working order at all times.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I like to be too.

If a dashboard light comes on, I immediately stop and look into it.  If something is spilled inside the car, I will pull over to the side of the road wherever I am and clean it up.  While it is impossible to keep the exterior spotless during a Maine winter, I do hit the automatic car wash as often as I reasonably can during the winter months, and can be seen washing and waxing almost every weekend once the weather gets above freezing.

So, you can imagine my horror a month ago when a strange sound started coming from what sounded like the passenger side of the undercarriage whenever there was a slight side-to-side motion of the car.  Given the pothole quotient during spring in these parts, and the fact that my car is an SUV with a fairly high profile, I was hearing it quite a bit.  It was a gentle knocking sound, as though something dangling underneath was bumping up against something else.  The car, a 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe with about 70,000 miles on it, has had very few problems in the two years I've owned it, so this was cause for concern.

Frankly, I did not want to shell out a bunch of cash to a mechanic if I could solve it myself, which I hoped was the case here.  My vehicular mechanical skills are much like my computer troubleshooting skills: intuitive.  I don’t really know how to explain what is wrong or how to fix it, but I can generally dive right in and take care of it myself in many situations.  If I had to teach someone else how to do it or describe what I just did to fix the problem, I’d be totally lost for words (which would be really something for me).  I instinctively knew that this sound from below the car, while irritating, was not something serious that would impede operation of the car in any way.  The only way the knock would knock was when influenced by a side-to-side motion.  It was not, for example, a faulty CV joint, since I've been there before with a prior car, and my bank account has the scars to prove it.

I did the most obvious thing first.  I went through the interior of the car to see if something was loose and knocking around.  I crawled under the seats and looked in all of the storage compartments, finding nothing that would be prone to movement.  I don’t tend to store a lot of “stuff” in my car anyway.  Just to be sure, I took every single thing out of all nooks and crannies of the car, from the papers in the glove box to the spare tire and everything in between.  Then I went for a quick drive around the block.  The knock was still there.

So much for Plan A.

The next step was to jack up the car and crawl under.  It was still mud season at the time, so this was a miserable thing to do.  There wasn't really enough room in my garage to easily jack it up and have room to get underneath, so I had to do it outside in the wet, muddy driveway, where there were likely earthworms and God knows what else.

I didn't use the small emergency jack I carry in the car, since it was both flimsy and also neatly packed away again after the failed Plan A.  Instead, I got out the allegedly heavy duty hydraulic “SUV jack” (note the quotation marks), which I kept in the garage.  I had not actually used it on this particular vehicle before, though it had always worked fine on my previous vehicle, which was a lighter car.  There was no reason to think it wouldn't work on this one, since it was supposed to be a jack capable of lifting SUVs, and my current vehicle is indeed one of those.

Wrong.

I positioned the jack carefully and started moving the handle up and down, up and down.  This went on for several minutes, and I was starting to get a bit winded.  “Wow,” I thought, “the suspension on this thing must be terrific if it takes this long to get the wheels off the ground!”  Come to find out, the jack couldn't handle the weight of my vehicle, and all my jacking was for nothing.  I proceeded to cram the car, the jack, and myself into my tiny garage and tried the whole process again on a cement surface, but still nothing.  This “SUV jack” was just not going to jack my SUV.

Moving the car back into the driveway, I shimmied underneath it without benefit of a jack.  The undercarriage does sit fairly high off the ground, but it was still a tight squeeze for me to get underneath to inspect things and commune with the earthworms.  Every move required contortionist-like skill, which is no easy feat for a guy like me.  The idea was to muckle onto a few things underneath and gave them a gentle shake to see if I could replicate the knocking sound.  After slightly burning my hand on a still rather hot exhaust system, which had been the primary suspect, I concluded that it was not the problem.  It moved a little bit, but made more of a metallic sound. 

Every shake dislodged a winter’s worth of dirt, most of which landed on my face and in my hair.  Nonetheless, it seemed like most everything under there was pretty solid.  I was just about to crawl out from under, pick the squished earthworms off my back, and go shower for several days when I tried one last thing.  There was a conduit for what I believe is a brake line that seemed like a possible culprit. Sure enough, it did have a side-to-side movement and bumped slightly into some other thingy nearby.  It sounded like the knock I had been hearing, and so I thought I had found it.  With much effort, I maneuvered my way out from under and went to get some plastic ties to secure the conduit in such a way that it wouldn't bump the other thingy.  After doing so, I took a quick spin around the block in the car.

The car still knocked.

Dammit.

I crawled back under, carefully avoiding the now very hot exhaust system, and saw that the ties had come off somewhere on my short drive around the block.  Still convinced that I had pinned down the problem, I got some more plastic ties and fit them more tightly than the last set.  I didn't want to make it too tight, for fear it would damage the conduit.  Another trip around the block, and still the knock persisted. 

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.  In spite of that, I crawled under the car yet again and readjusted the plastic ties in such a way that there was no possible way the conduit could knock against anything.

People were starting to look out their windows as I drove around the block for a third time, probably wondering if I was stalking them.  The crazed look on my face as I continued to hear the knocking sound in spite of my efforts probably only heightened their fears.

So apparently the brake conduit was not the culprit after all.  I was done for the day, and decided to just keep the radio turned up loud to drown out the knock until I could get a second opinion.  I was going to dinner with my brother not long after that, so I figured we would take my car and he could hear the sound for himself.  He didn't.  Claimed he didn't hear a thing.  Of course, he has two young children and a large dog, so his cars are constantly rattling, clanging, and bumping from all manner of detritus left behind by the youngsters and the pooch.  My car probably sounded like a sailboat on a glassy sea in comparison.

A few weeks have passed, and my delusion that the knock would just resolve itself miraculously has long since fallen by the wayside.  I've crawled under that damn car at least three other times in hopes of finding that which has eluded me for nearly a month, but to no avail.  The knocking persists.  As much as I hate to admit defeat, I think it’s time to make an appointment with my mechanic.

I can almost see how it’s going to go:  He’ll call to say the car is ready.  I’ll stop by to pick it up, and he’ll hand me an empty bottle of Ibuprofen or something similar he found rattling in some compartment I missed in my previous searches.  Then, with a smarmy grin, he’ll hand me a bill for several hundred dollars, and I’ll wish that bottle of Ibuprofen had a few tablets left.

I still have one plan left, although it might have a few flaws.  Since the knock can only be heard when the car is in motion, I am thinking that I can get someone to hang suspended by bungee cords underneath while I drive around on some rough streets.  The aforementioned “someone” would thus be able to pinpoint the source of the knock, and will then tell me what it is as soon as they are released from the hospital. 

Any volunteers?  Might be a free beer in it for you.

YouTube Video: A live version of the classic "I Hear You Knocking" by the incomparable Dave Edmunds. You have no idea how much I hate this song now.

Oh Good Grief, It's Spring Charlie Brown

“Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.” ~Linus Van Pelt in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

If you take the word “Christmas” out of that quote and replace it with “spring”, then Linus could have been talking about me.  The snow is melting, the sun is warmer feeling, and yet I am in the midst of my annual anxieties about spring. 

My spring uncertainties are not the same as those I usually get around the holidays.  I almost wish they were.  At that time of year, I get caught up in more specific concerns: finding the right Christmas presents, finding the money to afford aforementioned presents, attending parties without making a fool of myself, making time for everyone and everything, and the like.   No, the anxieties that creep into my head around springtime are lower-level and less-pressing, but no less stressful.

Some of them are not highly defined.  When it is 35 degrees, windy, and ice pellets are falling from the sky in April, I admit that at some deep level I begin to doubt that winter is really over.  Given the five months of snow and cold that have just dragged past at the speed of continental drift, one can’t blame one’s psyche for not fully buying into the idea that it really is over.  After all, there was 1816, the “Year Without a Summer”.  Temperatures were well below normal that year all around the world due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia causing unheard-of weather and crop failures.  There was snow in Albany, New York and Dennysville, Maine on June 6 of 1816.  Even within my lifetime, in 1990, we had more than six inches of snow fall on May 23 here in northern Maine.  Winter in Maine can be like that shark in the Jaws films.  Just when you think it’s safe, the damn thing comes back to bite you.

The general appearance of the outside in early spring is just a mess, which adds to the anxiety.  We have to pile the snow high here after storms, so while most of it has indeed melted, there are still huge dirty snowbanks in nearly every yard, slowly turning to water.  Even in a good year, some of the larger snowbanks can survive into May or early June in this part of Maine.  Trash, sticks, dog droppings and various other surprises lie around on the ground, left behind during the winter and now exposed by the melting snow. 

Where there are no snowbanks, everything is brown.  The grass and leaves have not dared to sprout yet, so the remains of last year’s dominate the view, dead and mired in the mud that is impossible to avoid.  Trees are still bare, and seeds under the ground have only begun to think about getting started.  It seems hard to believe that very soon, with some spring rains and warm sun, the green grass and leaves will soon burst forth, and flowers will be blooming.  At least, that is the plan.

One of my more specific worries this year includes the fate of my old riding lawnmower, which was literally limping toward the end of the mowing season last fall.  It had been giving me trouble all last year, and my only hope at the time was to nurse it along until the end of the season.  The old rustbucket threw a belt during the last mow in October, but it made it to the finish line.  Now I have to consider my options, none of which are good.  I can try to fix it myself, but frankly I am not very good at that kind of thing and will probably make things worse instead of better.  I could take it to get serviced, which is the most likely thing I will do, though that can be expensive, and loading a powerless riding mower onto a truck is a heavy job.  I suppose I can go without and just use my trusty push mower on the whole thing this year.  While the exercise would certainly be good for me, the extra time and work involved would be a real hassle, especially when it gets hot.  Sweating ranks right up there with cholera on my list of things to avoid.  Or, I could buy a new riding mower.  Let me know if you see the money fairy flying near my house, and I’ll flag her down and do just that.

I’m also worried about what I’ll find when I wash my car for the first time this spring.  My beloved chariot, as I refer to it, is caked in at least an inch of dirt and mud.  It has been showered with gravel and sand from driving on the interstate after storms, and was buried under snow several times this past winter.  I am bracing myself for the sight of the new dings and scratches in the paint job that I’ll uncover after that first wash.  Cars, like people, can’t stay new-looking forever, but I am going to do all I can to try to keep this car looking as close to how it did when I drove it off the lot two years ago.  I've got a bottle of touch-up paint on standby, and got a full kit of car cleaning supplies for Christmas just ready to crack open.  That chariot is going to shine, I hope.  Right now, it looks like something salvaged from the bottom of the Mississippi River, so it’s got nowhere to go but up.

My warm-weather wardrobe needs a serious update as well, since most of my best clothes from last year are really only suitable for use as rags when cleaning the aforementioned car or for dressing as a homeless person.  I've been milking them for a few years now, and they just don’t have another season left in them.  That means I need to shop for new clothes, which is easily one of my least favorite things to do.  I just don’t know what a guy my age (43, for those of you just joining us) is supposed to wear.  I do know what I am comfortable wearing however.  The former and the latter don’t always seem to coincide, unfortunately.  Plus, it’s getting harder and harder to find Nirvana tour t-shirts these days.  When I win the lottery, the first thing I am going to do is hire a professional fashion consultant.

In ancient times, the new year started in the spring, not midwinter like it does for us now.  That makes more sense to me, because a lot of what’s nagging at me at this time of year is the result of transitions, the new beginnings that are the hallmark of spring.  The old has passed, and the new lies ahead with all the uncertainty that comes with it.  All the little concerns I've mentioned here either falls under the heading of fear that the old has not really passed, or that there might be complications with the unknown new.

I know on an intellectual level that of course the hard months of winter are over and the beauty of spring is looming, but it still seems impossible at this point.  But it happens every year.  There will be robins.  There will be crocus.  There will be temperatures that allow us to leave our jackets at home.  It’s just a matter of hanging on and letting nature take its own time.

Foster Fish

Source: http://www.thezooom.com/2012/10/7399/

I have foster fish in my house, and I am not happy about it.

For those of you just joining us, let me recap some things for you.  About nine months ago, we helped my 87 year old grandmother move into an assisted-living apartment from the large house where she lived for nearly half a century.  While the move has been very positive in many ways, it did require a considerable downsizing, and many, many things had to be left behind in her house.  Among them was her two goldfish.  There is no room for them in her new digs.

In my opinion, fish are slimy creatures with cold, dead eyes, and have about as much personality as a typical member of Congress, so my interest in them is very limited.  Nonetheless, my job is to keep animals alive and healthy, so just flushing two pet fish for which I was mostly responsible was not an option.  Of course we were more than open to anyone who was interested in taking them.  (Insert sound of chirping crickets here.)  So, the fish just stayed back at her house and I kept them in food and clean water until we could figure something out.

When winter came, we drained the water pipes and winterized the place so we could avoid most of the considerable expense of heating except for during the most extremely cold parts of the winter.  Turning off the heat, however, meant relocating my fishy friends, at least for the winter.

A second or third cousin of mine said that she would adopt the fish, but she lives out of the area, and would not be coming to get them until later this year.  So, with much trepidation, I agreed to take them in short term. No one else, it seems, could or would, at least not right now, and I am kind of a pushover.  So, I've got foster fish.

My general dislike of fish as pets and not meals was secondary to my concern about my furry housemates.  With three cats in my house, all of whom have oversize personalities and very little discipline, I was afraid that the two fish were hopelessly outnumbered and destined to become someone’s dinner, especially considering that they live in a small tank that is only slightly heavier than one of the cats when filled.  It would be easy enough for one of them to tip.  Unless I kept the fish on the roof, in a safe, or stayed awake 24/7, I didn't see how I would be able to keep the cats away.

I brought the foster fish into the house and set their tank on the table where it was to stay for the time being.  All three cats gathered around, sitting up high on their haunches, looking not unlike tourists choosing a lobster from the tank at a seafood restaurant.    They could look all they wanted, but sure as heck were not allowed to touch.  Spray bottle in hand, I stepped back to watch how things would unfold.

Stop It (see this post for background on the nicknames of my cats) has a tendency toward being a bit defiant.  This, after all, is the cat who tries to nap on my morning newspaper, every single morning without fail, no matter how many times I scold him.  True to form, he was the first of the three felines to jump up and take a look at our guests.  He sniffed at the tank and batted a paw gently against the side, the inhabitants within doing their level best to ignore him but looking very uneasy all the same.  Stop It’s predatory instincts are strong, and his dislike for being ignored is even stronger.  Fortunately for me, he is also very sensitive, and one squirt with the water bottle sent him scurrying after he started trying to figure out how to pry the top from the tank. He would be back for round two, I was sure.

Get Down, my resident acrobat and the sister of Stop It, is svelte and athletic, relentlessly curious, and hardheaded to boot.  If she wants to do something, she does it and not just halfway. Get Down is all about commitment to a task.  Of my three cats, she is the one I would least want to meet if I was a mouse or goldfish.  She is also smart, and was more than happy to let her brother go first and see what this new thing was all about.  As soon as I squirted her brother and he flew off, Get Down decided it was her turn to scope things out.  She sniffed a little, all the while keeping one eye on me.  As soon as I moved just a little bit, she jumped down, knowing that these fish were some kind of forbidden fruit.  I had no doubt this was not the end of it for her.

Don’t Bite Me, in contrast to the other two, is kind of a fat cat, and not very adventurous unless it involves teasing the others or trying to permanently maim me.  It would take a huge amount of effort for him to even come close to getting up on that table near the fish, so he was the least of my concerns.  I actually held Don’t Bite Me up to the tank to take a look after the others had had their chance, and he was a bit intimidated by the fish.  Fear of the unknown, like fear of the vacuum cleaner, can be a powerful thing.  He has not gone near the tank or the table on which it sits since.

I knew the overnight would be sink or swim for the fish, literally.  It wouldn't be practical to keep the cats or the fish shut behind closed doors whenever I was not around to supervise, so I figured I would just let things shake out however fate deemed them.  I set the spray bottle of water right next to the tank as a warning of sorts before I went up to bed that night, and wished the foster fish Godspeed.

Dread filled me as I made my way downstairs the next morning.  Don’t Bite Me was annoyingly underfoot on the stairs as usual, in giddy anticipation of being fed his breakfast, but the other two cats were nowhere in sight.  Maybe they had already eaten?  I expected a scene of carnage, with scales, bones and water everywhere.

I stepped off the stairs, and there, nested on the clear plastic top of the fish tank, was Get Down, looking quite comfortable.  The fish swimming frantically just inches beneath her in the tank looked anything but.  Stop It had been sitting beside the tank watching the fish with interest, but jumped down when I entered the room.  I shooed Get Down off her perch atop the tank, gave her a small quirt of water just to make clear my disapproval, and decided that an uneasy truce had been formed.  If those cats were going to assassinate the fish, it would have happened that night.  But it didn't.

The cats don’t seem to pay much attention to the fish now, except when I put a pinch of fish food into the tank.  Even then, I think it is only because the fish food comes in a container much like the one their cat treats come in.  From time to time, Get Down can be found sitting on top of the tank, and Stop It will lay on a chair across the room and stare at the fish for long periods, but the truce seems to be holding.  Meanwhile, Don’t Bite Me is only interested in food that doesn't require work.

Spring will be here soon, and the foster fish will be out of here, either to a new home with my relative or back to their old one for the time being.  Even if the cats have more or less accepted them, I have not.  The only fish truly welcome in my house are those on a plate with a squeeze of lemon and some tartar sauce on the side.

Contents of My Head: Erranding Edition

Monday, being my day off from work each week, is the day I get stuff done.  You know: errands, appointments, and that sort of thing.  This past Monday, I made a trip to the city of Bangor to accomplish some items on my to-do list, including a routine doctor’s appointment and getting a haircut, among other things.  As is my nature, my mind kept up with a running list of questions during the day.  Here are some:

• What if people with obscene bumper stickers got caught in traffic in front of the president’s limousine or a motor coach full of nuns? Would they feel awkward?

• What good does it do you to wear a surgical mask over your mouth in the doctor’s waiting room, but not over your nose?

• Could this nurse who is squeezing this blood pressure cuff so damn tight actually beat me up if she wanted to?

• Why is the office staff so shocked when I volunteer to pay my insurance co-pay before my appointment?

• What awful things can be done to people who park in such a way as to take up two spaces?

• At what age does one stop receiving a reward sticker after having behaved well while getting one’s blood drawn?

• Do they secretly keep all the hair swept up off the floor at the hair cutting place and use it to make yarn or something?

• How gross would that be?

• How awful must it be to have a job where you are poking around strange people’s heads all day?

• When, exactly, was the “oversized t-shirt and stretch pants look” a powerful fashion statement?

• Does this lady cutting my hair appreciate that I chewed on an entire roll of wintergreen Certs just prior to my haircut, since I did eat a cheeseburger with onions for lunch?

• Is the hair-cutting lady trying to come up with a tactful way to recommend “Just for Men” hair dye to me?

• Why aren’t these kids in school?

• How brave does a guy have to be to let a stranger shave his face with a razor?

• Why is it that do they not let you see the menu items at the drive-thru until you are right in front of the speaker?

• How come the one thing I am looking for at the electronics store is seemingly the one thing that they do not happen to have in stock?

• Can I get this cheaper online?

• Why are those Christmas decorations still up?

• How come there are always several people standing directly in front of an item that I need to get?

• Why are some people apparently opposed to the use of soap?

• Or deodorant?

• Seriously, why aren’t these kids in school?

• Shouldn’t there be a law about people wearing shorts when the temperature is below freezing?

• How am I supposed to know in which lane to drive if the paint is worn off the road and there is no sign?

• Why do I never, ever, ever have the correct change on hand?

• If the cellphone in my pocket rings while I am pumping gas into my car, will there be an explosion?

• How long can germs live on a gas pump handle?

• What is the proper etiquette when standing beside someone at a urinal and one’s cellphone rings “midstream”?

• Does it do any good to use a hand sanitizer dispenser when you then have to touch the germy doorknob in order to get out of the room where it is located?

• Will I ever get used to people who seem to be talking to themselves but actually are carrying on a phone conversation through an earpiece?

• WHY AREN’T THESE DAMN KIDS IN SCHOOL?

Crazy Cat Person

I am not a crazy cat person, though I am a crazy cat person.  The italics make all the difference here.

Let me explain:  A crazy cat person is the one most people think of when those three words are strung together.  That is one who has a houseful of cats who dominate the person’s life, social and otherwise.  He or she (usually she, frankly) talks to them regularly and treats them more like people than pets.  I am most assuredly not one of those types of people.

A crazy cat person is someone like me, who “owns” (if such a word is applicable here since it often is questionable as to who owns who) cats who are out of their freaking minds most of the time.  I am cursed/blessed with three crazy cats, named “Stop It”, “Get Down”, and “Don’t Bite Me”.  They have actual names, but those are the ones they believe they have, since that’s what each hears from me the most often.

“Stop It” is marginally the least ridiculous of the three.  He was run over by a child with a bicycle as a kitten at his original owner’s house, and suffered a broken left front leg, which was set and has since healed.  It is still a bit stiff, but he gets along just fine.  The incident with the bicycle has made him a bit cautious, I think, but not nearly enough.  When he is not getting what he wants, whether it is attention, food, human sacrifice, or whatever, he knows exactly how to push my buttons.  Passive-aggressive activity is his strong suit. His favorite trick is to claw something.  He typically uses his scratching post for such things, but has trained me to respond to his whims by scratching less appropriate things on occasion, such as the sofa or the woodwork.  He is also the one who will lay directly on top of anything I am using if there is something he feels that he needs me to do for him.  Most of the books on my shelf have cat hair on at least a few pages.  “Stop It” has been known to walk across the keyboard of my computer while I am working on it as well, which does not exactly add a great deal of spice to my writing.  And don’t get me started on his affinity for napping on clean laundry.

"Stop It" in one of his favorite napping locales.

He will also stare at the ceiling from the top of the refrigerator for extended periods of time, and no matter how many times I take him down, he jumps right back up there immediately.  I once removed him from his perch ten times in a row within the span of about two minutes, just to test his tenacity, before I gave up. There’s probably a mouse or something between the floors, but he’s never, ever going to catch it.  It has never shown itself or left any evidence of its residency, so I suspect it wisely lives a quiet life entirely between the walls, out of reach of felines.

“Get Down” is the sister to “Stop It”.  She is a sweet and gentle soul with whom you can do just about anything.  If I hold onto one of her feet, for example, she will just stand there and stare at me, even sighing in disgust, waiting me out until I just stop.  She doesn't react much.  Same thing if I start to tap her tail while she is napping: stare and sigh, wait the dummy out until he gets bored.  She just tolerates whatever shenanigans I am subjecting her to, which she must see as the path of least resistance. 

"Get Down", living up to her name.

As her name implies, “Get Down” has a habit of jumping up on things that she should not.  One of her more benign tricks is to sit on top of the television set and dangle her tail over the screen.  She is also fond of trotting across nightstands covered with “stuff” at two in the morning, laying in the seat of my recliner just as soon as I get up to go get something, and napping in the middle of my desk when I am trying to get some work done.  She loves to snooze on paperwork spread across any table or desk.  “Get Down” is the reason that anything light and of value on a flat surface in my house has two-sided tape on the bottom to keep it secure.  Delicate things literally have a short shelf life in my home thanks to “Get Down”.

“Don’t Bite Me” is the newest addition to the household, having lived with me for not quite a year yet.  He is just over a year old, whereas the others are nearly five.  Much stockier and less athletic than his housemates, and a lot more in touch with his inner kitten, “Don’t Bite Me” is as mischievous and playful as the other two put together.  If the mood strikes him, which it often does, he will suddenly try to take a bite out of you without provocation.  They are not vicious bites, but he’s so rough and foolish that he ends up hurting me or the other cats.  More than once I have been reading in bed at night, absorbed in a book and absently stroking “Don’t Bite Me” who is lying on the bed next to me, and he will just clamp down on my hand out of the blue.  Not hard, mind you, but enough to get my full attention.

"Don't Bite Me", in time out again.

He has nearly four pounds over the others, so they have developed a low tolerance for rough play with him.  When “Don’t Bite Me” wants to wrestle, “Stop It” will indulge him for a few minutes, but then some line is crossed and “Stop It” starts hissing and growling.  “Get Down”, who is the smallest of the three, does not like to play rough at all.  Her strategy here, since ignoring him has long since been ruled out as an option, is to run away.  Of course, “Don’t Bite Me” thinks this is a great game of chase.  They run from one end of the house to the other and back again, over and over, sounding like a herd of small buffalo, until “Don’t Bite Me” gets tired or is put in time out in a bedroom by me. 

“Don’t Bite Me” spends a LOT of time in time out.

One thing that will get him there in a flash is when he plays Guardian of the LitterPlex.  I have an area in the house with litterboxes for the cats, the aforementioned LitterPlex.  “Don’t Bite Me” tends to like to guard this area, especially during high demand times, like just after meals.  If one of the others cats wants to use one of the litterboxes, they have to get past the Guardian of the LitterPlex, much like Cerberus at the gates of the Underworld.  Needless to say, I do not want the other two to start using other places in the house for their bathroom, so “Don’t Bite Me” spends at least an hour or so after breakfast most mornings cooling his heels whilst shut in the bedroom.

The funny thing is, big bully “Don’t Bite Me” is actually the most timid of the three cats.  The vacuum cleaner will send him into hiding for hours, and even shaking a plastic bag will send him scurrying off.  The other two cats look at him as though he’s lost what little mind he has when he reacts to these things which do not phase them in the slightest.

One would think that petite little “Get Down” would avoid big, silly “Don’t Bite Me” like the plague, since almost everything about him is the opposite of her, but you would be wrong.  She is relentlessly curious, to the point where she just cannot resist being nearby and seeing what kind of trouble he is going to get into.  Then, of course, she gets caught up in the middle of it, usually against her will.  What seems to be true with people also applies to cats: good girls just can’t seem to resist bad boys.

What’s most amusing is when the afternoon sun spills in onto one of the beds during this often chilly time of year.  The cats, being solar powered, will all find a spot in the sun to nap.  It’s not unusual for me to walk in to find “Stop It” and “Don’t Bite Me” doing some male bonding and blissfully snoozing next to each other.  Meanwhile, “Get Down” can be found a safe two feet or so away from “Don’t Bite Me”, with literally one eye open at all times.  Those two feet of space may as well be the DMZ in Korea.  She wants to be in the sun too, but doesn’t quite trust “Don’t Bite Me” enough to relax while he is so close by.  It’s kind of an interesting metaphor, actually: Those who irritate us always seem to be enjoying themselves much more than we ever are.

The cats make things interesting around here, to say the least.  Right now, “Stop It” is sitting next to me watching me type this, patiently waiting for his supper.  I just hope he doesn’t get it into his head to jump up onto the keyboafweuag0[p9o;jlk,[o;pfasdvzcsoie][‘;l.hre’aghpIZ;lng;.vfzd