Blog #60
I had five grandchildren in town for a week and
keeping track of them all was harder than keeping track of all the reasons CNN
thinks that Trump should be impeached.
One day we decided to go to a Cardinals baseball game. Ten of us!
I had to pay for parking the car at the train station; buy train tickets
(a mass-transit thing called Metro-Link); buy admission tickets; hotdogs,
sodas, peanuts. Do I look like a
Kennedy? The weather was absolutely
perfect and we all had fun. The
Cardinals lost.
On
a day that was perfectly sunny
We
thought that a game would be funny
The
results were so bad
At
the end all we had
Was
no hits and no runs and no money.
And besides, they spit. Not my grandchildren, the players. What’s with the oral fixation of American
baseball players? And by American, I mean the Dominicans,
Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Koreans and Japanese who make up most of the
American National Pastime. They spit,
they chew, they expectorate. They fill
their mouths with nuts, gum, tobacco, candy and pebbles and constantly and
continuously pollute the dugouts and the field with filth. Am I over-reacting? It’s disgusting. Basketball players don’t spit. Football players don’t spit. Bowlers don’t spit. Teachers don’t spit on the classroom
floor. Even the announcers are
commenting on the action: Yadier
Molina just set the new record for spitting forty-two bags of pollyseeds onto
home plate during a nine-inning game. It’s disgusting! Did I say that already?
Pollyseeds,
for those of you who have grown up and forgotten when you were a kid, are what
we used to call sunflower seeds. Urban
Dictionary, another electronic resource no human being can do without, suggests
the name came from the fact that parrots eat sunflower seeds and all parrots
are named Polly.
I had a friend who bought a parrot. On the first day, the bird said a dirty word
and, as punishment, my friend stuck the bird in the freezer for twenty minutes. When she took the parrot out, it shivered
uncontrollably and said, “I’m so sorry.
I’ll never say a bad word again. But
let me ask you something -- what did the chicken do?”
You see, back in 2009 as I was recovering from bypass
surgery in North Carolina, my daughters flew in to be with me (well, you never
know when the old man is going to kick it).
Carol, to liven up the atmosphere in the ICU, made everyone come with a
parrot joke, and that was one of them.
Here’s another.
A young woman bought a parrot even though the pet-shop owner
warned her that the bird had spent the last three years in a house of ill
repute. That’s a whore house to those of you who like when I talk dirty. The woman didn’t care where the bird had been
and so she bought it. Well, at least she
didn’t care until her husband came home and the bird looked at him and said,
“Hi, Fred. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
For the next episode of Poppy Patrol, Carol and I have
flown to North Carolina to spend ten days shepherding our three oldest
grandchildren (16,15,12) while their parents are off on a bicycle trip. We are occupying the master bedroom and I
have just noticed that they have a new toilet.
I noticed it because as I approached the little toilet room, the seat
went up, a light came on inside the bowl and water started spraying from the
rim. It scared the . . , well, it scared
me enough that I almost had to use it.
I’ve been closer to rattlesnakes without being that frightened.
But, you gotta do what you gotta do and you gotta poo
when you gotta poo, so I grabbed a plunger for protection and cautiously
approached this flashing contraption (or should it be con-crap-tion). It was peaceful, so I decided to find out
what it does. First, I had to sign in. That’s right, R2Pee2 wanted to know if I was
User-1 or User-2. I am totally serious. This was crazy! Was I going to have to fill out an
application? Height? Weight?
Did I use a diuretic? And who
exactly was going to approve me? The
NAACPee? And why do I need my toilet
experience improved? I thought I was
doing fine.
Welcome back, everyone, to my wacky world of talking
birds and flashing toilets. I hope you
are doing well. Tell me, why is everything so complicated? Using the toilet should not have 64 options
on a remote-control device. Even a glass
of water is complicated nowadays. It
comes from the refrigerator door now with bubbles or no bubbles, crushed ice or
cubed ice, lime flavor or orange flavor, chilled or room temp.
Even plain old eggs are now organic,
cage-free, hormone free, antibiotic free, non-GMO, natural light, free range
eggs. Seriously? And don’t get me started about coffee. I was at Starbucks and the lady in front of
me ordered the following:
A Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie
Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino Extra Hot With Foam Whipped
Cream Upside Down Double Blended, One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice.
That is an actual thing
available at Starbucks. I looked it up. But what confuses me is this: once you’ve ordered the chocolate brownie
iced vanilla with whipped cream, does adding the Sweet’N Low make you feel like
Marie Osmond would be proud of you?
Did you know that Florida resident William L. once ordered a
101-espresso-shot latte at his local Starbucks that cost $83.75 and came with
17 pumps of vanilla syrup, mocha and green tea matcha powder served with
steamed milk? Starbucks will close all 8,000 of it’s US
stores on May 29th to give their employees sensitivity
training. Man, if I had to deal with
people that wired on caffeine
and sugar, I wouldn’t want sensitivity training. I’d want a flame-thrower.
All these new things –
I just don’t know. I’m just a
stick-in-the mud who clings to the old ways.
There’s an old maxim that says “willingness to change is a
sign of maturity and excellent mental
health.”. Well I have the maturity of my youngest
grandchild and the mental health of a Crab Rangoon, so I guess I’ll just stick
to my old habits. Like sending you
another blog next week. Can you handle
it? There might be another parrot
joke. And in the meantime, stay well and
count your blessings.
No comments:
Post a Comment