Blog #91
I have told you before that men and women are
different. You may have already known
that. Here’s another example. Do you know how a man eats candy, like from a
Russell Stover assortment box? He picks
out a piece, eats half of it and then, if he likes it, will eat the other
half. Even if he doesn’t like it, he
more often than not will eat the other half.
A woman, on the other hand, uses her finger nail to gouge out a tiny
chunk of chocolate from the bottom and looks inside. If she likes what she has discovered, she
will eat the candy. If not, she replaces
the piece in its little fluted-paper nest and moves on to the next. Men, being by nature chivalric creatures,
always allow the women to have their go at the box first. That leaves us the sloppy seconds which
consist of cracked and fingered chocolates with creams and jellies leaking out
of holes in their bottoms. You know I’m
right.
My router stopped working. Now I have suffered through episodes where my
heart stopped working and episodes when my eyes stopped working, and believe
me, those were only slightly more traumatic than the router. I mean what are you supposed to do without Wi-Fi? The human race was born, survived and evolved
for 100,000 years without the Internet, but we have somehow arrived at a point
in the history of our species where we can no longer exist without
instantaneous access to everything.
Seriously! How are we supposed to
survive if we can’t go on Amazon and buy something we didn’t need and have it
delivered two weeks before we didn’t need it?
After a period of weeping, I decided to act like an
adult and call the Linksys customer service line. I was put in a queue. I hate being in a queue. I hate even spelling a queue, but after 43
minutes I was connected with my friendly, local tech assistant who lives in
Pakistan and speaks as if he had spoons in his mouth. We talked for hours!
I
thought that the tech was a shoo-in
To
help me with what I was doin’
But
first I got queued
And
then I got screwed
And
wasted my whole afternoo-in.
I absorbed that failure and
did what any rational, intelligent, seasoned citizen should do. I called my daughter Abby and begged her to
fix it, which she did. I guess I should
have thought of that first, but I didn’t want to aggravate her with my
time-consuming, childish problems. But
then I thought, Hey, I’m the guy who
changed her diapers and told her stories and sang her songs (even at her
wedding) and helped her with all her childhood problems. What goes around comes around; do unto others; cast
your bread upon the waters, and all those other Golden Rulish phrases. The
least she can do is repay the effort.
Except the diaper thing.
Hi there and welcome back. Google tells me there are approximately 15
million Jews in the world, a number which coincides with the number of ways to
spell Hanukkah. So if you celebrate it,
have a Happy. I hope you are feeling
well and making plans for enduring a long winter.
You know I have a bad back. Every old man has a bad back. Serves us right for standing up for
ourselves! Every once in a while, it
flares up and I go to Dr. Back, and I present to him all the unscientific
remedies my friends have recommended since my last visit. They come in three categories:
·
Exercise: Lie
down, sit up, hang from a door, you name it.
Dr. Back says you can exercise all you want. The disks in your spine are
bogus; exercise will do absolutely nothing to change that.
·
Diet: Orange
juice, painkillers, caffeine, pot. Dr. B
just laughs.
·
Creative: Lie
down on the floor, put live snails in your ears, have a yak step on your
balls. Pasadena!
I remember my
last flare. I was aching like a whore
the day the fleet came in. It was before
my pacemaker, so I could still have an MRI.
I checked in at the hospital and they told me Joe would take me to the
MRI room. I looked where they were
pointing and there was Joe, a volunteer only slightly younger than Stonehenge. In my worst
pain, wracked with spasms and passed out, I could walk faster than Joe. I could crawl faster than Joe. Mold could grow down the center of the
hallway faster than Joe. The Arctic Ice
Sheet is melting faster than Joe. I
could not stop laughing.
I wonder what Carol would
have done, Miss Inahurry of 2018. Yes,
the Princess of Lickety Split would probably have tripped the old coot, stepped
on his back and found the damned thing herself.
And demanded an MRI machine near the window – and warm bread. I love that woman!
This has been a bit of a bitchy letter. I’ve already complained about my candy boxes,
my router and my back. Well, as Roseanne
Rosanna Danna said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” But, as long as I have
you here, I have one more complaint. I
am suffering from Makeup Creep. Do you
know what that is? Makeup Creep is the
slight but inexorable encroachment of the woman’s paraphernalia onto the man’s
side of the sink. Now, I must admit that
I have my own stuff -- lotions and potions, pills and creams, brushes and
blades. But I pretty much keep what is
mine in the drawer and cabinet allotted to me.
But every week, little by little, the stuff that
belongs to my wife, whom I lovingly call Estee – the brushes and files and
bottles, the instruments whose usage I cannot fathom -- moves just a bit closer
to my sink so that eventually there will be no room for my stuff or, for that
matter, me. The woman has more makeup
than RuPaul!
Are you fed up with my complaining? I’ll stop.
Come back next week and I’ll complain some more. You don’t want to miss it. Until then, stay well, count your blessings
and don’t let a yak step on your balls.
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