Blog #133

Trader Joe’s Mandarin Orange Chicken.   It’s the best.  It’s rice and chicken pieces with a perfect consistency.  Here’s what you do: take the frozen bag out of the freezer, knead it around in your hands until the consistency is fairly even.  Then place it on your wounded hip.  They recommended bags of frozen peas, but I don’t like peas.  This stuff is perfect.  And it tastes great too.

Recovering from an illness or operation is a full-time job.  I don’t know how young people, with all their family and work obligations, manage it.  Of course, they’re young, and I guess that allows them to recover faster, but for me, a member of the not-so-young generation, my recovery schedule keeps me busier than Joe Biden’s damage-control team.  There are pills I have to take and exercises I have to do and breathing out of some see-through spider contraption and – oops – it’s time for the frozen Mandarin Chicken bag on my leg.  Don’t bend this way, don’t lift that way, take a walk!  Raise your toes above your nose, practice the stairs, take a walk!  Take the Tylenol, take some Benefiber, take a walk!  It barely gives me enough time to talk to you.

And then there’s the food.  Carol, in her unstoppable effort to minister to my every desire, wants to make me lunch.  I won’t put up with that.  Men and women have a different approach to food.  Take the peanut butter and jelly classic.  A woman takes an artisan, whole wheat slice, centers it on a small plate, spreads a thin layer of peanut butter over it, whispers the essence of jelly on top and covers it with a matching slice of bread.  Then she cuts the crust off and places two baby carrots on the plate.

A man takes bread – any kind of damn bread, Ritz cracker or leftover hotdog bun – something that will hold the glops of peanut butter and globules of jelly he dumps on it, then throws it on a big plate with some BBQ potato chips.  Does anybody see a difference here?  And what is the thing about cutting off the crust?  Was Eve scared by a crust of bread?  Does every woman carry a genetic imperative to slice off the crust of her man’s PB&J as if it were his foreskin?  Girls, if you want to make the guy happy, let him make his own PB&J, clean up the big mess he’ll make doing it and lose the baby carrots.

Fall has somehow crept upon us while we weren’t watching.  I’m looking forward to it.  Fall is my favorite season -- mid 70s, low humidity, wisps of clouds punctuating an otherwise blue sky.  Hi there, and welcome back.  I hope you are feeling good and appropriately Autumnal. 

I have more hospital stuff to talk about.  I seem to have an unlimited supply of things to talk about.  Have you read Catch-22?  There’s a scene in a hospital ward where one of the patients is lying in a full-body cast with only one hole, where the mouth is.  He never speaks or moves.  There is a bag of fluids dripping into him and a bag of urine dripping out.  Twice a day, the nurse comes and exchanges the bags for one another.  That’s kind of how I felt in the hospital.  Fluids were dripping in and I was playing Tinkle-Tinkle Little Star at the other end.

Thankfully, I was only there one night.  And thankfully, I did not have a roommate.  Being the misanthropic introvert that I am, I don’t play well with other children.  Even when I fly on airplanes, I hate having someone other than Carol next to me.  I mean, they might want to do unspeakable things to me – like talk!

Whenever I travel I find

I don’t like the talkative kind

I’d much rather ride

In comfort beside

A person who’s deaf, dumb and blind.

So now I’m at home recovering, and my wife has devised a system so that I can call her when I need help.  Under normal circumstances, it would be her summoning me.  Order me a library book, I need something from eBay, my pills are ready at the pharmacy, how many ounces in a half-cup.  And even though I am three rooms away, I can always discern her voice from among the continuous milieu of other voices she is surrounded with – Joy Behar, Terry Crews, Alex Trebek.  She is never without her blasting television.  I hear her speak my name and dutifully humble myself to her wishes.  Such a good boy!

But now it’s my turn.  She couldn’t possibly hear my voice over her CNN anchor, so she has given me a bell.  A bell!  I have a bell!  It’s the kind those Swiss people used to ring on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Grab it by the handle and shake it and – OMG, here comes Hurricane Carol whooshing down the hall to satisfy my beck and my call.  Such a good girl! This, my friends, is power!  This is the power of a Sultan to call his harem, the power of a shepherd to gather his flock, the power of a dictator to summon a crowd.  I love it!  I use my bell at least twice a day to summon my speedy Florence Nightingale even though I don’t need her.  Please don’t tell her how good I’m feeling.  I want to milk this for a couple of more days.

Speaking of milk, I haven’t been to my McDonald’s in a long, long while.  Yes, it’s my McDonald’s!  I’ve gone there every morning for years and it’s mine.  My daughter went there to get me a Diet Coke, and she bought herself a carton of milk.  My picture was on it.

Carol has just informed me that this taking-care-of-me crap is getting old.  She has repossessed my bell (she calls it busting my bells) and informed me that we are now getting back to our usual routine – keeping her happy.  Maybe I can use my bell to summon you back here next week.  Until then, stay well and count your blessings and read Catch-22.  Can you remember all that?  See you next week.  I miss my bell.

Michael                                    Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com