Blog # 282                               August 4, 2022

 

Everybody says that retail is dead, but I’m not so sure.  Now trending are small stores that specialize in only one or two items.  Just read the name of the store and you’ll know what to do.  It makes life so simple.

If you need bags, go to Sacks.

If you need bagels or donuts, go to Hole Foods.

If you need dice, go to Seven-Eleven.

 Or,

If you’re depressed, go to Lows.

If you want to buy marijuana, go to Quick Trip.

If you want to take your first wife to lunch, go to Fed Ex.

 

And,

If you need cheap landscaping, go to Dollar Tree.

If you need help in doing a blog, go to Write Aid.

Or if you’re looking for boorish, insulting and obnoxious men, go to Dicks.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  And if you’re looking for a cat, get a catalog.  If you want a dog, get a dogalog.  See, I can make stupid jokes too.  Did you laugh?  Purr.  Present mirth hath present laughter. What’s to come is still unsure (Twelfth Night).

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I love it when you come back.  I hope you’re feeling well and enjoying the Summer, although the Summer of 2022 has truly been a challenge.  Gasoline is high, inflation is higher, crime is even higher still, and now we’re in a recession.  And the weather!  Last night on NBC News, they said “Thirty million people are under a heat advisory.”  Have you noticed that they never say, “Three-hundred million people are not under a heat advisory?”

 

If you can avoid the heat advisories and the flood warnings and the car jackings, then summer is a perfect time for outdoor activities, especially golf!   I used to play golf three times a week.  I was never great.  I was never horrible.  But as the years go by and my various body parts get older, I play less and worry less about my score.  My friends are the same.  Why worry about pars and birdies when you can worry about tripping over your putter and breaking a hip.  Or being thrown from a cart and gouging your leg.  Or having a heart attack from the heat.  It’s a par-72 jungle out there!

 

Another summer annoyance has been the overabundance of political ads.  I voted on Tuesday.  Thank goodness the primary season is over.  Too many candidates, too many ads.  The worst are the radio ads for a local candidate: he loves puppies, eats Mexican food, watches Denzel Washington movies and when they say he supports the police, a police siren wails in the background as if they needed to remind us what the word “police” meant.  You’re driving your car.  You’re not really listening to the ad, but suddenly you hear a siren and instinctively slam on the brakes as if you had been doing one-twenty and had Jimmy Hoffa’s body in the trunk.  It’s dangerous.

 

And dangerous summer activities include boating.  Riding in a boat is great fun and brings out, mostly in men, some instinct, ancient and genetic, that has come down to us from Ulysses and makes us believe we actually know how to tie a knot and steer a water-craft.  I, of course, cannot do any of that.  I’m Jewish!  If Jews could operate a boat, God would not have had to part the Red Sea.

 

A lady comes home from the plastic surgeon.  “The doctor told me I had the breasts of a sixteen-year-old,” she tells her husband.  “What did he say about your 75-year-old ass?” the husband asks.  “He didn’t mention you,” she replies.

 

Getting old is an exercise in compromise.  There are new regimens and schedules that you must pursue.  There are old habits and pleasures that you must abandon.  Growing old is made easier, however, when the person living with you doesn’t seem to age.

 

I ought to be thankful a lot

For the wonderful treasure I’ve got

The treasure’s not gold

It’s the thrill growing old

Next to someone who clearly is not.

 

When I mention that to my wife, she scoffs.  “You only think that because you’re a sentimental old fool whose eyes are getting worse.”  Maybe, maybe not.

 

I get a lot of feedback from my readers.  I like the feedback.  I was at a gathering last week with about twenty people.  They’re all about my age and read my blog.  We spent some time counting how many of us had pacemakers and comparing Eliquis and Xarelto.  Then several wanted to know when I would mention them in my blog.  I get that a lot, so I told them, “When you say something hilariously stupid.”

 

As you are reading this, I am wending my way to Bald Head Island, a tiny, remote island off the coast of North Carolina.  You must reach it by ferry and traverse it by golf cart.  There are no cars allowed.  It is there that Cape Fear pokes its tip into the Atlantic current creating thirty miles of treacherous sand bars that have been the bane of Atlantic shipping over the centuries.  These sand bars are called The Frying Pan Shoals and, if you stand on one of the close-to-shore sand bars in a foot or two of water, you will be pummeled by warm Gulf Stream waves on one side and cold Atlantic waves on the other.  It’s magical.

 

The island was the home of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard the Pirate, in the early 18^th Century and will be the home of the Fox family for the next week.  My California family cannot join us this year – my daughter, her companion and my two beautiful red-headed grandchildren.  I love them all and will miss them a great deal.  So that leaves twelve of us.  Wish us well.  I’ll be writing to you from there.

 

Weekly Word:  A bane is a cause of great distress or annoyance, and if this blog has been a bane to you today, you’ll be happy to know that it’s over.  I have to stop now because I have so many other things to do -- count all the bees in the hive, chase all the clouds from the sky.  Come back next week.  I might mention your name.  Until then, stay well and count all your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com

                                                Go ahead, say something stupid.