October 2020 – Deep Dark Thoughts

Halloween 2020-Style

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday of them all, and it will be here in just a couple days. I love everything about this time of year: the trick or treaters, the candy, haunted houses, horror movies, and even the Celtic history behind the celebration, where they lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward of ghosts.

And this year was going to be extra special because Halloween falls on a Saturday and will occur on the night of a full moon. An ideal situation.

I say, “was,” because with the public health situation that we currently find ourselves in it is unlikely that very many people will be celebrating this rare concurrence of events. There won’t be the parties or gatherings that have marked previous years as people this time around choose to stay home and observe the date quietly on their own.

Which is a huge loss.

Personally, I think kids should be allowed to go out on Halloween. Think about it. They will all be wearing masks anyway. Except for a few clumps of children that occasionally gather on the same porch at the same time, they will all be spaced out to a socially acceptable distance as they run around out of control throughout the various neighborhoods. And, since past tragedies have eliminated handmade food and unsealed packaging, the candies are all individually wrapped as well as sealed inside a larger bag, so there is little chance of contamination due to contact with other people.

If you are already sending your child out to wander the streets in the night, wearing dark clothing and masks that impair their vision, to knock on the doors of people they have never met, how could it possibly be any more dangerous this year? Let the kids have their fun. They’ve been cooped up for about eight months now, they need a chance to blow off some steam.

And the parents could probably use a night off as well. How long has it been since you had an evening to yourself with no screaming, bored, whining rugrats crawling around underfoot? Probably too long.

My situation is a little different. My kids are all grown up. (Physically. Mentally, I still really worry about those two.) They haven’t done the trick-or-treating thing in many years. Instead, they typically hang out with friends and do whatever it is that young adults do on their own. I don’t know exactly what that is, anymore. I try not to think too hard about what it is they are actually doing since I remember what I was doing when I was in my early twenties, and there is just absolutely no excuse for that kind of behavior.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

This year, however, they will be hanging out at home with mom and dad. It’s just going to be one more day where my two grown kids are in the house with me all evening, without a break. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and…

Everybody loses.

All I can say is, thank god for television and alcohol.

Can you imagine if this pandemic had occurred before we had electronic distractions to take our minds off of the fact that we have been spending time with the same couple of people nonstop for the past six months? What if the only entertainment we had was watching the paint peel off of the walls and (god forbid) talking to each other? I think I would have murdered my entire family by now.

This Halloween, there won’t even be any kids trick-or-treating in my neighborhood to add some excitement to the evening. No smiling faces. No begging for candy. And no handmade costumes where I have to try and guess, “Are you a zombie, or a hobo, or did you get hit by a car before you got here?”

The lack of trick-or-treaters in my area isn’t just because of the pandemic, however. It also has to do with my location. Stray kids don’t usually come to my house as I live out in the middle of nowhere and it takes about half an hour to walk from one house to the next. I actually haven’t had a trick-or-treater turn up at my door since 2011 when I moved to my present residence. Still, every year I watch the front door hopefully, waiting to see if some lost waif is going to brave the darkness and the distance to ring my doorbell and hold out his empty candy bag. I long for the day I can smile at the wandering child and tell him,

“I don’t have any candy. What are you doing out here, and where the hell are your parents?”

I mean, seriously. It would take a lunatic to allow their kid to wander around in my neighborhood hoping for someone to hand out candy. It’s like child abuse.

Happy Halloween!

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Quick Fix

There has been a little bit of drama going on in the Wilbanks household this week. Two of our members recently underwent surgery and are now lying around the house making my life miserable.

It isn’t the kids. They already make my life miserable, but they aren’t the ones that went under the knife recently. My wife and I are also fine. No, the poor little surgical victims this time are our cats.

We adopted two kittens a few months ago, Scout and Willow, and we were informed by their vet that it was time to bring them in and have them spayed. My first response to the suggestion was to ask how much the surgeries were going to cost. My wife’s first response was to tell me to shut up and do what the vet told me.

So, I shut up.

We scheduled the surgery for a Monday, and we were told not to let the cats eat anything for 12 hours prior to their operations. Apparently, much like a person, if they have anything in their stomachs while under general anesthesia, it is possible that they could vomit and choke. Starving the cats would normally not have been a problem. Since the cats do not possess opposable thumbs, they can’t open the pantry door and get their own food. All we needed to do was hide their food Sunday night and they wouldn’t eat. Kind of like what I expect the kids will be doing to me in a few more years.

The issue that came up was the fact that whenever we want to catch one or both of the kittens, we normally bring out some cat treats and the little morons run right up to us and climb into our laps. Because we couldn’t allow them to eat anything, this particular strategy was off the table.

Instead, we had to go the old school route of chasing them around the house until they ducked under the bed (their favorite hiding place), then crawling under the bed to grab them by whatever body part we could get our hands on. We pulled them out from their refuge, growling and hissing with their claws fully extended and tearing large strips of carpet up from the floor as they were dragged unwillingly into the light.

As I picked up Scout, she began to purr, but this was not the purr of a happy, contented cat. Instead, it was the rapid, panicked noise of a tiny psychopath trying to decide who she wanted to maul first. She clearly knew something bad was happening; something that she wanted no part of.

I don’t know how they do it, but animals always seem to know when it’s time to go the vet. A cat that is normally curled up right next to you 24 hours a day, stuck to your leg like lint on Velcro, suddenly vaporizes and disappears when it’s time to go to see the doctor. Fortunately, my kids have never been that intelligent. Most of the time they just jumped into the car and we were pulling into the parking lot of the doctor’s office before they even thought to ask where we were going.

It seems the cats are smarter than the kids, but I think I already knew that.

Anyway, we did finally get the kittens into the carrying cases and my wife drove them off to their unpleasant appointment with the operating room.

They came home at the end of the day, slightly groggy from anesthesia and with plastic cones covering their heads like tiny space aliens from a 1950’s science fiction movie. Scout immediately darted out of the carrying case when we opened the door. She ran around the house backwards as she unsuccessfully attempted to pull her head out of the cone. Because she could not see where she was going, she bounced off of every wall and piece of furniture in the living room during her initial escape attempts. Our house resembled a pinball machine, only instead of a steel ball it was a furry, four-legged demon ricocheting against every solid surface.

After watching Scout for several seconds, I glanced down and noticed that Willow had not moved from her crate. She was just lying in her case like roadkill on Interstate 5. I reached into the crate and pulled her out, but she immediately lied down on the floor. Her eyes were glassy and unfocussed, and I think she still hadn’t shaken off the effects of the anesthetic.

It didn’t look very comfortable, so I picked her up again and moved her to the couch, where she again just lied down and refused to budge. Every time I relocated her, she collapsed in heap and looked at me as if to say, “Okay. This is fine, too.” She was so stoned, if she could talk, I think she would have been discussing philosophy and asking if there was any more pizza in the fridge.

A few days have passed now, and both kittens have bounced back pretty well. They are eating and using the litter box normally, so I think the worst of it has passed. They still don’t like their little plastic space helmets, but we have been told they need to stay on a while longer. Besides, it’s rather entertaining to watch them pad around the house banging their heads into things. I would think after this many days though, they would have figured out how wide those cones are.

Cats aren’t very bright.

And they’re still smarter than my kids.

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Bad Odds

I read an article recently that said more adult children are moving back home to live with their parents than at any time since the 1930’s. They referred to these men and women as the “boomerang generation.” Well, I must live in Australia because I got boomeranged. Hard.

Now, many of you may think this is a good thing. You might believe that adult offspring living at home would be of great benefit to their aging and overworked mothers and fathers. They could help out financially by covering some of the bills, including food, power, and other necessities. They might lend a hand with the chores, taking on yardwork and housework so their rapidly deteriorating elders don’t wear out quite so quickly. They could even fix meals and run necessary errands.

You might think that.

And you would be terribly wrong.

I have two adult children living with me these days. EM1 is 23 years old and firmly entrenched in my home. She treats her bedroom like an apartment and has even changed the locks without providing her landlords a key. Landlords she doesn’t pay rent to.

A few weeks ago, I asked EM1 to pick one night during the week to plan a meal and cook dinner for the family. Instead of actually doing what I asked, she did nothing all week, then on Friday suddenly said, “Oh, I guess it’s my night to do dinner.”

She then told me to pick a restaurant, go online to order what I wanted and pay for it, then schedule a pickup. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t consider this to be “fixing dinner.” It’s more like Uber Eats, only with a shittier attitude.

And when she went out to pick up the food, EM1 decided to stop for coffee on the way home just to make sure everything was good and cold when it got to us.

This is her idea of “helping.”

But I have actually sort of gotten used to EM1’s particular brand of B.S. It is the younger kid that suddenly presented us with a whole new set of challenges this year. EM2 will be 21 in a few months. She is attending college, but her school has gone completely virtual. EM2 moved out of the dorms and back home with us so she could save money and try to shorten my life.

Although classes are online, she still drives to school on most days so she can hang out with her college friends while she studies. I am not sure of her reasoning for this other than perhaps some strange desire to cost us gas money and put wear and tear on the car. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand why, instead of staying in her room and opening up her laptop to attend class, she feels the need to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes to a friend’s apartment so she can open up her laptop to attend class.

But I have never understood how this kid’s mind works. This is the same child that wandered into our bedroom at 10 o’clock at night while my wife and I were trying to sleep and started singing a song from her favorite cartoon. Despite harsh words and a few thrown objects, she didn’t stop singing until the entire song was done.

To clarify, this wasn’t several years ago. This was just last week. (And the cartoon was We Bare Bears, just in case you were wondering. I have no idea what the name of the damned song was.)

This is my life with adult children in the home. No extra help with chores or running errands, just nonstop tests to see if I can keep my sanity or if I’ll finally break and fire up the chainsaw I keep in the garage and try to bring the house down around our ears. At the moment, the odds are about two to one in favor of the chainsaw in case you wanted to get your bets in.

Just the other day, I was in the kitchen washing dishes and loading up the dish washer. I probably spent twenty minutes boiling my hands in hot soapy water before I finished the stack of plates and silverware that had accumulated in the sink over the past few hours. I turned off the water, grabbed the bag out of the kitchen garbage can and took it outside.

When I returned, I found a dirty dish and a fork sitting in the sink.

EM1 was sitting on the couch watching the latest installment of some Korean soap opera. I asked her in a very pleasant voice, “What the f—k is this?”

She turned and asked what I was referring to. I asked her why there was a dirty dish in the sink, and with a look that suggested she couldn’t believe I was bothering her for something so trivial, she told me it was from her lunch.

I took a deep breath then clarified that I wasn’t really asking where it came from, but rather why didn’t she bother to wash it. She told me, “I’ll get it later.”

I asked, again very politely, “If you didn’t want to wash it, why the hell didn’t you at least hand it to me thirty seconds ago while I was washing all the other dishes?”

She shushed me, then turned the volume up on the television set.

For anyone who is wondering, EM1 is still alive and breathing. I’ll admit however, that it was touch and go for a moment.

But maybe we should up those odds to three to one in favor of the chainsaw.

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Three Years

Birthday cake with candle shaped like number 3

This week marks a milestone for Deep Dark Thoughts. As of today (or close enough that nobody cares) DDT is officially three years old!

I thought for this post I would skip the normal attacks on my family, friends, and career, and instead just take a moment to enjoy the accomplishment. In 2017, I started ranting about my misdeeds, mishaps, misfires, and life in general, and here I am in 2020, still at it. To be fair, I’ve been ranting about all of those things my entire life, I just made it official three years back when I began posting online about everything (and everyone) that gets under my skin.

I have never had any difficulty finding things to complain about and, let’s face it, this past year has been an absolute treasure trove of torment and annoyance. Between the garbage going on in the world around us and the fact that my adult kids have both come back home to live with me full time, I need the outlet DDT provides to me more than ever before.

And everyone out there who reads this blog gets to suffer right along with me. Misery loves company, I guess. Well, I hope you are all willing to endure it a little longer because I don’t think I’ll be stopping this slow-motion train wreck anytime soon.

Despite what you have been reading from me lately, there actually has been some good news in my life, so I thought I would share that with all of you. I’m getting older and I’ve been drinking a lot more in the past couple of years. That’s it. That’s the good news. I figure if I keep it up, I will probably be dead soon and that’s good news for all of us.

I will be gone, which means I will stop writing this blog. That also means all of you get back five minutes of your day on Thursdays. Win-win.

All kidding aside, thank you to everyone who has been reading, and especially to those that occasionally take a moment to send a kind word my way to let me know they enjoyed my directionless, meaningless tirades.

I plan to continue this blog for a while yet, but I have been considering making a few changes. I have been thinking about opening up this space to other writers who would like to share vignettes of their lives, offer new viewpoints to consider, or just rant about their own personal pet peeves.

The rules will remain the same. No religion, no politics, and no topics that in any way have any meaning in our current society. Uninformed, unenlightened discourse fueled by anecdotal evidence will be the only content acceptable in these pages. And, above all, I will continue to try to find the humor in the misery around us.

I haven’t completely made up my mind on which direction I will eventually go with this, but I am curious to know what any of you may think on the matter. I really want to hear from you. Comment below or send me a note or email and give me your thoughts. Is my lunatic fringe musings sufficient for a while longer, or is it time to hear some new voices? I’m okay with either direction and promise I won’t be upset if a few of you are tired of my pedantic complaints and ready to see someone else’s pedantic complaints.

Actually, I can’t promise that. As you may have noticed, I get upset easily and anything is fair game for Deep Dark Thoughts. I do promise that I won’t call you out by name, however. I can come up with a neat new nickname for you and nobody will know who you actually are. Just ask EM1 and EM2 about that.

Seriously, though, I do want to hear your thoughts about opening up DDT to other writers.

That’s it for now. Thank you for three years of your patience and tolerance, and I hope you’re willing to stick it out for a little bit longer. If you haven’t been with me that long, feel free to check out the archives and see what I was up to three years ago. (Hint: it’s going to look an awful lot like right now. The only difference is the kids have gotten a little older and grown a bit more sophisticated in their abilities to piss me off.)

Next week, things will get back to normal as I once again complain about how useless my children are. Stay tuned and check back in next Thursday. (Spoiler alert: my children are really, really, really useless.)

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And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.

Trivial Matters

As we do many nights of the week, my family and I were all seated around the living room watching our evening episode of Jeopardy! I was doing pretty well in several of the categories and I had just correctly answered a Double Jeopardy question that the contestant on the television missed. (C’mon man. Who doesn’t know that Robert Heinlein wrote the book Starship Troopers?) My daughter, EM2, looked at me and said, “Wow, dad. You’re pretty good at trivia.”

I thought about her comment for a moment and realized that yes, I was pretty good at trivia. I also realized that the statement wasn’t really a compliment.

I know a lot of stuff that nobody else cares about and has never done me any good in the real world. I don’t know how to rebuild a car engine, fix plumbing, or run electrical wire, but by God, I sure know that Myron MacLain created Captain America’s first shield, and is credited with inventing adamantium steel.

And I can tell you that the word sarcophagus is based on the Greek word “sarkophagos,” which means flesh-consuming. (I know. Gross, right?)

But what good is knowing a bunch of trivia? None at all. It’s even in the definition of the word trivia: “pieces of information of little importance or value.”

My brain, for some reason, just tends to hold onto little pearls of wisdom that nobody else wants to hear about. I can barely change a light bulb, but I know that the first commercially viable light bulb filaments were made of bamboo. Anybody care? Anyone? No?

Didn’t think so.

I don’t even seem to be able to retain useful trivia. I’m terrible at geography. I don’t know state capitols, the locations of major rivers, or even the location of most countries on a map outside of the USA and Canada. These facts might actually have some relevance in my life if I could retain them for longer than three seconds. But when it comes to information I wish I could remember, I seem to have the memory capabilities of a gold fish.

However, the words to the theme songs for Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, and The Beverly Hillbillies I will have on lockdown in my brain for the rest of my life. I will most likely be lying in my deathbed, singing to the nurse as she turns off all the machines in my hospital room, “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named, Jed…”

What can I say? I think there is something very wrong with the memory synapses in my brain. I imagine normal people’s brains as a series of drawers. If there is something you want to remember, you stick it in the drawer and it’s there for you the next time you come looking. My brains is just a bunch of shelves. Trivia facts are flat and heavy. I put them on a shelf, and they stay there forever. Important facts are round. Those suckers roll right off and fall on the floor the second I’m not paying attention.

I wish I knew why my mind worked this way. Maybe it was physical trauma. Perhaps when I was very young, my mother dropped me on my head during an episode of Jeopardy (which first aired on television in 1964, can you believe it?).

Most people hear that the ancient Egyptians were the first culture to domesticate cats over 4000 years ago and think, “Hmm. Interesting.” Then completely forget all about it.

My brain says, “Well, I better file that away for later because it just might come in handy on a long family car drive when I’m just about ready to kill one of the children.”

Being good at trivia does not make me better at my job, put food on my table, or keep me safe from predators. What trivia does, is that it tells me “Predator” was a 1983 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger made his movie debut in “Hercules in New York” in 1970. And let’s not forget that Hercules (also know as Heracles) was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman.

I can go on. I know you don’t want me to, I’m just saying that I could.

If I had lived in the early days of human existence, I probably wouldn’t have survived past my first decade of life. While all my friends and family were hunting for meat and figuring out which plants were safe to eat, I would have been pondering why my fingernails grew so much faster than my toenails.

It’s likely my life would have ended while staring at a flower and thinking, “I wonder why the bees like the purple flowers better than the yellow ones?”

Everyone else would be thinking, “Why is he just standing there? Doesn’t he see the Tyrannosaurus Rex about to eat him? Shouldn’t he be running by now?”

Before anyone starts sending me e-mails telling me that human beings and T-rexes were never alive during the same time period, yes, I am aware. Of course, I know that.

It’s trivia.

Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.