Author: Gary

By Special Request

For EM1’s birthday this year, she made a special request. She did not want a birthday cake like every other year of her life. This time, she wanted me to make Macarons.

“No sweat. Happy to do it,” I told her.

My initial thought was that Macarons are like fussy cookies. I have baked lots of cookies in my day, so this should be a piece of cake (if you’ll pardon the pun). After a little bit of research, I was quickly dissuaded of the idea that the little French sweets were anything like cookies. They are nothing like cookies. They may be flat and round, but the tricky bastards are only camouflaging themselves like an innocent cookie when in reality they are evil and do not belong in a normal human being’s kitchen.

Okay, maybe not actually evil, but the rest of my opinion stands.

My second thought was, instead of making them, I’ll just go out and buy some. It’ll be easier and I’ll just tell EM1 that I made them. Problem solved.

Until I started looking at prices.

Have you ever bought a Macaron? They are quite a bit more expensive than I expected, and since I had no desire to mortgage the house just to buy cookies (sorry … not cookies) I was back to square one. Only, I was actually further back than square one, since I now realized that this project might take a little more time and effort than I had originally planned.

Turned out, I was wrong about that assumption as well.

It took A LOT more time and effort than I originally planned.

I found a recipe online called “Basic French Macarons – perfect for beginners.” There are so many oxymorons in that statement I don’t even know where to start. The word “basic” should be nowhere in that sentence, and “perfect for beginners” is so misleading the author should be sued for libel.

There were only seven ingredients in the recipe, so in the beginning I thought I had a chance of creating something edible. The world is so full of horrible things that I should know better by now than to ever hope something will turn out the way it was promised. For such a small list of ingredients, there was an inordinate amount of sifting, separating, whisking, whipping, and folding.

I know what those words usually mean, but when applying them to baking I’m a little lost. In general, if I can’t do it with a bowl and a spoon, it just ain’t happening.

I suppose it might have helped if I had read the instructions the day before and had some idea of what I was doing before I started. The recipe called for room temperature butter and eggs. I keep both those items in the refrigerator, so the first step of making Macarons for me was “set butter and eggs on counter and go watch an hour of Netflix.”

That was the part of the baking experience that worked out okay. I had time to start season 5 of American Horror Story. Score one for the Chef!

Next, I pre-heated the oven and mixed my Macaron ingredients into the mixing bowl. The mixture came out like a lumpy green oatmeal. I am pretty sure that is not the desired texture, however I was not about wait another hour while I brought two more eggs up to room temperature. I was committed and already stuck in enemy territory.

I placed the oddly rigid mass into a piping bag and squirted out two dozen circles of batter on two baking sheets. Okay, if I’m being honest, I piped out two dozen ovals, triangles, and various blobs. You would think circles would be easy.

And you would be very, very wrong.

I read the next line in the recipe and it said, “let the Macarons sit out on the counter for up to a couple hours, until batter becomes stiff and rubbery.”

Crap.

I turned the oven back off and sat down to watch episode two of season five of American Horror Story. Baking had become an awful lot like binge watching television.

When the batter was ready, I turned the oven back on, waited for it to heat up (while watching more TV), then popped the first of the baking sheets in to cook for the recommended 17 to 20 minutes.

After which, I sat back down on the couch to finish watching episode 3.

Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled out my dark brown, crumbling Macarons from the smoking oven.

Cookie sheet number two went in, and this time, I paid more attention to the time. At the end of 17 minutes, I pulled out the oddly shaped, but properly baked, lumps of batter.

As they cooled, I made the filling. This turned out to be pretty straight forward. Butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Even I didn’t screw up that combination.

By the time I was finished baking EM1’s requested birthday treat, I had a plate with seven incredibly sad looking Macarons. But they were homemade, as promised, and they looked almost edible. Of course, I couldn’t try them out myself since there weren’t enough survivors for sampling. I can only hope they tasted better than they looked.

They probably didn’t.

It was a lot of work and I admit that initially I was a little bothered by EM1’s odd request for a birthday dessert. A cake would have been much easier and cheaper, not to mention I could have made it in half the time it took to make the Macarons.

I’m not mad at her, though. With only seven Macarons on the plate, EM1 ate them all on her own.

And I think that is punishment enough for anybody.

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Fat, Drunk, and Stupid

I recently read an article in Newsweek that alcohol sales went up 55 percent in the last week of March. (https://www.newsweek.com/us-alcohol-sales-increase-55-percent-one-week-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-1495510) The article speculates that since a large population of Americans are now stuck at home with nowhere to go, they are drinking more heavily and more frequently. Whether this is due to boredom, fear, or stress relief, the article didn’t say. I think it’s probably a combination of all three.

For myself, I have noticed a major increase in the number of nights each week that I have a drink and the amount of alcohol I consume when I do drink. 55 percent actually seems a little bit of a low estimate. I would argue that there are many people in the U.S. right now that aren’t holding up their end of this new statistic. To them I say, “Stop making the rest of us do all the work.”

During the week, I typically get outside for about an hour every morning to take a walk. The rest of the time, I am locked up in my house with no place to go. Just last year, an opinion piece in Vox argued that prisoners held in their cells 23 hours a day was a cruel, inhumane, and unjust punishment for even the most serious of criminals. (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/17/18305109/solitary-confinement-prison-criminal-justice-reform)

I haven’t committed any crimes and yet I’m being told I have to stay in lockdown possibly for months to come. How is this even legal? Is it any wonder I’m drinking more to compensate? The choices are I either down a couple gin & tonics, or I start a prison riot in my own living room.

I have a television, but so do prisoners. I have access to books and the internet. But, again, so do prisoners. In addition, prisoners are provided three meals a day and all the toilet paper they need free of charge. I have to get my own food. And toilet paper? Well, we all know how that whole deal is going.

The only thing that I used to have that they don’t have is the ability to go hang out in a restaurant with a few friends.

That’s gone.

Now, I have 60 minutes of time in the morning walking around my neighborhood and waving at the neighbors as they stare at me through the windows of their houses. The rest of my day, I can only stand in the window and look outside to see whose turn it is to walk in the yard.

Junk food and booze seem to be the only methods of dealing with the boredom of being trapped. Junk food and booze also seem to be the only things that grocery stores aren’t running short of. Is it any wonder then, that I spend a large part of my day wandering between the pantry and the refrigerator? If I’m eating, I’m not thinking about the fact that I can’t go anywhere. I settle down at night, of course, because that’s when I start the slow alcohol drip that will eventually allow me to fall asleep on the couch.

Alcoholism used to be a disease that people tried to treat. Overeating was similarly recognized as a problem. Today, they seem to be socially acceptable coping mechanisms for existing in a pandemic.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I have gained more than 10 pounds in the last month or so, and it is likely that trend will continue into the foreseeable future. My heart and my liver seem to be in a race to see which body organ can go into complete failure first. Presently, the liver has a small lead, but my heart is running a close second.

When a vaccine for the Covid-19 virus is finally developed and the world gets back to normal, I am curious to see what the death rates for liver failure and heart disease will be over the next few years. I’m betting that there will be a definite climb in the numbers.

Maybe … oh, I don’t know. About 55%?

In the meantime, I will keep eating whatever junk food I can find in the pantry, and I will keep drinking large quantities of alcohol to make sure I remain passive and don’t attack any family members. They may be annoying, but I don’t want to hurt them.

Even though some of them really deserve it.

(I’m looking at you, EM1. Wash your damn dishes once in a while.)

I could probably keep complaining about this for several more pages, but I can see by the clock on the wall, it’s time for me to go.

The warden has me on a strict schedule and I don’t want to miss my yard time.

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Grocery Shopping in the Time of Covid-19

Due to the recommendations of our president and state governor, my family and I have been huddling at home, watching television, eating, and generally getting on one another’s nerves for the past few weeks. Whereas I used to get out several days each week to see movies, have lunch, or just meet with friends, I now rarely see anything other than the same four walls inside my house.

The other day, however, I grabbed my car keys and headed to the great outdoors searching for a grocery store so I could replenish the family’s doomsday supplies. I just wanted to get some necessities. You know: chips, sodas, alcohol, and a few bags of mini marshmallows to make rice krispy treats.

In other words, essentials.

When I headed out, I was completely unprepared for what I encountered.

The night before my journey, we had a major storm roll through our town. It rained and the wind kicked up to over 30 miles per hour at times. As I drove along the street leading away from my house, I found myself veering back and forth over the roadway to avoid large tree limbs, garbage cans, and various other debris that had been deposited in my path. There were no other cars on the road, but that actually made the whole thing more surreal.

I felt like I was a lone survivor of the apocalypse, driving through an abandoned city on a broken, partially blocked road. I kept waiting to run into rusted, burned out hulks of other cars that would force me to abandon my car and walk the remaining miles to the grocery store.

And since I had left the house without my machete and sawed-off shotgun, I felt woefully underprepared for this journey.

I fortunately made it to the store without having to give up the car. I also did not see any other people out during the drive, living or undead. The streets were uninhabited.

I did find several cars and people milling about when I arrived at the grocery store. There was a short line of shoppers standing six feet apart from one another waiting for each person to grab a grocery cart, wipe it down with antibacterial wipes provided by the store, then get out of the way so the next person in line could take their turn.

I grabbed my cart, wiped it down, and entered the store.

Many of the shoppers inside were wearing masks over their faces. Some of them were purchased facemasks, while others were homemade. All I could see were dark, suspicious eyes, peering at me over the tops of the masks, gauging whether or not I was a threat. I assume they were all thinking the same thing as they looked me over.

“If he comes closer than six feet, I’m going to cave in his head with a can of creamed corn.”

That’s okay, though. I was thinking the exact same thing about them.

Just like any good apocalypse, the store aisles were mostly empty shelves thanks to previous looters who got there before me. No paper products anywhere. No soap, no eggs, no flour, no sugar. Nothing that could be horded and stored in a garage for coming months of anticipated famine. It was less like shopping and more like foraging for scraps in a bombed-out building.

I snuck around the store, moving from empty row to empty row, trying not to make too much noise. I don’t know why. I just know that’s what everyone does in movies when they’re in a grocery store that has been picked clean. Making noise usually gets everyone killed except the young, good-looking people. Since I know what I look like, I stayed quiet.

I found some of the items on my list, but certainly not everything. Shopping these days is an exercise in futility most of the time.

And there were no zombies to shoot, which made the experience even more miserable. At least with zombies you can work out a few of your frustrations with a baseball bat and nobody is going to call the police.

As I payed for my groceries, I waved at the cashier through the plastic barrier the store had erected between her and the customers. I swear, the stores have more security for their employees right now than most banks. I asked her several times how her day was going before she finally shook her head and yelled, “I can’t hear you over here. Just put your credit card in the scanner and go away.”

After loading my meager supplies into the car, I headed home. It was the same lonely, debris-filled obstacle course I came in on, only in reverse. Nobody drove up next to me to run me off the road and steal my food, which is good. It means society hasn’t broken down that far.

Yet.

Still, it made me glad when I was back home with my family. They drive me crazy, but it is a more normal kind of crazy than anything going on right now outside the house. For the foreseeable future, I am just going to hunker down behind the moat and the barbed wire and try to ride this thing out, at least until the next time I have to go foraging…

Sorry. I meant, shopping.

Shopping with my machete and sawed-off shotgun.

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Asleep At the Wheel

As I have mentioned before, my first job in law enforcement was with the Hillsborough Police Department. What I may have failed to mention about HPD was that it was an extremely small agency. The city was residential homes only – no businesses and no shops – and no more than about 11,000 people resided there.

My badge number was 23, and that was the highest numbered badge in the agency. That might give you some idea of just how small we were.

I worked the graveyard shift for the first several years. Ordinarily, working all night as a police officer is not terribly difficult as there is always something to do to keep you awake and busy. Not in Hillsborough, however. It seemed like the town rolled up its streets at 11 o’clock every night.

With no businesses, and all the residents asleep at night, there was very little for an officer to do in the wee hours of the morning in that town. This was before we had cellphones that would let you watch movies, play games, or check out social media. In fact, if I’m being totally honest, this was before we had cell phones at all.

Some nights, I would read a book. Others, I might meet another officer in our department break room and put a movie into the VHS. Sometimes, however, I would park my car in a dark corner, turn my radio to maximum, and fall asleep.

This may shock some people who have never tried to stay up all night driving a car at slow speeds when there are absolutely no calls for service and nothing to do, but sometimes a graveyard cop just needs to take a nap.

It didn’t happen all the time, but it wasn’t rare either. Rather than fall asleep while driving and waking up parked on someone’s front lawn (which also happened more than I care to remember) it was safer to just park somewhere isolated and close my eyes. I had supervisors that told us they would rather we get some sleep when we need it, instead of crashing the patrol car. It meant less paperwork for them and smaller insurance premiums for the city.

Until one day in briefing, we got a new memo. My sergeant announced that the new chief, Bob McNichol, had announced a moratorium on any cops sleeping while on duty. It had always technically been against the rules, but now the chief was asking the supervisors to enforce the rule and write up any officers caught sleeping in their patrol cars.

My sergeant shook his head at the new order. “This is bullshit,” he said to me and the other officers in the briefing room. “When the chief was a patrol officer, he was asleep in his uniform more than he was awake in it. They might as well have been pajamas.”

But the rules are the rules. My sergeant told us all that from that day forward, if he caught anyone sleeping, it would mean a write up in their file.

I lasted about a week.

One night, there was nothing going on and I was absolutely exhausted from lack of sleep during that past day. The sergeant had warned everyone to stay awake, but it wasn’t as if he was driving around actively searching for officers breaking this particular rule. I decided that I was going to risk it. Just this once.

I pulled my patrol car into the city corps yard, where all the black and white vehicles that needed repair or that had not yet been put into service were located, backed into an empty parking spot to blend in with all the other vehicles, and closed my eyes.

I must have been more tired than I thought. I went out. Hard.

When I woke up, the sun was coming up and the sky had already lightened considerably.

I wiped the sleep crud out of my eyes and looked around. That was when my heart stopped beating for a second.

Parked directly next to me was my sergeant’s car, and he was sitting behind the wheel barely three feet away from me. I figured I was busted and resigned myself to a new letter in my file. I even spent a moment wondering if I should sign the reprimand in blue ink or use red just for dramatic effect.

That’s when I noticed something odd. My sergeant wasn’t looking at me. In fact, he wasn’t looking at anything.

He was fast asleep.

I guess he had pulled up next to me, then while waiting for me to wake up and notice him parked right beside me, he dozed off.

One trick you learn about sleeping in a patrol car is: always leave the car running. That way the radio is always on and you can keep the heater running on particularly cold nights. It is also a lot quieter if you need to leave in a hurry without having to start your engine first.

When I realized that the sergeant was out, I dropped my car into gear, released the brake, and let the car slowly roll out of the parking spot. When I was about ten feet away, I hit the gas and fled for the open road.

At the end of my shift, I just happened to see my sergeant in the halls of the police station as I was getting ready to leave. He waved at me and said, “See you tomorrow.”

I waved back.

That was it. No comments or reprimands about sleeping. I guess my disappearing act had made him realize that he, too, had fallen asleep. I had dodged a bullet.

Fortunately, he had no desire to throw stones in this particular glass house.

That was just fine with me. If he didn’t want to talk about it, then neither did I.

I ran for the parking lot, jumped in my personal vehicle and headed home.

I can’t say that was the last time I ever fell asleep while on duty, but I can say that was the last time I ever let myself get caught.

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The New Abnormal

Over the past couple weeks, the Wilbanks’ household has been dealing with some changes. We are not unique in this respect, I am sure, as most people are trying to adapt and make sense of the struggles in our world today. A very short time ago, people came and went freely, traveling from place to place without a second thought. Today, it feels as if we have all been placed on some type of world-wide house arrest.

I used to have the entire house pretty much to myself every day. My youngest daughter was off to college, and my wife and my oldest kid both had jobs to go to. That is no longer the case.

EM1 and my wife are both working from home these days, and EM2 was asked to pack up and move out of her college dorm room. She is back at home with the rest of us, attending classes remotely on her laptop. (Which is interesting to observe, since as a music major she is required to attend saxophone lessons and be graded on her performance.)

It is a bizarre dynamic. We could all be sitting on the couch one minute, then the next EM2 jumps up and says, “I have to go to class!” That is when she runs into her bedroom, closes the door, and we start to hear saxophone music throughout the house.

Similarly, EM1 will tell us, “I have to go to work.” She then locks herself in her room and starts recording worship music for a church service that will be uploaded onto the internet three days later. Her church is no longer conducting live services on Sundays, so EM1 and the pastor record their portions of the service during the week and splice it all together to post on Sunday mornings.

Between EM1 and EM2, the house is always filled with music. I guess that is a good thing, but I must admit I am more used to having absolute quiet during the day. It is a lot harder to take a nap and binge-watch movies when someone is playing scales over and over on a brass instrument.

Since my wife is home all day, she has started tagging along with me when I am running errands. This is both a blessing and a curse. The other day, we were on our way to the college to pick up EM2 and bring her home, when my wife looked at her phone and told me, “This isn’t good.”

I asked her what the problem was.

She said, “I need to go back home and answer this email. I have to make some phone calls.”

I made a U-turn, took her back to the house and then went to pick up my daughter by myself, 45 minutes later than originally planned.

This isn’t totally new, however. I have mentioned in a previous blog that she is a bit of a workaholic and does the same thing when she is supposed to be on vacation. (You can find that story here if you’re interested.) So, the fact that she has been told by her boss to stay home hasn’t slowed her down one bit. The only difference is now instead of ignoring her family from her job site, we all have to sit in the same room with her and watch her ignore us from three feet away.

The second biggest challenge with all of us being home is that during the slow times we struggle to find things to do that we can all enjoy. For example: we have run out of things to talk about. How can you have a conversation when all four of you are constantly together experiencing the exact same thing at all times?

Me: “Hey, something funny happened to me today while I was fixing myself some lunch.”

EM2: “Yeah, we all saw you do it, and it wasn’t really that funny.”

End of conversation.

So, we try to find other things to distract us from the boredom. We tried baking some cookies recently. That actually was kind of enjoyable, until EM1 sucked all the fun out of it by frosting the cookies so that they spelled out the word, “QUARANTINE!” She has a knack for focusing on the worst parts of anything. I swear, that kid could ruin a New Orleans funeral procession.

Most of the time we simply default to sitting on the couch and turning on the TV. This is not as relaxing as it sounds. The four of us rarely like the same movies or television programs and we argue about what to watch more than we actually watch anything. We recently instigated an “each person gets to pick one thing” policy, but that too has its drawbacks.

After watching a movie that I picked, EM1 got to choose what we saw next. She selected a music video of a K-Pop group (which was not surprising as this is just about the only thing she watches any more). The video was 15 minutes long and, when it ended, I said it was mom’s turn to choose.

EM1 then spent the next half hour complaining that I was not being fair since my movie was 90 minutes long and her video was only 15. I told her we each get to pick one thing to watch regardless of how long it was. EM1 just complained louder. I felt like I was lecturing a three year on how to take turns on a swing.

This is what my life has become.

I don’t foresee any major changes in the near future, so I’m strapping in for a long and bumpy ride. I understand why we all need to stay home. It’s for the greater good. I only hope that in my case, the cure isn’t worse than the disease.

With my family, it could go either way.

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Last Line of Defense

I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know when it happened. Somehow, without my realizing it was occurring, I became the designated “killer of all multi-legged things that get into the house.”

I never wanted the responsibility. I didn’t ask for the position, but apparently it was bestowed upon me by the democratic decree of the other members of my household. I just wish someone had told me when it was happening so I could have removed my name from contention.

Unfortunately, whether I saw it coming or not, I am now the one responsible for removing all spiders, ants, beetles, bugs, bees, wasps, crickets, roaches, moths, mice, mosquitos, gnats, frogs, flies, centipedes, and even the occasional snake from our house.

Just the other night, I was curled up in bed, not quite fully asleep but already slipping into that wonderful pre-sleep dream state, when a voice from out of the darkness said, “Are you awake?”

Well, I wasn’t awake, and I was about to tell the rude, interrupting presence to go away when I realized for the first time that I wasn’t dreaming the voice. It was an actual voice.

It asked again, “Are you awake?”

I opened one eye and saw a blond head peeking around the frame of my bedroom door. It was my daughter, EM1, lurking in the hallway like the world’s worst burglar. I asked her what she wanted. Or, at least I tried to, but I was so groggy I’m not sure exactly what came out of my mouth.

She said, “There’s a spider in the bathroom. Can you come get it?”

Keep in mind, this is a twenty-three-year-old woman asking me to get up in the middle of the night to kill a spider. I wonder what she is going to do when she is living on her own and a spider wanders into her apartment. Call me in the middle of the night to come over and remove it?

Of course not. That’s a silly thing to even contemplate.

I know EM1 is never moving out of my house.

Anyway, I crawled out of bed and staggered down the hallway to EM1’s bathroom to see the eight-legged monster that was preventing any of us from going to sleep that night. EM1 pointed up at one of the walls, close to the ceiling, indicating a tiny black speck about the size of the fingernail on my pinky.

“Really?” I asked. “You needed me to deal with this right now?”

“I saw it once before, but it crawled away. I didn’t want it to get away again.”

Logical, I suppose. But still inconvenient timing.

I stepped up to the wall and reached up one hand to demonstrate that the murderous bathroom dweller was well out of my reach. “I can’t get it. What do you want me to do?”

EM1 held out a cotton ball in her hand. “Do you want to throw this at it? Try to knock it down?”

I told her that no, I wasn’t going to throw a cotton ball at the spider, and started to explain that her suggestion was utterly ridiculous. That was when I noticed that the floor of the bathroom was littered with cotton balls. Apparently EM1 had already been attempting this odd tactic of spider removal.

“Did you throw all these?” I asked her.

“I was trying to get him off the wall.”

“And he just batted them away?”

She gave me a dirty look.

Shaking my head, I began to look around for something that would allow me to reach up high enough to remove the intruder. I found a hand towel next to the sink and picked it up. EM1 held out a hand to stop me, but instead just made an unhappy noise and said, “Go ahead.”

I guess she would rather have to wash her towel than deal with the spider any longer.

I extended the towel to its full length and swatted the hapless critter on the wall. It fell to the ground in typical spider fashion, landing with its multiple legs curled under itself in the international spider language of “You got me and now I’m quite dead.”

Tossing the towel back on the sink, I walked out of the bathroom to go back to bed.

EM1 tried to call me back to pick up the dead bug. “It’s still on the floor. Aren’t you going to get rid of it?”

“I killed it,” I told her. “You can clean it and cook it.”

I heard little squeaks of revulsion and disgust for a couple minutes, then the toilet flushed. The saga had apparently ended. As I crawled back into bed, EM1 called out, “It squished when I picked it up!”

Yeah, they’ll do that. It’s one of the hazards of spider killing. And I should know.

It’s my job.

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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.

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