Deep Dark Thoughts – Page 16 – Deep Dark Thoughts

Lawn Mower Blues

My wife on the riding mower in our back yard.

My wife broke our lawn mower.

Technically, the lawn mower broke while my wife was using it, but it’s just more fun to say that my wife broke our lawn mower. I am usually the person that has my hands on anything mechanical when it decides to die or blow up so, for a change, I get to blame someone else. That doesn’t happen often, and I want to take full advantage of the opportunity.

My wife volunteered to mow the lawn recently on a Saturday to help out with some of the yard work. It was a very nice offer on her part. She sat down on our riding mower, started up the engine, then drove it into the back yard.

Two minutes later, she was back in the house telling me, “I think there’s something wrong with the lawn mower.”

I asked her what she meant by “something wrong.”

She told me, “I don’t know. It stopped working.”

I followed her outside to the back lawn, and she pointed to our mower. She had left it parked in the grass. It looked fine at first, but then I saw the problem. There was a little bit of smoke trickling from under the engine cover, and the drive belt that ran the mower blades was spooled out on the lawn underneath it like the eviscerated guts of some unfortunate animal.

“Something wrong” was a bit of an understatement.

I asked my wife to move the mower back to the garage. I said I would fix it later, knowing full well that I do not have the mechanical skills to “fix” anything more complicated than tightening a screw. (Righty tighty – lefty loosey).

Still, I figured I should give it a look.

I pulled out the owner’s manual for the mower and researched replacing the drive belt. It didn’t look that hard. The dude in the illustration on page 23 didn’t look like he was much smarter than me. And he was smiling. So, how bad could it be?

I lay down on the ground next to the mower, grabbed the belt and slipped it around the first guide wheel. The guide wheel, mounting bracket, and left mower blade all fell off of the mower and into my hands.

Okay. This was going to be a much bigger job than I originally anticipated. Time to go with plan B.

Plan B is the power equipment repair shop thirty miles away. I called the shop and told them I had a broken mower. They told me to bring it in. I explained that bringing it to them might be a bit of problem for me since I don’t have any way to transport anything bigger than a bicycle. When I asked if they could pick it up, since I don’t have a trailer to transport it, they gave me a phone number for a guy who does pick-ups and deliveries to their business.

Let me just say that part again: not a company that does pick-ups. “A guy.”

Nervous, but willing to give it a go, I called their “guy.” The phone rang a few times, then picked up.

“Yup.”

“Um. Is this … Gus?”

“Yup. Who’s this?”

“I was told you might be able to help me move my lawn mower to the repair shop. I need it picked up and transported to get it fixed.”

“Sure. I guess I could do that for you. Where do you live?”

Did any of that sound like a legitimate business transaction? Because to me it felt like the opening scene from a horror movie, and I had just invited some homicidal stranger over to my house to make me his next victim.

Gus, the delivery guy, wanted $125 to pick up the mower. I thought that was a little steep just to carry a lawn mower thirty miles away, but I was sort of stuck. My choices were to pay Gus to move it or live with a giant orange paperweight in my garage for the foreseeable future. I elected to move it.

Gus arrived later that day with his flatbed trailer, then asked for payment up front before he loaded my mower. Again, as I had limited options, I paid him.

He placed a metal ramp from the ground to the back edge of his trailer, then started to drive my mower up onto the flatbed. About halfway up, the ramp slipped off the truck and Gus and my mower came crashing back down to the ground. Gus fell off the mower and landed in the gravel that paves my driveway.

Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so bad about the hundred and twenty-five bucks. After all, it wasn’t me sprawled out in the driveway next to a broken lawn mower.

After making sure the lawn mower hadn’t gotten any additional damage in the fall, I asked Gus if he was okay. He stood up, made sure there wasn’t any blood on him or bones jutting in odd angles, then nodded.

“Good,” I said. “We get lousy cell phone reception out here and I didn’t want to go all the way back in the house to call for an ambulance.”

Gus said some stuff, but I probably shouldn’t repeat it since I don’t have age restricting software on my blog. He wasn’t very happy.

Trying to be helpful, I reminded him that the mower still wasn’t in the trailer and the repair shop was expecting it to arrive soon. He said some other stuff I won’t repeat.

Gus was not a very pleasant person. After almost getting squashed by a lawn mower I guess I can’t really blame him for that. Eventually, he did get my mower into his trailer and he drove off to get it repaired.

The whole thing was quite an ordeal, and I still blame my wife for the whole thing. After all, she is the one who broke the lawn mower and caused the whole mess.

In a way, she almost killed Gus.

I’m going to tell him that the next time I see him. I’d rather he was mad at her than at me.

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Thanksgiving the Hard Way

Another Thanksgiving weekend has arrived. Families are gathering around a large dead bird and announcing the things that have occurred in the past year that have made them thankful. My family is no exception.

At our house, Thanksgiving is a bit of a big deal. The entire extended family gathers for the full weekend and doesn’t leave until the last cranberry in the house has been consumed. But this wasn’t always the case for me. When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a somewhat smaller affair.

In the Wilbanks household, Thanksgiving was not a huge gathering or celebration. I remember in school I would do all the typical Thanksgiving things – cut out hand-shaped turkeys, paste together brown and tan paper chains, and assemble pinecone and peanut butter bird feeders – but most of that stuff found its way into the garbage can before the turkey in the oven was even brown.

On the day itself, it was typically a small gathering in our house. My dad’s parents had both died before I was nine, and my mom’s parents rarely bothered to come to our house. I suppose the 90-minute drive from San Juan Bautista was just too much of an ordeal for them (although if we ever failed to drive to their house for Christmas dinner, we would hear about it from my grandmother nonstop for the next year). My mom’s brother and his wife would show up on occasion, but since they lived in Los Angeles at the time it was understandable that they usually stayed home.

My dad’s many brothers and sisters all had their own family obligations so, we never saw any of them. Besides, all of the aunts and uncles and cousins on my dad’s side of the family got together once a year for a family reunion in the summer, and by Thanksgiving most of the fights and arguments that occurred at the reunion hadn’t yet been resolved. I will probably delve into the Wilbanks Family Reunions in more detail in a later blog. For now, let’s stay focused on Thanksgiving.

My two brothers are both much older than I am, and they had already moved out of the house by the time I was eight. They would, however, both come over on Thanksgiving to eat with us. My oldest brother, Dennis would typically show up late on Thanksgiving Day. The rest of us would already be eating when his beat-up Camaro would pull into the driveway. He showed up, said hi to my dad, then asked him for money because he needed gas in his car, or he was behind on his rent. My mom would hand him a paper plate, point at the half-mutilated carcass of the turkey, and tell him to get something to eat before she threw it all away.

Dennis would fix a plate of food, then go ask dad for money again.

I remember one year was a little different from the others, however. Dennis arrived, late as usual, but when mom handed him a plate, he said, “No thanks. I stopped and ate a couple burgers on the way here.” I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I absolutely believe he stopped for burgers on the way to a Thanksgiving meal, I just couldn’t believe he said it out loud to mom’s face. Dennis was never the most socially adept person I knew, but I thought he had at least had enough survival instincts not to poke a sleeping bear.

Turns out I was dead wrong.

To be fair to Dennis, mom was not the best cook in the neighborhood. Her turkey was typically just shy of being inedible. By the time she was done baking it, the turkey had the taste of sawdust but had a slightly lower moisture content.

It was the same meal every year. There were black olives that, as soon as they hit the table, I grabbed up ten of them (one on each finger, of course) then ran off before my mom could yell at me to wait for the rest of the food. The olives were followed by the bright red tube of cranberry sauce that still retained the shape of the can it came out of, and a plate of yams with marshmallow on top that nobody ever touched but mom insisted on making anyway. It was a family “tradition,” she said. Apparently throwing away an entire plate of untouched yams every year was also a “tradition” in our house.

Next came the bland, gluey, mashed potatoes. Eating them was like eating the paste they gave you in kindergarten, only with slightly less flavor. My grandmother always made great mashed potatoes with plenty of milk and butter because … well, because she was a normal person. However, she never bothered to pass that particular recipe down to my mom who figured a little salt added to that glutenous mass was all the seasoning it needed. On a few occasions she would put down a little bowl of gravy to go with the potatoes, but the stuff had the color and consistency of motor oil that badly needed to be changed. I never had the courage to find out what it tasted like.

The only part of the meal I looked forward to (besides the olives) was the stuffing. Stove Top stuffing hit the market in 1972, and it reached the Wilbanks Thanksgiving meal a few years after that. All you needed to do was put all the stuff in the box into a pot of boiling water and stir. Even my mom had a hard time ruining that part of the meal. Not that she didn’t try. There were frequently burned bits from the bottom of the pot that she would stir into the rest of the stuffing to “hide” her mistake.

Still, it was the best thing on the table. And it was usually gone by the time I got close enough to the table to fill up my plate. One box of stuffing is supposed to feed four people. There were five of us. So … go figure.

Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of Thanksgiving as I was growing up as well. It wasn’t all bad.

There were olives.

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Up On The Roof

I hate heights. I think I have mentioned this particular phobia before. It’s the reason we have trees that have never been trimmed, lights in the ceiling that will never be replaced, and Christmas lights on our eaves that went up the first year we moved in and are never coming back down.

I don’t like climbing ladders if they have more than four of five steps. By the time you get to step six, anything in your immediate vicinity was completely over your head while you were on the ground. If you don’t look up, why worry about whatever is there?

My dad didn’t like heights much, either. While I have no idea if phobias have a genetic component to them, if they do, I definitely inherited the trait from him. He was, however, a much braver person than I will ever be. Despite the fact he detested climbing up on ladders, it was his job to climb up onto the roof whenever one of us kids threw something up there.

There was always something on our roof when I was growing up. It was like a magnet that attracted toys. On any given day, you could find a frisbee, a football, tennis ball, tennis racket, somebody’s sandwich, and a pair of shoes on our roof. Whenever something previously landbound found its way up there, my dad was the one expected to drag the ladder out of the garage, climb onto the cracked wooden shingles covering our house, and throw down the detritus.

When I was about nine, I remember my dad finally got completely fed up retrieving our stuff from the top of the house. He warned me and my brothers that the next item we lost something on the roof, we would have to go up and get it ourselves. I suggested simply leaving the stuff up there whenever we lost an item, but my dad said something about the eventual weight breaking through and leaving a hole in our ceiling. I don’t think he was exaggerating, either.

The first item I had to retrieve myself was a baseball. I tossed it up on the roof and was practicing catching it when it rolled off the edge. On one particular throw, the ball got stuck in the rain gutter. I went to get my dad. He pulled the ladder out of the garage, balanced it against the roof, pointed upward and said, “Go, get it.”

I hated climbing up the shaky, wooden, deathtrap. 1970’s ladders were designed for one thing and one thing only: to murder children.

After that adventure, I tried really hard not to lose anything on the roof ever again. One time, my dad found me sitting on the front lawn, just staring at the street. He asked me, “Where’s your football.”

I just shrugged and muttered something like, “I put it away.”

“Where did you put it?”

I shrugged again.

My dad looked up on the roof and immediately spotted my football stuck up against the brick chimney. He pointed at the garage and told me to get the ladder. My life had become absolute hell.

It was one of my brothers that eventually saved me from my frequent rooftop adventures. He gave me an empty whiskey bottle, then told me to stick it in the rain gutter and leave it there until the next time dad made me climb up on the roof.

In those days, my dad was still drinking pretty heavily. Some weekends, he would drink so much he forgot where he was or what he was doing while he was there. Now, we call that being blackout drunk. Back then, my brothers and I referred to it as “dad’s Friday night.”

A few days after I planted the whiskey bottle, I threw something else up onto the roof. I don’t remember exactly what it was. It could have been a frisbee, or maybe the neighbor’s dog. I forget.

My dad dragged out the ladder and told me to climb. This time, as soon as I got high enough to see into the rain gutter, I pulled out the bottle and held it out so my dad could see it.

“How did this get here?” I asked, pretending I had never seen it before.

My dad looked startled, confused, and guilty all at the same time.

“Do you think I should tell mom that somebody threw a bottle on top of our house?”

“No. There’s no need for that,” he said.

“Do you think I ever need to climb up on this ladder again?” I asked.

This was the first time that my dad realized that I was a little asshole and that I wasn’t above blackmail to get what I wanted.

To make a long story short, the bottle ended up in the trash and I never climbed on the roof again. My dad never learned the truth about how the bottle actually got there, and he quit drinking completely a couple years later. I consider that a win-win.

Today, there is nobody to force me to climb ladders or go on the roof. I don’t make EM1 or EM2 do it either. I don’t think either one of them is afraid of heights, but just in case, I don’t really want to find out what kind of dirt those kids have on me. Blackmail might be genetic, too.

So, we’ll all just stay safely on the ground.

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Two Years Already?

This week marks two years that Deep Dark Thoughts has been haunting the internet. Boy, time sure flies when you’re angry at the world and have a lot of useless crap to say about it. Weekly observations, rants, and general frustration with the people and events around me have filled these pages every Thursday for twenty-four months, and I see no reason to stop now.

Going into year three, however, I thought I might change things up just a bit. I think I have made it pretty clear to anyone reading these blogs that I am basically a cranky introvert that doesn’t trust people I don’t know, and has grave reservations about the ones that I do. But where did all that antisocial angst come from? It didn’t just appear overnight.

The answer to that question is not a simple one. It can’t be explained in just a few minutes, or even a few hours. I have had fifty-three years of experience and anecdotal evidence to support my conclusions that people are out to get me and the world is a horrible place, and it would take another fifty-three years to share it all with you here in DDT.

So, let’s get started.

Going forward, I will share not just the day to day disappointments my family and friends put me through, but I will also be giving readers a glimpse at the history of my life as I understand it. In other words: the day to day disappointments from my family and friends from years ago.

I have been feeling rather nostalgic lately, and I figured it was time to start sharing some of the older, more ridiculous moments in my life. We shall see soon enough if this is a brilliant idea, or just the beginning of the end for this blog.

In previous blogs, I have mentioned my perfectionist mother who lost her mind, as well as my alcoholic father. We may delve a little deeper into my relationships with those two people. I have been told that writing can be therapeutic, so we’ll give it a shot. Hopefully, it will also be entertaining to anyone curious enough to read about my early life growing up in a typical (?) 1970’s family.

I have also mentioned that I am a retired police officer. Perhaps I will write about how I got into law enforcement as a career and share a few stories about my days on the mean streets of California. I should probably check with my attorney first to make sure the stories I mention have all passed the statute of limitations for prosecutions.

By the way, what is the penalty for transporting an unconscious hooker over state lines? Just asking for a friend.

I taught martial arts for many years. I could write about that a little bit; discuss the ramifications of teaching hormonal teenagers the best locations on the human body to attack when trying to kill a person or knock them unconscious. There is definitely a reason that insurance premiums are through the roof for karate dojos.

What else should I talk about?

Well, what do you want to know? As a reader, has there been a past article you read that you wished I would elaborate on? Do you have questions you want me to answer, or are there comments I made that left you wanting further discussion on the topic?

Email me or post your comments below on this page. Let me know what interests you. Or just tell me what parts, if any, of the past two years of Deep Dark Thoughts you have enjoyed (or not enjoyed) the most.

For me, the best parts have been the comments and responses from friends and family who have read my blog. Thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with me for this long. I appreciate your encouragement, laughter, and willingness to recognize this is all just for entertainment and amusement.

I also enjoy the complaints from people claiming that I have grossly exaggerated the truth, and could I please stop making them look bad. Mostly I hear this from my kids, and I always tell them if they stop behaving like idiots, I will stop writing about them.

Clearly neither of us is going to stop.

To summarize: Happy second birthday, Deep Dark Thoughts. Here is to year three, and hopefully there will be many more.

Next week, we get back to business and discuss how Santa Claus is not the only person that has been climbing around on the Wilbanks’ rooftop. I hope you come back to see what I mean.

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French Homework

Recently, my youngest child asked if I wanted to go see movie with her. I was a little surprised by the invitation, but I thought that would be a great idea. I enjoy movies, and they are always more fun to see with company, so I said yes.

Then she asked if I could drive her to the theater and pay for the movie. This question was not as much of a surprise. But I’m a father. I’m used to being the one to pay for everything. So, I still agreed to it.

I asked her what movie she wanted to see, and EM2 said she had been given a homework assignment from one of her classes to see a film called, “Cyrano, My Love.” That seemed a bit odd to me. It has been several decades since I went to college, but I do not recall taking any classes that sent me to movies for homework assignments. I asked what kind of classes she had signed up for and she said it was her French class.

The movie was in French.

That made much more sense, but also sounded like a lot less fun than the movies I thought we were going to see. I don’t know a lot about French cinema, but I had images running through my mind of black and white films of mimes smoking cigarettes and dying slow, agonizing deaths while a gathering of strangers applauded and whispered bad poetry.

Like I said, I don’t know a lot about French films.

Despite my misgivings, I agreed to go. I suppose I should clarify that it was actually my wife who agreed that both of us would go. I was simply too slow trying to come up with a good excuse to stay home.

Off to the movies, we went.

Our adventure into French film started off a bit rocky. We parked in a parking garage that advised we could get our parking ticket validated at the movie theater. When we bought tickets at the front ticket counter, my wife asked about our parking. The young man behind the window said we could have our parking validated inside at the concession stand.

Inside at the concession stand, the fine young gentleman at the cash register told us tickets could be validated outside at the ticket booth. Either neither one of them had any clue what we were asking them to do, or else this was some kind of scam the parking garage people were running to make sure everyone parking in their facility paid full price.

With no immediate resolution to the problem, I bought a bag of popcorn. I figured if I was already at the front of the line of the concession stand, I wasn’t walking away empty handed.

We went into the theater and found seats for ourselves.

The movie we were seeing was only one film of many that were being screened for the sixth annual, French Film MiniFest. The entire day was devoted to watching and discussing classic French movies. When I heard we were attending a film festival, I assumed that we would soon be surrounded by pretentious, twenty-something hipsters with man-buns and questionable bathing practices. Instead, the theater slowly filled up with old people like me, who apparently had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. I admit to being a bit disturbed to find out that I actually was the demographic the theater was shooting for that day.

I don’t recall much (or any, actually) of the French I learned back in high school. I was prepared to sit in the theater and catch a two-hour nap while people on the screen in front of me rambled on in a language I did not understand. I figured at least I would be able to tell all my friends the next day that I had attended a French film festival over the weekend. That was a statement I had never been able to make at any time prior in my life. I could pretend I was trying to become more cultured and sophisticated, instead of merely admitting I had been suckered into helping my kid out with a school assignment.

The movie, however, had subtitles. Instead of a language lesson, it was suddenly a reading and comprehension exam. I put my glasses on and tried to keep up.

To be fair, the movie was pretty good. I enjoyed it quite it a bit. It was the story of the playwright who, in 1895, wrote Cyrano De Bergerac.

To my horror, EM2 asked me who Cyrano De Bergerac was. She had never heard the story of the long-nosed poet trying to win the love of Roxanne for another man. Either I’m a failure as a parent, or EM2 is simply an uneducated lout.

I’m prepared to blame the kid.

When the movie ended, I returned to the box office window. By some miracle, the kid who had been there earlier had been replaced by someone who knew how to validate parking.

We returned to the parking garage and I went to the machine to pay for my parking. I placed the ticket into the slot and … it disappeared. The machine was out of order and it ate my ticket. I started pushing every button I could find trying to get my ticket back. After the ordeal I had gone through to get the damned thing validated, I wasn’t going to pay full price because some machine was having a bad day.

The ticket stayed gone.

We found our car and drove to the exit. When the attendant asked for my proof of payment, I started yelling. My wife and daughter slunk down in their seats trying to make it appear as if I was alone in the car.

The attendant never stopped smiling. He opened the gate, waved me out, and wished me a nice day. I’m not sure if he was amazingly nice, or if he just wanted me gone, but I took the hint and drove away. I don’t know who the guy was, but his boss should give him a promotion and a raise. People who can handle assholes like me and keep a smile on their face are a rare breed.

Despite the few hiccups, my day with my wife and daughter turned out to be a pretty nice outing. I got popcorn, watched a decent movie, and got to park for free. Not bad.

I’m going to call that a win.

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Farewell to Candy Corn

October has come to an end. It is time to say goodbye to Halloween, Trick-or-Treating, and bowls of bite-sized candy treats. This makes me sad, but at least there is a bright side. There will be no more candy corn in my house for another year.

I have never understood why candy corn was created or how it has continued to exist for so long. There is nothing about these tiny little nuggets of nastiness that would make me understand why anyone buys them or, God forbid, eats them. They are neither candy, nor corn, but rather tri-colored plastic chunks designed to make children cry.

Even the color of this stuff is off-putting to the heartiest of appetites. Orange, yellow, and white. There is nothing else in nature that is orange, yellow, and white and is the slightest bit edible. Actually, let me amend that statement: There is nothing in nature that is orange, yellow, and white and is the slightest bit edible.

If a bird saw a caterpillar that was the same color as candy corn, it would immediately turn and fly off in the opposite direction. Even an animal with a brain that tiny knows those colors probably mean the item is highly toxic and it’s not a good idea to try to eat it.

People should have the same good sense.

I understand that people have different tastes. I get that. My dad used to love corned beef with cabbage and liver with onions. He grew up poor, and the few times his family had meat on the table it was usually one of those two things. While I would rather go hungry for a week than eat liver and onions, my dad had very good memories of eating the stuff as a child, so I get why he likes it.

Candy corn is a different matter entirely. It is nobody’s idea of a treat. Putting candy corn in your mouth is on par with eating a scented candle. You can do it, but you won’t enjoy it and everybody who sees you do it is going to think you’re a little weird.

When I went out trick-or-treating as a kid, there were always certain houses in the neighborhood that I would avoid. I didn’t avoid the houses because of the people that lived there, I didn’t care too much who was handing out candy if it was the good stuff. I avoided the houses that handed out the items that a kid my age considered to be “crap.” You know what I’m referring to: apples, toothbrushes, pennies, and other items adults would call “healthy alternatives.”

But I would happily take a bruised and rotting apple over one of those small cellophane bags full of candy corn.

Conversations with my friends on Halloween night often sounded like this:

Friend: “Are you going to Mr. Smith’s house?”

Me: “Yup!”

Friend: “You know he murdered four kids on Halloween last year, right?”

Me: “I know, but he’s handing out full-sized candy bars.”

Friend: “What about the Johnson’s house. They have candy corn.”

Me: “I’ll go over to their house later. I have to get some eggs and toilet paper first.”

Candy corn is a scourge on our world. They are triangular shards of misery that I am convinced were invented only to suck the joy out of the word “candy.”

And the worst part of all is … my wife likes them.

I don’t know why. Perhaps there is some deep-seeded childhood trauma that makes her think she likes eating candy corn. Her taste buds may be damaged. Or she may simply have horrible decision-making skills.

She did agree to marry me after all, so her mental capacity has always been suspect.

But whatever the reason, she does like them, and that means that every October, the little nausea bombs turn up in my house. They are like vermin that only move in for one month out of the year. It could be worse, but it could certainly be better.

As we move into November, I can rest easier knowing that my house will be candy corn free for the next eleven months. But I can never completely relax. I know that it is only a matter of time before they show up once more.

There must be people other than my wife that buy candy corn. They wouldn’t keep making the stuff if someone wasn’t buying it.

Would they?

Or maybe, no one is buying it, but there is some massive, Illuminati-level conspiracy to keep candy corn around. Is it possible that candy corn is part of some kind of macabre, government experiment? Are scientists trying to discover how long it will take before children are brought to the point of outright rebellion and rioting over the presence of candy corn in their trick-or-treat bags?

I suppose it’s possible. Even probable.

In fact, now that I think about it, I see no other plausible explanation.

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