Deep Dark Thoughts – Page 20 – Deep Dark Thoughts

Hot Dog

School has finally let out for the summer. For parents this is the beginning of a three-month long nightmare where we suddenly have to be responsible for our own children all day long. No more letting the state provide free babysitting for the little monsters 30 hours out of every week.

For my wife, however, summer vacation is a much-needed break. She is an elementary school principal and to her, summer vacation means about eight weeks of time away from the hundreds of children that crawl around her school campus like ants on a dropped lollipop. Although we still have to take care of our own two little disappointments … I mean, our little darlings … at least for the summer months she doesn’t have to watch anyone else’s demon spawn.

In celebration of this event, my wife wanted to do something for the kids at her school. She decided she would set up a grill on campus and cook hot dogs for each and every child on campus. This way she could give all the students a free lunch as a way of saying “have a great summer and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

I know this sounds like a great idea. And, it is … for the kids. For me, it is a bit of a headache. You see, the only thing my wife knows about using a grill is handing me raw meat and telling me to bring it back to her when it’s ready to eat. I have the burn scars to prove that statement. So, for her grand plan of cooking the kids lunch, she needed volunteers to come to her school in the mornings and grill hot dogs.

200-300 hot dogs. Each day for three days.

Why three days? Well, there are almost a thousand kids at the school, and to make sure that everyone was included in the frank-themed festivities they broke the kids into groups by grade level. Fortunately, I did not have go do the grilling all three days. Other parents were foolish enough to volunteer, so I was able to skip the first couple days of Wiener-Mania.

The first day, no one actually did any grilling. The school’s barbeque decided that was a perfect time to stop working. Apparently, even inanimate objects at that school couldn’t wait for the kids to go away. Plan B was to throw 100 hot dogs into the microwave oven, then use the campus art supplies to paint black grill marks on them. The kids didn’t seem to mind. It was still free food, and I have discovered that when it comes to mealtimes, children are like feral dogs. They’ll pretty much eat anything that gets too close to their mouths.

Day two went a bit more smoothly. The school brought in a new barbeque grill that hadn’t yet given up on life and everybody got fed as planned. Day two was also a good day because I didn’t have to be there for that one, either.

Day three was my day.

Cooking hot dogs is no big deal. Even two hundred hot dogs are pretty easy. It just takes time. Where the real problem began is when my wife scheduled me to cook on one of the hottest days of the year. I’m almost certain she didn’t plan it this way, but knowing how much she likes to torment me, I can’t be completely sure. The day I cooked, the outside temperature was pushing a hundred degrees.

Imagine standing around in 100-degree weather for two hours while stationed next to a grill fired up to about 400 degrees. It isn’t a pleasant experience.

Each dog took about eight minutes from the time I placed it on the grill until it got tossed into the aluminum pan to be carted off to the lunchroom. Eight minutes times 200 hotdogs. Lather, rinse, repeat. Although, I think if I just dropped the dogs on the concrete I might have been able to shorten the cooking time by about half. The soles of my feet were certainly well done by the end of the day.

At one point, while I was poking at some franks with the melting pair of tongs in my hand, the devil popped up. He hung around about five minutes, then said, “It’s too hot, bro. I’m outa here.”

At least, I think it was the devil. To be honest, it might have just been a hallucination brought on by heatstroke.

Despite the heat, I managed to get through the day without bursting into flames. I even got a free hotdog for my troubles. Kids got fed, and the school year officially came to a close.

Now that summer has arrived, my wife can take a breath and relax … for about five minutes.

Did I forget to mention Summer School?

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.

Anatomy of a Bad Day

What constitutes a bad day? I suppose it’s a bit different for everyone, but I also think there are some basic components involved that will reliably turn any normal day into a bad one. In an attempt to identify these components, I have studied and dissected a terrible day I had recently. So, what have I determined?

A bad day – for me anyway – seems to be made up of four individual factors that all come together at the same time. Those factors are as follows:

One: Find out that you have been the victim of a crime.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up to discover that my mailbox had been broken into and some mail was stolen. Initially, I thought this was going to be my bad day. It turns out the theft of my mail was merely the precurser to an actual bad day. A sort of bad day warmup, if you will. The crime that actually triggered my bad day came about three days later.

My wife woke me up an hour before my alarm was scheduled to go off, which was a poor start all by itself. But, she woke me up to tell me that she had received an e-mail from our credit card company advising her there was suspicious activity on our card. She was on her way out the door to go to work and did not have time to deal with the problem so she figured she should drag me out of my own blissful sleep, dump the news in my lap before I was even fully awake, and have me try to fix it. She told me to call the credit card company and clear up the mess.

After an hour on the phone, my credit cards were finally canceled, and the fraudulent charges refunded to my account. Apparently, my old credit cards were about to expire and the company had mailed me new ones. You guessed it, the mail thieves from a few days back ended up with the new cards.

This was a very solid beginning to a bad day.

Two: Have something you are looking forward to get suddenly cancelled.

Later that day, I had plans to get together with my friend, Bob, and have lunch at my favorite restaurant. We typically meet up for lunch about once or twice a month depending on our schedules and I look forward to a good meal and sometimes a cigar afterwards. Bob usually tries to convince me to go fishing with him again, and I tell him I’ll think about it, knowing full well I am never getting on a boat with him again.

On this particular day, about the time I was hanging up with the credit card company, I got a text from Bob telling me that he was cancelling our lunch date. Something else had come up, and he wasn’t going to be able to make it. My original plan of Chinese food with a friend suddenly became me, the cat, and a peanut butter sandwich.

Swing and a miss. Strike two.

Three: Shit that was working just fine yesterday is now broke.

With lunch plans down the toilet, I decided that I should at least accomplish something productive. The fields needed to be mowed again since the weeds had bounced back to twice their original height from the last time I mowed. I grabbed the tractor keys and headed outside.

I jumped on the tractor, put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing.

Three weeks previously, I had paid over $300 dollars to fix the tractor because it had stopped working sometime during the winter months. When the repair guy left, it was running perfectly. Now, when I was ready to use it again, it had decided to go back into hibernation. $300 dollars wasted and I had a two-ton paperweight parked in my driveway.

Frustrated, and about ready to run away from home and look for a circus to join, I went back inside the house. To calm down, I decided to get myself a drink of water. I grabbed a cup and opened the refrigerator to pour myself some cold water from the water dispenser. And … nothing.

It made a clicking and humming noise, but nothing came out.

Broken tractor. Broken refrigerator.

The only thing left to do at this point was pour myself a drink of something stronger than water, then order a cake for the pity party I was about to throw.

I grabbed up the cat (my lunch date), collapsed on the couch and started petting the animal to bring my blood pressure down. I must have looked like some sort of demented Bond character.

Four: Use the very next excuse, no matter how minor, to fly off into an uncontrolled rage.

I sat down on the couch, trying to figure out what I needed to do to get the tractor and the refrigerator fixed. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall, but I knew that would not accomplish anything except create something else broken that I needed to fix. Namely, my hand.

At that exact moment, my youngest daughter wandered into the room and saw me on the couch.

“Hey, dad,” she said to me. “The light just burned out in my bathroom. Can you put in a new lightbulb?”

It’s possible that I overreacted. I’m not sure. All I know is that my daughter locked herself in her room and the cat ran to hide under the bed.

That was my bad day.

Since then, the tractor has been repaired, the refrigerator is working again, and we have gotten our new credit cards. Everything has pretty much gone back to normal.

Well, everything except it’s still dark in my daughter’s bathroom.

And the cat is still hiding under the bed.

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.

At Home on the Range

As many of you may or may not know, before slipping into the life of luxury that is called being a writer, I used to do something quite different to earn a living. For twenty-five years, I put on a blue uniform every day and wandered the streets of the city so society could treat me like their own personal chew toy.

That all ended in 2016 when the State of California told me that they would send me money every month on the condition that I did not come in to work any longer. I happily agreed. My agency stamped the word “retired” on my badge and we both went our separate ways.

While I was working, I was required by law to attend hundreds of hours of training every year. I attended classes and had to prove my proficiency during drivers training, arrest and control training, domestic violence and abuse courses, sensitivity and mental health lectures, etc. etc.

That was fine. I get why all that has become necessary.

What I didn’t know, however, was that even after retiring I would have to go to training. That’s right. Once a year, every year, I have to go to my department’s range and demonstrate that I still know how to shoot a handgun without losing a toe or other body part. For twenty-five years I carried a gun every day at work without any unfortunate mishaps. (Well, there was that one locker-room incident, but I still think that ceiling fan had it coming.) Even so, when I retired, I was advised that I needed to attend range training at least once every year.

This year, I almost missed it. I just happened to bump into a buddy of mine who asked if I was going to the retired employees day at the range this year. I told him I hadn’t heard anything about it. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe they don’t want you there for some reason. Who did you piss off?”

As I was sure (mostly) that I hadn’t actually pissed anyone off recently, I sent an email to the person in charge of scheduling the range for castaways like myself. I asked about the qualification date and why I hadn’t heard anything about it. She answered the next day.

She wrote:

Hi, Gary. Sorry you didn’t get the email, but we all thought you were dead.

I will go ahead and put you back in my email distribution list. I apologize for the mix-up.

Despite the surprise of hearing about my early demise, I soon received the relevant information and I showed up at my scheduled range date two weeks later.

The nice thing about a firearm qualification day for retired cops is that there is always food. Providing something to eat is pretty much how they guarantee that people show up. There is very little that motivates a retiree better than the promise of a free meal. This year, the Chief of Police and his three Captains fired up the grill and cooked tri-tip while I and the other old-timers wandered down to the firing line and, with shaking hands and poor eyesight, fired hundreds of rounds at mostly undamaged paper targets.

We may not have successfully hit a lot of those silhouettes, but I’m sure we scared several of them pretty badly.

Regardless of our scores, we still got to eat, so I consider the day a win.

When I was working, we were never allowed to bring food to the range. If we did, the range master would get mad and tell us to hike back up the hill and put it back in our cars or else he would take it away and eat it himself. We also had to clean up the range when we were done. As soon as we finished shooting, he would yell at us to pick up all the stray brass, clean our guns, then hurry up and get back to work.

Now, the only reason the range master yells at us is because someone’s hearing aid stopped working.

Personally, I prefer the old, retired guy range days.

After shooting, the day quickly devolved into tri-tip sandwiches, sodas, cigars, and gossip about what was happening at the police department since we left. (Okay, that last part is actually a lie since most of the retired officers don’t really give a crap what’s going on at the police department since we left. If the building burned down, I think the general response would have been, “I’m glad I don’t have to write that report.”) It was nice chatting and catching up with people I haven’t seen in several months.

In a year, I will have to do it all over again. Shoot my gun for two minutes, smoke a cigar and eat barbeque. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’m just that kind of a guy.

Hopefully, next year I won’t need to remind anyone that I’m still alive.

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.

Packed House

Last year, I wrote a blog about moving away from home. The article, Empty Nest, was about my own experiences of going off to college, but I wrote it because I was thinking about what my life would be like in the coming year when my own children went away and left me behind.

What I have more recently discovered is that it is pretty much impossible to have an empty nest when you have effectively raised a bunch of Homing Pigeons. They are never truly gone. They are just lurking around the corner waiting to see what kind of food I’m going to put out on the table. Like buzzards circling overhead, as soon as they see an opportunity, they swoop back in to take whatever it is that caught their attention.

That’s a lot of bird analogies in just one paragraph. Oh, well. Moving on.

Last week, I drove to Sonoma to move EM1 out of her apartment and bring her back home. I was able to get most of her stuff into the truck, but there will need to be a second trip to gather a few last pieces of furniture before her lease runs out and the landlord tosses it all to the curb. (Although, I’ve seen EM1’s furniture and the curb would not be a bad place for it.)

Two days later, I drove to Sacramento State University to move EM2 out of her dorm. I thought we got everything, but it turns out she forgot to grab her saxophone from her locker in the Music Department building. The saxophone costs three times the total value of everything else she owns, yet somehow that is the one thing she forgets to bring home. Sometimes I wonder who raised that kid.

Now, and for the next three months, I will never again have a moment’s peace. There will always be a kid or two parked on my couch, eating my food, and watching music videos and K-dramas. Not to mention all their excess furniture and stuff I have to trip over trying to move from one room to another. It looks like a yard sale that got relocated into the house.

I have tried asking them to do some chores. There is always shopping, laundry, and yardwork to do around here. But, EM2 looked me straight in the eyes and said, “But, Dad, it’s my summer vacation. I worked really hard in school this year and I need a break.”

I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or get mad. I settled for turning red for a few minutes and stammering at the cat about ungrateful children and their total disregard of reality.

When I told EM2 that the real world did not have summer vacations, that when she got a job, she would need to go to work twelve whole months out of every year, she nodded at me and smiled as if I was on her side.

“Exactly,” she said. “So, before I go to work, I have to enjoy the time off while I have it. Thanks for understanding, Dad.” Then she went back to watching some boy band on her cell phone singing in Korean.

It wouldn’t be so terrible except for the fact that while they are on “vacation,” I am shopping, cooking and cleaning up for four people again, two of whom are complete slobs (I’ll let you guess which two). I am not allowed to use my own tv, I can’t keep snacks in the pantry for longer than eight seconds, and although I get yelled at if I go into either of the girls’ bedrooms, somehow I can’t get a moment of privacy even when I try to hide in the bathroom.

I know what you’re thinking right now. I’m doing an awful lot of complaining about having my kids back home with me. Sure, there are some adjustments to make, but aren’t there good things about having the girls around?

Well, if there are, I haven’t found them yet. Recently, I asked EM1 to run to the store and pick up a couple items that we needed for dinner. She came back home with three bags of garbage that she paid for with my credit card, stuck it in the pantry after telling me I wasn’t allowed to touch any of it, and then went to her room, leaving the items I had asked for on the kitchen counter.

I suppose I should be grateful she went to the store when I asked her to. After all, it’s progress over the personally hurtful answers I usually get to such requests.

In the distant future, when (if?) the girls finally move away and get homes of their own, get jobs and become self-sufficient, there may come a time that I look back on these days fondly. I might actually miss them and wish they were still home with me. I might call them up on the phone, just to hear their voices, or drive over to their places to have dinner or just spend a quiet evening with them. There might come a time that I’m sad they’re gone.

I mean, I’m not holding my breath or anything, but stranger things have happened.

For now, I’m stuck with two leeches fastened to my sofa while they enjoy their “vacation.”

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.

Enough is Enough

When my youngest daughter graduated from high school, I honestly thought that I was done with all the school events, fundraisers, and parental participation nonsense. As I sent EM2 off to college, I told myself that the kids are (mostly) adults now and don’t need dad showing up at band concerts and football games or volunteering to chaperone school trips. I can just hang out at home and answer the occasional text message from one of the kids saying they were still alive, and could I please send money.

Turns out I was deluding myself.

It ain’t over by a long shot.

Recently, I found myself attending a concert at Sacramento State University for the sole reason of being there to support my kid. I can’t think of any other reason that I would ever have gone to such an event. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the concert was bad or there was anything wrong with it, it’s simply not something I want to go watch. Ever.

I have attended school concerts and recitals without fail ever since EM2 was in middle school. Every couple of months there has been another event my wife has dragged me to because, “we have to support our children.”

I’m tired and I just want it to stop.

Yes, of course I want to be a supportive parent for my kids. I was just hoping that now that they are away at college, I could be supportive from a long way away. You know, like on my own living room couch, watching television and drinking something heavily alcoholic.

I would be happy to pick up a phone and tell them how much I love and care about them, then hand the call off to their mother, since she genuinely seems to like talking to those two moochers.

When my wife told me that she had purchased tickets to go see EM2’s concert a couple weeks ago, I told her that I thought we had already gone to enough concerts and school events through high school. I asked why we should continue to torment ourselves while she was at college.

My wife tried to convince me that the college concert performances would be much better than the high school ones and that I would enjoy them much more.

Spoiler alert: she was wrong.

In fact, I would argue that the college performances are worse. For example, high school band concerts are free. My wife and I had to pay to attend my daughter’s most recent concert at the college. It wasn’t a lot, true, but it also wasn’t free. In my mind, I believe free is the better of the two options.

Also, the college concerts are much longer than the high school performances. In high school, the teachers and the school administration have lives and family they want to go home to. Apparently, in college, nobody has anywhere they need to be, so a concert that runs two and a half hours is no big deal.

My wife argued that the college students are much better musicians than the high school students. This may be true, but I don’t think that is much of a benefit. It’s still an amateur orchestra.

Imagine you are in a room listening to two crying babies. It is possible to make a logical, objective argument that one of those babies is much better at crying than the other. But just because one is clearly better than the other doesn’t mean that anybody actually wants to listen to either one of them.

This is pretty much how I feel about orchestra music.

And by the way, regarding this particular concert, all of the above arguments are completely moot since the college invited a high school orchestra to join them for the performance. So, I had to pay to get in, the concert was much longer than normal, AND the musicians weren’t any better than high school students since many of them were high school students!

During the performance, I kept having flashbacks to all the concerts I had attended in my daughter’s middle school and high school gymnasiums. It was like a musical PTSD episode.

To be fair, I’m sure there were many people in attendance at the concert that were happy to be there and greatly enjoyed the music that was performed. I believe my wife might even be one of those people. I, however, was merely trying to be supportive and make the best of a bad situation.

When it was over, I hugged my daughter and told her she was the best musician in the entire school and all the other kids should go home hanging their heads in shame at being so badly outclassed. I complimented her and praised her, and she had no idea that I would rather have been chewing glass than attending the concert.

Because that’s what a good father does.

I will do the same thing at her next concert. And the one after that. And the one after that. And, so on until I die.

Which, with my luck, will probably happen while I’m on my way home from a concert.

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.

Behind The Wheel

Apparently, miracles do really happen. Moses parted the red sea. Jesus walked on water. And now, after nineteen and a half years, my daughter finally got her driver’s license.

When I picked her up and took her to the DMV for her appointment, getting her license was not a forgone conclusion. She has had her permit for a little over twelve years (okay, eighteen months, but still) but she hadn’t had many opportunities to get behind the wheel and practice driving. Knowing the rules of the road isn’t enough, she still needed to be familiar with how to steer a car.

EM2 is a bright kid, but you can’t outthink a speeding semi when it’s travelling in the wrong lane and headed right for you.

We arrived at the DMV and were instructed to drive our car around to the back where behind-the-wheel assessments were taking place. I was told to remain in the car with EM2 until her instructor showed up and asked me to step out. We pulled up to the curb behind the building and waited behind another car already in line.

A man stepped out of the building and approached the first car in line. He was a pleasant looking guy with completely white hair. I don’t think he was that old, maybe in his thirties, but I imagine getting into the passenger seat and letting panicky teenagers drive you around town all day long might tend to prematurely age a person.

If I had to make a list of the absolute worst jobs in the world, jobs I would never want to do, conducting behind-the-wheel assessment tests would definitely be on that list. All day long, you survive one harrowing trip after another. The moment you escape from one poorly-piloted, metal death box, you have to climb into another one.

I imagine it must be like working in the military as a mine sweeper. You take every step hoping that you can locate a potential problem before it blows up under your feet. Eventually, you’re going to miss one.

I think I would rather be handed a box full of grenades and told, “We think these are duds, but just in case, why don’t you take a hammer and bang on each one of the them to make sure.” At least I wouldn’t see the end coming.

EM2 looked at the kid with the white hair and said she hoped that he would be her instructor. He seemed nice, and she was concerned that if whoever evaluated her was intimidating, she might get too nervous and fail the test. It was at this time, a big, unhappy looking dude, about six feet, five inches tall and weighing almost three hundred pounds walked up and told me to get out of the car.

If I hadn’t already been expecting something like that to happen, I would have thought we were being carjacked.

The guy didn’t smile once as he introduced himself and told me to go away. EM2 looked at me with a panicked expression, and I just shrugged. “It will be fine,” I told her, knowing full well that I was lying.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched as EM2 was asked to demonstrate her knowledge of the various levers and buttons in the car. At one point, the evaluator saw me watching and said, “You’re too close to the car, you need to move further away.”

I suppose he didn’t want me close enough to talk to EM2 during the initial phase of her test. Although, I don’t know what he though I might say to her.

“Make sure you don’t hit another car when you drive out of the parking lot. We don’t want that to happen twice, today!”

Or maybe, “If you run over a pedestrian, make sure you move the car off of the sidewalk before the police show up.”

Two minutes later, the evaluator climbed into the car and EM2 drove them out of the DMV parking lot. I sat down on one of the most uncomfortable, concrete benches I have ever had the misfortune to experience and waited. Less than fifteen minutes later, EM2 was back and, most importantly, the car was still in one piece and the same color all over.

The evaluator walked away, looking upset. But, to be fair, he looked that way before he got in EM2’s car, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

My daughter walked up to me and said, “He told me he had some concerns,” then she started to cry.

Okay, that was a bad sign.

When she calmed down, she told me that she had passed the test, but she had missed every point she could possibly miss and not fail. She showed me her score sheet and, sure enough, there were a lot of red marks. But, she passed!

So, ummm … yay?

As we walked back to the car, EM2 handed me the car keys and told me, “Here. I don’t want to drive anymore, today. Can we go get something to eat?”

As I drove us to a restaurant to celebrate (I suppose that is still the right word), I told her she should have waited one more year before taking her test.

“Because I would have had more practice?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. “Because after your test, I could have bought you a drink. You could probably use one, right now.”

I know I certainly did.

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.