Deep Dark Thoughts – Page 9 – Deep Dark Thoughts

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.

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Get a Real Job

Recently EM2 asked me if there were any chores around the house that she could do to earn some money. I told her there were plenty of chores to do inside the house and out in the yard and I would be happy to make up a list for her.

She asked how much I would pay her, and I said I’ll pay you the same rate I got when I was a kid. I’ll let you live in my house rent free and let you eat my food.

She didn’t like my answer very much.

I know better than to let my kids do any work for me. I learned my lesson a long time ago with EM1. Most of the time, when she “helped,” it ended up making more work for me than if I had just told her to sit on the couch and not move.

I recall one instance where I told EM1 to take my car to the gas station and fill the tank. I gave her $10 for her time and told her to use my credit card to pay for the gas. She drove away and didn’t come back for two hours. Apparently, she had a few errands to run and figured that was a perfect time to do it. She even used my credit card to buy herself lunch, get some “cute shorts,” and pick up coffee for herself and EM2.

The car had less gas in the tank than when she left, my credit card had three extra charges on it (not including the gas), and EM1 still had the original $10 I gave her sitting in her wallet. I felt like I had just fallen for some sort of Nigerian Prince scam.

My wife thinks I’m being cheap, and I should pick out a few tasks for EM2 to do and give her some money. Of course, this is the same woman that will give me a “honey-do” list a mile long and when I ask why, she says, “because you love me.”

Seems a bit of a double standard.

Anyway, I caved, as I usually do, and I told EM2 she could help me do some work in the yard and I would pay her for her inexperienced, mostly useless, assistance. Yes, I used those words. She pulled out her phone, glanced at the weather reports to check the temperatures for the next few days, then said, “No thanks. How about something in the house? Maybe I can vacuum the carpets?”

I didn’t realize there were stipulations to her participation. I wonder how well this is going to work for her when she is out in the real world, working for an employer that doesn’t find her as cute and charming as I do, and she tries to tell them, “It’s too hot, so I’m going to stay home, today. But don’t worry, I’ll vacuum my carpets to make up for it.”

I never got handouts from my dad when I was growing up. If I asked for money, he always gave me the same speech. “Go out and get a real job and earn your money like I do.”

Okay, this isn’t totally true. I do remember one time my dad actually offered to pay me for some yardwork. He told me to go out in the front yard and pull weeds out of the lawn. He told me he would pay me 5 cents for every dandelion I pulled. I grabbed a paper bag, gloves, and this weird, weed-pulling tool that looked like an overbuilt screwdriver with pitchfork points at the end, then I went to work.

I recall pulling a few dozen dandelions and, as I went, I would take the weeds that had already blossomed into white, fluffy dandelion heads, and blow the seeds all over the lawn. My theory was that if I was only going to make 5 cents for every weed, then I would need to make sure there was always a steady supply of new weeds growing to guarantee future money.

It was pure genius.

At least I thought it was until my dad came storming outside and screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” That was the end of that particular workday. It was also the first time I ever got fired from a job, and it wasn’t even a “real job.”

I don’t think I got paid for the weeds I had already pulled, either. Very disappointing.

Now that I’m the adult, I have a better understanding of my dad’s mindset. Why should I pay EM2 to do a job I can do myself without costing me any money? Or perhaps, more to the point, why pay her to do something that I was going to ignore, anyway?

Sure, I could offer to pay her to pull cobwebs down from the ceiling, or arrange the pantry in alphabetical order, but what’s the point? I don’t care about either one of those things, and it wouldn’t bother me if neither one of them ever happens.

Maybe I should just cut out the middle man and give her ten bucks to sit on the couch and watch television.

It would be cheaper than sending her sister out to gas up the car.

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Weekend Getaway

A week ago, the entire extended family drove up to Ice House Reservoir to spend the Labor Day weekend camping. 16 people spread out over three campsites for five days of campfires, food, drink, and loud conversations; it’s a tradition we have been following for more than 20 years.

Before driving up to the campsite for the weekend, my wife was going to work for half of the day on Thursday. I would load up the truck and trailer with firewood and enough food and supplies to keep all 16 campers fed and alive for five days, then when my wife got home in the afternoon, we would drive up into the hills to meet up with the rest of the family.

That was the plan.

As we all know, plans are only perfect on paper right before real life gets in the way.

Thursday morning, my wife woke me up from a sound sleep to tell me we had a problem. Sitting up and trying to figure out why I wasn’t still unconscious, I heard her say,

“I don’t know what happened. The garage door isn’t working. I think it’s broken. I have to go to work now. Bye!”

Then I was alone in our bedroom wondering how I was going to explain to a group of upset campers that their supplies for the weekend were all trapped in my garage with my truck.

Why is it that I only get bad news first thing in the morning? If I’m awake before my alarm goes off, it’s always because something or someone is broken, about to explode, sick, or actively on fire. Why can’t, just once, I wake up to news like:

“Honey! Get up! We just won the lottery!”

Or maybe:

“Hey dad, get up! I just rented an apartment. I need you to help me move out of your house!”

But no. I’m never that lucky.

I woke up, threw on some clothes, and wandered out into the garage. I discovered that one of the four heavy-duty springs that lifts and lowers the door had broken apart. I tried disconnecting the garage door from the opening mechanism and raising it manually, but the door is a custom-built, barn-style metal door that weighs about two-hundred and fifty pounds. It didn’t budge.

The truck – and five days-worth of food and firewood – was not going anywhere soon.

I went back in the house and found one of the cats sitting in the hallway, staring at me with a look that clearly said, “I thought you were leaving. Why are you still here?”

To be fair, I believe that is the only expression the cat is capable of making.

I ignored the cat’s rude behavior and grabbed the phone while beginning a search online for garage door repair companies. The first company I called told me they were much too busy to help before Monday morning. That was too late. By Monday morning, there would be a large group of people up in the mountains eating dirt and tree bark while planning how long they would torture me before allowing me to die.

I tried another company. This one didn’t even pick up the phone when I called. I left a message for them to call me as soon as possible, (just FYI, I still have not heard back from them two weeks later) then moved on down the list to company number 3. This time, I finally had some luck. The owner of the company picked up and said that he could be over in about an hour and would be happy to replace the garage door springs.

True to his word, less than an hour later, a work truck pulled into my driveway and a very friendly gentleman by the name of Nick stepped out. Less than two hours later, I had a working garage door and our family camping trip was saved.

I thanked Nick profusely for coming out on such short notice, and he smiled and told me it was no problem. He was glad he could help. Then he handed me a bill for seven-hundred and fifty dollars.

Apparently, garage door springs are made of gold or some other precious metal. That, or they can only be forged in the volcanic depths of Mordor. I can’t think of any other reason that four springs would cost almost a thousand bucks.

I almost told him to take his springs back and rebreak the door, but I didn’t have time to argue about the price. I was still under a deadline and needed to get myself up to Ice House. So, instead of following my first impulse of curling up in the corner in the fetal position and pretending everything would go away if I ignored it long enough, I pulled out the checkbook and wrote a check for more money than I paid for my first car.

The check may or may not have bounced by now, but that is a problem for another day.

I finished loading the truck, hooked up to the trailer and, as soon as my wife arrived at home, we took off for the campgrounds. Although it was a rocky start, the trip itself actually went pretty smoothly. Everyone had a good time, and there was plenty to eat and (more importantly) drink.

We arrived back home on Monday, dirty and tired, but in good spirits after enjoying a pleasant weekend with the whole family. It was good to get away, but it was also nice to be home.

As I walked into the house, I found the cat in the hallway staring at me with a look on her face that clearly said, “I thought you were leaving. Why are you still here?”

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The Job from Hell

Everyone has bad days at work. Sometimes a bad day can stretch into two or three, or maybe even a bad week. But, have you ever gone into work knowing deep down in your guts that this is the day you’re going to get fired? When I got my first job as a police officer with the Hillsborough Police Department back in 1991, that is how I felt every day that I went in to work.

For four weeks.

When I put on my blue uniform and started field training for the first time, I was assigned a training officer that seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing me from the moment I showed up at work until the second I left. I imagine when he went home, he must have had a few puppies in the house that he could kick just to get him through the off hours until he could start tormenting me again the next day.

Let’s call the guy, “Dave,” because his name was Dave and I have no interest in trying to come up with a fake name to protect his reputation.

I don’t know how he managed to become a training officer in the first place. Perhaps Lucifer himself promoted him to the position. The devil doesn’t have time to torture everyone personally, so he probably decided Dave would be a good substitute in his absence.

Dave never missed an opportunity to berate me or make me feel stupid. Every day I went to work, I was convinced that I would be fired before the day was over. I had a knot in my stomach that didn’t go away for a month.

I remember on a traffic stop, while I was talking to a driver who had failed to stop at a stop sign, Dave stood behind me and told me that my officer safety was lousy because I had parked my car too close to the car in front of me and I had forgotten to turn the front end of my car out into traffic to protect myself from traffic in the roadway.

Legitimate points, perhaps, but nothing that couldn’t wait until after I had completed my contact with the driver. Dave didn’t see things that way. Yelling at me was a high point in his day and he wasn’t going to wait if he saw an opportunity to do it. The driver of the car did not fail to notice what was happening either. As he signed the traffic ticket I had written, he shook his head and mouthed the words, “I feel sorry for you.”

Okay, maybe I imagined that last part.

Despite his love of telling me what a terrible cop I was, Dave wasn’t exactly a pillar of the policing community himself. We worked the graveyard shift, and I recall many nights that Dave would direct me to park the patrol car in the driveway of his house. He handed me a copy of the Field Training Guide and told me to “study the book” while he went inside the house to “take care of some stuff.”

“Take care of some stuff” was code for crawl into bed and go to sleep. I would be sitting in the patrol car reading department procedures and legal texts while Dave had himself a nice nap. I sometimes wouldn’t see him for half the shift before he came back outside with his hair mussed up and pillow lines embedded in his cheek.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. The nights that Dave left me in the car by myself were the happiest nights I had when I was training with that guy.

Somehow, I survived those four weeks and moved on to my next Training Officer, Nick.

During my first shift with Nick, he climbed into the car holding a Styrofoam cup full of coffee. He told me, “Let’s go get a newspaper, and if you make me spill my coffee before we get there, you’re fired.”

I thought, Oh, hell, here we go again. Different guy, same evil shit.

When Nick saw the look on my face at his comment, he put down his coffee and ordered me to pull over the car. I pulled up to the curb and stopped. As I was preparing to hand over my gun and badge and walk home, I heard Nick mutter, “That mother f**ker. They never should have given him a new trainee.”

“Huh?” I asked with my usual incisive wit.

He asked me, “What did Dave do to you? We need to find a way to get your head unf**ked before you hurt yourself. For starters, forget everything Dave ever told you.”

I think that was the first time in over a month I was able to take a full breath. Life got much easier from that day forward. I discovered that you didn’t have to be an absolute tool to be a Training Officer, and that mistakes could be opportunities to learn something. It soon became apparent that most of the other officers at the department didn’t have too much love for Dave, either.

Things got even better about three years later when Dave got fired for violating department policy and then lying about it during the Internal Affairs investigation.

I’ll be honest with you, I threw a little party for myself that day.

Karma can truly be a magnificent bitch.

So, the next time you think you are having a bad day, even if it is absolutely the worst day at work you have ever experienced, just remember it could be worse.

You could work with Dave.

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Four Wheels and a Windshield

My youngest is starting her Junior year of college this fall. This is her first year not living on campus so it is also the first time she will need a car to commute to and from classes. With four drivers in the family who need vehicles and only three cars available, we had a small problem.

My wife needs her car to get to work and I need my truck to get groceries, shop, and run other errands throughout the week. We asked EM1 if she would be willing to share a car, but she acted as if we had suggested renting out her room to a group of traveling carnival clowns. She immediately began complaining that she had her mirrors exactly where she wanted them, her radio stations programmed to her favorite channels, and she didn’t want her sister messing everything up.

Rather than reminding her that the car isn’t hers and she doesn’t even pay for the gas she uses, I decided I didn’t have the energy to devote to that particular argument when there are so many better things to yell at her about. So, I let it go.

I suggested that we look for a cheap, but reliable, used car that EM2 could drive to and from school.

My wife had other ideas. She saw an opportunity to get herself a new car and then let EM2 drive her old one. My wife argued that her old Subaru was safe, reliable, and well maintained. We knew it had never been in an accident and that we had taken very good care of it while we had it, so it was an ideal vehicle to give to our daughter.

I agreed to the plan. When we told EM2 that she would be driving her mom’s car, she shrugged and said, “I don’t really like the Subaru. Can we look for something else?”

I have terrible children. And I have only myself to blame for that. It’s my fault they were born and it’s my fault I continued to feed them until they were big enough to start developing opinions about stuff.

We were offering her a four year-old car with a sun roof, fully functioning heat and A/C, stereo/CD player, electric everything, and more safety features than the first rocket that NASA landed on the moon, and she wanted something else.

My first car was a twenty-year-old Volkswagon beetle that my dad bought from a friend of his for $350. Even back in 1983, three hundred and fifty dollars was a ridiculously cheap vehicle, and I think he might have overpaid. The car was basically four wheels and a windshield. And the windshield was cracked.

There was no air conditioning. The only heat available was a small lever on the floorboards that would open a vent between the engine compartment and the cab. Air would flow over the engine, warm up marginally from the heat of the carburetor, then move into the driver’s compartment along with a significant amount of exhaust.

On cold days I would play a little game with myself while driving on the roadway. I would try to roll the window down right before I passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning, then roll it back up before freezing to death. If nothing else, being constantly on the precipice of death at least kept me from getting bored on long drives with no one else in the car.

In addition to the lack of environmental controls, it only had a six-volt battery running the electrical system. It was enough to start the car (most of the time) but it wasn’t enough for anything else. Not even a radio. Being a typical teenager in the 80’s, there was no way I couldn’t have music in my car. I eventually bought another battery, stuck it in the trunk, and wired up a portable stereo system with a state of the art, 8-track tape player.

Okay it wasn’t state of the art. It was my brother’s piece of crap player that he let me have when he upgraded to a cassette player. But it worked, and that was all I cared about.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned that carrying around a 6-volt battery in the trunk of a car attached to loose stereo wiring was an incredible fire hazard. Even if I had known, I probably would have done it anyway. After all the carbon monoxide I had been breathing, I wasn’t making good choices at that time in my life.

My point to all this is that I was grateful for what I had. I was grateful for the crappy car, the questionable heat source, and the hand-me-down 8-track tape player. I didn’t ask my dad, “Can we look for something else?”

If I had, he probably would have sold the car back to his buddy, handed me 20 bucks, and told me to go invest in a bus pass.

Now I have kids that feel entitled to turn up their noses at a car that is better and more luxurious than anything I could have ever imagined while growing up, and like I said before, it is totally my fault. I have never instilled in them a sense of appreciation for just having basic necessities.

But maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe I can start now with a more practical car for EM2.

Does anybody know what I can get for $350 these days?

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Garden of Earthly Disasters

Every year, I plant a garden in my back yard, and every year, I usually experience about 50 percent success. Half of the plants do very well, while the other half make it their mission in life to suck up water and fertilizer for a few months before dying without producing any edible payback. I have gotten used to that dynamic. I take the good and accept the bad.

Not this year. This year, every plant in my garden decided that they were going on strike. They seemed determined to show me up for the farming failure they have always perceived me to be. From the day I planted the first seeds, I could almost hear the giggles and whispers as they conspired against me.

Let this blog be my written capitulation to the inevitable. I quit. I surrender. I cease and desist. My white flag is firmly planted in the ground, and hopefully, unlike everything else I put in the ground this year, it will not die.

The ordeal started with the zucchini. I plant squash every year because it is the easiest thing in the world to grow. You almost have to go out of your way to screw up growing zucchini. It will sometimes pop up in a garden uninvited like some kind of predatory, invasive lifeform dropping out of the sky to take over the planet.

A month or so after planting, I noticed that the zucchini plants had become infested with squash bugs. I tried pesticides, oils, and even physically removing the bugs by hand. The bug population outpaced my ability to keep up with them. They sucked and chewed on the plants until the leaves wilted and the zucchini turned yellow and fell off before growing large enough to pick.

When the battle was officially lost, I pulled out the plants and threw them away. As I pulled the zucchini plants from the garden, many of the squash bugs fell off onto the ground. I began to stomp them into the dirt, venting my frustrations on the tiny invaders who had rendered the simplest plant to grow into a desiccated heap in my yard. As I stepped on the miniature vampires, I discovered something I had never previously known about squash bugs.

They can fly.

To my horror, several of the little monsters launched themselves into the air, and all I could do was watch helplessly as they redistributed themselves through the rest of the garden. They quickly disappeared from sight. As they landed on the still healthy plants, I could hear their little squeals of glee as they found fresh fields of vegetables to destroy.

In addition to the bugs, the heat this summer has been oppressive. Sacramento has been experiencing a record number of days in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the plants that were bug free could not hold up against long hours in the direct path of the blistering sunlight. They wilted and dried out, lying down in surrender like French soldiers in World War II.

I tried giving them extra water during the hottest part of the day, but it was as futile as trying to push back the tide with a slotted spoon. The end was obvious, and inevitable.

All summer long, I have been growing small, withered plants that would open a few pathetic flowers, then die off before being able to produce any fruits or vegetables. I haven’t been this disappointed since EM1 dropped out of college.

I have tomato plants with no tomatoes, cucumber plants with no cucumbers, pepper plants with no peppers, and lettuce that resembles the bagged salads you forget in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator for several months. (Assuming the bagged salads also included a handful of hungry bugs.)

The garden isn’t the end of it either. I have several peach trees that suffered from leaf curl and dropped all their fruit before it could ripen. I have two apricot trees that just decided to take the year off, and I’m not totally certain why. I also have a couple apple trees that the birds seem to be enjoying very much. Every piece of fruit in those apple trees seems to have been nibbled or pecked by something that was only interested enough to take a few bites before moving on to make room for the next vaguely hungry animal in line at the buffet.

And the coup de grace in this disaster of cultivation is my back lawn. I have a huge dead hole in the middle of my lawn where the kids set up their inflatable pool. They swam in the thing once, then ignored the pool for weeks. I asked them several times to deflate it and move it, but instead, they let it remain in place just long enough that nothing green could possibly survive in the circular zone of destruction directly underneath.

It’s like a cosmic joke that everything I touch this year will die a slow, agonizing death. Even grass isn’t safe from my swath of carnage.

In light of my vegetative failures, I have decided it is time to give up. Going outside each day to view the destruction of flora that used to be my home landscaping has beaten me down to the point of submission. I am accepting defeat.

From this day forward, I will remain indoors where my cursed touch will be limited to the few sacrificial house plants shivering in fear on the windowsill. The iris and the begonia are doomed, but they can die knowing that their sacrifice will not be in vain.

They died so that others might live.

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