humor – Page 10 – Deep Dark Thoughts

When Nature Attacks – The Sequel

Once a week, every week, my entire extended family gets together for an evening to have dinner and catch up on each other’s lives. It’s been going on for years and there is no sign of the practice slowing down in the foreseeable future. This is not the topic of today’s blog; it is merely the setting.

Recently, we were all gathered for the “Family Night Dinner,” at one of my wife’s cousin’s homes. My daughters, EM1 and EM2, had driven there separately so they had their own car. At the end of the meal, we all said our goodbyes and left to drive home. EM1 and EM2 arrived at the house a few minutes before my wife and I did.

EM1 was standing outside her car, looking underneath the vehicle and making several utterances of distress. EM2 saw us pull into the driveway and gleefully announced:

“EM1 ran over a skunk!”

It was about this time that the smell reached me. Yup. She had indeed run over a skunk, and its farewell calling card was all around us.

“It wasn’t my fault!” my oldest told me. “It ran out in front of me and I didn’t have time to stop. I think it did it on purpose.”

My first thought was that skunks don’t actually “run.” It’s more like an awkward waddle. My second thought was that most wild animals aren’t generally suicidal. I mean, I don’t know what this skunk’s family life was like, or if it had suffered a recent tragedy, but I still don’t think it intended a quick jaunt into the roadway to be the last thing it ever did on this planet.

I didn’t say those things to EM1, however. What I told her was to leave her car outside the garage and go through a car wash in the morning.

I thought that would be the end of the skunk adventures for the evening, but I was wrong.

We went into the house and my wife let the dog into the backyard to pee before we went to bed. Less than five minutes later, she tells me, “I think the dog got sprayed by a skunk.” I looked outside and, sure enough, our dog was rubbing her face in the grass and whimpering like a mugger that just got pepper sprayed.

I opened the door to check on her and that smell hit me again. Worse this time since it wasn’t just a little bit on the undercarriage of a car. This time it was a full load, released all over the dog.

My wife asked what we should do. I told her, “Whatever you do, don’t let her into the house.”

We had made that mistake once before. It took months for the smell to leave the living room. No amount of air freshener or carpet cleaner could cover it up, either. Instead of hiding the odor, it just made it more nauseating. Our house smelled like a candle shop that catered to potheads.

As I watched the dog run around the yard, pushing its face through the dirt and weeds of our back lawn, I couldn’t help wondering if this was more than just a coincidence. It’s possible it was sheer dumb luck that the dog got sprayed by a skunk the same night that my daughter killed one with her car. But it doesn’t seem likely.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but the timing just seemed a little too convenient. I think what actually happened was there was a skunk wandering around our neighborhood when my daughter pulled into the driveway. I think it sniffed the air as she drove by and thought, “It smells like Rupert got killed. I have to go to this house immediately and avenge my fallen brother.”

I believe there may be a vast network of skunk hit squads, roaming the country and wreaking havoc on anyone who has ever harmed one of their own. I think that’s why the roadway stinks for so long after a skunk gets hit by a car. It’s a homing beacon calling out to the hit squads; telling them that they have another job to do.

I know I sound crazy, but so did Galileo when he said that he believed the Earth circled the sun, not the other way around. So, don’t discount the idea just yet. Keep an open mind and talk to your friends about it. Maybe they saw something that they were too uncomfortable to talk about before. Maybe we just need to circulate the idea for a while before the real truth can come out.

Only time will tell which theory is correct: complete coincidence, or bands of roving skunk hit squads?

Could go either way.

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Movie Time

I love to go out to the movies. What I don’t like is having to go out to the movies with all the other people who love to go out to the movies. I understand that the theaters need to sell tickets in order to stay in business, but there is a part of me that believes every theater room should have one seat and one seat only. You buy your ticket, go in and watch the movie in complete privacy, then go home.

I have never liked crowds, so this is nothing new. I typically go to the movies on Tuesday during the first screening of the show I want to see. Statistically, Tuesdays are the days that the fewest people go to movies, so this is not coincidence. I also choose movies that have been showing for a few weeks already so most people who want to see it have already done so.

Despite these precautions, I am still besieged by other people who, for some reason, believe they have as much right to be in the theater as I do. I don’t know where they get these ridiculous ideas.

Most people in a theater are pretty considerate of others and I really don’t have a problem with them. This is about 95% of the theater-going audience. It’s the other 5 percent that always seem to manage to have a representative in the room when I am there that make me want to stand out front with a picket sign proclaiming, “Shut up or get out,” and “Ushers should be armed.”

Desperate times require desperate measures.

We all know the people I’m referring to. We have all dealt with them at one time or another. If you can’t think of a single time that you were bothered by someone in a movie theater, it’s probably because you’re one of them.

First on my list for banishment are the loud talkers, loud eaters, loud laughers, and just generally loud everything. These are the people that sit five rows away from you, but you can still hear their “whispered” conversation as if they were sitting in your lap. Usually they love to chat during the previews (which I dislike but am not going to make a big deal about), then decide the conversation they started needs to be finished even if it goes on for the first ten minutes of the movie. These are the same people who bring their own noisy food which they inevitably unwrap at the quietest parts of the movie. The worst of this bunch are the ones who have seen the move already and happily announce to the rest of the people in the theater things like, “Oh, there’s the guy that’s going to shoot the dog later.”

Next on my hit parade are the parents who bring little kids to mature-themed movies because $8 is cheaper than a babysitter. I don’t care if you think you need a couple hours away from the house or you really wanted to watch this particular movie, if you’re going to emotionally scar your offspring, do it at home like the rest of us. There are plenty of things you can stream on your TV to give Junior a pathological fear of chainsaws.

Leave the kid outside tied to a tree if you must, but don’t let the little brat into the theater. While I’m watching scantily-dressed teenagers get cut open with a meat hook, I don’t want to hear, “Daddy, what’s that man doing to the other man? Why is that girl running away from him?” Usually followed immediately by, “I have to go potty.”

Sick people should also be verboten from any theater. I saw a movie once where I had to listen to the guy behind me sniff, cough and sneeze through the entire show. The noise was bad enough, but the fact he brought his plague virus into a sealed and crowded room to share with the rest of humanity should be a crime in all fifty states. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that this guy was the reason I came down with a nasty cold less than a week later, but I would still like to run into him in a dark alley someday so I can kick him in the nuts.

Okay, that might be a bit harsh. Maybe just one nut.

The left one.

There are so many more theater pests that I think should be fitted with shock collars at the front door, but no one has the time to read my entire list. A couple more quick ones are: People who check their phones during the movie so that it lights up the entire theater. People sitting next to you that you’ve never met before but have decided they want to chat or “tell you something funny.” People who snore.

Yes, I said snore.

I actually had a man sitting next to me who fell asleep while we were watching “Thor: Ragnarok.” I don’t know how the hell he managed it, but about midway through the flick, he was slumped to the side of his chair and making more noise than the movie soundtrack.

I mean, come on. If you’re that bored with a movie, just get up and walk away for crying out loud.

Although I have already for the most part given up on humanity, I am not going to give up on my movies. I will continue to go to the theater and watch whatever strikes my fancy. I will also be silently judging everyone else who chooses to be in the theater with me. I will be the old guy in the fifth row who keeps turning around to stare at people and mutter obscenities under his breath.

If you see me, feel free to say hi. Then please gather up your things and exit the theater.

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Happy Birthday to Me

Last weekend, I celebrated yet another birthday. On Saturday, I turned WTF years old.

It would be nice if people reached a certain age and birthdays just stopped happening, but unfortunately that’s not how the process works. You get a new one every year whether you want it or not.

I started my special day by waking up before anyone else in the house had started moving. Ordinarily in these circumstances, I would immediately begin making as much noise as possible to wake up the kids. They have an annoying habit of sleeping in until noon if left alone and I get a great deal of pleasure out of making their lives miserable. This day was different, however. I figured a quiet house was just what I needed.

Breakfast was a birthday bowl of cold cereal. A birthday bowl of cereal is like a normal bowl of cereal except there are usually a few more tears in it. I debated putting a candle in the bowl to make it more festive, but I’m pretty sure a candle won’t light after it has been submerged in milk. To add to the air of desperation, I had to eat my breakfast with an oversized serving spoon because no one had bothered to do any dishes that week. That’s okay, though. I managed just fine since I have a big mouth. I know I have a big mouth because people have been telling me that my entire life.

Things did pick up in the afternoon. As a gift to me, my family took me to a movie and a restaurant for dinner. I got to choose the movie, and I got to pick my favorite restaurant. As an added bonus, I also got to pay for everything.

Happy birthday to me!

While we were at the theater, I bought some popcorn. I always have popcorn when I see a movie. It’s just my thing. Usually when my wife and I get popcorn we argue over whether or not to put butter on it. I prefer it dry, since I don’t like the plasticky burnt taste of the fake butter. I also hate how greasy it makes my fingers. My wife loves the stuff for some unknowable reason and insists that it be used to ruin an otherwise perfectly good tub of popcorn.

We usually argue in line for a few minutes and when we get to the front counter, she tells the kid working the snack bar to add the butter. This was my birthday, though. So, on this day when we got to the kid behind the counter … she told him to add butter.

Then I paid for the snacks.

Happy birthday to me!

I enjoyed the movie, and dinner afterwards was pleasant. I swore the kids to secrecy about my birthday. I didn’t want them telling the waiter just so they could watch dad squirm in his chair as the restaurant staff sang an offkey version of a birthday song while holding a melting blob of ice cream with a candle in it. I enjoy a free dessert as much as the next guy, but I don’t care to be the center of attention in a circus like that.

So, while we were eating, I told the waiter that it was EM2’s birthday.

After dinner, we headed home for a quiet evening. A little late-night television, a glass of wine, and two kids laughing and arguing while they watched videos on their phones.

And there was cake.

Lest anyone think we forgot the most important part of any birthday celebration, my wife baked me a lovely, homemade, chocolate birthday cake. She even managed to find a pink box to put it in and a sticker with a barcode to put on the side of the box. She always goes the extra mile because she loves me so much.

My wife covered every square inch of the cake’s surface with candles, then applied a blowtorch to it for three minutes to get them all lit. Okay, that part’s a lie. It’s just my attempt at an old age joke. The reality, though simpler, was actually much more depressing.

My wife rummaged in the junk drawer, located a single candle at the bottom of the clutter, and stuck it in the cake. The family sang Happy Birthday to me, hurrying to get through it before they completely lost interest in what they were doing. Somehow my daughters managed to get through the song without ever once looking up from their cellphones. Maybe they just forgot the words and had to read them on their screens.

After fourteen or fifteen attempts, along with a five-minute rest break when I got dizzy and started to hyperventilate, I blew out the candle. (Yup. Another old age joke.)

The kids both grabbed a piece of cake and disappeared upstairs to watch a Korean soap opera. My wife took two bites of her cake, set it on the counter and started answering work e-mails on her cellphone. I got to work cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.

Ah, yes. I can’t wait to do it all again next year.

Happy birthday to me!

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Summer Job

When my daughters came home from college this year, I suggested that they might want to find some summer jobs to keep busy and earn a little money before school starts up again in the fall. They both agreed that sounded like a good idea.

I offered to pay them to do some yard work around our house, but apparently that did not sound at all appealing. Either I was not offering to pay enough or, more likely, they did not consider anything around the house or yard worth doing. After all, I haven’t been able to get them to clean their rooms in twenty-two years, I don’t know what made me think I could get one of them to mow the lawn.

For the past month or so, both girls have been taking on jobs housesitting, babysitting, watering plants and caring for animals. All these little side jobs give them something to do each day instead of just sitting on the couch reminding me why I was so willing to pay a lot of money to send them away to school. They are also earning some decent wages. People will pay quite a bit more than I expected to know that their animals and yard are being taken care of while they are away on vacation.

And surprisingly, the girls are doing really well. Given my history with them, I fully expected the people that hired them to come home to brown, wilted plants in the house and brown, wilted animals in the back yard. But everything so far – fingers crossed – has gone smoothly.

The only glitch I have noticed is that when I suggested to the girls that they should get summer jobs, I didn’t realize that I, too would end up being saddled with a variety of summer jobs. Unpaid, summer jobs. Internships, I suppose you could call them.

After spending a morning in my own yard, weeding, gardening, and harvesting fruit off our trees, I hadn’t planned on spending my summer afternoons taking care of someone else’s property. However, it is becoming unpleasantly predictable that somewhere around one or two o’clock in the afternoon, I will hear one child or another tell me, “I forgot to water the plants at Mrs. ———‘s house. Can you drive me there?” Or, “I was supposed to take in the garbage cans and get the newspaper at Mr. ———‘s. Dad, can you go over there and do it? I don’t have time right now.”

Or my personal favorite: at eight o’clock at night, while EM1 was house sitting for some friends who live a half hour away, she called me to say, “There isn’t any food in this house, can you go pick me up something to eat and bring it to me? Oh, and while you’re out, can you stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things? I would really appreciate it.”

I think the most surprising part of this conversation is that she got what she wanted, and that was totally my fault. I should have reminded her of all the times I asked her to help me with chores and she refused, then hung up the phone, laughing maniacally. But there’s something about a child asking you to bring them food. Baby bird syndrome, I’ll call it. It makes me want to spit chewed up worms in her mouth.

Unpack that statement however you like.

Anyway, this whole ordeal makes me wonder what my life will be like when the girls go out and get real jobs. You know, the actual 8 to 5 routine. Long hours, short lunches, and angry bosses. Am I still going to get phone calls asking for help? “Dad, I was the last one at the store and I forgot to lock up. Can you go close out the register and lock the doors for me?” Or, “I’m in surgery right now, but I forgot my lunch. Can you pick me up something and bring it to the hospital?”

Okay, that last one was just wishful thinking, but who doesn’t want a doctor in the family?

All I know for certain right now is that I seem to get sucked into helping the kids with whatever tasks they agree to do for our neighbors and friends, and I’m not making a penny doing it. This seems very wrong, especially when EM2 tells me that she just got paid $100 to go pet someone’s cat for five minutes. A cat that I probably fed, bathed, and cleaned their litter box.

From now on, if EM1 or EM2 take on a new job, I’m not going to lift a finger to help. They are the ones getting paid for it, so they can do all the work. If either one of them suddenly find themselves in trouble and they need my assistance because they forgot to do something, or need my help at the last second…

Yeah, who am I kidding?

I’ll probably do it.

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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.

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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.

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