humor – Page 11 – Deep Dark Thoughts

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.

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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.

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Roughing It

It took a little longer than I thought it would, but I finally got out for my first camping trip of 2019. My wife and I had originally planned to do some camping in January and February, but due to some truly remarkable thunderstorms moving through northern California, we opted to forfeit our reservation deposits and stay home.

Of course, both times, despite the ominous weather forecasts, not a drop of rain fell during the dates we were supposed to be gone. We stayed home and complained nonstop about the sunshine and perfectly cloudless skies.

For this most recent trip, when we made our reservations, we were determined to go camping regardless of weather forecasts, wildfires, bears, or whatever natural disasters threatened.

To hedge our bets a little bit, we decided to go someplace that could only be marginally considered a campground. We ended up taking our trailer to the Jackson Rancheria Casino RV park. The “campsite” was outfitted with leveled concrete pads, manicured, real grass lawns, a nearby general store, and full power hookups. There was even a swimming pool and game room attached to the main lodge of the RV park. It wasn’t all comfort and luxury, however. We had our difficulties to content with. For instance, the first night that we were at the park we discovered that we didn’t have any direct streaming capability on our television set, and we were forced to watch basic cable like a couple of wild animals.

And, there were the regular hardships one has to endure while camping, of course: The shower in our trailer is a little cramped. The hiking path around the campgrounds needed to be repaved. Our 70-year old neighbors made quite a lot of noise, partying and carrying on until well past 8:00 PM. And, I was woken up early one morning when the lawn sprinklers turned on next to our trailer.

You know, the usual wilderness stuff.

No uncontrolled fires were allowed at the campgrounds either, but that was no problem. I just fired up our portable propane firepit, poured my wife and I a few (too many?) glasses of wine, and voila! Instant campfire. At least until the bugs came out at sunset, then we went back inside to watch tv.

For food, we brought with us a wide assortment of cookies, crackers, alcohol, chips, alcohol, sodas, water, alcohol, and two pounds of pre-cooked bacon. Why two pounds? Because we were going to be there for a whole three days and, despite our tv situation, we aren’t savages.

Whenever we got the craving for actual food, we had to head for the casino. The main building was too far away to walk, but luckily for us there was a shuttle bus that drove through the RV park every fifteen minutes to pick up people who wanted to go gamble. There aren’t too many campgrounds that offer shuttle service. Most places can’t afford to run twenty-four hour bus service to move you from one cluster of trees in the middle of nowhere to another cluster of trees slightly further away. It doesn’t make a lot of financial sense.

This was a casino, however. They don’t make a lot of money from the people that just stay in their trailers all weekend. They needed a method to relocate you and your cash into the seat of a slot machine with as little effort on your part as possible.

Honestly, I only went to the casino for the restaurants. I had no intention of doing any gambling, yet I somehow managed to come home a couple hundred dollars lighter than when I went. As I walked through the casino, I kept finding slot machines that I wanted to play and thinking to myself, “I’m just going to sit down for a couple minutes and I’m only going to spend ten dollars.” After a while, “I’m only going to spend ten dollars” became, “I have to win back all my money.”

Unfortunately, no matter how many games I played, the money only seemed to flow one way. It turned out the only machines in the casino that were consistently paying out cash were the ATM’s.

On a side note, I do find it interesting that on the base of every slot machine in the building, there was a little metal plate that said, “Have a gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.” I wonder if that little sign has ever helped anybody. I imagine it’s sort of like the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes. By the time you’re close enough to read it, it’s already way too late to do you any good.

Fortunately, the very quiet and subdued shuttle ride back to the RV park was free, otherwise I might have been trying to hitch a ride on the highway back to my trailer. The only cash I still had in my possession was a dime and three pennies, and I only had that much because thirteen cents was insufficient to pay for one more spin of the wheels. There is very little in this world that is quite as humiliating as a slot machine spitting out a ticket worth thirteen cents, as if it is telling you, “I’m done with you, buddy. You can go now.”

Perhaps the only thing more degrading than receiving a ticket for thirteen cents, is actually going to the reimbursement kiosk and cashing it out. But, there I was, with four coins in my pocket reminding me that I had sunk as low as I could go.

Despite my financial failures, our first camping trip of 2019 was not a total loss. Even though we were returning to our campsite completely broke, we still had everything we needed to salvage the vacation. We had a refrigerator full of alcohol and bacon waiting to cheer us up.

What more could anyone want?

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You only had one Job!

On the south side of our house, there is a dirt field. The field is about two acres of open space and, during most of the year, I just ignore it. It requires very little upkeep or maintenance in the summer, fall, or winter.

Every spring, however, after a few months of rain followed by several weeks of pleasant warmth and sunshine, the field is taken over by weeds. Usually by the end of April or middle of May, the weeds have grown to be as tall as I am, and I know it is at last time to fire up the tractor and cut them all down.

For 2019, that time has come.

Mowing the field is not my favorite chore. In fact, I try to avoid the task for as long as possible. This year, I successfully ignored the weeds longer than usual, but I had to admit it was time to get to work when the neighbors began to drop little hints.

First, it was just the gentleman next door, mowing his own fields and waving at me while he did it, as if to say, “See how easy it is? Now, why don’t you try it?”

It escalated a little bit with a few light-hearted comments like, “Weeds are getting a little tall, aren’t they?” “You trying to build a hedge maze for the kids?” Or, “Is your mower broken, or are you just a lazy, inconsiderate jerk?”

Finally, when I got the anonymous note hand-written in blood that said, “Cut down the f***ing weeds or you will never see your dog again,” I knew it was time to mow.

Mowing the field typically takes a little over three hours, so I figured I could do the job on a Saturday morning. Of course, projects around my house never seem to go smoothly, so I cleared my whole day, just in case. Apparently, that was the only thing I did right, all day.

I got up at about eight o’clock and went outside to fire up the tractor. Because I had not used the blue beast in a few months, the first thing I did was check the fuel gauge. Of course, the tank was empty.

I went back into the garage to grab one of the five-gallon portable tanks of diesel that I keep for just this sort of emergency. I picked up the first tank, but it was as empty as the tractor. I grabbed the second and discovered that, while not completely dry, the pint or two of fuel inside was not going to be sufficient to cut down two acres of weeds. I tossed the empty tanks into my truck and drove to the nearest gas station. The nearest gas station, by the way, is still a twenty-minute drive from my house.

When I returned, I fueled up the tractor, then noticed that the front tires were both almost flat. No problem, however. I just fired up the air compressor in the garage. After the first half hour, the compressor had not risen above 5 pounds of pressure. I finally realized that I had left the pressure valve on the bottom of the compressor open. Another half hour after closing the valve, and all tires were returned to their appropriate internal pressure.

It was now almost ten o’clock and I was at last ready to get to work. I placed the key in the ignition and turned it. There was no reaction. Just a soft clicking noise that slowed to a stop, then dead silence. After sitting unused for three months, the tractor’s battery had gone completely dead.

Still not deterred, I retrieved my battery jumper box and attached it to the tractor battery. I again jumped into the driver’s seat of the tractor, placed the key in the ignition, and….

Complete silence.

I rechecked the connections between the jumper box and the battery, but everything seemed properly arranged. A little more investigation revealed that the jumper box itself was also dead. Apparently, if you don’t recharge them every year, they stop working. Who knew?

I dragged the box into the house, plugged it into a wall socket and, a mere hour and twenty minutes later, it was fully charged and ready to be put to work. I returned to the dead tractor, attached the connectors of the jumper box to the battery and tried once more to start the engine. When I turned the key, I got some more of the weird clicking noises, but the motor still refused to start.

It seems in addition to a dead battery the tractor had developed a few other ailments during its three months of inactivity.

The dog’s chances of ever coming home were beginning to look a bit bleak.

In desperation, I began to call tractor repair stores in the area. Most were either closed, did not provide pickup or delivery (I do not own a trailer big enough to carry the tractor), or did not work on my particular model. I was quickly running out of daylight and phone numbers to try.

Then, just as I was starting to wonder what kind of dog I should get to replace the old one, I finally caught my first break of the day. I found a repair shop that I knew had gone out of business the year before, however their website was still up and active. The website advertised that although the business had closed, the owners were still doing mobile servicing and repairs. When I called, I spoke with a man who stated he would be happy to take a look at my tractor.

I asked when he might be available, and he said, “Are you home right now?”

Tim (as I discovered he was named) was at my house thirty minutes later. He looked at my tractor, shook his head, and told me, “Nope. I’m not going to be able to fix it today. I need some parts and I won’t be able to get them until next week.”

Just when I thought I was saved, more bad news. I shook Tim’s hand and thanked him for coming out. He said he would give me a call when the parts were in, and we could schedule a time to service the tractor. Then he asked me, “Do you need the tractor running today?”

I thought that was an odd question. Hadn’t he just told me he couldn’t fix it?

“Um, yeah,” I said. “That’s kinda what I was hoping for, but I understand you can’t do anything until next week.”

He smiled and told me, “I can’t fix it until next week, but I can get it running for you today. Once I get it started, though, you have to leave it running. If you turn it off, I can’t guarantee it will start again.”

I don’t know what he did, but five seconds later, the tractor’s engine roared to life.

It took most of the day, but I finally had a functioning tractor. What had started out as a three-hour project had become a saga of ridiculously epic proportions but, in the end, the damned field did get mowed.

And, oh yeah, the dog came home, too.

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Picnic Day

I graduated from the University of California at Davis in … well, let’s not worry about the actual date. Let’s just say it was a while ago.

UC Davis has a tradition of opening up the campus every spring for one Saturday afternoon. They call the event ‘Picnic Day.’ Originally, Picnic Day was created as an opportunity for parents to come to Davis, visit with their children, and try to figure out why they were paying thousands of dollars every year to let their kids attend the school. There were opportunities to meet administrators, there was often a school baseball game scheduled for the day, and information booths were set up by all the major fields of study at the university to hand out flyers and answer questions.

Over the years, this folksy, family-oriented event has morphed into something much bigger. It is more of a carnival atmosphere these days, with food trucks, games, stage performances, parades, and souvenir garbage for purchase. There is also an assortment of individuals wandering around the campus that on any other day would have been sent on their way by the local police. I count myself among that particular group.

I have not been to Picnic Day since I was a student at the school. This year, however, I decided to go.

Two of my college roommates contacted me and said they wanted us to all get together for a reunion and Picnic Day was the perfect excuse to do it.

One of my roommates, Chris, I see every couple of years. Whenever my family is in southern California, we get together with her and her family and visit for a day. The other roommate, Steve, I have not seen in over twenty-five years.

I don’t know much about Steve or what he has been up to during the last two dozen years. I only see pictures of him when he posts on social media. His life is clearly much better than mine, since I occasionally scroll through snapshots of him hiking and bicycling through foreign countries, while I am sitting on the couch brushing corn chip crumbs off of my chest.

But despite the differences in our lives, I agreed to go.

My wife and I showed up in Davis at ten o’clock in the morning. Chris was with us, since she had flown in from San Diego the night before and was staying at our place. Steve was running late, so the three of us that were already there decided to go to the college bookstore and buy some UC Davis clothing as a reminder that at one time we were young and had things in our lives to look forward to. Chris and I bought hoodies with UC Davis on the front. At $50 apiece, how could we pass them up? Such a bargain!

My wife offered to take pictures of us with our new gear so, in 90-plus-degree weather, we donned sweatshirts and posed for photographs. This was probably the dumbest thing we did all day, and this is on a day that we attended a cockroach race, ate bacon-chili-cheese fries for breakfast, and spent twenty minutes staring at six differently-colored garbage cans trying to figure out where to throw away a plastic fork. By the time we were done taking pictures, my brand-new sweatshirt had fully lived up to its name. (I’m referring to the ‘sweat’ part, since I assume it was always a shirt.)

Steve showed up as I was drinking a 4-dollar bottle of water and trying to overcome my mild case of heatstroke. I recognized him the second I saw him. I must admit that I was a little put out by the fact that he looked exactly the same as the last time I saw him, twenty-five years ago. I kinda wanted to punch him. I restrained myself, though. Mostly because he’s bigger than I am and in much better shape, and I didn’t feel like taking a beating in front of a thousand strangers.

I got over my hard feelings pretty quickly. Later that evening, Steve bought us all dinner at a very nice restaurant in town, and it is extremely difficult to remain mad at someone who is providing you with free food.

Besides, spending time with Chris and Steve reminded me of how much I enjoyed hanging out with them when we were kids. For a little while, it felt like we had never been apart, and we were still the same twenty-somethings hanging out over a couple of beers and talking about what classes we were taking that semester.

It was an absolutely perfect day. It was the kind of reunion everyone hopes for when getting together with old friends, but that so rarely actually happens.

At the end of the day, Steve and I hugged, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways. We promised each other that we were going to do a better job of keeping in touch and that we would make some plans to get together again soon. We were sincere when we said it, but I am aware that life and reality often get in the way of good intentions.

I’m sure I will see Steve again. I feel fairly certain about that. It could be in a few months, or it could be in a few years. It might even be another couple decades before we cross paths again. I hope not, but it’s possible.

And, I bet when I see him, that son of a bitch will still look like he’s twenty-five years old.

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Glory Daze

Were the good old days really any good? Are the memories of past accomplishments reliable, or are they slightly skewed by thirty years of ensuing failure?

As I get older, I frequently catch myself thinking about things I used to do when I was younger. I wonder why I stopped hiking through the wilderness for days with nothing but the items I could cram into a backpack. I think about playing high school football and little league baseball. I remember jumping into a car on the weekends with my buddies and driving to Santa Cruz to hit the boardwalk and lounge on the beach. And I ask myself, why don’t I do those things anymore?

Then I injure my back carrying the garbage out to the curb and the answers all come rushing back to me.

I’m not a kid anymore.

In college, I used to be able to drink and party all night, and still make it to class at 7 AM the next morning. Now, if I have two glasses of wine in the same evening, I pass out on the couch and wake up the next morning feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck.

When I was first working as a police officer many years ago, I loved to work the night shift. I worked all night, slept for a few hours in the morning and was back up by noon to go to the gym. These days, if I’m awake past ten o’clock at night I congratulate myself for managing to stay awake so late and promise to reward myself with a three-hour nap the next afternoon.

Times have changed and so have I. But it’s more than just realizing all the things I used to be able to accomplish that I don’t anymore. I also find myself wondering how many of my memories are just over-exaggerated recollections of what truly happened. Or maybe even recollections of things that never actually occurred.

We have all listened to other people inflate the truth a bit. We’ve listened to stories over the years that get bigger and more exciting with every telling. That diving catch for a three-yard gain on the high school football field becomes the winning touchdown for the State Championship. A two-pound bass you caught as a teenager, over time and multiple tellings, grows to the mighty leviathan that dragged you and the boat around a lake for five hours before you were able to finally land it.

I have begun to wonder how many of my remembered accomplishments were slightly less spectacular than I recall them to be.

I used to be a pretty good dancer. At least, that’s what I tell myself these days when I’m out on the dance floor with my feet rooted in place and I’m swinging my arms at something roughly resembling the tempo of the music. However, I have a growing suspicion that my go-to move these days is probably the exact same epileptic flailing I was busting out in the clubs when I was in my twenties. The only difference is, the haze of my memories is telling me I was John Travolta, when I should be remembering Daffy Duck.

I also used to study and teach martial arts. I remember being pretty good at that, too. But lately, as I break into a sweat just trying to bend over and tie my shoes, I began to doubt my own recollections of what I used to be able to accomplish.

I remember being in my forties and still being able to spar and hold my own with black belts in their twenties. Of course, I also remember one of those twenty-something year old kids cracking a couple of my ribs when he landed a punch I wasn’t prepared for. So, that’s kind of a mixed message for me.

Was I any good, or was I just a punching bag?

Maybe the truth is a little of both.

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a picture he took while we were practicing in our Dojo fifteen years ago. It shows me three feet off the ground about to kick a focus pad. (Believe it or not, that’s me in the photo above.) This picture was taken back when I could still get myself in the air without a ladder and three friends preventing me from falling off. But, more importantly, it actually shows me doing something that I tell people I used to be able to do.

So, if this was true, if I used to be able to jump in the air and kick something over my head, what else am I remembering correctly? Maybe my memory isn’t so foggy after all.

Maybe I actually am John Travolta, and perhaps I did catch the winning touchdown at a State championship game.

Maybe.

I mean, probably not.

But, maybe.

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