Although it seems insignificant, I deleted a story today, one that was 40+ pages. Not because it was a lesser story, but because I am incapable of the subtlety needed to capture the bittersweet dread and optimistic anticipation of each of my days.
Each fall, I look back and remember when a plane crashed where I lived. It could have easily zeroed me out in a blink. The story I wrote involved Joe Frasca, the dead pilot, visiting me, much in the way Scrooge had visitors from the past and future.
In the story, Joe Frasca did not waste his time telling me to use my allotted time wisely.
Instead, he told me that the only authentic life is one that’s observed, felt, and experienced, regardless of location. We focus so much on the Kodak moments, the vistas snapped in impersonal pictures and the adrenaline-laced remnants of activity that we forget that every single moment of our lives is a solitary window observing everyone and everything around us.
That Joe was an expert stunt pilot and saw the world from one of the best viewpoints possible isn’t lost on me.
I forgot that the pilot was engaged at the time of his death. Someone sent me a link to a blog post his sister wrote. After reading it, I realized that the lessons he did actually leave me with aren’t mine to fictionalize. One day, if I am capable, I will revisit the story, in the same way that I still look to the sky, wondering about the other universe floating above us.
I recently went for my annual wellness exam. Despite buckling down fanatically in the last few weeks, I was concerned. A decent bit of the doctor’s visit was a discussion about my upcoming lab work. Because of my previous cholesterol levels, it was a foregone conclusion that I’d most certainly be placed on statins this time. Although I’m not focusing on weight, I’ve reduced the volume I eat substantially, as well as doing my best to eat healthily. For once and for all, I’m also going to find out if a ridiculous amount of weight loss will eliminate the need for blood pressure medication.
Though I knew my lab results were in, I waited for the dreaded call from the doctor’s nurse, wherein she’d give me the bad news about needing an additional drug.
Spoiler alert: the nurse laughed and said, “Whatever it is you are doing X, the doctor wants you to keep doing it – except for the shenanigans.” She went on to say that my lab results were excellent. I didn’t know what to say except to laugh and tell her I’d be back soon enough to tell the doctor I’d lost 20% of my body weight. It did not feel like a humblebrag to say it out loud. While I don’t know what medical surprises will drop like an anvil on me, I do know that I think I finally can give up the yo-yo that’s plagued me.
Thanks, Lemons, Tammy, Mike, and the person who gave me “choose your hard” as a non-optional observation on life.
Among my other Halloween night liveliness, I also surprised some neighbors will full bags of candy. Despite having many suspicions about what transpires inside the house across the street, I took an overladen bag of full-size candy bars across the street before sunset. The family living there has a son about thirteen. As I approached, I noted they had the dining room table up against the front living room window. The table was loaded with all manner of tacos, meat, and related food.
While I couldn’t hear what was said, I did hear someone say in Spanish that I was approaching. The father stood up and approached the door. When he answered, I held up the bag and told him it was for his son.
His face went from reluctant to beaming with happiness. “Really? Wow.”
I handed him the heavy bag. I don’t know if we were speaking Spanish or English. (I love those moments where I’m entombed in the moment and language is a spectator.) He immediately gestured toward the table and invited me to have a bite with them. It floored and humbled me. I declined. I heard the mom say, “Wow!” when she saw the quantity of candy. As I walked away, the son jerked the door open again and shouted, “Thank you!” I could hear the smile in his voice, so I turned and smiled back.
*
At the end of the night, I did go to the inside corner of the street to give the group of kids there a full bin of full-size candy bars. They danced with joy. I think they’ll remember me. I’ll remember the look on their faces for a long time. *
For a couple of the other neighbors, I left an extensive offering of candy for their children at their doors. I didn’t hear back from either – and that’s okay.
What I will hold close to my heart is the face of the father across the street when he realized that I was giving his son such an unexpected gift.
The other issues I mentioned, unspoken suspicions – they fell away.
Whatever I accomplished there, I think he changed his perception of me.
I don’t know how the rest of y’all are in this regard, but these moments comprise a chunk of what humanity should be.
This is a non-traditional post. I started with a different idea. Instead of discarding it, I’m posting it.
“Y el amor nunca es amor si no es idiota…” Ricardo Arjona. (From “El Amor Que Me Tenía) Loosely translated: “…and love is never love if it is not idiocy…”
“Love is the thing that compels you to do something stupid before you do something even stupider.” – X
“Love is the thing that compels you to do something stupid before being able to do something reasonable.” – X (alternate)
As Steven Wright said: “I bought one of those tapes to teach you Spanish in your sleep. During the night, the tape skipped. Now I can only stutter in Spanish.”
Likewise, I find myself stuttering in other regards, wondering where people find the confidence and ease to live the life they know they should be living. I’m increasingly sure most of them are winging it.
“My wife said to me last night, “You treat our relationship like some kind of game!” Which unfortunately cost her 12 points and a bonus chance.” – Unknown
“X, stupidity isn’t a crime, so you are free to go.” – Several people.
“Without a doubt, my favorite Robin Williams movie is Mrs. Fire.” – Internet
I was voted Most Humorous in Mortuary School. I need to use that more.
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“Thank you for all your support,” I shouted to my work pants, acknowledging they had been tasked with the impossible.
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The Family Dinner Rule: If it ain’t been said at least four times, then it ain’t been said.
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My sister-in-law Darla’s bathroom had water all over the floor!
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My director told me I could no longer dramatically do a puff of magic smoke every time I left the work area, so I switched to glitter capsules. He’s pissed. But kind of cute with his face covered in glitter.
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My neighbors installed security cameras yesterday. I’m obsessed with doing puppet or character shows above the fenceline now. I’m letting you know in case they don’t find my idea as funny and brilliant as it seems to be to me.
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“You’re running for President – not Sheriff of Cracker Barrel.” – X
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IF YOU SEE A LINK THAT SAYS “DONALD TRUMP NUDE,” DON’T CLICK ON IT. IT’S A VIRUS AND MAKES EVERYTHING YOU TYPE APPEAR IN ALL CAPS. – X
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Springdale is having its Demolition Derby at the end of the month. Good news: AAF and Car-Mart, as always, are selling cars perfect for just such an event. #satire
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I wonder if anyone doing genealogy found out they had a great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather who was a Sheriff – and then found out they lost their job for failing to fire a warning arrow at a suspect.
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If I were in a gang, I wouldn’t carry a traditional weapon. I’d carry a violin. No one would see that coming until it splintered all over their head. Also, the police would have to start frisking people for violins.
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This Joke Works For Any Profession
Verne and Fern were sitting in the living room talking.
Fern said, “I’d like to win the lottery!”
Verne replied, “Why do you want to win the lottery? “Well,” Fern said, “I’d like to do nothing all day.”
Verne frowned. “You don’t need to win the lottery to do nothing all day! All you need to do is become a Maintenance Person.”
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Springdale experienced a massively thick fog last night, one that made the trees sound like a slowly running creek as they became drenched and heavy, highlighted the work of the surrounding spiders, and gave me an opportunity to make an unedited gif from the moisture blanketing the air.
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Untested truth: you COULD be bulletproof.
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In the way that so often happens to all of us, I had leftover Pitchfork Creeper pictures from my last birthday wrapping gift surprise. Because it’s been too long since I’ve done so, I took my extras with me to the grocery store and strategically placed them around the store.As always, I find myself laughing and wondering what people think as they encounter them in their mundane shopping experiences.*
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If you find yourself in a situation in which you are driving around behind random trucks to evaluate the scent and desirability of each vehicle’s exhaust, the truth is that there is someone out there who is thinking the same thing. That thought either liberates or confines.
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No one can convince me that flipping the overhead lights off as you exit a bathroom, knowing that someone is seated in a stall, isn’t funny. Not even the shrieks of my last victim dissuade me from this laughter.
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“I left nothing unsaid” can be either a reflection of personal authenticity or a sign you’re talking so much that the O2 masks may drop at any moment.
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The psychic I want to see is one who can tell me what lies are ahead. – x
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Though I am reluctant to admit it, I watched the new Borat movie. The movie? Terrible. Some of the jokes? Both surreal and hilarious. I’m informing you so that you can remind me of this when I try to use words such as “style” or “wit” without looking like a hypocrite. This movie is unintentionally a cross-section of so much that we imagine ourselves to be in the world, using satire and cringe so viciously that I wanted to file a police report.
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Any horror movie with the soundtrack sped up becomes a comedy. Any life remembered with nostalgia becomes too bittersweet to narrate.
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Masks are the minimum cost all of us should pay in public to acknowledge that we’re connected and reciprocally responsible for one another. – X
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My sister-in-law recently got diagnosed as a kleptomaniac. We were relieved to hear it. It explained why she took things literally.
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“Today is a full tomorrow, if you know what I mean!”
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Several hundred full-size candy bars doesn’t look like much now. Will there be little ghouls to rescue us from this hoard? *
The answer was “Yes!”
So many kids danced. laughed, and were incredulous to see me shoving handfuls of full-size candy into their hands and bags. I did my best to get the chaperones and adults to choose something, too.
At the end, I walked down the block with a full bin of bars. I gave the bin to the children at the door. Screaming and fits of joy ensued. I have to say it was one of those moments that I’ll probably remember forever.
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“Perfume as marinade” is a terrible way to get ready in the morning.
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I tried contactless delivery but the driver ended up in the backyard.
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For reasons I’ll explain in more detail if you need it, you should never mumble when ordering at a Taqueria.
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He didn’t just look a gift horse in the mouth but always took a long piercing look at the other end too.
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“X, I see that you’ve noted ‘Z’ in the blank for blood. That’s supposed to be your blood type.” The nurse looked at me expectantly. “It’s my blood typo, yes.” I smiled.”What does that mean?” She said.”Well, I wasn’t planned,” I said and looked away to give her a minute to figure out my humor.
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This is some of the weirdest, nastiest, and most delicious plant-based meat alternative I’ve ever tried. The texture is akin to alien epidermis. But I LOVE it!
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My voting anecdote squashes all others. For several elections, the Rodeo Grounds was my nirvana. I thought it couldn’t get any better. For this election, I of course voted in person. Having a stupid name amplifies the possibility of shenanigans, both giving and receiving. I waited zero seconds to get in. Zero to be identified. Zero to get to the kiosk to vote. And zero seconds to put the ballot in the final collection slot. My apologies to everyone who didn’t wait zero seconds, like me.
(Because that’s all you can really do, until whatever you’re working toward succeeds or you run out of road.)
In another life when I worked at Cargill, I lost my first weight-loss bet to Chris. It was a bit of a kick in the nether regions to give him a check for $100. He earned it though. His weight loss was substantial. As a previous football player, he figured out a way to overcome his athletic metabolism and avoid eating all the things, so to speak. I underestimated him.
One benefit to come out of my loss was to realize that the first stage of any life change is easy: motivation burns bright. The impossible trick is to keep walking one foot in front of the other until it’s a habit. “Choose your hard” my sage cousin reminded me, because living with bad choices is very hard indeed, a lesson I’m plucking from the tree of the obvious many days in regards to my life.
It’s only fitting (no pun intended) that his wife Tammy of 23 years is partially responsible for the recent gong to my head about my weight. For reasons of her own, she dropped a stunning amount of weight. The ‘how’ isn’t relevant; her choice became her reality and that’s the lesson anyone with a heart should embrace. Anyone seeing the pictures initially has difficulty believing that the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures are of the same person. The difference in her smile is beyond redemptive.
I’ve struggled forever with the yo-yo of weight; each successive inability to manage new habits that persist long-term takes a bigger bite of my ability to try it again. I wrote Tammy to simply tell her it was amazing what she’d done. She looks amazing and I expect that the life satisfaction she attained is paying rewards in every area of her life.
I realized that it is ridiculous that Tammy can do something that’s impossible for me. Tammy would probably think I’m crazy. Rocky had a picture of Clubber Lane on his mirror to remind him of his unexpected defeat. He didn’t wallow in it, though. Likewise, maybe Tammy would be amused to know that she is my touchstone in this. It’s nice to picture Chris behind her, too, laughing, and wondering if I can figuratively earn back that $100 he won from me all those years ago.
At our age, I think most of us realize that everyone wins when even a single person figures out a way to be who they are supposed to.
This world is connected in ways that amuse and delight.
Whatever motivation plagued Tammy, I’m claiming a piece of it in her name. Thanks, Tammy.
P.S. Another line from a Rocky movie comes to mind in regards to this current version of my struggle: “Ain’t gonna be no rematch!”
I stopped at the Subway by the airport after work. While arbitrarily attempting to comply with the contradictory multitude of signs regarding covid-safety, I moved along behind a man and a woman as they traded a succession of misheard questions and comments from the sandwich artist. I suspect that the sandwich artist was a mumbler before the epidemic put a mask on his face. Mumbling is one of my gifts, too, passed through my dad’s DNA.
As I neared the end of my sandwich trek, a commotion at the register commenced.
“Ma’am, we don’t have anywhere near one hundred dollars in the store.” The clerk spoke to the woman in front of me. He waved a $100 bill back toward her. “Can you let me leave my information and an IOU? I’ll be back to pay.” The clerk traded a can-you-believe-this look with the other worker standing next to him. The wife exchanged a look with her husband, one that said, “I might lose my literal mind here.”
I tapped the husband on the shoulder. As he turned, I said, “Let me buy y’all lunch. You can pay it forward. We don’t need to exchange information. Just enjoy your day!” He smiled but also nervously looked at his wife. “Oh, thanks!” the wife said. I let her rattle off a few pleasantries, the ones we’re obligated to offer when someone catches us off guard.
When I left the store, the husband and wife were pulling around the corner. The husband waved exaggeratedly at me. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it. When I looked at my receipt, I realized that only one of them ordered a meal. It occurred to me that I might have saved that husband’s life – or the life of the people in the Subway had no one stepped up to show either logic or compassion.
The title of this post popped into my head as I ran from work today. All of us have our struggles. I catch myself in surprise by the dusk in my head. Though I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, I’d walked across the parking lots and sidewalks in the rain, still wearing my mask. It was an absurd moment. “Lost in my thoughts” doesn’t begin to describe the floorless circumstance of my mind. If you’re lucky, you’ve had meditative moments of selflessness like that. In dense moments, they often save us from what streams in our heads.
Ricardo Arjona recently released another album. One of the songs, “El Amor Que Me Tenía,” among others, hit me like an anvil. I learned a lot of poetry and vocabulary from Arjona. He’s known for his turn of phrase. It fundamentally resonates with me. Musicians like him broke open the capacity in me to see beyond language. If Spanish were to become my primary language, I would devote myself to speaking like Ricardo Arjona writes his music, no matter how perplexed people become. I find myself wishing we spoke English the same way, too, but it is difficult to find anyone interested and willing to spend the day deconstructing the absurdity and content of what we say. (Yes, such a willingness is one of the things by which I evaluate a person. Those who demonstrate such an interest won’t ever be disappointed by circumstance.)
One of my co-workers from another department is an avid Arjona fan, too. He got excited when he realized that I had the new album. It amazes him that a gringo like me can appreciate such musicians’ subtle capture in his native language. I brought it, and though we don’t overlap many hours a week at work, I played it on the computer/jukebox I rebuilt at work. Today, my co-worker returned briefly to pick up something. He asked me to put “El Amor Que Me Tenía” on again. I did and increased the volume in the vast space to the point that the angels trembled. I left him there in the back of the room. As the song started, he sat and listened with the rapt attention of one enthralled. It’s rare to see another adult so rapturously engage with a song. When the song ended, he stayed seated for the next song. He emerged from the shadowy area in the back and looked reinvigorated. Whatever it is in that song, it found its way inside him. We now have a shorthand we can use to connect to that kind of music and message.
Whatever the moment with his immersion in the song was, it is a shame that we don’t have such moments several times a day. They ground us in our humanity, and in the parts of our lives we let slide from our grasp. *
P.S. “This amazing story was brought to you by me.” (A line I felt obligated to steal from a winsome writer.)
I still buy an entirely new set of socks each time I need them. For me, they are like new tires. Buying a few is tomfoolery. As comedian Steven Wright does, I wear and sort my socks based on thickness rather than color. Colorblind people everywhere are in my corner.
If that joke doesn’t work for you, try this one by Steve Martin: “I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”
Since you’re already a fan of mine as evidenced by the fact that you still somehow find the nerve to read what I write, you also know that I do not fold socks. It’s not that the mechanics of it escape me. It’s the folly of the days of one’s life spent doing it. Before you attack me, NO, I do not know what I’ve otherwise done with this amazing bunch of time I’ve saved by not folding socks.
Often, I of course use the old laundered socks as packaging material. Years ago, I accumulated them and packed them into my mom’s surprise packages I sent her. I sometimes wear the socks the last time when I’m on a trip and discard them once worn. There have been times I’m certain that housekeeping wonders what kind of lunatic discards his socks.
Not that y’all care to know, but I do the same with my underwear – except I don’t use those in my mailings, unless you ask me to. People tend to react unexpectedly upon opening a surprise box and discover underwear in various stages of decomposition. The idea of having underwear with different birthdays amuses me.
Before you mock me, I’ll admit that I CAN intermittently replace my socks and underwear without a total replenishment. But what else would I do with this obvious wealth I’ve accumulated in life? If one cannot splurge and buy a new set of underwear in its entirety, that is when life gets truly oppressive. You won’t find that written anywhere unless you inherited the diary of a madman.
For all the above reasons, perhaps you can now see why I am a liberal.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 