Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

•  I have no desire to kiss an animal.  Zero.  I may pet a dog, nudge a frog, pat a horse, let a ladybug crawl to the top of my finger.  But that’s it.  No animal kissing — or (ugh) licking!

•  Speaking of… How lucky is it that humans do not have beaks!  “I would like to kiss you, but unfortunately I have a beak.”  What a downer that would be!  Though it would be offset to some extent by one’s proficiency with sunflower seeds.

•  Speaking of… Birds feed their babies and birds feed each other.  Given that, I think it is more than plausible that wild birds understand the idea of a bird-feeder, i.e., that a feeder is not just some prolific seed-bearing plant but a way for someone to feed them.  I am also convinced that squirrels know bird-feeders are meant to feed birds, not squirrels, and that squirrels know they’re getting away with something when they raid them.

•  The statute of limitations for issues between couples should be one week.  If a grievance isn’t urgent enough to mention in seven days, the aggrieved should forfeit his/her right to bring it up.  This dictum, when observed by both parties, has the early benefit of bringing to light issues that may bear on the happiness of a relationship, and the later benefit of keeping grudges and resentments from growing.  Not that my spouse and I ever formally agreed to this but we have evolved to something like it over the past 50 years.

•  Certain people think their mission in life is to extract money from other people’s wallets, cooking up business schemes to exploit cracks in the system and personal vulnerabilities.  These entreparasites (my coinage) are not only OK with their chosen role in the economic food chain but can’t fathom why anyone would pass up the chance for such easy money. 

We have encountered a few such operators here.  They present themselves well and speak impressively of their careers.  They tell you they are the CEO of this, or the founder of that, or the chief medical officer of some testing lab set up expressly to run gratuitous (that is,  expensive) tests ordered by their affiliated nontraditional medicine practice, of which this town has many.  Most scammers do not hail from Nigeria — they work and live among us and regard what they do as success.  Ain’t capitalism great?

•  My current primary care physician is wonderful, but some PCPs don’t seem to want to deliver primary care.  I hate getting triaged to specialists for things I know a PCP should be able to handle if they were willing to work with me.  It’s akin to going to your car mechanic and saying “My car won’t start” and the response is like, “OK, so we need to send you to a battery specialist.”

•  “We need a bio-molecular physiologist in here!  This man is dying!”  Hard to believe that this line could be said with a straight face by any actor, even one portraying a surgeon in a Star Trek: Next Generation episode.

•  Hypothesis: Humanity is becoming increasingly fractionated.  Sub-populations choose to divide themselves into smaller and smaller socio-political units, i.e., tribes.  This may (or may not) be due to deep-seated intolerance for diversity and an innate preference for being among “people like themselves.”  It also may (or may not) reflect an unwillingness of pluralities to share social and economic benefits with minorities.  The United States may (or may not) be exceptional in this regard.  Perhaps this report, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” (More In Common, 2018), will provide us some insight.

•  Here’s a public service announcement from The 100 Billionth Person Department of Mental and Spiritual Health.  It’s a serious one, so go ahead and send your kids/yourself out of the room if you feel like you need to do that.  Although many readers of this blog are grandparents, this message goes out to parents and grandparents alike.  Don’t give your children/grandchildren cute names for their private parts.  Later in life, they may recall such names at inopportune times and the remembrance will be unwelcome.  So just refer to their parts by anatomical names.  Also, refrain from giving your children/grandchildren pejorative nicknames related to their bathroom habits, smells, etc.  Trust me, that is not how anyone wants to remember you remembering them.  Thank you.

•  A brief advisory to wine connoisseurs.  I had a glass of red wine today for the first time in a long while — it was a 2017 Jacob’s Creek Cabernet Sauvignon that was tucked away in our pantry, a bottle of which usually commands a lofty $6.49 at our supermarket.  If you are wondering whether this particular vintage improves with age, the answer is no.

•  It is only a matter of time before my state decides to ease its coronavirus-related social and business controls.  And when it does, I will have to answer myself, what will it take for me to feel comfortable going to restaurants or movies or museums, or walking a trail, or booking a flight on an airplane?  Given my pre-existings, I don’t have a clear answer, and until I come up with one, I am in stasis, regardless of what my governor says.  I know this much:  I’m not going to take one for the American Economy, nor should anyone else.

•  So I have an appointment for my bi-monthly eye injection.  I get a call the day before my  appointment from the health assistant, asking me whether I have had a fever, or have lost my sense of taste or smell, or have taken a trip in the last three weeks.  No, no, no and no.  She says, good.  To myself I say, how strange that I am weighing the value of my eyesight against the risk of getting the virus at my eye doctor.  To her I say, thank you, I’ll be there.

•  A priest, a rabbi and a horse walk into a bar.  The owner of the bar stops them and says, “Didn’t you see the sign?  We’re closed because of the virus.”  “Great… now how am I going to finish this joke?” sighs the horse.

•  OK, here’s another.  What has 1864 wings but can barely fly?  American Airlines.

•  In the eighth episode of The Twilight Zone in 1959, the nerdish Henry Bemis (played by Burgess Meredith) was the sole survivor in a nuclear wasteland created by World War III.  He wanders despondently through the rubble until he stumbles upon the ruins of a library and realizes he now has all the time in the world to pursue his favorite pastime, reading.  And then, because it is The Twilight Zone, his reading glasses fall and break into pieces.

When the stay-at-home orders were issued, I thought that I might become a Henry Bemis and use the time to focus on the painting, music, writing and reading that I enjoy.  Instead, I’ve found it hard to concentrate on such activities.  The news around the world, and from a number of friends, has not been uplifting.  Writing about everyday topics feels escapist; writing about myself seems self-absorbed and disrespectful; writing about politics may be cathartic but it is also tiring, stumbling through all the rubble of this disaster.

I have been taking guitar lessons since February via video chat but will be ending them next week.  Playing something badly over and over again until one slowly gets better at it (they call it practicing) is just too morale-draining for me right now.  I can’t imagine what it’s like for high-school and college students who don’t have this option.  Maybe they are more resilient at their age.  We will have to hope so.

Nonetheless, I am no Henry Bemis — there is no tragic twist to my story.  We have power, heat, food, internet and transportation.  I get to enjoy a hot cup of coffee every morning and listen to the birds outside.  We talk with our family more than we usually do.  And we have managed to avoid the virus.  It will be a relief when we can focus less intently on that.

• The water reservoir on my WaterPik is leaking and I need to replace the rubber stopper. WaterPik’s online store wanted $2.99 plus $3.95 shipping for one stopper.  Various sellers on Amazon wanted $12.99 with free shipping for 6 stoppers.  Cheapskate Craig spent the next 15 minutes in an internal debate between paying $6.94 to fix the problem at hand vs. buying stoppers in quantity and getting a 69% discount per stopper.  What would you do?

• I was trying to play a Beatles CD on my computer and make a copy of “Blackbird” so that I could learn the guitar chords.  My PC was able to play the first track (“Back in the USSR”) and the second (“Dear Prudence”) but when I tried to skip to “Blackbird” the media player kept hanging up.  At first I thought that my Windows Media Player might be out of date, so I downloaded another CD player.  Same thing.  What in the world?  Did this CD have some weird kind of digital copy-protection?  Well, after a half-hour of various attempts to play it, I finally unloaded the CD and saw the crack in the disc.

• My answer to the WaterPik stopper dilemma was this:  I figured I would have to replace the stopper once more, at most, before it was time to discard the unit and buy a new one. Therefore, buying just one stopper, and taking the chance that I would need no more than one additional replacement, seemed to yield the lowest probable cost.  All that calculating just to save $6.05.  I hope the calories that my brain burned made the effort worthwhile.

• My spouse and I just saw a good theater movie, The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss.  Afterward, we stopped in at a local upscale hotel bar to have a drink and a burger.  The bar was busy, it being Saturday night, and various characters filed in and out, it being a hotel.  Halfway through our drinks, two men started trading barbs from opposite sides of the bar (it sounded like a continuation of an earlier exchange) and the bartender had to intervene. One of the men was sitting next to us.  We continued our conversation, ignoring him.

Later, when our dinners were served and my spouse’s ordered-rare burger was delivered well-done, I remarked to her how this was the second time in a row her food was overdone in this restaurant.  This prompted the jerk-next-door to crane his neck around and ask, “So this happened to you before?”  I’m not sure what corner of my brain this came from, but I met his bleary gaze and said, “We’re having a private conversation,” and I turned back to my spouse.  And that was that.  The jerk turned into The Invisible Man and eventually left the bar, unnoticed.  Straw Dogs II did not ensue.

• I bought a new guitar earlier this year, officially my Christmas gift from my spouse and the first I have owned since college days.  Feeling enlivened, I signed up for some lessons, as I have never been able to do anything with a guitar except strum.  The lessons are okay but aren’t exactly what I expected.  I thought they might be like golf lessons, where the first things you learn are the fundamentals like posture and grip.  But instead, we have gone directly to songs (“Blackbird” and “Wildwood Flower” thus far) which have mostly served to highlight how bad my fundamentals are.  Perhaps my instructor figures I’m too old a dog to learn new ways and she may be right.  Nevertheless, I persist.

• Needless to say, I don’t buy into claims that Democrats and the “liberal media” want the coronavirus disaster to worsen in order to bury Trump’s 2020 re-election chances.  But I do believe that Big Media has a vested interest in heightening their viewers’ anxiety about the pandemic.   The more we fear, the more we watch; the higher the ratings, the greater the network ad revenue.  Sandersian as this sounds, liberal media is not the problem — corporate media is.

• It’s astounding how many aspects of once-ordinary life now look radically different when viewed through the lens of our coronavirus stance.  Television commercials for Caribbean cruises.  Vacations to Italy offered on “The Price is Right.”  Any group of people shown in close proximity, whether celebrating a victory or supporting a political candidate.  I have never been a social butterfly but the recommended person-to-person distancing feels like a virtual coffin.

• Employing the same decision-making tools I used in the Great WaterPik Stopper Debate, I decided this is a good time for people like me to utilize our capacity to entertain, as there are plenty of dour commentators and despairing lamenters as it is.  So, for the next month or so, I will be posting various non-coronavirus-related features here, as if this surreality did not exist.  Call it a survival mechanism.