It Isn't Easy Being Green

Kermit really nailed it when he said it isn’t easy being green.  But then again he was addressing the race question.  Lately I’ve been thinking about a whole different kind of being green.

            Today, “being green” means being environmentally conscious - a technical term meaning don’t waste stuff.  Our grandmothers used to call this being “frugal” but how tedious is that?   Back then it wasn’t a choice.  It was a lifestyle dictated by a lack of funds.  It was essential to be careful with your stuff - you didn’t go overboard using stuff, buying stuff, or throwing stuff away.  Now we have so much stuff we find it hard to appreciate any of it.  And stuff is soooo easy to come by.  Wal-Mart and the internet are chock full of stuff that is guaranteed to make us happy.

            Yet, at every turn we are encouraged to be “green”. We now have Greenpeace and The Green Party where once upon a time we only had The Jolly Green Giant. You can see how much more solemn things have become.  And why was The Giant green anyway?  Was he the product of the first misguided genetics experiment that crossed radioactive broccoli with humans?  Or did he climb down a beanstalk and decide he liked farming and advertising?  Or possibly, his excessive height just made him seasick from bobbing around in high altitude winds as he ho-ho-ho’d over various agricultural operations.  I don’t think he had any personal policies on “greenness” at all.  I suspect he might have even used pesticides.  But there must have been some reason he was so Jolly.  Maybe he grew things other than vegetables. 

            Greenpeace and The Green Party are not at all Jolly.  They are pretty serious, and have members who go around with the perpetually furrowed brows of the disapproving.  Maybe if they spent more time on farms and in gardens they too would be Jolly.  It would certainly be healthier than perpetrating endless acts of fruitless persuasion.

            At one time, back before anyone even thought up the idea of being green, it was all just taken for granted.  Recycling hadn’t been invented, at least not technically.  My dad, who didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of recycling as a political act, was nevertheless a dedicated recycler.  Every time he took a load to the dump, he helped them out by bringing more back with him than he had dropped off.  Today he would be arrested.  It would be illegal for him to make boat seats out of chairs with missing legs, wrong to bring home a millstone and turn it into the world’s biggest grindstone, and immoral to pick up that discarded wooden barrel that later housed such lovely flowers.  I’m almost glad he didn’t live into the era where he would have become an offender.  The mere thought of it makes me shudder – my own dear dad arrested for beauifying things that other people threw away. 

            Now, going to the dump involves a lot of rule following.  You and your vehicle must be weighed before you rid yourself of that bag of stinking meat that was fouling up your fridge.  The dump is so regulated that after you hurl your bag of meat into the appointed spot and drive away holding your nose, you and your vehicle must be weighed again.  It’s the municipal version of Weight Watchers.  The dump uses different scales for vehicles entering and exiting.  If your vehicle should ever weigh more on the outbound leg of your trip, a frightening situation could unfold.  They might tear apart your vehicle seeking the contraband garbage that you had squirreled away under the back seat.  Theft from a store is called “shrinkage”.  It will get you arrested.  You’re not allowed to shrink a landfill site either. 

            Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your greenness on the home front.  Our most recent endeavor was an energy saving showerhead.  I must admit that it did indeed save energy.  During a seven-minute shower, it grudgingly squeezed out about a cup of water.  My feet didn’t even get damp.  A day with one hundred percent humidity would have yielded a more suitable environment in which to work up a lather.  I smelled like a shampoo sample until mid afternoon.  And all the water I didn’t use lapped around in the hot water tank all day, doing no one any good.

            The downside of being green is that it can spawn conflict.  Suppose I read by candlelight in order to save energy.  Am I perhaps doing more damage by releasing carbon into the atmosphere with the candle flame?  Can I expect someone to ring the doorbell and slap me with a carbon tax?  And once I’ve saved that electricity just exactly where is it?  Does it get put aside as my own personal kilowatt hour, or does some other less conscientious person get to run his plasma screen TV with it? 

            So maybe, in some cases, we should take our example of how to be “green” from Kermit and The Jolly Green Giant.  They are the experts on greenness, and you can bet they are never, ever going to be as cranky as Greenpeace!  Butting other people’s ships and engineering high seas confrontations are not on their list of Green Things To Do.  And I’m pretty sure that despite how helpful it is to the environment, neither of them is ever going to endorse showering in a mere cup of water!

A Brief History of Swimming

            When I was five years old my parents had the good sense to build a cottage.  Now, to me, the actual cottage itself didn’t matter, nor did the view, its size, or its charming lack of plumbing. I didn’t care if the neighbors were clones from Deliverance.  All that mattered was that it was on a lake, an actual body of water.

I am completely, utterly, hopelessly heat intolerant.  When the weather gets hot I take it personally.  I mope, I fret.  Some say I get cranky. I’ve been known to hallucinate.  This is because in all the years of my childhood, I never once had to cope with being too warm.  After all, a blue body of water waited in my front yard, beckoning me to jump into it. 

A typical cottage day consisted of a swim after breakfast, interrupted by a brief break for lunch and supper.  At bed time I would be required to get out of the lake. 

My mother had two rules.  Rule number one: no swimming for one hour after eating.  Rule number two: no avoid eating so as to duck rule number one.  This left me with a one-hour void three times a day, which could be squeezed down intervals of fifty-minutes each if I adjusted the clock.

In order to avoid being parted from the water for too long, I would place my miniature aluminum lawn chair in the lake and sit in it while I waited for the hour to pass.  This satisfied the technical requirement that I not swim, while allowing me to stay wet.  However, sneaking the lawn chair into water higher than my waist was strictly forbidden.  This action invariably netted me fifteen minutes of banishment to the shoreline.  I never really understood any of this, and I still don’t.  I’ve never encountered any cases where gut-wrenching post-lunch cramps caused the demise of a person sitting in a chair.  I suspect my mother hadn’t heard of any cases either, but maybe she needed at least a few waking hours where she didn’t have to watch the back of my head bobbing in the lake.  I was probably more at risk of being struck by lightning attracted to my metal framed chair than I was of being seized by a cramp.  People don’t seem to worry about the swimming/eating thing as much today, but in the sixties it was one of the top ten worries, along with radioactive fallout, Russian spies, and whether or not someone might slip LSD into your Kool-Aid.

            Back at home in town, I still sought water everywhere.  Swimming pools were uncommon during my childhood, but you could cool off under the lawn sprinkler.  We were lucky enough to have rich neighbors who had a pool.  At least I thought they were rich – how else could they afford the extravagance of a plastic wading pool? 

Pools and plastic were both rarities in the early sixties.  The circular wading pool had two inflatable plastic rings for sides, one orange and one yellow, and a thin plastic bottom. It was a whopping four feet in diameter and could be filled to an impressive depth of 4-5 inches. Any deeper than that and you were “wasting water”. The water nicely covered your feet all the way up to the tops of your ankles if you were standing, or to the tops of your thighs if you were sitting.  Maximum capacity: two kids.  Actual capacity: five kids with an additional six standing nearby yelling that it was their turn.  From a parental point of view, it was the best possible swimming experience, as there was zero chance that anyone would drown. A kid was more likely to die of infection brought on by multiple toenail slashings.

Later on, as I went farther afield in the world I made friends with someone who had a real swimming pool – a large rectangular hole in the ground, with concrete squared off nicely around the edges. It had a snappy blue liner and a diving board at one end.  You could even swim in that thing on weekdays – no waiting to get to the cottage!  It didn’t matter that the population density in the pool rivaled that of Singapore, it was water, and it was deep enough to swim in.  And best of all, it wasn’t a public pool! 

My mother disapproved of public pools, and was ultimately proven to be correct in her analysis.  The one and only time I was allowed to go to a public pool I returned home with only one shoe.  To be more accurate, I returned home with no shoes, as the one shoe that was not stolen seemed just too heavy to carry back home after I discovered I’d been the victim of a one-legged thief.  Wearing a single shoe for the long walk home was more painful than scorching my bare soles on the hot pavement. Midway between the pool and home I pitched the useless unpaired sneaker into a shrub. 

Not long ago I walked past that same shrub, which is now a massive clump with stems thicker than a sailor’s arm.  I bent down and looked beneath the leaves but the shoe was not there.  Too bad – it might have made my mother re-think her position on how “irresponsible” I am.

On hot days I still like to take a dip, proving that swimming can be a lifelong pursuit.  You are only briefly too young to swim, and almost never too old.  But you do need to remember a few rules:  no swimming for one hour after eating, trim your toenails when swimming in close quarters, and keep your eyes on your shoes!

Phones: Then and Now

             When you think about it, phones have changed a lot in the last fifty or more years. They are now not only portable, but small enough to get lost in a tooth cavity or show up in unexpected places, like in the fishing tackle box you hid under the bed.  Last week I retrieved two cell phones from the laundry hamper and one from the dog’s dish.  I got there just in time.

            Back when I was a child we were like every other family.  We had one phone and only one phone.  And like all phones of that era, it was a black phone with a rotary dial.  It was at least twenty years before it occurred to anyone that a phone could be manufactured in a colour other than black.  

            Despite the lack of colour choice, you did have two options.  You could have a wall mounted phone or one that sat on the counter.  However, the location of the phone was non-negotiable.  Phones were always located in or near kitchens back then, the logic being that the homemaker spent most of her time there.  Placing the phone nearby meant that she wouldn’t have to run all over the house when it rang.  Etiquette dictated that she must answer the phone within two rings - it was impolite to keep the caller waiting.   She would have to deal with the leg she broke tripping over the dog in her phone-inspired dash after the call had ended.

My dad insisted we needed a wall mounted phone. He was sure that we would knock the table model on the floor and break it - an event as calamitous as an A-bomb plunking down in our back yard.  It was common knowledge that you were allowed one phone per household per lifetime.  That black phone was going to have to last you until the end of eternity, maybe even longer, no one could say for sure. Phones were so special you couldn’t even own one.  They were the property of the phone company, and damaging corporate property was more than likely punishable by execution of the entire family.  In the event of a fire, the phone was to be saved before your purse, your best hat, the radio you hadn’t finished paying for yet, and your Granny.

            The phone didn’t ring much back then.  It was only to be used for serious matters, and only for adult matters.  If you wanted to play kick-the-can with your best buddy you walked over to his house and knocked on the door.  This let his mother decide if you were a worthy playmate, depending on how clean/polite you were, and whether or not their family dog was inclined to seize you in his jaws and toss you around the yard.  The latter was a true test of your character and was an option that simply could not be exercised over the phone.  A clean hankie in your pocket and recently trimmed fingernails also went a long way toward impressing another kid’s mother.

When the phone did ring the phone calls were usually for Mom. These involved the church potluck suppers or bridge club meetings or baby showers that were the meat and potatoes of social life in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.  Rarely, oh so rarely, the phone calls would be for Dad.  This was so uncommon that it would leave the family awestruck for the better part of a week.   A meteorite slicing through the roof and striking you dead in your bed was a more likely event.  Invariably these infrequent calls came during dinnertime.  Forks dropped into plates during the shocked silence that fell over the dinner table.  Billy would swallow his pork chop whole and the dog would forget all about table scraps and start whimpering in the corner.  I would spill my full glass of milk and it would actually go unnoticed.  We would not even breathe.  Something of major importance was about to happen.

Phones were limited use items back then.  For example, the school did not phone home when you misbehaved.   If your transgressions required parental intervention, a hand-written note from your teacher was sent home, summoning Mom to the school.  Both the presentation of the note and the trip to the school by your mother instantly made even small infractions balloon into events of Biblical proportions.  

Schools have now come to rely very heavily on the use of the phone.  They even have phones that can dial themselves.  Teachers no longer need to waste time and paper writing notes to parents – they have an “automated dialer” to deliver the bad news.  The dialer doesn’t have a lot of information at its disposal so it just gives you a tease, kind of like a movie trailer.  It only has a few vague facts:  some student who lives at your address missed something, sometime.  You aren’t given the name of the student, just his grade.  You are given the date, but the time period is just hinted at, for example, “period two.” 

The auto-dialer leaves a cryptic message such as, “A student in grade nine in your household was absent from period three on November 3rd.”  What the message is hinting at is often difficult to interpret and might point the finger of suspicion at more than one of your offspring.  It doesn’t much matter.  If your kids have figured out how to answer the phone, you’re never going to hear that message.  It’s a wonderful example of advanced phone technology, but I don’t think it’s much of an improvement over the teacher’s note.  Sure the note could be tossed in the gutter on the way home, but the note was personal and ditching it would have led to a feeling of guilt.  Foiling the auto-dialer?  Who cares if the autodialer’s feelings get hurt?  That would just be silly.

Now, thanks to cell phones, calls follow us everywhere.  The dentist has to fill your tooth between phone calls and the doctor has to take a break from repairing your aorta to let the telemarketers know that you’re currently unavailable.  The phone rings while your boyfriend is on bended knee with diamond ring in hand, and he has to pause while you tell the Nigerians that they’ll have to wait until later to put all that money in your bank account. Your cell phone rings while you’re pumping gas, and you wonder if you are going to go down in urban legend history by blowing up an entire city block.

 Phones have changed just about everything.  It’s kind of tricky to figure out if their constant companionship is a plus.  A mere fifty years ago your phone would have been at home, safety attached to the wall.  Blowing up a gas pump was way less likely.  Aorta repair and marriage proposals could go undisturbed.  No one drove into a ditch/wall/movie theatre or backyard pool while typing on their phone. Disasters at the office somehow managed to wait until Monday.  And you could plan a whole vacation without ever once having to plot a route that stayed within the range of cell phone towers!

The Frog Who Jumped to the Stars

At first it pissed Franz off – those little scattered cuts, those twinkles pocking up the night sky.  It was hard to think about.  It totally ruined the nice black vista. 

Toby didn’t agree. He fantasized that the twinkles were collections of, of...something.  He couldn’t think of a word for it. He started putting them into groups, and calling the groups constellations, and pointing them out to anyone who wasn’t croaking too loudly to hear.   “There, that one – just to the right over Centre Stump - I call that the Lily Pad Constellation, and, ooh, ooh, omygod, look at that one over there!  It looks just like a dragonfly, a nice beefy dragonfly.” He stuck his tongue out but it came up empty.

Franz didn’t know whether to be sickened or impressed.  He was a little of both.  He dove deep, scraped himself through the mud, and emerged with a respectable burp. 

What were those damn, maddening, eye-tweaking dots up there? 

Toby was now pointing out another constellation he called “Fish Face” and how there was a hook trailing behind it.  Croaks of “fish” and “face” and “hook” were reverently bounced off the rubber lips of the onlookers.  Tongues flicked upward enthusiastically, and Morgo poked himself in the eye for the fourth time since supper. They went on naming, and pointing, and flicking, until Franz wished they’d just shut the croak up.

Toby sure had a grip on their attention, but Franz figured there was probably a way to steal back the fickle admiration of the boys.  He hopped a little farther away from the Stump so he could get a better bead on the twinkles.  He sorted methodically through his repertoire.  He could swim.  Nah.  He could croak.  Overrated.  And over used.  He could eat.  Hard to see how that would help.  Hard to see how it would hurt, either, but he had to stay focused.  He could jump.  Jump!  What if...what if he could just jump right up there to those twinkles and show everybody that they were just stupid holes in the overhead black? 

He moved back farther, farther away from The Stump than he’d ever been.  The Stump was dwarfed by the endless black that was totally twinked out, like flies on a fox poop.  But the farther back he went the more twinkles he could see.   He paused and worked his eyelids to redistribute the mucous in his eyes.  He needed to make sure it was all real. 

It was.

Franz hunkered down and spring loaded his thighs.  Then he went into a super lower-than-low crouch and let go with a perfect jump. It was even more gargantuan than he had planned!  He sailed past his blathering comrades, two of which now had their waggling tongues tangled in a pink knot.  He sailed past Centre Stump, past the shoreline’s Eastern Mass O’ Moss, and kept on going until he smacked head first into the side of a tree.   More of the twinkles poured right into his eyes as made contact with the trunk. 

Cries of “Holy thit!” came from below as the twinkle-struck frogs strained to get their tongue unhitched.  “Did you sthee that!?”  “Franz is right up there with the sthars!”

Stars?  Franz tried to sort out the ones in his head from the ones above.  They were...stars?  Hadn’t he read about them only last week in the newspaper?  Stars were just were suns that looked falsely itty-bitty.  He tried to remember the reason for that but it eluded him.

Franz jumped again, the stars in his eyes competing with the stars in the sky.  His trajectory went up and up and then it started to thin out a little at the apex.  The arc continued but now it went down in a blistering plunge.  Franz accelerated faster and faster as the lake rose up to meet the sky in a grand gesture of cooperation. There were as many stars in the lake as there were in the sky, and Franz knew he was quite likely the only star-gazing-flying frog in the neighbourhood, maybe even in the world.  He flew on and on until he heard the giant “kerrrrspllatttt”.  The pain came later.

He stayed underwater for a very long time.  When he broke the surface the boys were arguing over who had eaten the most fire flies and whether or not fire flies yielded visible farts.  Toby was categorizing fly clusters and naming them. Morgo was licking his swollen eye. 

The twinkles were gone and a light rain was falling.  Piper looked over and said, “Hey Franz!  Where ya been?  Did ya reach the stars?”  He coughed up a half lit fly. 

Franz turned around and cuffed Morgo in the other eye with his tongue.  It felt good to be part of the crowd once again.  And he was pretty sure of one thing.  Frogs reaching for the stars had better be prepared for a hunk of pain.  A really big hunk of pain.

 

Pamphlet Overdose

            You can tell when you’ve had a good road trip.  The car is waist deep in pamphlets, brochures, and multi-page booklets.  Most of them have bright blue and green covers, and they’re slick with eye-popping glossiness and sugary fingerprints.  You need a shovel to get them off the car seat before you can get back into the vehicle after each pit stop. They plaster the windows.  They stand in for blankets when the air-conditioning gets overzealous.  If it’s been a particularly long trip, chances are it’s safe for you to disable the airbags.  You will have plenty of printed materials to cushion you in an accident, and they won’t inflate aggressively and break your nose.  Plus, you’ll have something to read while waiting for the ambulance.

            Up until yesterday I always took all these brochures for granted.  They’re a pleasant part of the travel experience.  Every stop has a giant rack of them and they’re all free!  On each trip we do the same thing.  We collect mountains of pamphlets.  We scoop them up by the pound and stash them in plastic shopping bags all over the car.  After a few days they choke the map pockets, clog the centre console, and obstruct the air conditioning.  We once threw away the car manual to make room for them in the glove compartment.  On our last trip the spare tire required a crowbar to rescue it from a pamphlet wedgie. 

On a trip several years ago we descended into mad hysteria - no room left in the car!  Drastically, we decided to leave an entire bag of pamphlets in a recycling bin in Michigan.  Six hundred miles later we discovered that five Barbies and their entire wardrobe were nowehre to be found. The rejected bag of pamphlets was still with us.  Not everyone saw that as a silver lining. 

             Regardless of where we go, we grab booklets on all manner of tourist sites, from Disney World to Dollywood to the Japanese garden located in a goat farmer’s abandoned outhouse.  Even though we now travel without children, we nab pamphlets on backyard zoos and flakey reptile houses.  Our collection includes pamphlets on how to apply Jiffy Tattoos and still others that invite you to a session on The Private Life of the Button Mushroom at a one-room science centre.  I really didn’t need a set of instructions for that last one, but I was worried I might be missing something. 

            Most nights during a trip we hoist bags of brochures into the hotel room and spread them out on the bed.  Then we ignore them.  They’re kind of like unsuccessful models – pretty to look at, but ultimately tedious to engage.

            You can even get gobs of brochures for places you’ve never visited.  Just check any tourist site on the internet.  You can print out pamphlets such as Transporting Your Didgeridoo, Panhandling on the Alaskan Panhandle, and Where to Eat on Everest.  

            Recently I wanted to get a brochure printed out for an upcoming event.  It seemed to me that a colored, double-sided, one page fold-over would be quite inexpensive.  I would request plain paper, nothing too fancy - just a splash of color here and there.  How much could it possibly cost?  A few pennies per copy?  I would get a hundred of them, maybe even five hundred! 

            I called around.  Cost per double-sided sheet:  approximately one dollar!  My brochure would be spit out of a colored photocopier one page at a time, and every time the machine muttered “kachunk” it was going to cost me a buck. 

It made me think about the boxes and filing cabinets of pamphlets and their kin that lurk in the back of our garage.  I’m harboring a gold mine!  Had I realized their value, I would have taken way fewer of them.  Or maybe way more.  I definitely would have been more conscientious, less of a pamphlet junkie.  I would have balanced things out better by placing one used pamphlet into the display rack each time I took out a new one.  How else are people browsing for tourist attractions at the Arizona Tourist Bureau going to know what time the ferry leaves for PEI, or who’s up next at Branson?  Isn't recycling our civic duty?  

I’ve already packed a suitcase full to take with me this summer.  I’m also trying to figure out how to get rid of all the weird ones I sent for but no longer want.  So...just how do I send something back to the internet?

Childhood Heroes - Then and Now

Maniacal cracked-out sponges tend to scare me – especially when they’re wearing square pants. But this very characteristic has made Spongebob famous. Mr. Squarepants is a cartoon sponge who currently enjoys huge popularity on daytime cartoons. He has wildly dilated pupils and looks like he’s on the up side of a three-day drug orgy. The only sensible thing about Spongebob is his square pants, a wise choice considering his anatomy. I think if I had encountered a raving marine sponge wearing quadrilateral pants when I was a kid I would have needed counseling way sooner.

When I was a kid we had simple heroes - like the innocuous Porky Pig. He wore a regular looking jacket, a semi-formal red bow tie, and required no pants at all. What made Porky funny? He stuttered. Porky would never be on TV today, not even in adult cartoons. Those popular characters wallow in smut, violence, and suggestive oddball sexuality. They are okay for network TV, but a character who stutters? The hammer of political correctness would come smashing down. Porky would never fly today - even if he could be persuaded to put his pants back on.

Thanks to the movies, Spiderman is more popular now that he ever was in his comic book heyday. That’s kind of strange since he’s based on an arachnid, one of those black too-many-legged beasts that escape by zigzagging all over your walls. On one hand we’re deploying flyswatters, rolled-up newspapers, and Raid to control the beasts, and on the other, we’re idolizing them in films where they put the rest of us to shame by heroically avenging personal tragedy and kissing people upside down. What’s next? Mosquito Man? A crime fighting bomb-spitting cockroach? Super ants that hold a congress and figure out how to stop climate change, then wipe us out for being too stupid to solve the problem ourselves?

Right now the X-Men are pretty popular. They’re from a brotherhood of mutants. Remember how we used to be afraid of mutants? We figured that they would hurt us, since that’s the preferred strategy people use if they’re different from each other. Each of these mutants has a special power. For example, Cyclops has the ability to give an optic blast. Unless he’s a qualified ophthalmologist, that doesn’t sound very safe to me. Magneto is even scarier. He can manipulate electromagnetic fields, allowing him to generate force fields, levitate submarines, and reprogram your coffee pot. In the right mood, he can wipe your iPod cleaner than a Swiffered floor, and strip your computer naked. And your chromosomes.

Sadly, many of our childhood heroes have been dethroned. They’re too feeble, too ordinary or even too politically incorrect. Remember The Near-Sighted Mr. Magoo? He couldn’t see too well, but gosh, he knew how to have fun. No optic blasts from him! Mr. Magoo’s poor eyesight had him falling in to, or out of, every imaginable object. Today he would not be considered not funny, just disabled. We would give him a Seeing Eye dog, a cane, a pension, and a talking computer. But a shot at cartoon fame? Never! Instead of hilariously mistaking cushions for cats, he would be parking in the handicapped spot and spending most of his time seeking solace at the optometrist’s.

Richie Rich is another character who could never be a comic book hero today. Remember him? He was blond and cute and had a swimming pool and his own outrageously expensive car. He lived in a really really big house. He had two of everything that it was possible to own. Today he would hold zero interest for the reader. Why? He's no longer different than the rest of us sailing along on middle-class credit. He would be banned along with Little Dot, the girl whose every story depended on her obsession with dots. She would be referred to the school psychologist. Little Lotta, the obese victim of an eating disorder that gave her super human strength would be banned. The best she could hope for today would be a spot on The Biggest Loser.

Some of our heroes have fallen to changes in political climate. Speedy Gonzales, despite his legendary speed and wit, ceased to be aired on cartoon networks because he was fingered as a racial stereotype. He went from being cute and sassy to embarrassing. Oddly, he is still popular in Mexico. They don’t mind that his lazy buddies portray Mexicans in an unflattering way. They think it’s funny. It’s an old story - it’s okay to make jokes about your own racial group, but don't point your snickering finger at other groups. You can’t make cartoons about them either. So outside of Mexico, Speedy is banned. If you see Mexico on TV today it’s not about Speedy Gonzales, it’s usually about the drug lords, crime, and violence. So much for stereotypes.

Friendliness was highly valued when I was a kid. An abundance of this characteristic alone could make you a fantasy hero, like Casper the Friendly Ghost. He seemed to be a good idea at the time. He kept kids from being afraid of ghosts, since we could see how syrupy nice they actually were. There was nothing to fear there, so maybe those monsters hiding under the bed were friendly too. All in all, he was a terrific role model, nice in spite of his malevolent guardians, coping graciously with an abusive home situation. But Casper would be too simple today. He has no super powers, no weapons, just his friendliness. We’re more sophisticated now, so we know that anything too friendly is suspicious.

There was also The Friendly Giant, if you were lucky enough to have a mother that would let you turn on the TV at ten o’clock on a week day morning. He was an actual human being, except that he was a giant. He hung out with Rusty, a hard-headed, soft-brained chicken, and a talking somewhat cross-eyed giraffe named Jerome. Rusty was some sort of chicken and lived in a cloth bag hung way up high on a castle wall. Clearly a situation of abuse. Jerome, who consisted only of a neck and a head, didn’t seem to live anywhere at all. I suspect they were both just hand puppets, but I can’t prove it. Imagine producing a TV show today where kids would be entertained by mere hand puppets? Impossible. Even the Friendly Giant’s miniature “two chairs to curl up in” would bore kids silly, since they lacked lights, sound, movement, and schlock.  But I still want those chairs.

So we can’t deny that childhood heroes have changed. We’ve exchanged hand puppets for mentally unbalanced sponges, friendly ghosts and myopic seniors for characters who emulate spiders or can kill with their eyes. The rich kids, fat kids, dot-loving kids, and superfast mice are out. But a few things are the still in. Tweety is still eluding Sylvester on a daily basis. Bugs Bunny is still a charming smart ass. And I’m still waiting for the borrower of my cardboard box full of comic books to bring my heroes back!

Life in the Car

Do you ever wonder what your epitaph will say? Inevitably, something will be chiseled in granite. Unless you think about it ahead of time, you won’t be consulted on the last say you will ever have. Ideally, mine should chronicle my life in the car. It’s when I’m at my best.

As a solo act, being alone in the car trumps them all. The universe between the windshield and the back window is yours alone to govern. You can play any song you like on your CD player, and you can play it as many times in a row as you like. I always I end up listening to one or two favorite songs on a CD, over and over. I do this in case life is shorter than I expect it to be. I don’t want to wake up on the other side and find out that I invested too much time on tracks that I didn’t really like. Listening to music is not about being polite. At present, Dust in the Wind and Carry on My Wayward Son have the exclusive rights to the airwaves in my car. They bring about a cosmic atmosphere. Dust in the Wind laments on how ephemeral life really is, and Carry on My Wayward Son excuses all my transgressions on my way to laying my weary head to rest.

There’s a lot of stuff to do in the car, other than the obvious activity of driving it around. First of all, even though I don’t have an especially fancy car, there are a lot of controls to be adjusted. If I’m on a long trip I like to adjust the air conditioning about every one to two minutes. It keeps me sharp. In the winter, I adjust the heat even more frequently, switching it from blowing on my face, to my feet, to the back seat. I can never seem to achieve an ideal temperature for more than 30 seconds. It’s the main reason I insist passengers sit only in the back seat. That way they can’t touch the temperature controls.

Eating in the car is also a pleasant pastime, especially since drive-thrus are so plentiful. Coffee never tastes better than when you are driving around, the sun in your eyes, the tunes blasting, and the coffee stains outnumbering the buttons on your coat. If you are kind of clumsy like me, you might end up wearing as much of your coffee as you drink, but the battle scars on your coat don’t matter. You know the cup holder is in even worse shape than you are.

Often, when I’m driving around and my mind is roaming free, I will have a great idea about something I want to write. I keep a note pad in the map pocket of the door to jot down these jewels. I like to be safe, though, so I wait until I come to a traffic light that’s red. Then I begin writing furiously. Sometimes I can tell that I’m making the drivers around me paranoid. They think I’m recording their license plate numbers to report their driving errors. Occasionally, I try to reassure them by rolling down the window and yelling “Don’t worry – I’m just having ideas!” Usually they pretend they haven’t heard me and drive away quickly. They don’t even wait for the light to go green.

There are even more exotic things you can do while driving your car than eating and drinking coffee and deafening yourself with 35 year old rock music. Some people apply makeup, read books or maps, brush their teeth without the benefit of water, or catch up on their cross-stitch. These are all fun car activities, but I try to indulge in them only if the traffic light is long enough to allow me to fill in my income tax forms. At other times, when the red light lasts interminably long, I toy with the idea of changing my oil, but I never do, because I would actually have to get out of the car to do this.

Last summer Highway 11 kept interfering with my perfect life in the car. I spent more time stopped by construction than I did driving. Each waiting period stretched out longer than the previous one. I can tell when drivers’ tolerance for waiting has reached the limit. They start getting out of their vehicles and visiting up and down the long chain of cars to see if the other drivers know why the delay is so long. Of course, they cannot possibly have any additional information, but any kind of waiting is a good excuse for socializing. Pretty soon people start opening their coolers and slapping on sun tan oil as they pump other drivers for the details on what life is like in Cobalt, or Albuquerque, or Moonbeam. Eventually, just as Joe from Greenville, Alabama gets his BBQ lit, the line begins to snake ahead.

On my last trip up Highway 11, I finally tired of socializing with the same drivers at every delay. I decided to indulge in some light housekeeping in my car. I cleaned the dashboard and the windshield, and mucked out the cup holders. I re-folded about twenty crumpled maps. I alphabetized the travel pamphlets, restrung my tennis racket, and I had enough time left over to haul water from a nearby creek and swab down the passenger seat. It was suffering from some sort of encounter with spilled Chinese food. I considered re-warming the leftover food on the engine, but I was worried that I would run out of time.

I don’t like to be parted from my car. So perhaps my epitaph will reflect this. Maybe it will even be shaped like a car. And with all the advances in solar power and audio devices, I’m pretty sure that I can look forward to having the haunting strains of Dust in the Wind follow me and my car into eternity.

BYOB - Redefined!

Remember when BYOB meant Bring Your Own Booze or maybe Bring Your Own Beer - depending on how fiscally advanced your friends were? Now it’s way more boring. It means Bring Your Own Bag.

Originally, BYOB was invented to help keep your buddies out of the poor house when you all wanted to get drunk together. The current purpose? Lining the pockets of grocery store magnates. Oh sure five cents for a plastic bag is nothing. After all, what else can you do with a nickel these days? Penny candy costs ten cents! And, yes, even a whole bunch of grocery bags is only going to set you back fifty or sixty cents. But that’s not the point. I don’t think grocery stores are buying those bags for five cents each, so I smell profit being cooked up. In fact, now that we have the Internet, and nothing can be kept secret, I’ve discovered that those bags cost way less than one cent each. So that’s at least 400% profit on every bag sold. With a money-making scheme like that, grocery stores will probably stop bothering to pedal food at all.

Customers are only too happy to pay for those bags, figuring that they’re helping the environment. But…if I previously required ten bags to bring home my groceries, and now I need ten bags plus 50 cents to bring home my groceries, how am I helping the environment? In fact, I have consumed even more resources with this method. Somebody had to mine/smelt/manufacture/transport those coins I used as payment, or invent and supervise the cyberworld required to process the equivalent digital transactions. And they all drove to work in their SUV’s.

So, in my desperate attempt to help the environment, I am now transporting ratty moth-eaten plastic bags in my purse, pockets, and under my bra strap - so that I can save a few nickels. Frankly, it makes me feel cheap. But if I buy the bags I feel un-green. I also suspect that I’ve been mercilessly gouged by corporations that have figured out how to squeeze a few more shekels out of the environmentally guilt-ridden.

Cloth bags would seem to be the ultimate solution. So… in addition to used plastic bags, I tote my largish collection of reusable bags with me everywhere I go. They’re much bulkier and can’t be stuck into convenient nooks and crannies like the plastic ones.

The grocery moguls expressed their concern for the environment by helpfully selling me the cloth bags at a dollar a piece. They would like me to use them for a long time, but not too long a time. I can tell this because while they are made of cloth, they’re not washing machine friendly. A few rounds in the washer and they’ve become pathetically bearded with lint balls. Oh well. At least I can’t see the E. coli frolicking in last week’s meat juice/produce nectar.

But still I worry. While I’m not wasting plastic by bringing home an estimated 1000 bags per year, I am sucking up energy by putting them through the wash. So, basically, trying to be green is a painful equation that can never be satisfactorily balanced.

Of course I could always give up buying food altogether.

Cloak and Swagger

Have you ever noticed that when you put on a cape you immediately begin to swagger? No wonder it’s the garment of choice for superheroes. Picture Batman without his magnificent black cape. That’s right – now he’s totally neutered. He’s reduced to a muscle bound man in a foolishly sculpted leotard. But add in a cape and he is restored to superhero status. Capes are all about power.

Capes just don’t get trendy nearly often enough. If I wanted to go out a buy myself a cape this very afternoon, where would I go? Neither posh nor humble stores have a cape section. Where could I go to toss a satin cape over my shoulders and admire my reflection in the mirror? Even the Sears catalogue is devoid of capes.

So, where does Batman shop? Is there some secret Capeland Mall that we don’t know about? It seems that the Pope knows where it is – he always wears a modest-length pristine white cape for official duties. It’s probably a mall with separate entrances for superheroes and arch enemies, so they can avoid unnecessary clashes during off duty hours. There are different stores for heroes and anti-heroes, with clever names like The Cloakroom, Frantic Mantle, and Papal Stoles ‘n’ Stuff. Garments for sleuthing in are sold at Capers. Weekend wear features ponchos with a choice of stripes. These also possess the standard secret pocket where you can hide your jeans and sneakers when suddenly called into action. Possibly, in this mall, you can even buy a virtual phone booth, since real ones are scarce. These once popular change rooms have pretty much vanished in the era of cell phones, forcing superheroes into ever more compromising situations for urgent clothing swaps. Fortunately their super powers make these awkward moments fleeting. I’m not sure what the Pope does.

Perhaps the world would be a better place if we all started wearing capes. Don’t think so? The next time you fold up the sheets fresh out of the dryer, drape one over your shoulders. Oh – now you get it! Suddenly you are empowered. Now imagine that it is smooth and satiny and falls in thick red or black folds that drape down to the floor. You are now both sexy and powerful. You can see why even the tweed capes favored by British lords made them strut around with wool induced grandeur. Sherlock Holmes did his best thinking in a cape.

So who still wears capes? Well, there’s Dracula of course. His cape has a red lining that his tailor has discreetly installed to hide telltale stains. It also keeps people from confusing him with Batman, who stays with the classic double-sided black cape, which is not only intimidating, but reversible. Models wear capes - mostly because designers love to create capes but can’t figure out how to convince secretaries and doctors and accountants to buy them. Witches wear capes as a kind of uniform, making them easy to spot. This has the psychological advantage of warning us that we are about to be placed under a spell or fall prey to a potion. This little bit of foreknowledge actually primes us into being more easily influenced - the Wiccan version of advertising. Children wait impatiently every year for Halloween so that they can wear a cape. It doesn’t matter what the costume is, a cape is a mandatory accessory – Chicken Little and Michael Jackson costumes have capes that are just as worthy as the ones worn by Darth Vader and Snow White.

Capes are actually timeless fashion pieces. Darth Vader is still wearing one in a distant future… or is that right now in a distant galaxy? I can never figure that out. In Biblical times they were fond of capes, but referred to them as simply “cloaks”. Everyone had a cloak - the scribes, the shepherds, the rich, the poor. Even the cranky inn keeper had a cloak. They were practical in an era that lacked sewing machines, freeing tailors and housewives from the tyranny of sewing in sleeves. Long before panty hose were invented, these people had conquered the one-size-fits-all concept. A sleeveless item such as a cloak can be worn by anyone tall enough not to trip on its hem. Garments that have sleeves are not capes, nor are they cloaks, or ponchos, or stoles - they are coats! So when you see a cape with sleeves on eBay, do not be fooled.

Secret societies are also very fond of capes, or at least that is what I’m told. Details of their garb is, of course, strictly confidential.

Royalty goes in for the cape in a big way. You can easily pick out the king when you go into a palace – he’s the one with the biggest cape. Just in case you are a completely unobservant dolt, he also wears a crown. His knights wear sturdy capes that are handy to shelter in on freezing nights, or to stuff into bleeding wounds. They can be transformed into a blanket for a picnic, or a set of wings to aid an exit from a speeding horse. They also make a convenient wrap for warming rescued damsels. The sheer versatility of the cape is staggering.

So if you want to find yourself at the extreme end of the empowerment spectrum - good or evil - sew yourself a cape. There is no other piece of clothing that has the robust stamina and dominating atmosphere of a cape. Could Darth Vader have terrified Luke Skywalker while wearing a trench coat? Never! Nothing can be substituted for the noble cape. Whoever heard of a coat and dagger operation? As in all other things, only a cloak will suffice.

How to Say No

Do you ever get asked to do things that, frankly, you just don’t want to do? If you answered that question with a “no,” keep surfing. For the rest of you normal people, I’ve come up with a few suggestions on how to say "no." You will have to figure out for yourself when and where to apply my time-tested strategies.

Don’t lie about it. Just say “no”.

Say “no” but soften it with a “white lie.” Anyone who says they never do this is lying. And it isn’t even white.

Feign deafness.

Feign blindness. (Gets you out of a lot of stuff…)

Say “yes.” Especially useful when caught off guard. Go home. Think about it. Call back and say “no.” These things are always easier over the phone. Use one of the four techniques described above.

Say “no” but come up with an alternate solution to help the person making the request. Probably the gold standard in the art of saying "no".


Convince them they can do it on their own. (Doesn’t work when kids ask you for money or fever medication….)

Reply with an equal but opposite counter-request. (e.g. I will help you build your dog house, if you will help you me replace the roof on my cottage – hope you don’t mind doing it in June even if the flies are a tiny bit bad then… Most likely to be successful if your request is far more burdensome)

Say “Shhhh”. Pretend you are listening for a burglar. Indicate that you just “heard something” outside the window. This only works at night.

Walk away distractedly. If pursued mumble something about “those voices in my head.”

Carry around business cards that say, “Director, Just Say No Program.” Hand out liberally.

Defer your answer – maybe you want to say “yes” after you think about it. (especially useful with kids, if your first inclination is to say, “Oh-my-God-NO-are-you-crazy-have-I-taught-you-NOTHING???!!” There is an outside chance, very small, that you could be over-reacting.)

Advise them to call 1-800-NOT-EVER. Their hotline will take care of it for you. There is a small monthly fee for the subscription. Well worth it.

Say “yes” and then clearly illustrate your incompetence. “Sure, I’ll look after your dog! Don’t worry about the last five dogs that ran away. Two of them eventually came back. One was even alive…”

Wear a button that says “NO!” If people ignore it, show them how sharp the pin is. (Caution – “show” them only.)

Defer the request. Check with others in the group who supposedly said “yes” to the proposal. Chances are half didn’t and the other half won’t show up. Applies mostly to parents and events that take place very early in the morning. Give in to peer pressure. Ask yourself: what would other parents do?

Say “yes” and feebly mention that you will help as “soon as you can manage”. Keep crutches in plain view or wear an eye patch. Works especially well with bosses who are afraid of unions.

Slip out the back, Jack, Make a new plan Stan… (it worked for Paul Simon…)

Gotta Love Those Earworms

Okay, it sounds more disgusting than it really is. They finally came up with a name for those maddening tunes that get stuck in your head and play over and over (and over and over…). They’re called earworms. They come knocking on the door of your brain completely unbidden: Jesus Christ, Sooooperstar, do yoooouu think you’re what they saaaaay you arrrre? If you weren’t around in the early ‘70’s that might not set one off in your brain, but if you’ve ever owned that album you are now doomed for the rest of the day. And if you’re like me, it will tap you on the shoulder in the middle of the night to remind you that it’s not quite finished with you just yet. It will override an iPod plugged directly into your brain, and it will make you go around humming that brief set of notes until your family starts considering stoning you with the leftover pork chops.

How did they come up with the term “earworm”? Just like so many other interesting English words we borrowed it from the ever clever Germans. They use Ohrwurm to describe this distressing bug in the head. From there it’s a short leap to “earworm.” Even though the term is not at all accurate – the tune is in your brain, not your ear, and there is, thankfully, no worm – it says it all. In reality, it’s just a bunch of intractable synapses having it off with you. Still, the term earworm perfectly nails the process.

Earworms are vile creatures. They play only a tiny portion of a song in an endless loop of brain-eating repetition. At the neurological level the needle on the tone-arm of your brain has gotten stuck in a groove. It can advance no further into the song. The harder you try to drive the fragment to the end, the more resistant it becomes.

Some musical artists are more talented than others at spawning earworms. Pretty much anything by Stevie Wonder will set one off. There is soooperstition, writing’s on the waaaaaalll. The overly catchy tune written for Canada’s 1967 Centennial is especially dangerous: Caaaaa-naaaa-daaaa, one-little, two-little, three Canaaaaadians… That one wormed out in my head for so long that it eroded down into my eye socket and caused era-realted hallucinations - mainly Pierre Elliot Trudeau caricatures. TV commercials finally dethroned it in 1971 by convincing me that I’d like to teach the woooorld to sing, in perfect har-moo-nnyyyy…setting me off on a Coca-Cola buying frenzy.

Sometimes new earworms set up shop in the middle of the night. One minute I am sleeping peacefully, the next I am wide awake and listening to an internal version of Hey Jude…but only the first eight bars. At times earworms even become adulterated. I have been tortured by the alternate Hey Jude lyrics a classmate once wrote: Hey Jude, don’t take it baaad, take a maaaad hog, and knit a sweater… So, so, SO much worse than the original!

So what can you do when you are infected by an earworm? Should you take an Aspirin? Stuff your head under a pillow? Crack yourself over the head with a baseball bat? Place your head in the vice in the workshop and squeeze until the worm pops out? Trust me. None of these work. Save yourself the bother. The only way to de-worm yourself is to find a recording of the song and play it. Somehow this satisfies the ear worm, integrating it back into its source. It nestles back into the song instead of bristling in your brain. Your head becomes clear again, and like a dog on his way home from the vet, you are blessedly worm-free. That is… until you encounter a Stevie Wonder song or one of those patriotic tunes crafted to inspire the war torn masses. It’s a long way to Tipp-errrr-arrrr-yyyy…

Attention Span

I think our attention span is spiraling down into ever tinier fragments of time. Now I’m tired of this topic; I’m going to think about something else. What were those hockey scores? Has it started raining yet? I think I’ll make spaghetti for supper. No, wait. I was trying to turn my attention to the topic of span. Oh shoot. What was that topic again? Must remember to gas up the car. Isn’t some kid somewhere at some lesson waiting for a ride somewhere? Okay, now where was I? Oh yeah, I suspect something is happening to our attention span. Now where is the lid to the jam jar? I thought I put it right over….. ooh, look at the pretty picture on the calendar!

It’s like we’ve fallen into some sort of jumble of societal dementia. No one thought can last for more than a few seconds before caving in to the centrifugal force of the next bigger-better-faster thought that comes busting into consciousness. Or maybe it’s just a plain ordinary thought that meanders in and sets up shop. In any event, thought number one is deposed.

Researchers who have a higher attention span than the rest of us have figured out a few things. They say that the average attention span for adults is twenty minutes. What a lot of hooey. The average attention span lasts for the duration of that golden period that lies between strings of TV commercials. And this holds true only if someone blows something up, or guns down five people, or takes off their shirt. Failure to produce these essential components puts the attention span at about three minutes for adults, and three seconds for teenagers.

Rock videos probably changed the global neural network for length of attention span. This is how they work. You insert yourself into the video slingshot and hang on for dear life as they pummel your bleeding eyes with rocket-speed scene changes. While your neurons have their stubby pencils out still trying to record the first scene, the video blasts on through scenes two through twenty-five. You are still less than twenty seconds into the video. Plaster your brain with a few hours of this and then sit down to write a thrilling essay on how Shakespeare makes use of classical allusions. Gee, this is hard. Perhaps a video game would settle me down.

Advertisers know a secret they have kept carefully hidden from us. Focused attention span endures for only eight fleeting seconds. After that we look elsewhere. This gives them the appropriate rhythm they need to ping-pong us with their products, leaving us conquered by what amounts to attention spam. Now that I have revealed their secret they will probably hunt me down and force feed me frozen home-style deep dish pizza until I die of pepperoni poisoning. Of course, if I can distract them for eight seconds, I can probably make my escape.

Now where was it I left my other sock?

A Perfect World

Someone told me the other day that this is not a perfect world. Gee, I already knew that! In fact, I’ve known it for a long time, at least a year or so. In the five decades prior to that I merely suspected it. What tipped me off? Well, it wasn’t any one big event, just the culmination of a lot of little events. That couch I paid $29.95 for on eBay never showed up. The birds at my feeder kicked out the bird seed and pooped on my deck chairs. The dog packed up my suitcase and took it with him when he moved in with the neighbours. Other hints: my iPod showed up in the dryer after boldly venturing into the washing machine. It was the first time I ever witnessed music committing suicide. Last Christmas I came down with a bad cold, just like the previous eleven out of the twelve Christmases. The only year I was spared the cold I had Norwalk virus instead. What a mercy it was to return to the simple rigors of a fever and a runny nose the following year.

I’ve also begun to notice that globally the world is a little less than perfect as craziness crests ever higher. When there are devastating wildfires in California or Australia, some people run for their matchboxes so they can get in on the act. The rest of us are left banging our heads on the Wall of Disbelief. While most people either strive to make the world a better place, or at least are feckless enough to avoid setting off the general ruination of the planet, there are a few who are so inexplicably malicious that we are left stunned with the jaw-dropping stupidity of their actions.

Why can’t we ever have perfection? To figure that one out, we would have to understand just what perfection is. Apparently, Aristotle was the first one who flopped down in his lawn chair and allowed this concept to wash up on the shores of his brain. When it was all over and the three barrels of wine had been rolled back into the cellar for refilling, he had decreed three rules. Perfection has to be complete – no parts can be missing. It has to be so good that nothing similar can be any better. Also, it needs to have some sort of goal in mind, and it needs to achieve that goal, like a hockey player with a vendetta lucky enough to have a crossed-eyed goalie on the opposing team. There can be no margin for missing that goal. Pretty heady stuff – can you imagine what Aristotle might have come up with if he had stopped after just one barrel of wine? Or if he’d sustained a puck to the head?

I tried to think of things that might fit with Aristotle’s three point plan for perfection. Shopping came pretty close, but fell down on the goal part. Often I buy the no-name brand when I can’t find the premium brand, or when the premium brand has a price so high that I require treatment for altitude sickness. Likewise, driving a car almost fit the bill, but when I applied the “nothing could be better” part I had to admit that my car was a Ferrari only in my mind. Regrettably, swimming in a lake on a hot summer day also fell by the wayside. While, for the most part, it satisfies all of Aristotle’s carefully constructed principles, I remembered that time I emerged from a swim with a blood-sucker the size of Lassie stuck to my leg. I’ve never felt the same about swimming since.

Then I thought about ice cream. Could it possess the potential for perfection? I began to apply Aristotle’s line of thought to find an answer. If you stick the ice cream in a cone, it is complete – no parts are missing. Can ice cream be said to be “so good that nothing of the kind could be better”? If you throw half a paycheck into this endeavor, that will most definitely be true. No point in getting the cheap stuff when you are seeking paradise. Does ice cream achieve its goal? This is a toughie, and you can see why Aristotle needed all those barrels of wine and a cozy lawn chair as assistive devices. It’s not something you can just decide in a moment or two. It must be tested. Ben and Jerry’s, Hagen-Dazs, homemade ice cream – all these depths must be repeatedly plumbed. Lumps of cookie dough must be deployed. Cherries must be Garcia-ed. Vanilla beans must be paraded down your palate, front and centre. Chocolate must be placed on the altar of your tongue and given its due diligence. It takes a lot of years and a lot of effort to make these important decisions about perfection. I’ve worn out more than one lawn chair in this exploration, possibly making me a larger authority than Aristotle in more ways than one. And when it was all said and done, when the multitudinous tubs of ice cream were swept away, and when the sugar fix wore off, and the bathroom scales loomed up into my consciousness, I would have to say that, unequivocally, ice cream fits all the criteria for perfection.

So while I admit that this isn’t a perfect world, there are those rare moments when it comes close enough not to matter. And in those moments, your fist is wrapped around a sticky cone, your forearm is awash with a river of ice cream, and bathroom weigh scales were never invented. That, my friend, is what you will find when you reach your Shangri-La or your Heaven – a big frosty ice cream cone. And it will have not one but two giant scoops waiting. Just for you.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest…

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" How many times have you dueled with that tired scrap of philosophy? I never really get as far as thinking about whether or not there was a “sound.” I tend to get caught up in the part about the tree falling in the forest. Now, I can’t be certain, but I am pretty sure that, like all other things that don’t quite turn out the way we wanted, it’s my fault. The point isn’t whether or not the event was noisy, it’s my role in it that counts. Somehow, a tree has fallen. No doubt, it happened because I forgot to wash, feed, clean, or mail in something. Somewhere a sapling is without its mother and I am to blame. A bird’s nest is crushed on the forest floor in a yolky mess, a squirrel is missing his nuts, and a whole lot of bark beetles are wandering around trying to decide what to do next. And I know that it can all be traced back to me.

How do I know this? Well, why would the tree be an exception? I am responsible for all the other things that have gone wrong in the world, so surely my influence encompasses unsuspecting trees. It’s a guilt complex served up with global tendencies.

The magnitude of my complex has crept over into megalomania. The war in the Middle East? I’m pretty sure it’s my fault. After all, haven’t I been sucking down all kinds of gasoline in my Honda Civic, driving as much as four miles a day, and mowing the lawn without regard to fuel consumption? And what about the current economic mess that is sucking the life out of our entire planet? Yep, probably did that one too. I’m not sure of the mechanism, but somehow I must have played a tiny unwitting role that set this calamity in motion. Probably it was that account I closed at the bank with the $23.95 in it. One day someone will identify it as the fiscal tipping point that started the ball rolling.

So, how I have come to place myself at the centre of these crucial events? I’m really not clear on the “how” of these situations, but my guilt meter relentlessly claws at me. A dog gets hit by a car in Africa. Yep. Also my fault. If I’d sent that twenty dollars to the Save the Canines Fund, the dog would have been happily sleeping in a dog house. It would have had food and water, three rubber toys, and a photo of me hanging on the wall. It would not have been wandering willy-nilly in the streets scouring for food. My fault, all my fault.

I admit that I might have let my sense of responsibility get out of control, but it all started with little things. Someone spilled a Coke on the rug. I failed to clean it properly and now the permanent bear-shaped stain is my fault. I have to live with that terrible knowledge. The toothpaste ran out. I was the last person in the house to set foot in a store. I completely let my family down by failing to buy toothpaste. It doesn’t matter that the store was Blockbuster Video. Just wad that up and add it to the bin labeled All My Fault. A bridge collapsed and three people were injured. Oh oh – I was a little tiny bit late with the municipal taxes in 2003. I should have thought about how that transgression could lead to a disaster. In another city. In another province. Mea culpa.

So, for whatever reason, I have begun churning down the Hill of Guilt, deeply embedded in a giant dirty snowball. Its diameter is ballooning with the stretch-marks of remorse, and I’m picking up a lot of debris and momentum as I cascade ever downward. And I almost hesitate to report this: that tree in the forest is firmly in my sights. And when I hit it, no one is going to care if it made a sound or not. But the unleashed blast of guilt is going to pepper the entire planet.

Not Much Stock in Bond

I dragged myself out on a totally frigid, snowy night to see the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. I haven’t missed seeing a Bond film since Live and Let Die had me wallowing in laughter and popcorn back in the 1970’s.

I always make a point to recognize the “specialness” of the Bond films by seeing them on the big screen at the theatre. At ten dollars a head, I reserve this honor for relatively few movies, mostly because the deteriorating conditions of our local theatre are now easily eclipsed by the average TV set in the average home. But some things still need to be seen on the biggest screen you can find. As I watched the movie, here is the question that chiseled its way into my brain: where, oh where, was James Bond?

James seems to have traded in his personality for the Unlimited Edition of his License to Kill. Perhaps too many flying fists and knives and guns have sliced off his charm. Clearly, this was an action film that has fallen into the froth of maximum overdrive. It made Mad Max look like a sissy. Every single character got smacked or shot or knifed, usually with a sprinkling of each. This tended to occur in multiple ways and in multiple exotic locations. Some of them survived it, but most were left like turfed litter on the floor of a hamster cage. During the course of the film, Bond’s License to Kill actually had to be reloaded more often than his gun.

Of even more concern - Bond was so engaged in fisticuffs and dodging broken glass that his sense of humor was completely lacking. He even failed to concoct any of his usual double entendres. The James Bond who quipped "I am now aiming precisely at your groin. So speak now or forever hold your piece" in The Man with a Golden Gun was a no-show. I guess it could happen to anyone. I know that personally, the more people I beat to a pulp on the average day, the less funny I am. It bothers me to the point that I’ve cut back to decking less than a dozen people a day. It’s helped me regain the balance I need in my life. I also try to duck a lot – too much head pounding can put me in a mental fog. I become like a man with a hammer: every problem starts to look like a nail. Maybe that’s what has happened to Bond - one blow too many to the head. It’s rendered him desperately serious. He’s left his personality behind in the hotel safety deposit box, where it’s languishing in his wrinkle-free Armani tux and charming the panties off the safety deposit box next door.

James is now so jaded and shopworn by endless adventures in the spy world that he has almost nothing left for the ladies. Or did his supply of Viagra fail to arrive from that dodgy internet source? Instead of wooing the ladies, oh wait, make that lady since there was only one this time, he merely nodded his head, in a you-know-the-drill kind of gesture. No champagne, no titillating gambling, no white dinner jacket. I don’t know if she even bothered to murmur the customary “Oh James!” Even Moneypenny got better treatment than that! The only woman lucky enough to receive the Bond Treatment in this film had the boringly chaste name of Strawberry Fields, clearly a downgrade from the daring Pussy Galore of yesteryear.

And where was the indomitable Q or facsimile? While actor Desmond Llewelyn was impossible to replace, leaving a pandering John Cleese as a mere husk of a Q in the last few films, they both still made us laugh. Now in order to jam in more brawling, they’ve left out the whole spy toy reveal scene. I suppose MI6 now gets their kinky guns and laser beam watches over the internet like the rest of us, cutting out the middle man, and avoiding those huge liability insurance bills for their test lab. We didn’t need those laughs anyway, and it allowed them to punch in yet another action scene that was so tightly shot, I couldn’t really tell what was going on. Mostly, it was just more bashing, gun grabbing, and environmental ruination. To up the ante, the action took place on slippery roof tops and frail scaffolds. Lots of glass broke, but not in the elegant and regretful way it did in the antique glass museum in Moonraker. It didn’t make me want to charge in with my broom and my dustpan and my glass blowing repair kit.

Even the villain was kind of watered down, although not nearly as much as he would have liked by the end of the movie. He wasn’t so much evil as annoyingly snotty. His plan wasn’t the usual lofty goal of world domination or destruction, it was, well, stealing the water from a small poor country and selling it back to their corrupt goverment at a high price. Gee. Doesn’t this happen in the real world just about every other day? Water, oil, pantyhose manufacturing – isn’t it constantly wrestled for in the global marketplace where people use stocks as their weapon of choice instead of loaded guns?

So, I guess like so many other franchises that have lasted for decades, Bond has gotten tired of it all – the dead lovers to be avenged, the brain-teasing intricate spy plots, the megalomaniac bad guys, the humiliation of reporting to a woman, the lack of stimulating new spy toys sporting miniature saws and blow torches that come in handy in those everyday hopeless situations involving ropes and sharks. He’s had enough. Every molecule of suave sophistication has been sucked out of him. Like the rest of us grinding away in routine jobs, James Bond has become burned out. Perhaps it’s time for him to fill out the papers for his MI6 Spy Division Pension and kick back at the casino with his own cash. It’s time for him to settle down with one (or two, or three) women and sort out his collection of cravats. Maybe then his charm will resurface with a few of those one-liners to keep the hotel maitre-d’ chuckling.

As for me, I too am retiring. I probably won’t go to see any more Bond films until they can give me a character once again, not a robot attached to a pair of murderous fists. When Bond needs a personality transplant from The Terminator, it’s time for me to throw in my Official Glow in the Dark MI6 Spy Watch. The Bond franchise has melded with all the other soulless action films and forfeited its uniqueness. If they left all the brutality on the cutting room floor, you would miss the entire movie while carting your over-priced tub of popcorn back from the snack bar. So, the next time there is a Bond offering, stay out of the cold winter night and out of the theatre. That way, you won’t feel the need to punish yourself for wasting your time and money by sticking your tongue on an icy fire hydrant on the way back to your car! Keeping your ten dollars in your pocket may fail to provide you with a whole quantum of solace, but it should at least give you a cup full.

Half Empty? You Bet!

The other day someone indicated that I was a “glass is half empty” kind of person - as if it was a BAD thing! Of course my glass is half empty! After decades of consumerism and self indulgence, I’m surprised to find that the level is only half way down!

A glass that is half full is suspicious. Maybe it was never filled all the way to the top. But a half empty glass? That most certainly started out full at one time. Between the full state and the half empty state, someone got to slurp down the delicious contents. When the glass gets to be half empty, it’s because the contents were good. So, despite misconceptions to the contrary, a half empty glass indicates a life well lived. A half full glass? That’s likely as good as it ever got!

I must admit that half of anything always sends up a red flag. Recently they began marketing half Christmas trees. These are neatly bisected from top to bottom, so you can mount them on the wall, in the Christmas version of the wallflower. That way the tree doesn’t intrude by taking up too much space. This smacks of rampant practicality. Christmas tree are supposed to be large and showy and in the way. They are supposed to drop needles in your coffee cup as you walk by and tempt even the most docile cat into an ornament-busting climbing expedition. And there should be plenty of room underneath for a small child to get lost in the wonder of the packages.

Before Christmas trees became mere facsimiles, they were actually organic and came out of the forest. You would go out swaggering like Paul Bunyan, scout around, and chop one down. Ultimately, every Christmas tree was pretty much just half a tree. Of course, the tree looked great – until you chopped it down. Then it looked… not so great. By the time a tree was hauled over hill and dale and arrived in the living room, you felt blessed to have a quarter of a tree left! There was always a less than perfect side, one with only a few thoughtlessly placed anemic branches. It wasn’t exactly a perfect half of a tree like the current renderings in plastic, but it definitely wasn’t a full tree either. A little bit of Martha Stewart style carpentry with a saw and a drill would be needed to correct the problem. It required only a little skill, plus a tolerance for sap on your floor, your pants, and your cat.

Now life is so much more complicated that it’s turned the corner back into simplicity. You can just buy a mere half of a tree. If you change your mind in the future, you can go back to the store and buy the other half and strap them together. Voila – you now have a whole tree. You have just bought a Christmas tree on the installment plant er, uh, plan.

The advantage of half a tree is that it requires only half the lights and half the decorations. The downside is that it yields only half the presents, all of which must conform to the theme of one half. For example, you may receive one sock out of a pair, a container of Half and Half, or half a loaf of bread (better than no loaf). If will only take you half the time to unwrap your gifts, and blissfully, you will have paid only half as much as you would have with a whole tree looming over your wallet. But, worryingly, half way through Christmas Day the lights will go out, since you never should have cut those strings in half. Hopefully you bought a bunch of them – at least six of one, half a dozen of another. But things will work out okay. I suspect that in the long run, it actually won’t even be half bad.

Marshmallow Men: The Memoir

Have you noticed that Christmas traditions come and go just like everything else? Even something as venerable as Christmas has trends. Our family once enjoyed a decade-long love affair with Marshmallow Men, the spawn of Kraft Mystery Theatre. This was one of our favorite TV programs back when we had a single TV channel. The low-tech advertising on this show was just as engaging as the episodes were. At times it was even better. Kraft furnished all of the advertising during that hour. Each commercial break was leisurely and homey, unlike today’s ads that slingshot you from product to product like a dizzy marble in a flaming pinball machine.

Kraft commercial breaks featured an attractive beehived and aproned homemaker. Without stooping to the soul destroying style of Martha Stewart, this motherly figure demonstrated recipes made with Kraft products. They always included our favorites - Cheez Whiz, or Miracle Whip, or Jell-O, or, best of all, Velveeta Cheese. After all, what would be the point of Kraft lovingly producing all those family fortifying food products if families didn’t know what to do with them? At least once during every episode of Kraft Mystery Theatre my mother would leap out of her chair claiming “Oooooohh!” and run for a notepad and a pencil. That is how we were introduced to the Marshmallow Men.

That particular Kraft commercial detailed how to build your own army of white puffy pseudo snowmen. Two large marshmallows were used for the head and body, and four miniature marshmallows were drafted into play for arms and legs. The whole Man was assembled with toothpicks carefully broken in half so as to not stick out and reveal the secret of their assembly. Additional toothpicks were dipped into food coloring and used to paint on the eyes, noses and grinning mouths. I had a particular fondness for using yellow food coloring to draw in blond curls, revealing my secret desire to be blond and curly. We never made any Marshmallow Women – the recipe simply hadn’t given any instructions for that! The Men remained alone in their sugary celibacy.

Then there was the question of just what to do with the Marshmallow Men. You certainly couldn’t eat them – they were too handsome, and there were those sharp toothpicks to consider. The only option left was to display them. Sometimes the Men took up residence in the Christmas tree, and at other times they graced the coveted top of the TV set, deposing the ceramic Santa. Once, in a bizarre but somehow satisfying exhibit, they were featured in a Nativity scene. After a few days, they were mostly forgotten as they silently morphed into dusty white cement.

TV commercials aren’t nearly as benevolent these days. They don’t generate Christmas traditions. They only want us to buy stuff - mostly stuff we can’t afford, or don’t truly want, or stuff that we will tire of before we get the wrappings out to the trash. There are no elegant instructions on how to craft Marshmallow Men or make a casserole laced with Velveeta Cheese. For that, you would probably have to turn to the internet. And there you would probably just get distracted by instructions on how to build weapons of mass consumption. I don’t recommend it.

Sign Here, Please

I can’t believe it. Ringo no longer signing autographs? After October 20, 2008, Ringo Starr will no longer sign autographs. His stated reason: he simply can’t keep up with all the demand. But… I can’t help but wonder… could it possibly be just the opposite? Maybe as the bags of fan mail have dwindled to a trickle, and girls both teen and middle-aged have finally moved on to other idols, maybe this is just sour grapes. Is there anyone left on the planet without a Ringo Starr autograph? It seems like I can’t open a sock drawer or fish through an old coat pocket without a Ringo autograph surfacing. I’ve used them to write grocery lists on, to start camp fires with, and to line the bird cage with, and still they keep showing up.

I suspect that the truth may no longer be skulking under heaving bags of fan mail. A day-in-the-life of the great man probably goes something like this. Ringo wakes up in his country mansion, and dons his Gucci smoking jacket. He slips past all the dusty Beatles memorabilia frowning out from the walls, passes through his TV room where someone has left A Hard Day’s Night playing in an endless loop on the DVD player. He picks up a pack of smokes from the hallway table so that his wife will think he’s just nipping out for a puff. All the dogs are still sleeping, so he goes down to the mail box at the end of his private laneway, alone. Even though he had the groundskeeper oil the hinges yesterday, they still squeak a little as he slowly pulls the door open, the door with his own face painted on it.

The mail box is empty. He sucks in his breath and quickly looks around to see if anyone has noticed. It’s only six a.m., but you never know if Eric Clapton might be looking out the window of his study. This time of the morning he’s nearly always sitting there, downing his third cup of Earl Grey, and grimly working his way through the mountain of fan mail. It just wouldn’t do for him to notice that this is the third day in a row that Ringo’s mail box has been empty. Clappie would never understand how it is with drummers, and how they tend to fade into obscurity more quickly than show-off guitarists. At least Ringo doesn’t need to worry about stares from the neighbors on the other side. Ozzy is back in California at this time of the year, and the trucks usually just dump his fan mail right into the empty swimming pool anyway.

It’s so much better to pull the plug yourself than to have your plug yanked by lack of interest. Ringo knows that the public wants what they can’t have more than what they can have. All those days of signing slobbered-on cocktail napkins, and plates, and toilet seats, and baby bottles, and questionable underpants are best forgotten. Better to be proactive, pick a date, and just stop autographing. That way, whenever Ringo gets short of cash, he can release a signature or two on eBay, since all his John Lennon memorabilia is pretty much gone now. And the best part? He won’t have to face the mailbox every day, and stupid Clapton and Ozzy will have nothing to sneer about!

Profile This!

About me. I’m not fooled by this demanding little phrase that lurks around on blogs and other websites. This is really just a profile – and “profile” is simply a euphemism for “autobiography.” Such a thoroughly abhorrent realm.

Why such a reluctance to chronicle my life? Like everything else, it has its little black roots back in the tedium of my childhood. There was always one thing you could count on during the first week of school each September. The teacher placed the Gun of Obedience to your head and compelled you to write “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”. Unless you had spent the summer trekking in the Himalayas, or had been lucky enough to have wrestled with a rabid bear and two cubs underneath your back porch, this assignment was fraught with peril. You could come up looking duller than dust and I routinely propelled myself right to the top of the dust heap.

My composition invariably read something like, “We went to our cottage. My Dad caught a fish.” After that I was pretty much stumped. Even then I could recognize this autobiographical gusher was a bit of a literary embarrassment. The real meat of the summer wasn’t suitable material for school compositions: my uncle had discovered that he could keep beer cold in the well and stayed drunk for fourteen days proving it; my mother had murdered a snake with an with an axe so dull that the snake committed suicide to ends its own suffering; a sibling drank too much Purple Jesus and passed it off as food poisoning; the boy next door kissed me; I began to suspect that boys were not nearly half so disgusting as I had thought… You can see how things could get totally out of control if you ever started indulging yourself biographically.

More than a few years have intervened since anyone has had enough power over me to make me crank out a weary memoir. I haven’t been inclined to explore the profile-driven social networking services like Facebook. But now, after years of autobiography-free bliss, I have succumbed to the lure of blogging. And with that comes the wanton cries of the “about me” section. Suddenly, I am propelled all the way back to my seat at school, chewing on a tasty sodden pencil, mired in a blank haze. And when I think about it, things haven’t really changed all that much. I still go to the cottage in the summer. My Dad is no longer there to catch a fish. Me? I’m quite happy to leave the fish right where they are. And, for the most part, this seems to make the fish happy too. And it still happens – I still get sweaty palms and a film of fur on my tongue every time I start trolling for that ever elusive fodder - something, anything, to put in the “about me” section!

Backing In

Everywhere I go I’ve started to see it. It’s happening at work, it’s happening out at Wal-Mart, it’s happening in the streets. People have suddenly been seized by the insatiable urge to drive backwards into parking spots. And I would have to say, that if I were grading them, they would all be attending remedial classes!

I can’t quite grasp what is inspiring drivers to engage in all this reversing every time they approach a parking spot. You don’t back into a spot to save time, because it definitely takes longer to jockey a few tons of metal into a space that it does to back it out of a space. Even if you do it badly, it takes longer. So, if you are backing in because you think that when you drag your weary body back to your car at five o’clock, you will make a substantially faster getaway, you are only fooling yourself. You already used up that time in the morning, cranking the wheel this way and that, trying to back in.

Maybe backing in is a backlash against perfectionism. I think this is a very real possibility because none of these drivers feel any obligation to back their vehicles into an actual space. Mostly they are skewed way over to one side, helping themselves to a generous slice of the space next door. A few clever drivers are actually capable of lining up the middle of their backed in vehicles with the line that designates the edge of the parking space, ensuring that two full parking spots are nicely occupied. Maybe this is done deliberately so that there is plenty of room to open the doors, as this seems to be a favored by short women who can barely see over the dash of their giant SUVs. They need plenty of room to get a run in order to gain enough height to get back into their vehicles later on. That, and it costs so much to fill the tank with gas that they now feel entitled to spread their vehicle over two parking spaces.

So just what are the reasons for wasting your time by backing into a parking space? Is it so that you can scan the beautiful vista of the parking lot and see the building that is your destination while you are pulling the keys out of your ignition? Is it so that your car can see you coming when you return? Is it because, at the end of the day when you return, your car door is now three feet closer to the building? Or maybe you can’t recognize your car from the back, but the front is easier? It is because you like the thrill of using your rear bumper to scare the paint off the car parked in the next spot? Is it because you like the way it looks when a vehicle is parked at an odd angle, breaking up all that boring symmetry in the parking lot? So many drones following so many rules! Maybe it’s because some other driver who was none too anxious to get in to work backed in, and now you feel pressured to prove that you too are a master of the reverse gear? Is it that you secretly like taking up two spots every day, knowing in your black heart that your participation in this collective madness has now ensured there are 20% fewer places for the vehicles of your co-workers? Are you looking out of the building and cackling neurotically while I endlessly circle the lot where there are no spaces left because everyone backed in and did it badly?

So do me a favour. Line it up in the middle of the space or forget the whole venture. Your vehicle should be between the lines, not over the lines. If it takes more time, that’s okay – everything has a price, even the delicious activity of driving around backwards. Or…drive forward into the space and back out when you leave. It takes less time because there is no need to align your vehicle with anything. You will probably arrive home two seconds ahead of your backed-in co-worker. Now there's satisfaction that money can never buy.