You can call them senior moments but if they've been happening your whole life then it's time to take stock and realize you're just a damn fool.
The other day I was about to take a walk but thought I would quickly change out some leaky outside faucets first. I was wearing my nicest slacks because it was a little cool for a mid-summer day. I got out the new faucets (love those quarter-turn models), the plumber's glue, the wrench, and went to work.
They got installed and now I have splotches of that blue adhesive on my nicest pants and on both deck railings, the new and the old. I can get it off the decks if I care to but it's on those nice DKNY slacks forever.
A couple days later I was watering my small container garden and as it was already July figured I should use up the last of the fish emulsion on the three pot plants. I mixed the emulsion with water in a five gallon bucket, poured the bucket of fish shit into the hundred gallon pot, and half of it sloshed back out onto my nicest shoes. Nice, fish-smelling shoes.
A couple days after that, I backed into a small tree and smashed the tail-light on my old truck. I was backing right into the sun, but that's not a good excuse.)
(Then yesterday my screen door was stuck on the sliding glass door so when I brutally forced it open it broke the sun blinds right off the wall of the house beyond repair. The next morning I put an egg on the counter, it rolled to the edge and fell to the floor with a splat, when my back was turned to get into the fridge, and the replacement egg I cracked was rotten.)
Sounds like me. ha ha
Don’t worry about the number of senior moments becoming ever more frequent.
Eventually the number of senior moments decreases to one.
Math is not my forte…I don’t get the decrease to just one.
Paul, a witch has given you the evil eye. Carry a fresh egg around with you in your pocket to collect up the hex energy that’s been swirling near. After a week or two, wrap the egg in money (it can be play money) and bury it in cemetery earth at midnight. That solves that.
Muncie Memories
We moved to Muncie, Indiana from Oswego, New York in August, 1959 when I was five (with a stop in Cleveland for the summer at my grandmother’s small apartment building) when my dad got a job teaching English at Ball State Teachers College (later BSU). He had hired a sketchy-looking guy with an old red truck to haul our belongings out from Cleveland for twenty-five dollars, including a painting the soon-to-be-rich-and famous painter Roy Lichtenstein, one of Pop’s colleagues at Oswego State, had given us. (When we were in his studio picking out the painting, I wanted the “Donald Duck” which later sold for millions when Roy’s Pop Art career took off.)
When the truck arrived at the rental at 225 North Celia across from Ball Memorial Hospital, where ambulances screamed into the emergency room at all hours, the driver said he wanted thirty-five dollars instead of the agreed upon twenty-five and there was a big argument on the street while our furniture, and the painting, was held hostage. It was a hot sweaty August night and he and the movers wearing tee-shirts.
My father refused to pay extra, the movers took off with our stuff, and he chased after them in his old Chevy station wagon. The police came, my sister wailed that they had all her toys, and finally the truck returned and was unloaded.
(Lucius, William, Edward, Frank, and George, the original Ball Brothers of canning jar fame, funded the college, hospital, and other institutions, after they took advantage of the cheap and abundant natural gas around Muncie, and moved their operation from Buffalo in 1887.)
My earliest memory of Burris Laboratory School was in kindergarten: we had a bathroom in the large classroom and once I walked in on Louise Huston sitting on the toilet with a ruffled dress cascading around her down to the floor. (She had a big smile on her face and I quickly retreated.)
One of the Ball Brother’s progeny was in our class, a kid named Jerry Fisher and he always brought a dollar to buy his lunch across the playground at the Ball State student center, while the rest of us brought forty cents, or we just walked home for lunch. Jerry always ate at the student center because he lived outside town in one of the mansions on Burlington Pike and once our whole class went there for his birthday party at his huge orange palace next to his uncles’ houses, all descendants of the Ball Brothers.
(When I was seven I went into the school bathroom and Jerry was in there and said, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” I can’t remember what I said to that, Jerry whipped out his string bean, and I scooted out of there without doing my part of the deal.)
Burris was called a laboratory school as it was connected to the teachers college and located on the edge of the campus. Student teachers were sent over to all of Burris’s classes, K through 12, to observe, assist, and get experience. We had three student teachers in the morning and three others in the afternoon. The only thing I remember about those college kids was once in fifth grade there was some project being lead by Mr. Western, and Beth Smith didn’t know what to do.
“Just stand there and look feminine,” Mr Western wisecracked with that big smile of his. (I left Burris after sixth grade so I’m unaware if there were ever any scandals: liaisons, relationships, pregnancies or marriages in the high school days when the student teachers and students of almost the same age intermingled.)
Winter Time Dreaming
Whenever I get high I imagine making my performance dreams come true, and fantasize about hiring a creative director to help that happen. I was thinking about this when I remembered what I had written in the last sentence of my story ridiculing New Years resolutions, that I would volunteer to help make yours come true by being your minder, and using very tough love. I then mentioned, what could be seen as a cry for help, admitting that I could use a “minder” myself, someone who would help me organize my content to make it more accessible, in my quest for recognition and attention.
Now I can hear my detractors saying, “No, don’t make it more available for others!” and as I’m easily influenced by just one voice of disapproval, it’s enough to plunge me back into doubt, listlessness, and desperation. (Granted, these ideas, steeped in faux-confidence and stoned bravado, usually seem ridiculous in the morning.)
***Retired And Ready To Rock!: I do have a lot of content, but what to do with it? Here’s the deal: you might think I’m the classic grouchy old white man, okay Boomer?, over the hill, beyond the fringe, and heading to that verdant pasture in the sky, in molten hell, or somewhere in between, though I’m not a religious person. The reality is that having recently retired from a job and business, an actual forty-year career, which absorbed all my energy, I’m now starting to actually live, create, and think of things to do besides growing marijuana.
In other words, I’m not just old and in the way (reality notwithstanding), I’m ready to rock! (Oh who am I kidding, it’s just the coffee talking, dammit, here on January 6th in the middle of winter.)
***My Minders: But no, it’s not just all this introspective bullshit, I actually have my potential creative directors on the way here, one may be in the parking lot outside my door right now! They’re coming, one today and the other next week, to help me work on my homemade book project, actually over the last few months they’ve both been by here several times, cutting and pasting with me in my office.
So how can I harness these women’s boundless energy and imagination? Both are aware, “with it” gals, one in her thirties and the other fifty, and they’re ready to leap to their feet upon my command and do whatever I ask them. Usually they help me with projects I’m not motivated to do on my own, like the essay compilation we worked on for a couple months. (In other words, I can’t do shit unless they’re here inspiring me.)
***Fear and Chickens: One of these women, or both, might be perfect for the gig: one has children and the other has chickens. Am I more like a child or a chicken, a chicken who wants to grow up and be an adult? In popular usage a chicken is someone who’s afraid of everything, and isn’t that exactly why I want to hire these minders and creative directors, because I’m too afraid to make the leap into stardom as a local Youtube sensation, or whatever, by myself?
This will be the lap of luxury, paying them to sit on my couch, hear my creative dreams, help me make them come true, then see what happens next? All I have to do is say something like, “Okay, today we’re going to tape my fifty-eight second dance move, send it out to the Universe live, and see what happens!” (But I never say that and nothing ever happens.)
(hillmuffin@gmail.com)
Trapped in Squalor
It doesn’t take long for me to generate squalor. I’ve been home a couple weeks and surfaces have quickly become clutter vectors, the floors magnets for detritus, and I am wishing for a house cleaner to save me. It always feels so good when the place is straightened up but have no desire to do it myself.
It’s a disaster within also as I’ve been on the road for two months and my previous healthy diet of copious amounts of veggies, in various forms, has vanished. (I just got my latest test results and my sugar and fat levels have gone way up.)
I started hiring housecleaners about thirty years ago when the wage was ten dollars an hour. The house cleaning would evolve into garden help and whatever else needed to be done. I ran through ten or more over the years, once entertaining the idea of having a tea party where I’d invite all the former housecleaners.
I really hate housecleaning though I have actually started doing my dishes the same day for the first time in my life. (I’m thinking of that song from the Broadway musical “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” which goes “Everybody ought to have a maid! Everybody ought to have a working girl, to putter around the house.”)
Back in the day out in the hills I was living in such squalor that not only were all the dishes dirty but were so encrusted with dried food that if I wanted a plate or bowl to eat from it meant soaking the disaster dishes for hours.
During the fall I’d pull a worker off harvest duty every few weeks to clean the house. “A clean house makes Paul happy and relaxed and that’s important if we’re going to get through this,” I said. They didn’t like it but went along.
The last year or so I was pretty spoiled, renting out my place in the hills in a work/trade situation. Once a week she came in and prepared an entree and many veggies: sauteed, fresh salad, and a green drink. The green drink could be scary or tasteless, for some who tried it, but I liked drinking that medicinal goop.
Trading housing for twenty hours a month seemed like free food, but now she’s bought the place and I’m struggling just to chop up a few veggies. (She also did some housecleaning every month which kept the squalor under control.)
Who are these neat freaks who keep their homes clean? How do they do it? It’s not like I go to work, am gone all day, and come back to a clean house. I’m home all day and every move I make creates more dirt as I go in and out, tracking in the grime.
When I was sick a couple years ago I felt like a helpless blob and wanted everything done for me. Now I’m healthy but still feel like a helpless blob and would like everything done for me.
My latest motto is: “I don’t do much but it takes me all day to do it.”
I’m just doing the minimum, which is usually a sign of depression, am not motivated to do anything around the house, and will be lucky to just get a batch of clothes into the washing machine today. I love a clean house but detest cleaning, like good healthy food but don’t like cooking, and must really like to whine and complain. (I know what you’re thinking now: “Shut up! There are people here with real problems!”)
hillmuffin@gmail.com
Ten Hugs
I was sitting around the house checking out a movie on IFC and was warmed by a hot love scene when a lesbian photographer seduces her straight editor. Watching the blond being touched by the spiky-headed artist I thought, “I could have a lesbian love scene! I could have a love scene in my life!” and decided to go to the Hempfest, determined to hug ten people.
Now, I’m not the hippie world’s biggest hugger, but I’ll respond, and made my way through the crowd, explaining my mission as I hugged, just so everyone knew they were just a statistic. After eight hugs I thought about hugging someone I didn’t know, went upstairs at the Mateel and I sidled up to my potential #9 hug victim. Pam was a sweet woman from Whitethorn, we had a hug as I told her my plan, and she turned to her friend standing nearby.
“Lisa,” she said. “He’s trying to hug ten people.”
“I want a hug!” she said. “I need a hug!”
She gave me a very sweet hug, then she hugged me from behind and I reached my arms behind me to hold her. We scooted up against the wall and hugged each other for forty minutes! We hugged and talked and she told me she did environmental activist work in Berkeley. She was of Spanish descent, a Latina beauty, really, and as we danced slow Salsa together she looked up at me and said, “Is this for real?” I wouldn’t let go of her.
Finally she wanted water. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
“No, I’ll go with you,” I said.
We went downstairs and danced to some slow Reggae, which I didn’t like as much because a) dancing to Reggae is boring, b) it was noisy and I couldn’t talk to her like upstairs, and c) I couldn’t hold her like up there when we were in our own little world.
She said we’d go back up after a couple songs, and then asked me, “How do you know Pam?”
That’s when I blew it, the whole thing up, out of the water, gone. Instead of simply saying something innocuous like “Oh, you know, friends of friends,” I attempted to tell the literal truth. “Well you see, I was introduced to her by mutual friends and we were going to maybe get together but it never worked out. Well, at one point I made it over to her place but she had to leave in five minutes and” blah blah blah.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said.
She never went back upstairs with me, back to our sweet hugging zone and I realized almost instantly what a faux pas it was, that I had inadvertently put her in the middle, between me and Pam, her best friend. My wordy literalness, my openness, my thoughtless truth-telling had ruined a nice thing. Ah the horror of being me!
Her energy felt different after that conversation, I wandered off and when the party broke up I found her and slipped her a note telling her I had had a wonderful time, including my phone and email.
I didn’t hear from her but she was such an inspiration I still wrote her a long letter every morning for a week, but had nowhere to send it. I called Pam and left her a message asking for Lisa’s email but never heard back. After a week I put the seven letters in an envelope and mailed them to her in care of Pam in Whitethorn.
(Days, weeks, months, and years later: still no response.)