Good Night

I am sitting here in my big, comfortable, manly black leather poppa chair in my living room, reading a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER. Do you remember reading a NEWSPAPER? And it's published by the AARP! I guess that explains why when I fill out an on line form it takes forever to scroll down to my birth year. And why I sometimes think 1997 was ten years ago.

I have good memories from 1997. My phone plugged into the wall in 1997. And I used the dial up method of getting on the internet. It took a while, but I had a while to spend back then. MTV played music videos in 1997. And the songs that were their picks to click back then are now called Classic Hits on You Tube. I carried paper pictures of my Lady Wonder Wench and the rest of my family in my wallet back then. There were only two genders in 1997, and I was one of them and my Lady was the other.

Hard to realize that back then was now in 1997. Which maybe explains why when I sneezed yesterday, my back hurt all day.

I like fortune cookie words. Break some words apart, like a fortune cookie, and sometimes you find interesting messages inside. The word "Politics" is a good example. Break it apart and you find "poli" which means many and "ticks" which refers to annoying little blood sucking bugs. Do politics ever annoy you...like a bunch of little bugs crawling around on you...drinking your blood?

I like sitting here in my big, comfortable, manly, black leather poppa chair in my living room, breaking fortune cookie words apart, because lots of times the hidden messages inside tell you something valuable. Impossible is a fortune cookie word. "Im" means I am, and the rest of the word is "possible." So break the fortune cookie word "Impossible" apart, and you get a boot in the butt that tells you to get up off your fanny and give something hard a try.

Break open the fortune cookie word "analyst" and you find the word "anal" meaning anal, and "ist" which in this case means person. So breaking open the fortune cookie word you find that an analyst is an anal person...particularly a political analyist...they're all over the cable news networks. And they are painful...in the butt.

Back in the day when there were daily duck and cover drills, when we practiced putting our school desks between us and thermo-nuclear distruction, there was a group of friends who called themselves, "The Royal Order Of The Purple Shaft." I was a charter member, along with John, Jerry, Frank, and Leo. We have all lost touch over the years. But a time warp ZAP! happened this week.

John's daughter Jane sent me an email, and I think at least part of the Royal Order shall ride the shaft again. Jane says she remembers meeting me at a radio station… specifically WNBC in New York. She is now a knock out graphics artist but she was just a little kid back then. I don't know if she has kids of her own, but I'll find out. Lots of girls these days don't want to have kids when they find out that it takes 9 months to download a kid.

Who do you trust? I'm sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room, looking at one person in my life who I can trust, completely. My Lady Wonder Wench. She's in her pink bathrobe, with her left leg tucked up under her butt, and she's sticking out her tongue a little while she's squinting through a magnifying glass at a cross stitch pattern she's working on. I'm a lucky guy in lots of ways.

There are several other friends and relatives in my life that I can completely trust. I'm finding out that lots of people don't have anybody they can trust in their lives, and I don't know how they get from one day to another...not really trusting anybody.

The late, great, Johnny Carson did a TV show called, Who Do You Trust. Married pairs of contestants were asked to answer some questions. The husband decided which one would answer. Right there you can see that was back in the old black and white TV days. You'd need a staff of divorce lawyers right there in the studio if you tried that these days. And you can't necessarily trust experts today either.

I explained the word expert a while ago, but if you missed it, the word ex refers to something you had, like an ex husband or wife...and the word pert means lively and perky. So an ex pert is simply one who used to be lively and perky... not necessarialy so much now.

This just in from a big tourist company: "What vacationers want to do most on vacation is nothing." That's not big news to those of us who are members of the Louie Louie Generation. But...remember that Big Louie...the head guy of the Louie Louie Generation says in my book Staying Happy Healthy And Hot, available at Amazon dot com...shameless plug...Big Louie always says, "There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want to do." And as usual, he's right. But not for the reason you might think.

You simply can't do completely nothing, because doing nothing is doing something. Think of the word recreation. Re-Creation. Creation is a very big thing according to a very big best selling holy book...where it says God spent all week creating everything, then on the seventh day...even the Almighty God had to knock it off and rest for a day. Look, creating stuff is hard work. It doesn't matter if you create stuff by building a house, making potato salad, or figuring a way to get to Mars and back.

I like sitting by the window when my Lady and I go to Applebees for our regular Friday night dinner out. The window shade was down this Friday, so I pulled it back up so my Lady and I could watch the world outside spin around. We like to do that, because we like to watch the other people arriving for their Friday night dinners out. Are they holding hands? What's he doing with a girl as pretty as she is? Oh please don't bring that screaming kid in here.

We had just started guessing what a young couple was watching on their smart phones as they were walking in, when a middle aged guy came storming over to our table, pulled the shade back down, looked at me and said, "You pulled that shade up so the sun is hitting me right in the eyes. I'm going to kick your ass." Without thinking, I stood up fast, so I could return the favor. I have some martial arts training. I was pretty good at it. In fact after my first Karate lesson I found I could break a 2 inch board with my cast. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, where you can go ten blocks and never leave the scene of a fight. I was such a tough young guy that I could actually get taxis in Manhattan…right at Penn Station. I instantly and completely forgot that at my present Louie Louie Generation stage of life, weight lifting consists of just managing to stand up.

Sacred excrement. I knew this was going to happen eventually. But it knocked me right out of my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room anyway. This just in...seriously: "A Vancouver Buildings Council has blocked the lease of a restaurant property to the fish-and-chips chain "Moby Dick" on the grounds that "Dick" is an offensive word. The restaurant chain says the name has "Literary significance" and does not refer to male genitalia.

Dick is not an offensive word." No. Dick is my name. I am occasionally not offensive. Dick was also my dad's name, it is my name, and the name of a couple of other reasonably un-offensive guys I know.

I figured this would eventually happen because that's where we're going. We are becoming a "Win or Whine" society. First there was the famous "N" word. And doesn't that sound weird to you when some well dressed, well paid fantastically famous newscaster is reporting on a serious story with a straight face, and he's talking about "Senator so and so" who shocked his audience by using "The N Word." "Shocked I tell you." By the way, "Shocked I tell you" is a very funny quote said by a corrupt cop in the old, black and white Bogart movie called "Casablanca." The cop in question is closing a nightclub because he has just supposedly found out that there's illegal gambling going on. As he's saying "I am shocked, shocked I tell you that there is gambling going on here", one of the employees comes up to him with his evening's winnings. But of course he's "Shocked, shocked I tell you" that there's illegal gambling going on. Sacred excrement.

I Just came back from a quick trip to our favorite diner with my Lady Wonder Wench. It's in a college town nearby. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Out of 13 couples we saw, only one couple was holding hands. That seemed very much out of whack. My mind often jumps from one thing to another, so I started wondering what is this whack some of us are so often out of. And I got one answer when I sat down here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room and started thumbing through Astronomy magazine.

Some astronomers call the formation of our moon, "The Big Whack." They figure something very big smacked the earth a long time ago, and the stuff that flew off the earth eventually became the moon. Evidently that kind of thing happens a lot more than we know. One day about 66 million years ago a 6 mile wide asteroid slammed into the earth off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The explosion was as powerful as millions of nuclear bombs. It kicked up billions of tons of vaporized rock, filling the sky with dark clouds that blotted out the sun for decades. Temperatures around the world dropped by around 50 degrees. That killed off the dinosaurs because there was nothing for them to eat. Their disappearance led to the rise of mammals...which is a fancy word for creatures that eventually became...us. Timing is everything.

The smart guys in the white lab coats tell us that if that big rock had fallen just 30 seconds earlier or later it would have landed in the deep part of the ocean, and it wouldn't have created that cloud...which means most dinosaurs would have survived, and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Because mammals probably wouldn't have happened.

I almost fell out of my big, comfortable, manly poppa chair in my living room just now, when I saw this in a very legit news magazine. "Longtime single people in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco are now marrying themselves in full ceremonies."

First of all, I was born and brought up in Brooklyn and I've been to San Francisco. Any comparisons are fraught with foolishness. Brooklyn guys figure a 7 course meal is a hot dog and a six pack. The same cannot be said for guys in San Francisco, because it's really hard to tell which people are guys there.

Second, and far more important is I don't think Sologmasts have really thought this out. It's not like if you win a free trip to Paris, you get to go twice. There is a very high divorce rate. What does that do if you marry yourself? If you divorce yourself, who gets what?

Distractions, distractions, distractions. They're all over the place. I was sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable poppa chair trying to get started on a new podcast yesterday when a four engine, 6 ton wasp hit the glass door here in my living room. I mean he hit it. I thought he was going to break the glass. He didn't break the glass, but the whack must have made him dizzy, because he fell down, and glared up at me...and buzzed. I could hear him through the double glass door.

There are a lot of wasps in our yard this time of year, and some of them don't understand glass, so they whack into the glass door. Generally they just get up and fly away. This guy didn't. I swear he was standing there at the bottom of the door, and glaring up at me. Now I'm not an expert at wasp anatomy, but it looked to me like he was standing on his back legs, and he raised one of his front legs and pointed it at me...I think he was giving me a waspy center finger.

I forgot about the podcast, because I am a man, and I wasn't going to let this challenge to my masculinity pass. I keep a can of wasp spay right there by the door, because as I said we have lots of them this time of year. So I picked up the can, and very carefully opened the door...just a crack. I didn't want him getting into the house, because if my Lady Wonder Wench saw him she would become a pink streak running into the bedroom where she would lock the door and drag her dresser in front of it and vow never to come out until I whacked that wasp... and she would insist that I slide his scalp under the door to prove it before she would come out again.