Choose Your Own Superhero or Saint

"I find it is a great strain for me to believe what I see, and I am becoming afraid occasionally to look at some things in case they would have to be believed."

 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Dubious Superpowers 

• Bulletproof underpants
• Unerring ability to correctly use “literally” and “figuratively”
• Lasso of shame
• Always finding what one is looking for
• Motivational skills workshop leadership expertise
• Ability to shoot dental floss from fingertips, or silly string, depending on circumstances
• Invisibility socks
• Nonfatal curiosity
• Selective hearing loss
• Human kindness
• Infallibility in matters involving faith, morals, and tech support
• Poop that smells like peppermint
• Never applying the front brake first
• A superhero suit made out of memory foam that guarantees comfortable naps in otherwise uncomfortable spots, and which incidentally doesn’t make the wearer look fat
• Ability to apply inexorable logic to accept what cannot be changed without bursting into tears
• Secret power to initiate onset of hot flashes in others regardless of their age or gender
• Ability to open new CDs using only fingernails and patience (and not teeth)

 Elements of Mysterious Heroic Backstory

• Being tragically orphaned at a young age and left with a tremendously positive cash flow generated by Papa’s extensive interests in South American strawberry jam plantations.
• Event causing parents heartbreaking deaths never conclusively determined to be an unfortunate Act of God, a malicious act of Caltrans, or a particularly creative form of murder/suicide; all three theories coincidentally agreeing however that beyond any doubt, substance abuse was involved.
• Credible rumors that unexplained three-year hiatus from crime-fighting and damsel rescuing were connected with an almost fatal addiction to cat dander; which by the way, was only licked by chamomile shampoo and positive affirmations
• Founder and First Customer of the Witless Protection Program to avoid conspiracy theorists, despicable in-laws, and door-to-door preachers/storm window salespersons.
• Empathy for the downtrodden inexorably combined with unlimited power to hold downtrodders responsible.  
• Scientific discovery that the degree of a person’s verbal genius in mixing metaphors in hilarious ways is inversely proportional to their bodily hirsuteness; for which a single-use Nobel Price Category was invented to award the Nobel Prize in Mind-Bending Uselessness That Just Might Lift Homo Sapiens Up Next Rung of the Evolutionary Ladder, if Only We Could Answer the Question: “What?”
• Inventing a wearable monitor that measures how many rocks have been taken in one’s rocking chair and how fast each rock is. The device is programmable to establish a goal of rocks/day and speed/rocks, and to provide motivational reminders throughout the day, and can be uploaded via Bluetooth to one’s social media of choice.
• Being born without double-jointed thumbs but at the age of 11 learning through self-guided meditation how to make thumbs double-jointed.
• Posthumous speculations about whether or not you really existed or were a postmodern take on the myth of Sisyphus’ ultimate happiness written by Pat Nixon using the pseudonym Idiot Nonsavant.

 Miracles I Might Perform If Nominated for Canonization 

• I will create a polar vortex limited in time and space to people in the green room waiting to speak at a climate change denier convention. They will however be suddenly, mercifully painlessly, and permanently frozen into embarrassing positions.
• The next time my kitty has an allergic reaction to the food she can’t digest and loses her hair in patches, I will shape one hairless patch like the face of the BVM with bleeding scabs for eyes.
• I will assure that the doctors who cure a photogenic poverty-stricken young brother and sister of a fatal disease will be credited with miraculously saving the childrens’ lives, instead of giving credit to that old hypocrite Mother Theresa who caused untold suffering and premature deaths of poor women who she forced to have too many children to feed, and who generally died in childbirth before they were 30.
• I will give everybody who drives a car the power to find a perfect parking place three times in his or her life.
• I will create lasting peace on earth by genetically modifying human DNA to eliminate chromosome combinations that cause people to be mean. (Kidding. God created Man in his Image, so god only knows how to fix that mess.)
• I will give everybody who regrets having a tattoo the power to wish the tattoo away, but only once in their life; so wise up people contemplating that heart-shaped dolphin tattoo.
• Publicly eliminating an infestation of scary bugs and spiders from the vicinity some people who are deathly afraid of bugs and spiders.

  What I’d want to be Patron Saint of

• Cats with food allergies causing their fur to fall out in patches
• Finding movie parking spaces
• Persons with cat dander addiction
• Strawberry Jam Plantations
• Impatient people whose impatience is mostly justified
• People who begin three sentences in the middle of each sentence they attempt -  that they may resolve each sentence chronologically and intelligibly to the amazement of friends and relatives who had begun to despair at their increasing incoherence.
• Skate boarders who defy convention and don’t cut their hair like skateboarders and/or who refuse to wear baseball hats backwards.
• People who just want to make a perfect light flaky piecrust

The Age of The Ten-Year Plan is Over

“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.” ― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman  (Picture Credit)

And I just found out. I’ve always had an empty beer can to throw hard at people who ask six year old children what they want to be when they grow up. I’m six! I’m busy being a kid. Stop rushing me or I’ll give you some crap about being an astronaut or a crime-fighting cyber-warrior or a princess.

So, I don’t know how old I was when the first vague plans began to coalesce around my future. I don’t remember ever saying I wanted to be a middle-management career bureaucrat at Research-O-Rama University. But at some point I knew I wanted to get married, and have kids and have a house – although by then the white picket fence was out. Definitely wanted a hedge instead. These days I’m still planning. For when I can’t drive a car anymore and have to walk out for groceries. For downsizing so if I drop dead without warning my heirs won’t find a hidden porn stash or that puzzling collection of beer bottle caps. I’m planning where to put my DNR and my weed where they will be respectively easy and hard to find.

But this morning I spoke to some Gen-X people who said when an interviewer asked them what their ten year plan was they pretty much said: why bother? Wouldn’t that make them think you were a flake? I asked.  No: pragmatic, they replied. First, there are no opportunities for buying houses with or without picket fences unless your parents are friends with Mitt Romney on Facebook. Second, stuff happens. They said that at every point of their lives, if asked to guess where they would be even five years hence they never would have predicted themselves to be where they found themselves five years later. Why should tomorrow be different?

This is the age of uncertainty, at least for the generation of Baby Boomers’ children who took our advice and went to college only to find themselves with six-figure debts and no job opportunities. Instead of getting mad - or maybe after passing through the stages of denial and anger etc, - they have reached acceptance. And while they may not exactly embrace the uncertainty, they find no cause for anxiety. Like the anxiety I have, for example, about whether I’ll ditch the porn before I’m suddenly stabbed by a door-to-door bible salesman.

Maybe in ten years, I’ll be an astronaut, I said. You never know, they said.

Hit Lists

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.”

― Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

I have been wondering lately about whether I should have a hit list. It takes my mind of wandering whether I am on somebody else’s hit list.  I realize, that as we get old we can’t keep up mentally with the pace of life and sometimes things that we used to cope with can unexpectedly  overwhelm us. And when confused, the best defense is first paralysis, followed by paranoia. That which I do not understand, I fear. Thus, I feel the need to start composing my own hit list just as an exercise in keeping my mind nimble.

As my 95-year-old MIL with dementia will tell anybody who listens, the Jews are trying to take her money. There are several problems with this, besides the fact that there are probably no Jews where she lives and she has no money. Those problems are, in no particular order: she’s crazy as a bedbug, nobody wants anything she has, if she had any money she would have no idea where it was or whether it was gone. Also, she can’t understand why the machine next to her bed rings and rings and when she tries to answer it by putting the speaker to her ear and the receiver to her mouth there is nobody on the phone. Her skill set has been whittled down to a few pretty rudimentary tasks like eating and peeing. Critical thinking went overboard sometime in the last century along with personal hygiene and table manners.

 But back to hit lists. I think we all need one  - even if we never have any intention of hitting, which I assert unequivocally that I don’t. Besides I have no personal enemies. It’s strangers. Like the nameless jerk who took two parking places at the grocery store, or the guy who used his snow blower to clear the snow from his driveway into his neighbor's freshly shoveled driveway, or the stupid woman at the dog beach who walked in front of me as I waited in line at the doggie water fountain and watered her dog first – like I was invisible or something. Too bad my dog is a lover not a killer or she’d have had her throat ripped out by a very salty thirsty dog.

 I’m not at the paranoia stage yet, but I do find it troubling that so many people my age lack situational awareness. It’s almost as bad as intentional malice. Stop parking your shopping cart in the middle of the frickin’ aisle while you try to find tarragon. The spices are in alphabetical order you stupid frail freak. Look under T!

 So much for people on my hit list.  I don’t have to engage in transatlantic flights of fantasy to imagine the kind of people whose hit list I’d end up on.  I don’t judge young men whose pants are falling down, but when they catch me smirking at their silly clothes I suspect they judge me because I have cat hair and quilt thread on my pants.

 Then there is, regrettably, the group of people who oppose vaccinations because they cause autism; and those who think a sever winter storm proves global warming is a myth. If such opinions are expressed within my fortunately very limited hearing range, I make my opinion known. You’re all idiots.

 Seriously, you people who take the Bible literally, you should think about this. Since scripture says death is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, it makes perfect sense that your life must be the fruit of the Tree of Stupidity. Also, I don’t think god-fearing people are allowed to have hit lists since you’re supposed to love your neighbors. So, love me you wackos, and I won’t add you to my personal hit list.

So, I Made a Quilt

“When money’s tight and is hard to get

And your horse has also ran,

When all you have is a heap of debt –

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
……….


“When stags appear on the mountain high,

with flanks the colour of bran,

when a badger bold can say goodbye,

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!”
Flann O’Brien

This first picture is the quilt sandwich being pinned together for final quilting. The solid-colored blocks in olive and red-orange are each embroidered with an art nouveau flower. This picture was about a week ago. My quilt is finally finished.

When I was in high school, our class took a trip to New York City, and we toured the UN. There was a lovely large rug hanging on display somewhere and the guide explained that the traditional weavers of what were then called “Oriental” rugs, always included an error in the intricate patterns because only god was supposed to do perfect. Of course, somebody asked where the error was, which prompted the guide to sigh with exasperation at how widely the high school students had missed the point. Clearly, he/she had no clue where the mistake was. Which is another difference between the UN rug and my quilt because I know where I went wrong.

Operating on that lesson learned long ago at the UN despite the humorless tour guide’s judgment, I intentionally included an error in my quilt. In fact, operating on the tried and true American maxim that if a little is good, more is better, I intentionally included more than one error. Many more in fact, and I hereby state for the record that all errors were intentionally made out of my extreme humility and desire not to be godlike at which I must admit I succeed admirably. I make no admission that drinking while quilting is perhaps an unwise practice, or that a couple of pints of plain while quilting is likely to introduce more errors than a humble sober quilter might make. No badgers said goodbye while I was quilting, although a cat appeared intermittently.

By the time I was done, my sewing machine said I spent over 80 hours of sewing time. I estimate I spent 2-3 times that much time in cutting, piecing, pinning, and ironing, and I’m not even including time spent in ripping out mistakes, drinking beer or saying goodbye to my kitty. The quilt is kitty-approved.