MAINT REQD

Désolé, la page que vous demandes est introuvable.

The Internet, in French

Doesn’t that sound better in French? Or more sincere anyway; like the page you were trying to  find in French is lost in some bleak wilderness and they’re beyond being sorry, they’re positively desolated they can’t find it for you. 

While I always admire sincere apologies, I’m kind of an expert in fake apologies. I have always been fond of apologizing by saying “I can’t tell you how sorry I am”.  Or “I couldn’t be sorrier”. But I recently heard that somebody topped that a while back. It turns out Rob Blagojevich said, when he was caught and/or convicted that he was “unbelievably sorry”.  Which I imagine he was about being caught. He was probably desolated about being convicted.

So, not to make a handbrake turn to segue, but I’m beginning to feel desolated about my car disrespecting me. It’s been nagging me for a while with this “MAINT REQD” light that is annoying for several reasons. First, it’s in caps, so it’s shouting at me. Second, it can’t be bothered to spell out the entire message so it’s lazy. For some reason being shouted about by something lazy is particularly annoying. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I’m unbelievably desolated by the rudeness involved here. Besides you wanker, I made the damn appointment with the dealer for service, so you can stop shouting at me. It’s tomorrow.

Then, in the past few days, I’ve developed another theory about this enigmatic message. Perhaps I’ve been too quick to judge my Prius. Perhaps the dashboard light is trying to send me another message entirely. Maybe it’s trying to hint in it’s deferential way that it’s ME that requires maintenance. 

But this surely is not news to me, my old Toyota friend.

It’s not like I don’t already know I’m kind of high maintenance. It has also not escaped my attention that I’ve got a backlog of what we used to genteelly call “deferred maintenance” when we didn’t have a budget to get that slow leaky faucet fixed or the termite inspection done. I need a haircut. I need to exfoliate the heels of my feet. I need, well, let’s not get too far down this road because I might want to stop being a hermit and make friends again someday and I don’t want it out there on the internets about how long it’s been since I had my cholesterol checked. The Toyota may be right to say this in CAPS after all. I have been wearing those ratty t-shirts when I take the dog to the dog park and I’m sure the dashboard can see the holes, the stains and the places where the shoulder seams are coming undone. O dear. I do require maintenance.

So tomorrow, after I leave the dealership and the dashboard is no longer shouting at me, maybe I’ll make an appointment with the hairdresser. Then, I’ll apologize to the dashboard. Je suis désolé, unbelievably désolé.  I doubt if the stupid car can speak French anyway.

Take a Break

All I want

Is one break

Which is not

My neck.

 - J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man

I have to be a bit pickier about breaks. I want a break that is also not nervous and/or down. Also, not a break for which there is a designated room, as in Employee Break Room where, for all I know, employees are either broken, or only admitted if they’re already broken. I’ve been there and I’m never going back. Besides, I’ve had my neck literally (not figuratively) broken and it’s now held together with some titanium sticks and bolts. So, I’ve got the whole bionic thing going for me.

But enough about breaking things and throwing china and cleaning possibly deadly spiders’ webs out of old cars and figuring out how to put stuff on e-bay to attract people with too much disposable income and an un-satiated lust for “collectibles” of no discernible intrinsic value. You know who you are.

Instead, let’s talk about the amazing weather and the lovely sunshine that is so warm and gold I can hear it whispering for me to come and bask. Of course, everything outside sounds like its whispering from in here sitting inside in front of my computer pursuing my eternal quest for enlightenment on the internet and pondering the wisdom of some of my bookmarks.

I need a break anyway. I spent the morning reminding myself that I can still craft a hella legal document, specifically an amendment to a trust document, replete with herebys and witnesseths and pursuants sprinkled liberally among the bold and underlined important stuff, and the stuff that is in CAPS just so you know it’s the most important in the hierarchy of importance.

So, then I made some sun tea and added enough sugar to induce an insulin coma and then my kombucha starter. Now it sits for a couple of weeks to ferment. The violet kombucha I made last month has carbonated the heck out of itself in bottles and a double shot adds a delicious sweet fizz to the nasty smoothies I make out of leafy greens, fruit and nuts. No matter what smoothie components I use I end up with this thick green mush that I will generously admit is an acquired taste, and not to be taken from a clear glass where you can see the sludge left behind.

I’m not as fussy as my roommate in combining smoothie ingredients and use what comes to hand. Princess (let’s call her that) flatly refuses to acquire a taste for my recipes and finally objected so strongly that I had to stop using mustard greens, the wimp. And, as Princess Wimp fancies herself a culinary wizard, she prefers to add bananas and avocados and often almond milk to achieve a nice creamy consistency, which I admit looks and often tastes better than mine.

I’ll use water and/or fruit juice and often end up with grassy strings of chard or stems of broccoli rabe. I also toss in a few teaspoons of apple cider vinegar, which tends to make my concoctions on the tart side.

Now, some would say I’ve always tended toward the tart side and I wouldn’t deny that in terribly unladylike terms, at least until happy hour was well underway. So I’ll now take my grey smoothie (kale, chard and pomegranate juice mix together into a purplish gray that is a slightly more appealing color than spilled tile grout. But I’ll be drinking it in the golden afternoon sun, taking a break from my labors and reading a good book.

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.

Predictions for 2014

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.”

 - Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Well, I predicted some bad shit for 2013 and was, sadly, wrong about the spontaneous combustion of over-tattood people and the resulting loss of innocent bystanders lives. Of course, I mean I’m sad that my prescience was so misplaced. I suppose the up-side is that people didn’t combust and explode.

I was better at some of my other predictions: in 2013 the heterosexual population of America didn’t succumb to The Gay Flu, and traditional marriage survived.  Whew, eh?

So although the accuracy of my predictions is not precisely inversely proportional to my dwindling patience and cognitive functions, it was less than 50-50 last year. But what the hell, I might as well go ahead and predict some stuff for 2014.

1.     French will continue to be the primary language spoken by people from France.

2.     Corporate banks will continue to financially rape and pillage besieged Americans without fear from regulators, prosecutors, or the whimpering whispers of the atrophied individual consciences of their board members.

3.     The rich will continue to get richer.

4.     No one will invent a perpetual motion energy generation machine, an effective cold remedy, or a soupspoon with a built-in thermometer that will beep softly if the soup is too hot.

5.     No one will come up with the answer to the universal question “what could possibly go wrong?” (Although I predict the next-best answer will continue to be, “Nothing too bad surely.”)

6.     No one will discover a new color in the visible light spectrum. In the unlikely event that this prediction is wrong, the new color will positively not be named “grumble”.

7.     An asteroid will not strike earth causing nuclear winter and killing off homo sapiens to make room for the rise of the cockroach evolution. At least this year.

8.     The android Dick Clark will not be perfected in time for New Year’s Eve 2014 and we’ll either have to go to bed early or get drunk enough to enjoy watching the continued decline of one-time-journalist Anderson Cooper.

That was the easy stuff. Now for the more daring predictions for which I’ve become a legend in my own blog.

1.     Strange moth-winged creatures will appear in Tierra Del Fuego, and by the end of 2014 will have conquered South America as far north as Rio De Janeiro.  They will eat the brains of humans shorter than 5 feet and leave taller people alone.

2.     South Americans will evolve into a taller species than humans on other continents and will never, ever adopt the metric system. Because of, you know, the 5 foot tall thing.

3.     Bright LED lights placed at the Southern edge of the Panama Canal and facing south will both attract and deter the mothmen from migrating further north. They will surround the southern border of the Canal flapping their stupid moth wings in frustration. Sadly this lesson will be earned by the sacrifice of millions of short South Americans who will try to deter mothmen with incandescent bulbs and will not survive.

4.     Sustainable LED lighting will become all the rage in North America and we will save hella energy by replacing all those old inefficient lightbulbs. So, silver lining there.

5.     America, bread-basket to the world, will become gluten-free almost over night due to the emergence of a new pest: the wheat boll weevil that destroyes the entire Archers-Daniels-Midland GMO wheat monoculture that will have replaced all the other grain crops produced in the USA. China will win the 2014 “____-basket-to-the world championship” for rice.

6.     Number One on the list of reasons to go to war will continue to be religion, beating out plague, pestilence, invading mothmen, and all other causes combined. The God of Peace will continue to have the last laugh on his pitiful creatures.

Printing Presses and Susceptible Hearts

“Through printing, tender boys and gentle girls, chaste without foul stain, take in whatever mars purity of mind or body; they encourage wantonness, and swallow up the huge gain from it. …

Writing indeed, which brings in gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print. Should you not call her a harlot who makes us excessively amorous? Governed only by avaricious gain, will not that most base woman deserve the name of prostitute, who saps the strength of the young boy by fostering wantonness? This is what the printing presses do: they corrupts susceptible hearts.”

Filippo de Strata, Polemic Against Printing, trans. Shelagh Grier and intro. By Martin Lowry. As quoted here in “ Books Have Their Own Destiny: Essays in Honor of Robert V. Schnucker” edited by Robin Bruce Barnes, Robert Kolb, Paula Presley, Robert V. Schnucker

I suspect this guy’s ok with the spoken and the written word but has a some kind of problem with the printed word. Which is wack – words being words and all. But that’s not what I’m blogging about, which – blogging – would make this guy’s eyes melt. At least this is an ad-free blog so there’s no possibility for avaricious gain for Weeping Sore – at least in writing this blog. Once I’m discovered by a big publishing house thought, all bets are off.

Filippo here seems to think that if a woman is “governed only by avaricious gain” that will foster wantonness. Imagine, if you will, what it would do to any man. Now, while fostering wantonness has long been on my bucket list, I never thought I could get that far down into the bottom of the bucket by merely writing. And don't get me started about "swallowing up the huge gain" from wantonness.

But who wouldn’t be tempted to be wanton, am I right? “Fostering” has this genteel taint of patronizing primitive forms of life - like the little ladies - but in, like, you know, a good way. And it’s a slippery slope from literary wantonness to criminal behavior, like, say pulling off a gentleman’s hat. One man’s wantonness is another man’s assault and battery:

WANTONNESS, crim. law. A licentious act by one man towards the person of another without regard to his rights; as, for example, if a man should attempt to pull off another's hat against his will in order to expose him to ridicule, the offence would be an assault, and if he touched him it would amount to a battery. (q. v.) - A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the UnitedStates. By John Bouvier. Published 1856.

Whether wantonness saps the strength of tender boys is a point I do not care to dispute. But Fillipo says its effect on woman is worse. What’s worse? It makes them whores, what else? Not to put too fine a point on it, but Filippo is a dick. Filippo has whores on his brain if he thinks women who write are  “suffering in the brothel” of the printing press; while it's nobel and brings in gold for guys who write. 

I have to admit though he's inspired me. I'm thinking about adding "Maiden with a Pen; Harlot in Ink" to my calling cards. From there it's a mere leap from a roof with an umbrella to pulling off men's hats.

It all comes down to corrupting susceptible hearts. It’s like the sign on the church across the street where Patti lives: "Become the person you would want others to be". At first glance that might sound like sound advice. Upon reflection, it would be the perfect mission statement for a wanton suicide bomber.

Stress and Excuses

“I’ve had a wonderful evening. This wasn’t it.”

Grucho Marx

I don’t manage stress. I pretty much make a hash of trying to remain calm while stress increasingly bosses me around. I could turn to drugs I suppose. But reality is still there, waiting up and sitting in a chair with its arms crossed over its chest when I try to sneak back in after curfew.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, since I’ve had enough experience making excuses about being late: trust being earned and not demanded, as we all know. See, the cigarette smoke smell on my fingers is from holding the pencil used by other bowlers who smoke when we all used the same pencil to mark our bowling scores. Yeah, I was out bowling. I broke 100.

It’s the tiny detail that makes it real. Not too much embellishment, just a touch. I actually did break 100 once too, so it wasn’t so much a lie as it was a distortion of the order of events that really happened. Kinda like Grucho’s lovely evening.

Once, when I was late for work around Xmas, I said I had a flat tire. Lame, right? But no, because it turns out this guy in a Santa Clause costume stopped to change my tire. Who would make up something like that? The person who won’t just phone in a trite excuse, when they can tell an engaging lie, that’s who.

But what is bad is my stress mismanagement. What used to be little stuff has become bigger and I remain copeless in the face of simple things. Like yesterday, I was late for a sewing class which frankly who cares, right? But I was already a bit tense when I left the house. Then, Nana in the car in front of me slows down for several dozen of the 87 stop lights between me and the class while the lights are still bright green light; because, well they will eventually turn yellow; and in due course almost certainly red; and her reactions aren’t what they used to be when she was, say, 80. So better to just stop at the green ones, or at least pause long enough for me to give her substantial and detailed advice about what she might be doing instead of driving ahead of me when I’m late, like, say, knitting tea cozies for her friends at the retirement home. Or bowling with heavy smokers.

The funny part was that I was the first to arrive because everybody else thought the class began at 9:30 not 9:00. The instructor explained the website had the late time although it was really supposed to be 9:00 (which is what the employee on the phone told me). So of course I said, yup, sure, I thought it was 9:30 too, but I’m early because I wanted to have time to enjoy a cup of coffee and chat about making tea cozies.

At least I can still make good excuses. I suppose my still functioning bullshit skill balances out my diminishing skill at coping with stress. Which, when I think about, is a good trade-off because there are stress-management drugs but as far as I know science hasn’t created a medicine that can enhance one’s skill in making up entertaining excuses for being late.