Author: Brian J. Noggle

She didn’t ask me; I don’t have a business or life coach. She asked this of my beautiful wife the other day, and my wife asked me last night while we watched the sunset.

I remember Joe DuBois asked me that in 1998. We were standing at the old timey semicircle sink, washing up after a day of running printing presses, and I told him I did not know. I mean, back then, I was five years out from college, and I told him that I hadn’t expected to be working as a printing press operator five years from then.

It’s pretty clear I’ve never really been much of a planner. My wife, on the other hand, does, so this question is right in her wheelhouse. She likes to plan out the week to come on Sunday nights, including the nights we’re staying in (all of them these days) and what we will eat for each meal. She likes to get a little more granular than that, but when the week unfolds, something always comes up which derails the weekly plan. Someone has a homework emergency. Work runs long. Or something. These variations stress her out a lot at times, whereas I am able to better go with the flow.

If I skip ahead in five year segments from my conversation with Joe, I would find myself working at an Internet startup that I hoped would make me rich. Five years later, I had been an Executive and had just struck out on my own as a consultant, but mostly was taking care of my two children. Five years later, both my kids are in school, and I’ve taken a contract with another startup that I hoped would make me rich–my billed income was certainly high, and I thought the sky was the limit (until my accountant calculated the annual tax increase, which sobered things quickly). I’d also started training in martial arts after my boys did. Five years later, my consulting work had gotten stale, and I took a full time position that’s not as swashbuckling, to say the least, as being an independent contractor. Five years from then, which is only three years from now, I’ll have a high school graduate and high school sophomore and…. Who knows?

If we reel back in the years in five year increments, we can see what I was blogging about on this day in history.

March 20, 2015
Book Report: Holiday Memory by Dylan Thomas (1978)

March 20, 2010
No posts on this date, but a couple on March 21:
This Administration Cannot See Clearly
Charity Founded By Former Elected Officials Blows Entire Budget On Overhead, Parties
An Unfortunate Turn To Boilerplate Health Care Sob Story

March 20, 2005
No posts on March 20, 2005, either, which is odd as it was at the height of my blogging. However, on March 21, I posted:
Book Report: Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War by Bob Greene (2000)
The Dogs That Didn’t Bark
Collateral Damage Audience
Post-Dispatch Gets It Right In Sidebar
But There Won’t Be Smoking Allowed

To be honest, that’s what the blog is really about: Giving me the ability to go back to a point in time and see what was going on in the world and in my life at the time. You, gentle reader, are just along for the slow-moving ride.

And where ever I am five years from now, I’ll know how I got there. But I’m not sure where that is, nor am I sure where I would want that to be.

So the spellchecker in the browser here does not recognize the spelling of coronavirus yet, which is a nice thing.

On Tuesday, we had a project manager for a local contractor out to re-bid replacing the gutters at Nogglestead. The current gutters, many years or decades old, can no longer handle the deluge that comes with severe spring thunderstorms. I had the same fellow out to bid last year, but we didn’t have it done for some reason–I got busy or something. At any rate, the price was the same, so I put down a deposit on it. Sometime in the next week or so, a team will be out to put my new gutters on amid the panic. After he took my check, the project manager held out his hand to shake mine, and I felt like a dandy germophobe in not clasping his.

I went to Sam’s Club yesterday to top things off in case some time in the near future I won’t be able to. The hours have been trimmed, and I got there about an hour after the store opened. I can’t give you an apples-to-apples comparison of the same time period on a normal weekday, but it wasn’t terribly crowded. Cleaning products were limited to two per SKU as were diapers and whatnot. The laundry detergent was mostly gone. The meat department and produce department were a little light, but I managed to get what I needed. I managed to hit the checkouts as everyone else did, but I remembered I wanted to pick up some sushi for lunch, so I went back, and when I got to the registers a second time, the lines were minimal.

We have been staying in more than normal, with only one trip out some days (Sam’s Club or the recycling center). Today, my beautiful wife is going to visit a 92-year-old woman who just joined her choir. When she first showed for choir, she forgot where she parked, and my wife drove her around the church parking lot looking for her car. So the new choir member made an afghan for my wife, and she wants my wife to pick it up today in spite of the current unpleasantness.

Five of the last six days have been overcast and rainy, with only yesterday warm and sunny. Spring always catches me by surprise. This year more than others. But a cool, rainy spring last year led to our best peach crop ever, and the trees are starting to blossom now. I hope we’re not going to get another freeze, but it is definitely possible.

So that’s the story. Life goes on, especially for the people who have to go to work somewhere that’s not in the service industry. It might even seem more normal for the people who still have to go out to work every day than it does for those of us in the professional trades who sit at home alone but for the Internet headlines and rumors for company.

Good luck out there in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Remember to eat your neighbors first while they’re still plump, before they start getting thin from starvation, and only then dip into your stockpiled beans.

Now that I’m dispensing financial advice to your detriment, gentle reader, I want to let you know in on a little secret I learned back in the old days, before the macarenavirus, when my son and I could freely travel to the YMCA for a triathlon class in advance of a triathlon sure to be canceled now.

After class, we went to the vending machines to get a Gatorade. The price listed on the machine said $1.50, and it had a credit card reader, so I used the credit card to buy a couple of drinks.

When I checked the credit card statement, I had a pair of charges for $1.60. When I checked the machines again, I saw the fine print: The price reflects a ten cent discount for using cash.

Well! I never! Well, no, I rather too often!

So I have decided that I’m going to save that ten cents each drink and pay with cash from now on.

One thing to note about me is that I don’t tend to carry coins out of my house. We have a little mite box for the Lutheran Women Missionary League, a little receptacle for change that you can bring, once a month, to church and dump into a larger box. So whatever change I accumulate in my pockets goes in there when I unpack for the evening.

Now I do try to generally be frugal with my pocket money as I will, if given the opportunity, stuff it into some collection plate or another. So I get a twenty out of the ATM once or twice a week, and then I promptly stop by the doughnut store. As a matter of fact, I tend to get that twenty just to buy doughnuts. My order comes to $4.76, and the proprietor gives me a quarter and three fives in change. If I have a dollar, I’ll tuck it in the tip cup. If not, sometimes I tuck in a five (a tip jar is a sort of personal collection plate, ainna?).

So when I get to the YMCA, I have a wallet full of five dollar bills. Two of the machines dispensing Gatorades do not take five dollar bills (apparently, the only “cash” allowed is coins or one dollar bills). One of them does, though, and we get a Gatorade and change paid out in three Sacajawea dollars and two quarters. Two quarters and a Sacajawea buy the other, and I have two dollars left.

Two dollars in coins.

You already know what happens next: I get home and put the change into the Mite Box.

So I’ve essentially spent two dollars to save twenty cents.

Fiscal responsibility really isn’t my strong suit. I have an English and Philosophy degree, friends. Not accounting. I would have said “economics,” but we know that’s not a study of money so much as manipulating people into doing what the economists want.

I predicted even before the macarenavirus troubles began that a dying time was coming. As you know, gentle reader, my aunt and godmother died on Thanksgiving. Her illness and the age of the previous generation led me to my unhappy musings.

Yesterday, the best man at my wedding died of a drug overdose.

I had met Mike in high school where he was a year behind me. We had a Spanish class for a year and got to be acquaintances. When I went away to the university, Mike was one of the people to whom I wrote (letters, not emails, as I am far older than most people who use you.regettingold.om). We shared an interest in poetry and exchanged poems (printed on computer paper as we did have computers back then, you damn kids, but not the Internet, really). When I came back on break my senior year, we did coffee house open mic nights and poetry slams together, and we did that throughout the middle 1990s along with some roleplaying games and trips to GenCon.

We started parting ways toward the end of the 1990s. I got a girlfriend, and he got married, and although the house I rented with my new bride was only a couple blocks from his, we didn’t see each other as much because we were married men or something. He wasn’t even my first choice for best man; I think I slotted him for second runner up or usher, but when my first choice for best man decided he could not, in good conscience, stand at my wedding (and another groom’s man stopped talking to me), I gave him a battlefield promotion to best man. And he did it well.

We didn’t drift apart after that; sometime after I moved out to Casinoport, he stopped returning my phone calls. The last time I reached out to him was November 2000, when I left a message in Spanish on his machine (voice mail was on tape recorders or locally hosted computer chips back then, gentle reader) to invite him to go see Bedazzled. He never called back.

Although I would have called him my best friend back then, in retrospect I’m not sure how good of a friend he really was. He was, erm, good with the ladies. He was handsome, smart, athletic, and appeared to have self-confidence in bunches. So, yeah, he was with a lot of ladies, including a number of women in whom I was interested and told him so. He used drugs and kept that hidden from me because he knew I would disapprove. He definitely showed me what he thought I would approve of, so I’m not sure who he was.

He called me up in early 2008. A mutual friend, the other of my groom’s men who bailed on me over a philosophical argument of some sort, had reached out to him after a decade, which prompted him to call me to apologize for the break in our friendship. He told me that, back in the day, I was such an ass that he would have to tell other people before meeting me that I was an ass and that he got tired of having to warn people about me. He told me a bit of what he was up to, but he never asked me anything about how I was or what I was doing. I was an executive downtown, and we had a baby, and I lived in Old Trees, not far from one of his obsessive flames and one of my crushes (two different people) that he slept with lived. I was bursting to tell him if he asked or if he even seemed interested, but the call was about him, not me.

So the fellow who was to be my groom’s man but stormed off after the philosophical argument reached out to me yesterday to let me know that Mike had passed. I understand he had substance abuse and mental health issues that followed him into middle age. That he pushed away most of his remaining friends. I was just talking about him with my wife not long ago, but I hadn’t felt compelled to reach out to him.

The service is on Thursday night, but it’s in St. Louis, so I won’t make it. It’s funny, for someone I haven’t talked to in a long time how this has affected me. Perhaps because I thought we were such good friends once, but I was later not sure (so, Brian J., why don’t you trust anyone, including your own judgment in people?). Maybe because he was a peer and one of the first of my youth cohort to die that I’m aware of. I don’t know.

Sadly, so many of these death posts are about how I feel about it and not a roaring tribute to the deceased. But I am an egotist and a recovering ass, so it’s par for the course.

(Link for you.regettingold.com seen today on Friar’s Fires and Neatorama.)