Category: Life

So for a couple of weeks, we marveled at the beautiful spider webs woven between my truck’s driver-side mirror and the ground. Some spider was working overtime to rebuild it after windy days or days where I inconveniently drove my truck somewhere, tearing the delicate hunting ground.

I mused that the spider must be living in the mirror assembly, as it was unlikely that the creature would climb up my tires, through my suspension and body, to the mirror every day. Instead, after building the spider would retreat to its lair and then emerge again to drop down its initial lines and crawl back up to spin the web.

On my recent trip to Kansas, this was confirmed as the spider started rebuilding its web in the parking lot of the restaurant where I’d had dinner.

I took a few snapshots, climbed in, and drove off, presumably with the spider still dangling from its line. Along the road to my hotel, it blew off somewhere into the wilds of Leavenworth. Last seen headed southwest, towards Chez Venom.

As I drove along, I wondered/hoped two things:

1. The spider did actually blow off outside my vehicle and did not blow into the truck. Otherwise, every time I clamber into the vehicle in the coming months, I will sit in a spider web beneath a grudge-holding spider.
2. That the spider’s species habitat already included Kansas. Otherwise, I might have introduced an invasive species into the habitat, which could bring some sort of ecological apocalypse on the Sunflower State. Worse, I might be subject to some sort of government sanction under some obscure administrative rule. A certain kind of person often thinks about government regulations that one can inadvertently break and ruin one’s life with. I’m special.

The restaurant was an Applebee’s (since it shares a parking lot with the used book store. Do you think the spider saw that and thought, “Yayus! Bees that taste like apples!”?

Long enough to have a free Guinness Bar Towel:

Long enough that I have to explain to kids what the free Guinness bar towel is. Or what Fark is, for that matter.

As I was born in Wisconsin, you know I like my summer sausage. Also, I like deals. Which leads me to this series of events that recurs every couple of years:

1. I see a Johnsonville Summer Sausage display at the grocery store and decide to work some into my diet.
   
    
2. I have a little sausage for breakfast. I have a little sausage for a snack. I find myself buying a lot of summer sausage, a couple small sausage a week.
    
3. I start buying the larger size of Johnsonville Summer Sausage because it’s less expensive that way.
    
4. My summer sausage consumption continues or increases.
    
5. I see the Hillshire Farm Yard O Beef at Sam’s Club, or my children see it and become very excited about the concept of Yard O Beef and the ability to bash each other with processed cattle. I think, Hmmm, that’s even a better deal than the large Johnsonville package and buy it.
   
    
6. I taste the Hillshire Farm summer sausage and think they must have slaughtered the cow right at the salt lick and then threw the bloody salt lick into the sausage press with the beef.
    
7. I stop eating summer sausage. The Hillshire Farm summer sausage mocks me from the refrigerator. Lots of Hillshire Farm summer sausage mocks me from the refrigerator. Call it Two Feet Ten Inches O Beef.
    
8. Seriously, it’s still there in the refrigerator, and when I want a proteinish snack, I find myself eating Kraft dried Parmesan right from the little plastic shaker jar instead.
    
9. Months or years later (honestly, it’s a lot of salt), I throw the Hillshire Farms sausage out, and I never buy summer sausage again.

Well, not exactly never. Three to five years later, I repeat these steps in exactly the same order. Except next time, my boys will try to bash each other with the sausage by then. They will be young men bashing each other with sausage.

The postman brought me exactly what I ordered:

An Ozzy Osbourne CD and the book Benedict XVI: Last Testament in his own words.

There were no discernible scorch marks on the cardboard.

I guess that’s what happens when you have a fellow who listens to heavy metal and reads First Things.

So one of my goals for this year was to read all the comic books I own.

Well, to finish reading the comics I’d purchased, not read all the comics I owned again. Last year, I organized my comic books into short boxes and stored them.

However, I had another short box of comic books that I’d bought in 2008 at a garage sale at Edgar Road Elementary. They were marked 10 cents each, but I bought the whole box for $4 or $5 without counting them. It turns out they came to almost 100. Plus, I’d picked up a couple books at Vintage Stock in recent years. And I’d bought a couple comics for my kids that they’ve then sold to me for a discount when they wanted to buy Pokemon cards. In retrospect, even though they sold the books to me at a discount, I have bought the books twice which makes me a not-so-smart shopper. It also explains why I have single issues of mutant titles–when it seems inexplicable, I realize the cover has Cable on it, and the youngest thought Cable was cool for some reason when he (the youngest, not Cable) was six years old.

At any rate, I decided to read those comics this year so I could enumerate them in the spreadsheet of my collection and then store them properly with the others in an organized fashion. So it’s sort of like how I treat my actual library: I get, then I read, then I enumerate. Of course, there is not much organization in my book library at all, so the comic book collection quite differs from real books.

As you might know, I have been diligently knocking off comic books throughout the year, often as a break from reading actual books or after completing a chapter of a real book like The Grapes of Wrath. The Edgar Road Box, which I would shorten to ERB if I planned on ever speaking of it again, contained pretty good sets of mid-80s comics like Alpha Flight, Power Pack, and The New Mutants, but I was not familiar with those series, so I pushed them off.

But I eventually got to them.

And this week, I finished the last of my comic books.

Now that I’m done with the personal goal, I lack a sense of accomplishment.

On the one hand, as you might expect, I look at the end of the stack and I think, “Is this the last time I read a comic book?” I don’t tend to go to the comic book shop looking for comic books these days, and I haven’t even been to Vintage Stock for months. I haven’t been to Missouri Comics since it closed and moved to Florida (I wonder whether the recent hurricane has wiped him out?) The answer to this is probably not, since I’ll still pick up stuff from the independent comic book publishers at -Cons, and if I discover a small box cheap at a garage sale, I might still be tempted. But who knows?

On the other hand, now that I’m done with it, I look at it in terms of a personal goal, and think, “That’s the best you can do for personal goals each year?” To be honest, my annual goals in the past have been tied to certain metrics. Ten years ago, they were: Read 70 books (I read 125); write 50 rough drafts (I wrote 12, most of which ended up on this blog eventually); submit 50 pieces to magazines (I submitted 12; one, though, appeared in a national magazine); write 3 applications (Junk Data; ReadTrack; WriteTrack–0 completed). I also had a nebulous goal (exercise more) and a specific goal (learn to play piano). I didn’t do so good with those goals, although even today I’m tracking the books I read and get close to or more than 70 per year. And I do exercise more, although I don’t track it.

This year, though, I had more discrete goals: To get a black belt; to do a triathlon; to read all the comics I own; to publish a book of poetry. I’m three quarters of the way through the list, and I wonder if perhaps I should not have looked for something more meaningful than these. Or at least more meaningful than reading comic books as an annual goal.

I mean, I’m ::cough, cough:: closing in on fifty years old. Reading comic books in middle age is not something one does. At least, I look around my cohort and don’t see anyone else doing it. I’m not sure I’d even feel comfortable mentioning it to anyone I know. So let’s keep this between you and I, gentle reader.

Of course, when wanting to have a goal of something more meaningful, you have to have a concept of what is really meaningful. Perhaps that is what I’m struggling with when being down on this particular little pastime. I mean, I enjoyed reading the comic books a bit, although I’m more of a book reader these days. I take a certain pride in my collection (I should add an s, as I am proud of most of my collections). Perhaps that’s meaningful enough, and perhaps annual goals can be that trivial.

Who knows? Perhaps I should set as an annual goal for 2018 Get over the mid-life crisis you’ve been having since you were sixteen years old.

At any rate, since I did bother to list them, below the fold you can geek out with the complete list of my comic books as of today.

Continue reading “Personal Goal Reached, Revisited” →

As you might remember, gentle reader, my cat was recently fitted with a Edwardian collar after surgery. He spent a couple days sequestered in my office and went a little stir crazy, so we let him out and took off the collar since he wasn’t paying attention to the stitches.

Well, with the collar off, he found them and irritated his surgery site, so he’s back in the cone of shame.

Now, just as a reminder, we call him by many appellations now, but remember, he’s still the Big Bopper. Do not confuse him for someone else.

The Real Thing:

The Big Bopper

Not to be confused with:

Ming the Merciless

A Triceratops

“Weird Al” Yankovic
in the “Dare to be Stupid” video

Marvel Villain Doctor Bong

Although, to be honest, when he scratches the cone in the bed in the middle of the night, he sounds like Doctor Bong.

He gets the stitches out in a couple of days, at which point we will have to go back to our regularly scripted humor at his expense.

A couple years back (and by a couple years, I mean a decade), all the cool kids did posts where they emptied their pockets, took a picture, and talked about what they had. The meme ran through the gun bloggers, so you had an assortment of knives, pocket guns, spare magazines, and whatnot.

I’m a little behind the times, but bear with me.

As I have mentioned, I like wearing looser khakis with decent pocket space. I need to wear a waist size up and cinch the waist with a belt to accommodate my fat thighs, and this leaves me with lots of pocket space. Enough to hold me until tactical harem pants come in style, anyway.

How much pocket space do they give me? Plenty, as demonstrated by what I carried in them on a recent trip to the local Silver Dollar City amusement park.

So here’s my junk on the table:

• The obligatory bottle of sun screen. The lotion, because I suspect the spray-on bottles provide plausible appliability–that is, you can say you’ve put on sun screen, but mostly you’ve sprayed some at your body and not actually covered your skin enough to protect yourself.
   
• The Thoughts of Confucious, a paperback I brought along because I don’t like most rides. Was I the guy reading a book in the amusement park (while wearing khakis, no less)? Yes. During the Southern Gospel Picnic, too. Talk about missing the spirit.
   
• A large stuffed horse for winning the shoot-water-at-a-target horse race game. And two smaller horses given as consolation prizes to my boys, who aren’t yet as fast as their father at bringing the stream of water on target. But soon, they will beat me at everything, so I have to enjoy these wins when I can.

  Full disclosure: The big horse rode in my shirt pocket, not the pants. But it went with the khakis, which were not actually khaki in color but black.
   

• A wallet that shrank as the day went on.
   
• A key ring that I recently reduced to the keys I actually use from a larger set that includes what looks to be a number of house keys to…what? My home in Old Trees? My mother’s house? I have no idea.
   
• A pocket knife that I used to open a bag of chips at the park. “Do you only use that for opening things?” my oldest son asked. I’m not sure what else he would use a pocket knife for, but the question does not help his case that he should have a pocket knife.
   
• An iPhone that, I’m proud to say, only has one screen of apps on it, and most of them are things Apple won’t let me uninstall. I AM A LUDDITE.
   
• A notepad and a pen. In the old days, I’d use this for scribbling down thoughts and poem fragments. Now it’s mostly shopping lists and films I want to rent from the video store.
   
• A small lighter. I don’t smoke, but if I’m ever in a situation where I need fire, I’ll really need it badly, and I’d hate to spend that time futilely trying to start a fire with sticks or stones and lamenting if only I had a thirty cent lighter now.

Not depicted: The theme park’s paper/calendar of events and a collection of change that grew as the wallet shrank.

In the olden days, the everyday pocket contents would have included wipes, little toys to amuse little boys, and whatnot. But that’s when the post would have been entitled “A Daddy’s Pockets” instead of “A Father’s Pockets”.

This morning, while taking my children to school, our loud music scattered a couple of deer a couple houses up from us, and as I drove slowly by them, on fled from the loud music pouring from my car. Too small to leap the rail fence, it ran until it found a spot it could comfortably duck under. My oldest son, whose name has five letters so he gets to ride in the front, and I chuckled about the deer not liking Billy Idol. As I continued on the farm road, I was working on the humorous Facebook post I would make for it.

We went over a couple of large hills, and as we came down the hill and towards Wilson’s Creek, I saw in the distance a car with its flashers on on the side of the road. So I tried to figure out what was going on and slowed down. The car started moving, and I saw beyond it a truck sitting with it’s flashers on behind it, and I looked to see what was going on.

Then….IT broke from the trees and the shadows on the right side of the road.

A cow, escaped from a nearby pasture.

It moved into the left, oncoming traffic lane; apparently, it was some kind of English breed. I stayed, behind it, driving slowly because it’s impolite to pass livestock on the right. Also, I was not sure when it might decide to move into my lane.

The cow ran from the loud music pouring from my car. It was no longer Billy Idol; instead, it was Against the Current.

I’ve never seen a cow double-time it like that since Top Secret!

Someone came out on a four wheeler to get it, but I herded it into its pasture as it fled from me and turned left at the first drive. Perhaps it wasn its pasture. Perhaps it was just a quiet pasture, or at least a pasture that would be quiet when the loud Toyota was past.

I don’t know how close it was; if I was going my normal rate of speed, would I have been past the cow when it broke onto the road, or would I just have been too close to stop in time? Idle speculation at this point.

But I did get a Facebook status out of it.

Feel free to scrub it of context and submit it to “City People Are So Dumb!!!!” listicles.

So my children started their own business, again. This time (or perhaps back then since it was the day before yesterday, and their business models change quickly) it’s secure document disposal. That is, they discovered that, when you wet a piece of paper, it becomes easier to tear. So they would wet documents and tear them for a small fee.

They used a page out of the most recent copy of Forbes magazine, but left me a little note telling me what happened.

Your magazine was a victem of circumstance

Of course, it’s reminiscent of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter“.

Not a mysterious letter. Not a victem of circumstance.

That you have to look on the back of the wadded-up, torn, and repurposed piece of paper.

He wrote the note on the back of an important letter home describing an upcoming event for one of his clubs.

Which we would not have read if we hadn’t gone all C. Auguste Dupin on him.

Raising children starts out all H.P. Lovecraft from the very moment they emerge from the birth canal and then grow into Poesque mysteries as they age.

My kids asked me about the decal in the back of my pickup truck window.

As you might expect, my pickup truck’s rear graphicature represents the stereotypical country dweller in Southwest Missouri. I’ve got an old bumper sticker from around the turn of the century that says “I’m proud Bush is our President”. I’ve got an American flag so faded that you can’t tell it’s an American flag unless you’re really close. I’ve got the logo of a professional football team–the Green Bay Packers, the only team that matters and not the Kansas City Chiefs, the closest team to this corner of the state and therefore the preferred one for most of the locals.

Things go a bit awry with the Webster Groves Historical Society decal, as I’m no longer in Old Trees itself (but I maintained memberships in the historical society and the friends of the library until they stopped sending me things because I moved away).

No, the boys were asking about the Reason – Individual Rights – Capitalism decal:

It’s a little worse for wear, but it has been on the truck for longer than the Bush bumper sticker. I most likely put the decal on right away, as I have affixed a similar decal in every car I’ve owned.

The decal came from an Objectivist-themed outfit called RIC Trading. Back in the last century, I was a big-O Objectivist. I read a lot of Ayn Rand in college, of course, and I even read Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. I subscribed to a magazine called The Intellectual Activist (which employed a much younger Robert Tracinski, if I am not mistaken). The magazine turned me down when I offered to write for it, but to be honest and as reasoning writers of today will tell you, I’m a little lightweight for serious philosophical diatribes. I think I saw an ad for RIC Trading in the back of the magazine, though, and I got one for my first car, a Nissan Pulsar.

Well, I bought my cars cheap and high mileage in those days, and I put ten or fifteen thousand miles a year on them, so I turned them over pretty quick. When I couldn’t find RIC Trading around for another order, I bought a bunch of them on eBay (and got a free lapel pin to boot).

As I have aged, my cars’ prices have gone up, but they’ve lasted longer as demonstrated by the current pickup truck that I’ve been driving for sixteen years and change.

But never fear: When I get my next car, I’ll have a RIC decal for it. As I’ve got a couple left, I might have enough to cover all the cars I’ll ever own.

I explained what each meant for my children. Although I’m no longer a capital O Objectivist (I don’t recognize the infallibility of Ayn Rand), I still believe in Reason, Individual Rights, and Capitalism.

Rage Fitness.

For those who don’t think Cross Fit fits their actual mood.

Me, I’m more a Minor Annoyance Exercise guy.

From an AllRecipes.com recipe for microwave quesadillas:

Aluminum foil helps keep food moist, ensures it cooks evenly, keeps leftovers fresh, and makes clean-up easy.

Remind me to not favorite that little science experiment.

I don’t want to feel old, old man, but the email spam folder no longer sends me ill-spelled come-ons for young attractive singles or Webcam ladies.

On the plus side, it meshes right in with the pharmaceutical proffers.

True fact: When I was taking a triathlon class preparing for my first indoor triathlon this winter, the coach did ask me if I have any health conditions that would impede my performance. He asked this after watching me flail about in the swimming pool for thirty minutes. (I have previously related the story.)

But medical professionals have helped me uncover the thing that will keep me from becoming a top-flight performance athlete: I am fundamentally lazy I have an underlying heart condition.

My heart is three sizes too small.

Actually, it is not, and I have no heart condition that I know of (but if I continue with these foolish mid-life athletic futilities, who knows what I might learn?).

I just have a ready-made quip for any occasion related to my athletic performance or lack of endurance.

Not only am I fundamentally lazy inclined to reserving energy, I am also full of excuses capable of reasoned, logical explanations for accomplishments of sub-optimal level.