Trip Guilt

Yesterday was weird. 

With only four days remaining until our trip to Maine, I have been trying my best to recover from this aching hip thing called sacroiliitis, or at least get it to the point where it doesn’t hurt so much. I’ve been taking the meds I was given and refraining from strenuous activity, yada yada yada...There has been some improvement, but not fast enough for my taste. So, yesterday there I was avoiding all strenuous activity, watching the U.S. Open on television, taking hot jacuzzi baths and using a heating pad. What was my wife doing? Rage cleaning!

That’s not entirely fair. She wasn’t actually...mad...or anything, it just seemed like it to me from my view from the couch. She cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom, scrubbed the wood floors, vacuumed the entire house, all the while doing load after load of laundry. Meanwhile, I sat there feeling more and more worthless by the minute. Guilt began to creep in. I started to imagine what she was probably thinking but was too nice to say, “How convenient that your back goes on the fritz just when all this work has to be done!!” Then, just about the time when I was about to offer my limited services to help, she says to me:

...I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m upset with you for laying around the house watching golf while I’m running around like a crazy woman cleaning this house. No. I am not. Your job, right now is to get your back working right so you can drive me to Maine without having to stop every two hours to get out and stretch. So, stop feeling guilty!!

Isn’t it weird how when you’ve been married to someone for 36 years, you start to be able to read each other’s minds? You can tell what’s going on up there just from body language!

This morning, the house is immaculate. My back feels a bit better than it felt yesterday, and we now have three days left until zero hour. Today is packed with business activity, as will be tomorrow for half the day. Then our COVID tests Tuesday afternoon, and packing up Wednesday afternoon.

Poor Lucy will soon discover that she will not be coming along with us...again. She will not be pleased. She already knows something is happening because the staging area for trips to Maine always starts filling the dining room weeks before we leave. She has seen the traveling stuff accumulating in there. Her hopes are high, at this point. But, with some of our time being taken up with lake house hunting on this trip, there will be times when we will be away from the cabin for long periods of time. Having Lucy along will not work well under those circumstances. So, the poor girl will believe with all her heart that she is going to Maine...right up to the moment when when we close the door in her face on Thursday morning. It’s a horrible feeling. I hate leaving her for so long  and I love having her up there with us. She loves the lake more than we do! So, I’ll have guilt weighing down on me until we get to Pennsylvania. Luckily for us, Lucy will have one of her best buddies taking care of her...Bernadette, along with her omnipresent fiancé, Isaac. They will lavish her with love and attention which will hopefully help compensate for our treachery.

Has America Lost Its Mind?

Social media has had a bad week. Truth be told, its had a bad year. The entire past decade hasn’t been that great either, come to think of it. Sometimes it’s great. I’ll see a beautiful picture of someone’s new baby or their hilarious dog doing something adorable and it makes me smile. Other days I’ll come across some bad news about an old friend. I’ll send him a private message or pick up the phone and connect, a very good thing. But most days, social media is the place I go that convinces me that we Americans are losing our minds. What I see on Facebook—I gave up Twitter a year ago—is essentially the Balkanization of my country, the great herding of us into our exclusive enclaves of ethnic, religious and political identities. Once safely there, we feed on only the things that confirm our tribal beliefs. The process has made us dumber, meaner, and uglier.

A couple days ago a story appeared on my feed. There was a picture of dark menacing clouds gathering over the Capital building with the ominous headline...A Storm Is Brewing. The story had been reposted by a friend, who had reposted it from someone else, who had passed it along from a blog written by some other guy with 5000 followers who I had never heard of. The author, it turns out is a semi-obscure blogger, (I know a thing or two about obscure bloggers!), known for writing very conservative opinions for a group called Colorado Republicans. So, like any concerned citizen who learns that there is a storm brewing in my nation’s capital, I read the story. Wow.

According to the writer of the piece, who assures us right away in the very first sentence that he is not an alarmist, proceeds to tell us that there is a massive conspiracy cooking in the highest levels of Washington, the result of which will be violent civil war after the 2020 election, regardless of who wins!! Can you imagine how frightening the story might have been if this guy was an alarmist? Anyway, here’s the scoop: If Donald Trump wins, top officials of the Democratic Party are plotting violent insurrections to punish the citizenry for re-electing Trump. This violence will make the protests since George Floyd’s murder look like child’s play. To protect Americans from this violence, top officials of the Trump administration are drafting up Marshall Law edicts for the entire country. If, on the other hand, Joe Biden wins, equal violence will be unleashed in the streets of every American city—with the active support and assistance of Biden-Harris and the leadership of the Democrat party—to enact retribution against those who elected Trump in 2016. What evidence does the writer offer as proof of these allegations? We are assured that his information comes from a highly placed government official who shared this treasonous information with him personally. The reason he is so certain it is all true is because ordinarily, this friend of his hardly ever talks about what’s going on at his job. That’s it. His one source for this bombshell story is some anonymous guy he knows in some unnamed department of the government.

After reading this story, I rubbed my tired eyes with my fingers and pondered how we have arrived at this point. That so thinly sourced, illogically reasoned claptrap could possibly be believed by rational human beings is quite beyond my comprehension level. But, then I read through the comment section. The unanimous reaction of nearly all those bothering to offer an opinion of this piece was...This is so scary!! Well, of course it is! If it weren’t, you wouldn't be reading it, it never would have been reposted a hundred times. So, why was it reposted so many times, eventually finding its way onto my feed? Two words...confirmation bias. If the story sounds like something you think the other side capable of, then you are more likely to believe it, no matter how obscure the writer may be or how little evidence he offers to confirm his assertions.

After this depressing experience, I asked my wife a hypothetical question that went like this. “How different would you feel about the world right now if you hadn’t read anything on Facebook for the last twelve months?” Suppose our collective consciousness had not absorbed anything from social media. Would we be better off or worse off? My contention is that we would all be smarter, nicer, and better looking...and in much less need of therapy. 

The Dumbest Idea I’ve Ever Had?

One week from today, Pam and I will be in Maine. This time I’ll be packing long pants. High temperatures promise to be in the mid 50’s to mid-60’s, low temperatures mostly in the 40’s. We might get lucky and catch a day or two in the 70’s, but we also might get a day or two in the 40’s. I sure hope not! But, no matter, we will be in Maine for a little over three weeks and that’s just fine with me.

Meanwhile, we have entered an informal lockdown-ish, self imposed, semi-isolation mode leading up to our departure. Pam is somewhat a stickler in this regard, although she is much more relaxed than she was last time we went to Maine. I think we all have relaxed a bit, although COVID is still alive and well,  lurking out there. Our pre-trip COVID tests will be next Tuesday, in compliance with Maine state requirements for incoming travelers. So, my planned trip to Mona’s yesterday had to be scrapped when both my intrepid assistant and my wife had the same reaction to my plan to smoke cigars, inside at a place with no social distance arrangements and no mask requirement, “Ok, this is about the dumbest idea you’ve ever come with.” My defense amounted to the fact that I had honestly never given the COVID implications a second thought, or even a first thought. Going to Mona’s is just something the fellas do every couple a months. Besides, the area of dumbest ideas I have ever come up with is an awfully broad field of study for such an offhand accusation! Doug Greenwood was the first to point this out...”No way. You’ve come up with lots dumber ideas than this!” Yeah, so...we decided that sitting inside, blowing tobacco smoke in each other’s faces for a couple hours probably wasn’t the ideal pre-trip routine. Yet another fine tradition laid upon the alter of this interminable pandemic.

In other news, I have been dealing with a medical issue for the past three-four weeks. It has been quite painful and troubling, and as a result, the mind begins leaping to ridiculous conclusions. Isn’t it funny how our minds so quickly jump to the worst case scenarios? Anyway, I finally went to the doctor yesterday and discovered that all is well. I do not have cancer, tumors, gall stones, kidney stones, or any of the other wild diagnosis I had come up with in my head. Instead, its something called Sacroiliiatis, a fancy term for...sore hip. A course of prednisone, 1000 milligrams of Tylenol, and wet heat for a week or two should do the trick, says my dorky, but gifted family doctor, who also opined that I probably hurt it lifting heavy boxes at Hope Thrift. The very last thing that wonderful place needs is one less volunteer, so my three weeks in Maine comes at the perfect time. I can recuperate from this hip thing while I’m there and be ready to head back to the store when I return.

Finally, I have a buddy named Tom Allen. Cool guy. U of R grad, goes to my church. He occasionally sends me hilarious stuff. Some of it I can even share with the general public! What follows was one of his best submissions. After the Mona’s thing and the collective cluelessness of my guys to it’s implications, it rings especially true!!

I don’t know about you, But I’m thinking that now might be a good time for a woman President...

You Guys Hear About This??

There was a huge blowout bash at the Waldorf-Astoria to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Manhattan Comedy Club recently. Everybody who was anybody in the humor business was there. Mr. Impressions was there, of course, along with Mr. Slapstick, Mr. Improv and Mr. Standup. Then, Mr. Pun walks in and immediately ten people collapse on the floor dead. The next morning’s headline in the New York Times was:

Pun In. Ten Dead.

AWAY, Season One. A Review

There’s a new show that is all the rage on Netflix. It’s called AWAY, and it’s about the first crew of astronauts to attempt to land on Mars. Pam and I were excited to watch anything about space travel and those crazy engineers who run NASA. A couple of nights ago we finished season one. So much for The Right Stuff, or even Apollo 13. This was more like This Is Us in space. It looks like the folks at NASA have gone through sensitivity training and gotten in touch with their feelings. I hated it.

So, the story revolves around the multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-gendered, multi-sexually orientated crew of five, led by an American woman, Emma. We are led to believe that she wouldn't even be on this mission had not her husband, Matt, fallen ill with some genetic disorder that has left him in a wheelchair back in mission control. The rest of the crew checks off all the correct 21st century boxes, there’s the carefree second in command, Rahm—from India, Lu, the Chinese officer who gets outed as a lesbian barely 24 hours into the mission, the surly Russian cosmonaut, Misha, the most experienced guy on the crew and the only one with an old school spaceman personality, who naturally, goes blind during the trip and gets transformed to a fuzzy teddy bear right before our eyes. Finally, there’s the botanist from the Sudan, Kwesi, who has never been in space before, but serves the important purpose of not only representing the African continent, but also the community of faith, when we discover that he is the only crew member who believes in God via his “what are the odds” devout Judaism!! Back in Mission Control, the leader of NASA is a gray haired woman who is hailed as a great leader despite the fact that she shows zero qualities of leadership beyond frowning at people who bring her bad news and suggesting that everyone meet in the conference room immediately! Meanwhile, Matt seems to be the hero of the show since he is constantly coming up with Jerry-rigged solutions to the constant stream of malfunctions that plague the ship, all the while having to deal with his constantly disobedient 15 year old daughter and her Latino boyfriend. If that’s not hard enough, poor Matt has to fend off the growing affections of the stand-in mother, hand picked by NASA, to look after said daughter. Not to be outdone, we discover that Rahm has the hots for his commanding officer, Emma, setting up the question in all viewers minds...Which of them will be unfaithful first??

This show, in only ten episodes has broken the all time tear count set by its inspiration—This Is Us—by a country mile. Every five minutes, these highly skilled, meticulously trained scientists burst into uncontrollable sobbing at the slightest provocation. Emma, the commander, is the leader of these water works, constantly provoked to tears by her daughter, her husband, and her own feelings of inadequacy. Somehow, this woman has been chosen to lead this historic mission, to command the most significant human endeavor ever attempted by man and womankind, despite the fact that she clearly would rather turn the ship around and head back to earth to council her daughter about the dangers of premarital sex. She is a hot mess of regret, indecision, and self doubt...you know...the Right Stuff.

This is the thing I don’t understand about Hollywood. These are the people who are constantly lecturing the rest of us about our intolerance, our racism, our hopelessly provincial misogyny. And yet, this is what they serve up as an example of a strong woman...Emma. It is not possible to overemphasize just how uninspiring she is as a leader and a woman. When her flailing, mutinous  crew desperately needs a firm decisive leader, Emma gives them weakness, indecision and petulance. She is constantly having to be reassured by her husband back home that she’s going to be ok. It’s pathetic. Hollywood, it turns out, doesn’t know a damn thing about what a strong woman looks or acts like. I do. I grew up with a bunch of them. My sisters would have had the crew of Atlas doing their jobs without any belly-aching in five minutes, never mind my mother, who would have mopped the floor up with them the first time she heard any whining. Oh, and try challenging her authority? Good luck with that.

The worst scene in season one comes as the ship is about to be incinerated by what appears to be an unavoidable series of failures. We are treated to Emma and Rahm, sitting side by side in the control room plotting the proper coordinates to try to avoid disaster...and we are asked to believe by the script writers that they have time for a ten minute side bar about their nascent feelings for each other??

Houston, we have a problem!

We won’t be watching season two.

What’s In YOUR Garage?

One of the most significant casualties of COVID has been my gym membership at AMFAM. Although I’m still paying for that membership, I have not felt comfortable going against my doctor’s strong advice to avoid the place like the plague. So, I have adapted and become a road warrior, putting in roughly 18 miles of walk/run a week along with other exercises designed to keep me south of 200 pounds. When you spend this much time on the streets of your neighborhood, you begin to notice things. Then, if you’re like me, you begin to obsess over the things you notice. For example:

There are roughly 80 homes in Wythe Trace. It is very much a typical Short Pump neighborhood, well trimmed lawns (for the most part), nice homes, and decent people. And cars. Lots of cars. Over the past five months I have begun to notice something about these cars. Finally, the other day, I decided to test my hypothesis by actually counting them. My hypothesis was confirmed and now, lucky for you guys, I am here with the fascinating results. The conclusions I have drawn from the data are solely my own.

Either in the driveway or parked on the street, I counted 152 cars in my neighborhood. This was a typical day, so that number is a reliable one. Almost two per house. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. But, here’s where it gets interesting, (READER: I sure hope so), I counted cars from 16 different manufacturers. We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford. Here they are in no particular order: Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Suburu, Mercedes, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Cooper, Jaguar, Volvo, VW, and Kia. Of the 152 cars I counted, guess how many were made by American car companies? 35. That means that 77% of the cars purchased by the folks in my neighborhood, were bought from foreign companies. Here’s how it breaks down:

Toyota= 38

Honda= 29

Ford= 17

GM= 13

Nissan= 12

Hyundai= 9

Mercedes= 7

Subaru= 5

Chrysler= 5

VW= 3

Volvo= 3

Mazda= 2

Kia= 2

Cooper= 1

Jaguar= 1

There are a thousand conclusions you could draw from these numbers, proving that old adage that statistics can be bent into any shape to tell the story you wish to tell. Some might look at these numbers and say, “Wow, isn’t it amazing the amount of consumer choice we have courtesy of Globalization!” Others will look at these same numbers and say, “Toyota sells more cars to us than the top three American companies combined!! That’s economic suicide.” Some will see these numbers as exhibit A in the case of why we keep losing manufacturing jobs and the support they give to the middle class. Others will see the same numbers and bemoan the stifling effects of union work rules and contracts that have priced American cars out of the marketplace. Others will say that without globalization, we would be stuck with inferior American-made cars, insisting that we buy so many Toyotas and Hondas because they are better cars! 

What about me, you might ask? I live in Wythe Trace. What’s in my garage? Well, so far in the 35+ years of being married I have purchased a total of eleven cars. Three of them were from foreign companies, a Honda Accord, a Volkswagen Scirocco, and Pam’s current Hyundai. The rest have been American cars and/or SUV’s, including my current Cadillac. I must admit that the national origin of the manufacturer never really entered in to my buying decisions. Besides, in the world we live in things can get complicated. For example, my Cadillac XT5 is a General Motors product, but it was assembled in Shanghai, China with a transmission made in France. Pam’s Hyundai SantaFe? Montgomery, Alabama. So, that whole Buy American thing can be confusing as all get out!

But, what about American jobs?? When I bought my first car, I was 20 years old. Back then, the only foreign made cars I knew anything or cared anything about were the Datsun 240-Z and the Mercedes Benz 450-SL, neither of which I could afford. I liked them because they were hot and fast. What did I buy? A used VW Beetle, which I would probably still be driving today if the floorboard hadn't eventually rusted through. But, 40 years ago, the BIG THREE American companies dominated. Now they don’t. I’m not losing any sleep over it. The way I see it, if they want to regain their place of dominance they need to build better cars. What about American jobs? Which ones? The jobs of the guy at the Hyundai dealership who works in the shop? How about the woman on the assembly line in Montgomery, Alabama who helped put Pam’s SantaFe together? Do those jobs count?

Globalization is a complex and sometimes unsettling thing. There are negatives to everything, winners and losers in every economic upheaval. But honestly, would you rather go back to the days of the Chevy Chevette and the Ford Pinto? Those are examples of the total crap that used to roll off Detroit assembly lines before Toyota and Honda came along.

No thanks.

The Death of Optimism?

This morning, a headline from a story from NBC news caught my eye:

Fauci says U.S. must “hunker down” for Fall and Winter

Then the money quote in the first paragraph of the story:

“ Don’t ever, ever underestimate the potential of the pandemic. And don’t try to look at the rosy side of things.”

Somewhere, Norman Vincent Peale is rolling over in his grave.

Apparently, the Era of Optimism is officially over, the power of positive thinking, a thing of the past. All those corny songs from the old days about Accentuating the Positive and walking on the sunny side of the street are relics from a bygone era. Today is all about sober acceptance of the worst case scenarios of life.

Look...I get it. Constantly downplaying the seriousness of COVID is foolish. Breezily dismissing the deaths of nearly 200,000 Americans as some sort of hoax is ignorant and dangerous. But, my experience of 62 years informs me that things seldom if ever turn out as bad as predicted. Maybe this will be the exception, but better than expected outcomes have had an astonishing record of dependability for most of my life. So, with all due respect to Dr. Fauci, I will take COVID seriously, but I will not succumb to pessimistic acceptance of the inevitability of the “potential” of this pandemic. There’s another potential at play here, Doc, and that’s the potential of a vaccine, the potential of better outcomes than the models have suggested. If I have to make a bet on which potential wins, I’ll put my money and my energy on...success, not failure.

The Fall and Winter might very well be dark. But if all of us give ourselves over to the inevitability of the darkness, we guarantee its arrival.

Wear your mask. Wash your hands. Be considerate of others. Practice Social distancing. But remain positive and optimistic as the weather turns colder. Reject pessimism. Hold on fast to hope.