The Bible and The Far Side

Just a few examples of twisted humor that I find hilarious and most other people find stupid...

Also, this...just read a headline that an investigation has been launched into alleged use of LSD by marines at Camp Lejeune. Seriously?? Can you imagine anything more terrifying than fully armed Marines on acid??

So, when times get tough my morning routine features a little Bible reading and a browse through The Far Side...both for much needed doses of eternal truth.

A Bad Back and My Dad

Many years ago I attended a picnic at my sister’s house. I don’t remember the occasion or the year, only that suddenly I found myself flat on the floor in her living room, gripped by excruciating pain while everyone else was outside in the yard. I had come inside to go to the bathroom and when I took the first step after exiting the bathroom, my back seized up in a tight and painful ball dropping me like a rock, face down onto the carpet. I could not move and could barely scream out for help. I can’t remember how long I was on the floor but eventually my sister Linda came inside and found me there. At first she laughed, figuring I was trying to play some trick on her. Where would she have gotten such an idea? Finally she realized I was in great distress. And since my big sister has always been the type of person who knows exactly what to do in the clutch, she ran into another room to fetch her nurse’s bag. Back then she was a public health nurse who made house calls in Gilpin Court, tough woman—my sister. Anyway, I remember her pulling a giant needle out of her bag and giving me a painful shot in the buttocks, one that she seemed to take just a bit too much delight in administering. Later she told me it was Demerol. Within ten minutes or so I was able to sit up. The subsequent trip to the doctor revealed that I had damaged a muscle in my back the previous day when I had helped a friend of mine move a spinet piano up a flight of stairs in his new house. Although I didn’t recall being in any pain while moving the piano, the doctor assured me that it had done some kind of damage which had resulted in the severe spasm that had thrown me to the floor the following afternoon. A couple of days later I was totally fine and feeling cocky when I saw my Dad who asked me about how my back was feeling. When I answered, “Great! No problems at all....” he looked me square in the eye and said, “Listen son, I don’t care what that doctor told you, I’m here to tell you that you’re going to have trouble with your back for the rest of your life so you better get used to it.” My Dad, Mister Encouragement.

He was right. Of course he was.

Although I haven’t been thrown to the ground since that day at Linda’s, my back has always been like a temperamental child for nearly 30 years now. I can go months with no problems whatsoever despite lots of strenuous activity, then throw it out brushing my teeth. The list of benign activities that have managed to throw out my back are truly laughable. My back has been sent into violent spasms over...

-teeth brushing

-plugging in a lamp

-picking up my car keys from off the floor

-filling my car up with gas

The past few days, after all the lifting at Kaitlin and Jon’s new house, the back has been quivering between good and evil. Every move I make, I am aware of it. I can feel the muscles tighten and loosen back there and every thing I feel makes me suspicious of its intentions. It will probably work its way out on its own. It usually does. But I did resort to taking a muscle relaxer last night to be on the safe side. May do it again tonight.

So yeah...Dad had it right 30 years ago. He hurt his back when he was in the Navy during WWII on a ship somewhere near Guadalcanal, and it gave him fits for the rest of his life. But, I take great comfort in the fact that when my Dad was 80 he was still putting in a garden every year...by himself! But it was so like my father to give it to me straight, no sugarcoating—“Your back is going to give you trouble for the rest of your life!” That’s just the way he was. Mom, too. They parented us with very little regard for our tender feelings. They were in the truth telling business. If I wanted a feel-good story I could watch Mr. Rogers. None of this, “Everything is gonna be alright” nonsense. Nope, tough luck about your back there, Son! By today’s standards I suppose it sounds a little harsh, and maybe it was. But I would give almost anything to have them both back. I don’t know about you but I need someone who I can always count on to tell me the truth. Don’t you?

2020 Ennui

2020 has now managed to slog its way into December. COVID is not only still with us, it appears to be ascendant. There is a vaccine on its way, but public confidence in it, along with everything else coming from government officials, seems at an all-time low. We are witnessing a poisonous and petulant transition of power never before seen in American politics. Our new President looks more frail with each passing day, and the old President seems hellbent on blowing everything up on his way out. I returned to the office yesterday to a death claim and more bad COVID news. It is fair to say that I find myself fighting against a rising tide of depression.

That probably sounds more dramatic than I intended. The fact that I feel a bit depressed is no bombshell. Life is full of highs and lows. Not every season is filled with triumphs. There are times in life when events conspire against you. That’s just the way life works. You grind through the dark times and eventually the sun breaks through the clouds. It has always been this way for me and I think for most people. This just happens to be one of the dark moments. When you’re essentially an optimist, having a pessimistic outlook is disconcerting. It catches you off guard, feels foreign, as if your mind has been invaded by an enemy. 

But, I will power through this at some point. I always have in the past. Good COVID news would help. A couple of good productive weeks at work would help. Good things happening to people I love would help the most. I have much to be thankful for. The blessings I have experienced in my life make a very long list. So, you can’t fairly complain when you experience a few setbacks, especially when those setbacks are beyond your control. This is the last I will speak of this in this space. Nobody wants to read about someone else's problems. All of you have plenty of your own problems, right?

Why do mermaids wear seashells?

Because she outgrew her b shells.

Wonder Woman

Spending an entire week helping your daughter move in to a new home is unlike a Maine vacation in one significant way...I actually lost weight. Apparently, packing and unpacking boxes, cleaning and moving furniture, burns more calories than fishing, sitting around a camp fire, and drinking beer. Who knew?

We are back after a week in Columbia, delighted to have slept in our king size bed last night, and so thoroughly proud of Jon and Kaitlin we can hardly stand it. Their new house is beautiful and, for the moment, clean. There’s only one room that remains unfinished—the study— and even that is coming along nicely. We even put up the tree before we left...

At this point I should probably stop using the term we, since although we all put in our fair share of labor, this entire enterprise would have been an unmitigated disaster without...Pam Dunnevant. It is almost impossible to overemphasize just how indispensable she was to the successful completion of this mission. Everyone has their own work style. Some people require supervision to stay on track, others work best when given a list, etc...but my wife thrives in chaos, and this skill is a dramatic thing to behold in action. From the time we pulled into their old driveway on Sunday afternoon until we crawled out of their new one Saturday morning, she was like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a Teamster foreman. Whether it was her down on her hands and knees scrubbing a stubborn spot on the bathroom floor, or packing up an entire kitchen by herself, or throwing together delicious meals for everyone every night, she was the queen bee around which the rest of us merely buzzed. It was an amazing performance that had all of us glancing at each other asking, Who is this woman, and when is she gonna crash? But, she never did. She would be forgiven for sleeping until noon this morning...but she won’t.

I had my moments. Friday, I was given a list of five objectives for the day. I love having a list. I finished everything by 2 o’clock in the afternoon, but my best moment of the week came later that afternoon when the internet guy showed up to hook the house up to the World Wide Web. This guy was very tall, wore his mask on his chin and was a dead ringer for Snoop Dog. We all understood roughly 25% of what he said, which made it difficult to determine how to proceed with his directives. Eventually we were able to make out the fact that unless he could gain access to the walk-in crawl space under the house he could not continue. The door was locked and Jon, who was at work, had the only key. Snoop was about to pack up and leave when a skill I learned during my misspent youth came back to me at the perfect time. I ran into the back yard, retrieved an old expired credit card from my wallet I keep for just this purpose, and slid it between the lock and the door knob and DING, I was in! We retrieved Snoop before he was able to make his escape, he was able to hook up the internet and everyone lived happily ever after.

But, my wife was the thing this week. Amazing. 

Moving Day

Today is the big day. The moving van guys show up at 9:00. Over the last two days we have packed up tons of boxes, and filled my car up with five loads of them. We have mopped floors, cleaned bathrooms, vacuumed carpets...and have the sore hamstrings and tight backs to prove it. I have endured the soul-crushing traffic on the aptly named, Hardscrabble Road, ten times in two days. In the four years that Jon and Kaitlin have lived in this rental house, the aforementioned city street has been under construction, and in those four years I have yet to determine to what end. Honestly, there are several traffic cones that have spider webs on them. Still, after 48 months of pointless destruction and the eternal meanderings of menacing earth moving equipment, the road still gets reduced to one lane during the peak traffic hours of each day. The guy who holds the sign that says STOP on one side and SLOW on the other was a teenager when we first met. Now he has a receding hairline and a beer gut. But...I digress.

First item of business this morning will feature me taking Jackson across town to a friend’s house for a play date with a husky puppy. These friends are the same ones who will be bringing us our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, just two of the amazing people that make up Jon and Kaitlin’s life group from Midtown Church. If Jackson makes it over there without throwing up all over the inside of my Cadillac I will consider it a major victory and a giant middle finger to 2020. 

Two jokes:

Hear about the Pharmaceutical company that has combined a laxative with alphabet soup?

They call it....Letter Rip.

What do you call a long line of men waiting for a haircut?

A barberque.

Oh...and then there’s this:

So great. The perfect photograph for 2020, right here. Taken somewhere in London, I think. This brave women, with a crude handmade sign, sums up what’s really going on out there. You might be asking, Yes, but the cop’s hat is blocking out some crucial information. Really? I don’t think so. Do you honestly need any other information besides Electr and Microwave to know that this woman has hit the proverbial nail on the head? Just when we were getting close to stumbling on the truth about the...microwave thing...along comes COVID. How convenient. Coincidence? This woman doesn’t think so. And she took the time to make a really cool sign to let the rest of us in on the truth that the big shots at the power companies and the big shots at the microwave companies don’t want us to know. There’s biological damage, for the love of God! 

Nostalgia and the Big Move

In the Beginning . . .

After much badgering from my family and with crucial technological help from them I am launching this Blog.  It is my intention to record my observations about life as they come to me and as I am  inspired to write. The subjects will cover a broad range of topics from minor daily frustrations to the more profound issues of government, politics and religion. I claim no special wisdom or educational credentials. I am simply a college educated business owner with a wife, kids and a mortgage who happens to have a large library. With all that reading comes the conceit that I might be smarter than the average bear and maybe the world could benefit from my insights. However, having just written that sentence it occurs to me just how vain it sounds so ...I take it back. The world will do perfectly fine without my brilliance. 

  I feel it only fair to declare my biases at the beginning of this adventure.  I am 52, an unapologetic baseball fan, suspicious of anything "big" such as BIG business, BIG government, BIG deals...all are inherently dangerous, a lover of family and being a father, passionate about dogs, especially golden retrievers like Molly.  I also love music that is well written and well performed as it is one of the few things that has the power to bring me to tears.  My personal tastes range from classical through earlier country through the blues and rock and roll and then abruptly end at disco and rap.  Its as if music died with the Beatles..although Ben Folds is clever and there are random contemporary artists that I enjoy. I also much prefer the company of younger people to older ones. On subjects political I lean Libertarian..on matters religious I am Christian.  

So that about covers the biases.  Keep these in mind as you read the many opinionated rants to come.

Above is the very first post in The Tempest, published ten years ago. Amazing and quite encouraging that so much of it is still true, with the glaring exception of the fact that I am no longer 52. Alert readers will notice the smaller font size. My eyes worked better then!

On this Lord’s day Pam and I are leaving for Columbia, South Carolina to spend the week moving Kaitlin and Jon into their first house! Thanksgiving will be a working vacation. But we are indeed thankful for them both and excited to be able to help. Pictures to follow!

The Desire to be Heard

I have been at this for ten years now. 2,300 times I have typed out my thoughts and published them in this space. The Tempest has served as a platform to share my thoughts and opinions with anyone willing to read them. It has been part creative outlet, part opinion column and part confessional. It has also been a sometimes unfortunate public record of the many occasions where I have been wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly. Prior to The Tempest I produced 14 leather bound journals, 19 years of such thoughts which were private, for my own consumption. I’m not sure what to make of it all, what it says about me that I feel compelled to write things down. Part of it is my belief that history is important, the proper understanding of which can be the world’s best teacher. Part of it is the notion that when I am gone perhaps my children and grandchildren will find my recollections instructive, or at the least interesting. I wonder what Dad thought about Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, gay marriage, the designated hitter rule? It’s all in there. Did Pops ever doubt himself? Was he ever afraid? Yes and yes. You can look it up.

But the real reason for The Tempest has become clear to me recently. Human beings all come with various desires baked in to their DNA, a survival instinct, sexual attraction, flight or fight etc. One of the strongest instinctive desires is often overlooked, the the desire to be heard. Look around  and you will see this desire being played out all around you, the quest to be heard and understood. I recognize it in every street protest, every Facebook argument, every long line at the voting booth. I even see it in places of great violence, where all self discipline has been lost. Riots are at their essence a misshapen scream to be heard gone horribly wrong, producing the polar opposite effect in the listener. All we see is the destruction, everything else gets downed out.

I see this desire to be heard and understood in every single divorce I have ever encountered. Although there may have been other reasons, practically every person I have ever talked to about their divorce says something like... He just never listened to me. She never heard me, never tried to understand.

So, I continue to write. For me it’s always been great fun, almost a habit, but always therapeutic. The best part about a blog is that nobody is forced to indulge me. If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, you are free to ignore the post. Also, if you disagree with what I write you are free to register your disagreement in the Comments section. That way, you get to be heard too. The popularity of The Tempest has waxed and waned over the past ten years. There have been times when everything I have posted gets devoured by lots of people, but then there are also times when most of what I write gets totally ignored. You can’t take it personally and I never do. It’s an odd fact that after ten years I still can’t predict with any reliable accuracy which it will be...which is just as well since writing to maximize clicks would be the death knell of this blog. The rule here has always been that I write about things I care about, never what I think the reader might care about. Hence, all my baseball rants.

But, to all of you who have taken the time to read for the past ten years, especially you devoted few who read everything, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.