I Have No Life

I try to keep busy even though I have apparently reached a point in my life where I don't have to do anything at all, if I don't want to. Well, except take showers and stuff like that.

Yesterday was Monday, so since that is "pancake day" I drove to Independence and had sausage and eggs and pancakes at the Englewood Cafe.  I always sit in Denise's section, because I've known her since the Eighties when she was a waitress at her dad's restaurant and I was a telephone repairman and frequented the place for my coffee breaks. Denise's daughter works there, too. I remember when she was a baby and Denise would bring her into her dad's place on her day off.

Englewood Cafe is the kind of place, by the way, where you frequently get involved in conversations taking place at other tables. I'm not sure just what the cues are, but at some point you just feel free to chime in. It seems odd, but, then, you just don't go there if you don't feel like you could tolerate that. Plus people walking to the register might toss their newspaper down on your table if they're done with them. Yesterday I found an old friend and sat at his table, and by the time that conversation was over, it was almost time for lunch. I drove to Walmart to buy an SD card for my camera, then back downtown to figure out if I wanted a baloney sandwich created from my rich store of food stuffs rattling around in the icebox in my apartment/loft. (Opted for a breakfast burrito at the coffee shop.)

I went for a walk and wound up downtown and got about two miles in.

Today is Tuesday. Wednesday I meet some old ex-phone company employees for our weekly breakfast. Tuesday is "open." 

My son asked to borrow a camera because he wants to learn how to use a DSLR before he goes to Iceland.  His cell phone pics are always interesting, so this should be good. He sent me a picture of his dog taken with the camera I gave him, which gave me an opportunity to explain how the white area caused the camera to under-expose the entire picture just a little. I photoshopped the levels back up to show him how to do that.

Not so Novel an Idea

f you ever took Psych 101 in college, then you were exposed to all those "studies" that revealed one thing or another about human nature, or maybe we should say human behavior, (depending,) and at the time we weren't holding them to too high a scientific standard, but just sort of sucked it all in, as if they were strangely pertinent Von Daniken works, or Yogic revelations, or even the horoscope section below the funnies, (despite the disclaimer that it was presented purely for its entertainment value and held no scientific basis in fact.) I remember a lot of them and dredge them out once in awhile, more or less as I am reminded of them, like old jokes.

There was the one about the Irish railway workers who of course drank beer all the time while working, or at the very least at noon, and the owners wanted to know, OK, just how many cups of beer can you drink before the beer stops making you work better, and starts making you work worse. Was it seven.  Eight?  Lo and behold, they were shocked to find that productivity dropped off after the very first beer!  Oops.

Similarly, college students who were routinely cramming for tests the following morning might want to know the same thing about how coffee consumption affected fact retention. The results of that study were a little more generous, for "they" found that memory retention and cognitive abilities increased as coffee was consumed, but only up to about seven cups, where things started to drop off. Believe me, some of us were just as dismayed about that result as were the Irish rail workers and their study. It is probably noteworthy that the subjects of the coffee test were college students--the same people who could drink beer and get progressively drunk over the course of an entire evening before the crash--I will always suspect we would have done better on that beer test even though the benchmark may have been how many spikes can you sledge hammer into a railroad tie per minute.

What does it all mean? They didn't teach us that, but I wonder if in the case of these two studies, one or the other of them holds the key to writing novels.

You know, maybe.

Stick With ME

I hope that by jumping around to all the different blogs, and then to Wordpress, that I didn't lose anybody. I remembered why I don't like wordpress, which is that at least in the free versions of their templates, you don't have enough control over them. Sure, there may have been some way to get around that, or there was something I didn't know about, but WP and I just don't click.

This is my blog and I'm sticking with it.

But, uhm, I have nothing to say at this time. Maybe later.   -R

So Far So Good

I would hesitate to brag that I made a New Year's resolution--how mundane--but I kind of did, which was to start writing more, in this blog, at least, and hopefully even more. But, gee, is it the 5th already? New Year's whut?? OK OK I'm here now. The trouble is mainly that my life has been pretty boring lately.

I've been wearing myself out recovering from "multiple illnesses," (a phrase I hope doesn't catch on,) and running in fear of the latest thing--a 24 hour stomach ailment that is so bad people are confusing it with food poisoning. Right at this moment I was tempted, for a few seconds, to recount all the gory details here.  Boy that would give me something to write about.  But it's a long story, and actually quite boring really, unless you're the one going through it, and, if you are, you'd probably rather forget it.

Changing doctors. I've moved, of course, and now both my primary care doc and my cardio doc are way too far away. I could live with that, but then my primary care doc got snippy with me when I told him I had googled the medication he was prescribing to me and it sounded kind of scary. He walked out of the room, in fact, so I didn't get to explain my concern to him--all I was really trying to do was elicit some sort of reassurance, maybe an explanation about the warnings. At any rate, all this made me feel like my doctor and I were not able to communicate effectively, and maybe it's time to move on.

And all this makes me realize I think about my health too much. Not that you shouldn't think about your health at all, but, you know, old people. 

The loft is comfortable. I don't even mind hanging out in here when it's too cold to go outside. I'm binge-watching all five seasons of The Twilight Zone.  The episodes are a mixture of dated cliches (some originating right there on the show) and some cutting edge stuff that still holds up. I've written three guitar pieces, but still nothing on the . . . er . . . literary front. Meanwhile, the trains go by, paralleling the river, back and forth--it's really kind of amazing to think of the amount of freight that rolls by every day--and the river is gradually getting more and more clogged up with ice floes. Intellectually, I know, I realize, the days are getting longer now, but I still wake up in the dark every morning.

I woke up in time to see the moon setting. 

Mainly Just My Writing Exercise

Again I looked back at my saved documents and read some of my old blog posts from 2005.  By the way, I'm still fighting that tendency to regard any date that starts with 2,000 as "the future," due to many years of conditioning. But to get real, that, (2005,) was twelve years ago. Long time. Sure it's merely the span of time covering the end of my work career and then my retirement so far, but it's also the amount of time I spent between birth and junior high school.  Long time.

Anyway, I recorded in one post that my wife, when asked by me when she was going to make breakfast one Saturday morning, replied, "probably not as early as you hoped, but sooner than you feared." I really miss her.  Not to mention, she was a great cook, so whenever she did make breakfast, it was worth the wait.

When I moved out of my house, I found that I was the owner of tons of cooking utensils and decided I didn't want to have to move them with me. I donated anything whose purpose I didn't understand and kept the rest, but now, what I actually use is just the tip of a giant ceramic and copper and stainless steel iceberg. I am such a bad cook that I go beyond the bachelor archetype into the realm of the pathetic. I'm keeping all the stuff because I think that one day I'll get around to learning what to do with it.

I carefully go over my lab numbers when I get them back every three months to make sure I'm not depleting myself somehow, but I seem to be doing OK. Speaking of the future, where's that pill to replace eating?  Just kidding. I kind of like eating.

Uhm, That Last Post . . .

I just read that last post, and my conclusion is that perhaps there is some sort of medication, or therapy, that can help. And yet,  a very tenuous and sort of vulnerable thread of logic ran through it and down the page that the astute reader might cling to and slow their fall.

Moving on. Every year we talk about the same stuff regarding the beginning of a new year, no matter how we mark it, whether it be by a number on a calendar or by some fortuitous orientation of planetary bodies. Obviously the calendrical year starts at a point close to the Winter Solstice, as if it tried to represent the planetary alignment thing, but sort of failed at perfect precision and accuracy, so it makes sense to me to observe the planetary method and leave the calendrical methodology to the IRS.

And every year I make the same observation that time, and life, etc., is really more like a meandering path than a circle, and the movement of the planets through the universe backs me up on this, because as the Earth orbits around the Sun in a relatively consistant cycle, the entire solar system is also moving through space since the Milky Way Galaxy (in which we reside) is rotating even as it simultaneously shoots away from the center of creation, so you might imagine the Earth's actual path to be a sort of crazy smeary corkscrew motion, which also verifies another idea of mine that if you know too much, you'll go nuts.

Every year we try to change. The cyclical nature of the year lends itself to the idea that the "new" year is a clean slate, and therefore we have the opportunity to change ourselves (for the better, of course,) or maybe not just the opportunity, but the permission, you might say, maybe something like when you move to a new town where no one knows you and if you decide to totally change your haircut, who's to know?

Every year, we generally fail. I think it's because you can't change. I think a better strategy, if you're not happy with what's going on, is to stay yourself--you've been that way for awhile now and are probably getting pretty good at it--but change the way that you do it. That's something you have control over. 

To sum up:

1.) Pay your taxes.

2.) Try to ignore the fact that the planet Earth is plummeting headlong into an icy oblivion.

3.) Be yourself.

4.) As always, as Mel Brooks said, live with the idea that being alive should be the exact opposite of being dead.

5.)  Have a happy new year.

Fugitive Time

I was amazed to find that I still have, on my hard drive, a document full of posts I made in an old blog from about ten or twelve years ago. I'm glad I saved that stuff--I imagine I deleted the blog but didn't want to lose what I had written--but I confess there's a little of the Flowers for Algernon plot twist going on. I almost didn't recognize the writing. I only vaguely remembered writing each of the posts, but not at all the inspiration for some of the humor in them. I was quite good!  This stuff was all written during the last good, productive years of my career, before the downward spiraling tail end, and, I read, I was starting to think about retiring, without a definite plan yet, but thinking it might be a good idea. Sometimes relishing an idea is better than the actual execution of it.

Now, if I may beat an idiomatic expression just a little deeper into the ground, fast forward to 2017. Here I am, totally without plan or direction, even eight years into my retirement. By the way, eight years??  It seems so much longer than that. Is that a good thing? Time flies when you're having fun, but at least the good news is that I am ageing faster and faster.  The bad news is, that's not good news.

So.  The passage of time.  It's problematic.  Not in the way climbing a mountain might be problematic, but in the way you fall off a log. You never forget how to pass the time. It's like riding a bicycle, or falling off a log.

I keep writing and writing, in this post, but I can't seem to climb out of this hole. What I'm getting at, I think, is that we are good at thinking about stuff that helps us survive. Our brains do some things really well without us ever having to try try very hard. Like recognizing faces, even though as we've all been told a zillion times it is such a data-dense operation that even supercomputers have a difficult time of it, or like remembering where objects are,  We are so good at that that we invented a memory trick method where we pretend to place facts in a make-believe room in our minds.

But we are really bad at solving more than one problem at a time, or rather, figuring out a problem whose cause is more than one thing.  That really throws us for a loop. Apparently in the evolutionary development of the hominid brain, that situation just didn't come up that often to require a special adaptation to get around it. Don't believe me?  Look at this picture of my mirror, where you can see the mirror image of my watch in it. What time is it?

What does it all mean?  Who knows.  I'm just saying. And, in reality, deciphering the time here is actually the easiest when you figure out the single thing you need to think of when looking at it, rather than the two obvious things that are wrong. How is this like life?  Gawd, I hope not at all.