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Zeno’s Race To The Vaccine Bunch of friends tried to help me get a vaccine appointment today. I got leads on almost half a dozen possible locations/companies/mass vaccination sites. I love my friends! Were any available where I was pointed to? Not a single one. It seems by the time knowledge gets to me, however it does, they’re already booked solid. But I really do appreciate the thought. I’ve had some almost excessively good luck in my life. But there are these recurring situations where I am always falling through the cracks. My love life for example. Mental health not being so great, but not so bad as to warrant any support. Not artsy enough to be taken seriously as an artist, and not nerdy enough to be taken seriously as a computer professional. I tend to bore people and I get talked over a lot. I feel most of the time like I’m some sort of misplaced inventory. Like I’m really not supposed to be here. This seems to be another one of those things. February 25th, 2021 Life In A Plague Reality Show… I’m out for my evening walk as I’m desperately trying to stay active in some limited fashion while trying to avoid the plague, and and I’m thinking that either this plague or social isolation is going to get me, one or the other, and suddenly I realize Firesign Theater only played the last half of that show Beat The Reaper…the part where one lucky contestant has to guess what fatal disease they have, and Beeeet The Reaper! But the first half is a dozen lucky contestants get to run through a spray mist of some deadly disease and race to get the vaccine. 12 lucky contestants, but only 6 doses of vaccine! But it’s okay dear friends, because the odds of actually contracting this weeks’ disease is only 50-50. Last week it was Ebola and almost all our lucky contestants managed to Beat The Reaper. Let’s have a big round of applause for this week’s lucky contestants! (music plays) Who knows what this week’s racers will have to face. Maybe they’ll make it to the shots in time! They’ll only find out when they get to the vaccine station and try to grab a seat before the others do. Maybe the rest won’t even catch the disease! (Clock music plays…) Oh I’m sorry…you didn’t Beat The Reaper. But aren’t they a swell bunch of contestants. (music plays) Let’s let them see the consolation prize, brought to us here on Beat The Reaper by our favorite sponsor, Ralph Spoilsport coffins…the World’s Largest New Used and Used New coffins here in the city of (deep breath) emphysema. Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous coffin…star studded mud guards, chrome fender dents, wire wheel spoke coffin dollies, two-way sneeze through air vents, sponge coated edible coffin handles, fully factory equipped satin cushions from our fully factory equipped satin cushioned factory. Yes dear friends it’s a beautiful coffin with doors to match! Birtch’s Blacklist says this coffin was Stolen, but for you dear friends complete price: only two-thousand-ninety-five hundred dollars in easy monthly payments of twenty dollars a week twice a week and never on Sunday! (music plays…audience applause) Why isn’t this a reality show we can watch now? It’ll be a ratings hit! Oh wait… December 16th, 2020 Winter Driving Tip A co-worker put this up on her Facebook page…
Auto-Correct strikes again! But this actually works. Pretend you have a lovely quadruple decker frosted layer cake on the front seat you just spent big bucks on for someone’s birthday… November 27th, 2020 Great Deals Are Out There! Black Friday Shoppers: We’ve reduced the mileage on this fabulous vehicle ONE DAY ONLY!!! Hurry before this offer ends!
Stolen from a Mercedes page I follow on Facebook. Black Friday is an Even Better day to stay cocooned at home than either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Plague or no. June 10th, 2020 From Our Department Of Imponderable Things Continuing my Facebook Memories from my Disney World Vacation of 2015…this final snapshot flew by this morning… At least this blog doesn’t throw the past back in my face unless I go looking for it. How do things go from all warm smiles and cheerful carefree conversation to mutually assured friendship destruction in just under a year? I appreciate that I can be intense and hard to handle from time to time, but by 2015 he’d already know that and we were still good. I have close friends who know me from our grade school days and they’re all use to me. I get exuberant. I get moody. I get quiet. I will talk your ears off. Yeah I chatted with him a bunch in email. But he always answered back. He seemed to like hearing from me. Like when I passed him technical details of the German diesel emissions scandal, or that Youtube of a couple guys drinking German beer laced with helium. He loved it. I geek out about things that interest me. But they interested him too. We had so many mutual interests. Space. Technology. Current events…we were on the same page there. Sometimes he’d tell me to just get to the point. Everybody tells me that. I don’t just explain things, I tell stories. Discovery is the joy of life. The journey is the point too. I wear my heart on my sleeve. He’d seen all that since high school. He saw sides of me that nobody else sees. He knew me. Either he was faking it, and every smile he ever gave me, or something really got to him that spring in 2016. I can’t believe he was faking it. None of my theories add up. He just blew up at me. And I did too because it wasn’t fair. And that was that. I’ll probably never know what it was. Maybe if he’d told me what it was I would have stayed home that time and let it pass and we’d still be talking. Maybe. But it’s probably for the best. That’s a really small comfort zone you have there.
April 19th, 2020 What Pollen Should Have Already Taught Us About Touching Your Face Wrote a very important letter today, and went to mail it off. Once outside I see that my car is covered in pollen. It’s that time of year here in the Mid Atlantic. I’m thinking as I get into the car that not touching your face and eyes with your fingers should be standard operating procedure during pollen season anyway… March 29th, 2020 I Love My City Took a socially safe walk around my little Baltimore neighborhood. It’s grey and damp and chilly this morning, but at least for now while we’re allowed outside I need my walks. It’s not hard to stay a safe distance from everyone. Most folks outside these days are walking their dogs. This was new…
My first thought was somebody’s trying to upstage one of Hampden’s neighborhood easter eggs, the legendary David Bowie bust. I’ll keep a watch to see if the window dressing changes. I love my city.. February 8th, 2020 Smartass Phone Listening to my iTunes library while doing my cardio therapy workout. I queue up the Swing playlist. While I’m on the most difficult (for me) machine, the iPhone helpfully starts playing Glenn Miller’s take on Song Of The Volga Boatmen. December 4th, 2019 Dear Apple…Please Stop… I’m listening to The Warsaw Concerto on the iPhone. It’s lovely Rachmaninoff-esq music (it was actually composed for a movie whose director initially wanted to use Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto but the copyright holder wouldn’t allow it. So he hired composer Richard Addinsell, to do something in the style of Rachmaninoff. The movie isn’t well known, but the piece by Addinsell is now a part of the classical music canon. Anyway…it’s the sort of lovely beautiful, evocative romantic music I get in the mood for sometimes. Like the other night…and I’m doing the dishes and I’m zoning out to the music and occasionally swiping back to the beginning of the piece and listening to it again (it’s not really a full blown concerto, it just calls itself that…) and then the iPhone makes a sound and I look at the screen and there’s a popup window. I don’t have my reading glasses on and all I can make out are the words… Your First Love… Well all sorts of things went through my head and I scrambled around to find my reading glasses and by the time I got them on the popup had vanished. I looked in the notifications center. Nothing. I checked my mailbox. I checked my Facebook app. I checked my Twitter app. I checked every app I could think of that might give me a notification. I couldn’t find it. It began to feel like some existential message from a digital Twilight Zone about how completely I’ve failed in love. Hello Bruce, here’s a message from Your First Love! Whoops…not quick enough. Now it’s gone. Vanished into the mists of digital infinity. Now you’ll never know what it was. Still the same dweeb you were as a teenage boy aren’t you? Now here’s your daily reminder to fill out your timesheet! Before going down to the art room bar to pour myself a drink I decided, just on the off chance that it was some weird new iPhone Apple thing, to google “ios your first love”. Jackpot. It’s the damn music app. I must have touched the heart icon whilst rewinding the music I was playing. That wasn’t nice Apple. #singleoldgaymaleproblems March 25th, 2019 Coincidence? I Think Not… I subscribe to MeUndies. I like the fit and the material, and it’s one less thing I have to buy at the store. But mostly what I like about MeUndies is the fun, colorful new patterns they come up with every month. Raised in a gloomy Yankee Baptist household where disapproval at anything smacking of personal vanity was always in the air, nearly all my life since I left the nest I’ve been trying to give myself permission to…well…just be myself. I like color in my wardrobe, even the parts not generally visible in public. Well…except for my blue jeans. Blue jeans must be blue. It’s tradition. But I want color everywhere else. Ask me about the electric blue streak I sat in the chair for three and a half hours to get in my hair. Lately I’ve taken to wearing a bandanna hanging out a back pocket again, like I used to when I was a younger guy, only now I get ti-dyed bandannas, partly to confuse anyone who thinks I might be signalling something (ask me how much I Hate that damn hankie code!) , but mostly because I like the idea of tie-dyed bandannas. Next winter I swear I’m going to buy some new flannel shirts like I do every winter, but this time I’m going to bleach them white and then tie-dye them. So…anyway…the Very Day before I got on my train to Florida and Walt Disney World, MeUndies sends me a new pair with their latest pattern… Llamas. They sent me Llama underwear. Well of course I wore it to my Biergarten dinner reservation.
Dude, it’s hilarious. You’re hilarious. Good thing you’re not reading my blog or this post might piss you off. July 17th, 2018 Desert Hiking Safety Kit There’s a joke I heard once on the Johnny Carson show late one night. It was one of those 1960s lounge lizard sort of jokes and Ed McMahon was telling it. So it went: one way to never get lost in the desert is to pack along stuff you’d need to make a good martini. If you find suddenly that you’ve lost your way, just unpack the martini fixing and start making yourself a good martini. Sure enough someone will come along, tap you on the shoulder and tell you no, no, that’s not the way to make a martini. As I said, a lounge lizard joke. But nine year old Baptist kid me still thought it was funny, and I still do. You can alter the joke in many ways and still get the same punchline. Take your laptop computer with you out into the desert. If you get lost take it out and begin typing out a vigorous defense or brutal criticism of The Last Jedi. Sure enough someone will come along, tap you on the shoulder, and begin arguing with you about it. Which brings me to the perfect margarita. For me that’s what I first heard was called a Godfather Margarita. I first tasted one years ago at a place in DC called Alero. It was Wonderful! From then on it was my go-to margarita. But all I knew about it from the menu was it had Amaretto in it. For years off and on I’ve been trying to figure out how to make one at home, and failing miserably each time. Several weeks ago, at Bar Louie’s, on a hunch I asked the barmaid if she could make me a margarita but swap out Cointreau for Amaretto. She did…and that was it! Perfect! Good thing I was taking the light rail that day. So I went back to work, fiddling with classic margarita recipes, and failing miserably. Nothing I did at home seemed to work. When I tried just swapping out the Cointreau for Amaretto they all tasted horrible. Long story short, what I finally figured out is most bars don’t make you a classic margarita, which according to the Received Knowledge is just tequila, lime juice and either simple syrup or agave. They’re using sweet and sour mix instead because that’s what they have mixed up for making drinks. So I tried using sweet and sour sauce and it clicked. Finally. My perfect margarita. Here it is: 2 parts tequila. I use Tres Generaciones blanco, but any good top shelf tequila will do. I am convinced now that the reason tequila has such a bad reputation in this country is Cuervo. No Steely Dan, the Cuervo Gold does not make this night a wonderful thing. Treat your fling a little better and they might come back for more. 1 part Amaretto. Note: Disaronno is NOT Amaretto. They seem to be really good and obtaining shelf space at the liquor store, but they don’t make Amaretto. Amaretto is made with almond infusion. They can’t even call it Amaretto on the label anymore, probably because some Italian rule says unless it’s made with almonds it can’t be called that. I use Lazzaroni, and drink that by itself on the rocks from time to time and it’s Very nice. Try a real Amaretto once and you’ll see the difference immediately. Way more flavorful. 1 1/2 parts sweet and sour sauce. Ice. Combine in shaker, shake well. Serve over ice. Is this a strong drink? Yes it is. So…no driving afterward, please. Have one at home with a nice cheese plate. And if enough people object that this is not the way to make a good margarita, I will definitely take the fixings with me when I go hiking in the desert. April 21st, 2018 Wait…Where’s That Light Coming From..?? Note to self: remember to take off your nice new wristwatch with those really really bright phosphorous hands and numbers, before you go into the darkroom… April 8th, 2018 Don’t I Feed You Enough?? Feline love. I have the front door opened and the outer storm door closed to let more sunlight in. I look up from my lunch to see the neighborhood calico on my doorstep looking in. So I walk over thinking she would like some food and maybe some fresh water. But…no. She’s presented me with another offering of dead bird…the fourth one in two weeks. Feathers are everywhere on my front porch, and the fresh kill right on my doorstep. As I open the door she fixes me with that unnervingly steady cat gaze. Where’s all that cat food coming from…how come I never see you kill anything…here, let me show you how it’s done… Yes dear…I know you love me. Another one I have to give a proper burial to in my garden. As I wrap the bird up I wonder if Klingons leave the dead bodies of their enemies at the doors of their boy/girl friends as a token of love…
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Visit The Woodward Class of '72 Reunion Website For Fun And Memories, WoodwardClassOf72.com
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