CSotD: Monday Short Takes
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Harry Bliss makes the hair on my neck stand up.
Thank god I live alone and don't have to be told how to tie off a garbage bag. Or maybe not wanting to be told how to tie off a garbage bag is why I live alone.
But this is the point where I release the bag, let it drop down into the trash bin, walk out of the room, flip on ESPN and become uncommunicative.
Which is the wrong choice.
You're not supposed to avoid talking about things.
You're also wrong to stay to talk about it, because, if you simply contradict and say that your way of doing it works just fine, that's confrontational.
And, if instead of doing that, you explain why you tie off the garbage sack the way you do, that's "mainsplaining." Dear God, we can't have "mansplaining."
This may have hit me harder because it came on a Monday, and so came after a weekend of watching football and therefore of commercials that rely on schlub humor, in which irresponsible, childlike men have to be manipulated into getting the muffins for a breakfast they hadn't remembered, and in which football coverage is continually interrupted to remind us that "Kevin Can Wait" is America's #1 New Comedy.
(Which I think means it has aired twice and follows "The Big Bang Theory" in which time slot "Sunrise Semester" would be a ratings giant.)
Anyway, this hangdog asshole tanked his family's insurance rates, but he's a good guy and accepts the fact that he is an incompetent and does everything wrong.
Though, if he wants to feel guilty, he could admit he should have looked into accident forgiveness and found that Liberty Mutual is far from the only insurance carrier that offers it and that it isn't part of their default package, either.
But that would have entailed mansplaining.
Better to just suck it up and be the fool who ruined everything. He probably suggested State Farm in the first place. Thank god he married a wise and competent woman.
And I've never understood why things like antiquing and family get-togethers have to happen on Sunday rather than Saturday in the fall, which form of planning, by the way, already assumes that Dear Old Dad doesn't deserve to be asked for input before such things are arranged.
The joke here is that he should have gotten on the boat. So he's still doing it wrong.
Meanwhile …
Mother Goose and Grimm reminds me of how grateful I am that I don't have a Jack Russell, given the lack of activity around here this summer.
Though our previous routine had been a full-fledged trip to the park each morning and several mile-or-so walks elsewhere in the day, he's a hound and thus happy with whatever fragments of that can be captured. As I write, he's snoozing on the couch.
If I had a Jack Russell or a border collie, I'd have to put him on Doggie Downers to get through all this, but, fortunately, I left hyperactive dogs behind when I ran out of little boys to keep them stimulated.
Incidentally, Mike Peters has an exhibit happening at the Billy Ireland in November, and, if you can't wait for that, here's an interview I did with him back at the dawn of time.
And finally
For all that today began with "nobody understands me," here's Rhymes With Orange truly tapping into a major part of my youth.
We had big yards, in part because we could and in part because the farther back to the woods you cut, the farther away from the house the mosquitoes gathered, and we had some prodigious games of not-quite-baseball.
There was a baseball field, too, only a fair ball down the rightfield line was a ground rule double and everyone on both teams had to go into the woods to find it.
But that field was for big kids and for big kids who brought their little brothers and sisters and had to be responsible for them, and so games there weren't nearly as frequent as just setting up in the yard with the plastic bat and whatever ball was appropriate and whoever was available.
As I recall, use of the actual Whiffleball was limited to times when you had five or six people, some of whom were five or six. A sponge-rubber ball was too heavy and would damage the bat. The favored missile was a tennis ball, assuming you had at least one outfielder, two infielders and a pitcher.
But, whatever the ball, whatever the team lineup, Ghost Runner #1 was the All-Star.
Random memory: One of those games at the semi-real ball field included about a dozen of us, plus a very little brother, who was content to eat an apple and take a very little brother role in the game. At his age, however, "eat an apple" meant to skin it and discard the rest, and at one point, I managed to glove the white orb he had left on the ground, take it out to the mound and serve it up to the next batter.
The result was applesauce all over the infield and everybody bent over in laughter except the fellow who was furious, since it surely would have been a home run if it hadn't been an apple. Good times!
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