CSotD: Humpday Afternoon
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A flashback from Dark Side. When I was 12 or so, I used to walk to the hospital each Friday to have my braces tightened and to get a Tommy Tooth lecture. Tightening the braces made my mouth ache for about six hours, but the lecture stuck with me a long time and, after high school, I went several years without seeing a dentist.
The physical pain was never an issue, even when I had to have a tooth filled. But as the horse says, the lectures were agonizing. Dentists have an obligation to promote good oral health, obviously, but there’s a lot of futility in nagging people about things they aren’t going to do.
I knew a guy who flossed several times a day, but he was the sort of person who did everything he was told to do. If the dentist had told him to stand on his head and sing “Old MacDonald” after every meal, he’d have done that.
He reminded me of Tolstoy’s description of Pierre Bezhukov:
He felt as though he were the center of some important and general movement; that something was constantly expected of him, that if he did not do it he would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he did this and that, all would be well; and he did what was demanded of him, but still that happy result always remained in the future.
Eventually he got fired and then his wife left him. But if he’d ever smiled again, it would have shone like silver.
I lost track of the flossing guy before Fitbits came along, but not only do I think he’d have obsessed over getting his steps in, but I’d be willing to bet that, somewhere in this world, he’s doing just that.
I have nothing against physical fitness or oral hygiene, but I think you have to do those things because it’s who you are, not because somebody told you to.
Though if you do it because someone told you to, I guess that’s who you are.
I take the dog out twice a day. Sometimes I walk with her, sometimes I sit and watch her snuffle around or play with her friends. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a full-blown hangover, which seems to be a factor of a changing body, not any moral rectitude on my part.
However, today’s Bliss caught my eye because Paul Simon has explained the derivation of that song, which is about the morning after you’ve been up all night tripping, and you’re not hallucinating anymore but you’re still, well, feeling groovy.
By contrast, nobody with a hangover ever feels any compulsion “to make the morning last.”
One of Suzi’s friends at the park is a retired greyhound named Bert. Sometimes they play a game where she’s a rabbit and Bert pins her to the ground by her throat, which scared the bejabbers out of us the first time, but he’s a kindly gentleman and they both think it’s hilarious.
When she was a puppy, they played a game where he rocketed around the park and she tried to catch him, but it didn’t take long for her to recognize the futility in that. Now she just watches him getting his steps in.
Bert’s a good fellow and I’m glad he’s out of the racing racket, but I do wonder, once the tracks have all been shut down, if anyone will still breed greyhounds? I suppose if there are still pharaoh hounds and salukis, there will always be greyhounds.
Suzi’s hoping so. She has always had a giant crush on Bert.
I’ve heard good things about the new Superman movie, but Krypto wasn’t fluffy. He was some Krytonian short-haired breed, like a white, muscular beagle.
I was surprised to find that Krypto dates back to 1955, because I thought he came along just about the time I was outgrowing Superman and switching to Spidey. But Wikipedia has a whole tendentious explanation of his origins, which is precisely how Superman went off the rails and why I gave up on it.
Kids would write in with questions like “How does Superman cut his hair?” and, instead of suggesting maybe the kid was becoming too old for the comic, they’d invent some totally ridiculous explanation.
I thought having kids outgrow Superman and pick up on Peter Parker’s adolescent angst was not only a reasonable progression but a good way to maintain both very young and not-so-young readers for comics.
But they piled on Superboy and Supergirl and Krypto and Superhorse and Bizarro Superman until the whole franchise became top heavy and you began to wonder if anybody had really died when Krypton exploded.
However, you have to take my criticism in context: I’m still pissed at Dickens for changing the wistful ending of Great Expectations.
To get back on a positive vibe, I love Mary Lou. It helps to remember that she came into the strip as an unwed not-quite-teenaged mother whom Gene befriended and, years later, married, so it makes sense that she doesn’t see herself as the star of their kid’s movie.
She wasn’t the star of their wedding, either, which happened at her dad’s diner.
They say men marry their mothers, and Mary Lou is not all that different from Janis: They’re both level-headed without being humorless, which is an excellent combination.
When I became a dad, the Gender Reveal happened in the delivery room, though I had to fight my way in there, back in ’72 and again in ’76. That was before they put in bleachers so that everyone in the mother’s family and circle of friends could be present.
Upstaging your own kid seems not-okay.
I don’t have a problem with parents finding out the sex of their kid before it’s born, but making a party out of an intimate experience seems weird. My rule is, if you weren’t there when it was conceived, you don’t belong there when it is born.
Meanwhile, until it’s old enough to start dating, its gender is none of anybody’s damn business.
It’s not everybody’s, even then. It never was.
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