A year closer to death

It is, as a good many people here in our happy little burg keep reminding me, my birthday, specifically my 60th birthday,  for those of you who like to keep track of such things. I generally do not keep track of such things, either for myself or for other people; birthdays after age forty are simply an annual reminder that you are now officially one year closer to death. And I especially do not like birthdays that come in years that end with eight, as this means that the number on my age year clicks over to zero. This is an enjoyable experience when you turn ten or twenty; in the first instance it means that you are no longer a little kid, no matter what your mom and dad think, and in the second instance you are a.) no longer a teenager, b.) two years past the point where you can indulge your baser instincts with an adult without penalty of law, and c.) just a year short of being able to drink legally everywhere in the United States; but beyond those two points the accumulating zeroes are just annoying as hell—to find out how annoying, simply ask any woman in her late twenties just how many times she intends to turn twenty-nine before reality forces her to turn thirty—and the fact that I can now take money out of my IRA without accruing sizeable penalties is not making me feel better about reaching this age. 

So I am stuck, it seems. I was going to mark the day by buying a bottle of tequila, going home, and then getting completely hammered, but my coworkers tell me that this is more than vaguely inappropriate for a man of my gathering years and that my head will hurt like a son of a bitch tomorrow morning, so I think I will skip the tequila and just make myself a baloney sandwich instead. I have enough age-appropriate aches and pains without adding new ones to the mix. I do wish, though, that people would stop wishing me a happy birthday; I keep asking that they not do this and they keep insisting on doing it anyway, which is starting to get on my nerves, very frankly. I am waiting for next week, wherein people will stop with the Happy Birthdaying and even the belated Happy Birthdays will go away, and I can be chronologically miserable without everyone's best wishes making me feel even worse.

Apologies

Yes, I know I said that I would have something new here in a week and that it's been almost a month since I posted anything, but I am working on a couple of things here and I will put them up just as soon as I can. I promise. Really, I mean that....you know, I can hear you snickering out there, dammit!

The wave

Yes, my mood has improved greatly over the course of the past twenty-four hours, although I’m not sure why that is, he said lying through his teeth, and thank you for asking.  It’s as if a great wave has washed over me and swept away a multitude of things that annoyed the hell out of me and now I feel clean and refreshed.  Of course, the biggest annoyance of all is still with us and will be until winter of 2017, at which I am seriously considering throwing a humongous party complete with liquor and strippers to celebrate the glorious occasion.  I think it’s a wonderful idea, although my brother tells me that I should make the celebration contingent on no one pretending to come from Westchester coming by to cast a pall on the whole affair.  This strikes me as very sound advice and so I will hold off the actual planning of the annoyance’s retirement until such time that I know it can’t continue to annoy me

Yet another observation...

I think of myself as a fairly well-educated person, if any graduate of the American system of education can actually make that claim, and I like to think that I have a fairly robust vocabulary for a man my age, so it was with no small amount of discomfort that I had to ask what the word spectrophilia meant upon hearing it yesterday for the first time in my life.  Spectrophilia, for those of you who are now as ignorant as I was yesterday, is a sexual attraction to ghosts, goblins, spirits of the decidedly not Scotch variety, and other phenomena of the paranormal. I did not know this was a thing until yesterday, although I suppose I should not be surprised that such an obsession exists.  Kraft-Ebbing was very detailed in its analysis of 19th century sexual obsessions and as time marches on I presume that the need to find new ways to obsess about sex must march on as well.  After all, buggering bunnies, like Putin's foreign policy, is so 1875 that it isn't even funny anymore. And nowadays we have cute vampires for the teenaged girls to thrill to and zombies for the teenaged boys to mow down with their Xboxes, so an attraction to metaphysical phenomena seems only the logical next step in the progression leading to robot sex and Bolshevism. I do, however, wonder why someone needed to coin a new word in order to describe this sort of thing. When I was a boy, back when dinosaurs and Richard Nixon walked the earth, everyone called having sex with someone who wasn't there masturbation. It still seems like a perfectly serviceable word to me, so I wonder why they, whoever they are, had to change it. Spectrophilia sounds more like the name of a lousy 80's glam rock band than an improbable perversion, or at least I think so; your mileage may vary.

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BAMBI: You may find this hard to believe—I know I was stunned and amazed when I first heard it—but the vast majority of bald eagles do not know any of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner. That’s a solid gold fact. In addition to this, most bald eagles do not spend a lot of time thinking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unless happiness is a species of fish, have no clue what the Constitution is all about, and are reasonably certain that Lincoln’s Gettysburg address refers to someone’s summer home or maybe an automobile dealership; most bald eagles have never even heard of the American Civil War. This, however stunning you may find these revelations, is nothing less than the plain unvarnished truth of the matter. Your average bald eagle knows as much about American history and government as your average American teenager, and with less excuse as well, since, unlike American teenagers, they’ve not had to endure that prolonged exercise in legally compelled ignorance known as compulsory education. When you see a bald eagle sitting in a tall tree looking proud and majestic, the one thing you can be fairly certain of is that he’s not thinking about is how he’s proud to be an American; he’s either thinking about getting something to eat or how eagle babes really dig this whole proud and majestic look he’s got going on.

This goes on all the time, of course; one culture after another picks an animal and makes the poor critter the repository of all the alleged cultural virtues, whereas the animal itself is just trying to make a living and support the wife and kids on the crummy salary national symbols get paid. This happens to birds all the time; the French cockerel, for example, does not worry all that much about projecting pride, arrogance, and that certain je ne sais quoi that makes the French French. No, he’s just trying to avoid being the coq au vin when your family comes over for Sunday night dinner and sometimes he does not succeed. Recently, Americans had had to put up with penguins marching hither and yon, like maitre de’s on parade, and some animated nonsense about penguins dancing up a storm south of the border, down Antarctica way. Now, penguins may dress better than your average bird, who, with a few exceptions, tend to dress with all the style of your sixteen-year old son going to the junior prom (ruffled pink shirts and big bowties? What the hell were we thinking?), but penguins also tend to live together in huge colonies without bathrooms, like the completely stoned inhabitants of some very bad 1960’s hippie commune—ashram—Volkswagen minibus packed with Deadheads, and feed their kids by puking half-digested fish into their mouths on a regular basis. Try doing that with your kid and the tuna sandwich you had this morning and see how fast you wind up in the slammer. Clearly, while the penguin is, no doubt, a very snappy dresser, penguins are lousy dancers and it’s pretty clearly they lack the social graces to be successful in modern American society. So, eagles are noble, doves are peaceful, swans are romantic; this sort of thing is all codswallop and balderdash, when it isn’t busy being poppycock. Birds are none of the above; they are altogether filthy creatures with quite disgusting, if not actually nauseating, personal habits, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they wouldn’t mind crapping all over your brand new shoes just for the fun of it, if you gave them half a chance. All the patriotic chest thumping about the symbolic importance of the bald eagle can’t change that one damn bit.

Other species get the same sort of treatment as well, and I blame most of this on Walt Disney. During his career, Walt probably did more to protect animals that don’t deserve protecting than anyone else in human history. Mice, whether you call them Mickey or Minnie, are not cute little adorable balls of furry fun; they are vermin. Ducks really are as vile-tempered as Donald is, so there’s a little truth in advertising there, and deer are not sweet, lovable nature’s children who only want to play and frolic in the forest primeval with their cute little furry friends without having to worry about people and their nasty firearms; deer are oversized rats with hooves. Deer don’t want to frolic in the forest primeval; they want to eat my mother’s geraniums and her shrubbery and crap all over my front yard every chance they get. So when my co-workers accused me of trying to kill Bambi the other night, my answer is a) I didn’t kill the deer, b) I wasn’t trying to kill a deer at all, it was an accident, and c) the little bastard had it coming.

The fact is all I was doing was going to get my mother some milk and eggs. I was on a back road and a car had just passed me when I saw a deer bolt across the road like he’d just heard Bugs say deer season. I jammed on the brakes, as the one thing you learn quickly about deer around here is that where you see one, you will quickly see two. In my case, there were six or seven of the despicable beasts, all charging across the road at top speed without bothering to look to see if there was any traffic coming. There was; I was it. I managed to miss deer two through six with considerable ease; number seven, on the other hand, proved a little harder to miss, given its insistence on charging right in front of me and then hurling itself up onto the hood of my car. I slammed on the brakes; it seemed the right thing to do at the time; and the sudden de-acceleration caused my somewhat unconventional passenger to go flying through the air with the greatest of ease, and to land without the slightest scintilla of acrobatic grace. He landed with a pretty loud thump. As if that were not enough, the beast then gave me a dirty look that said if he had two legs instead of four, he’d be looking for a lawyer and suing my ass off right now. Then he went charging off into the woods after his friends, and without giving me his insurance card, either, which is the sort of silly irresponsible behavior that give many deer a bad name these days, if you ask me.

I suppose things could have been worse; hitting the deer only resulted in $327.56 worth of damage to the car. While he was busy being an unwilling hood ornament, the deer managed to kick my passenger’s side mirror off its mounting and to damage the electrical system on that side of the car, too. I wasn’t hurt at all, except in the wallet, and I think the deer suffered little more than bruised ribs and injured pride; he was up and running within seconds of my hitting him; so maybe this will alert him to the dangers of running around with a fast crowd after dark. If it doesn’t, then the next time he gets in my way, see if I cut Nature Boy anymore slack; no way, Bambi—next time, you’re venison.

PET STORY: A cat went beserk in Oregon yesterday; not for being in Oregon, of course Oregon is a very nice place, or so I hear, and I am sure that most Oregonian cats are more than happy to live there; and attacked its owner, sending this unfortunate woman to the hospital with a good many more cat bites than most people have to put up with in a month of Sundays. Apparently this was not the first time this particular cat went after its owner and the CNN report does not specify why the cat should want to go after its owner in the first place. Frankly, not enough cats go after their owners, in my opinion. The world would be a much better place, I think, if cat owners had to relieve themselves in sand boxes and leave the cats to get on with their lives with a minimum of interference.