Ecclesiastes tells us everything we need to know about life, except how to cure the common cold

First, I want to make clear that this is not the piece that I promised to post in the previous post; the material is still fighting me and yes, it is getting more than a little annoying at this point, but things are what they are and when the thing finally gels I will put it up here PDQ, as my grandmother used to say, may she rest in peace. No, this thing is just a screed about adult coloring books. Now, you may not believe this—I know I didn’t when I first heard about them—but adult coloring books are a thing nowadays. I have seen them. They exist. They do; I am not kidding. The adult coloring book is not terribly different from the coloring book we all knew and loved when we were all about five years old and going to kindergarten.  The outlines in the book are a bit more complex than the ones we filled in when we were kids; there are no happy little bunnies or cute little kitty kats in the adult coloring books; and instead of using crayons to fill in the blanks one uses colored pencils (isn’t that racist? Shouldn’t it be pencils of color?), which allow, I would imagine, a much finer degree of control over where the color goes than a crayon or a magic marker can. The principle, however, is the same: it is a coloring book.

In related news, and I will tell you how this news is related in just a moment, the Census Bureau announced recently that the Millennials have finally passed in absolute numbers the great bulge in the American demographic python that is the Baby Boom Generation.  In addition, the number of Generation Xers will pass the Boomers sometime in 2028, proving yet again, as if the fact needed proving, what a bunch of slackers the Gen Xers are.  The Boomers will not go quietly—there will be plenty of kicking and screaming; the one thing that the Boomers could always do well is throw a magnificent tantrum—but The Preacher tells us in Ecclesiastes that one generation passeth and another generation cometh, and there will be no exception for the Boomers, no matter how much the spoiled senile delinquents insist on staying.

In short, the Boomers are entering their second childhoods, assuming, of course, that they ever left their first childhoods. With Boomers, this can be hard to tell. One would think that it would be impossible to generalize specific characteristics across an entire generation; some members of the Greatest Generation were not so great, some members of the Silent Generation were not so silent, and not every Millennial is an ill-informed doofus…well, maybe that’s a bad example; but most Boomers (specifically the Boomer I cohort of 1946 to 1955) are self-absorbed, egocentric dolts that never grew up (I blame drugs for this, especially weed). If you are one of these Boomers and you feel that this description does not describe you, that you are a functioning adult that long ago left the 1960’s behind and have moved on into the broad sunlit uplands of adulthood, then I apologize to you for the insulting description and I congratulate you for your acceptance that being a mature human being is not a fate worse than death, but let’s face reality: you’re a freak. 

So, we have adult coloring books and cable channels catering to the Leave it to Beaver nook in every Boomer’s soul and now dating sites on the Internet where the Boomers can go and find other Boomers with whom they can relive the happy years of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out without all the teenaged angst. We must endure commercials for CD collections of the Boomers’ favorite music, followed by equally endless commercials for prescription drugs that promise to keep the Boomers reasonably healthy in their second childhoods. Frankly, it all gets to be a bit much after a while.  Is it too much to ask some people to just grow up already and act their ages?  

Apparently, it is, and I am sure that because it is, somewhere in the deepest recesses of the Census Bureau there is joy abounding and happiness without limit, as the numbers finally show, after more than seventy years, that the most egocentric and annoying of American generations is finally beginning to go away.  I would imagine that the Census Bureau already has several cases of champagne on ice in the basement of its Maryland headquarters, stored there to help their long-overworked staff celebrate the happy day when the last Boomer hops into the celestial VW Bus and heads off towards the empyrean Woodstock with his doobie in hand and Saint Wolfman Jack blasting the Rolling Stones’ Can’t get no satisfaction on the radio.  Then the Census Bureau will party like it’s 2099, or, better yet, like it’s 2199, the latter date guaranteeing that there will be no Boomers left holding out on tropic atolls like stranded Japanese soldiers awaiting the return of the Imperial fleet.  And the girl that Mick is trying to make in Can’t get no satisfaction: she’s probably a grandmother now.  

Lack of writer's block and other misadventures in electronic publishing

So here’s the thing: I have lots of ideas, so the usual excuses for not writing don’t really apply here. I have, for example, a piece half written on my desk even as I sit here at work listening to some teenagers being callow assholes for the sheer enjoyment of being callow assholes, which is the sort of thing you have to expect from teenagers, I suppose.  Telling myself that they are simply engaging in the teenage imperative doesn’t make their stupidity any less annoying, however.  So yes, there is no real reason why I haven’t been writing busily away here.  It’s just that RA[1] has raised its ugly head once again and I have had other things on my mind.  Having been medically evicted from my hips for non-payment of rent, RA has, like so many people in the past few decades, decided to improve its life and move to the suburbs.  I’ve never thought of my ankles as being particularly suburban, but I imagine that if the mind itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, an annoying autoimmune disease can find suburban bliss and better schools for the kids in somebody’s ankles.  Its’ just that I would prefer that if find its bliss in someone else’s ankles. Mine hurt enough as it is.

In order to find some relief from the new tenants, I went to a very nice Chinese doctor who x-rayed my feet while I had unexposed photographic film in my pockets—yes, I know that the film is ruined, thank you for the reminder—and then told me that I had an inflammation in my ankles. The doctor was a very nice man, as I said, and so I did not tell him no shit, Sherlock, where’d you leave your squad car?  No, I simply nodded politely and asked what he intended to do about it.  He indicated that some cortisone was in order and he left me alone with my thoughts and my bare feet for a few moments to go get a nurse and some cortisone as well.  When he came back about five minutes later with both nurse and drugs in tow, I hopped up on the table as brightly and chipperly as someone who just invented the word chipperly can hop anywhere, whereupon the good doctor sterilized my right foot and then jabbed me in the ankle with a very large needle.  This being my first cortisone shot ever, I and my ankle did not respond well to the sudden intrusion of the corpus, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologize to the doctor for screaming, what the fuck, at him at the top of my lungs.  The doctor, however, did not so much as blink an eye at my comment, which leads me to believe that I am not the first person he’s injected with cortisone who has had this reaction.  Afterwards, I was left in the hands of the nurse, who proceeded to show me how to use the ankle braces the doctor told me to wear.

One of the braces the nurse gave me was a simple ankle brace that anyone who has had a sprained ankle will be familiar with. The other brace looked like a bondage device for foot fetishists.  The simple ankle brace came with a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian) and four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  The foot fetishist’s wet dream came with no instructions in any language at all (including Slovenian).  The nurse quickly showed me how to put the thing on and then rushed off to see other patients.  As you might imagine, I have worn the foot fetishist’s delight exactly once, because I cannot figure out how to fasten and secure the device to my ankle.  In fact, I wear the brace for my left ankle on my right ankle; it seems to work, but there may be dangers here that I will comment on at a later date. As for the left ankle brace that I wear on my right ankle, it strikes me as decidedly odd that anyone would choose to print out, in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs, detailed instructions on how to put on a sock.  I realize that the bureaucratic mind will seize at any opportunity to make itself annoying to the public it allegedly serves, but this seems to be unnecessarily annoying. Didn’t we all learn to put on our socks before we started kindergarten? And even if our mothers put the socks on for us, I think that the majority of the world’s sock wearing population would have learned how to put on their socks simply by watching Mom do it every morning.  I, and I expect billions of other sock-wearing people as well, do not see the need for subjecting the gimps of the world to a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  We already know how to put our socks on, thank you very much, or did I miss something along the way?

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[1] Rheumatoid arthritis, if you are not a long time reader. I would say that this particular ailment is a royal pain in the ass, except that my ass is the one place it doesn’t bother at all.

SKYDIVERS: If you are at all like me, and if you are at all like me then you regard thirty-minute home pizza delivery as one of the fundamental characteristics distinguishing truly civilized societies from those inchoate masses of culturally benighted heathen hearts who place their trust in reeking tube, iron shard, and those English muffins topped with mozzarella and tomato sauce, which are most definitely not almost as good as the real thing, trust me on this one, then it necessarily follows that you must also regard the now almost constant loss of various and sundry body parts by skydivers as they plunge towards the Earth as an especially irksome phenomenon and one with disturbing implications for the long term electoral viability of the Republican Party.

Now, I am all for debating the long term electoral viability of the Republican Party with anyone who wanders down the pike, provided that they themselves are pikeless and I have Smith & Wesson’s latest and best bit of hardware in my pocket, just as I am in favor of debating anyone about anything, up to and including sex, religion, race, and whether or not jars of mayonnaise should give the contents’ calorie from fat percentage on the label—I think the label should just say Yes at that point; if the oily white goop you’re putting on your chicken sandwich to make it even halfway palatable after that dried out chicken’s been sitting in the back of your refrigerator since last weekend doesn’t get 100% of its calories from fat, then the oily white goop you’re putting on your chicken sandwich isn’t real mayonnaise—at least, that’s my opinion; I am not, however, in favor of debating anything with anyone so long as there is a prosthetic leg, complete with Reebok running shoe, protruding from my windshield. In this situation, I don’t care one way or another about the long-term electoral viability of the Republican Party; I want to know who’s going to pay to fix the damage to my car. And don’t tell me to call my insurance company; I refuse to let those thieving skunks jack my rates through the roof just because some dope started coming apart at the seams some 5,ooo feet up.

You might not think that dealing with the ongoing plague of disintegrating parachutists might not be the most important problem of our modern age, but it is one that will grow in size and intensity as the baby boom generation ages. This generational cohort, stuck as it is in a perpetual adolescence, will refuse to grow gracefully as previous generations did and will spend an inordinate amount of time doing things any normal person would think beyond the physical capacity of someone of an advanced age. But the baby boomers, for whom life means never really having to grow up, will try to deny the biological effects of passing time and as a result of this denial the skies over this our Great Republic will soon fill with dentures, limbs, pacemakers, walkers, bifocals, AARP membership cards, and the occasional veteran of the Summer of Love, all of them raining down upon an unsuspecting populace like so much unwanted space debris. Things will definitely get uglier hereabouts before they get any better, folks.

In any case, and yes, I am about to digress from the point here; I thought you’d want to know that before I actually did it so you wouldn’t be wondering just how this other subject came up without any prior notice—there was a time in this country, and I know that a lot of the young people here will find this hard to believe, when it was possible for an ordinary citizen without any sort of prolonged psychological training whatsoever to walk down any street in a fairly good-sized American town and be able, with a fair degree of accuracy, tell which of their fellow pedestrians was a complete raving lunatic. Your average citizen required no special skills for this task; loonies, being a polite lot in general, made detection much easier with their constant habit of carrying on conversations with people not immediately observable to the naked eye.

Modern loonies still carry on conversations with themselves, of course; no one willingly gets rid of a good gig; but detecting loonies from the broad mass of people is now so much harder to do that many people simply give up and hope that the man sitting near the emergency exit muttering to himself is on the phone to his broker and not someone who thinks that aliens from the planet Mongo are out to steal his brain waves with fly paper and Gorgonzola cheese. Modern communications technology has brought us to this; phones are now so small that they fit in your ear and I am sure that some clever scientist somewhere is working on a model that the phone company can insert directly into your brain, the better to bill you for thinking about calling someone outside your family circle.

Such technological compactness may be a good thing, for all I know, but I think I can speak for many people when I say that I find people I do not know suddenly starting conversations about their private matters as I am trying to read my newspaper disconcerting in the extreme. No, I do not want to hear about your cousin’s wedding and no, I don’t care what the bride was wearing or whether the maid of honor had had to much to drink when she brought up that bit about her sleeping with the groom the night before and wasn’t it wonderful that the lawyer was a friend of the family and would only charge half his normal fee for handling the divorce (if I were a betting man, I’d say that the answers to both questions is yes, but what do I know? I could only hear one side of the conversation). Clearly, someone must devise a system whereby those of us who are merely wandering by can tell whether or not people are on the phone or just speaking to the top tenor in the choir invisible. Perhaps if people on the phone could hold up a sign and let the rest of us know one way or the other, this would be a nice gesture, I think. Life is hard enough here on the ground as it is, what with crazies raining down on us all the time these days.