Update #30 [Where are we?]

Where am I living these days anyway?! Bloomer Town? Undy-ville?? Panty Lane???

While litterally in life I barely know where my head rests at night . . . this event threw me steadfastly into the I obviously have absolutely no clue anymore anymore anymore at all . . . the other day as I was standing at the kitchen sink washing the freshly walked dog (Irving Brown Socks) off of my hands when something odd caught my eye. [Here – I’ll set the scene for you real quick – like] It was a beautiful sunny day outside – and there were clothes hanging on the line – thinking about whatever it is that clothes think about as they dry off in the breeze . . . and then there were . . . and then there were . . .

Holy moly! Those are my unmentionables hanging out there on the line – for the entire town to see . . . 2 (two) pair of my boxers – for reasons completely unknown to me – had made the treck from the washing machine to the great/grand out-of-doors to hang in all of their should-maybe-have-just-gone-in-the-dryer glory. There may as well have been big spotlights on my mostest inner-mostestitudes . . . a billboard of my measly thoughts that I think all of the time . . . a guy in a sandwich-board advertising stuff about me that could possibly end up on a sandwich-board . . .

My world flashed in front of me for a couple of more seconds – and then I washed my hands of the whole situation and moved on to my next ridiculous thing to sweat bullets about – and then forget about almost immediately.

And if you need to reach me – I’ll be in Boxer Station in Boxer Station in Boxer Station – huzzah!

Update #29 [Who has ‘em?!]

Well – I do of course!

The other day I went to the dentist – it had been something like 5 (five) years since I had darkened the toothy doorstep of anyone who leaned into the more – ah – dental areas of –uhm – practical medicinery-ism – and I was moderately nervous.

The worst part of going into any kind of office is the clip-board full of paperwork that I have to fill out . . . and – honestly – this may be tied to something slightly more broken in my brain – because I just can’t fill in the miserable little blanks on the forms with any coherent thing that makes any sense – this is a pleasant “condition” that also happened all during school . . . put a test in front of me – and I start trying to figure out what the angle is – what exactly question number 10 (ten) is even getting at – and how it applies to the malarkey that question 27 (twenty-seven) is screaming over there anyway – anyway – anyway . . .

Well – some – of those blanks got filled in (I know my name!) – and then the dentistry really got cracking in earnest. There was scraping and polishing and sucking and – most importantly – a dentist’s assistant that decided to (through a plastic shield – and all of the noise of power tools in my head) have a complete conversation. It was all very pleasant.

The best part came when the actual dentist flew into the room, shook my hand (as he was already looking at some charts) and proclaimed that I had perfect teeth – and that I should take extra special care of them. The assistant concurred. They both ran out of the room and I was left – basically – sitting on top of tooth-mountain – the king of all teeth.

Some of the joy evaporated when the assistant came back into the room to give me an old song and dance routine (minus the singing and dancing) called “How to Brush Your Teeth!” – which included – for the record – a technique that is much easier to manage when holding a set of plastic teeth out in the air . . . I happen to have gums – and a cheek. Next up – was a demonstration of how to floss where she – no joke – tied a knot in the floss and yanked it (multiple times) through all of my back teeth . . . all while gleefully saying “Oh! That bleeding will go away soon enough!”

Then I (old bloody gums) was told that I had more paperwork to fill out . . . and the day was done.

Ants 82

A Book Review?!

Recently I read “The Road” written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was a story about a father and son struggling to survive as they attempted to travel towards a warmer climate in a post-apocalyptic world.

The entire premise of the story can be summarized on page two, in the second paragraph. “With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving winter here.”

Even though you can pick up the tidbits of information that they are sleeping on the side of a road, living in a world where calendars hadn’t been in use for years and that they needed to get south before winter arrived – you have no idea and aren’t anywhere near prepared for the dips and turns that this roller-coaster of a book has in store. Intermittent flashbacks serve to build more of an understanding of the relationship between the father and son while leaving the origins the events that brought the world to this desolate stage shrouded in as much of a mystery as the world itself has become covered in soot and ash.

The boy is so young that he has never know any other world than the horrible world that he is in, so the father tells him stories of how they are the “good guys” who are carrying “the fire” in an effort to make it seem like all of their experiences on the road are worthwhile. They must always stay vigilant of the potential dangers around them. They must always continue to move forward.

The 241 pages of the book flew past me in two days as my eyes nervously moved from word to word and page to page in a bid to somehow keep the almost certain doom of the main characters at bay, the impact of this book has already managed to stick with me for a considerably longer amount of time. The cadence of the writing – which is mostly broken up into small quick moving paragraphs – drew me in and kept me at the edge of my seat and I am really glad that I read it.

While not for the faint of heart, I would highly recommend Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” to anyone wanting a tense story that they will continue to think and possibly worry about long after they have finished.

Thank you to Random House for telling me how to write a “Classic format” book report. Maybe for my next report I will choose the “Collage format” or perhaps the “Interview” – who knows?!

A Painting of a Cat (Named Spot Elliot)