Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 36

When you get to be forty-seven years old, you don’t have the body you used to. Even attempts to get into shape won’t bring back the smooth skin and fluid joints of my youth. I embrace who I am, however, because the nooks and crannies and what lies underneath tells the tale of who I am.

The first time I broke my arm came from falling off the slide on my swing set when I was about five. I seem to recall falling of from somewhere near the top, but those who witnessed the mishap claim I fell off the bottom. It’s funny how small children blow things up to be so much bigger than they are. So much time has passed since then that I can’t remember that I kept breaking my cast riding my Big Wheel all over the neighborhood, but others seem to recall that clearly.

I broke my arm a second time at a 4H meeting at my neighbors house the year between my 5th and 6th grade years. I ran in the house to put down my papers and ran back out. As I exited the sliding glass door, the rug came out from underneath me. The next thing I know, my forehead is striking the brick threshold. While everyone worried excessively about the large goose egg on my face, I kept pointing to and complaining about my arm. Turns out I was right and they were wrong. I will say, as an aside, my mother comforting me afterwards was one of my more enduring memories of her.

I broke my arm a third time riding my bicycle the very last weekend of college. Riding to blow off some steam before finals, I wrecked when I got out of the saddle to peddle up a small rise. When the chain slipped, the sudden increase in momentum of my foot pitched me over to the left where I tried to break my fall with my right hand. Not thinking much of the whole episode, I picked my bike back up and rode the rest of the way back to town. The farther I got, the less my arm would move until I could barely move it at all. I got a ride to the hospital once I was home. While there, they couldn’t tell if it was a break or not. They offered medication to get me through until Monday which I declined because I was a ‘tough guy’. What follows was one of the most miserable two nights of sleep ever. I damn near begged the orthopedist to give me something when Monday finally arrived.

When I was young, we used to have a humongous vacant field called ‘The Weeds’ – a relatively tame moniker consider the growth that existed there. My friends and I were riding there one day when I steered my bike straight into the heart of a ‘stickery bush’ as we used to call them. I was firmly convinced I was going to die from all the blood from all the wounds which, honestly, were only a bunch of minor scratches.

My gnarliest scar comes from another bike wreck I had in high school. Headed home after summer conditioning, I lost my balance climbing a hill and fell into a rusty guard rail slicing my left upper arm. It didn’t bleed much so I didn’t think much about it and therefore did little about it. Little did I know that the really deep ones don’t bleed much and leave the nastiest scars. I’m probably lucky I didn’t tetanus or a similar disease. Did I mention it was my second bicycle wreck of the day?

I used to make fun of Ms. Boss for her ‘finger toes’ when we first got together. First of all, making light of your girlfriend’s toes is not the way to her heart. Second, when you realize that your small stubby toes – which could be best described as looking like pink corn hanging off my foot – are actually the strange ones, you come off looking tremendously stupid.

Both my grandfathers were ‘4F’ during World War II. Fortunately, I inherited by maternal grandfather’s foot problems rather than my paternal grandfather’s heart problems.

I have broken my toes I don’t know how many times. I damn near added to that total last week. Have I mentioned that my forty-seven year-old eyes don’t work at night like they used to?

My strangest ‘blemish’ comes courtesy of an all-day trip to the beach. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I decided to take summer classes at a different school in the South. Some friends of mine called me up and asked me to make the three-hour trip to see them while they were on vacation. I hopped in my car at the time – a 1984 Ford Escort manual five-speed with no air conditioning – and made my down there. I hung my left arm out the window the entire way down, went to the beach, and hung the same arm out the window the whole way back. While I was well aware that I’d had too much sun overall, I couldn’t understand over the next couple of days why my left arm hurt so much more than a sunburn. Finally, during a break at my job washing dishes at a Tex-Mex restaurant, I decided to take a look. It looked like I had glued two lemon jelly beans to my left upper arm. While I felt plenty of pain in that moment, it paled in comparison to the hurting that would come later that evening when they popped. It was years later before I figured out I had a second degree burn because, of course, I didn’t go to the doctor. I’ve got a patch of freckles on my left arm to remind me of the summer of 1990.

My pinky finger looks horribly broken until you hold up the other pinky finger and realize it’s a mirror image of the first. You can blame my parents for that one, I was born that way.

One of my bottom front teeth is stained horribly yellow. On some level, you can blame my mother for that one, but I am actually very fortunate on another level. Some of the children of mothers who took the same ‘safe’ medication for morning sickness came out a lot worse off than I did.

My left thumb carries a constant reminder that that saws shouldn’t be used in place of a file.

If you look carefully enough at my right wrist, you can see what happens when your oven mittens aren’t quite big enough to pull dinner out of the oven.

I’ve had psoriasis since I was a kid. It moves from place to place on my body, goes away and comes back. The one spot it almost always remains is the heel of my right hand.

My forty-eight year old cousin sports a small pox immunization scar on his arm. Born fifteen months later, I escaped that one.

My lone nagging sports injury comes from wrestling practice. My practice opponent, new to the sport and strong as an ox, lifted me off of my feet during a take down. As the room started spinning around, I heard several of my teammates yelling ‘no’ just before I got body slammed to the floor. Unfortunately, my opponent learned that there’s quite a difference between ‘wrastling’ on TV and wrestling in high school fifteen seconds too late for my left shoulder. I was out for several days and never got it looked at, but it still hurts a little if I sit in the same spot for too long.

If you look closely enough at my senior pictures, you’ll see that one of my eyes is the tiniest bit swollen courtesy of a drill during wrestling practice earlier that day. I do believe my sisters enjoyed putting makeup on their brother to cover the shiner just a tad too much that evening.

I injured my ankle during my senior year. Honestly, I can’t remember how I did it, but I do remember begging my parents to take me to the hospital to get it looked at certain that it was broken. Several days later, they relented only to discover that they were correct and it was only a sprain. Years later as a parent, I still think of this situation when faced with ‘go/no go’ hospital decisions with my own children.

The skin under my wedding ring is as pale as it can be. It’s a half inch wide and I never take it off.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 35

I’ve had several people suggest that I’ve had sleeping problems for awhile now.  I resisted the diagnosis for over a year, but a sleep study – which is basically  the worst and most expensive night in a hotel all rolled into one – determined that I did indeed have obstructive sleep apnea.  So as of this week I have a CPAP machine in my bedroom.  I would say that it sucks, but it actually it’s more accurate to say that it blows. My head feels like a balloon as the machine does its thing. More than once I startled myself awake when my mouth opened in the middle of the night and started hissing air. What’s worse, however, my insurance says I have to wear it four hours a night. How would they know? It keeps a log that I have to give to my doctor. While the medical technology invading my bedroom is bad enough, the fact that the insurance company creeps in as well is worse.

I walked out the door without my phone a couple of weeks ago. A creature of habit, I left it on the bed when distracted from my routine. I use my phone a lot on a normal day – I’m writing this entry on my phone as we speak – but it seemed like I needed it more than usual that morning. After learning of my predicament, the saint that is Ms. Boss offered to bring it when she joined me for lunch after her morning meeting. Driving to lunch, I felt like I was launching into the unknown without any way to know where she was or what she was doing or when she would be there. As I sat in the parking lot for what seemed an eternity, I lamented technology’s intrusion into my life and the great anxiety it fomented within me. I have to be honest, the anxiety created in me by the realization of how much I ‘needed’ my device in that moment brought a few tears to my eyes. Soon enough, Ms. Boss appeared which greatly relieved me. When she got out of her car without my phone, however, the first thing I did was ask about was my phone. I deserved the reaction I got entirely. Sometimes when you hold up the mirror in front of you, the reflection is as awful as it appears.

Up until ten years ago, I didn’t have a wireless phone. In a former life, I lived 3/4 mile back a dirt road that turned into a quagmire every time it rained making in impassable for the subcompact car I drove. As I was leaving my desk at work, I would phone home to Ms. Boss then start the one-hour journey home. Inevitably, Ms. Boss would be there at end of the driveway within two minutes of my arrival with the 4×4 to get me the rest of the way home – no cell phone necessary.

Within a year I had two cellphones – one for personal, one for work. While I’ve managed to fight my way back to one, the expectation from my employees ever since has been 24×7 availability for a call. Text messages only made the problem worse. ‘Critical system notifications’? Even computers call me in the middle of the night.

During the ‘bad old days’ at a previous employer, Ms. Boss mentioned that the notification tone that I’d received an email message in the middle of the night would cause me to groan in my sleep. She’s put up with a lot of that. Did I mention she’s a saint?

I am the KING of trivia: I bought a copy of World Almanac and read it cover to cover every year, I browsed atlases for fun, I had not one but two full sets of encyclopedias to peruse. As I’ve often told people, I know millions and millions of the useless pieces of information you would ever want to hear and I learned them all the hard way. Nowadays, all one needs to do to learn something is pull their phone out of their pocket, type a few words, and there it is. What would have been my most impressive skill thirtysome years ago is now irrelevant.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 34

I viewed the video of the two Korean leaders stepping back and forth over the concrete block that represented the border between their countries this week probably a half-dozen times.  I found the whole thing fascinating for two reasons.  First, I obsess over all things North Korea.  Let me be clear right up front, I see no redeeming qualities in the leadership of North Korea or their guiding principal of ‘juche’ whatsoever, but I find all the trappings that go with them quite intriguing in an almost sci-fi kind of way.  Second (and more germane to my loose theme) and as I’ve said before, I love maps, and more specifically in this case, the lines drawn arbitrarily by humans across the landscape.  The concrete block represents a decision made by two winners of World War II to share the spoils.  Other than human actions that came out of that decision, there really is no difference in the dirt that lay north of the block than south of it. Despite that, two men stepping over and back is a huge, huge deal.

I rode my bicycle everywhere when I was a teenager.   While it was a bit of necessity to get to work and sports activities during the summer, I took a few ‘pleasure’ cruises as well.  What I had was nothing fancy – just a heavy steel-frame Huffy 10-speed probably purchased at K-Mart – but it allowed me to stretch my boundaries and explore.  At one point, I decided that I wanted to ride my bike to the county line.   This was a twenty-mile ride one-way across hilly country to another arbitrary straight line placed in the middle of a swamp nearly 200 years prior.  This line, however, served more than a destination for a teenage bicyclist.  Just before the line sat a bar – one of the few structures on this miles-long stretch of road in the middle of the aforementioned swamp.   Why did it exist then and still exist to this day?  Because you can drink on this side of the line and can’t drink on the other.   People from a town on the ‘dry’ side of the line would travel over four miles in the middle of nowhere because it was the closest place to get legally drunk.

A similar situation plays itself right up the road from my house outside a large college town.  One one side of the state line, you can buy a keg, but cold beer by the can or bottle is a no-no.   Meanwhile, you can buy all the cold beer you want on my side of the line as long as it’s in cans or bottles.  Getting a keg will involve a twenty-mile trip to the distributorship in the other direction.  Why not buy the keg on the other side of the line?  Merely crossing the line – which is right in front of the store – with said keg will get you arrested and your car impounded should law enforcement be so inclined.

Google Whiteclay, Nebraska and read about its “raison d’etre”.  It’s a similar situation to the one I outline above, but hundreds of times worse.  Believe it or not, if I ever find myself in the area, I intend to visit.

While Whiteclay is a “pop by if I’m in the neighborhood” destination, Wagah, Pakistan is on my bucket list.  If you’re going to have an arbitrary border, you might as well do it with flair.

Of course I’ve been to Four Corners – the only place in America where four states come together.  I also managed to make myself look like an idiot placing at least one appendage in each state at the same time.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 33

As I write this, snow is falling outside the window.  As government employees, both Ms. Boss and I have the day off for Martin Luther King Day, but it has a bit of that ‘snow day’ feel to it.  As an ‘essential employee’, I never get the privilege of skipping work because of bad weather.   As nice as today is, I do not get to share my children’s anticipation of another snow day tomorrow.

The house I grew up lay just off a minor state highway.  On nights that snow was forecast, I used to lie awake and listen to the noises the cars made as they drove by.  I listened intently hoping that the sound of tires on pavement would disappear meaning the snow was getting thicker and thicker.  The sound of nothing but a loud muffler passing across the thick snow was absolutely glorious.  Only then would I stomach listening to the nearby elevator music station for the announcement I so wanted to hear.

My children don’t have to listen to the radio or watch television or even surf the web to find out if school’s closed.  The school district robocalls us… at 5:00 in the morning… when ‘essential personnel’ who don’t care about snow days would rather be sleeping.

One of the kids in my neighborhood once convinced me that I shouldn’t track through the snow in the yard.  He was convinced that if we left it alone, it would blow and drift in the road and cause school to be cancelled.  His logic seemed sound at the time.

Snow days meant sledding when I was a young lad.  I’d dress in my snow pants, puffy jacket, moon boots, and toboggan and walk the sled my father had as a boy a half a mile away to the top of the hill in my subdivision.  The rural township my parents lived in didn’t plow the neighborhood streets then leaving the residents to their own devices.  After a few hearty souls managed to make their way up the hill, the snow would be compacted on the street with very little traffic willing to follow.  What was treacherous to adults was a treasure to me.  With a good running start, I could ride my sled down the middle of the snow-covered street for almost a quarter of a mile.  Teary eyed with a face full of snow and snot at the end, I would turn right around, march up the hill, and do it again.  The times I remember most fondly, however, were the times that my father went with me.  With both of us on the sled, we went farther, we went faster, we created some of my fondest memories of the man. It was glorious.  I’ve tried to recreate these times with my kids, but the old sled is gone, the township plows the street, and there’s just too many distractions inside to walk miles in the snow.

My fondest snow memory as an adult is quite a bit different.  The Boss family once lived in a warmer state that did not handle snow removal well.  As snow fell deeply at work – a place, I might add, where I was once again ‘essential personnel’ – my employer offered accommodations at a local motel for those that had a sizable commute.  I thought for a split second about taking them up on the offer, but made the decision based on where I truly wanted to be.  The first forty-eight miles of my commute took two hours.  The next mile of my commute took one and a half hours but left me a mile short of home.  Knowing that I would not get any closer, I parked my car in a parking lot and began walking the rest of the way home.

Two things are etched in my memory about that evening.  First, I remember short-cutting across a field as the storm clouds parted.  The moon that shone that night transformed the pristine, knee-deep snow all around me from an treacherous obstacle to a thing of beauty.  Second, as I walked in the door after my ordeal, Ms. Boss helped me out of my wet clothes, robed me in a warm blanket, and embraced me.  I was home for seven hours before I had to retrace my steps back to work, but that singular moment was worth it.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 32

The absence of posts in the last two months can be explained by the adoption of yet another hobby.  An attempt to crochet Ms. Boss a scarf of Christmas occupied much of my November and December.  The effort failed abysmally.  My first attempt yielded something that looked nothing like a scarf whatsoever.  My second attempt looked more like a very long piece of rope.  The third attempt kind of looked like a scarf but was more of a two-foot long ruffle – think Elizabethan era collar but in red.  My fourth attempt was a three-inch by three-inch square when it got abandoned.  My fifth attempt – actually started on Christmas Day – started out promising, but ended up being more like trapezoid when I got several rows into it.  It was at this point that I put away my crochet hook before someone got hurt.

While my attempt at craft resulted in nothing useful being created, I would not consider the exercise completely pointless.  I spent the majority of my lunch breaks working on the project.  My employer does not pay me for this half-hour of my day, but more often that not, I continue working for them anyway.  (To be fair, this is more my doing than theirs.)  I actually enjoyed leaving my desk, going out to my car, getting out my yarn and hook, and doing something else for about twenty minutes.  It is, after all, my time.  While I’ve set crochet aside, I really should embrace taking my lunch break for me and doing something productive that has nothing to do with my employer, like… I don’t know… writing in my blog.

In a previous job that I worked for almost ten years, I determined that my employer owed me almost a year of time off for all the lunches and breaks that I didn’t take by the time I left.

As an hourly government employee, I enjoy the opportunity to earn time off instead of pay when I work overtime.  At one point in my career, I rarely took the time.  I always figured that everyone else’s time off would eventually find its way to my paycheck.  These days, I wish I could take the time and sometimes I do anyway.  Something about having four daughters just doesn’t allow the paycheck to stretch as far as it used to.

I took the time between Christmas and New Year’s off.  This was the first time that I’d done so in years.  Naturally, I spent almost four days of that time sick in bed.

I used to work some rather strange work schedules.  At one point in my career, my workweek started at 7 p.m. on Friday and finished at 7 a.m. Monday morning.  Yes, I was working when most of the rest of the world wasn’t, but wasn’t when everyone else was.  I miss those days sometimes.  If I could work like a dog for a few days followed by a long string of time off, I’d do it.  Too bad I don’t have the strength and skill necessary to be firefighter where that schedule comes standard.