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Happy Wife from inside the bathroom this morning, “Would you hand me my phone?”

“What?”

“My phone. I want my phone.”

“But…you’re on the John. How long you going to be?” husband asks incredulously.

“Long enough to play a game of Word Mix.”

Husband fetches phone, cracks bathroom door, hands phone to wife.

It’s a simple little anagram game. She can play it for hours. Given the modern marvel of 3-D, interactive, multi-player, phantasmagoric games out there, Word Mix is to these what bloodletting is to surgery.

I’ve no excuse for the dearth of posts here lately, except to point out I’ve little time anymore to get my creative juices running during the day. Being as I am, once again, a single cog in the gear of economic progress.

I phoned my friend Dave who I haven’t talked to in quite a while. We exchange email, which is all fine and good, but as a means of communication it’s imperfect. There’s no substitute for the texture of a real human voice when it comes to conveying the nuance of experience. Dave lives in southern California. He retired last year, and his wife this year. We got caught up with the goings-on in our lives — his mom, my parents, distant friends, etc.. I was most interested envious in how he and his wife were able to retire so early (he’s my age). Especially since Happy Wife and I are — best guess — still five years out. I could hear it in his voice — he and his wife had had enough. Check, I thought, we’ve had enough too, but you’re only 56, what if you outlive your savings?

There was a pause in the conversation. Where a voice conveys nuance, a pause conveys doubt.

We promised to keep in touch. I’m encouraged; he told me his and his wife’s two favorite places to visit are New York and Alaska.

The next day, in the middle of her preparation for date night, I pulled Happy Wife over to look at a nice condo I saw online, new on the market. She liked it, but was not thrilled I was already looking to downsize our lives in preparation for Retirement. Her general concern being she wants to enjoy her years one at a time and not hasten their passage by fixating on the endpoint of the five-year plan. I conceded her point. Carpe diem.

Look, she said, it’s a beautiful day outside, we’re doing well, let’s enjoy what we have right now. Well, I said, agreed, it is a nice day, but it’s cold. It’s not so bad, she said, and to prove it, she took a break from her preparations to go outside for a moment of quiet contemplation on the backyard deck:

Some of you have asked how The Book is coming along. Okay, not a lot of you, but some of you. How many does it have to be to rise to some? Anyhoo…

Let’s just say it’s one more thing to laden the five-year plan with.

Some A couple of you have asked if I might post an excerpt, something I’ve resisted doing, but given this may never see the light of publication, what the heck.

To provide you a context for the excerpt without giving away what the book is about (and by about I mean what I think the book is about now, something any writer will tell you is subject to change. Especially early on in the writing process one may have an idea of where the story will go, but very often that can change. I am a firm believer that the story finds the writer more often than the writer writes the story), our protagonist (Russ Livengood) is approaching an austere building on a university campus when he glimpses its cornerstone. Here, there’s a brief pause in the forward action of the story to relate a bit of the building’s history:

——–Excerpt———-

He was stopped now in the shade of the Browner Tower building – a faded, weather-beaten brownstone. Her mortar joints were checked and crumbling, an oxide green patina coated the copper gutters and facets on the uppermost windows. Over the years it had bled down the uneven bricks, looking like dried tears of defeat. As Russ stared at those tears he could feel it welling up inside him, the one nagging insecurity he’d not been able to shake since deciding two years earlier to return to school: Could it be my best years are behind me, too? He glanced at the building’s cornerstone, 1930, and wondered how she must have looked then, nearly sixty years ago, this “Citadel of Academic Excellence.” Yes, that was it; he remembered it now, that bit of pomp he’d seen printed in his recruitment brochure: “Browner Science Tower – A Citadel of Academic Excellence.”

It was then, in 1930, that Dr. Seymour B. Browner, then eighty nine years old, once long-listed for the Nobel Prize, had been wheeled by his caretaker into position near the cornerstone of this eponymous tower to deliver its dedication. Enfeebled by decades of bending over a microscope to peer into the eye of the fruit fly – Drosophila melanogaster – the organism whose eyes he had worked tirelessly to mutate from red to white, Dr. Seymour, ever since his eventual retirement from academia in 1911, had been relegated to a wheelchair due to a debilitating form of scoliosis.

Once the caretaker locked the wheels of Dr. Browner’s wheelchair into place, he carefully placed a microphone in the doctor’s slight left hand. He helped him position it to permit the doctor to speak with ease, as the curvature of his spine no longer permitted him to sit upright. A throng of university supporters had assembled for the dedication – faculty (current and emeritus), noted alumni, Dean’s Level patrons, bankers and shop owners and other pillars of community, as well as proud fathers and mothers of gifted children, aspirants to scientific stardom. The caretaker handed the doctor a small card with the words of his dedication printed on it. He whispered to him that he may proceed when ready. Ever so feebly the doctor raised the hand that held the card to order the cessation of clapping. When his eye glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose the caretaker was quick to his aid. As the doctor began to read, his hands, wracked from forty years of working tweezers to separate Drosophila mutants in tiny glass dishes, trembled; his voice, impaired by a botched spinal surgery, quavered over the speaker. The crowd pressed in, anxious to bear witness to what this one time titan of science, now a disfigured elder of the community, had to say. Somebody stepped forward and lowered the volume to reduce feedback. The doctor spoke slowly, straining at times to read each of the august words printed on the card.

But no sooner had he started, it seemed, and he was finishing up. “And  so it  is  with  great –” he paused to clear phlegm “– pride   that I  dedicate  this  building. Bring  us your  young,  the  scientific leaders  of  tomorrow. Your truth  suckers.“ As written it was seekers, but the crowd had understood, and was duly charmed. A hearty round of applause went up.

The caretaker retrieved the microphone from the doctor’s tremulous hand and carefully replaced it with a bottle of champagne. The crowd once again grew silent, expectant. The caretaker then stepped behind the doctor’s chair and turned it slightly, to position him very close to the cornerstone, such that even the feeblest swing would break the bottle. Surely it would.

“Dr. Seymour, sir, if you would please, look this way!” A crush of photographers had come forward. For years the scoliosis had forced his head to droop when he sat, but the doctor fought that now. He raised it slightly, his dim, gray eyes peering out from between his bushy white eyebrows and the rim of his glasses, which had once again slid down his nose. There he sat, dressed by his caretaker in a brown tweed jacket, a matching fedora with brown pants and oxford shoes, hunched but dignified, tired yet regal, a bottle of champagne – the cork expanding imperceptibly outward – dangling from his frail grip. Dozens of blue bulbs flashed to capture the salutatory moment.

When the photographers finished, the caretaker bent down to tell the doctor that he may “swing away when ready.” But as the doctor drew back the bottle in a sloth-like motion – the very bottle that had been jostling around in the rear tote of the wheelchair the entire time he was earlier rolled across campus – the cork exploded from the bottle. Gasps went up. The cameramen jumped backwards. Three women burst from the front of the crowd and rushed forward. The caretaker trumpeted, “Would somebody please get us a towel!” Handkerchiefs were deployed from pockets. In mere seconds a flurry of helping hands had descended on Dr. Seymour, frantically but gently dabbing at the sticky streams of Perrier-Jouët (vintage 1920, the year of the doctor’s Nobel mention) running down the deep creases of his withered cheeks and brow.

The story had been reported the next day in the Around Town section of the newspaper: “Browner Tower dedication – not the splash that was hoped for.”

——–/Excerpt———-

Breakfast this morning. Part of the five-year plan. One-egg, cheese omelet, bacon, Chilean blueberries

Just another daily commute home from the office:

Did our taxes today. The Man owes us some money.

Some may object to my use of the term owes in this context.

Why, we should be grateful just for the opportunity to live in a country where there are jobs we can work at, and be grateful we can even pay income taxes, and be equally grateful our masters representatives don’t keep it all.

Some may object to the term grateful in this context.

What I mean is, one has to consider who’s working for who, who should be grateful to who?

Or as AC/DC sang, “Who Made Who?”

Should the egg be grateful to the chicken, or the chicken to the egg?

I can tell you this much, I’m grateful for Happy Wife. In a way you could say She Made Me.

That’s a Cyclamen in her lap. Wikipedia says the plant is native to Europe, from the Mediterranean Basin east to Iran, with one species native to Somalia. And to think I bought it at a grocery store in Alaska.

Haha – Ruth Bader Ginsburg falls asleep during the State of the Union speech.

She blamed it on the wine but if you ask me you can’t rule out the presenter.

It happened to me once. At a pharmacology seminar. I had not been drinking wine or anything else beforehand. I was seated near the back row, among friends, when all of a sudden a sharp jab to the ribs woke me up. I came to and there was my friend, a fellow grad student, Dasha I think it was, whispering loudly in my ear, “Dude, you were snoring!”

Who could blame me? The presenter was some prof from biochemistry droning on and on in a monotone voice about curing cancer in mice. It was late on a Friday afternoon. Like I said, I hadn’t been drinking, though if I recall I had had a big lunch. You know the feeling I’m talking about. The lights go down, your head bobs once, then twice, you correct yourself both times nearly giving yourself whiplash, and then the third time you don’t come up. Everyone was laughing about it after the seminar. Evidently I’d been snoring pretty loudly. Dasha said people five rows down were turning around to look.

Then again I wasn’t being paid $215K a year. If you’re being paid that much money you should be required to stay awake. No matter who’s speaking. If you don’t your pay gets docked. I totally love the look of unconcern on the face of the dude to her left — “Like, whatever.”

I started this last Sunday.

————————————–

A lop-eared bunny for breakfast:

The inventiveness of Happy Wife never ceases.

A grim, foggy morning outside. The phonecast indicates sunshine for days and days ahead. So far this morning, though, we are all like vegetables huddled inside a cold soup. Not a morning to slide out of bed and into the flip flops, throw back the drapes, step onto the porch and greet the wondrous felicity of the day with a beaming smile, filled with anticipation — “Good Morning!”

No.

In other words, it’s February. My birth month. Nothing felicitous about turning 55. Or having a David Byrne moment at your desk only the third week into a new job, “How do I work this?”

You see, one imagines that when you reach 55 on the job you become a fount of knowledge, with the young-ins queuing up outside your office. One by one they give a supplicant tap on your door, respectfully asking if you might share a bit of your hard-won wisdom with them, any little kernel of advice you might have that would help them gain the mastery over their job that you now enjoy over yours. This is the natural order of things, no? A thin consolation of elder-hood? That palpable sense of omniscience that attends seniority and Letteredness which permits you to reach back in time and pontificate, “Why, when I was a junior analyst like yourself, we used to…”

That’s not happening.

Not that I’m complaining mind you. People at work have been great and generous towards me. But just imagine the transition: One day I’m grappling with the biological implications of one protein interacting with another, and the next I’m talking with a corrosion engineer about the Trans-Alaska pipeline. (Which is just fine, btw).

I know, right — the life of a dilettante. The very thing my wise father once cautioned me about: Never become a person who knows a little bit about a lot of things, son.

Sorry, Dad. I have become such a person.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Big whoop. Just watch: some hacker will get hold of this, connect my name and birthday, and before you know it take out a mortgage in my name. You know what, no worries. I’ll just find out where the house is, go there, and plop myself down in the family room on the couch and chill. If anyone objects I’ll shout ’em down, “This is MY house.” Ha!

How’s Harry? Well, he’s been a super responder to therapy, that’s for sure. One injection of a mitotic inhibitor and his tumor shrunk from a fist to a golf ball. After another, to a grape. We have our sights set on a pea. His vitality is back to wild type. But we dare not let that go to our heads and scold him for bad behavior, because he’s quick to remind us, Don’t forget I’m sick:

Whatchya gonna do?

Needed new pants for the new job. Two pair I thought would be good. Which made me think of Men’s Warehouse. Because there the salesfolk drive you to buy two of anything you only need one of.

Off I went.

A salesgirl with a mind for customer service greets me on arrival. She guides me to the place in the store where the pants are. “These are our pants,” she says. I thank her for her service. I browse the pants offerings. Eventually, I identify a brand I like. Buffalo brand. So-called, I presume, because the pants are tough? Or perhaps it’s because the brand is endangered?

The salesgirl spies my interest and returns to assist.

“I’ll take a pair in green, and one in black, 34×34.” Well, you’d think the size was Martian or something. Turns out there was one pair in that size in green in the entire store — not a small store by any means — but not a single one in black. She begs my pardon and scurries away to check the database. Only one black pair in a 34×34 in the entire company! They have >1000 stores nationwide. I was right, an endangered pant size.  Whatever. She offers to get me the one pair that’s left. No charge. Inter-store shipment. I thank her for her service.

I wait and wait. No call. I go in a week later with Happy Wife and explain the situation to the store manager, an unctuous Italian man who looks like the villain from a cheap spaghetti western. He tells me the computer “says” the pants arrived in Anchorage. I resist correcting the error of personification. Nobody in the store can find them. We wait and wait while half the salesfolk search the back room. As we do, Happy Wife finds a couple sweaters she thinks I might like. I didn’t like. To me, either one would make me look like Fred Rogers, or some old fart delivering a fireside chat.

Finally, the store manager gives up, nobody can find the damn pants. He apologizes profusely for the wait, and offers to give me a pair of pants of my choice for free! Plus, when the pair I was waiting for eventually arrives (or is found), he’ll call me, he says. So off I go to browse the pants again but guess what: Not a single pair of casual pants in any color or any brand in a 34×34 in THE ENTIRE STORE. At one point we had like half the store’s salesfolk searching through countless piles of pants, none of which had the tag conveniently displayed on the fold of the pants facing the customer. Nooo. Each pair had to be pulled from the shelf and the size searched for on the tag inside the pants.

Frustrated, the store manager flips his greasy bangs away from his eyes and says, “Look, find a pair of pants you like, any pair, and I’ll search the computer and see if we have a 34×34 in that size at any of our stores.” I do. He does. Many exist! He’s pleased this is finally over. “I’ll order the pants today and call you when they arrive.” I give him my cell phone number. He circles it. “Tuesday,” he says,”Tuesday at the latest.”

A week passes, no call. Finally, come Friday, Happy Wife stops by the store and wouldn’t you know it the pants are there — not only the freebie I’d ordered a week earlier, but also the pair that couldn’t be found! Happy Wife texts me:

Got the pants.

What? Why didn’t they call me.

He said he did.

Pfft.

I get home and open the bag. Two pair of pants alright. But neither pair is what I had ordered. The original pair, the one that couldn’t be located, that ain’t them. And the other pair, the freebie, the one he told me the computer said was available in my size in hundreds of stores — nope, that wasn’t the pair I chose. The color’s not even right.

Sheesh.

I try on one pair anyway. Brand: Joseph Abboud. Evidently Mr. Abboud measures in centimeters, not inches, because this 34×34 wouldn’t have fit me when I was ten. Clearly I’m a Buffalo man. Back in the bag both pairs go.

I return to the store days later. A different perky blond in skin tight black tights and impossibly high stilettos ambles toward me. I give her the entire sad chronology. She gives me a pouty face. Together we search for a 34×34 — again. Finally she hands me a pair and insists I not look at the label and try them on. Humor me she says. I do. The waist is okay, but too long. Ah ha, she says, I thought so, that brand runs large. It was a 32×34. She fetches a 32×32. I try them on. Pretty good. I take them. Now for pair two. She continues to search through some obscure pile of black jeans, probably also endangered, and finds, guess what — a 34×34! I grab them like she’s a relief worker and I’m a refugee. I try them on. So so style-wise, but they do FIT, so I take them.

She hands both pair of pants to the unctuous store manager to handle the return. He asks me for the receipt. “What, you’re kidding, right? You took it from me the last time I was here.” He doesn’t remember, not right away. Slowly he does, and apologizes profusely for the rigamarole. I countenance his apology. He countenances my countenance. I leave the store. It feels like victory.

I wore the 32×32 to work to today and was pleased with the fit, even while sitting. They fit like Buffaloes!

The opening poem read at our wedding nine years ago come June.

Best fetch yourself a hanky first.

Untitled
By Walt Whitman

I do not offer the old smooth prizes,
But offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is called riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve.
However sweet the laid-up stores,
However convenient the dwellings,
You shall not remain there.
However sheltered the port,
And however calm the waters,
You shall not anchor there.
However welcome the hospitality that welcomes you
You are permitted to receive it but a little while
Afoot and lighthearted, take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before you,
The long brown path before you,
leading wherever you choose.
Say only to one another:
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law:
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

What, you wonder, is to blame for the paucity, the shortfall, the utter dearth of posts at Rod’s Alter Ego?

In a word: Work.

You see, whereas my former job permitted me time to ruminate during the day, my present one has my nose to the grindstone. So by the time I arrive home, scratch Harry (who was diagnosed with Lymphoma, btw) behind his ears, prepare and drink a stiff one, Happy Wife is coming through the door. We commence with discussing our day, and then it’s couch time, another glass or two, and before we know it it’s 9:30 and off to bed we go. Or at least she does, because come 5:30 am Harry needs his morning walk since I am no longer able to do it midday. Because: Work. Spotting a theme are you? I go to bed about 10:00 pm after getting Harry back inside the house. If these things are done out of order nighttime commotion can result.

This caught my eye a few weeks back. In particular:

We don’t fare much better with time to love. It takes time and experience to develop the wisdom and maturity to choose an appropriate partner and love him or her in a way that doesn’t make everyone miserable. Relationships need attention, and attention takes time. Children take lots of time too, and some reflection and experience, yet we are biologically made to bear children when we are young and unwise.

What then to call those of us who didn’t bear children when young (or ever), fortunately wise? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone tell me I was wise to not have children. Especially if the person had children of his or her own. Actually, I take that back. There was one person, a mother herself. She didn’t say it to my face, but many years ago during a rant against me in an email she’d sent to someone I knew, she barked that it was a damn good thing I never had children of my own because they would be totally f*cked up.

Well, gee, thanks Mom. Love you too.

If parents think that childless people must necessarily feel empty without children, as they would without their own children, that’s a mistake if you ask me. The feelings that arise from imagining that you don’t have something you in fact do have, versus the feelings that arise from not having the thing at all, are very different indeed. Consider: a person who imagines life without his right arm versus a real amputee. Maybe not the best comparison but you see my point.

Trust me parents, I have never felt incomplete because I don’t have children.

This relates to a pet peeve of mine. Caution: science ahead.

Evolutionary biologists tell us that the “purpose”[1] of evolution is reproductive success (as opposed to survival). All organisms, humans included, the theory holds, have been individually and “naturally selected” for the “purpose” of making more copies, more babies. Reproductively competent babies in particular. That’s what the author above meant when she wrote “we are biologically made to bear children.” The theory doesn’t only mean normal humans can bear children, as in we have the proper functioning biology to do so (sperm, eggs, uterus, etc.). No, the theory goes beyond that. Every gene, every cell, every organ, indeed an entire organism we are told exists for one and only one ultimate “purpose,” which is not survival — that’s old Darwinism — but reproductive success. The rest of life, we are sadly told by the theory, is nothing but a means to the ultimate goal of reproductive success.

Codswallop.

Lots of us are childless, often by choice if heterosexual, or because of sexual preference as with homosexuals. If every gene, cell, and organ in our bodies was supposedly naturally selected for no other “purpose” than the means to make (and nurture) babies, then why have so many of us not fulfilled that “purpose.” Can’t have it both ways if you ask me. And evidence exists indicating that the number of us who are childless by choice is growing, not shrinking. Plus the last time I looked more and more people are “coming out” every day.

Another snippet from the link:

Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough time but that we waste the time we have. Seneca famously thought this. (“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”) Most of us seem unable to refrain from “wasting” time. It is the rare person indeed who can be maximally efficient and productive. For the rest of us — that is, for almost all of us — Seneca’s advice about not wasting time seems true but useless.

Indeed. Which is why I adhere to Bonnie Raitt’s maxim: Life becomes more precious when there’s less of it to waste.

Gotta go. Lunchtime is over. Ugh.

[1] Purpose is put in quotes to indicate a matter of speaking. There is of course no real teleological purpose to evolution, i.e. no conscious intention.

When you play to avoid losing, expect to lose.

Fingers Crossed. Allegiance declared. Our front window:

I’ll have more here for you to ignore later. Been a busy week.

Je Suis Packers!

UPDATE: À Seattle!