Can’t We All Just Get A Lawn?
Looking for a place to live in Seattle isn’t that easy. It’s not just because the vacancy rate on rentals is impossibly low right now and every rental seems to have multiple bidders, but because it’s tough to find just the right place.
I admit that giving up our view in Florida was hard. Who wouldn’t want to live in such a lovely place. No, I’m not talking about the drop dead gorgeous view of the ocean and Indian River. It was lovely because there was absolutely no maintenance.
A condo on the 8th floor lacks foliage. There’s no shrubs to prune and definitely no lawn to trim. Well, there is a lawn, but it’s 80 feet below you and you don’t have to take care of it. A cadre of foreign speaking lawn folks would show up at the crack of early on Friday and do all the dirty work.
In looking for a home here I didn’t want to make the same mistake I made in Melboring. The Diablo house came with an acre of land, something I thought would be wonderful to have. It wasn’t. Lots of yard means lots of work, and even though I had a stroke of brilliance, wanting to leave it au natural, that still meant picking up dead branches, mowing, trimming and all sorts of horrific homeowner duties.
I quickly figured out how to get out of this. The very first time I mowed the lawn with the dad in law’s riding mower, I drove it into a small gully. I was never allowed to drive it again. I know, smart, huh?
I have never liked yard work. I guess it’s because of all the lawn I had to mow as a young man. I only had to mow, there was no trimming in my family’s yard. Yes, it needed to be trimmed. But this was before the days of weed whackers. And there was no way I was going to trim the yard with the medieval tools my father always seemed to be bringing home from one place or another, including the ever sinister sickle.
Back to house hunting. I looked at a few houses that had beautiful yards. I admit, I am in love with the idea of a beautiful yard. They can be quite beguiling. But like a woman who wears gorgeous makeup on a first date, eventually you see them without it and, well, it can be quite the sight for sore eyes. The same is true of any yard I have. It can look great to begin with, but eventually I will wake up next to it and fear for my life.
The first house showed a lot of promise. It was a townhouse. A very small yard. But it was well landscaped by the owners and I could readily see that all those lovely bushes would suffer greatly at my lawn caring hands. Better to move on.
Then the Shoreline house popped up on Padmapper. It had a very promising yard, one that has lots of weeds, only a couple bushes, a big brown patch of dirt in the back where nothing wants to grow and side and front yards that can’t be more than five feet wide at any one point. In fact, the grass was taller than the yard’s width
Ah, the perfect yard. Now, I know some people love to spread out far and wide and love their acres of land. But I know too many of my friends who are slaves to their yards. I know they like to pretend to love weeding and planting, watering and weeding, weeding and weeding. Did I say weeding?
Now, my idea of weeding is to nuke everything with Spectracide. I don’t have the patience or the constitution to do all that back breaking weeding stuff. Frankly, I have better things to do with an evening or weekend – like have fun.
I have to admit that nuking is a very accurate term, too. I didn’t know until just recently that you should use this stuff sparingly as it is pretty powerful. All it has to do is touch a leaf to kill vegetation. In the spirit of “more is more” I would really lather the stuff on, thinking it would speed up the death. What it did instead was create a very large patch of collateral damage in the yard, killing all the surrounding grass and occasionally, a small bush. It looked like Vietnam after an Agent Orange spree.
So it’s best that I have a small yard, a starter yard if you will. I will need to relearn things like mowing regularly and using Spectracide sparingly. I may even have to learn to pull a weed or two.
Nah! Who am I kidding. As we all know in the Northwest, eventually the whole thing will turn brown in the summer because unlike the folks in Florida, we’re kind of partial to conserving precious resources. We don’t turn on the sprinklers when it’s 90 out in order to keep up with the Joneses who water day and night, damned the water bill and water shortage.
There’s only one downside here. My yard has turned out to be expand-o-matic. Every September my yard triples in size. Just for a month though. I bet most of your yards can’t do that. You see, each house on the cul-de-sac has park duty and needs to mow and trim the park next to my house. That’s my expand-o-matic yard. Just over the fence lies a wedge of ground with two picnic tables and a play area. It becomes mine every September to maintain. Surprise!
That’s OK though. I plan to name it as well for that month. I think Hurricane State Park will do nicely. Now all I need is a ranger hat.
In the Emerald City, wondering if the locals will mind a park entrance fee,
- Robb
A Story Worth Sharing.
In the world of marketing, communication, public relations and the web, the big buzz word these days is “story.” What is the story? How do we tell our story? Is there a story to tell? The buzz list goes on and on.
Stories are hip these days. I, of course, knew this a long time ago. Stories are what makes the world go round. It’s the reason why we go to a movie, read a novel and stay glued to a magazine article.
Stories resonate with us. We get them and with good reason. Well, a couple of reasons, actually.
First, stories are familiar to us. They are built into our DNA. Long ago, before we could speak in any comprehensible language, all we could do was “ugh.” Not a great tool for telling a story. But we could draw. And pictographs became the first story boards, painted or drawn on the walls of caves. Think of these as the first big screen TVs, though you are going to have to live with an awful lot of repeats since the medium was both primitive and permanent, lasting right up to this day.
Stories, of course, began to morph over time. Once we could whip out a couple phrases in our native tongue, we’d sit around the campfire and tell stories orally. Then print was invented and we ended up with books. Shelves of books. Entire libraries of books. We basically went nuts for stories.
Then came the web, which opened up a door for a world of folks who had no idea how to tell a story. The web was run by dweebs who could punch fierce code but didn’t have the social skills to say hi to the dweeb in the next cubicle. Stories went to hell, especially when the Second Anti Christ (Google) came along. Microsoft was the first, in case you’re wondering.
Ah, Google and their damned search engine optimization strategies. Keywords were the bomb, not a story. A story was only as good as its ranking in the search engine, so the masses flocked to the idea of writing information so that it ranked high. That meant lots of keywords and the story be damned.
Then a funny thing happened, something I knew would be the case long ago. No one read the information. This miracle of communication, from web pages to Facebook, fell on largely deaf ears.
Why? Because people love a good story. They can’t help themselves because their brains are wired this way.
Yes, your brain wants a good story. Researchers have found that the components of a good story, a really detailed description, an exchange of dialogue between characters or an evocative metaphor, sends the brain spinning. Different parts of our brains are activated by the elements of a story and it helps us feel alive.
For example, the words lavender and cinnamon titillate our language center as well as the part of the brain that processes smells. We can smell the lavender just by seeing the word in print or hearing it.
A metaphor, it turns out, is an extremely powerful thing. It can set off the sensory cortex, which is how we perceive textures through touch. Descriptions such as “he had leather hands” or “she had a velvet voice” are actually touching – we feel the words as well as hear them.
A couple days ago I wrote about my life being all fiction. There is some truth to the idea. These studies have shown that your brain can’t really tell the difference between reading about an experience and actually experiencing it in real life. Your brain processes the information the same. In other words, a good book is just as good as life itself in the way your brain perceives it. This is why you feel so alive. Your brain is simulating reality when you read, much as it does when you dream.
In fact, a good story can actually improve your social skills in the real world. People who love a good story are more likely to understand other people, empathize with them and see to world from their perspective.
Now here’s an interesting twist. Stories can make your mind keener and more perceptive when they are told in print or in the movies, but not television. Well, at least in children. That’s because children are often left to watch television alone, so there is no real world interaction to add context to the story. It is just information. However, if a parent sits with the child, it will come to life, just as it does with a movie or book.
I love the fact that stories are in again. I have spent much of my adult life telling stories. I love the whole art of storytelling, keeping someone glued to a page or a screen with every word I write.
In the process, I connect with them. They can see themselves in what I write, or see my perspective on something that may or may not be familiar to them. Through this, we all learn more about our world and the complexities it offers. Like a simulator or a computer game, stories let us train for real life. It helps us become better at it because unfamiliar ideas and situations become familiar to us through the stories we read. It gives us comfort when new things inevitably come along, because we have experienced it before, at least in the words of others.
In a world of article spinners and banal writing on the web, it’s nice to know that a good story still turns us on. We are hard wired this way. We can’t help ourselves. It is one of the things that has and will always set us apart from the machines we create. Someday they may be able to create a story, but they can’t experience one. That is our pleasure, and our pleasure alone.
In the Emerald City, making it all up as I go along (as any good Story Laureate should),
- Robb
What Might Have Beens.
Facebook is an amazing tool. Sure, it can make you absolutely batty when someone fills it full of minutia and banalities. Let’s face it, a lot of life is indeed mundane. At other times, however, it can be a crystal ball, allowing you to look at what your life could have been.
I think there are more than few of us who have searched for people from our past. Let’s face it, we’re curious what happened to the “one that got away,” the “one that never could be,” or the “one that came too close for comfort.”
As you know, I’ve certainly had my share of got aways, never coulds and way too closes. Thankfully, the relationship gods have spared me too many wrong turns in this regard, always denying me the ones I would have taken up with at all costs and sending some wonderful people my way instead.
I must profess that some are still a mystery to me. I have seen them on Facebook, well, at least the ones that I haven’t blocked or they haven’t blocked me. What I see are impossible possibilities. I really don’t know how I could have ever wedged myself into the life I thought we could have led. But yet, time and time again, I tried.
It’s funny how we are given blinders early on in our relationships. These blinders, of course, were essential for the proliferation of our species. If we didn’t have them, we would have never slept with some of the people we slept with in the heat of the moment.
These blinders can do us a lot of harm, however, if we take a liking to them. Eventually, we will start to notice that the things that didn’t bother us or the things we once thought were sweet and cute, are now making us nuts.
We can only see this clearly after the fact. At one time, we could only wonder what our life might have been like if we zigged instead of zagged. But thanks to Facebook, we get to see it in written and visual form.
I admit, I have on more than one occasion looked through the pages of my once-significant and could-have-been-significant others. I always end up thanking my lucky stars that things didn’t work out between us.
It’s not to say that anything is wrong with these women or their lives. In fact, they seem to have perfectly wonderful lives, largely, I suspect, because I am no longer in them. There are reasons for this. First, I could have never squeezed my bigger than life existence into their relatively sedate lives. And second, I would have eventually tried to raise them out of their humdrum lives so they could actually have some fun.
This isn’t meant to sound mean. I am sure their lives are very fun. It’s just not the fun I would have. For example, I love an occasional theme park. I even had annual passes to Disney a time or two. But I can’t do Disney every single week. I would be an absolute loon in no time and possibly end up going postal.
Now, this isn’t about Disney. It’s about the lives others lead and how my life is so very different. Frankly, I am surprised anyone can fit into my life for any length of time because it has a nasty habit of changing on a dime.
Case in point. I moved back to Seattle recently on a permanent basis. I had several lovely times in Florida, even the Diablo years had their rare moments, but not one of these significant others could have just uprooted their lives and come to Seattle. But the Janmeister did. Now, one could argue that she might be insane for leaving the sun and swaying palms of Florida to be with the likes of me. But Janutti has a similar disposition in life. She gets me. And that is both rare and something you probably want to hold on to dearly.
It’s not that she is just living my life. We are living the life we created together. This hasn’t always been the case in my 54 years on this earth. More often than not, I simply tagged along with the life someone else wanted. After all, that’s how I ended up in Florida.
When I look through the photos of my Facebook mights of, could’ves, would’ves, did, I can’t help but put myself next to them, in place of the ones they are with now. I don’t fit. I guess I never did. Even if it was a photo of the two of us taken for real, it looks Photoshopped. I simply didn’t belong in the photo, or in that life.
Certainly the photos of Diablo and I looked like someone was in a Photoshopping frenzy. I look out of time and place. I know now that I was totally a fish out of water. I’m just glad she never whipped out one of her many knives and call me sushi.
It’s really rewarding looking through all the might have beens. It really helps me appreciate the “what I haves.” My life would have been so different if I was looking forward to my 33rd wedding anniversary this Sept. 9. I wouldn’t be looking forward to my son visiting this summer. He would never be. If I had stayed with Diablo, I would still be living in Melbourne, hating my very existence. Thankfully, she set me free.
And yet it does. Thanks Diablo for giving me my life back. Thanks to the others who touched my life who thought I was a nice guy, but not their nice guy, to once again, steal the Janmeister’s words. And thanks Janmeister, for accepting me just the way I am, with all my might haves, could have beens and just the way I ams.
In the Emerald City, thanking God that the might have beens remained just that,
- Robb
Busted.
Last Tuesday was a big day for me. I hadn’t done anything like it since 1992. Back then, it felt a lot different, mostly because taking a trip back then was a little more hit and miss and I did it all took place downtown and in White Center.
When I stopped doing it, it wasn’t really a conscious decision. I simply changed my routine. Instead of doing it there I did it in my car instead. Daily. I admit. I was a younger man back then and it didn’t matter where I did it. It was fairly inexpensive and I seemed to have an endless supply of money.
But now, it can really add up. I mean, I was shelling out probably $20 a day on it, a level of commitment I couldn’t readily keep up. Especially when I could do it for just $5.
A lot of people are doing it too, I found. I didn’t know this until last week, when I hopped in the Janmeister’s rental. She offered to drop me off, so I could catch a bus. Yes, a bus. I have become a bus rider.
After a 20 year hiatus, I can tell you that the bus hasn’t changed much. I can say that the quality of people in Shoreline are much better than the ones in White Center. They don’t smell as much for starters.
One thing that has changed is paying for the privilege of bussing it. Back in the day you had paper tickets or a monthly bus pass. The bus pass was a really good deal because you could ride the bus as much as you wanted and it cost the same. I think I paid $32 back then for a two zone bus pass.
But those wily transit folks figured out how to fix their revenue problem with the Orca card. Every time you ride the bus, you swipe your little card and they ding your bank account. The good news is you can ride any transit you want, from light rail and Kitsap or Pierce Transit to the ferries. Pretty cool. Still a little pissy that it doesn’t work on the Monorail, but I’ll live with that.
I ride the 301 Express. It stops right by my house and drops me in the scary tunnel downtown. There’s something about that tunnel that still creeps me out. I used to poke fun about it in a parody I wrote about riding the Metro bus. Wait, I still make fun of riding the Metro bus. I didn’t really like the tunnel then and I’m not sure I’m crazy about it now. I guess it was all those disaster movies where people are caught in the subway during an earthquake. I can’t help but think I will be one of the lucky ones to get caught down there during a shake, rattle and roll in Seattle. If there is an earthquake and I don’t post a RobZerrvation the next day, look for me at the Westlake Station. I will be under some rubble.
Back to the bus. I took my seat and off we went. The 301 is a pretty popular bus and for good reason. It’s an Express. It only makes a handful of stops before getting on the freeway. I left at 7:11 and made it downtown 7:40. It takes me that long in my car but as I noted, I’m only shelling our $6 instead of $11 to park plus gas and wear and tear on the vehicle.
As I sat down, I did notice something had indeed changed. Back in the day, people would talk on the bus. Now they all they do is stare blankly at their iPhones. They do this for the entire trip. Not just one or two people, but 30 or 40 of them. Me? I people watch, just like I always have. In this case, I watch people who are so removed from living life in this big world of ours that they do the Zombie stare at their phones.
What do they do on the phone? Well, they don’t talk, that’s for sure. Instead, they scroll through their music, read their email or text. I’m not sure who thinks these people are so interesting that they want to text them while they are on a bus. What do they text? “I am on the bus.” “Bus sucks.”
I think I liked it better when people at least acknowledged that someone else was on the bus. In a sad way, I think iPhones have made people the mindless drones that Steve Jobs poked fun of in his famous launch ad for the Mac. All that is needed is for chick with a hammer to come running down the aisle of with a hammer, smashing everyone’s little screens.
I do admit that the tunnel did fascinate me yesterday when I was heading home. I arrived just as several buses were departing. None were mine. Then the tunnel went completely empty. Before long, a light appeared. It wasn’t a bus, but the light rail. It disappeared and a moment or two later, my bus arrived. It’s kind of jarring to see buses and a train use the same tunnel. Very sci-fi for this guy.
As for me, my bus was one of the train followers. As I boarded it, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had gotten on the right bus. There’s no way to tell once you’re onboard, so for the first five minutes or so I wondered how I would ever get home if I got on the wrong damned bus.
I didn’t. It delivered my to 183rd and Aurora about 1/2 hour later. No stressful drive, no hunting for a place to park, no wondering what the commute home up Aurora would be like. I get to leave all that to the bus driver. Not a bad deal for $3.
We’ll see if I remain as optimistic once the weather turns bad. Perhaps my honeymoon with Metro will become an icky divorce come winter time.
In the Emerald City, thinking I should cause a commotion by asking the person next to me how they are today,
- Robb
Shh, It’s A Secret, Facebook.
An amazing thing happened last week. Amazing only in that it is so late in coming. It seems that the Associated Press finally apologized to one of its long dead reporters. It only took them 77 years to admit they were wrong.
If you didn’t see the story, let me recap. Edward Kennedy was a war correspondent in World War II. As the war came to a close, he was one of the privileged few to witness the Germans unconditional surrender in Reims, France. He was about to get the biggest scoop in history.
Only one problem. Winston Churchill and Harry Truman had agreed to keep the secret one more day so Stalin could enjoy a second, coordinated surrender in Berlin. Kennedy never got the memo. Playing the unpleasant role of scape goat, he was instead taken to task by the AP and summarily and unapologetically fired.
He had been accused of breaking a pledge that he and 16 other reporters had made to keep the surrender a secret. It was a condition of being allowed to witness it.
Now, one has to wonder why Ed’s career was destroyed so, given the fact that he filed the article with the AP and the AP could have just killed the story. They were his boss.
Which brings me to the topic of today – how nothing like this can ever happen again.
Not because it was unconscionable. But because technology makes it way too easy to share everything.
I wonder what World War II would have been like in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Sure, the Allies could keep a lid on everything back then. It was seen as patriotic for the press to allow their wartime reports to be censored for security reasons.
But now, everyone carries their own portable reporting devices with them. Reporters are a dying breed, largely because their own role in controlling the flow of news has become something of a dinosaur.
If D-Day were to happen today, hundreds of Frenchmen would be snapping photos of all these ships mysteriously arriving off their shores. O.K., so it wouldn’t be that mysterious at all. Folks in England would have already been sending friends photos of the troops massing and shipping out.
We’d all see the whole thing unfolding on Facebook. If you remember, the Germans had their little coding machine that they thought was so unbreakable they never bothered to change the codes. We had one of their machines and they didn’t know it. So we knew everything they were up to.
We would today, too. Screw the Enigma machine. We have Twitter. I could see it now. Frenchmen Twittering – “Americans parachuting in from sky.” “Boats landing on coast.” “Invasion imminent?”
While Churchill and Roosevelt could be heavy handed with the media, appealing to their patriotism and sense of duty, I don’t think they would have had a clue how to handle Facebook and Twitter.
Obviously, fighting an axis of evil led by the mustached one requires us to make sacrifices. We readily lived with rationing, blackouts and metal drives. But give up Facebook and Twitter to stop a madman? Are you nuts?
And then there’s poor Ed Kennedy, trying to follow the rules, filing the story only because he assumed the war was over, which it was the moment he witnessed the surrender. How could he have possibly known that Churchill and Roosevelt had created a photo opp for Stalin, so they “delayed” the end of the war by a day.
I can only wonder how many additional allied troops died in that intervening day. Everyone assumed the war was still going. I’m sure the Germans did. But if they had Facebook, they could have just posted the news to their friends: “Wir geben. Sie hat gewonnen.”
Within seconds everyone would have known the war was over. It is indeed an amazing medium. To think that within minutes news can be shared with friends all over the world.
I think this technology would have changed history. If only the Romans had had iPhones instead of chiseled stones or papryrus and a quill. These were pretty slowtech. By the time you chiseled “Beware of Greeks that bare gifts,” the Trojan Horse would have already been through the gate. But give the guards a Twitter account and they would have been able to alert the entire Roman Empire that something seemed a bit funny about the giant horse with a belly that snickered loudly, like someone was pulling the wool over someone else’s eyes.
Certainly, Caesar would have been given a heads up about his bud, Brutus. Someone would have Tweeted that Brutus had it in for him: “Watch your back, Caes. Brutus is our to get you. He wants the salad to be named after him.”
Caesar would have had none of that and Unfriended Brutus on Facebook. And that would be that.
Of course, one could argue that that is what set the whole thing off in the first place. Caesar may have Unfriended him already. People do whacky things when you Unfriend them. They really take it personally I’ve found, though no one has gone as far as to stab me in the back (though one of my exes came real close.)
But back to the AP and reporter boy. I can’t help but feel sorry for this guy. He was just doing his job, filing stories about the war. He got the story of a lifetime and filed it with his boss, who then promptly hung his ass out to dry. And Ed got to live out his life in shame, dying a hollow, broken man.
Ed died in 1963 in a tragic car accident. The AP never apologized to him during his brief life. But then they chose to 77 years later. That’s supposed to make everyone feel better. It’s like the U.S. apologizing for slavery a couple hundred years later. Oh, they did? Well, there’s another RobZerrvation topic then.
It was equally sad that Ed’s daughter put on her brave face for the story. She said dad would be thrilled to have received the apology… 77 years late. Sure he would. Wait until I’m dead to say you’re sorry. I think it’s safe to say that Ed doesn’t really give a crap. He’s on the other side of the Pearly Gates and I’m pretty sure there’s no AP teletype up there to let him know that his former employer has forgiven him.
His new employer forgave him too, I hear. He does that kind of thing. In fact, Ed is running the news bureau for the Heavenly Times. He’s working on a story right now about the Rapture with a humorous side piece on the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Speaking of the scoop of a lifetime!
In the Emerald City, wondering if God is a benevolent, loving Editor,
- Robb
Why Were We Ever “Friends?”
I have always had an odd idea about friends, I guess. I suppose I’m a bit of a Pollyanna about the whole friends thing. And don’t get me wrong, I have had some great friends, some who are still my friends all these years later.
Maybe they are to blame for how I perceive friendship. We’ve had our good times and some really bad times. We’ve enjoyed hours of laughter and years of not speaking, often because the tears were still flowing because of something one of us had said or done.
And still, we would find our way back to one another.
Then there are those odd people we let into our lives, people we once thought of as friends but never really were. Sure, they pretended to be. They might have even thought they were.
When we are in our 20s and even our 30s, we create a big circle of “friends.” I don’t know the reason why, but it can be both alluring and delusional at the same time. Being friends takes a lot of work. It is time and labor intensive. I truly believe that you can only have a handful of real friends at any point in time because there is only so much time in the day to maintain a friendship.
The others are really just acquaintances. It’s the “Hi how are you?” kind of friend. I know I’ve touched on this topic before, but as I look back at my time in Florida, I have started to realize that I once again fell into the trap of befriending people who didn’t deserve even a moment of my time.
Now, before any of you in Florida start thinking I’m talking about you, I’m not. If you’re still connected to me on Facebook and I respond occasionally to your posts, you’re good. Instead, I am talking about a cadre of friends who became my friends because of that ill conceived and poorly executed thing I once called a marriage.
For some reason, I didn’t take all those lessons learned in life and use them over the past seven years. Instead, I fell for the old routine of letting my now ex’s friends become mine.
I look back at this and once again wonder what was I drinkin’? These people were not my ilk at all. They were all needy losers who hovered around the ex like chicks flock to a mother hen. She loved that role, by the way. For all I can tell, she still does.
For much of the time it was an out of body experience for me. I would smile, chit-chat, occasionally laugh, all the time wondering deep down what the hell I was ever doing spending any of my previous time with these people.
Here’s the cast of characters. We had her high school friend Wes who had broken up her relationship with her one time future ex Alan because he secretly wanted Michelle (yes, Christine, Wes had the hots for Michelle). We had his wife, who was nice, but I think perhaps afraid of her own shadow, much less the general public. We had her other friend, Moon, who ended up staying with us for a couple days until I demanded she leave. She had not a shred of decency, changing her clothes with the door open so I could get the full-meal deal in terms of views. I admit I would have never complained if the view had been a pleasant one. It wasn’t. Then there was the maintenance man turned photographer (DB) and his mouthy live in (Anne Marie) who would invite us to sail on their boat where they liked to be in the buff. Again, not a view I would want. Rounding out the flock was her usual collection of people with more issues than Life magazine.
And everyone wonders why I was so moody. Sure, I was in a nightmare of a marriage with someone I had barely known before I skipped off to Florida to be with her. I will take the blame for that. And I can’t really blame her for surrounding herself with all these “needies” because it made her feel important.
What I can do is blame myself for falling into this trap… again. I know better than to try to make a significant other’s friends my friends. It never works. First, if your significant other has hot female friends, eventually you want to shag them. Diablo had a few who fell into this category. Sure, you play coy about the whole thing, but if given a guilt-free, punishment free moment, you would do the big nasty in a heartbeat.
So you can’t get too close to them because, 1) it might happen or 2) it doesn’t and your significant other is convinced it did or will. This is a no-win.
It’s tough to be friends with the guy side of the equation also. First, you wonder if the reverse is true, thinking that, 1) perhaps they want to sleep with your signifiant other, 2) they already have or 3) they are right now.
This all equals out in the end, though. Eventually, you split the sheets and all her friends retreat along with her, like the Southern general leading the loyal troops back into the mists of the Civil War after they got a whooping from the North. They slip back into the shadows of your mind, only vague memories.
Well, they used to be memories. Then God invented Facebook. Even though you are no longer actual “Friends,” you continue to see their ugly mugs and banal comments because they are “Friends of Friends.”
So, occasionally I see them once again. And every time I do, I am reminded of why we aren’t friends now and never really were. That, my “friends,” is a very good lesson to hold onto. Perhaps this time I will.
In the Emerald City, looking at my “Friends” list and wondering who will be raptured next – oops, there went another one,
- Robb
I Thought Of It First. No Really!
Throughout my life, I have had a passion for inventing. That’s the good news. The bad news is I suck at engineering and manufacturing, so most of my brilliant ideas continue to swim around in my mind and not in the real world.
Others have found their way into reality. In a world of “only ifs,” I probably could have been wealthy right now. Or at least got credit for something others brought to market.
Case in point: Skydiving Tunnels. There’s one of these in Orlando and now one in Tukwila, just south of Seattle. Basically, it’s a wind tunnel turned on its end, allowing customers to experience the thrill of freefall with no need for an airplane ride or a parachute that may or may not open.
I thought this up when I was 16. And no, this is not a mostly true. I was hanging around the Issaquah Parachute Center back then and in the dreary skies of Seattle, skydivers often had to wait weeks for a chance to go skydiving. I was a big airplane geek as well, so I knew all about wind tunnels and how they worked. So I put the two ideas together and even drew a mockup of what it would look like.
Fast forward to today and there it is, my concept in working order. Of course, at 16, I had no idea how to turn this into reality or how to get funding or anything. I guess I was just ahead of my time.
I also built a working model of a human powered gyrocopter back then. It seemed so simple to me. All the machinations worked perfectly in model form, but for some reason my mother refused to send me to welding class at 14 so that I could build it in the backyard. We may never know if it would actually work. Thanks mom!
I also came up with an idea for a perpetual motion power generator that I am sure will really work. It uses train cars, batteries and a track. It cheats the idea of perpetual motion ever so slightly, only in that the train initially needs to be diesel powered to do its stuff, then suck energy from batteries which also generate additional power that can be used elsewhere.
During the disco craze I came up with the idea of putting lights in the bottom of shoes. Sure, kids have these today. But my idea would use a built in microphone that would sense the beat of the music and turn it into lit multicolored signals in the shoes, creating your own disco dance floor anywhere you were.
I actually made a working model of that idea, but then the disco craze faded out and I never made the jump to the idea of kids wear. As I said, always a day late and a dollar short.
I still have a working model of another invention. It is a parachute, much like the winged chutes you see skydivers with today. I added a pair of flaps to the back, like an airplane has, which should give the chute tremendous maneuverability without having to ever worry about stalling it out, which can increase its sink rate. It’s still in the “to do” pile as I haven’t actually tested it. If you hear about some guy jumping off his roof and dying, just figure that I finally got around to trying it out.
The reason it’s in the “to do” pile is that I always seem to have more ideas on my plate than time. I have a terrific idea for a personal sound device which would play theme music to go along with your life. Think of any soap opera or movie. Just before the big moment in the scene, there’s a little stinger of music that captures the mood of what’s going to happen.
So there you are – you are about to break up with your girlfriend. Rather than hit her stone cold with the news, you play the break up theme on your device so she knows it’s coming. There would be themes for every eventuality… I wrecked the car, I quit my job, I slept with your best friend, I am moving to another city, you name it. The entire spectrum of human emotions, each with its own musical snippet to set the stage. For instance, here’s one that is for when you have news you want to share: News. Or if you have something foreboding to say, try some Drama.
I still like that one. I know I could have used it many, many times in my life to soften the blow, even though I would be hard pressed to find just the right theme for “It’s over between us, I already packed my shit, I am sleeping with someone else and I want a divorce.” That one could be pretty hard to come up with. While it should be sympathetic and sad on the receiving end, I would want to pick something pretty triumphant and joyous.
Perhaps someday I will hit pay dirt. Increasingly, however, in our connected world, I seem keep thinking up things that already exist. Case in point. I was working on a client project yesterday and it dawned on me that one of the reasons we chow down our food so fast is because many of us hate eating cold food.
Aha! I think. What we all need is a heated plate. What a great idea! Well, it was and here it is – Heated Plate.
I just can’t seem to get a break here. Wait a minute! I got it! How about a daily humor column where I can rant and rave to my heart’s content. I’ll call it RaveandRantserrvations. Kind of catchy, eh?
In the Emerald City, thinking about what else I can come up with that someone else will make millions on,
- Robb
Fiction? My Whole Life Is!
I have a confession to make. While I love to read, I don’t read fiction. Over the span of my lifetime, I have perhaps read less than 50 books that were fiction. I managed to make it through The Old Man and the Sea but never could mount an assault on any one of Hemingway’s tomes. I read the whole series of Tom Corcoran books about his fictional crime investigating photographer in Key West, but have yet to read a single James Bond thriller (or see a single James Bond movie).
I have read Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, but Following the Equator and Kidnapped remain on my bookshelf, collecting dust. I do admit to reading Great Expectations, but the only Christmas Carol I have been engrossed in is the version Bill Murray did, and I’m pretty sure it was entirely faithful to Dickens’ original. I don’t remember Ebenezer Scrooge being a golfer.
I have friends who pour through fiction. My own mother, bless her heart, can read an entire book in a long afternoon. Me, it can take weeks, months even. I just can’t seem to get my arms wrapped around the idea of fiction.
Go figure! I’m a damned writer after all. You’d think I would be like most writers and glom on to the work of others, enjoying their own journey into their minds and imaginations, appreciating the selection of every carefully penned word that managed to make it past their critical, writer eye.
I have long wondered why I don’t get into fiction. I have even started two fiction books myself, Brewster McCabe: Private Eye and For the Corporate Good. Both are pretty damned good, though I confess that Brewster has been in process for about 20 years now because I came to realized that it was as much an autobiography as it was a tongue in cheek detective story. So many things that happened in my own life are woven into the pages of Brewster that I can’t really tell what is and what isn’t fiction.
And therein lies the problem, I think. I live a pretty fictional life. In many respects, I am a living, breathing work of fiction. The pages are filled with adventures, memorable characters, impossible settings and scenarios, plenty of drama, moments of humor and even some intrigue. It is a rich story that is unique to me, but identifiable to many, for we all live a life of fiction.
As I’ve said here and there, we create our own life. We make it up as we go along. There is no master plan for us, except the one we dream up. Our life has a beginning, a middle and an end, just like a novel. Along the way, there are twists and turns, some so unbelievable that no author or filmmaker would ever allow it to stay on a page or be shown on the silver screen.
Yet to us it is completely normal. Just like the words that unfold in a story, we get caught up in the plot, we revel in where it is taking us, this journey we call our life. No one has ever written anything like it, and yet we add to its pages every day without a thought.
I always laugh when someone tells me they can’t write or that they aren’t creative. There are two sides to writing: the learned side and the side no one can teach you. Anyone can learn the rules of writing. You can even learn them to the point that you can break them with great zeal. I do all the time. Rules, as we know, are meant to be broken, and the very nature of writing is so personal that standardized rules can’t accommodate all our needs.
I like to think of the whole learned side as a framework. It’s the girders and beams of a building. The design of the building is what we get to create. It’s our own story. It will never be told again in exactly the same way. We are uniquely its author.
I’m luckier than some. I have found a way to get close to my story, to own the telling of it, whether it’s in these RobZerrvations or in my memoirs, or even Brewster McCabe, with all its puns, plays on words and veiled and not so veiled references to my life and its foibles.
So perhaps that’s why I’m not big on fiction. My own life is better fiction than any writer can come up with. There have been times that it has been a bigger mystery than anything Agatha Christie dreamed up. And at other times, it has been a nightmare that even Stephen King couldn’t have conceived. Yes, even Robert Louis Stevenson couldn’t top the adventures I’ve had.
I guess fiction seems a little pedestrian to me. I am fortunate enough to be both the subject and the author of a masterpiece, one that I can relive over and over in my own mind, or in the things I actually write down. I can run it through my Mental Cuisinart and frappe it into anything I want, keeping facts I like and getting rid of those that don’t amuse me or resonate with my audience.
That is the fun of creating our own work of fiction. Our old language arts teacher isn’t there to grade us on it. There’s no final exam. You simply toil away at the saga, adding page after page, until one day you get to that place all writers do. Those two words that every work of fiction shares: The End.
In the Emerald City, trying to conjugate my verbs so I can take them to work with me today,
- Robb
Third Times Not A Charm – Marriage Encounter III.
I can’t really write about my first two marriages and ignore the last one. It was epic in all respects, much like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that defined the various stages of our relationship.
I met Diablo during the release party of Pirates of the Caribbean I in Key West. I probably wouldn’t have ever married her, but damn if Pirates of the Caribbean II wasn’t released in July 2006. So there wasn’t another option, except leaving her marooned mid swoon and heading back west.
As we all know, oil and vinegar makes a nice salad dressing but it doesn’t want to stay mixed when you’re not shaking the hell out of it. We were never a great salad dressing.
But I really did figure that we would be together forever, and if it had to be the latter part of “for better or for worse,” then so be it. Sure, the alarm bells were going off. I knew that it was a dangerous undertaking to marry someone who had never been married before and who was addicted to Disney. All that princess stuff and “happily ever afters” really sets up a girl for disappointment, especially when her Prince Charming was still in the frog stage.
As always Diablo took the reins immediately on the marriage carriage. She wanted to do a pirate marriage – now there’s an original idea – since my last one had been a pirate marriage as well. I really think she had a single white female thing going, wanting to have the life I was in when she met me, but instead of being the understudy for the part of Robb’s Wife, she wanted the lead.
No matter. It sounded good to me, largely because we had talked the Pirate’s Dinner Adventure Theatre folks in Orlando into letting us do the ceremony there. Not before the show, but as part of the show.
This required a performance and a script. How could I resist writing a script? Hello! Writer guy. So off I went to write the play that was actually a marriage. Or was it the other way around? I guess somewhere along the way I neglected to realize I was playing the lead and would actually end up with the prize – the Boob-y Prize, perhaps – but the prize nonetheless.
The general plot was irresistible. In the middle of the show, a bold captain (me) strolls up onto the deck (stage) and challenges their captain. They think I want to fight. The captain says, “What type of challenge.” I say “Marriage.” They all look repulsed and jump back. I should have jumped overboard. I would have too, if only I had written it into the script.
As with almost anything I do (don’t ever let me write your eulogy), I had to add some shtick. During the play, uh, ceremony, the monk marrying us asked us to disarm as a demonstration of trust. We kept pulling out swords, guns and daggers from the darndest places. I had no idea Diablo could hide so much hardware in very private places. I still wonder where that three foot sword came out of, but I have some ideas.
It was a good show, I must say. So much so that Diablo tried and still tries to take credit for it. But you can see my fingerprints all over the script, right down to the schmaltzy part where we pour sand into a single bottle with a bunch of B.S. about where we have been and how our lives are now one. Tear jerky stuff, I tell you, but still B.S.
I’m sure everything was B.S. to the 500 Brazilians who attended our wedding. Our own wedding party was about 70. The rest of the cavernous theater was filled with busloads of 20-something Brazilians who didn’t seem to understand that Diablo and I were getting married.
I didn’t seem to understand it either. The full impact of doing the deed hit me at the reception. The cake people had brought our custom wedding cake in. It was a pirate ship. It was supposed to be white, but they made it brown. Diablo hit the roof. It was going to ruin her day and no amount of consoling could keep that from happening. And if her day was ruined, mine was certain to be.
I was just too blind to see that this was a huge warning sign. The girl liked to be in control of everything and certainly that included me. She had warned me that I had better not be partying it up at the wedding. I didn’t. I was a good boy, drinking pop prior to the performance.
But afterwards, well, it was a damned reception. It is supposed to be a party. And since she didn’t drink and the theater folks had offered us a bottle of champagne, well who am I to screw with tradition and not make a couple toasts. Yes, I was a little tipsy, not too tipsy, but just enough to still be happy about the play, uh, wedding, that I had just been in.
If I look hard for them on my computer, I can still see Diablo’s pissy look at our wedding in the photos. Me, all smiles. Her, frowny bitch-faced. Another warning sign that a storm would be brewing and it wouldn’t be a Hurricane (for the uninitiated, that’s my pirate name).
In my memoirs, I am overly kind about it. It’s because I wrote it while we still thought we would be friends. Talk about someone being delusionally optimistic.
Looking back, it was another “what was I drinkin’” moment in my life. I was caught up in a whirlwind of a moment that had begun the day before at Disney. Yes, my marriage saga takes you to the Magic Kingdom, the happiest place (not!) on earth.
The Pirates of the Caribbean ride had just been refurbished, adding Jack Sparrow into the scenes. It was due to re-open on the day of the movie release. Diablo, being a news reporter, had wangled an invite to do our wedding there too on live television.
So off we headed at the crack of early to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride with a small cadre of crew in tow. I mostly wanted to ride the ride in pirate costume, so I had readily agreed to doing a series of fake weddings on TV.
However, I had no idea I would be getting married five times that day on top of getting hitched for real the next. I think that’s why I didn’t have the sense to cut and run. I had been through the “I do’s” so many times in rehearsal and then on live TV that I didn’t even think about what this would really mean to me.
I wasn’t ready to get married. I was a fish out of water in Florida and still getting over my last relationship. But single white female girl really wanted the happily ever after thing and I was Mr. Fill In The Blank.
It wasn’t all bad, mind you. I did get to go on the ride in costume. True, I had to marry Diablo to do it. But it is one of my favorite rides, even to this day, in any theme park.
I sometimes wonder if the Disney handlers ever knew that we were getting married for real at one of their competitor’s places just across town. I bet that would have made them a bit Grumpy.
In the Emerald City, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last,
- Robb
The River Of No Return.
I don’t like rivers much. Not because one of them drowned my brother, mind you. Rather, it’s because I’ve been sold down a few of them over the years.
O.K., so I don’t like being sold down the river. It’s not fun. I don’t think there’s really a worse feeling on earth to have someone you trust completely sell you out.
The first time happened oh so many years ago. I had started a non-profit group along with my pirate mates Waterrat and Black Bart. We spent an entire summer dreaming up a new pirate group in Seattle that would provide a safe harbor for the malcontents in the Seafair Pirates who wanted out of the shenanigans they called a club. Things had gone from bad to worse until it was no longer fun to play pirate. Politics, not piracy, had won.
Things were great in the beginning. But then one of my best friends started thinking with the wrong head. This can be a good or bad thing, as you know. There is only so much blood in a man’s body and it can only flow to one head at a time. His blood was below decks and its flow would send me down the river of no return.
Yes, I was sold down the river. Blindsided, too. Without a word from my so called best friend, I was beached. In pirate parlance, that means I was marooned, suspended from the group I created.
Now, I can take my medicine like a big boy. But only if there is a prescription for it. In creating the group, we had purposely removed all the trial nonsense the Seafair Pirates had, so there was no beaching, no suspensions. You were either in or you were out and we were neither.
Suffice it to say that it was a very ugly scene. That happens when you get sold down the river. You’re cast adrift and there’s no way you can make it back up to the safety of what was once familiar surroundings to you. You simply must go with the current, not quite knowing where you will end up.
I wish that was the only time this had ever happened in my life, but it wasn’t. I sometimes think I have “C.O.D.” tattooed on my back or something because it seems to keep happening, and not always with friends.
Loves in your life can do the same thing. In some respects, it can be even worse. You give your heart and soul to them, all in the hopes that they say those three magical words to you, “I love you.” I can safely say that there aren’t three better words on this earth. Four perhaps, but not three.
I have sought these words many times in my life. I have sold my own self down the river a time or two just to hear them. I’ve pretended I like cats, ballet, Celtic Thunder, the soundtrack of Les Miserables and an assortment of other oddities that my close friends know are total B.S. But I truly believe them at the time. Yes, they do turn out to be B.S., but I really wanted that other person to love me.
And then somewhere down the line, the awful truth comes out. I have made plans to totally change my life (and sometimes I do), only to find out that while I was a nice guy, I wasn’t their nice guy.
I personally don’t know how you can ever say that falling in love with someone was an error on your part. I have to wonder what goes on in a person’s head. One moment, they have fallen madly in love with you, and the next moment you’re getting the old heave-ho, often without warning.
Yes, sold down the river. As anyone who has had their heart ripped out and stomped on, you know the feeling. There’s nothing worse. I have been punched in the face and gut, I have been stranded in the middle of nowhere, I have been within a hair’s breadth of being homeless, dined on Top Ramen for an entire month at a time and drove a Pinto. And I can tell you that there is nothing more painful than giving someone else your love freely and having it given back to you, sometimes hat in hand.
If I sound bitter, I’m not. As you all know, I still love love. And I still throw myself out there in the fracas we call relationships, whether it’s a new friend or a new love.
And while it doesn’t shake my faith in love, it does a number on my ability to trust. I know that you can’t take someone at their word every time, but when you share those three words between you, I think there is some obligation to use them carefully and precisely. We’re talking about someone’s heart here, which is an amazing gift that is also amazingly fragile.
I would like to think that when you give it to someone else, they take good care of it, as if it’s their own because really, it is. It’s not something anyone gives lightly, like a a bouquet of flowers because you had a tiff about some stupid thing. It’s a heart. Your heart.
I have learned a valuable lesson on the river. It isn’t always a river of no return. Sometimes you get caught up in some pretty scary rapids, perhaps you even get caught in an undertow that pulls you down to the point where you’re just going to drown in sadness and despair. But eventually, you come back to the surface. You stop struggling against the current that had you thinking you can go back to the way things used to be. Instead, you just take a deep breath and relax, believing that the place you’re going is a better place. And usually it is.
Slowly, the current starts to flow again and we move on. We find a new love, someone who treasures our heart as much as we do. And that makes the whole journey worthwhile.
In the Emerald City, enjoying calm waters and smooth sailing for a change,
- Robb