The Days of Wine and Noses.
I readily admit that I have a less than stellar nose. Like the AMC Gremlin of yore, its designers started off with a good idea, lost interest halfway through and tried to end it as quickly as possible.
It’s not nature’s fault, really. She did start out with a great idea. My childhood photos show a lovely, even classic Zerr nose. My fifth grade photo, however, shows a vastly different nose. Somewhere in 4th grade I caught a softball with my face instead of my glove. Unknown to me, I had broken my nose. I didn’t even know I had broken it until I was almost 30. I was trying to give a willing nurse CPR and while I was checking out her vitals, she casually mentioned the fact. Needless to say, it really killed the mood and here I was doing such a good job playing doctor.
My mother obviously never gave my swollen snot box a second thought. I was the last of four rambunctious boys. Blood and guts were the norm in my house. A broken something or other? Not even worth a Band Aid, let alone a trip downtown to see Dr. Pettibone (yes, that’s his real name).
Hey, that’s life. I don’t hold a grudge about it. I can still breathe, which is something I can’t say about my mother.
At least no one could accuse me of being a Pinnochio. How could they? I could tell lies all day long and my nose would never grow, not even one teeny-tiny bit. Lord knows I have tried over the years.
O.K, so that was a bit of a lie. While it’s true that I did indeed lie a lot when I was a kid, it never got me anywhere. The nose never got longer, but I sure got a sore rear end. I was a master at making up a tall tale to cover my tracks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the damned story a week later when my mother slily prodded for a long lost detail.
And then God created truth serum. Well, wine. But in sufficient quantities, it is as good as any spy-strength sodium pentothol when it’s used on me.
Consumed in small quantities, I become far more interesting at cocktail parties since I am a bit shy in unfamiliar surroundings. In slightly larger quantities, however, I become an old “Truth Teller.”
In the early moments of a party, I will compliment you on your new dress or lovely tie. A few glasses of drunken grapes later and I’ll ask you in all honesty why you picked that unflattering cut for that two-sizes-too-small frock you wore to the same party last year. Or wonder aloud whether that Rorschach Test tied around your neck had been a gift from Helen Keller.
This can be both good and bad thing, of course. In the rare examples above, it has never proven to be a good thing as I begin to question – often with razor-sharp wit – why your world is not as neat and tidy as you make it out to be. This would explain why re-invites to parties are a rarity for me. The truth – at least my version of it – isn’t necessarily welcomed in select social circles, well, any circles.
That said, the right amount of wine can wash away all the hubris and guile I possess, turning me into an old Truth Teller who can wash away all the pain, guilt and uncertainty you possess along with all the veneers that protect my too-often broken heart and very fragile ego.
The tipping point for this is well known by now. In the name of science, I did quite a lot of research on this matter when I was younger. Somewhere around the end of glass three and beginning of glass four, all social pleasantries go out the window and the truth – welcomed or not – finally comes out.
I confirmed this fact once again last week. Kat and I were on our Friday date night. A glass and a half at dinner and pleasant conversations ensued at Olive Garden. Two glasses more afterwards and I let Kat know what I really thought of her. Both barrels. The unvarnished truth!
When you’re younger, you want to think that someone will love you for all the silly things you say in your wedding vows. But as the years go by, you find out that not everyone can make it through the “worse” part of “better or worse” or the “poorer” part of “for richer or poorer.”
This is what Kat found out as the third glass of wine took hold. The whole truth spilled out of the glass in front of me.
As we all know, I have run the gauntlet of love over the last few decades. I’ve had some famous flings, some near-fatal failures and yet I remain a hopeless romantic who still believes that someone will see the joy in my tortuous flaws and wimsy in my enduring uncertainties and self-doubt.
I just never thought it would truly happen and eventually I would have to settle for someone who would hopefully tolerate me on occasion, and perhaps be horny enough to have her way with me on special occasions, like when a total solar eclipse appears over Washington State on a sunny day.
Then, like magic, Kat came into my life.
There has never been another Kat. I don’t think there ever will be. For some inexplicable but delightful reason, she loves me for who I am. For better, for worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health, cranky or off the charts hilarious, she still love me.
As I spilled my guts to her, it reminded me of a very good friend of mine. His wife passed some years ago. He has gone on with his life, of course, even found companionship at times with others, but there is only his one love. He can never love another like he did her. She has his heart and his soul.
Thanks to some so-so Merlot, the no-holds-barred truth was laid out in all its scary glory that night. The heart laid bare. The ego checked. The gloves off. Kat finally knows how crazy in love I am with her.
Who knows what would have happened it if was a really good bottle of wine instead of the so-so Merlot? I can only assume that clothes would have gone flying to the floor, romance would have played its fickle hand, there would be lots of moaning and groaning, and then the cops would show up, largely because we were at the Lynnwood Elks and it was BINGO night.
In the Emerald City, wondering if 7:30 a.m. is too early for a glass of honesty,
- Robb
Rrrrrrrrr, Rrrrrrrrr.
It’s hydro season again. Sadly, the sport ain’t quite what it used to be. The races, which used to draw 250,000 people to the shores of Lake Washington, is having difficulties finding a footing in this age of 2,345 cable channels and social media.
It used to be huge in Seattle. Long before there were the Seahawks, there was Wild Bill Cantrell and the Gale boats, Jack Regas in the Hawaii Kai, Jim McCormick in the Miss Madison and racing bad boy Bill Muncey in the Miss Thriftway.
I grew up with these guys. From my bedroom window in Renton I could hear the guttural roar of the World War 2 V-12 fighter engines that powered these water-born aircraft. They flew along at breakneck speeds with only one square foot of the boat touching the water, the rest suspended on a cushion of air.
They were among my first heroes, as these were the days when drivers weren’t seated in closed cockpits. They didn’t even wear seat belts, believing (falsely) that in an accident they would be thrown clear of the boat. The only thing that kept them in these things were two hands on the wheel and a left foot jammed against the firewall as they reached speeds of 170 or so down the straightaways.
I am reminded of this because I recently became a supporter of the Unlimited Hydroplane Museum here in Seattle. There, they not only lovingly restore the old boats to their former glory but run them at various races, recapturing my youth every time one of those now vintage boats takes a turn around the course.
When I worked at Associated Grocers, I made it part of my job to smuggle out some of the old trophies and films that are in the museum now. I knew that if I ever left the company that one day all that history of the Miss Thriftway and Thriftway Too would be lost forever.
So it seemed fitting that I support the museum as much as I can. These wooden boats can’t maintain themselves, and a single trip down to the museum sends all those memories of my youth and young adulthood flooding back.
In 1988 I took a year off from the Seafair Pirates. My own pirate band was quite busy and it was a good time to step away, in part because they had a silly rule that you couldn’t ever go out in a pirate costume without them, even though you owned the damned gear yourself.
Of course, I never listened and my own antics led me to be in the presence of giants that summer. Over the years, the Pyrate Band has donated itself to raise money at auctions. It’s an easy way to give back. We provide the pirate band, you provide the party.
Earlier that year, we donated the band. We went for about $400 I believe. Eventually, the buyer contacted me. It was none other than Don Jones, the Managing Director of Seafair. He was having a little party at his house and wanted us to entertain.
On the appointed day we arrived at his home. As pirates, instruments in hand.
At the entrance, there were two large inflatable hydros, one filled with Miller Lite, the other with Budweiser, two of the major sponsors of hydros. This was going to be a great party, I thought. Don invited us to grab and beer and ushered us into his lovely waterfront home.
Then it struck me. There at the party were all my modern hydroplane heroes – Chip Hanauer and Jim Kropfeld for starters, Jim Lucero, boat designer, John Walters, driver of the Pay n’ Pak and occasional crew chief, Bernie Little, owner of the Budweiser – the list goes on.
And here we were, a band of pirates, brought in to entertain them. Being a pirate, and better, a pirate musician, is the ‘E’ Ticket at Disneyland. You get to go places no one else would get to, meet amazing people and do things you just can’t do as an ordinary pirate or civilian.
This was one of those days. The beers were flowing, the food was never-ending and the party was in high gear. The drivers and crews were an awesome bunch. They told stories, gave each other endless grief and one-upped each other for much of the night. All we had to do was sing some songs, mingle, make everyone laugh with our own antics and soak up the ambiance of hanging with the sport’s elite at the home of the head of Seafair, his own pirates not invited.
I must say one of the highlights was Jim Kropfeld’s decorations. He had broken his neck in a racing accident and was wearing a halo brace while it healed. It wasn’t hard to spot him in the crowd. On the large brace he was wearing, which included a halo to keep his head steady while he healed, other drivers had hung beer cans representing the two “beer boats”. You could hear him clinking and clanking wherever he went.
Sadly, the evening ended all too quickly. Our two hours drifted into three, then four, then five. We left about the same time as everyone else, sharing stories of our run-in with our hydroplane heroes all the way home.
As the boats arrive in the pits this weekend, I’ll think back to those days. Many of those wonderful guys are no longer with us. Their spirits will be in the Stan Sayres Memorial Pits this weekend. And I’ll be thinking of each one of them, not only this weekend but whenever I head down to the Unlimited Hydro Museum to ogle at the likes of the Winged Wonder, the Pay ‘n’ Pak, the Blue Blaster, the Bardahl, Wahoo, and soon, the Squire Shop.
I’m sure kids today have the same fun I did as a kid.
Just kidding.
In the Emerald City, hydro fever and nostalgia upon me,
Rrrrrrobb
Son Of A Gun.
I just became a gun owner. To be precise, a modern gun. I’ve shot historic weapons for more than a decade, you know, the ones with flints and gunpowder.
A real gun, though? I’ve never felt the need. And, after shooting historic weapons all these years, a modern boom-boom stick comes across as much too high tech for my tastes. Stick a shell in it, point and bang. What’s the fun in that?
With a flintlock, you never know if or when the gun will go off. That’s part of the fun. And while modern gun enthusiasts will brag about the firepower and kick their weapons have, their eyes go wide with wonder and delight when they fire off a .60 caliber round with my doglock. Kick? Hells ya!
I know people that own dozens of these new-fangled techno guns. Me, I’ve never really wanted to. In fact, as of today, I have never even shot one. While I’m no peacenik, I tend to leave law enforcement in the hands of professionals, especially since I tend to shoot everyone in a simulation game, friend, foe, family – no matter.
But the earthquake a week or so ago reminded me that the Big One is out there somewhere. Officials say we may have to be on our own for up to two weeks.
True, I could pull out our cannon and the three flintlocks we have around here to protect the family. We have enough powder to mow down a small army – if they are patient enough to wait while we reload them one at a time.
If you haven’t fired a black powder weapon, it isn’t a quick process. You need to pour the measure of powder down the barrel, add some wadding if the ball is much smaller than the bore, and ram the ball down the barrel until it seats snuggly against the powder. But wait, there’s more. Only then do you pull back the hammer. Add powder to the pan, cock the hammer back off safety and BLAM! Hopefully. As I said, more art than science.
I don’t think it’s the optimal defense system to ward off angry hoards who want my food and supplies. In the aftermath of the Big One, people will make do for a couple of days. But once they’ve exhausted all their goodies, they’ll go foraging and that means coming to my house.
When I was in Florida I always had the requisite two weeks of food and water on hand, along with provisions such as a crank emergency radio and flashlights. But in Florida, angry hoards are few and far between, largely because disasters (hurricanes mostly) happen with such frequency that everyone knows the drill. Wait for the storm to pass. Gripe that you have no food and water. Bitch that the AC is out. Rinse and repeat.
But here in Washington, we’re fairly unprepared. We don’t get hurricanes or tornadoes. Just the occasional volcano and earthquake, including the ever-present Big One that is supposed to last 15 minutes or so.
So, it was with a lot of trepidation that I finally broke down and purchased a shotgun. Well, technically my wife Kat bought it. I have stayed true to my promise not to own a weapon. Yes, it’s a fine line in a community property state, but this is my story so I’m going to tell it my way.
We didn’t know where to buy a gun but had seen a Big 5 ad that showed a nice enough looking shotgun on sale for $239, so we headed there to buy a gun. Here we are, two innocents and non-gun owners at the counter, pointing to the gun like two tourists who had never seen the Grand Canyon before.
And here’s where it gets really weird. It seems that you can take a shotgun home with you in Washington State in about 30 minutes time. Some basic paperwork with basic questions (Are you a loyal American? Have you ever tried to overthrow the government?), a quick background check to make sure you’re not a convicted felon, and they hand you the box.
As we waited for Kat’s I.Q. test to be graded (she has not tried to overthrow the government I can safely say), Kat wondered aloud if we had to come back the next day to buy shells, a kind of cooling-off period.
Nope. We bought those too. We laughed to ourselves as the salesman showed us our options. We couldn’t tell one from another. But no matter. Eight bucks later we had enough buckshot to fill up the retreating fannies of 25 angry hoarders.
No test to see if we knew how to work the gun or even load it. Just a quick thank you for your business and we were out the door.
We could have been anyone. We could have been unhappy with our meal service at the Red Robin next door. We could have crazed racist Trumpers. Sure, Kat had to certify she was not mentally ill, but what mentally ill person would ever admit they were, well, mentally ill?
One two-sided form, a check with the government to see if you’ve done time and there you go Mr. Gun Owner, you have exercised your 2nd Amendment right.
Thank god for YouTube. Videos showed me how to load and unload the damned thing. It also showed me how to change the barrel (it comes with two barrels, the reason I am still not sure of) and another video showed me how to take out the wood dowel in it so that it could actually hold more than one shell, which is comes in handy when faced with angry hoards, or so I’m told.
And thanks to Amazon, I can now accessorize it to my heart’s content with all sorts of after-market goodies, including a pink bandolier that holds 25 shells, just in case Kat needs to get her Rambo on in the post-Big One apocalypse.
I won’t feel that need of course. I know how to work it now and it’s safely put away for the day when the angry hoards try to storm my castle.
But truth be told, I will probably give them a good shot or two first with the cannon and the flintlocks. Unleashing the holy hell of black powder is just too irresistible and the element of surprise would be worth it.
I’ll let Kat do the Rambo part. The angry hoard will probably see the pink bandolier with clashing red shells and drop dead on the spot – from laughter.
In the Emerald City, burning the NRA application that came with the gun,
- Robb
That Isn’t Funny.
We are losing our sense of humor. And that is an extremely dangerous thing for our civilization. Our new found P.C. attitude where everything ends in “-ist” and “#metoo” is creating closed off worlds where we no longer have to think about our own belief systems, foibles and fears.
instead, we isolate ourselves in spaces where everyone is just like us: scared, judgmental and angry.
Now, I’m not saying that every joke out there is appropriate. I mean, we figured out long ago that blonde and Polish jokes weren’t appropriate any longer. There are many more thing we don’t joke about. That is the norm in comedy. Comedy evolves with the times.
But as of late, it is being shut out and worse, it is being demonized, like higher education. More and more we are calling out humor we personally don’t think is funny, shaming humorists, columnists and comedians and in some cases in social media, even silencing them for good.
Comedy and humor were never meant to be politically correct. It is meant to shock you, to cause you to consider other truths through absurdity, to stand society on its head and turn it 180 degrees so we can see our collective similarities and shortcomings.
Back in the late 50s, early 60s, Lenny Bruce was jailed for some of the things he said on stage and in records. His routine was at the cutting edge of where we as a society needed to go. The same could be said of Richard Pryor, George Carlin or Robin Williams. Think Carlin was tame? Look up his landmark Supreme Court case regarding the Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.
Lately, I’ve been watching comedy from the 1970s and 80s. All in the Family, Happy Days, Family Ties seemed like harmless sitcoms in their day, but they tackled so many social issues we are still trying to come to terms now – racism, gender equality, politics, religion, abortion, crooked politicians, molestation, school bullying – a litany of topics that are in the headlines today.
The difference? Their approach – comedy – tackled these issues in a safe place. We watched stereotypical families work their own way through these problems and resolve them through dialogue, respect and humor.
Sure, this was all scripted stuff. But the issues they covered were relevant to their day, just as they are now.
Case in point. There’s an episode of Happy Days where Richie is planning to vote Democrat. His father is Republican, as was his father and his father’s father. The back and forth reasonings could have been performed today – the situation today is nearly identical with the polarization of political beliefs in our communities and our homes.
Perhaps no place is this more evident than Laugh-In. Watch a couple of episodes of Laugh-In on Netflix or Prime and you’ll be shocked to hear all the jokes that are still so relevant and topical today. The show touched on so many things we are afraid to even talk to our best friends about today for fear of sounding racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic or what have you.
Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten how to laugh about our shortcomings and imperfections. We take everything so seriously these days. We have become so afraid of being misunderstood in social media that we had to create emoticons with a big smile just so someone sees that we are trying to be funny.
The problem with humor is that it is very situational. The words count yes, but so does the delivery. The nuance of what is and isn’t said creates the humorous situation, the one-liner or plot context. We understand that it is humor, we allow it to disarm us for the duration and once we are through being entertained, we find that we may have actually learned something about ourselves and what it’s like to be a human.
I’m sure that certain groups would think that the Coyote & Road Runner shows were all about cruelty to animals instead of the idea that intelligence can beat technology and that good always triumphs over evil. Pepe Le Pew would seem like a misogynist to some, even though as kids we only laughed at the case of mistaken identity and the impossibility of a skunk and cat every finding true happiness.
Sure, there were some horrible stereotypes along the way. F Troop with its “Indians” and Speedy Gonzales.
The point here isn’t about the missteps we have taken in our attempts at humor. Again, times change, standards change, and what was funny in one time is inappropriate and even repulsive in another.
But these days, everything is becoming inappropriate. Instead of waiting for a good laugh, we are waiting to be insulted so we can exact our revenge on even the most innocent of observations about this crazy thing we call life. We don’t want to be entertained; we just wait for that moment where our clan became the butt of a joke so we can raise holy hell about it.
That is a sad thing for us. Ultimately, it will be our undoing. Watching some of the shows from the 1960s and 70s show how little we have progressed, even though we think we have made such great strides in our society.
If anything, we have regressed. We are back to those dark times when people were afraid to make a joke in order to break the ice and start a discussion or make an audience think. We are afraid to laugh at a joke that yes, may be a bit off color, but thankfully isn’t so sanitized that it doesn’t challenge us intellectually or emotionally.
Without humor and the ability to look at ourselves and society in a mirror, we lose our ability to evolve. We instead, slip back into the days when we were afraid of those who were different from us, shunning them instead of engaging them.
Humor is the universal icebreaker. Without it, we turn ice cold.
In the Emerald City, looking for punch lines in all the wrong places, 😃
- Robb
To Health With It!
My mortality has been challenged as of late. Being rushed off in an aid car to the hospital will do that to a guy, even though I had no idea why I was in the aid car in the first place.
It ended up being just a little thing. A memory brain fart known as Transient Global Amnesia. Four or five hours of not remembering the last minute, let alone the last hour, of your life.
I’ve had other brushes lately with being more mortal and less invincible than I like to think I am.
Last Friday, I said goodbye to one of my teeth. The dentist said it was time for it to go, so out it went. I am still sore from the experience. After all, it wasn’t an insignificant tooth. It was a molar. Worse, it was an expensive molar for at some point I paid to have it crowned.
When my dentist asked if I wanted to take it with me, I said, “Heck ya!” I mean, at some point in my life I forked over about $500 for my part of that tooth and I wasn’t about to let it go that easily. Perhaps I’ll make it into a necklace so when I go pirating I can scare the kiddies into pristine flossing of their own teeth. It looks pretty scary now that it’s out of my mouth.
I don’t really miss it. But I did remark to Kat that the photo on Facebook – a closeup of me singing on stage last week – marked that tooth’s last performance. The other members of the cuspid choir will have to go on without one of its own.
As usual, I didn’t give much thought to the outcome of the surgery, for that’s what it actually was. A few of my teeth are the only parts of my original equipment that aren’t with me anymore. Everything else is intact. Well, there is that one piece of plumbing that was severed several years back after I finished my baby making years. But I don’t count that since the whole piece is still in there, it’s just chopped in half.
I’ve been lucky in that respect. I’ve only been in the hospital twice in my life, once for kissing a girl, the other for temporarily losing my mind in a brain fart. The kissing episode landed me in the hospital for an entire week when I was 18. O.K., it wasn’t just the kissing disease. I also had hepatitis.
My doctor said that I would have gotten hepatitis no matter what. It just happened to coincide with kissing a girl who had hoof and mouth disease, as I liked to call it. Somewhere along the way, I seemed to have come across a doorknob or bathroom that had a little fecal matter on it, and the result was hepatitis of the infectious, not serum, kind.
Speaking of fecal matter. My wife and friends have been imploring me to get my butt tested for cancer. I was supposed to do it six years ago when I was 55. But I got distracted along the way so I never went in for the fantastic voyage by the all-seeing eye.
Long story short, I finally gave in to the peer pressure. I didn’t get the rotoscope view; instead asking for the poop test, or occult blood something or other.
Most people would go home and send in a sample immediately. Me, I had to wait for the right time. I wanted to make sure my poop was really worth viewing under a microscope.
I finally decided that I would do the deed on my 61st birthday. I could have done it a day or so earlier, but why give them a year-old sample when I could give them something really fresh.
I did this with some trepidation. Over the years I have become convinced that I probably have butt cancer. I read everything I could on the subject and found that I had at least five of the symptoms.
Of course, I have also done this with brain cancer. I was sure the headaches were caused by a tumor. But then they did a full MRI of my brain for the brain fart and found nothing. Well, nothing cancerish or tumorish. Yet. I do have a polyp on my pituitary, whatever that is. The doctor thinks I was probably born with it, which would explain my total lack of maturity to this day. Yes, I looked that up too.
I can’t say I was disappointed that my poop test came back negative. Between that, the MRI and all the blood work they did when they thought my amnesia could have been a stroke, I seem to have nothing to talk about when I get with other old people to inevitably discuss our various health issues. I am, for all practical purposes, healthy as an ox.
That didn’t keep me, however, from getting an iWatch so I could start tracking my health. Or the all-seeing, all-knowing scale in the bathroom that’s connected to my phone. Every day it tells me my BMI, water mass and all sorts of things I don’t even understand, but should probably care about.
The only blip I really had was borderline high blood pressure. I told the doctor that it was only because I was in an exam room. I bragged that I could take it down 10 points or more through meditation. She asked me to check it daily for a week and give her the results. Sure enough, I dropped it by 10.
So, I have nothing to worry about, for now. I have been struggling with remembering the word “emerging” lately. I didn’t think much about it until I saw a feature on a woodcarver who discovered he had ALS. Yes, I’ve looked up those symptoms too. And now I have something new to worry about.
In the Emerald City, having an inkling that Kat may have blocked my access to MayoClinic.org.
- Robb
Going The Distance.
When I was a wee boy and a beardless youth, I fell madly in love with a girl just down the street. Well, she would have been just down the street if her parents – who were besties with my parents – hadn’t moved to Hermiston, Oregon.
I would have probably never fallen so hard if it weren’t for the annual treks her family would make up to Renton to visit their grandmother. It was during one of those summer visits that I met Lori, who, like most 14-year-old girls, was far more mature (and developed) than boys her age, including me.
We spent a lot of time in my treehouse, my de facto place to take a girl at the age of 14. When I was 16, I had the keys to the car, so we were off to more private places to explore the wonders of one another, as long as I had a pocket of quarters to keep her baby brother at bay and far away.
Having a long distance relationship was so exciting then. At least until the day that letter came in the mail. She had met someone else and in the process, broke my little heart. It was so broken that I took every letter she had sent me, and ever photo she had given me, into the backyard and torched it all. Take that Lori!
You’d think that would have cured me of long distance relationships. They never work out.
Fast forward eight years and I was in the Cayman Islands. I had met a girl there from New Orleans. Faith. She had a southern accent, then a weakness of mine, and lived in The Big Easy. How much more exotic and long distance could it get?
Our romance lasted about a year. She would fly up here on her husband’s dime, sending me Fed Ex packages of her lingerie before her visit, much to the delight of my fellow mailroom workers. We would have a whirlwind visit, then she would fly back to Louisiana.
I never went to see her in New Orleans. She did, however, fly me down to Disneyland. It was there that I found out that I wasn’t the only one she was two-timing with. Words were spoken, feelings were hurt, all mine, and it ended right then and there. I flew back to Seattle. She flew back to the swamp from which she came.
You’d think that would have cured me of long distance relationships. After all, they never work out.
Then I went to Cayman in 1989. This time I met a girl from Amarillo, Texas. She was moving to San Francisco, which wasn’t quite as long distance as New Orleans, so maybe this one would work out. We began a commuter flight relationship, me flying down to the Bay Area; she flying up to Seattle on a monthly basis.
Things were going great. I decided to move to San Francisco. I stayed there a month. I was homesick. She eventually moved here, until the close proximity of the relationship showed that neither of us were suited to each other, me finally blocking the door in our townhouse to keep her from trying to take advantage of me in the night.
Now, you’d think that Lori, Faith and Psycho would have cured me of long distance relationships. They never work out.
But then I went south again. This time to Florida to play pirate for a week. I met a quirky reporter girl who seemed to have her heart set on me. There was no way I was going to take the bait this time.
Six months later I was in Florida. At least it wasn’t a long distance relationship. I gave up everything I knew and moved 3,000 miles across the country to make sure this relationship would work.
It started out swimmingly. It was like being on vacation. We even had season passes to all the Disney World parks. We had it all.
Then the prices went up at Disney. We didn’t buy an annual pass anymore. Instead, we moved to Melbourne. No, not the one in Australia. The Melbourne in Florida. The one that’s in the middle of nowhere. With all the excitement of any backwoods, hayseed town.
I was now without any distractions. I had lost all my Washington friends, my daughter was mad at me for moving, my son was no longer a constant or even weekend thing and I found myself in a living hell. Worse, we no longer went to Disney World.
And I knew long distance relationships didn’t work. I had a long history to prove it.
I’m a pretty smart guy, too. But I seem to be really dumb when it comes to love, especially long distance love. I just lose all my sensibilities.
Of course, it’s easy to look back and see the connections now. It’s clear as day. But back when I was still heartbroken over Lori, I didn’t understand that long distance relationships really don’t last. Oh, sure, one of my friends will pull up an obscure story of one that worked, perhaps even their own, but I know that this is the exception, not the rule. After all the fires of passion burn out, you come to find that you never really had anything in common, except perhaps a love of long-distance relationships where you never had to deal with one another for more than a couple days, or a long week at best.
I’ve finally learned to stay local. After searching the world for pretty girls, I found one right in my own backyard, so close that we could have walked right past one another any number of times at Lake Washington Beach Park, in the Renton Highlands or at the McDonalds on Rainier Avenue.
If only Rainier Valley had been just a couple of miles farther away, I could have had my first and only long-distance relationship with Kat instead of traipsing all over the continent looking for love in all the wrong places. It would have saved me a lot of time and heartache.
In the Emerald City, without an ounce of faith, but an abundance of grace,
- Robb
Quicher Bitchin’.
I’ve been thinking about choices a lot lately. I’ve made some great choices in my lifetime and some famously disastrous ones. I suppose we all have. The wonderful thing about choices is that in many cases, they can be improved upon or changed by the choices we make down the road.
Our lives are never in a straight line. Rather, life is a long zig zag with plenty of double backs, switches and hairpin turns. At each juncture, we have choices to make. Some good, some bad, some simply don’t matter one way or another.
And yet, we seem to be living in a world in which we falsely believe we don’t have a choice. We are bombarded with noise from 24-hour news channels, binge-worthy TV series and movie franchises. We turn to our new best friend – our smartphone – every couple of minutes to see if someone liked something we said or on the flipside, see if someone said something bad about us.
In short, we are in a continual fight or flight mode. When we were a more primitive species, fight or flight kept us alive. Hear the tiger – fight the tiger or flee from the tiger. Fight or flight was fundamental to our lives and evolution.
It was never meant to be a way of life. It was a survival tool But today, we’re in fight or flight mode all the time. And we wonder why we’re so unhappy, why our hair is falling out, why our doctor wants to write us prescriptions for anxiety or depression and why we all feel so out of control.
It’s because we never get a chance to just sit in our modern caves, far away from any real or perceived danger, free from fight or flight tendencies, where we can just unwind. Instead, we willingly invite all the danger into our homes in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, CNN and Fox News. Our once safe harbor is hit from all sides by the media, politicians, corporations, special interest groups, religious leaders and people with an ax to grind – even people we thought were our good friends.
The truth of the matter is, we made all these choices. We have created the life we choose to live in. We chose to buy the latest smartphone. We ordered up Internet connectivity for our cars so we can be constantly connected there too, added TV to our tablets and Netflix to our computers so we don’t miss a minute of anything. We willingly share the minutiae of our lives with total strangers on Facebook and recoil when others don’t like our revelations within seconds of them being posted. We live in a nonstop panic because we never take the time to find peace in our lives.
It’s easy to get sucked into this vortex. I understand. But what we are missing is the ability to find perspective, to consider at length what is going on, what it means to us, and whether it deserves further consideration. We miss the important process of quiet contemplation where we can re-center ourselves and return to normal. We are in a continual state of chaos that is in part, caused by our own choices about what we want to have in our lives and what we want our lives to look like.
In the old days (pre-Internet, even pre-TV), we read Hemingway, James Joyce and the classics. We tended to prefer education over edutainment. We would have never watched a “reality” show because we would have understood that it’s all staged, heavily edited pablum. And now we have a President who is a “reality” show star himself and that seems normal to us. We’ve come to value pop culture over being educated and have entered the dangerous world of actually demonizing education and worse, science. We are dumbing down, becoming reactive to false stimuli and losing our sense of what is truly important as we submerge ourselves in the faux environment we have created through our limited, head-in-the-sand views, subscriptions and Tweets.
We have created this world and then we complain about it. We act like we are victims when in fact, we are the creators of our own chaos.
Long ago, when television first came out, it would have died within a few years if no one had bought a set or watched a show. But we gravitated to it, first out of curiosity, then out of amusement, and finally out of need.
We are doing the same with Facebook, Fox News, Twitter, Instagram and other mindless distractions.
Don’t get me wrong. I obviously have a Facebook account. I surf the news. I read other’s posts. But I don’t live on it. If I read something I think is questionable, I check the facts. I don’t subscribe to the thoughts of others because I’ve learned to do basic research. I’ve learned to filter what I see, hear and read. And I’ve learned that others, particularly those who are the loudest, tend to have the most to sell.
Today I am learning to filter out the constant clatter and din of 24-hour noise cycles. I am finding peace in playing music, reading some of the classics, limiting my time with acquaintances who don’t add value to my life, and spending more time listening to the quiet that is becoming my life.
Another choice. That’s all it is. Everyone has this same superpower. We can all step away any time we want to and enjoy life in a quieter world, a real world, we choose to live in. We don’t need to panic at the sight of a “Breaking News” flash on TV or sound like Chicken Little every time the guy in the White House Tweets another fantastic claim that is factual nonsense.
We can reject any and all of it if we choose. But sometimes I think we find it easier to just bitch about it all instead. Doing something about it takes a lot of work. And fewer and fewer seem to want to do that work.
In The Emerald City (for now), making better choices (for now),
- Robb
What A Coincidence?
I went to the Alan Doyle concert Friday nigh. If you don’t know who Alan is, well, how about lead singer of Great Big Sea? Newfie music? Kitchen party?
O.K., so he may not be well known. But he does draw a rabid following of fans who love his songs of the sea and stories about life in Newfoundland. If you haven’t heard him, give him a whirl. You may just find yourself questioning what you’ve been doing all these years without his music, just like I did when Great Big Sea first stepped into my world about 15 years ago.
The fact that Alan isn’t super well known is the reason this story is so fun. The only time I had gone to the Edmonds Performing Art Center was to see Great Big Sea for their 20th year tour. This was in 2013.
It was their last tour before Alan struck out on his own. I had the chance to see his new band at the Triple Door last May and couple of weeks later bought tickets to his May concert in Edmonds.
I am particularly proud of this as: 1) I rarely commit to anything more than two weeks out, let alone a year out and 2) I remembered a year later that I had bought tickets and actually went to the show.
It was at the show that I came upon one of those amazing things that happen in life, one that shows us clearly that we live in a very, very small world.
Let’s step into the Way Back Machine (vague Sherman & Peabody reference) for a moment. Way back in 1994, I had just started my company. We were in between clients at the time (a nice way to say that receivables were not keeping up with expenditures), so I took a temp job, one that required me to drive every day from West Seattle to Everett.
Now, for you geographically challenged, that’s quite a slog. Today you wouldn’t even attempt that kind of commute, given Seattle’s growth and legendary traffic. But back in the 90s, it wasn’t too bad of a drive.
I worked at Providence Hospital in their Communications department. They needed someone to handle their employee communications and I took the job. They ended up liking me so much there that they offered me the job fulltime. But I was already my own boss and there was no way I was going to be chained down to a desk again, working for The Man. That would have to wait until 2012.
I worked with some really wonderful people. Dava, the boss, wasn’t such a charmer but I worked mostly with Lori and Linda.
I hadn’t seen any of the old gang in 25 years. Notice this is past tense, for as I was waiting for Alan to come on, a woman behind me said, “Robb?”
It was Lori.
Talk about a small world. We hadn’t crossed paths for nearly a quarter century and there she was in the seat right behind me. Not at a James Taylor concert or some other ‘star”, but at the largest kitchen party in the world featuring Alan Doyle.
These moments always amaze me, largely because they are pretty rare in life.
The first time it happened to me was on Moorea, one of the islands in French Polynesia. I had driven my rental car up to Belvedere, a scenic viewpoint that overlooks the bays where Mutiny on the Bounty was filmed.
As I enjoyed the breathtaking splendor, I heard, “Robb?”
I turned and there was Janice Gaub, who was an advertising account representative when I worked at Associated Grocers. We didn’t exactly move in the same circles back then, but there we were, 10 years later, standing on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, she on a cruise and me just hanging out at Club Med on the island.
Several years later, I was vacationing in New Orleans. I was outside the aquarium along the Mississippi taking pictures. “Robb?” I heard someone say. “Is that you?”
It wasn’t Janice. It was Jerry. He and I had been Seafair Pirates together. I hadn’t seen him in years. But there we were, Jerry, I and our respective wives at the time.
I’m not sure how this exactly happens. In all three cases, I hadn’t seen these people for years, even decades. But there they were. Bigger than life.
Jerry may be the oddest of these happenstances. We both lived in West Seattle. Not exactly a big place at the time, he on the south side of California and I on the north. Never once did we run into each other while I lived there even though we frequented the same restaurants and bars.
Which makes these moments so amazing. And so telling.
The reason I say telling is because though rare, it seems to happen when you’re the farthest from home. I mean, Moorea is 4,800 miles from Seattle, a 12-hour flight. And there was Janice. About 2,5800 miles, and there’s Jerry.
Yet, in Florida, I never ran into anyone I knew from Seattle in those, not even at the world’s most popular and frequented theme parks.
I came to this sad “fish out of water” conclusion one day. I came to finally realize how truly alone I was there, largely because I had been there eight years and never ran into anyone I knew. I had been in the middle of the Pacific. I had on the riverfront of The Big Easy. But never in Florida.
Back in Seattle, the same amount of time passes that I had been in Florida and I run into Lori. In the seat behind me. At a concert showcasing the talent of one of Newfoundland’s biggest stars, whose virtually unknown in the states, let alone Edmonds, Washington.
It makes me really wonder about this world of ours and how small it really is. We like to think that we’re being swallowed up by urban sprawl and our own self-absorption, but these blast from the past encounters prove to me that we indeed live in a pretty small world, if we just take the time to look around us and see this place for the miracle it is.
It certainly makes you wonder if we’re just a stupid accident of primordial ooze or all interconnected some way in ways we can never truly understand.
In the Emerald City, wondering who I’ll run into next. Or not.
- Robb
A side story. I hadn’t seen Lori since two ex-wives ago. So I needed to introduce the lovely Kat. I did the usual “Kat this is Lori” and “Lori this is Kat” thing. Kat looked at me quizzically and I simply said, “Remember that Christmas where I ended up at the wrong holiday party?” and Kat instantly knew how Lori fit into my world. You mean you haven’t heard the Wrong Christmas Party story? It’s right here.
A Couple Strokes Off My Game.
As Superman, I have been able to skirt most conditions mere mortals endure. As we all know, Superman’s only weakness is kryptonite, and in his mild-mannered form, Lois Lane.
You never see Superman taken away in an aid car, rushed to ER, connected to a slew of machines and run back and forth through an MRI. It just isn’t very Supermanny.
Well, this Superman, this man of steel and mirth, got taken for a ride this weekend.
No, I didn’t go faster than a speeding bullet. Instead, I lost my mind.
Everything seemed normal for much of Sunday. I puttered around the house, took a nap, watched some TV, shot at the woodpecker that keeps making love to my house. Nothing out of the ordinary.
At some point, I went upstairs to check on Kat, and that’s when everything apparently went haywire. I couldn’t remember the morning, who was president (I think that’s a trick question as I am usually in denial about that anyway right now), and I kept asking why the furniture was in different places in the living room.
That shouldn’t have been a difficult one to answer since we spent the better part of Saturday moving everything around the room to make it more feng shui. O.K., truth be told, we were making room for a bar.
However, this was all something of a mystery to me around 1 in the afternoon.
I vaguely remember Kat on the phone. Insert some fogginess here. Later she told me that when I heard the sirens I said, “Those aren’t for me, are they?”
They were. The medics poured into the house and started assessing me. I failed the “What year is it test?” but nailed the “What is your name?”
So far, so good. I got one out of two right. As we rode in the ambulance my memory started to return. I saw my son driving in his car behind me. Kat was nowhere to be found, but only momentarily.
Before I knew it I was in a hospital gown laid out on a bed in Room 11 of Swedish-Edmonds. Everybody seemed to be in a rush, connecting me up to a plethora of beeping machines. They took blood, stuck a needle in my arm in case they wanted to shoot me up with something exotic down the road and ran a bunch of basic tests.
Then it was off to the MRI. As a writer, I’ve written about every aspect of an MRI, except what it’s like to be put in one. Well, it was a no-brainer (sorry, couldn’t resist). I wasn’t claustrophobic. I just closed my eyes, went to my happy place and relaxed. If it weren’t so noisy I probably would have just fallen asleep. Midpoint, the technician pulled me out and shot some dye into me so he could look at all that blood pumping through my noggin.
And then it was done. I was wheeled back unceremoniously to emergency.
I can remember all this quite well. As usual, I was making jokes throughout the whole process, entertaining the staff. Kat, the poor girl, was worried sick since she thought it might have been a stroke. Bless her heart. While waiting for the paramedics she ran all sorts of tests on me. I don’t remember a single one but she told me I had a nice smile.
Finally, after about 45 minutes the doctor came back into my room. The MRI showed nothing atypical, which was a great disappointment to me since I thought my brain was extraordinary in both form and function. Sorry, science, I’m no longer donating it to you for further study.
Today, I am home. With good reason. They want to make sure this was an isolated incident and nothing would be worse than being downtown in a skyscraper and wondering how in the hell I got there.
Oh, I almost forgot the verdict. It seems I had what is called Transient Global Amnesia. With TGA, you can’t remember where you are or how you got there and you may not understand what’s happening at the moment. You remember who you and the people closest to you are, but that’s about it. It happens to people as they grow older. It’s not serious, nor does it have any long-term effects. It just scares the living crap out of you and everyone else around you.
Anything can set it off: stress, strenuous physical activity, crazy good sex (I’m going with the latter since it’s my story I’m telling). You usually never get it more than twice in your life.
Over the years I’ve told others about the day about a decade ago when I was in the shower in Florida and suddenly panicked. I couldn’t remember what I did that morning or what I was doing in the shower.
At the time, I attributed the episode to withdrawals from Lexapro. I went cold turkey in that regard, so I just thought my brain was short-circuiting as the drug left my system.
But now that I look back, the situation was almost identical. The only thing different 10 years ago was that my flatmate didn’t call 911. Since we were in the throes of a divorce, I think she was hoping that I would just stroke out.
Looking back, I think I had my first episode of Transient Global Amnesia. Hopefully, the one yesterday was my last.
Why weren’t there photos of me on Facebook in a hospital gown, wearing a backless house dress? Superman would never do that and my family is under strict orders to never take one, even for family entertainment.
But I decided that this story was important to share with my audience. As you get older, this can happen to you. Hence, the decision to write this RobZerrvation.
If it does happen to you, get someone to call 911 immediately! This is no joking matter. Without hooking you up to some machines or running a CT scan or MRI, there’s no way to know if it’s a stroke or TGA. This is something you can’t self-diagnose.
I was lucky. I had a momentary brain fart (my new name for TGA). In the end, it was no big deal. But it could have been.
And for all those doubters out there, I finally have proof positive that I do have a brain. And from what I was told, it’s running on all eight cylinders right now. Except for two epic backfires.
In the Emerald City, still wondering why I rearranged the furniture,
- Robb
I Wanna Be An AstroNOT!
I was watching a great show about the space program the other day. It was a bit surprising since I can rarely find a show I haven’t seen at least once. Even the crappiest documentary or movie will get my attention.
In this case, the documentary was In the Shadow of the Moon and was filled with interviews of the astronauts that went to the moon along with some footage I had never seen before.
There were some great stories in it. I’ll share two of my favorites. The first was about the unflappable Neil Armstrong. Al Bean told the story about how he went into the astronaut office shortly after Neil barely escaped with his life after the lunar lander simulator went out of control and he ejected while it was flying sideways at about 150 feet.
Neil was sitting at his desk making doing some slide-rule calculations. Al couldn’t believe he had actually ejected a few hours earlier. When Al asked him if it was true, Neil simply said, “Yup.” Nothing about almost dying. No details about the event. Wow!
The second was told by Buzz Aldrin. He noted that the astronauts were required to pause at the last step of the ladder before jumping onto the landing pad. He used this time to fill his urine bag. He said every astronaut has his own first on the surface of the moon. Being the first to pee on the moon was his.
The stories are simply amazing. These guys really do have The Right Stuff. I admit to being a bit envious when it came to how they are able to control their emotions in the toughest situations and I tend to fall apart in the simplest ones, or worse, ones that have never come to pass.
I blame my overly fertile imagination for this. I mean, I can conjure up the wildest scenarios when it comes to things that could happen. During our recent record snow, I was sure that every crack and creak of the house was a warning sign that the roof was about to collapse. I even spent a sleepless night waiting for it to happen.
It didn’t. Very few things that I come up with like this ever happen. Many years ago, I was sure that my Grand Am, affectionately known as the Crap Am, was going to die on us. It did eventually. It wasn’t that I had some power of prognostication. Cars break and even if the thing had a dead battery one wintery morning I would have claimed some victory that yes, I was right.
I’m not, of course. I spend a lot of time worrying about things that will never happen. And that is what sets me apart from the astronauts.
They don’t think like I do. Michael Collins said it best. He said there’s a million things that could have gone wrong at any minute on a moon mission. One tiny malfunction could set off a string of events that could kill them or leave them circling the moon for eternity.
We saw this happen, of course, with Apollo 13. Tom Hanks handled the whole explosion with aplomb in the movie. Jim Lovell did him one better when it actually happened to him. When he said, “Houston, we have a problem” his voice is so calm in the actual recording it was as if he were giving a weather report on a sunny day.
The reason is simple and it’s not all the training they do. No amount of training can take every possibility into account. It’s the fact that they never took the time to think about the .001% of things that could go wrong, only the 99.999% that was going right at the time.
It was a real moment of clarity for me. We spend so much of our lives worrying about what might happen that we miss what is happening all around us at this very moment.
Instead of being present in the moment, we’re worrying about the bills that are overdue or the noise coming from our engine. In my case, the roof collapsing. Millions of things that can go wrong but might and probably won’t ever happen, causing us to miss living in the moment and enjoying this amazing miracle called life.
Now that’s The Right Stuff! For decades I’ve spent a lot of valuable time worrying about what might happen. And yet, it was those things I didn’t know was about to go wrong that I’ve handled the best. From the end of a relationship to driving like a bat out of hell to the hospital so my son wouldn’t be born in the town of Gorst and spend the rest of his life working at a Radio Shack because of it.
I’ve have had that Stuff momentarily when I was in the middle of a crisis, which thinking back, was often. I’m actually pretty good at working the problem when there is a problem. The decisions come easily and I have amazing clarity.
All that stuff I could worry about that could go wrong? A bunch of mental masturbation that leads absolutely nowhere.
Case in point. Finding that your car won’t start in the driveway offers a very different set of decisions than if your car is in a bar parking lot in a seedy part of town and it’s two in the morning. You can worry day and night that your car may not start. But until it does, you can’t assess the situation as there’s no context, only a fertile imagination running amock with all the possibilities.
That’s how these maintain-an-even-strain astronauts handle life. In the moment. Avoiding problems as best they can and working the problem when one does come up. The alternative – considering everything that could ever happen – is not an option because it will only be a distraction, making you crazy with the endless possibilities.
I’ve wasted enough of my life worrying about all that stuff that never seems to happen. I think I’m going to try harder to live in that magical moment of now and stop worrying. Maybe it’s not too late to have The Right Stuff after all.
In the Emerald City, looking at the stars without wondering which one was going to fall from the sky and kill me,
- Robb