Do you know the way to...Viagra Falls?

Let me offer a musical interlude as we segue into this blog entry. Remember the rock group Blood, Sweat & Tears? They gave us some sage advice in the day: “What goes up must come down.” Hope you’re already humming along.

It isn’t often that I hear something that cracks me up, makes me want to wretch, and run for the remote all at the same time. A few weeks ago, the very thing happened, however.

I typically turn on the TV when I eat dinner, an act which some say doesn’t provide the best circumstances to consume and begin digesting a meal. On this particular occasion, I was putting the finishing touches on my evening repast and grabbing a tall, cool glass of OJ. I am watching the Science Channel, another great habit, and listening Brian Greene – who hardly seems old enough to be one of the world’s leading physicists, but for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration – talk about the wonders of the universe.

OK, “wonders” is the operative word because we are getting ready to break for commercial. Lots of these science shows like to break to commercials about elegant, slinky, sexy cars which have been engineered for excellence into the next millennium. I can dig it, even if I can’t afford it.

But noooooooooooooooo…….

We are breaking to commercial for Viagra.

This is about the dumbest and most inane commercial I’ve ever heard (remember, I am in the kitchen gathering sustenance for my evening meal). It’s a good thing I didn’t have a knife in my hand when I heard the opening line of the commercial. I might be moved to open a vein on the idiot who wrote the copy.

“You like who you are.” Duh, let’s just start this one off appealing to male vanity.

“This is the age of knowing what you’re made of.” Right! More appropriate wording: “This is the age of knowing that life really sucks because you can no longer perform.”

It just keeps getting better and better. Not only is this the age of knowing what you’re made of. “And knowing how to get things done.” Right! More appropriate wording: “And knowing that you can’t just whip it out and make an impression.”

I am crying at this point, and we are only five sex… I mean five secs… into the commercial.

“With every age comes responsibility.” Wow, is that a lesson daddy taught you? I guess in this day and age, the word “responsibility” is synonymous with “there’s a pill to kill what ails ya.”

I am so beside myself at this stage that I make mad dash for the remote of my DVR. I know there is no way I will remember all these pearls of male wisdom, so I hit the record button to capture the moment for posterity. I know I will revisit the commercial one time to write all this down since – as a journalist – I am prone to get quotes right.

Then I mosey back into the kitchen and go about my business so I can return to my science show and consume my evening repast.

But we aren’t done.

If you’re old as dirt, which I guess I am because my 61^st birthday was yesterday, you remember the old saying, “Sex can cause blindness.” OK, that was a crackup 50 years ago, and some of us were smart enough to see through the irony. But it is prescient (look that one up in the dick… I mean dictionary) for the next available caveat in the commercial:

“Side effects include abnormal vision.” C’mon. Give me a break! I guess the message here is that the act of procreation comes at a cost. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for the pharmaceutical company to warn that Viagra affects your good judgment and capacity to hear things correctly.

OK, this next one is just a gem. “You didn’t get to this age by having things handed to you.” Paleez. I may be getting just a tad raunchy here, but I would venture to say beaucoup men actually did get to that age in just that manner.

A blitzing 60 sex… I mean secs later… we have consummated the deal and are getting ready to light up a smoke. “This is the age for taking action.” I am really thinking that this commercial is going to be followed, appropriately, by one for Depends. Much more, and I will have to make a mad dash to the facilities.

Keep in mind that I “listened” to this commercial, and didn’t actually watch it until today when I took my little scrap of paper into the living room to record these most profound of observations. I didn’t realize until I actually “saw” the commercial that the whole thing was done in puke green.

Yeah, now that’s a real turn-on.

Time is a concept

If you are a John Lennon fan, you know I’m borrowing loosely here for the title.

I’ve always been a tad mystified at just how much stock people place in time. It is, after all, a manmade concept which, at its very core, serves to usher us go the grave faster than we would get there if we just lightened up a little. It seems to rule every molecule of our being, keeping us in an existential stranglehold, and playing with us like silly putty.

From whence, my good readers you ask, does the previous graph (journalese for paragraph) come? Well, yesterday I had an interesting, perplexing, and somewhat humorous scuff with the Time Monster.

A good friend of mine, who rarely takes time off for good behavior or anything else, has been spending the week with family here in the hinterland. I agreed to answer her phone at her place of business while, at the same time, pounding out stories on my laptop. It’s a busy season for both of us, and fortunately I have time and ability to multitask and TCB.

Nothing unusual here…that is until yesterday. As the clock figuratively struck the close of business, it was time for me to forward her office phone to her home phone. So I glance up at the clock on the wall, hit the speaker button on the phone, and initiated the process in what I thought was a timely manner.

If you are an expert at forwarding phones, you know that someone or something (aka, an answering machine or voice message) must respond at the other end to successfully execute the maneuver. My friend answers, and what I hear next just blows me away.

“My clock at home says you’re five minutes early.”

Huh?

OK, in the temporal scheme of things maybe this just isn’t a biggie. I even tell her I’ll hang up and call back again in 5. I am offering the only concession I have in my back pocket.

But what just amazed me is that I am somehow supposed to mentally teleport myself to her house, at least a few miles away from my current location, check her Big Ben at home and not the one a few feet away from me, account for the time differential between Point A and Point B, and then return from my astral travels to the chair which currently houses my butt.

As a journalist, I have more than a passing acquaintance with time. We freelancers work against constant and brutal deadlines which involve both day, time o’the-day, and – if you’re like me – different global time zones. I consider myself to be an agent of Anti-Time, since I generally don’t let it rule my life. For example: I go to bed when I’m sleepy, not at a set time. I get up when I’m ready, which generally coincides with the rising of the sun.

As Anti-Time as I am, this is personally laughable since I am the galaxy’s biggest proponent of atomic clocks. The neato thing about atomic clocks is that they are self-setting. If you can insert a battery and figure out just which time zone you’re occupying, you are in like flint. I love the fact that the U.S. atomic clock complex is located only a few hours as the crow flies from my location here in colorful CO.

In my line of work, it's important to interview people on time; hence my reliance on atomic clocks which are just about as close to "actual time" as one can get without warping into a discussion about Einstein and SpaceTime, gravity, and the curvature of the universe. The people I interview are clearing a portion of their day for me, and I respect that.

But returning to the subject at hand. Think about the ways time keeps us in its clutches. “I don’t have time to deal with this now.” “If I had time, I’d have a heart attack.” “What time should we meet?” “Time is money.” “This is a waste of time.” “Time [is/isn’t] on my side.” “Time flies when you’re having fun.” (With regard to that last one: does it fart if you aren’t?)

I like what James Taylor has to say about time: “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time/Any fool can do it/There ain’t nothing to it/Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill/But since we’re on our way down/We might as well enjoy the ride.”

I also love this one from writer William Faulkner: “Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

I have hopefully not wangled my friend’s nose too out of joint with this discourse. I just think it’s time to slow down and smell the roses…

I googled you the wrong way…

OK, talk about shock and awe. First, and philosophically foremost, it begs the question: how does one get googled in the right way???? I suspect a number of you will let your imaginations run wild with this one.

This is probably one of the funniest things someone’s said to me in years…and I do mean years. But aside from that feeling that it could turn into a Depends moment without a warning, it’s a teaser to a really terrific story.

The story starts today, or should I say several weeks ago, when a message is left on my voice mail. I’ve been working on a new deck on my house sun-up to sundown. Two things are true: I am damn near the point of physical exhaustion each day (ughhh), and I’m losing weight (yippeeeeee). It’s something around 8:30 or so as darkness is about to descend on my humble home. I am smart enough not to rush to the phone when I hear it ring. You see, one does stupid stuff when one is tired. Like: trip over a pine tree root, tumble head over heels, and break a leg (or arm, or bruise one’s sense of pride at a minimum).

I check my voice messages before hitting the sack. And what I hear at the other end just astounds me: “Do you know who this is?” is the way the message starts. I get a lump in my throat. Unless my mind has completely left me, it’s Lori – the best friend I’ve ever had in the world. OK, you may think this is no great shakes, but it is. You see, she and I haven’t talked in 25 years. Not because anything went wrong; sometimes life just gets in the way.

Deep background: Before I moved to Colorado, I lived in the swamp and swelter land of northern Florida. It’s almost hard for me to conceive that I could have ever been a Floridian, especially given the fact that anything over 70 degrees F makes me feel like I’m dying of heat stroke. But after attending Florida State University and becoming a young working adult, I stayed nestled in Seminole Country and brought home the bacon.

My last job in FLA was with the Florida Legislature, and this is where Lori and I met. We became fast friends quite quickly. There are some interesting paradoxes here. Our first names are only one letter different. And even if you misspell our first names, they are still only one letter off.

OK, this brings me to the subject at hand. When people haven’t spoken in 25 years, one may be inclined to bring out a flow diagram and figure out just where the heck things can go. First choice: do I call back? Well, that’s a duh approach. Yes, you call back. OK, when I call back will we have anything to talk about? Well, another duh insight. If you don’t have anything to get caught up on, it would be pretty sad.

Lori and I were the kind of friends who could finish each other’s thoughts and sentences. Both of us have an incredible sense of humor and perspective about the outer world. So when I called her back the following day, imagine this: two people inhaled (no, not Bill Clinton style!) to move on to the next sentence 25 years ago. The problem was we didn’t exhale until recently. We talked on the phone for nearly three hours that night. It was incredible time travel, to say the least. I’m sure we would have worn out the proverbial fly on the wall with all the nonstop conversation. With as much air as we both needed to suck to keep the conversation flowing, I am amazed the universe did not collapse in on itself.

So as the sparks flew for our nation for the 4^th of July, Lori and I were just positively on fire during our next phone call. Both of us, over the years, had tried to find the other. Keep in mind that, when last we communicated, there was no Internet, no iPhones, no technology to speak of. I wasn’t even able to get a private phone line until 1991. The world was, indeed, a much larger place back then but growing smaller by the nano second.

It was during this holiday conversation that all hell broke loose. Referring to her erstwhile efforts to find moi, she utters that brilliant technologically-challenging phrase: “I googled you the wrong way.” My response: “I bet that’s illegal in 43 states.”

With that, we are both preparing for serious bladder issues.

Seems she had misspelled my first name, and nothing came up in the google search as a result. Once she caught herself, it was a different kettleafish.

I really had to fight to regain my composure. The last time I’d laughed that hard was…coincidentally…also in her presence. She and I had gone to see the movie, Educating Rita. Something said during the course of the movie tickled her funny bone, and she burst forth into belly laughter. As her laughter grew louder, it became contagious among the theater’s patrons. A snicker here turned into a chuckle there. Twenty chuckles morphed into 50 giggles. Pretty soon, you couldn’t hear the movie for the laughter. You could, however, hear the patter of little feet racing for the facilities.

So Lori, thanks for the laughter. And thanks for the lesson: it’s not a matter of who gets googled so much as how you get googled.

I’m going to take a chill pill before we talk again…

Going over to the dark side

When you get up at 0’Dark 30 on a Saturday morn and it’s a pitch black and a bloody 5 degrees below zero, the mind tends to wander to various depths of perception…and sometimes the shallows. Thoughts are pretty random under these conditions, but they are somehow miraculously tied together by what is a momentary black hole of consciousness. Things just swirl around the event horizon until they are eventually sucked in without a trace.

Like:

Coffee just can’t be hot enough. And when you take that first sacred sip of fresh brew, you know you have nirvana well in hand.

The fire in the woodstove is mesmerizing. This is funny because you don’t necessarily have glass doors on the sucker, but you leave the door cracked so you can contemplate the wonders of spontaneous combustion. You realize, naturally, that spelling the word “combustion” at this time of day is a miracle in and of itself.

You appreciate thermolite-lined boots. Having cold feet is akin to having aching teeth. Nothing ruins a day so completely than either of these conditions. OK, well…maybe…throw in some aching sinuses. It’s a chicken-and-egg conundrum because there will also, undoubtedly, be a ball-buster headache singing second soprano in the foreground. Cause and effect is a curious thing.

You are thankful your brand, spankin’ Toyota 4Runner was built from the proverbial ground up in Japan and not in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Unless you’ve been living on the Moon recently, you’ve been inundated with news and revelations about the Toyota Mega Recall. And the millions of cars that have been recalled were all manufactured on our own sacred soil. Quelle domage, as the French say. Un-freakin-believable, as a friend of mine says!

Of course, then there is all this banter about Daylight Savings Time. I think the cosmos – which has been drifting around the vast expanse of space and time for millenia -- is getting a big belly laugh out of our human attempt to, dare I say it, “control” time. This annual turnaround is just prescribed behavior, much like “going to see the aspens turn” here on home turf during the fall. Salmon swim to the places they are born to spawn and die. That is genetic. Au contraire, the human species has been too busy working on some absurd playbook that prescribes forms of acceptable behavior. “Spring forward, fall back.” Uh-huh. Remember the old Doctor Pepper commercials? How about: “I’m a lemming, you’re a lemming, wouldn’t you like to be a lemming, too?”

I save thinking about the absurdities of our county government and special districts for daylight hours. But it does kinda make you wonder why our local Road and Bridge Department only plows our roads during election years!

The Way of the Ninja

My New Year’s resolution, if you can call it that, is to not fix what ain’t broke, and fix what is.

And so I’ve been doing some subtle replacement of things like…my old bedspread which I’ve had for ages. The new satiny, sexy one, of course, now graces the new mattress which sits high (and I do mean high) atop my bed. Having made the mistake of thinking that the expensive and expansive purchase of a Tempur-pedic mattress set would enhance my sleeping experience, I finally ended up with a really nice traditional box spring set which harkens back to my graduate school days. I say this because that mattress set, too, was oversized height-wise. It gave me the nice, through rather silly and false, feeling of “flying” into bed each night. I am not exactly a tall person, and enjoy the feeling of loftiness as a result.

Aside: Whateva you do, don’t buy a Tempur-pedic. They are over priced, over marketed, and here it comes, very uncomfortable if you mind a depressing squish in the middle of the bed. I don’t care if the astronauts like them. After all, most of us aren’t going to have an outer space experience, and the accompanying weightlessness, when we hit the sack.

Back on topic: I also replaced my sheets with a really exotic set of 750-thread count Egyptian cotton. Now I will be the first to admit, I thought this thread count hysteria was just that. But, since the first night of slipping ever so sweetly onto the cotton, I know from whence people are speaking. Each one of those lovely little threads is part of a somnambulistic welcome mat and just feels so soft, silky, and inviting at the end of a hard day of writing…or hauling in firewood.

Aside: Cali and Izzi, my fuzzy little treasures, adore them too. With one of my faithful gato girls on my left and the other on my right, I am literally strapped in for the night. Good thing I’m doing less tossing and turning these days (nights).

Back on topic: When one is a vegetarian, one learns the exquisite uses of the mighty blender as regards the making of fruit smoothies and other culinary delights. After quite a bit of use, my blades of my Cuisinart were hopelessly dull.

Aside: This is a quality not unlike the characteristics of a portion of the population up here where I live.

Back on topic: You know times are tough when you can’t even buzz your way through a frozen strawberry. So I am newly resolved to acquire something that will, for a change, buzz and smash and slather and decimate. Like everything with a pulse (this is a blender joke, to be sure!!), I had seen the ads on TV for the latest “must have” kitchen gadget: The Ninja Kitchen Prep.

Aside: I am pretty much a reverse barometer when it comes to as-seen-on-TV stuff. If it’s advertised, I will generally go out of my way to not purchase the item. Most of the stuff is crap despite miracles claimed and universes saved.

Back on topic: OK, I am more than passingly familiar with the harrowing qualities of the Japanese Katana, the mighty sword of the Samurai and others who are deft at wielding superheated steel. And since the blades of the Ninja were compared to the Katana, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or just do a dramatic eyeball roll. The ad was high drama at its best, invoking centuries of heroism into the simple act of making guacamole...

But I decide, for better or worser, that I will invite this terrible Ninja into my kitchen. I go to my local Bed, Bath and Beyond and manage – much to my joy and horror – to pick up the last one in the store. While I’m in the checkout line, I’m wondering if I am about to join the ranks of those who just got their brains – and wallets – sucked dry. I guess the Ninja was this Christmas’ hottest selling, value-added kitchen accoutrement.

So I get home and pull the Ninja, which is a beautiful shade of royal blue and not black like the Ninjas of old, out of the box. I hadn’t eaten all day, and I figured I’d wash the bugger up and subject everything to the frozen strawberry test. As I’m taking the thing apart, I quickly start to examine the Katana-curved blades in the pitcher. The Ninja has four (count ‘em, four) gracefully curved blades, and this is the reason they’re compared to the Katana.

Aside: Or so I thought.

Back on topic: Then comes the Laurel and Hardy moment that must inevitably follow. As I am pulling the blades out to give ‘em a dippy-dunk in the hot water, I think to myself, “I wonder if they’re sharp.” And literally as the thought hits my gray matter, I manage to slice one of my fingers open on the sucker.

Aside: Did you know that you can bleed for quite a long time if you cut your finger? There isn’t much there for protection, and any cut on your finger is going to hurt like holy hell. Also, even after wrapping wobs of tissue around your finger after you pop an ice cube inside to staunch the blood, you will – as the saying goes – bleed like a stuck pig.

Back on topic: In the midst of this Ninja drama, I am trying to remember if you put a cut appendage above or below your heart to slow the bleeding. Finally, finally, after a half hour, my blood is finally showing signs of clotting. I have been spared the fate of the Samurai but have certainly lost face.

Aside: I am apparently vitamin K deficient, and I also bruise like no one’s business. And while -- as I was informed many years ago when I cut my finger on a ceramic tile and called the doctor’s office after more than an hour of corpuscular egress-- no one has ever died of a cut finger, that’s cold comfort when you feel like the vampires are circling above.

Back on topic: Despite the trauma and the drama, I love the Ninja. And I wholeheartedly give it five thumbs up because I haven’t cut myself since.

Aside: Funny Ninja-like noises are not require for operation. Trust me, it won't stop the bleeding...