Robot Fever

I dream of a future where robots will pick ticks off my hide better than that lazy service monkey I put up with, even though he works for peanuts. However I’m a bit concerned that machines will never be up to basic tasks especially given my negative experiences with that painful Epilady I shave with everyday. Lately even my rug Roomba has rejected my advances since its battery has become weaker and meeker as the dirt on my carpet becomes bleaker and streakier. 

It’s true that I’m no ‘shoe-in’ and a little out-of step with tomorrow’s high tech trinkets. Even easy remotes spook my simple skull and don’t work all that great when covered in grime and fist-foods that I ate. I also  can’t understand why those motion sensing lights refuse to react if my elephant carcass lumbers under one, but when a runt of a rodent dashes past, the thing lights up like an immolating monk? Though I have figured out how to turn off most digital clocks with a hammer, I am still perplexed as to why my microwave needs to know the date before giving me one to heat meat and eat freely. 

I’m probably just in a bad mood since I found out that my electronic coffee pot has a really high fever and feels hot to the touch. Actually I am pretty sure it has worsening Alzheimer’s since its brain regularly forgets what it is doing and just stops brewing in the middle of a cycle. Just my dumb luck – why couldn’t my Pyrex pot be just nuts or have Parkinson’s disease because then at least I might be able to start the day with a delicious protein ‘shake’. 

I just wish today’s pocket robots required a little less babysitting  as compared to real babies which actually protest even more loudly when you almost sit on them. It just seems I spend too much time buying bricks of specialized batteries, software, cables, and compatibility accessories to keep all of these needy new-age gizmos from getting sick and becoming a burden to me and the rest of society. Luckily humans are so much less demanding - all they want is the basics like free healthcare paid for by somebody else, a wing, a prayer, and a Diet Coke with a Mentos chaser that DOESN’T blow up in your face.

High DEAF and Coddled

I don’t know how the world functioned before the advent of high definition TV to show us what REAL life is supposed to look like. Did media REALLY used to only come in two colors – grey and greyer, where we had to guess which one of the fifty shades Flipper actually was or worse, LISTEN to his persistent twitter feed?  I mean honestly, who can survive today without a daily dose of good glowing visual stimuli like zits, pits, and craggy faces to deliver the bad news every morning. 

In those caves, our ancient ancestors must have been truly in the dark without today’s modern rainbow of weather maps to guide them through typical tasks of daily bargain hunting and coupon gathering. Poor hairy cretins actually had to shove their matted mugs out into the open atmosphere and breathe unprocessed air to forecast a typical day of  'just a touch of famine and a high probability of death'. Now self-absorbed and chamois-soft meteorologists mutter monotonously, and tell us more than we want to know about their humid warm ‘lows’ and icy cold fronts – why can’t they forget their pants and just talk about the weather instead?

Isn’t it in the Bill of Rights somewhere that no one should be subjected to low fidelity scratchy speakers, ‘free-see’ TV and analog radio programming since digital satellite crystal bliss is LITERALLY gracing our fingertips. Anyway who wants to use their precious time to bend those rascally rabbit’s ears when it’s so much more fun putting that ‘check-signing’ hand to better use, paying for recurring overpriced subscription services. Better still why wait to grow old and go deaf slowly the old fashioned way, when all that ‘hear-clear-over-here’ sounds now makes it so much easier for today’s budding brainy teens to blast 100 decibels of bass directly into their ear canals daily.

Hey I know I am slower than a snail when it comes to adopting new fashionable trends and cleaning up after my own coddled slime trails from kitchen to privy. I’m just not sure if I’m ready to commit 100% of actual LIVING life to learn everything about anything by simply sitting on my tufted tuchis and matching tush cushion, staring blankly at a beckoning bag of noisy electronic conveniences.  Anyway I have heard that seductive siren’s song all before which wickedly works in mysterious ways to  make one deaf, dumb and ‘quarter-less’ in REAL life  - Can you HEAR me now PAC MAN? 

Hooker Hang-Ups

Given the typically rumpled stumps n’ skin that I sport it is probably no surprise that I am not a big fan of hangers. With stupid hangers horning in all over the place, what good are the backs of chairs anymore? Don’t you think if somebody balder than me took the time to invent handy door knobs all over the house, shouldn’t we take the time to hook stuff onto them.

Closets and the sagging shirts on sticks that populate them are fine for Regular SANE people but given my pink eye, tongue , and Pepto bill,  irregularity IS my middle name. Oh sure hangers are the perfect tool for organized people like my wife who orders her closet by color and a first-in first-out rotating inventory control system. But I on the other hand, only need ‘em to spruce up the reception for my digital T.V. or as a fancy flexible finger to flesh-out those twitches from itches deep down in my britches. 

Part of my problem is that hangers come in too many styles, colors, and materials so my clothes vault looks like a crazy clown party - or perhaps that’s just my personal choice of cheery checkered oversized formalwear. Even though I prefer wood or plastic to hang my hefty habiliment on, unlike metal wire hangers, they are so thick and heavy that they take up more space in the closet than my ‘bull-writing’ shirts and ‘Monteras’ do.  Even when not being worn, if my jodhpurs are jostled they always fall from their proper place of grace when precariously perched on those top-heavy ‘s’ shaped open-sided pants lances.

I admit it though, my prudish and unorthodox hang-ups with ‘hookers’ probably stems from the fact that we purchased our ‘DUMPicile’ from former clothing shop owners, who favored us with crates and crannies filled with the bulky bendy things as a house-warming gift. Their thoughtfulness would be hard to nix if their hanger handouts had not all been scrambled and mis-handled like a twisted mix of pick-up sticks. Anyway who wants to spend days deciphering how to dislodge my duds from THAT mess when any ol’ floor is just so much more convenient than a claustrophobic closet full of dangling triangle-y things!

Techno CAR-ma

While robots and I spend lots of quality time together and I DO whisper sweet nothings into an Android on a regular basis, I’m not a fan of these new cars that parallel park by themselves. Honestly, I don’t know about you, but first off who HAS to park this way anymore on a regular basis? It would be one thing if I had to parallel park daily or even once a week around small children wearing big orange cone-headed caps; but for occasional activities like personal hygiene which I do annually or orally, why pay for fancy options?   

I also don’t remember where on my insurance policy that I listed the car as its OWN driver? Why should I take on all the risk and responsibility to park these cars if THEY are the ones incurring the liability now? If my car wants to do something nice for me automatically why doesn’t it try changing its oil, ‘honking’ my ‘horny’, or  better still, picking the bugs out of its own grill for a change.

I might be more open to a vehicle that parks itself if the simple technology already in my car worked well 100% of the time. Except for when my window squirters fall-off and shoot innocent bystanders, a simple skip of a CD or an occasional wrong turn directive barked by a GPS, usually doesn’t hurt anyone. But I’m guessing if my sensors turn senseless and my car’s ‘puter-parker brain burps over the by-and-by, my attempts at a ‘parallel  plunge’ near the South rim of the Grand Canyon COULD become more akin to ‘bye bye’!  

I know I know it’s just my bad, technology car-karma coming back to haunt me again. I guess if the birds, bugs and I kept our Wite-out to ourselves and treated cars with more respect in the first place, they wouldn’t strike back with skid marks n’ mistakes so much. Maybe I should just get with the modern times and learn to be more accepting and progressive about our car’s ‘right to drive’ itself. Ok, I’ll think about it, but if the that bolt-bucket starts burning rubber to promote the unholy marriage between gas and electric drivetrains – that’s where I’m gonna’ draw the line!

Stinking Credit Card Colors

You’d think one of the great joys in my life is to look in my wallet and see lots of pictures of Green dead Presidents. Yes, stacks of cash are a step above the obligatory lint balls, expired McDonalds Monopoly pieces, and torn n’ tattered school pix from when my kid was half her current age. But the real highlight of my low-life, faux-leather ’billy-fold’, is my true-blue credit card, used to plump up my ‘piggy’ with pennies from every purchase.

Oh sure, I conceal and carry the Crayola collection of ‘CRUDit’ cards in every conceivable shade of the rainbow. However, most of that collective credit patina simply props up my pocket, and evens-out the lopsided cellulite bulges when I frequently ‘turn the other cheek’. Who knows what any of these credit colors mean anymore anyway? When I was a mere pup, if you were lucky enough to have a ‘free’ credit card, it was a utilitarian, dirty gray short & fat springy plastic bookmark. If the banking gods deemed you and your big ‘snob-shot’ salary worthy, you might also get to possess that other card – the enviable holy grail of true credit worthiness . . . a glistening GOLD-COLORED slab o’ plastic.

But these days everybody gets offers for Platinum, Emerald, Sapphire, and Slate colored credit cards which up until now, I had always thought were just geological structures rather than actual colors. I even recently saw a politically incorrect ‘Black-faced’ credit card, tap-dancing around premium exclusivity, rather than the more realistic ‘black hole’ VACUUM of debt, which drains your veins faster than ‘Drac’ if you’re careless. Unless he’s kissing his own glossy promo headshot, NOBODY - not even that irritating, diminutively-domed Dyson inventor-dude, wants to face THAT KIND of a sickening sucking sound.

Regardless of your favorite tint, whatever color these cards start out as, they can all bleed gallons of red ink if used indiscriminately. That’s why I always wondered why can’t somebody make credit cards out something REALLY practical like beef jerky or thin-sliced Velveeta cheese? Then at least when you get in a little over your ‘credit –head’, you can still ‘eat ‘em up’ BEFORE your creditors bestow the same favor upon you. Hmmm, maybe not such a great idea to fill my hot wallet with perishable cheesy credit cards though? I clearly don’t need additional reasons to be the ‘butt’ of my family’s hairy, old n’ moldy ‘STINK’ jokes!

Humbling Challenge

Since I have a couple of gunboats that have been apparently mistaken for feet, my wife has decided to kill me with her personal Bataan march towards a goal of one MILLION steps by mid December. While that might be fine if she had informed me a couple of years ago but she must not have noticed they are selling pumpkins in the stores now. So that leaves us with nary two months to complete 8,000 steps per day to help achieve her stupid foot-fungus goal.

Oh sure I applaud my wife’s healthy ambition to pound the pavement and carve off the kilos, but how did I get sucked up into this Dr. Scholl’s delight of daily drudgery? As long as I watch my salt intake and clean up after my slime trail, I kind of like being the resident slug anyway. Street walking in the shadows is fine if you’ve got the legs for the job but it’s my calloused feet and personality that rub people the wrong way. If only somebody could invent a machine to handle the burdens of BIpedal locomotion, I would get on that Midnight express train in a hurry and turn into a ‘BUY’ guy with bells on to seek freedom!

So low and behold at an estate sale last week, the ‘Big Wheel’ himself must have heard my incessant whining and prayed to shut me up. Yes, opportunity rolled over my toes that morning, in the form of a drop dead price on a stealthy, 2+2 on the floor, black electric wheelchair with a seatbelt and cool joystick to match. Now this is what I call living – why didn’t somebody tell us new-age upright primate gladiators about these horse-less chariots before? Once I clean the dirt off between all of its ‘moto-toes’, even I can glide through a million steps in the next couple of months. Better still as a bonus, with this ride I can circle the wagons and DO donuts in the parking lot while I eat glazed ones too!

I mean honestly, chasing the mail truck and the neighborhood wolf pack down the street has never been so much fun, though now climbing stairs and reaching for the choco peanuts on the top shelf is an unbelievably sweaty pain. Currently I’m perfectly healthy, but whenever I ROLL in that chair, my TOOTSIES literally look and feel powerless and it’s very humbling. Unlike the truly challenged who need these wheelies to move-on with their lives, when I tire of complaining about my insignificant toil, I can simply CHOOSE to get up whenever I want. So my choice now is to WALK HAPPILY with my wife, however long she needs, and wherever she wants to go while I still have the chance. Oh and don’t worry about my milk chocolate covered ‘Robo-Rolo’ - I promise we’ll find it a good home with a much less whiney and far more worthy CHAIRity in need!

Bells N’ Whistles

For an old guy I still try to embrace new technology. In fact as often as I can I hug the new dishwasher and tell it how much I love it while stuffing its craw with greasy fowl leftovers and bowls of dried-on Midwest grits n' bits. I don’t particularly care how clean the dishes get as long as it steams my corn and is silent but NOT deadly to my inbred clan. Yes, other than a few muted arcade beeps, every time I open the thing, the dishwasher returns its gratitude for being a member of the family by simply existing in silent bliss.

Unfortunately most technology in our noisy lives often plots to bite us on the otitis. How can Monks and other old world primates like myself ever hope to achieve inner peace when everything now ‘burps’ ‘slurps’ and keeps ‘waxing on’ UN-poetically in my ‘Eire’ canal? Today it is clear that my gizmo and gadget habit works overtime to hammer my anvils and hum on my drums even without a formal proposal of marriage.

For example, by now Juan Valdez must be deaf since whenever I add water to the coffee machine it tweets like a fruit-loopy wet toucan. The water pot pumps, pops, and creaks with groans of protest. When the brew cycle is complete it peeps incessantly like a hungry hen and screams even louder when it shuts itself off. Who designs this ear muff stuff - horrible aural sadists? If I’m allowed to ignore my kid whenever I want then why can’t I motor my ‘Hoveround’ to end of the driveway in peace and ignore my seatbelt’s chirpy chimes too?

I’m not against new fangled progress but I can’t be the only Amish sympathizer to want technology’s bells without a clapper or its whistles without fipples. I accept that the world needs to slobber over clobber but I’m just not sure if in my own home sanctuary all that stuff needs to beep, bleat & peep MORE than I do. Don’t worry I’m not a crazy shut-in yet and can take the strain. But I am a little worried about those steamed cobs though . . . the corn have started shoving sticks in their ears.

THE morning paper

Every morning I quietly hobble from my coffin to retrieve not one, but TWO different newspapers. I have to keep up with the daily demand for wrapping up wedding gifts, lining bird cages with paper mache and of course the never-ending need for dead fish n’ chips grease absorbing diapers . Oh sure I peruse the headlines for the important stuff too like the movie start times or the daily horror-scope. But primarily I just like to see how tall a Jenga tower of newsprint I can build to test my wife’s forklift skills on the way to the recycle bin.

We have a love/hate relationship with our paper boy even though he is actually a 40 year old man who drives an even older van in the wee wee hours of the morning. On the one hand he does give us our daily fix of inane news along with an array of conversation starters during our Pop Tart time. But you would think the guy would have the decency to place the papers neatly on my doorstep instead of ejecting papers out of the window anywhere but on the giant driveway landing zone. I think he purposely spaces his nightly emissions as far apart as possible and plants them in the wet grass, muddy gutter, or up in the trees so I can play ‘Where’s Waldo’ every morning in a 6 A.M. stupor.

The paper-pusher is just bitter because he is STILL dealing to newsprint junkies even when most of his peers have moved up in the publishing cartels to become octopi ink-milkers or ‘blah-blah’ blogging barons. It also may be due to the fact that nobody else on our street gets a morning paper anymore so he has to drive far out of his way to throw stuff ONLY at our house. Except for the ‘newsies’, what other career allows you the luxury of pitching softballs at interviewees, hitting the comic books to do research, or throwing high priced yet worthless pre-paid projectiles at your clients’ houses.

As gasoline prices rise and the route delivery biz dies, I try to keep abreast of the changes afoot for those parts as well as the rest of the lifeless body of the newspaper industry. Despite the waning few of of us die-hard, hard-headed Cro-Magnons who still need to let our knuckles do the dragging through WalMart ads, I’m afraid the ‘dailies’ destiny is dier . Yes as soon as wireless bandwidth makes that next big speed leap for the finish line, the paperless e-book revolution will definitely spell doom for my newspaper dude and his ‘van-do’ attitude. This foreboding change to my breakfast ritual may seem alien at first. But luckily in our shack's litter box, I can always take pillow-soft comfort in at least one close morning encounter, of THE paper kind!

PAN – the Greek god of cooking

Oh sure I love gyros and baklava just like most folks, but I draw the line at being associated with that weird little half goat / half dude Greek God of mythology! I don’t dispute my hairy legs, hooves, and the fact that I can play a mean 3 octave scale on a flute? I can’t help the horny head and satanic similarities either, but I swear the only Greek God I follow on Facebook is “Pita Pan”, the portly paladin of peanut butter.

Despite cruel rumors to the contrary, the perforated pan that I find most godly does NOT reside within my lack of videographic ability, or a less than flattering blog review. No in fact, my favorite pan is a 100% flute-free, tin Frisbee that will never witness Jehova unless he needs a perfect pizza or a tray of tasty choco-chip cookies expertly browned every time.

Its ‘hole-y’ presence aside, don’t kid yourself, my pan is tough and it faces the oven’s dominion of fiery purgatory every day just like it owns the place. I have only had trouble with it once and that was in an unfortunate polka dot tanning incident which I attribute primarily to that hot-head practical joker, Apollo. It’s not handy protection either when Zeus blows his nose overhead, but on the other hand it strains a pot o’ pasta like nobody’s business.

So take my advice, if you want cooking salvation, grab the holiest pan you can and plan to become a fan. You’ll soon learn the only dough you KNEAD to be happy is made of pizza flour, and life’s golden brown parachutes are best unfurled on hot aluminum and covered in GREECE. As high-brow Greek gods go, my PAN may not seem like much except to Paula Deen ’s hillbilly baking family tree. But no matter, I’m still am a ‘PAN-TASTIC’ true believer of the one and only, tried and true cooking ‘god’ which remains closest to my heart . . . and hopefully furthest away from UNDER my bed.