I hate cleaning house, but sometimes it’s got to be done.
I have a rule of thumb: If it takes more work to step over the piles than to pick them up, I pick them up.
Dad had to threaten us with a spanking to get me and my siblings to clean our room. “It better be clean when I get home from work or else!”
So we got home after school and immediately began wasting time, watching Gilligan’s Island or whatever was on. Until suddenly we realized Dad would be home any minute. The dogs’ ears perked up when the Ford pickup got close. Two minutes’ warning.
So it was into the bedroom, throw the toys into the closet, make the beds and get done just as Dad was pulling into the driveway. In the nick of time. Just enough to make it look like we made an effort. Just enough effort to dodge a whipping.
And Dad of course marched right to the closet and said, “OK. Now clean the closet.”
Easy peasy. Just push everything under the bed. Until one day Dad got wise, swiped a broom handle under the bed and pushed it all out in the middle of the floor. “Now put everything where it goes. Don’t just dump it in the closet!”
Dad figured out the problem: three channels of bad TV for us kids to waste time and fight over. He finally got fed up and banned us from watching TV until he got home. “If you don’t have time to do your chores or your homework you don’t have time to watch TV.” He pulled out the channel dial and took it to work every morning.
All it took was a pair ofneedlenose pliers and the bad TV-watching shenanigans continued.
Then it escalated. Dad began taking the electric cord to work.
Luckily the mixer cord fit. So we watched TV till we got nervous, then crammed everything under the bed like always.
Dad got so frustrated he nailed a long piece of paneling to the bottom of the bed frame so nothing except maybe a sheet of paper would fit.
When our strategy changed to piling it up between bed and wall, he kind of gave up. The man was a fearsome spanker, but I don’t think his heart was in it. Being a drill sergeant took time away from what HE wanted to do after work.
Me in the ladies’ glasses I had to wear for two weeks.
Sometimes I like to play a game where I lose things and try to find them with my glasses off. It’s like a scavenger hunt. It’s especially fun when I hide my glasses which I can’t see without.
Strangely enough I discovered that my wife’s prescription is practically the same as mine, minus the astigmatism. That came in really handy when I accidentally lost the game by sitting on my glasses. As if I needed another sign that we were meant to be.
Since I know I have th at option, the game is less of a challenge, so I have a rule that if I have to put on her glasses, I lose. They might not look good on her but they’re damn silly on me.
While ago I tried to turn on the living room light by mashing on a packet of gluten-free soy sauce. in this house you turn on the light and the ceiling fan with a little plastic doohickey. With my glasses off, I couldn’t tell the difference.
I won the game even though I had to hunt all over the room, because I didn’t have to put on those silly red glasses.
After locking my keys in the car a few times in college, I found the solution: Why lock the car at all?
I found out on the way home from school one day. I stopped by the mall to see a friend who worked in the sandwich shop. I was only gonna be a minute. Half an hour later I went to the parking lot and I couldn’t find my car. Crap. Forgot where I parked again. That happened a lot.
I went up one row, down another, one row after another for several minutes and still no car. How could I be off by so many rows? Finally, it hit me. Someone stole my car!
Ratt – Round and Round
My Chevy Malibu had a faded paint job, burned oil and sometimes backfired. But it was a passable low rider car especially since it was free for the taking.
I called the police, called Mom and Dad who had to drive an hour to get me. Police said not to be too optimistic.
But what do you know? The car thieves were caught speeding in a school zone in the next town over. They were in jail and we could pick up my car. Sweet.
Except my very expensive college textbooks were missing. The eyedropper I used in biology lab was brown. Someone had smoked a joint through it. Hopefully they swallowed an amoeba.
Then more luck. A school teacher found all my books in a ditch. All I had to do was drop by her school and pick them up. They had permanent stains and my art history textbook had road rash, but they would make it through the semester.
Also, bonus! The joyriders left me a couple of cassettes: Nazareth – Hair of the Dog (score!) and Ratt – Out of the Cellar (OK for hair metal). Still an overall pain in the ass.
After that I kept a wire coat hanger inside my back bumper. It got regular use.
Nigel:Certified snack hound, being a spoiled little turd boy.
Nigel is such a spoiled little baby. He’s an inside dog, but ever since it got warm, he barely wants anything to do with us. I can’t even get him to come in for food half the time. He just wants to be OUTSIDE.
We rescued him and he gets to sleep inside in the air conditioning, but he’s like, “No. I want sun and I want dirt.”
I think he missed his calling as a yard dog. He’ll spend the whole day outside, sunning if we let him. The weather has been nice, but it gets cold overnight in a desert town.
This morning, he was shivering after I put him out to do his business, and he still wouldn’t come in.
I had to go through the whole passive agressive tummy ritual and carry him inside. (“Oh, no, please don’t hurt me. I’m just a little guy.”)
He eventually came in and got some lap though. He loves us. I just think he just loves outside more.
“I wasn’t even supposed to be here!” I thought on the first day of the lockdown, and I laughed and laughed, because because I fully expected to be Raptured as a teenager on Jan. 1, 1984.
Now here I was in my late 50s, waiting for a plague that had everyone emptying shelves and crowding into gun stores. I felt like the guy in Clerks who came in on his day off, only to face one disaster after another.
If I got left behind, so did y’all
Daniel Knox – Armageddonsong
My little Baptist church was having a New Year’s Eve party (no alcohol) on Dec. 31, 1983. We’d had a good potluck in the Fellowship Hall and were holding hands, standing in a circle. We had finished singing “Blessed Be the Tie that Binds” and someone began counting down from 10.
I hadn’t told anyone, but I knew the Rapture was going to happen at the stroke of midnight. I had pieced it together after reading Revelation and listening to radio preachers. I couldn’t possibly have been influenced by the title of a famous book…
Five, four, three, two, one, aaaaand… Nothing.
The Handsome Family – When That Helicopter Comes
Time to pack up dishes and say our goodbyes. I thought about waiting, in case Jesus was on Mountain or Pacific, but I knew there was no point. I felt like a complete fool.
The Summer Camp Preacher
Jill Tracy – Doomsday Serenade
My Rapture obsession started on the last night of my last year of church camp. I was sitting in the tabernacle with a bunch of other kids my age and younger. A thunderstorm was brewing and the air was still and humid.
The preacher told us we’d better be ready. Stores were installing equipment to read Number of the Beast barcode tats. Rock music and Dungeons and Dragons were preparing children for the Antichrist. There was trouble in the Middle East and America and Russia were ready to fight that final battle.
The Rapture was coming. You would either meet Jesus in the air or be left behind to live through the Time of Tribulation. “Do not miss the Rapture,” he said, preparing for the Invitation. “But if you do, don’t say we didn’t warn you!”
Bob Marley and the Wailers – Midnight Ravers
You could try being one of the 144,000 martyrs who defied the Beast, but your suffering would be horrific. At least there was a loophole, I thought, but he had me rattled. What if I had only fooled myself and I wasn’t saved?
We held hands as the pianist played, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” I liked holding hands with the girl next to me. She was cute. Which worried me even more. Thinking about girls at a time like this?
Suddenly there was a loud crack of thunder, and rain pounded the metal roof. The cute girl let go of my hand and headed to the front. Others followed and I joined them. I said the right words, prayed with a counselor and filled out a card.
I don’t think my hometown preacher liked the sermon. He asked a lot of questions. But I knew what to say. A week later, I had my third baptism – or was it the fourth? (Pro-tip: Always check your pockets before you get baptized. Lost a good wallet.)
So over it…
Meat Beat Manifesto – Paradise Now
When the Rapture failed to happen on the night I’d chosen, my end of the world mania stopped. I quit accepting everything the preachers said. I didn’t want to hear any more theories about the End Times. It would happen or it wouldn’t.
I resented the summer camp preacher. That was a shitty way to treat children. I bet he created a lot of future atheists. It was over the top, but it worked for a reason. I grew up surrounded by that kind of talk.
We watched films where people vanished, leaving only clothes and shocked sinners If something scary happened in the world, people would shake their heads and go, “Wars and rumors of wars.” They’d talk about their theories in Sunday School. Would the Time of Tribulation come before or after the Rapture?
But the verse about how “no one knows the day or the hour” (Matthew 24:36) kept it from getting out of hand. You didn’t have to figure it out. It was just “soon.” They didn’t sell their shit and kept going to work like regular people.
Beam me up Scotty
I could have done without that particular religious trauma, but I understand why Christians get excited about the Rapture. You know the saying, “Everybody wants go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Wouldn’t you rather go to heaven in a whirlwind like Elijah than die of cancer?
I know why I fell for it. It wasn’t just the camp preacher if I’m honest. I was stressed out, worried about the future. The Cold War was stressful. Everyone had a nuke with his name on it.
Even worse, I was about to graduate high school and had no idea who I was or what to do with my life. If the world ended, I would be off the hook. Too bad though, I had to figure it out.
Now the world is in a bigger mess than it was in ’84. Lots of man-made apocalypses coming down the pike – climate change, political and economic instability and out of control AI.
I don’t know how the hell I’m going to deal with all that. I’d like nothing more than to have Scotty beam me up, but I learned my lesson. The earth will always be my home, like it or not. I have to figure it out. We all do.
When I was a little kid I had a bad habit of being an asshole by mistake. Like the time someone left their locker door open and I kicked it shut — right on the finger of a little girl I had a crush on. The teacher looked at me like I was evil incarnate. No chance to explain.
Or the time I convinced my friend to do a trick on his new bike.
We rode our bikes all over town. They were like hot rods to us. As long as you were home for dinner you could spend the whole day exploring, riding down steep hills and checking out other neighborhoods.
Our hero was Evel Knievel. He always said don’t try this at home, but we all knew he really meant. Do crazy stuff.
Our bikes had the kind of brakes where you push down on the pedal. My friends and I loved to get a little speed ride up the driveway and eeerrrrrrt! Leave black skid marks on the concrete. That made us feel like badasses. Probably from all the Starsky and Hutch we watched.
One day my friend Mike turned up with a new bike. “It’s got front AND back brakes!” he said. He rode around in the street a few times and showed me how it worked. Back brakes worked like normal, with the pedal, so he rode around a bit and then made a skid mark in his driveway.
“What happens if you do a skid with your front brakes?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I never tried it,” he said. He rode to the corner, turned around and started pedaling. I waited in his driveway to see what would happen. I honestly had no idea.
It was pretty spectacular all right. He got about halfway up the driveway, locked up the front brakes, did a somersault, smashing his ribs against the handlebars.
He said, “Um. I. Need to go inside for a minute.” He stumbled inside, slammed the door and I heard, “Waaaaaaaaah!”
Then his mom came to the door. “Sorry, Mike can’t play right now.”
Lesson learned. Sort of. I had plenty of bike crashes of my own, but not the same way as Mike.
It happened again. Rubbed my eye after handling hot peppers. A jar of jalapenos just fell out of the fridge and splashed all over the floor. Now the whole kitchen smells like vinegar and my eye is on fire.
You’d think I would have learned by now.
It’s part of the reason I call my wife “my hussy” as a term of endearment. She thinks it’s hilarious, as do I – Victorian insults, LOL.
It’s mostly in-joke, pillow talk material. Not as amusing without the backstory.
We were at our workplaces, texting/sexting/flirting after our second date. Somehow the subject of chili peppers came up. I told her about the spicy stir fry I’d made the night before. I love peppers. She does not.
I mentioned the part I don’t enjoy: burning the shit out of my eye after cutting jalapenos.
“You don’t want that getting on your fingers if you’re planning to have sex.” She told me how bad it hurt when she accidentally got some of that on her bits.
“Like last night,” I said.
“I didn’t have sex last night…” sounding concerned.
“That’s good you hussy!” said. “I was talking about my eye. I got pepper in my eye last night.”
I really had gotten pepper in my eye. And I wasn’t a bit worried.
That was over a decade ago and we still get tickled when we use that word. She’s my hussy and I’m proud to be hers.
Dvorak – Slavonic Dance Number 2. My favorite of the Slavonic Dances, some of my favorite pieces of classical music.
Mispronouncing Dvorak is not a hit with the ladies. I have several senses of humors, one of them being to play dumb on purpose to annoy people.
If people think I’m dumb, but since I know I’m joking, it’s funny to me…
I used to torture my mom by pronouncing classical composers’ names wrong on purpose: Prokofiev like “Proko-feev,” Dvorak like “Dizz-vorzhak,” Tchaikovsky like “Chis-kowsky.”
It pissed her off because I listened to the stuff all the time with Dad and she knew I knew better. She still corrected me, just like, pissed off.
It was funny to me… Tried that routine on a date once. It was not a hit.
My wife is still annoyed at me because I got her to mispronounce Dvorak when she first met my mom. “Gets a reaction every time,” I said.
Mom said nothing. She was being polite to my new girlfriend.
“Just think,” I said this morning, “Mom went to her grave thinking you pronounced it Dizz-vorzhak.”
It was not a hit.
Anyway the joke’s on me, because I apparently don’t and never will say Dvorak right since I’m not Czech and already have my hands full learning Spanish.
How Czechs say Dvorak
So Duh-vorzhak it is. (Unless you’re my wife. Then it’s gonna be Dizz-vorzhak on purpose.)
I was a very religious Baptist when I was young. These days I’m “spiritual but not religious” and I’m much happier. The type of Christianity I learned was really bad for my mental health. I don’t think it’s been especially great for society either.
However, I have to give some of my former co-religionists their due. It WAS a culture, and culture is important. It becomes part of your identity. I can say from personal experience that leaving a culture is not easy.
The little church I went to last was like an extended family and an interesting cast of characters:
The bossy and very proper lady who prayed in Old English.
The old farmer with the W.C. Fields nose who could outwork any 20-year-old.
The educated eccentric who heckled the preacher and got away with it.
The demure teenage girl I crushed on but was too shy to ask out.
The sweet old lady who would make you a pie if you helped her sing her late husband’s favorite hymn.
The lady who listed all her ailments if you accidentally said “How are you?” (Doh!).
The former preacher who you prayed wouldn’t do the closing prayer because he would try to pray a sermon… (Dear God please no, there’s a roast in the oven!)
The man who got killed by two hitchhikers who took his shotgun away from him during a robbery and he was too tender-hearted to use it on them. And his widow went to see them in jail and forgave them!
And of course, the gossipy hardshell types, though they tended to go to their spite church whenever they got mad at the preacher. (They gave the rest of us something to gossip about.)
I might have changed drastically from the boy I was, but you can’t run away from memories like that.
After my landlord died, things changed at the ranch. His widow was nice enough. But she had a business in town and wasn’t around much. The grown daughter began handling the ranch’s affairs.
And it seemed that she didn’t like me much. More attitude than before. I suspected it was because she was friends with the people who ran the competing paper. Anyway, she started to come across like a bit of a bully.
Little indignities reminded me where I stood. Like when the pool man who was on drugs loaded up everything of value he could find and pawned it. Power tools, lawn equipment, electronics – and my bicycle. And I wasn’t allowed to have friends over…
The sheriff’s department found everything, including my bike, at a pawn shop. The owners and the “important renters” in another outbuilding got their valuables back. Guess who didn’t get his bike back? The Sheriff’s Office was “going to get back to me,” then quit returning my calls.
Or when the “important” renters decided my place was quaint and they wanted it. Didn’t matter what I wanted, because they had more money and got their last name from the founder of a Texas county.
The daughter moved into the ranch house and I had to pack up all my stuff and move into the outbuilding where she’d been living.
First night I got eaten up by fleas. Took two bug bombs. She’d left the place dirty and hadn’t moved anything out. That pissed me off. I decided not to clean the place I’d been renting until she cleaned hers, but she never did.
Instead she gossiped about how messy I was till I got wind of it. I called her and said my name was on the lease. If she had a problem she could call me. By then I didn’t care. I was already looking for another place.
I managed to score a garage apartment from former co-worker and it was sayonara rich bitch!
The new pad had its own flaws, but the landlords left me alone. All they asked for was the rent. I liked renting from the upper middle class much better.
Late Boomer's Den 
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