All posts filed under: Humor

The unfortunate members of my household provide entertainment – along with the rest of the world.

Leaving home. For good.

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The WideEyedParents must have been insane in 1980. Or incredibly tired of Philadelphia. Because they bought a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse that stank of dog pee and had questionable electrics in a rural New Jersey town along a remote marine estuary. The paint peeled. The ticks out in the yard bit. The lights flickered when the wind blew too hard. I for one, preferred to avoid the spooky front hall – still don’t like it to this day. Our fictive kin the WideEyedHeinrichs, came for the first annual Memorial Day picnic in 1981. We kids drank ourselves sick on store brand orange and grape soda while our parents lounged on the epically huge screen porch. We didn’t know it yet in 1981, but that screen porch would become the summer epicenter of our lives there.  Last week I couldn’t watch when two of the WideEyedBrothers moved the old wicker furniture off of the porch and onto the moving truck. We all expected my parents to die there. Not, like, tomorrow, but eventually. But then all of …

The dogs will not have the last peanut butter cup.

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The vastiness of the cosmos has been replaced by wonderment at the intricacies of mammalian interiors around here lately. The WideEyedLaundry is full of gored up shirts and khakis. My mind, in moments of distraction, traces ropey muscles, rubbery tendons, and white bones rather than the sparkle of faraway stars and dark matter. I imagine muscles flexing, tendons pulling, and mighty bison hooves stomping on dusty ground. A buffalo died at the zoo a week or two ago. The strange nature of my job calls on me to transform this creature from fur and flesh to clean, white skeleton. The process involves waterproof shoes, a U-Haul van rental, several students, many scalpels, and protective gloves. Defleshing a bison used to be normal. Well, not yesterday normal, not for me. But most of our human past required the ability to make dinner from something that used to be walking around. Personally make dinner, not abstract-grocery-plastic-wrapped-into-a-frying-pan-dinner. Now, it’s a little strange for most people. I just can’t help but notice the way things go together in there, …

Fruit flies, a nasty old chair, and 100 years of fine art.

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I’m sitting here in an anciently ugly wingback not quite as nice as Hamish the Corgi’s chair at home and I’m paying for the privilege. Sort of. The price of the chair is probably included in the cost of my vanilla latte and slice of spiced apple cake. My WideEyedButt is squashing this hard used feathered cushion as a my second choice of morning activities. First choice, oh happy happy first choice, was a bust. I went to the museum to hang around with Anselm Keifer’s Der Morgenthau Plan. I intended to stand in front of Jackson Pollack’s Convergence. I read a biography or two about him since I was last in front of the image and I wanted to see if it felt different. Giacomo Balla’s dachshund in Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash missed me, I think, and I intended to visit. None of them were there.  On loan, gone, packed up. Who knows. Now I find myself, sitting in a cloud of fruit flies and regular flies (a real problem this coffee …

Numb.

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The leaves on the ground are red and orange and gold and wet in the rain. The air stinks of fall, of soil going to sleep and grasses falling into dormancy. The squirrels stash nuts on my hose reel, on the little ledges of decorative trim all over the house, in the compost heap. Hamish the Corgi races smiling through the fluttering heaps of leaves at top speed, he thinks the rustling noises make it seem like he is going faster, faster, faster. Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog stands at the back door testing the temperature with her nose, holding one dainty foot above the rain-wet stoop. Maybe, maybe not. She can’t decide if she really wants to go outside. I should feel something when I look at all this charm but for the next day or three or four I’m numb. Numb at best. A many-months long project finished up this morning when the grant proposal was submitted. I balanced working on it with other writing projects, other lab work, the start …

My work colleagues are dogs. And no, I’m not a sheepherder.

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Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog and Hamish the Corgi work with me all the day long. And they work hard on their dog chores. Miss Tibbit holds the cushion down on the chair. Hamish holds the chair in position. They sigh and stretch and mumble over their tasks. Every now and again, Hamish has to squirm into a better holding position, Miss Tibbit must squeeze herself tighter into her little dog-round position. Today Miss Tibbit worked in the window seat in the front parlor. Hamish occupied himself with holding down the old red settee. I was so lonely. The keys wouldn’t type right on the keyboard. The words wouldn’t come in my careful writing. The day was bleak. Now we’re back up here for the evening round of work. Sweet Tibbit is snoring and twitching with her full post-dinner belly and Hamish looks like he may have actually passed out. And, sure, the WideEyedSpouse is across the room, sighing and creaking around in his chair doing mysterious Spouse office things.  But he’s with …

…time is passing at an accelerated rate –

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I looked out my office window this morning and saw yellow maple leaves scattered all over the yard. The borage in the garden is barely clinging to abundant life. The bees are a little less busy in the blooms. It isn’t summer anymore. Time is passing. Normally I don’t think much about the seasons changing, except to contemplate on the untidy lack of straightness in our planet’s axis relative to the orbital plane. That bothers me kind of a lot. Things should be straight, not at weird angles making everything all tilty and awkward and winter and summer. But I keep noticing – time is passing. Yesterday was trash day. Our junky old dishwasher didn’t last even an hour out on the curb. And that’s fine, except that I would be willing to swear that it just was trash day the day before that. It only comes once a week so if every day is trash day in my mind, what is happening to the days in between? Time is passing in a blur of …

When deadlines physically manifest.

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When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall deadline grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the office wall, and she looks you crooked in the eye and she asks if you finished your draft yet, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ WideEyedFunk always says at a time like that: “Is your draft done yet, WEF?” “Yes ma’am, it’s uploaded to dropbox.” Misquote adapted from Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. Director John Carpenter. Twentieth Century Fox.

Chickens three ways.

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Chickens. The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me have any. We have the space for a microflock and someone has to eat all of those extra worms in the worm bin. Which, if you recall, was also forbidden by the Spouse. He believes he has some power over the goings on of the WideEyedHousehold. Funny. Chickens were in my life three ways today. The Caribbean chicken spends most days with me. I carried that one from his home rolled in a tube. I took the Caribbean chicken to a frame shop here in Buffalo and I’m pretty sure that when we unrolled the canvas, sunshine and cheer glowed out at us. The framer laughed, couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I worry that I brought only one Caribbean chicken home. There were a dozen or more – we were left in the back room of a little gallery to flip through the canvases and pick which chicken would be moving to Buffalo with us. Do the others miss our little red chicken? Have they moved to homes in Paris, …

what is now and what will be..

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My dream self is a deadly street fighter. My dream self can speak 4 languages fluently. My dream self has several published books, can fence (with a sword, not stolen merchandise), and has a Nobel Prize. She has a tattoo of a stately oak (Quercus coccinea Muenchhausen) scribed on her back and joie de vivre on her arm. My dream self can drive race cars and ski the triple black diamond trails. My dream self is smart, she is confident, she never eats too many potato chips in one sitting. She is perpetually 35 years old, young, fit, lovely, and doesn’t need reading glasses. My dream self is kind, mature, and gracious. She never has too much or too little to say and never, ever makes a fool of herself. She has never disappointed people, or been disappointed by them. She doesn’t fail or falter. I have, I do. I’m old. Accomplishments are things past. Regrets, disappointments live long in my heart. But Dream-Self reminds Me-Self: dreams are not what was. Dreams are what is …

The moon over my Hammie.

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No, actually Hamish the Corgi was too wiggly. He couldn’t get himself settled enough to peer through the 12mm lens at the moon. He kept trying to put his meaty paw on the telescope tube for balance and he was sort of kicking around in my arms. I know he was disappointed, but he can try again next time. I stared at the craters, I like the ones with the impact cone in the middle. I don’t know why. The WideEyedSpouse sort of pushed at me. “Hey, let me have a turn,” he sniveled. I took one more look and stepped back from the Celestron, immediately looking up at the now-puny moon hanging above my neighbor’s house. It was lame in comparison to looking at it with the telescope. After what felt like A THOUSAND YEARS, I politely asked the Spouse to move. “Come on man,” I whined, “you are totally hogging the telescope.” He engaged the selective deafness protocol. “Come ON,” I stepped into his personal space. He put his shoulder toward me. I …