While out walking the mutt, I spotted my son playing an animated game of four-square during school recess. He noticed me and started shouting and waving. He’s ten, so I suppose my stock is nearing its peak. As his his teenage years draw nigh, I’m predicting a bear market, followed by a full collapse.
When I was ten, my world revolved around baseball cards. This was before the card boom and subsequent collapse. I’d get together with trading partners and we’d nerd away the day swapping cards. Around that time I bought several packs of hockey cards. I remember looking at one card in particular. The card featured a first-year player with a strange name and eye-popping stats. Oddly enough, though I had purchased just two packs of hockey cards, I had doubles of this particular card. Alas, no one in the neighborhood collected hockey cards, and thus my interest soon faded.
The closet in my room had a small opening in the wall. I loved to dump marbles and whatnot into the wall, and listen to them drop one floor below. Bored with the hockey cards, one day I dumped them in the wall.
I only mention this because the card just sold for $94,163. I’m fairly certain the two cards are still in the wall, and I know exactly where they are. In my new life as a construction ninja, I’m also fairly certain that I could extract the cards and patch up the garage wall within an hour. Alas, how does one present this scheme to the current home owner? No doubt I’m too lazy to put the effort into such a goose chase, but in a couple of years, I could envision Zach and I undertaking this scheme under the guise of “having an adventure”…perhaps an adventure in which a surly teenager and his lame-o dad reforge bonds weakened and frayed by teenage angst.
Buster riding his "General"
Today I took the kids to a see a Buster Keaton flick. I don’t know about you, but I am so sick of talkies. Afterwards we ate at a Mexican restaurant that sits next to a tiny airport landing strip. I guess drug dealers don’t fly on Sunday, because no planes took off or landed during our meal. The food was reasonably authentic (fresh lard no doubt). The only other time I ate there the whole family got food poisoning (perhaps too authentic?), but at least we got to see 10 takeoff/landings.
From Mrs. Neill’s blog:
When did these two adorable children
become these two rascals?
*sigh*
Every morning I pull out my bag of drugs and a razor-blade. It’s all part of my latest scheme…to be drug-free.
I’ve been taking Prilosec, a stomach fixer-upper for 10 years. The cost and the long-term side effects have me thinking it’s time to end this relationship. Alas, getting off Prilosec is akin to breaking a heroin addiction. Cold turkey attempts have launched my stomach into the depths of hell within 36 hrs. My plan: The pills are 12mm long. Every week I will shave off one more millimeter of the pill. In eleven weeks I shall be drug-free. Nevermind that one medical professional has mocked my plan. But what does she know…she’s hooked on the stuff too.
So there’s that.
I’m fifty years late, but I’m halfway through Kerouac’s “One the Road”. And let me tell you, it blows. Now mind you, I don’t have a professor whispering in my ear, telling me what to think, but dang bro, the book reads like a cheap imitation of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”. Add it to my “disposable” roster: Applebees, TGIF, etc., Americanized Chinese food, hype leading up to a football game, people talking about golf, Donald Trump, Readers Digest, SUV’s, Star Wars, the far right, the far left, and the polarized hate-filled state of American political discourse…although I suppose lists like these don’t help the cause.
The good list…people/things that ring true: all six seasons of The Wire, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, the 1st four books of the New Testament, the beer brewed at Vermont Pub & Brewery, my wife, neighborhood parks in Paris, pre-WWII brick houses, the four (weather) seasons, tacos at El Milagro in Chicago, and Ira Glass.
At the end of the most miserable day of her life, Asia left this note on her brother’s bed. A year later, though she has outgrown her misspellings and backwards letters, her relentless spirit of hope and joy remain.
"Dear Zach, Today was bad. Tomorrow is better."
Alas, we all grow. Know what I’ve outgrown? Of course you don’t! It’s like we never talk. We’re practically strangers now! Anyways, as I was saying…I’ve outgrown watching my kids play sporting events. You’ve seen those annoying parents screaming and shouting from the sidelines, right? Well it turns out that that mutant gene is in my DNA. So rather than subject other parents to my “coaching”, I’ve taken to wandering around the neighborhood of whatever venue the boy/girl happen to be playing. The urban settings fill me with the glorious tension of uncertainty. The suburbs offer a different bag surprises. In Pittsburgh, you’re never far from wilderness. This was one block from Zach’s soccer game in an unassuming suburb:
So there’s that.
Yes, I am still working on Asia’s new room in the attic. Thanks for asking! Just as Portland hipsters cannot resist painting a bird on things and calling it art, I cannot resist building unnecessary bookcases to cover every HVAC duct. Drywall goes up next week…
