The knockers at my door

I walked outside at 6:00 AM this morning to pick up the newspaper on my driveway. Across the street my neighbor had come out of the house to set the sprinkler. I was dressed, she had on a robe which was hanging open to show a flannel nightgown, her hair was uncombed. When she saw me she pulled the front of the robe together and retreated back into the house.

The house she lives in for a long time was a rental. We moved to the neighborhood in 1975, and the people across the street were a nice couple with young children. Like most of my neighbors from that era they moved on from their starter homes and got bigger and better houses. When they moved a couple with a teenage daughter moved in. They stayed for a year or so and then they moved and they rented the place out. Another young couple moved in. They had two pre-teen boys.

One day I walked by my front door and through the glass panels in the portico I could see the lady of that house standing in the front window, nude from the waist up. I yelled to Sally, "Honey, the neighbor lady is standing naked in her window."

After a time the now-clothed lady introduced herself to us as Sharon. Her husband was Skip. The boys were hers, and Skip was her second husband. Sharon had a nice body. Even though at her introduction she was clothed I remembered from my brief look what was under the clothes. Unfortunately her face was, well...how do I put it...it didn't match her body in attractiveness. Sharon didn't have a car, and a couple of times she asked Sally to take her to the grocery store, which Sally did.

Apparently the couple was having trouble. One morning when I went to work I saw Sharon and her two sons sitting on the front porch, suitcases around them. As I drove down the street a taxi went by me. I put two and two together. We didn't see her again for quite a while, and we didn't really see the husband either. Very soon after Sharon and the boys left we saw a beautiful Asian girl going into the house with him and I swear they didn't come out for days. It was the heat of summer and his lawn was dying. It was turning bright yellow, but the curtains stayed closed.

One day I looked out to see the curtains open and Sharon, in a bikini, washing the front window. Later on that day she came over to our house and I answered the door. Sharon was still in the bikini, and was wearing high heels. Sally came to the door, "Hey Sharon! You goin' to the beach?" (The nearest one being about 750 miles away.)

Sharon told her story: Apparently Skip had kicked her out; he'd sent her and her sons home to Detroit while they got a divorce. She waited a few weeks and flew back to Utah, took a taxi to the house and walked in on Skip and his girlfriend. By this time the landlord had driven by and seen the condition of the yard, so he evicted Skip. I have no idea what induced Sharon to fly from Detroit just to clean the house.

We didn't see Sharon after that day although she sent Sally a letter detailing her troubles and that was the last we heard of her.

When I look at that house across the street, even 30 years after the fact, it's hard to forget looking out to see a nude woman in the window, or having that same woman show up on my doorstep with her basketball-sized boobs barely covered. What I think is, I wish it would happen to me now.

Don't mess with us

An article in the local paper shows folks why you don't mess with anyone from Utah. It's now legal to carry a gun--even without a permit--in one's car in Utah. A car is an extension of your domicile, private property, so having a gun in your glove box or under the seat is perfectly legal.

Now if the guy next to you on the freeway is annoying you with loud thumping music, or the girl in the other lane is chatting on her cell and putting on false eyelashes while traveling at 75 mph, you can pull out your gun and shoot them. Really. I wouldn't kid about such matters.

My favorite local cartoonist, Pat Bagley, shows the general local attitude about the subject.


Recently a family member approached me at a holiday get-together and put a semi-automatic assault rifle in my hands. I glanced at it politely and handed it back. I hoped it wasn't loaded. He's one of the folks who worry that Obama will take away his right to own that rifle, so he bought one before some ban took effect. The way he tossed around the name Obama made me wonder if he thinks the President of the U.S. is personally going to come to his house and go for his weapon. There are steps to take before such a thing would happen, like a bill passing Congress and the Senate, then being signed into law. Lots of things the President desires and asks for don't come to pass.

Fortunately for my assault rifle-packin' family member the gun lobby is right there in Washington looking out for his right to carry around some major firepower, and now the local legislature has said he can carry weapons in his car. Well, I believe he already carries weapons in his car, because he has a concealed weapons permit. The law about having a gun in your car, if you're over 18, has nothing to do with a concealed weapons permit, which you can't get until you're 21. So for those three years before young Wyatt Earp can get his concealed weapons permit he can at least carry a gun in his car.

I wonder how people in other states view Utah and its gun laws? I've written about it a couple of times, here, and here.

Incidentally, in the story where I tell about the Trolley Square shooting and the Ogden Police officer who first responded I need to make an update. That officer recently left his job and went to jail for forcing an underage girl to perform oral sex on him. Apparently his gun wasn't the only deadly weapon he had on his person.

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The best singer you've never heard of

Friday night at a local high school I helped Sally with a fundraiser for the education foundation where she works. My role was pretty small. I helped with ticket sales, specifically credit card. I had exactly one opportunity to prove I could do it and I blew it. I ran the guy's credit card and then forgot to give him the tickets he'd just purchased. Sally jumped right in and saved me on that one.

The fundraiser starred Peter Breinholt, a local musician who normally sells out concert halls and venues where he's playing.

Sally and I hadn't heard of him, and I mistakenly thought he was a concert pianist. Imagine my surprise to look in the school auditorium to see a full band doing a rocking warmup. It looked interesting, and the band sounded great.

After the evening Sally and I were left shaking our heads that we hadn't heard of Peter Breinholt. His band is tight and talented, and Breinholt is superbly talented as both musician, singer and songwriter. The reason you haven't heard of him is that he is really popular with the local Latter-day Saints community. You wouldn't have known that from his concert before a couple of hundred adoring fans last Friday, though. There wasn't any overtly Mormon messages from behind the microphone. It was a concert of great music. At times Breinholt moved the audience with his beautiful vocals, other times had them jumping out of their chairs or singing along, especially when he did a medley of '80s songs. The standout to me was a rocking, full-out version of the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back." I think Breinholt should release his version of the song. It could be a big hit.

I went to YouTube and found several videos of Breinholt, but most of them are of the digital camera/30 second snippet variety. The two songs I like the best don't show his band. The second, featuring the beautiful song, "The Water Is Wide," has him backed up by none other than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!* The first, his own song, "What About," done in the snow before some sort of alpine event, appears to be a lip synch job, but at least it shows his singing and songwriting talents. To my ear Breinholt's voice with his distinctive vibrato sounds closest to that of Glenn Yarbrough of the New Christy Minstrels from over 40 years ago.

The fundraiser was generally considered a flop. The venue would have had to be sold out to make it work, but not that many people showed up. It had more to do with poor promotion for the event than the artist. The people who found out about it and raced in, even a half hour after the concert started, were happy to be there. I guess everyone else just missed out.

I hope they'll try this again. I'd love to see Peter Breinholt and his band with a full audience, yelling, dancing, singing along.

I guess if they really want to sell it out they'll invite the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to back him up.





*My former coworker, Brian, whose brother-in-law is a member of the Choir says they call it "The MoTab".

Mom's anniversary

It was a year ago today that Mom died. She had been in an Alzheimer's care center for four years. She didn't die of Alzheimer's, but of uterine cancer.

I've been going through some of the blog entries I've written about my mother, Wanda, over the past three years.

In this one I describe a super Christmas present she gave me.

Even before Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's she was paranoid/delusional. She'd exhibited symptoms of various mental problems all of my life. All it took was for me to find an old postcard in my files to be reminded that my mother was different than other moms.

Here's a posting of Mom's reaction to me being bitten by a neighbor dog.

Finally, here's the story of the day she died, one year ago today, and her service.

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Early riser

It's good to be retired. It's good to be able to sleep in past my usual 4:00 AM waking time. Yep, I got up that early. I'm a natural early riser, but I'm also nervous. Some days I'd just lay in bed, my thoughts hurtling through my brain like a tornado until getting up. What's the point of just lying there with my mind spinning? I found after retirement that almost all my anxieties came from my job and people I worked with.

I'm going through some of my favorite entries for Paranoia Strikes Deep. Here are three that relate to my former jobs, former bosses and coworkers.

In 2006 I wrote about what we used to call Secretaries Day, because as much as I loved working with secretaries (that's me in the picture on top schmoozing one of the lovely women I encountered every day on the job, heh-heh) I resented that secretaries got a day to honor them and the rest of us rank and file workers didn't. And of course there is the absolute worst day of all, Bosses Day. My friend Dave called this entry my rant about bosses. Re-reading it I can see, yeah, he's right.

When it comes to work you don't have a choice of coworkers, nor do you usually have a choice of bosses. In some cases I've been lucky with both, in other cases not so lucky.

Two of the most interesting--and obnoxious--coworkers I ever had were on a minimum wage shit job for a dried food plant. I got laid off in 1974 and found a much better job with a school district, but I never forgot these two characters, Horrible Howard and Jerky Jerry.

I also never forgot Grunt, my coworker in 1976. He was a biker so interesting I used two entries for him. The first is here, and the second is here.

I have included two of the cartoon strips I drew in 1979 and '80 about Grunt. I notice that I placed Grunt, who I worked with at the school district, back in my old food plant job. I guess I saw him as belonging to the shit job more than the school district job.

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Goodbye, Philip José Farmer

I have great affection for the writing of Philip José Farmer, who died February 25 at age 91.

Farmer wrote in the science fiction field, and was up front about his influences. He loved old pulp magazines like Doc Savage and writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created and wrote the Tarzan novels.

From Farmer's "history" of Doc Savage, in Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life, published in 1973 when he was 55, he wrote: "There is a fifteen-year-old in my brain and he loves Doc. There is also a seven-year-old who still loves Billy Whiskers, a nine-year-old who still loves Oz and the heroes of ancient Troy and Achaea, a ten-year-old who still loves John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, Rudolf Rassendyll, King Arthur, Og, Son of Fire, Umslopogaas and Galazi, the Ancient Mariner, Captain Nemo, Captain Gulliver, Tom Sawyer, Hiawatha, Jim Hawkins and Sherlock Holmes."

A few years ago Farmer was given permission to do a new Tarzan novel, The Dark Heart of Time. It was probably the only Tarzan novel not to have the name Tarzan in the title, and might be the reason it was the first and last Tarzan novel from Farmer, unless you count his pastiches like Lord Of The Trees or Lord Tyger. He even placed a Tarzan pastiche in sex novels like A Feast Unknown.

What made Farmer's name in the early '50s was sex, and his novelette (later expanded into a novel), The Lovers. Up to that time sex and science fiction didn't mix like say, sex and hardboiled detective novels. Sex wasn't necessarily taboo as a science fiction theme, but it was generally avoided.

For me, Farmer's magnum opus is To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first novel in the Riverworld series. Sir Richard Francis Burton is the main character. All of the people who lived on earth are resurrected on a large planet bisected by a river. There is a plot by an alien race regarding earth people, and the secret is in the tower at the head of the river. This book is one of the most original novels ever written in any genre. It's the ultimate fantasy. What would you do if you woke up in such a world with everyone you knew scattered somewhere along a river that stretched for thousands and thousands of miles? Burton finds that if he dies he is resurrected somewhere else along the river, so he drowns himself over and over.

The whole premise of the Riverworld series is so mindboggling that my attempts to describe it fall totally flat. It defies an easy or brief synopsis.

A TV miniseries was made of Riverworld. I watched the first half hour and turned it off. The concept is so huge it just can't be reduced to a television program.

There is a fine Philip José Farmer website with articles and a bibliography of everything he ever wrote. He had a long career, he broke new ground several times with his themes, but it was his imagination, his ability to take me into very alien places or introduce concepts that got my attention 45 years ago and continue to fascinate me to this day.

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Three years, still paranoid

I'm a little late, folks. On April 18 it was the third anniversary of this blog. That probably doesn't mean very much to you, but it was 425 entries ago and it means something to me.

I started it because I wanted to talk about some things, specifically the paranoia that was saturating my life at the time. I retired this past January 1, so the main thing making me paranoid, my former boss, Phil, is gone from my daily life. I recently talked to a therapist about Phil, because I worked for him for 20 years and I told her that Phil was very paranoid, and working for a paranoid makes employees paranoid. We had about 15 men in our department and whenever something would happen we'd dread Phil's reaction, making up paranoid scenarios in our heads. It was because we didn't know what to expect from Phil. Phil always looked at things as if they had been done to him personally, as if he would be criticized for the actions of others, so he came down extra hard on us. We became paranoid about Phil's paranoia. It's catching.

My mother was a paranoid, but she was also delusional. She came down with dementia and was put into a nursing home in 2004. She died a year ago, on May 12, 2008. I grew up around paranoia and then I worked for paranoia. In 1995 I went for some serious counseling and psychotherapy and the opinion of my therapist was that I was paranoid. I had caught paranoia from my boss and from the people around me.

So, paranoia strikes deep.

What I found in writing this blog is that the paranoid theme obviously didn't fit everything I wanted to tell you about, so I would go for long stretches without mentioning it.

I don't blame anyone for not going back into my archives, but if you're interested here are links to some of my favorites.

My first entry.

Here's an entry from May, 2006, which shows that paranoia about the current flu scare isn't new. Just three years ago we were worried about Bird Flu, amongst other things...

One thing about my former job as a mailman for a large school district is I met a lot of women. I'm married, and always told my wife about the women I worked with. This is a mom I met a few years ago. Whenever I re-read this I always wonder what happened to the woman I called Biker Chick.

That's enough reading for now. In days to come I'll be linking to some more of my favorites.

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Salvation by proxy

News that President Obama's late mother, S. Ann Dunham, was posthumously baptized into the Latter-day Saints faith shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's followed stories of this practice.

At one point Jewish organizations asked the LDS Church to stop the practice of baptizing Holocaust victims.

There was another story a few years ago that Adolf Hitler had been baptized.

Of course these people are all dead; they aren't dug up and immersed in a baptismal font. Someone stands in for them and is dunked in their stead. The idea took hold in the late 1800s when church president Wilford Woodruff was baptized for the signers of the Declaration of Independence after a "vision" in which the Founding Fathers came to him and asked for the baptism. In the modern church the practice goes on, but church rules require the people baptized are relatives of the living persons, not celebrities like Elvis, or world figures like Czar Nicholas...or Hitler...not unless a descendent of the person is a Mormon and puts the name in for baptism.

Like a lot of religious practices around the world that seem strange to outsiders, the LDS practice of baptism for the dead has raised more than a few eyebrows. The church always feels uncomfortable when asked to explain itself about unusual doctrines and inevitably some testiness will arise. Some who defend the practice of baptism by proxy might say, "Well, the person doesn't have to accept it, so what's the big deal?" I assume this means that when informed of this baptism, the baptized person from his place in the afterlife can choose to accept it or reject it. The discomfort of surviving family members knowing that some church is trying to turn their ancestors into Mormons isn't considered. The "what's the big deal?" attitude is usually a sign that the person questioned knows an answer based on his faith won't be acceptable to the questioner.


There were embarrassing incidents years ago surrounding what is euphemistically called baseball baptisms (baptisms under false pretenses). Mormon missionaries were given quotas and teenage boys were targeted for baptism. There's an interesting article about it here. As with the baptisms for the dead, current Mormons are reluctant to discuss, if not outright hostile with questions about the baseball baptism program.

Last year the LDS Church had a problem with negative publicity over polygamy. They were aggressive about distancing themselves from the FLDS group of polygamists who made the news by having their children taken into state custody. They have an ongoing problem with the HBO series, Big Love, about a man living with three wives.

I was raised in the LDS faith, but dropped out when I was 17. At the time I didn't know of any of these practices. I have polygamist ancestry but my parents told me polygamy no longer existed. I don't remember anyone mentioning baptism for the dead, and my active membership was concurrent with the baseball baptisms, but I never heard anything about them.

I'm sure there wasn't any malice attached to the baptism of President Obama's mother. It was probably just some zealous member who thought he was doing the woman a favor. I doubt any of Ann Dunham's descendents are LDS, and if told of the posthumous baptism Obama might be puzzled, but I don't know if he'd be offended. However, some people of other faiths are very offended by the practice and it rears its head every time a high profile incident like this occurs. The church should police its baptisms more carefully, but it's impossible to rein in members who go above and beyond the call of duty in trying to haul the unwilling into their idea of salvation.

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My favorites

In a busy and trying week, here are two current favorite things:


Favorite picture.

My son sent me this picture of the Obamas at a 3D movie in the White House. I don't know what they're watching but everyone seems to be enjoying it. How come the Prez's glasses are white and everyone else has blue glasses? Well, except for the guy in the second row.

Maybe they're looking at 3D movies of the Republican party self-destructing; a real life disaster in living color, high definition and, yes, three dimensions.

Favorite story.

I told you yesterday about Sally's friend Kris, whose father died and was buried on Tuesday. At a reception after the funeral everyone was sitting around in a Mormon wardhouse eating little sandwiches, "funeral potatoes" (famous at Mormon funerals), and drinking punch.

Kris' friend, Kevin, told this story:

On Monday Kris went to get some things she needed for the viewing and funeral, specifically pantyhose. Kris never wears them. Kevin told her, "Better get two pairs in case something happens to one." She just got the one. Sure enough, when she went to put them on for the funeral they had a big run in them. She called Kevin and asked him to stop at the store and pick some up for her.

I don't think Kevin will mind me saying he's gay. He's also a big guy, 6' tall, built very solid. He was in the Fred Meyer store in downtown Salt Lake City getting a clerk to help him find the pantyhose for Kris's size, and was aware the clerk was looking at him as if he were buying the hosiery for himself. He went into a little act, "Oh, these aren't for me, I wear the ones for the big girls!"

As Kevin got to the cash register with the pantyhose a woman shopper close by suddenly passed out and fell on the floor. A man walking by was looking at her and walked into a display, knocking it over. The clerks rushed over to see what was going on, and just then the power in the store went off. Kevin was at the cash register with no clerk and suddenly yelled out, "Will someone help me with these pantyhose? They have to be at a funeral!"

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Two funerals in two days

Jackie was married to my wife's cousin, Steve. She died on Sunday, April 26, 2009, and her service was this past Monday.

Jackie was a person who gave to others; everyone who stood up to speak of her told of her selflessness, her devotion to friends and family. Even her boss spoke of her in glowing terms. She had applied to his department at the medical insurance company they worked for, and he said when she turned in her application he felt like going into the hall and doing cartwheels. Isn't how you'd like to be remembered? As someone that someone else would do cartwheels over?

She was married to Steve for 31 years. I knew Steve in high school, I knew Jackie before Steve knew her. She and my then-girlfriend were friends. We double-dated with Jackie and her dates. I don't know when she hooked up with Steve, but both of them had been divorced, and this is the marriage that "took" for both of them.

This past January I went to dinner with members of Sally's family, including Steve and Jackie. On the way into the restaurant I told my sister-in-law, Nancy, that Jackie didn't look much different than she did when I met her at age 14, back in 1964. Nancy told Jackie that and for one of the few times in my life I was happy that someone repeated what I said about them. Jackie had kept herself very youthful.

Jackie died in a cruel way. She was diagnosed with cancer in her colon and liver and despite chemotherapy died in five weeks. It was a tragedy all around because she should have had a lot of years ahead of her. She left behind an extended family and a lot of friends, many of whom made it to the graveside service.

Stan was the dad of my wife's friend, Kris. He died of what is generally known as "incident to old age." Stan had lived to be 96. He'd been active his whole life. He worked for the railroad until retiring in 1977 at age 65, then worked for another 15 years on his farm. He lived a long time and worked hard.

Stan's widow is Josephine. They had a long life together, married just short of 73 years. His daughter, Kris, had a very close relationship with her dad.

After Jackie's Monday service we went to a viewing for Stan at the same funeral home. Sally attended his funeral on Tuesday. She said the funeral was beautiful and that Stan was much loved. His widow chose a final resting spot for him under the beautiful mountains.

Jackie, Stan...we'll miss you both.

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Moon conspiracy

Angels & Demons, the new Tom Hanks movie based on the best seller by Dan Brown, is coming to theaters. I'm not a big fan of Dan Brown. I thought The Da Vinci Code was a potboiler of a novel and I skipped the movie. What I'm most interested in is that Brown writes about conspiracies. Big conspiracies.

The true conspiracy theory--in my own limited definition, that is--is that it remains a theory, without the true smoking gun-style proof. We've all listened to the same conspiracy theories for so many years they have started to lose their meaning. Movies are made of them: Oliver Stone's version of the JFK assassination, Area 51 in the Nevada desert being home to aliens from outer space (Independence Day, et al.), a flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 (numerous movies and television shows). On and on. The fiction starts to take over and whatever real evidence there might be left of the event(s) becomes swallowed up by that fiction. Hell, it's more fun to have it that way! You can't prove it anyway. No matter what sorts of documents you produce or evidence you show me another guy will come along with an entirely different context using the same evidence to "prove" his point. But when you see a movie based on the events it takes hold in the public mind as being the truth of the event.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is the incredible claim that America's rush to the moon in 1969 was to recover alien artifacts found on the moon. There are websites and books about this conspiracy. They all present photos that purport to show structures, not natural but artificial, on the moon's surface, including giant construction projects, towers, glass domes. The photos are blurry, they're taken from far away. People studying these photos can see the structures. I can't. In a 1976 book, Somebody Else Is On the Moon by George Leonard, they are nice enough to make line drawings of what we're supposed to be seeing in the photos.

In the second book I'm reading about many of the same structures and events, Dark Mission, The Secret History of NASA by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara, published in 2007, I have a hard time seeing anything in the photos. I guess I'll take their word for it, but to me it's like a Where's Waldo book without Waldo. I look and look and I guess I just don't have the same mindset, but don't see what they're referring to.

If they had crystal clear pictures of a glass dome on the moon, or sharp close up images of alien construction equipment digging mines on the moon everyone would accuse them of using Photoshop, so in some ways it's better for them that the photos they show be open to interpretation.

Several people have done a tremendous amount of work to present these theories that NASA and the U.S. Government are hiding the facts of alien beings leaving artifacts on the moon or on Mars. Dark Mission devotes much space to NASA pictures of the face on Mars and other structures showing evidence that alien beings were once there. The rationale for hiding the facts, according to Dark Mission, is that the people of Earth can't handle the thought that they aren't alone in the universe. It's claimed that were these facts known it would cause disruption of our way of life, religious, economic, and scientific. But in order to keep these facts from the public a massive conspiracy has been ongoing for decades. Of course there are some "good" NASA employees who have come forward with information, but NASA just pooh-poohs them.

There's also the disinformation factor. If the government wanted to scuttle these theories then they could just release enough wrong information that sounds good through those employees, and that can be shot down after the conspiracy buffs publish them.

So to the authors of these conspiracy theories, thanks for presenting your fascinating stories and evidence. I believe you believe what you're saying, but I'm a skeptic. Dan Brown's books notwithstanding, I've found that it's almost impossible to keep a big secret for very long. I think we give the people in our government too much credit for being able to hide the truth when many times they don't know what it is themselves. Maybe someday National Geographic will send a ship to the Moon and they'll find big glass domes that enclose the remains of cities or work projects from eons past. Maybe they'll go to Mars and check out the sphinx-like face and the mysterious area known as Cydonia. If someone can get there besides the U.S. government and show it to us then I'll say to you guys, way to go, thanks for telling us about this sort of thing years ago. But, oh yeah, such information would bring about the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So, on second thought, maybe for now it's just better to read the conspiracy theories.

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Found money

Has this ever happened to you? This morning I went into my closet to find a pair of slacks. Sally and I are attending a funeral on Monday and I want to make sure my pants fit. In the past couple of months I've had surgery, lost some weight, gained some weight back, and wanted to see if I needed to buy new pants. When I put them on they fit just like they did the last time I wore them, which I figure was probably at my mother's funeral a year ago. I felt something in the pocket and pulled out a wad of cash, $33.00.

When I wear slacks I don't use a wallet because it makes an unsightly bulge, so I take out money, my Visa card and my driver's license and put them in my front pocket. I remembered the driver's license and credit card but apparently not the cash.

If there is a greater feeling than finding money you didn't know you had I don't know of it.

It reminded me of an old joke, one Orson Bean told to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in the mid-'70s.

A man is going through some old clothes to donate to Goodwill. He turns out the pockets and finds a claim ticket for a pair of shoes at a shoe repair shop. He'd completely forgotten he'd taken them in. The ticket is 25 years old but the man thinks what the hell, I'll go into the shop and see if they still have the shoes.

When he provides the elderly cobbler the ticket the old man explodes, "What! This is 25 years old! Are you crazy? You think I would have your shoes after all this time?" He goes into the back of the store grumbling and complaining, then hollers to the customer from the back. "Are your shoes black wingtips? Need heels and a half-sole?" The man thinks, remembers, and then replies, "Yes, those are the ones."

"I'll have 'em for you Tuesday!"

Ciao.

Senior discount

A few years ago I was in a store and when I made my purchase the young woman behind the cash register asked me, "Are you 55 or over, because we have a senior discount." At the time I wasn't 55 but my beard, which went white early on, has made me look mature. In other words, my mind is immature, my face isn't.

"Sure, I'm over 55." I got 10% off my purchase.

I was asking for my senior discount at that store for a couple of years, even after I was officially "55 or over." My wife, Sally, wouldn't ask because she was embarrassed. When it comes to saving 10% I have no pride. There came a day when I said, "I'd like my senior discount, please," and the clerk answered, "We discontinued that practice."

"Say what?"

"Yes, there are just too many people over 55."

Aha! Ageism. Geezer discrimination. Unfair! I'll sue!

Well, no I won't, but I'll go somewhere else to get that discount.

There are an awful lot of us Baby Boomers who are hitting an age, aren't there? We made for a bulge in the population since the late 1940s that is still being dealt with. I read a letter in my local newspaper the other day where a young woman was complaining that "the older people" are going to suck the Social Security system dry, leaving her nothing.

So we "older people," who are here because our dads fought World War II and came home horny, conspired with our moms to make millions of babies, who worked 40-45 years of our lives supporting our grandparents' and parents' generations with Social Security are now a bunch of leeches on the system. Gee, young woman, I'm sorry if I'm getting what I earned over four decades of labor, but I can just about guarantee that unless our economy goes into total collapse, and at that stage there won't be any Social Security for us Baby Boomers either, your generation will get theirs.

Social Security may undergo some changes, some drastic, but it will be there in one form or another. It is a program where workers work all their lives thinking there will be something for them when they're eligible and when someone talks about changes the workers get testy and start making really loud noises in Washington. It doesn't hurt that AARP, which is an organization for older folks like the NRA is for gun owners, is a powerful and vocal lobby.

I liked the ad that was in my mailbox today. "Don't forget my SENIOR DISCOUNT!" I worked hard; I deserve it.

Oboy! Something new to worry about!

This past week a couple of stories have surfaced that have captured public attention. The latest is the swine flu story. The old fears of a flu pandemic, like the one in 1918 that killed millions, have popped up, prompting a lot of anxiety. Right now the deadliest cases seem to be in Mexico. As I write this the Center for Disease Control says 40 people in the U.S. have swine flu.

Forty people out of 300+ million people, and panic is already setting in. It reminds me of the SARS scare in 2003 or the first swine flu scare in 1976. Every day in our country heart disease, strokes and cancer take thousands of lives. You can leave your driveway and get killed in your car. We have a lot of things to worry about but we have chosen to let the flu story take over our minds. We do this to ourselves all the time. It's like the real killers in our society have gotten boring to us so we have to come up with new things to scare ourselves.

The other story is the so-called Craigslist killer story. My wife asked, and rightly so, why this is big news when people are getting murdered every day.

For some reason this story with a tall pre-med student killing a photogenic prostitute has gotten big play everywhere. Why? Once again, have routine murders, rapes, robberies gotten so boring we have to spend the national attention on this story?

A few years ago there were stories about sharks attacking swimmers and they got a lot of play on television news. For me, who doesn't swim in the ocean, there was a threat level of zero that I'd get attacked by a shark. It's the same with most of the people in this country. A psychiatrist got on National Public Radio to talk about why we take these stories and run with them: It's because they're sexy. It's much more fun to worry about a shark attack than getting cancer or having a heart attack. It's more scary to think that we can catch the flu from just going out in public and having someone cough on us than to it is to think of what our fat intake is doing to our arteries.

There is one good thing about these stories. We are no longer looking at last month's obsession, the Octomom. That's worth a few scares from network news right there.

In Treatment

Every Sunday and Monday Sally and I watch HBO's In Treatment, which presents 25-minute episodes of therapy sessions with a cast of patients. It takes place mostly in the office of Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), as he works to help people. The problem is that Dr. Weston has as many problems as his patients.

We think the acting is uniformly excellent. We also know a little bit about therapy, since we've both been through it. I don't think it hurts to talk to a professional, especially when a person has issues he can't talk about with family members or friends. Or frankly, when we're too close to the problem and need a fresh perspective.

In 1995 my boss drove me to the tipping point. I finally went into therapy with Brenda, who I visited for five years, working through a number of issues. Sally visited Brenda, also, and was helped. So when Sally and I watch In Therapy, we're familiar with some of things we're hearing. The shows are dramatic, not reality TV, so there are arcs to the stories there wouldn't be in real life. Some of what I'm familiar with is how resistant some people are to hearing the truth. They go into therapy wanting to be validated in what they are doing. When the therapist suggests something else they first reject it as if they are being attacked. If they're smart they'll listen and think about it, and many times discover the professional is correct.

My first sessions with Brenda were tense. I didn't know what to expect and she was trying to draw out of me what she needed to know. A year or more later when I had shown substantial progress she told me the first couple of times she talked to me, "You scared me. You were so paranoid* and scary I didn't think I could continue with you." That shocked me down to my shoelaces. Say what...? Me scary? She thought I was on the edge. Edge of what? Going postal? Nope, that's not me, and she found that out. We developed a rapport. We both worked hard and we had results.

So both Sally and I know enough about the subject to be dangerous. We now recognize people with disorders we're familiar with from therapy. I couldn't sit someone in a chair and tell them how to fix their problems, but I can recognize their problems and give my diagnosis, "Man, you're all screwed up. See a shrink."

Anyway, In Treatment is excellent drama with great acting.

*Hence the name of this blog.

My guilty pleasure

I have watched the first two episodes of the CBS Thursday night slasher-TV drama, Harper's Island. If you aren't familiar with it, Harper's Island is a mystery series that will end after 13 episodes.

There have been two episodes of Harper's Island and so far five people have been killed. The way people die in this show is why I think of it as slasher-TV. They all die in gruesome and horrible ways, just like in an R-rated slasher movie. With the popularity of the CSI franchises and all of the creative ways people die on those shows, not to mention the stomach churning scenes of corpses and autopsies, we've become more desensitized to violent death on TV. The movies have been doing it for 40 years, and now TV has caught up to the perversity of it all.

The basic premise of Harper's Island is that a whole wedding party descends on the island "37 miles off the coast of Seattle, Washington." Henry Dunn is marrying rich girl, Trish Wellington, and they invite all their friends, who so far number a couple of dozen as far as I can tell. Trish's dad is there as is her univited ex-boyfriend, Hunter.

Henry Dunn is played by Christopher Gorham, a young actor who had a big role in Ugly Betty as Betty's boyfriend, also named Henry, Henry Grubstick. (Maybe Henry changed his hairstyle, took off his glasses and changed his last name, then met Trish.) For some reason Gorham just doesn't look like a guy who would attract a rich girl, but then I don't know what those guys look like. They don't look like me, either.

The star of the series is Elaine Cassidy, a really fine young actress. She's yet another in a long, long string of people with accents who play Americans, and talk better American than us Americans. Is this a fad of some sort? To hire Australians or Brits, or in Ms. Cassidy's case, Irish, and train them how to speak American English?

Cassidy plays Abby, a girl who grew up on Harper's Island, who knew Henry when he was a working stiff (oops, maybe 'stiff' is the wrong word) on the island during summers. Her estranged dad is the police chief (or the whole police department, since so far he's the only cop we've seen). Several years before when Abby was a child her mom was killed in grisly fashion by serial killer John Wakefield and in turn Abby's dad killed him. But now that the wedding party is on the island the killings have started again.

The fishmarket isn't the only place on Harper's Island where I pick up a piscatorial odor. There are enough red herrings being dragged all over the place to fill San Francisco Bay.

Anyway, even with the gory murders I have a terrible guilty pleasure, enjoying this show as entertainment. According to an article about the series, it's a mix of Scream and the novel by Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None. The killer in And Then There Were None was extremely clever in his engineering of the murders, and when I read it as a junior high student I enjoyed the hell out of the book. But that was before I fully understood how we as a species regard death as something we want to see. At least in fantasy form, that is. When it happens to real people it's a tragedy, when it happens on a TV show or a movie it didn't really happen, so we can excuse it. It's sick, but it's the way we are and have been forever. I'm sure when our stone age ancestors were sitting around a fire at night the storyteller of the group was regaling them with tales of death, how Og, Son of Fire got bashed in the head and had his brains eaten, and everyone around the campfire laughed...you know, like prehistoric horror movies.

Take a chill pill, Dr. Phil!

Dr. Phil was going on yesterday on his TV show with some parents about their children and the "sexting" phenom. That's the one where kids take pictures with their camera phones of themselves nude, or of their genitals and then send them on. The problem is that the person for whom it is intended may send it on, causing a ripple effect. One young girl who had done this was interviewed and told by Dr. Phil she had done a "dumb thing" but it did not make her a "bad person."

Wow, Dr. Phil, do you live in a bubble? These sorts of self-pics are all over the Internet and I strongly suspect, based on what I found just this morning on a site devoted to exhibitionists, that these girls don't have any problems at all showing themselves, and would like the rest of us to see, also! Of course they're not bad people, they're good people! It's just that I may have a slightly different idea of "good."

I'm all for people being over 18 in order to post these things online, and the site I accessed claims that everyone in these pics is over 18, so I'm not sending out anything illegal. With a couple of exceptions I stayed away from total nudity or pictures of girls "pleasuring themselves" (a term I heard on Oprah a couple of days ago). But I think you get a strong message from what these girls are showing us: they like their bodies, they are happy with themselves, and by golly, they'd like us to know it! Who am I to pretend I know best for these fine young women? I would like to publicly thank them--and the makers of digital cameras and for the Internet and entrepreneurs who know for everyone who likes to show off their body, there are 10 people who like to look at it--for making these pictures of themselves available.

Our two grandgeniuses

Sally and I love being grandparents. My son, David, is a good dad, he's in a good marriage and has a couple of great kids, both girls. Bella was 4 in December, and Gabby will be 3 at the end of June. Bella is very smart, and by having her precedent to guide her, Gabby is ahead of the curve for her age.

One of the things about grandkids is you get to hear funny stories and I love to share. Recently David sent me a note saying that he got out his digital camera only to discover that Bella had taken some pictures. That wouldn't be a big deal, but he had shown her once how the timer worked, so she set up the camera on the coffee table, set the timer, and took pictures of herself and her sister. David also tells these stories about the pair:

The girls didn't want anything to do with the Easter bunny when they saw him at the mall. When I told them that the Easter bunny was coming to bring them stuff (to make them act good), they kept asking me if the Easter bunny would stay outside and not come in our house. I had to assure them that the Easter bunny would knock on the door while they were sleeping and give Mommy and Daddy the treats, but NOT come in the house!

They're both starting to develop their own personalities. Gabby is going to be the class clown, and is more extroverted. Bella is like me, and introverted, but thinks about things logically. I don't know if I told you, but we bought them a little table and chair set. It had to be put together. When I put the chairs together, I let Bella help me screw in the screws. Now, one of her favorite things to do is get the screwdriver and take apart the little chair and put it back together. It's only four screws, but just like the camera, you can show her once, and she remembers. Maybe she'll be an Engineer, whereas Gabby could be a lawyer-type.

Gabby won't take no for an answer, and she figures out ways to barter for what she wants. Sometimes she gets what she wants, because she makes a good case. One example, on Easter, we gave them chocolate. We let them only have a certain amount. Gabby found an extra piece of chocolate, and we told her that she had to wait until tomorrow because it was too late. Bella would have said okay and gave us the chocolate back. Gabby, on the other hand, tried to make a deal with us and said, "It's OK, just let me hold it. I'll keep it safe, and I won't let anyone eat it!". We ultimately got it back, because her attention span is still shorter than ours.

See what I mean?

What the hell are you thinking, people?

I had one of those nude-in-public dreams last night. In the first part of the dream my brother Rob and I are trying to pitch a script idea to a producer. I'm nude, but no one seems to notice. In the second part of the dream, still nude, I'm heading to the cash register at a restaurant. My wife says, "Do you have the check?" I say, "Look at me. Do I look like I'm keeping the check somewhere?" When we leave the restaurant I remember feeling sorry for the other patrons who had to look at me.

Some people make these nude dreams come true! The Internet is a place where, with a bit of looking, you can find amateur sites where exhibitionists can send in pictures of themselves, in lingerie, nude, having sexual intercourse, performing oral sex, bondage, you name it!

The sky is the limit when it comes to debauchery and compromising one's self.

Despite that, the site I am referencing has rules: No pictures of menstrual pads or blood, no stool, and no kids under 18. Well, at least they have some rules, because they don't have any rules against people making fools of themselves.

Here are some pictures I've culled off that site. It'll be nameless. I don't want to get sued by them. The people in these pictures can't sue me for public defamation because they've already defamed themselves.

Many of the folks blur their faces, crop off their heads (in the photos, not literally), wear masks or otherwise disguise themselves.

Some should disguise themselves.

Other people seem proud to be showing their goods to the world.

Did I mention the guys who like to dress up?


Some day I might see you on this site, but you'll never see me. God bless the Internet and its endless entertainment.