Author: djgourdoux

Not Anymore

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I used to be a fidgeter, but not anymore.  I used to toss and turn in bed at night, before and after falling asleep.  Now, when I go to bed, I quickly find a position I’m comfortable in, and stay that way until morning.  More than once, my wife says, she’s woken up in the middle of the night to find me so still she has to check that I’m still breathing.

This afternoon I visited our vacation cabin for the first time since last November.  Our cabin sits in the woods on a dead end dirt road that in the winter is only partially plowed, up to and not far after my driveway.  It’s always very quiet here, but never quieter than in late winter.  There is literally no traffic on the road. When I got here today, it was cold out, and there was about a foot of snow on the ground.  I had to park my car in the street and trudge through it to my front door.   I opened up the cabin and found everything was how I left it.  My deer hunting coat lay hanging on the same hook, the refrigerator remained unplugged with its doors propped open, blankets remained neatly folded on the beds.   Everything was in its place. I started a fire in the wood stove and unloaded the things I’d packed and waited for the cabin to warm up.

This evening, I went out for a bite to eat and picked up a couple of things for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.  When I came in out of the dark and cold, the fire was still burning in the stove, and the cabin was bright and warm and quiet.   I started reading, but soon an “off” cycle hit me hard.  “Off” cycles are when my Parkinson’s disease medications wear off, about every three and a half to four hours.  When they hit, I take my prescribed dosage of Carbidopa / Levodopa and wait for it to kick in.   Most of the time, the off periods aren’t too bad, it’s a discomfort that I’ve gotten used to.  About twice a day, though, usually after I’ve eaten a full meal, they’re pretty rough, as the rigidity or stiffness that is my most prominent motor symptom makes movement of any kind very difficult and extremely uncomfortable, and if I’ve eaten a lot, they’re accompanied by severe nausea and acid reflux.   I’ve learned to eat less at dinner time, for example, but sometimes it still hits me.  About all I can do when these bad off periods occur is take my pill and find a place to sit or lie down and ride it out.   Usually after an hour, longer during the really bad spells, I feel the pill kicking in and gradually start feeling better, and about an hour later, two to three hours after the off-period began, it’s over, and I’m good for about an hour and a half until the next off-period begins.

I was alone in my cabin when tonight’s bad spell hit.  I took my pill and lay down on the couch and waited for it to kick in.  As I laid there it occurred to me that I wasn’t moving, not a muscle, and I looked around the silent cabin and saw all the things that were in the same place I left them last November, all of them still and unmoving. I thought of myself, lying there among them, just as still, and I thought of how I often find myself in the morning, in the same position I fell asleep in several hours before, just like the things in the cabin that remained unmoved since last November.

I used to take comfort in the site of my cabin being unchanged from how I’d left it, but not anymore.

Now it terrifies me.

You Say Potato

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Friday night is take-out night.  It’s a tradition we’ve been observing in our house for years, since our kids were small, and still continues, now that my wife and I are empty nesters.

A few months ago, tired of the usual pizza from our favorite take out place, we turned our attention to the rest of the menu.   We decided to try the ribs and a couple of side dishes.  We were pleased to find they were delicious, the sauce tangy and sweet and better than a couple of those famous chain restaurants that supposedly specialize in ribs.

This was a pleasant surprise, but the real surprise was the baked potato that came with it.  Upon opening the Styrofoam container, my wife said, “oh, wow.”

“What?” I asked.

“Look at that baked potato,” she said.

I looked.  It sat there, next to the ribs.  At first glance, I noticed nothing unusual about it.  “What about it?” I asked.

“It’s enormous!”

I looked a little closer and she was right, it was huge.  It was about twice the size of a normal baked potato.  “Huh,” I said, “you’re right.  It is big.”

We ate, and the ribs and the potato and the appetizers were all very good, and we were both full and content.  There was enough that we’d have leftovers to reheat.  We went about the rest of our evening.

About 9:00, I was watching television and my wife was reading, when she turned to me and said, “Tomorrow you can have what’s left of the ribs for lunch.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And I think I’ll take what’s left of that potato.   Maybe I’ll add some bacon bits and cheese and things and make one of those stuffed baked potatoes.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

“There should be enough left over.  That potato was so huge.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty enough for your lunch.”

“I still can’t get over how big that potato was,” she added.  “I mean, seriously, have you ever seen such a big potato before?”

“I don’t know, I don’t normally pay that close of attention to potatoes.”

“I mean, come on, you couldn’t help but notice it.  It was gigantic.”

A few nights later, we were grocery shopping at Woodman’s.  We were in the produce department when she said, “I wonder if they have any of those giant potatoes?”

“Giant potatoes?” I asked.

“Yeah, like we had with the ribs the other night.”

We arrived at the stand that held individual potatoes.   I took one of the larger ones off of the stand and showed it to her.

“This one’s pretty big,” I said.

“Are you kidding?  That’s nowhere near as big as the one we had with the ribs.”

“I don’t know, it’s pretty big.”

“You’re out of your mind,” she said.  “It’s not even close.”

We looked some more and there were no giant potatoes.  Finally, I said, “Maybe that potato we got the other night was just a freak of nature.”

“Maybe,” my wife dejectedly agreed.

About a week later, we decided on take out again,

“Pizza?” I suggested.

“No, I’m not in the mood for pizza.  How about those ribs again?”

Soon I was home with another Styrofoam container of food.  I hung up my coat as my wife opened up the container.

“Wow,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The potato.   It’s gigantic.”

I looked and there was no denying, it was enormous.  For some reason, I didn’t feel like hearing her go on and on about the size of the potato again.

“Look at it,” she said.  “It’s huge!  I think it’s even bigger than last week’s!”

“Yeah, so what?”

“I’m just saying, they have such big potatoes.  It’s really a value for the price you pay.  I wonder where they find them?”

“Did you ever think,” I asked, “that it’s not natural for a potato to be that big?   Did you ever think that maybe they’re selling us genetically modified and mutated potatoes?”

“No,” she said, “they’re real.  They’re natural.”

“How do you know? “

“I doubt that our local pizza place is genetically engineering giant potatoes.”

“Well, they don’t taste any better than normal potatoes, so I don’t know why it’s such a big deal that they’re so big.”

“Are you kidding?  Even you said last week that the potato was delicious.”

“What about those little russet potatoes, or red potatoes?  They’re some of the best potatoes ever, and they’re small.”

“What are you talking about?   Why are you getting so defensive?’

“I’m just saying, the size of a potato isn’t all that important.”

A couple of nights later, I came out of my office and stepped into our living room.  My wife was in her chair, on the phone with somebody, when I heard her say, “It was gigantic.  I’ve never seen one that big.”

Then there was silence as whoever was on the other end was talking.  Then my wife said, “Really?  You know where I can get a big one?”

I’d heard just about enough, when she said,  “Well, first thing I’d do is take a paring knife and remove all the skin.  Then I’d put it in a pot of boiling water, you know, to soften it up.”

Then I could hear her saying something about soup and carrots and vegetables, but I wasn’t listening, I felt sick to my stomach, and left, looking for a bucket, feeling like I was going to throw up.

The following Friday night, I was downstairs and my wife upstairs.  I had the television on, watching a commercial for some natural male enhancement product when I heard my wife come down the steps.  I quickly turned the channel.

“Are we getting carry out?” she asked.

“Yeah, “ I said, “I’ll run and get it.”  I was having difficulty hiding my depression.  “I suppose you want ribs.”

“Nah,” she said, “I’m more in mood for a burger and French fries.”

“French fries?”  I perked up.  “You’re in the mood for French fries?”

“Yeah, I don’t know why, but French fries sound really good to me.”

I smiled, and suddenly felt better.  “I’d be happy to get you some French fries.”

“As long as they stay crisp. I hate it when they get all cold and soggy.”

I drove into the dark night to pick up our order.   At the intersection before my destination, I got stopped at a red light behind a large diesel pickup truck, a Ford F-350.    It sat high on its frame, elevated by giant monster-truck like tires.  From behind the wheel of my Toyota Prius, I had to look up to read the license plate.

It was from Idaho.

Mid February

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He’d always spent too much time inside his own head.

It had gotten to the point that he started referring to himself in the third person.   Bitterness and cold emptiness gripped him like the snow that covered the ground.

When he was a kid, after the lights were turned out, he’d lay awake, the sheets pulled up over his head, and listen to the indecipherable murmur of the voices he heard from the far reaches of the darkened house, and he’d wait for the warm hum of the furnace blowing heat through the registers or the familiar rumble of a distant train to drown them out.  He had trouble distinguishing between what was real and imagined.

Now the voices had gone silent.  The house was empty.   Empty days faded and bled into one another, shrouded in a fog of fatigue.

Then she’d be there, and every once in a while he’d say something and she’d smile, and the fog would lift, and the years fall away, the emptiness consumed.  It occurred to him that her smile was neither real nor imagined; because nothing real could be as perfect, and its perfection and beauty was beyond the boundaries of any landscape he could construct from the murky depths of his shallow and narrow mind.

In the middle of the still and black night he woke and felt her in his arms. He realized that it didn’t matter if she was real or not, because she was all he had, and that was everything.

The History of Man Explained in Three Minutes

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(I wrote this for my wonderful Aunt, the school teacher, who is always so supportive of me and takes the time to write well thought out and encouraging critiques of my work.  Sharper than a razor blade, she remains as always one of my all-time favorite people – this is an example of the kind of B.S. I’ve always tried to show off for her with)

Back in the old days when we were not-so-bright Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons or whatever, we had to rely upon instinct to survive.   The most important component of this survival instinct was fear.  By being fearful of that sabre-toothed tiger that was always lurking about, we learned where to find the best shelter, how to read the wind, whatever we had to learn because we were motivated by primal fear.  That fear is what lead us to discover fire, and once Prometheus had let Zeus’ little secret out, Zeus saw his worst fears realized, that those crafty humans would learn all of his secrets, and soon we were splitting the atom while Zeus went off to the great senior home in the sky, where he bores the other gods with the same old stories about how in his younger years he was feared and worshipped and powerful (although I hear he plays a mean shuffleboard).

Meanwhile, with the sabre-toothed tiger and other threats to our day to day survival removed, the forever evolving humans had less use for fear.   Once they sublimated fear, they gained visibility to those things that had previously been available only to the gods – love, truth and beauty to name a few.   Fear is the enemy of these things, and it fought against them so as to regain its force.  So fear created greed – what is greed after all but the fear that others may get more than you? – and greed in turn created power, the power to instill more fear.  Power manifested itself in religions and corporations and the NRA, and told people, forget about the sabre-toothed tiger, what you need to fear is each other, while you are staring in wonder at how lovely and true and beautiful that flower is, a black feminist Muslim is going to blow you up and force you to spend all of eternity underground at a barbecue hosted by this nasty red dude with a pointed tail.

Only when we recognize fear as the archaic and obsolete force it truly is will we gain access to all of those Platonic planes, as well as a few we probably don’t know about yet.

Melting Diamonds and the Great Blue Bus in the Sky

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(Going through some old files tonight and I found this -it’s one of the first things I wrote upon joining the Kenosha Writer’s Guild a few years ago, and one of the few things I wrote back then I can still read now without invoking the gag reflex …)

There used to be an old blue school bus that ran from the parking lot of the A&P grocery store in Ladysmith to the Norco Window factory in Hawkins every day.  I’d walk the four blocks from my apartment on the third floor of the Gerard Hotel to the bus, and for a while, I’d be joined by Jack Anderson, a big burly man of about 6o years old with a scraggly white beard, who worked in the same department at Norco that I worked in.  Jack worked alongside the slightly older and famously cantankerous Conrad Stonkey, one of the great characters I’ve had the pleasure of having known.  Conrad was at the time in his early 60s, a rather short man of medium build, whose thinning hair had turned pure white with age. Every day Conrad wore the same olive green work uniform, work pants and shirts, and had an olive green colored cap that covered the thinning white hair on top of his head.  He also sported a little pure white goatee, that for special occasions he would dye an appropriate color.  To celebrate his Irish ancestry, every year on St. Patrick’s Day he’d show up with this white goatee colored green. On the fourth of July, streaks of red and blue would be added to the natural white for a stirring patriotic salute.  He was ornery and complained about everything, but he also had a sense of humor, and when he laughed, he would clench both of his fists and hold them at his thighs, stand on his tippy toes, and emit a high-pitched “tee-hee-hee” sound.  It never failed, you’d get a laugh out of him and his automatic, reflexive action would be to clench his fists, stand on his tippy toes, and make “tee-hee-hee” sounds.

Conrad and Jack would take panes of glass and stack them on top of the aluminum frames I and my work partner, the 45 year old confirmed bachelor Lew Reed, were responsible for.  Lew would fill the individual aluminum spacers with silicate, I would snap them together into wobbly rectangles and store them in groups of about 30 of the same dimensions in the hot room, where Conrad and Jack would take them and stack them on the tables we had covered and taped with construction paper earlier that morning, inserting the freshly cut and clean pieces of glass that they’d take off of rollers that were fed from outside the room by another member of our crew, Roger Arndt.  Finally the stacks of glass and aluminum spacers that were so carefully prepared by Conrad and Jack would be wheeled to the middle of the room, where their sides would be covered by a fresh coat of “goop”, which was some form of thick adhesive material that the worker, for a period of time my friend Jeff Severson, would whip up from the strange goop-making machine that stood in the center of our small room and apply to the stacks of windows with a cardboard grovel.  When finished, Jeff would wheel the table with the gooped up stacks of glass outside of our temperature controlled room to the larger factory that sat outside, where the goop would dry and someone would later come by with a utility knife and cut through the goop, revealing the separate insulated aluminum spacer bound panes of glass that would be incorporated into wooden sashes to complete the transformation of raw material to window.

We worked in this small room, me and Lew, Conrad and Jack, and Jeff, with Roger popping in between loads to see what size of glass panes to pick up for washing and feeding through to Conrad and Jack next, together for 8 or 9 hours a day,  and during peak times, an additional 5 hours on Saturdays.   So we got to know each other pretty well.  I, being the youngest and by far the most immature of the group, settled easily into the role of clown.   I quickly mastered my job of snapping together the aluminum frames so that I could stay comfortably ahead of my work, leaving my mind free to explore ideas to convince the others, especially grumpy, cantankerous old Conrad, that I was one sandwich short of a picnic.  Amongst my favorite routines were:  1)  getting “angry” at the stored boxes of metal spacers and going a few rounds with them, showing off my boxing skills, quickly throwing left jabs and lethal combinations and punching them until my knuckles literally bled, 2) standing on top of the papered  tables, flapping my arms, and cawing like a crow at the top of my lungs, and 3) with Jeff and a visitor from an outside department starting out with the bass vocals of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” ,  jumping up on top of one of the wheeled tables and singing the high pitched falsetto lead as loudly as I could, all the while using the wheeled table as my surf board,  pretending to ride a big wave.  I’d get puzzled smiles and head shakes from Lew Reed, and when I’d get the involuntary tippy-toed, clenched fisted “tee-hees” from that old mule Conrad Stonkey, I knew I’d accomplished something.  Exactly what, nobody knew, but it was undeniably something.

I’d spent enough time with these guys that I had gotten comfortable – maybe, too comfortable – with them, and wasn’t afraid of showing off for them.  I was living alone, very much alone, at the time, and work provided on many days the only real contact I had with other human beings.

After the misery that was high school, I had no desire to attend college and subject myself to more of the same.  I was eager to experience a life without school, and make money, and buy things.  After graduating high school, I got a job where everyone who couldn’t get a job anywhere else got a job, the C & D Duck Processing plant in Franksville, Wisconsin, where I worked my way up to the illustrious position of lung sucker, and with my handsome $4.33 per hour salary was able to buy my first car, a 1974 A.M.C. Hornet, a green hatchback with yellow racing stripes down the side.  I was also able to make enough money to purchase a stereo system, and get a pretty impressive start to a record album collection.

But it didn’t take long for the job of sucking the lungs out of ducks (to be clear, we sucked them into these big vacuum guns, not our own lungs) to lose its luster, and in mid 1977, a year after starting work at C&D, I grew restless.  I was still living at home, still lonely, still not meeting any girls.  I decided it was time for the next chapter in my life – I decided it was time to go out on my own.  The only choice there was for such an adventure was for me to return to my ancestral homeland of northern Wisconsin.  So it was that I moved into the Gerard Hotel in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, high on the banks of the Flambeau River.

I had lived there, on my own, and worked at Norco, for about a year by the time Jack Anderson came to join our little department, and we hit it off right away.  Whereas Conrad was an ornery old fart who found reason to complain in just about everything, Jack had a much more philosophical view of life.  He was well read and had a fast mind, and he had his own way of viewing things.  He had raised two sons who were older than me and, in 1978, had a young daughter about four or five years old.  At the end of the work day, his wife, who was a bit younger than Jack, probably late 40s, would walk with his young daughter to meet the blue bus that we returned to Ladysmith on, and together the three of them would walk home.  I remember that it never failed, every day, the eyes of both his wife and young daughter would light up when Jack got off that bus, and they’d walk home together, the three of them, Jack walking that distinctive, lumbering walk of his, a picture of domestic bliss that never failed to put a smile on my face.

Jack kind of took me under his wing.  I may have been wearing my plight as a lonely young bachelor on my sleeve a little bit more than I’d like to admit, because I think Jack saw through the façade my clowning around all day tried to project and saw the loneliness underneath.  He’d always take the time to have serious discussions with me, and we’d discuss current events and old movies and philosophy, as I had picked up every now and then some of my brother Mike’s college books and liked to pass myself off as knowing something about the subject.  It turned out Jack had read many of the same books, and was able, in his simple terms, to make me understand for example what Kant’s categorical imperative was all about, on a morning when the blue bus chugged down highway 8 to the Norco plant.

Jack also took enough pity on me to help me out on occasion.  One morning, he handed me two army fatigue jackets that used to belong to his sons plus an old black and white checkered winter coat, saying he had no further use for any of them and would like to see them come to some good.  They were great; I wore them until they fell apart.  I still have one of the army fatigue jackets to this day.  I did find in one of the pockets a letter from Jack’s oldest son to his second son, saying how he was coming home on leave from the army soon, and how he was looking forward to seeing his little brother, and how he knew a guy in Eau Claire they could get some good weed from.  I never showed this letter to Jack.

My favorite memory of Jack Anderson took place on a very dark morning in late November. We had to be on the blue bus by 6:00 A.M.  About an hour earlier it had started to snow, one of the first snowfalls of the season.  It was cold out, no wind to speak of.  It started with a few big snowflakes slowly and silently drifting from the sky, and then it started snowing heavier, still big flakes, silently dropping out of the low ceiling of night and into the halo of the Miner Avenue streetlights like an invasion of miniature white paratroopers.  The ground was just cold enough that the snowflakes started to stick, and they’d lie there on the sidewalks, glittering in the glow of the streetlights.

I had gotten to the bus first that morning, and when Jack joined me a few minutes later, his eyes were wide with excitement.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“What, the snow?” I replied.

“Did you ever see such a beautiful sight?”

“Yeah, those were big and pretty flakes, weren’t they?”

“They were diamonds, is what they were.  They were diamonds, thousands of them, at my feet, shining.  And they were mine.”

I thought, that’s exactly what they looked like, illuminated in the glow of the street lights.  They glittered and sparkled just like diamonds.

“I was a wealthy man, there, for a while,” he said.  “I was a wealthy man.”

I don’t remember much else about the ride to work that morning, but I remember, a couple of times throughout the day, he’d remind me, “I was a wealthy man, there, this morning, with all of those diamonds shining at my feet.”

Jack was right.  He was a wealthy man that morning.  I understood even then how rare a diamond Jack Anderson himself was.  To see and appreciate the beauty that was there at that moment, on display just for him, as he lumbered his way up Miner Avenue, his lunch box in his hand and his head at his feet, counting the diamonds that were his and his alone.  Conrad Stonkey was roughly the same age, and I can guarantee he wouldn’t have seen the diamonds.  Nor would Jeff Severson or other kids my age.  The question was, and remains, would I see them?

With Jack having shared his poetic vision of the miracle that was present in that moment with me, I liked to think that I would see them, and I’ve at least tried to look for the diamonds at my feet throughout the years, but no doubt I’ve missed most of the miracles that are constantly occurring every day.   I know I have all too frequently worn the blinders of preoccupation as I made my way through the journey of each day, preoccupied with family issues, work issues, or lately, disease and fear.  But through the years, I have revisited that early snowy morning hundreds of times, and heard Jack describe what a wealthy man he was, and each time I think how lucky I was to have been there and been the one he shared his wealth with.

I have no idea whatever became of Jack Anderson.  I have not seen or talked to him since I left Norco on Halloween, 1979, more than thirty years ago.  If he is still alive, he would now be in his 90s.  I’m sure that he has long since forgotten about the goofy 19 year old who he shared a bus seat with for a few months.  I’m sure he has long forgotten about the army fatigue jackets and winter coat and wisdom he shared with me.  But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ll never forget him and his lumbering walk, and if he has gone on to the great blue bus in the sky, I like to imagine that every year, when the first snowfall hits the early morning street lights of Miner Avenue in Ladysmith, his ghost can be seen lumbering along with his lunch box in his hand, counting the diamonds as they accumulate around his feet.

On the Way Home

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(This is a couple of paragraphs I wrote for the new novel I’ve been working on – I don’t think I am going to keep the scene this was part of, but I kind of like this part)

I found my bus and boarded it, with four minutes to spare.  I settled in with the other passengers, and was relieved when the bus lurched forward with no one sitting next to me.  Still cold from the short walk to the station, I leaned my head against the window and watched the lit up skyscrapers and the slow streams of headlights on the expressway.  I could feel the warmth from the registers as I listened to the murmuring whisper of the blowers.  I started nodding off, my head against the window, in the reflections of the buildings and the headlights, in the warm hum of heat.  I was on my way home.

When I woke I was warm and the bus was out of the city, on the interstate, deep into the vast blackness of the flat county terrain, interrupted only by the occasional barn light or yellow front porch light some late arriver forgot to turn off.   Frost was forming on the top outside of the windows.  Moonlight shone on a blanket of snow.   Every now and then we’d pass a farmhouse lit up enough to reveal smoke pouring out of its chimney.  It was a bitterly cold night.

As the bus approached the exit, I could see, in the distance, the faint yellow lights of my town glowing in the midnight black, twenty minutes of cold darkness away from the interstate.   The flat and empty and darkened winter farm land looked cold and barren, making the glow of my town on the horizon seem warm and inviting.  It’d be two o’clock on a Wednesday morning when the bus pulled into the Sinclair station on Main Street; from there it’d be about a five block walk through the sleeping town until I was home.

The Year of the Dishonest Corn Chip

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(a brief note:  I’ve been battling a bad case of the flu, and the following was written under the influence of a fever and an unprescribed mix of several over the counter cold and flu medications)

Riddle of the day:  why will next May 8th be mistaken for a dishonest corn chip?  (* – answer below)

From the numbers department:  The upcoming calendar year will, as every year does, have some interesting dates for fans of number sequences.     Among the more interesting facts:

  • Although the two digit representation of the year (13) is a prime number, the four digit year (2013) is not (3 * 11  * 61 = 2013).   This is why anyone who is celebrating their 61st birthday on March 11th of this year should automatically be named king of the world, or at least be given a 25% off discount at any Midas muffler shop.
  • The year 2013 is the first year this millennium (if you accept that the millennium began on January 1st, 2001) that will not have any dates where the month, day, and two digit year are all the same numeric value  (1/1/01, 2/2/02, 3/3/03, 4/4/04, 5/5/05, 6/6/06. 7/7/07, 8/8/08, 9/9/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11, 12/12/12).  Note also that with 13 being a prime number AND greater than 12, there won’t be any dates where the month times the day equals the year (last year had an abundance of these:  1/12/12, 2/6/12, 3/4/12, 4/3/12, 6/2/12, and 12/1/12) This is good news, as it should result in a significant decrease in the volume of e-mail and Facebook postings about how wonderfully special such dates are.
  • * The answer to the riddle:  A dishonest corn chip might also be called a “fibbin’ nacho”, not to be confused with the famous mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, who derived the famous number sequence that is a key plot component to the novel “The DaVinci Code”  (Inspired by the sales posted by Dan Brown’s yarn, the next novel I write will use a more famous number sequence (5,8,8,2,3,hundred, known to scholars as the famous “Empire Carpet” sequence)   as a key plot component  The reason May 8 will be confused with a dishonest corn chip (as well as a dishonest fascist, (a.k.a., a “fibbin’ Nazi”) ) will be that it is the only date in the year who’s month, day and two digit year values (5/8/13) represent a segment of the Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34, …).   This will mark the first such occurrence in more than five years, since March 5, 2008, and the last time it will occur in more than eight years, the next time being August 13, 2021.   Because of this, anyone who turns 13 years old on May 8th should also be given a 25% discount at any Midas muffler shop.

 I hope that you found this as fun and entertaining to read as I did to write, because it’d be nice to know there is someone out there who is as big a nerd as I am. 

Please note the Drivel by Dave remains an independently funded site, with no influence from or debt owed to any corporate sponsor.  We adhere to the highest levels of ethics and integrity, and those looking for unbiased views will continue to be able to trust us, just like they can trust the Midas touch for all of their automotive repair needs.

Checking it Twice

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It’s Christmas time again.   Having trouble finding just the right thing for that special someone this year? No worry – Drivel by Dave has been making a list!  Check out these latest additions to our catalog.  These are all new inventions that have patents pending:

  1.  For those looking to lose a few pounds:  A six pack of my new low fat tapioca, called, “Pudding it Lightly”
  2. For the overly sincere ecologist on your list:  The DBD 2100:  An automobile engine that is fueled by shattered dreams and disillusionment (capable of getting up to 50 MPF (miles per failure))
  3. For the collector:  A new coin:  the 43 cent piece (with the likeness of Charles Nelson Reilly on one side)
  4. For those who like gadgets (like a GPS): An OSO (“Over States the Obvious”) – an interactive device you place on the dashboard of your car that points out painfully obvious and depressing facts (like, “You took that corner a little fast”, “You know, you aren’t getting any younger” and “That shirt has to go.  Who dressed you this morning?”)
  5. For the pet enthusiast:  A thought translator for gold fish.  Never wonder what your goldfish is thinking again.
  6. For the kids:   A “Tickle-Me-Peter Francis Geraci” doll – squeeze it’s hand and hear a random interpretation of the latest bankruptcy laws
  7. For the lawn enthusiast:  a hydrochloric acid sprinkler system
  8. For dog lovers:  Beef flavored treats infected with the Rabies virus
  9. For the bureaucrats:  A pen and pencil set with a twist:  the pen uses lead, and the pencil ink
  10. For the traveling food enthusiast on your list:  A Teflon flying pan – powered by a pair of jet engines, it’s machine washable and has been tested and proven capable of frying bacon at altitudes of 30,000 feet
  11. For the outoors enthusiast:  a can of Instant Grizzly Bear: Just add water, play dead, and hope for the best.
  12. For the history buff:  The Stovepipe Hat Stovepipe:  Be thinkin’ Lincoln every time you put a log in your woodstove with the stovepipe that looks just like the hat Lincoln wore
  13. The Insurance Salesman Canary – a small yellow bird you send first into a cocktail party to detect the presence of insurance salesmen.  If the bird lives, you know it is safe to enter.  If the bird dies, then there is an insurance salesman present, and you should get out of there as fast as you can, or else be prepared to debate term versus whole life for the rest of the night.

Order now while supplies last.  Void where prohibited by law.

Fear and Hatred and Profits

/ djgourdoux / 4 Comments

(I wrote this in reaction to something I saw posted on Facebook yesterday that said essentially “bad people do bad things, there’s nothing we can do.”   I’ve debated posting it here until I finally said fuck it)

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searching for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?

–  Nick Lowe

Friday, December 14, 2012:  The world is unrecognizable.

Maybe those Mayan calendars predicting the end of the world were right after all. When insanity rains over innocence, the structure of the world starts to fall apart, and everything we know to be true and real and important is torn.   The world isn’t the world anymore.   It’s beginning to look more like Hell every day.

No place is safe.  We’ve had shootings in temples, grocery stores, movie theatres and, just in the past few days, shopping malls and elementary schools.  Think about that for a moment – temples and elementary schools.  Places of worship and learning.   Grocery stores and shopping malls.  Centers of sustenance and commerce.   These are elemental components of any civilized society.  They may have been home to violence in other countries, but in the United States?

What’s to be done?  There will be much debate in the coming days.  Do we banish all guns forever?  Or do we arm everybody?  Nobody knows the answer.

Maybe a place to begin is to start recognizing each other as neighbors, as fellow human beings, and start treating each other as such.   What we are seeing is the result of the intense fear and resentment and selfishness that is pounded into us day after day.   How many sick people are out there with serious mental illness going untreated?   How many needless guns are out on the street for people to “protect” themselves from those evil people with different colored skin who are just waiting to hurt them?

The problem is money.   The NRA doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the second amendment or protecting people’s rights.   That’s all a sham – the NRA is manufacturing fear so gun companies can manufacture more guns.   And it’s working spectacularly well.

The same is true of the people looking to cut “entitlements.”  They aren’t concerned about leaving our children with crippling debt.  That’s a sham, too.  They’re working for the health care industry, trying to eliminate Social Security and Medicare so that private companies can take them over.   The result of this will be an even larger number of the already expanding population of people with mental illness falling through the cracks, not getting the treatment they need.

This is a volatile combination that is brewing.   More mentally ill people and more guns on the street.  More fear and divisiveness being stirred up.  More anger and confusion and chaos.   More money being made.   And more rhetoric and resentment.  It’s all festering, right beneath the surface, and it’s spreading like cancer.

It’s ironic that the same people who so fervently go on and on about the rights of the unborn are the ones shrugging their shoulders today, saying “bad people do bad things, there’s nothing you can do.”  Today 20 innocent children were slaughtered.  They were between five and ten years old.   Any society that can’t protect five to ten year old children is a miserable failure.  And I don’t care what anybody says, the right of five to ten year old children to live a fear free life and not be gunned down in cold blood is infinitely more important than the right to hunt deer or to cower to manufactured fear behind the barrel of a handgun.  I’m not saying get rid of guns, I’m saying lets’ bring a little honesty and perspective to the debate.   And these children, who are loved by parents and siblings and grandparents, who’ve just started developing friendships and passions and experiencing joy and wonder, who have so much potential, are more important than those unborn fetuses we hear so much about.  If you want to be pro-life, that’s fine, but be consistent – be pro-life for those who are already living as well as those yet to be born.

We are told to hate welfare recipients because they are cheating us.  We are told to hate immigrants because they will take our jobs.  We are told to hate people with different colored skin because they want to hurt us and take our things.  We are told to hate people with different religious beliefs because they want to blow us up and make us worship their gods.  We are even told to hate people who work for us, teachers and cops and prison guards, because they are getting better benefits than we are.  Then we scratch our heads and wonder, why all the senseless violence?

Are we really that fucking stupid?

Prodigal Son

/ djgourdoux / 3 Comments

Someday I’ll come back and they’ll be there again, the rolling fields and the small patches of woods, the corn and hayfields, whispering in the midday breeze under a fat sun in a cloudless sky.  They’ll return, and so will my youth, and I’ll run through the tall grass just because I can.  My lungs will fill with the warm afternoon air I push through, and I’ll run until I collapse in the cool shade of one of those big oaks just south of the railroad tracks. I’ll close my eyes and when I open them I’ll be dizzy from the fresh air in my lungs.   The green of the treetops will swirl with the deep blue of the sky into a kaleidoscope that twirls and spins to the rhythm of my throbbing heart.  After a while I’ll climb up on the tracks and follow them into town, past the empty backyards, the smell of freshly mown grass in my nostrils as I walk past and on to the grain elevator and feed mill.   Then I’ll be downtown, standing on the tracks in the middle of Main Street, looking south at the storefronts.  Everything will be the way it used to be; even the bank will be in that big old granite and marble building.    The Ben Franklin store, the pharmacy, the bakery, the café, the grocery store, they’ll all be how they used to be.

I’ll follow the tracks to the old train depot, and it’ll be open again, like it was when I was small, and I’ll step in and sit in the waiting area, brightly lit through big windows by the afternoon sun, dust dancing in the streams of light.  After a while, in the distance, I’ll hear the rhythmic hum of my train coming, getting closer and louder, then I’ll hear the clanging of the crossing bells on Main Street as it pulls up to  the station.   An unattended door will open and I’ll climb up and board the empty and ancient passenger car.  I’ll take a seat on one of the wooden benches next to a window.   As I sit there, the train will start to move, and I’ll wonder where it’s going to take me.  All I’ll know is that it’s not going to heaven, because heaven will be out my window, fading and vanishing.