Sitting in the dark and listening to the owls is one of my favorite things. We have a mated pair of great horned owls outside that hoot triplets to each other for hours. Between them and the Canadian geese and manic coyote improv you’d never guess you’re listening to Los Angeles.
Monthly Archives: November 2022
Stupid ironies
One if the great things about being retired is that I’m no longer
the oldest childless geezer working in a corporate office who manages to catch just about everything that moms young enough to be my daughters would bring from wherever nursery school, kindergarten or day care their children young enough to be my grandchildren attended, including my second and third cases of strep throat. The moms were so cute until I caught their kid’s kids’ plague, then they were a menace. I mean whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough?
Every time I had strep throat my voice, torn to sheds by that vile bacterium, would plunge several octaves so that when I returned to work after two weeks those same moms would call me up every day just to hear how sexy my voice was. Life is full of stupid ironies.
Incudentally, I had a great line in there about Typhoid hotties but I couldn’t decide if hottie should be capitalized or not, then figured it was too historically obscure anyway and dropped it. I have a novel length collection of such lines. Sometimes they still bug me years later. The price of learning how to write by watching stand up comedians. Every word counts and there’s no room for error. Hence, Typhoid hottie goes in the dustbin, and rightfully so. Don’t fuck with the punchline.
But I digress.
Fitted sheets
Sixty five years old and I still can’t fold a fitted sheet. There must be a secret to it, but some things, like magic, are best left secret, or left to my wife, anyway, who can fold a fitted sheet like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Men have their purposes, I suppose, and folding fitted sheets is not one of them. I blame it on biology.
So I put away the perfectly folded pillow cases (those I can do) and dropped the fitted sheet for her atop the bed in an unmanageable fluffy glop and left the room. She was in the throes of a solo Scrabble game and barely seemed to notice. Ten minutes later I returned to the room to find her still concentrating every ounce of her being on the Scrabble game and the fluffy sprawling glop of a fitted sheet in a perfectly geometric rectangle about so big. As far as I can tell it’s some sort of Sioux magic thing. Best not to ask. I put the sheet in the linen closet atop the other perfectly geometric rectangles. Weird. Neat, though.
Brick Wahl 