Frustration

 

I had a frustrating day yesterday. It really only takes two things to make it that way. First was my old Ford. I spent two hours on it installing new brackets for the driver's seat so I would have two more inches of legroom. After some skinned knuckles and sore knees, I realized I was doing it all wrong. Unless I wanted to end up in the back seat one day, I would have to do it all over again the correct way. But, fine. I locked up the garage and went back into the house to regroup. Tomorrow is another day, and I'm sure I'll get it done then.

Move ahead to suppertime. I was making ribs in the Instapot, one of my favorite easy dinners. (Instapot is a fancy ass pressure cooker.) First you make up a little rub for the ribs, then add the liquids to the Instapot, hit the right button, and in less than an hour you have delicious ribs. Unless....

Let's look at packaging and how it affects certain of us who are not as agile as we once were. Like those goddamned blister packs for pills. I hate them. It takes me ten minutes just to open one pill, and requires knives, scissors, and sometimes a saw. For the ribs, I needed some water, apple cider, and liquid smoke (A flavor additive) to put in the Instapot. Water and cider, simple. But the liquid smoke bottle was brand new and secured by a skin of plastic wrapped around the top. After five minutes of picking at, digging at, and cutting at the plastic, I got the top opened. Under the top is another plastic seal with a little tab you pull. I picked at it and pried it, but couldn't open it. So I got the trusty knife, the same one I use for those blister packs, and stabbed the bastard. My reward was liquid smoke, brown liquid smoke, gushing from the bottle and dousing everything on the counter. It took me nearly thirty minutes to clean up, and required me to shout out the word 'Fuck!!' at least three hundred times as I wiped it all up. The only good thing is that I didn't have to worry about the stuff that landed on the floor. Scout took care of that.

Today's Tom Sawyer

 

One of my long time regrets is that I didn't take auto mechanics in high school. Even though I loved cars and couldn't wait to drive one, I passed on the opportunity to take that class. Instead I opted for the easy class, architectural drafting. It was clean and all you had to do was draw lines on paper. I did very well in that class.

With all the old cars I have owned in my life, that auto mechanics class would have been very helpful. Instead I have had to either pay somebody else to do the work on my cars, or sell them off when they got too complicated. Now I am again involved with an old car. A ninety two year old Ford, and I'm trying to do everything that needs to be done, myself. Over the weekend I changed a tire. I don't mean that I took the spare mounted on a wheel and exchanged it with one of the four other tires. I actually removed the tire from the rim and mounted a brand new tire with an inner tube on that rim. There was no cursing. There were no injuries. It was not that difficult. In fact it reminded me of doing the very same thing on my bicycle when I was a kid. I did learn another thing while I was replacing that tire. I learned that if I open the garage door while I work, numerous old guys would somehow appear and start asking me questions. Some of them were even helpful. Like seventy five year old Steve from a couple of doors down. I got him to crawl under the car and break loose the filler plug on the differential. I had been wrestling with that thing for a month and could not budge it.  

 

Skid Row

 

Then                                                             Now                              

My sister suggested we get together at her new apartment on Sunday for brunch. I asked her where she had moved to, and she gave me an address on West Madison Street. "Ha, ha..." I laughed, "So you live on skid row now?"

I still remember my very first trip into downtown Chicago on my own. It was 1967 and I had just bought my new, used, 1962 Ford Galaxie. I now had freedom and I wanted to explore. So I got on the new interstate highway that they were building out to our town and headed into the big city. I got off at the Madison Street exit and turned left. I had no map and no idea where anything was. It turned out that I had discovered Chicago's skid row, West Madison Street. It was a collection of rundown buildings with cheap liquor stores and bars on the first floors and flop house hotels above them. The street was dirty and full of litter. At the first red light that I came to I noticed a zombie like man wandering towards my car. He was holding a large wad of newspaper in one hand and told me that he was going to clean my windshield. I rolled up my window just as he spat a giant wad of slobber onto my windshield and then started to wipe it off with the newspaper. As he smeared his saliva around I hollered at him, "No, no... NO! I'm fine, the window is fine!" He just kept wiping and wiping, smearing his spit around and around. Stuck in traffic, waiting for the light to turn green, I learned something that day. Stay out of the west side of Chicago, and don't pull right up to the car in front of you at a stoplight. Leave plenty of room to escape.

I'm sure my sister didn't think my comment about her living on skid row was funny. But she had no idea what West Madison Street was all about fifty years ago. So I showed her a photo of it from back then, and then I Googled Richard Speck and showed her that. Fifty five years ago Richard Speck raped and murdered eight nurses. He lived on West Madison Street in one of those flop houses. Right near where we had our very nice 'brunch' on a very clean and upscale West Madison Street.

Ponna

 

The actual pole behind my house. One of those wires is my cable television.

I changed cable companies on Wednesday. I know that all cable companies have horrible customer service, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for spending less money and that's what I got for the next two years. Kind of a pain in the ass, but for eighty dollars less per month it is worth it. So the guy came, a nice guy, and in a painless conversion that took about an hour, I had three working televisions. I also had new internet service with a new wireless router. After the cable guy left, after I fed the dogs, and after I fed myself, I began letting the Amazon Echos and remote electrical plugs know they had a new master. That was around six in the evening. First three Echos were a cinch, the fourth one was not. So I went on to the 'smart' plugs that I have lights plugged into. After two hours of fucking around with those and not getting them to work, I gave up and realized that I would have to get up out of my chair and physically turn off/on the lights from now on. I then tried to tackle the fourth Amazon Echo. It is the oldest and most difficult to configure. With my phone in hand I followed the instructions. That didn't work. I then freelanced for awhile. That didn't work. I reset it, I deleted it, I rebooted it, I did every damn thing I could think of. After about an hour of that I brought up the chat line on the app and asked for help. Somebody named Ponna came on and told me to reset the thing, delete the thing, and reboot it.

"I already did that ten times." I typed calmly, while in my head I was shouting.

"Okay sir. To help you I need the last four digits of your card."

"Card?"

"Yes, the card you use."

I thought for a moment. What the hell card does Ponna need? Is there a card that goes with Alexa?

"You mean my credit card?"

"Yes."

So I gave Ponna the digits and Ponna had me do some more things. Some things that I had done over and over before contacting Amazon customer service. Nothing worked. Finally, in frustration, I typed back to Ponna.

"I'll tell you what I will do. I'm going to chop this damn thing into little pieces, put it all in a box, and ship it back to you."

Three little dots appeared, and below that it said 'Ponna is typing'. A few moments later Ponna responded.

"I understand your frustration."

And that was the last I heard from Ponna... until ten minutes later. My phone beeped and the Amazon Alexa chat bubble came on the screen.

"So, did that work?"

Air

The last four days found our temperatures up in the mid to upper eighties. In fact my thermometer said ninety one degrees on Saturday. So it has been hot for the month of May. Earlier in the week I had put the small air conditioner in the living room window, but it just couldn't keep up with the heat. I do miss the ease of whole house air like we had in Florida. Just touch a button and cool air flows from vents throughout the house. Installing such a thing in my nearly one hundred year old house would be quite expensive and disruptive, so I live with the window units. Yesterday I was sitting in my office, sweating my butt off, and I decided that maybe I could wrestle the large and heavy window air conditioner from the back porch to its place in the dining room. I put it in there because the dining room is central to the house. I hadn't planned to actually hoist it into the window, just have it there and ready for me to rope the next visitor into lifting it with me. It is very heavy. As the day wore on towards afternoon, the house got warmer and warmer. The big air conditioner was sitting right there on the floor. I don't know what got into me. But like a mother who suddenly gets super strength in an emergency, I squatted down, put my arms around it and hefted that thing up onto the window sill. I got it into the window and plugged it in. Ahhhh... sweet, cool air. For five years I haven't been able to lift that air conditioner by myself. But I did it. One hour later a breeze blew in off of Lake Michigan and the temperatures dropped twenty degrees and stayed that way. At least I got it done for the summer heat coming.

Down on Bucky's Farm

 

That's me stepping in cow shit

I think our Chicago winter has let go of its grip. Spring has been quite the tease with eighty degrees one day and freezing the next just to remind us of what winter can do. I'm pretty sure we can now breathe a sigh of relief for the next three months. Summer is here, finally! Who doesn't love summer. The three months that we can look down our nose at Florida.

The fine weather yesterday got me to thinking about summers when I was a kid. So many great times. Like the year we went to a farm in Indiana. It was owned by an old buddy of my dad. His name was Bucky. Apparently Dad and Bucky were good friends in the army during WWII, so one summer we got to visit Bucky's farm. It was very rustic. I was probably five years old, and I hated it. They did have electricity on the farm, but no plumbing to speak of. This son of suburban Chicago had never seen an outhouse before. My god, we had to poop outdoors in a little shed? Yes, I had to plop my tiny ass on a board with a hole in it and when I was done it didn't even flush. The crap just lay there about four feet below, smelling and drawing flies. Okay, so I learned something that summer about how farmers pooped. I also learned something about cute baby cows. I learned that they lived in the barn and pooped where they lived. To my horror, I found that when you tried to  pet one, they will step on your foot. That hurt a lot, but I probably got my revenge later that day when we had hamburgers for dinner. Like I said, the farm was rustic, no plumbing. After playing in the barnyard and probably smelling like cow shit, Mom figured that I needed a bath. Down in the basement of the farm house, was a hand pump. I was told to undress and step into a galvanized metal tub full of water, exactly like the one the cows drank out of. The water was tepid at best and to rinse, water was poured over me from a bucket.

There was one thing about that farm visit that I did enjoy. One day my dad and Bucky had to go into town. They stopped off at a gas station and went inside to do some adult stuff. Probably just to bullshit and have a smoke with friends. Anyway, out behind the gas station were a bunch of old rusty cars rotting in among the trees. I was in heaven. I got to crawl around inside the old hulks and pretend that I was driving. It was great fun. In fact that may be how I got my penchant for owning old cars. Playing in the rust, grease and dirt was so much fun. Fun until we got back to the farm and Mom made me take another bath in that damn cow, drinking tub.

 

Conversation in a Gay Bar, on a Weekday Evening

 

Tuesday evening I was sitting in a bar. Next to me was a young man, not bad looking. After a bit the young man turned to me and asked me where I was from.

"Chicago."

He stared at me for a second.

"Really? I'm from Virginia. Have you ever been to Mississippi?"

Okay, that seemed a bit off. Anyway, we talked some about the South and places the young man would like to visit some day. I asked him his name. (The following name is fictitious)

"My name is Andrew. So, where are you from?"

Andrew was a bit drunk and was repeating himself.

"My name is Alan, and I'm from Chicago."

A bit more conversing and then he asked me the worst question ever.

"How old are you?"

Well, Hell. I hate telling people how old I am, but I don't lie.

"Ummm.... seventy one years old."

"No... Oh my god. I thought you were like forty five or maybe fifty. You look great. Are you sure you're that old? What year were you born?"

I was suddenly in love.

"1949"

"Oh my god! So what were the 1950s like? Do you remember when Chicago had all those gangsters? Did you know any, like Al Capone? My mom is forty five, my grandmother is sixty five. I was born in 1997..."

Twenty four years old. Right in my wheel house.... forty years ago. It was like I had been hit in the head with a baseball bat. Twenty four, 1997? That was the year I met Mark. I was having a conversation with a child. Andrew reached over and held my hand for a minute, until I gently pulled away and excused myself to go pee. When I got back, the boy was in deep conversation with the guy on the other side of him. An older gentleman, of about forty five or fifty years old.