A Book for the Ages

I opened the gate and there it was, kicked off to the side, just a shadow of its former self. The Yellow Pages. Time was, not so long ago, that the Yellow Pages was a hefty book. The thing that had been dropped off at my house yesterday barely registered on the scale. It was so light that Mark could have picked it up, which he didn't. I did. I picked up that book of unwanted advertising, that waste of paper, and marched right up the sidewalk, into the house, through to the kitchen, and out the back door where I dropped it into the recycling bin. I remember my first Yellow Pages. Back in 1972 when I got my first telephone. No kids, not like the phone you carry around and futz with all day. I got a proper telephone that was wired into the wall permanently so that if I wanted to move it I would have had to call Illinois Bell Telephone and paid for that move. Oh yes, that was the phone company, Illinois Bell. There were no others to choose from. I couldn't get pissed off, throw a tantrum, and sign up with another company. I was stuck with Ma Bell. I did have one cool modern option on my first phone, I ordered it with touch tone. Touch tone, which means it had buttons instead of a rotary dial, cost extra. It is an extra charge that I believe I am still paying to this day. Anyway, back to the Yellow Pages. With that phone service in 1972, I got delivered to my apartment two books. The Yellow Pages, and the White Pages. I had arrived, the telephone company had acknowledged that I was an adult. I don't think anybody uses the Yellow Pages anymore. We have Google, Yelp, and others on the internet. If I want to find something I don't have to heft that big book out and leaf through the pages. Just a few keystrokes and every service that I need shows up on the screen. So I don't think they should be wasting the trees and ink on all those books they deliver to your door. Really, they only need to print one, for my mother.

So, Is There a Drug For This?

I have nearly a hundred television programs on the DVR. I also have a couple of hundred television channels to choose from. Yet yesterday, Sunday, I couldn't find anything that interested me. There was nothing showing that I felt like sitting down and putting in the time to watch. I'm not saying I wasn't interested in many of the shows, I just didn't want to sit down and watch them. So I got on the computer and went to Facebook. After a few minutes of witty commenting I left Facebook and started a game of Gin Rummy. The computer bored me, I needed something else. I took the dogs out in the yard and after tossing Bette's toy a couple of times so Bette could run back and forth like she was insane, I lost interest in that too. What the hell is wrong with me? As I get older I find that I have no patience. When a movie comes on I check to see how long it runs. Anything over ninety minutes and I feel antsy. I have at least three movies half watched on the DVR right now. Mark loves to go to the theater. I like the theater, but I dread going because I know that fifteen minutes into it I will be squirming in my seat looking forward to intermission. I hate shopping with Mark because he likes to spend more than five minutes in each store. I can't read a book more than one chapter per sitting. What I think I have is adult ADHD. I think that I may have had it all my life, especially when I was a kid in school, because I would rather be the clown in class than do the work. Unfortunately ADHD wasn't a thing back then, every kid was like they came out of a cookie cutter and was expected to fall in line. If you didn't, you were in deep trouble. I often found myself in deep trouble. Anyway, yesterday when the bright idea hit me that I may have that problem, I went to the computer. I Googled ADHD and found three sites that had online tests to determine if you have Attention Deficit Disorder. The first test I took consisted of only six or seven questions, and when I finished it I was over the top. So I went to another web site and took their test. Again I think it was seven questions and again my score was high, which isn't a good thing. On the third web site they had it laid out just a bit different. They had a page full of questions, probably ten, that I answered as best as I could. It was when I got to the bottom of the page that I freaked out. It had an arrow with the words "Next Page" on it. For godssake, I did not want to spend my afternoon filling out page after page of questions. Right there I think it was a giveaway, just the fact that it bothered me that there was another page. But instead of cancelling out of it, I clicked on the arrow and filled out the next page of questions. When I was done I hit enter and got my results. My score was 37. 

Blue Fur

8AM yesterday morning and I am sitting down to a breakfast of chicken Parmesan, and spaghetti. I have already fed the cats, fed the dogs, and walked those same dogs. My reward for doing my morning chores is this meager breakfast of leftovers from last night. Later in the day, after volunteering at Abandoned Pet Rescue, I return home for lunch. I open the refrigerator and stare blankly at a wall of food, yet there is nothing in there for me to eat. I dig, and dig, and all I can find are two hot dogs. Over on the counter, in the bread box, I find some hot dog buns. They are three weeks old. They have a blue fur coating over most of them, but I am able to find two that can be salvaged. After picking away a bit of mold from the buns and boiling the hot dogs, I have my lunch.

Something is wrong. Mark and I have a system that has worked for the last eighteen years. I pay the mortgage, the electric, the car insurance, and all other miscellaneous bills, and Mark feeds me. That means Mark drives to the store and  purchases all the food for the house, and then he returns home and prepares the food for me to consume. I, in return, get fat. Usually when Mark goes shopping he makes sure that he buys some things that I am capable of preparing without his help. That would include breakfast foods so that I am not slurping down spaghetti at eight in the morning. It also includes the proper supplies that I would need to prepare my lunch, such as bread without penicillin growing on it. I am not saying that Mark did not buy any food this week, he did. The cabinets and refrigerator are overflowing with food. The problem is that it is all ingredients for Mark to make spectacular dinners for me. It is all crap that I have no idea what to do with. There is a box of something called Arborio rice in the cabinet. There are cans of artichoke hearts, coconut milk, and beans that I've never heard of before. He has five different types of flour, every type of sugar invented, and some kind of weeds in the vegetable bin. Not just one package of strange weed like vegetables, but many different bunches of them. I couldn't identify any of them much less figure out how to prepare them. What I do know is that at some time or another all of that stuff will end up on a plate in front of me, and it will taste damn good. But I need Mark to prepare it. So all day yesterday I had to scratch around to find something to eat. Mark had not bought any cereal, no bacon, no lunch meats or cheeses so that I could make a sandwich. I felt the pangs of hunger and realized what those poor people must be going through in famine ravaged areas of Africa.

A Bismarck and Eternal Salvation

I just realized it's Holy Week. It doesn't really mean much to me, hasn't for over fifty years, but it does bring back memories. Not necessarily good or bad, just memories. Thinking about Saint George Church and School brings back a flood of them. I remember something called First Friday. It didn't have anything to do with Holy Week or Lent, it was something that happened the first Friday of every month when we were in school. I actually loved it. First Friday required you to go to Mass on Friday morning, and the nuns made an allowance for you to come to school late on that day. The Mass wasn't the most enjoyable part of First Friday, although it did allow me to sit and daydream for an hour. The thing is that the biggest part about going to that Mass was Communion. And the best part about going to Communion was that you couldn't eat breakfast until after. That meant that when we got to school, later than those who didn't go to Mass, breakfast was waiting for us. For me that meant a Boston crème filled Bismarck with chocolate frosting, and a carton of milk. That was the big payoff. That and eternal salvation, but to me it was really the Bismarck.

What I do remember about the Lenten season were the Stations of the Cross. I believe it was every Friday afternoon in Lent that the entire school had to walk over to the church and sit through the 'Stations'. Yes it was a couple of hours that we got out of class, but it was also participatory so I couldn't relax and maybe take a quick nap. There were prayers to be recited along with the priest, and then there was the constant sit, stand, kneel routine that the Catholic Church is so famous for. Just about every other religion you can just sit on your ass while the preacher gives a sermon, but not in a Catholic church. Sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel. It is just possible that aerobics was invented by a pope. What made the Stations of the Cross unbearable was the incense. It made me nauseous, and along with the stuffiness of the church it often gave me a headache. But that was going to school the Catholic way. First Fridays, Stations of the Cross, May Processions, religion classes. You would think that with all this time taken away from studying and learning school subjects I wouldn't have learned very much. You would be correct. When I was finally pulled out of Catholic School and sent to the public school, I was way behind the other kids. And worst of all, no Bismarck's on Fridays at Central School.

Dildos For the Elderly

Mark received a catalog in the mail today that totally pissed him off. It was for old people things. Compression socks, a turkey neck lifter, deluxe walker with padded seat for when you get tired of pushing that thing around, skin tag remover, everything you could ever need in your old age was in that catalog.

"Why did they send me this thing? It's full of weird stuff that old people use." Mark whined.

"The same reason they sent you an AARP membership last year. You're old."

So there was a bit of back and forth about at what point old age sets in, with Mark insisting that he wasn't there yet. When we were done Mark tossed the catalog towards the garbage. He missed because he's old and can't throw things very far. Anyway, I picked it up and started leafing through it. I was surprised to see that there were actually things I could use in that catalog, especially for my bad feet. But it was when I got further back in the pages that I was even more surprised, or should I say shocked. They had two full pages of dildos and vibrators for old people. These were not the torpedo shaped, smooth vibrators that they advertised in the back of the Knights of Columbus magazine when I was a kid. These were full on dildos with veins and other anatomically correct details. So yes, it turned out that they did have quite a few things in that catalog that I could use.

1960's muscle massager.