Righteous indignation, the key to longevity

January is a month for reflection. We are forced indoors to live closer to each other so we put away sharp objects and reevaluate our relationships. This also happened in 1517 when our man, Martin Luther, evaluated the relationship of the wealthy and the priests who were selling pardons for indulgences (later perfected by the United States Congress). So in January 1518 Christoph von Scheurl told Luther “Hey, this is good stuff” so he translated Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses from Latin into German, printed, and distributed them thus giving rise to the Protestant Reformation. This in turn led to public education and the free press which led to the telephone, mechanical transportation and the gasoline engine, which is what brought me to the little town of Floyd Virginia recently.

It’s a beautiful ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway as I take a detour and stop at a general store. I could just imagine myself living in a small town like this with stores that have the original wooden floors laid down in the early ‘30’s and 40’s. I love the neighborhoods with different styled houses, not the cookie cutter homes you see now, but old buildings with style and grace and front porches with wooden corner lattices. I could write a book about mountain waterfalls and become a beloved local personality, found at the local diner every morning at 7:15 sitting at my usual table dispensing wisdom and witty remarks over cups of fresh hot coffee.

But right now I’m an aging curmudgeon with an active bladder.

I’ve lived in a small countryside community before and it’s nice but I came to realize that happiness and peace only goes so far and what really gets all my cylinders firing is a bit of irritation and disgust. For that you need a city: 1) A guy walks down the sidewalk with a baseball cap turned backwards, his pants hanging down below his rear. You want to shake him until his little wiry earphones fall out. 2) The man at the mall walking towards you appears to be babbling or arguing with you but then you see the little cell phone sticking out of his ear. 3) When I say “thank you” to a young sales clerk she says “No problem” which is not a proper reply. “You’re welcome” is a proper reply. A “thank you” should not be brushed away like stray lint. You could be pulled unconscious out of a burning three story house and a fireman carries you down the ladder then revives you and saves your life and you say “Thank you good sir! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” and he walks away and says over his shoulder, “No problem”. That’s just wrong on so many levels.

Such egregious vexations and there are others. You pick up the morning paper and read about politicians and find yourself yelling at the ceiling which terrifies the dog.

Then you read where Penn State, out of pure greed, protected a sexual predator in its midst. Another good argument for why women should take a turn at running the world.

It is the power of righteous indignation that will keep us old conservative moralists alive and hanging on in nursing homes long past our normal time. It’s medicinal. We will ward off cataracts, dementia and gout thanks to the power of anger. The righteous like me are a long lived gnarly bunch and the imperfections of others are our vitamins.

I have to stop writing now. My wife wants to see me about our relationship---something about the garbage not being taken out as promised. Again.

Inner peace, right here and it's free!

Call me Joe the Barbarian but when I see the Hollywood people with their spiked hair, 10 million dollar weddings, their need to be bigger than life, their sweaters made from harpy eagle feathers woven with organic peat moss, a steal at $1,392.95, I want to grab my outdoor jacket, insulated jeans and head to the mountains. The Blue Ridge Parkway is 53 minutes from my house and I have an urge to go there, slog through snow covered woods and hike to the top of a mountain, take in the splendor and let my jangled soul find rest.

The urge hit me again recently as I was crossing the Catawba River on my way to Hickory listening to a man on the radio talk about a book he had written as a form of therapy. He talked about an unhappy childhood. As a result he became a transvestite, found he wasn’t satisfied so he had a sex-change operation which was a mistake and now he is back from a Malaysian lake where he went to seek inner peace but still has abandonment issues and blames his blue collar insensitive father. Right there, just as I crossed the bridge over the Catawba River on Interstate 40 I said out loud “Oh, grow up.”

Yes, I talk to myself sometimes and if you live long enough you too will have that privilege.

Therapy is by nature a whiny process---expensive whimpering, so I go the mountains and see what God is doing while everyone else gets the blues and takes decongestants.

Statesville is a wonderful city to live in with parks, beautiful homes, blueberry scones and HD TV and yet you can hop in your car and shortly find yourself in a silent snow covered mountain forest. Suddenly you are in Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” waiting for Yuri (Omar Sharif) and his mistress Larrisa (Julie Christie) to come riding together through the woods in a sleigh all starry eyed for each other. The moment you step into a winter forest you see the splendor yet sense the danger and you have a strong urge go in deeper.

You can blame your blue collar mother for this. She told you a million times never go in the winter woods alone, that the seemingly safe ice on a pond can break and you could fall in and be lost forever. So of course this enhances the experience and becomes something you must do. The danger is real, the snow is cold and the laws of physics apply to us all. We need moments of splendor as well as danger to remind us that we are not the center of the universe and that one should never travel without wearing clean underwear.

Some time ago I took a guest from Brazil to the mountains. He had never experienced snow and ice. We tramped through the woods as a light snow fell. He kept grabbing at snowflakes. We arrived at a frozen pond and I showed him how to step out on the ice. We both stood there and took in the silence, the majestic mountains and the millions of snowflakes falling all around us.

He was speechless, almost childlike, and looked at me with a wide grin, his eyes watered from the cold, his nose running and his ears were red. He wanted to tell me how wonderful this was but he couldn’t describe it. We later walked back to the cabin saying nothing, each feeling small yet complete.

You don’t have to go to Bora Bora to find inner peace. It’s right here, and it’s free.

The Taming of Man

Years of research has shown that women have a civilizing effect on men. The idea sells a boat load of women’s magazines.

Many believe that without women men would remain slobs and that our knuckles would still be dragging the ground. At some point a cavewoman gave a caveman a list of errands ( get some milk and pick up a rotisserie chicken at the T Rex Mart) and so he figured out a lot of things. Civilization with its paved roads, pick-up trucks and forklifts is just the result of some poor man trying to get a wooly mammoth back home and in the freezer. Remember, she’d sent him for a chicken.

But the truth of the matter is men are still slobs; we just don’t get to enjoy it.
Recently my wife went out of town for a few days and suddenly the house sprouted clothes like mushrooms after a rain. There were socks on the couch, shoes in the dining room, pants hanging on chairs, T shirts in the hall and boxers in the refrigerator---just kidding--- that was my my Beatles "White Album".

A home is subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of the universe and when a stable body is removed a vacuum occurs and an ugly truth is revealed--- the only body left in the house does not know where the laundry room is.

High school science teaches us that a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless a body close by reminds the first body that the garbage isn’t going to take itself out. For men “at rest” is our normal state. Exceptions to this rule occur when men gravitate towards a smaller mass such as the remote or a bag of Doritos.

Men are like bears, loveable slobs of nature and we like to do what bears do. Left alone we’d amble about, swipe at a jumping salmon or two, rub our backsides against anything upright and sleep all winter. We are not aggressive but we will shovel our driveway when it snows to show the other bear guys that we are alive and virile and don’t mess with our honey bunch. On the other hand clearing the snow away makes it easier for other bear guys to come into your home--- but then bear guys aren’t noted for being real smart.

Men are by nature simply not civilized. We should never have put plumbing in the cave. Given our druthers toilet seats would not only be left up at all times, we’d tear them out completely. We believe long pants at breakfast are not necessary and the only food that should never be barbequed is yogurt.

Like government bonds we take awhile to mature and if you bring us into a relationship patience is required. It takes time for us to forget we use to scarf milk straight out of the carton but now we should pour it into a glass. Shortly after we were married my wife began training me with jelly glasses that had pictures on them. Every time I poured the milk into a glass with the funny pictures she would give me a piece of cheese. I was so proud.

A man needs a woman even more than he needs zinc or vitamin E. At times men grumble about domestication and howl into the dark but it’s all bravado. Honey Cakes, deep down men will embrace any rule and strive to do our best so long as we know this one thing about women--- and that is that they love us.

We can always hope and work on our Spanish

Our Lord says that he has other sheep that are not of this fold and that He will call them and so we should hope given the current flock of Republican candidates for president – rams confused by morals, ethics and the legal voting age---that our Lord will summon other sheep quickly. We must always maintain Hope while we plow ahead each day to acquire inner peace and income, which for me started this morning as I dashed about trying to find my car keys (they were in my pocket all along) and was late to work only to find I had also forgotten my wallet. One more confused sheep in need of a watchful shepherd.

Hope. Your financial advisor, Carol, calls and explains to you that with the fall of the dollar and the volatility of annual average accruals, she’s thinking a comprehensive safe harbor release of matured assets with marginal fluctuations minimized while Jupiter aligns with Mars and it’s the dawning of the age of Aquarius and so you say “Fine, do it.” For all you know you just gave her permission to get fifty grand in twenties and she catches the next flight to Aruba where by midnight she’s eating sturgeon caviar. You pray not. You hope not.

Intense paranoia belongs to people who live about a mile to the right of Attila the Hun. Such as people who live in Wyoming and stock pile AK-47’s, grenades, bullets and cans of beanie weenies in preparation for the overthrow of the government or invasion by space aliens. This is not for intellectuals like you and I who sit at Starbucks sipping latte’s and mochas, not brooding over antibiotics in our skim milk or worry about thought control drugs sprinkled onto our French fries by fast food restaurants operated by the CIA. No, each morning we read our newspapers taking in article after article that warn of some calamity creeping towards us like a tiger stalking the forest deer. We shrug at the coming apocalypse, turn the page and butter our toast.

We remain hopeful people. I bought a book that tells you how to speak Spanish. It has helpful phrases in it (“I have back pain.” “Where is the bathroom?” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”). It was the most hopeful investment I have made in years but proved to be a most wasteful expenditure of funds. I imagined myself becoming fluent and conversing with people about the weather or their well being. Instead when I tried to impress a waitress in a Mexican restaurant and inquire about her family it came out “How is the foot mountain today for supper did you?”

I realized later I could also mistakenly have said “My right ventricle just stopped working” and while I shout “No, amigos!” they have thrown me on the floor and a 200 pound bearded waiter in a sombrero gives me mouth to mouth and someone sticks the electric paddles to my chest and screams the Spanish equivalent of “Fire in the hole!” (incendio en el hoyo!) and right there beside the taco bar my body flops like a fish and my hair begins to smoke. For me, this is possible.

This year we can hope and pray for the addition of good sheep in Washington instead of the current goats that nose through the garbage and we can hope the new ones will endeavor to work for the common good. On the other hand they are part of the same crowd that wanted to converse in Spanish and that didn’t happen either. But, we can always hope.

A new year of dogs, children and angels

Centuries ago we Baptist decided to forget about angels. The Catholics already had the angel market locked up to enhance their dark cathedrals with bead rattling, smoky incense and Latin liturgies.

So instead we Baptists claimed the Holy Spirit who dwelt in believers and told us what we were to do which is pretty convenient for people loaded with theological self-confidence. You study some scripture, work up a load of guilt, sit in a well lit smoke free sanctuary and just open your mouth from a pulpit and out comes Truth, condemnation and doctrine--- such as separation from the world--- which worked great for introverted people like me with raging acne and no social skills. I came to believe rejection was a sign of my righteousness. It got me through prom night.

The idea that I was right and everyone else was wrong peaked during my teenage years and helped nudge me through college. But there comes a time when a man lies in bed at night thinking about the colon and his aortic valve and being right isn’t so important. You find you’re developing interest in winged spiritual creatures capable of hovering over you on a bleak night in the Emergency Room which gives a whole new dimension to medical insurance. In recent years I’ve attended some Catholic services hoping to increase my coverage---maybe even get a second opinion.

Aging is tedious business. The passing of another year hits me as I write this from my desk upstairs in a house where people without sleep problems went to bed hours ago. My boxer sits beside me as she has for almost every column I’ve written weekly for three years. I read her each story aloud and then I say “How’s that one?” and she always wags her stump of a tail. Boxers are just one long muscle so when one part starts moving the entire body is engaged, like an excited slinky toy. Pretty soon all 80 pounds of it is trying to get into your lap. We’ve both faded a bit this year, her face is whiter and I’m cutting my side burns higher in an attempt to outrun the whitening process that is creeping up my hair line.

But you can’t outrun grandchildren. Ours go full-tilt from the moment they stampede through the front door until they are brought down by exhaustion or ropes. Their personalities are blossoming and they are bolder about approaching the old beast that writes at the computer.

Laura, the oldest grandchild, walks up to me and with a twinkle in her seven year old eyes says “Knock Knock.” I stop typing and say “Who’s there?” “Boo.” “Boo who?”and she says “Why are you crying!?” And she laughs and laughs. So I say, “Knock-knock.” She says, “Who’s there? “ “Fortification.” “Fortification who?” and I say “Fortification we’re going to the beach”. She giggles and runs downstairs.

Recently I was sitting in the Artisan Café on Davie Avenue when I was approached by a gentleman and his wife. They told me they read my column every week and clip out the “good ones.” I walked into a gas station last week and the attendant looked at me, pointed and said “Hey, you’re the guy that writes those stories about everyday stuff.” I smiled.

So for the coming year, dear reader, I’ll try to write some “good ones” about everyday “stuff”. But tomorrow I’m going to buy some Grecian hair formula and find a really good book of Knock Knock jokes. There is a little angel I want to be ready for next time she comes.