Category: Oddities

I See Icy Things

You’re a writer – you know how it is. You look out the window and see the same old thing every day. Some days it’s cloudy, some days it’s not. But it’s the same. You get comfortable with it. The view out your window is part of your routine.

Yes, well. Scratch that.

The house in Southern California was a low-slung, single-storey tract house from 1963 on a concrete pad sitting on a corner lot. The views out the window included the street to the east, bordered by the neighbor’s low-slung, single-storey tract houses, the street to the south with the same, the swimming pool in the backyard to the west, and the neighbor’s identical house to the north.

This house in Woodbridge, NJ, is a two-storey wooden fella built in 1936 with a full basement and more stairs that Carter has liver pills (if you’re not of an age, Carters was a company before my time that sold liver pills. I guess they sold a lot of them, or perhaps only made a lot of them. Anyway, you have to be of an age to understand that metaphor. If you’re not of an age, I do apologize). 

From this house, the view to the east is the street, a variety of houses from a variety of eras, and, way off there between them, the treetops on Staten Island. Neighbors’ houses from the early 1900’s comprise the views to the north and south, while the view to the west includes a long, narrow backyard, a fence, a railway, and the town of Woodbridge spreading away in all its Old World charm.

Woodbridge received its charter, its permission to be a town, from King George III in 1669. That’s Old World!

In California today they’ll be hitting a clear, sunny high of 67 degrees. Over here we’ll be seeing a cloudy high of 42.

Here’s what surprised me: everything freezes here. 

Puddles from Tuesday’s rainstorm are transformed into tiny skating rinks. When you shine your flashlight on the lawn at night, the lawn flashes a million tiny fairy lights back at you, and you think perhaps you’re looking at a miniature, very busy city.

Like the view out your window, it’s the stuff you take for granted that so radically becomes something else when the temperature falls that reminds you the world is not what it seems.

Our challenge, yours and mine, is to appreciate and embrace the temporal nature of the world around us, even when it seems to be the same day after day. To look for and understand even the tiny changes that make the world, well, the world. And to let that understanding inform our writer’s minds.

That’s one challenge. For me, the more urgent challenge is to figure out how to turn off the outside faucets so they don’t blow up my inside plumbing. Another piece of the temporal world, I guess…

Moving Part 3: The Pod

In writing an article, the number one, single most important, top of the to-do list thing to do is find an angle for the story. Usually it’s the lead sentence that sets up the rest of the piece. 

It turns out that the same thing applies when you’re moving: How are you gonna frame this move? Is it going to be with movers, or by yourself? Is it going to be long and elaborate or quick and simple?

We had an image in our heads when deciding to move out of our family home of 27 years. On the left side of the driveway, we anticipated a pod, a long-term moving/storage device. Next to that would be a U-Haul van, to carry the short-term stuff we’d need when we moved in. And, next to that would be a dumpster – see Moving Part 1: Chuck it! We had also mentally set aside an area for stuff to be donated.

In a perfect world, this would have been absolutely ideal. No matter what you picked up in the house, it would go into one of these four receptacles. This? To the pod. That? To the van. This? To the dumpster. That? Goodwill. Piece of cake!

Alas, the world isn’t quite perfect. We got the pod delivered long before the U-Haul. We were moving so quickly, and so brainlessly, we had no clue what would we would need in New Jersey. We were just dashing stuff into the dumpster, into the pickup truck for donations, and into the pod, without any idea what we were doing. 

I had the pod about 75% full when my wife called and said she needed some more checks. They’re in a folder in the file cabinet, and she needed ‘em right away. 

The file cabinet. Hmmm. That thing was rusted and didn’t work very well. I tossed that out on Sunday. This was Wednesday. Hmmm. The files went into bankers boxes, which I loaded on Monday, before I shoved the dresser and the wardrobe in there. Hmmm.

There’s a slope to the driveway, don’t you see? I kind of used a gravity-assist to move the big heavy furniture into the pod. And I suspended the kayaks by ropes above the furniture. And it all locked those file boxes in place, you see, wayyyyy down there in the front of the pod. Hmmm. Bit of a problem, that.

About an hour after the phone call, and after I had the furniture hauled out, and the kayaks lowered and removed, and the file boxes exposed and open, my wife arrived. Just as she pulled up my aching fingers found the checks – success!

She looked at the mound of furniture and boats and files I had unpacked and asked “why are we taking all this stuff?”

In stuffing it all back in – having snarkily replied “because” – I couldn’t find a place for the wine-bottle rack thing we’d inherited from her brother. It’s a cheapy, with sharp-edged iron straps and oak strips. Very ‘70s. I figured I had to find a place for it, as it held great sentimental value for her. The edges on that thing are sharp, and I nearly lost a finger to it, but it was eventually wedged in there, by gum.

Now, the number one admonition of the pod company was don’t let anything come to rest against the door – tie your furniture forward and make sure nothing comes loose. If it rests against the door, you won’t be able to open it.

That advice? That’s for morons. Duh, thank you mister moving man.  

I used that heavy furniture as a bulkhead, holding all our other possessions away from the roll-up door. Brilliant!

The last things to go in were a trio of floor lamps – shoddy and wobbly but useful, we figured, until we could replace them. As those could slide against the door, I took the moron route and tied them in place with a piece of rope. 

In the world of pure dumb luck, we were still using our bed, our towels, and some clothes while we waited for the U-Haul. These, plus the clean dishes we’d accidentally left in the dishwasher, turned out to be the very things we needed when we got to NJ.  These, and of course the bicycles, because, seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve pedaled through the snow or the roaring wind of a nor’easter. Anyway, those came with us in the U-Haul.

The pod arrived a week after we did, and the guy sort of tore up my lawn with the truck when he delivered it. It’s okay, we signed a waiver. Oh, that covers him. Rats.

Long story short, you can imagine what came loose and wedged the roll-up door in the closed position. The rope remained tied, but the lamps had wobbled out from under it. I hate those lamps.

It took my wife, the truck driver, and my super-human strength to pry the door open enough so I could use my little-girl-skinny forearms to reach under the door and wiggle the lamp loose enough to release it. 

Most embarrassingly, I prodigiously broke wind as I was lifting the door. It was one of those eye-wateringly pungent releases that causes the birds to fly south a little faster and the sky to turn gray for a brief moment. I felt bad for the truck driver (my wife’s used to them by now), but hey, that’s the risk of the job, right? He rather staggered over to the cab of the truck and hastily drove away. 

That’s for tearing up my lawn, bucko!

My son and his wife helped us empty the infernal thing. When he got to the beloved wine rack, my wife told him he should just toss it out. “Cheap junk,” she said. 

I could only stare at my nearly-missing finger in disbelief.

The pod is out there now, emptily taking up my driveway while we wait for a convenient pickup date.

In the end, we didn’t get the smooth move we’d planned, but we got moved. 

The empty pod out there sort of stands as a testament to the extraordinary speed with which we’d moved our family and our stuff, our lives and our livelihoods, across the nation. 

Is it the story I’d planned to write? Well, this story sort of wrote itself.

Now, I’ve been unnecessarily hard on the pod company, and I shouldn’t be. We used a company called PODS (portable, on-demand storage), and they have been flexible, professional, and easy to work with throughout.  I do highly recommend them, should you find yourself in a similar situation.

And I do highly recommend that you avoid finding yourself in a similar situation!


Moving Part 2: Hanging Around

Few things are more exciting than moving. Having a root canal. Brain surgery comes to mind. Taking a road trip with the in-laws that you just don’t like.

In our grand move across the country, we’ve had to  “spruce up” our fine old house of 30 years.

Now, sprucing up can be a relative term. Sometimes, it’s just a coat of paint in the dining room. Other times it’s a whole new roof that takes a small fortune to accomplish.

We had to pay a painter half of $16,000 for him to do – well, let’s just call it some touch up.

My wife wrote out a check for $8,000. But the pen quit on the first zero of the 8000. So she scrambled to find a new pen and finished the check.

The next day, we checked our bank account, and found that the $8,000 had been returned to the account.

What would you do if you were faced with a similar situation? Well, that’s exactly what we did: call the bank.

It was a tortuous call. Put on hold, transferred, put on hold transferred, transferred, put on hold. We finally reached the fraud department and were promptly put on hold.

While we were on hold, the phone we were using rang and a man came on identifying himself as Isaac from the fraud department. He promptly requested my wife’s social security number, which she quickly gave him. Then he asked for her birth date. 

I got all excited and made her hang up the phone before she gave out that information. Come on – there is no way the bank should be asking for your birth date!

I believe the man was honest when he said he was with the fraud department, but I’m rather certain HE was the one committing fraud!

So we had to call the bank again. Transfer, hold, hold, transfer, transfer  hold, hold, hold, and then we got to the fraud department where we were put on hold once more.

My wife sighed in frustration “I just want to hang myself!”

The fraud department finally got back on the line and told us someone had written additional zeros on the check to make it $8,000. We explained that that was us because the pen quit. The banker said “Oh. Well, the money is back in your account.”

To get the contractor paid, we had to rush into town, pull out $8,000 in cash and deliver it to the contractor.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever handled $8,000 in cash, but it is a bundle of 80 $100 bills. That is a wad of cash!

We felt like gangsters driving around with this manila envelope stuffed with cash. We met with the contractor in a parking lot, and handed over the dough, glancing over our shoulders for the Fuzz. The Heat. The Man.

When we got home, we saw we’d missed a call from the local police department. Uh oh, we thought. Busted! 

How nice is it that the cops call you before they bust down your door and drag you off to the Big House?

We called the number and reached a police officer at his home. He asked if we were okay. He said he’d been to our house, and no one was there.

He said that the bank had reported that my wife was considering suicide. He just wanted to make sure she didn’t go through with it. Well, sure, we said. I mean, that would be kinda bad…

So, we laughed, and explained that oh no, it was just frustration. He laughed, and then asked, on a private note, if that house was still for sale.

What?!? Why, yes it is!

Do you see how the world works? One door opens, another one closes before you can get your foot out of it.

The bank is happy. The contractor’s happy. The cops are happy. And our realtor has a new contact.

Did we get reimbursed for the time, the mileage, or the headspace all this took? No.

But it is nice to know that folks will check up on you if you say something that raises a red flag.

Sad that nobody can take a joke…

Moving Part 1: Chuck It

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You engineer plot twists and plot points and  introduce  characters to flip things around, all with the goal of moving the story along. You want your reader to keep turning pages right?

The last thing you expect is for this kind of plot twist, this kind of introduction of new characters to move things along, to happen in your own life.

But, surprisingly enough, this is exactly what has happened to us, being my wife and I. The 1-year-old grandson has been an  appealing siren, calling to us from the rocky shores of New Jersey.

Well, we were there at the beginning of October when we spotted The House. She was lovely,  Cape-Codish four bedroom, two-floorish sort of thing with a big backyard in which the dog and the probably-will-get-older-than-one-year-old grandson could play and frolic with abandon.

And it was for sale.

What the hey, right? What are we waiting for, we asked ourselves. So, we made a pitch. You miss the shots you don’t take, right?

They accepted the offer on October 3. The seller enthusiastically wanted to close in 30 days – November 3. Cool!

Wait, what?

In order to afford the new house, we have to sell the old house. You know, the one in which we’ve lived for 27 years and raised three kids and, in total, six dogs and what seems like 72 cats…

Imagine your parents’ house back in the day. It was nice enough – maybe needed a little sprucing up, right?

That’s our house, too. Just needs a little sprucing up, like a roof, flooring, drywall and paint. Oh, and you can’t be living in a house where all that is going on. Sooooo…

After a weeks-long scramble – we both have day jobs, ya know – we closed off the living quarters of the house. That’s a distinction, that living quarters part. Most of the stuff we’re keeping is crammed into the garage!

Here’s an adage you can borrow: the number of people’s possessions rises to meet their available square footage. The guy who moves from a studio to a 10,000 square foot home will eventually fill that space with stuff. If he has kids, it doesn’t take very long.

Here’s a piece of advice: chuck it. Keep the stuff you wear, the stuff you use, the stuff you like. But if you haven’t actively liked, used, or worn it in the last six months? Chuck it.

Years ago I was having trouble with a coworker. A good friend told me to blow it off: “he doesn’t pay enough rent to take up that kind of room in your head.”

That’s your stuff. I can say this after filling two 40-foot and three 8-foot dumpsters, and after an even dozen trips to Goodwill: chuck it, and chuck it now.

Why are you still reading this? Why aren’t you out there chucking your stuff?

Thanks for reading this – there’s more to come. Next, fitting it all into the Pod!

Remember: chuck it!

Cooler Heads

Following up on yesterday’s fearful diatribe, let’s us think for a minute, you and me.

IF the aliens use this hydrogen technology for fuel, they can’t  be using a lot of seawater. All they use is a single hydrogen proton at a time. Seriously, how much water do they need, when, like, a teaspoon will get ’em from here back to the planet Zemnar, or wherever they live?

I mean, with global warming, the sea level is actually rising. That means they must know there’s plenty to go around.

If they were all that afraid of us, we’d be zapped back to the stone age already. That we’re not means we’re more of a sideshow than a threat.

The big WHEN of our cracking the hydrogen proton puzzle is decades away, and is still a pretty big IF.

And all of it is just theory in the first place.

So, until they land on somebody’s front lawn and say “yes, we’re using a proton-fission engine to create spacetime bubbles around our ships while we harvest droplets of your seawater for fuel and if you interfere with us we’ll zap you into non-existence,” I don’t think there’s all that much to be afraid of.

OMG, what if they land on MY lawn?!? I’ve got to go mow it right now!!!

I Have No Crackers

You know me, right? I like funny stuff, and writerly stories and stuff like that, right? Well, I just had the crackers scared right out of me. Right out.

I just finished reading Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent, you see.

It’s about UFOs, although they are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. They changed the name because our Navy ships have reported seeing vast, glowing orbs beneath the bubbling waves. And because of the Roswell crashed ship (no longer flying).

This author is the former top CIA guy who ran the UAP program for the Department of Defense and has worked closely with guys like General Jim Mattis and Senator Harry Reid. He’s legit.

He’s now gone public because he believes UAP are an IMMINENT THREAT not just to the country, but to humanity itself.

Because. They. Are. Real.

That’s pretty creepy, but here’s what scared the crackers out of me:

We’ve all heard about UFOs darting this way and that, super fast but usually silent. If you’ve seen one, and I have, you ask yourself how could they do that?

Well, Elizondo’s scientific team figured out that alien spacecraft have an energy source so profound that it warps spacetime. They travel through our atmosphere in a spacetime “bubble,” separate from our own atmosphere, yet passing through it. The bubble warps spacetime, allowing them to dart and dash around us and travel vast, galactic-sized distances in the blink of an eye.

The only way to generate so much energy that we know of is to split the proton of a hydrogen atom – we split the atom itself to make hydrogen bombs. Splitting the proton inside the atom releases way more energy. It works out in Einsteinian physics. (In a timely aside, I was reading about our own experiments with that just last week.)

So, these spacecraft probably run on hydrogen.

That’s why they’re here: our vast oceans are huge hydrogen reservoirs.

So it’s not about us, and never has been. We’re a convenient gas station. They’ve only ever been interested in our water.

Except that the UAP have frequently been seen hovering around our nuclear facilities.

Which means that now it is about us, because we’re starting to dabble with those super-high levels of energy ourselves. When we split the hydrogen proton, we’ll be a competitor for their fuel supply.

Elizondo’s team reasons that this is why aliens have been abducting humans – to learn our physiology. It explains the crop circles and the mutilated cows – to figure out what we eat.

He tells very scary stories of UAP starting and stopping our nuclear missiles – shutting down banks of silos, and actually launching a rocket, only to shut if off the last second before it left the silo. And shadowing our aircraft carriers and charging our aircraft. All to figure out and test our military capability.

They don’t want to invade us because they don’t care about us.

They’re just learning how to wipe us out because we’ll be a competitor. An annoyance.

If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, there is one more little data point: we have utterly no defense against them.

Now, Elizondo is a security guy with 22 years in the Army and CIA. He’s got that kill-or-be-killed mindset, and that’s why he sees them as a threat. But he makes it clear that we are no longer the dominant species on this planet, and probably haven’t been for a long, long time.

Now, maybe the aliens will welcome us into their spacefaring community. Maybe it’s not dire. I keep thinking that, like the Europeans first visiting the New World, there are different nationalities, perhaps races of UAP. In that case, maybe they won’t act in concert to eliminate us.

But we have no value to them. We’re like gnats, except when we start dabbling in that level of power. Then we’ll be an annoyance. Pests.

It makes me very sad to think that this could be our fate, that you and I could somehow be zapped out of existence, rather in the blink of an eye, I would hope, over reasons we’ll never quite understand.

Normally I’d make a closing joke, but, honestly, I don’t know what to think.

Read the book – Imminent, by Luis Elizondo – and see what you think.

Thanks for staying with me all these years!

Okabus Dokus

It’s a little known fact that the old Latin term for “okey-dokey” was okabus dokus. Look it up. What did the serving girl say to Julius Caesar when he asked her to get more grapes? I’m telling you, it’s a thing.

Or, maybe not.

I met with some old friends today that I haven’t seen in, like, 35 years. They’re not old, you know, relatively. But I hadn’t seen them for a long, long time.

We were discussing this and that and here and there, and I suddenly got this brain wave. Call me simple – go ahead, everybody else does – but how about this for a metaphor:

When you first start out on your own in the world, you don’t know anything. Here you are, twenty-something, and it’s all so bewildering. You don’t know where you’re going, or what you’re going to do.

One day follows another, and you get along. Careers, lovers, kids, they all come and go. All the while you’re putting one foot in front of the other, doing the best you can.

And then, one day, after a bunch of years, you pause to look back. And not like glancing in the rearview mirror at a red light, but a real look. You examine all the stuff that has happened on your road.

And it’s amazing. You started out at the edge of a dark forest, only seeing that little space just ahead of you.

But now there are towns and people and nations and oceans – all the stuff that you discovered and uncovered on your journey.

And there are the things that you did – stuff you created, accomplishments, awards, accolades, failures, disasters. All right there for you to see.

And loved ones, here in that town, there in that village. Kids, dogs, cats. They’re all there.

And right through the middle of all that is a beautifully paved road. Wasn’t there when you started, but it’s there now, because you paved it.

You linked all those towns and mountains and people and jobs and accomplishments together. You.

No matter where you are in life, at the beginning, the end, or somewhere in between, that beautiful road stretches out behind you, tying all the events of your life into one, continuous expanse of once-unknown but now treasured landscape.

The road ahead? Still an unknown. It’s like those video games where you clear the forest just enough to see what’s coming, but not where the road goes.

Which is cool, right? You can’t change the road ahead – no matter which way you take yourself, the road paves right underneath you.

So, what can you do?

Take a page from Julius Caesar. Put your thumb up in the air, smile, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Okubus dokus.

Kate Capshaw in the 80s

So it’s 4:11 AM on Friday and I can’t sleep because of this cold and I’ve just finished drinking my tea with a little honey and a little lemon and a big dose of bourbon because I sound like Orson Welles after smoking a carton of Marlboros, and suddenly the floor falls away.

Although I’m sitting in the dark fog on the back patio, having just finished an email to my boss advising him that I’m calling in sick today, somehow I’m now at my desk at work.

And the floor falls away.

I zoom past the guys in Service Management on the first floor who look at me like, what are you doing here?

And then it’s down a black tunnel with the occasional lantern lights and the showers of the sparks from the wheels of the mine cart…

OMG I’m in the mine cart part of the that dreadful second Indiana Jones movie with the zombies and the trearing out of still-beating hearts!

Except there’s no kid screaming “Indy! Indy” who will someday grow up to be a fine actor and win an Academy Award for his excellent work in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Big Shorty, that was the character.

And there’s no Kate Capeshaw from the 80s wearing a diaphonous top screaming my name… rats…

Equally, there’s no guy in another mine cart roaring through the dark, looking like a cross between Lurch and the Last Airbender and shooting lightning beams or whatever the hell was going on in that movie.

Nope, it’s just me, in the metal cart, barreling down, down into the darkness.

Are you sure about that no Kate Capshaw in the 80’s part?

As the cart bashes along the rickety track through tunnels filled with spiders and stuff, you gotta think that ol’ Indy Jones had to be questioning his career choices. I mean, this track can’t end up in a sunny little valley with a retirement home and a cuppa tea, can it? Kate Capshaw from the 80s smiling saying g “yaay, you made it?”

How old was Inidana Jones, anyway? If he was 35 in, like, 1935, how come he was so old in the last movie? He should only have been, like, 70…

Down and down I’m roaring, all by myself in my little black mine cart. Surely this track dead-ends. Or maybe it leads to a cave stuck in a mountainside, like it did in that dreadful movie.

Maybe I’ll have to hang on to some jungle vines with Kate Capshaw from the 80s clinging desperately to me. That wouldn’t be so bad.

I feel like something huge is happening in my life. A life- changing something. And, while I can’t do anything to stop it, maybe I don’t want to stop it, because it’ll all be okay in the end.

Or maybe it’s just the bourbon.