WHO’S DIS?

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I'm not even sure who this is

Every morning I come down from my shower, dressed and ready to roll. I have a cup of coffee that I enjoy and there sits TLW (The Little Woman) watching the morning news, and this is a daily ritual including weekends and holidays.

On the TV every morning is the weatherman, John Elliot, who annoys me to no end. I think the guy thinks the show is about him. But in spite of my annoyance, he will show pictures of celebrities who have birthdays on that particular day.

Usually about 3 or 4 people are shown with their name and age and he mentions them and life goes on. Except for me, that is. If this person is younger than 45, chances are I don’t know who the heck they are, where they came from, or if they just snuck their picture in the lineup for a thrill.

Where have I been? These are supposed to be celebrities, famous people, and I have never heard of them! It reminds me a lot of when you went to school, got sick and stayed home for a day or two, returned and the teacher starts the class where they left off, but you are lost.

Then there is Facebook. The younger crowd has their own dialect, say things I have no idea what they mean, and it seems all so now while I seem all so then! This is not good. I read the newspapers every morning, I read books and am part of the social media, it is not like I am not informed. WHO THE HECK ARE THESE PEOPLE AND WHAT DO THEY MEAN???

I decided not to get too upset about it, no, I will continue to go my blissful way, unencumbered by extra names and things I probably don’t care about anymore anyway. Let’s face it, nothing is so important that I would want to mention it while trying to get it off the tip of my tongue! God knows I do enough of it already with the people I do know.

Hey, I'm old, leave me alone.

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JUST DRIFTING

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Today, October 1^st, is a beautiful sunny cloudless lazy day with a temperature up near 80. Being that there will be so few of these days left soon, I decided to take my sketch pad and drive over to Lake Ronkonkoma, with nothing in mind and a pad in hand. On a lonely Tuesday afternoon about 1:00pm off I go and arrive at a section I never go to, a beach and playground with picnic tables and trees, an ideal place for a hot day. With the calmness of the lake, the sky cerulean overhead and the calm roaming of the lake by geese, mallards and the spot shading of tall trees, there is nothing I wish to sketch or study, nothing seems to inspire me.

I am starting to feel lonely, or at the least transparent, no one to talk to, no one to share a joke or observation with, just the sense of being isolated in this picturesque or bucolic world!

At a picnic table sits a lonely figure, a young man about mid-thirties or early forties. A laptop is open as he studies it while battling the sun high overhead. He stares into the portal of everything relevant in this world, while ignoring the world itself. A father with his little daughter, maybe 2 years of age walk along the water’s edge, watching the geese float by in single file, one family eying another in God’s little acre. Across the way sits a very colorful playground, filled with other young children, some shouting while their parents sit on the park benches that surround the park and just watch.

I wonder if these are unemployed people fighting to keep busy in a slowed down economy, or did they just take this beautiful day to play hooky?

Across the lake is an old restaurant, been there for all the 30 or so years I’ve lived around here, and it was very old when I first arrived. The tavern being dismantled by a huge crane and crew of men, splintered pieces of frame and skeletal framework from craftsmen of yesteryear are all that is left of the historic place, one piece of life being replaced for another.

And with this going on, all this life and destruction, I am uninspired! Amid all the natural beauty, all the gift of weather, and the freedom to enjoy it, I can’t inspire myself, there is nothing I wish to see for the first time and record it’s impressions on my mind and soul.

Sadly I return to my car, and like the lazy day and serenity of the lake, I drive at a leisure rate of speed, just watching the world, like the geese, drift by.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

FIVE MORE MONTHS AND ITS CHRISTMAS!

How did I come to that conclusion? Well it is the end of July, when all the holiday stuff comes out!

There are two seasons in the direct mail industry and two seasons only: Christmas in July and summer in December! That is how it works and will always work. The problem is that by the time a season does come around, you are creatively spent and sick of the season.

I can remember sitting in my office on a hot July day thinking of ideas for the holiday season. I mean the ac is on high and I’m in a rolled up sleeved shirt and near sweating. Most people would stay away from me because I wasn’t in the holiday spirit. The rub is that you never wore a short sleeve shirt to work with a suit, and that damned tie was always tight!

I was in a Walgreens recently looking for a toy for my pool. I needed something to float in and I found just the thing, an inflatable lounge with a headrest, which allows one to fall asleep in the pool. Since my pool is usually covered by tree shade somewhere ion the surface, about 45%, you can safely sleep without getting a burn, and when you do drift into sunlight, it makes you aware of it with your eyes closed.

Washington Nationals

Walgreen's

As I perused the aisles of the store, with the legions of Walgreens shoppers, I noticed how closely the Walgreens logo resembles the Washington Nationals Logo on a point of purchase ad! This of course took me back to my advertising days and it became an advertising daze. As I continued up and then down the wide aisles filled with junk I don't need, I started to notice the boxes of Holiday cards and small sets of tree lights and small artificial trees. That warm fuzzy feeling of hatred suddenly reappeared in my cold heart of this particularly warn day for merchants pushing their sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays because they are cold days, a lot of food with an excuse to eat it and you get to see family and friends. I just don’t want to celebrate in my bathing suit while Santa is dressed in a heavy coat and hat. That reminds me that I play Santa for people with disabilities in December when we should, but the suit is sooo very hot to wear that I must shed a few pounds!

Well, I know the Holidays are in five short months as I mentioned, I just hope I didn’t put you out of the spirit. HoHoHo, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah  and Happy New Year!

Where has the time gone?!

FIGHTING THE HEAT

It is Tuesday, June 25, 2013 as I write this and it is the second full day of heat and humidity. The heat I can take, but the humidity is too oppressive. As I sat in my den reading the newspaper after working around the house, the sweat was pouring and I was very uncomfortable. Yes I have air-conditioning but choose not to us it until later in the afternoon, because I’m cheap and all alone anyway. So I decided to go into the pool and relieve my misery.

That first venture into the water for the summer season is always the toughest, no matter how hot and humid it is. The body has two choices, one is just to go onto the diving board and plow right in, or dive right in as they say, or you can take the sniveling, cowardly way and slowly wade in, a little at a time, slowly submerged up to your hips on the shallow end like a little sissy, and maybe, just maybe have the courage eventually to dip down all the way. That is not the manly way to do it! Someday I will try to dive right in.

Of course once you are acclimated to the pool temperature, you look around to see if any nosey neighbors are looking, then you look around the pool and the rest of the property and feel guilty that you are indeed in the pool while there are things to do, but you remind yourself that there are poor people working right now in an office, putting up with crap, bosses and or insolent underlings, maybe in a stuffy conference room answering questions on why a project is late while you enjoy freedom! That plus the fact that you just paid a few hundred clams to open the thing up and get it ready so you CAN feel guilty.

Now TLW (The Little Woman) never goes into the pool. She would rather die than be caught in her swimsuit. She hasn’t been in the pool since at least since my daughter lived at home, about a good 20 years ago. She has NEVER been in the newly dug and rebuilt pool ever. This of course astounds me as we do have it fenced in with bushes about shoulder high around the outer two edges.

Although the pool can be a lot of work with the upkeep of chemical levels, it is not all that bad, and the robot, that resembles a submergible tank that can climb walls and clean. One of the greater pleasures is to barbeque a steak, smelling the cooking while you lounge in a float with a gin and tonic. That my friends is the beginning of heaven as we know it.

And so I will once more brave the heat of early afternoon and venture out to the pool where I will get my money’s worth and think about the poor workers. Think I’ll splash a little too.

MARCH

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As I look out the window this Monday morning, it is March 25fth; the early spring morning is grey and cold. What is worse is we are expecting snow and it should be 2 to 4 inches! People this winter past have had enough and so it goes. The way winter is overlapping, will fall do the same?

The TV news is showing a guy ‘LIVE’ in Fredericks, Maryland standing in snow as I write this. One of my fellow board members is happily skiing away the hours, enjoying the snow out west. The Bay Hill Invitational looks like it is a wash out as is all of Orlando Florida! It got me thinking: is there any truth in global warming?

I keep hearing about global WARMING, and keep freezing! In my day when you mention warming, you don’t expect to see snow. Now if palm trees were popping all over the place, I could believe, but the only palm trees I expect to see are potted, unless I get potted.

Now the experts say that the fact that we are having snow so late is due to global warming. Huh? Are they the ones spreading this rumor? Something about the melting icebergs, and the rising seas and maybe the Yankees won’t win the pennant this year? What IS happening to my life?

Mom called March: “Crazy March” that only crazy people are born in Crazy March. Of course she doesn’t really believe it since two of her off spring are born in March. If she were correct, I would be the sanest of her children being born in July. How many of you would believe that? I could rest my case on that alone.

JULY SANITY

I do recall one March where I flew down to Orlando while a snowstorm was about to hit NYC, landed in Durham, it started to snow and then flew to Florida, landing at 11:00 PM in sweltering humidity and heat, and woke up to 32 degrees temperatures!

When you think about it, we sense the disaster due to our time here on Earth, but if you look back into history, the weather has always been unpredictable and will always be unpredictable!

As for me, I will do some chores, a little design work I need to do, take a nap and watch the snow come down all from my recliner.

So let it snow, be it Monday who cares in the end? I’m happy to be alive and retired. My weather forecast goes like this: Early morning coffee changing to Jack Daniels by evening.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ONE OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE WORLD, GERARD O'HARA