It wasn’t a bad day. More, it was a day when you don’t stop moving and when it’s over, you wonder if you accomplished anything. There were so many stops and starts and lots of running up and downstairs.
I never made it to comments. I haven’t opened any emails. I did take quite a few pictures but haven’t had time to process them. The rain is just starting. It may not hit us as hard here — not the rain, anyway — but definitely very high winds. With the trees still full of leaves, that means blowing branches and breaking trees.
The animals must know what’s coming. Everything was in a feeding frenzy.
Photo” Garry Armstrong
Our nor’easters are essentially “local hurricanes.” Storms come in from the ocean and start to spin. They don’t move. So if it’s rain, there’s flooding. In the winter, we’ve gotten as much as three or four feet of snow before it finally breaks up.
With the contractor working, there was a strong sense of pressure to get finished before the weather moved in.
Then, there were phone calls. I’m checking out other medical insurance. I should have made the calls earlier in the week, but I had to make them today.
Meanwhile, it’s the world series but I think they are going to cancel the American League Pennant because of the weather. A glitch in Garry’s baseball channel went on for hours and entailed a prolonged wait on hold for tech support. To learn, as I suspected, they were having problems. The baseball channel has a lot of problems, but if you want to watch baseball, gotta have it.
I needed to fix Garry’s broken email too — which wasn’t difficult but took a long time. Warning! Delete old emails! If you don’t, eventually your email server stops serving and goes on strike.
The contractor did a GREAT job on the house. He’s still here. It is a real improvement. No more rot and no more of that sloppy, moldy old door … and the front door is finally insulated and nicely finished. It needs a new painting, but I think maybe it’s too late.
Narrow entry hall, too
New Surroundings — our contractor — managed to do a good job without bankrupting me in the process. He did a really good job. All neat and sealed against the weather. And we sure have weather incoming.
Tomorrow, we have to take the car in because somehow, one of the two latches that keep the hood in place broke off. No accident or anything. It’s just gone. It’s not a big deal driving a few miles into town, but a longer trip could cause serious damage.
Meanwhile, since both Garry and I have doctor appointments next week at UMass, their automated equipment calls every day for each appointment. They are such long calls, too. I feel a powerful need to go edit their electronic phone calls.
None of this sounds like a big deal and it wasn’t a big deal, but It was busy and fragmented. This is the only thing I’ve written today and I need to process at least a few pictures. Frozen pizza for dinner because I’m off my meds for a few days to give the rest of me a break. Today is the day I realized what a difference they make.
With the washing of the dishes, the official day is done. I feel like the day never fully started. I knew this month was going to get weird. On my agenda for tomorrow is explaining to the doctor that Garry’s has run out of hydrochlorothiazide because The Duke ate the container. Duke doesn’t (fortunately!) eat the pills. Just the plastic container. And any wood he can wrap his jaws around.
I have a lot of natural antiqued wood furniture. Duke is not the first wood chewer in the household. Only the most enthusiastic.
At a recent staff meeting in The Shinbone Star’s palatial newsroom, I worked to put down a coup attempt (there’s that word again) after beleaguered writers opined that they deserved a raise.
I challenged them.
“A raise?” I said. “But what have you actually done to help our readers?” Nobody had an immediate answer, so I pressed my advantage.
“We’re just preaching to the choir here,” I said. “All of you rant and rave about Trump, but that’s not helping readers who are already ranting and raving on their own. What they really need is a way to shut up their stupid relatives and stupid neighbors who still love Trump in spite of everything! You want a raise, then give me something that helps our readers do that!”
You could have heard a pin drop. I knew I had them then because…
Hey, movie mavens! Tomorrow night it’s “Roll Everything!” as I host “Rustlers’ Rhapsody” at the Uxbridge Senior Citizens Center on Main Street in downtown Uxbridge.
It starts at 5:30 pm with refreshments and trivia prep time.
At 6pm, it’s curtain time for “Rustlers’ Rhapsody,” a wonderful 1985 spoof and homage to those wonderful “B” westerns of our childhood. Surely, you remember the Saturday matinees at your favorite neighborhood theater? You know, where the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black.
The plots were simple. Good versus evil. Good always won. The heroes had nice outfits. The villains usually wore dirty, ill-fitting garb you could smell from your front row seats as you chowed down popcorn, juji-fruits and hot dogs.
At 7:45 pm, it will be Q&A time as we swap trivia about favorite movies. Maybe the featured film will sharpen your recall of those golden olden days.
“Rustler’s Rhapsody” fondly remembers heroes like Roy and Gene. There’s a nice bit of surprise casting that will leave you smiling. If you know who I’m talking about, mum’s the word.
You’ll find yourself singing along with the wonderful ballad at film’s end that definitely will have you recollecting your days of innocence, lost in the wild west where there was no doubt about law and order.
So, saddle up your cow pony and ride the high country to the Uxbridge Senior Citizens’ Center tomorrow night. We’ll start the show at 7pm. We need your help to smoke out all those bad hombres.
Several of my recent blogs here have been about Star Trek and all of its various iterations.
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It’s apparently sparked a bit of a trip down memory lane because Marilyn just posted a funny (and true) blog about Star Trek called Ten, Nine, Eight… (Shut Up Spock).
It seems we have inadvertently (or advertently?) begun to write new mini-episodes of an old radio show we did a long time ago in a galaxy not that far away — and that Marilyn wrote what was probably the first parody of Star Trek.
When the original Star Trek went into syndication in the early 1970s, Marilyn and I (and many others of our tribe) watched them. Constantly. Repeatedly. Usually under the influence of Romulan Ale.
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I’m just kidding. It was usually Acapulco Gold.
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We all loved all of them. Back then I was doing a one hour weekly radio show called “Fulton’s Folly” at WVHC. Our college radio station. (Note: Our alma mater is on Fulton Street, hence … )
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It was a sketch comedy show. Most of it was pretty dumb, but sometimes it was truly funny. One of our most popular recurring skits was the previously mentioned Star Trek parody. Marilyn and a friend of hers had the idea, and called it “Sterling Bronson, Space Engineer.”
Why? First, it was an inside joke about the radio station’s real chief engineer. Second, we figured if we called it anything with “Star Trek” in it, we’d probably get sued. Looking back “Star Trek, Oh God Not Another Generation!” would have been cool. The episodes recounted the adventures of the merry band of miscreants who flew a United Federation Organization Star Ship, the UFO Sloth.
Its crew consisted of:
Captain James P. Clerk,
Science Officer Mr. Spook,
Chief Engineer Sterling “Scotty” Bronson,
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Femur,
Communications Officer Lt. O’Hara
Helm Officers Ensign Tolstoy & Lt. Guru
Nurse Temple.
They were not the sharpest pencils in the Star Fleet box.
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Hell, they spent the first 6 episodes just trying to get out of the transporter room and beam down to a planet. Marilyn and her friend wrote the first dozen episodes.
Our listeners really liked them. After a while a young aspiring writer who worked at the radio station began writing longer, more complex episodes. One story is was a humorous send up of “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.” The young writer went on to become a successful science fiction and fantasy writer. His name is Simon Hawke.
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He wrote one of my all-time favorite book series called “Time Wars,” available on Amazon.
A few years later I wrote and produced a full length one hour episode of the series. It was called “Sterling Bronson, Space Engineer.” Original, right? It’s online and you can hear it here.
If I can ever find the tapes of the original series Marilyn wrote, I will put them online too. They are in my basement somewhere. I found them once. Damn it, I’ll find them again.
Years and years ago, I wrote the beginning of a Sterling Bronson episode that I never finished. I found the script a while back. It was printed on old dot-matrix computer track paper.
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(Yeah, it’s that old). I’ve always regretted having not having finished it. What cracked me up is that it’s based on the same point that Marilyn’s blog made. That being how Spock has an annoying habit of constantly counting things down.
All of our recent Star Trek blogs have made references to, our “So Called President”.
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In that light I’ve updated the episode. A smidgen. Here it is: the “Lost Sterling Bronson Episode”. It’s supposed to take place in real time. (“24” ripped me off!).
ENSIGN TOLSTOY: Captain! A Trumpulan ship has De-cloaked and is arming its weapons!
CAPTAIN CLERK: Trumpulans? Who the hell are they?
MR SPOOK: A recently discovered species sir. They are an off-shoot of the human race. Apparently, hundreds of years ago a small group of humans left Earth and colonized a remote planet. They worshiped some long-forgotten despot they referred to only as “The Donald”. They are known for their lack of attention span, their rejection of anything factual and their tradition of wearing dead animals on their heads. They are easily offended and will attack anything that does not worship them.
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CAPTAIN CLERK: Great. A bunch of narcissistic alien assholes. God, I miss the old days when we just had to deal with Klingons.
ENSIGN TOLSTOY: Sir, the Trumpulan ship is firing!
MR SPOOK: Shields are down to 90 percent. At this rate we will lose shields in 75.1243575789
CAPTAIN CLERK: ROUND IT OFF SPOOK!
MR SPOOK: A couple of minutes Jim.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Arm photon torpedoes! Lock all phasers on that ship! Ensign Guru, FIRE!
ENSIGN GURU: But sir, if we fire on them, then they will fire on us. And we will fire on them. We will just be creating very bad karma.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Damn it Guru, I know you’re from the planet Gandhi Five but I don’t have time for your left-wing peace and granola crap right now. If you don’t fire the phasers, we are all going to die!
MR SPOOK: In 69.268 seconds captain.
ENSIGN GURU: I’m sorry sir. It is against my beliefs to attack anyone. Even if they are narcissistic alien assholes.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Then why the hell are you the Weapons Officer?? Never mind! I’ll fire them myself.
LT O’HARA: Now old on sir. You can’t fire those phasers. You’re not in the union. You’re senior management.
CAPTAIN CLERK: WHAT? Are you serious?
LT O’HARA: Yes sir. Article 15, section 5 of the contract states …
CAPTAIN CLERK: OK. Fine. Whatever! Then you do it!
LT O’HARA: I Can’t sir.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Why not??
LT O’HARA: I’m in a different union.
CAPTAIN CLERK: I don’t believe this! There must be something I can do!
MR SPOOK: There is sir. But I suggest you hurry. Shields will be down in 51.7865 seconds.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Stop telling me the time and tell me what the hell I can do!
MR SPOOK: I believe you might be able to get something called “A Waiver”. It would allow you to fire the weapons systems on a provisional “one time” basis.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Great! Get me one of those!
MR SPOOK: I’m sorry sir. You would need to get that from the ship’s shop steward.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Shop steward! Who the hell is that?
MR SPOOK: Chief Engineer Bronson.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Attention Chief Engineer Bronson. This is the captain. I need to get a waiver to fire the phasers immediately! If I don’t we are all going to die!
MR SPOOK: In 52.7685
CAPTAIN CLERK: Shut up Spook! Can you do it Scotty?
SCOTTY: I can sir, but I’ll need more time! There’s a lot of paperwork involved. I get can get it for you in about a week.
CAPTAIN CLERK: We don’t have a week!
MR SPOOK: We have 41.3454
CAPTAIN CLERK: SHUT UP SPOOK! OK, listen Guru, how about this. We don’t shoot the Trumpulan ship. We just “wing it”.
LT GURU: Wing it?
CAPTAIN CLERK: Yeah! We “wing it”! Just like they did in those old holographic 20th century Westerns you love to watch. We just target the weapons systems. We “shoot the guns out of their hands”!
LT GURU: Hmmm. That sounds reasonable.
SFX: Phasers being fired.
MR SPOOK: Direct hit on all weapons systems sir. And I might add with 1.209384765 seconds to spare.
LT O’HARA: Incoming message from the Trumpulan ship sir.
CAPTAIN CLERK: Put it on speaker.
LT O’HARA: It’s an old-fashioned text message sir.
So this morning, when Bonnie went into her barkathon, I knew one more night of no sleep was going to knock me off the ledge into a deep, pit. I would be in a coma from which I’d never wake up. Garry actually got up and went to sleep in the living room and I got to sleep.
I’m really grateful. I also feel guilty, but I don’t feel like I’m falling apart. It’s the first time in weeks I haven’t felt on the edge of collapse. Most of my parts don’t hurt (much) either. Golly whizzaker!
But I also don’t have anything to say. I’m all spoke out. I’ve been chatting it up for weeks and months and years and I don’t seem — at least for now — to have any chat left. I’m sure it will come back, but right now, I’m SO happy to be sitting here, coffee on the left, Garry on the right, dogs soundly asleep on the sofa.
Why can’t they do that in the morning when I’m trying to sleep? Is this one of those Murphy Laws?
Have a great day! I’ll be fully ready to chat tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Hard to tell.
I lived in New York City for the first 40 years of my life and since then I’ve lived in the woods in a small town in Connecticut. So I have a good perspective on life in the city versus life in the country.
To be honest, there’s very little about city life I miss, except for being able to go to the theater without spending hours sitting in a car, stuck in traffic. However the one major perk of city life that makes me wax nostalgic, is the pleasure of living in an apartment building with doormen. Now, most people would probably not think of doormen as a big selling point for living in New York City. That’s because doormen are the best-kept secret among us long-time New Yorkers.
There’s a special relationship that often develops between friendly residents and chatty doormen. You get to know each other well and become like a family. These men know a lot about your life from the comings and goings in and out of your apartment. And people tend to talk to doormen, almost like they do to hairdressers. Mine knew my kids, my mom and my friends in the building, which created a strangely intimate relationship. They knew when we were doing work in our apartment, like when our upstairs neighbor’s bathroom leaked and our bathroom ceiling fell in. They followed every skirmish in our battle with the insurance companies, which lasted two years.
Photo book of doormen in NYC
Memoir of a doorman
Novel about doorman in NYC
I’ve experienced this relationship as a child, as an adult and as a parent of young children. Each phase is unique and gratifying. As a child, every doorman knew my name and often the names of my friends who visited frequently. I had severe school anxiety so waiting for the school bus in the lobby every morning could have been a tense time for me if I hadn’t had a doorman to distract me and keep me talking. Jimmy was my favorite for many years, a tall thin man with a missing tooth who made me look forward to the morning wait for the bus. If I was running late, he would make the bus wait for me and would call up to our apartment to tell me to hurry up.
The doormen also helped the kids in the co-op bend the rules so we could play in the street. They let us skate and ride bikes in front of the building, which was strictly forbidden. They were our lookouts, warning us to stop if someone on the co-op board was entering or leaving the building and might ‘report’ us.
When my kids were young, we lived in a different building, all of two blocks away from the one I grew up in. But the next generation of doormen, they were as wonderful to my kids as mine had been to me, and they too developed a strong bond.
Their doormen let them skate, skateboard and practice gymnastics down the long, narrow hallway leading from our elevator to the lobby. I could send the kids downstairs to play on their own and know they were safe and supervised. I had built-in babysitters.
They often let my kids spy on people in the elevators on the security cameras they kept behind the lobby desk. For some reason, that was a huge treat!
The long hallway in my apartment building
Once our doormen went above and beyond for my ten-year-old son, David. David had a pet python and there was a large ficus tree in the lobby. David thought the snake would have fun climbing around in the tree so the doormen let David sneak the snake into the lobby and, when no one was looking, put it in the tree. David and the snake nonchalantly hung out in the lobby for several hours, with people coming and going, until someone finally noticed something moving in the tree. That ended the tree climbing experiment.
The lobby decor has changed but the ficus tree is still there!
As an adult, there are a myriad of other reasons for enjoying the luxury of having a doorman. They accept deliveries for you when you aren’t home and help you with your bags.
Another convenience, beyond mere safety, is they let workmen into your apartment when you aren’t home so you don’t have to wait for them to show up or give them your keys.
\You also feel safe knowing the doormen monitors everyone who comes into the building. They won’t let anyone up to your apartment without your approval. They are your first line of defense against predators and nuisances.
In the country, I’m friendly with the local post office workers, farmer’s market cashiers and with the people at the nearby coffee shop and market. It’s not the same thing. It’s not as personal. These people may like you, but they don’t know your life or have your back like doormen did.
Doormen are a special breed of extended family that I treasured as a New Yorker and I miss as a country dweller.
To participate in the Ragtag Daily Prompt, create a Pingback to your post, or copy and paste the link to your post into the comments. And while you’re there, why not check out some of the other posts too!
Meanwhile, it’s the world series but I think they are going to cancel the American League Pennant because of the weather. A glitch in Garry’s baseball channel went on for hours and entailed a prolonged wait on hold for tech support. To learn, as I suspected, they were having problems. The baseball channel has a lot of problems, but if you want to watch baseball, gotta have it.
By DUTTON PEABODY
DUTTON PEABODY
