If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.
A cool, misty morning out there.
Apparently, our slumlord neighbor's continuing effort to start a penicillin farm on the roof continues apace. Such a shame. That house was someone's pride and joy once. Now just look at it.
Sitting here typing while wearing a heart monitor, an effort to capture these skips that have plagued me lately and left me needing to sit down for a moment when they arrive more-or-less out of nowhere. The cardiologist didn't seem particularly worried, and we spent most of our time together talking about jets for some reason. His LPN was taller than me, a solid Southern Tier type whose hair wasn't dyed and who was all business without being a jerk about it. I guess that comes with the profession. She shaved a groove between my boobs and stuck this thing that looks like a flash drive smack in the middle. Then she gave me a little notecard to record any "episodes", which left me wondering why in the hell I needed this monitor if I was just going to write down every ka-chug.
But I'll wear this for the next week, my little birth control device that keeps P some distance away as a matter of aesthetics and for the practical reason that she doesn't want to squash it.
I'm also not allowed to bathe that spot for the next seven days, which means avoiding my own boob sweat has become a priority. No running.
So in lieu of an amorous diversion, last night P and I laid in bed and looked at boats. My impulsive side was stirred by the news that the boat Rodney Dangerfield drove so recklessly in Caddyshack is now for sale.
Yessir, for a mere $350,000.00 you or I could be the owners of the Seafood, complete with Caddyshack memorabilia on the walls (don't they have another word for "wall" on a ship? "Bulkhead", maybe?) and a fighting chair out back for that big marlin battle.
But although I like to picture Peg and me out riding around on our sixty-footer, surrounded by family and maybe a couple friends, we might as well face the fact that it just isn't going to happen. We're both way too busy, even in this slowing season of life. And it has a 1500 gallon fuel tank, which suggests an expense with which we'd struggle. And this thumb drive taped to my chest reminds me that I'm one or two missed heartbeats from leaving Peg with a pile of junk to sell off even without a forty-year-old yacht.
So I guess we'll pass, with a sigh. I'd love to step onto a boat that whisks me back to 1980, when this vessel was brand new, but this time with Peg there. Could you imagine the life we might've had? Me either. And I really like all our kids, so I reckon things happened when they should have.
Pondering this morning the psychological insight gleaned out on the golf course last week. I tend to ruin every viscerally pleasurable experience by overthinking it, examining and analyzing to the point that I'm no damned good at anything that requires a little flow and surrender into the moment, achieving an anhedonia that can fairly be attributed to thinking too hard. My frontal lobe has pretty much won the moment.
And this has impacted my golf game, as I think instead of swing. It gets much, much worse if there are stimuli flowing from my office through the cellphone and into my already overstimulated brain. Then as balls go sideways or are passed in the air by the tufts of sod I've launched behind them, my amygdala takes over and I digress into rage golf.
But last week as I was well on my way to rage golf after three holes, having received through my iPhone an outrageous filing in a case that has been a sharp emotional irritant, I received a phone call in another case from an old lawyer I really like. He's spending his summer on Cape Cod, and called to discuss a new piece of evidence in a case we're cobbling together involving tax arcana. I picked up the phone thinking he was someone else, and even when I mentioned Peg and I were on the golf course he still wanted to talk.
So for the next 28 minutes, I carried him into the tee box for my drives, into the fringe for a chip shot, onto the greens for a tricky putt. And I've probably never golfed better in my life.
What happened? My theory, being something of an expert given my history degree and one hour of CME on the neuroscience of negotiation, is that having Malcolm chatting with me while I set up and swung the club took my frontal lobe out of the equation, sent it off to go solve a problem while the somatosensory part of my being frolicked in the absence of a cruel master. The facet of my being that fails constantly because it's become subject to the tyranny of the centers of reasoning (and speech, I guess) experienced a moment of freedom to be what we all are under these layers of evolutionary neural development.
So that's perhaps given rise to a goal, now that I've observed the results: figure out how to compartmentalize the lawyer brain, to give it absolute control when that's necessary but shove it back into its cell when thinking is counterproductive, which is actually quite often. Reason should be a servant, not a master. It's only part of what makes us human. Nobody ever wanted to get jiggy with Mr. Spock, and Learned Hand never had what it took to compete on the PGA Tour.
How in the hell did I ever learn to land an airplane, one of the most visceral experiences I've known and felt, with this reasoning center on overdrive all the time? Probably best that I was twenty at the time. Lawyer me probably would have flown off the end of the runway, analyzing right up to impact.
That constant habit of thinking and observing thing shows up often, but not necessarily in a bad way, in the evenings when P and I are out on the veranda, her sipping a Diet Coke while I engage in "abstinence" by just having one cocktail. Peg's one of the smartest folks I've ever met, in ways that are so very different yet complementary to my strengths, such as they are. It makes for truly wonderful, free flowing conversations. No wonder our TV is rarely on, and neither of us knows how to access the cable channels after over a year here.
Last night's topic was football; specifically, why are folks so obsessed with the game lately? P's never been much of a fan, so the change over time is less obvious to her. But to me, the increasing intensity in how folks feel about their team feels more apparent. Football team banners abound around this town, around PC, around Perry. A school mascot may provide one's social media avatar. The schools in Buffalo dismissed early on Monday because the Bills were playing a televised night game in Orchard Park, and the kiddies needed to make their tailgate parties before the Pilsner and chili gave out.
It's all crazy. And it all seems to give meaning to peoples' lives, to comprise an alternative reality to the depressing downward trudge of the typical American existence in 2022. Struggling to pay a big medical bill because your employer-provided insurance stinks? Stripped of your individual worth at work, and forced to wear a corporate polo with a plastic name tag? Worried your country is sliding into civil war?
Relax. Go Bills. Or go Dawgs. Or how about a "Two Bits"? (some will know that routine).
My theory is that folks are more enthralled with football, despite its objective brutality, exploitation of formerly poor black men, fake jingoism before the games, and the utter banality and vapidity of the pageant that has replaced in our lives the majesty of a high church eucharist, because their lives grow more tenuous and miserable by the day. Unhappy, insecure people care deeply about football, about their team.
In my own life, I've had moments of utter madness over football. As a small child I was a Notre Dame fan, and one night in 1971 on national television the Fighting Irish were decimated in Baton Rouge by Tommy Casanova and a very good LSU team. I was disconsolate, unable to accept such an unjust and horrible outcome. My father stood over me taunting his seven-year-old son, on behalf of the entire South that taught those Yankee Mackerel Snappers a lesson, and suggesting (well, "suggesting" makes it sound like he spoke in euphemisms, which he certainly didn't and doesn't) that I was a p***y for reacting as I did that night, a second grader.
Maybe life with Dad provided the misery that fueled my outburst. This game mattered greatly, because my guys were in a proxy battle against the tyrant of Lee Ann Drive.
Later, decades later, I tossed an empty wine bottle at the television screen when Texas scored on a fourth and goal from the twelve to defeat USC in the 2006 national championship game. That was one of the low ebbs of my life as I look back on it, piled high with losing battles in the courtroom, spending too much time sitting around alone when I was home. Of course I needed the Trojans to bring some sunshine that evening in the Rose Bowl, and of course I had trouble accepting that the Longhorns prevailing that night wasn't a personal setback.
But you know what? I can watch a football game now mostly just for the show, the primary pleasure being that seeing the colors and the spaces where they play tickles whitewashed memories of earlier days. It gives me a chance to cook, and P a chance to entertain on occasion.
I'm too happy to care. Most folks can't say that, from what I've seen.
And the more misery, the more tribal affinity, the more replica jerseys sold and television ads purchased to sell us a truck or a beer. So there's money in all this unhappiness, a sure indicator it's not going to get better.
In a few minutes I have my third conference call in a case I haven't even accepted yet, making it a potential freebie. What in the hell is there to talk about? I don't calendar these phone conferences, and so have no idea half the time what we're there to discuss. And this one's by Zoom, so I'll need to pull myself together and find a shirt that covers this heart monitor. No use raising questions about my ability to keep up the fight.
$350,000 buys a lot of private charter boat rides and comes with none of the headaches or hassles of owning it. :)