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Archive for December, 2018

Christmas comes faster every year

Posted in Personal, tagged on December 30, 2018| Leave a Comment »

One good thing about the period after Christmas is that you don’t have to hear “Are you ready for Christmas?” all the time.

I have always struggled not to answer that question honestly.

The honest answer would be, “No, not even close. I’d be happy to fall into a coma until after New Year’s.”

But it’s a rhetorical question to initiate small talk. You’re supposed to either enthusiastically say yes or talk about how much there is left to do.

It’s like the question “How are you?” Even if you aren’t doing well, the correct answer is “Fine,” or a variation. Years ago a police captain I knew always answered that question with “If I was doing any better I couldn’t stand myself.”

The wrong answer is anything like “I don’t know, I must have eaten something last night that disagreed with me because I can’t stop running to the bathroom, and I’m gassy too. You might want to stand back.”

In some ways the question reminds me of one my father used to ask me after milestone birthdays: “Do you feel any different?”

I never felt any different. 20 felt just like 19, 30 felt just like 29, and 40 felt just like 39. He died when I was 44, so he couldn’t ask me at 50.

My answer would have been different that time.

It is not so much that I “feel” different now, at 53. I “feel” inside the same as I did at 35. But I am keenly aware, and seemingly more so each year, of the growing gap between feeling 35 and being the age I am, which I am reminded of at every turn. A couple of days ago a woman asked me whether I am retired. I wasn’t dressed like I had money, so I can only assume I looked old enough to her to be retired.

It only added to a growing sense of mortality, enhanced by the way that time seems to move faster the older you get.

It’s like being on a treadmill that goes a little faster each year, but behind the treadmill, right behind you, is a wood chipper. If the treadmill gets too fast, it’s going to toss you backwards right in that wood chipper.

“Are you ready for Christmas?” carries with it a sense of how many years I’ve heard that question, how much more quickly I move from one Christmas to the next than I used to, and how many more years I might hear it.

They ask, “Are you ready for Christmas?”

But part of me hears, “Are you ready for the abyss?”

A little more than a week before Christmas someone asked me again. I hesitated, with the honest answer rolling around my head.

“I’d really like to skip Christmas,” I wanted to say. “There are so many expectations and so many obligations, and before you even know it the year will fly past and we’ll be doing it all again.”

Instead, I thought of an answer that contained the truth but was a polite and acceptable response:

“Is anyone ever really ready for Christmas?”

She laughed.

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2019’s coming news

Posted in Personal, tagged , , , on December 30, 2018| Leave a Comment »

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when an editor friend who makes an annual address to a civic group elsewhere in North Carolina asked me for predictions of news in the coming year, that I realized I am a modern Nostradamus.

Since I started contributing, I have an accuracy rate of 100 percent. Or, in case you think “accuracy” should mean “things that came true,” that may be zero percent.

But some research reveals that still leaves me in the range of Nostradamus. (Full disclosure: no actual research was done.)

Lucky you!

So, following are my predictions for 2019. Take note, and plan accordingly:

Early in the year, Special Counsel Robert Mueller issues the formal report of his investigation, though it leaves many unanswered questions that set the world of political talk shows ablaze. Within hours, Mueller appears at a joint press conference with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and the presidents of Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN as they enthusiastically announce a five-year renewal of the hit reality series “Dystopia,” which all present then realize they forgot to announce the launch of in 2016.

A new biopharmaceutical foods company introduces bacon infused with pleasure-giving dopamines and neurotransmitters that simultaneously trigger “fear of missing out,” anxiety, wanderlust, nostalgia, jealousy and schadenfreude. Facebook stock collapses.

Responding to a continuing escalation in tariffs on products from Asian countries, a coalition of furniture companies establishes a floating factory complex operating from international waters that has the ability to navigate to avoid major storms. Shortly after beginning operations, however, it becomes mired in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” of floating plastic debris and is unable to escape 2019’s first typhoon, which sinks the entire complex.

Triggered by the sudden explosion of the bacon market, pork belly futures skyrocket, and industrial pig farms in eastern North Carolina become the new center of the state’s economy. Twenty-story office towers appear in Smithfield and Kinston.

Facebook use falls to near zero, and the company files for bankruptcy protection. Days later, a weeping, hysterical Mark Zuckerberg is arrested after undressing inside a Publix, wrapping himself in bacon and trying to climb into shoppers’ carts.

Faced with the possibility of a clean break from the European Union without a new agreement on trade and travel, voters in Great Britain overwhelmingly approve a new referendum that literally says only, “Oh nevermind.”

Elon Musk, the eccentric CEO of car-maker Tesla, announces a new software update for something that is euphemistically called “emissions testing mode,” a built-in practical joke that can make the car emit farting noises when a turn signal is on. The car owner can choose from six different tooting sounds, including “Short Shorts Ripper,” “Ludicrous Fart” and “Neurastink.” … Oh, wait, nevermind, that actually happened in December 2018. (Seriously, it really happened. You can Google it if you don’t believe me.)

Late in the year, the company that revolutionized bacon expands into artificial intelligence with a neurotransmitter-bacon-skinned sex robot. Civilization collapses.

Bacon-loving America soon resembles a scene from “The Walking Dead” as those left alive wish they were dead and attempt to hickory-smoke members of opposing tribes.

As the Christmas season nears, the survivors of the Baconpocalypse find hope for world peace as observant Jews and observant Muslims, who don’t eat bacon, finally settle their rancor to make common cause against the only remaining world power, a multinational army of vegetarians and vegans sweeping across the continents of Europe and Asia.

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Absolutely certain — and also wrong

Posted in Personal, tagged , , on December 15, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Rarely has anyone asked me a question that I felt more certain about while answering.

Several times in the first week of the month, someone asked me the same question, and each time I felt the confidence swell up like a warm balloon inside of me. How dare they even ask? The answer was so obvious that I all but openly scoffed at the questioner.

“Do you think we’ll get any snow?” a co-worker asked.

Pfft.

My eyes narrowed and the corners of my mouth rose into a slight, cynical grin. My back stiffened. I felt like a sage asked to impart wisdom upon the uneducated masses. I waited a moment, letting the pause settle to the ground between us, before answering in a tone as calm and placid as the surface of a lake on a windless day.

“No,” I said. “Or we might get snow, but there is no way – absolutely no way – we are getting anything like a foot of it.”

I cited the lower end of the forecast, which at the time was around 6 inches, and said I’d be happily surprised if we got that much.

That was all the wiggle room I left myself.

I could easily remember all the times forecasters predicted the possibility of calamity – whether hurricanes, floods or blizzards – that never materialized, and times when predictions of tiny weather events fell disastrously short of what happened, as with last month’s ice storm.

More than that, I remembered all the times I hoped for big snowstorms, only to be disappointed.

Those memories fueled my sense of certainty. Those forecasters. They weren’t going to get my hopes up this time.

Early in the week, the forecast shifted from day to day, and it further fueled my certainty.

The shifting more or less stopped by Thursday, but I was not deterred.

“Do you think we’ll get any snow?” a co-worker asked me on Friday.

My eyes rolled so far back in my head I could see my brain pan.

“No,” I said, trying not to sneer, “certainly not 10 to 16 inches.”

And I added that since the highs were going to be in the 40s in the days before any snow fell, the ground would be warm and it would melt pretty quickly. There was no sense wringing hands about it.

I intentionally avoided the grocery store. I would not be held hostage in long lines of hysterics loading up for Snowmageddon.

My lone concession to the forecast was to agree it would be prudent to send last Sunday’s paper to press earlier than usual Saturday evening, just in case.

I woke after midnight that night and looked outside to see a dusting of snow on the grass, and a steady amount of new snow falling. I retrieved my News-Topic from the front sidewalk, shaking the snow from it, and went back to bed.

Several hours later I woke and looked outside to see that something close to 6 inches had fallen and piled up in the trees, and it was still snowing steadily. I checked my phone’s weather app, and it said there was a 100 percent chance of snow until early afternoon.

It appeared that I might have been wrong.

As the morning went on and the snow grew deeper, I began to worry about the amount of food in the refrigerator.

Around noon, when there clearly was much more than a foot of snow on the back patio, I worried about the power going out.

When the snow finally stopped, I went outside with an 18-inch ruler and pushed it down into the snow on my car. It sank to the tip.

I was wrong. Man, oh man, was I wrong.

You may ask, did I learn a lesson about acting so haughty?

Based on experience, I can answer with nearly absolute certainty, and I will be succinct: No, I learned nothing. No way.

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