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Posts Tagged ‘not work’

Degrees of separation from fame or infamy

Posted in Personal, tagged , , , , , on June 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

My high school’s most famous graduate is either an actress featured in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” or a homicidal maniac.

I thought for sure it was the maniac, until I Googled the person I thought was going to be the runner-up, which led me to my high school’s Wikipedia page, which under the heading “Notable alumni” listed two: the person I Googled and the actress.

All of this was prompted by one of those questions that pop up on social media (which you should never answer, by the way, because it’s all just data mining, not harmless fun): Are you your high school’s most famous graduate?

Almost no one would be able to answer yes to that. But it made me think about what the answer for my high school might be.

I went to a small, Catholic high school in Phoenix, Arizona (I’m not Catholic, but the school was practically around the corner from my house, so I chose to go there). One of the school’s graduates who achieved a sort of fame actually came from my circle of friends and my graduating class, Robert Walesa, but he was more notorious than famous. A few years ago, after being stopped for drunken driving and sent home in a cab (not hauled to jail), he got mad, grabbed a rifle, drove his other car to a spot near the DWI checkpoint, shot a sheriff’s deputy from a distance and drove away. Eventually, they figured out who did it and came to his house. He met them at his front door and fatally shot himself on the spot.

He made national news, but it was of a routine sort of shocking news nowadays. I doubt many people remember him.

Better known, I hope, was Jeff Feagles, who graduated a year behind me. He was a football player and made it to the NFL, where he played 22 years as a punter and twice was named to the Pro Bowl.

It was while Googling Feagles that I learned that an actress named Catherine Hicks graduated from my high school in the late 1960s. Among other things, she is known for playing Dr. Gillian Taylor, the whale biologist in “Star Trek IV.” That’s certainly the role I recognize her from, but she had many more, including Marilyn Monroe in the 1980 TV movie “Marilyn: The Untold Story,” for which she received an Emmy Award nomination.

I think Hicks gets the edge over Feagles.

But I think the best-known person who graduated from my high school, disturbingly, might be another infamous member of my own graduating class, though thankfully not from my circle of friends. He did not seem to any of us like a homicidal maniac, but a little more than 16 years after graduation, Armand Chavez made national news and lingered in the headlines much longer than my former friend.

You might recognize him better by the alter ego he adopted after being expelled from medical school, Diazien Hossencofft. He claimed to be a thoracic surgeon and geneticist, and he sold bogus cancer treatments and anti-aging injections for thousands of dollars. And he probably would have gotten away with all of that for a long time had he not also convinced a girlfriend to murder his wife.

The murder story has been the subject of TV episodes of “Crime Stories,” “Court TV,” “American Justice,” “The Investigators,” “Snapped,” “Monstresses,” “Sins and Secrets,” “I’d Kill For You” and “Charmed to Death,” according to Wikipedia.

There is unlikely to be any other graduate more famous or infamous. The school closed in 1989 because of declining enrollment, so even the youngest graduates already are in their 50s. If any of us are going to make it big, we are running out of time.

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Everyone likes Mom better than me

Posted in Personal, tagged , , on February 4, 2022| Leave a Comment »

My mother has long been far more popular on the internet than I am despite her being dead.

I got used to that eventually, but now she’s also getting better junk mail, and that stings.

My mother had a massive heart attack in late 2008 that pushed her from a mild, early dementia that no one who knew her recognized to clearly obvious dementia. I had to place her in assisted living, and I had all of her mail redirected to my house. Naturally, that included junk mail.

She died in May 2012. (Just two days before the big corporate business transaction that I predicted, correctly, would eventually cost me my job – but that’s a story for another day.)

After she died, I started sorting through a box of her things that I had put aside. She had been a newspaper features writer in her youth before I came along, and again from middle age to her retirement, and some of the writing she was most proud of was in the box.

I wrote about a few of the things she wrote and posted them on my personal blog. That’s when her internet following began.

One post reproduced a column she wrote about making Buckeye Balls, a type of peanut butter candy that is popular with fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes because the candy ends up looking like an Ohio buckeye nut. That post has been, by far, the most popular post on my blog, seen by thousands of people. A week does not go by without it getting multiple views. Around the time of the Ohio State-Michigan game and the Christmas holidays, it can get dozens of views per day.

I’ve had people (yes, plural) who were writing books about candy contact me about that post.

Like my mother’s internet traffic, her junk mail also has persisted. Each of the two times I have moved since she died, the junk mail followed, even the ones misaddressed to a man named “Lucas Tabor” (a transposition of her married last name and her maiden name).

I know for a fact that my mother has not donated to the ASPCA since at least 2008, but the group still spends postage to solicit money from her.

The mail has become a testament to how much paper our society wastes.

Since moving to High Point, I have gotten a few pieces of mail addressed to either Mom or Mr. Tabor inviting her/him to come see a local retirement home, and one of those came just this past week, but it stood out in one critical detail:

It offered wine and Girl Scout cookies to those who would visit.

My first reaction was that my mother would have been sorely tempted to make that visit.

My second reaction was to wonder why no one ever offers me wine and cookies.

I’m nowhere near needing to find a retirement home, but why isn’t anyone else making that pairing to lure foot traffic? Or if anyone else is, why am I not in the demographic to get that offer?

If my mother is going to get all the internet readers, the least I deserve is some free Thin Mints and cabernet.

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Admire the commitment to the bit

Posted in Personal, tagged , on December 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »

In comedy, there’s often a “straight man” – one person who is sane and sober and “normal” while someone else is delivering the jokes or being a clown.

The straight man makes the scene funnier, but if the straight man is the only person on-screen, nothing’s funny.

Which is why I once risked my own digestive safety and well-being for the sake of a short food video.

It was more than a dozen years ago, but the friend I made it with recently dusted off the video in a new post on Facebook.

Two important things about this friend, whose name is Lee:

1. Ordinarily, anyone who is with Lee is the straight man, the Abbott to his Costello, the Ice Cube to his Kevin Hart. Life is a rich tapestry of humor to him, and he is constantly cracking jokes. Visiting a friend’s ailing mother in the hospital, he tells her, “You have more tubes coming out of you than a radiator.” Someone on Facebook posts something like, “Name something you can say both at a birthday party and during sex,” and he answers, “Howdy howdy howdy, I’m a cowboy.”

2. His mouth is made of asbestos. Hot peppers mean nothing to him. He will eat anything and like it. Do not challenge him to a pepper-eating contest. At best, it will end in an agonizing draw.

This is where the video comes in.

More than 12 years ago, Lee and I both were living in Richmond, Virginia, where he was the features editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. One day in a staff meeting, he told everyone that a chicken wing restaurant in Richmond had what he considered to be the hottest wings in the world. They were named Suicide Wings.

The paper’s executive editor decided that if the wings were really that hot, it might be funny if the paper shot a video of Lee and someone else eating the wings.

Lee told me he had put out the word to the entire newsroom that he needed someone to go with him. I had an instant clairvoyant vision: No one would volunteer.

This would be a huge problem. A video of Lee eating the hottest wings on the planet, without the contrast of someone else also eating them, would look like a man eating a plate of plain fried chicken.

I told Lee that if no one else volunteered, I would go.

My vision came true. No one volunteered. I had to go.

Understand, I like spicy food, even to the point that my eyes water and I turn red (redder than usual, that is). But I’m no “Man vs. Food” fanatic about it. If you label the food anything like “Suicide Wings” or “Stupid Wings” or something with the word “death” in it, or you require me to sign a release of liability, you can generally count me out.

But there I was with Lee and a videographer, walking into Planet Wings one sunny day, resigned, head up, trying to sound cheerful about my impending gastric doom.

It went pretty much the way I envisioned. From the first bite, I was in agony. Maybe they were the hottest wings in the world, maybe they weren’t. But they were the hottest I had ever had.

Next to me, Lee chomped quietly away on his wings.

I gasped, exhaled sharply, turned red, then purple, and Lee looked over at me, then back at the camera and rolled his eyes. 

For perhaps the first time in his life, Lee was the straight man.

I called it quits after just three wings. Lee ate all of his wings plus one of mine and took the rest of mine home in a box.

The video is pure gold. I may never take part in a greater comedy bit in my life.

The editing was a bit misleading. I did not get up in the middle of eating and get a large soda refill. That came after. Also, the videographer put text on the screen at the end saying I ate only two wings. But both of those edits make the video funnier, so … whatever.

Years later, after we both had moved on to other cities and other jobs, Lee dared me to show the video to my new employees. Too late, I told him – I had already showed it to them because it was too hilarious not to share.

I don’t mind being laughed at – at least not in that context. All I want is acknowledgement of my commitment to the bit. I sacrificed the lining of my mouth and throat, and the entire contents of my tear ducts, for the sake of making people laugh.

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Shatner oldly goes, but is he first?

Posted in In the news, tagged , , on October 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Depending on your definition, William Shatner almost certainly is not the oldest person ever to go into space.

As an aside, count me among those people who wish that billionaires could find something more constructive to do with fortunes so vast they literally could not spend all of their money if they tried. In the early 20th century, our nation’s superrich men competed to see who could erect the tallest phallic object in New York City as untold millions around the world starved and died of disease, and today they launch phallic objects into space amid a global pandemic.

However, like millions of other lifelong “Star Trek” fans, I got a small kick from the sight of Shatner in his Blue Origins jacket – which had stitched on his right chest “W. SHATNER” and under it “AKA CAPT. JAMES T. KIRK” – gazing about the space capsule in open-eyed wonder and, back on Earth, gushing emotionally about the experience.

And at 90 years old, Shatner certainly is older than any astronaut, cosmonaut or wealthy space tourist Earth’s various government space agencies or billionaires have sent into space.

It’s just a little arrogant to assume no older person, anywhere, ever went into space.

My quibble here is with the definition of “person.”

Many who remember “Star Trek” probably also remember astronomer and exobiologist Carl Sagan on his show “Cosmos” discussing the odds of life developing elsewhere in the universe, particularly intelligent life reaching a technologically advanced stage. (If you don’t remember or never saw it, you can find it online at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x271be)

To summarize, even at the time that was recorded in 1980, astronomers estimated there could be 400 billion stars just in the Milky Way, and Sagan conservatively estimated that perhaps one-quarter had planets, most of those having more than one planet. If conditions for life are rare or the odds of intelligent life are low, there could be just a handful of civilizations in the entire galaxy, or even none other than ours – but if the chances are better, there could be thousands or millions.

And there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

If we met intelligent extraterrestrials, and instead of trying to kill us they treated us as peers, would we not begin to refer to them as a people? Or any one of them a person?

And what if some of them have longer life spans than we do?

It’s conceivable that there are or have been dozens of planets where intelligent life developed and advanced technologically to the point of at least limited space exploration, and that at least one of them sent someone into space who has lived longer than Shatner.

So all we can accurately say is that Shatner is the oldest human to travel into space – that we know of.

After all, there’s also the whole topic of humans secretly abducted by aliens …

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The Thinker

Posted in Personal, tagged , on August 3, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I have a contemplative chipmunk.

Or rather, living near my house there is either a chipmunk or a family of them prone to striking a contemplative pose and holding it for an inordinate amount of time.

When my wife and I first moved to High Point, in the backyard we found a pretty chunk of gray-and-white-striped granite roughly the size of a human head. My wife moved it to a corner of the back deck. The next morning, she looked out to find a chipmunk perched on top of the rock simply staring out at the yard.

Every morning, the chipmunk returned. And each time, it remained on that perch, not moving, for a long while.

When the weather turned cold, it disappeared, but in the spring it came back — or it and others came back. Sometimes the chipmunk on the rock looks a little smaller than usual. Maybe there is a young chipmunk mimicking a parent’s perching.

Whether there is one or there are more, whether it’s learned or just in the nature of chipmunks, the behavior is the same.

The critter gets up on the rock and just looks across the yard — not unlike the way I sometimes sit in a chair on the deck and look out across the yard, silently staring as my mind wanders. Sometimes I think about yard projects I want to get to, some short-term, some for next summer, or the next. Sometimes I simply wonder at nature, looking up into the trees, the setting sun still lighting the highest leaves stirring in the breeze as the darkness starts to deepen down below. Sometimes I worry about money or work or myriad choices I’ll never be able to undo even if I discovered during my rumination an alternative I would have preferred. Sometimes I just stew.

Sometimes I look at that rock and wonder what the chipmunk thinks as it looks across the yard.

Is it planning lunch?

Thinking about digging a new extension for its burrow?

Wondering whether Mrs. Chipmunk will be feeling frisky later?

Worrying about the neighbor’s cat?

Maybe it’s just absorbing a moment’s peace.

Or perhaps it is just trying to figure out what the big, white-headed beast keeps staring at across the yard, and why it won’t just stay inside its brick cave and leave the deck to its rightful owner.

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No thanks needed for dodging disaster

Posted in Personal, tagged on February 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Let me first say that if offered a reward or prize for saving High Point from icy catastrophe in Thursday’s winter storm, I will decline it.

I am gratified that my actions may have prevented widespread damage and electricity disruption, along with the human misery that would accompany that, but it would be wrong to seek or accept any reward.

No, my actions were prompted by no heroic intent but instead by my desire to avoid looking like an idiot for the second time in less than a week. Saving the city was a happy byproduct.

When the previous ice storm hit last weekend, the power in our neighborhood went out around 8:30 a.m. My initial thought was that my wife and I could stay with my stepmother because she has gas logs, so her house would stay warm even though her power was out too.

She told us, “Come on over.”

But as we began to gather our things, she texted a reminder: Her house gets its water from a well, so no power means no pump and no water. If we came, we would have to bring containers of water to flush the toilets.

This altered the calculus.

Maybe it would be better to just add layers of clothing and stay in the growing cold.

Then I slapped my forehead. Though we had lived in the house since June, somehow I had forgotten an element of the room.

“We have a fireplace,” I said. “Let’s just build a fire.”

The previous owners had left some firewood beside the house. Happily enough, they were under cover and were dry, so I set about building a fire.

As the flames gradually grew, I saw a few curls of smoke rolling up past the mantle into the living room, but once the fire was full and hot, everything appeared to go up the chimney.

We set up a table near the fire to play Scrabble while waiting for the power to come back on.

Gradually I noticed the room growing a bit hazy. Some smoke continued drifting into the room.

After a couple of hours, the amount of smoke started to worry me. I set up a ladder by the smoke detector.

I grabbed a towel, opened the front door and started waving smoke out the door.

After a minute I thought it looked like smoke was rolling thickly off the porch. Turning back toward the fireplace, I saw smoke pouring into the living room toward the front door. I had made things worse.

The hallway smoke alarm went off, and then the alarm’s control panel in the kitchen started screeching.

I scrambled up the ladder and removed the smoke detector from the ceiling to run outside with it as my phone rang – the alarm company checking to see what was happening. I grabbed the screeching control panel as I answered the phone and went out the door.

“No,” I said, “the power went out and we built a fire in the fireplace, and we have some smoke in the house.”

Back inside, I looked around the thick haze and felt panic.

Had I ruined the house? Would we have to hire a disaster mitigation company?

We decided we would just have to let the fire die on its own.

So we sat in the smoke and kept playing Scrabble. I tried to focus on the board. Any glance around renewed my panic.

Gradually, the air cleared. The next day, we cleaned out the fireplace, and the house no longer smelled of smoke.

A couple days later, the forecast of another ice storm loomed, but this one was supposed to be much worse – up to a half inch of ice. Maybe even more than that. Trees would buckle everywhere.

I didn’t want a repeat performance of my errors.

Given the age of our house, our fireplace probably originally burned coal, which I once was told meant you could burn a Duraflame log in it but not wood. When I went to the store to find one, it seemed many other people had a similar idea. But I tried other stores and eventually found a box of logs. If the neighborhood was without power for a couple of days, we still would be able to keep warm.

I changed the order of the cars in the driveway so the four-wheel-drive vehicle was in the back.

And Thursday morning I lit a burner on the gas stove (the ignition on the stove is electric, so you can’t light it after the power is out) and kept it on low. Now if the power failed we could heat soup.

We were as ready as we could possibly be for a catastrophic ice storm.

Naturally, nothing much happened. Some ice, but no catastrophe, and it melted by mid-afternoon.

As long as I hold on to the box of logs, I expect the city will make it through the rest of this winter with no significant ice-related outages.

You’re welcome.

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Labor unrest a crippling situation

Posted in Personal, tagged on June 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Life advice: At some point as you get older, you should not try to lift a lawnmower by yourself.

Apparently I passed that point sometime in the past year.

When I needed to take the mower in for service last summer, I hoisted it solo into the back of my SUV without any trouble.

But last weekend, I hoisted the mower solo to drive it from Lenoir to mow the incipient meadow in the front yard of the house my wife and I bought in High Point two weeks ago.

This time, there was some trouble.

As I lifted the mower I felt a muscle in my back complain. I don’t speak fluent muscle, but the complaint seemed something along the lines of, “I’m too old for this crap and I’m done.”

I got the mower into the SUV, but the rest of the packing I had to do without the help of that muscle.

I coughed, and the muscle threatened me.

Almost every step I took, the muscle grumbled.

And the muscle continued grumbling during the nearly two-hour drive to High Point.

As the day turned to evening, the muscle stiffened its resolve, meaning it not only wouldn’t help me move around the house but it fought me. I walked like the old people in the Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched in my childhood – bent over, holding one hand on my back. If I’d had a cane or walking stick, it would have been helpful.

Finally, I went to bed and was able to sleep – for a while. But the muscle’s constant complaints woke me.

And because our house in Lenoir has not yet sold, we barely have any furniture, and the muscle refused to help me rise from the mattress on the floor. Once I rose, I could not bend over to pick up my socks.

It was a work stoppage. A boycott.

Somehow I got myself showered and dressed for work.

The muscle grew more cooperative as the day went, ceasing the boycott, and we are back on speaking terms again.

But I’m worried.

For now, we are splitting our time between High Point and Lenoir. The grass in both places refuses my request to temporarily stop growing. There may be more mower transport yet to be done. I won’t try to lift it on my own again, but what if the muscle balks anyway? What if there’s another boycott?

Looking ahead, there’s a larger worry. I’m not getting any younger, and what if the muscle has sympathizers? Next time more than one muscle might boycott.

My entire body might unionize and demand better working conditions – i.e., no more working conditions.

That would be unacceptable. I might have to hire some union-busting goons. Things could get ugly. There might be violence. I’d be caught in the middle, literally. Any blood that would be spilled would be mine.

Everyone tells you it sucks getting old.

No one says you will find yourself quietly negotiating a careful labor agreement with your own muscles just to keep walking upright.

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Technology amps up anxiety of moving

Posted in Personal, tagged on May 30, 2020| 1 Comment »

Some people change residences frequently, not only renters but home buyers. A woman once told my mother she never lives in a house longer than three years “because then you have to clean it.”

Then there’s my wife, Jane, who hates moving. Early in our marriage she declared that the next people who moved her would be a local funeral home.

We are now in the middle of buying and selling a house for the third time in the 21 years we have been married.

When we moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 2001, the only thing about the house-hunting process that had changed since I first bought a house as a bachelor four years earlier was the advent of online listings.

When we moved to Lenoir in 2013, the one new wrinkle was the ability to digitally “sign” all the sales documents needed in Virginia while we were on a computer in Lenoir.

But now?

The process of buying and selling a house — each separately but especially both together — has been transformed into a nightmare of text messages, emails and automated phone calls, all of which seem to be added onto instead of replacing the regular calls and emails that previously went between a buyer/seller and the real estate agent.

The day our house went on the market, my phone “blew up.” I had heard other people use that phrase, but I had no firsthand experience. My phone had never done it before. But, boy howdy, now I have experience.

Each time someone wanted to schedule a showing, I received both a text and an email requesting confirmation.

If no one confirmed it quickly, I received a phone call asking about it.

Once the showing was confirmed, I received both a text and an email showing it had been confirmed.

When an agent rescheduled, the entire cycle repeated. If someone canceled, there was another round of texts and emails.

After each showing, we received texts and emails showing the “feedback” provided by the agent for the person who saw the house, which usually was an email mostly full of questions that had not been answered.

On the house-buying end, we both receive automated emails requesting various documents, and if a couple of days pass we get reminders that we have not provided particular documents.

Our agent uses a website that tracks all the tasks that must be completed by either her or us, and each time she writes in that a task has been completed we get emails telling us that she has updated the timeline. The timeline is a wonderful tool, and I applaud it, but it’s yet another series of notifications that trigger my phone to buzz or bong or hum.

All of this piles stress on top of the ordinary stresses of moving plus the added anxiety of a worldwide pandemic.

If Jane and I live to complete the move to High Point, I feel certain she will not declare this time that the next people who move her will be a funeral home.

Mine will be the body they will carry out because she will kill me if I ever want to move again.

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The looming question: What now?

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on May 8, 2020| 3 Comments »

With Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order at least somewhat eased as of Friday evening, I know what many of you in North Carolina, and those in other states similarly starting to “reopen,” are thinking: What are we supposed to do now?

The answer can be found within one of the lines of criticism directed at Cooper by his opponent in this fall’s election, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. After Cooper announced the limited loosening of restrictions on businesses, Forest issued a statement that said in part, “He does not believe that North Carolinians have enough self-control, restraint, or common sense to act responsibly in a world with COVID-19.”

No matter how you plan to vote this fall, if you want to know what you should do now with the limited freedom of movement that fits under Cooper’s Phase One guidelines, look to Forest’s statement: Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Upon reading that, those of you who interact with the general public regularly probably feel a sense of impending doom.

A different quote applies here. In the 1997 movie “Men In Black,” about the secret government agency that deals with extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, actor Will Smith’s character asks why officials don’t trust the public with the truth because “people are smart.”

Tommy Lee Jones’ character replies, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

That may be too cynical and overly broad, but if there were not a nugget of truth to it then no one would ever be crushed under a stampede of Walmart shoppers on Black Friday, political advertising would contain no falsehoods, and scammers would have to apply for welfare.

Ever since the stay-at-home order and social-distancing guidelines first were issued, there have been complaints about some businesses and people who were not complying. And they are correct, it’s not hard to find people ignoring all social distancing guidelines.

The number of positive tests for coronavirus continues to rise in part because some people do not take the threat or precautions seriously. Even if the governor had left his orders unchanged, those people’s behavior would not be affected — just the way that anti-littering laws don’t stop some people from throwing their McDonald’s wrappers and leftover fries out the window in front of you on the highway.

The best thing you can always do is be the best kind of person you know how to be, the kind of person your parents would be proud to see on television.

That doesn’t mean you have to wear a hazmat suit to the gas station.

It means having the sense to know that just because you feel fine doesn’t mean you haven’t been infected, so if you’re going someplace where you’ll probably be pretty close to people it would be a good idea to wear a mask of some kind to help reduce the risk to other people as well as their risk to you.

It means having the sense of history to realize that the last pandemic this extensive, the Spanish flu, lasted two years, not two months, so we will have to adapt our behavior for the long term, not revert to our old habits and go “back to normal.”

There’s another quote that applies. In “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Taylor scolds someone who is not displaying common sense, “Act like you got some smart.”

Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Or you can boil that down to something even simpler and easier to remember, something that I tell myself all the time — but don’t often enough heed — especially when it comes to interactions with other people:

Don’t be stupid.

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Coronavirus restores youthful perspective on time

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , on April 24, 2020| 11 Comments »

At long last, I found how to make time slow down.

But like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, I don’t know what to do with myself. Who needs all this slow-moving time? Take it back. You can have it.

Now I’m ready for time to speed back up again.

We all notice by our mid-30s that as we get older time accelerates. Each year goes by more quickly than the last.

By the time I turned 50, it seemed I barely was able to grow sick of mowing the lawn in the summer heat before frost hit, the leaves turned and I had to wear heavy coats again. Winters once seemed like a long, tedious parade of putting on and taking off heavy coats, but in recent years even the coldest weather has become almost tolerably brief because spring arrives so quickly. Almost. But spring departs barely after arriving, like a coworker who hates to be left out of a party but doesn’t like socializing.

Facebook serves up “memories” that feel recent but were posted a dozen years ago by a version of me that had mostly brown hair, which makes me think about how close I am to retirement age. Can the next dozen or so years really go even more quickly than the past dozen? It seems like a long way off, but back when I was 42, 54 seemed a long way off.

I thought it would go on like that endlessly, each year adding acceleration on top of the previous year’s speed like an ion engine building momentum in space until eventually I would whoosh effortlessly into the void, barely noticing as death arrives and passes quickly behind me.

But then came the coronavirus, and instead of speeding into a void it feels more like I have careened into a giant, moist sponge cake with thick, creamy icing. I’m embedded in it and can’t extract myself.

Last weekend on the radio a news reporter said it was the beginning of the third weekend since Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order took effect.

“What?!” I said. “That can’t be right.”

Two weeks? We had been cooped up mostly at home and locked out of many of our favorite businesses for a lot longer than that … hadn’t we? I checked the calendar.

Nope.

This is now the fourth weekend, not even 28 days yet.

But it feels like the fourth month.

Time has slowed to a crawl. My sense of the passage of time is now more like it was when I was 6. Inside my head, I’m whining, “But I haven’t been able to go out just to have a beer in FOREVEEEEEEERRRRRRR.”

I’ve seen memes on social media saying every day is like the movie “Groundhog Day.” We wake up and everything is the same, no matter what we do, because our options are now so limited.

I understand the frustrations of those protesting the stay-at-home restrictions.

But I also understand the limitations of the health care system to deal with a sudden influx of severely ill patients. There simply isn’t much room. Ask around. Fewer people than would fit in your living room would be a major crisis.

So when my inner 6-year-old whimpers, “How much longer is this going to taaaaaaaaaake?” my inner adult answers, “It takes how long it takes, now behave or I’ll pull this car over and GIVE you something to cry about!”

I’ll just have to take a beer out of the refrigerator, go sit in a corner upstairs, sulk and stare out the window, thinking about all the things I can’t do.

It feels like I’m grounded. We’re all grounded. It feels like it will never end.

My inner adult eyes the sulking 6-year-old in the rear view mirror.

“I know it feels like a long time,” the adult says. “I promise you we’ll go out when it’s over. Whatever you want.”

The 6-year-old rolls his eyes and half-heartedly answers, “Oh, OK.”

But to him the road ahead looks like a Kansas highway. It stretches on and on toward a distant vanishing point on the horizon.

My inner adult knows we are in a slow-motion race on that road. The prize is a healthy community, and it doesn’t go to the ones who get to the end first but to the ones who get the farthest without running anyone off the road. It’s harder than it sounds.

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