This morning, while in the bathroom, Captain OCD saw the outside cat on the windowsill. An everyday occurrence, but the otherworldly noises she was making were not. He opened the window to let her in, like he always does, and she bolted over his shoulder as soon as she could squeeze through the open window. He looked down to see a big raccoon on the ground hissing at the breakfast that narrowly escaped his claws. There go my hopes of her moving out to live with a nice raccoon family.
It’s often said that cursing is an indication of inarticulateness, that a person swears only because he suffers a paucity of vocabulary, a position I heartily disagree with. Often (well, sometimes) when I curse, I’ve put as much thought into that choice of word as any other choice of word and I’ve heard too many articulate and well-bred people curse quite effectively. My position is that using a particular category of word is not, in itself, sufficient evidence upon which to convict the speaker or writer of ignorance. I do agree, though, that complaining to your girlfriend that the little fuck shits her goddamn pants every fucking time she sees a big fucking dog, in front of the little girl, is grounds enough for immediate forced sterilization.
Stephen Fry, who is currently in Mexico filming a documentary, has come to the rescue of my thesis. I (and half the population of the Internet) follow him on Twitter because he is funny and brilliant, in both the intellectual sense of the word and the broader British slang sense of the word, and his frequent little tweets put a smile on my face throughout the day. That he is articulate and well-read cannot be denied, and yet he tweeted this:
Director just casually dropped a bombshell. I have to ride a mule tomorrow. A thousand boiling arses. Two hours up a mountain. Buttery fuck.
Perhaps that was funnier at 2:36 AM when I read it, or not as funny to someone who has heard that term before. I apparently don’t get out much, because I cannot recall ever seeing or hearing it. I can dream of few things more enjoyable than having a few drinks with Stephen Fry.
I love the creative ways language can be used. Like this message from Washington State Ferries:
Subject: Improvements to Fare Collection Policy
Eliminating checks and Canadian currency as forms of payment.
Separating the senior/disabled fare into two categories and offering new ReValue cards for senior or disabled customers.
Removing discounted single round-trip fares (senior, disabled, youth) from kiosks and the WSF Web site.
The first is certainly not an improvement for people who write checks, but at least we’ll no longer need to worry about all those Canadians trying jam up the American monetary system with their loonies and toonies.
The second must be an accounting move, unless those eligible for senior and disabled fares objected to being lumped together. There is no double discount for disabled seniors, so which ticket should disabled seniors ask for? It might be an interesting sociological experiment to camp out in a toll both and record how such customers self-identify. Or should they leave it up to the discretion of the ticket seller? No pressure there: I was once at Denny’s when the waitress started to automatically add the senior discount for a customer clearly in his seventies, so that he’d been eligible for the discount for the better part of a couple of decades was not a secret. He was not pleased: “No discount!”
The third is my favorite. When buying passenger tickets at home or at a kiosk, there were few regular-fare passengers because there was no one physically checking the ticket against the eligibility of the ticket holder for the fare class, hence many people buying a ticket at home bought a discounted senior, disabled, or youth ticket. Regular ferry commuters have gotten screwed so often for so long that traditional societal mores assume a sort of moral flexibility when it comes to cheating the system. Be left waiting on the dock for the next ferry more than an hour away one too many times because Vashon gets all the love in the form of loading priority and more ferries, and you start to think the system owes you. One would have thought this loophole would have been addressed in the brainstorming sessions.
In ferry system’s defense, they didn’t say who the improvements would benefit.
Attention, the makers of Ziploc bags: please print this, in 36 point bold type, at the top of each bag:
C’mon, how hard can it be to zip the damn loc?
I’d pay extra.
Captain OCD is talking on the phone with someone he’s done work for off and on since he was in college, explaining what he’s done this weekend to fix a few problems with her irrigation system or something. I walk by, give him a quick kiss, and he says, into the phone, “Okay. I love you. Bye.”
He’s decided he’s not a good multi-tasker.
It’s 3:30 on a weekday so Grandpa sets down the shovel or the wrench or shuts off the lawn mower, wipes his hands on the rag always sticking out of a back pocket of his khaki work pants (always paired with a white undershirt – I don’t think they called them T-shirts in those days, not that he’d ever wear a T-shirt), walks up the stairs from the back yard to the kitchen door, makes a right and then a left to the living room, and turns on the TV. No sound yet because he has that turned down all the way, so just the picture. He reverses his path to go back to tending the vegetable garden (with a handful of various vitamins, discovered in an auction box, at the base of each plant because if they’re good for us they’re probably good for plants) or mowing the lawn or fixing a car or tinkering with the sump pump he made out of old lawnmower, toilet, and car parts. His is not an idle retirement.
Grandma is in the kitchen – Grandma is always in the kitchen, doing exactly what for hours at a time has never been clear – so there is no one to watch the flickering, silent picture on the TV in the living room. At 3:45, he makes the trip again to turn up the volume slightly, then back outside he goes. Around 3:55, one last trip back into the living room to turn up the volume to a standard listening level. He’s in for the duration now and sits down in his Lay-Z-Boy, the one that has only ever been in recline mode when someone other than him sits in it because chairs are for sitting, not reclining (one doesn’t sleep in a chair because that’s what beds are for, but one does occasionally every evening rest one’s eyes), and picks up the top newspaper from the ever-present foot-high stack of papers on the foot stool next to his chair because, likewise, one doesn’t put one’s feet up while sitting in a chair because that’s a slippery downward slope headed straight to lazy. At 3:58 (according to the electric clock on the wall above the TV) he gets out of his chair to turn up the volume loud enough so the neighbors several hundred feet away in their own kitchens can follow along. Judge Wapner will begin schooling The People in matters of The Court in two minutes.
I wasn’t around when TVs first made their way into American living rooms, so I don’t know if the set needed to warm up before the picture reached optimum viewing quality or if the volume needed its own, shorter warm-up period. I can scarcely make a grocery list without first performing an Internet search, so I could find out easily enough. He wasn’t hard of hearing, but maybe there were interpersonal dynamics at play that I didn’t recognize. Maybe it was a passive sort of control. Maybe it was his way of ending his day of puttering a little early, before the evening news came on at 5:00. He was, after all, not watching some bit of fluff like a game show or a silly afternoon talk show where people talked about feelings and other self-indulgent nonsense. He, a smart German immigrant with little formal education, was watching the American justice system at work. I prefer to believe that his afternoon TV-warming-up ritual was what Grandpa did just because that’s what Grandpa did.