Kind of Blue

I have been accused in my day of not really noticing or appreciating things my wife Susan does to decorate our house.

I have to say, guilty as charged. About the only things I pay much attention to inside the house are the TV, my recliner and the contents of the refrigerator. As far as the rest of it goes, I may as well live in an Army barracks.

I tried to correct that once years ago, when she was a little frustrated after she had done some decorating and rearranging and I hadn’t noticed it. So one night I was sitting there on the couch, and I said, “You know, I like this lamp.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes, I think it looks nice in here. I’m glad you got it. When did you get it?”

“About five years ago,” she said.

Oh, well. I tried.

One problem is, women love to watch all of those crazy home decorating and renovation shows that come on TV. They watch these shows and then they get the urge to go do some of that stuff themselves. I tried suggesting she watch a cooking show instead, but all I got was a dirty look.

The other day, riding in the car, she informed me that she had decided she wanted to paint the kitchen. I didn’t understand why. Didn’t we just paint it? I asked her.

“We painted it 10 years ago,” she said.

“Exactly!” I said. “It seems like just yesterday. Plus, I like it the color that it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What color is it?”

I wasn’t sure, so I muttered something under my breath, turned up and radio loud and swerved the car violently, pretending a squirrel had run out in front of me, all in an effort to change the subject. Of course, she didn’t buy that, because she knows I hate squirrels, and am more likely to drive on up the sidewalk to run one over than I am to swerve to miss one.

Fine. So I didn’t know, from memory, the color of the kitchen. Knowing when I’m beaten, I gave in and said, sure, I think it would be a great idea for you to paint the kitchen, with an emphasis on the word “you”, cause I ain’t painting nothing!

This set off about a two-week quest to find the right color. She was going with blue, but apparently, there are about 967 different variations of blue paint available at Home Depot. She began to buy samples of the various blues, then would paint a small section of the wall to see if she liked it. Invariably, her initial reaction was to hate it; then, after a few hours, she’d decide she liked it; then she’d come around to hating it again. After a few days, there were so many different colors on our kitchen wall, it looked like the Partridge Family bus.

On about the 20th try, she called me in the kitchen, pointed out a new swath of color and said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think you need to be on Prozac. Just pick a color!”

One angry look later, she had decided on a color. It was blue. I thought it looked great. She hired some guy named Luis to come over and paint my kitchen. He had a puzzled look on his face when he walked in and saw the kaleidoscope of colors on the wall, but I just said to him, “Don’t ask, por favor.” He nodded and went to work.

Now, here’s a trick that women used that I’ve learned about. Basically, I look at home renovations in one way – how much is it going to cost? The price of painting the kitchen, and also the downstairs bathroom, seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I didn’t’ squawk much. But then, she hits you with the sucker punch – now that the room has changed color, everything else in there has to be replaced!

“I need some curtains for the kitchen,” she told me before the paint even dried. Why, I said. “Because, obviously, dummy, the green ones we have don’t match the blue walls now.” And she’s also commenced to buying new accessories for the bathroom, since it changed from whatever color it was before to blue, as well. I’ve hardly seen a woman as excited as she was the other day when she found a blue soap dispenser in Big Lots.

Hopefully, we’re through with the redecorating process for at least a few weeks. Now I can concentrate on the important stuff in the kitchen and bathroom, like leftovers and cold beverages and a stack of National Geographic magazines. I’ll let you figure out what belongs in which room.

How to talk to women

As a man who has lived a lot of years, and most of them in the same house as a woman, I’ve gained a lot of wisdom, and I feel the need to impart some of it to the less-experienced among us.

Here’s the deal. In order to get along with women, you have to talk to them. They like that. They’re not like us. They can’t watch a four-hour football game during which the longest sentence uttered is, “Pass the Doritos.” They enjoy talking, which is ok, but they also expect to be listened to, which is hard, and they expect you to talk back to them, which can often just be impossible.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, they often are not talking about what you think they are talking about. If they tell you that the weather is going to be nice this weekend, it’s not an encouragement for you to go play golf. It’s a subtle reminder that you promised to clean the gutters.

If they are being quiet, and you ask them what is wrong, they usually will say, “nothing.” They don’t mean this. What they mean is, “If you really loved me, you’d know what was wrong with me, and you’d fix it, without me having to tell you.” Even if there is no way in the world you could know what is wrong with them, you are expected to know. Then you have to apologize for not knowing.

I’m going to outline a few situations that men might find themselves in with women, and I’m going to give you the correct, and the incorrect, response to each of them.

Situation: She walks in the room, stands in front of you and says, “Does my butt look big in these pants?”

Right response: No, honey, of course not. Your butt is not big.

Wrong response: No bigger than usual.

Situation: She goes to get her hair done, and she comes home angry, complaining that it looks terrible and the hairdresser did not do what she asked her to.

Right response: I think it looks good. It actually makes you look younger. You’re just not used to it yet.

Wrong response: Why don’t you go see if the hairdresser will give you your money back?

Situation: She says, “It’s really warm in here. I’m burning up.”

Right response: Ok, do you want to me open a window, or maybe adjust the thermostat?

Wrong response: Yeah, I read the other day that you’re at about the age when hot flashes begin. It will pass.

Situation: She walks into the bedroom wearing a new nightgown and says, “Look what I bought the other day.”

Right response: Wow, that looks really great on you, honey. You know red is my favorite color.

Wrong response: Oh my God, how much did THAT cost?

Situation: She decides to try a new recipe, then asks you at the table what you think of the meal.

Right response: It’s pretty good. I never even thought putting cinnamon on spaghetti would be good, but this is great.

Wrong response: Do you think Domino’s is still open?

Often, the way to handle these situations is to realize that you’re not going to win no matter what you do, so you should just pretend you didn’t hear her. Then if she presses you on it, just say, “I’m sorry, honey, I was thinking about where I could take you for dinner Saturday night. You really deserve a night out. Now, what did you say?” If you’re lucky, she’ll let it drop, and if you’re really lucky, she’ll forget you promised to take her to dinner. Just make sure you have the number to Domino’s handy.

King of the court

My 17-year-old son David innocently asked me if I wanted to go to the basketball court with him Sunday. Since he’s at that cute age where he rarely speaks a sentence to me that doesn’t begin with the words, “Can I have..”, I said sure.

I warned him, though, that I was not going to play him in an actual game. I’m too out of shape for that foolishness. I might hurt myself or, in a much worse outcome, I might actually lose.

He’s been trying to bait me into a basketball game for some time. The other day he was trash-talking and I said, “Have you forgotten who won the last time we played? That’s right, it was me.”

He responded by reminding me that it was three years ago when that happened, when he was still in the eighth grade. Oh, big deal. Like there’s much difference between an eighth-grader and an 11th-grader. I mean, I haven’ t changed that much in three years, so what makes him think he has?

Anyway, we got to the court, and we started shooting, and I realized the little booger knew what he was doing. He knew there was no way I was going to let him stand unchallenged on the court. Finally I said, “Ok, I’ll run you a quick one. Let’s play to seven.”

No, he said, we always play to 12. Fine, I said, knowing I couldn’t back down. If you show weakness to these urchins, they’ll kill you in your sleep and steal your debit card. So I agreed to play to 12, which in retrospect, was a poor decision.

The game started out calmly enough. I drained a couple of jumpers, he made a layup here and there. By the time the score was 3-1, there had already been three timeouts for injury. It may surprise you to know that two of those times, he was the one who got hurt. He kept foolishly running into my elbow.

The other time, I jammed my fingers quite badly when I reached for the ball and accidentally hit his hard head. As evidence, my middle finger on my right hand is swollen to the size of a bratwurst and is turning black. Having a middle finger out of commission severely hampered my morning commute. But I stayed tough, and took a 7-4 lead, and would have at that point been the winner had I stuck to my original plan.

Then, he began to catch up, and I began to move a little more slowly. I was going to my left with all the quickness of a sea turtle on Quaaludes. After he tied the game at 7-7, I looked up and saw my wife drive up in her car. She had come to watch the fun. Trust me, I had no illusions about who she was pulling for.

It’s a good thing she showed up when she did, because it gave us an excuse to stop the game for a few minutes, and I was about 5 seconds away from a cardiac event.

“How are you doing?” she said, and I told her that I was doing just fine, but it might not be a bad idea to dial 9-1-1 on her phone and have her finger hover above the “send” button, just in case. She smiled, told me that she had faith in me, and asked me where the life insurance policies were.

The game resumed and, as you can surmise, what with my concentration thrown off and my finger hurting and the fact that the baskets were 3 inches higher than regulation, not to mention it was really a bad biorhythm day for me and my astrological signs were lined up poorly – well, I lost.


Don’t worry, though, I handled it maturely. I congratulated him, and secretly vowed to work over the next few weeks to get ready for a rematch. I’ve hired Larry Bird as my shooting coach, I’m doing conditioning work with Lance Armstrong, and I’ve begun taking steroids. If all that fails, I’ll remind him of all the times I let him win when he was younger. I’m not above accepting charity.

I watched the Super Bowl Sunday, because I am a red-blooded American man and it is required behavior, like spitting in the sink or drinking straight from the orange juice carton.

I watched it at home, with my son and my dog. None of us cared that much about the game, since we’d hoped the Falcons would make it, but I guess I pulled for the Packers, and my son was for the Steelers. The dog didn’t state a preference.

My daughter was in Athens, studying, I’m sure, because that’s what college students do all weekend. And my wife was upstairs doing something else because, let’s face it, I was watching football, and that’s no place for a woman.

Don’t get me wrong. I like watching football, and I like women. I just don’t like watching football with women.

I don’t much go got football-watching parties, because these usually involve women who are allegedly watching the game, but are really there just to talk. I know, I know, there are some exceptions out there, women who actually are interested in the game and know what’s going on. But I think that’s probably a pretty low percentage, and why take the chance?

My wife will occasionally come into the room with me as I’m watching football, which is fine, except she tries to talk to me, because women think that you are supposed to communicate with your spouse, which is of course crazy talk.

She’ll try one of two tactics in her attempts to talk to me during football. First, she’ll talk about things having nothing to do with the game, like what needs fixing around the house, or how much money the kids need for something, or a story about somebody she knows who caught her husband with a dental hygienist and wants to leave him except they just spent $10,000 on in-vitro fertilization and she hopes she’s pregnant.

She soon learns that this is getting nowhere, as my only response is a grunt before I scream “Screen pass? Who is going to be fooled by a screen pass on third-and-20????”

Her second method is to try to make comments on the actual, game and this is disastrous, because the comments are not appropriate. It’s usually stuff like, “Why are they wearing that color jersey with those pants?” or “Look how long his hair is!” or “Why is he grabbing himself there?”

“Listen,” I told her the last time she tried this, “I appreciate the effort. But all I really want to hear you say when I’m watching football is, “Do you need another beer, honey?’ “ That led to a rough afternoon. Who knew divorce attorneys worked on Sundays?

My daughter is actually a pretty good football watcher, but that’s because I trained her from birth. But her mother just wasn’t trained right, and it’s too late now. It’s why we’ve had two TVs since the day we were married.

I’ve changed my football-watching behavior during the years as I’ve aged and mellowed and my home insurance premiums have gone up. I closely follow two teams – the Falcons and the Georgia Bulldogs –and I used to get quite animated during games, and perhaps would toss a few things around harmlessly. OK, I’ll be honest – I’ve thrown some fits while watching games that would cause Charlie Sheen to tell me, “Whoa, dude. Calm down.”

Now, when things are going poorly for the Bulldogs – which occurred in several games this year immediately after the coin toss – I just get quiet and watch stone-faced, and remind myself that there are people suffering in the world and war and famine and I shouldn’t get upset just because somebody FUMBLED ON THE 1-YARD LINE! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

OK, maybe I still need some work, and maybe I’m a little bit sexist (I can hear my wife saying, “a little bit????”), but I’m a work in progress. Football is over for a few months, and now I have a lot of time to hear about what needs fixing and who’s pregnant, and I promise I’ll at least pretend to be listening.

What's on TV?

I have satellite TV, and we’ve ordered the “Deluxe Jumbo 5,000 Channels of Crap” package, so I have an endless possibility of things to watch, all the while saying “I can’t believe I’m watching this.”

My wife and I often watch separate TVs, since she likes shows like “I had a 200-pound Tumor”, or reality shows about people who have 30 kids in their house, or shows where some Yuppie couple in San Jose spends three weeks deciding how to redo their kitchen floor. Meanwhile, I’m downstairs watching sports, or cool shows on Spike, like “1,000 Ways to Die.”

Have you seen that show? It depicts all sorts of crazy ways that people have died over the years – exploding toilets, a turtle dropped on a guy’s head by an eagle, a skateboarder passing out facedown in wet cement – with graphic re-creations. I can’t understand for the life of me why women don’t enjoy this show.

The truth is, I have the TV on a lot, but I don’t really watch it that much. I am thrilled that IFC is now showing “The Larry Sanders Show,” which is the best show in the history of television. But other than that, pickings are slim.

The other night I was sitting on the couch, flipping through one of the many HBO channels that I overpay for, and I saw that the movie “Up” was coming on. Well, I’d never seen it, and I thought, I’ll give it a try. I’d read good reviews, and it looked like a delightful animated adventure. My daughter said she’d watch part of it with me.

Have you seen this movie? For the first 20 minutes, I had to pretend that my cold was acting up so my daughter wouldn’t ask me why I was getting teary-eyed and sniffling from watching a cartoon. I haven’t been that emotional watching a movie since (Spoiler Alert!) Old Yeller got a bullet in his brain.

At least it was a pretty good movie. One good thing about my children growing up is I don’t have to sit through awful kids’ movies and TV shows any more. There was a point in my life when just seeing something purple could turn me homicidal, all thanks to Barney the Dinosaur. I used to daydream about driving to California and strangling that little guy on “Blue’s Clues” with my bare hands.

Now, my children watch wonderful shows like “Jersey Shore.” I wouldn’t watch that show unless I was wearing a haz-mat suit. You could probably get an STD if you watched that show on one of those new 3-D TVs. If aliens land on Earth and see that show, they’ll immediately incinerate us all, because they’ll think there’s no hope for humanity. A purple Barney was pretty bad, but an orange “Snooki” is too much to bear.

I suppose I could do something productive instead of just sitting on the couch in front of the TV set. I could, but I’m not. It’s cold outside, it gets dark at 5:30, and by the time I get home from work, my brain needs rest, not stimulation. Hopefully there’s a good bowl game on tonight.

Shopping in a warehouse

The other day my wife and I found ourselves in the parking lot at the enormous warehouse store, Sam’s Club. We got out of the car and I looked at her and asked why we were there, and she said, “I don’t know.”

This was surely a sign that we should have gotten in the car and gone back home, but no, we forged ahead, with a pledge to each other not to spend too much money. An hour later we were $200 poorer and headed home with a carful of stuff, and I have no idea why we bought any of it.

When we first walked in, I was greeted by dozens of flat-screen TVs. It was Sunday, so there were football games on. I stood there, mesmerized, like a 15-year-old boy in a strip club, with my mouth watering almost as much.

Never mind that just last month I was contemplating putting my baseball card collection on EBay just so I could pay the cell phone bill. I was stricken with flat-screen TV fever, and found myself thinking things like, “You know, $2,500 is not really a bad deal for a TV like that. I mean, think how much use I’ll get out of it!” We’re probably the only people on our block who still have a round-screened TV, or whatever you call those old things.

Those warehouse stores are the devil’s workshop, I can tell you that. There are three people living in my house right now, so why would I need a package of 60 rolls of toilet paper? Yet we bought one. You go in those places thinking you’re just going to buy paper towels, and you walk out with a new living room set, a pressure washer and 27 pounds of frozen shrimp.

The most crowded part of the warehouse store is the food section, because of all the free samples. There were people lined up, 8 or 9 deep, at some of the sampling stations. I swear, some people come there for their Sunday dinner, which is fine, if you want to eat your entire Sunday dinner off of toothpicks.

I bought some interesting things on my most recent trip there. I got a new white dress shirt. Some men buy their clothes at Brooks Brothers, I get mine at Sam’s Club. It might explain why I’m not exactly shooting up the old corporate ladder.

I also bought an enormous collection of hot chocolate. There are, like, 8 different kinds of hot chocolate in there, which seems great, until you get home and realize that your favorite flavor of hot chocolate is, you know, chocolate. That, and I drink about 5 cups of it a year. So I’m covered when it comes to hot chocolate until 2021.

We grabbed a few other things we desperately needed while there – a box of pomegranates; 50 chicken wings; a pack of reading glasses; and enough laundry detergent to wash 212 loads. We chose this one over the laundry detergent that could only promise 210 loads. Since our daughter came home from college this weekend and brought her laundry, we’re already down to about 110 loads left.

I think I need to stay away from Sam’s for a while. I’ll go back when I run out of toilet paper, which should coincide with the next visit from Halley’s Comet, unless I actually need something from there in the meantime. You know, I could really use that pressure washer…..

Home remedies

I try not to do the “you kids don’t know how easy you have it” speech with my children very often, because I realize that each generation has its own set of problems and issues to deal with. For example, it is very hard for my son do his homework while playing a video game online with his friends and texting his girlfriend. I didn’t have these pressures. I just, you know, did my homework.

But I must say that there have been some improvements in medicine that have definitely worked to their advantage. For example, they have never had their skin burned by the compound of red death otherwise known as “merthiolate”, or “mercurochrome.”

My mother loved me, I am sure, but she did not miss an opportunity to put this stuff on me. It supposedly was some sort of antiseptic, and every time I had the smallest of scratches, she would drag me into the bathroom and get out the little dropper and put some merthiolate on me.

Words can’t describe how this stuff burned. She may as well have dipped a fireplace poker in the fire and branded me with it. And not only did it burn, it turned your skin bright red. How did anybody think this was a healing agent?

It got to where I would hide my injuries. I could have walked into a running chain saw, and I wouldn’t have told my mother, because I knew exactly what she would do. This got to be difficult, because I was a little boy and naturally got scratched and scraped up daily. But I would just put on long sleeves and long pants and a stocking cap until everything healed up.

I did some research on this and I’ve discovered that they don’t use merthiolate or mercurochrome much anymore because, for one, it doesn’t work, and for two, it’s TOXIC! Well, heck, I could have told you that when it was burning a hole in my skin.

Another favorite cure of hers was hydrogen peroxide. This wasn’t as bad; it didn’t burn, it just bubbled on your wound. Again, I’m not sure that something that causes a chemical reaction on your skin is doing you much good, but it’s good for a few minutes of fun if you’re sitting around the house bored. Wait, am I the only one who does that?

When I would get ulcers in my mouth, my mom had another homemade remedy – Goody powders. Ulcers are very painful, so I was willing to try anything to make it feel better when I had one. It was simple, you just poured a Goody powder directly onto the ulcer. For about five minutes after doing this, the pain was unbearable. I would literally drop to my knees, tears running down my face, as the throbbing pain coursed through my mouth. I remember looking at my mom the first time she had me do this and wanting to say, “Why do you hate me?”, but of course I didn’t say anything, because my mouth felt like I had swallowed burning charcoal.

But, before long, that pain went away and the ulcer didn’t hurt at all. I could eat and drink all I wanted without pain, until the Goody’s powder wore off in a couple of hours. I have since learned from a dentist that putting a headache powder on an ulcer like actually burns the skin and prolongs healing, and is a bad idea. I have to tell you, though, it brought me a lot of relief back then. I will neither recommend nor discourage this home remedy.

If I got a fever blister, which I often did, my mom had a special remedy that she got from a local pharmacist. This stuff wasn’t over-the-counter, it was under-the-counter, because it was a homemade concoction that the guy had come up with. It contained ether and was, apparently, illegal. But I have to tell you, it worked. That pharmacist either retired or got arrested, I’m not sure, but I know you can’t get his ether cure anymore.

Some of this sounds pretty bad in retrospect, but I survived it. My mother meant only the best for me, and even if her home remedies could have killed me, it would have all been out of love.