Tag: life lessons

Just For Laughs

Just when I thought our winter of discontent was going to stick to the well-trudged paths of Doom Scrolling and Ain’t It Awful, our old friend Reality stuck its hilarious little head up out of the ditch and starting cracking jokes.  Have you heard the one about Lulu the dog who inherited 5 million dollars?  She’s currently chasing a yellow Lamborghini expressly bought for her enjoyment.  (I made up the Lamborghini part, but somebody actually did give their dog 5 million bucks.)  Or, how about the guy from Florida who turned his uncle’s skeleton into an electric guitar.  (Totally icky, but totally true.  God, we’re an idly rich society!)  Anyway, here are a couple more laughables that might brighten your winter afternoon.

On Valentine’s Day, Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudo wellness/awareness corporation, Goop, introduction a new vibrator.  According to the website, the good people at Goop have “tested a lot of vibrators over the years” before they finally came up with this double-ended PPD (personal pleasure device.)  Okay, full disclosure: I don’t know very much about vibrators, but I do know a thing or two about testing, so I’m interested in knowing how the Goop folks conducted theirs.  For example, there’s a machine at Toyota Quality Control that slams a car door 50,000 times to find out exactly how long it takes for the latch to finally break and fall off.  Is that the kind of test Goop did?  Or, in the aviation industry, before they ever put an airplane in the air, they put it in a wind tunnel to see how much force it takes to blow its wings off.  Did Goop do something like that?  And speaking of aviation, it takes hours and hours of study, training and inflight experience to become a test pilot: what qualifications did Goop’s vibrator testers have?  I would hate to think that Ms. Paltrow would put her name on a product certified by amateurs.  Or course, these are all moot questions because apparently the Goop vibrator sold out in hours.

A little more seriously, the Chinese government recently banned the BBC, and everybody west of the Vistula came apart at the seams.  While I think it’s a shame nobody living on the banks of the Yangtze will be getting the cricket scores anymore, I’m compelled to point out a couple of things.  First of all, this is China — whose idea of free speech is – uh – they don’t actually have one.  In the entire 5,000 years of recorded Chinese history, freedom of speech existed for about 20 minutes in 1911 when Sun Yat-sen sat on the Dragon Throne.  It’s like describing blue to a blind man.  Secondly, and more importantly, the BBC was never broadcast in China; it was only available in the luxury hotels.  The truth is 99.9999% of the citizens of the Middle Kingdom have never heard of the Beeb and wouldn’t know it if it bite them on the bum.  So, let’s just put this little act of censorship into perspective.  The Chinese government has millions of Uyghurs locked up in concentration camps, they beat the crap out of thousands of Hong Kong students every weekend and perform hundreds of human organ transplants (where the donor is not notified) every day.  Honestly, if, after that litany of evil, you’re getting your knickers in a knot about who gets to watch Masterpiece Theatre south of the Great Wall, I can’t help but give it giggle.

But I saved the best for last.

Somewhere in Louisiana, a woman sprayed her hair with Gorilla Glue.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Gorilla Glue makes Super Glue look like a worn-out Post-it note.  This stuff could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and Lebron could bounce him up and down the court all day without any ill effects.  So, right about now you’re probably thinking “What a horrible accident!  The poor thing was probably in a rush and grabbed the wrong bottle.”  Nope, she did it on purpose.  Here’s what she recently posted on social media:

 “When I do my hair, I like to finish it off with a little Göt2b Glued Spray, you know, just to keep it in place. Well, I didn’t have any more Göt2b Glued Spray, so I used this: Gorilla Glue spray. Bad, bad, bad idea.”

OMG!  But, wait!  This isn’t the funny bit, yet.  After she discovered there was no way to wash this stuff out of her hair, she started a GoFundMe account to pay for a surgical removal – and people gave her money!  Over $18,000!  Think about it!  There are children starving in Brazil, and a bunch of people consciously decided, “Screw you, ya skinny little six-year-old!  I’m giving my money to a lady in Louisiana with Gorilla Glue in her hair.”  Anyway, now she’s lawyered up and is thinking about suing the Gorilla Glue people because, despite the various warnings against using an industrial strength adhesive on skin, clothes and/or eyes, the label does not specifically mention hair — and therefore it’s misleading?  Wow!  Gorilla Glue better get their act together before people start spraying it on their hotdogs to hold the wiener in the bun.

Don’t we live in a magical, frivolous age?

Parsley — My New Life Coach!

Here — in the dreary winter of Covid-19 — I’ve decided to quit listening to the news, the pundits, the experts, social media mavens and those lower-than-low-life influencers.  From here on, I’m taking my life strategy — from parsley.  No, I haven’t become a Lockdown Loonie.  Nor have I gone mutant Dr. Doolittle and started talking to the vegetables.  But I’m telling ya for a fact that parsley says all there needs to be said about how to live life in these troubled times.

First of all, you need a little background.  We live in a large urban area, but my wife is originally from cattle country.  (Where she’s from, they eat steak for dessert.)  Unfortunately, the only wide-open space we have is a medium-sized balcony/deck.  But rather than bitch about the lack of “land, lots of land, ‘neath the starry skies above,” every year, my wife rounds up a bunch of pots and creates a herb ranch – the “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” variety.  We eat like medieval kings, and she gets to channel her inner Jesse Chisholm.

Okay, so today, after what seems like a lifetime of gloom with an extra portion of doom thrown in, I was looking around for something to satisfy my optimistic soul.  Good luck with that!  Anyway, by pure chance, I noticed the parsley.  It’s been sitting there on the deck, in its pot, nice boy, since last spring.  It’s part of the landscape — like the rosebush, the patio table and that gate slat I haven’t fixed (OMG, has it been 2 years?).  But – here’s the deal — it isn’t supposed to be there.  It’s winter: parsley dies in the winter.  And in Canada, we do winter like nowhere else on this planet.  Think Siberia, and drop the temperature by 10 degrees.  Our polar bears get frostbite, for God’s sake.  There are parts of this country that are colder than Mars.  (That’s true, BTW.)  Even here in Vangroovy (the garden spot of the Great White North) our below zero can be double digits.  So, what the hell was the parsley doing there?

They say a good leader always leads by example, and what better example of straight in-your-face badass is a plant whose lifespan is April to September, still green as moldy cheese, in the middle of winter?  Even Vin Diesel isn’t that tough.  This little guy is defying the laws of Mother Nature, Father Time and Old Man Winter — just by being there.  Whether his purpose in the world is getting chopped up for soup, sprinkled on mashed potatoes or used as a decorative garnish to be thrown away without another thought — he’s doin’ it.  He’s doin’ it every day — without fail — to the best of his ability.  Without fanfare or flourish, that parsley plant is telling the universe “I’m still standing.”  And in these dismal dark days, that’s pretty damn good advice.

Signposts Of Life

The “Life is a journey” cliché has been done to death — but it’s there and I’m lazy, so what the hell!  People say life is a journey, and it is — but it’s not a straight-and-narrow, or a super highway or even a twisty backroad to heaven.  It’s a wilderness, and we poor mortals are forced to navigate it the best way we know how.  That’s why our more than benevolent society gives us signposts.  These are big, simple, well-lit markers that we can clearly see as we’re speeding along at 200 KPH, going – uh – wherever it is we’re all going.

When we’re babies, the first signpost we get is “NO!”  This keeps us away from dangerous stuff, disgusting stuff and stuff we really shouldn’t put in our mouth.  Easy!  But it doesn’t take us long to discover that some “no’s” are more important than others.  For example, when we ignore, “No, don’t pull kitty’s tail!” we end up with lacerations. However, “No, don’t throw your food on the floor.” Is nothing serious.  (After all, cleanup is not our problem.)

From there, the signposts get a little trickier.  Sure “Play nice!” is relatively easy, but “Share!” comes with a double-edged sword.  There isn’t a person on this planet who hasn’t run into the “share” conundrum.  Meanwhile, this is when we realize that — even though the world is full of signposts — some people don’t feel any obligation to observe them.  It’s a hard lesson when we’ve “shared” our cupcake with Sally, but Sally has decided to keep her cookies to herself.

Then the signposts start coming faster, and they’re a lot more complicated.  We learn there are certain words that are off limits, even though they’re surprisingly fun to say and actually quite common during times of parental stress.  We also learn “Don’t lie!”  This is a biggie.  However, it comes with a number of caveats that aren’t always obvious to the untrained eye.  For example, Uncle Jake’s Special Spaghetti Sauce might honestly taste like dirt, but if you say so there will be consequences.  Here’s where we find out that even though the path is always clearly marked, on occasion, life is a lot easier if we simply look the other way.

Teenage years are full of signposts that are basically contradictory.  “You’re young: have fun!” is diametrically opposed to “You need to study, or you’ll end up a crack whore like your cousin Jerry.”  Plus, we’re starting to get the feeling that some signposts are deliberately misleading.  Some, like “Algebra is important!” are there to keep us on the path whether we like it or not, and others, like “YOLO,” are trying to lure you into the weeds.  Then there’s the uber dangerous “Ahh, come on!  It’ll be fun!” which can go either way.  Follow this one too far and you could end up either hosting multi-level marketing seminars in your living room or sittin’ in an alley somewhere, smokin’ crack with your cousin Jerry.  It can happen!  Luckily, most of us manage to get through the 12-to-20 labyrinth and come out the other side as Adults.  And here’s where things settle down a bit.

As adults, we all see life’s signposts, and we all kinda know which direction we’re going.  Plus, even though we sometimes don’t admit it, we all know where the edge of the path is.  Mainly because, at some point in our lives, we’ve screwed up and found ourselves stumbling around in the weeds.  It’s not very pleasant.  That’s why, even though “Love thy neighbour” doesn’t apply to Fang, the 24/7 Death Metal music freak down the street, we don’t go down there and beat him over the head with his sub-woofer.  That’s off the path, over the hill and down the other side.  And we know if we go out there, there’s always a chance we won’t find our way back.  So, from time to time, we might covet our neighbour’s wife and her ass, and maybe even her riding lawnmower but we don’t do anything about it.  We just glance up at the signpost, look at the snarl of brambles and thorns and weeds beyond it, and roll over and go back to sleep.