BlitzBlog

On June 3, I moved this blog to eponym.com because it allowed me to see
if anyone (if at all) was reading my inane rantings. On that day, I sent out a mass email with about 40 names on it, anouncing the move.

Oh, I knew there
were 3 or 4 shut-ins with whom I would occasionally speak about
Blitzblog, but I figured pretty much everyone else was just humoring me.

As of today, almost one full month since “re-publishing” I am astounded
at the amount of hits this thing has gotten. Blitzblog passed the 2100
page-view mark 27 days into its existence, from over 375
different visitors. Jeez, who ARE all you people? 
(Unfortunately, Eponym can't give me that info). What I do know is that
there are a fair amount of insomniacs reading the site, as 20% of the
hits are coming between midnight and 6am. I'm guessing that Blitzblog
is a sleeping pill of last-resort to these poor folks who must be
desperate for anything that'll bore them to unconsciousness.

Well, I'm glad interest in Blitzblog is growing, daytime or night. If
you have comments, please feel free to leave them- good or bad. If
there's a subject you want me to expound upon, let me know. Opinions
are not something I am reticent to give.

Oh, and by the way, thanks for reading.

Here's the dream scenario for many husbands that I know.

You have a wife who cannot sit still and feels the need to fill her
every waking moment with activity. To fulfill this need, she is happy to
go out and earn a degree as a teacher, get a job teaching, and instead
of taking summers off, she goes to work at a sleep-away camp so your two
kids can attend the camp for virtually nothing.

This leaves you home.

Alone.

Okay, except for the 2 dogs.

Just the 3 of you, for 8 weeks, in your own house. With no kids or wife
to ask you stuff, especially when SportsCenter is on.

Sounds great, no?

What would you do if this happened to you?

Party like a madman?

Drink and smoke in the house?

Walk around in holey
underwear and leave the toilet seat up?

Call out for pizza and Chinese
and Mexican and sit on the couch and light your own farts until you
fall asleep?

Yeah well I thought that's what I'd do too.

But no.

Reality sets in when the house is so quiet. And all those chores you
never seemed to have time to do, well they've been whispering to you
all year, but you didn't hear them because they were drowned by the racket
of your family's everyday life.

So you sit in the house and hear those soft words come wafting from the
porch, “Paint me, Matt. I'm desperately bare and I need a nice coat of
gray semigloss.” 

So 3 days later, while you're washing the paint
off your hands, you hear a murmur when the water shuts off, “Look down,
Matt. Look at my grout. My grout is dingy, Matt. Please run to Home
Depot and get some grout cleaner. I used to look so bright…”  A
few more days go by, and as you bring the garbage from the grout
cleanup outside, you stop to stretch your tired back.

You bend back and look at the beautiful blue sky. And as your eyes roll
back toward earth, you hear, “Trim.” and you think, “What?”  And a
whisper answers, “Look at the house trim, Matt. It's peeling.”

A week later, the trim looks wonderful, except for those new white drip spots on the freshly-painted gray porch.

But you mosey around back of the house and spot the hammock, which
thankfully you have no trouble hearing as it shouts to you, “C'mon
Matt! Grab a beer and lay down! You deserve it!” The warm summer
weather and the beer and the satisfaction of the new white trim and the
new white grout and the new gray/white-spotted porch all combine to help you
doze off, lazily in your wonderful wonderful hammock.

You awaken a while later. It's almost dark. You get up and think, “Hey,
shouldn't those backyard ground-lights be on by now?” So you go check
the wire and the timer and realize that the last time you used the
weed-whacker, you might have clipped some exposed wire.

And you hear that faint whisper again. This time it's barely audible,
as it's coming from under the ground. “Get the shovel, Matt. I know I'm
100 feet long, but I have a short circuit in me. Help me be whole again,
Matt.” Luckily it's too dark to start digging tonight, but at least you
know what project is next.

Whew! Shoveling for 2 days is hard work! I'm so dirty and sweaty, I
need to towel off in the garage before I go inside. Ouch! I just banged
my elbow as I took off my t-shirt on that stupid kitchen table Kate bought at a
garage sale. She bought it 3 years ago for $5 (or was it 5 years ago
for $3? I forget) and I started stripping the years of paint off it 2
summers ago and man, I just know when it's done, it's gonna look great.

3 nights later, I'm feeling dizzy from breathing in paint dust and
stripping fumes, so I go inside to watch TV. I'm a bit hungry so I open
the cabinet in the kitchen to find the crackers. Where are my crackers?

2 hours later, after I pulled everything out of the cabinet, I found
the crackers. Behind the baking powder. What the HELL do we use baking
powder for? And how did it get in front of the crackers? We haven't
baked anything from scratch in 10 years. And why do we have five
half-empty plastic tins of ice cream sprinkles?

So I lay down on the couch. I think I can hear a whisper as I doze off, but thank goodness, it's not loud enough to wake me.

I need my sleep now, because I need to get the house back in order
tomorrow. You know, hide the party paraphenalia, take down the Farrah
posters and the black lights.  The family is coming home in two
days.  All this fun has left me exhausted.

Yep, it's gonna be a great summer.

Took my daughter, this evening, to see the movie Cars. In it was a scene that was, ostensibly, about cow-tipping. This reminded me of another evening a long time ago…

Allow me, to regale you all with my one and only cow-tipping experience.

It was 1984, I believe. Myself and a few recent Pratt grads were in the
very rural Macungie, PA visiting a brilliant fellow grad who'd landed
his first job out of Pratt at Bell Labs R&D.

Now we, as a bunch, could easily (at the time) be described as a
drunken, stoned bunch of obnoxious New York sphincters.  To the
more polite denizens of Macungie, we were just Mikey's “city friends.”

Mikey was living in a tract house in a development on the edge of a
farm. He was having a party that evening for a co-worker's birthday, if
I recall, and there were about 30-40 people from his workplace at the
house. Well-informed worldly engineers and shockingly sheltered
secretarial vixens mingled, drank, smoked, and danced the evening away.

As it got late, and the party wound down, one besotted local mentioned
the term, “cow tipping.” Another besotted party-goer, namely
YrHmbleSrvnt, inquired as to what this term meant.

“You don't know what cow-tipping is?!” he asked incredulously.

“Uh, no. We only have waiters that we tip in Noo Yawk.” I answered.

“No-no-no. It's not THAT kind of tipping, ya dern foool. It's like tipping when you tip
something over!” Buford explained.

“Ah.” Pause. “So what's the big deal with tipping cows?” I bit.

“C'mon out the back. We'll show you.” he slyly grinned.

So about 10 of us, drinks in hand, headed out the back yard to the
fence that abutted the pasture. We got to the fence, and I peered into
the darkness. “There she is.” Buford said, almost reverently. I saw
nothing.

Being a NYC boy at the time, allow me to explain that darkness to a
city person is a relative thing. We are rarely in a place where there
is no light coming from somewhere. Through the windows from the street
outside, constant traffic, even a broken elevator has an emergency
light. No, about the only time a NYer faces total blackness is those
flashes of darkness when the subway car screeches around a turn and
loses contact with the third rail.

Anyway, so I'm leaning on the top of this wooden rail fence, peering
into …nothing. I guess it was a moonless night. Up to that stage in
my life, I'd never really taken the moon into account as a source of
luminescence.

So I ask, “Where WHO is? And what the hell is cow-tipping?” 

Buford then carefully explains to me that cows often sleep, or at least
doze, standing up. And that in the dark, one can run up to them and
push them over and they make a really funny sort of upset “Moo”
noise.  Being um, chemically enhanced, at the time, I thought this
was pretty amusing.  Buford saw my amusement, and he knew I was
hooked. “Wanna try it?” he asked. “What the hell, let's do it.” I
volunteered. “Tell me what to do.”

“Okay, you climb over the fence, and sneak around on her, and when
you're a little ways away (?!), you get up a good head o'steam and body
slam yourself right into her side. She'll go over like a ton a bricks!”

So I hop the fence. After a few steps I notice how this pasture is a
lot mushier than Mikey's back yard. I can feel the mud sucking at my
sneakers, moistening my socks and the bottom of my jeans.  I take
a dozen or so furtive steps into the dark pasture, trying to be quiet.
About this time, I can see a large black bovine-shaped silhouette about
40 feet away. I look back at Buford and the rest of the crew, and
they're all squinting in the dark, waving for me to go for it.

I start a quick jog, and then a good lope, and by the time I'm 15 feet
from Elsie I'm running at full steam. I slam myself full-on into
Elsie's flank BAM!

Except that Elsie doesn't go over like a ton of bricks.

As a matter of fact, running into Elsie is more like hitting a slightly
firm brick wall. I bounce off the startled bovine and land splat on my
back, looking up at the stars. I remember noticing how brilliant they
were at that second, but to this day, I couldn't honestly tell you
whether those stars were in the sky or in my head. But I do remember
the next thing that happened quite clearly.

I heard not an upset sort of plaintive “moo,” but a loud snort. I
picked up my head and saw Elsie's outline, with a few highlights
shining off her horns. “Hmmm,” I thought, “I didn't know cows had
horns.”

That's when I heard my compadres yelling. “Get up! Get out of there!
Hurry!” I think that it was before I actually had gotten to my feet,
the realization that Elsie was a bull hit me. So I made one last
panicked glimpse over my shoulder, when I swear Elsie (or now Elvis)
was starting to head my way.  I began running across the dark
muddy pasture towards the fence, which now seemed 1/4 mile away. I
finally got to the fence and jumped it as quick as I could.

I looked back but I couldn't see Elvis at all, but I know, I just know, he had just turned back into the darkness before I looked.

Muddied, dazed, missing one sneaker and a lot more sober, I headed back
into the house with my new friends, glad that I could be the source of
the entertainment for the evening.

Man, I'm never trying that again.