Man Martin's Blog, page 124

Travels with Nancy

Nancy and I have been traveling together lo these thirty-three years.  We've seen London, France, Greece, Mexico, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and now Aruba.  On our honeymoon, we went by train to New Orleans - it was the first time either of us had ever been.  We were such babes - we gawked at everything, marveled at everything.

The pleasure of traveling isn't so much going somewhere as going somewhere with someone.  We are inveterate people-watchers and make up little stories - not always very nice stories, I'm afraid - about people we meet.  We work together to puzzle out whatever conundrums travel brings us - the street signs on Crete, the money in England - it may be different since the Euro, but when we were there, you'd feel like you had a pile of dough, and it'd turn out you hardly had any at all.

It is a pleasure, of course, to fill your days with pleasure; we eat too much, drink too much, play too much, and when we come back to our room, we - well, here the hand of propriety will draw the curtain of modesty over the scene, but you get the idea.

But as much as pleasure for pleasure's sake is nice, what really gives it spice is the little awkwardnesses and perplexities; where's a good restaurant - we parked too far and have to walk, oh dear - let's go inland and get lost for a little while - followed by little discoveries and triumphs - that's what this little switch is for!  Say, there's a grill, we can cook for ourselves - look at that beautiful lizard!

Vacation is a playground where you get to do the mock-serious enterprise of being adult and together making decisions against a backdrop of paradise.  I hope in heaven, there'll be angels who don't speak English or confusing road-signs, or a tricky currency to master.  Those things are the essence of delight.  Those things and being with someone you love.

Me versus Geography

One thing I wish I knew more about, without any inclination to go to the trouble of actually learning about it, is geography.  I write this on the balcony of our hotel in Aruba.  In the distance I can see shimmering water and white sand, a steady breeze is blowing through the palm trees.  Below I can see a shuffleboard court and the pavilion where they serve alcoholic milkshakes.

And I have absolutely no idea where I am.

I know Aruba is in the Caribbean, but that's really no good to me.  Where exactly is the Caribbean?  I am not being the least ironic; I honestly do not know.  Is the Caribbean different from the Gulf of Mexico?  I know we're not near Honolulu, and I know this isn't the Mediterranean, but other than that I'm in a fog.  I didn't even realize Caribbean has one "r" and two "b"s until I started typing this.

If the Arubans speak Dutch - which I believe they do - are they still considered part of Latin America?  I know we're not far from Haiti because the pilot pointed it out on the way over.  I know they speak French in Haiti because I read it in a book by Graham Greene.  I know they also speak French in France.  I have a pretty good idea where France is, and I can also do England, Spain, and Italy.  Everything else in Europe is just a mishmash until you get over to Russia and then China.  I have no idea where Holland is, the people who originally settled Aruba.  At least I know that they speak Dutch in Holland.  I don't think they speak Hollandaise.

I'm not much better when I get to the states.  Georgia and Florida I can find in a heartbeat, and the states bordering those I'm pretty clear on, but once I get past Tennessee, I'm bewildered.  Where is Arkansas?  And those big square states where they grow all that corn, what are those?  My sister lives in Iowa.  I have been there.  I would not be able to find Iowa on a map.  I don't know the difference between Iowa and Idaho.  Is there a difference?

As sad as my ignorance is, I have no ambition to amend it.  I know we are in the Caribbean.  I know Idaho is not in the Caribbean.  They do not speak Hollandaise in Holland, but Dutch.  The ocean is to my left, and the shuffleboard court and alcoholic-milkshake vender are directly below me.  I know everything I really need to know about geography/

Happy Father's Day.

Your Powerball Odds

Odds of winning the PowerBall jackpot: one in 175 million.

Odds of being struck by a meteor: 1 in 700,000.

Odds of being attacked by a shark: 1 in 11.5 million.

Odds that purchaser of winning ticket will discover friends and relatives he never knew he had: 100%.

Odds that he is wearing a baseball cap at this very moment: 75%

Odds that purchaser of winning PowerBall ticket lives in a double-wide: 1 in 3.

Odds that he will prudently invest his money in stocks, tax-free municipals, and reits: 1 in 550.

Odds that he will invest in Elvis Collector Plates and Pit Bulls: 1 in 5.

Odds he will move to a much nicer double-wide in Maui: 1 in 7.

Odds that he is married: 1 in 2.

Odds that if he is married, he will be divorced within two years: 1 in 3.

Odds if he is not married, he will be within two years: 1 in 2.

Odds that if he gets married within two years, he will be divorced in another two: 1 in 3.

Odds that in either case, the ex-wife will end up in possession of the double-wide in Maui: 1 in 2.

The Writer's Bio

A Picture of the Writer. He is Alert but Relaxed.
Respiration and Heartbeat are Typical.In 1958, one of E Henry Martin's sperm penetrated the tough zona pellucida and fused with an ovum of Dorothy H Martin.  Mitosis occurred, and a multicellular diploid was formed.  A Y chromosome determined the sex would be male.  Around the thirty-eighth week, he was expelled from the vaginal canal, and, separated from the first time from the placenta, took his first breath.  His parents named him Emanuel Henry Martin IV, which became his legal designation; however, he was commonly referred to as "Man" or "Manny."

 Four months after birth, he could control his head and lift his chest when placed on his stomach, and within the first year he was able to walk on his own.  Within seven years, he lost his baby teeth.  At this point he was growing between two and three inches a year.  He had acquired language and begun formal education.

After eleven years, he entered puberty.  Secondary sexual characteristics such as increased body hair appeared.  He developed acne and began having erections.

In his twenty-second year, he had ceased growing and found a suitable mate.  By his thirties, he had successfully reproduced two times.  His hair became thinner, and his skin began to lose elasticity.

Currently brown spots have begun forming on his hands.  His reaction time is slowing and his muscle mass is decreasing.  He breathes twelve to twenty times and his heart beats seventy to seventy-five times each minute.  He can be expected to live another thirty years.

Going Gray

I'm Sure My Mortician Already Has a Green Fright
Wig and a Red Rubber Nose Picked Out for MeFor some time now, my hair, what there is of it, has been turning gray.  Recently, however, there is a new development.  The hair at my temple has gone perfectly white.  I want you to re-read that last sentence: I did not write temples, but temple.

Specifically, the hair just above my left ear has gone white, whereas the rest of my hair is the same oatmeal-and-dirty-sand color it has been for the last half decade.

Let it be said, I'd fantasized about having gray temples.  I'd imagined passersby murmuring, "Why, look at that distinguished gentleman with graying temples."  Only then would they notice the mustard stain on my shirt.  I'd never looked distinguished in my life, and thought the coming of gray hairs might do that for me.  Now, however, it appears Mother Nature intends me to look like a geriatric calico.

Nor is this temple episode Nature's only little jest at my expense.  I could tell you things about ear hairs and nostril hairs that would make you weep.  I scarcely knew ear hairs were a thing; I now recall having seen elderly men whose ears seemed to be giving birth to toothbrushes, but I had not paid them much attention.  At least, thank the Lord, my ears aren't doing that.  Rather, each of them is producing one long hair apiece.  Similarly, there is a long hair that likes to grow out of my right shoulder blade.  Just there and nowhere else.  My chest hair is mostly gray, making it virtually invisible against the frog-belly white of my torso, except there are two unaccountably dark tufts, right around my nipples.  Seeing myself shirtless in the mirror is like being stared at by a long face with pink, bushy eyes.  And there are liver spots.  I do not know why they are called liver spots, but the moniker is singularly apt.  One cannot behold them without being strangely reminded of liver.

So my dreams of a distinguished old age are come to naught.  I tell myself that when I'm buried, at least then I'll look presentable, not like some sort of clown.  My shirt will be clean, my fingernails polished.  But I know better.  I'm sure my mortician already has the green fright-wig and the red rubber nose picked out for me.

The Solution for Poison Ivy

What makes poison ivy so insidious is how well
it blends in with its surroundingsThe summer has been a rainy one, which is wonderful in some ways but has also helped spread poison ivy.  Twice my neighbor has asked me to spray poison ivy outbreaks in her yard, and I've also had to spray it in mine.
The thing that makes poison ivy so insidious, is that it's a master of camouflage.   Amid Virginia Creeper, it will have dark leaves with serrated edges that look like Virginia Creeper; if it's growing amid Cross-Vine, it will have lighted-colored leaves and less noticeably serrated edges.  This is a good example of selective evolution at work.  When we kill the poison ivy we can spot, we leave behind the poison ivy we can't spot, over time inadvertently breeding species that blend in more and more successfully with their surroundings.  Eventually we will make it impossible to ferret out at all; it will be indistinguishable from common ivy, blackberries, even oak trees.  Everyone has had the experience of breaking out in poison ivy welts, having been unaware of having been in poison ivy.
I think the solution is to deliberately cultivate poison ivy that is easy to recognize.  Instead of killing the poison ivy we can see, we should only spray the plants that are the most difficult to detect.  If we see some poison ivy and think, "Whoa, poison ivy," we should leave it alone unless some other poison ivy comes along that is even more conspicuous.  I'm not saying this would happen overnight, and indeed generations would melt away before the project was complete, and - most importantly - we would need 100% cooperation from every person on the planet, but if we stuck to it, gradually poison ivy would become absolutely impossible to overlook: it might have bright mauve leaves with pink speckles, ideally with the words, "p-o-i-s-o-n-i-v-y" right on them.
Then, and only then, on a pre-agreed signal, everyone would go out on the same day and spray the poison ivy into extinction.
End of story.

Are You Getting Enough Twigs in Your Diet?

Some time back, my doctor suggested I take CoQ-10, which I've been doing assiduously as I do everything my doctor says, provided it doesn't require me to change how much I exercise, how much I drink, how much I eat, or what I eat.  I'd never heard of CoQ-10 and to this day can't imagine why anyone would give a vitamin such an idiotic name.  Why not call it R2D2 while you're at it, or C3PO?

That's when it dawned on me: the Vitamin Industrial Complex is making this stuff up.  When I was a kid, the vitamin we all took was 1-a-Day, and a good, patriotic vitamin it was, too.  The name and the dose were identical, which is how they should call all things.  If you were older, the vitamin you took was Geritol, which was basically 1-a-Day but with gin.  Later, 1-a-Day began to call itself 1-a-Day with Iron, which meant it now had iron instead of being just a sugar pill, which it had been before.

Then, someone discovered Vitamin C, and a new word entered our vocabulary: mega-dose.  You couldn't just take one-a-day, oh, no.  It wasn't like the daily allowance of iron, which you could pretty much get by licking a mailbox; C you had to take in mega-doses.  D was another one.  Sunlight either, I forget which, broke down D or else activated it, so basically, unless you were Count Dracula, you needed a constant supply of D in an IV drip.

B Complex was the one that puzzled me.  Why did B get to be complex when all the others were simple?

Somewhere along the way a scientist let slip that there are a limited number of vitamins, and the alphabet was more than sufficient to name them all.  There would never be a need for vitamins X or Z, or even vitamin Q.  Vitamin E is the furthest planet in the vitamin solar system.  I do not know the scientist who divulged this, but you can bet if the AMA gets hold of him, his body will never be found.

Faced with a finite number of vitamins, the Vitamin Industrial Complex shifted its strategy to "supplements."  For example, fish oil.  (BP missed a PR opportunity when they didn't slap, "Now!  With More Oil!" on all the seafood coming out of the Gulf.)  Another one is "antioxidants;" you can sell the public liquefied lawn clippings so long as you say it's an antioxidant.  As far as I can make out, all the iron we ate back in the 50's and 60's is causing us to rust, and the antioxidants keep us from doing it.

This is in addition to ginko, echinacea, garlic, and zinc.

Starting today, I suggest you give up taking vitamins and just throw random things from the refrigerator, pantry, and spice cabinet - berries, nuts, that sour cream that's starting to turn, peanut butter, cumin, garlic powder, twigs, leaves - along with a generous handful of nails and sawdust into a blender and drink the result.

Let me know how it works.

A Very, Very Short Blog Explaining Why Humility, Though More Difficult than Pride, Is Actually More Likely to Be Associated With Happiness, And Hence Advocating Assuming an Attitude of Humility for Anyone Able To

If you're not humble, you believe you deserve to be happy.  It is highly unlikely you will believe you are exactly as happy as you deserve, so sooner or later it will occur to you that you aren't as happy as you deserve.  (If you believe you're happier than you deserve, that's humility.)  If you think you aren't as happy as you deserve, you'll feel cheated out of something, and that will spoil whatever happiness you do have, and you'll be miserable.

Someone who's humble, on the other hand, doesn't think he especially deserves to be happy, and is therefore surprised and grateful when he is and not overly disappointed if he isn't.

So try to be humble.  If you can.

"How Do You Come Up With a New Blog Every Day?" A Video Documentary

Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned From Chickens

It's true, man, chickens are magnificent, proud beasts, and we can learn so much from them.

Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder: That's the thing about chickens, they never forget the miracle of just existing.  Chickens marvel at a beautiful sunrise, or maybe just a rock, some rotten cabbage, anything really.  Chickens are just in a constant state of wonder.  I love that about them.

Treat All People Equally:  You might be the richest person on earth or you might be a bum.  Maybe you're the pope or you're a meth addict.  To a chicken, it's all the same.  As far as she's concerned, you're just a great big bald funny-looking chicken with hands.  The world would be a better place if we could all see things that way.

Take Things One Day at a Time:  Dude, I really envy the way chickens do this.  Me, I take two, maybe three days, at a time.  It's crazy, but I can't stop myself.  Like just the other day, I took Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday all at the same time.  No wonder I'm always tired.  Not chickens, though.  Those glorious bastards.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff: You ever seen a chicken sweat?  You know why not?  No sweat glands.  Case closed.  That's just genius.  You never see a chicken worry about retirement.  All they do is scratch, peck, and poop.  If you do what you love, every day is a vacation.

Lay an Egg Every Day: They make it look so simple.  They don't even know they've done it.  Later, they're like, "How'd this egg get here?"  They don't even know they're chickens.  If they could talk, they'd be like, "Am I a chicken?  I don't know, never thought about it.  I'm just taking it one day at a time.  You got any rotten cabbage?"  That's how they do it.  They don't think about stuff, they just are.  I tell myself, I can't lay eggs.  But the fact is, I just don't have the guts.  I don't have the integrity to lay eggs.  Chickens.  No self doubt.  No fear.  God, I love them.