"AWKWARD"

I pledge allegiance to my belly...?

Awkward seems to be my favorite word lately.  I misappropriated it from the little French lady.  You would think she would use the word gauche. She seems to be using awkward on a regular basis.  It seems to go well with her other favorite word, "obtuse".
For those of you who tuned in late I will define the difference between awkward and obtuse.  At least I will give you my definition.

Isn't math exciting and AWKWARD!?

Awkward is when someone crosses the street (jaywalking) while texting and I run them over with my Mazda, then I back over them trying to check out what I ran over.........."AWKWARD" .

Obtuse is when the family of the victim blames you for what happened.


Perhaps a better example of obtuse would be George W. Bush's presidency. 
An example of awkward would be George W. Bush's presidency.
Hmmm!.....This doesn't seem to be working  out as I expected.


Ok, I will try again.  Do you watch "The Office"?   Michael Scott is obtuse.  
This video on youtube will help define awkward.
We've all had those awkward moments.   Did you ever walk out of the bathroom with a toilet paper tail?  You go to an event and you're sitting in a chair and your legs are crossed and you realize your socks don't match, causing you to jump up quickly to hide it and you knock over a table, spilling your exotic red drink on the carpet. After that things really start getting awkward.
Did you ever go to somebody's house for coffee, take the milk out of their fridge, pour it into your coffee and ten minutes later find out you just used the breast milk meant for the baby sleeping upstairs?........A..W..K..W..A..R...D....!!!!!
Did you ever try to give a pregnant woman a hug but her belly was so large you shook hands with her instead?...AWKWARD!!!
Worse yet....You ask a lady how many months along are they are in their pregnancy and they say, "I'm not pregnant!!!!"....and they storm off in a big hissy fit.....Sorry!!!!....AWKWARD!!! 


Things can get a little strange.  I went to high five with someone and he didn't notice me so I hugged him instead.  I may have attempted to kiss him also, but I am trying to block that out of my mind. I am no longer invited to the Sunday football fest....AWKWARD!!!


Well at least I didn't go to the State of the Union speech and holler out, "you lie!!!" to the president. AWKWARD!!!!!  That one also qualifies in the obtuse category as well.


There are numerous awkward occasions in my life:

• You think someone is talking to you.  They start swearing at you.  You finger them.  They were talking to someone behind you.  AWKWARD!!!!...DANGEROUS!!!!
• In my youth I had a pair of ice skates.  We had an outdoor rink at our school.  I wore fairly thick glasses, and the ice rink had two puny spotlights.  We decided that we were going to do the "whip" a few times.  I took off my glasses and put them "somewhere". After we were done skating we decided to go home.  It was so cold my feet were frost bitten.  I could not find my glasses.  I walked home, a distance of two miles. When I got home and explained to my parents that I had lost my glasses, my father drove me back to the rink to look for them.  It was 10 o'clock at night.  I was hopeless looking for them in the dark.  When I got home and took off my boots,  I found my glasses.....inside my boot.  The frames were crushed but the lenses were ok.  My feet were so frostbitten that I could not feel anything.  I could have walked through crushed glass and I would not have felt a thing......AWKWARD!!!!...and very short sighted on my part.
• Sometimes you get struck down by strange psychological conditions.  Sometimes I used to get a "shy kidney or bladder".  I would walk into a restroom, usually in a bar to use the urinal.  Five seconds after I walked in, someone else would walk in.  I would be standing at the urinal for a couple of minutes and the guy behind me would say, " Are you done yet?, I really have to go."   "Done yet??...I haven't even started!!!"  A  lot of  mumbling and swearing would commence. A gay guy asked me if I needed any help.  I told him I could handle this myself.  AWKWARD!!!! 
• Sometimes a really good idea goes bad.  I am always trying to improve life on the planet.  I watched a program very recently on recycling human waste.  I had tinkered with this idea I  in the past.  One of my neighbor's dog took a large crap practically on our doorstep.  I purchased a large mouse trap, put it in a low gauge plastic bag that would rip easily, filled it with  his dog poop, put a string on the spring, wrapped it, put it on his doorstep and waited. It was spring loaded and ready to go. I was sure to do this late at night with great stealth.  When he opened his gift, it was regifted and recycled.  This is truly the definition of recycling. The neighbor did much cursing.  He did not seem to appreciate my gesture to improve the planet through recycling.  AWKWARD!
•   I had a very similar idea with human waste.   I was going to save my own human waste and sell it around the neighborhood.  I asked my wife to do the same.  She is very resistant to this proposal.  In fact, she insists that I get some type of psychological counseling.  She didn't say it exactly like that.  One of her suggestions was for me to call my hometown and see if their village idiot is missing.  What do you suppose she meant by that?
• If you really want to get revenge on someone all you have to do is send them a letter with the heading:  Herpes Testing Lab, U.S. Communist Party membership drive, Subscription renewal for Gay Hustler Magazine.....well, you get the idea. AWKWARD!

Isn't life just a series of awkward events interlaced with moments of lucidity?  There is no doubt in my mind.

No awkward events in you life?  "You lie!!!!"

Hurry up, Brain...My body is waiting.

It was a dark and stormy night.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

There!!!!

My English teacher said you should try to grab your readers right from the start.  It worked for Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens.  It will work for me.  I actually tried to fit Hemingway into this but saying, "Did the earth move for thee?" did not seem to fit into the introduction.  My English teacher would be so proud.

So much for introductions.  Let's move on. 

This is for all of you who tuned in late.

My name is Jonathan Hemlock.  But not really... this is a fake name.

I try to write blogs that have a beginning, middle and end.  My English teacher also mentioned that.  I want my blog to be original and quirky.  A wry little story about life as you get older.

"Getting older beats the alternative."

The thing about getting older is that your body knows but your mind is usually eight to ten years behind.  That is why I have pain medication.  I try to do things I did in 1973.  I can still do a one and a half back flip off a diving board.  I am sure of it.  

I can barely walk down the street without falling off the curb but I believe I can run a hundred yard dash in under a minute. I say fifteen seconds.  I am sure of it.

I probably could do ten or twelve pull-ups if I didn't have a torn rotator cuff.  I am sure of it.

I  thought about training for a half marathon.  I probably could win my age category if my hips, back and shoulder did not hurt so much.  I am sure of it.

This is my current mindset.  There is a lot of things going on in your body that you are not ready to accept.  Just the other morning my wife said to me, "Your loud snoring kept me awake half the night."  My response was, "Really? I kept you awake? How long have I been snoring?"   Her quick reply was, "Since 1993!!!!"  That's odd! I never heard a thing.

The body is like a finely tuned automobile. My mind tells me that I have a Rolls Royce but I went to my mechanic at the health clinic recently and he told me I have an Edsel.

I noticed a few quirky things.  When I enter a building ... or even plan to enter a building, I always have to check out where the restrooms are. This is very important as you get older.  We have two and a half bathrooms in our townhouse.  A good thing.  In the morning all of them will be in use.  Wilson will use the half bath as his personal water supply.  The initials IBM have a totally different meaning now.  IBM means Impending Bowel Movement.  I can't imagine living in a place with one bathroom.  I shudder.

I also noticed something about flatulence.  In my youth it was something we did for amusement.  We had total control over this.  It was like burping.  Something the guys did to amuse each other.  Who ever burped or farted the loudest or the longest was a person to be envied.  At some point, like in your early twenties, you mature and stop doing it for amusement.  This is something you control, more or less.  But then you realize you don't control it so you try to be discreet.  You try to find open space.  You run to an open field. You avoid places that have echoes.  You blame it on the cat. You adjust your life... then you get old.  

The rules change again.  Now you are afraid to pass gas.  There is a degree of uncertainty involved in this endeavor.  This is why older people are cranky.

There are other issues involved in olditude.

When I was growing up I thought old people smelled funny.  I am now "old people".  Do I smell funny?  My wife tells me I smell just fine.  She is starting to be "old people". Should I trust her opinion?  I don't dare walk up to a young lady at Walmart and say, "Do I smell old?".

Your other senses start to diminish.  You don't know you smell old.  My sense of smell has gotten so bad that my neighbors call me when Wilson's litter needs to be changed.  I can eat a Limburger sandwich and a glass of sour milk while I change the litter.  I'm guessing that my sense of taste is diminishing also.

My sense of hearing is not as keen as it used to be.  I learned to compensate.  I learned a few tricks from my dad who had the misfortune of being too close to numerous dynamite blast in the mines.  

An example of my dad's bad hearing would be: I would say, "My sense of hearing is not as keen as it used to be."  My dad would say, "My fence of fearing snot as bean looses bees? What does that mean?" It made for some comical non-sequiturs, but it was also very frustrating.  He would never admit that he had a hearing problem.  We just didn't talk loud enough or there was too much background noise.  He had trouble accepting his aged hearing.  I guess the acorn did not fall far from the mighty oak in that respect.  I will try to make a better transition, or as my father would say," I will dry and bake a letter transmissions?"

As a person gets older it gets more difficult to sleep unless you are watching your favorite television program on the couch. Then it will take about ninety seconds to fall asleep. Why is that?
Someone told me to count sheep.  It would make you sleep.  I tried it.  Guess what?  It didn't work.  The damn sheep kept moving.  I had to keep starting over.  I was getting really annoyed with those sheep.  I decided I would sheer the sheep for their wool.  That way I could keep track of who was counted and who wasn't.  This would have worked except I started to get allergic to wool.  So I would wake up exhausted and itchy.
My wife has a similar problem.  She can hear crickets farting at three o'clock in the morning. She has extremely keen hearing except when I am talking to her. After I repeat something three times she will then demand I write it on paper.  Then she scolds me about my bad handwriting.
Yeah....Penmanship does not get better with age either.  I now write like a doctor does a prescription.  So now we just email each other.  This does not make for good dinner conversation. But...we have documentation.

There are other things that just don't make sense anymore.

• The hair on my ears is growing faster than the hair on my head.
• A young whippersnapper is someone under sixty.
• The diaper aisle at the pharmacy has as many diapers for adults as for infants.
• Television..(kata...boomm!) grams hav...(kata...boommm!) a lot of backgro..(boom...boom) background..(boom...boom!!) noi..(boom!..boom!) noise.  Am I the only (boom...kata..boom!!) person this...(boom!..kataboom!) annoys, Dr Phil? (Kata...boom!!)
• My television has I about seven thousand channels. Why is there only about five good programs on television?  Why isn't one of them "The Codger Channel?"
• Jennifer Lopez looks like a teenager and I yearn to see Betty White's cleavage. She's hot.  I am not well.
• If I am not snoring my wife puts a mirror under my nose too see if I am still alive.  So far so good. 
• One of our neighbors is so old that she was friends with (and outlived) people who had streets named after them.  She called the "Robert Grissom Parkway" The Bob!!!! A personal friend of hers.  That's old.

I have a lot more questions, but this is a good start.  Now I can go read my book.  My book?  I don't remember where I put my book.
Someone told me yesterday that memory is the second thing to go.  That person told me what the first thing to go was.  I can't remember who told me that and what he/she said.
If you are reading this, call me.  Whoever you are.  I need to know.
Hmm...What do I need to know?