Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

Feb 232015
 
Escaped sheep being led back in to a pasture w...

Sheep are born to follow.

The role of a good sheep is to follow. Keep your head down; nose stuck in the butt of the sheep ahead. Don’t look around because you don’t want to know about anything that is off the beaten track. You don’t care where you are going so long as it’s where the crowd is. Don’t worry about what your destination will look like because it will look just like where you are now. So long as you stay with the herd it’s all good.: no muss, no fuss and no tension. The life of a sheep is secure, comfortable and stress-free. What more could you want?
You may have become a sheep after finding out that you aren’t cut out for the role of trailblazer or you might be following a family tradition. However you arrived at sheep hood, your troubles are over. It’s lonely on the path less traveled. It’s frustrating to try and fail and even harder to bounce back and hit it again. Why bother? How many times did you fall down before you embraced your mediocrity? One? Twenty? It doesn’t matter. Some sheep struggle. Others are born to follow. It doesn’t matter. The end is the same- a fat and happy life of blissful blandness. Life become placid and you are at peace with the world. You no longer accept any responsibility or blame for whatever happens. You stop worrying and striving. Life presents no more challenges. You experience no more frustration. Your mind is free from doubt. It is the way things should be.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Feb 232015
 

 

Bob’s a Bad Influence 

OK, if Bob’s going to slack off and then 24 hours late whine about how Yankees are destroying the South, there is no reason why I can’t do a little whining as well- even if it is out of character for me. I already gave a shout out because, at long last, we are experiencing the last of the silly Harry Potter movies. I suppose it is a relief to see anything positive about the UK these days so maybe I shouldn’t be so negative but I can only take so much. We are long past Britain as the ruler of the waves and the sun never setting on the Empire. They have come down quite a bit in the respect area over the past century. The best they can do these days is sending the Royals in funny hats out to titillate the peasants in Los Angeles or Ottawa or push Amy Winehouse on us. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me.  Harry Potter was a vehicle to present a positive image for Britain with attractive, un-pierced, un-tattooed and un-sexed young people who speak intelligible -if pommy- English.

I’m not planning to see this last gasp of British civilization but I still like to know enough about the dumb movie to have a few good comebacks when the topic comes up, I found this Cliff Notes version of the plot. It works for me and you might enjoy it as well.

Harry Potter- the laugh riot

Funny as the Harry Potter movies might be, I doubt if the Brits can even guess the depths of potential humor. I can’t wait until Mystery Science Theater 3000 gets hold of the series. It will be a hoot. Meanwhile, not only to we have to put up with the Royals and their damned hats, we get silly British college twits who think that life in America is funny. I’m going on the record here to say that I shop at Walmart and there is nothing funny about it.

Walmart, the movie

It’s bad enough that America has to police the world and defend countries that don’t have enough pride to defend themselves but when they put out movies touting their cultural superiority and then make fun of Walmart, it’s too much for me.

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Feb 232015
 

 

I’m looking at my desktop this morning- not what Windows calls my desktop- I mean my real desktop.  It’s a mess- a controlled mess to be sure- but still a mess.  I confess that I don’t understand quite how I lost control but somehow the result of a series of seemingly reasonable organizational decisions over the last month is clutter.  As you probably can guess, clutter doesn’t bother me a lot.  What bother me are the consequences of clutter.   I fear that the wraith of my order loving wife will breach the security of my office and destroy my serenity.  She tries to restrain herself in the vain hope that I might suddenly get my act together but eventually she loses it and I hear “When are you going to clean your room?” or the even more ominous “Do you want me to help you clean that mess up?”

Somehow I can't manage this clutter.

Somehow I can’t manage this clutter.

This drives me to panic because her involvement will push me to crisis.  I know that her solution for clutter is the trash can.  Life is simple for her.  You handle something; then you either file it or throw it away. I don’t dispute the logic of her thinking.  It is just that there is some obstacle in my brain to actually doing it.  Everything on my desk is on my desk because it is important.  It doesn’t get there otherwise.  I am merciless with junk mail.  It never gets past the trash can. What’s on my desk is pure gold.

As far as the stuff cluttering my desk, if I could throw it away, I would.  It is just that I still need it, although I confess that that need may not be today or even next week.  (It is ridiculous to claim- as my wife does frequently- that I am a hopeless hoarder and that without her careful oversight, our house would look like a dump. After all we are only talking about my desk and not the whole house.)  I need everything on my desk.  The problem is that I don’t necessarily need it right now.  If I leave it there in plain sight then when I do need it, I will know where to find it.  In the meantime, my only problem is that it might obscure my view of something else that I need now and can’t find.

From time to time, I try to organize the clutter.  I consolidate by making piles of similar things but this doesn’t help very much.  My wife isn’t fooled and I find it harder to locate important items.  It isn’t that I don’t want to put things away; putting items away just puts at great risk my ability to ever find them again.

People suggest that all I need to do is file my clutter away where I can pull it out again when I need it.  I’ve tried that with disastrous results.  It works fine initially and my desk gets clear.  The problem occurs when I need to find anything and don’t know where to look for it.   Say I have some information about making videos.  Should I file it under the person providing the information, the type of video or do I just make a big file with everything video in it.  This bothers me when I file things but it is a real problem when I go to find it again.  First, I have to remember that I wanted to dig deeper into this issue which may not happen once the information is out of sight.  Second I have to know how I filed it of else I have to go through multiple possibilities.  The odds are very good that I will forget about the issue altogether but even if I do remember it, it will take hours to find it.  Often even when I know the right folder, I won’t find what I want on the first time through the file.  I have so many bad memories about searching for information and most of them are bad.  As a result, I cling to my cluttered desk

So what’s on my desk right now?  Well, in the far left corner there is a stack of paper with my wife’s business invoices on top.  I still have to get our tax information organized and to the tax guy, so it has to stay visible.  Beneath that stack is some miscellaneous information that I need and am afraid to file.  There is the gate code, copies of our passports, the title for the car we are trying to unload, loan documents for my son’s car, a catalogue I thought I might need, an offer from an internet marketer that promises to change my life and printouts of the pages from one of my websites. I confess that some of those items can be filed away or even tossed because I either don’t need them in the foreseeable future or I don’t need them at all because the offer expired.

In front of that stack is the mailing from the tax guy with instructions about getting him the information.   I just consolidated that pile with my wife’s checking and credit card information from the other side of the desk.  I filed the registration and the passport copies in my personal folder but I am afraid to file the gate code so it now resides in my ‘I don’t know what to do with this’ bin in my out box.  Now the left side of my desk is looking presentable if you ignore the USB splitter, the SD card reader, my cameras (still and video), a calculator and my headphones.

Swinging around to the right we see my inbox (with three levels for in, out-filing- and what they heck do I do with this), a file for index cards which I once thought were an ideal method for taking notes, a stack of those note cards, a jumble of paper, my old Franklin Planner- now unused but containing contact information-, a book I was reading but have abandoned, a stack of audio cd’s, another book and the Spanish Language study program CD we used before going to Argentina.

Now that I inventory the items on my desktop, it is clear that much of it can either go or be stuck in a file with the probability that I will never look at it again.  My wife is right again but I can’t just cave and admit it.

After that painful inventory, I confess to being a sadder but wiser man although I doubt that it will significantly change my organizational skills in the future.  It is so hard to make this life and death decisions about my desk and so easy to hope that they all will resolve before I have to deal with them and so I muddle on.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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So What Happened to Vacations?

 Posted by at 11:02  rants
Feb 232015
 

I hate vacations. There’s nothing to do.

David Mamet

I’m confused. 

I confess that my upcoming vacation has kept me distracted. Serious vacations are new to us or at least memories from the past.

Beached

Going over our plans in my head in order to nip in the bud any potential problems, I can’t help thinking about vacations from the past. Times have changed. Today it seems that people yearn to get away from reality in some safe environment. People want to escape the harsh realities of 21st century America in make believe and indulgence. It is escapism, pure and simple. Maybe it is justified to want relief from the rat race and maybe it helps people cope with a meaningless job and a dysfunctional family. But I’m not buying it. The only benefit from two weeks on a Caribbean beach getting daily massages and drinks by the pool is a pile of debt. It doesn’t make you a better person or get you a better life. All if does is let you catch your breath. That’s not a vacation! That’s a cop out. The vacations I remember best were no walks on the beach or Mai Tais at sunset. They were serious commitments and wimps weren’t allowed.

Back in the Day…

When I was a kid, we took family vacations and what a family vacation meant to the Carlson’s was packing the whole family in the car and driving somewhere. Only rich people flew when I was a kid in the 50’s and nobody went anywhere to do nothing. Family vacations were road trips. We took a one week trip to Washington DC in ’53 which meant about two days in DC and four days on the road. Four days on the road with three boys under 10 in the backseat of a Chevy Bel Air Sports Coupe is not for the faint of heart. My parents took this all in stride because they wanted us to see our country’s capital. It was an educational experience. Somehow we took in all the National Landmarks and the Smithsonian and on the way there hit all the state capitals on our route. I remember that trip fondly and I  can’t remember much about fighting with my brothers in the back seat. Now that was a vacation. Thank heaven for the Burma Shave signs,

There were some shorter vacations to the nearby Ozarks and scenic Colorado but there was nothing relaxing about our family vacations. Every social and relationship skill we had ever learned was tested and found wanting. It was always a relief to get back home to get some quite time and personal privacy. Still, those vacations are my benchmark for defining a good vacation- engagement.

So I don’t get resorts! 

When I think about vacations, you don’t find me yearning for a mindless week of self-indulgent indolence. Vacations are for self improvement, adventure and testing yourself. You wouldn’t catch my parents on a cruise or lounging on the beach and I guess the apple doesn’t fall very far away from the tree. Vacations were not relaxing or self-indulgent. Nobody puts three young boys in the back seat of a 1953 Chevy Bel Air hardtop and drives for two days just for the fun of it.

It must be those self-indulgent boomers. 

Campo Santa Margherita

Today, it seems that the only reason for vacations is creating the opportunity to do nothing at the highest possible cost. I blame it all on the self-indulgent baby boomers who never had to work for anything in their lives and now feel entitled to continue asking. But no matter, I’m no boomer and I’m off the Venice to hob nob with the Venetians in the side streets and Campos away from the tourist meccas. We;re going to shop at the food markets, sample the dishes at the home style oosterrias and drink Bellini s in the Campos. We don’t know much Italian but it doesn’t worry us. We will be immersed in Italian culture and testing our ability to communicate beyond the constraints of language. It’s not a road trip but somehow, I think my parents would approve.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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No News is Good News

 Posted by at 11:02  principles
Feb 232015
 

What do we need to know?

Newspapers, news radio, CNN, NPR. It is all around us. News you need to know. Crisis here. Disaster there. The latest on the Pitt kids, Tiger’s golf game and marriage, Obama’s latest oration. They tell us we need to know what is going on. It is important to be informed. I am not so sure anymore.

I played the game

I have played that game. My first year at graduate school, new to the cultural mecca of the East Coast, I would devour all five pounds of the Sunday New York Times, marveling at its richness and depth and sure that soon I would become as sophisticated and elite as I clearly deserved to be. It didn’t take. You can take the boy out of the Midwest but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

I got hooked

I did pick up the news habit, however. If I was going to be a sophisticate, it was important for me to know what was going on. I have continued to read newspapers throughout my life. From time to time, I have been addicted to NPR and 24 hour news radio stations. An evening was not complete without Huntley and Brinkley telling me what was important. When they retired, others replaced them. I was hooked on my news fix. Somebody had to tell me what I needed to know; what I needed to worry about.

But then I noticed

Well, as I get older, I begin to notice something. Nobody was ever very clear about why I needed to know all this. With all the urgency about keeping me informed, the President never called to ask my advice. After giving me all that information, nobody ever cared what I thought or needed me to step in and do something about it. All that careful preparation to make sure that I would have the appropriate response to any crisis and then I was just left hanging. I was full of information but with no place to use it.

Now I get it.

Well, lately I have started to question some of these basic assumptions about life that I always thought were important – like news. I started to think about what I need to know and why I need to know it. I reached an important conclusion – I don’t don’t need to know anything that is printed in the daily rags, broadcast on the radio or shown on TV. Everything will continue to be just as wonderful or just as fucked up whether I know about it or not. There is nothing that I can do to change or ever affect what is happening and no reason for me to think about it at all. So I stopped.

No More News

No more new radio. The oil spill will do whatever it does whether I worry about it or not. No more CNN. I can’t do anything to find those lost girls so why get involved? No more newspaper. California is going over the cliff. Let it go. There is nothing I can do about it. I quit with the news.

I have better things to do.  How about you?

From now on, I have better things to do than follow the news. I know that if they need my help with anything, they know where to find me. How about you? Are you still craving your daily news fix?

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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