It feels like a Friday the Thirteenth.

***

Water bottle tossing should be an Olympic sport. No, not the 16-ounce bottles of plastic water. I’m talking about the five-gallon bottles men seem to be only able to wrestle to the water cooler. I used to body wrestle the bottle to the top of the cooler. But then, Sheldon taught me how to sling it in a single pass where it would land on the opening. A single Bocce-like underhanded sling using the full range of motion in your arm to lift the bottle onto the cooler. Stepping back from the cooler to watch a water-slinger is ballet crossed with golf.

***

Am I the only one to end up with tiny paper cuts on my tongue after eating a walnut?

***

United Airlines: a man was dragged off a plane resulting in a broken nose and reconstruction surgery; a man was threatened with arrest if he didn’t give up his fully paid first-class ticket for a “more important person”; and on a flight from Mexico to Canada a scorpion fell down from the overhead bin landing in a male passenger’s hair. When he brushed it away, it stung him. The Friendly Skies are not that friendly.

***

Driving through the construction of the Spaghetti Bowl, and the confusing mush of shoulder lines and lane lines, I thought of my Uncle Karl who claimed he suggested to the California Department of Transportation the idea of painting white shoulder lines to keep motorists on the road. This was in the 1930s, I think. I hate to imagine what it must have been like to drive without the shoulder lines. This morning, the drivers, including an 18-wheeler hauling cows, really couldn’t keep between the lines.

***

24 people are stuck on a roller coaster in Maryland. It says they are at a Six Flags but I figure United Airlines probably owns part of the Joker’s Jinx coaster.

***

Just now: a guy pushing a handcart was nearly run over by a city bus advertising a menopause play. This could be a whole story; just saying.

***

I swear to goodness: a second menopause bus just tried to take out the same guy. Definitely a story.

***

Paul Simon is a brilliant writer. Take his Cloudy:

Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they’re cloudy
They have no borders, no boundaries
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell
Down from Berkeley to Carmel
Got some pictures in my pocket and a lot of time to kill

You can just see yourself on a bus going nowhere. I always jump to the two-lane road between Sonoma and San Francisco. The grape vine whipping by and the clouds coming up off the bay.

These clouds stick to the sky
Like floating question–why?
And they linger there to die
They don’t know where they’re going, and, my friend, neither do I
Cloudy

In a simple few lines, Simon captures a carefree moment. There is probably a deeper meaning; no matter. A simple day of doing nothing works for me.

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The flag carrier at the front of the parade struggled to keep the Stars and Stripes and the Gadsden Flag from crashing to the ground as the wind whipped at the top of the 30-foot flag pole. He thought perhaps agreeing to carry both flags was a poor choice. Behind him a band of cowboys and their ladies carried various flags. Children wandered away toward the street causing the mothers to pull them back. The flag carrier hesitated slightly as the crowd moved up. He seemed to sense the parade was slowing down; the participants unsure of their route. He pressed on with both flags dipping behind him. At the end of the marchers, a cowboy blew on a sheep horn. A low, mournful cry wafted over the parade. The group marched forward as the man with the sheep’s horn ran to catch up.

***

A Conversation

“I’m just going to take a quick walk to stretch my back.”

“Does your chair tighten you up too?”

“Badly.”

“I heard a rumor we might get new chairs.”

“I heard it too.”

“Either they give us new chairs or they supply us with an unlimited supply of Ibuprofen.”

“Honestly, either option couldn’t hurt.”

***

I wonder what archaeologists will say about my trash. Will they question why I needed to eat so many pop-cycles finding only five-inch sticks at the bottom of an eroded bag? Or why I threw out a stack of unopened junk mail promising millions if I just entered the clearinghouse sweepstakes? Does the unopened mail mean something and should I have recycled it?

I never used to worry about my garbage. It would go into a can, the trash man would lift it into the truck, and away it would go to the landfill. Then Earth Day came along and I have wondered if I am doing enough to reduce my trash thumbprint of waste? I threw away my entire collection of Mother Earth News magazines and replaced them with a thumb drive with 40 years worth of magazines in roughly three inches. I now wonder if someone will find the magazines and wonder why I was so wasteful? They will never find the zip drive; I plan on hiding it in my junk drawer. Hopefully, I won’t get the bright idea to empty it.

Too much stuff ending up in an archaeologist’s museum. Here is a stack of battered and torn magazines advocating against too much waste. And over here, is the same pile of magazines in a plastic memory device. At least the paper can degrade; they memory stick will be around for a long, long, time.

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