Cranky Old Man

   I was sitting outside the Honda dealership yesterday, waiting for Doralyn to come and pick me up. I had just brought my car in for service and when I found out that the bastards would not even be working on it over their lunch break, I decided I didn't really want to sit around and wait for them.

   I was sitting on a bench outside when one of the salesmen walked by with a couple of what looked like potential customers. The salesman had a friendly hi, how's it goin' but one of the customers he was with took the time to give me a second and somewhat (to me) disapproving glance, as if I was perhaps sitting somewhere I shouldn't have been. At this point, I mouthed something at him.
   Now, my lips barely moved and I'm sure the man heard nothing. I suspect that if you had been sitting on the bench right beside me you likely would have heard nothing as well. I, however, actually heard the words I mouthed reverberate softly through my head as I spoke them.
   They were... fuck off.
   I was somewhat shocked and/or bemused at the fact that something which seemed much more like an angry thought in my head had actually been verbalized out loud toward another (likely innocent) person. I had been a hair away from cursing out a total stranger out loud, for no real reason. I hadn't been in a bad mood, in fact I was actually feeling quite happy. It was a beautiful day and I was sitting there waiting for my beautiful wife to shortly arrive. In the middle of all this, a man I don't even know looks at me twice and I hurl (quietly) invective at him.

   This is not the first time something like this has happened. As I've aged, my impulse control mechanism seems to have become a little tattered and frayed around the edges. It's almost as if I've had sixty years of peoples' crap to put up with and I no longer feel the need to be polite about it. I've had that many years to watch the reactions I get to things I say and maybe I just don't care anymore.
   In all honesty, though, I don't get this way just when I'm angry. I've never really been one to talk to total strangers about anything in particular but lately I've been much more prone to striking up conversations with people I don't even know about whatever seems to be going on around us. It has occurred to me that sometime other people have interesting viewpoints or things to say but, unless you engage them, these things remain hidden. In the past, I always felt there was a possibility I was going to be judged somehow if I opened my mouth to speak and so I didn't. Nowadays, I don't give a damn.
   Last night, Doralyn and I were standing in a movie theatre lobby, waiting to go in. We were the first people there and eventually the lobby filled up with people behind us. At one point, I turned around and looked at the crowd and told Doralyn that I had a strong desire to get all of their attention and make an announcement of some sort. I didn't have anything in particular to announce, I just wanted a bunch of strangers to know how I felt about something. As I stood there, attempting to come up with something that was announcement-worthy, here's what I arrived at and how I envisioned it sounding--"Hello everyone, if I could just get your attention for a minute I have a bit of an announcement to make! I just wanted you all to know that I am here with the most beautiful woman in the world and I can't believe she actually agreed to marry me!!" Hard to say what kind of reaction I might have gotten but it really wouldn't have mattered because I'm kind of at that age when, as I've stated, I don't give a damn.
  

Where The Heck Have I Been?

   I have been strangely absent from "Neanderings" for the better part of two months now.
   I found this rather astonishing when I actually checked. It's not like I haven't been busy blogging but it's all been over on "Strides" as the whole running thing seems to have pre-occupied me.
   Part of the problem, though, is that I just haven't found a topic which inspired me. I actually started a few posts which might have been "Neanderings"-appropriate but then they died on the drawing board. Here are a few of them.

Jolie

   One concerned Angelina Jolie. It was difficult to hear about her decision to undergo a double mastectomy and not want to write about not only her bravery but also how this decision would ultimately affect her physical desirability. It is clear from seeing pictures of her, post-surgery, that she is still an extremely beautiful woman. How many of us, though, and more particularly men, look at her now and wonder what is underneath. From here, it's not a huge leap to go right straight to the superficiality of beauty. For years, Jolie has been near the top of the list of the most physically attractive women in the world. Does her ranking now drop, simply because of reconstructive surgery? I've made the point before that once you take many of the most beautiful women in the world and strip away the make-up, the hair styling, the expensive clothes, the cosmetic surgery and the airbrushing what you have left are pretty ordinary women. You take those same ordinary women and apply all of the aforementioned techniques and procedures and what you get is beauty. But how do we value that? And should we? So that was one idea for a blog post.
  

Wallenda crossing.

I'd already written a blog post last year about Nik Wallenda's crossing of Niagara Falls. The post was called "Tether" and centred on the use of a harness as a safety precaution. Wallenda was against its use at the time but the network televising the stunt insisted and so it was used. Just recently, Wallenda walked across a portion of the Grand Canyon without the offending tether. In the televised buildup to the event, much was made of the obvious life-threatening danger involved. Wallenda didn't seem nearly as concerned as I suspect some of the rest of us were. We watched the whole thing and I actually found it rather nerve-wracking as my fear of heights kicked in almost constantly. As I watched, it was hard to wonder what if? What if he does fall? How will the Discovery Network handle this? Knowing that this was a possibility, there had to have been a plan for dealing with it. I also couldn't help but wonder how many viewers wanted him to fall. As disturbing as that is, millions of people watched and you just know that some percentage of them wanted it to end badly. Yet again another topic for a post.


Fairly representative.

   Grade Eight graduation. For one reason or another, we and many of our friends and acquaintances had kids graduate from Grade Eight this year. Facebook was awash with pics from almost all of these. Of course, one of the amazing things you see are kids who seem to have grown up, almost literally, overnight. It always seems that, at this stage in their lives, the girls have grown up just a little faster than the boys, however. The boys, in spite of their suits and tuxes, could not hide their underlying goofiness/gawkiness. The girls, suddenly, were awash with beauty. What I found disconcerting more than once, though, was that the beauty often was infused with sexuality. The trappings of sexuality were all there--make-up, high heels, cleavage, stockings, you name it. I'm sure that for many of the girls this was a first-time experience (as much of the teeter-tottering on heels indicated) and you wondered just how much of it might actually be embraced as they continue on into womanhood. As a man, however, it was discomforting to be sitting there in a public school auditorium or browsing through Facebook and coming to grips with how you were actually supposed to be looking at girls who were only kids last week. I'm glad we had boys!

   Aging. I turned sixty recently. Numbers are really only just numbers but this particular number has led me to consider a little more pointedly just where I stand in the aging process. Don't get me wrong---I think it's pretty cool that I'm sixty and I think many of the next years of my life are going to be simply awesome. It's hard not to notice the changes though. As a blog topic, several things have popped up which seem to be appropriate things to offer discourse on but I am at the point where there seem to be so many things to talk about that a whole new blog appears to be the way to go. So, at some point in the not-too-distant future, there may be yet another blog for your perusal. Once I think of a name for it...
   Nazi time travel. Okay, I can't even remember just how

this popped up, but somewhere on the internet I found a story about the possible existence of a bell-shaped device  the Nazis were working on during the war which, in turn, might have made time travel possible. There seemed to be credible documentation which suggested that at least they were working on this if, indeed, they hadn't actually manufactured one. Einstein himself had a theory that time travel was possible so it's not difficult to see why the Nazis might have been intrigued by this and willing to commit the resources to it. One of the theories I ran across suggested the possibility that Nazis were able to use this machine to travel into a different dimension, a dimension in which they were (and are) the world leaders. Google it, actually. Pretty intriguing stuff and probably worthy of a blog post.

   Okay, that's about it, those were some of the things I was thinking of making posts about the last couple of months  but didn't. Ironically, as I was sitting here working on this post, Doralyn mentioned that I didn't seem to be posting on "Neanderings" anymore. I kind of laughed and re-assured her that I was doing so at that very moment! Hopefully, I can get back into posting here (as opposed to there) a little more regularly now. Running is kind of cool but it is just running...