Resisting Turnip: Boredom or Cuteness

Electron Blue 17: How to resist the Turnip

He’s here to stay, I’m sorry to say, our world and its media currently seem to orbit the misshapen roundish vegetable and all its satellites and its every perturbation. He and his antics get ratings, and ratings get money and clicks, so it will keep happening with nothing to stop it - except two things: Boredom and cuteness. Have you ever gotten bored with a “reality” TV show? Have you ever turned off a show because its storyline got dumber and dumber? Have you hoped in vain that something interesting would happen so that it would be worth watching again? I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but the media universe is full of irresistible things which lost their inspiration, or their capacity to generate outrage, and ran aground on the stolid rocks of boredom and the channel switcher. I’d rather watch a pitcher rub a baseball against his butt than listen to political speeches telling me how great it is going to be. OK, it was great for the Cubs. Not so great for the rest of us, maybe. 

If you’re bored with baseball, try this strategy to resist the Turnip. This is something which happens constantly even if people don’t consciously promote it. You can trivialize the monster. I’ll give you some examples. When the first “Star Wars” film came out, the one now known as number 4, Darth Vader was a genuine villain. He was terrifying! Not only that, he committed genocide on a planetary level, when his “Death Star” reduced the entire planet of Alderaan, along with everyone on it, to space rubble. This was one evil character. He stayed evil until the very end of film number 3, when the film makers started giving him more sympathy, as long as he was dead.

During the decade following the Star Wars films, people started to see Darth Vader in a comic way, including parodies, comedy skits, costumes, games, collectibles, and a world wide wash of Darth Vaderiana. Even more, there were Darth Vader kiddie toys, lunch boxes, Halloween costumes, plushies, you name it. Here was the killer of millions, destroyer of planets, asking for candy at someone’s door.
And nobody blinked.

The same thing has happened with the eldritch horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, where the dread Cthulhu has been turned into a toy for babies and their parents. Cthulhu is soft and green, with tentacles and big eyes! And what of the toys made in the image of plague germs? Do you really want to take Ebola Virus to bed with you? I guess that some of this must be considered “avertence” behavior, trivializing and making it cute so that it will not kill you. But can you see the terror through the plushie? 

Then why not try it with the Turnip? I saw toys made from Hillary, with hideous “Hello Kitty” style oversize heads that looked like embryos. Did they do it with Turnip? Comedians are working overtime so let’s see the Donald Toys. They will be drooled on by babies, chewed by dogs, and kicked around the house by rambunctious kids. Can we make him funny so he will not hurt us?

The Return of Electron Blue

Electron Blue 16:  Changing color and returning

So it happened. The thing that none of us impotent rational pallid intellectuals dreamed of in their nightmares happened. The overweight orange Rutabaga has been selected as the leader of the free world, more or less. The vegetable has won. And in the word sphere, he is associated with the color Orange. How dare that Turnip take my brand away from me? He’s been called “His Orangeness,” “Orange Face,” “Big Pumpkin,” and other names of that sort and I won’t stand for it. I didn’t stand for Turnip then and won’t now. This means, among other things, that at least for a while, I am “divesting” (a word currently on the Buzzword List) from Orange. I pulled all the orange garments out of my closet and will fold and hide them. I can’t stop driving my Orange Honda Element, I do need the transportation. But I wish I had some sort of high-tech liquid crystal car paint job that could transform from Orange to another color with the press of a switch.

Then what will I use for my theme color instead? I already switch twice a year, in Advent (the four weeks up until Christmas) and during Lent (the six weeks before Easter). Priests in the Catholic and Anglican churches wear purple during these seasons, as well as blue sometimes. I have been purpling myself for years so why not now? I have plenty of purple stuff. 

And as for this Blog which was named “Orangeness” when I started it as a humorous screed, well, things haven’t been so humorous since I started it. But I still want to write. So how do I change colors here? By going back to the past. I had a blog called “Electron Blue” from 2004 to 2008. It was named after the brilliant blue color of my car at that time, a Honda CRV. I wrote “Electron Blue” to chronicle my self-driven project to learn mathematics and physics, so the original Electron Blue was science and math-oriented. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to study these things, due to pressure from the day job. A few years later I revived it as “Electron Blue 2” and that ran for a year or two. Now that I no longer have the day job, I have more time to write so why not just switch back to the bloggy colors of blue and violet, (with a little orange accent here and there) but without the exclusive emphasis on science. I fished the header art out of digital oblivion, changed the wording and a bit of design, and now I am ready to once again throw my little koosh balls of verbiage into the endless chaotic flux of the infosphere. If you are interested, the URL for this remains the same: http://elementorange.blogspot.com. I will be writing about a wider range of things than in the previous two iterations, as well as continuing my humor and rants when I feel like it. I’ll help you forget Turnip and his gang of vegetables, at least for a moment or two. Welcome to Electron Blue 3.

The Algebra of Madness

Orangeness 15: The Algebra of Madness


A does not equal A but B equals A. Three times AB is 1/3 of AB. A multiplied by -1 is 10A. If you repeat A does not equal A long enough and enough times, it will be true. And you can divide that by zero and come out positive. See? I'm good at math. I'm the best at math. I can tell those math professors at MIT plenty they don't know. I can turn a billion dollar loss into a billion dollar gain, because 1 billion = 1 billion. I know more about math than anyone. Believe me. So if you block off something with parentheses, which any high school kid should know, you get everything that’s covered in those parentheses. I know more about math than anyone, and I’ve got that all figured out, trust me. Multiply that by a fraction of 300 million and you get 600 million, all coming to invade us. Honestly, do the math. You’ll have math teachers begging on the streets.

Meanwhile, if you take your e-mail archive and actually look at it before talking about it, you will find important subjects like sales from Macy’s, L.L. Bean, Target, Home Depot, Staples, Safeway, and 10,000 ads, 20,000 demands for your time and money from an entire charity industry, even an entire economy. That’s important, right? So let’s do the math. 10,000 + 20,000 = 30,000. Plus or minus about 3000 extra ones from the prolific “Dot and Bo” online fake furniture store, which sent out so many e-mails that the company went bankrupt. So that’s it for the e-mails, add it up and it’s nothing. Right! 

Believe me, I know what numbers are. After all, a woman is from 1 to 10! They call those “real numbers,” which means they’re not fake. Not fake at all. I only want women who are 10s, that is number winners, decade girls, orders of magnitude, baby. But after 30, forgeddaboutit. There’s a linear equation here matching age with hotness, inverse proportions. Trust me, you start at 10 and go up from there till you get to 30 and that’s the end, you’re off the graph. Career over.

Remember to only trust the polls that have me ahead. I’m a winner and cannot lose, do the math. Is the math rigged? You tell me. I’m good at math. I’m the best at math. I can tell those math professors at those fancy colleges what they don’t know. Believe me, we’ll put them all out of business. Nothing will count any more, only me.

Rent A Helper

Orangeness 14: Servant

I want a servant. Not a slave or some poor soul in debt bondage, and not a nanny. I want someone like the person who took care of me while I was mired in the House of Mildew. She was not just a house cleaner, she was a multi-star general of home economics. She could tell you where everything was going and contact the people who would disappear it. But the best was that she took care of me while I dashed around meeting with lawyers and realtor and CPA and e-mailery on my laptop. She brought me food she made herself, nice stuff like salads and pasta, since there was no food left in the Refrigerator of Dismalness. And she did my laundry!  And made my mildewy bed!  And she bravely swept up the mouse droppings. And all this work from a lady who just celebrated her 80th birthday!

I am now totally spoiled. I am waiting for someone to do all this household work for me, now that so much of the contents of the old house are now sitting in my apartment exuding that lovely perfume into my enclosed urban atmosphere. What would I like this person to do? She and her team will clean off all the baked-on mung and greasy dust in my kitchen. She will help me move the stored materials into another room. She will vacuum my rugs when my back hurts too much to bend over and do it myself. She will make my bed with fresh sheets which smell good! She (or they) will clean the cavelike deposits from my bathrooms. And so much more. So why not make it so, as the Captain says? I have done it, contracted a professional service agency who is going to come to my apartment with a cleanliness team and make a first stab at cleaning the joint up.

But this isn’t all I want my caretaker to do. I want her to actually like me, in a tenuous and idealized version of what a nice relative might be like. Like, bake cookies or look through my books with me preparing to send them out, or just have a conversation. I grew up in a world of sarcasm. I’d like to have just a few non-sarcastic moments in my life, especially in our current twisted atmosphere. I would pay for it. Just a few hours every few days, maybe. Pathetic, you’ll say. Make your own friends. Would you believe there are companies with “Rent-a-Grandma” service? And personal assistants ready to help you? I don’t trust it, but the concept is out there. With no nagging voices about how socially inept I am. You arrange and pay. This whole thing existed with the “lady’s maid” in the nineteenth century and earlier, but it is culturally dangerous in our modern era since the maid will probably be from another country and have different customs. Right now I’ll settle for cleaning and less dust, and hopefully a smile.

Dust and Ashes

Orangeness 13: Dust and Ashes

I scattered my mother’s ashes at the site of the old family house. You might think that Massachusetts is a barren sub-arctic place inhabited only by granite boulders and evergreen trees, but that isn’t true. There are jungles of vines and scrubby swamp trees wherever people do not cut it back. And that was where I poured out the ashes. “Fertilize plants, Mother,” was my liturgical blessing. After all, my mother drew tree forms constantly, so she might as well have her remains (or “cremains” as the funeral home called them) turn into trees. Whenever it rains, the water will percolate my mother’s atoms into the soil along with the roots and the mushrooms. Good enough for Nature.

I was nervous about opening up the little dark blue box of Cremains. What if it looked kind of like mulch, all stringy and roasted and dark, with leftover things in it, like eyeballs and fingernails and bone bits and the metal pin that they attempted to fasten her together with, what if there was still something recognizable in the pile? Fortunately, the funeral people had ground it all up or cleaned it, so that the remains of my mother looked like a fine mass of greyish-white powder, easy enough to undo the plastic bag and sprinkle it here and there in the jungle. A neighbor was kind enough to witness this, so I wouldn’t have to do it all by myself.

I was wearing high boots so I could walk through the brush and leaf piles, but since there was a wind the ashes blew from the places I poured onto the new polish of my boots. We wiped the ashes off but now no matter what, my fancy outdoor high footwear will have some atomized remnant of my mother’s existence on them as long as they exist. But were the ashes to speak, they would complain that I had paid too much for the boots.

This harmless dust resembled no less, or more, than the heavy deposit of sticky powder that had accumulated in my mother’s bedroom over the years and years of neglect. It was on the windowsills, the tables, the jewelry boxes, the cabinets, the tschotschkes on the shelves, the shelves, the TV, the video cassette player from the 1990s, the annihilated unplayed cassettes, and almost a thousand books, piled up after reading and never touched. After seeing the ashes, I realized that my mother had already partially disintegrated and was turning into ashes even before she passed away. And now I look at the same thing happening on my cluttered shelves and in my cluttered dwelling and my cluttered living room filled with the pre-ashen detritus of the old house. I swear to the great Goddess Kondo (Japanese de-cluttering queen), I swear to the God of dust and ashes, DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME. Dust, dust in the wind, dust on the books, as my birthday approaches: Take it away, throw it out, blow the dust off before you become dust yourself.

Spring Verbiage

Orangeness 12:  Verbiage

The infogarbage spew is going full blast. You gotta love something that, to quote a Facebook post, sucks your brain juices. Now that we live in Turnipworld, we must emulate the Great Rutabaga and continue to forget everything we learned, even if we didn’t learn it till 2013. Wow, the celeb facts are flying at full speed. Jaw-dropping historical photos! Adorable celebrity moms! You’ll never believe what the Rutabaga said today! We may have to put up with this vegetable for years.

It’s not just social media (LIKE ME DAMMIT I NEED CLICKS), it’s sociopathic media. Another neck-snapping unexpected consequence of some Harvard dropout genius’ invention to ogle coed girls. Don’t you wish you had become an engineer instead of an artist? I still don’t know which way to insert the USB plug, which of course they knew all about back at MIT in 1968.

There is so much verbiage garbage that a mere paragraph on Facebook (CLICK ME I’M HERE ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT) of BuzzLanguage will not suffice. Let’s take a trip through the May garden of buzzing words, while endangered bees grab pollen for their doomed honeycombs:

We are hoping that the Turnip will “pivot,” a choice word for changing your stupid ideas while still trying to sell them. Turnip knows only turning towards the sunlight of public attention. That’s all he knows. You will not beat him by out-thinking him. He is, if you really must think about it, an “existential threat” and “categorically wrong.” Now what again is an “existential threat?” I believe that it involves a chain-smoking, unkempt French philosopher coming at you brandishing a Communist hammer and sickle. The French have seen all this before. And what is “categorically wrong?” I think I heard Barack Obama use it (correctly, too) so that must be some of that intellectual talk we need to forget about.

Have you ever seen a Unicorn? Yeah, the white Little Pony that farts rainbows? Well this Unicorn is now defined as a start-up company that is already worth a BILLION $ before it ever makes or does anything! We must be entrepreneurs, folks, and chase that Unicorn! How will we attain start-up heaven? Be disruptive! Outthink disruption: innovate new possibilities with Analytics. Big Data is your friend, even as it is sucking out your brain juice! (I WANT BLOG PAGE VIEWS! READ ME! No, blogs are too long gimme Twitter tweets!). Big Data knows your secret consumer desires. Do you have a role model? I want a role model, even if the words are so Boomer. Millennials agree, but what is a role model? Here’s a (somewhat edited) excerpt from an article in a real paper magazine:

“My definition of a role model is someone who maximizes their potential to push the boundaries of their circumstances with passion, purpose, integrity, and the sensitivity to know they are setting an example for others along the way….I can relate to the underdog story. He is showing us all how through belief in yourself, hard work and dedication, it is possible to achieve your dreams, prove your doubters wrong, and go from an underdog to a (star).”

Tell me about it. 

Passion! Purpose! Integrity! Believe in yourself - and work hard! You, too can become a DJ or an emoji designer or a Unicorn….or a turd of impressive size, weight, and fiber content.

O.C.D. in the parking lot

Orangeness 11: Obsessive Compulsive Parking

“Park Prettily,” I read at a car park in England. Nothing pretty about it, Brits.

I am edging back and forth, forward and backward, trying to place my Dorkmobile into a rectangular parking place. Go forward, go backward, turn steering wheel a little bit…Too much! Back up. See those worn-out yellow lines on the asphalt? You need to be 1 foot away from them on both sides. 12 inches, that’s all you get. Open the door and see 9 inches between you and the line. No, that won’t work. Your fellow unpretty parker will open the door and bang a dent into your door. My car is pocked with these mini-dents, there’s no way to avoid them. And I’ve probably doored someone else’s car dozens of times. 

Park Prettily. Back up again. NO WAIT someone is coming down the parking lot alley at high speed (at least for a parking lot) and you can’t see them because you’re in between monster “mini” vans that look like enormous sweet potatoes on wheels. Mine is equally oversized but rectangular and boxy rather than ovoid. The designers of this parking lot did their planning in 1991, when it was built. That sounds like yesterday, but it was more than twenty years ago and cars were not giant vegetables back then. You could actually park in one of their spaces without smacking your neighbor’s car door with yours.

It’s mathematical, trigonometric if you draw the lines carefully. A change of just a few inches as you back up is multiplied into a large arc in the front. You are making parts of a 270-point turn and inscribing an arc that moves along a virtual circle trying to move your wheels sideways while moving forward and backward inch by inch. But those other drivers haven’t stopped, they’re whizzing by in back of you and you can’t see. Ah, but wait, potato driver to your right is stashing her grocery bags in the back of the mobile and she is LEAVING. Time for you to find your wallet (another commercial adventure) and escape. But no, another vehicle whose size dwarfs the blob that just left has pulled up into the space. Not a vegetable, this is the crate the vegetables got shipped in. Let’s see them park prettily. 

Donald Trump as Vegetable

Orangeness 10: The Big Turnip

Whenever I see the word “Trump,” it looks like “Turnip” to me. And, y’know, that Trump person who’s all over the news kind of looks like a large root vegetable, the rutabaga who for whatever subterranean dirty reason is running for the Presidency. Well you know about me and vegetables, so what is it with Rutabaga that appeals to so many people? They say it’s because he allows people to think and say nasty things and get away with them. “He’s not a politician, he tells it as it is.” Really. This is your role model? I lived with someone just like that for all of my young life, my father that is, he ran his mouth just like Turnip but didn’t have the advantage of being filthy rich which excuses all bad behavior. There isn’t much I can say about Turnip that hasn’t been said before, especially since he’s playing us all with calculated advancements of schtick that titillate the media in vibratory doses. Yes, he’s a vegetable with an electric info-dildo that causes frenzy and even violence, while he looks on sucking it up. 

The info-dildo’s stimulation, of course, comes from the energy of burning info-garbage which I elaborated on in the previous Orangeness post. When you burn info-garbage you get a toxic pollution of burning media fumes and an overload of smokin’ emotion. Because this is how Turnip is the root of our current culture of emotional whipping. Check out your buzzwords! Jaw-dropping! Eye-popping! Shocking! (Number 7 will astonish you!) Stunning! You need to see this! You’ll never believe what happens next!  He can keep you rolling and remember, all attention during a campaign is good attention. Wouldn’t I love to have that amazing dirt-proof quality, that no matter what I did or said, my followers would still be thrilled with me. But do I really want to be a celebrity? Do I really want to eat vegetables so that I could generate more methane for my info-garbage trash fires? Or perhaps, in some jaw-dropping turnaround, Turnip will finally fall into the boiling pot and get mashed.

Infogarbage

Orangeness 9: Infogarbage

The Internet is a vast ocean, spanning the whole globe, even where it is land. It is an ocean of electronic information, not water. There is a reason why moving from site to site is still called “surfing the Net.” Every time you turn on that computer and connect, you are exposing yourself to the endless circulation of metaphorical water and allegorical salt. 

And, just like the real ocean, the Net-Ocean (fishing nets, that is, to snare you and your fellow creatures) has regions and seas, some clear and balmy, others polluted and full of harm. The bottom is lined with the shipwrecks of “dot-com” companies, start-ups, service providers, search engines, and the remains of once massive lords of the sea….Compuserve? Altavista? Geocities? Whale carcasses, all of them now.

There is now so much plastic and other pollution in the ocean that it has spun together to form artificial islands and a permanent layer of compacted material, harmful to fish and sea creatures. And the Ocean of Internet is going this way too, but the polluting material is not physical but informational. I call it “infogarbage,” and by now there is no place either in the ocean or on the Internet that has not been somehow compromised by it, even if it is tiny and hard to see.

Much blather, sometimes true blather, has been written about the “monetization” (lovely word, that) of the internet, and the frantic competition for people’s attention. The oil of the information age is attention, that “made-you-look-and-click” thing. See where I’m going with that metaphor. Oil, fossil fuel, is so essential that people will drill the bottom of the sea to get it. On the internet, monetized sites drill to the bottom of your brain and suck out the oil of your attention. Their sole ambition is to get people clicking on the site and sharing it on social media in international cascades of infogarbage, “going viral,” and thus showing that it is a suitable drilling platform for more attention, more ad space, more info garbage. And it’s cheap and can’t break and exude awful goo all over the shoreline.

What, you say, my time is my own, and if I want to click on celebrity facts or cat videos, why shouldn’t I? Yeah, don’t we all. But then I discovered that these obsessive little entertainments are provided by an enormous industry of spammy sites, which underlie the ubiquitous ads. Back in the ancient days just after the millennium, reams and reams of spam was delivered to us under a bubbling coating of word salad, shredded civilization aimed at defeating the spam filters which kept the pollution manageable. Now there is no need to elude the spam filters - we readers have BECOME spam, and we take it in every moment of our blenderized attention span. An enormous industry uses thousands and thousands of pseudo-informative sites to extract from us. You are a resource to be mined and exploited. If petroleum had consciousness, it would be you, bubbling up the pipe along with countless exploitation web sites.

They have names often compounded with “buzz” and “viral.” ViralRecall, BuzzBombed, BlitzLift, Lifescript, Bite the Buzz, Mindbuzz, PeekWorthy, ViralWorld, Mind Pause, Distractify, Viral Hog, Buzzify, PopnHop,Viral Recall, ViralIgniter, CoViral, Viral Scoop, Shareable, BoreBurn, Bored Panda, Boredom Therapy, DamnBored, Lifebuzz, SetViral, GuiltyFix, Flipopular, Viral Mega, and on and on. This protozoic proliferation of infogarbage sites is managed by a few “content management” companies such as “Taboola” or “Outbrain.” From these sources, massive rivers of info sludge pour into the Net Ocean. They deliver the basic output of tabloids from history: celebrity gossip and facts, grotesque freak shows, lurid crime stories, cute animals, sports, medical quackery, and of course, female cheesecake. Boobs, ass, and more boobs. The more you click, the more boobs you see. And eventually you will be set upon by malware, the hook under the bait.

You can see the evidence of these myriads of catch-you sites as “by-lines” under “sponsored posts” or even in supposedly legitimate “news” posts on Yahoo or CNN. You have probably seen and consumed material from millions of them. These sites can MAKE MONEY by renting ad space, and may be the basis of what is advertised as “how to make a fortune working only four hours a week.” Yes, if you create and manage 100 or 200 garbage sites, you’ll get royalties from the ads. Maybe only one dollar per site or 1/10 cent per click, but you’ve got a lot of them and it mounts up, so let’s create ViralBuzz and its permutations and go off to our warm beach in the Caribbean! More celebrity boobs, baby. What is notable about this industry is that it produces NOTHING. No craft, no food or drink, no helpful gadgets, no books or medicines or furniture…nothing except money.

So we are back by the ocean. It’s clear, blue and sparkling, and the rum drinks with the fruit in them are on the table, and your laptop showing the output of your 700 info garbage grab-you sites is hidden under the pillows. That’s the same ocean you’re polluting, but in an informational way. In the world of information, there are no limits. It’s jaw-dropping and mind-blowing. You’ll never believe what can happen next.

Epic House Clearing

It’s been a while, we know that. My last  “Orangeness” entry was in early October of last year, 2015. A week after that, my mother broke her hip in a fall at home. Twelve days later, despite attempts to repair it and rehabilitate her, my mother passed away aged 94. 

Since then my life has been seriously disrupted since I am the only heir and executor of her estate, and she left a load of stuff behind which has to be taken care of. So in these months since then I haven’t had either the time or the energy to post to the Orange. But it’s 2016 now, and February, the dreariest month of our year, so I need to get back to what I like. A sip of orange juice if you might say, though orange juice reminds me of my late father who was rather unsavory in his addiction to orange juice. 

Let me tell you about what was left to me in this epic passage of generations. Plenty of money, enough to pay a lot of taxes on, so I am now for the moment one of the greedy parasitic inheritors of unearned wealth. And a decrepit house in a Boston suburb, filled with 60 years of hoarded parental material, ranging from ancient decaying coats and clothes and shoes, to 60 years worth of financial statements and check stubs proving that my mother bought a bottle of milk in 1974. And my father’s piano, which a piano technician has proclaimed un-repairable. It sounds like an otherworldly dulcimer and I have recorded some untuned piano sounds to use in later ambient compositions. Last but not least there is the archive of my parents’ musical and artistic careers, which includes my father’s music and media recordings. With great effort on my part and Maggie, the archivist at Brandeis University, we were able to stash all of my father’s music material into the Brandeis Department of Music archive, where it can be accessed by anyone interested in the music of my old Dad.

Much more difficult to curate is the large collection of unsold art of my mother’s. My mother created a large amount of art with no intention of selling it. She just made it because she was compelled by talent to do so. Talent unfortunately does not mean money and in her day it was considered completely crass and low for an artist to market his - or especially her work. So my mother’s output is sitting slowly falling apart in the two back rooms of the rather small house. I have gotten a couple of them placed or promised to museums or collectors but the majority remains with the old house…and the mice. 

Yeah, I haven’t mentioned the mice yet. Not computer mice, real rodents, in their numbers, infest the house. I heard them scampering in the ceiling and behind the furniture. I did not see one, which is good because if I had I would have immediately decamped to the less infested Hampton Inn. The mice were feeding on old birdseed left in the room behind other things we couldn’t see. Even when we removed the birdseed the mousies kept coming because they had left stashes in their nests which they built all around the house in hidden hoarded places. Now mouses are cute, right? Mickey and Minnie? Three Blind Mice? They are NOT cute. They are vermin. And what I didn’t know about mice is that they pee and poop all over where they go, for territory and path marking. And this mouse effluent stinks unbelievably - worse than a skunk, if you have ever smelled that. Mouse effluent is also transferable. In that it contaminates whatever touches it, which in turn contaminates whatever touches that, etc. etc. I have been spraying Febreze and other stink relievers and I still smell it more than a month afterward. 

It was Christmas time and I was re-enacting the Battle Against the Mouse King, but I had no Nutcracker or Toy Soldier Army to combat them. My helpers set up traditional snap-traps baited with peanut butter and seemed to put a dent in their numbers, but what we really needed was a fierce cat who would rid the house of them gladly.

Work has been done. I need to de-clutter my own place, and every time I remove something, I either stupidly buy something new, or find more stuff. I’m like my mother. I have check stubs from 1987 in a big space-filling box. 1987, you are going to be history, if I can get to you. That’s almost mid-century, though I think my mother beat me in the long-term hoarding department.

The old living room still looks mostly as it was when my parents lived there, mid-60s style. But the antique dealers are at work. I am selling off furniture pieces one by one, though I can’t do that while I’m not there. I managed to get rid of the most well-known piece, the chair known as the “Womb Chair,” designed by the famous Finnish architect and crossword-puzzle fill in word Eero Saarinen. This chair is a famous mid-century modern design but I always disliked it. Once you got in it you couldn't get out. Sort of like being in a womb I guess. You would struggle to get your butt out of the deep back of the chair and then you would pop out wet and screaming to pick up your drink from the round cocktail table which my father built to go with all the other mid century stuff.

As I have stuff removed from the house in advance of selling it, I offered the chair to a local antique store specializing in mid-century modern housewares and furniture. It is supposed to be worth some money but there has been some deterioration over the years so maybe not so much. At least someone will buy it and it will find its way to a better home. I'm still looking for a  home for the art, which is large and difficult to display, and also smells of mouse pee.

I guess you’re up to date now.

February 14, 2016.