Blunt Wit

So is it just me or is everything there days getting chopped, diced and sliced into ever smaller chunks for our entertainment consumption? Seems like we’ve become a nation of instant gratifiers – give it to me now, give it to me quick, gimme, gimme, gimme.
So back in the good ole days our forefathers had single-moded recreation. They listened to the radio. Or watched TV. Or bowled. Nowadays our diversions stream at us deludgelike and we process information and experiences multi-modally. Meaning, we blog, text, chat, watch Youtube and bowl all at the same time. Television comes at us via snaky cables and ubiquitous satellites with a specific channel for every perversion. The internet fractures our attention even further. We get bombarded with messages like we’re in some sort of primordial multimedia soup.
And back in the day we actually moved our schedule around to accommodate our entertainment and not vice versa. Do you even remember back to the time when you waited for that specific time for your favorite TV show – you know, Thursday night Seinfeld’s. These days with Tivo, YouTube, BitTorrent and internet TV, we watch what we want, when we want to view it. And don’t get me started on lascivious content.
Speaking of which, in the past, our recreation broke distinctly into either high brow or low brow. You either sipped highballs and watched opera or chugged Pabst Blue Ribbon while ogling women wrestling in mud.

Nowadays the demarcation between high and low brow culture has been blurred. Heck I think they’ve even got a mud wrestling opera cable channel now but I could be wrong. At a minimum everything these days gets sexed up. I mean sex sells, yes, but scantily couples hawking toilet paper …

and vacuums …

Jeesh.
And then there’s blogging. Who has time to read – God forbid – a novel. I mean I break out in hives when I see the polysyllabic length of a USA today newspaper. Give me short snippets of wisdom, entertaining nuggets of laughter, in short, give me blogging or give me a lobotomy.
I figure in time our collective attention spans will shorten to that of the common goldfish – which is to say, 3 seconds.
Not what were you saying …

All hail to the chief! And by that I mean me. Father and commander-in-chief of the state of my own family. Or so I would like to believe.

So please pause a moment in silence as we mourn the passing of a member of our family. Young Tommy died recently of thirst or hunger or a myriad of other possible illnesses. Or possibly an overzealous door slam. And I killed him. Or at least that is what my wife and children say.
Tommy was our pet hamster. He was just another in a long line of hapless animals to mysteriously kick the proverbial bucket under my watchful eye. I didn’t kill him. I swear it. My wife took the kids to visit the in-laws and left me to take care of things. One of those chiefly being the well being and continued existence of Tommy. But somehow he escaped. Poof, one day he was just gone. An empty cage. A little hamster Houdini. Darn, I knew I should have cuffed him to his miniature flywheel while I went to work. Too late. Anyway, a week or so after they got back we found him wedged behind a door. My kids called for an impeachment – hamster autopsy but the judge ruled I, as next closest of kin, could determine the COD (cause of death). So I pronounced it poor hamster suicide and we buried him in a shoebox in the back yard next to Lester the goldfish, yet another unfortunate casualty that I had nothing to do with (or at least directly).

Of course this ‘Tommy incident’ just managed to dredge up all the ill will from the previous ‘Lucky incident’ all those years back. Then we were living in Beijing and to keep up with the Joneses (or in this case the Wang’es) we bought a pet bird. Not just any bird, mind you, but some rare, talking squawker. We named the unlucky avian, Lucky. Talk about irony. He would squawk in his pigeon Chinese … ‘Qu ba’, ‘Qu ba’ which can be translated as ‘go’ or more colloquially as ‘go take a long walk off a short pier’. This he told you to do constantly. After a week of sleepless nights of endless squawking, I tried to convince my wife we needed to eat fried chicken-like bird for dinner. A sympathetic friend eventually taught us how to put a cloth over the cage to shut Lucky up thus sparing his life for the time being.

So like with the current ‘Tommy incident’ my wife took the kids to see the in-laws and left me in charge. Well, wouldn’t you know, I come home from work one day to find Lucky claws up on the bottom of his cage. On the positive side, I did notice that he had a pleasant look on his beak so I have to believe he had a peaceful passing. I’m guessing stress induced heart attack … the number one killer in talking birds (or so I’m told). I went down to the market to buy a replacement bird, thinking I could fool them into thinking that some bizzarro Lucky was somehow the real deal. No luck(y). So again there were calls for my resignation as father, my impeachment as chief caregiver in our household. However, like Bush/Cheney, it would take more than a few innocent causalities to get me to acknowledge my mistakes. So we stayed the course. Surged ahead and got a golden retriever puppy.

I guess that’s why our dog Jasmine these days is always eying me with deep canine suspicion. Dreadfully afraid for the next time my wife takes the kids to visit the in-laws.

So my spouse says I’m cheap. I prefer to think it is more that I simply have my priorities all screwed up. For the record, I’d probably say I’m more frugal. Economical, perhaps, or possibly thrifty. But never cheap!
You know there are whole countries, races of people, who live with the “cheap” stereotype: the Scots, Dutch, Indians and Catalonians just to name a few. Ever notice Scottish Inn on the interstate. A motel so cheap you have to clean your own room. Or have you ever ‘gone Dutch’ on a date and paid your own way (muttering ‘the cheapskate’ under your breath).
My biggest problem is that I’m admittedly “penny wise and pound foolish”. I scrimp and scrounge on the little things, then blow it all on some big gesture. There are simply moments in life that require a little flare. I fully embrace the Chinese saying that “you aren’t born with money nor do you carry it with you after you die (so live it up a little)*.”
Funny thing is, I do the same thing with time as well. I am ultra efficient thinking two, three, sometimes seven steps ahead, always doing little things to shave off valuable seconds or minutes. Not rushing per se, mind you, just being hyper efficacious with my precious time. Then what do I do with all those stolen seconds and minutes. I spend them wantonly on a beer, a sunset and/or writing a silly blog.*Note I added this little gem to the end all on my own.

And here is a little video to punctuate the point: