Ride

 

One day, after twenty-five years
Head of service at the local Sears
Helen Walker put her pencil down and walked away
And all they found was a little note
'Adios' was all she wrote
But as she left, someone heard her say

"Gonna buy me a ticket to the end of the line
Wanna feel the air, breathe the countryside
As long as those wheels keep rollin', I'll be satisfied
Gonna ride, ride, ride"   (Robert Earl Keen)

This is an important day for me.  It is my last day of work before I officially retire.

Yes, I am riding off into sunset.

Yes, I am heading out to pasture.

Yes, I am hanging it up.

No more meetings, no more phone calls, no more Zoom calls, and no more TEAMS. As the kids say, if you know you know.

I won't have to ask for time off to go to the doctor or the dentist or have some work done on my car.

Schedule a vacation?  Every day is a vacation!

I can stay up and watch the ball game or a movie if I want to.

Do I feel old?  Honestly, no.

How's my health? Outstanding, no complaints.

Neither one of my parents retired. They just quit working. My dad's reason was due his health and my mom quit because she had to look after my dad. 

I'm happy I can retire. I worked for the health system for almost 22 years and the insurance company for 17 years.  That's not too shabby.

I've gone through 7 Presidents of The United States: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

I've worked in the Open Concept (no cubicles). Two desk cubicles. Quad cubicles.  A cubicle with a door. Finally, I've worked the past six years in my son's old bedroom that is now "my office".

I've worked with many different people from many different areas of the country, and that part has been fun.

But somewhere in the 90's, a school of thought appeared in the business world that said work life should be as miserable as possible. Also known as "The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves" paradigm.

Over the past 30 years, I've experienced some of that. I'd read "Dilbert" in the morning before work and dog gone if it didn't happen at work the same day.

Lay-offs. Natural work teams. "Huddles".  I have been in meetings where leadership said they could replace everyone in the office with people from the bus stop.  ("Johnson, what happened to all the people that used to work here?"  "Sir, I fired them all and decided to hire the people from the bus stop."  "Who is going to train them?"  "D'oh!")

When the insurance company decided to close the office I worked at, they sent the Executive Assistant Senior Vice President of Closing Offices who said, "Well, when you look at the numbers, it was a no brainer".  I'm glad he didn't have to think about it, that would have been bad.

When I started, I did everything manually. Then came the computers.  Now I have a computer with two monitors.

When I started, I had to wear at least a dress shirt, dress slacks, dress shoes, and a tie.  In 1996 everything went from Business Attire to Wal-Mart causal.  I've worn a tie maybe six times since.  Zero times since I've worked from home. 

When I started, people could smoke cigarettes at the desk. Then, they moved it the loading dock. That's where you got all of the good office gossip.  Then they banned it from work forever.

99.9% of the people I've worked with have been real gems.

As people of my generation used to say, it has been real.

Roger Hines, one of my teachers at Wheeler, said you'll sit around your first couple of months of retirement and then you'll go out and get something else because you'll be bored. 

We'll see about that. 

 

This Week's Picks: Week One

 

 

Here we are again at the start of another College Football Season.  Things are different this year.

For one thing, there are 18 teams in the Big Ten, meaning there are 8 teams over 10 if my math skills honed at Cobb County Public Schools are good.

The Big Ten was a Midwestern Conference. Now, it has schools from the West Coast—the big ones, the big whoop-de-do schools like Oregon and USC all the way to East Coast (Rutgers).

Nobody is saying it, but it will cost a lot of money to travel in this conference.

Plus, can you see Indiana University ever winning the Big 10?  How about Wisconsin?  Minnesota?

The SEC is a little better. They are adding Oklahoma and Texas, which makes sense, considering they are basically Southern states.

But still, there are 16 teams in the SEC. How much money do you want to bet that Vanderbilt never wins a conference game?

There's a twelve-team playoff that you need a slide rule to figure out. This ensures we won't hear bellyaching from teams like Florida State. For that, we give praise.

This Week's Picks!

 

Jawja vs. Klemsome: Last year, Georgia lost its conference championship to Alabama and was kicked out of the playoffs. Georgia then beat the snot out of Florida State in the Orange Bowl. Clemson had an off year, for them.   I think UGA will win. UGA wins.

 

Bumbles vs Down Town Connector University. Speaking of slide rules, The Bees were buzzing last week in Ireland when they beat FSU which makes it the second Georgia school to humiliate FSU in a year.   Tech looks better than they have in years. They should have little problem with Georgia State. Tech wins.

The Lions of Nittany vs Almost Heaven? West Virginia? Gee, every year someone says West Virginia is going to be all that and a bottle of Mountain Dew. Then they lose. They will this time.  Penn State wins.

Our Lady vs The Ags:  Oh Lord, Notre Dame is the best team until the season starts.  Texas A&M will give them a fight, but Notre Dame has the luck of the Irish, Rudy, The Gipper and all that.  Notre Dame wins.

The State of North Dakota vs Prime:  North Dakota State is an excellent FCS school that should be in the FBS. Colorado gets attention because their coach has a gigantic personality and is a good copy. Colorado wins and Prime picks up three new endorsements.

Jawja Souhurn vs Boyzee State: Georgia Southern (school song: "Pop A Top, Again") welcomes Boise State to Pat Paulson Stadium and the land of the unforgiving gnats.  It is a big-time school.  What the hey, Georgia Southern wins. 

 

My Beloved Owls vs. The Alamo: The real big news is that Kennesaw State starts playing in the FBS, in Conference USA, on Saturday against the University of Texas at San Antonio.  UTSA is a pretty big school and was very good last year. Their most famous alumnus is Santa Anna, the Christmas rapper. The Owls are big underdogs in this one. I'm listening to my heart on this one: Owls win.

 

 

65 And Still Alive

 

Last week, I turned 65 years old.

I remember when that was old. When my parents turned 65, they told of days of yore when they would have to use the outhouse.

They also spoke about the days when they would walk to school uphill, both ways, even in the snow. And they loved it! It was much better than having to ride in a so-called school bus. But who doesn't love a school bus?

I have relayed my tale of woe to my son about how we would have to get up from our seats to "change" the channel when we wanted to watch something else.

We had three main channels in Atlanta. 2 (NBC), 5 (CBS),  and 11 (NBC).  If President Johnson decided to give an address to the nation, you had to forget about "Flipper" that night.

"Flipper" was a TV show about these kids in Florida (no Mom) and they had a "pet" dolphin named Flipper because, really, what else are you going to name a dolphin? Flipper got the kids out of all sorts of trouble because, follow closely, Flipper was "faster than lightning".

Life was tough back then.

One thing the show "Mad Men" got right was how ubiquitous smoking was back then.  Everybody smoked when I was a kid, even the kids. 

Everybody had their own "brand" of cigarettes.

I remember Old Man Manis smoking Winstons because they tasted good like a cigarette should. At least, I think it was Winstons. It may have been Pall Malls.  All of the cigarettes brands sort of blend in together. Except for Virginia Slims, which was marketed for women. Steve Martin said they had breasts.

My mom smoked whatever was on sale or those with coupons on the back that you could save and turn in for a prize when you had a certain amount.  I know we redeemed the coupons a couple of times, but I don't remember the item being such a big deal that if Mom had given up cigarettes for a couple of months, she could have bought it at K-Mart. 

Ah yes, K-Mart.  Or as my Aunt Lizabeth called it, "K-Marks".

K-Mark was the Wal-Mart before Wal-Mart.  It was a big deal in Marietta, across the street from the structure that put us on the map: The Big Chicken.

The Grand Opening of K-Mart was a big deal. They had Buck Owens perform. Jayne Mansfield was there, too.  

Mom was not a fan of Jayne's and said Jayne was drunk during her appearance.  I don't know how she could tell because we were standing somewhere in Kennesaw for this grand opening. But when your mom tells you someone was drunk, buddy, you can take that to the bank. 

We all rode in cars that had few, if any, seat belts. But the cars were cool back then.

My cousin had a Corvette.  It was really a snazzy car, particularly for a family that was not into being snazzy.

His twin sisters shared a Corvair, which they got as a graduation present.  Ralph Nader said the Corvair was unsafe at any speed.  It wasn't a pretty car, but they survived having a Corvair.

We were Plymouth people. One year, Old Man Manis brought home a Plymouth Fury, which was as big as the state of Rhode Island. It was a massive car that later both my brother and I drove. 

Mom's car was a Plymouth Valiant with a push-button transmission.  Never let it be said we didn't live in the future.  By the way, this was the car Mom ran over my brother's cat with that honestly was more gruesome than the Mason murders. 

When you reach 65, you begin to look back and feel grateful.  For all of their imperfections and quirks, my parents did the best they could with what they had.  We had meals every day, a place to stay and sleep, and we never had to worry about whether someone would come home.

We didn't worry about crime that much. We rode our bicycles without helmets. As a seven-year-old, I would walk by myself to a convenience store a mile away to get a treat, even though the house was full of treats.

I've survived Atlanta traffic, high school, college, work, play, and various home projects where I didn't know what I was doing.

I've been fortunate to have an amazing wife. We have a great kid, who in turn gave us probably the best baby ever born on earth. 

I was born in the greatest country in the history of man, at the greatest time, with the greatest music and entertainment.  I have no complaints. 

Now, if those kids would just get off my lawn.

 

Weird

 

When I started "blogging" (or whatever you call this), I had to come up with a name for the blog.

My first attempt was to name it "Alan's Alley" since that was the name of a weekly sketch on The Fred Allen Show. It was a radio show way before my time. (Before some smarty boots mentions it, "Allen's Alley," featured a character named "Senator Claghorn," who eventually became the basis for "Foghorn Leghorn" in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Never say this blog is not educational.)

That didn't work out, so I considered some other names before settling on Humor Me. One name was "Wierd."

You may notice this is a misspelling of the word "weird."  The kids at Wheeler could not spell the word weird because they took the "i before e except after c" very seriously.

For some reason, this word appears frequently in my yearbook inscriptions, as in "Alan, you are one weird guy" or something similar. Actually, it read: "Alan, you are one wierd guy."  As Five For Fighting said, "it's not easy to be me."

 
I decided against it because nobody would get the joke except my mid-70s Wheeler classmates, who would argue with me that they spelled the word correctly and that I was a "wierd guy."

Since we are in the "throw anything against the wall and see if it sticks" portion of the election season, it appears the Democrats have found a new word to describe Donald Trump and company.

Weird.

Out with the "existential threat to Democracy," and in with "weird."  Trump's weird. Vance is weird. Six out of the nine Supreme Court justices are weird.  Ninety-nine percent of the people who vote for the Republicans are weird, and they must be made fun of at times.

Over the past ten years, I have come to realize that Trump has acted like Trump for decades if not centuries. The way he acts in 2024 is the way he acted in 2014, 2004, 1994, et al.  When he was bringing money into NBC for his goofy game show, nobody said he was weird.  When he was sending money to Democratic Senate candidates, nobody said he was weird.

 Now, all of a sudden, Trump is weird. He is strange, man, and not in a good way.

JD Vance has also been tagged as weird. His statement about "childless cat ladies " has caused such a stir that both Chelsea Handler and Jennifer Aniston felt compelled to comment on it.  So you know it was serious. 

For the record, Vance said in 2021, in an interview with Tucker Carlson (oh heavens!), that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

It was a hyperbolic, sarcastic remark, but it didn't say anything about couples unable to have children and being against IVF.  It was cutting, to be sure, but I'm not sure it was weird. 

He didn't say all childless cat ladies are miserable-just this bunch.

But, if people want to get up in arms about it, well, that's politics. Welcome to the NFL, JD.

What was weird about JD's introduction to National politics was a thread about Vance being sexually attracted to couches.

I saw dozens of Vance couch jokes on X and I wondered where in the world it came from.  Someone said it was in his book Hillbilly Elegy.

Well, I read Hillbilly Elegy and I don't remember him expressing interest in couches.  I think I would.

Business Insider tracked down the creator of the Vance and Couches joke.  It was some guy on X that wrote a joke about Vance. That's it. 

"Perhaps, Rick (the X poster) said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the  "ecstatic truth" — in Herzog's words, "a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual," encompassing falsehoods that "make some essence of the man visible."*

In the past eight years, people have correctly noted that Trump has told some tall tales, to put it nicely. When considering this, it is best to acknowledge that if Trump actually lied is immaterial. It is best served by thinking it as "ecstatic truth" because he was trying to make the essence of his opponents visible**.

As for his decision to include a fake citation (Rick listed page numbers from the book) in a post about a man having sex with a couch, Rick claims highbrow inspiration. "Not to  egghead it up," he said, but he was an English major "and I do have  certain literary tastes." Listing page numbers was "in the vein of"  authors Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who used excerpts and citations, real and invented, to lend an air of authenticity to their  fiction. "It's something I've found funny my entire life," he said."***

I'm all in favor of political humor and appreciate a lot of it. I used to read National Lampoon when I was a kid and regularly come across pictures like this:

This was tasteless and not very funny. But, there was truth in it and the truth was the main reason Edward Kennedy never became President. ****

The joke about JD Vance is tasteless and not very funny either. The problem is, at least from a humor stand point, is there is no essence of truth about it.   The joke just says, "I don't like JD Vance because he's from the opposite party so let's post something distasteful and make him deny it. Ha. Ha."

If this is what this election cycle will be like, we're in for a bumpy ride. 

Footnotes:

*Business Insider, July 30, 2024

** That's a joke son, a joke. 

***Business Insider, July 30,2024

**** The cartoon is titled "The Delegate From Chappaquiddick"