In our vast old age, cable television or satellite or some pulse-pounding form of high-def radio will become increasingly important as we spend more time nursing ourselves back to health, because tonics and balms aside, few things make a geezer jump up and twitch like taking a gander at Darrin’s office in McMann & Tate. Think back! You’ve seen it a thousand times, and if you get colds you’ll need to see it a thousand more: desks are covered with ashtrays, cigarette butts and half-empty bottles of scotch. Obviously, we’re healthier than we know, and scotch prevents absenteeism. Obviously. The bug Pete and I and half the city have been trading, mixing and matching for over a month has settled into my lungs and makes breathing an unpleasant adventure.

If only I hadn’t quit smoking.

Pennies are humble and beautiful. People are careless with coins, but I adore them. It’s one of the quirks I’ve observed in men: they either collect coins or despise them – sometimes both at the same time. I can’t explain that. The Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction, where gleaming, museum piece cars trade for hundreds of thousands, is on TV in the living room, though my first car was a 1979 Pinto Wagon that by 1985 was still cheap enough to run that I could always get home from the Amoco station on just the change under the floor mats. And when you limp into the Turnpike Toll Plaza in a bland blue Pinto, they’re not surprised when you pay in pennies.

When someone shows you his true colors, you should believe him.

Yes, “health” is such a nebulous term. It could mean practically anything, like “misogynist” or “complete sellout.” In fact, why don’t we take the dictionary, separate the words from their meanings – since we’re not using those anymore – and shift everything a nonsensical two or three over. Then we can all pretend to be shocked! and surprised! – whatever the new versions turn out to be – when women’s bodies turn up dead – oddly, still meaningful – on hotel floors. Just the way they did in the bad old days.

Won’t that be “funny”?

In an exciting turn of events, I woke up Sunday without a voice where I could swear I’ve had one all this time. And of course Monday I got that flu shot we’re all desperate to talk about, but beyond that, I immediately drove home and keeled over. Yet today, I bounce back, like one of those inflatable Bozo the Clown things we all punched as angry children. So far, I have to say, these metaphors could go better.

Anyhoo, blogging and hijinx will recommence in three, two, one, and –

I’m thinking of making videos in which I speak slowly, calmly and say fuck a lot. I feel this will add spice to the public discourse. In the meantime, it’s a relief to find people like RH Reality Check speaking rationally and factually on the very serious topic of reporductive health.

RH Reality Check: Framing Reproductive Rights from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

Of course, he’s acting. But it irritates me beyond description to hear men discuss their opposition to abortion. I simply don’t care why dudes think women should be baby factories, and that includes every dude, no matter who makes his ruby slippers.

Bob made a good point in comments: the composter wasn’t cheap. Let’s not laugh that off. As people of modest means and vivid imaginations, we wouldn’t have had the cash except for two little things. One: moving afforded us a little found money because we saved like wild animals. Two: when I spend more than $100 at a time, I feel faint. Pete and I talked over what the property’s needs might be, and I shopped carefully. Very carefully. More carefully than that. The result: a handful of really good prices on the method and model I wanted more than shiny shiny jewels, and we bought the one with the best shipping. It’s an investment in making the crappy pulverized shale into better soil, and putting our money where our mouths are, ecologically. That is an image you should immediately scrub from your brain pan.

The house is old and has other needs, too. For instance, Pete’s climbing into a wall today to stuff insulation into a crevice I wouldn’t touch without a hazmat suit and an Iditarod dog, but that’s me. And speaking of me, I can’t figure out how to carpet stairs without a powerpoint presentation.

Tata: This is the fourth store we’ve been to and we can’t seem to find square throw rugs. Where are they?
Department Manager: That section over there has throw rugs.
Tata: That’s true, but I want a square rug. Do you have those?
Department Manager: Yes.
Tata: Where are they?
Department Manager: Over there with the carpeting.
Tata: No. I don’t want carpeting. I have a landing on a staircase. It’s about 36″x36″ and I want to put a little throw rug on it.
Department Manager: You can buy those online.
Tata: I’m in your store right now. I’d like to buy it, take it home and put it on my floor today, preferably so I can jump up and down on it and make little noise. Also: my cats should enjoy the fluffy warmth and shed all over it.
Department Manager: What you need to do is go to a carpet specialty store where they do binding and you can buy a custom carpet and they’ll do the binding and then you can have the carpet but we don’t have that here and I can’t help you.

If I turn and look at Pete, he will tell the Department Manager that she should go shag herself, not to mention Berber and Scotchguard, and I just can’t picture myself getting the bum’s rush at Lowe’s before the cocktail hour.

Tata: Thank you. Pete, dahhhhlink, we need friction tape, possibly all of it.
Pete: She didn’t hear a word you said.
Tata: Well, I used several at the same time. So: no. But let’s not dwell, when I have a Buy One, Get One Free coupon for Febreze! During the season when everyone stays home and farts, our house will smell delightful and our cats will be perplexed…

I have no idea – zero – if this is a good idea or if somewhere, a bottle of tequila wonders what just happened. I will say that when I pestered Cablevision in vain to give me the NASA Channel a few years ago, I would have watched this all day every day just for the backup dancers.

h/t: MEW.

Desire is the craziest thing. You can want things for no reason you understand, but you can’t live without them. For a few days, the breeze smelled alternately like fresh air after a cleansing storm and bacon. I seldom crave anything heavier than melted cheese, which my every blood relative would eat off a garbage can lid, but a few times last week I caught myself wondering if the guy at the next desk might be better hickory or apple smoked.

Obviously, I wasn’t spending enough time with my garden.

I wanted a greenhouse the way other people want flat screen TVs, and one day last spring I got one. It’s like a plastic slip cover and wasn’t expensive. Pete built it in a snug spot against the house. It’s a lot smaller than it looks in the picture, above. Imagine our surprise, then, when we planted a few summer squash and a handful of spinach seeds in a big plastic planter, watered it between painting and moving and suddenly found THIS in the greenhouse. The dimensions of the shelf are 6′ x 1′. Double that, add a Y Axis and you begin to see the FEED ME, SEYMOUR aspect of this situation. Yesterday, I looked around for Rick Moranis. I mean, wouldn’t you?

All this foliage springs from this one planter. No, really! It’s two or three squashes, mushrooming in size, if you will – if you won’t, though, I’d get a machete. I’m not even stuffing them with plant food until they burp, but now that I’ve thought of it, that sounds like fun for everyone. I think I can terrify the neighbors with squash blossoms and Miracle Grow.

One point: these plants have produced more than a dozen blossoms and no squashes. We are thinking of ourselves as proud farmers of little oxygen molecules, and they are adorable.

In other news: a tomatillo plant someone gave us – was it Mom? was it Trout? – has taken over one end of the garden bed. I freely admit: this bushy giant surprises me every day. I’ve grown tomato plants since I could hold a shovel but I’d never grown tomatillos, so I planted this plant where a tomato would do really well. Good sun, good drainage, lots of water, but only about a foot and a half from anything else. Everything around it loves the attention of the bees but hates the bushy bushy tomatillo plant, which is threatening to out-produce the entire rest of the garden. Obviously, I adore this fantastic thing, which is now closing on seven feet wide.

I’m overjoyed! Next year, we’ll plant tomatillos again, and this time, they’re getting their own room. We’ll teach them to smoke and drink to stunt their growth. I’m hiding the car keys.

Every Word of the Day from Wordsmith.org, which you should join and learn words because words are tasty, includes a snappy thought. Today’s example:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. – Hal Borland, journalist (1900-1978)

I have been suspicious of a tree. It was a particularly menacing apple tree outside my bedroom window two blocks from where I live now, and never have I seen the like of it. In high winds, it practically glowered. On sunny days, I could feel its rage. One day, my boyfriend came home from art school and found me hanging out the bathroom window, snipping away at the tree’s most offending branches, though so many offended it was hard to reach highest dudgeon without a ladder.

Tata: I have to fix this so it can’t touch the house!
Him: Let me get the Polaroid. The gaze is masculine but paramedics will enjoy a photo essay.

Who doesn’t, frankly? Some time ago, I went looking for greener cleaning products. Larry, the little black cat no longer intent on stealing your soul, had feline leukemia and I had to be careful about in-home chemicals. Now that Larry’s gone to his fishy reward, I could polish copper pipes with hydrochloric acid if I felt like it, but why repeat antics? Anyway, Pete and I use this stuff to clean and moisturize the teak furniture Pete’s mom bought when he and I still had training wheels. It works fine, the scent is neutral, the wood looks content enough, but it’s nothing to write home about, as opposed to this –

– which is a REASON TO LIVE. Some time ago, we bought a bottle of this almond cleaner and used it in the apartment, which was very small and had a very tired looking floor, so perhaps any attention at all was a shock. The floor looked great and the apartment smelled heavenly. Suzette tried it and didn’t love the results. It seemed possible Method had reformulated – or something confusing: a second bottle we used at Pete’s house smelled okay, but the unvarnished floor was dull and the scent was nothing special. Then we didn’t see the product at that grocery store I terrorize and when we found it somewhere else, I opened the bottle suspiciously to smell what’s what.

Rapture, that’s what. Pete mopped the floor while I painted the upstairs hall on Sunday. Upstairs, I smelled almond oil, which was indescribably marvelous. I can’t say why this product may be alternately so-so and a gift from the gods, but so it appears. Before you buy it, give it a good sniff. It won’t make black light posters more exciting like chemical cleaners will. How does that fragrance make you feel?

It’s been a long time since I saw anything this vile.

That clever man is a representative of the State of Florida on the floor of the Republican National Convention. I could go out on a limb and say that suit’s probably not this gentleman’s favorite evening attire, but why speculate about this one fellow when evidently more than one cognitively impaired douchebag thought this was excellent party gear? What is it?

It’s an alligator hat, with a likeness of Presidential candidate Barack Obama clutched between its jaws. I’ll admit: at first I didn’t recognize the image, since I’m from New Jersey, where we don’t know the difference between alligators and crocodiles because we know herpetologists who do, and they throw some steeeamin’ soirees. But ignorance of ignorance is a fleeting privilege, and this bliss left on the wings of Mercury.

I’ve lived in the South but I’d never to my recollection heard the words gator bait. What is this? Hunting alligators is dangerous. For a certain segment of the swamp-neighboring white population, it was a common practice to use black children to lure alligators out of hiding. How?

It is with regret and through clenched teeth that I inform you some people look upon this horror with such amusement and nostalgia that whole hosts of kitchy goddamn memorabilia exist to satisfy those longings for the Bad Old Days. And now, jackasses from Florida have aired this blot on American history as hilarious headgear. Not only am I proud to be an American in the twenty-first fucking century, but I am thrilled that no mainstream media outlet said shit about this to shame the shameless. It’s a beautiful goddamn world.

By the way, I’ve seen the fifties health film with the lady on fire. It warns against washing your clothes with gasoline.

No comment.

hat tip: Melissa, Petulant and InfamousQBert, who presumably have better hats.