humor

‘Who Killed the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown?’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a couple of hours, we will be pumpkin hunting, my girlfriend and I. They call it “pumpkin picking” for some reason, but the only “picking” that will be happening will be me pointing at a nominee and my girlfriend either shaking her head no or collecting it for us.

Like many other activities, I have not gone pumpkin collecting since childhood, a period of my life that I mostly wasted in an 18-year-long wish for it to be over. (Instead, I lingered in it and that all ended in 2010.)

My girlfriend discovered last year that she has a talent for carving the jacks o’lantern. In a remarkable coincidence, I re-established at around the same hour that I possess no such talents, that the pumpkins and I have no rapport. My sole attempt last year, my one try at even producing a traditional (in America, in the 1970s) triangle-eyed and two-toothed smile (three teeth if ambitious; see above), was hindered by my lack of patience. I would have had more of what we like to call success if I’d set out from the beginning to carve the sucker with my two thumbnails and my deep need to weep at panic boredom.
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A Novena for the Completely Distracted

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The cat took the phone. That is the only explana-scuse I can come up with. Ángel, el gato de amor (pictured above), wanted me to get an upgrade so I could take better (well, any) photos of her. Like the one above.

One night last week, somewhere between the room in which my girlfriend and I were watching television and the bedroom in which we were going to be sleeping, my phone left my person, never to return. I placed it in my pocket upon standing to walk into the bedroom, but when I arrived in the bedroom three seconds later, it was no longer in my pocket. An inspection tour of both rooms and the hall in between them led to neither phone nor evidence of foul play.

An ancient (five-plus-years old) brick of a phone, which did not do its one job of placing or receiving phone calls very well, it is not missed. What is missed is an important sense of myself. What is missed is my understanding, my long-understood understanding, that I do not lose things, that not losing things was my one talent. Sense of self, we hardly knew ye.
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A Meal Fit for a …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I don’t know how science works.

To the best of my knowledge, electricity can be explained thus: Step 1, flowing water or wind turns a turbine which looks like a giant screw, and Step 2, I walk through my front door, pick up a black rectangle, punch a red button, and “Dah dahdah, dah dahdah,” Sportscenter is on. (I wrote technical documents—white papers—for electrical engineers for five years and instruction manuals that were used in home construction around the nation. You’re welcome. Expertise takes different forms, and mine is in forming sentences. The engineers supplied all the science-y numbers that make buildings happen.)

Cooking is among my top several favorite activities to pursue for when cooking is something to be done. I reminded my girlfriend of this recently:
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