Right Cross (Cigar Smoke 1-28-10)

OK, I am sitting here at my desk basking in the right-wing-nut glow of the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts. I still can’t quite believe what happened. The Democrats lost the Kennedy seat. The decisive 41st seat. Un-frigging-believable. Holy Political Moly, the irony is just too delicious to not gloat over it.

But I know it is unbecoming to gloat, so I won’t be gloating very long. I’m a short-term gloater. Something will piss me off within the next hour and there won’t be a Scott Brown truck to run it over.

So I would like to spend some time talking about being a right-wing nut. I think us right-wingers have gotten a semi-bum rap. All of us aren’t Bible-toting Ku Klux Klan racists and war-mongering insensitive capitalistic greedy scum who hate gays. Although, I would admit that most of those groups could be in the Republican Party. What can I say? I don’t sleep with any of them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think we should all chill out a little and take a closer look at who is on the other side. So I thought I would share with you some of my so-called right-wing views. So eventually you will love me, and send me nice gifts.

And I realize this will be a short and somewhat shallow revelation of my positions. However, I don’t have the space or the talent to present a more in-depth offering.

First of all, I am an atheist. I am not a big fan of religion. However, I would side with the religious right over the spiritual left. At least, the religious right has some kind of moral standard. They hold themselves accountable for their actions. Most people on the left seem to just want to be spiritual, whatever the hell that means. They all just want to move to New Mexico and gaze at sunsets or navels and take a few hits on something and be mellow. Seems to me they just don’t want to acknowledge any of the hard stuff.

I warned you it would be short and shallow.

I’m also on the right because people on the right actually show their love of the country. They are not embarrassed by being patriotic. People on the left always say they love the country, but they always say that when complaining about how bad things are. They never seem to show it with flags or pins or bumper stickers like us right-wing-nut jobs do. Is it really that hard to say that you love the country and not put a but after it? People on the left want us to be more like France. People on the right are comfortable being Americans. People on the right are proud to be Americans. Are people on the left proud to be American?

Maybe. But it would be nice if they showed it once in a while.

I like FOX News. Sue me. But I think Bill O’Reilly is an arrogant jerk. Just like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is an arrogant jerk. I’ll admit my guy is a jerk-off if you will throw yours under the bus. At least we could make a stab at being civil. Let’s get rid of those two guys, huh? You go first. I’ll drive the bus. Then maybe Scott Brown can swing by in his pickup.

But you can’t take away FOX News. You keep all the other stations. Just let me have my one poor little stepchild of a station. But hell, some of you lefties don’t even like the fact that us right-wing-wackos have any TV news stations at all. If it were up to Obama, FOX would be gone. What a whiner.

And in my simplistic right-wing view, global warming is the biggest hoax in my lifetime. It is such a crock that Betty should name a cooking pot after it. First it was that our poor planet was getting too hot and then, when the facts wouldn’t support that, they quickly morphed it to climate change. And just this week the United Nations acknowledged that they made a slight mistake in their prediction that the Himalayas were melting. They had said they would melt by 2035. Seems as if there was a typo. It should have been in the year 2350. What’s 315 years among us scientists?

And lest we forget, the other little UN global hot air goof: Remember when they said all this supposed melting would make the seas rise by 18 feet? They eventually confessed that they meant 18 inches. Feet? Inches? What’s the big deal?

And the polar bears are going to all die. Doesn’t anyone even give a leftist crap that the polar bear population is increasing? But that wouldn’t fit with the agenda. I’m glad I’m enrolled in another school. Remember, I’m not trying to be too heavy or critical here.

I’m extending my little peace pipe or lotus leaf or outstretched crushing right-handed manly handshake to help us see each other a little better. I love polar bears, dammit. But whatever global climate change there is (which may or may not be happening) is making the polar bear population go up. There are more polar bears. Shouldn’t having more bears be a good sign?

Finally, I’m on the right because the right is grateful for and honors the military. The Berkeley left tries to ban them from being able to recruit near college campuses. The left sings songs about how bad they are. John Lennon wants us to Imagine. I want us to imagine what the world would be like without the US military.

OK, I’m stepping down off my soapbox of gloating. Oops, I have to get back up there again. “Air America” just went under.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Coffee with a Little Ire To Go (Cigar Smoke 1-14-10)

Being retired has enabled me to get into a number of things I didn’t have time for when I was a real person. I’ve been able to sit on the couch for very long periods of time until someone puts a feather in front of my nose to see if my nostril hairs are moving. I’ve been able to buy an iPhone ap that lets me track my FedEx packages and look at it every day to see if my packages are in Lexington, Ky., or en route to the delivery center in Austin, Texas. And most recently, I have been able to check out a different place to get my coffee every day in and around Pasadena.

Yes, I have had coffee at every Starbucks within a radius of 10 miles of Old Town. And I’ve enjoyed most of them. I usually go out and buy a USA Today and solve the crossword puzzle instead of solving my own life problems. And I always order a small coffee of the day and the clerk person always says, “Do you mean a tall or a grande?” And I always say, “Small.” And they say, “Tall or grande, you white-haired geezer bastard?” And I say, “Let’s compromise. How about a smande?”

After I had been to all the Starbucks in the area, and after many of the managers had put me on their no-sip lists, I started going to other coffee places. I would seek out semi-lowlife kind of spots where I could feel comfortable. Places with almost acceptable coffee and lots of open tables. Hole-in-the-wall spots. AM-PM stores. Hawaiian drink places with coffee signs in pencil. Donut shops. Enjoyed them all.

Except for the one on Colorado Boulevard that was so damn fancy that I felt like I had walked into someone’s living room. This place had poofy couches and nice chairs and carpets and — scariest of all — table lamps. Holy roasted coffee bean, baby. Table lamps! And then this nice Japanese woman asks me what I would like and I ordered a coffee and felt obligated to get this little mystery pastry goodie that was on a really nice plate with a lace napkin on it. And I paid her and she bowed and she kind of hesitated, so hell, I bowed back. And she bowed again. And I bowed.

And then, when I’m sitting in my stuffed chair with my table lamp on, she comes over and bows again, and I bow, and she bows, and I bow and I stick my nose into my coffee. She is startled at this, so she asks me if there is anything she can do, and I say, “Maybe bow one more time.”

Haven’t been back there. I found a new place out in Monrovia. Just my kind of place. Has coffee with sizes that you don’t have to be bilingual to order and is fairly big, so I can find a seat, and is far enough from my house that I can smoke a cigar on the way over and back. I love this place. I just take my iPhone and drink my coffee and observe all the other patrons with their electronic rectangles and am happy that we will never have to actually talk to each other. It’s perfect.

Well, almost perfect. I’ve been going there for a couple of months now, and it’s been great. And then a few days ago I go there and have my small coffee without flak and I go back out to my car. And some coffee-juiced jerk-off has parked his car so close to mine that I can’t get in.

How do people do this? He pulls into the stall next to me and parks right up against my car. He is literally within six inches of my door. He barely missed my rear-view mirror. There is no way anybody can get in my car. Twiggy on a diet couldn’t get in my car.

At first, I think of how I could beat this lowlife with a crowbar and tell the jury straight out that I did it and I know they’d let me off. But, of course, I am a semi-civil person. I will not club the guy to death. I try to stay calm. I accept that I will just have to live with the fantasy of clubbing the guy to death.

So I walk back into the coffee place. I say in a loud voice, “Excuse me. May I have your attention? Please put your hand-held devices down. This is a real person speaking to you. I am not voice- activated software. I am rage-activated human. I would like to know who the owner of the car is who parked his car so close to my car that I cannot get into my car. That’s what I want to know.”

Nobody raised his or her hand. So I said, “OK, here’s the deal. This key in my hand is my car key. I am going to walk out to my car and take this key and scratch my name and phone number on the side of your car so you can be sure to know who to apologize to. Or you can take your own car key and back your car out of the parking space where you have parked your pissily parked piece-of-shit-and-Shinola car.”

I turned and started walking out. Some lady ran by me and whisked that Escalade out of that parking spot before I could say “club to death with a tire iron.”

Damn soccer moms!

Wanna Sleep With Me? (Cigar Smoke 12-31-09)

Would you like to sleep with me? (Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you spill your coffee.) Actually, I’ve asked that question to many women over the years and, of course, they assumed that I meant would they like to have sex with me, and their answers have ranged from “With you?” to offensively feminine finger-pointing pissy laughter to being nailed on the side of the head with a purse to having to excuse myself before the police came — and once, to having to dodge projectile vomiting.

OK, forget the sex thing. I get it. I’m talking about actual sleep. I seem to have a few quirks when I get in the sack. (And that’s not counting that spaced-out country music groupie in Bakersfield 30 years ago who mistook me for Buck Owens.)

Here’s what I do when I get in bed. First of all, I have to wear boxer shorts. I cannot sleep in briefs. I just can’t do it. And I can’t sleep naked because of the restraining order. And I can’t wear pajamas ever since I went to college and wore them once and my so-called buddies ripped them up and waited until I got back from my classes to burn them in front of me. And I can’t wear a T-shirt. Just boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts. Big, loose, oversize boxer shorts.

And once I am actually in bed I have a set of rituals I must go through before I can even think about going to sleep. I am not joking here. I have to do the following. And in this particular order. No variance at all. Variance is for sissies. First of all, I have to sigh and moan. I just lie down and it seems as if the weight of the world lies down with me. And I sigh and I kind of moan “Oh, God, that feels good.” And I throw in a couple of other moans just because that is always what I do.

Then I consciously start addressing various body parts that need attention. My back is always first. I have a chronically bad back, and I have to press it down into the bed until it hurts. And it hurts every damn night, and I keep pressing it harder and harder into the mattress and the hurt kind of feels good and I moan out a few Oh, Gods to somebody — I’m not sure who.

Then I take the heel of my right foot and push on the inside of my left knee maybe three or four times. I’ve had two operations on that knee and it, like me, is somehow just not right. So when I push it with my heel that stretches it out — and the pain is both expected and welcome. And then I moan just a little louder than my back moan.

Then I take my right heel and continue down below the knee to my left calf. And then I massage my left calf a few times to take the pressure off of it, and it seems to relax me. And then, because I want to be fair, I take my left heel and go over and massage my right calf so it won’t feel neglected. I am not making this up. I do this, dammit. Every night.

Then I take one heel and put it in the ball of one foot and massage the bottom of that foot and then take the other heel and massage the bottom of the other foot. This allows me to draw one final moan-sigh out of my excuse for a functioning body. “Oh, God, that feels good.”

Then I pull the covers up around my neck and tuck the left covers under my left cheek really securely, and then I tuck the right covers under my right cheek, and it’s all very snug and tight like a Boy Scout mummy bag. It makes me feel, well, toasty. And then I rub my bare chest vigorously for a few seconds, and just before my chest hair catches on fire, I stop and enjoy the warmth.

Now, I move into my final phase. (No, not senility.) I interlace my fingers and rest them on my toasty chest and start to crack my knuckles. But I don’t just crack my knuckles. No, I count the number of successful cracks for each hand. For some reason, I can crack more of the fingers on my right hand than on my left hand. Usually I crack, maybe, three fingers on my right hand and only two on my left. Only rarely does my left hand ever win. And even rarer still are the nights when I successfully crack all my fingers. I think this has only happened three or four times in the last 10 years. And when it did happen, I was so excited I had a hard time going to sleep. But, like I said, that hardly ever happens.

Usually, I finish my knuckle-cracking ritual and I give one final sighing moan to the gods of sleep, and I lie perfectly still and let myself metaphorically melt into the bed like a drunk Zen guy. And I fall asleep within 30 seconds. Like a damn clock, baby.

Next week, I’ll tell you how I brush my teeth.

Giving the Gift That Never Starts Giving (Cigar Smoke 12-17-09)

I try to give good gifts at Christmas time. In fact, most people think I am very trying. Last year I asked someone who had received a gift from me how they liked it. And they said, “You are very trying.”

Like I was saying, I usually give pretty good gifts. But I do have a tendency to push Santa’s chunky envelope just a little. A couple of years ago I gave someone in our extended family a gift that I didn’t know what it was until after she got it. Really. I bought this kind of psycho-looking funky metal art object with arms reaching to Pomona kind-of-statue thing. At the time, I felt a little uneasy buying it, but I thought it looked pretty cool so I pulled the Visa on it.

Then when the unbelievably happy recipient of the gift opened it, she was very excited. She said, “Wow! I’ve always wanted a jewelry butler.” I am not kidding you. I had purchased a jewelry butler not knowing jewelry butlers even existed. She asked me where I found this and I had to tell her the truth — that I had searched the Internet for months and talked to jewelry experts around the country until I had found just the perfect jewelry butler I knew she would love. (Please don’t tell me what a jewelry butler does. I don’t want to know. My ignorance and I are very happy together.)

I admit I do try to give gifts that are a little off the beaten track. I like to give gifts that nobody would ever give themselves. I look for gifts out in left field, just north of the power alleys. Once Robert Frost told me one of my gifts was on a road that shouldn’t even be considered.

Yes, I am the guy who gives you that purple elephant footrest. I can’t think of a better way to rest your tired feet than propping them up on the back of a foot stool that looks like an elephant, a purple elephant. You know you wouldn’t buy that for yourself.

I once gave a newlywed couple I knew a Christmas gift of a power drill. I thought to myself, just how many pretty, useful things can one couple use. So I sprang for a Black & Decker beauty that could drill through cement, and I’ll never forget what the wife said to me after she opened it: “When did you get out of prison?” You talk about a moment of Christmas joy.

But last year something very unusual happened. I was visiting the house of someone whom I had given what I thought was a really nice gift and, hot damn, they actually had it in their kitchen and were actually using a gift that I had actually given. Actually. It was incredible.

I said, “Do you remember the wonderfully thoughtful person who gave you this stunning gift?” The woman whom I had asked, at first, tried to not tell me who it was, but I held her down near the sink and had my knee on her apron-covered upper torso until she said, “You did. You did. Thank you. Stop.” I said, “Yes, it was me who gave you that cool gift. Thank you for remembering.”

I had given them one of those combo coffee pot and tea-water-heating units that lets you use individual packets of specialty coffee or tea packets to make your own favorite beverage. That way everyone in your family can have just the right drink for themselves. It’s just so modern and efficient and cool (almost snazzy) that I feel like breaking out into a break dance. That reminds me; a few years ago I gave my 80-year-old uncle some break-dancing lessons. He made it to the lesson where he spins on his head in the kitchen. His widow never forgave me for that one.

But that combo coffee-brewing baby was a hit. I just love going over there when they throw a little party and walking among the coffee- and tea-drinking guests. Everyone is getting the exact drink they want and love and need. A latte. A mint tea. A cappuccino imotatte. An English tea. A Chinese tea. A Chai tea. A Nestlé’s cocoa packet some little fart neighbor kid snuck in. It just makes my Christmas heart sing.

Speaking of Christmas singing, I bought our family a wonderful gift many years ago and it still is the most joyous gift we as a family have ever received, (although, technically, because I was the one who gave it, I don’t know if I can receive it, too. In the spirit of the season, let’s just say I can.)

Anyway, I gave the family a Christmas ornament that is painted a bright and shiny Tijuana gold, and if I say so myself, it is quite beautiful. It’s a gold metal ornament that looks like Elvis. Looks just like him. Right down to the drug injection marks on his arms. The detail is amazing. And not only does it look great, it plays two of his Christmas songs — “Blue Christmas” and something else we can’t make out. And get this. The batteries are still going. The same batteries it came with 10 years ago. It makes me want to cry.

My family feels the same way.

Driveways Driving Me Crazy (Cigar Smoke 12-3-09)

I know I am a blessed person. I have a great family. I have both my health and my nine medications. I have a hovel up in Oregon I can escape to. And I have enough money to still be able to subscribe to newspapers. And I’m lanky. I’m living on house money, baby.

But I have to complain about one thing. For the past 38 years, yes 38 damn years, I have had really bad driveways. I bought my first house up in Altadena in 1972. It was such a great house and such a great deal that I just decided to hell with having a bad driveway. But indeed, it was a bad driveway.

The house was on funky little street called Northhaven Lane on a cul-de-sac. (That’s French for “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”) And you came down this very steep hill to get to the front of our house. And then the driveway was on another even steeper hill to get to the garage. Yes, the god of driveways had doubled down on me and had given me an essentially useless, probably criminal, driveway. You could not go down the driveway and have much hope of coming back up the driveway.

Occasionally somebody could do it if they had a Hemi-kind of V8 engine and floored it in reverse and screech-assed up the thing and scared the hell out of me and my insurance agent. But generally, you could go into the driveway, but you could not get out of the driveway. It was like the Roach Motel for Buicks.

I can’t tell you how many plumbers and pizza delivery guys would not even slow their macho butts down when they got to the driveway and ended up on the bottom and had to be towed back out. I should have bought a tow truck but, like now, I wasn’t that bright.

Anyway, it was an ugly driveway and I endured that car-swallowing sucker for 17 years. And then Marge and I moved into another house in Altadena over on Crest Drive. It was another great house, built back into the semi-woods, maybe 100 yards off the street. Well, Virginia, that 100 yards of blacktop was my new driveway nightmare.

No, it wasn’t steep, but it had a few other fun navigational challenges. First of all, the driveway was very narrow and it went over a flood control channel on a stone bridge built by Chinese slave labor in 1896. Then about 50 yards in, there was a huge tree stuck right in the middle of the driveway. And this tree further divided the driveway into our driveway and the driveway of our neighbor who hated our Airedale. He would call us up and say, “Would you please keep that beast of yours quiet?!” And I would tell him, “Marge isn’t that noisy, dammit!”

Speaking of Marge, she would always have her car parked in the garage and she would want to get out at night, and she would say Jimsie Whimsie could you pleasie-wheezie get my car out of the bad old driveway that scares me because I’m a woman and you’re a man and you like backing out backwards and driving in the darkness of death when you can’t see over Chinese slave-labor bridges into seven-foot tree trunks? Please? I’ll make you chocolate-chip cookies and hide them in my bra. (OK, she never said that part about the cookies, but everything else is damn close to being true.)

So I put up with 12 years of the second horrible driveway. And then we moved to our current driveway-challenged house on Braeburn. When we were thinking about buying it, I mentioned to Marge that the driveway wasn’t really that good, and she said that she knew that, but it was better than the last driveway. And I said yes, it was better — in kind of the same way Mussolini might have been better than Hitler.

Well, she looked at me, closed her eyes, opened them up again, and I was still there, and then she turned to the Realtor and said, “We’ll take it.” So we’ve been in this driveway hellhole for the last nine years. And, OK, I admit that it isn’t quite as bad as the other two nightmare driveways of my past, but it still is not good. You see, it is another long driveway that goes right from the street straight back into the backyard. But now we have a gate to the backyard, which I have to open and close all the time and it’s a hard-to-muffle-my-screams kind of gate.

And then once you get inside the gate you have to kind of split off a little to get both cars in there. And, of course, Marge has her car in the garage and I have to keep mine out in the coldness and dampness where squirrels can take their little dumps on it.

So now when Marge needs to go out and my squirrel-turded-up car is there, Marge will coyly say, “My car needs to get out.” She flicks her eyelashes a couple of times, and adds, “You’re so manly when you’re backing my car up.” And I say, “I’m in my robe! It’s midnight!” And she says, “The neighbors probably won’t call the sheriff again.”

God, what I would give for a circular driveway. Or a couple of chocolate-chip cookies with bra marks.

Spice Up Your Sex Life (Cigar Smoke 11-19-09)

OK, admit it. Your marriage could use a little juice. A little tap on the accelerator of love. How do I know this? Because I have my ear to the ground and my nose to the wind and my mouth to the top of a Coors Light. Like the other night, a friend of mine told me that he had cuddled up to his wife, and said, “You wanna have some steamy sex tonight?” And she said, “Sure, who’s coming over?”

Now if you are a guy, that is not something you want to hear from your Spousy Wousy. So I would like to offer a little bit of marital advice to all the men out there. (You women can read along, too, if you promise not to use this information in your divorce hearing.)

OK, here we go. You’ve been married for a while. The last sexual conquest you had, other than your wife, was a female Sherpa on Mount Everest. Yes, it was exciting getting her out of that big, furry Eskimo outfit, and yes, you enjoyed her moaning your name in Urdu. But that was a long time ago. You are now married. You are not bored. You love your wife. You still find her romantically pursuable to engage in naughty stuff. But you need a little kick.

A while back I thought I’d jack things up a notch, so I suggested that my dearly beloved get flat-out jay-naked and wrap herself in Saran Wrap and meet me at the front door when I came home from work. I know this is kind of trite. It’s been done before. But it had never been done for me. So I was really jazzed. And I rushed home that evening and knocked on the front door, and my Wifey Poo answered the door, and she was stark naked! Of course, it might have been a little sexier if she hadn’t wrapped herself in aluminum foil. I remember it well. All she said was, “We were out of Saran Wrap.”

Another approach you might want to try is using sex toys and marital aids. You might want to try that. Not me. I’m too afraid. I know if I showed up some night in the bedroom with a whip and wearing German boots and running some battery-operated object that whirred, I would not get the desired affect. I just know my beloved would be laughing so damn hard she would spit up on her flannel nightgown and keep slapping her knee. Who needs that?

Here’s something that is not quite as extreme as whirring things. This is a killer. You should pay me for this one. Please don’t tell anybody you heard it here. (I could lose my poetic license.)

When you get in bed with your Loin Mate, just nuzzle her a little, and be playful, and put your finger on her cheek and let it run down her neck and then let your finger drift to the top of her shoulder and then on to that upper chest region where it is OK to touch without permission and then stop, and arch your eyebrows, twice, and say, “Darling, I would like to spice up our sex life a little.”

Hopefully, she is not laughing and says coyly or with slight alarm, “How?” And then you reach down and grab the little red and white tin container you have put on the nightstand and you sprinkle some cinnamon right there on her upper chest freedom zone. And as she is looking puzzled, you say, “Cinnamon. Spice. Cinnamon is a spice. Spice up our love life. Get it? Get it?” And if she tries to dial 9-1-1, say, “Columbus sailed over here for spice. Just do it for Columbus. Please.”

OK, OK, maybe you want something that is a tad more subtle than sprinkling cinnamon on your Matey Watey’s Chesty Westy. May I suggest a Mystery Evening of Love? Yes, I have done this many times. You just arrange the evening ahead of time but you don’t tell your wife where you are going. It’s that damn simple. Even you can do it.

No, you can’t go to a sports event. Geez. And don’t go to your gentleman’s club and say, “Uh, Destiny, this is my wife.” Don’t do that. That’s not mystery, that’s masochism. Other than that, most things are open. It doesn’t have to be expensive. A dinner at a restaurant in a different town and a movie. Maybe go see a play in some little playhouse where there are more actors than audience members.

There are a lot of mysterious things you can plan. Just announce it as a Mystery Evening of Love and you are set, baby. Just don’t tell her ahead of time what it is. You don’t want her to know she’ll be eating at Denny’s in Temple City and then seeing a movie with Adam Sandler in it.

My best Mystery Evening of Love was a few years ago. I told Marge ahead of time to expect a mystery night and she was maybe not all a-twitter, but pretty much semi-a-twitter. When the big night finally arrived, we got in the car and headed out the Ventura Freeway. For an hour and 15 minutes! Marge kept asking me where I was taking her. I kept pretending I remembered where it was.

We finally got to the venue and to reveal the mystery; we were there to see a Tom Jones concert in Thousand Oaks. And hey, Marge loved it. When old Tom was belting out “What’s New Pussycat?” Marge was answering him. And when he sang “She’s a Lady,” Marge whispered to me, “Since we aren’t staying in a motel, would you mind if I gave Tom our house key?”

I told her, “If you ever do that, I will never sprinkle cinnamon on your upper chest again.”

Eureka! I Have Lost It (Cigar Smoke 11-05-09)

I would like to write about something young and vital, but I forgot what youth is. I think it was a time when most of your body parts still worked, and you wished they wouldn’t. I’m not sure what that means, either.

As you all well know by now, and are sick of hearing about, I am now 68 years old. But I am a vibrant, virile 68. Many times people will come up to me and say, “You look so vibrant and virile you could pass for a man of 67.” And I just nod my head and tip my imaginary hat with a young vigor of, maybe, a man of 66.

Anyway, the other day I had just gotten out of the shower, looked at myself in the mirror, flexed my arm muscles and scrunched my rippling abs, and said, “You look like a man of 65.” So I put on my slippers and went into the bedroom to get dressed. And I finish getting dressed, except for my shoes. I can’t find one of my shoes.

Now, I am usually kind of a neat-nik. Some might even say I am an anally retentive piece of human garbage who continually spoils things by trying to always be better than others. Well, what can I say? I am better than all you sloppy losers. I like being neat. I like being orderly. I like being not liked.

But I have to admit that in one area of life I am not neat and orderly. My dresser is always full of T-shirts and pants and sweat suits and jackets, and next to my dresser on the floor are at least five pairs of shoes. Regular shoes, tennis shoes, loafers, slippers. All turned over in a jumbled mess. If I saw this disaster at your house, I would look down on you and know I was better than you.

Hold it a second. I think I am having a senior moment. I can’t remember why I am writing this column. Oh yeah, I remember now. I couldn’t find one of my shoes. I am all dressed and I am looking for my black loafers. I can only find one of them. I go through the pile on the floor again. Not there. I then go into the closet thinking I may have actually put them where they are supposed to be. Thank God, they weren’t there. I go back to the pile and actually get down on all fours. I think I may have accidentally pushed one of the shoes under the dresser. Nope. No missing shoe there. Just dead spiders, rat droppings, toxic dust bunnies and M&M wrappers.

And then, while I am down on all fours, I had an epiphany. (When I was younger I used to know what that meant.) All of a sudden it came to me that I had seen only one of my slippers, too. Yes, on my crawling searches I had seen only one black loafer and only one tan slipper. And I thought to myself, “Self, that is damn peculiar. What are the odds of losing one shoe for two pairs, at the same time?” And I answered, “Self, for a 68-year-old piece of senile shit, you rock.”

So I get up off of all fours and I am standing there in my bedroom, all alone, and I say to my one rapt listener (me), I know where my other shoe is. And I exclaim, “Eureka, I have found it!” And I look down at my feet and tears come to my eyes. I have found both of my missing shoes. On my left foot is my black loafer and on my right foot is my tan slipper. And at this moment I realize that I have experienced an official senior moment. I really cannot believe I was actually wearing two different-colored shoes at the same time for at least a half a day. The night before I had gotten into my robe at around 7 o’clock and had gone back out to the den to watch television and pass on words of wisdom to Marge. I sat there on the couch for four hours and I had my feet up on the table and I never once saw that I had on two different-colored shoes! I never saw it.

And I went outside and had a cigar and put my damn feet up again on a damn end table and I smoked a whole damn cigar and I looked right down at my one tan slipper and my one black loafer for a half hour and I blew smoke rings up their little shoe nostrils and I never saw them!

So I go back inside to relate this Eureka moment to Marge, who has been known to have a few senior moments of her own, her being a much older individual than I am. She’s 69. Yeah, she’s a cradle robber. I say, “Margie Pargie, I have something to tell you.” And she says, “I know your first name is Poopsie, but what is your last name again?” I say, “Whoopsie. It’s Poopsie Whoopsie.” And before I can say anything else, she falls asleep on the couch and her Kindle falls to the floor.

At first I was kind of pissed off that I couldn’t tell her about my “Eureka!” senior moment, but it actually worked out pretty well — because by then I had forgotten what it was.