Episode 84: On Getting On

* At the farmers' market last summer, people were snapping photos of my T-shirt. Written on it were the words, "Half the men my age are dead." People of my generation found it funny. My daughter didn't like it at all. I am 75. That's the average life expectancy of the American male.

There's this, though: If you manage to reach 75, your life expectancy jumps to 86.3. That's good.

I guess.

* A current Humana TV commercial pushes its Medicare supplement plan. It was written by someone who thinks people over 60 suffer universal physical and intellectual enfeeblement. It is delivered by an announcer speaks VERY CLEARLY and A LITTLE TOO LOUDLY. He underlines one word for emphasis on a whiteboard that has only ten in total. The word is "and". He then makes a joke so lame it wouldn't cause a titter from a toddler. And he makes a very, very big deal out of the fact that the sales brochure he wants you to call for is FREE! Madison Avenue really should seek out copywriters who have had their last growth spurts and whose complexions have cleared up.

* So far, I haven't felt the old-guy compulsion to find myself those armpit trousers with two-foot zippers. But retirement has propelled me toward the comforts of track suits, in my case a blue velour number that is bliss during the morning hours I devote to the newspapers. It makes me look like an over-the-hill Atlantic City lounge singer, so I promise not to wear it outside the house. On the other hand, the sweatshirt and pants I wear to the health club are rapidly becoming supermarket and rest-of-the-day wear.

* In the last decade I had a quintuple bypass and left carotid throat surgery. I've had a dental implant and gout (twice). My left knee and right hip periodically threaten to quit on me. I have arthritis everywhere but my hair, and my blood sugar skitters along the edge of diabetes. Like most people other than hedge fund managers I lost a ton of money in the recent economic unpleasantness.

So why am I so happy nearly all the time, often even downright giddy? Why do I all but skip to the mailbox to retrieve all those Christmas catalogs?

As a freelance writer working at home with a wife who commuted to the city five days a week, it took a year or so after she retired to get used to her being around all the time. After necessary adjustments, including addressing changed expectations and new divisions of labor, we settled into this warm bath that is retirement.

We sleep until we wake up. We read the papers until we are finished. We nap when we feel like it. We get discounts at museums and movies and hotels. No homework. No bosses. No brain-dead editors. No spiteful colleagues. Our friends are mostly younger than we, because I'm no more enthusiastic about cranky old people than I am about other people's messy progeny (our grandchildren are, of course, golden exceptions.) At lunch, we discuss dinner. We plan our next trip to to Venice. To Paris.

What's not to like?

A happy new year for you, too.

Episode 83: What Women Want?

"Given the opportunity, women will behave as badly as men."

So I declared - or, rather, whispered - back when the Second Feminist Wave was at full boil. You didn't make female friends uttering such heresy. It was unassailable movement cant that women would bring their nurturing, gentle ways to positions of power if men would just get out of the way.

I demurred, pointing out that Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Gold Meir all took their nations into war.

Evidence of the truth of my conviction mounts. Look to Washington: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas has long been in tune and in lockstep with ideological hard cases like Trent Lott and Mitch O'Connell. Holding up the farthest lip of the loony Washington right is Representative Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, who imputes traitorous allegiances to anyone with whom she disagrees, presumably including most of her colleagues. Michelle has pledged to form a Tea Party caucus in the House after the election.

Need I even mention Backwoods Barbie of Alaska, she of the pretty face and empty head, who can't name a newspaper, who thinks Africa is a country, and who never left North America and didn't bother to get a passport until two years ago. Whenever she cites "common sense" as one of her virtues and those of her benighted followers, check your wallet and make skid marks in the opposite direction. Judging from e-mails I get from conservative male friends and neighbors, the main thing for which they favor Sarah is they'd all like to boff her, presumably joining her in shrieking "Lamestream media!" at the climactic moment.

Let's not linger on Catherine O'Donnell, the Senatorial candidate from Delaware, who thinks masturbation is adultery, took 19 years to get a bachelor's degree, and opened her first commercial with the claim that she isn't a witch. She has defaulted on at least one mortgage and owes thousands in back taxes. She has no visible employment except as a professional candidate. In a recent debate, she couldn't name one Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed. Pretty fades. Dumb is eternal.

Carly Fiorina, Tea Party candidate for Senator from California, isn't dumb. She was CEO of HP. Of course, the company stock plunged during her term and she laid off 30,000 workers while shipping jobs overseas. She was eventually fired by her board of directors but walked away with a multi-million-dollar golden parachute. Not dumb, but certainly inept, she thinks failure is a great credential for fixing her state's problems. She's said to have a ferocious temper, a requirement in a movement that thrives on inchoate rage. And, she's anti-abortion and against gay marriage.

Across the border in Nevada, voters are unhappy that their decisions to live in a state whose economy is based upon gambling aren't working out. About half of them think that Sharron Angle is the answer to their problems. Sharron runs a TV ad that juxtaposes photos of dark-skinned people climbing over a fence with shots of white school children. She has claimed that Dearborn, Michigan and a non-existent town in Texas are ruled by Sharia law. She told Harry Reid in a debate confrontation to "Man up!", an idiotic catch phrase that explicitly questions a man's virility. Imagine if Reid had rejoined with the equally denigrating "Don't be a pussy, Sharron."

Early in her campaign to fill the Senatorial slot from Connecticut, Linda McMahon said she had a plan - a secret one - to bring jobs back to her state. Presumably, she imagined that she would arrive in D.C. and lay out said plan before four-term Republican satraps who would immediately bow before the wisdom of a freshman who had yet to find the bathroom. Linda's credentials for fixing Washington are contained solely in her management of World Wrestling Entertainment, a sleazy operation throwing steroid abusers and their slutty helpmates together in scripted conflict for the edification and amusement of pizza-faced adolescents and their dimwitted older brothers. She has spent over $45 million of her own money on the campaign, which seems to have annoyed voters who wonder what good might have been done in more worthy causes. Should Linda lose, at least she can kick her husband in the crotch. She's done that to Vince before, on camera.

And can we forget Governor Jan Brewer's famous brainlock during a debate when she could do nothing but giggle for agonizingly long seconds? This was around the time that she revealed that headless corpses were strewn about the Arizona desert.

The message? When you vote Tuesday - you are voting, aren't you? - don't fill in the ovals just because the candidates are female or Polish or conservative or Green or gay or Democrats or Latino or Tea Party or Socialist or Italian or black or Catholic or Jewish or small business owners. Vote for the good of all of us, not the worst.

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For those who inquired - and thank you - the absence of posts on this blog and my website, http://www.akeyinthedoor.com/ , was due to a monumental crash of my computer. It wiped out both my basic operating system and my external backup hard drive and has required a lot of work getting it all back.

Episode 82: What They've Been Saying

For the George W. Bush commemorative articulation award

"I simply misremembered it wrong."

- Mark Kirk, Republican Senatorial candidate from Illinois, after untrue statements about his service in Iraq and Kosovo.

Runner-up: Richard Blumenthal, Democrat from Connecticut, who misremembered the truth about his non-service in Vietnam.

The eternal quest for compassion and understanding

"We need to wipe them out!"

- Rush Limbaugh, referring to Democrats on his radio show of March 22nd.

"Spay and neuter liberals."

- Sign seen at a summer Tea Party rally.

Academic clarity of thought

"International recognition endows African state actors with a domestic power of command."

-Pierre Englebert, Professor, Pomona College, on strongman African leaders

"It's just inexorable, this authenticity in the visual language of sameness."

-Sharon Zukin, Professor, Brooklyn College, speaking about gentrification

Military Justice

"You go into Afganistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they don't wear a veil. You know guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway, so it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.

- James N. Mattis, Marine General, appointed commander of American forces across the Middle East. No word on when the General last fired a weapon in anger.

Tolerance

"Doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland?"

- wordsmith Sarah Palin, weighing in on the proposed Islamic cultural center in New York

Ordinarily, we can fairly assume that Backwoods Barbie would prefer see the island of Manhattan and its payload of liberal elites cut loose from its mainland moorings and shoved out into the Atlantic to play with the icebergs. Yet here, with the wisdom bestowed by her 3,000-mile geographical (not to say geopolitical) remove from the site in question, she feels qualified to voice the concerns of all of middle

America.

She is not alone, of course. Every Republican, Reagan Democrat, social conservative, Christian religionist, documented Tea Party yahoo, and right-wing loon has hitched up to the Islamophobic wagon train. Al Queda has to be delighted. This is their best recruitment tool since Shock and Awe.

Don't get me wrong. When I am appointed Supreme Leader of All the Peoples of the Universe, the practice of religion of any sort in any degree where and whatsoever will be banned, and all physical manifestations of any faith of any kind - churches, synagogues, mosques, temples - will be razed to the ground, plowed under thrice over, and spread with salt. Half the world's violence and social problems will thus be eliminated. Until humans came up with new reasons to kill other humans.

Since that post isn't open just yet, here's my backup position: Do all of you support our founding document (by which I mean, Sarah, the Constitution you profess to love)? Do you truly support the freedom of any resident of the United States to believe any damn-fool accumulation of fables, folk tales, legends, and resulting idiot dogma they wish? If so, mind your own business.

Or, must everyone filter their convictions through a screening process enforced by self-appointed guardians? Freedom for religion for everyone? Except for Muslims, and maybe Mormons? And Jews? Seventh-Day Adventists? Or possibly Jehovah's Witnesses? (God - your God - knows it's annoying to have to deal with those people on the front porch.) How about Congregationalists? After all, they're for abortion and same-sex marriage and Darwin.

So do ya, Sarah? Like the Constitution, I mean. Or do ya think it needs a little tweaking?

Episode 81: Lies, Damned Lies and Capital One

For frequent travelers who regularly journey overseas, the credit card company with the dopey barbarian TV commercials has a seductive offer. Repeated unquestioningly by many reputable publications, including The New York Times and Consumer Reports, is this claim, appearing in the FAQ section of the Capital One website:

"Capital One does not charge a fee for using your credit card for foreign currency transactions. Foreign purchases will be converted at the foreign exchange rate in effect at the time of posting the charge."

What a deal! Other banks and credit card companies charge anywhere from $1.50 to $10 or more every time you withdraw money from a foreign A.T.M., the justification being that (1) you aren't using a branch of your home bank, and (2) the home bank or credit card company has to convert dollars to euros (or whatever).

But Capital One says it doesn't do that, at great expense to its profit line.

The truth? In anticipation of a three-week trip to Paris, I applied for and received a Capital One credit card. It was my intent to use it only out of the country, in this case from April 24th to May 16th. Normally, I prefer my debit card on trips abroad, not wanting to run up debt. But the Cap One card would save me hefty fees, especially if I paid off balances electronically with a few days of using it. You follow my logic, I hope.

This I did, incurring charges only from May 3rd to May 17th and paying them off in full well before the end of that month. Then came an "Accounts Summary". It showed four cash withdrawals and my four electronic payments, the last one on May 15th.

But here's the thing: The summary also listed four "Cash Front End Fees" totaling $41.63, directly preceding the cash withdrawals. A rose is a rose is a rose. That is to say, they have created another term for what they actually mean - "Foreign Currency Transaction Fees". The final indignity was a $5.86 interest charge, despite the fact that the balance had been fully paid in less than three weeks from first use.

There was no satisfaction to be drawn from the Capital One call center, of course. The woman at the other end seemed to have Tagalog as her native tongue.

A double pox on Capital One.

Episode 80: Snip. Snip.

The eagles have flown back to Canada.

But the temp just passed 70 degrees. Wrens and robins are building nests. Crocuses have popped and there are multiple green shoots in the garden and the economy. It is the time of year when men's thoughts naturally turn to the office basketball brackets.

Geezer couldn't care less whether Wofford or Gonzaga make it to the Sweet Sixteen and hopes the Final Four will come and go as quickly as possible. But there is a little-remarked phenomenon that also takes place every year during March Madness:

Men choose this time to undergo vasectomies, causing a major annual spike in that elective procedure. This makes a certain peculiar sense. The surgery hurts for a day or two afterwards. Rest is mandated, with frequent applications of ice to the immediate area of the operation. Since they'll be sitting in front of the tube more or less continuously for a couple of weeks, these men think, why not do their wives a favor while they root for Vandy or the Running Devils. For a cherry on top, their better halves are known to be grateful for the sacrifice, which can bring later benefits.

That reminds me of a story:

I had a vasectomy back in 1972, when it was less common. My doctor was perfect: George Clooney-ish, tanned, with crinkly eyes, touch of grey at the temples, cleft chin. He assured me that the procedure was brief, involving two small incisions to either side of the scrotum and the snipping and cauterizing of two vessels called the vas deferens.

It could be done in his office, with local anesthetic, or in the hospital. I took the coward's option, not wishing to be awake if the nurse happened to goose the doctor at a critical moment. Then, given that this would involve people messing with three of my favorite possessions, I asked if it would hurt.

"Like a knee in the groin", he tanly reassured me.

It did. Ice was applied to the region for the next two days. After two weeks, the doctor told me to take a sample. Imagine that - medical authorization to spank the monkey. Crinkle.

Vasectomies were unusual enough that I wrote up the experience and sold it to Penthouse Magazine for their first American edition. A movie called Love Story had hit it big a year or so earlier. Its advertising tagline was the nonsensical but memorable, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

I titled my article "Vasectomy Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry". It was reviewed favorably in the Saturday Review of Literature, quoted in several other magazines, and reprinted and distributed by the tens of thousands by Planned Parenthood. I lived to hear my title used as a punchline in a Catskills comic's standup routine and as a gag in a TV movie starring Lee Majors.

Bob Guccione, the editor and publisher of Penthouse, was delighted with the attention. He invited me to dinner in his private dining room in his first Penthouse Club in Mayfair, the tony London district. In attendance were Guccione, his main squeeze, me, and the recently anointed Penthouse Pet of the Year. We were served by dishy young women in French maid costumes. Miss Pet kept fumbling distractedly with the buttons on her blouse.

But that's another story.

Episode 79: The State of the Geezer

Gazing far too long into the middle distance is a common symptom of passage through one of those big "0" or "5" birthdays, an occasion to reflect on what has been and what might come. When it's the arrival of the 75th anniversary of your birth month, the contemplation of clouds and trees and hills and water can last hours, days. More.
It is, after all, the bleak transition from what gerontologists classify as "young old" to plain "old", with a decade to go before "old old." Further inducing reverie is the fact that 75 years is the average life span of the American male.

Brooding about receding gums, rectal probes, unexpected bodily discharges, and every new ache or twinge - is the downward path to ruinous despair. Instead, I try to look to the light, as, for example, back when I qualified for Social Security and found that I wasn't required by law to replace all my jeans with those suspendered trousers with the two-foot zippers that every old coot I'd ever known seemed to favor.

Remember, Boomers, you're not all that old if (a) no one has offered you a seat on the subway yet, (b) you've only had one colonoscopy so far, (c) you can remember which of your cars you drove to the supermarket, and (d) you can identify two or more of the following celebrities:
Peter Gabriel. David Naughton. Kelly Hu. Mena Suvari. William Katt. LeVar Burton. Lisa Loring. Tea Leoni. Carrot Top. Sean Astin. Anson Mount.

We turned our reading chairs around to face the window. It looks through the treetops over our valley and out to the confluence of the Croton and the Hudson. The eagles are still doing wheelies over the water this late in winter, yet I spotted our first robin yesterday in the big black walnut out back. Deer are gamboling down on the river flat. Blizzards of white trumpeter swans lift off in great flocks to traverse the valley, north, then south, then back again.

We're off to Paris for a month in Spring, so we've been getting our innards and outer layers checked. Over the last three months, my dentist, internist, urologist, cardiologist, optometrist, dermatologist, and gastroenterologist all cleared me, with a caveat or two. They confirmed, in order, that I had no cavities or need for extractions, my blood sugar is within bounds, my prostate is still supple, my cholesterol readings were the best in ten years, my vision prescription remains the same, I haven't developed any melanomas, and there was only one benign polyp in my colon. And, nine years after my quintuple bypass, my blood pressure was 120 over 70.

We're going to Paris, did I mention?

Episode 78: On Bigots and the Godly....but I repeat myself

Only Jon Stewart seemed to notice the recent recorded comments of the current Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina. Andre Bauer is seeking to succeed his superior, the Governor who transformed the meaning of "Hiking on the Appalachian Trail" into a euphemism for shagging his Argentine tootsie.

On the campaign trail, Bauer chose to divest himself of his grandmother's advice about not feeding strays: "You know why?" he proclaimed. "Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks."

Denying poor children food will, following Bauer logic, help solve the problem of rampant poverty in his benighted state and, presumably, the other 49.

They'll just die. And stop being a bother.

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At Play in the Mind of John Boehner

The immaculately groomed and deeply tanned House Minority Leader from sunny Ohio insists he can, too, come up with ideas with more than two letters (That would be "NO!") He is hurt that the Democratic majority has not given more consideration to what he thinks is a viable alternative health care plan. He all but stamps his feet in ongoing snits over the way his grand plan is brushed aside.

That plan? According to the Congressional Budget Office, his proposal would extend coverage to another three million Americans by 2019. That would leave only 52 million citizens uninsured.

Compassion, Republican style.

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Separated At Birth?

On the left, George Clooney. On the right, center, a Shinwari tribal leader in Afghanistan as photographed by Adam Ferguson for the New York Times.

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Give It Up For The Lord

Focus on the Family, the profoundly anti-abortion Christian advocacy group, is sponsoring a commercial during the Super Bowl. It will star Tim Tebow, a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from the University of Florida. Focus on the Family is opposed to abortion under all circumstances, even rape or incest.

Tim, the widely-heralded jock, is the son of Bob Tebow, head of a self-named evangelical association in Jacksonville, Florida. Click on its website to read its mission statement, "What We Believe". For pure, mind-boggling bafflegab, it's hard to surpass. Choice excerpts include:

"The words (verbal) of Scripture recorded in the autographa are inspired, not just concepts."

"By inspired, we mean that we believe the Scriptures have been 'breathed out' by God Himself."

"The written Word of God is totally without error of any kind."

"There is one God and there are three distinct Persons of the Godhead that are co-eternal, co-equal, and co-existent."

"For the rapture...the dead in Christ shall arise and be caught up together with those who are alive in Christ shall arise and be caught up together with those who are alive in Christ to meet Him in the air."

And so on and so on. And on, throughout a three-page evisceration of logic and the language. Every word of the Bible (as interpreted by Mr. Tebow and his fellows) is the literal truth, the exact word of the Almighty. Never mind that the book is a collection of folk tales and myths written centuries after the events it purports to describe.

CBS had no trouble accepting this ad despite its long-asserted policy of rejecting advocacy messages. It had already turned away a commercial for a gay dating service, as it did applications from MoveOn.org and PETA in the past.

So now will the network accept an issue ad from Planned Parenthood?

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Updates

In the last episode, Geezer suggested a few exceptionally annoying words and phrases past due for disposal. Chris and Fig offered these candidates:

*"Sounds like a plan."

*"Bring it!"

*"Let's do this!"

To which I would add this singularly unimaginative utterance from a banker at the Davos confab (surely this has passed its expiration date):

"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Geezer also shared a few bizarre communications to his website http://www.akeyinthedoor.com/. Add this one to the collection (verbatim):

"Hello everyone! I would like to burn a theme at this forum. There is such a nicey, called HYIP, or High Yield Investment Program. It reminds of financial piramyde, but in rare cases one may happen to meet a company that really pays up to 2% daily not on invested money, but from real profits.

"For quite a long time, I earn money with the help of these programs. I'm with no money problems now, but there are heights that must be conquered. I get now up to 2G a day, and I started with 500 funny bucks."

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