Read The Green Red Green Online
Authors: Red Green
Take a few minutes on a Saturday morning and look at your hands. Turn them over slowly so you can see all the scars and nicks, and it’s amazing how the memories will come flooding back. How can you look at that thumbnail without remembering the dock you built and then rebuilt, before hiring a guy who charged too much because he’d seen your work? When you notice the knuckle with the missing hair, it reminds you which hand you use to light the barbecue. Some of the marks bring back simple images: a chainsaw, a Cuisinart, a nail gun. Some of them remind you of locations: up on the roof looking down, followed immediately by down on the ground looking up; under the car; inside the furnace; over the steam valve; inside the ambulance.
But you don’t want to look back too much. So drop your hands, pick up your tool box, take a couple of aspirins, and go and make some new memories.
H
ere are five survival tips on how to keep a marriage smoking long after the fire has gone out:
1) Be very quiet when she’s talking. If she stops talking, always wait a full minute before speaking. She may not be finished.
2) Do not change the subject. Even if you have to speak first, you can usually figure out what she wants to talk about. For example, if she’s trying to clean an oil stain on the kitchen floor, she probably wants to talk about you trying to fix the lawn mower in the sink.
3) Watch her body language. Alter what you’re saying in response to what she does. If she stops doing her nails and starts sharpening a knife, it’s time for you to do a one-eighty.
4) Maintain eye contact. If you can’t see her eyes, you have no idea how things are going. If you’re working on the car and she asks you about plans for the weekend, take the time to roll out on the creeper so you can see her response, rather than just yelling, from under the car, “I’m going fishing with Bob—I told you that last week.” Remember that she has access to heavy tools and the lower half of your body is exposed. Always maintain eye contact. Don’t have conversations in the dark, and don’t talk to your wife on the telephone unless you’re a professional.
5) Keep your sentences short—five words maximum. That allows you to change quickly. If it’s not going well, try saying “Unless” or “But” or “Whatever.” Short sentences give her a chance to talk. Which is what you want. You want the conversation to go her way. It’s not about success. It’s about survival.
T
here are a lot of things a man can do to fool everybody about his true age. For one thing, there are products out there to help: hair dyes and wrinkle cream; cosmetic surgery and toupees; contact lenses, laxatives, and Viagra. You can talk about things that younger people talk about. You can wear young clothes and drive a young person’s car. You can even pretend to like young people’s music. But it’s all over when you hit the dance floor.
Once you start flailing away doing the Frug or the Monkey or the Loco-Motion, you’ve blown your cover. When people see you dance, they know you grew up with Chubby Checker. Even slow dances give you away, as you sway with your arm stuck straight out like a railway crossing. The horrible truth is that you have to make a choice: you must either be honest about your age or never, ever dance again. It’s a tough one. My advice is to do both.
N
o matter how much we do, there comes a time in the life of any car when we have to say goodbye. This can be upsetting and even traumatic for the owner, particularly if he still has two more years of car payments. Here are a few procedural steps you can take to ensure closure at this time of great emotional stress:
• Remove from the car everything that has any personal significance for you—the paper cups, the cigarette butts, the spent shells, your underwear, your passenger’s underwear, the previous owner’s underwear, the fuzzy dice, the dingle balls, the sex lights, the eight-tracks, the Garfield window sticker, the pizza boxes, the pizza.
• Leave anything that you never used—maps, napkins, air freshener, emergency brake, turn signals, owner’s manual, rear-view mirror, seat belts.
• Step back from the car and think about the significant memories it holds for you—car chicken, car chase, car ceration; drag race,
Dragnet
, drag queen; prom night, promise night, prompt night; flat tire in the rain, small errors, medium impacts, big explosions.
• Say a silent prayer of thanks: “Dear Lord, thank you for making this car, and for making it run, and for making the previous owner leave the keys in it outside the 7-Eleven. Thank you for not allowing me to harm myself or other people with this car. Sorry about the raccoon. Amen.”
• Turn and walk away—no second thoughts, no looking back. Forget the car. Go to the nearest ATM, take out fifty dollars, and buy another one just like it.
I
have a couple of concerns about the whole self-help movement. The idea is that each of us is great and fantastic, and there’s nothing we can’t do if we just liberate ourselves from negative thoughts. I’m middle-aged, twenty pounds overweight, barely average height, with poor eye–hand coordination and a history of avoiding physical exertion. No amount of self-help will allow me to be the starting centre for the Chicago Bulls. And that’s not just a negative thought—it’s also a positive reality. The point is we
need
to have negative thoughts about ourselves. Negative thoughts keep us employed and married and allow us to get along with our friends and neighbours. Nothing kills a relationship
faster than saying to yourself, “I could do better.” Especially when the truth is that
they
could do better. Try to think of your ego as a hot air balloon. The positive thoughts keep it up, while the negative thoughts keep it down. The perfect altitude for you is just above the high-tension wires and just below the radar. Too many positive thoughts and you have too far to fall. Too many negative thoughts and you’re dragging your basket.
I
f any of you have worked in a high-pressure sales organization, then you’re familiar with the concept of having a quota of sales or contacts that you’re expected to meet. I’m beginning to think that the quota system is a natural phenomenon that occurs in all aspects of human behaviour.
Yesterday, I was trying to pull out of a side street. There were two cars approaching—the first was an elderly gentleman with his turn signal going, and the second was a teenager with no signal on. The first car didn’t turn but the second one did. What that shows me is that when we’re young, we don’t use our turn signals, and then when we get old, we have to use them all the time because we need to meet our quota and we’re running out of time.
And it’s true with lots of activities. People who sit quietly now probably did way too much talking in the past. And it’s usually the same with non-smokers and non-drinkers. They used up their quota. Maybe impotence is the ultimate acknowledgment of a job well done.
I
was watching an episode of
60 Minutes
last week and they had new evidence that life will eventually kill us. That show has been on the air for about a thousand years, and I wonder how they’ve managed to come up with new things for us to worry about every week. I bet if they went back over their old shows, they’d find all kinds of catastrophes that just never happened: banking machines are dangerous, or ozone depletion will bring the end of life as we know it in the next four years, or disco music causes spinal damage. I notice that the worries are getting larger these days. Instead of uncovering corruption in Nicaragua, they’re now telling us that our air is poisoned, our water supply is polluted, the polar caps are melting, and we have more garbage dumps than farms.
I hate to sound irresponsible, but I’ve lost the ability to get upset about these horrible problems. I just need somebody to tell me what to do and I’ll gladly do it. I’ll boil my water or stop dancing or store my garbage in rubber. Whatever it takes. Just don’t tell me I should be worrying about things I can’t understand or control. No wonder
Seinfeld
was a hit.
I
f you’re fed up with neighbours and strangers coming to your front door to visit or to ask for your participation or to try to sell you something, here are some things to do that will keep them away:
• Place a “Watch for Land Mines” sign on your front lawn beside an exploded car.
• Keep a big dog on your porch, chewing a pant leg.
• Rewire your doorbell so that it plays a tape of gunshots.
• Cover your welcome mat with shards of broken beer bottles.
• Put one of those yellow police barrier tapes across the end of your driveway.
• On your front door hang a sign saying “Caution—Exorcism in Progress.”
• Leave a pizza delivery car in your driveway with the door open and the engine running for a week or so.
• When you see someone approaching, start a chainsaw running inside the house.
• Place quarantine signs around your property.
• In the middle of the night, turn over a rectangle of your front lawn so that it looks like a fresh grave. Add another one every few months.
W
e have a thirteen-year-old dog who doesn’t look or listen as well as he used to, but apart from that, he seems just fine. They tell me he’s ninety-one in human years, and I’d say he’s got another thirty or so to go. I’ve been studying him to discover his secrets to longevity, hoping I could apply them to my own life. I ruled out drinking from the toilet bowl, and my wife kiboshed relieving myself on the lawn. That left the naps. My dog has about seven naps a day. That’s a dog day. That equates to seven human days. In other words, to a dog, the time between naps is a day. What a great concept. That’s something I should do. If I have four naps a day and count the space in between each as a day, it will completely change my life. Sure, it’ll screw up my calendar, but I’ll be well rested and I’ll live to be 160.
T
here is a misconception out there that technology makes us more efficient or saves us time. I don’t agree. Yes, a microwave oven can reheat a slice of pizza faster and more efficiently than a normal oven, but first I have to go out and earn enough money to buy the microwave, so you have to add that time in. Then I have to read the instructions and set the clock. Then I have to pay for the electricity to run it. I know what you’re going to say. “It’s not as much electricity as a stove uses.” Don’t worry about it. I’ll eat the pizza cold. That’s faster than any microwave, and it doesn’t cost a cent. So be careful when you’re choosing technology. If it’s something you really need in your life, great. But a lot of technology just gives us faster ways of doing unnecessary jobs.
M
y wife was talking about a friend of ours, commenting on how successful he’d been. We’ve been married long enough for me not to take that as a criticism, no matter how it was intended. I did say, though, that this guy really enjoys his job, and my wife answered, “That’s why he’s good at it.”
I’ve heard that before, and I still don’t agree with it. It’s based on a fallacy. You’re not good at something just because you enjoy it. Karaoke has proven that. To my way of thinking, you’re not good at something because you enjoy it, but rather, you enjoy something because you’re good at it. And you need to have proof that you’re good at it. People have complimented you or you’ve won awards or been promoted. If you continue to do things without getting that kind of feedback, then your enjoyment is at the expense of someone else’s suffering. You’re not good at it. You’re just at it. And the
reason you enjoy it is because you’re oblivious to the fact that others are allowing you to keep doing it because of stringent societal regulations concerning assault and homicide.
So in the future, please make sure you’re good at something before you start to enjoy it. If we all do that, there’ll be an instant upgrade in party jokes, after-dinner speeches, and honeymoons.
O
ne of the signs that our society is changing is the decline in the number of taverns in the community and the proliferation of coffee bars. We have them in malls, at airports, even in bookstores. Is this really a good idea? We have a population that’s overworked and overstressed. Is more caffeine a good thing? I wonder how much of the end of civility in our society is directly attributable to that fourth cup of java. Road rage, arguments over a parking spot, jockeying for position when lining up—none of these situations is improved by the presence of Juan Valdez. When I see a guy on the news climbing a bell tower with an assault rifle, I wonder if things might have been different if he’d switched to decaf.
B
reakthroughs in medical science are wreaking havoc on the tradition of each generation benefiting from the toils of the former one. In the old days, when mid-forties was the life expectancy, a man would pass away and leave his estate or his farm or his blacksmith tools or whatever to his son, who would be in his
early twenties and could really use that stuff. Now we’ve got people living for eighty years and more, and it’ll only get worse.
I think we’ll see the time when it will be common for people to live past the age of one hundred. That’ll really mess things up. What is the point of dying at the age of 110 and leaving everything to your ninety-year-old son? It’s a little late. So you might think about leaving it to your grandson, who’s only seventy. Or your great-grandson, who’s fifty.
To really make a difference in someone’s life, an inheritance has to come much earlier. So you’d end up leaving everything to your great-great-great-grandchildren, who are virtual strangers and barely blood relatives. Instead, I say your best bet is to spend the money before you die and spend it on somebody you know really well—yourself.