The Green Red Green (19 page)

Don’t do it. When the bosses offer the early retirement, hold out for a big payday and a transfer to somewhere exotic. If you’re useless enough, they might just go for it, and if you’re not, they’ll keep you.

H
ere’s a puzzle for those quiet evenings when there’s nothing on TV because all the professional athletes have gone on strike again. The theme of this word search is different kinds of fish.

P
erception is everything. Here are a few ways to make your neighbours think you’re rich:

S
ometimes at our age, we lose our enthusiasm for new experiences because we think we’ve tried everything or we’ve lost our confidence or we’re tired of standing in line in the emergency department. The trick with things you’ve never done is to pick something you can actually do. Friends and family may have suggestions. Maybe fly fishing or lawn bowling or origami. My
wife suggested I try not interrupting her, but that only led us into an ongoing argument about time and space.

M
aybe you’ve always wanted to be in the volunteer fire department but have never joined because you don’t have time or can’t pass the physical or just don’t want to be spending your weekends with the kinds of losers who are attracted to that kind of hobby.

Well, instead of turning normal citizens into firefighters, why don’t we just turn a normal car into a fire truck? Who hasn’t thrilled to the sight of a huge fire truck roaring down the street to put out a blaze you started totally by accident? It wasn’t your fault—it’s the lousy instructions that come with electrical appliances.

Fire trucks need shovels, picks, and axes. The trucks carry these tools on the outside, where firefighters can get them in an emergency. So just drill holes in your trunk lid, slightly larger than the diameter of the handles. Then the tools will sit right
there, ready for use. Don’t worry about the damage to the lid, because you’re going to paint this baby fire engine red.

Fire trucks also have lots of flashing lights. And so do you: Christmas lights. You probably have a set hanging off your eaves-trough that you forgot to take down, right? Just hook them to an extension cord. (That will limit the range of your truck, but any fire that’s farther away than the length of an extension cord is probably none of your business.) Attach the string of bulbs to your fire truck with wire staples, plastic clips, or duct tape.

A fire truck also needs a siren. Your horn is a good start, but for extra noise, loosen your alternator belt and your fan belt and your power steering belt, and then folks will hear you coming. If you really want to be safe, punch a few holes in the muffler. Plenty of hose is essential too, so get yourself a number of hoses and reels from the hardware store (or borrow them from someone who’s not around), and attach them near the front of the car. You can hook the hoses right to the engine’s water pump, and this becomes a pumper truck. And don’t worry about them not matching. We’re going to paint this baby fire engine red.

A fire truck wouldn’t be a fire truck without a ladder that can turn in any direction (because fires can happen in any direction, and you may park in any direction). So for that you need a rotating platform. Hold a three-by-three piece of plywood in the middle of your roof and drive a six-inch spike down through the middle of it. (Make sure no one is in the car when you do this.) To make your pivot point, run a rod through the ends of the ladders and through a couple of screw eyes in the roof, and then run rope up through some pulleys and you’ll have a ladder that fights fires in two separate directions at the exact same time. And she goes up or down, just like the professional units but at a fraction of the cost.

Just a word of caution: don’t drive with the ladders in the up position. Personal experience has shown that the ladders will make contact with high-tension wires, and although wood
doesn’t conduct electricity, it burns well. My fire truck unfortunately caught fire. As soon as it cooled off, I painted it a beautiful fire engine red.

I
have golfing buddies. They’re good guys, and we all get along just fine. But I think if you took those same four guys and put them in a car or sat them at a restaurant table or parked them on a bench for four hours, they would eventually be bickering and entertaining homicidal thoughts. This is because men have trouble socializing with each other when there’s nothing else to do. Put them together at a ball game or a racetrack or a golf course and everything’s fine.

Women, on the other hand, seem the complete opposite. They’ve been known to turn off a television in favour of conversation. They often spend a couple of hours over coffee with a friend. They work from a different set of rules than we do. Conversation can never be the central focus for men. None of us has all that much to say, and we have even less interest in hearing what the other guy has on his mind.

That’s why golf is such a great game for men. It’s the perfect way to feign interest in your friends without wasting a whole afternoon.

O
nce a year, you really need to clean out your drawers. More important, you have to throw out all your previous day planners. They’ll just make you feel stupid and old. I was
thumbing through some that I found in the back of my desk. They go back a few years and had some interesting entries, including the following:

Get rid of all those day planners right now so that you can get on with your life. The secret to happiness in old age is to erase all traces of personal blunders and let fading memory work its magic. It’s called the George Bush Approach.

B
ack when I was in elementary school, we had a point system that allowed students to accumulate points over the week and have a shot at going home on Friday with a gold star. I miss that. We need to bring that sense of success back into our lives. Here’s a sample list of achievable rewards. Get a hundred points and the gold star is yours.

T
hese days there is a great deal of emphasis placed on communication and interaction. We have cellphones and smartphones and pagers and email and networking. We have all this technology allowing us to exchange ideas easily and instantly. So what are we doing with it? We’re calling people when we don’t need to. We’re programming our cellphones to play tunes instead of ringing. We’re getting non-essential messages in a variety of formats. We’re playing computer games at our desks with strangers from around the world. We haven’t really improved communication—we’ve just made it easier for bad ideas to be shared.

Before the techno revolution, if you had a theory you presented it to a friend or a colleague first to see if it had merit. You could limit the embarrassment. Now if you have a theory, you create a website and broadcast it to the world. Life gets very difficult when everybody knows you’re an idiot. It’s bad enough when only your wife knows.

I
don’t think we should feel like failures when we don’t have a significant impact on the world. It’s often the little things—the small accomplishments, the minor victories—that are the most satisfying.

So for the sake of your own mental health, take a few minutes at the end of each day and try to focus on some tiny breakthrough you had in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe you feel good about not eating that doughnut. Maybe you feel good about eating them all. It doesn’t matter what it is. Look for small accomplishments. I consider each day that the police don’t have to come to my home a true blessing.

Find ways to feel good about yourself. We can’t all be Nelson Mandela or Albert Einstein or Jerry Springer.

Y
ou’re on the couch watching TV, grazing the dial with your thumb and tapping the remote like you’re sending Morse code.

Your wife asks you to stop doing that and just find something and stay with it. You reply that you can’t decide what to watch until you find out what’s on. And you say it all without taking your eyes off the set.

Your wife suggests you look at the guide on the TV, which is what it’s for.

Your wife picks up her knitting or a book. Finally you settle on what you want to watch—a comedy, a sports event, and something with guns—and you’re keeping yourself apprised of what’s going on in all three. Then something really good happens on the comedy. Like Hawkeye is going to get a girl for Radar. So you settle on it for a while. Your wife looks up, but just then the commercials start and you’re back on the road, thumbing your way to a better show.

Your wife gets up, exits the room, goes out and buys her own TV, and files for divorce. It can happen. Life is about choices. So is television. You can’t have a successful marriage and a TV remote. I say go for the successful marriage.

Unless the playoffs are on.

T
hinking is usually a good thing. It can save you from physical harm and psychological damage. But thinking at the wrong time can also create a lot of problems. Here is a short list of times when it’s better not to think: