donshogren.com

Sunday mornings are for writing posts, but being distracted lately and failing to come up with much of a topic, I went to social media for suggestions. The world seeming even darker and scarier than usual, I gave it up and wandered off to oddball tasks, where I discovered that my old Blogger work is accessable after all. It’s an archive, so the images are all gone and a lot of the references are twenty years old, but there’s some decent stuff, if you can bear some erratic punctuation and a few factual errors. Sifting through my screeds on the 2004 election and such, I looked for something a little on the lighter side. This one seemed cute, from those days when life was actually not the least bit simpler. It will be very difficult to resist the urge to edit it–it’s been a long time:

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Remotely Disinterested

In 54 years of life it has failed to occur to anybody that I might actually be worth something, and so I admit that I again shirk my Patriotic American duty to be SCARED TO DEATH, this time of my identity being stolen. Nevertheless, yesterday The Little Hun brought home from the again obviously evil gates of Super-Monstrous-Wal-Mart a shredder, the timing of such purchase to coincide with the annual cleaning of the files of records of things transacted across the vast Le Sequoit global empire.

So while I might have been enjoying a nice, quiet Saturday in the doldrums of this February Great Lakes climate—listening to the Illini game, playing Scrabble with two computer generated mavens and watching the Discovery Channel—I found my concentration dangerously fragmented by a series of odd sounds. This beguine began benignly (sorry, I watched De-Lovely, The Cole Porter Story the other night) with about fifteen repetitions of rhrhrhrhrh. More disturbing was what followed–a couple of very low huuuuuuuuuuuuuuums and then silence. I was nearly moved to turn around, but things hadn’t reached the point of acrid vapors quite yet.

Still, after several cycles of this it was clear that some intervention would be necessary to avoid the distracting hubbub of numerous oaths of damnation as my wife attempted to repack the shredder in its original packing material for a return trip to the Superbly-Magnificent-Wal-Mart, let alone the inevitable byplay related to the perceived importance of our as yet separate activities.

And so, heroically, I turned to enter the fraying.

First off, it was clear that the proper tool was needed for the job of clearing the blades. An attempt was being made to pull out the offending clumps of account and SS numbers with a set of tweezers. Carefully balancing the relative values of my previously noted valuable time, the cost of the machine, and the admittedly high likelihood of irreparable damage, I opted immediately for the small screwdriver vigorously poked between the blades alternated with blowing the loosened material all over the room. Thus was made relatively short work of the jam, and upon inspection it was determined that the blades remained more or less in line and that it was time for another run.

What followed might be considered eerie or coincidental in another household, I couldn’t say because my memory of other households I’ve been a member of is understandably selective. In this household, however, it was inevitable. I proceeded to shred everything in sight, hundreds of sheets, with no jams. Did this irritate my dear one? Nope, the whole ordeal just further validated her longstanding tenet, “I hate machines and machines hate me!”

Last night, after shutting down the DVD player, turning down the Wave Radio from theater-type volume, tuning the VCR back to channel 4, selecting TV from VCR/TV, selecting the “Soundscape” music channel on the cable box, switching to TV mode on the cable remote, turning off the TV, setting the wave radio to 45 minute sleep mode and canceling the alarm, I thought to myself, “What’s her problem?”

Whilst performing my ablutions, I realized that in the morning she would turn on the TV, change the channel of the TV instead of the Cable (remote still in TV mode) and get static with no sound (was turned down to listen quietly to Soundscape on the Wave Radio). So after remembering to leave the seat down and the door to the bathroom open (I hate that thud in the middle of the night), I made a mental note to turn on the TV in the morning, switch the mode to Cable, put the volume back up on the Wave Radio, and turn off the Cable/TV combo.

Probably because I have so many such responsibilities around here, I forgot this morning.