Boomer Randomness

I must have "nice guy" tattooed on my forehead. Or sucker. People, total strangers, seem to single me out when they need something. I was in the middle of a group of several people exiting the grocery store recently when a young woman sheepishly approached me with sad eyes and a story. She said her car wouldn't start, she had called police and others and needed twenty seven dollars; even one dollar would help, anything. She appeared to be in her thirties and dressed in typical casual attire for the neighborhood and the season. She said she could show me her driver's license, credit cards, etc., I assume to prove she wasn't just scamming me. I told her I thought there was an ATM in the store and she spoke a partial sentence indicating that wouldn't work. I told her I was sorry but I only used cards, didn't have cash and couldn't help her; all lies, by the way. There are a few reasons why I didn't want to give her twenty seven dollars ... I was ...

Boomers get credit for many wonderful things ... DNA fingerprinting, the artificial heart,  Bob Dylan, the Internet, Viagra. But boomers, as a group, aren't prepared for retirement. It seems that our parents saved and saved and saved; we spend, spend, spend. Some of us got it right, however, and I'm jealous of them. Many of my bar friends are retired. They travel to exciting places like Italy, Ireland, Thailand, New Jersey. They live in houses that are paid for or close to being paid for. Some of them worked their asses off to reach this delicious point in their lives and now reap the rewards. Some of them were blessed to have the resources to live these adventures while working. I'm doing my best to not be jealous of their good fortune or good planning. Sometimes I have to force myself to remember that I've had a great life up to this point. I played and spent more than saved, so now I still have to work. Retirement won't be at all what I had hoped. Th...

Try this experiment (you'll need a partner in another room, house or city). First, pick a starting time, then wait twenty minutes. Now phone your partner and after she says hello, wait twenty minutes, then respond. Your partner should then wait for twenty minutes after your response, then wait another twenty minutes to begin a conversation.  Each response in the conversation should be separated by twenty minutes for the send and a pretend twenty minutes for the receive. That is how a conversation between a person on Earth and a person on Mars would play out. The signal takes twenty minutes in each direction. The effect of a twenty-minute delay in communication was one of many factors being studied during an 8-month isolation experiment that ended a couple of months ago. Six NASA volunteers lived in a 1200-square-foot structure near a volcano in Hawaii. Picture 6 people living together inside a two bedroom, one bath apartment for eight months, with no option to go outside...

If you want just a hint of what people in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico are going through, shut off the water in your house for a weekend. Our water heater sprung a big leak on a recent Saturday morning. Fortunately the maintenance super was already on the property fixing another problem (on his day off). He couldn't replace the water heater till Monday and had to shut off water to the entire apartment because the water heater shut off valve was also broken. Picture routine water-related activities you take for granted: flushing toilets, brushing teeth, making coffee, rinsing dishes after breakfast, taking meds, cooking almost anything. I lost count of how many times I instinctively turned on a faucet, sometimes after already pumping soft soap into my hands. Fortunately we could turn the water back on a few times for a few minutes to flush toilets and fill containers and we could use a guest apartment to take showers. Our 'ordeal' only lasted two days. Most residents o...

Ears, eyes, noses, throats, legs and arms are probably pretty jealous lately. Why?  Because knees are getting all the attention. Football players taking a knee during the National Anthem started as a statement by one player, with the intention of drawing attention to social injustices in our great country. Other players have since joined in on this practice and a national conversation about race, the 1st Amendment, patriotism, policy and law is the result. Sadly, the conversation is often more of a shouting match and the loudest voices are at each extreme end of the debate over the appropriateness of taking a knee rather than the original issue. As each side digs their heels in (more body parts), the conversation has become more about perceived patriotism, or perceived lack of patriotism, than about the social injustices that led to this behavior. The loudest voices ignore the underlying issue and forget that kneeling is in its own way a sign of respect. Those players are ...

It’s hard to mentally process the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night.  Fifty-eight people are dead, at the time I’m writing this, and more than 500 are injured.  The shooter is a 64-year-old retired accountant from Orlando who lives in a retirement community near Vegas.  He killed himself as police were breaking into the hotel room where he was doing the shooting. The casualties were among the 20,000-plus fans at the third day of a country music festival.  Jason Aldean was singing the third line of one of his hits when he dropped his guitar and ran off the stage.  He probably couldn’t hear the shots, but he saw the crowd reacting and I’m guessing a sound tech was able to warn him in his ear monitors. The videos and news reports I’ve seen so far show the obvious panic.  Nobody knew where to run.  The tendency is to head toward the entrance where you came in, but it turns out that was the spot most in the sights of the shooter.  Artists ...