mrpeenee
mrpeenee: an unauthrorized autobiography
Friday, March 15, 2024
In Which Nursepeenee Considers Rectal Thermometers for Everyone
Sunday, March 10, 2024
In Which We Consider Photographic Proof
Our dear friend Bobby claims that I only write this blog in order to complain. To prove what nonsense that is, let me point out that it was a lovely day this afternoon and the cherry trees in the Castro are already starting to bloom.
I spent the afternoon organizing old printed photos, by which I mean I would pick pictures up out of one stack and put them in another and do absolutely nothing about them. I have a rough estimate that I probably have about 3, 000 photos. I never ever go back and look at them, but I decided I'm going to try and cull out the really dead wood and make some room in the closet that the boxes they live in are currently occupying.
I hired an organizer to come in on Wednesday and look through all these stacks and piles of so many much younger mrpeenees. My direction to the organizer is simple: pitch all the pictures that have no people in them.
My beloved R Man and my sainted mother shared one common trait, they were terrible photographers. Both demanded that the subject freeze and stand perfectly still while they tried to push the shutter button. Inevitably the result was a crooked blur that they swore was a picture. R Man dealt with his photography limitation by taking pictures of mostly landscapes because mountains don't move. Thus about easily a third of those 3,000 are just random mountains and forests and streets. When I look back at them, all I see are images that I already remember. So those 50, 60 shots of the hotel in Glacier Park in 1988? Out. Actual pictures of friends and relatives, many of whom have moved on to the other side of the grass, those I'll keep.
Here's a few that I've already run into and decided to put in the keep pile.
A tiny little mrpeenee, circa 1956, with my father, I think in Galveston. What strikes me most about this, aside from how absolutely adorable I was, is how very dark my father was. He had beautiful olive skin that never burned and would tan in the time it took him to cross a street. Did he pass that gene down to me? Hell no.Thursday, February 29, 2024
In Which We Fill Out Forms
I did my taxes tonight, always a highlight of the year. Hot little forms have been showing up in the mail for the last couple of months all claiming to be "important tax information." which I pile up on my desk where they glare balefully at me. I spend all of February doing nothing about them and dreading the day I will actually dive in and wrestle them to the mat. When I finally do turn to, all I have to actually do is check off a bunch of little boxes my tax guy has created. They are all questions like "did you invest in bitcoins last year?" And then every year I remember, oh yeah this is no big deal, this is why I pay the tax guy. EVERY. YEAR.
As long as I was in a government state of mind, I went ahead and completed my census form. I had merrily assumed it would just be asking for my address and if I was a white boy. It did ask that but it also seemed reluctant to take my word for a number of other impertinent queries.
For instance, it asked how many people lived here. I said just me and then the next question was, pretty much, are you sure? What about just for a little bit? Did you look in the closet, did you check under the bed? Dude, I swear I am the only one here.
They also focused a lot on my internet access and tools, to the point where I started to wonder if this was actually a census or a marketing survey.
They then asked in two different places what my ancestry or ethnic origin is, like they were trying to catch me out on a lie. When I checked off "white" it wouldn't let me move on until I specified what flavor of white I am. I claimed I was Finnish because I figured that would screw up their algorithm. My family comes from England, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, pretty much everywhere the natives survive on potatoes and cabbage. So I suppose I could have just listed "Western Europe," but where's the fun in that?
Guys:
Thursday, February 22, 2024
In Which We Writ Small
The recent chill and wet weather has conspired to make my nose run like it's being paid overtime. It flows pretty much year round anyway, but lately it seems to have taken on a new urgency. Anytime I bend my head even slightly it feels like the tide has decided to go out. When I die, please tell them to list the cause of death as "drowned" instead of "crazy old man bullshit."
I got exactly as far in writing this post as the word "bullshit" above when I took a break. I do that, I take lots of breaks. Unfortunately, when I eventually wandered back into writing mode, I realized I had completely forgotten what I had planned to write about here. Oops. I am pretty sure, despite the lead paragraph, that I was not going to focus on my mucus. Also, in journalism school, they taught us to spell the first paragraph of a story as "lede." I have no idea why.
Considering how short these posts are, it's sort of amazing how long it takes me to scratch them out. But that's always how my creative process (if you could call it that) has worked. At my job, when I would write a press release (a chore that popped up on the regular because, well, it was my job) I always had to allot sufficient time for wandering around the office while wrestling with synonyms for "small business" even though early on I did discover how to spell the word "entrepreneur."
I would saunter away from my desk and make laps around the office thinking press release thoughts. I have no idea what my coworkers made of this, but I didn't like most of them anyway. A big part of my rambles involved avoiding the jerks and checking in on my friends. I always got the releases out on time and I got in some exercise. It was a win-win all around.
Now that I have retired and am a free man, my writing is still kind of peripatetic, but now I can take 4 days to write 4 paragraphs and I don't have to worry about my erratic punctuation and spelling, all of which suits me just fine. But no matter how casual I am about a deadline, or lack thereof, I still really need to have a topic even if it is how I absolutely do not have one.
Guys worth writing about:
Friday, February 16, 2024
In Which We Play Doctor
Did I tell you about the Uber I recently had where I, minding my own business, suddenly realized the musical entertainment was a Christian rock radio station. Dude, really? Could we maybe change to heathen R&B? Agnostic jazz? Something that doesn't include the word "praise" quite so often or quote some fairy tale from the bible.
I have been spending quite some time with Uber of late. Part of the joys of being an old man are the abundance of doctor's appointments that I get to enjoy. Waiting rooms all across San Francisco have become known to me. When I was younger, I would pass the time by rearranging the furniture in them more to my liking, but now I just sit there and sulk.
But mrpeenee, I hear you ask, what is the point of these medical rendezvous? Oh, this and that, most of it expensive and usually painful. I had to get my trigger point injection in my back cause the first one had finally worn off and also which, ouch.
Speaking of ouch, I had to get the various bits of sun damage spread out over my hide checked on. As a small blonde child growing up on the Gulf Coast, I had plenty of blistered skin and my frequent sunburns are coming back to haunt me. Discolored lumps and bumps now litter any patch of skin that was ever exposed to the sun. My doctor refers to them as barnacles. Hilarious sweetie, absolutely side splitting.
You deal with these by taking liquid nitrogen on a q-tip and dabbing it on the offending lump. The nitrogen cauterizes said lump ("cauterize" is a fancy word for "burn that shit off" and it is exactly as much fun as it sounds.) I always exaggerated the discomfort and would squeal and berate my doctor for humorous effect. My original practitioner was always quick with the dabbing part so we could move on to my theatrics. My current doctor apparently feels the need to be more thorough and will cheerfully swab away like it's some arts and crafts project. I want to explain to her that this is not some hobby, but I'm so busy gritting my teeth I can't quite get around to it.
Also, I had to go to the chiropractor, but since that's mostly just a gossiping, I don't really mind it.
Medically necessitated naked guys:
Thursday, February 8, 2024
In Which We Try to Fly
Fred and I wrapped up our very amusing trip to LA (I had short ribs four times in four different ways in the three days that we spent there. Don't ask me, I don't know how these things happen.) We woke up Monday morning to make our way to the airport and that's when our gay little adventure came tumbling down. Isn't that always just the way?
The whole weekend the news had been full of rack and ruin predictions about a great big storm that blew in Saturday night. I had ignored all of the weather related hysterics; I grew up in the swamps of East Texas and I am not impressed with rain storms unless they actually have sharks aloft in them. Los Angeles is a desert community and I figured the angelinos were simply unfamiliar with the concept of precipitation.
Sure enough, the storm blew in Sunday, and you know what? It was rain. Fred went out with some friends but I stayed in the hotel and had lunch in the nice little dining room and was very cozy.
We were supposed to fly out at noon on Monday, but weather conditions delayed our flight till 2:00. No big deal right? We got to the airport and our departure started slipping back further and further with weather delays continuing to be blamed. Finally about 5:00, the airline announced "oh you know what, never mind, your flight is canceled."
While my fellow passenger panicked and griped, Fred got in line at the ticket counter to pry our bags out of Alaska airlines' nasty little hands and I started scrambling to get another flight out. We were at Burbank airport and they were zero more flights that night, but I found a United one leaving out of Los Angeles International (LAX) around 8:00 pm.
Before I could even feel relieved, my phone decided it was tired and wanted a break. I had spent the time we were hanging around playing games on my traitorous phone and now it was dying. I hustled over to an outlet and plugged the charger in, only to find that in the 90 seconds it had taken me to get my charger going, the seats were no longer available. The only option was an even later flight at 10:30. Fine.
LAX is on the far side of Los Angeles from Burbank, but we made it over there in about an hour and cleared security in record time so that we could go and settle in at the gate. That's when we slammed into the world's most miserable seating. The whole terminal is very new and part of the decorating involved chairs that were both modern and lumpy. I spent almost 4 hours in them and never did find a comfortable position.
By the time the gate agent announced in funereal tones that our flight was delayed (AGAIN. It's not even the same fucking airport, How could this bad luck have trailed after us?) Fred was seriously beginning to fade. The combination of chemo and cancer has been hard on the poor little thing. He was crumpling like a balloon at the end of a very long birthday party and I was starting to wonder what one does if one's companion simply collapses in the particular hell that is an airport.
Let us just skip over the misery of those few hours, including the part where I made Fred just lie down on the floor because there was no where else to settle. In the end, miraculously, we made it back to our own little cow town and never has it seemed so welcome. My suitcase disappeared, but by that point I was perfectly willing to abandon it and all the dirty clothes it held. I just wanted to return to the embrace of my own bed, my own pillow, and my own toilet.
Guys:
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