On tailgating and stuffed drawers 09/25/2020
/So I called my buddy Rich up and asked, where are we watching the Giants game Monday night? 3 of us were going to congregate at his house. Then he asked his wife Sue and she was understandably uncomfortable with that idea. Then I offered my apartment and nobody thought that was a good idea either. So we all sat in our individual homes and texted. Not as good. But we have to adjust. No fans, nobody coming over, yikes. I spoke to John about this and offered that they used to have big screens outside Giants stadium, and why couldn’t the guys in our comic get together and tailgate in the parking lot. His response was, “Would they even let you in? I don’t think so.” So we put our heads together and came up with going to the local sports bar. You’re certainly not going to sit inside, but then when you sit outside, could you possibly see the tv inside? Answer: no. Then we thought, if you’ve ever asked to make a call or send a text in a restaurant, you’d have their wireless password, and bingo, our first comic this week was born. The point is, we’re social animals so we’ll figure out a way to get together somehow. But just keep your damn mask on, okay? And around the chin doesn’t count. Neither does under the nose. In the words of Bill Maher, that’s like wearing a condom around your balls. So around your nose and under your chin and then we’re cool, capiche?
Our second comic deals with accumulating stuff. Boxes of stuff, drawers of stuff, magazine racks of stuff, bookshelves of, well, you get the drift. There’s one particular drawer in my kitchen with some knives, a juice-squeezer, tongs, etc. Half the time we open it, it gets stuck. Then you have to root around with your hand to turn something flat so the drawer opens. For instance, we have three pairs of scissors. One of them are the “good scissors”, the ones that work, but we keep the others around “just in case.” When we moved from a house to an apartment we got rid of lots of stuff, like the kids old soccer and baseball equipment, and (sigh) several boxes of lp records, which never made it out of the garage because we just had a cd player.
After all that cleaning out however, we now have new electronic stuff. SInce John is an artist and illustrator, he has even more stuff than I do, but we ran through the list of SWK (Shit We Keep) and came up with the list that appears in this comic. John came up with the electric gooseneck candlelighter, since he actually has one that plugs into a USB port. I still have a butane powered one, though I have no idea where I keep the butane, so when the lighter runs out, I buy more butane to go along with the butane I can’t find, and we wonder how we accumulate so much stuff? How do we avoid getting overrun with it? I have a theory that in every relationship there’s a hoarder and a chucker-outer. I personally have a limit of 3 back issues of any magazine. When we have more than three of any magazine, New York, New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, I surreptitiously chuck it out. Shhh, don’t tell anyone. But damn, since my wife proof reads the blog every week, she’s going to find out. Oh well.
Have a nice weekend and for our Jewish friends, we hope your fast isn’t too painful (but face it, you’ve probably got a lot to atone for). See you next week.
Andy and John