Another Week: Number 104

I once heard Kevin Matthews say “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” (He was likely quoting Alfred Wainwright.)

Physical activity adds another factor to this calculation because your body’s furnace kicks in about 15 minutes into a walk. If you start off too cozy, you might end up steamed like a microwaved bag of peas.

Tuesday afternoon, though, walking west along Kenosha’s harbor into 18 mph gusts, my twenty-year-old Patagonia fleece jacket was no longer providing the astonishing wind protection it did when new. The chill sliced through my sleeves and, randomly shuffling through my AirPods, Jason Isbell‘s “Elephant” ripped my heart like a precision chainsaw.

On Thursday, a slightly colder day, I switched to my Lands’ End puffer jacket and nearly levitated as I bounced blissfully down some bleak blocks in my neighborhood listening to “Life Becomes Me,” by The Nadas.

Outerwear really does make all the difference.

Glancing around, my community appears even more entrenched after the election. Some yards have become little compounds fortified by Trump signage, while across the street, rainbow signs support love, Black lives, and science “in this house.” There are even a few Harris/Walz signs still standing.

The American flag has become something of a proxy Trump banner. One of my neighbors installed an entire flagpole in his front yard immediately after Election Day — then added a second flag depicting the head of a bald eagle and the Constitution.

That bonus flag (sold by CLYTTE, apparently an acronym for “Choose linking Your Trusted Traditional Emotion”) soon exhibited a tendency to tangle, and so disappeared.

Next, the Stars and Stripes itself vanished. So now there’s just a pole — perhaps for Festivus?

Another neighbor planted a small American flag in his front yard. It rises a good ten inches above the dirt in front of has gas meter, next to his downspout extender.

On Monday, a 15-year-old shot and killed a teacher, a fellow student, and herself at a school in Madison, Wisconsin. Two others were hospitalized in critical condition. All week, the story dominated Milwaukee’s local news, which described the shooting as “unimaginable,” even though mass shootings are so routine in America that viewers can recite all of these clichés like Catholics reciting the Order of Mass.

Thursday was Election Day yet again and I was voter number 3, but I have completely cut MSNBC out of my daily routine after a 16-year dependence. It’s nothing against them; they did great work. But despite it all, the guy who tried to overturn a presidential election is going to take the presidential oath again in a few weeks. At this point in life, there’s a keener sense that my days are numbered. I have no more decades to spend scrutinizing impeachments. An hour of Hallie Jackson NOW is plenty.

I mean, as you may recall, we rather famously lived through “a horse loose in the hospital” (although many did not). Eventually, we realized that having a horse loose in the hospital was both ridiculous and extremely dangerous, so we got the horse out of the hospital, even though he didn’t want to go.

Now — missing that reckless excitement, I guess — we have invited the horse back into the hospital. Already, Trump is planning the annexation (Anschluss, in German) of Canada. It makes you wish we could check facts on YouTube.

But don’t worry, everything’s going to be great. We’ll just try to ignore the elephant — or horse — somehow.

To that end, I have been doing a bunch of reading. As I removed my glasses before cracking a book on Tuesday evening, they somehow flew out of my hand and broke in two on my living room floor. I was able to re-order the same pair from EyeBuyDirect in about three minutes, but shipping and Christmas mean I’ll need to improvise for a few days.

I found some old contact lenses – but although contacts allow me to see a more handsome fellow in the mirror, the problem at my age is presbyopia, meaning I need reading glasses over my contact lenses to look at my phone, my laptop, or a book.

My new six-dollar Walmart reading glasses put me in another dimension. They make my coffee cup look oval instead of round, and my hands look extremely crepey — and weirdly long, like the hands of the subject in The Scream.

After Christmas, I should receive my replacement glasses with their Transitions® lenses, and I can go back to resembling Dr. Strangelove.

I walked 6.82 miles this week.

Emirates NBA Cup 2024

The NBA Cup is a thing the league started last year, and you get the sense they’re forcing the sportscasters and players to say it’s wondrous and meaningful when it mostly smells like a phony money grab.

They hold this “in-season tournament” in November and December to attract attention during the NFL season, even though it makes no sense. Sure, they paint their courts hideous colors, and they shoot confetti and award a trophy — but when it’s over, they still have two-thirds of the season left to go before the real playoffs.

On Tuesday, though, I did watch the Milwaukee Bucks smother the Oklahoma City Thunder in the “championship” game, 97 to 81. My main takeaway was that some commercials are shockingly bad, and others are almost brilliant.

On the one hand, the Emirates airline that sponsored the tournament had Penélope Cruz on one of their planes showcasing their quilted upholstery with sexy saxophone music. Plus, they have video screens and indeterminate food on a tray — in economy!

Uh-huh.

On the other hand, Snyder’s of Hanover promoted a revolutionary new idea: a holiday pretzel cabin so that gingerbread people are not forced to live in houses made of themselves.

Even in these dark days, someone out there is still trying, still thinking of new angles — and that gives me a tiny glimmer of hope.

Happy holidays!