Mucking through the primordial ooze

I was just reading my friend Los Angelista’s wonderful blog in which she was marking her fourth anniversary at this ‘art’ and it came to me that I too might have been at it for a time approaching four years. But, I wasn’t sure, so I checked.

Vaingloriously, I ‘Googled’ myself and I found my earliest blog. This crude effort was three different blogs ago. The current one is the one of longest duration and I am not planning to depart from it in the foreseeable future.

Anyway, what follows is my blog from Sept. 4, 2004. This is actually the second blog entry I’d ever offered to the world, or my two readers at that time. The first entry was merely a reprint from a newspaper feature I’d written.

I also checked my personal journal for that day, just to find out what the world was like for me at the time, and found that we had gone to the Farmer’s Market whence we ran into different people we knew, including my ex-wife’s erstwhile student teacher from two decades earlier and upon whom I had a kind of crush at the time, and I noted that she had, ahem, aged remarkably pleasantly. Nothing much else other than that we were recently back from Kauai.

But, 2004. It was so long ago. What was life like back then? Let’s see. George W. was still president but the situation in Iraq, we were told, would be cleared up ‘soon’. Al Gore hadn’t yet morphed into Michael Moore with nicer clothes, and Princess Diana was still dead, but continued to provide fodder for People mag.

On the home front (everybody’s home front) property speculators and developers were still having orgasms over a real estate market that woujld be booming ‘forever’, bringing us all wealth and palatial homes with mortgages of half-a-million but easily affordable at subprime for a couple who worked at Wal-Mart or Burger King. And Britney hadn’t yet ‘doffed trou’ for public scrutiny. Yes, in all it was a happier time.

Without further ado, let us return to those golden days of yesteryear with a retro-visit to my 2nd blog entry ever.

Sept 11/04

1. No matter how much money you have, it's always barely enough to get by on.

2. There is always a Plan B.

3. Never pee into the wind on a sailboat.

4. You will only stub your toe in bare-feet when you have an ingrown toenail.

5. No matter which route you take, there will always be roadwork -- especially when you're late for work or an appointment.

6. No matter how late you arrive for a doctor's or dentist's appointment, you will still have to wait half-an-hour.

7. Doctors will have you sent into that little examining room even though they're not yet ready to see you. Is it to give you hope, or to increase and prolong your anxiety?

8. If you're male, you couldn't get an 18-year-old hottie when you were 18, and now that you have the money and car that might lure her, you're too old.

9. Procrastination is like masturbation -- either way, you're only fucking yourself. (pardon the profanity, I was very young and crass back then.)

10. In life, if nothing changes, nothing changes.

11. You can be a godfather, a godmother, or a goddamned fool, but you can never be a god.

12. The queue you decide to join will always take the longest, and the little old lady with only two items to check out, who is just ahead of you, will have 47 store coupons (most of them outdated, or from another store) that she will demand to have checked. She will then hand the cashier 200 lottery tickets she wants scanned.

13. All divorces are acrimonious at first.

14. When the divorce is finalized and your ex states that she wants you to remain friends, that will never truly happen. The most you can hope for is a reserved politeness on meeting, in which both parties are waiting for the other to say something inflammatory.

15. Children will never love you back as much as you love them.

16. After having chastised a youngster for not visiting the bathroom prior to departure on a trip, you will be struck by an overwhelming urge to pee within half an hour of leaving your doorstep.

17. All airplane trips are frightening, uncomfortable, and hideously boring.

18. Cat hair does not cling to cats.

19. Anyone nitpicky enough to write a letter to the editor complaining about a typographical error, deserves the error.

20. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, either teach PE or chair the local teachers' union.

21. A person cannot step into the same river twice. (OK, I stole that one from Buddha)

22. Unrequited love fantasies never become reality -- at least not in the way you wanted them to.

23. Or, they do, and that can be worse.

24. Your dreams are merely dreams, they do no foretell the future or resolve problems.

25. Beautiful women do not break wind, get greenery stuck in their teeth or become stricken with diarrhea. If they did it would destroy all illusion.

26. (bonus aphorism) There is no justice in the universe. If something genuinely fair or fortuitous seems to have transpired, it was a random fluke. So, life ain't fair. So, get over it.

posted by Ian at 8:50 AM
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