Not Quite Dead Things....

In order of their appearance, we have a tree, some saints, a charging station, a bug, and some Iranians (we hope).

Today promised to be long and complicated and it has delivered. It began with the usual morning walkies round the neighborhood; we headed out and quickly passed a young tree that was out at the curb, in a planter, tipped over on its side. Hmmm, I wondered, why are they throwing THAT out? Then, on our way back home from walkies, it got even more curious, because there was a gaggle of workers and a couple of trucks surrounding it. It looked like a crime scene being investigated, and I was half expecting one of them was Max the coroner saying to Morse, “Shall we say 2:30 for the report, then?” I could even see one of those little CSI flags sticking out of the ground.



But it just turned out to be a crew from the town planting a new street tree, and that evidence marker simply said “tree.“

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I waited as long as I could for two clients to schedule meetings with me- one here, one in Rochester- and failed at both, so I left around 10:30, leaving just enough time to grab lunch, eat it in the Rochester office, check emails and such and head to the dentist. One of the things I checked was seeing this meme:



I knew what had to be the immediate reply to that-

St. Jude- Hold my beer.

For the patron saint of lost causes takes way more shit than the patron saint of things that are merely lost. Airtags help with the latter; the former, like these clients from today, not so much. I am probably the only person alive to remember an odd confluence that the J-Man got himself involved in, not long after I moved here for school circa 1981.

Back then, we had two daily newspapers: the Buffalo Courier Express in the mornings and the cleverly named Buffalo Evening News as the afternoon paper of record. The Courier had the longer and more prestigious upbringing, numbering Samuel Clemens among its past editors. It held its own as an independent morning voice long after AM and PM dailies elsewhere had been merged or one or the other survived; some was from a tacit agreement of the original Buffalo-based founding family not to publish a News edition on Sundays so the Courier could have that to itself. That ended when the last of the heirs died and the paper was sold to Warren Buffett in 1977. By the time I arrived in 1981, that Sunday competion had the Courier near its coffin, and they tried any number of rescue efforts to stay afloat before finally folding in 1982, shortly after I subscribed to them.

The most famous of these magic bullets was an attempted sale to Rupert Murdoch, not long after he purchased the New York Post and made its founder Alexander Hamilton want to shoot himself to death all over again. The paper's union rejected the contract offer Murdoch made to them, and it was curtains on the Courier not long after. But they tried one other trick in the months leading up to that desperate move: for a few months after I got here, the morning paper offered free classifieds.

Remember, this was 1982 or so, with the Internet years from being a force. Monster dot com was a gleam in Godzilla's eye on Monster Chiller Horror Theater, Amazon was a river. Classified ads in the local paper were how things got sold, jobs got posted, apartments got rented. Newspapers made big bank from this monopoly service.

And then there were the personals. Famously homaged in the late 70s Pina Colada Song, they were always short, occasionally sweet, and sometimes led to the best and worst of interpersonal relationships. In Ithaca, I once went to dinner at some friends' apartment- girls, though not girlfriends of mine (or each other;), and made some unfortunate noise about returning the favor. Months went by with no Ray-ciprocation, so one morning I opened The Sun and found this in the personals section:

RAY
We're hungry.
- Phyllis and Michelle

I threw something together in the kitchen for them the weekend after that was in the paper. Not surprisingly, I'm not friends with either of them anymore;)

When the Courier ads went free, two rather unique ones started appearing regularly. Weird ones. Some were the REALLLY personal kind of personal ads, of the still-free-sexual-70s hanging on with swingers. They had their own distinctive code words beyond things like SWF for "single white female." I'm not offering examples here; as my junior high health teacher told us at our one and only boys-only sex ed session, You can use your imagination. The others were just as weird, usually going something like this:

Prayer to St. Jude: (Say this prayer nine times a day. By the eighth day your prayer will be answered. It has never been known to fail. Publication must be promised.) “May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved and Preserved throughout the world. O Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us, St. Jude worker of Miracles, Pray for us. St. Jude helper of the helpless, Pray for us. Thank you for Favours Received.” By A.S. (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for favours received and Thank you for listening to me.)

But the one I remember, which I swear to the saints I did not send in, was the perfect blend of the sacred and rhe profane:

Modern male thanks St. Jude for favors received.

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After seeing St. Anthony and reminiscing about his brother from another apostle, I finally got to my semiannual cleaning appointment at my dentist, with more encounters with the not quite recently deceased.

I managed to get there a bit early and checked at a hi-speed public electric vehicle charging station around the corner from his office. I figured I could get its battery topped up and I was early enough to walk the couple blocks to and from there.
 

Ray: “Saints preserve us! The high voltage charging station that ALWAYS has both cords in use, has one free!”

Charging station: “Mine is an evil laugh. Why did you think the plug wasn’t in its holster? BECAUSE SOME IDIOT BEFORE YOU BROKE THE GROUNDING PART OF THE PLUG OFF OF IT AND IT! WON'T CHARGE!!!”



So I just bailed and drove over to Ron's office. Moments later, in the chair with the hygienist starting to poke and prod around my gums,  I stared up at the ceiling with implements in my mouth. I noticed there was something crawling around over my head- under the fluorescent tubes on top of the lens for that light fixture. Maybe a bee, or maybe a stinkbug? I figured I’d better tell the hygienist about it so she didn’t freak out if she suddenly saw it or, worse, it fell out of the fixture into my lap while she was poking around in there.

Bad move, since she has a serious phobia about creepy crawlies. But I calmed her down, and got the quickest cleaning I’ve ever gotten from her in years. I did suggest before I left that they get Ol' Six Legs out of there, since it seemed to be slowing down and was basically being cooked under those bulbs like an order of chicken nuggets under a heat lamp at McDonald’s- and if it DID turn out to be a stinkbug, that would not go well for them.

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And my final brush, not of teeth but I fervently hope not with DEATH:

I drove home after the cleaning with the sports station reporting on the USA soccer getting ahead of and ultimately beating Iran, whose players were basically told before the match that their families would be thrown in prison and tortured if the players on the soccer team didn’t “behave.“ I just pray that doesn't include the behavior of "losing when all they had to do was kick the ball out of bounds for 90 minutes for the draw and for advancing over the Great Satan."

AYA-TOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL-AHS gon' be mad.

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I also wrote down some thoughts about Star Trek IV, which I rewatched the night before, most of which got butchered by Siri as I dictated them. Now I understand why there were no smartphones in even the Original Series: they were likely banned sometime in the mid-21st century after an unfortunate event where the POTUS's text to his Russian counterpart called for "calm" and got autocorrected to "bomb." I'll return to that, and some suddenly anachronistic references to books and a catalog, in our next exciting episode.