I’ve always been hesitant to buy a snow blower.  For one thing I have a storage problem.  The available space in my single car garage is gradually becoming unavailable.  So I have a big debate with myself about spending money on one every winter.   What it’s come down to is a poker game between me and Mother Nature.  The way I figure it, I win the longer I can put off the expense.  The x factor of the equation is inches of snow per season.  As long as I’m not dealing with an avalanche of snow during the winter, I don’t mind shoveling a few times a year.  And if I decide to gamble the other way and finally purchase a snow blower, and that particular winter sets a five year record for snow fall, in my mind I will have cashed in on a double-downed bet.

My little game of chance has been going on for about eight years now.  That’s about how long I’ve been dealing with the osteoarthritis that has been invading various nooks and crannies of my skeletal structure.  That’s one of the reasons I don’t mind shoveling a few inches of snow, at least up to this point.  You need to get some movement going to keep your joints from freezing up.  No doubt I can stand the work out.  I sit around on my ass all day typing up shit like this.  Some days the only exercise I get is opening and closing the refrigerator door.  Real men don’t need snow blowers.  All my neighbors have one, but to me when they get all show-offie with their machines, if it’s not a validation of self coddling, it is at least a display of hubris.  I generally don’t go for that sort of thing.

Sure there’s the argument that having a snow blower around would save me time.  But right there is maybe the main reason I don’t need one.  Saving time might be important if I had important stuff to do, like go to work.  But I’m retired.  I have no place I have to be.   It’s THE perk of retirement, the life style advantage to which all others are measured. If it snows a foot, big deal. I have all day, all week, to shovel what I need to shovel. The city ordinance about getting the snow removed from a street-side sidewalk does not apply to me because I don’t have a street-side sidewalk. When my wife and I bought this house 43 years ago that was something we did not give the slightest thought to. Sometimes life just works out.

I don’t mind telling you I have been taking Mother Nature to the cleaners.  In the past seven years Omaha has had only one  winter weather event that has produced more than eight inches of snow.  Typically we get a couple of bouts of two to five inches, a few dustings, and that’s about it.  We used to get a lot more winter precipitation, if I remember right.  No doubt what’s happening lately has something to do with climate change.  But five days ago some very ominous weather reports started rolling in.  Three days later I received confirmation from every TV weatherman that the snow storm moving in from the west was going to be a doozie, a virtual white armageddon.  Driving around in my car, radio station KRAP informed me I was going to get at least a foot of snow dumped on my driveway.  I bounced from one of my pre-selected radio stations to another hoping that at least one of them would just keep playing the 60’s music that I had pre-selected them to play, so I could stop thinking about all the shoveling I might have to do.  But every disk jockey was saying the same thing.  Get to the grocery store and stock up.  You won’t be able leave your house for a week so it wouldn’t hurt to check and make sure you have enough of your prescription meds on hand.  .  Better pick up some bottled water because there’s a good chance your pipes will freeze once the power goes out.  Also you might want to drop by church real quick and say a little prayer that you don’t have a heart attack because there’s just no way an ambulance is going to be able to get to you.  Whatever you do don’t go outside and shovel.  You’ll have a heart attack.

So I decided it was time to cash in my chips.  I was certain Mother Nature wasn’t bluffing this time.  I went out and bought a Snow Buster 5000, smugly confident I had outfoxed my opponent once again with my purchase.  The full house of a storm she was about to throw down would be no match for my Snow Buster 5000 royal flush I was going to surprise her with.

There is one thing about my Snow Buster 5000 that is of an inconvenient nature.  It’s heavy.  I made the mistake of removing it from my SUV by myself and tore the flesh away from my shin bone and crushed the small toe on my left foot in the process. I’ll probably lose that nail.  But after filling my Snow Buster 5000 with gas I was confident I was ready for whatever Mother Nature was going to deposit on my driveway overnight.

The next morning what greeted me was not Mother Nature’s wrath, but rather a thumb-nosing mockery- an inch of snow.  Geezuz I can take care of that with my leaf blower, which besides my snow shovel is what I used because my fucking Snow Buster 5000 won’t start.  I could have easily made it through another season without the god damned thing.  You stupid bastard  weathermen can just stick your fancy doppler radar up your ass.  I know you think your incompetence can be easily glossed over by reminding us how lucky we were to have avoided your forecasts,  but I would like to point out your forecasts were the reason I took a personal bitch slapping from Mother Nature.  The least one of you could do is take this piece of shit Snow Blaster 5000 off my hands.

                                       

Show Room Snow Blaster 5000                                      My Snow Blaster 5000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am pretty close to entering the seventh decade of my life.  I am retired too, and so I have a lot of time on my hands to reflect on lots of stuff.  You’re probably too young to have the deep thoughts I have and don’t give a shit about the existential conundrums of life.  So many things are perplexing to me.  Does God really exist?  If there is a God who is the creator of all things, is He sorry about Donald Trump?   Is there life after death?  Are there marshmallows in heaven?  I hope not.  I don’t like marshmallows.  How will I die, like am I going to suddenly drop over from a ruptured  aortic aneurysm with my life’s blood detouring any which way it pleases inside of me till I lose consciousness?   Or will I linger relentlessly in a hospital bed with cancer cells migrating from one organ to another till my insides are just a compressed mass of unrecognizable cell clutter that eventually leads to a grizzly implosion and merciful death?  I’m a registered organ donor, but what a waste that would be if all my organs are enveloped in a neoplastic goo.  That would ordinarily really piss me off, but I’ll  be dead so I guess I won’t worry about it.  So to anyone out there that might have benefitted from one of my fantastic organs if those nasty cancer cells had stayed away and bothered somebody else, just know I tried to help you out.  Now a large vessel stroke would really chap my ass.  A paralyzing stroke or any type of major central nervous system incapacitation  would be the worst.  You just sit around and get in everybody’s way for a really long time before you check out.   I’d probably have to have someone hanging out to feed me and change my diapers.  I hate being dependent on anybody, because anybody is always fucking up my life.

Take the douchenozzles that set my countertop and laid the tile during my kitchen remodel.  I suppose you could forgive them if they couldn’t spell the word “clearance,” but you would think they would have an understanding of its concept, like how far from the floor should the countertop be to fit a dishwasher underneath, or how many lateral inches should be allowed to accommodate the sink.  I made the mistake of counting on them to have a grasp of those basics.  And then there’s the guy who called himself a carpenter that framed out one side of my bathroom door a solid inch out of alignment with the other during my bathroom remodel.  In the long run it’s just better to do the job yourself.  That’s what I’ve learned.  But there isn’t enough time.  We all know that.  If I had the time maybe I would take an on-line course in dentistry.  Then instead  of having to go back to my dentist to have him replace that filling that he just installed in my last  upper right molar two days ago I could just take care of it myself.  Time.  Just not enough time.

So I’ve been watching time go by.  I’ve been watching time go by and taking a look at it to see how I am doing.  We all measure that differently.  Some people go to church a lot to help them figure it out.  Others go through their check book ledger and take a gander at expenses or all the charities they’ve contributed to, or legal fees they’ve had to pay.  Some check out their stock portfolio.  You know how I keep track of the passage of time?  I’ll show you.

                    

1947- circa 2003       2003-2008         2008 -2012        2012-2015      2015-2016          2016—-?

These are my maintenance prescription meds that I take daily.   They are all lined up on my dresser, like soldiers standing at attention, and  I have watched with some alarm as new recruits seem to be mustered into their ranks within an increasingly compressed amount of time.  And that doesn’t take into account the shit that went down in October of 2012.  In medication bottle terms, it looked like this:

Confusing, I know.  Here my bottles look like a bunch of drunken sailors, which is not far off the mark, because in October of 2012 I had total knee replacement surgery.  That involved taking a lot of narcotics and muscle relaxants and sedatives and for three or four days it was easier to just throw everything haphazardly into my night stand drawer and hope when the time arrived to ingest a dose of something,  my eyes could focus sharply enough to help my brain direct my hand to the proper something.   And if you’re thinking of breaking into my house because you would like to get your hands on all the left-over narcotics I never used, I hate to tell you you would be wasting your time.  You’ll have to go to the Omaha landfill to find them.  If you’re interested, they’re in a baggie with a quarter cup of coffee grounds, an ounce of water and a piece of moldy havarti.

If you look carefully at my prescription bottle time-line, you will notice a straggler falling out of formation in the picture at the right.  That one bothers me.  It’s my newest recruit and I am extremely hesitant to push it forward in rank with the others I insert in different ways inside my body.  It’s a statin, a cholesterol lowering medication that for the past two years I have managed to convince my primary care physician I don’t need.  I still believe my recent, uncooperative LDL levels are temporary.  In my mind It’s all simply the result of some over enthusiastic mouth banging of anything that ended up on my plate during our month-long holiday gormandizing orgy I call glutton-fest.  However, my attempt at a quick fix this January evidently was unsuccessful.  Oral cramming for a week prior to my physical exam on Kentucky blue-grass salad and boiled cabbage didn’t produce the lipid results my physician was looking for.  So according to him, it’s a statin or a potential heart attack or stroke.

I’m ok with a heart attack.  Maybe I’d go out quickly.  Hardly know what hit me.  But stroke?  No, no. no.  You know how I feel about that.  But damn it- the side effects of a statin.  I’m already achy enough.  And you’ve got your head up your ass if you think I’ll stop drinking scotch.  Then, once again, what does my doctor really know.  Maybe he’s just another anybody I should think twice about becoming dependent on.  I should probably take a stand.  As general and leader of my army of prescription bottles, maybe it is time to incite it to insurrection and revolt.  I’m running out of counter space.  On the other hand, my doctor and all his questionable statistics could be right.  If that’s the case I guess I would be better off doing as he says so I can put off running out of what I am beginning to appreciate more and more each day- time.