Call me a quick-moving chump. I was in the grocery store, in a hurry. I saw this new product. It's called "Grapples." Pronounced GRAY-ples. A Grapple is an apple that tastes like a grape. Figuring it was some kind of weird genetic engineering that would turn me into a newt if I ate it, I bought a few.
Didn't look at the small print. Ordinary apple, infused with "natural and artificial grape flavors."
Talk about something vile. I thought my daughter The Spare was gonna heave. I sent those suckers rolling into the underbrush with my best baseball moves, warning the faeries not to touch them.
Squirrels aren't as picky as faeries.
On to today's sermon!
I have a friend who lost her job about the same time that I lost mine. She started a little business moving senior citizens from their homes into assisted living. At first she struggled, but business is picking up. Her best clients are hoarders.
You know what hoarders are. They're folks who never throw anything out.
If you combine hoarding with collecting, which one of her clients did, you get a whole house filled floor to ceiling with stuff, except for one small pathway through it all to a moth-eaten bed. The poor dude (for dude it was) had more than 1,000 packs of toilet paper. Unopened. He could have stocked a Staples with his mounds of office supplies.
Anyway, today I helped my friend clean up the apartment of an educated man who had lived there alone for 40 years without ever cleaning once. He was a minor hoarder. We filled 20 boxes with books.
I should say that I filled 20 boxes with books while my friend did other chores.
Here's the rub. I'm completely clueless about the simplest of tools.
Tape dispensers are the enemy. And in order to transport the boxes of books, I had to tape the boxes shut.
This is where the good Old Time Religion serves you well.
A Christian would see a tape dispenser as the product of human ingenuity. Perhaps, in struggling with it, the Christian would ask the help of his/her god. (But recall that this deity is very busy and not likely to take things like tape dispenser difficulties and inability to score in the red zone very seriously.)
As a Druid, I addressed the tape dispenser directly. You see, everything in the world is endowed with a hidden life force. Anyone who has cussed their computer out knows this.
I looked the tape dispenser in the sharp teeth and said: "Sweet thing, you and I are going to have to work together today. Please be congenial. I need the dough I'm gonna get from this gig."
Before making this address I'd had a bear of a fight with that thing. Afterwards it was more like a marriage. Good sometimes, tough sometimes, but never as impossible as in the beginning.
The moral of this sermon: Feel free to talk to your appliances big and small. If anyone overhears you, just say, "I'm a Druid." That should clear everything up.
6 comments:
I get the same results with tools by starting each operation with 'look fucker...you better work for me,or your out the door'..
Like my mother before me, I'm an inveterate talker to so-called inanimate objects.
In my job it helps to be able to hold a conversation with a large computer server, so it only sometimes gets me labelled eccentric.
I reccomend it - I've never thought of saying 'I'm a Druid'to nosey parkers though,probably because I'm not one. Everyone knows I'm a Witch.
Love,
Terri in Joburg
Yeah, big time appliance whisperer, here. Used to have an old, not particularly good, car in my poor student days to whom I would say, "Please, please, please, please, please get me home. Please." She usually did
I've always talked to the applainces that gave me trouble just like my Mom before me, but we always called the applaince "a little gentleman" and we were going to fix his wagon. I guess we believed in the power of hillbilly women to overcome whatever an uppity gentlman might throw her way. Hey, ya gotta worship something, right?
It sounds like those hoarders are of a certain age that grew up during the Great Depression. My father is one of those and he hoarded and saved everything. He's been in a nursing home for more than a year now and we're still cleaning up his stuff--pairs and pairs of (cheap) new shoes that he never wore, new shirts also never worn stuffed so tightly in the closet you couldn't get another one in edgewise, a yard full of junk cars and pieces of rusty scrap metal, old moldy books, piles of carbon paper, on and on. The 30's really damaged a lot of people; in fact I'd be willing to bet there's a proper psychological term for it somewhere, that specific variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder brought on by living through the Great Depression.
Yikes Anne you tryin' to get me lynched over here!!?? You can't say anything like "I am a Druid" around these parts without expecting someone to send their Pastor over to visit you. This is the buckle hole of the Bible belt.
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