Legalizing Weed and Other Substances

After considerable thought (at least five minutes’ worth), I have come to the conclusion that it is a big mistake to legalize any presently controlled substances.  As we have all been told for generations, you start with Weed, and before you know it you are lying in the gutter with glassy, heroin-filled eyes, mumbling to yourself, scaring people and singing Puff the Magic Dragon and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, just before you die in agony from the best high you have ever experienced.

The Destroyer

Using that same logic, it stands to reason that making extreme pleasure-inducing agents legal will soon result in their becoming commonplace items of ingestion.  Imagine if you will, typical future family interactions:

“Henry, you have put enough cocaine on your cereal.  Leave some for your little sister.”

“Mom!  Johnny won’t share his opium with me.  Make him give me some!”

 “Okay.  I have one coca leaf for each of you.  That’s all you’re getting.  So shut up and stop pestering me.”

“If I told you once, I told you a thousand times!  Stop giving our heroin to the dog!”

“Honey, do we have any more Ecstasy or did the kids take it all?”

Are we headed for a future filled with stoned kids and pets and exasperated parents on speed?  It’s something to think about while passing the joint around.

This could be YOU!

============================

DISCLAIMER:

In case you haven’t figured this out already, this is meant to be funny, and nobody should take it seriously.  There.  I said it.

I Want Christmas! -- Memories

Okay.  I already told everyone about my stage debut as Innkeeper No. 2 in the St. Joseph’s Elementary School annual Christmas pageant.  If you haven’t already read about it, you can find it here.  I won’t repeat that story again – not that it isn’t a good story, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble and I don’t want to bore you.

I didn’t tell you about the doll house, though.  That was one of those magical Christmases.  I was about 4 or 5 years old.  My parents and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment behind my maternal grandparents’ gas station, on our little town’s Main Street, which was part of a longer highway that extended to nearby towns and to the small city located about three miles away.  It was a noisy, busy highway and my parents and grandparents were always watching to make sure I didn’t venture onto it and get myself run over by some passing idiot driver motorist.  The little apartment was cramped and old.  A few years later, we would move across Main Street, into a much bigger house, but for the time being we were roughing it.

My parents didn’t have much money then.  My father was working seasonal jobs as a bricklayer.  My mother was not yet working outside the home.  Things were tight.  Of course, being a little kid, I didn’t know that.  My parents knew it because they were the ones who had to figure out how to live on peanuts.  There was never a thought, though, of not having Christmas.  Of course, we had a tree.  In my memory’s eye (which can be mistaken because, after all, I am now 70 years old and this happened back in the very early 1950s) it was a small tree.  To my young eyes, it was probably the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world.  I was easy to please.

That Christmas, I woke up, got up out of my bed in the apartment’s only bedroom and walked into the living room.  There, by the tree, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  It was a doll house.  It was unwrapped, probably because it was too big to wrap with whatever Christmas paper my parents had.  There were other presents, too, but the doll house was the centerpiece.  Of course, it was just an inexpensive metal one, but to me it was a miniature palace.

I played with that doll house for years until, eventually, it became dented and worn out.  I don’t know how it met its end.  It was probably tossed out.  But that would be in the future.  On that Christmas morning, it was the best present ever.

Another thing I remember from around that time is that I was scared to death of sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.  Nobody could get me to do it.  I was a pathologically shy kid, anyway, and a big, bearded fat man in a red suit with a loud voice could send me hiding behind my Mom’s coat.  Finally, one day, someone (I think it was Mom) got me to sit on the lap of some Santa or other and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I did it very well, too.  I actually talked and I didn’t cry.  Word of my accomplishment got around the family and my parents’ friends, and they must have thought it was cute because some of them laughed.

Fast forward to my high school years.  By then, everyone knew I could sing and I had ambitions to become an opera singer.  One Christmas, I found myself part of a small choir rehearsing to sing at the Midnight Mass at our Catholic parish church.  The choir was being led by a man whose desire to serve far outweighed his musical ability.  He couldn’t even carry a tune, a real drawback in a choir director.  The choir consisted of two men and three females:  my younger sister, another soprano and myself.  We three females had good singing voices.  The two men, on the other hand, were at least as tone-deaf as the director.  This made for an interesting balance.  My sister was the youngest of the female participants, so the other soprano and I were the ones who ended up trying to make sure the whole thing wasn’t a disaster.

Somehow, we got through the mass, and that particular singing group disbanded for good.  Nobody was sorry about that.

Excerpts from my Book, "Opera For People Who Don't Like It"

Opera For People Who Don't Like It is a drop-dead funny, completely painless look at the art of opera and the people who perform and produce it.  It is beautifully illustrated by the talented comic artist Peter Fay.

It is available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle formats.

Here are a couple of short excerpts from the book.

From Chapter 4:

"Operatic characters don’t die like everyone else. For one thing, they die singing. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I were dying of some awful disease or someone had just stabbed or poisoned me, the last thing I would want to do would be to sing about it. “Somebody call 911!” would be my most likely reaction, provided, of course, that I were capable of making any sound at all. Most likely, I’d just fall back and die and leave the commentary to someone else.

In Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni (Italian for Don Juan – same guy, different language) has just broken into the bedroom of an attractive woman, with the idea of breaking into her. She isn’t about to take that lying down, and she makes enough noise to wake up everyone, including her father. The father and Giovanni get into a sword fight, which lasts about thirty seconds until Giovanni runs him through.

You’d think that would be the end of the elderly man, but it isn’t. Damned if he, Giovanni and Giovanni’s servant don’t spend the next minute or so singing a trio about how the old man’s soul is slowly leaving his “palpitating bosom.” It’s only on the final cadence of the trio that the old man is finally able to die and be done with it. The poor man gets no rest even then, though. Toward the end of the opera, he comes back as his own statue, just to scare the life out of Giovanni. He succeeds."

From Chapter 14:

"Here is a list of frequently asked questions, along with answers you might get from a singer who is in the mood to be snarky.

Can you break glass with your voice? No. Nobody can do that. If you ever find anyone who can, please warn me ahead of time, because I won’t want to be standing in front of him when he opens up with one of those pinging notes. If he can break glass, think of what he can do with my fragile brain cells.

Where do you sing? I’m like a streetwalker. I perform for whoever pays me. I travel around a lot. So you won’t have to worry that I’ll commandeer you into coming to my next performance. It’s in Tokyo.

What do you think of Luciano Pavarotti? I don’t know. I never met the man and, considering that he’s dead, I don’t think I’ll get an opportunity now. I do love his singing, and I’m sorry that he was silenced so soon.

Is it true that opera singers are temperamental? No. And if you ask that again I am going to kick you in the ass.

How many hours a day do you practice? I practice until my neighbors start throwing rocks through my window. (In other words, I don’t get as much opportunity to practice as I would like, and I’m not about to let you know that.)

What advice can you give to someone who wants to have a career as an opera singer? Find something else to do that has less aggravation and pays better."

I Want Christmas, Continued Again

The Art of Opening Gifts

Like all arts, gift wrapping requires concentration, dedication and talent.  Most of us don’t have that much talent for making something immortal out of fancy colored paper, ribbon and Scotch tape.  Concentration and dedication are not even considered, because we just want to get the whole thing over so we can get on with something more fun, such as watching Christmas movies on Lifetime or eating a lot of cookies.

The other popular Christmas art is opening gifts.  Different people have different techniques for peeling off the layers of paper and ribbon and revealing whatever treasure or dreck is inside.

(A)                There is one adult female in every family who sits and looks at a wrapped present and says, “It’s so pretty, I hate to open it.”  Her lack of perspective concerning what is important (the present inside the wrapping) and what is not important (the wrapping) and her hesitance to get on with it make everyone else want to pick her up and shake her like a rattle.

When she is finally persuaded to disturb the wrapping, and find out what she is getting, she VERY slowly and VERY carefully, with great reverence, frees the gift of, first, the ribbon, then the paper.  This gives her time to form a plan of how she is going to react if the present inside is something she must hide in a closet or re-gift to someone she hates.

(B)                I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never seen a man act like (A) above.  Men usually prefer to rip the damned paper open as fast as possible to see if, this year, they lucked out and are getting something good for a change.  There is still a certain art involved.  A man can either rip open a gift with great <i>élan</i> or with great disinterest, knowing he is probably getting cologne, aftershave or a tie for the fourteenth year in a row.

(C)                Women who are more impatient than (A) above – in other words, the rest of us – usually take reasonable precautions not to tear the wrapping too much while trying to get at whatever is inside.  We were brainwashed by our mothers to save used Christmas wrap from one year to another, and we still have Mom’s voice deep in our psyches.  That is the Voice of Christmas Past, and it never goes away.

(D)               Some gifts, such as a new Harley, are too big to be wrapped.  In that case, nobody has to open anything.  They just have to figure out how to get the thing out of the living room.  This takes half the fun out of getting a present, but it saves paper.

(E)                Many families have a joker who loves to put a small sized gift into a large box with a lot of stuffing to take up the extra space.  I used to be one of those jokers, until I grew up.  This provides endless fun to everyone except the recipient when the gift is opened.  If an adult pulls this trick on another adult, the present had better be something spectacular, if the gift giver knows what’s good for him.

(F)                Kids are not concerned about such mundane things as wrapping paper.  If they are left to their own devices, they will have pieces of mutilated gift wrapping all over the living room floor by the time they get through opening their presents.  Mom is usually watching, though, and making sure that enough re-usable paper survives the yearly paper holocaust, to be used again the following year.  She learned this from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who survived the Great Depression.

The Original Family Gift Wrapping Saver

 Giving gifts to our loved ones and beautiful Christmas memories to our children are wonderful things.

I Want Christmas, Continued!

I always love the Christmas season, but this year, more than ever, I need a good old-fashioned one.  I have a terminal case of We-Are-Going-To-Have-a-Sociopath-in-the-White-House Syndrome.

Even back in ancient times, before cable TV, smartphones and the Internet, we knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.

It always started off with the annual collection.  This was my idea.  All three of us Minicozzi kids would pool our money together to buy gifts for Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa.  As the Advent season ground on, we would add whatever coins we could spare to the fund, and by a few days before Christmas we would have enough to get something nice for all four of them.

“Nice” was a relative term.  Our family was working class, and we lived in a small town, next to a small city, in the middle of the apple growing area of Washington State.  Nobody in our family expected diamonds or anything like that.  We weren’t rich, not by any kind of stretch.  Some sweet-smelling hand lotion from the dime store was a “nice” gift from three kids who had been pooling their change.

We always had the most fun on the days and weeks leading up to Christmas.  The streets in the Downtown shopping area in the small city next to our small town were decorated for the season, and the stores had their colorful displays in the windows.  Window shopping and browsing were obligatory and fun, especially if you were trying to figure out what you could get for Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa with the money collected from you and your siblings.  I think that’s where I learned how to be both budget conscious and a spendthrift.  I can spend a lot of money, but I know how to get a bunch of decent stuff in return, even if some of it is stuff I don’t need.

I don’t remember when I stopped sitting on a store Santa’s lap, but I remember one of the times I did.  I was a terminally shy kid, but I was persuaded to go and sit on the lap of the big man with the big beard and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I must have been cute or funny, or both, because my parents laughed about it and told their friends.

Our Catholic elementary school held a Christmas Pageant every year, and the whole school took part.  Every grade had a presentation.  I made my stage debut in the First Grade, as an innkeeper.  Our grade was presenting The Nativity that year.  When the time came to cast everyone, Sister A. gave all the plum parts to other kids.  I was a homely kid, tall for my age and awkward.  In addition, I had attention deficit problems.  There was no way that I was going to get the part of the Virgin Mary, and I was not likely to be cast as an angel, either.  Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men were all boys.  The only thing left that would at least give me a line or two and a chance to shine was the part of an innkeeper.  I became Innkeeper No. 2, in a line of three.  Innkeeper No. 3 (a boy, of course) was the one who got all the lines because he got to direct Mary and Joseph to the stable.  All I got to say was that I didn’t have any room.

I learned very early in life that it’s best to get on the good side of the director if you want to be cast in a decent role.

I got a laugh when I spoke my line in the performance.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I was telling the two holiest people in the world that I couldn’t put them up, for Pete’s sake!  Later, my Mom told me that the audience laughed because I was cute up there.  I wasn’t trying for cute, either.  I was trying for unforgettable.  I was unforgettable, but not in the way I wanted.

I have a special memory of the school Christmas Pageant when I was in the Eighth Grade.  My singing voice had been discovered the year before, and my wonderful Seventh Grade teacher, Sr. Ernest, had passed the word on to my very dear music teacher, Sr. Dolores Mary, who had arranged for me to get singing lessons at a local music school on a partial scholarship.  In the Eighth Grade, I was asked to sing “O Holy Night” in the annual pageant.  The catch, though, was that I had to sing it in French.  I had never attempted French in my life.  Sister Ernest, who was of French extraction, taught me how to sing the words phonetically.  Poor Sister Ernest!  She tried hard, but I had a terrible time getting my American mouth around some of the French pronunciation!  I wish I could sing it for her now, because now I can do it properly.  Back then I was just a kid who couldn’t speak French who was thrilled to be asked to sing such a big solo.

Sister Ernest would be proud.

==========================

For more of my humor, go here.

I Want Christmas!

I know.  Thanksgiving Day hasn’t even come yet, and I’m on Christmas already.  This year (2016) I am in desperate need of Christmas, more than ever.  It’s one of the symptoms of a disease called We-Are-Going-to-Have-a-Sociopath-In-The-White-House Syndrome.

This would have made my mother say,
"It's so pretty, I hate to open it!"

What Not to Give Me (A Single Female Baby Boomer) for Christmas

Everyone likes to get presents.  I am no exception.  There are times, though, when a thoughtful gift can turn into a pain in the ass.

Take large plants, for example.  There are people who love spending time with plants.  I am not one of those people, and there are many more of us.  Plants don’t like me.  I think plants are fine, so long as someone else is taking care of them.  I am the kind of plant parent who thinks that plants should be seen, but not in your face.  When I DO give a plant attention, it is a death sentence.  Plants take one look at me and die, because they know they are doomed, anyway.  Never give someone like me a plant, if you value its life.

Please don’t give me a pet, either.  I already have one:  Harmony the Cat.  She has been an only cat since I adopted her, and I don’t think she’d take kindly to having competition for her position as Empress of the Apartment.  I don’t relish the thought of fights to the death being conducted in my living room.[1]

Another impractical kind of gift for me is any kind that involves large amounts of perishable food.  This includes big baskets of fruit.  Fruit is delicious.  I love almost all kinds of fruits, especially things like grapes, apples, pears, peaches and oranges.  Those things can be easily eaten.  Whole fresh pineapples and whole coconuts require muscles and/or sharp implements and a lot of patience.  Often, there is a whole fresh pineapple in the middle of one of those big baskets of fruit.  To add more craziness, one person cannot possibly eat all that fruit before it starts to go bad.  Have you ever tried giving fruit away to your friends?  Don’t – unless you enjoy wasting time and carrying oranges around.

Nobody has ever given me a Costco gift certificate, and I hope that nobody will ever do that.  I have never taken out a membership in any company that expects customers to buy things in bulk.  Families can save money that way.  I would only end up with a small apartment full of stuff that would go bad or that it would take me a year to use up.  Yes, you can buy a TV at Costco, but that never occurs to me because there are so many other places to get a good bargain on a TV.  On the other hand, if anyone wants to give me a Costco gift certificate for a great meal at a fine restaurant, I will grab it and love it.

Oh, and I live in a small apartment.  Before anyone gives me anything that takes up room, I hope s/he takes the size of my apartment into consideration, especially if it is a butt ugly thing that the giver is re-gifting to me.

... like this thing!

Pretty dishtowels are nice, and I have one hanging in my kitchen.  I almost never use it, though.  I air dry all my dishes on the dish rack because it’s more sanitary that way, and easier.  If anything in the kitchen requires wiping, I use paper towels or a sponge.  The dishtowel is just there for looks, although nobody ever looks at it.  My kitchen is full of everything from big bottles of Poland Spring water to a big bag of cat food to just about anything a kitchen can hold.  One little dishtowel is lost in the clutter.

Sets of bath towels can be a good gift, but that shelf in my closet where I keep towels and washcloths is already bursting with them, and I don’t think they want more company in there.  This is my fault, in part, because the local odd lot store sells nice towels at cheap prices and there are times when I am in the mood to shop.  You can guess the rest.  I have more than one useless item that I bought in that store, along with some good stuff.  I discovered Sarabeth’s preserves and storage ottomans there, for which I am grateful.

One of these days I’ll write something about a lack of closet space, for which storage ottomans take up a lot of the orphaned stuff that doesn’t have any room.

That’s a whole other story.

---

[1] In fact, you should NEVER give anyone a pet unless you are SURE that the person will love the animal and care for it and make a lifetime commitment.  Seriously!

A Black Friday Poll

Yes, I know.  It isn’t time for Christmas-related stuff yet.  We haven’t even had a chance to survive Thanksgiving Day.  That’s a whole other thing itself.  There is one aspect of the Christmas season, though, that we should address before it has a chance to overcome us:

Black Friday

I would like to conduct a little poll to see what my readers have planned for Black Friday.  Please choose one of the following:

I plan to:

(A)  Hide at home, with all doors and windows locked, binge-watch episodes of “Law and Order” on TV and eat Vanilla Almond Granola directly out of the box.

(B)  Do all my Christmas shopping in one day – online – sitting in front of my computer wearing PJs.

(C)  Get to Target, Kmart or Walmart before anyone else, defend my place in line with a baseball bat and a shotgun and bring someone with me who has sharp elbows and good shoving skills.  If possible, bring my scariest-looking relatives with me, male and female, including kids.

(D)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then run around like a junkie on Speed trying to buy everything at once.  This is like Black Friday, except there won’t be as many bargains and a lot of people will be too tired to fight, anyway.

(E)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then go online and send everyone gift cards.  This is the last resort of the lazy and of people who hate to go outside to shop.

(F)  Other (you don’t have to elaborate, unless you have a really juicy idea).

You may post your choice in the Comments section below.