The Green Red Green (13 page)

If my wife is reading this, that boat I’ve been looking at is still for sale.

T
here are many differences between men and women, and all of them are at least interesting. Many are even mind-boggling. For example, women have no respect for pockets, but men live for them. Pockets are a place to keep money, treasures, notes, car keys, your wallet, and your hands as a signal that you approach life as an uninvolved spectator. Women don’t like pockets because they add bulk. Women are uncomfortable with bulk. The pocket itself adds two layers of material, and if you put something in it, it’s even worse. Women prefer to use a purse. And it’s not just the bulk thing. Women carry more equipment—makeup and hair devices and various personal items. No garment would ever have enough pockets. So as odd as it may seem, I say we just
leave well enough alone. Let the women stay with the purses. If they ever switch to pockets and then start standing around with their hands in them, that would only mean more work for us men.

E
ngineers keep coming up with new gadgets and then salesmen have to figure out why we consumers need them. It’s a phenomenon called “technology in search of a market.” Well, I think I can help. I saw this gadget recently. It’s like a little computerized Dictaphone that you talk into and it converts what you say into text that you can read. The words come up on a little screen, and you can print them off or save them on your computer or just look at them and marvel at your own genius. Well, I have a great application for this product. Instead of using it on yourself, use it to record what other people say. Everybody’s pretty fast and loose with oral communication, but there’s still a healthy respect for the written word. Just think if you’d recorded your wife’s voice that one time in your twenty-year marriage when you both knew you were right. Or that time your boss got into the eggnog and promised you a job for life. Wouldn’t it be a great way to immortalize what you’ve been told? Expressions like “Your car will be ready by three o’clock,” or “Your home will never go down in value,” or “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just a mole” would be captured for all eternity.

T
here’s been a lot of discussion about early parole for serious offenders, and the big question is always whether they are
fully rehabilitated. I have a suggestion: allow these prisoners to play golf for at least six months prior to their parole application. If they can get their handicap down to under fifteen, then they should be set free. If not, they have no control over their bodies and parole should be denied. If this rule were ever applied to me, I would spend my entire life behind bars, which in some ways would be kinder than allowing me to continue playing golf.

E
verything seems to be going faster and faster these days—cars and rockets and people’s lives. I think Einstein proved that everything is relative or something like that, and it’s never truer than it is with speed. Now that I’ve lived a bit, I have a better perspective on what rate of motion is. Here’s a list of things that really do go fast:

I
was driving into the city yesterday and I was speeding. I was at least 20 percent over the speed limit when I went right by a parked police car, but the officer didn’t chase me or signal me to pull me over. That’s because I was pretty much the slowest car on the road. Everybody speeds now. The average car today goes much faster than the average car of thirty years ago. Yet the average driver today is much older than the average driver of thirty years ago. Does that make sense to you? Is it a good idea that as our population ages, we give them more horsepower? Think about your own grandfather—his eyesight, his hearing, his reaction time, his alertness, his sleepy leg. Please don’t allow him to be at the wheel of a speeding car. You must put the safety of others ahead of your impatience for the inheritance.

H
ere’s a quick, easy way to install your own skylight in your truck or van. A skylight will beautify your van, increase its value, and make it more fun to drive. It’s such a sure-fire hit, in fact, you’ll be tempted to do it to your own vehicle. But I suggest you work out the bugs first by trying it on a friend’s.

Okay, let’s create the opening for the skylight first. Get up on the roof and eyeball where you want the skylight to go. Over the
driver’s seat is a good spot. You’ll be cutting a rectangle with a reciprocating saw, but first grab a pickaxe and make a decent-sized pilot hole.

Cut the hole out with the saw. (Make sure it’s a rental saw, or better still, borrow one from a friend.) Now lay some caulking around the edge to make ’er waterproof. You don’t want rain dripping down the back of your neck. In fact, you might want to put caulking around the collar of your shirt just to be on the safe side. Now you’re ready for the glass.

You know, the difference between a handyman and a hobbyist is the ability to take somebody else’s hobby and turn it into something handy. The handy thing is a van skylight. The hobby thing is an aquarium. Find an empty aquarium (or empty a found aquarium) and use that as your skylight. It’s light and strong and waterproof. All you have to do is put it on the roof upside down. Sure, it might smell a little fishy, but then so does the van. And it’ll be real handy if you’re ever lost and need to look around, because you can pop your head right up into the aquarium, like a turret.

If you really want to push the envelope, mount the aquarium skylight on the side of your van, near the back, for that kid who’s always asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Now he can stick his head into the aquarium and see for himself.

W
hen I was growing up, we didn’t have “best before” stickers on anything. If the milk smelled okay, you drank it. If the meat was somewhere in the vicinity of its original colour, you ate it. If the can had rust only on the outside, you ate the contents.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Now everyone demands the best. That’s why people are up on the night of January 11 finishing off
the “best before Jan 12” ice cream. And they wonder why we’re all overweight. I wonder if this “best before” concept will expand to include friends and family. Can you picture Uncle Ernie with a sticker saying “Best before second martini”? Or Grandpa’s saying “Best before 7 p.m.”? Or your own saying, “Best before 1971”?

H
as this ever happened to you? You’re out with your spouse at a social function, and she starts pontificating on a topic about which she knows nothing. Coincidentally, it’s a topic about which you know a great deal—your business or your investment or you personally. And what’s worse, she’s making all kinds of false statements and exaggerations. If you’ve been married only a short time, there’s a temptation to correct your spouse in front of others. You will soon learn that the truth not only does hurt but it is usually a self-inflicted wound. So don’t ever correct your partner in a group. Nor should you stand behind her and make hand gestures indicating to the others that you think your spouse is a little wacko. No, your job is to move away slowly or pretend you’re not listening or act drunk. The truth is for church or the courts. When the truth comes out at parties, it’s only going to make trouble.

W
e all know that the best relationships are close to a fifty-fifty partnership. Here are the signs that perhaps one partner is dominating the other:

I
like to watch football on TV, but I find that lately it’s getting violent and offensive and the camera coverage is far too graphic. Of course I’m talking about those shots of inebriated fans with their shirts off. There was a guy on last night’s game sporting a bad green-and-gold paint job on a gut so massive he must have used a roller or he would have been late for the game. And it’s not enough that he has this overwhelming mass of unsaturated fat to share with us, but he also feels that he needs to wave his arms frantically and jump up and down, making his belly look like an aerial video of a 7.2 earthquake.

Now, I know I talk a lot about how difficult it is to be married and have to make compromises, but I think this is a situation where being married can really help. I’m talking to all you fat guys out there. Before you go to the game, get your stomach all painted up and show it to your wife and ask her if she thinks the world wants or needs to see this.

And please, please listen to her answer. Some of us are watching the game with our families, perhaps having dinner in front of the TV. You must stop the madness.

I
have a theory about the size of a man’s butt. (I’m happy to report that I haven’t done any research on this.) My theory is that through a man’s life, the size of his butt pretty much follows the pattern of the bell curve. It starts out quite small, increases in mass in his early teens, expands exponentially through the thirties and forties, reaches the zenith of its growth potential around the age of fifty-three, and then diminishes in size exponentially until the age of seventy-five, at which time it has returned to being quite small.

I can understand why it enlarges through middle age, because there’s usually a fairly substantial gut out front, and if the butt were too small, a man would be unbalanced and unable to stand up. But I don’t understand why it has to shrink with age. It seems cruel or at least ironic that when you finally get to the age where you can stop worrying, you’ve got nothing to fall back on.

A
lot of people my age are making the move from the two-storey, four-bedroom family home into a one-bedroom condo. They tell me that they want to reduce the work and general hassle of owning and maintaining a house, but I don’t believe it. Sure, the condo management people will cut the lawn and shovel the snow and look after the outside maintenance, but they charge you a few
hundred bucks a month to do it. Chances are, you could have the same level of service for the same price on your own house. Maintenance is not the issue—it’s all about downsizing.

Downsizing is not a new concept. Life does it to most of us. Haven’t you ever noticed how much smaller your grandfather is than he used to be? We’ve been battling life from our four-bedroom fort every day for a lot of years. Now that we’re running out of ammo, we need to be a smaller target. Maybe in a condo with security, the world won’t bother us as often.

And of course, no extra room means no extra visitors. No matter who drops in, at some point it’s going to get late and you’re going to have to go to bed and they’re going to have to go home. And you will have peace.

That’s what this is all about. Moving to a condo is you giving up on conquest and, instead, opting for peace. You’ve always found peace in the smallest room in the home. Now you’re hoping to find it in the smallest home on the block.

T
ake a minute and count the number of headlights on your car. Usually, you come up with the number two, which is not one of my favourites. I like the number eight. With eight headlights, you can have two pointing up, two pointing down, two to the left, and two to the right. The only way another vehicle can surprise you is from the back end, and you can eliminate most of that risk by maintaining a minimum speed of roughly a hundred miles an hour.

So what you have to do is mount six more headlights on the front of your car, in such a way that they are solid yet infinitely adjustable, not to mention waterproof. Sounds like another job for duct tape.

After you’ve got all the headlights taped to the grill (and make it secure—use lots of tape and run it right back to the doors on each side), aim them as well as you can. They’ll need realignment on hot days and after collisions.

You’re going to need extra power to run the extra lights, so line up half a dozen car batteries in your back seat. Wire them using metal coat hangers, then attach them to the headlights with two or three sets of jumper cables run from end to end.