OK, let’s address the elephant in the room: the emails complaining about my complaining about life on the river. I often hear: “If things are so bad, you should just stop going there.” My reply is that bellyaching is standard operating procedure these days. If I may …
Complaining is, apparently, the in-thing now. Even if you’re running for public office, you complain about your personal problems and how unfair life is … even if you’re living high off the hog as a less-than-one-percentage-point-of-the-population billionaire. For disclosure purposes, I’m not quite at the billion-bucks mark, yet. I need about a billion point-two more. (I owe a lot.)
Note: For the best visual effect, picture the following fake quotes spoken by someone playing the air-accordion. “Please donate money to me. Heaven forbid, do you have any idea how tough it is having only seven mansions and 17 golf courses of my own?”
Not done yet: “So please, you people who can barely put food on your tables and are living in empty washing-machine boxes, help me out, and donate your last nickel to pay for my lawyers, expensive suits and my extensive staff of maids, butlers and servants who are under strict orders and threats of lawsuits if they dare tell people what I really do. People are saying, ‘Sir, nobody has ever seen anything like it’.”
He’s 100 percent right about that part.
Tanning booths don’t run on palm leaves. And keeping people from spilling the beans ain’t cheap — and everybody knows it. So, you know, your call on the donation thing.
Since I’ve gone this far, I’m of the opinion this country needs a new political party just for the above mentioned guy. The “W.I.M.P. Party.” An acronym for the … “Woe Is Me, Pity” Party. That’s it. I said it and it felt good. Real good. Strange. For some reason, I feel like having a cigarette and I don’t even smoke.
Bring on the hateful emails, but I remind you I didn’t mention anyone by name, so if someone, some particular person, pops into your mind … ask yourself “why?”.
Moving on, and to make a short story long, I’ve decided to comply with the requests to stop my bellyaching about life on the river. Here’s a happy tale.
I’m still alive. Well, for me, that’s good. After the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario flooding in 2017 — when the water rose to about 6 inches inside our camp — Kathie and I, obviously, had to have work done. Inside, one of the many projects was redoing the electric. Old wiring was disconnected and, for the most part, ripped out and replaced. With that said ...
One of my first projects this year was putting an exterior baseboard along the bottom of the outside camp walls. In the process, I came across a shabby wire and exterior outlet running across the area where I was working. Not being the idiot my family thinks I am, I tested it first to be on the safe side. I was checking to see if it was an older one, no longer in use. One can never be too careful.
Because I’m not Noah and didn’t think to pack two of every tool in my truck to bring, I forgot my AC/DC voltage tester. (My bad, can you imagine if Noah had forgotten chickens? “It tastes like rat.”) So, what I did was, I simply grabbed a table lamp from inside and plugged it into the outlet; I flicked it on and off several times, to be thorough, to see if it would light up. It didn’t. Nothing, dead, not-a-flicker.
So, I forged ahead, grabbed my metal cutters, placed them on the wire, clamped down and ripped into it like I was cracking open a walnut. After the flash, the loud explosion of electricity reaching every which way for something to maim and destroy, my eyeballs jettisoned eight inches out of my head like Daffy Duck’s would in a Looney Toons cartoon. Holy crap, Batman!
As my vision slowly returned to focus — and despite now looking like a cross between Art Garfunkel and the Bride of Frankenstein, with a Three Stooges-like puff of smoke circling over my hair — I somehow found myself standing six feet away from where I’d been working just seconds ago. The good-news part of the story? I was alive … I think. Hallelujah and praise the Lord.
Moments later, Kathie came down the stairs to our camp below and, unaware what had just happened, said ... “Hey, just so you know, we gotta get a new bulb for that lamp. It blew out this morning.”
Shocking. Totally shocking.
And that’s the way it looks from the Valley.
BTW, I get great emails. Thank you, readers.
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