Garbage Chicken

From time to time, when my wife is using the master bathroom, I have to use the kids’ bathroom. As the bathroom is primarily used by two teenage boys, it can be a bit…well…unkempt, to put it nicely. I won’t get into much of the specifics, because I want to keep this high-brow, but there is one phenomenon I would like to address today—the never-emptied bathroom garbage.

The wastebasket in this bathroom is kept in the cabinet under the sink, so it is not something you see upon first entering the room. Indeed, unless you have occasion to throw something out in there, you would never even look for it. The truth, though, is that if you wash your hands after you do your business (which you should always do, young man!) then you would have to look for it, because this particular bathroom utilizes paper towels rather than cotton ones. (If you’re wondering, our towel rack fell off the wall years ago and I’ve not been ambitious enough to install a new one, but that’s a story for another day.)

Once you have washed and dried your hands and it is time to throw away your used paper towel, your next move would be to open up the cabinet under the sink and simply throw your debris into the garbage. Sounds simple, I know, but upon opening that cabinet you will be greeted with a wastebasket that looks kind of like a snow cone at first glance. The garbage, full to 150-percent of capacity, collects in an almost spherical shape that seems to defy the laws of physics. Faced with this mind-bending phenomenon, two questions occur to you: 1) Should I attempt to add my garbage to this unstable heap of refuse; and 2) Why doesn’t someone simply dump this garbage?

The answer to the first question is easy. If you are anyone other than my two teenage sons—no, you would not attempt to add your garbage to the pile, but rather bring it out of the bathroom and find a different wastebasket. But if you are one of my boys, the answer to that question is “Yes” and that gets to the heart of the second question.

Clearly my kids are playing a long-range game of “garbage chicken” and they both refuse to blink first. Why would either of them bother to spend the two minutes it would take to simply take the garbage can out of the bathroom and dump it, when they can instead add yet another paper towel or bathroom cup to their Jenga-like tower of rubbish? Perhaps they think that if they were the ones to dump the garbage it would be admitting some sort of defeat.

When I first came across this phenomenon a few months back, I decided not to dump the garbage myself, not because I wanted to enter into their game of garbage chicken, but because I thought it would be an interesting social experiment to see how long it would take before one of them finally took action. Since they are the ones who use that bathroom 98-percent of the time, it seemed reasonable that one of them would eventually address the situation head on. Well, it seemed reasonable in theory, but a week later I checked back underneath the sink and found a pile that looked similar to one of the trash heaps in WALL-E. Unable to stand it any longer, I broke down and had my younger son (lucky him, he was the one awake at the time) finally dump the garbage.

Satisfied that the game of garbage chicken was finally disbanded, I went back to my room, blew my nose in victory and threw out my tissue in my bedside wastebasket…which was completely full, forcing me to squash down my garbage with every ounce of strength I could muster so my tissue would somehow fit in. Exhausted, I sat down on my bed and wondered to myself, “Why are my kids so dang lazy?”

The Wisdom of Puppets

 

I was born about three months before the start of the 1970s, which was a very turbulent decade. I mean, all decades are somewhat turbulent, but the 70s seemed more turbulent than most. Certainly, it was more turbulent than the 50s or 90s, and maybe slightly more turbulent than the 80s, though probably not as turbulent as the 60s. I won’t go back further than that, because then you run into the World Wars, so those decades don’t really count, because those would definitely be more turbulent, so then the argument gets unduly skewed. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into this whole decade debate in the first place, because that’s not really the point of what I’m writing here and now people are going to feel compelled to take sides for their favorite turbulent decade. Let’s move it along.

The point is, as a kid in the 70s, it was difficult to process the world around me and understand right from wrong. Some people I saw on TV were good (Walter Cronkite) and some were bad (Son of Sam.) And some started off smart and sensitive and ended up as an out of control monster (Dr. David Banner.) I quickly noticed the complexities of human nature, so it was difficult to know which adults to trust. Instead, I learned to trust puppets.

I grew up when Sesame Street had just started on PBS, and I soon saw that the puppet characters were generally wiser, kinder and more trustworthy than humans. They taught me about letters and numbers, about how to eat right, and about being a good friend. And it wasn’t just Sesame Street where the puppets were the wise ones. Shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Captain Kangaroo, and for us East-Coasters, The Magic Garden, each had kind, lovable puppets teaching us valuable life lessons.

So why am I bringing this up now, four decades later? Because I believe the world needs the wisdom of puppets now, more than ever. Remember earlier when I was talking about the relative turbulence of decades? You might have noticed that I didn’t even bring up any of the decades in the 21^st century. That’s because our current decade, and the two that preceded it, have been a complete and utter fiasco.  We need some puppet-sense immediately!

Here’s a thought for next week’s presidential debate. Let each candidate speak through a puppet. Have each of them drop below the podium, shove their hand up a puppet’s bottom hole, stick it up top where everyone can see the cute little bugger, and let their puppet do the talking. I believe that people are automatically kinder and wiser when they speak through a puppet. This may be the only way to have a truly civil discourse. (Note: I’m not suggesting the puppets look like the candidates—that could be terrifying. I’m looking for happy, colorful, non-human looking puppets that instantly engender goodwill.)

I’m willing to bet that if the candidates added “must speak through puppets” to the debate rules, it would increase viewership exponentially. Honestly, I wasn’t really planning on watching the debate next week, but if I knew I’d be seeing felt instead of flesh, you can bet I’d tune in. I’m sure we would all learn a lot more in that format than in a standard debate setting, and the entire audience—no matter your political affiliation—would enjoy the obligatory group sing-a-long at the end.

Ah, who am I kidding? CNN would never go for this. Now, if the debate were on PBS…

How Does This Grab Ya?

 

Not quite three months ago I had hernia surgery. It was an inguinal hernia on my right side and the surgery was performed laparoscopically, using a robot. I didn’t get to meet the robot prior to the procedure, but my surgeon assured me that he would be the one controlling the robot, and the chances of the machine going haywire during the surgery and trying to take over the world were practically zero. That was very reassuring.

My surgery went well, and I was sent home with nifty painkillers and told to take it easy for the next four to six weeks. The first week after the surgery was particularly challenging as I had difficulty with even the simplest of tasks. Open a jar? Not gonna happen. Put on socks? No dice, Chicago. Carry my laptop to a different location? Uh-uh. Fortunately, my wife and kids were very helpful during this time, but I felt guilty having them do everything for me.

Slowly but surely, I was able to start doing things for myself again, but the one activity that remained challenging as the weeks wore on was bending down to pick something up off the floor. Basically, if I dropped something and I happened to be home alone, I was screwed. I tried to enlist the help of our cats, but despite my explaining what they had to do as logically as possible, they would generally just sniff the object I wanted them to pick up and slowly walk away. Jerks!

As my frustration with my unbendability increased, it occurred to me that I could greatly benefit from owning a grabber. Decades ago, when I worked at MAD, the publisher, Bill Gaines, had one of these devices near his desk and he would often employ it to pick something up out of the chaos of his office. Bill was a millionaire genius, so I figured he must have known what he was doing, so I jumped onto Amazon to find one of these handy devices.

I was unsure if there was a more technical term for the tool I sought, so I just typed “grabber” into the search engine to see what I would find. Sure enough, when I hit enter, the exact tool I was looking for appeared on my screen; indeed, hundreds of them did. At first, I was thrilled that I managed to find what I was looking for so easily, but then I started clicking on my options and got annoyed. Almost every one of the products displayed was listed as either “Grabbers for Elderly” or “Pickup Stick for Seniors.” Clearly, at 54 I’m no spring chicken, but I’m surely not “elderly” or a “senior;” at least not yet.

As I scrolled through my various grabber options I wondered if there were some that were somehow specifically for the elderly and others that were meant for younger individuals. But there was nothing in the descriptions that led me to believe that might be the case. A grabber is a grabber is a grabber, no matter the age of the user. Eventually I got past the misguided description that implied you had to be old to use this particular product, and I settled on a grabber that seemed just right for me. I put it on my Amazon wish list and got it from my wife on the first night of Hanukkah.

When I received my grabber, I was not quite a month out from my surgery and picking things up off the floor was still a definite challenge. But with the grabber in hand, my life transformed. Accidentally dropping a tissue on the ground no longer led to an hour-long depression. I was now able to confidently retrieve my snot-rag and deposit it in the trash without bending an inch. For the first few weeks after getting this miracle tool, I used it frequently. In fact, I came to enjoy dropping things, because it gave me a chance to flex my grabber.

But here’s the fascinating part…three months after my surgery, now almost completely healed and more or less able to bend without pain, I still use my grabber to pick things up. Why shouldn’t I? The convenience of not having to bend is amazing! It makes me wonder why everyone isn’t walking around with one of these things. I think the marketers of this product who call it a “grabber for the elderly” are missing a golden opportunity here. Who wants to bend down to pick things up when the grabber can do the work for you?  I say, just like mailing checks, using a phonebook, and writing in cursive, in 2024, bending down to pick something up should become obsolete. Take it from me, a guy who uses his grabber more than his cellphone. Just don’t call me elderly.